It's Been A Long Time

Hello Blog.

As I told my group chat girls "There is no knitting.  There is only me strumming my guitar.  Badly."

And while that's a little bit of an exaggeration.

There is a whole lot of truth to it as well.

Which isn't to say that I can play guitar yet.  My chord changes are abysmally slow.  Bar chords are still an emerging skill.  But I am enjoying relearning music theory as it pertains to the guitar strings/frets.  Way back in the dark ages before the dawn of man I was a music major in college.  I was a vocalist who also dabbled in piano (the official term for my keyboard skills was "proficient", which isn't to say I was good, but I was passable at the basics).   All those long forgotten lectures on music theory and "using all the crayons in the crayon box" are starting to resurface, as is my love for music.  It was always there, the need for music in my life.  But I'd forgotten how much I love not just to listen to music, but to MAKE music.  It feels good.

And I got a new guitar.

I know.  I don't NEED two guitars.  But we wandered into the guitar store and there it was.  So beautifully blue I couldn't resist.  It is my favorite shade of blue and it matches my favorite nail polish (that I happened to be wearing that day).  It was love at first sight. The Greatest immediately bought it for me calling it my birthday present.  But even if my birthday hadn't been right around the corner he would have bought it for me.  My birthday was just a convenient excuse to spoil me.  He really is The Greatest!

So I returned the favor and bought him an upgraded guitar for his birthday.

Our music room now looks like this.

Guitar Acquisition Syndrome (also known as GAS) is real.

On the knitting front there has been knitting.

Unfortunately it is all Knit Picks knitting.  So I can't talk about it until the test knits are published.  Fortunately for me they recently released their "Merry Knitmas" collection and I can show you one of my favorite test knits ever.

Look how flipping cute that is!  I knit that pillow.

Here it is modeled less artistically on my knitting chair.

I loved knitting it.  I have to admit I looked at the chart and felt a little overwhelmed but once I got in to the rhythm of it it was very fun to knit.

I tried very hard to convince my contact at Knit Picks to send the pillow back to me when they were done with it.  I'm just so enamored with the rows upon rows of gnome-ish Santas.

But they weren't going for it.

I guess I'm going to have to suck it up and buy yarn to knit two (or three, or maybe four) for my house.

That's really going to eat into my guitar practice time.