Petunia rambles on and on….

Am I up to this – promising to put up a blog post every single day in November?  Well, it’s easy to make the promise – may not be so easy to keep it, though.  But I’ve got some ideas running through my head.

• I could take a picture of a skein of yarn every day and post it – that would take me through 2014, maybe longer.
• I could take a picture every day of the clutter on my desk, and document my attempts at reducing the mess. This would be rather boring, as there’s been little progress in quite some time, and none is expected in the near future.  The Desktop of Shame.
• Got something going on privately that’s going to go public in the near future. The impact this situation makes on my life is gonna be harsh, and it may do me some good to just finally get it out. I’ve got another blogsite, set up to document my half-assed attempts at losing the weight I gained, (only about 30 lbs – it’s not like I turned into a whale), after I quit smoking.  The blog and the exercising, dieting, weight loss never developed as fully as it should have, and I’m thinking about “re-dedicating” it to documenting my inability to cope with change and poverty dealing with reduced circumstances creatively.
• Pictures.  I’ve got thousands. If I root through what I have digitized, I could post for months.  I have scanned family photos that were taken well over a hundred years ago.  I have pictures of places I’ve been, things I’ve seen, people long gone.
• I could post recipes.  I have many; been collecting for many years.  I got that “trait” from my mother, who was a fabulous cook, prepared wonderful things for us, for extended family, for guests.  She loved doing it, and was always trying new recipes that she got from friends, magazines, newspapers, cookbooks.  Everyone who ever sat at her table benefitted – and us, most of all.  The recipes she tried that were especially well received were copied over into loose-leaf notebooks, filed by category.  Some of them go back to the 1930’s, when she was first married and learning her skills.  I’ve got her notebooks!  I, too, look for new recipes, try interesting ones, experiment in the kitchen, but some of her recipes are so perfect that I’ve never even tried to better them.  I’ve never made the standard, soft and puffy oatmeal cookies – I still use her way.  I’ve never used any other recipes for lemon meringue or pumpkin pie.  And becoming an adult, a new wife and mother during the Depression, she collected lots of ideas for using up leftovers in ways that looked and tasted like a different meal instead of warmed-up reruns of last Tuesday.

So – it anyone going to join me for NaBloPoMo?  Who’s in?

I would leave here…..

and come back home to unceasing stress and aggravation?  Why?

 

I figure that, as times get tougher here for us and for everyone, I get more “bang for my buck” if I buy fiber to spin.  For the most part, my knitting has been for my own amusement, as an entertainment, hobby activitiy; it’s never been for covering and protecting the family.  I do not engage in this to keep loved ones from freezing to death out on the tundra.  I enjoy the fondling collecting of the yarns, the searching for patterns and deciding on the ones that are just right for a given fiber or color or yardage.  I am definitely a “process knitter,” enjoying the repetitive motion that is soothing to me.  I’m amused when knitters sometimes complain about something that is vast quantities of plain stockinette, oh, the boredom – I see it as calming, and am quite content to knit for hours in one color, doing one identical stitch after another.  It helps me keep the frantic at bay.

Heaven knows, I’ve got yarn.  I’m up to my arse in skeins, but still, now that I spin, I’ve been eyeing fiber much more.  Spinning is another repetitious (read that as soothing, calming) activity that works for me.  And it’s adding more pleasurable hours to the dollars spent!  Splitting it up, drafting it a bit, lots of spinning, plying, skeining, soaking, washing, drying, winding the finished product into “yarn cakes” all takes time, keeps me busy.

And THEN I get to begin the actual knitting of the chosen project!

I’m really getting high value for my “entertainment” money.  Sit and figure the cost of a movie, 2 tickets, popcorn, sodas and divide that by what?  2 hours, maybe??  While I’m buying quality fiber and paying for hand-dyeing, a skill I don’t yet have, the hours of hands-on time involved in all these steps and stages brings the cost of my “fun” down to about a dollar an hour or less.  And truly, there is no other way I can entertain myself for so long this cheaply! 

(Pop, are you reading this part?  This is really not as expensive as you think!)

At the FiberFest in Snow Hill, MD on 10 October 2009, I met the lovely Teresa Levite, of Teresa Levite Studios, and got to see her work, her skill.  Envy is an ugly word, and I am envious of this lady’s talent.

Here’s an example:

No-brainer that I’m going to fall in love with this Superwash BFL in shades of denim blue!  Isn’t it beautiful?

But here’s the proof of her eye for color:

Is that wonderful or what?  And anybody that knows me knows that I avoid yellows, oranges.  I joke that they make me look like a banana. Have never been “my” colors. But I had to have this!!!   Now that’s talent – to make me desperately want even colors I usually don’t look twice at!!

And of course, here’s another alpaca picture – I have 100+ pictures, at least.

As you can see, Pop’s found himself another woman, and she stared at him with those big eyes, and batted her long eyelashes at him! She would have followed him anywhere – he does that to the ladies!

I was also sniffing around the Misty Meadow Alpaca booth.  Bats of fawn-colored fiber leaped into several large bags as I watched, stunned. What could I do?  And we got a wee dye kit for Pop to play with!  And all this was for sale!

The colors, so many colors, playing against each other. I had to restrain myself.  Pop thought I ought to be confined)

We had a lovely day at the FiberFest.