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.

Weekends

Saturday evening I stepped out my back door to see a momma bunny spread out over her brood of babies. I've never seen baby bunnies before, and they were so precious! The mom immediately ran to the next yard to try and distract me (such a good mom!). I kept a good distance and managed some blurry cell phone pictures to capture the moment.

This weekend was super busy. I managed a short nap each day, thankfully, but I didn't really get much else in the way of downtime. I'm hoping that tonight I can relax and finish a library book or two and maybe get another inch or so knit on my Zinone. Since I'm alternating two skeins on Zinone right now, I ended up working on my new shawl sample more this weekend, just because it's a bit easier to cart around through parks and back and forth from events. As is the theme with me lately, this photo does not do the colors in this yarn justice. It's much more variegated in person.

I only have one more play rehearsal this week, on Tuesday night, so I'm hoping that this week I can get some recharging in. On Wednesday I have to go up to the city to see my endo, which I'm not really looking forward to in the wake of my ER visit a couple weeks ago, but maybe he'll have an idea as to why my blood sugar got so out of control.

Linking up with Crafting On

A Week

Oh man, has it really been a week since I've posted here? This week has been crazy and long and I am so excited to be at the back end of it. You know those days where nothing seems to go right? It's been like that for the last two weeks. Play rehearsals are going well, but there's a lot going on and I feel like I've barely had a chance to breathe.

I've made a little progress on my Zinone, but I got distracted by a new shawl sample, so this has been on pause for the past few days. Tomorrow is the halfway point of the TTTKAL, so I probably need to focus on banging out the lower body of this now if I have any chance of finishing it by the 30th. It would be great if I could figure out how to accurately photograph this color, but I'm still not having luck. Oh well.

Tomorrow is the Pride festival up in the city, and I'll be going for a couple hours—the dogs have a grooming appointment, so I'll drive up and drop them off, then go celebrate at Pride until the dogs are ready to get picked up. Next week is my town's first Pride festival, and I'm really looking forward to participating (as much as play rehearsals allow). I'm hoping that even  with all the planned Pride festivities that next week will be a bit calmer than the past two, but at this point I'm kind of expecting something else stressful and crazy to happen. 

Summer Knits and Shakespeare

I can't believe we're already at the end of the first week of June! This weekend is the Shakespeare Festival, so I'm going to be spending the next couple nights in the park watching A Midsummer Night's Dream. I have a few friends in the production, and the festival brought in an amazing director this summer, so I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm just two rows away from joining the front and back on my Zinone, and I'm really looking forward to stockinette in the round. I really love how this is knitting up, and I'm really looking forward to including this top in my summer wardrobe. I was nervous about trying to get this top done for the TTTKAL, since I have another top I want to finish for the OAL and I was unsure if I could finish two fingering-weight tops in two months, but I'm happy with my progress from this week, and I think I'll be able to make it work.

Happenings

Oh, where to start? Sunday was the first rehearsal for Mama Mia and I'm already having a blast with this show. I really can't wait to see what the next five and a half weeks hold, because this really is a super fun show. Unfortunately, late Sunday night/early Monday morning I had some blood sugar issue and had to go to the emergency room. I'm much better now, but that was not a fun way to spend a night.

This year's TTTKAL is now underway, and I pulled out this Zinone that I cast on for last year's kal, but I didn't even get the upper back finished before I shoved it onto a bookshelf. It's really zipping along now, though, and I'm already at the neck cast-on. I've been knitting this during play rehearsals, and while I'm super impressed that I managed to get through the lace, I'm definitely glad to only have to knit plain stockinette from here on out! This yarn is a merino-tencel blend I dyed at a workshop a few years ago, and it's just the prettiest shades of lilac and purple. It's really hard to photograph so far, this photo doesn't do it justice at all!