Birthday Sale!

Hi Friends! It's September, which means it's time for my Birthday Sale!!

Everything in my Ravelry Store is 29% off with code HB29. The code is good through September 14th, so pop on over to Ravelry and get yourself something nice for my birthday! 

The Ocean's Daughter

The Ocean’s Daughter is a lightweight, one-skein shawl consisting of two eyelet patterns and garter stitch. Using only basic stitches, it is knit on the bias, and is an ideal choice for a portable project.

The Ocean’s Daughter is perfect for showing off variegated and specked hand-dyed yarns.

The Ocean’s Daughter is 20% off on Ravelry with code SEAMAID through Friday, August 16th!

Rambling

July was a really weird month. There was just so much going on, between my personal life, and the play, and then my dog dying, that I think it's going to take a while to fully recover. This whole summer so far has felt really long and exhausting, and I'm ready for it to be over. I've been exhausted and burnt out for at least two months now, and I really hope that I find my equilibrium again soon.

I pulled out my Old Harry the other week because I needed something pretty brainless to work on, and I've finished the body and have started the first sleeve. I have another sweater on the needles that I'd like to finish this month, so I don't know how much longer I'll keep carrying Old Harry around.

I've got quite the backlog of pattern writing that I've been meaning to catch up on for over two weeks, but haven't managed it yet. This is mostly due to my complete inability to do anything right now except read romance novels and eat cheese. Like I said earlier, I really hope I find my equilibrium. Quickly. I'm trying to keep track of all my self care—eat regularly, eat occasional vegetables, get enough sleep, try to keep my apartment from looking like a total trash pit—but this burnout/depressive episode is really stubborn. The only way out is through, though, so here I am, head down and plowing through. 

Mystic

My dog died on Friday.

We got Mystic thirteen years ago as a tiny puppy with a black wiry overcoat. He loved playing soccer and splashing in his water bowl. As he reached adulthood he lost the black overcoat and turned into this blonde beauty with curly hair on his butt only. When we moved to Florida, he rode on my lap the whole way down, and when I left for college he hid under my mother's bed for days.

He was my best friend.

By the time my family joined me in South Dakota, Mystic had started getting  cataracts. He was totally blind for the last two or three years of his life, and sometimes he walked into things. He had this amazing little bark that was almost like a huff under his breath, and we called him a grumpy old man. He'd been a grumpy old man almost since he was a puppy.

Mystic loved carrots more than anything else. The second he smelled a carrot, he'd be in the kitchen begging for pieces. He loved food in general, and tried every day to convince us that he hadn't had breakfast yet.

Once or twice he even got away with it.

Mystic loved sleeping, and napped for close to twenty hours a day. He had several blankets to choose from, but he'd nest in or on anything even remotely soft. He regularly slept on my knitting projects, on my mum's slippers, and even on my brother's backpack. If it was made of fabric, then it was a dog bed.

He was endlessly patient. He let me dress him up in my clothes and wrap him up in shawls and blankets. I'm certain that he wouldn't have chosen to get wrapped up like a babushka on his own, but he never protested when I tried it.

He loved being up on furniture, especially when he got to be in someone's lap or next to us. He loved cuddles and belly rubs, and he insisted on getting his belly scratched every morning before he'd deign to get out of bed, never mind that he'd been the one to wake me up and had been ready for breakfast for an hour already.

Two of his favorite words were "brekkers" and "bedtime."

Like many dogs, Mystic hated thunderstorms. Several years ago, after much trial and error, I finally discovered that his favorite music was Le Nozze di Figaro, and it was the only thing that could even remotely calm him during a thunderstorm. This video is the most played one on my youtube account.

He hated being apart from me. If I thought he was getting too bratty and wouldn't let him up on the sofa with me, he'd go up to my room and pull a blanket down from my bed to make a nest. Once, when I went away for the weekend, I came back and he laid down next to me, holding my hand between his front legs with all the might that his little fourteen-pound body could muster, insistent that I not leave him again.

Mystic taught me that I could love wholeheartedly and unconditionally. Even when he threw up in my bed, when he kept me up all night making nest after nest in the duvet, when he was at his most ornery, I loved him. I loved him so much that sometimes I didn't think I could hold it all.

He loved me, too.

I was with him at the end. He'd been sick for a few days, but I didn't think it was serious. Almost by accident, I had a cold on Friday and decided to stay home. Almost by accident, I decided to get Mystic from his kitchen quarantine and bring him to bed with me to snuggle. I'm so, so thankful that he wasn't alone.

Mystic was the best possible dog. He was even better than any of us could have asked for.

He was my best friend.

I miss him.

Tech Week-ing Along

I can't believe it's only Wednesday. I'm completely exhausted, and I want nothing more than about thirteen hours of straight sleep. We have our first dress rehearsal tonight, and the show is really coming together great. I'm managing a few rounds on my Villainous CYOAT for the Outfit-A-Long each night, and now that I've separated the sleeves from the body it should go even more quickly. I'm hoping to be able to squeeze out elbow-length sleeves on this, but we'll have to see how far my yarn goes.

I am eating a lot of dry cereal and rice ramen this week, and I'm looking forward to having time to cook a real meal. Tech week is always hard on me, but this year it's even tougher, for a few different reasons, and I'm really looking forward to next Tuesday, when the play is over. My apartment is a disaster, my plants are neglected, and there might be a new life form growing in my fridge, and I'm really looking forward to getting some time and energy back to deal with those things.

Voting and Tech Week

Happy Monday! First piece of business, Hell Creek has been nominated for Pattern of the Month over on LoveCrafts. If you have an account, you can vote here.

It's tech week for Mama Mia, and I'm already exhausted. I had a four-day weekend, and I pretty much just slept through it. I had rehearsal Saturday and Sunday, and I'm going to be going straight through next Monday. The show really is coming together, though, and we finally got to start working with the band last night, and I can't wait to see how we keep making this show more and more fun over the next few nights.

Outfitting Along

I've been fighting something this week that hopefully is just allergies—my doctor just put me on a new regime for the next week or so to see if we can get me feeling better. Play rehearsals are still going well, but now they're going even later in the evenings as we work on really pulling the show together. Next week is tech week, and hopefully after our stumble-through tonight we'll be in good shape for it.

Because the 4th of July is on a Thursday this year, the university system has given us Friday off too, so I have a four-day weekend to look forward to. It's just what I need to get myself rested and ready for tech week and production, and I'm really looking forward to having four days off.

Last night I finished my shawl sample, and my goal is to get it blocked and written and sent to my tech editor this weekend. It's a bit mushy right now, but it's going to be gorgeous once it hits the water and opens up some. Since that's done, I'm now focusing 100% on my cropped CYOA Tee for the OAL. My plan for my outfit is to wear this over a dress that is about half finished—the bodice is done, but the skirt still needs to be assembled and attached. I'm not worrying about the dress until after the show is over, but the top is great backstage knitting! 

Whoops

Wow, apologies for the really bad lighting in that photo, but as you can see, my Zinone is finished! What you can't see is that it's actually too small. The armholes are too tight, and the whole thing fits more like a crop top than a t-shirt.

I'd been having suspicions for a while that this would be too small, so I'm not completely surprised, but it's definitely frustrating that I didn't listen to my gut and check it earlier. I was in such a rush to get this done that I didn't want to take the time to block it on the needles and see if it would grow as much as it needed to, and now I'm paying for it.

I really love how this yarn knit up into this top, and I definitely want to rip it out and reknit it, but...not right away. I'm going to let it sit in time-out for a while. This month, I have a new shawl sample that's almost finished and I have just over four weeks to bang out my OAL projects, so I don't have time to dwell on my own bad choices! 

Progressing

It's been a bit of a wild week over here. I'm fully in the thick of play rehearsals—we have just six more regular rehearsals before tech week, which feels almost unbelievable. How are we this far along in production already? It feels like we only just started rehearsals!

My shower drain has been completely blocked for twelve days now, with no sign of my property manager coming to fix it yet (I'm hoping that today is the day), and the other night I broke a vial of insulin and spent a large portion of yesterday morning panicking about getting more, because it's too early to get a refill and the cash price of insulin is ridiculous (fortunately, I have an amazing pharmacist who figured it all out for me, for which I am extremely grateful).

I've been making good progress on my Zionone, despite not knitting as much as usual, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to finish it by the end of the TTTKAL on Sunday. I really want to get this finished this week so, 1. I successfully complete the KAL, and, 2. I can start working on my OAL projects and not feel bad about having to set this top aside again. I'm freaking out about the OAL because the top I'm knitting for it has barely been started and my dress for it is one I'm hand-sewing, because that's totally a reasonable thing to do. I'd love to successfully complete the OAL since it's going on hiatus after this year, but July is going to be more than a little crazy, so who knows.

I Stand with Ravelry

Yesterday Ravelry banned support of Donald Trump and his administration. The Ravelry team has determined that they cannot make Ravelry an inclusive space if they allow support for white supremacy, and support for Trump and his administration is "undeniably support for white supremacy."

I am so, so proud of Ravelry for taking this stand, and I am so proud to be a member of a community that is caring, compassionate, and willing to take a stand like this. Ravelry will undoubtedly get some pushback from this: white supremacists don't like being told that they cannot continue openly supporting white supremacy in certain forums. But an important part of anti-facist work is to make it difficult for facists to be openly and vocally facist. By banning support for Trump and white supremacy on Ravelry, the Ravelry team have taken away a space where these people can be openly hateful.