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Back at it

Once the holidays were over, the decorations taken down and stored until next year, the baking frozen (ok, mostly eaten), I focused on doing the year-end inventory. This is always a chore I really dread, although it’s never a bad as I think it will be. That’s because I’m nowhere near as careful or exacting as I might be. Here’s my process.

Print out the inventory of both raw materials and finished items from last year as my starting point. I do actually take all of the finished items out of bins, count them, and organize them as I replace them in the bins. But for the raw materials? I look into my many bins of yarn and sort of guess. I mentally add up how many partial cones I have and sort of combine them to make full cones, and then tally the total. For a business my size (minuscule, really) I believe it’s good enough. In now-almost-ancient parlance, ‘good enough for government work’. And since I only do this to file my taxes and thereby report to the government, I decided a few years ago that it is good enough for me.

So what came next? I had to re-knit that cabled hat for my daughter, as the yarn I’d used previously, 90% acrylic and 10% alpaca, itched her. So I have the hat now and have worn it several times with no itchiness. She went to the local craft store and bought some variegated 100% acrylic yarn and I went to town. I dropped it off to her yesterday morning, sans pompom since she makes WAY better pompoms than I do. By afternoon she sent me this photo. Happily it doesn’t itch her.

A's 2nd cabled knit hat

Yesterday I realized I could actually get back to my loom. I haven’t been able to sit in front of it since….drum roll…the first week of November! Two whole months! The warp, of course waited patiently for me; what choice did it have?

weaving my blues & greens warp

I only got about 15″ woven yesterday when I’d had enough. I just wasn’t into it. Today I got about 45″ woven when it was time to walk the dog.

Leaving the house, I saw that I’d received the sweatshirt I ordered for the little grandson. Today is actually his 5th birthday, but I hadn’t ordered it in time to get it, dye it, dry it, and get to him today. Still, I’ll be seeing him tomorrow, so that will have to do.

For a long time his favorite color was “lello” – yellow to those of you not familiar with interpreting little-kid-speak. But for a while now when you ask him what his favorite color is he’ll say “all colors” – meaning rainbow. So I dyed a sweatshirt for him, and a mask to match. The dye job wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but sweatshirt looked pretty good hanging up. I was as careful as possible when removing that hanger, but one of the sleeves swiped the body leaving blotchy dye on it. Sigh. 🙁

Ro's dyed sweatshirt

Ro's dyed mask

I need to move quickly on this as I have to babysit him at noon tomorrow. So I decided to steam it to set the color as best as I can. It’s batching overnight now, and I’ll rinse it as soon as I get up tomorrow morning. Then I have to get it into the washer and dryer so I can take it to him.

On Friday my older grandson, age 9, had a Zoom guitar recital. He did great! I snapped a shot of the Zoom screen (and blurred his face ‘cuz I want to respect his privacy and not be send his image all over the internet for time immemorial). Looks good, eh?

Ru's recital

Oh yeah, I also spent a god-awful amount of hours sitting on my butt figuring out how to share screen with both my desktop and my phone, mounted on a holder borrowed from my daughter, working up 8 samples and a handout, all so I can volunteer to teach an online class on how to make a covered yarn button for the Weaving Center. I still have to organize a slide show to use during the presentation. Two friends have agreed to be my test subjects this Friday afternoon so I have a deadline.

covered yarn button

2 comments to Back at it

  • Jennifer Petschke

    You’re a busy woman! Hat looks great, grandson with guitar looks like a rock star and love the sweatshirt!

  • Judy T

    Love all of this Peg (well almost all of it, taxes never are very exciting) …your weaving … the new hat… the rainbow sweatshirt (I got to see it being worn during a FaceTime yesterday)… and the awesome guitar recital zoom (I didn’t even know he played)… and how fun to see that you’ll be teaching an online class! You leave me as impressed as always!

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