If a car going at 45 miles per hour...

I was just writing an email to my mother telling her about my day and realized that this really needs to be blogged. If anything ever deserved to be blogged, this deserves to be blogged.

OK, so there are vending machines in the break room at my office. If someone loses money in the machine, they just stick a note on the machine and when the guy comes to fill it, he gives me the notes and the money to distribute. This is one he gave me today.

It said, "The machine owes me 95 cents because it charged me 85 cents for a 75 cent item and it didn't work the first time."

I can't tell you how much pleasure that gave me today. It's like one of those math problems: If the machine charges you 85 cents for a 75 cent item but it didn't work the first time, how much does the machine owe you? How great is that!!!! As someone said, it's like those insurance reports where the person is describing how an accident happened: The tree jumped into the road and I hit it. Priceless.

Life is like that

I’m a pretty intuitive sort of person. I trust my feelings (not my emotions but feelings I get about things – emotions aren't completely untrustworthy), I usually follow my hunches and I know that when my inside voice is telling me to pay attention to something and I tell it to shove off, I’m usually going to pay for it. Something like that just happened to me while I was felting my backpack. Here’s the unfelted version:

Here, however, is the felted the liver out of it version. Hummm… I like the shape and I think I’ll go ahead and write up the pattern but I’m a bit disappointed that I sat and let it get to this point. But felting is lot like life – there’s no going back.

Now that I’ve had my Forrest Gump moment, we move on.

Here’s the Roman Stripe Stole I’ve been making as a craft for the read along in my Ravelry Shakespeare group – we’re reading Antony and Cleopatra. The pattern is really fun but you really have to pay attention and keep your wits about you. I’m using Louet Euroflax Paris in Willow. It’s 100% Wet Spun Long Linen and for weavers among us is 14/2. For the non-weavers among us, it’s a lace weight and Willow is a sort of olive green.



And here’s the Pi Shawl using the Habu stainless steel wool yarn. This is being so interesting and really quite challenging. Most of the challenge has to do with the size of the yarn. This photo shows the start of the shawl with the sample of the Euroflax on one side and a light worsted weight yarn on the other just to show the scale of how small this yarn really is.

Happy Anniversary!

I should have done something clever to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of the blog but to be honest, I forgot and then it got late so I'll just acknowledge the milestone and then go watch "In Plain Sight" which I missed most of last night.

I didn't get my backpack felted but I did get 2 lace projects started.

The first one is a book project with the Ravelry Shakespeare group. We're reading Antony & Cleopatra and knitting Egyptian/Roman inspired things. I found a lace pattern in Barbara Walker's Second Treasury called Roman Stripe. I have some olive green linen left from another project so I'm using that along with some olive colored beads.

The second is an EZ Pi Shawl but it's being made with Habu wool/stainless steel that's about the size of sewing thread. I'm working it on US size 5 needles (3.75mm) and I really like the effect.

So here's to another year!