Halle-frickin-lujah

Warning: huge babbling of a post.
Condensed version: work is quieter, dinner party angst, blood donation surprise, Knitting Nature, one-year anniversary, UFO resurrection, and connecting inspiration to output.
Signal to noise ratio: medium-low.
Typing mood: loquacious.
Pictures: floral; stream-of-consciousness.

Crocosmia (this particular cultivar is called Lucifer). Hummingbirds love them.

The huge time-sucking project at work is finally done (mostly), and thank goodness. It was a little dicey on Friday but it all pulled through. I got the whole weekend off to vegetate, catchup on everyday stuff, and sleep in. It was GLORIOUS. We even cleaned up the house on Saturday for extra bonus points (although the comforter still needs washing. Dang but I wish I had an extra-capacity front-loader, I hate schlepping that thing to the laundromat). We had some friends over for dinner on Saturday night because I finally got over my deep-seated fear of dinner parties and accepted that I have no innate hostess ability besides being able to shove food at people, but that's ok, as long as the food is tasty and I avoid sticking my foot in my mouth (I tried throwing a party for 50 people several years ago and 4 came. I haven't thrown any parties since then. I just invite myself to other people's parties and bring nice wine and maybe help with the dishes so I can feel useful).

Oh, oh, and I donated blood on Saturday morning and QUEL MIRACLE! I passed the damn hemocrit test! My blood droplet even sunk in the iron sulphate solution which is a FIRST for me. I hadn't even been very assiduous in taking the iron-enabled multivitamin for the couple weeks before. Now I've been trying to remember what all I ate last week and why I'm suddenly super-iron-woman.

Frances the cat contemplates the Russian Sage

I won a blog contest over at Carol's and she sent me Knitting Nature by Norah Gaughan as a prize. Woooo! Thank you Carol! The designs ideas are fascinating, I love the incorporation of the mathematical motifs. There's one lovely jacket in particular I've had my eye on for months now. Yup, another sweater to add to the queue. Maybe it's time to finally stop obsessing about perfection and knit this one.

What else? Sunday was our 1-year wedding anniversary. I can't believe a year's slipped by already. It's been great. We went out for an anniversary brunch at Simpatica, who catered the wedding. Yeah, brunch, aren't we romantic? I don't care, the crepes were fantastic. Otherwise we lolled about and made kissy faces at each other. Well, maybe not the kissy faces, don't want to disgust the cat.

Calendula! If I did any natural dyeing, I'd dye everything with calendula, they're so much fun and easy to grow. Sure, everything would come out yellow, but what's wrong with that?

I resurrected an old children's sweater that I'd thrown in the corner in a fit of pique months and months ago. Stupid heavy cotton. Stupid in-the-round top-down causing the body stitches to stretch out in ugliness when I joined the sleeves in the round and began knitting them. I monkeyed around with needle sizes and found dropping 3 sizes (1.25 mm in total) knit the previous body row stiff enough to mostly take up those stretched sleeve stitches. I'm still not completely happy but we'll call it practice and finish it before she's too old to fit in it. I finished off one of the sleeves, 1 sleeve + rest of the body south of the sleeves to go.

And I also damned the torpedoes and started work on some patchwork that's also been floating around my head for several months. But bleh it did NOT turn out like I had pictured it. It just looks flat and odd. Maybe I'll get a picture so you can mock it alongside me. Why is it so hard to squeeze ideas out from my head and form them in real life? They always seem to turn out ugly, misshapen lumps. It depends on my infatuation with the idea how much I'm willing to work with the real life turd that comes out, usually working it into something nowhere near the idea vs. ripping it apart and consigning it to a dark drawer (yeah, you'd think the more devoted I was to the idea, the more I'd want to try to form it, but it usually works out in the opposite way).

Enough extemporizing, let's look at more flowers. Foxglove!