Stress

My Knit Picks order arrived!  My Knit Picks order arrived!  My Knit Picks order arrived!  My Knit Picks order arrived!

I'm a little bit excited.

Or at least I was.

Until I held my new ball of yarn next to an old ball of yarn.

I knew I was getting a completely different dye lot.  And I knew there would be some variation in color.  But I must admit I did not expect the dye lots to be so very different.  I checked the label three times to be sure they didn't send me Orca instead of Obsidian by mistake.

The label say Obsidian.

I'm still not convinced the label isn't on the wrong color.

The bottom line is this yarn is useless to me.

I considered frogging the bottom half of the sweater and then striping the lighter and darker yarn for the bottom of the sweater, but I didn't like the way it was looking.  It was weird with the bodice and sleeves being the very dark grey, and then the bottom being lighter striped.

So my beautiful perfect most awesome Tweedy sweater...

is now a pile of tweedy balls.

I am beside my self with sorrow.  I am considering purchasing another 12 balls of Obsidian (so they'll all be the same dye lot, maybe 13 balls just to be safe) and starting all over from scratch.  But then I'll have to figure out what to do with the 10 balls I already own, and the two balls that don't match anything but each other.

I don't need this kind of stress in my life.  I have a baby with her third round of strep since Thanksgiving who refuses to eat or sleep.  So I don't get to sleep.  And an unexpected flat tire (although, honestly, who on earth expects to get a flat tire).  And I spent two days on the phone with my internet/phone provider.  First I had no internet because my router was bad.  So after the new router was installed my phone failed to work.  It turned out they ran my phone lines through the router instead of through the existing phone lines in the house.  And nobody wanted to fix it.  Internet said that was a phone issue.  Phone said it was an internet issue and it would cost $85.00 for them to come out and look at it.  Let me take a moment to remind everybody that this is a situation they created.  And they want me to pay them to fix it?  I don't need this kind of stress.  I've got Valentine boxes to make, and science fair projects, and IFSP meetings, and I have to be at the Cardiologist at 8 am tomorrow to look at Queen Bean's heart defect.  I have stress covered all on my own.

I don't need my knitting to cause me stress.

I think I'm going to shove the whole thing into The Abyss.

Thank goodness for new purple yarn.  14 skeins should be more than enough for a Grown Up Girl of my very own.

Please...pretty pretty please...let this yarn play nicely with the pattern.

I need this.

I Have A Theory

There is a legend about the Lizard People of Arizona.  Supposedly they live deep below the Superstition Mountains.  They have no origin story.  No one knows how they came to be there.  Are they people with Lizard heads and human bodies, or all human but covered in lizard skin?  Or just people-sized talking lizards?  No one is precisely sure because there are no documented encounters with the Lizard People.

But I think I'm turning into one.

I have lived too long in the desert.  I no longer have any internal heat.  I am only as warm as my environment.

Like a lizard.

Case in point?

The other morning my thermostat said it was 75 degrees inside my house.

Seventy-five used to be middle of summer heat.  Shorts weather.  Swimming weather.  Gorgeous weather.

Instead I was huddled on my couch.  So cold, my teeth were chattering.

Pathetic.

I know.

But this means I got to wear some hand knit socks.

Pattern:  Down the Rabbit Hole

Yarn:  Stroll Hand Painted Sock Yarn, Make Believe, 2 skeins

Needle:  Size 1 tiny clover dpns

Modifications:  None

Review:

I love socks!

 Look at those fun colors!  I would never ever ever wear a sweater that was blue and green and purple.  But as socks they work!  My inner five year old is delighted by these colors.

I think I knit this pattern mostly for the name.  I loved pairing a color way called "Make believe" with a sock pattern called "Down the rabbit hole."  The combination spoke to me.

I like how the spirals mirror each other on each sock.  And I enjoyed how the spiral went all the way to the tip of the toe.  Very well thought out sock pattern.

And that's all I have because...

Someone ran off with my socks.

I keep telling her physical therapist not to teach her to do things like crawl, and pull up on the coffee table, but this girl is unstoppable.

I told The Greatest my Lizard people theory and he told me we live in the wrong place for that to be true.  So much for running away to the Superstition Mountains to join me people in the warmth of the Earth.  I'll just sit here on the couch and shiver.

Today's Bit Of Random

It happened.

I lost my quilting ambition.

We had a birthday party for Meaty last weekend.  When ever my house is full of boys I say a silent prayer of gratitude that I have four girls and one boy instead of four boys and one girl.  Eight twelve years old boys is a loud, smelly, hungry crowd.  But also funny, and smack talking, and video game playing, and unafraid to look silly dancing, and drama free.  So it isn't all bad.  I suppose if I had a house full of boys I would adjust and probably wonder what I'd do with more girls.  Its funny how the circumstances you live with become what you assume to be normal.

But I digress.

In anticipation for the approaching horde I packed up my sewing machine and quilting supplies, lest they get pizza sauce on them.

And they have yet to see the light of day.

I picked up a few new spools of thread at the store the other day.

But they have sat on my counter, untouched, and unloved.

And we can add "quilts with all purpose thread instead of quilting thread" to my list of quilting sins.  I read somewhere that they were basically the same thing if you were machine quilting, so there was no need to spend the extra money on quilting thread.  I don't remember where I read it, so I have no idea if it was a credible source, but I've taken the idea and run with it.  All my quilts are quilted with regular thread.

Someday....I'll finish it someday...

I finished knitting my last half a ball of yarn for my Tweedy sweater.  I took a picture, but now I can't find it, and it is too dark to take a new one.  Seriously.  I tried.  Dark room + dark yarn = blurry dark blobby picture.  Allow me to offer this picture of Queen Bean in its place.

Had this been the intended picture of my Tweedy sweater you would see that it only measures 15.5 inches, an inch and a half less than the required 17 inches, and missing the final 8 rows of ribbing.   I tried to convince myself that I could be happy with a shorter sweater, but I know in my heart of heart that this is not true.  I will never love this sweater if I stop at 15.5 inches.

I have ordered two additional balls of yarn.  I hope the dye lots aren't off by too much.

And since I was placing an order I went ahead and got a new pair of needles to replace the pair I sat on.

And I may have also ordered some purple yarn for a sweater, since I only needed thirty four more dollars worth of yarn to get the free shipping.

We'll over look the faulty rational that says it is better to buy thirty four dollars worth of yarn to save on six dollars in shipping fees.

Because YARN, that's why.

So while I wait for Knit Picks eternally slow shipping (seriously, do they route it through India, with a lay over in Siberia?) I cast on for a hat.

I have a feeling I'm gonna finish this before my yarn comes.

I'm toying with the idea of seeing if I can knit an entire sweater while I wait for my Knit Picks order to arrive.

I should probably finish a quilt instead.

In kid news, two of my children came home today and told me that they have big projects due.  Meaty's science fair project is due tomorrow.  And Sweet Pea's model of the solar system was due yesterday.

Thank goodness Meaty has been (almost) on top of his science fair project.  He had six weeks worth of data to use.

If anyone is curious, we discovered that when growing plants from cuttings honey produces thicker longer roots than commercially available root hormone,

And since this isn't our first round of "name that planet" we already had two different sets of planets in the garage for Sweet Pea to use on her model.

I'm pretty sure I earned an A.  Even if it is getting turned in a day late.

I promise, we do make the children do their own work for the most part.  She did all the labels and worked a mean glue bottle.  I don't think the fact that she didn't paint the styrofoam balls should count against her.

And I deserve a medal for singing the Blues Clues Planet song with her for a freaking hour and a half until she had the names of the planets in order firmly committed to memory.

Behold the glamour of Motherhood.

Cake Smash!

So it turns out, when you give a one year old a cake of her very own to do what ever she wants with it...

Epic Cuteness occurs!

Worst Hangover Ever

I had a migraine on Sunday.

It was a doozy, with the pain, and the sensitivity to light, and the nausea.  I wore my sunglasses all day and made the children the world's strangest macaroni and cheese (it was from scratch and ridiculously thick, but I could not think my way to adding more milk to thin the sauce)

But as bad as the migraine itself was, today I have the pleasure of a migraine hangover, and that is infinitely worse.

My brain misfired all day long, and bad stuff went down.

I began the day by sitting on the couch beside my knitting.  Only I misjudged the distance and sat a little bit on my knitting.  To be precise I sat on my knitting needle.

It did not survive the encounter.

And while I can't blame this on my migraine I did have to face the sad reality that I do not have enough yarn to finish my tweedy sweater.  I started with 10 balls of yarn.  I am down to my last half a ball.

I need this to measure 17 inches.  I don't think I'm going to squeeze three more inches of knitting out of that final half a ball, not to mention the eight additional rows of ribbing.  Especially since I only got ten rows out of the first half of that ball.  I don't have the mental brain power to deal with such devastation.

I took a shower and I'm pretty sure I didn't actually wash my hair.  I just conditioned it twice.

I dropped things.  I tripped over things.  I needed a hair stick for my hair but feared if I entered the bedroom to fetch one I would fall into the 12 foot Christmas tree that is still in our room, and wake The Greatest, who was sleeping in anticipation of his shift tonight, so I put a pencil in my hair.

Which was really unnecessary since there is a box full of hair sticks for the etsy shop on top of the fridge.  But I couldn't choose between all the pretty new ones. So I stuck a broken pencil in my hair and went out in public.  It seemed like the reasonable solution at the time.

I took The Queen Bean to her physical therapy.  I stopped for a soda on the way there, hoping caffeine would fix my addled brain.  As I pulled out of my parking space I almost backed into a semi.  I swear it wasn't there before.  How did I miss something so big?  I probably should not have been behind the wheel of a car.  We survived the perilous journey to physical therapy and back, but my conversation with the therapist was very random and disjointed.  She probably thinks I'm on drugs.  And I don't blame her.  When we got home The Queen was sleeping so I sat in the garage until she woke.  When it was time for The Greatest to go to work we looked high and low for the car keys only to discover them still in the ignition.  Thank goodness I closed the garage door.

I stumbled through the rest of today, feeding the children cereal for dinner.  I do not trust myself with the stove.  Here's hoping my brain is working once more tomorrow.

On the bright side I got the pictures from The Queen's Cake Smash photo session last week.

Is she not the cutest thing ever!

More Pictures tomorrow.