IT'S ABOUT TIME!

Sorry to have disappeared since the start of 2011 (really before Christmas since I was home) but between the holidays, travel and then trying my darnest to get caught back up at work I've had NO TIME to ramble!  I've still been crocheting, and taking some pictures, just no time to tell you all about it!  Most of my crocheting has been happening in the mornings vs. at night after work.  My late hours in the office last week meant I had no energy after my evening commute.  It also seems that after getting up 30-60 min. early most mornings in December I now can't get out of that habit!  I've slept in a couple of days this month but usually when I do I half pout as I leave for working looking fondly at my yarn on the couch and then I spend most of my day at work  (the spare seconds that I can find) looking at patterns online, reading about all the wonderful crafting you are all up to and ordering yarn online (which is RIDICULOUS!  the last thing on the planet I need to do right now is order MORE yarn!!)  So, I get up and crochet in the mornings so that I can get my "fill" and am more productive in the office.

This morning I finally pulled these back out for the first time since I worked on them at Christmastime

This is my first attempt at mittens, crocheted or otherwise and they were going along really well my last night/morning in Busti.  Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to finish them before we had to drive back to MD so into a bag they went along with a print out of the pattern and chicken scratch notes on a paper towel of all things.  In the time between returning to MD on 1/2 and this morning (1/12) I never once get them out of their plastic bag...I barely even thought about them.  I had moved onto this knitting/new challenges "obsession" and wanted to challenge myself with something new.  Yes, mittens were also a new adventure but I just have had too many ideas rolling around in my head of projects I want to make, things want to try/revisit and things I want to keep for me...it's just too much all at once!
This of course means that when I opted to try and work on these this morning the chicken scratch paper towel "note taking" was hard to decipher and by the time I left for work I realized that the 10 or so rows I'd crocheted up past the thumb gusset were wrong and will have to be pulled out tonight.  I just need to make sure this actually happens tonight while it's all still fresh in my head.  Besides we got about 2" of snow last night and it would be nice to enjoy a lovely winter item such as jacquard pink mittens while the weather's still right!

My other "work in progress" (which is actually non-existent now...) is a knitted, yes you read that correctly KNITTED ribbed scarf!

This no longer exsists.  While the Vanna's Choice yarn does still exsist but it's been frogged and wound back into a ball that was thrown into a bag of yarn that (still) needs to be put away.  On Friday night (after a date night downtown, where I came home with this to help fine-tune my new obession, I got distracted while watching Jon play Mario Kart and inadvertently added a stitch.  I've read in the book how to rip out a couple of rows or drop a stitch to fix this sort of problem, but unfortunately I couldn't actually FIND where the added stitch happened.  So it was frogged.....all of it.  It was wound up to be put away due to company on Sunday.

I still have plans to make this scarf and it's going to be knit and ribbed (I first attempted a crocheted rib back on like 1/3 but was unhappy with what I was getting), just not with this yarn.  It'll also be "Guilder blue", but I'm waiting on an online order from Hobby Lobby to arrive with some more yarn to try for this instead.  This order had to happen because I ran out of yarn for the one below!  It's also much longer than that now.  This is what I worked on over the weekend while watching the breaking news reports from AZ.  It looks great and I can't wait to start wearing it, but it's too short right now.  So the Hobby Lobby order was placed on Saturday afternoon with this, the blue and some other goodies which were shipped out this a.m......hoping to have by this weekend but given the crazy East Coast weather right now I'm not holding my breath.

I also started (and finished) an infinity scarf for myself (started it when I ran out of the yarn above)  I don't have a picture because I got all the ends woven in this a.m. and threw it on as I walked out the door.  I can't remember the brand of yarn used either, but it came from Hobby Lobby (not ILTY) and is a Bamboo blend in cream.  I used the same pattern as the black Infinity I made for my boss' birthday.  I wasn't 100% sold when I started it, and kept asking Jon what he thought.  I think it's a success though because it's hanging with my coat in the office today and 3 people have stopped and asked me if I made it, told me how pretty it was and told me I should sell them because they would totally buy one!  I guess it's not too shabby after all :-)  This also tells me that I really need to get my b-u-t-t in gear and get an Etsy site up and running!

So that's all for now - I'm going to try my best to keep updating and blogging more than once a week as it makes my posts shorter.....I like to write here on my lunch break, but I have to actually take my lunch break for that to work!

Join in the fun!! (click on the picture below to see what the rest of us are working on....)  What are you working on?