I Must Stitch

I have totally lost the inclination to do any stitching, all I seem to want to do at the moment is knit. Which wouldn't be a problem except that I really must get the pre-stitching done for four classes that I am taking later on this year and also finish the final round of the UFO Round Robin that I am participating in. I am sure that part of the reason why I don't fancy stitching is the deadlines and the fact that I currently feel that even if I stitched for every second possible then I would still not make enough progress to achieve the deadlines. So in order to get past this I have decided to set aside most of this weekend to stitching. The only other thing on the agenda is taking my Mother and Niece to a fund raiser tomorrow for a guinea pig and rabbit rescue centre.

I have been making progress on reducing my knitting stash and so far have completed 5 squares that will be donated to The Ghana Project. I also have 3 other squares almost completed and 3 scarves on the go (why have only one WIP when you can have half a dozen?). I have decided that once I have reduced my stash by at least 12 balls (or skiens) of yarn I will reward myself by starting a new pair of socks. So far I have turn two and a bit balls into squares and once the scarves are finished that will take the total number of balls used to 6. This is partly due to the fact that one of the balls of yarn that I am trying to use up is a masive 500 grams of DK yarn.

Fantastic Post Day

At the end of a very long Monday in the office trying to deal with the aftermath of yet another weekend of downpours and floods I got home to find two wonderful parcels waiting on my doorstep. I am begining to wonder if there will ever be an end to the rain this year. On Friday my niece (who is nearly four) very glummly told me that she hated the rain and thought that the sun was gone forever.

The first parcel contained a skein of beautiful blue and green sock yarn from Cherry Tree Hill, which I can not wait to start knitting with but need to find just the right sock pattern for, and two packets of coffee. This parcel was recieved from Sarah as part of the Fiber & Frappe exchange organised on the Fiber Freaks BB.

The second parcel was a gift of a gorgeous hand stitched bookmark from my friend Maria, who is very naughty to be sending me gifts. Both parcels are amazingly wonderful and sure made a fantastic start to the week. Huge thanks to both Maria and Sarah for spoiling me.

Now all I need to complete my week is for the weather gods to be kind and to send us a dry spell. Work is bad enough without having to cope with emergencies which invariably result in people having to work weekends and being extra grumpy on a Monday. The downpour on Friday was especially bad and meant that a number of my work mates never made it home on Friday and were stranded over night in their cars.

Thank Goodness Its The Weekend

It has been a long week and boy am I glad that the weekend has finally arrived. We are going through a restructuring process at work, at the sametime that we have hit a really really busy period and the IT bods are also changing all our hardware and software. Which added up equals long hours, long boring meetings were people argue round in circles and get all defensive about minor matters and training courses (I just love training courses designed to tell me how to do the work I have been doing for the past couple of years just with slightly modified software). So all around I am glad for two days off, no alarms, no deadlines just plenty of sitting on the sofa watching tv and stitching or maybe knitting or if I feel like it doing nothing at all.

Charity Knitting

My new addiction to sock knitting has led to an addiction to sock wool and over the weekend I indulged in a bit of retail therapy. Because I am very bad at making decisions I have managed to order a small mountain of sock wool - it was really really hard to decide which ones I liked the most. In order to halt the rapid increase of my stash yesterday I decided to have a clear out and discovered several balls of yarn that either I can not remember why I brought them or have been left over from completed projects. So I have decided to turn the stash that I no longer want into scarves, hats, squares etc. and donate them to various charitable causes.

While searching the internet for charities wanting donations of knitted items I came across the Crafting for a Cause Blog which I have decided to join in order to try and help them achieve their amazing goal of producing and donating to charity 3000 items in 2007.