I'm getting ready to sew another messenger bag. Isn't that there exciting news?

Amy Butler Charm fabric and "Mud Brown" linen (Yes that's what they called it, now that's charming.)

It's rainy and overcast today, so it's a good day to start cutting out the pieces.

A totally gratuituous and pretentious picture of my finishing tools.

* * *

"PLEASE POST A PICTURE OF YOUR SWEATER

THANK YOU AND GOODNIGHT"

okay, okay! (she's SO persuasive!**)

Anyway, just to refresh your memory, here is a link to what this pattern was supposed to look like. And here's what I did to it:

Six years in the making...countless sweaters* suffered to bring me to this point.

Yes, I know it's big, but I like that. It's supposed to be a substitute for a coat. If I could change one thing with a magic wand it would be to make the sleeves shorter. But that not being really an option, I will learn to like the sleeves long, which is not really anything new to me.

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*um, learning experiences currently hanging in my closet with no foreseeable purpose

** "haha" taken out and put down here

I forgot about these:

Anyway, I bought the yarn (Artyarns Supermerino) at Webs after wandering aimlessly through aisles of cardboard boxes of coned yarns in a dark warehouse. Don't get me wrong, that was fun! But this yarn was far more portable, it not being on a cone and weighing, what, 5 pounds? Now I know it would have been fun to haul a few cones of yarn onto an airplane, but decided to give that a pass*. This time anyway.

So, I worked on these on the airplane. Just a few ounces of yarn to haul about. I really like the color.

I also spun up some yarn that will actually get used and not chucked in the mason jar:

I cast on for some cabled neck warmer thing and will put up a pix as soon as it starts looking like something.

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*Seriously, I made this decision because I knew I would not be able to reach the overhead bins and didn't want to be dependent on some tall person getting them. I'm telling you, I wanted to be able to get as far away from that plane as soon as it landed. No time to wait for the coned yarns to come down!

I went to visit with Cindy this weekend. She and I sat in a park knitting socks and looking at a Japanese sewing pattern book and talking about everything under the sun. It's always great to catch up with Cindy.

We also walked around and I found this big jar, which I almost broke when I walked too close to some stone porch steps and the bag it was in made contact. It made this great "dink!" sound when that happened. I thought for sure no jar for me no more.

But it survived to do what I had wanted it for:

Click

It seemed like a good place to put some random handspun.

This is how most of my handspun ends up. Just in piles around the house. They are all oddballs.

While in Rhinebeck, Deb gave me an orange batt of fiber from Spinner's Hill that she didn't care for. I spun it up, it was fun and I declared it done. The yarn was the end product. What to do with it?

Give it away! to my friend Angie, who is a very creative knitter and person.

Today she gave Becky this made out of that yarn:

Becky loves him. She was playing with him while we were waiting for school to be out.
(And check it out--the hair is actually growing)

We are getting ready to move and need to clean the attic:

Yikes, maybe tomorrow.

So, I finished a sock last night. Good thing it isn't a long way to my knee because otherwise it would have taken me that much longer.

Oh, you tall people just don't know how tough you have it. Can't fit in tiny fuel-efficient cars...never get to stand in the front row for pictures... always hitting your head on the ceiling and getting rushed to the emergency room...gotta use more yarn and time to knit your knee-highs....you know, what a drag it must be.*

Hey, your socks don't match.

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*Just teasing I like tall people because they can reach things in high cupboards for me.

Hey, so I was going through my closet full of yarn trying to decide what to get rid of and what to keep.

While in there I found an old sweater of koigu I'd started for Becky. I'd quit because I just didn't want to work on it anymore.

But I didn't have the heart to rip it out. Or the energy.

And now, upon finding it yesterday, I was intrigued at the possibilities as to what it could become. What? What?

What about a thing to button around the neck? That would be nice and then I would not constantly have to be rewrapping my scarf and my neck would no longer be cold.

Something like this:

"This? Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl... "

And koigu is only recommended in small doses in my world.

And so, me not knit? That's awfully melodramatic.

Say hello to a partial sock:

Hi! Tell her to knit me a mate.

This is one of those Latvian Socks everybody is knitting. I liked knitting it so much that I overshot the 10 repeats of the lace pattern and decided to go for 15.

Currently, I am on repeat 14 and have hit, as you know from the previous entry, the wall.

And so, the moral of this short story is--it's nice to have a knee-high sock*, but it would be even nicer and far more practical to have two knee-high socks.

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*because, despite knee-high sock #1's current status of partial, I am still in for finishing it. Because I get high on closure. I may ebay all my yarn away, but I will finish the one sock.

For those of you who don't know it yet, I like to knit.

No shit.

For reasons quite unknown to myself I am sick of knitting. I like it, but I don't feel like knitting. I sit on the couch and stare at the tv, seeing commercials I've heard but never seen before.

As I said, I don't know why I am tired of it. Maybe it's the knitting equivalent of writer's block. Maybe it's the switching the clocks back. Maybe I'm just hungry.

Or maybe this is what it's like to OD on spinning? One starts avoiding yarn and what you do with it?

Have any of you ever had the exquisite initial pleasure of unearthing an old high school journal while cleaning out your parent's house? And you open it up and relive what you were thinking way back when you were 16, 17 or 18 years old?

It's truly cringe-worthy. At least mine were. But that didn't stop me from putting them in a fire-proof safe to keep until I am an old lady who is dying to remember what she was like at 16 years of age.

Oh well, it's not like I consider my 24-month-blog entries totally cringe worthy, just incredibly cheesy at times.

And boy, am I obsessed with the knitting or what?

Or was I?

I want to do something else.

Check ebay....maybe tomorrow....maybe next week.

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Note to Leigh in 2 years: are you cringing?