WIP Wednesday: Thanksgiving Eve

Happy Thanksgiving Eve, everyone!  Tomorrow's the big turkey day, are you ready?  I just about am, my mom and I have plans with some of our knitting group to gather together with food and all of our projects.  I'm hoping that with their help and a Thanksgiving miracle, I'll finally start seaming my cardigan and get started on some of those ruffles.

I've been off work all week, taking a few of my days off before I lose them at the end of the year.  That's given me time to enjoy a little extra sleep and to make sure I keep going strong on my NaNoWriMo efforts.  There's just a few more days to go, and just a few thousand words to go as well.  I'll probably still have story ideas left to explore, and some unfinished ones that I've started.  But I'll get all 50,000 words typed up for sure.

And to go with my literariness, I have a new pair of glasses that I just picked up from the optometrist this afternoon.

They're purple!  For the first time ever, my prescription has stayed stable enough that I didn't actually need new glasses.  But I had the insurance to cover most of it, plus the flexible spending money that I had to use up (insurance and vacation time, gotta use them all before New Year's), so now I have two pairs of glasses that I can wear.  It's kind of exciting.  Plus, it means that next year, when insurance only covers lenses, I can put new lenses in one of the frames and still see wearing the others while they do it.

Sad news about my Fruit Loopy Shawl, though.  The yarn was on Knit Picks the other day, but now that they're having their 'Big Sale', it's gone!  It's like the colorway has ceased to exist.  I'm going to have to find someone on Ravelry willing to sell it from their stash.  But I'm still tempted to make a purchase from Knit Picks anyway.  To comfort myself.

Speaking of comfort, I'm so looking forward to all of the food tomorrow!  I wouldn't have believed it when I was a kid, but I think the dishes I'm looking forward to the most are the cranberry sauce and the Brussels sprouts.  I know, weird, right?  Of course, I'm also going to save room for pumpkin cheesecake and chocolate pie.  For the sake of being festive.

What are you looking forward to eating tomorrow?  And what will you be doing while everyone else watches football?  For more WIP Wednesday posts, go to Tami's Amis.

WIP Wednesday: If a picture is worth a thousand words...

…then can I add this to my NaNoWriMo word count for the day?

This is my belated haul from the Kid 'n Ewe fiber festival two weekends ago.  Going clockwise from the top-left:

1. Brooks Farm Riata in an 8 ounce mega-skein of Sherbet (yum)
2. Heavenly Fiber Stardust Sock in Optimist (what a great name!)
3. Wooly Wonka Ceridwen Sock in Bazinga (I happened to be wearing all of these colors that day, so it was meant to be)
4. Knitting Rose Yarn Blossom in Thunderstorm (one of those gorgeous grays that has shades of other colors peeking through)

The irony is that I have all of this yarn, but this week I faced a terrible thing: too little yarn.  I ran out of Knit Picks Imagination in the final section of my Fruit Loopy Shawl.  This puts me in a terrible mood, even though I should be able to order another skein of this colorway, and it gives me an excuse to make a Cyber Monday order.  I just hate that I can't get it done now, you know?  After all of the time you spend working on something, it's frustrating to be so fundamentally stumped in the final phases.

But I comforted myself by looking at all of the other pretty yarns. And then I distracted myself by casting on another project.  I could have started tackling the seaming on my cardigan, but I needed to just start knitting something, and the sweater is going to mean figuring out something I've never done, and starting out frustrated by yarn shortage is not good.  Better to save that for Thanksgiving amongst crafty friends and delicious food.

I cast on another Christmas present, so unfortunately I can't share anything about it.  But so far it's coming together quickly.  And hopefully there will be plenty of yarn.  Or someone might be getting a frustrated pile of frogged yarn in their stocking.  Kidding!

For more WIP Wednesday posts, go to Tami's Amis.

WIP Wednesday: It's all downhill from here

I love the feeling of Wednesdays, that almost perceptible moment when you tip past the halfway point of the workweek.  Especially because for me that coincides with the coffee klatch in the afternoon, making the 'peak' of hump day something I look forward to.

But there's always something about passing that halfway point that's satisfying.  I'm well past the halfway point on the Fruit Loopy Shawl, it's starting to get narrower on the other end, and I just hope that I have enough yarn.  I removed a short row section on either side of the middle point, so hopefully I'm safe.  I'm not quite sure what I would do if I reached the end of my yarn with a row or more to go.  I just won't think about it.

Being more than halfway through my training program has pluses and minuses.  On the plus side, I've developed the habit of running every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday.  On the minus side, the miles are starting to rack up and it's taking longer and longer chunks out of each of those days.  I've also been experimenting with listening to things other than music while running, because while pop songs are great to help me power through a couple of miles, I find that the humor of 'Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me' podcasts is a more helpful distraction from running for over an hour.

I'm also halfway through my word count towards my daily goal for NaNoWriMo.  Which means I still have about 800 words to go, so, um, I gotta go!  Bye!

For more WIP Wednesday posts, go to Tami's Amis.

Inspiration Saturday: A selection from my story soundtracks

Instead of offering knitting inspiration this week, I wanted to share some of what I'm using as the inspiration for the stories I'm trying to write throughout NaNoWriMo.  I know that it's National Novel Writing Month, but I've had this collection of short stories in me head for too long, and I needed a means to get them out.  The idea is simple: each story has a song in it.  Playing on the radio, being sung in the shower, whatever.  The song may or may not make total sense to the story right off the bat, but each story came out of my listening to the song and making some connection to a lyric or something.

So here are just a few of the songs that I'm using to create little worlds (note: for most of these, I've never seen the music video, so I have no idea if the story a director came up with might be in any way related to my own):

'Empty Room' by Marjorie Fair:

'Caramel' by Suzanne Vega

'Too Bad You' by Megan Slankard

'Rock & Roll Queen' by The Subways

'Manic Monday' by The Bangles

Just a small sampling.  Maybe one day I'll reveal what the story lines are, but for now I'm more concerned about getting my word count for today done, because I've had a busy day that did not involve being on the computer until now!

For more inspiration, go to Woolen Diversions.

WIP Wednesday: Words, words, words

Well, we're still in the first week of NaNoWriMo, so I'm not feeling exactly like Eliza Doolittle:

But I am logging in some quality time with my keyboard to keep making the daily word count goals so far.  This means two things:

1. I haven't gotten to do too much knitting.
2. I still have more storytelling to do tonight, so this blog post has to be short.

I've made a few more ruffles on my Fruit Loopy Shawl, but other than that, it's all words, words, words.  I'm not sick of 'em yet.

For more WIP Wednesday posts, go to Tami's Amis.

WIP Wednesday: There's always time for hellos and goodbyes

It's the last week of October, so I'm saying goodbye to one month and hello to another.  But that theme has repeated itself throughout the week.

First, a bittersweet goodbye as a local yarn store closes.  Farewell, Old Oaks Ranch.  I'll miss the statue garden and the alpacas, but I'll look forward to the new yarn stores which may be opened in its wake.  And I'll always have the closing sale yarn purchases to remember it by:

Apparently I start stashing when I feel sentimental.  Or any other emotion.  I had seen the skein of Araucania Puelo during the Crawl and liked it, so I went ahead and got it this time.  I also got two balls of Liberty Wool Light, because I always like their color mixes, and this chartreuse, gray, cream and lilac is no exception.  I'm thinking a pair of yoga socks, and maybe enough for some matching mitts?  And then, three colorways, two skeins each, of Llama Lace.  You gotta love the name.  And after seeing someone else's WIP in the store using it, I couldn't choose between them and just brought them all home with me.

Also coming home with me is my own alpaca!

No, not one of those, unfortunately.  An alpaca needle felting kit, including naked alpaca starter:

Cute, no?

On a happier note, I also bid adieu to one of my WIPs, the Christmas knit.  It feels good to get that one completed and move on to the next gift.  This one I'm going to sew!  In the meantime, I'm also making progress on my selfish knit, the Fruit Loopy Shawl.  It's still colorful and makes me smile whenever I pick it up.

Everything isn't coming to an end, though, some things are starting up in November.  Specifically, NaNoWriMo.  I've mentioned this before, but basically, I'm going to be trying to write 50,000 words over the course of the 30 days in November.  I know it's 'Novel' writing month, but I'm actually working on a collection of short stories.  Shh, no one tell the strict NaNo dictators or I'll be smeared with red ink and thrown in a life-sized slush pile.  Just kidding.  I'm looking forward to the mad panic of blurting all of the words onto the keyboard and getting the stories out of my head.  And hopefully attending some write-ins to engage in that very specific kind of socializing that involves staring at your computer and working intensely…around other people doing the same thing.  Communal isolation.

Alright, so those are the beginnings, middles, and endings for this week's WIP.  For more posts, visit Tami's Amis.