Little tracks

Today's post is about making progress, of the slow and steady kind. Te past week went in a haze of coughing and sniffling, starting with smallest cub on Monday home from school and feeling miserable. Bear was out of town, and so I was the duty- parent. Tuesday was a normal Tuesday with cubs at school and me at work. Then the rest of the week went in a round of first me joining little cub in her cold, then elder cub. Bear came back and seems to have escaped the contagious period, and little cub was at school Friday. I' m hoping this week brings a nice relaxing normal work week, will full health all around.

I've been making slow progress on the newest cardigan, a few more stripes done, and beginning to think about shaping the under arm. I've been reading Barbara Walkers from the top, and realize the shapping I have developed based on my experience with drafting patterns for sewn garments is the same as Barbara's recommendation for shaping the body and under arm curves! Not sure if that is great minds think alike, or zeitgeist, or even duh! I'm tending towards great minds as that makes me feel cleverer. After a week of feeling like my head was full of thick goo - I'm taking any positive thoughts I can muster.

My next knitting project was going to be socks, Handspun socks ... But I've struck a hitch, I can't find the yarn. Not I can't find yarn for there is plenty of that, plenty of sock yarn to hand, and a local supplier happy to sell me more. My problem is that I can't find the yarn I want to use. Recently I spun a green-blue sock yarn from a skein of vintage Purls sock blend, I cabled the yarn and planned to knit a pair of socks ... the yarn looked a little under plied so I ran it through the wheel again adding a little more ply, and sat the yarn in the yarn bowl in the living room. Yarn bowl you ask, what is a yarn bowl. Well around the house there are some lovey items of glass, ceramic, brass or wood that are just there on display because they are too pretty to put away, and because we choose to put the ugly stuff like the crock-pot and the vacuum cleaner away and leave the pretty stuff out. We have more 'stuff' than we have spaces to tidy it to. end result is some things like the lovely large glass bowl in the living room end up being a temporary storage space for spin type project bits and pieces. Right now there is a spindle collection, some more sock yarn I've divided into four to spin into a four ply, and a wee pencil case that stores various fine dpns. There 'should' be a skein of marbled cabled blue green sock yarn here ... but there isn't, still aftr checking all the other places i can think of and not finding it I keep looking in the bowl just in case it has reappeared.

So I've been looking into all the odd places I may have tucked the yarn away in a fit of tidiness and thoughtlessness, I've been finding other things. One of those was a stack of paper that bear brought home. The company he works for recently rebranded, we won't even discuss from what to what, but its just the latest in a long list of changes this time so the firm can create a commercial identity separate to its current owner for a variety of reasons. The paper was old letter head, some heavy thick corporate letter paper, some gridded engineers calculation pads - all with the companies former logo and address printed at the head and foot of each page. Bear hates wasted, loves fountain pens and good paper, so brought the paper home to be used here rather than be thrown out at his work. There wasn't much, a few half used pads, and a part stack of nice letter head paper. But since I couldn't knit the socks I wanted to and as I was bored with the new cardigan ... I made some book blocks from the discarded paper. The first batch were square backed journals ....with rounded corners thanks to Stampbattery who loaned me a corner punch. I've now bought my own.

The second batch were inspired by Zoomer, who showed me her quarter bound books. I loved the look of the spine all plain and serious and the cover more colorful. I want to make more like this .... many more. I love the aesthetic, but also realize this makes decorative paper go further. I get more books for each sheet I buy.

The last set of books were experimental, made from the discarded paper, the batches of which there were only 20 or 30 sheets. Not enough for a full notebook, but enough for a thinner soft cover notebook. Pink and blue are two 'signatures' each, so around 20 leaves, or 40 pages. The brown and green thicker. They are narrow, as once I cut of the company footer and header I had less paper to work with. The green has the binding sewn through the cover, and the brown is my attempt at a soft cover moleskeine style. I followed instructions I found online to form the spine by curve a soft spine strip over a pencil. I can't find the instructions and a few frustrating days trolling through my browser history has not located it. Maybe I imagined it. I will post a link if I ever find the tutorial again.

Wish me luck in finding the lost sock yarn, and the curved spine tutorial (warning: don't google that phrase without the words bookbinding or it gets all medical),

Take care, na Stella

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