Wednesday Already?

And so it goes with good intentions. I turn my back for one minute and the next thing I know a week has gone by without a post. I do, however, have several excuses. The first is that I haven't really finished anything new and so didn't have any pretty pictures. And of course, it's all about the pictures. The second is that I've been fighting off a cold since last Friday and hardly had the energy to lift a needle, let alone the bandwidth to figure out what to do with it once I picked it up. So it's been a week without a lot to show for it. Some quilting on Calico Cats has happened. Some assembly of Grandmother's Flower Garden has happened. Some quilting on the Baby M quilt has happened. And there have been a few experiments, but none that led to anything spectacular.

One successful experiment was this hat, which I'm calling Lacy Squares because that's what the stitch pattern is called. I found the pattern in a pattern-a-day calendar that I have used for several years, and thought it would make a nice feminine hat for Arkansas Children's Hospital. I had to fiddle with it a little to make it work, and then of course I had to invent a way to decrease stitches at the top as unobtrusively as possible. I think it works. The yarn is Hobby Lobby's equivalent of Caron's Simply Soft, which makes a very soft hat with very little structure. I hope the ribbing holds it snugly enough to the head. I've written up the pattern and sent it off to a friend for a test knit. If she gives it a green light I might even offer this one up on Ravelry. I can't say it's completely original, but what in knitting really is. In the end it's all knits and purls anyway.

Today I did finish this tatted bookmark. I used some size 8 perle cotton I had lying around, which is a pretty fine thread, but it worked well. Because the thread was so fine I had to add extra repeats to make a usable length; it ended up about 7 inches long. That meant it was a slow project but not a difficult one. And I still have some of the thread, so I'm looking for another project for it. It's a sort of antique gold color, so not a snowflake. Perhaps another bookmark or a cross. I'm trying to create things that will sell at Christmas Marketplace in November, and trying to guess what people will buy always gives me a headache.

When I logged the Lacy Squares hat into my "yarn used" account book (yes, I am that kind of person) I realized I had only used about 150 grams of yarn this month. This is in contrast to an average monthly usage well over 1000 grams. It has been a successful yarn sabbath. Of course I'm looking at the calendar and realizing Marketplace is coming, and Christmas is coming. But so is September, and I'm not chafing at the bit all that much. I've needed this time to break out of the pattern of needing to finish things and use up my yarn stash and somehow in so doing prove that I am a useful and productive human being. In fact, I'm already working on a plan to do more of this kind of thing for 2016. We'll see what happens.