You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December 2008.
It was a good year. A really good year. That’s what comes to mind immediately when I think about 2008. A lot of good things happened this year, for both Ev and I – new jobs for both of us, time spent together and with our family, continued success with The Painted Sheep, lots of fiber time. There were some rough spots too – illnesses (thankfully brief), watching my brother go through a divorce – hideous to say the least, the extra stress that the horrible economy brought. But all in all, the good outweighed the bad in 2008, by far.
What also comes to mind is just how busy this year was. I feel like I had more balance between work and play this year but that I really went non-stop. A whole lot happened this year. When I was thinking about this post, I skimmed through my posts from the year, pulling out highlights from the year. It was a lot of fun to see what 2008 really brought. Here’s some of the highlights:
January – super stressful! Still at the old job – the unspoken thing on the blog was that I was in the midst of an intense job search. The true highlights of the month (aside from first interview at WFC) were spending time in the dye studio and taking off to Vermont for MLK weekend.
February – I got the job! The moment the offer came in still sticks out for me – I was on my way home from work, right smack in the middle of no where and had to pull into a convenience store parking lot to take the call. I started smiling on February 6 and didn’t stop for months. Giving my resignation the next morning was another highlight 
February also brought my first SPA and my crochet class at Creative Fibers.
March – diving head first into my new job, dyeing new colorways as the first hints of spring started to appear.
April – The Painted Sheep’s 1st Anniversary! What a celebration it was! Some very exciting behind the scenes stuff happened for The Painted Sheep too – hopefully details will come soon. I also met the Yarn Harlot!
May – I found my Sweet Caroline! And there was fiber festivals – Massachusetts with my girls, New Hampshire with my Ev.
June – the crazy week that I loved so much – my trip to Louisville sandwiched in between opening day of the Farmer’s Market and a Nutmeg Spinner’s Guild meeting. Eeek! Knitspot patterns arrived at The Painted Sheep. Ev and I “officially” became UU’s.
July – new yarns and great adventures! I introduced Shimmer and Zen, played in my dye studio and spent an afternoon on a tall ship.
August – 3 little words: La Lana Wools! Oh and it was in the middle of our first vacation in quite a long time – our week in Colorado and New Mexico was amazing. La Lana and the whole trip to Taos was my favorite part.
September – I really became a hooker! The crochet class at Creative Fibers got me started but the class at Webs was what really got me hooked (pun intended). The other highlight – the Fiber Twist! The last day of summer was picture perfect and fiber filled. Can’t wait til next year!
October – fiber festivals and fall days! The Wool Arts Tour in NH and Rhinebeck (2 posts worth!) had beautiful weather, all my favorite fiber folk and perfect fall days. I had the pleasure of being a mentor at my own spinning guild – doing the dyeing demo and workshop was an amazing experience.
November – again, 3 little words: President-Elect Obama! I think 11 pm on November 4 was the best moment of my year. Hearing Keith Obermann announce that he was the presumptive winner is something I’ll remember for the rest of my life. I still get teary-eyed thinking about it. I can’t wait for the Inauguration. It was a really great month for other reasons too – Ev started his new job and subtly finally came to The Painted Sheep’s colorways.
December – Crazy busy followed by a fanastic vacation. Time to relax. The start of Mr. Greenjeans.
And there was fiber! Knitting, spinning, dyeing, more knitting, more dyeing. I can’t even fathom how many pounds of fiber I dyed up this year (there was 25 pounds in one weekend, remember?). The knitting projects were a little easier to tally up (thank you, Ravelry). Here’s what I accomplished in 2008:
- 1 adult sweater
- 4 baby/children’s sweaters
- 5 pairs of socks
- 6 hats
- 1 pair of mittens (admittedly it was only finishing the thumb)
- 3 scarves/cowls
- 11 home items – 6 potholders, 2 hot water bottle cozies, 2 Christmas ornaments and 1 granny square trivet
- 1 shawl
- 3 small bags
That’s 35 FO’s in 2008! Woo hoo!
Pretty amazing when I look back on it all. I accomplished many of my goals for the year – reducing some of my stress, spending more time with Ev, learning to crochet, The Painted Sheep continued to grow, I got a new job. There’s goals big and small, still to accomplish – more on that tomorrow! For right now, I’m not quite ready for this amazing year to end yet. As is our New Year’s Eve tradition, Ev and I are making cioppino (fish stew), having a decandent dessert and drinking great wine (less of the wine for me – on call tonight).
Thank you for helping to make this year year so great! Wishing you all a fabulous end to 2008! Have a safe and happy New Year!
So far, I’m still happily in the land of denial over this whole going-back-to-work thing. Can’t seem to get my lazy ass off the couch to actually shower and get dressed for work. Thankfully, a meeting closer to home than work means that I get to stall for a little bit longer this morning…
The vacation was all that it needed to be – fairly unstructured (though I wish it were even less structured), relaxed and fiber filled. In the end, I knitted up the cowl, 2 Christmas ornaments, crocheted 2 potholders (for Mom’s birthday – she loved them!) and got a good start on Mr. Greenjeans. At this point, I’m 8 rows from dividing for the sleeves (its knit top down) and close to 300 stitches. Ack! No wonder I only did 6 rows while I watched a movie yesterday! I spent way more time than I intended poking around online, especially on Ravelry. I blame this squarely on the new laptop – the ability to be online while parked on the couch makes it easy to get sucked in. I also discovered that I can use tags to organize my projects and queue (and maybe the stash too? I’ll have to check) on Ravelry. I know, a little slow on the uptake on this one. I tag things (usually stash yarns, sometimes projects but never queued patterns) but never knew that I could organize them into tag categories. My anal side came out in full force when I found this. I got a little bit obsessed with the tagging and organizing thing, including all 10 pages of my queue. I spent a good chunk of vacation organizing on Ravelry. Its all good – time well spent, even if it took me away from the knitting a bit…
All in all, it was a great break. But now, I can’t delay the inevitable. Must head back. Wish me luck (and a slow day!).
Enjoy your day!
First, Happy Birthday Ev! Hope you have a great day!
After a very busy few days, I’m ready for some quiet time, especially as vacation comes to a close. Last week was busier than I anticipated. Tuesday was spent focused on the new laptop – between buying it and set up (and a few calls to tech support – cause we’re inept), it consumed most of our day. On Tuesday evening, our boiler crapped out. Unfortunately, the only cause of this was our own failure to have it cleaned (in the 3 years we’ve been in the house). In the end, we got VERY lucky – our neighbor connected us to a friend with a boiler service business – he came over quickly, did the necessary cleaning and got us restarted and charged next to nothing. That was one of those moments I dread as a home owner – not knowing if I’m about to get ripped off or not. Some of the places we called gave us “estimates” of $600 to $800 to do an emergency cleaning and service, telling us that we needed extensive work (thankfully Dad is an HVAC guy himself, though he doesn’t do boiler work and was able to give us an idea of what might be wrong). The guy we found charged $50 for his quick cleaning and service. He’ll have to come back to do some other work for us, but at least we’re set for the time being and found someone reliable and reasonable. The rest of the week was far less stressful. Holiday stuff on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday, I spent the day shopping – something I rarely do. I headed up to Webs for their after Christmas sale and did some birthday shopping (there’s 5 birthdays in my family before MLK Day). When I hit the Webs sale a few years ago, I got some great deals. This year, I only picked up just a couple of things – a bag of Rowan RYC Soft Tweed in a great shade of pink (enough for a sweater for me – I’m thinking simple, maybe a Sweater Workshop-type pullover), a couple of skeins of Saucy for pot holders and a sock blocker key chain – something fun for my leftover sock yarn. Webs was followed by a stop at Creative Fibers – considering my “big feet” issue, I thought it best to pick up an additional skein of Koigu to make socks – with its yardage, 3 skeins will do it for me. Saturday was spent helping my brother move. On Sunday, it was our turn to host the family – we celebrated my mother’s and Ev’s birthdays. Most of the day was spent cooking (golabki, more of Grammy’s bread and cake) and cleaning before the family arrived. A crazy few days it was.
Today I finally get to snuggle into my new bathrobe and settle into the couch with Mr. Greenjeans. Time to relax. I have a couple of great movies – Mama Mia and Burn After Reading – to keep me entertained while I work through the more mindless parts of this sweater. Ev’s working, so I have the whole day to myself. When he gets home, time to head out to dinner for his birthday. A quiet dinner out is in order. It promises to be a much more relaxed day than the last few. I’m off to knit.
Tomorrow, its back to work. Better enjoy the quiet time while it lasts…
First sign that Santa made a stop at our house? 
The kitties are done with the whole “behaving” bit.
Second sign?
Merlin is hard at work relieving a pile of new mousies of their “extra” parts – tails, eyes and ears.
And the last sign?
There’s new yarn in
my Ravelry stash!
Santa was very good to us. Not only did I get that yummy Koigu, I got The Little Box of Socks to go with it. Ev is very good – he was trying to mix it up a bit by going for a yarn and a color combo that I don’t normally knit with – he remembered that Koigu was “good stuff”. Well done! Along with that, he got me the new bathrobe that I so wanted/needed and The Audacity of Hope. Ev got several books that he wanted, including the new Stephen King graphic novel. Even the kitties had a full stocking of mousies (note to self – the black ones look far too much like the real thing – ick). Thank you Santa!
Of course, the real gift of the holiday was spending time with the family. I spent Christmas Eve day baking Grammy’s Bread, as I always do. Its become a tradition I cherish, that reminds me so much of my grandmother. Christmas Eve was at my parents’ house, with the whole family. My niece and nephew were a delight! They’re old enough to really get into the holiday. Their sweaters were well received (by their parents – clothes only get a passing glance when there’s toys to open). We started Christmas Day with a quiet morning at home. The rest of the day was spent with my family again, at my brother’s house. It was a couple of full and happy days and really a wonderful holiday.
From all of us at The Painted Sheep, Merry Christmas!
Remember how I said I was going to my couch for vacation? Thanks to an early Christmas present, I’m even blogging from my couch now. Yep, Ev and I got a laptop for Christmas! How excited our we? Imagine trying to run an online business off of a 5+ year old PC that crashes at least once a day (sometimes 4 or 5 times – oh, the memories…). Now you know how excited we are! We found a fantastic holiday sale and got a laptop, new printer and went wireless (thank you crappy economy! at least we can be happy about the good deals out there). The new toy is an HP, I barely know its details (I confess to knowing next to nothing about these things) but I do know that its just wonderful! Its fast, has all the bells and whistles we wanted and is a tremendous upgrade from what we were working on before. And, I can blog from my couch! Woot! We’re still working on setting things up. I’ll be making some minor changes to the website in the next few days, before I start a major overhaul of it – now that I have a PC that works, its finally possible. Fingers crossed that things go smoothly… I’ll post updates here if the website will be down at all, not that will impact the important thing – your ability to shop on the Etsy site remains uneffected!
On to Work In Progress Wednesday. I’ve been knitting a fair amount. Lots of playtime over the weekend and on Monday. First up, a “modeling” shot of the cowl that I knitted up this weekend. 
(one of my new toys is a webcam – it beats trying to take a picture in the mirror!) Its super soft and was just right when we went out last night. I have a feeling that there are more of these in my future – its a great quick project. On Monday, I decided to pull out something that’s been in my stash for a while – a couple of ornament kits from Ornamental Knits. Within a few hours, I had these: 
Perfect additions to our tree!
My other project this week has been Mr. Greenjeans, which I finally (!) started on Sunday. Its off to a great start. 
I love the color! As planned, I’m alternating between two skeins, 1 of the lighter batch and one of the darker. This was to blend the colorways, but also to avoid pooling. Its working perfectly. Its a great pattern – simple and really fun to knit. I’m one very happy dyer/knitter!
As for goals for the week, I’m not setting any. I’m on vacation through Monday, so we’ll see how far I get.
I’m off to finish baking bread for tomorrow and then to celebrate Christmas Eve with the family. Have a wonderful day!
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