Glorious

Today is so warm and sunny that I finally believe that it’s really summer. I’m distracting myself while I wait for an appropriate time to go get a series of blood tests that my doc would like me to have. He gave me the form ages ago but I didn’t have time before we went on holiday so today is it. I’m drinking hot water trying to pretend that it’s tea and hoping I don’t faint from starvation before I can get to the lab. I don’t want to go too early because there’s always a line-up then. I think it’s harder to fast when you’re conscious. I woke up at my usual 6 am and am trying to wait until at least 9:30 am before I leave.

I had a weird glitch yesterday with my computer refusing to connect with the Internet for a number of hours. It eventually fixed itself. While I was waiting I amused myself by continuing to stick mini-photos in my travel journal and spent a number of hours writing up my notes for the Spin Your Own Stripes workshop that I took while I was in Red Deer. Yeah, I know that’s disgustingly anal of me but I like to have everything crafty that I do put into my Accomplishments binder. You never know when the information will come in handy years from now when I can’t remember exactly what I did. I even printed 2 copies of the notes and put the second copy in my class notebook so that it’s there too. Here’s a photo of the 2 wrist warmers I made out of some of my sample yarns:


Knit on 56 sts with 2mm needles, they're about 5.5" long before I ran out of yarn. Yeah, I know they don’t remotely match. So what? They’re soft and warm. Hard to imagine wearing them on a day like today however. It’s supposed to get very hot. I’d better get some more of my sorting/cleaning done before it heats up. Yesterday I managed to shovel 2 more large green garbage bags out of the mess that used to be my studio. That’s a total of 4 now and the pile still doesn’t seem to be getting much smaller. I’m starting to be quite ruthless which is all to the good. Unfortunately I can only work on it for an hour or so before I start looking dazedly at the heaps and the sorting comes to a halt. Perhaps it’s something in the dust? It doesn’t matter how long it takes as long as it gets done eventually. I need my studio floor back.

I’ll share with you my favourite distraction this morning. There’s a fabulous antique knitted lace exhibit on at the Lacis Museum in Berkeley, CA. If like me you can’t make it to the museum, the next best thing is to click on the Exhibit and see a slide show of the pieces. The shawls, scarves, stockings, caps, doilies and edgings are beautifully photographed with detail shots — 111 in total. On my high-speed cable modem it took about 15 minutes to view them all. Breathtaking!

If that’s not enough for you, click on the Previous Exhibits link and go to the Memories in Beads slide show. 173 photos of purses, bags, clothing and unattached bead-stitched canvas with details of some of the stitching and antique beads. Unfortunately neither slide show has captions but it sure is great eye candy! There are several other slide shows available on this website also. Get clicking!

I almost forgot — Happy Fourth of July to my US readers!