Works in Passion

If you've known me for a while, you know that when I was a kid, I loved to draw. I would draw a LOT, I even had a doodle journal for a bit that I cringe to look through. SO MANY EMOTIONS! Prednisone is bad, kids. Don't be on it for 17 years, then have a transplant and have to come off it, your body will be VERY UNHAPPY.

Anyways, now I knit. It alleviates the nerves, it creates things that I don't have to cringe at, I don't see all the raw emotions, though I can still feel them when I stroke the fabric. Here I cried into the blanket. There, I was watching an intense movie and knit so fast my needles almost caught fire. But no one can see those things but me.

Last week was kind of dramatic. No, wait, it WAS dramatic, no 'kind of' or 'maybe', it just was. And I had to admit, I was so glad I was knitting and spinning, it took a lot of my anxiety and pain away. And funny enough, well, the worst of it was taken while working on my Serenity Blanket. Of course, I was also watching a whole lot of video game playthroughs (it's fun to watch GhostRobo play scary stuff because he's as big a wimp as I am, though a little more squeaky).

But it's not just to knit, I get bored, my wrists get sore, I need something else. So, my dear friend Janalee caught me at a spin out near Park City and handed me a small bundle. "I'm sorry it doesn't have any black in it, but it's as close to goth as I could find," she said as I opened it up. Uhhh, are you kidding? It's named MARCELINE! If you don't know who that is, watch Adventure Time with your kids, you might spot a little vampire girl with a bass ax guitar who sings like Anna Nalick and sucks the red out of things (not blood, just the color red). It is PERFECT.


So here I am, spinning a worsted weight (or as close as I can manage once it's all double-plyed up) and chilling out when I'm not knitting or dodging drama. Just thought I'd update all of you.

So if you're feeling a little in the dumps (or a lot in the dumps), what do you do? Do you draw? I don't much anymore but I love looking at other people's artwork. Show me!

So I went to fight a War.

I won't apologize. This is my blog, I will post what I want when I want but...I do need to catch up on what I've been doing lately. See, I went and joined Nerd Wars, the latest Tournament (#4) starting in February and I've been knitting. Like a fiend. Nevermind castonitis, that got sated very early on. And now I've got a lovely finished object gallery just to show off!

Now, I'm on Team Tardis and if there's any reason for the silence here, it's because I exploded with posts there and quickly rose to the top of the chattiest chart. I've met so many friends, including Maggie (who works at Kamille's and has angora bunnies!). But I don't have pictures of them (or if I do, I don't wish to show them since I'm in them). Let's move on to the knitting.



It begins with the Gothic Tam, available in the Interweave Knits Holiday Accessories 2011 issue. I was disappointed that the tweed yarn caused the intricate pattern to get terribly lost but I still liked the swirling vortex of space look.



The second was my attempt at the 2-color brioche stitch using a couple of Malabrigo Worsted colors. It came out lovely, warm, and soft as a sigh.



These were the prize of my February, cashmere fingerless mitts. I had some laceweight cashmere but not enough for anything actually lace and so I had to search the Ravelry pattern search and came up with this. It's actually even softer than a sigh, it's luxury and it only could be moments away from my fingers when I wore them rather than a hat or a scarf so I could pet them while I wore them.



Any baby that calls himself Stormageddon: Dark Lord of All (Doctor Who reference, Netflix it now on Instant) is deserving of a hat that looks set to keep his ears, head, and part of his chin warm against the chills of war. The pattern was lovely, once I got over a severe case of derp and figured out what I was doing.

And at last:


A Tardis cover for the device that holds more books than I could plausibly carry. It brings me a smile every time I see it, keeps the random drops of bathwater off my device and also chases off any random dust.

Five projects in a month? I did it and I'm quite chuffed, I "melted the cube" or managed to meet all 5 challenges (well, 6 challenges but one was a donation to a charity) and I'm that much closer to being prepared for winter, babies, and watery doom to my books.

And I'll have 5 more to feature next post but in the meantime:



Enjoy the weather while you can.

How I spent the last two hours at work.

Now, I'm not a lazy nurse, I'd prefer to call myself an efficient nurse. Which means that by 10pm at the nursing home, meds are done which includes all the signing off of meds and narcotics that I've passed, all the treatments are done, all the tube feedings, all the nurses' notes, the call lights are answered, everything is...quiet. Or mostly quiet, depending on how well those narcotics worked.

And I am left to my own devices. Now, I'm not sure what Teri or Patty do when it's quiet for them, but for me, I grab my knitting and now that I have it, my Kindle. I used to scoff at those who had one. I know, I'm a guilty one, but you just can't beat the feel of the paper, the inexhaustible battery life, the reliability of a good old fashioned book. But a Kindle is light, portable, doesn't need to be held open, and always opens to where you last left off. Convenient!

And then there's my knitting project. I had a case of startitis but most of those projects landed in the frog pond as soon as I cast on and checked gauge. Sometimes that happens. But one that endured is the Spectra scarf.

I had no idea how much straight knitting it includes. It's a garter scarf, pretty much, with panels of stockinette and a little bit of short row action just to keep the knitter from going utterly comatose. The yarn is from Studio June, called Star Struck due to the sparkly bits of silver woven throughout (antibacterial!) in the color Bright Copper Kettle. The panels are Jojoland's Melody, cleverly named MS08. Clearly these people don't work for Crayola.

The nice bit about both Kindle and Spectra is that I can put both aside immediately in the case of a call light or bed alarm going off. The joys of being a nurse in a rehab facility, eh?

WIP Wednesday: January 4

Before I go into the featured Work In Progress, there is something that needs mentioning.

Sometimes life happens. Sometimes someone's mother has a brain tumor and the only thing that springs to mind is the thought that her last days would be spent in comfort if she had a little something from her own mother to keep her. Except that the only thing she got to keep from her mother is a sweater's worth of old, scratchy mohair. And the only one that someone knows who could turn that mohair into something worth enjoying is that someone's niece.

Enter the Scarf.


I knew just what to do with this yarn as soon as I got it. Three skeins of Bernat mohair plus and it would be a Simple Lace Scarf (Ravelry Link) on US#13 needles.

Now most people ought to know that I am an 85% selfish knitter. Sure, I'll knit for others if I know them and I like them and can be assured that my knits will be well received, which is why this scarf is a bit of a hit-or-miss. I don't know my Aunt Lea's mom. I don't know Aunt Lea's grandmom. But here I am, knitting up scratchy mohair that, to be honest, is just a shade softer than twine. I wondered why. Why would I do this for a total stranger?


Because I love Aunt Lea. Sure, my other aunts are great but when I had flubbed my clinicals for RN school, she was the one who was able to get my mind off of things by talking with me until the wee hours of the morning. She is the only one that I've honestly been able to connect with. I've seen her home and the incredible amount of books everywhere, books that I have read, books that I plan to read, books that sounded like I would love if I could remember the title and author. She has opened up to me and I to her and I realized that if she is this cool, her mother could only be just as awesome, if not more.

And to be honest, if my mom had a brain tumor and wanted, maybe, a hot tub installed in her bathroom or something else that I couldn't do and I knew someone who could do it, absolutely I would ask them to do it for me. Well, for compensation but hey, hopefully at a discount because it's family and they love me.

Either way, that picture was taken at 11am and right now I've finished up the second skein, the scarf is about 3 feet, and I'm about done. One more day.

You could call this your obligatory New Year's post

...and you'd be right.

My NYE wasn't much to really hoot about. Old people don't party and frown upon loud noises and wild celebrating after 8pm. But that's okay, because I got my long-awaited Chinese food and even longer awaited fortune cookie.

The cookie itself was, well, an ordinary cookie but the fortune inside, it sure was something else.



How's that for exciting? And just earlier that day, I had found that a local university was offering an LPN to RN transition program starting fall 2012. If I could get in, I might just start school again. I just hope I can find a way to pay for it all somehow.

So, much like almost every other knitter, I started a project for good luck. I had two skeins of Manos del Uruguay Wool Clasica that came home with me at the Three Wishes moving sale:



And yesterday I put two ends together, made a slipknot and did a long-tail cast on with both ends, casting on 200 stitches with a #10.5 US size set of circulars. I'm pretty pleased with the results so far, I did a bit of good work on it during church, which was handy because we start at 9am now and I was up till 1:30am the night before, showering so I didn't have to battle for it in the morning.



It's a really nice stitch, the linen stitch and the two yarns really are working nicely together for now, though we had to sit and discuss whether they would be a brioche scarf (never done brioche before!) or the linen stitch scarf or something else altogether. I think I made a good decision, though. This looks nice.

As I didn't get to do very much partying on NYE, we had a little party tonight instead. Sis brought Ticket To Ride and we had a pretty hilarious time trying to beat each other out.



I came in a close third, my sister in second and my brother in law wiping the floors with us way in front. I can't wait to do it again! I'll cream them all next time, bwahaha!

I will leave you all with a picture of pooped puppies. Because who doesn't love a pair of pooped pups?



Dad took them on an 8 mile walk so they're all tuckered. :D I hope you all had a great New Year's Day and I hope that you manage to fulfill all of your resolutions!