Oh Boy!
Dear Blog-
Christmas is finally over! The humiliating cat sweater project is finished! I have at last finished re-formating and organizing 17 patterns in my word-processing program, changed them all into Word documents, and from there into pdf files!
I'll take one story at a time. Last Friday, the 22nd, I had to go to the LYS to play Knit Dr in the morning, and then left there to run out and finish up my shopping. When I walked out of the last store I felt like I had really accomplished something and that I was that far ahead of the rest of the world. The traffic was awful last week! And I really, really didn't want to be out shopping on Saturday, I figured that was pretty masochistic. Then like magic, the appointment I was supposed to have on Saturday morning rescheduled, so I actually had the day free to get some final things out of the way. DH went out to do his Christmas shopping (the stuff I hadn't already done for him at the LYS) and I had a nice peaceful day at home. I was in the midst of re-doing all my pattern files so I also re-took a lot of the pictures and spent a whole lot of time arranging things, taking the photos, running over here to the computer to see which photos worked, and then setting up the next pictures. I did get most of them done, and took the last two yesterday. Also, my order of Silk Garden Lite for the second Argosy arrived, and I just had to start that, as I finished the first Argosy the day before.
Sunday was the farmer's market, and yes, in spite of the cold and that it was Christmas eve, people did come out and shop. It was too danged cold for me, tho, and I came home and got dinner started and also began my second sleeve for the PW CYO.
We had a lovely day with my Mom on Christmas, my Dad was too sick to put in an appearance and spent the day sleeping. He has Meneire's (sp? too lazy to go look it up) and gets horrible spells of vertigo that last for days. After brunch we hung out with Mom for a bit and then came home and relaxed with our books and my knitting. In his travels on Saturday DH got a thistle feeder for the birds, and as we sat there Sunday afternoon, he said, Look! The whole tree is filled with little yellow birds! We had three pair of goldfinches in feeding all at once, and that was pretty darned cool. I knew we had a pair as I had seen them from time to time over the summer in the back yard, but it never occured to me that we had more than that. How lovely.
It was back to the grind for both of us on Tuesday, I went for my last day working at the LYS, and he back to work, only to be sent home early as they were really slow at work. We were pretty danged busy at the shop, but not crazy. She made a mistake on the ad in the paper, and listed the sale as starting on Thursday instead of Tuesday. So right there, that tells you that there is a God, and he didn't want Lynda to have a crazy day at work like she did last week.
Wednesday I went and got a hair cut, ran errands, exchanged something I got DH for Christmas, and somehow ended up buying myself two jewelry boxes at 60% off. I started putting things in them and realized that I have things I haven't taken out and looked at in ages. It was like Christmas all over again.
Yesterday I had the free time to finish with all the formatting of the pattern files and ordered from Morehouse Farms, and here we are, waiting til I can eat breakfast, and then after I'll take my Mom out shopping for the day. We had proper winter-in-the-desert weather yesterday, very cold and rainy, and I know when the clouds clear off the mountains today that they will be covered with snow. This will definitely be a day for wearing the woolies.
So after I finished the first PW sleeve last week I decided that I really had to knuckle down and get the cat sweater done so that she could have it on Sunday when we saw her at the market. It really only took me a day to finish it, but as I told DH, it took enough hours that you really can't charge a decent hourly rate for the knitting, because no one is going to pay $150 for a cat sweater. So that will be my one and only knitted cat sweater and a lesson learned. Mark it down in the history books. But for what it was, it came out well. I didn't get to see the cat's Mom on Sunday as she came after I left, but I did get a call later that afternoon telling me how much he loved his sweater and that it was a perfect fit. So that ended well. I took this photo Saturday morning in my photo frenzy, and meant to take another when the light was better, but forgot. But you can see what it ended up like.
So while I was at it, I also finished off the Argosy Scarf from the latest Knitty, in the Silk Garden. I blocked it on Sunday, and here it is -
I do like the finished scarf, tho I think I will like it in SGL in the original colorway better. In fact, I have this one around my neck right now and will wear it today out and about. The SGL scarf that I just started is a bit lighter weight of course with a nicer drape and the colors are gorgeous.
I am also so close to finishing my second PW CYO sleeve that I should be done either tonight or Saturday at the latest, so I can block them on Sunday, and dive into the body of the sweater.
But you know that I have been in the process of putting some of my patterns up on a web page, and so I sat down and looked at all the patterns I have on the computer. My word processing program is Lotus Wordpro, which I realize is ancient and probably not cool, but I have been using it for years and know my way around by now. So I went through all my pattern files and made them somewhat uniform - pattern name on each page, logo and copyright info on each page, making sure that the photo was on page one, in some cases taking a photo if it was an old pattern and I didn't have one there, or retaking the photo if I had figured out a better way to stage it. With about 17 patterns, it took me a few days to do that. Then each one had to be saved into Word, which decided yesterday that it wanted to reformat all my pages, so I had to change them again once they were in Word, and then from Word into pdf files. Then I sat down and wrote up a short blurb on each pattern, noted down the photo # with each blurb for DH, and when he got home from work I just stepped aside, cooked a good dinner, and let him spend the evening (God bless him!) putting them all into seperate pages on the website and putting the Buy Now buttons on each page. So you have to go look, if only to admire what the website looks like. It needs a couple of small tweaks, but I am really pretty darned pleased with the work he did putting it all together. I still have several bag patterns that I did for myself that I realized should really be written up into patterns, I hope to get those done in the coming week, at the latest.
Well, time to go get ready to take Mom out shopping. I'll have to tell you tomorrow all about my knitting-related Xmas gifts.
Christmas is finally over! The humiliating cat sweater project is finished! I have at last finished re-formating and organizing 17 patterns in my word-processing program, changed them all into Word documents, and from there into pdf files!
I'll take one story at a time. Last Friday, the 22nd, I had to go to the LYS to play Knit Dr in the morning, and then left there to run out and finish up my shopping. When I walked out of the last store I felt like I had really accomplished something and that I was that far ahead of the rest of the world. The traffic was awful last week! And I really, really didn't want to be out shopping on Saturday, I figured that was pretty masochistic. Then like magic, the appointment I was supposed to have on Saturday morning rescheduled, so I actually had the day free to get some final things out of the way. DH went out to do his Christmas shopping (the stuff I hadn't already done for him at the LYS) and I had a nice peaceful day at home. I was in the midst of re-doing all my pattern files so I also re-took a lot of the pictures and spent a whole lot of time arranging things, taking the photos, running over here to the computer to see which photos worked, and then setting up the next pictures. I did get most of them done, and took the last two yesterday. Also, my order of Silk Garden Lite for the second Argosy arrived, and I just had to start that, as I finished the first Argosy the day before.
Sunday was the farmer's market, and yes, in spite of the cold and that it was Christmas eve, people did come out and shop. It was too danged cold for me, tho, and I came home and got dinner started and also began my second sleeve for the PW CYO.
We had a lovely day with my Mom on Christmas, my Dad was too sick to put in an appearance and spent the day sleeping. He has Meneire's (sp? too lazy to go look it up) and gets horrible spells of vertigo that last for days. After brunch we hung out with Mom for a bit and then came home and relaxed with our books and my knitting. In his travels on Saturday DH got a thistle feeder for the birds, and as we sat there Sunday afternoon, he said, Look! The whole tree is filled with little yellow birds! We had three pair of goldfinches in feeding all at once, and that was pretty darned cool. I knew we had a pair as I had seen them from time to time over the summer in the back yard, but it never occured to me that we had more than that. How lovely.
It was back to the grind for both of us on Tuesday, I went for my last day working at the LYS, and he back to work, only to be sent home early as they were really slow at work. We were pretty danged busy at the shop, but not crazy. She made a mistake on the ad in the paper, and listed the sale as starting on Thursday instead of Tuesday. So right there, that tells you that there is a God, and he didn't want Lynda to have a crazy day at work like she did last week.
Wednesday I went and got a hair cut, ran errands, exchanged something I got DH for Christmas, and somehow ended up buying myself two jewelry boxes at 60% off. I started putting things in them and realized that I have things I haven't taken out and looked at in ages. It was like Christmas all over again.
Yesterday I had the free time to finish with all the formatting of the pattern files and ordered from Morehouse Farms, and here we are, waiting til I can eat breakfast, and then after I'll take my Mom out shopping for the day. We had proper winter-in-the-desert weather yesterday, very cold and rainy, and I know when the clouds clear off the mountains today that they will be covered with snow. This will definitely be a day for wearing the woolies.
So after I finished the first PW sleeve last week I decided that I really had to knuckle down and get the cat sweater done so that she could have it on Sunday when we saw her at the market. It really only took me a day to finish it, but as I told DH, it took enough hours that you really can't charge a decent hourly rate for the knitting, because no one is going to pay $150 for a cat sweater. So that will be my one and only knitted cat sweater and a lesson learned. Mark it down in the history books. But for what it was, it came out well. I didn't get to see the cat's Mom on Sunday as she came after I left, but I did get a call later that afternoon telling me how much he loved his sweater and that it was a perfect fit. So that ended well. I took this photo Saturday morning in my photo frenzy, and meant to take another when the light was better, but forgot. But you can see what it ended up like.
So while I was at it, I also finished off the Argosy Scarf from the latest Knitty, in the Silk Garden. I blocked it on Sunday, and here it is -
I do like the finished scarf, tho I think I will like it in SGL in the original colorway better. In fact, I have this one around my neck right now and will wear it today out and about. The SGL scarf that I just started is a bit lighter weight of course with a nicer drape and the colors are gorgeous.
I am also so close to finishing my second PW CYO sleeve that I should be done either tonight or Saturday at the latest, so I can block them on Sunday, and dive into the body of the sweater.
But you know that I have been in the process of putting some of my patterns up on a web page, and so I sat down and looked at all the patterns I have on the computer. My word processing program is Lotus Wordpro, which I realize is ancient and probably not cool, but I have been using it for years and know my way around by now. So I went through all my pattern files and made them somewhat uniform - pattern name on each page, logo and copyright info on each page, making sure that the photo was on page one, in some cases taking a photo if it was an old pattern and I didn't have one there, or retaking the photo if I had figured out a better way to stage it. With about 17 patterns, it took me a few days to do that. Then each one had to be saved into Word, which decided yesterday that it wanted to reformat all my pages, so I had to change them again once they were in Word, and then from Word into pdf files. Then I sat down and wrote up a short blurb on each pattern, noted down the photo # with each blurb for DH, and when he got home from work I just stepped aside, cooked a good dinner, and let him spend the evening (God bless him!) putting them all into seperate pages on the website and putting the Buy Now buttons on each page. So you have to go look, if only to admire what the website looks like. It needs a couple of small tweaks, but I am really pretty darned pleased with the work he did putting it all together. I still have several bag patterns that I did for myself that I realized should really be written up into patterns, I hope to get those done in the coming week, at the latest.
Well, time to go get ready to take Mom out shopping. I'll have to tell you tomorrow all about my knitting-related Xmas gifts.
posted by Lynda Michaluk Sorenson at 7:40 AM
2 Comments:
Very nice looking Argosy scarf -- that's a pattern that caught my eye too.
*Gorgeous* picture of the Christmas cactus, I set it as my desktop background. I have one in that color but not with that big round bloom. Mine is in Oregon, probably dropping its spent blooms all over the floor, waiting for me to get back there in a couple weeks. Congratulations on the good-looking web page!
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