Weekending

Since I'm working on Sundays now, Thursday thru Saturday are my weekends, so you get early blogging about my weekend this week.

D was away with some friends for a guys' weekend.  I have to admit that I did do a fair amount of chore-type things (like steam-cleaning the downstairs carpets.  ugh!), but I then got to enjoy sitting in the nice cool downstairs to knit after I finished that up.  (Sidebar:  Our HVAC system is dead.  And of course, it was the first really HOT weather we've had so far this year, and I avoid the heat like vampires avoid the sunlight, so until it gets replaced - hopefully this week - the upstairs in the mid-80s is too hot for my tastes!).

As you'd expect, I knit quite a bit.  I'm about a third finished the border of a shawl I'd like to get done by mid-June.  It's not a hard knit, but it's beaded, so it takes some focus and concentration and it's not really TV knitting for me.  I had put a new sweater on the needles on Wednesday, so I worked on that and I've got about 5" of the body finished, still working on the waist shaping bits right now.

I also wrote up the pattern for that sweater, plus a second pattern draft for a small shawl to go off to a sample knitter so I can start to the process, albeit slowly, on the final volume of Legendary Knits.

All that aside, while I do still find knitting relaxing and fun (which is a shocker, considering that 100% of what I've knit in the last 18 months has been deadline knitting), I occasionally need a break from that repetitive motion, so Saturday, after I had worked in the dye studio while it was still coolish in the a.m., I blocked out a couple of hours to work on the winter-themed quilt I'm hoping possibly to have done for my parents' anniversary in December.

I had already finished up one applique block eons ago - the mistletoe (which, for some reason, is orienting itself upside down).

Last weekend, I finished up the snowflake block, which was a challenging one for me, being really rusty on my needle applique skills with all the tiny pieces and circles involved.

And this weekend, I worked on a pair of pieced blocks with Flying Geese patterning - two different colorways. 

It was a nice break from my knitting and I felt like I actually made some progress on this project!

Hope your weekend was great too!