"Should" is a Lie

I've got finite hours in a day, but it's so easy to lie to myself about what I can reasonably accomplish. 

Take sewing, for example:
I'm a novice sewist, but I have this notion that I should be able to start a project on a Saturday morning and have it finished before bed Saturday night. I have craft group on Saturday morning, which I've been attending regularly for several years now. I do not have a Saturday morning to work on sewing. At best, I have Saturday from around 1 p.m. until bedtime. 

If it doesn't get finished on Saturday, it's not getting finished on Sunday because my Sundays consist of sleeping in, laundry, cooking, spouse time, and whatever crafting I can do from the couch. This is the way of things. This is my ideal Sunday. I sometimes deviate from my Sunday plans for an hour or two, but then I return to my regularly scheduled programming.

What I'm getting at here is that I really do myself a disservice by insisting that I "should" be able to start and finish a project in a single day. The result is sadness and disappointment that I wasn't able to accomplish what I set out to do, which isn't helpful to my goal of enjoying sewing, is it?

Anyway, I was going to share a lovely flannel robe this week, but in order to do so I need to actually sew the pieces together. For once, though, I'm not upset that I didn't finish it on Saturday. I cut out all of the pieces without incident. I made efficient use of my fabric yardage. I didn't fuss, cuss, or throw anything. And all of those things are markers of success along the way toward my goal.

I feel hopeful about sewing, and that's the main thing.

In the meantime, I've been spinning and knitting! I've been experimenting with using support spindles for worsted spinning by using a half hitch to spin suspended while maintaining the spinning tip's contact with the bowl. It's a really great solution to wanting to spin in my lap but not wanting to spin woolen or use a temporary cop. I'll expand on this in a future post. 

I also took some time to work on spinning a thicker single, both on a heavy spindle and on a wheel. It's not as thick as I wanted (I was trying to mimic a worsted weight Noro yarn, but my combed prep wouldn't have made that happen anyway), but I like the result. Spinning thick is difficult for those of us who spend hours upon hours spinning laceweight singles for fingering weight plied yarns!  

 

 

Since then, all of my spindle spins have been moved over to the wheels to clear out projects while I wait for my EEW Fold and my Ashford Elizabeth 30" to arrive. I'll still continue plying my in-progress chain ply on a spindle because I really prefer a spindle for that. My loop joins are so much less noticeable, and I can make nice long chain links. Otherwise, the spindle army is put to rest for a little while.  

On the knitting front, my Threshold sweater is past the armholes now and joined in the round. The yarn I'm using is lovely with this pattern, and it's enjoyable to knit (even if I haven't been able to memorize the cable pattern). I just transferred it to a shorter cable, and it's unfortunately not easy to photograph at the moment.

I also cast on for TUNE, a laceweight tunic that I may or may not shorten into a tee. I'm using handspun for this: a light fingering weight, two-ply Merino in a purple-to-black gradient. It's going to take eighty-four years to knit, and I'm fine with that because it's very soothing to work on.

That's about it for this update. Works are in progress, and I have some tacos with homemade tortillas to get to eating. That's a new low (or high, if you think about it) for me in terms of avoiding going to the grocery store. 😉  

Midyear Update

It's been a wild ride these past few months, and I have a lot to share!

I've continued the obsession with all things square. Since January's post, my spouse 3D printed a 4" pin loom for me, and I finished the reclaimed 18" version.

Noro Rikka is the perfect yarn for bias weaving at this density, and I'm thrilled with how it works up. The resulting fabric is going to be a mini throw pillow because, for the record, an 18" loom doesn't really net an 18" pillow cover! (Also the loom is more like 17.5" but who wants to say that all the time?)

 

I had to get a little creative with where to hang the loom so I could stand while working, and it turns out that one of the crossbeams on my Glimakra Standard is just about the right height to hang it.  

In March, we took our annual trip out to Death Valley for some camping and wildflower viewing, and I brought the 4" loom along as a downtime activity. These little squares take about 15 minutes each, so they're not much of a time commitment. 

After the trip, I did some experimenting with the 7" fine sett loom and discovered that it can easily be used for multi-layer weaving by skipping every fourth pin to recreate the gaps in the three-pin setup (like the 4" loom). The sett becomes almost identical to the regular three-pin sett, so this opens up weaving with DK and worsted weight yarns.

I have quite the little collection going.

 [six weeks pass, Tour de Fleece starts, and my therapist asks if I've been writing...😂]

Hello. I cleaned my house to company-ready status last weekend, and now I magically have a brain to write with again. Weird.

Instead of putting the two Noro Rikka panels together and making one pillow without a mate, I dug up some deeply stashed Donegal Yarns Aran Tweed to make solid back panels for two matching pillows. Weaving on this big square is such a meditative practice. If you're at all handy, I highly recommend scrapping a stretched canvas frame and making one of these.

Otherwise, I've been spinning since before the beginning of July. Finishing spins, starting new ones, cooing over quite possibly the softest, squishiest yarn I've ever spun. I think I'll do a roundup post of recent spins after the month is over.

Also in early July, I turned 35. I keep saying that this is my one-third-life crisis year because I bought a little old pickup truck and ordered a brand new spinning wheel for the first time since I started wheel spinning in 2016 on my Woolmakers Bliss, which is now on its second life in Canada, in case you didn't know. 

 

Unless the world implodes or explodes, next month I'll be receiving an Ashford Elizabeth 30. She's a big, beautiful lady, and I am quite excited. They've already sent me the lazy kate and extra bobbins I ordered, and while the bobbins are sitting cold and lonely in their shipping box, I've already put the lazy kate to good use with my vintage Ashford Traditional.

 

Spinning so much lately really has me daydreaming about handspun knitting again, which had really taken a back burner to weaving for a while! Now, I have a couple of small weaving projects in the planning stages, and I'm thinking about what to do with this lovely skein and its deep, dark, in-progress mate that you will just have to wait to see. 

 

I want to talk to y'all once every couple of weeks, okay? It's good to be here, and it's good to have an uncluttered mind, so I'd like to keep it that way. 

 

Drop me a line here in the comments or on Tumblr if you're interested in boosting the activity in my Discord server, because I'm real bad at it! I've largely shunned the other social media options, and I don't care because I don't want your money unless I write a book someday or you need editorial assistance with your book. I should probably make an email account for that, shouldn't I?

 

See you in two weeks, pals!