Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Germ-a-lerm-a-ding-dong

Help! Cold germs ate my brains! Yes, your poor damselfly succumbed to the Winter Plague thanks to a very cute but snot-nosed 3-year-old, Grandbeastie Rosebud. That’ll teach me to wipe her nose and not decontaminate after. Yuck. Exactly 2 days after the snot incident we spent a delightful but foggy Sunday out at Reifel Bird Sanctuary with brother, sis-in-law, and Nana feeding the chickadees, geese and ducks:

DuckSoup

Here I even had one little female mallard with her head between my boots eating seeds that Thom chucked at me. They tickled! Now I have to wash my poor boots off too since they’re covered in duck breath and webbed footprints.

Unfortunately it was colder than I expected and I got a little chilled. (Hey, in my defence it was sunny and several degrees warmer when we left home!) Later that evening as we celebrated Thom’s brother’s birthday with fondue I started to feel a little sore throat coming on. Blech. Hope I didn’t share this with anyone there. Today I had to reschedule my dentist appointment too which was supposed to be tomorrow. At least there’s nothing else on the schedule until next week now which should give me time to recuperate.

Meanwhile, Before Bug, I managed to sort out some stuff in my basement dye studio/laundry area.  No m*ths down there either! Yay. I got all the Indian cotton scarves washed and freshened up, 16 in total. (Yes, I have a lot of them.) The area still needs more sorting and cleaning though. I have too many dyes and assists all jammed into 2 cupboards. Things are falling out when I open the doors and I can’t find what I need. Not a good situation. It’ll have to wait until I feel better though. I’m not tackling any dust when I already can’t breathe!

I know I shouldn’t wait so long to clean and sort the stashes but you know how it is. Time zips by too fast and before you know it, more years have disappeared in the rear view mirror. I’m not a messy person. I like to be organised and reasonably tidy but not scrupulously so. And I live with another crafty person who has his priorities too which I always have to take into consideration. Unfortunately his neatness standards are a bit lower than mine and he understandably won’t let me sort his stuff for him. So I have to work around them as best I can. Many years of negotiations have gotten us this far anyway. Heh.

Nothing much more to report really. I got the pearly handspun yarn dyed a deep red-orange semi-solid. The angelina fibres dyed even deeper than the wool and it’s very pretty! No photo yet though. Sorry. It’s still hanging on the basement clothesline. I also found a few items to over-dye (which isn’t happening yet), including a sweater-coat that goes with nothing in my wardrobe and a couple of shawls that I’ve joined together into one blanket. The latter were the results of long-ago sheep-to-shawl contests and, although not from the same fleece, they’re the same weave structure, Dogwood Lace, an Atwater-Bronson lace design. (If you’re interested, there’s more about this structure here.) So they kind of went together ok. It remains to be seen how they will dye though! I don’t really care as long as this thing isn’t white. I’ll be putting it on my bed for extra warmth. More on this when I get to it.

We’ve had so much fog lately but today it’s raining. I don’t care. I’m not going anywhere! Instead I bought myself another Craftsy class with a sale that was offered. I’ve really enjoyed the two that I’ve been alternating watching: The Ultimate T-Shirt with Marcy and Katherine Tilton and Knit Lab: Fit Your Knits with Stephanie Japel. They are both excellent, full of great tips and neither too fast nor too slow for my attention span. I think it helps that the instructors are fun, vibrant, smart people who are comfortable in front of the camera and very able to explain their topics in clear terms. Hopefully the new one I got, Custom Fitting: Back, Neck, Shoulders by Kathleen Cheetham will be as helpful to me. The Tilton class is short on fitting these very critical areas and Lynda Maynard’s Sew the Perfect Fit doesn’t go into it in enough depth so I’m hoping this one will fill in the gaps.

I must like this format – I’m now up to 13 classes! Quite a number were free and I tried to get the others on sale rather than pay full price so it’s not as crazy as it sounds. I’d certainly rather buy a specific class and have unlimited access on my own time schedule than pay a subscription fee. If they go that way they will just lose me. I think I already have enough information in my library to keep me happy for as many years as I have left anyhow! And there’s still lots of free sources on the web. You just have to watch the quality of the information.

OK. I’m done babbling incoherently. More anon.

1 comment:

Heather said...

Hope you are feeling better soon!Even so, a Damselfly that's under the weather seems to get a lot more done than many healthy people on any given day!