Train of thought
So … it’s 9:30 am Monday …
1) It’s the first day of vacation. Last week, after making half a dozen really stupid mistakes and realizing how much more irritable I was than I normally am, I said you know what? I need a break. Luckily, I have a kind boss, and thus here I am having a decompression week. I have no big plans, I have no bananas. I’m just having a 9-day weekend. Woo! 
2) I love Sundays, because they result in sights like that over there –>. I love pancakes. This is the best pancake recipe ever. It’s from the Betty Crocker 195X cookbook. Classic. I’ve been making these pancakes since I was very young.
Oddly, I prefer Karo syrup. That’s right, plain old light corn syrup. I don’t know of anyone but my brother and I who like to eat pancakes with Karo.
<– several hours later –>
3) Whew. I totally forgot how irritating I can be. I realized about 1 pm that I’d inadvertently scheduled my entire vacation week into 2-hour increments. I say “inadvertently” because I really didn’t mean to have any schedule at all, this was supposed to be relaxation time. However, while I was running madly about the house accomplishing things today (seriously, isn’t this supposed to be a break?!) I realized I had very specific plans for each hour of my next 7 days.
OK, so I need to relax. Or perhaps, learn how to relax. I don’t seem to be very good at it. Boy can I schedule and plan, though. A week or so ago I emailed all of my coworkers with a document that was originally named “Schedule and Plan.” I have to laugh at myself sometimes. I cannot imagine what it must be like to be on the receiving end of my scheduling/planning/organizing/editing OCD issues, but I imagine it’s kind of like having a drill sergeant around. Fun!
You know what? I probably can imagine how it feels easily, because I do it to myself, too.
4) Whew again. Aside from cleaning and reorganizing my entire house today, I stopped for a bit and made dinner. It was the same slow cooker rosemary tenderloin with orzo I made over the holidays. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to make it since. I am hopeful. Others have made this from my recipe and it turned out well. I had meant to try it before now - when I post recipes, etc. I like to try it out to make sure I wasn’t smoking something when I wrote it. My cooking tends to be of the “throw stuff in until it seems okay” method, so writing down what I do? hahahaha riiiiiiight.
5) I’ll leave you with my kitten. She’ll be 7 months old in a week. I expected her to get bigger than she is, if only because her parents were bigger, but she’s still a shrimp. A fat shrimp. One would think with all the “leaping tall buildings in a single bound” she does every day, she wouldn’t be chubby, but she is. If only she was this sweet all the time … Maybe when she grows up? I do love those little tufts of fur between her toes, and I love that she’s ticklish :D. (Me=sucker for animals.)
Tomorrow will be more restful, right?
Crafting takes a left turn
OK, this is what I intended to post earlier today, but haven’t had the time today. Why? United Way. Don’t get me started. The bookkeeping is horrendous.
So … today is weird show and tell. My first presentation is Callie’s Christmas stocking. It was the project I completed in order to qualify for starting a new project. I can just see it now - I just keep emptying and refilling the same drawer all year and nothing else gets done.
I prefer to think of this stocking as Not My Fault. I’m actually somewhat embarrassed to show you this, and all I can say is that I must have been channeling my cat’s personality when I made this. I wasn’t trying for … whatever this communicates.
In any case, this is an example of what turns up when I decide to embroider something. I’m not a great stitcher, but except for the black nose backing, it’s all needle and thread. I think that viewing it next to Callie herself is probably the best way to communicate to you the very real similarities between the personality and the stocking.
Grandma - My other show-and-tell piece is a bunny-shaped cutting board my mom brought back from Iowa - something my grandmother took out of some dark corner where it has been hiding for 72 years. No kidding! My grandmother (by the name of Betsy Timpe) painted this in 1936 in the Timpe School on Timpe Lane, a one-room schoolhouse on the prairie in Nebraska. So you’re starting to see about the size of the town, eh? This is completely awesome. I don’t even have words.
So, anybody out there want to present their most embarrassing or any slightly odd crafting projects?
Three-Color Afghan Q&A
So one of the main projects I’ve been working on in December was a gift, so I never showed it that much, however now that the holiday is over I’ll reveal it. It’s an afghan that I made for my grandparents, now about five feet long and about 4.5 feet wide. It’s very dense and yet stretchy. Working on it with it on my lap kept me very warm!
Yarn: It has three colors - off white, chocolate brown and dusty blue. The worsted-weight yarn is Vanna’s Choice from Lion Brand (oh how my husband laughed when I brought home Vanna White yarn!). It’s an acrylic yarn, and I thought it a bit squeaky to work with. But on the whole it’s pretty soft, easy to care for, and fairly priced for a project as big as this. I believe it took 5-6 balls of each, something like that. It was made by holding three strands of yarn together as you go, so it took lots of yarn.
Hook Size: Speed Hook Size Q . This was my first foray into “speed hooking” and I am torn about the method. I mean, the loose gauge is great for this sort of project, but it’s not quite so fun to work with. Kind of hurt my fingers.
Pattern: Lion Brand’s free pattern the “5 1/2 Hour Throw”. I modified this pattern quite a bit althought the basic “V stitch” (as I call it) is the same. I used a smaller hook (calls for size S) which of course decreased the gauge a lot. I still thought it was loose, so to keep this from feeling “too floppy” I used pretty tight tension. Despite the gauge decrease, I did increase the size overall significantly by adding additional stitches (the original is about the size of the striped without the border). I also removed the fringe it called for and instead added a two-row deep half double crochet “binding” border to tighten the edges because I was still unsure how the floppiness and stretchiness of the stitches around the edges would work out over time and with repeated washing. (Note: Normally I would give you the link to the pattern, but Lion Brand’s site is apparently in the midst of renovation and is totally borked. So here’s the pattern from Michael’s.)
Color Pattern: The pattern is a single color thing, but I made a pattern of solid stripes surrounded by a three-tone border. This matches my grandparents’ sofa (they call the sofa a “davenport” which I’ve never heard outside that area of Iowa). In my next post, which I shall title “Made of Fail” I’ll tell you how I ended up making this particular color pattern, and give you some insight into how spectacularly the phrase “I am not perfect” fits me and why that doesn’t matter. The crap I had to go through to get this project to completion was astounding, and as usual, it was all my fault because I made it harder than it needed to be. Typical. Well, hope y’all like it 
My brother Jeremy gracefully agreed to “model” the blanket to show approximate size. Pretty big for a lap throw, yes?
Afghan Detail of border and brown stripe:
