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.

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?

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. 🙁

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?

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.