Last year at this time I decided to make a temperature blanket for the year Erich (aka the Shop Elf) we were married. I was building a spreadsheet to hold the historical high and low temperature info and selecting my yarn colors and the manufacturer for each temperature band. 

Then Erich passed away and everything in my life came to a grinding stop. 

Several months later I decided that I was still going to do a temperature blanket but it would be for my first year without Erich - January 12, 2023 through January 11, 2024. I considered adding, somehow, the amount of rain on each day but each idea could not be integrated easily and then I saw a temperature blanket that used the amount of daylight and darkness such that the high temperatures were daylight and the low temperatures were the darkness.   I used the Weather Underground to locate a personal weather station near the house so I could get the temperature data. I used Time and Date to get the sunrise & sunset data and built out the rest of the spreadsheet to calculate the number of stitches based upon minutes of each.  I even added some conditional formatting so the recorded temperature would show the color of the yarn for that temperature band.

For the yarn I chose an acrylic from Lion Brand because the blanket will be on the couch and will probably get washed a lot plus the yarn is not very expensive!  Being the geek I am, I also set up a page in the spreadsheet to calculate the amount of yards yarn I would need based upon a test gauge swatch for the number of stitches and then calculated the total yardage using the number of stitches over the course of the year for each temperature band...   

Once December started I went and ordered one to 2 skeins of each yarn and cast on the first rows of black on New Year's Eve.  New Year's Day I started with January 12th.   It takes about 2-3 hours to knit each day while watching TV; today I am working on finishing January 14th and maybe all of January 15th. 

​Yes, it will probably take me all of 2024 and some of 2025 to finish it but it will keep my hands busy in the evenings

Back in March I decided to knit a sweater using yarn I had bought almost 15 years ago when I lived in Murietta, California. The yarn was to be for a sweater that was in the Interweave Knits magazine which didn't get knit until I moved here and I bought other yarn for it so this yarn was stuck in my stash.

This sweater is knit cuff to cuff in one massive piece and then stitches are picked up for the collar and bottom band. I had to read the pattern several times and I actually re-wrote it for 2 reasons. First the pattern does not give instructions on knitting the second half of the body; it just implies that what you knit for the first half is worked in reverse and since I had a different yarn with a different gauge, I was going to need more exact information. The second issue is that the big collar - the turtle neck, is not actually attached to the sweater and the instructions don't say that; it just tells you to cast on stitches and knit in the round for a specific length. I had to look at the pictures of other knitter's projects to figure this out. 

I mostly worked on the sweater on Thursdays, down at the yarn store where we have a knit club get together from 2 pm to 4 pm. I usually show up early after having completed the errands I need to do in town.

Two weeks ago I finished the second sleeve and then spent that weekend knitting the collar which I mead longer than the pattern called for and in lieu of the separate turtle neck. Next up was sewing the sleeve and side seams and adding the bottom band which I decided I would do over Thanksgiving week as I had no plans to go or see anyone [I had been recording all the Star War Saga movies, no series, to watch during this time]. 

On Friday I had finished the bottom band and on Saturday I wove in all the ends from the color changes.  

I can now wear it cause the weather has gotten cool if not cold!

10 years ago when I was heavily into weaving and knitting, I saw a sweater pattern in Interweave Knits that I wanted to make; many times there was nothing in the issue I wanted to make.  The sweater pattern is Notre Dame de Grace.  

I went and purchased a nice worsted washable wool and started the sweater.  I had done the sleeves and the back when I realized that I did not have enough yarn to finish it and NO more was to be found, not even in someones stash on Ravelry. And there is sat, unfinished un-knitted for the past 10 years.

I even kinda forgot about it.

​After I moved here and unpacked, once of the things I brought with me as my stash of knitting, to keep me busy until my studio contents arrived and was built.  That is why I was working on the silk Feather and Fan Scarf; which I just realized I never blogged about.  Let me fill you in on that... 

I started the silk Variegated Feather and Fan scarf just before I moved here. It was a project for the road trip and while home alone. I used a selection of 12 colors, lace weight, from Red Fish Dye Works  and via knitting with 2 threads I "blended" the color changes.  I finished it in last June. 

It was while digging through the yarn stash for the silk, that I found the abandoned project and decided that I would start it, again, with new yarn, after I finished the scarf.  It was in early June that I drove north to Austin to hit the Ikea there and I took a side trip to a great knitting shop Hill Country Weavers to find a NEW yarn, maybe a cotton or bamboo, for THE SWEATER; and I did.  Originally, when I found the yarn, I thought it was bamboo but it is an organic cotton that is amazingly soft.  I went for 2 colors - Bay Leaf and Poppy.  So far I have knit the sleeves, in the Poppy, with a band of Bay Leaf at the wrist and last night I finished the back, in the Bay Leaf with a band of Poppy at the bottom and along the shoulders.  I have just started the front which will also be in Bay leaf with the band of Poppy at the bottom and along the shoulders. As for the collar and the placket, I have not decided if both will be Poppy or if the placket will be Poppy and the collar will be the Bay Leaf.   

Here are a few pictures of each project from along the way

30 days ago I arrived in Texas to live and work. I am now settling into a routine.

Weekdays, I am up a 6:30 am, get ready for work, make my lunch, and head off to work around 7:30 am. The drive is about 21 miles and it takes me thirty some odd minutes to come out of the hills, on local roads, into New Braunfels and to arrive at the office.   

At work I am working directly with Marty, and we maintain the current production environment and code for a large number of applications, databases, services, and reports. The entire IT team that I am on consists of 8 people and they are a nice bunch of guys (yes, I am the only woman, as usual).  I start the day looking at error logs and tickets that have come in over night and address them. Then I move on to fixing any code. In my first two weeks, I found code that had been "lost" (not checked into source control) and then rewrote it since it was last touched in 2007, so we can deploy it to a new server next month. Along the way I also removed swaths of dead and obsolete code which saved at least another week of work. This application is now on the testing server. 

After work, which is 5:00 pm (yippee, no long hours!) I usually head back up the hill to the house; but at least one day in the middle of the week, I do my grocery shopping and get gas.  Friday nights, I am going to a knitting shop for a 2 hours "knit and bitch" get together. 

Speaking of gas, right now it is anywhere from $2.09 to $1.88 depending where you are around town. I am also only filling up once per week since my drive is so short - time and mileage.   

After dinner, I sit, watch some TV and do a bit of knitting, chat with Erich and head off to bed by 10:00 pm.

On the weekends, I am still unpacking, putting things away, running other errands, and more.   Three weekends ago, I drove up to Austin to go to the IKEA to get some stuff for the house and went to a knitting shop. Two weekends ago I cleaned up the property as there was lots of construction garbage everywhere; that took 4 hours. Then last weekend I met up with a Facebook friend and we went to two knitting and weaving shops in the area and I also found a great place to go swimming in the Guadalupe river such that I am not paying for parking or river access AND it is only a 15 drive from the house.  This weekend, well just more stuff that has to be done in the house. 

Here are some pictures of the wild life - Deer and Gray Fox plus some of the river.

It is all done and I actually wore it to work.  
I knit extra stitches at the ends of the top edge so I could tie it like a shawl, when worn like one.
I have now started another one but this one will be longer, more like a cape and I will do a centered back panel with the wedges coming off each side. This one will be for Elisa of Scotlan

After I finished the variegated fisherman net scarf, and Bunny Bravehart wore it in NYC.

And after NYC it was sent to Elisa in Scotland, where Claymore decided that he should wear it too. 

After all of this… I had plenty of the silk left over and decided to knit another scarf for myself. I don't know if this a scarf or a mini-shawl? Let's call it a scrawl perhaps??

Last night I started the 10th color, a brown that border on a burnt umber. You can see a few rows of it on the left. After that I have a burnt siena and then the orange, that is visible above in the picture of Claymore. 

If all goes according to plan, it should be done by New Years day and then I can post a picture of ME, wearing it. 

My sweetie-pi is a away for the weekend and so I had big plans to keep myself busy...

I was very very tired yesterday. It was a long stressed filled week. 
I am still deep in my project at work and I had a big lack of confidence event mid-week. The current task, out of many before the project is done, is something new for me and I realized on Wednesday that I might be going down the wrong path and I realized this at 5:45pm. I came home and proceeded to spend the next 4 hours Googling for articles on the subject cause a bit of OCD had set in. It was that or stay at work  - very very late. I did find a few articles and even a reasonable tutorial that would, when I read it all, explain to me, where I took a wrong turn. This of course caused me to not get a good nights sleep and to wake up even earlier than normal. I spent almost 9-10 hours on both Thursday and Friday redoing my code. Thankfully it all worked and I certainly understand the subject better. 

All of this resulted in me being very tired yesterday. I stayed home and decided to work in a new knitted scarf.  Last year at Convergence I treated my self to a hand picked color wheel of yarns from RedFish Dye Works. The color wheel I chose was of muted colors (12 colors) of Silk 20/2 weight which is lace weight and I am/was planning to do a nice color gamp shawl/scarf. But since my loom at home currently has cotton waffle weave towels on it AND each skein is 450 yards.. I figured I could do a knitted scarf and still have plenty left over to weave with later. 

I then went looking through my library of knitting books for a nice, lacy scarf that was not a very complicated pattern. I will be watching TV while knitting so I need to balance attention to the pattern to actually watching the tube (though TV's are not tubes any more).  I did not find any thing I liked in a pattern book so I then turned to my knitting dictionary. I found a diagonal fishnet pattern that would light an airy. I had to do some experimenting to get the right weight and needles and how many rows to knit to get a "variegated" look.  As of today I am almost half way done. 

Here is a picture of the scarf in process and I am part way through the 5th of 12 colors.