Monday, February 2, 2015

Christmas a Few Weeks Late

I take a flexible attitude to celebrating holidays on time.  I don't see much point in making a holiday more stressful in an attempt to have everything finished and ready by a certain date, at least when it comes to celebrations for adults (I have little brothers, so I know that you can't get away with that for kids).  I am happy to celebrate Valentine's Day on February 11, and I will celebrate my birthday over the course of a couple weeks if life allows.  Hence my craft-related Christmas presents have arrived in January, and I am finally writing about them in February.

First, I got fabric.



Technically, I got a new blade for my rotary cutter, because mine was . . . almost five years . . . old and wasn't really cutting any more.  The jade anna dress is still under construction, and I needed it.  But mondial patchwork also had their random lot de coupons/fat quarter collections half off.  I selected three colors, blue, purple, and grey, and received four to six fat quarters of each.  They weren't really fat quarters, as you get remnants of different sizes, but I love them.  I now have more than yellow, orange, and green in my fabric stash!

My husband bought me yarn.



My intelligent husband has figured out that sock yarn is an easy, low calorie, and relatively inexpensive way to spoil me, and so he has learned what makes a yarn sock yarn.  So on his last business trip to Germany, he brought me back 200g worth.

He also tends to bring back colors he hasn't seen me use in a while.  I've knit a lot of blue for myself, because I like blue, and he decided that I needed orange and yellow to balance out.  There is a good reason that I don't have much yellow in my stash or in my clothes closet, as I don't care for it.  The temptation exists to throw the Regia in a dye-bath.

He also got me this, in green to continue stretching my horizons.

This yarn is a blend of alpaca, silk, and cashmere, and is as deliciously soft as you'd expect from that composition.  My husband (with the help of the nice lady at the yarn store) picked out enough for me to make a hat.  I think I want this as a cowl or smoke ring, so I can have this yarn tucked up against my neck.

This was all quite welcome, as things have been nuts around here.  I went through a time where I spent two hours in the evening writing code only to spend four hours the next day debugging the mess I had made, all with the need to make a presentation in a specific meeting.  My husband was traveling, and then we had to go to France to attend a funeral.  It was in the midst of this that my husband checked the mail and informed me that my fabric sample had arrived.

I stared at him.  "What fabric sample?"  Had I honestly ordered some fabric and forgotten?  That doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd forget, since I tend to obsess over such purchases and make pages of geometry calculations before ordering anything fabric-related.  I was mentally scanning backwards in time to try and figure out what he could be talking about when he handed me the fabric.

 

It has little hobbit doors on it!  And pipes and smoke rings for Gandalf!  A early swap present had arrived!  It is currently sitting on my craft table so I can pet it admiringly and daydream about what it will become.  I don't have any definite ideas yet, but isn't it awesome?

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