Punch Needle Embroidery

Easy and Relaxing my ass!

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Yesterday evening, Madeline's vet called and said that my little girl was howling at anyone that passed, running around in her cage, reaching her paws through the bars when anyone walked by, and had chewed through her IV. In short, she was ready to come home.

The adventure that had gone from "indigestion and mild constipation" to "possible peritonitis" to a step in the right direction to her actual recovery is almost over. Only 14 days of antibiotics left. Whew. It turns out that she had a nasty infection in her colon and intestines, probably from a suture from her little girl surgery that got infected and spread like wildfire.

So, fingers crossed, we think my little girl is going to be just fine. So now on to regularly scheduled knitting content.

Which there's not much of. Since I have been employed and calling myself a functional, contributing member of society, I have noticed two things. 1. There is not much time for knitting. 2. The only time that Mother Nature allows me to take pictures of my minimal knitting progress is when I am away from my knitting- at work. I seriously left work a little early today in hopes of making it home to take pictures before the sun set. As I raced that fiery ball in the sky, I sped up and took turns faster than anyone should take turns in a Jeep (they roll) I cried in desperation, just one good picture of my new pink handspun! Just one halfway decent picture of my finished sleeve! But no. I walked in and pulled the cats off my leg just in time to see the last glimmer of sunlight. The pictures will have to wait until the weekend.

As the knitting Olympics draws near I keep promising myself that unless I finish a substantial amount of UFO's, I will be WIP-wrestling, which (let's face it) sucks and is soooo not the point of the knitting Olympics. I could start anything! I've got it narrowed down to a couple things, including a really cable-y bulky sweater that I could totally knit out of yarn from work and get super-cheap, or I could continue to destash and maybe re-knit the sweater I frogged the other day that was so small even Calista Flockhart would have to grease up to get it on. I could start a new pair of super awesome lace socks, or a lace shawl, which would really be a stretch. But as the opening ceremony creeps up, I keep unearthing more UFO's and feel guilty for even contemplating a shiny new project. Even if it is from stash. In order to make myself feel better and less overwhelmed, I've started calling just about everything a WIP. Dirty dishes? Better finish that WIP. Okay- that's pushing it, but I am starting to include ancient cross-stitching projects as WIPs. I'm even going to put them on my knitting blog (gasp!) should natural daylight allow me to. And in my efforts to create a better system of pattern organization, I managed to unearth a few fat quarters from my failed attempt at quilting. And the inspiration struck. You know the feeling. You see it every time you look at your stash. You don't see the piles of yarn teetering, threatening to fall over and reveal your little laceweight problem to the world... you see a blank canvas. You see what all of that yarn, those beads, that fabric- you see what it could be. And for a second, you see hope in that dark little corner of your house where your stash grows like a fungus. And then before you even realize what you're doing, you're on the fourth row of a new project. I guess you just blacked out. Who knitted this while you were innocently admiring your stash? I don't know! That darn knitting fairy I think. Thrusting exciting new projects into your hands while your WIP-elimination efforts were going so well! What a selfish bitch!

I'm rambling. I'm going to go knit on a treadmill and call it marathon training. State of the Union my arse.

Good juju wanted

If you have any healing thoughts to spare, send them Madeline's way. She is not eating, drinking, or going to the bathroom and the vets don't know what is going on with my baby. They have given her antibiotics, fluids, barium dye tests, enemas and painkillers, but no answers so far. If she isn't dramatically better by Monday, she will be having exploratory surgery, which she is not likely to wake up from since she is currently very weak and has a heart murmur.

We meet again, anonymous

Dearest Paige,

Glad to see my comment made it into your blog! I am glad that you are okay and not...dead or something like that. Keep up the wonderful blogging work and just know that some of your friends will always stick around when you need them the most. Even if you don't make them a hat.

I've said too much.

Sincerely,

Anonymous

Dear Anonymous,

Thank you for your most flattering and somewhat uplifting comment. Your support is like a sports bra, but better. My readers are the support I need to continue blogging my fiber adventures and you guys don't even need to be washed after each mini-marathon training session. And that's just awesome. But there's a problem with being anonymous, dearest anonymous. I can't make you a hat if I don't know who you are. From your writing style I would have believed you to be my friend Ben, who recently received a hat that I had started in August (I did have to frog it twice to make it fit so I believe that buys me a month of guilt-free lateness, but the remaining remaining three and a half months have no excuse.) So since your comment arrived AFTER I gave the hat to Ben, I will deduce that you, dear, sweet anonymous, are not Ben. I believe that you are also not Adam, as he was nowhere near a computer when I received this particular comment. I am also in the process of making him a hat, which he knows. He knows this because I made sure he was actively involved in the choosing of the colors as he wanted the hat to match his motorcycle. So I know that you are not Ben and you are definitely not Adam.

But who are you? Only time and/or the tracking of your IP address will tell. Should you decide to reveal your identity to me (and not my other readers) and tell me your favorite hat colors and the approximate size of your head, a hand-knit hat could be in your future. But probably not the near future, I'm just not that punctual. I can be reached at peaceloveyarn@aol.com for such a revelation.

Paige

Life is starting to sort itself out now that I've openly expressed my worry and slight panic about suddenly being thrust into functional-member-of-societyhood. There are daily surprises, like credit card bills (I SPENT HOW MUCH ON GAS?!) and, teeth-shaped holes in all the plants and newspapers, wet spots in my sock yarn, and the occasional cat puke on the rug. (Madeline's hobbies include floral arrangement, floral digestion and then floral regurgitation.) But for the most part, things are good. I'm still not finding a ton of time to knit as my body is determined to catch a cold or flu or bubonic plague and I spend most of my time away from the office passed out on the couch with cats on my head. I am spinning quite a bit, and for Christmas I bought myself a small cardi's worth of Spunky Eclectic, which I have begun spinning. (South African Fine in the Orchard colorway, by the way) Wanna see? Of course you do. It's amazing.

I know. That's one sexy hank of yarn. Seriously- no skill at all to spin this stuff. Drafts like a dream and all of those yummy colors plied together can make any one's spinning look good. This is one of the first rovings I've spun where I've actually been disappointed when my 4 ounces were up. Thank goodness I bought more. I've also recently spun some of Mandie at Sheepytime's roving, which I will photograph and then plug shamelessly on my next post.

But that's all for now. I've got a kitten that needs a cuddle on the couch, so I will leave you with a few action shots from Madeline's new life as a Darling girl.

Happy New Year!

Wow. I don't know where to start. I think I'll start with a comment from a concerned yet anonymous reader.

Hey Paige,

this is anonymous speaking. I like your blog and try to read it often. You haven't updated it in over a month. Did you die? Decide to stop knitting? Lose a finger in a tragic bobsledding accident? Finally figure out how far you can stick a knitting needle up your nose before it starts to tickle your brain? Get bitten by a sparkling werewolf? Srsly...wtf mate? What am I supposed to do if I don't know what you are knitting or what species of animal you are attempting to save?

Dear Anonymous,

I'm really sorry to have worried you with my lack of posting on knitting/life content. I'm still in that funky place between college and real life and haven't figured out when things like knitting, blogging, or training for my mini-marathon are going to happen. There just aren't enough hours in the day right now, yah know?

So no, I wasn't in a bobsledding accident (but I'm sure that I would be should I decide to start bobsledding so I think I will stick to safer activities for the time being) and I wasn't bitten by a werewolf, sparkling or not. I did however, manage to save an animal from the shelter.

This is Madeline Sophie Darling, the Christmas/Graduation cat. I adopted her on December 13th and she's been entertaining me and tearing up all of my knitting projects since then. She has a bit of a heart murmur and is getting over a nasty case of ringworm, but still finds time to be ornery and tear up all my roving. That being said, she's absolutely adorable and I love her to pieces.

As far as knitting goes: same old same old. It's been a while since I was so madly in love with a project that I couldn't put it down, except for the mittens with which I was smitten until I put the first one on today and realised I should have increased substancially after the ribbing...oh well. They have been frogged and will be addressed at a later date.

As usual, I decided to make a couple new year's knitting resolutions, and that I will share with you.

1. Until I'm down to 5 or fewer projects, finish/frog 4, start 1. For the most part this could be fairly easy, as many of the projects sitting around my studio, unfinished, really only need a few hours of work done before they are finished. I actually managed to finish 3 projects on Thursday, a baby blanket, a pair of socks, and a hat for my friend Ben (who has a larger than normal head and has a hard time finding hats that fit him). I decided to frog a hat that I had made for myself out of some splurge yarn, Mountain Colors River Twist, and then make mittens which obviously turned out disasterously wrong. So I dug out a sweater I started this summer on my trip home from Ireland. It's big, it's plain, it's black and it's out of some really rough Donegal tweed and it SUCKS to knit, but it will be the best jacket ever when it's done, and it will also be one less project on the needles.

2. Find a better system of needle management/organization. I have 4 current needle organization systems at the moment, all of which suck. I have at least 10 size 7 circs and I can't tell you where a single one is. This system will commence once project count is down and needles are freed up to be organized.

3. Knit more for charity. This can be anything from 8x8 squares to the Schyuler Blanket Project (comment or email me if you'd like to know more about this project) to Snuggles for animals in shelters to Project Linus blankets. Overall, be a nicer knitter.

4. Yarn diet. Not because I have a stash problem, but because I'd like to move out of my parents' house eventually. All of my other attempts to destash in attempts to control and minimize the stash have failed, and I think I was trying to yarn diet for the wrong reasons. Now that there are bills to pay and taxes to be done, I think the yarn shopping needs to go on hold for a while. Because that's what financially responsible adults do. Or so I hear.

Yeah...that's about it as far as knitting goes. I'm just in a strange place right now as my two seemingly separate lives (school and home) are merging. Part of me still thinks I have to head back to Purdue tomorrow night, even though that's just not true anymore. It's just super weird to be done with school and moving on, especially since Adam is just getting started with school (yes- he's still very much in the picture). Life is strange. But good. There are new challenges at every step, new thrills, new dissapointments, new everything. Now I've just got to figure out how to juggle it all without dropping everything.