Knotty Mouse

• I’ve been doing quite a bit of knitting on the sock in the last few days and I’m up to 5 1/2 inches of foot!
• I also cast on another sock from some skeins of Regia Crazy Colors I have. Its a heavier yarn (sport-weight-ish) and I’m thinking I might get to the short-row heel faster with this. I really want to do a practice run on the heel because I’m nervous about making a complete and utter mess out of it.
• My son did a fun run for his school to raise money for a new gym floor. They had to run as many laps as they could and we sponsored them per lap.. I did $1.00 a lap because I figured that my son couldn’t do more than 5. He did TWENTY SIX! *falls over* Oh, my aching wallet!
• I’m packing up orders from this weeks update and working on new items for the next update (April 9th) for the shop. Being creative feels REALLY good right now.
• My office/craft room/studio (it has no name.. its just the “mouse hole” usually) is absolutely trashed and I’m going to have my husband help me re-organize it later this week. Hopefully he’ll build some much needed work surfaces for the back wall and we’ll get a place for my fabric to live along side my yarn and roving. I’m starting to realize just how much I’m going to need to fix it up so that I can work more productively.
• My 30th birthday is less than 6 months away and I’m starting to really think about where I am in my life and what I wanted to accomplish by that point. Its a thought that is really prompting me to get off my ass and do some serious prioritizing. This idea is an entire other post.. for another day.

I had half a post written from last night about how we spent all weekend cleaning out the garage and how I was sad to put my son’s toddler toys and ride on cars out on the street for a charity pick up today.. until I started reading blogs and got totally sidetracked.

I saw a photo on someone’s blog (useful, aren’t I?) of a pair of toe up socks done with Wendy’s pattern/formula and it got me thinking about my lousy one pair of hand knit socks (besides a pair that were gifted to me..)and all of the sock yarn that I have. My issue with top down socks is that if I cast on a proper amount for my leg and ankle- that I end up with a sock that doesn’t fit when I get to the instep. The last 3 socks that I’ve started knitting have ended up not fitting at the instep and I get frustrated that I knit all the leg and heel to find out that it doesn’t fit. Determined to like sock knitting - both because I love wearing hand knit socks and that buying sock yarn is.. well.. y’all know about buying sock yarn or you wouldn’t be here. Its so pretty, comes in small skeins, is cheaper than buying yarn for a whole sweater, and just basically takes the edge off of a yarn diet… I had to try to get some sock knitting mojo.
After doing a little more searching I found the Knitty article on toe up cast ons from Wendy and sat myself down with a skein of gifted Koigu KPPPM for a sock lesson. A few hours later ( I was on the computer and doing housework at the same time..) I had this lovely merino hat for my Bast statue that sits on my desk. I’m using the “figure 8″ cast on from the article and I found it very easy. Unfortunately I had a serious brain-fart somewhere along the lines and never realized that I wasn’t supposed to knit an actual fingering weight sock on size 1 needles with only a 16 stitch (8 on each needle) cast on! Um.. yeah.. I’m sort of slow like that. I realized this AFTER I had been to Wendy’s site and taken a good look at her current sock project- no pointy toes there! Instead of ripping out the sock I’ve decided that it will be a design feature (shut up.. I can too call it that) and I will knit the other sock (look.. positive thinking!) to match.
I will then pray that they don’t look so stupid and noticeable that I don’t have to locate an individual with pointy toes to give these socks to. This is all assuming that I don’t get either a) bored or b) completely frustrated by this whole “short row heel” thing that seems to be as heated a debate as “dpns vs. magic loop/ 2 circulars”- right now I’m enjoying myself as I start the even rounds of the foot. If nothing else.. Cheshire Cat has a lovely new pointy hat.

Not much knitting going on here at Chez Mousie lately- but a lot of designing. I’ve spent the last week and all weekend printing bags, making polymer clay & beaded stitch markers, and working on some fiber animal cellphone charms in preparation for a huge shop update tomorrow - March 26th. I’ll update this post when the shop update goes live.. which will be sometime between tonight before I go to bed (around 11pm EST) or tomorrow after my son gets on the bus (820AM EST) in the morning.

Now that I’m able to sit in an upright position without my head spinning round - I thought I’d catch up on some photos that needed posting here on the blog. After much complaining from the Munchkin about how unfair it is that he’s not allowed to wear skulls to school - I broke out the freezer paper and exacto knives and went to work creating a pirate shirt that was ’school safe’. Add a bright orange shirt on clearance from Target to some textile painted swords and you’ve got a happy Munchkin! The whole “freezer paper stencil” thing was way easier than I had anticipated - the hardest part was remembering what on earth I did with my iron and ancient ironing board. I used Jacquard brand textile paints and stencil brushes on cotton teeshirts and made sure they were dry (hit them with a hair dryer..) before removing the stencils for crisp edges.

Of course after seeing Munchkin’s shirt my husband decided that he HAD to have another pirate shirt as well. I had to do a bit of re-styling to the skull and swords because of the size and details but I think it really turned out well. I did heat set the designs as marked on the bottles of paint.. but am still worried about washing the designs at the moment. You can’t tell from the photo but this design goes across the entire chest of a mens medium teeshirt.

Since I clearly can’t leave well enough alone with the Llama,Llama, Duck thing.. and created a bag with the critters on it as well. You can’t tell from the photo because the flash went off.. but the critters are done with silver paint. I’m considering selling this bag in the yet unnamed Etsy shop but I’m not sure how many of these I want to cut out. I am rather happy with the results though and have many other ideas for bag and shirt designs.

On Wednesday night at around 3am I woke up a little sick to my stomach and woozy - little did I know that it was down hill from there. Y’all know that terrible stomach virus that is going around? Yeah.. I got it. I’m renaming it “the toilet hugger” - because that’s what I did for TEN hours. Believe me- If we had medical insurance my sorry ass would have been at the doctor praying and begging for that fabulous shot that stops you from hurling up your toenails for hours on end. I was so ill that the husband had to take Munchkin to the bus stop and pick him up because I couldn’t move from the floor where I had crashed out earlier in the day.. I’m also NEVER eating Jamaican food again- since I seem to have no taste for it after the previous nights ‘festivities’.

I thought I was going to get a break and sleep last night.. but Munchkin ended up with the bug at around 730 at night. Poor thing was sick until the wee hours of the morning - the husband took over around 3am when I was walking into walls and blubbering like an infant due to lack of sleep. Fortunately it was all over by then and we were all able to sleep well into the afternoon..

Today it seems that we’re done hugging toilets and trash cans and are doing better with the exception of a little fever here and there. Both of us have no energy what-so-ever and have been living on bland foods like toast, ginger ale, and chicken with stars soup. Munchkin and I hung out on the sofa and watched Charlie & the Chocolate Factory (with Johnny Depp), Godzilla (the newer one with Matthew Broderick), and a few Star Wars movies (episode 5 & 6) most of the day.. and I’ve tried to catch up on a little blog reading when my stomach has allowed me to sit upright without feeling nasty. I’ve got about 150 feeds to go through and a mailbox full of comments and emails - so I’m going to be a bit behind for a few days with correspondence.

Take care of yourselves out there in blogland !!

When I started spinning on a drop spindle I really wanted to make entire knitted items out of my own hand spun yarn. The first hand dyed roving that I bought was purple (of course) and from my first trip to Distaff Day at Peachtree Handspinners Guild.. While I was there I asked whether 8oz of roving would be enough for Clapotis from knitty because that’s what I was itching to make, and most were in agreement that I would be able to at least make a half-clapotis with it. Little did I realize that spinning an entire 8oz of roving on a spindle was a major undertaking.. and was more suited to when I had a wheel. I also found out that merino (which that fiber was) would pill like crazy and wouldn’t be something that I’d want to make a shawl out of… so I put the idea away for a later date.

At Christmas this year I was gifted with 8oz of Corriedale pencil roving from Crown Mountain Farms from my friend Jane in some gorgeous purple shades.. and I knew instantly that I would spin it up for a half-clap of my very own. This is the first bobbin of that fiber (spun at Jodi’s studio in Athens) washed, wound into a  ball, and knit up on size 10 needles. I’m in LOVE with this scarf. I’m using the directions from K-Pixie website and the “clapotis by the row” spreadsheet and so far I’m impressed with how quickly this thing is motoring along. I started it about a week ago (the progress in the photos is a few days old now) and I’m actually on the 7th drop-stitch row- its not nearly as boring when you only have about 35 stitches on the needles instead of over 100 and I think I’ll get a lot more wear out of this than the shawl version. I’ve had a lot of pooling of colors up farther but I’ve decided to just let the yarn do what its going to do and not tink back to remove any ’stripes’. I know that many people are not a fan of this pattern (to put it mildly.. ) but I think it really shows off a hand spun or hand dyed yarn while making it the center of attention rather than drowning the features of the yarn in a lace type design.
Unfortunately it was nearly 80F here today (!!!) and there doesn’t seem to be any scarf wearing weather in the future. I do think that if I get it done quickly enough that I can still wear it to the bus stop in the morning without looking like a crazy person who is just looking for an excuse to wear knitwear.

.. pissed on.. is that how it goes? Well then, consider me lucky I guess. I usually try to avoid talking about my ‘real life’ at Chez Mousie but I think that’s a tradition that is going to stop.. because I’ve got some verbal venom to get out of my system. So, if you come here for the knit and the spin of it all.. just click to another blog because there isn’t going to be any of that here today. This is the post where I tell y’all some of the shit that has been plaguing my life as of late.. and the reasons why I haven’t been saying a whole lot. Still with me?
About a month ago all hell broke loose at my husband’s job. Without going into a whole lot of details, I’ll say that it was a) another case of no one wanting to pay my husband (what the crap is with that??) b) a boss who really shouldn’t be the boss of anyone and c) a company that seemed good on the outside but on the inside had absolutely no morals. All of this plus more boiled up and over one day and my husband walked out- refusing to work again until a meeting was called and things were fixed. A letter arrived at the house 2 days later stating that my husband’s employment had been terminated due to totally bogus reasons… and he was ordered to return “company property” that he was supposedly in possession of. More bullshit to heap on top of the bullshit sundae that they served us around every turn of his employment.. and that was the cherry on top. Now, I’m not going to tell you that my husband is the easiest guy to get along with… because after 9 years of marriage I’ve been through a lot - but he by no means deserves this type of treatment on job after job. After almost a week of sitting around the house feeling rather shit-upon, my husband asked me if I would ‘mind’ if he tried to make a living on his freelance work with computer graphics and design because he really couldn’t stomach being treated like this again. For some reason.. I agreed.

Fast forward to ‘now’.. and here we are in the Land of the Self-Employed. I’m pretty sure that the term “freelance” actually translates roughly into “sit around and wait to be paid”.. because its what we seem to be doing. Everything has been re-budgeted within an inch of its life and I’ve got a really tiny weekly grocery allowance for 3 humans and a cat.. but the scary thing is that we’re ok like this. In fact, we’re more than ok.. its actually sort of nice to have my husband home so that he can come to pick up Munchkin at the bus stop, go to school functions, take me to the grocery store, etc. Its nice not to be home alone in an empty house until 4pm when Munchkin gets home and not have to rush to eat dinner at 730 or later at night when husband finally rolled in just so we could have some ‘family time’. There is a lot of creativity flowing in the house recently- my husband has really made progress in his design abilities and I’ve started work on a lot of new things that I’m hoping to mold into products for a yet unnamed Etsy shop. I’m hoping this situation was meant to kick us in the ass and force us to move out of a place that is comfortable so that we would realize the potential we have around us.

The verbal venom I’m feeling the need to spit everywhere is concerning people who can’t just leave well enough alone. There are some people in my life (who don’t read this blog, know about it, or have any idea that I’m a knit-blogger) who want me to be something I’m not and think that clearly I’m looking for the answer to make my life and everything in it bigger, better, faster and more. Just because I connect with these people on a few common things- they think that I strive to be something else.. something that society deems as “Better”.

Sure, I’d like to have money- who wouldn’t want to not have to worry about their bills, be able to take vacations, buy expensive items at the drop of a hat, and have a new car rather than a hand-me-down that barely works? Yes, I do covet things like designer handbags (oh Betsey Johnson “Lucky Bag”.. how I wanted you..) and make mental lists of places I’d shop if money was plentiful - but there’s another side to my personality. Its the side that decided that the acrylic nails that I had put on for my anniversary really weren’t going to work in the life that I have now- and that I should just take them off and stop pretending that I was happy with them.  In reality, instead of buying one of those expensive handbags I’d probably just use the money to take a trip to a fiber festival, to visit a blogger I met online, buy things from other people’s online shops, or donate to some of the many organizations that I’ve learned about from blogs. I don’t want a mink coat, diamond rings, or a damn maid! I’m not you..  my morals are not your morals… please stop trying to make me into you. My “quality of life” doesn’t include a million dollar summer house in South Beach- I would just like to own a house with some land (I’ll settle for owning any house at all really..) and be able to rent more dvds from Netflix!

Refusing to be beaten by a plastic toy..  I pulled the infernal machine out of its box and decided to go another round with the “Amazing Button Machine”.  After two cups of tea and a few Google searches- I figured out the problem and went about fixing it. I tightened every screw on the machine, tossed the instructions in the trash, and proceeded to make the buttons the way I remember doing it in grade school art class. The result was success!

Its dark & depressing outside today- thunderstorms, pouring down rain, and generally unpleasant. It was raining so hard earlier this morning that I actually drove Munchkin to his bus stop rather than risking him being soaked and getting sick. I’ve been trying to have another bus stop put in here in the neighborhood - but for some reason they don’t seem to care that 4 children have to walk twice as far as the others. The only working windshield wiper on the car sounded like it was trying to seize up and I’m praying that it decides to play nice until we can afford to get it fixed. The way the car was stalling this morning has really started to worry me.. but I’m hoping its just the rain and the change in weather.

I’ve been working on a few things here and there.. but none of it is bloggable right now for one reason or another. I’m gearing up to add more things to the shop in the middle of the month and I’ve been spending a lot of time figuring, thinking, planning, etc rather than blogging.