Wrist Wruffles

I have just added a new pattern for sale on Ravelry. This pattern is very near & dear to my heart. It was my first real design. I submitted it to knitty a year ago, but alas, it didn't make the cut. Since then I've been just sitting on it, trying to figure out what to do with it. Obviously like so many others I have been so moved by the tragedy happening in Haiti right now, I felt compelled to do something more to help out. I've made this pattern available for purchase at $2.50 and now through February 28, 2010 ALL of the proceeds will go to The Red Cross Haitian Relief Fund. I know it's not much, but every little bit helps, I figure.

So, if you want a fun, cute, quick knit using less then half a skein of sock yarn, and want to make a contribution at the same time, please consider buying my pattern. Thank you!!!

praying & such

Life updates...

Beastie's test results all came back negative. Which is of course, to mean that we should be happy. Hooray -- there's nothing wrong! Wait, if there is nothing wrong then why does he have wet, sloppy, slimy poops four or 5 times a day? (hey, don't go getting grossed out -- I'm the one who has to change them!) He is on two new meds. Next appt in 4 months.

My boss got home from TNNA in Long Beach. We (me and my cohort, the "Rock Star Dyer" Tasha) bombarded her with new design ideas, new marketing ideas, new color ideas, new yarn ideas, etc. Scary what the mice come up with when the cat is away. Lucky for us, she loved them all. Phewww! I get to keep the best job in the world!

The knitting & crocheting has been chaotic at best. I've mostly been swatching and sampling for designs for work. In my spare time I'm working on leftover holiday gifts. I still owe Aaron socks (Beastie's one-on-one Monday - Friday); I still own Nate, my spare son, a pair of fingerless mitts; I still owe Kera, Medium Child's GF, a pair of socks. Some of these are in progress. Some of them are in thought.

And of course, the ten shawls for 2010. Yes, that's me, the queen of over-commitment.

My heart breaks for the Haitian people. We briefly visited Haiti once and it was an absolutely beautiful country, but so insanely poor that it was almost painful, and that was before the earthquake. I pray that there is some bright side to this tragedy.

Speaking of praying, I've been doing a lot of that lately, considering how completely lacking I usually am in all things religion. Grams has been sick. For those who know me, grams is really my best friend. She and I have a mother-daughter relationship. Anyway, she is 86 and is having platelet issues. And they found a tumor on her liver. She had a biopsy today, but they had to give her two transfusions just to do the biopsy. So yeah, lots of praying.

Maybe I'll make my grams a prayer shawl. Because, ya know, I need an excuse to cast on one more project.

Beastie is off school for the next FOUR days. Ugh. That means lots of time spent on my laptop knitting or crocheting or designing while he putters around the living room and watches TV. Cross fingers that I might actually get a few things completed in the next few days!

Astral Cowl

Beastie & I overslept this morning. All the 'men' were gone to work/school and it never occurred to any of them that I might appreciate a wake up. So at about 30 seconds before the bus pulled up to the house I woke up, just in time to glance at the clock, jump out of bed and hear the tell-tale crunch of gravel. Fuck.

Run outside (in my jammies and no bra) and explain to the van driver that we have overslept. Wake up beastie, who has no interest at all in being awake and run downstairs to go potty. Meanwhile, beastie has made himself vertical and grumpily wandered to the kitchen. Try as you might, you cannot explain "hurry" to a severely autistic, tired, hungry six year old. You must let him sit at the table to eat his breakfast and even though you try to convey that the cold poptart is just as good as the homecooked eggs he has been eating everyday for breakfast during his 2 week holiday vacation, you somehow fall short and settle for him yelling at you in between bites of pastry while trying to jam his hightop sneakers onto his feet.

And that was all before 9am.

Thankfully the day got better after that. I saw two foxes on the drive to take beastie to school. One following the other across the road. They were beautiful with huge bushy tails. Foxes have always been enigmatic to me. They look like a cross between a dog and a cat, at least to me. I think I like them, although I'm not really sure.

Leigh Ann, my bff, came over and did my dishes and vacuumed my floors, because that's the kind of bff she is -- and no, you cannot have her, she's all mine. Meanwhile I finished the Astral Cowl I had been sample knitting for work. Here is a before blocking photo:



and a detail shot

I'm all kinds of thrilled with how it turned out. Beth is taking it to TNNA along with the other cowl I designed made with Halo; she did the sample knitting for that one and it is OMG gorgeous. I cannot wait to see the photos of that on our model.

I've also been working on a few other designs, several from mmmmmalabrigo. I am thrilled to be designing more often. It's like a dream come true. Really, my whole fibery world is like someone said to me, "Write out a description of your dream job & then we will pay you to do it."

I am blessed.

2010, really???

I refuse to do the whole resolution thing, but I do make some commitments every year, so if you want to call it a resolution, so be it. Here they are, in no particular order

• I will blog more often.
• I will be more myself in my blog; less worry about being politically correct -- I have both a work blog and a volunteer non-profit blog for those things. Here you will get the real me.
• I have started doing weight watchers. Not so much in an effort to lose weight, which, let's face it, we all probably need to do, but more to bring a sense of accountability into my eating routine.
• I will do my best to pay all my bills when they arrive, not set them aside and then forget about them and then feel like a deadbeat when the insurance company calls or when I get an electric shut off notice.
• I won't take my husband's problems with his job on as my own. I have enough worries of my own to deal with -- I don't need to let his high stress career become our high stress lifestyle.
• I will continue to be the best mom I can possibly be.
• I will devote more of my efforts to my job, because I know I have the best job in the entire world and I am incredibly lucky to have it.
• I will dangle participles with abandon, when I want to.
• I commit to design at least a dozen good patterns this year, for both knit & crochet. That's a dozen total, not a dozen of each -- I'm not that crazy.
• I will tweet, plurk, facebook, ravelry, etc, etc, etc as often as I can without making me & my social friends crazy.
• If I want to blog something, I'm going to. I'm not going to care if it is witty or thought provoking or even just a sentence or two. If you don't like it, don't read it. This is for me from here on out.

Okay, /bitchrant.

So I've also taken on some nifty tasks for 2010. Some designing commitments I'm excited about, including designing six different things out of various flavors of Malabrigo. Plus some projects, first of those joining the 10 shawls for 2010 group on Ravelry. I'm working on my first TWO shawls simultaneously, one is knit and the other is crochet. I'll post about them later.

Beastie had his mega tummy scoping this past Monday. Everything looked good, pancreas was functioning normally, etc. They biopsied every organ from his esophogas to his rectum, most of them in 3 or 4 places. Plus they took blood samples from his tummy, spleen, intestines, colon, etc. They will be doing massive allergy testing plus all sorts of other stuff. We should be getting the results back next week.

Okay, back to the needles, need to get a sample done by tomorrow for work. My own design even! Woot!!!