Folklife Festival

Memorial day weekend was Folklife Festival weekend-- imagine a country fair but with dreadlocks instead of cowboy boots. It's an annual music and dance and artisans crafts fair. On Friday I did some volunteer work during the afternoon then tried a few dances and listened to some music before heading home.

On Saturday I brought my custom knee brace and better shoes and danced quite a bit. :) I'd been looking forward to that for months, hoping I'd be able to dance all weekend once Folklife arrived.

On Sunday I took lots of Advil and put an ice pack on my knee all day. It performed surprisingly well-- hurt a bit, but not as much as my calf and shin and quads! All in all quite a success, even if I didn't get to dance "all weekend"

On Monday I cleaned house and rested.

The big fiber and spinning conferences are coming up real soon. I'm not really ready yet, but I'm probably as ready as I'm going to be. It should be fun anyway. I'm looking forward to learning new skills and spinning yarns and hanging out with other spinners.

This year's Fiber Exchange project is due already!! yipes! Fortunately I'm ready to turn it in, but you'll have to wait a little longer before I get a post written up about it. I feel like I've had no time to relax since my knee started getting better. I've got yardwork that's way overdue (lots of weeds to pull, bushes to trim back, etc etc), housework that's way overdue, projects that got put on hold... and I'm still in physical therapy twice a week plus finding time for the exercizes at home.

I'm sorry that the blog is suffering at the moment, and even more sorry that I haven't gotten out to look at YOUR blogs! It will happen. Soon, I should hope!

Knee Update: I've Started Dancing Again.

... not that it's easy, or comfortable, but at least I can do a little of it again.

and I've been back to the ice rink. I get to do even less there-- five minutes gliding around the rink followed by five minutes resting. Nothing fancy, nothing impressive, hardly even exercize. .. but at least it's movement, and I can hope that some day it will come easy again. For now it hurts and it's exhausting. .. and even the return to the rink is bittersweet. The first time was especially difficult, as it hit me as quick and as painful as being run over by a speeding semi truck that the last time I skated, Beth was still my friend. .. or rather, I believed she was. Now she's not.

And like the missing sock, that friendship is gone for good.

In fact, the sock seems to have far more likelihood of returning.

ah well. One adapts to the things that don't heal.

hugs all.

I Have The Dreaded SSS !

..which would be Single Sock Syndrome!!

(not the more familiar SSS: Second Sock Syndrome-- nope, I rarely have trouble getting the second sock started, finished, usually even to match. The second sock goes great-- I know what I'm doing, I've worked out the glitches on the first sock, the second sock goes by like a breeze.)


My Norwescon sock is still missing!!! ARGH! Lost and found doesn't have it. The hotel doesn't have it. My luggage doesn't seem to have it! WHERE DID IT GO???!

I'm blaming house-gremlins again. ..though I've had remarkably little trouble with them in the past year. .. and I'm not sure "house" gremlins would be the right species, since I wasn't at home when it went missing... so I guess "convention gremlins" would be more accurate.

I've moved on to new projects in the interim, while I wait to see if the missing sock will ever show up...

but I'm not adapting well to the absence of my missing sock! My feet are in a war over which one gets to wear the single finished sock. My fingers are aching to finish the now-familiar pattern. My camera wants to take a triumphant picture of the sock that should be finished now but isn't even here anymore.

Single Sock Syndrome, I guess... the equally devastating cousin to Second Sock Syndrome so widely suffered by knitters around the world.

It doesn't help any that this was a pair of socks that took a devastatingly long time to complete (now even longer and perhaps never to be completed) .. I started the ball of yarn in early October (yes, I'm behind on my posting. I realize that, and I will try to catch up as I can!) ... ripped out that progress in late November and restarted. ripped out that progress in late December and started AGAIN. .. finally settled on a mild adaptation of the Jaywalker pattern and worked on sock 1 in Tucson, AZ while we sat with Keith's father in his final days. ... I made good progress throughout January and February-- those horrible cold stormy winter days of wind and snow-- and didn't bring the second sock with me to Hawaii. .. I did bring *SOME* knitting with me to Hawaii, but I didn't work on it at all (despite its looming end-0f-May deadline), not even on the plane flights. I would have left the fiber world behind entirely for all of March except that I can't. ;) .. I planned a quilt and picked out fabrics, I sewed (entirely by hand! with needle and thread! no machine!!!) a pair of slacks for Keith, I learned to spin sennit into rope, I wove a coconut palm leaf fish... but no knitting.

Maybe if I'd worked on the second sock while I was in Hawaii, it wouldn't have been able to go missing at Norwescon! argh!! Regrets will doom you.

And now it's gone. And it will take me a long long time to come to terms with the permanence of that fact. For now I am still hoping it will come back. Later on, when I am certain that I have done everything possible to find the missing sock and have been fruitless nonetheless, I will, perhaps, settle the battle between my feet by making the Single Sock into a hand puppet.

Then my hands can war over which one gets to wear the blasted thing.

Hugs all!

The Sock I Was Working On At Norwescon...

...may have stayed there. (pout!!)

I had it with me on Saturday night, but it wasn't in my purse on Sunday afternoon. I did my best to track it down, but no luck so far. (I keep hoping that when I get the last of the odds and ends unpacked and sorted out I'll find it in some unexpected corner-- it's not in the dirty laundry. I know that much already (having already gotten those pulled out and washed) but perhaps it is tucked in with a costume piece or bit of random whatnot.

I hope it shows up again! It was one of my treasured Get Well Knee yarns and I'd already turned the heel on the second sock! durnit!

The Sock I Just Started Is Already Doomed.

...at least in terms of matching pattern.

It's a stripey Regia (I know I said I don't like Regia, but y'know it's not all that bad when I work it on larger needles! It gets a bit stiff and unpleasant when I put it on tiny needles and get too many stitches to the inch.. but on size 2 (3 mm) it's just not bad at all!

And this was a delightful colorway-- crayola-box bright rainbow of stripes. Like wearing a circus, I guess. ... I picked up two balls of it one day recently when I found myself out of the house with nothing to knit (how did that happen?) and some time to kill.

I cast on for a scarf but didn't like the results, so after a bit of work and a week or two of thinking about it, I ripped back and started over. I cast on for a sock, but I cast on too many stitches (80 instead of 60) for the gauge I was getting but was delighted to find that it was a good start for knee socks! Oh what a delight to think of a circus-striped pair of knee socks!! .. but fate is against me-- there is no more of this yarn to be had at any of the local stores.

So I ripped out that progress to cast on yet again for a more traditional trouser-sock length and discovered that *even though* the two balls of yarn are the same dye lot, the striping length varies substantially! argh! from start of blue (blue-green then pink-yellow then red-orange then blue-green) to end of second blue is 10.5 yards on one ball, and 13 yards on the other! .. I don't know if it varies within the skein-- I didn't check. All I really need to know is that this pair of socks is off to a troublesome start and not likely to get better behaved!

Delighted To Announce The Winners!!

I didn't get as many responses to my Hawaii celebration "challenge" as I thought I might. (I live in fear of running a contest some day and having a thousand respondents more than I'd planned for!!)

But the Great news is: That leaves me with the ability to share the Aloha Spirit with BOTH contestants! Paula and Mia will each get a box of Hawaiian spirit to share and enjoy! I'll be putting those boxes into the mail by next weekend (or explaining the delay if I don't get it done on time!) and will share a picture of the bounty once I am sure that the goodies have reached their targets!

Thank you for playing!

And yes, Basset, I will come to your blog this week too and see what your son has done!

...pps-- the slow boxes from Hawaii did eventually get here. :) .... so did the priority mail envelope with my final rolls of film that got mis-routed (my fault: I picked up the envelope on May 9 and bought postage for it at an Automated Postal Center that same day-- thinking that I would drop my rolls of film into the mail for processing on the mainland once I got home again. .. but then I realized they'd be at risk for x-rays, so I got the film processed on-Island instead until our very last day. On our last day on the islands, I rounded up all remaining shot film and put those final rolls into a lead-lined x-ray protection bag in a new priority mail envelope (did I mention that I had destroyed the previous envelope getting the previous film back out?), taped the postage (that I had cut out of the previous envelope) to the new envelope, and left it with the hotel desk clerk to drop into outgoing mail for me while I headed to the airport for our departing flight. ... the postcards I handed him the same day got home the day after we did! ... the re-routed priority envelope took more than a week. But considering that I'd bought the priority mail postage two weeks prior and on a different island, I'm just glad that it found its way home at all!

I'm *almost* done unpacking everything! (isn't that a sad comment!) and I am really looking forward to sharing some of the photos that I took. Also, pictures of knitting, weaving, and other fiber news, the post I promised about Norwescon, and much much more!! Coming soon. :)