Sunshine

I am usually 99% not interested in vampire books, but I saw the top of a blurb about this one that made me pause. And then as I paused, I saw that Neil Gaiman liked it, and I read the rest of the blurb. I checked to see if it was in my library's digital collection, and it was. A few minutes later I was reading it, and then I could hardly put it down for the week when I could agonizingly only read it in half hour gulps at night.

I've read a few of Robin McKinley's other books, but haven't found one that really grabbed me until this one. I think one of the things that got me was the juxtaposition of an awesome baker and a vampire teaming up to defeat a great evil. I liked that the world felt believable, and was all the better for not being 100% fleshed out. And, I loved that the vampires were not what they so often are in popular literature, basically humans who now have a nasty blood habit, but they were very alien. They thought differently, acted differently, had different values, and processed reality differently. Though you totally fall in love with Constantine, you never once forget that he and Rae can not be together because of what he is, even though Constantine is a good vampire. I'm never going to be a vampire fic fan, but this book was one of the most gripping reads of my year so far, and I just wish there was a sequel!

Pathetic, but something

It was a crazy week, and while I got lots of great things done over the weekend, many of them were NOT knitting. I did finish the main part of the ski mask, and after trying it on will begin to knit tentacles for it, but other than that I basically

1) Knit three more stars, seen here first as the first two (the third one has a Halloween color scheme and is still blocking) stars,

and here is the whole handful minus the latest one. Why yes, I'm milking this for all it's worth!

I also finished a dishcloth that has been my 'reading' knitting for the last bit. It's weirdly textured fingering weight cotton I found somewhere out here and have decided to knit up. It also smells really dusty, so I'm debating giving it a bath before gifting it to someone here in parting.

I made bagels, ginerbread cake, and pizza this weekend, cleaned my floors, did my laundry, got rid of three boxes out of my house, took some good naps, talked for a few hours with Ruthie, got to watch a little of Once Upon a Time Season 3 (not a huge fan) and welcomed fall with a hoarded pumpkin spice latte Via and pumpkin spice candle. Last week was...rough...and I'm hoping that this one is better. Especially as I'm in for another crazy weekend on next week!

In Search of Stars and Speckles

Oddly enough, teaching once again has massively sabotaged my creative endeavors. Minutes in the evening are mine, but I have been working on setting a BOUNDARY--at 10pm I will no longer work on school things unless it is an emergency situation. I started to tell a co-worker yesterday that I felt that was reasonable, realized I was saying working from 7am to 10pm was reasonable (it's crazy town actually!), but for my life it is a new little line of reason, so we're going with that!

I have been loving Hunter Hammerson's new star pattern, Scintillation, and have been blissfully off in little star land since the pattern came out right before term started. The sad thing is that I have a whole box of odds and ends I'd love to be 'starring' right now, but alas, they are in Texas. So, I'm making do with the few bits of fingering I have left. Interestingly enough, they are my bits for HP house stockings, so naturally I ended up deciding to do two-color house stars too! In case you haven't been following my Instagram, here are most of my stars-

The other creative thing I did since I was doing Kool-aid dying with my handwork girls anyway, was to play around with making some speckled yarn using Kool-aid. I found ChemKnits very helpful tutorial, and got started. I wanted to do a warm and a cool colored yarn, so first I did my green-blue-purple,

then the red-orange-yellow. I found the 'jelly rolls' ridiculously charming, and walked them over the Admin for a nuking.

While not what I was anticipating, I'm pretty happy with the results!

I realized that I had put down too much dye, so I tried again and got a much more subdued skein.

Much more the speckled look I was going for, but not as vivid as I was hoping. This is worth further investigation when I'm near some undyed yarn again. I think if I let the yarn dry out more after soaking it, the speckles won't spread as much. Also, I've been wondering about splatter painting it instead of using a fork. Next year!

Parting shot: My spare room once again became a yarn drying station!

Let me sum up...

Obviously I choose living over blogging for all of last month, but now I’m back in Zambia and can’t go to Starbucks, stream Netflix, or hang out with my friends or siblings, so, I’m back!

First of all for anyone worried, I finished my Stash Dash 2018 goal of 3,000 meters! First, all the projects I cast off at the beginning of May,

Then all the things I finished during term 2 and while I was home-

Among the things I accomplished while I was home was three skiens of lumpy green handspun that I named Jurrasic Yarn because I was in a dinosaur mood. I need to work on better consistency, and I put a bit much twist into this at times, but it will make a cozy cowl or hat.

I plied it on my drop spindle which worked much better than fighting my wheel. Now I need to attempt a true three ply… I need to figure out what kind of wheel I want to save up for so I can get the corresponding Lazy Kate.

I made Mercy three dishcloths and didn’t get a picture of a finished one.

I finished the Nurmilintu scarf/shawlette I made using the cotton-alpaca blend a friend brought me from her trip to the Orkneys. I also failed to take a picture of the whole finished and blocked item.

I got two Hufflepuff stockings done, one to fill out my house stocking set, and one as a gift to the friend who made my wand. Cuteness!

And, in my biggest fail, I have no good pictures of my amazing Trondra hat in which I made a HUGE colorwork breakthrough. So, I plan to write a post talking about said breakthrough, but even though I am well in to the lining color, I have no good pictures of the lovely right side of my project.

Lastly, I am heading down the foot of my second travel knitting sock. I've shelved that project again for now, because now that I'm back at Sakeji I have a new project I need to tackle, a hat, a baby blanket, a few other small projects to finish. So, that pretty much sums up my summer crafting.