socks are cool.

I know this is sooooo 2009, but it still makes me laugh, okay?

I finished up a pair of socks for me today. I probably should have been working on my mom’s present for mother’s day, but eh. These seemed more important.

stripes!

These socks were firsts in a few ways: new yarn and new construction method. They’re toe-up instead of my usual cuff-down construction, which will remain my preferred way to knit socks. I don’t like the way the toe fits, and found it difficult to gauge how long to make them before starting the heel. I’m eager to see how the yarn holds up. It’s Knit Picks Felici in the Time Traveler colorway (of course). I’ve been very pleased with how my other KP stroll socks have worn, so hopefully it’ll be two for two.

teeny stitches!

The rest of this post really could just be Dr. Who memes… I haven’t kept up with the new series very much past when Amy was pregnant (or is she? dun dun dun) or possibly in love with the Doctor (or is she? dun dun dun (also he is clearly the superior choice to Rory, who is just so bland)), but Matt Smith seemed like a fine Doctor. Also we don’t get the regular BBC at my house, and I am too lazy to sign up for Netflix, which I am led to believe has Dr. Who available for instant playing or something.

give me your keys, man

downside

So I didn’t get into the opera internship program. This isn’t why I haven’t updated in a while, because I just found out yesterday/early this morning (although I suspected this was the case for the past few weeks). The truth is I am pretty bad at blogging on any sort of regular schedule. Blogging on days off only really worked for me when those days were spread out. Six and seven day stretches of non-stop retail bullshit really put a damper on my willingness to go home and tell internet strangers about my life. “Today I got yelled at and called a liar for enforcing the completely reasonable policies of my workplace, and bagged so many goddamn coffeemakers and Snuggies that my shoulder is still all out of order. Also I hate people.”

I am more than a little sad at this turn of events. I’d hoped to get in way more than I let anyone know, and now that I haven’t I am seriously floundering. What the hell am I going to do now? It was entirely stupid to put so much faith in such a long shot. But I did, and now I’m stuck.

Retail sucks the life out of me. Just absolutely drains me and makes me long for a ten-car pile up on the way there so I won’t have to deal with it. And now I worry that it will actually happen, because I mentioned it to more than my brain. (I am occasionally and all-consumingly superstitious about things like this.) I want a way out, and quitting is not a viable option right now for so many reasons, most of which are Money, but can’t find one anywhere.

I don’t know what to do, and it is terrifying.

waiting

I’m stuck in a kind of rut lately. Waiting (eagerly!) for any word from the Opera people has put me into a kind of suspended animation, if that makes sense. There’s a sort of transience about everything I’ve been doing lately, and a kind of distance. Yes, I still knit on my lunch breaks and after work, and I’m stewing over that fanfic I mentioned last post, but it all seems very disconnected and like I’m watching it happen from the outside. It’s like I am doing all these things and waiting for my Real Life to start, whatever that might mean.

To combat this, I’ve been trying very hard to finish a lot of my projects so that I can start new, exciting ones when it’s spring. (Which is another thing, the weather here has been ridiculous. It has hit 60 a few times this month and last, but today it is super windy and there are big dark clouds on the horizon that are possibly snow. Grump.) Mostly this finishing-spree has included socks, but I found a scarf that I’ve been “working on” since July, if my Rav page is to be believed. So that is getting done, and I’m looking forward to making this top when my supplies arrive. Broke the “no new yarn” rule for it and everything.

Maybe I can pull myself out of the slump by finding and making things I really desperately want to work on? That is what I’m hoping for.

a change of pace

Back in January, I applied for an apprenticeship position with the Santa Fe Opera. I’ve known about their summer program for at least a year, as my boss at UT was the one to tell me about it, but it was too late to apply for last summer by the time I’d discussed it with her. So then it was senior year and All Thesis All The Time, and I kind of forgot about the program until this past winter. Retail during the holidays was soul-sucking and horrible in so very many ways that I knew I needed to get out. The applications were available in December, and I had all my things sent out by the first week of January.

This is all a long way of saying that my radio silence was mostly due to a long weekend trip to Madison, WI. It was the closest place Santa Fe was doing interviews that gave me enough time to request off work. (New York was closer geographically, but their dates were too soon to put in a request.) It was a very enriching experience, and even if I don’t end up making the cut for the program, I will still be glad to have gone.

the view from the window. my mom gets to book all the hotels now.

Apart from that, I have been knitting a bit and have gotten back into writing. Mostly it is shitty Harry Potter fanfic, but there is something deliciously rebellious about sitting and scribbling Weasley smut on my lunch break at work.

knitting ennui

It has been a very blah kind of week here. Work kicks my butt every day, even when there are like ten customers over the course of an eight hour shift, and I come home ready to sleep for nine days. It’s left me useless for anything other than surfing Rav and sort of halfassedly knitting dishcloths.

Right now I have some major socklust, in that I would like a new pair of hand knit socks, but I don’t have a pair on the needles that are anywhere near done. In fact, the pair I was most excited about ended up taking a turn for the worst. Turns out when the pattern says “this stitch pattern does not have a lot of stretch, please size accordingly” that is exactly what it means. So while it fits my foot just fine, it will barely go over my heel. And my other sock pattern is too boring to mention, although I have made some progress in the past week. It’s a good traveling/lunch break project, but not anything I am bursting with excitement to work on when I get home.

Enter: lace.

16 rows = about two hours of knitting

Technically I’m not breaking my “no new projects until one is finished” rule, because I am 90% sure I have to frog those socks. And anyway, it’s not like I’m actually knitting anything else right now. All the projects were too boring, but now there is light!

snow day

Yesterday, I called off work because it snowed and I couldn’t make it off my street, let alone a half an hour away to the mall. Snow utterly defeats me in a way that very few things do. Usually I can power through things, or else be two seconds away from breaking apart completely but somehow manage to white-knuckle it to victory. But not with snow. It happens, and I morph into a useless lump of nervous almost-barfing and leg twitches. This is the worst superpower, to be sure. It doesn’t help that the tires on my car are about 80% bald, and thus about as useful as a barrel of radioactive monkeys when it comes to traction and steering in winter slush.

So, since I was stuck at home all of yesterday and feeling pretty crappy about it (let me tell you about my ridiculous actual-job work ethic), I decided to spend the day doing something useful. Decided is actually not the right word. It is more like I remembered I wanted to knit some dishcloths and retroactively declared them penance for missing work.

is it still technically "housework" if I never get around to washing dishes with them?

I’ve made these three so far, and am currently working on another spirally scrubbie. They are too much fun. I am hoping they will hold up well enough to use in the shower, and not just for dishes, since my shower puff is coming apart. It is the second one that’s done that, and it annoys me. I don’t think I bathe particularly vigorously, so why is this puff, which is designed specifically to scrub dirt off skin, coming apart after less than a year of doing just that? Arg.

Other than that things have been pretty chill around here.

a picture list

Things that are objectively awesome:

1. these hand warmers, finished a few days ago

fourth pair in less than a year

2. this dress, finished this morning

there will be much prancing and preening

3. this diploma, that arrived yesterday

!!!!!!

thinky thoughts

I have a short attention span when it comes to projects. Maybe you have noticed this.

In the past week, I have worked on four different sewing or knitting things. Not because any of them are frustrating or upsetting, but because there’s only so much time I can spend working on something before my brain goes “next!” I finished up a pair of purple hand warmers, got another inch done on the shawl, finalized and sewed together my peony dress, and just last night started another pair of hand warmers that in my head are going with the new dress.

For a while, I used to really fight this urge to have dozens of projects going at a time. I still struggle with it, and it’s very easy to get overwhelmed and buried under lots of half-finished projects that I have no desire to work on. But I think in the long run, it is a better approach to crafting for me.

I’ve tried to be someone who works on only one or maaaaaybe two projects, and keeps with it until they are done. What inevitably happens, though, is that I mess up, or get bored, or see something shiny, and all my project mojo goes out the window. The aforementioned project languishes, and because I’m trying to be good and not start anything else, I just stop crafting. Which makes me not want to craft because I get out of the groove and everything will be difficult when I come back, and uhgggg who wants a hobby that frustrates them? So I end up internetting for hours at a time and not doing anything productive. By the time I get back around to working on The Project, I am grumpy with it and don’t take my time and it ends up being rushed and less-than.

So instead, I give reign to my start-isis, and work on what I want, when I want. It means I may have upwards of ten or fifteen things on the needles/hooks/in the machine at a time, but I am rarely bored or unproductive with my hobbies. If something frustrates me, I can put it down for a while and work on something that is less aggravating. I don’t feel as though stopping a project means “quitting” my hobby, as it kind of used to before. It means that for right now, that project can chill until I’m in a better mood to work on it.

My hobby shouldn’t bore me, or make me angry. It doesn’t make sense to keep slogging through something, cursing it every stitch of the way, only to end up with a crappy finished product. All for what? So that I can say I worked on this and only this for the past X number of months?

Another subset of this is that working on multiple things doesn’t actually take me that much longer to finish. The only time it really effects my output is in my sewing. If I work exclusively on a dress or something, I can get it done in about two or three evenings of dedicated sewing. These garments are always poorly fitted and sewn, though, because about halfway through night one I get frustrated with it and ram everything through the machine in an effort to just Get It Over With. The extra week or two it takes to sew a properly fitted and sewn dress is worth it to me.

All of this is basically a preface to this statement: my new Peony dress is nearly complete, but I had to stop along the way and do some other stuff. It needs the neckline facing, a zipper, and some hems yet.

peonies are flowers, right?

Since I started working at the mall, my wardrobe has included approximately fifty bazillion more skirts. Our dress code doesn’t allow for jeans or sneakers, so that eliminated most of the bottoms I usually wear. I have one pair of dress pants. The hem recently fell out, and I have been too lazy to fix it.

So basically, I am always wearing a skirt or dress. (If not pj pants…)

My rotation is getting a little boring, though. Most of the skirts I wear are ones I’ve made myself, as is my favorite dress. I wanted something easy, and something that could be either dressy or casual depending on my mood/laziness quotient. About 80% of my dresses are black. They’re simple enough to fancy-pants it with shawls and jewelry and socks, but some days I am too lazy for even that!

I also wanted something relatively inexpensive since I’m trying to save up enough money to move out of my parents’ house. They’re cool and all, but I get along with my family much better when I don’t have to see them all the time.

Peony from Colette Patterns looked like it would fit the bill. I ordered it last week, and it was at my house within two days. I am still kind of impressed. I didn’t chose any fancy-fast shipping options, either. Just bam! new pattern.

 

picture taken literally minutes after opening the package

 

The fabric is my favorite part of this dress so far, though. The dark red one is a length of dupioni my friend gave me a year or so ago. I’ll be using it for the belt. The print is from fabric.com. Cruising around the site one evening, I decided to check the clearance section. Got three and a half yards for under $5 a yard, when it was originally close to $18 a yard! It is right this minute in the wash, along with a length of muslin. I haven’t decided if I want to flatline the dress yet; maybe it will help reduce wrinkling? It’s a cotton/linen blend, so anything to keep the omgwrinkles at bay… Currently I’m planning on flatlining at least the bodice, and will wait to see how everything else pans out.

I’ve been fitting the mock-up over the past few evenings, so once the fabric is out of the dryer, I can get started cutting. My next day off is Saturday, so I am looking to finish this up by the end of this week.

getting organized

Now that Christmas is over, I’m getting back into crafting for myself. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy making things for other people. Everyone I gifted a knitted present to appreciated it, and that was half the fun. I am selfish, though, and I miss having something of my own to show for all the work I put in.

Along with this, I am trying to cut down on my yarn stockpile and be more organized generally. Reading other people’s posts and such on Rav makes me feel that I’m “not that bad” when it comes to stashing, but then I also do that when I watch the Animal Cops episodes with cat hoarders. So. I decided to downsize. Excluding the two multi-gallon bags of yarn from various grandmas (seriously), all the yarn I’ve bought for myself has been condensed into four plastic boxes.

it's only a problem if you admit it

A box each for: worsted cotton and acrylic yarns, worsted wool-based yarns, sock yarn, and WIPs. Mostly the last box is socks. Seriously, I have three pairs going right now, and immediate plans and supplies for at least two more. Socks are like my favorite thing to knit, closely followed by hand warmers: functional, portable, and ridiculously satisfying.

But I haven’t been in a sock knitting mood lately. My current projects are a pair of purple hand warmers from a kit I got this Christmas, which are coming along swimmingly, and a purple shawl I started last March.

endless garter stitch

I’m hoping to make it a little bigger than the original, which is only about 50” wide. Everywhere I go, I’m cold, and shawls are the perfect thing to remedy that. Or they are for me, since sweaters and cardigans are too complicated or something for me to manage. It doesn’t make any sense. There are probably a comparable number of stitches in each project, but there is something about sweaters that breaks my brain. Maybe it is all the different pieces? Unsure.

Another rule (which I will certainly break when the time comes) is I have to finish one current project before starting another. No more socks until I finish one of my zillions already on the needles. There is a self-limiting aspect of “not having any more sock needles” sort of built into this rule, so maybe it will actually stick. Upon completion of this shawl, I will be starting this one. Made out of this yarn, it will hopefully be nice and warm for wearing to work.

Apart from my numerous knitting projects, I’m also planning to start a new sewing project. The pattern and fabric are already ordered. Huzzah for late-night internet shopping!