19th Nervous Breakdown

Whew. It has been a month. Spring arrived overnight and at work we've been playing catch up ever since. The first two weeks of May I spent every single day so stressed out I couldn't decide whether I was going to throw up or cry (I actually managed not to do either). My boss was so stressed out he alternated between yelling and throwing up. It's been delightful around here, can you tell? To make matters worse, my boss got me a second, part-time job doing bookkeeping for his sister-in-law. Which should be a good thing, except her books are SO messed up and I have been killing myself to find time to work on them adequately. It's nice to have the job and it's a great learning experience, but the timing kind of blew big bookkeeping chunks.

But things are starting to quiet down now and we're getting caught up. Last week I finally picked up my needles again and cast on for a new project, another Icelandic shawl:

I'm knitting it with the tangerine orange Plain n' Fancy laceweight that my beloved yarn mule* Carole shlepped back from Utah for me.


I STILL haven't finished sewing up the blue sweater, now that spring's here, my motivation has fled--but I did finish the Sockotta socks.
I haven't worn them yet, but so far I'm not wild about them. I'm still on the fence about the yarn, and I'm not going to make the Balbriggan heel my standard heel anytime soon. I'm glad I tried it, but it's kind of fussy and I don't see the point. There are easier ways to achieve a similar result.

When Carole and Sharon and I hit Sakonnet Purls during this past weekend's fabulously fun yarn crawl, I bought some Claudia handpainted sock yarn in Freesia. It is intensely pink. I'm not sure this picture does the intense pink-ness justice, but here's the first sock, completed already:

I also bought two sweaters' worth of blue wool yarn (including the armful of Debbie Bliss you may have seen me with over at Carole's blog). I know! Me, blue? And I made Carole and Sharon dig through every %$^#%$ bin in the ^$&%# store to find it, too. I just thought it might be nice to have a sweater that wasn't green, you know?


*in case any of you wonder, I'm using "mule" in the sense of one who transports drugs for another. Carole does not have long ears!

I, Who Have Nothing...

but these pictures of primroses.



I haven't knit anything, I haven't spun anything. The blue sweater has its zipper but still needs to be seamed. I didn't even have anything on the needles until this past Saturday, when I started a sock out of Sockotta (I like the colors but I don't like the fabric it creates). The sock has been kind of interesting because I decided to play with my heels and toes and used a faux-Balbriggan heel on it, which so far I like. I call it a faux-Balbriggan heel because I wasn't into the grafting and my instructions didn't make sense, so I decreased to one stitch instead.

This is the first year I've seen the primroses in bloom--I bought them post-bloom last year and wasn't sure they'd even come up, much less sure what color they might be. They're not as fancy as I had hoped but they are hardy, and I guess you can't ask for both.

I'll miss most of the fiber fests this spring due to Garden Club obligations (can't wait til my term as prez ends! one more year) but it's probably just as well since my living room is drowning in fiber anyway.