Pre-Vacation Miscellanea

Why I love Knitty ...

... 'cause you find things like this there.

Since I haven't been knitting for a long, long time, I hadn't been to Knitty for a long, long time. This morning I decided to pop over (mostly just to check my link and make sure it was still working), and browsed this issue's free patterns. And found the above, which has no purpose in life other than being completely adorable, looking relatively quick and easy to knit, and being a free pattern.

But lest you think Knitty's all fluff, let me tell you that in every issue they have a bunch of patterns - all free - and most for extremely useful and beautiful things like sweaters (yes, entire sweaters - and cool ones), hats, socks, and a variety of other wearables. Did I mention they are all free? It's just so unusual to get such high-quality, unique patterns for free, consistently.

But I just might have to make some ZoZos.

This has made me think about knitting ... which I would like to do again. I know what happened. I got too lost on the project(s) I was working on, and there's just about nothing harder than trying to pick up a several-year-old project, re-orient yourself, and get it back on track. But I have some mental issue about starting a new project when I have old ones languishing.

There was the self-designed sweater I was knitting. For one thing, it wasn't going well, which was part of my frustration in not keeping up with it when it began to lag. For a second thing, I had grown to detest the color I'd chosen (and bought $100 worth of for this project), which doesn't encourage stick-to-it-iveness, either. Sigh.

Then I'm pretty sure I was working on a pair of socks, the whereabouts of which I do not even know. Sigh again.

I was working on a sweater a few years ago (Celtic Icon) which was going horribly wrong, and I remember that it actually caused me to stop knitting for awhile ... because I couldn't bear to pick it up anymore, yet I couldn't enjoyably justify starting anything new when I had that one that I wasn't working on. I finally made the tough but necessary decision to scrap that project, and rip it all out. Then I was able to move on.

While I hate the thought, that may be where the self-designed sweater is headed.

So I'm getting ready to go on my annual beach trip to North Carolina. I've always taken knitting with me. I've almost never worked on the knitting while there. I'm debating whether to dredge up some project, take it with me, and renew my knitting skills while on vacation; or wait till I come home and save the packing space. Decisions, decisions.

I'm paring down seriously this year on what I take. I usually took at least one knitting project, and five or six books. I often never even unpacked any of it. It would turn out that we'd either be busy the whole time, or even when I was just sitting around on the deck, I was too busy looking at the ocean to watch my knitting or words on a page.

This year I'm taking exactly 2 books (one fiction, one non-fiction - my mood varies), and was going to take an embroidery project 'just in case' ... but I don't really have one ready to go. My embroidery of the Death tarot card has reached a point where I need to draw on some more of the design before I can continue, but it's a complicated bit of drawing for which I'd prefer to use the light box (tracing). But to do that, I need an enlarged copy of the card, which I've lost, and it's tricky to make a new one ... the room our copier is in at work is always crowded with people, so it's hard to find a chance to copy something when no one's around ... and I don't really want to explain why I'm standing at the office copier making an enlargement of a tarot card with the Grim Reaper on it.

(Although a simple "mwaahaahaaaa" might suffice to get people to leave me alone for the rest of the week ...)

Three more days ... we're now hoping to leave Friday night after all, and drive part-way and get a hotel room. We originally weren't going to, and were going to leave super-early Saturday morning - but even if we do that, we're liable to not get there till late Saturday evening, maybe not even before dark - and that just sucks.

But there's a lot to do to get ready by Friday night. And what really pisses me off is, I could have done it - except that I woke up Sunday morning with the worst back pain I think I've ever had. It's all concentrated around a spot on the right-hand side about mid-way up, and feels for all the world like a pulled muscle - which would be fine, I could know what to expect if that was it - except I'd done nothing in the preceding days to cause a pulled muscle, and have not been able to figure out what the hell's wrong with it. Also, pulled or strained muscles (on me anyway) usually begin clearing up in a day or two, but we're going on Day 4, and it's as bad as ever - and most of the time excruciating. I can barely move, which has put a real damper on the energy and motivation needed to get things all packed up in time to leave on Friday.

Ah, the week leading up to a vacation. Always a joy.