Rambling and such.

 On my last fiber fluff post, the one where I shared my current shawl project, I forgot to note what size needles I am using and the weight of the yarn. I am working that shawl up on size 8 circular needles and in worsted weight yarn. I haven't touched it all week because I have been busy with things like housework. I have managed to find the floor around the desk and a big portion of the floor before the couch. I am also almost completely caught up on dishes.

It is my hope that if I get them all done, Cuddle Bear can start from a fresh slate and we can figure out what's not working right with his technique to scrub pots. He's been putting stuff with food on it in the drain board. It's made for a heap of extra work, but once it is all done, I think we can put things to rights again.

I was so tired over the last couple days that I didn't get a bunch of things done, including making my menu for the upcoming week. I am going to try to get that done today. I am happy that Beloved picked up some cinnamon apple instant oatmeal for me to have for breakfasts this week. I think my rolled oats have expired. Expired oats smell funny and I have been assured by the internet that they taste worse. It's funny but I never thought of oats going off like that. I suppose there's a first for everything.

I didn't get as far as making brisket last week. Beloved shied away from the $15.00 cost of it. He talked me into just buying some smoked brisket from the barbecue place up the street later this week. I don't know how well it will work for making Ruben sandwiches, but I know that it goes well on a salad. 

It was a big disappointment to learn that the diner that we loved going to up in the city went out of business. We're not sure when it happened but they had the best Ruben sandwiches. I have a recipe to make a Ruben casserole that I am going to make again. The last time I made it, Beloved seemed to really enjoy it and the kids tolerated everything except for the sauerkraut that went into it. But my craving for a Ruben sandwich has been strong and the entire reason why I wanted to make corned beef brisket last week.

Fiber Fluff: Stalled on the Shawl

 Hi everybody!

I have two shawls that I currently have set up for working on. They're both stalled because life has gotten in the way of spending time on serious knitting. One is the Lady in the Woods pattern which I am making in magenta with a black border. One is the pattern that I've winged together as I was going along. Both are not complicated patterns. They're straight up stockinette stitch (well, technically the Lady in the Woods is garter stitch but that is boring).

I haven't done any spinning in a while. I'm going to try to get to it again today. I'm half way through a ball of grey alpaca pencil roving. The cop on my drop spindle is half full. I think if I focus, I can finish it off over the next two weeks. The hard part is going to be spinning the third ply for this yarn. It is 2/3 alpaca and 1/3 acrylic. I have no idea what the staple length on the acrylic is. The ball of chunky yarn (which I'm going to unspin and have roving out of) claims it to be almost 300 feet long. If the staple length is 300 feet, I'm going to have to cut it up to make it easier to spin. According to my research, spinning acrylic is a lot like spinning silk. We'll see if I need one of my light weight spindles for this or not. I'd like to use the same spindle for all the plies and then spinning them together to make the final yarn. Everything is in the same colorway, so I don't need to chain ply to keep colors organized.

The crochet preemie hats project is on pause right now. I have about 80 preemie hats done. I just need to get myself organized to figure out how to get them to the rural hospital in my area. When the big project was done through the spinning guild I used to be a part of, the hats all went to the big city hospitals. I didn't think that was fair once I realized that. So, I have to do a little planning to get these hats to local rural hospitals so that they have something warm and comforting for the little ones there.

Book sales have slowed down, but my yarn stock pile is still pretty hefty. I am still drawing from the yarn that was donated by kind souls. Some of these hats look pretty funky but they work up super quick. I am branching out from hats for micropreemies into hats for babies a bit bigger to use up the yarn faster. I keep telling myself it's slower by the hour but faster by the week. I am debating if I should make thumbless mittens for the babies to match their hats. The last time I did that, it went over really well. 

Fiber Fluff: New Shawl Pattern

 Hi everybody.

I have been stalled on the spinning front because I haven't been able to walk and spin as I like to. It is my goal to get back to the half ball of grey Alpaca pencil roving and finish spinning it over the next few weeks. This way I can free up the spindle to start spinning the third ply of the yarn I plan on making. That is going to be from grey Acrylic pencil roving. Which I was shocked to discover it was silky in texture compared to most Acrylic yarns. Technically, this roving that I'm using is a 'chunky yarn' but I'm spinning it. I have no idea how long the staple length of the fiber is. It could be the approximate 200 yards or it could be less. It's going to be an adventure.

I have been working on a knitted shawl in a pattern that I brained up last year. I am a slow knitter which is why I haven't finished it but it's a really simple pattern. It is knit in stockinette stitch with a garter stitch stripe every 4 inches. I casted on 4 stitches at the beginning. The right side rows are knit with a make-one increase after the first stitch and before the last stitch in a row. This gives it the classic triangle shape. The wrong side rows are all purl stitches. After 4 inches of work, you knit two rows to make the garter stitch ridge and then go back to stockinette. You start your garter stitch on the right side of the shawl, making those increases as you do in the stockinette section.

The color yarn I am using is garnet. It is a 50/50 wool and acrylic yarn. It has a nice feel in the hand and is working up fairly warm. Like all of the triangle shawl patterns I make, I knit until either I run out of yarn or until it is wide enough to fit the person I am going to gift it to.

Fiber Fluff: The Bear is almost done! Huzzah!

 I have two more parts to make and fill with polyfill before I sew everything up together. My challenge is I am out of purple yarn and the last of my polyfill went into the body of the bear. This weekend, I will be picking up purple yarn, polyfill, and looking for button eyes that are a bit more like what Snuggle Bug has described.

Aside from that, my spinning is on hold and I just started making legit curtains for our windows because people keep looking in. It's terrible for my anxiety, so I'm crocheting curtains.

I will have to walk into the maelstrom to get things, oiy.

 My last week has been spent on knitting feverishly on this sweater. (40 rows before the final edging.) I haven't even started the bear that's been requested of me. I'm starting to think I might not get it done at all. I'm crocheting just as feverishly on a mobius cowl. I think I made a mistake thinking it was going to be easy to get done quick. Large yarn and large hook is faster than small yarn with a small hook. But 200 stitches per round is still alot. And I worry it won't be large enough or wide enough with the yarn that I have. 

I was planning on baking cookies from scratch but now I think the best decision is to buy packaged dough and go that way because I'm running out of time. I think the school pictures (that initially I thought weren't going to happen) showed up. That means picture frames and such. Aside from going into Shopmageddon to buy picture frames, I need to acquire things for the 12 boxes of Yule. I also need to locate books for the holiday eve book giving that I've started doing. And there are people that I can't  make things for because the pattern I was testing had the gauge all messed up. I don't have time to fix that and then make three versions of that pattern. So, I will have to brave the crowds to get stuff for them.

As a person with social phobia, Shopmageddon is not my favorite time of year. As a matter of fact, it is my least favorite time of year between the crowds and all of the canned holiday music that hasn't changed since 1950. I loathe Bing Crosby's voice because I've been over exposed to it. And they start playing it earlier and earlier with each year. I heard holiday music in one store back in August and they were setting up some of their holiday displays. Ugh.

Nablopomo post no. 16 - Slow progress is still progress.

This confounded sweater for Cuddle Bear is taking forever. I honestly don't know if I'm going to have it done in time for Yule. I just finished the table mat for the tea cozy set pattern test. I need to buy more yarn because I don't have the right color to make the two that I want to in addition to this pattern test. 

Now, you may wonder why I am doing a pattern test. Because the last time I took a pattern for granted, the gauge was all wrong and I had to rip the whole thing out. It was a headache. I'm fairly sure that I need to get more buttons as well to finish the tea cozy itself. Heck, I think I need buttons to do the button joins for Snuggle Bug's stuffie.

I have buttons but they're all the wrong shapes. All I need are simple, round buttons and I have none. You want stars, flowers, or hearts, I've got it. But no basic buttons are in my button jar because I have used them up repairing things. Large heart buttons could be fashionable on a pair of pants, but they'd be useless because they wouldn't fit through the button hole. Ugh.

I am at the point where I am questioning if I'm going to get any of this done. I always do, but I have my fits of uncertainty and stress.

Nablopomo post no 12: Embroidery

 I started this project back during the summer to keep me from being bonkers with stress. It's a quote from the Filianic scriptures. I designed this freehand.

The lettering and the centers of the flowers are done using DMC's floss no. 799. The petals on the blossoms are using JP Coates 158. The hearts are a variegated red-pink from Designs for the Needles with out a dye lot number. And the leaves and stems are worked with Designs for the Needle's number 826.

This is a sample of sorts. The lettering is running stitch. The stems are too. The centers of the blossoms are Rhode's stitch. The petals are satin stitch. The leaves are closed fly stitch. The hearts are satin stitch. The one on the upper right is properly done satin stitch inside a running stitch border. The one on the lower left was just randomly laid satin stitches inside a running stitch border. I should have gone with proper satin stitch.

Needlework!

 

Above are my latest embroidery projects. The fan with the butterflies that was started by my late Grandmother K. is finished and framed. I altered the pattern some because the extra bits they wanted done would have hidden the stitch definition. The top right is my project of the day with a favorite quote on it. I put up a vote for how the flowers should look. The internet answered lavender petals and blue centers. The project on the left is stalled because black 12 point Aida cloth is a real headache to work on. It is a sampler. I'm going to finish it this year. I am going to continue the black and white theme. All the stitches on there are crossed stitches. If I can manage it, I'll only be using crossed stitches for this project. It looks cool, but it's painful to work on.

A special embroidery project completed.

 The fan pictured to the right is a project that was stuffed into a bag of yarn I inherited from my late paternal Grandmother. She only had the handle of the fan done before it got put into a bag of yarn and forgotten. (Not that I've done that before, wink.)

It has taken me months to work on it because it was an emotionally grueling task. Finding a strand of her hair tangled up with some of the wool for this pattern, I got teary eyed and twisted the wool a little tighter so that silver thread of memory was in it. Looking at the finished product you can't tell where it is, I felt that was appropriate.

I still have to mount this and frame it. It is going to go beside the white fan with flowers on it and a Monarch butterfly beside it. That was the one she completed. It is sitting on the bookcase. This will likely go beside it. I miss my paternal Grandparents terribly and I haven't fully mourned their deaths. Family politics and circumstances kept me from their internment. At the viewing I was wandering around comforting relatives. I got a brief glimpse of my Grandfather in the box at his viewing and not a single glance at my Grandmother's viewing.

Some day, Beloved and I are going to go down to the family plot and lay some flowers down. It won't be easy, but it will be healthier for me than thinking they're still puttering around at the farm.

Fiber Fluff: I think this sweater is going to make me crazy.

 Dear Reader,

I'm working on a sweater for Cuddle Bear that is a pattern that dates back to WWI. Doing the pattern exactly as it is written, it looks like it's going to fit him for two seasons. He's super excited about this and doesn't care if he gets it a bit late. Given how slow progress is going on it, it may be January when he gets it. I don't know. I have tried dedicating two hours everyday to working on it. But garter stitch is painfully boring. I'm debating finding audio books that I can listen to as I work. Maybe it will relieve the boredom.

Snuggle Bug asked for a pair of slippers. I'm struggling to find the notebook that I wrote the pattern down in. The project room is kinda something of a disaster because I haven't got in there to organize and clean things. And that disaster has spread to part of the living room because I have books I'm working on that I need my notes to complete. It's just a mess because I was not well for multiple months and never got to this.

Now we're getting to the time where I'm getting nervous. Functionally two months to go. I just might be screwed, y'all.

Working on a migraine, yay. /sarcasm

 Today has been beastly hot. It is currently 90 deg F in the apartment with all the windows open and the fans running full blast. It would have been worse if I hadn't opened things up. The high temp has me feeling awful and exhausted. It didn't help that my sleep last night was rotten thanks to this cursed heat and humidity combination. I got more done yesterday than I did today. I folded a ton of laundry. (I still have more to fold but no energy to do it.) 

I tried going on Keen but so far there's been no fish biting. I'm taking the approach that this is like fishing and eventually I'll catch something if I am patient enough. Honestly, though, it looks like Keen is just degrading. It makes me wonder why I am even attempting it right now. Not the bad policies, not the stupid political moves, or the sniping between advisors (which can get bitter in the back channel communication). No, there's just been no flow of business. I'm questioning the whole point to this exercise.

On the fiber front, I did a little spinning today. I had to wear an apron because bits of second cuts off of the roving were flying through the air. I didn't have this happen with the first ball of pencil roving. I'm hoping this is just a coincidence that I'm starting with the wrong end of the ball or something. I'm spinning grey alpaca fiber on a drop spindle that was dirt cheap and I honestly have no idea what the weight of it is. The first single is in a hank sitting on top of some magazines I plan to use in a collage at some point for art therapy day.

I have been wrestling with the badly written instructions in a Leisure Arts manual for how to do the faggot/fagot stitch. After a week of trying different things, I finally dropped the manual and started messing around with the yarn based off of what I saw in the picture. Thus, today, I have a half finished washcloth made in this stitch. It is a yarn-eater stitch and is like the bastard love child of a puff stitch and a v-stitch.

No progress has been made on my black and white sampler. It's been so hot that I just couldn't sit in the front yard and use the light bouncing off of the sidewalk to backlight my work to find the holes so I could stitch. And it looks like the one day it is going to cool off a bit, it'll be raining. So, that project is on hold.

I finished the back of the preemie sweater that I started. It is a six inch square. Now to make the front panels and the sleeves. It's a bit of a pain because I am using 'baby' yarn which is stupidly fine and an e-hook which is a bit of a strain on my eyes. I am thankful that I have my bifocals that let me read but it's a bit more challenging to do crochet on a small scale because these eyeglasses are smaller frames than my last pair. I have to find my cheap readers that work pretty good for this stuff. They're buried somewhere on the kitchen table.

I can do minimalist design too.

Pic # 1

 I bought the hoop and the butterfly sticker at the craft store the other day. My total working time on this project was about an hour (with Snuggle Bug distracting me). First pic is with out the sticker. Everything is back stitch and using leftover floss from the birds project. The buttons I randomly found in my bag, which inspired the whole process.

Pic # 2

 I have come to the decision that I am going to resume art journaling for therapy. Doing mandala coloring is mind numbing and doesn't really work for me. I'm finding that embroidery helps me calm down.

Maybe art journaling will help me process the stuff I'm dealing with. I will post pics of pages as I get them done.

Projects and my sanity.

I have started on a new sampler. I just grabbed fabric out of my stash and discovered that I had a significant amount of black 14 count Aida cloth. So I popped it into a large oval shaped hoop and started stitching. I am a masochist. I'm not insane because I am not doing black on black embroidery here. But it is difficult for me to see the hole in the fabric where I need to pass my needle through. Still, I'm going to make this thing. I'm going with white on black for this one. I have another, larger but narrower thing of black Aida cloth. That'll go on the scroll frame and I will do something like gold work on it. I mean, if I am going to torture myself, I may as well go whole hog on it.

I am not doing well. I am getting towards the bottom of my current depressive episode and feeling like everything is hopeless. It's part of the reason why I haven't posted most of this week. I just have been so full of despair and disgust with myself that I feel like I am an utter failure as a human being, just as my abusive parents predicted I'd be because I didn't conform with their concept of what normal was.

The business with Keen has really upset my apple cart. I have looked into other platforms where I can give readings for hire but they want full time commitment. I can't do that. The whole reason why I was on Keen was because of the flexibility of the platform worked with my disability limits. Now they're pushing towards this other model of business and I just can't do it.

I have been rather dejected and thinking about other things that circumstances had forced me to give up, like painting. Being depressed and thinking about these things does not help being depressed, it just makes it suck even more. 

Throw on top of this, we have a new neighbor who triggers my c-ptsd whenever I encounter her. I either get the powerful urge to flee, space out and go on autopilot, or a visceral urge to do violence. All three are really bad options so I have been hiding in the apartment as she has been steadily redecorating the entryway and public spaces of the building.

Her sense of taste in such things is atrocious. I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. She's making noises about repainting the entryway. If I wind up going to the hospital with an asthma attack because of her crap, I'm giving her the damn bill. She's just a few steps away from taking over my gardens. She's talking about putting mulch over everything. We're not past the danger of frost. I haven't purchased the plants that I want to put in the beds this year. And she's sticking decorations out there where I wanted to put a planter, all proud of herself.

It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that she's entitled and has an attitude problem. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that she's demanding that the other residents of the building put up with her shit. I want to punch her in the face but assault is not the answer to the problem. So, I am doing needlepoint and envisioning stabbing her in the eye with just about each stitch. I posted the front and the back of my current project because both look kinda cool.
 

I am a coffee fiend.

 Stitched this in one day because I was stressed out over doctors' appointments. One of them got canceled and I just sat down with my project and got to work. The 'tabletop' was only partly finished the night before after I had drawn the design out on the burlap. 

The 'tabletop' is cross-stitch. Then I got bored. The coffee drops on the right hand side was an attempt at satin stitch inside an outline. It looks uglier in person. The coffee beans on the left side was the same and you can really see how the burlap didn't work well with the satin stitching.

The motto is back stitch. The coffee in the mug is cross stitch. I reconsidered cross stitch for the whole affair and used tent stitch for the mug (switching the direction of the stitch for the handle). The saucer is back stitch. I failed to realize that I couldn't do it in tent stitch and maintain the spacing that I had planned.

Stitching on burlap is on one hand a lot easier to pass your  needle through than stitching on 14 count Aida cloth. On the other hand, it has a lot of the same hang ups and it tries to shred itself as you're working. I wore an apron so that I wasn't covered in burlap bits.

I had my three month follow up with my general practitioner doctor (long way to say our family doctor) to discuss the bloodwork that he ordered and how I was doing with my diabetes, as well as any other health concerns I had. It was not a super great visit. He's a good doctor with excellent bed side manner and a great sense of humor. At the same time, he got serious when he pointed out the trend over the last six months that my A1C is going up. Nine months ago, my A1C was 6.4 units. Three months ago, it was 6.9 units. I got a little nervous but he said that it was still a good number because it was below 7. This time, it was 7.2 units.

Then we talked about my cholesterol. It went from being in the ideal range to being up 20 units, and that was the bad cholesterol. I confessed to stress eating cheese, a lot of cheese. He said that was the most likely culprit and that I should work on cutting down on the stress eating. He reassured me that the situation wasn't dire but I needed a course correction. He told me that I needed to start exercising more and work on lowering my stress levels. It was explained that stress can elevate blood sugar levels and prolonged stress can elevate your A1C due to the elevated blood sugar levels.

So, I'll be posting more pictures of stitchery that I have been working on in an effort to calm the fuck down. I am also going to try to see if maybe I can do walks at the park and take pictures of their gardens or something to help me be accountable for my exercise. Today, I paced back and forth in the kitchen spinning some alpaca roving for 30 minutes. Apparently, 30 minutes of walking is a good number to start out at. At one point the diabetes magazine I was subscribed to (which is no longer in print) had a couch to 5k program that would get you ready to run a 5k in a month. I laughed and moved on to the next article. Now, I'm starting to think that couch to 5k program, with the goal of walking it might be reasonable.

I don't know. I just know that I feel kinda shit and the reason why is all my own damn fault. So, I have to make changes to my diet and schedule. I don't know how I'm going to fit in the exercise time, but if I can get back to where I can stay awake after the kids get on the bus because my blood sugar didn't spike after eating breakfast, that'd be great.

Coping skills.

 I have bad anxiety issues. I'm on a laundry list of medications to help me with it. It's due to a laundry list of trauma. It really sucks. I do my best to cope with it. Recently, I recalled that doing embroidery helps my brain calm right the fuck down.

So, I worked on the Ukraine sampler (you'll see it down thread in the feed) to cope with my anxieties over the war in Europe. Raised during the Cold War by parents that insisted that bombs were going to drop any day now and that we were going to be forced to do inhumane things to survive was bullshit for so many reasons on so many levels. 

I'm still dealing with anxiety even with my medications. So I am working on this projects. I didn't like the suggested stitch sections for various bits so I changed them. 

The leaves are a detached chain stitch in the center with a straight stitch to either side to fill out the shape. The orange blossoms are detached chain stitch with a single straight stitch in the center. The centers of the orange blossoms are leviathan stitch. The pink blossoms are satin stitch (done as per project directions, but I'll rant about that in a second). Their centers are French knots. The stripes on the pink bird are badly done satin stitch, because I was distracted and not wearing my reading glasses to get a good look at the fabric. Everything else is straight stitch or running stitch.

The pink bird's tail on the left side is whipped straight stitch, they wanted me to use chain stitch for it but that would have looked sloppy. I used straight stitch for the beaks instead of chain stitch for the same reasons. The project came with a sewing needle, not an embroidery sharp that was the correct size. Thankfully, I have plenty of embroidery needles and some in the right size for this fabric. They wanted me to work everything with two strands of floss. I managed the outlining of the pink bird and the satin stitch for the pink flower petals and came away wanting to throw the thing across the room. So I switched to three strands and things are working up much easier. 

When I outline the lower bird with the blue floss, it'll have to be with two strands to make match the upper bird. But the details are going to be worked with three strands of floss. I refuse to do the tiny circles in satin stitch. It will probably be more leviathan stitch, rice stitch, or something else that fills the space but looks more interesting. This thing is supposed to be cut out and mounted on cardboard. They want me to tape it to the cardboard, which just doesn't make sense. 

It's clear this project was for someone with minimal stitching history. I'm going to hem the edges and sew the project to the board with long stitches connecting the sides together just as my Grandma K. taught me to do with my other embroidery projects. The trick will be finding a frame for it and figuring out what I'm going to work on next. It'll probably be hemming the Dune Fear Litany tapestry that I  made.

Wut r werds?

 It's be a hell of a while since I posted, it feels like forever. On my tiny side blog which I use to promote my religious writing blogs, I got a Russian troll to anonymously send me propaganda with the expectation I was going to post it because I am not a supporter of neo-Nazis. I apparently am going places if I am getting that kind of response to posts calling out neo-Nazis for attempting to use my morning little prayers that I post on there for their bullshit.

I have another embroidery project. This is from the Jaydan company and is simply called Birds. It's a printed fabric one. I had a counted cross stitch one but discovered that the chart they printed was off by ten stitches in random directions. I got so frustrated with it I threw the damn thing away.

This project has been annoying in its on special way. They sent me a sewing needle to do fine stitched embroidery instead of one of the smaller embroidery sharps that you're supposed to use. I did the pink sections with that until I got fed up (bird and flowers). At which point I put my shiny new sewing needle into my sewing needle case and found my smallest embroidery sharp needle. They wanted the flowers and the leaves to all be satin stitch. But with this weight fabric and the small size of it all, even with two threads it was a pain in the neck. I did the pink flowers in satin stitch, managing not to throw the project across the room in frustration because I was doing embroidery with a sewing needle.

After I switched needles I did the brown sections in running stitch. They wanted the solid portions of the branches and the left most part of the tail of the pink bird to be in chain stitch with two strands of floss. I said screw that, it was just going to look wrong. So running stitch for the branches and that part of the tail was whipped running stitch. The leaves have a single detached chain stitch in the center and then single stitches to either side of it to fill it in. This way, they actually look like leaves. The centers of the pink flowers were supposed to be satin stitch but I used French knots because it looks better. I know that I'll keep modifying this thing as I go along. I am filling it in by color instead of my usual start with a motif and move on.

I still want to make the "I Can't Adult" project, but I think I will be freehand-embroidering it because the chart was awful and nothing was lining up correctly. I'll probably put a different motif than the cross stitch roses on the four sides of the motto. I've been working on a lot of embroidery and sewing of late to cope with my sky high anxiety. I forgot to take one of my medications and just about had a panic attack later in the evening because I didn't have my medication in my system to keep me calm.

I'm really frustrated with this whole business of being on a cocktail of medications to keep me calm and help me sleep. It doesn't help that there's a whole heap of learned shame over this because I'm afraid that if 'people' find out that I'll be deemed a drug addict and lose my kids. It's all programming from when I was a kid. I'm trying to unravel it but it's really hard. 

Glory to Ukraine!

 The war in Ukraine broke out and I started to panic. I grabbed some embroidery materials and started stitching. I wish the war was done as fast as this sampler was. It's on 14 count Aida cloth. I have learned it doesn't lend itself well to long back-stitch with the same issues as satin stitch. That's why some of the lettering looks funky. The smudged area is where I tried to wash off some pencil marks. It's just wet. When it dried out, the smudge mostly went away.

The garden at the base of the image is hope. The light brown fence represents the troops who are defending their homes and their hopes. The dark brown field represents Ukraine's importance as an agricultural center/breadbasket for the region. The central figure is Ukraine. The sword represents their willingness to fight for their homeland. The flower represents their willingness for peace. The crown is their sovereignty. I tried to incorporate traditional Ukrainian elements into the sampler. My counted cross stitch skills are filled with fail.

My feelings on all of this is the Russian army needs to get the fuck out of Ukraine, all of Ukraine, and go home to fix their own country. Vladimir Putin needs a kick in the teeth, literally. And I'm terrified that WW3 is going to break out. So I stabbed the shit out of some fabric to make something that showed my support for Ukraine and mentally was stabbing the dictator of Russia in the eye with each stitch.

Fiber fluff update

 Well, it's December and I've only got one present made. That's right, I've only made one present. We'll be baking cookies later on in the month. But, that's not the same as making stuff like scarves and toys. I'm panicking a little bit about what I'm going to give people. I was going to make my increasingly famous Apple Pie Moonshine but the list of people who can have it keeps growing smaller. I may just give out the recipe.

On the preemie hat front, I'm grinding away at making hats. The people who write these patterns and say they work up in fifteen minutes lie. They're dirty, filthy lies. It's more like a half hour regardless of hook size and yarn weight. It is vexing but I'm going to keep at it. I've lost count as to where I'm at right now. But I know that I'm not going to hit my goal of 100 by January 1. Those few months back in the summer when I had a mental health crisis really screwed up my plans for the holidays. That's typically when I'm working on making things for people.

Spinning is on hold at the moment because I'm trying to finish off this damn ball of yarn for the preemie hats. I'm a bit frustrated. I love the way the Alpaca fiber is spinning up. I'm sure that it'll be a beautiful yarn. But I can't make anything for myself out of it because I will react to it. Nothing is as disappointing as getting all that work done and discovering that you can't do anything with it.

I'm debating rebooting my Etsy store and slapping up some of my yarn hoard for sale. I've been considering spinning for production for a little while. I enjoy spinning and I know that I can spin for production level work by the fact that I have spun a mile of yarn in the span of a month. And it was good, fine weight yarn. On a drop spindle. Since I have a kick wheel, I can probably do double that in shorter time. I am just in the situation that I don't have a comfortable chair to sit in and do this work. 

Looking at the yarn offered up for sale by others and the cost of their spinning services, I find myself thinking I could probably undercut some on the price and still make a decent bit out of my hobby. And not be left with the question of what the hell am I going to do with all of this damn yarn that I have spun. I'm still deciding on this one.

Monday Rant: What's wrong with being Chaotic Good?

 I make people uncomfortable by doing nice things for them. I don't understand it. Somewhere along the way, the practice of random acts of kindness started getting frowned on if they didn't meet a specific standard (usually some WASP suburbanite vision of it ala buying coffee for the next car in line). When I was in labor with my second son, I had brought with me a crafting project to keep me distracted. I overheard a mother in the next bed over (we were all waiting our turn for our c-section delivery) who was very distressed about being a single mother and her lack of goods for taking care of the baby. I asked the nurse if I could give that woman the baby blanket that I had finished, explaining that the entire thing was made from a hypoallergenic yarn and machine washable. The nurse was confused but said it was ok, as long as I stayed in my bed. My solution was to hand the blanket to the nurse to give the woman (which made the nurse visibly uncomfortable). The other mother started crying when she received the blanket.

I told this story to someone I knew and they got offended. I was chastised for making the woman cry when her situation was so bad. I pointed out that I had given her something that was going to help and they proceeded to defame this mother claiming that they were likely a 'welfare queen'. It took a great deal of restraint not to punch them in the face when they started talking smack about this poor woman who was in a hard spot that they knew nothing about.

This isn't the first time I've been told that my random acts of kindness and charity are 'wrong' because I'm giving to the 'wrong' people. Apparently, you're only allowed to give to the poor if you're part of an organization (preferably run by a church that you're a member in good standing), you're only allowed to give money to charitable organizations instead of directly to the people in need, and if you're making things to give away it has to be to charitable organizations instead of to people directly, because the people might sell it.

The general attitude that my acts of kindness and charity to others is going to enable some kind of nefarious behavior on the part of the people who are in need is bullshit. But I run into it a lot around these parts. There's always the assumption that the poor are going to use cash to get drugs or alcohol. There's the attitude that you've been conned out of your money if you pay for an impoverished person's lunch. And this vacillating sense of virtue signaling on if you're giving to a charity. If the charity is one that is considered virtuous based on their public image, you're a bad person for not giving to them when you choose someone else. (I'm looking at you, Salvation Army and your anti-LGBT+ bullshit.) I hate the default assumption that if a charitable organization is nominally associated with Christianity, that means they're better than the other organizations.

I tend to skip the organizations for the most part and just give to people in need as I meet them. Things tend to find me that people are in need of and I pass them along instead of insisting on charging a buck. The only organization that I work with is the spinning guild because they're well vetted and have a good set of contacts for distributing goods to the people who need it. I also picked to do so because they're secular. I know that nobody is going to be getting pressured to convert to anything in order to get what they need to be ok.

But this cultural attitude that all poor people of bad moral character and that by helping them I am enabling them to do nebulous, nefarious things makes me furious. If the homeless person I gave a scarf to decides to sell it, obviously they needed the cash more than the scarf, so it still helped them. When I give things away, they're no longer mine to dictate what happens to them. The same is true about any act of charity. You give it away, it's not yours anymore and you don't get to say boo about what people do with it. Don't like it, don't give it away.

Chaotic good for life. To Hel with the haters.

Fiber fluff update

 Well, I had a bag of mostly felted fiber that I just gave up on and threw out. I felt like I was wasting precious resources when I did so but there was no hope for it. The least felted bits of it, I managed to spin some really slubby yarn out of it. I don't like it and I don't know what I'm going to do with it. There's not enough to make something big. I am debating the possibility of something like fingerless gloves. I just don't know if there's enough there for even that. I really didn't get much yarn out of it, though I did accomplish the heavier weight I was trying to spin with it.

I finished spinning the cotton-candy purple merino that I dyed and carded myself. My mother in law has a drum carder. I used it for the first time to card that stuff. It was an interesting experience. It again came out as a slubby yarn. I don't particularly like slubby yarns because I find them difficult to work with. That said, It still looks like cotton candy. I have to wet it and hang it. I'll probably do that while we still have the decent weather. I know that I overspun it. It's an uneven, slubby yarn but it was not only my first attempt at using a drum carder but my first project using a ring-distaff. I think I like the ring distaff for the mini-batts of fiber that you get off of a drum carder. I tried using it with pencil roving and it was an unmitigated disaster.

The alpaca pencil roving that I was working on is sitting in the bag. I have about a quarter of the first ball spun. I am going to spin the rest of that ball on the super cheap drop spindle that I started on. It may have been super cheap and it's lacking ornamentation of any sort, but it works ok and I think I might be able to fit the entire ball of pencil roving on it. The second ball of pencil roving (which is about the same size) is going to be spun on my kick-wheel. That probably won't be happening until after the holidays.

The baby hat project is up to 35 hats. I don't think I'm going to make my goal of 50 hats by the end of the year despite the fact they're preemie hats. When people tell you these hats work up in 15 minutes a piece, they lie. I finished off the really obnoxious ball of yarn that was making each stitch a different color because of how they dyed it and I had to use stitch markers to tell where I was in the process of making the damn hat. The current ball of yarn isn't half as bad. The color runs are longer so it works up like stripes and it's a lot easier to see where the increases are.

I'm stalled on my neon pink wingspan shawl. I've just been too busy with other stuff, like being sick for two and a half weeks. I'm working on trying to get caught up on a bunch of things. I am probably going to be working on that shawl in December or January at this rate.