Socks, socks, socks!

This weekend I finished the requested Hanover socks for a friend's kid who is headed to Hanover as a freshman. When I washed them, I threw another couple pair I finished this summer that are going to be gifts. 

The Hanover socks are 6-row stripes. The leg and top of foot are 3x1 rib.

Hanover socks (mine ravelled here),

knit in Opal 4-ply in 5180 and 5188

A friend requested navy socks. The solid color let me play with a lace pattern I've been wanting to use.

Rose Ribs socks (mine ravelled here),

knit in Cascade Heritage Solids in 5623

Whenever Knitpicks comes out with a new round of Felici colors, I set some aside that I think specific people will like. I think Holly will like these (and I bought some of the same colorway for myself--I'm no dummy).

Baker Street socks (mine ravelled here),

knit in Knitpicks Felici in Baker Street

These are also 3x1 rib. The difference between these and the Hanover socks is that I did a round of k1, sl1 each time there was a color change on the leg and top of foot. It just adds a little more interest, both to the knitting and to the finished socks.

So, does anyone remember back in January when I wrote about being more intentional and allowing myself to not get things done? I'm not going to lie; I don't feel like I'm doing very well at that. I did the Knitsonik mittens, which was a project that took some intention and planning, but I don't feel like I've been successful at addressing my Crazy besides that. I do not lie fallow well. I don't give myself very much space to just be, and I think I'm doing myself a disservice.

In the grand scheme of things, this isn't a huge problem. It's better than a crack habit, for example. I am a work in progress.

And friends get some nice socks as a result.

Optimism

or, Why not?


Lots of people hate New Year's resolutions, and I understand why.  January 1 is just another day. Nothing magical happens when we flip the calendar and begin writing 2012 on our checks (or, more likely, writing 2011 2012 on our checks).

I get it.  Still, why not be optimistic?


Why not decide to start new habits and reaffirm old habits that have fallen by the wayside? Why not decide to try something new? Why not decide this is the year I'm going to clean out my closet, eat more veggies, and reacquaint myself with the treadmill?

I may not keep my resolutions past January 15, but that's still fifteen days with good habits. There's always the possibility that I will be able to keep them all year.  Why not?

In the spirit of optimism, I say:

• I will begin tracking what I eat on Weight Watchers most days. I'll shoot for 7 days and be thrilled with 5. Weight Watchers works for me. When I stop tracking, I gain weight. When I track, I eat better. So I'll start tracking again, and I will lose weight. Why not?

• I will continue to try to work out at least 4 times a week, and I'll pay myself $10 for every week I succeed. 

• I will try to add variety to my exercise. We are now the owners of a Wii Fit. I've used it two times, and I am sore so it's doing something. I will continue to use the Wii Fit, walk on the treadmill, and go to my yoga class and/or the aquafit class.  

• In a related resolution, I will not let the Wii Fit get me down when it says nasty things about me not working out. It does not know that I am not monogamous to it, and it behaves out of that ignorance. I will not be stymied by a machine.

• I will do exercises on the Wii Fit that strengthen my back and abs because that will help compensate for my wonky spine. I don't like doing them because they are hard, but I will do them because a) they will help my back not hurt, and b) they will get easier. Why not?

As I've thought about my New Year's resolutions, I thought they would have to do with knitting. Apparently they don't. This is what feels important to me right now, which is probably a direct result of holiday eating. (Almond bark pretzels, I'm looking at you.)  I choose to be healthier.

I raise my glass of iced coffee (1 point) to the sky in a toast to a healthier, happier me.  Why not?

Bring it, 2012. I'm ready.

Well, Sort Of....

It is possible that one of my resolutions just made it possible to break another.

I have been happily paying myself for working out.  I've been stockpiling the money with the knowledge that I can use it to buy whatever I'd like.  I don't spend money easily, so it's been sitting idle.

And then I saw this post.

I love her yarn.  I love her sense of humor.  I love her color choices.

The first yarn I bought from her became this

and the second became this

Actually, it became two identical pairs of those.  I gave the other set away.  Andrew bought me a skein of her yarn for my birthday in the colorway Angst for the Memories, which I haven't used yet.

Love. Her. Yarn.

So, when I saw the post with a fantastic colorway and a new base, I ordered it.  I actually had to stop myself from ordering both available skeins of Also, I Can Kill You With My Brain, and then I had to stop myself from ordering both a skein of that AND a skein of Tardis.

On one hand, I think this is precisely the sort of thing on which I should use exercise money.  I love it, will get lots of enjoyment out of it, and the purchase supports a small business.  On the other hand, I recognize that one of my resolutions was to knit with yarn from my stash instead of purchasing new yarn.

I just am unable to care in the face of such perfection.  Bring on the new yarn.

Checking In: Six Weeks

This is a check-in for New Year's Resolutions, but first things first.

If you were wondering how the knitting was going after my last post, I give you this:

One sock is finished and I'm nearly to the heel of the second.  I'm enjoying the pattern (Temperance).  The pattern shows up better in Temperance than the first pattern I tried, but it's still not great simply because there's a lot of color going on in this yarn.  I think this will work, but I think I'll probably reknit this pattern in something more monochromatic at some point.

On to Resolutions:
I'm still riding the Resolution Train.  I recently read that it takes 91 days to make a new habit, something that startled me because I always thought it was 14 or 21.  I'm keeping that in mind as I try to keep up my resolutions.

1.  Music:  I have a bunch of CDs that I carry in the car.  I am mildly successful listening to them.  I'm still working on this.  I have been startled to find that a CD that I thought I hadn't listened to much was very familiar to me.  It's not that I never listened to it; it's that I didn't like it when I did.

2.  Exercise:  Paying myself to exercise is working!  One week I only managed three workouts, but that was because I had a horrible headache on that Saturday.  I decided that if I worked out five times the following week, I could count it.  I did, and I did.  I've been walking on the treadmill while watching DVDs, and I've been enjoying not hating it.  The time is soon coming when I will accept that I have to ramp up the intensity of the workout, but right now I'm thrilled that I'm doing something that doesn't involve the couch and my ass.  My weight, however, has not moved.  I am disappointed by this and trying not to think too much about it.  The blame may lie with chocolate.  And pancakes.  And cheese.  Actually, there's really quite a lot of blame to go around.

3.  Yarn:  I have to admit a couple things.  My birthday is in January and I received yarn and a knitting store gift certificate as gifts, so I certainly haven't felt deprived in any way.  I also just placed a significant order for yarn, but all of it is being used for gifts.  I think this is okay, but I do need to keep thinking about what I can knit that will use up stash yarn.  The editor of The Knitter, a UK knitting magazine, has set a goal to only knit from her stash in 2011.  The thought makes me a little queasy, and I don't even consider myself an impulsive yarn-purchaser.  I'm trying to tell myself that if I work at using stash yarn now, I won't ever get to the point where I feel I have to limit myself for a year.  This may be a lie, but I've found that lying to myself is rarely as harmful as people make it out to be.

Feel free to utilize this when raising your children.

4.  Upholster:  The chairs are back, but there's a problem with one of them.  After playing phone tag, we've scheduled for someone to look at it on Wednesday.  I'm confident it will get fixed and we will live happily ever after with these chairs.

Posting these check-ins, while almost definitely boring to you, is really helpful to me.  This space is one part diary and one part public reckoning.  Even though I know very few people are reading, the fact that someone on the Internets might be reading makes me want to work hard to succeed so I can report success rather than failure.  Who knew the Internet could be a bodhisattva?

Crossed Off The List

Resolution #4 is complete!

The picture below shows the homage to the '70s we were doing with our cushions.  The blue and red are from our couch now.  The orange, brown, brown plaid and fuzzy gold are the cushions we wanted redone.

Apparently we're going to get a storm that will shut everything down for a bit, so the upholsterers called and asked if I could meet them at my house on my lunch hour so they could be sure to get the delivery done before Stormageddon.

The brown and fuzzy gold chairs both got covered with this:

 and will live in our living room.  It was tricky to pick upholstery that would help tie these chairs into the rest of our belongings.  Our life looks a bit like an Ikea store, albeit a lot messier.  I think the contemporary fabric helps the chairs look like they belong.

Who am I kidding?  We just liked the spots.

The plaid became this:

 and will live in Andrew's hobby room, which has a bunch of comics, Reds memorabilia, and two bright red walls.  There's a pattern on this, but it's subtle and didn't photograph.

The orange became this:

 and will live in our bedroom.  The top three chairs were all garage sale finds.  The leaf chair was Andrew's grandparents, and he had a hard time deciding to let go of the orange (super scratchy) upholstery.  When we found this bit of fabulous fabric, he changed his mind.  The fact that the orange cushion had a distinct bum imprint from years of use may have helped as well.

The piece I'm most excited about is the metamorphosis of this little chair.

It lived in the bedroom at my grandparents' that I slept in when I stayed with them.  It belonged to my mom as she was growing up, and it held no sentimental attachment for Mom or Grandfather.  This became clear when I discovered it in Grandfather's garage on a pile of junk.  He let me take it home, and it's been living in our garage until we got around to making the trip to the upholsterer.

Here it is finished!

I love it.  I love love love it.  It makes me feel like I'm a character in Alice in Wonderland.  It's going to live in the yarn guest room.  Now I'm wondering if it's time to paint that room....

Accountability, Part II

Sorry about the horribly mundane nature of this post, but really, you haven't come to expect sparkling brilliance, have you?  I thought not.

My New Year's resolution was, in general terms, "Love what you have and where you are."  I broke that into four smaller pieces, and here's the progress on those:

1.  I wrote that I couldn't decide if it was smarter to clean off my full mp3 player or buy a larger device.  As I reread that, I realized the choice was clear.  Why would I buy a different device when all that was needed was to clean off what I already owned?  Because I am OCD, I deleted 30 GB of data and spent a weekend putting music back on it.  Crazy?  Mais oui!

The good news is that the device is better organized and doesn't have music on it to which I will never listen.  (Timbaland, you're out.)  The bad news is that the best place to really listen to albums is the car.  My car won't play from my mp3 player, so I need to be more purposeful about carrying CDs in the car.

The fact that this is such a dilemma is an excellent illustration of how charmed my life is.  As Professor Henry Higgins says, "A reminder."

2.  I am kicking exercise's ass.  I've had a cold that decided to linger on for a week and a half, so I've just been walking on the treadmill and not pushing myself.  It's been working.  I've earned $20.  Take that, couch!

3.  I've started knitting this Bristow cardigan in yarn I bought when a local yarn shop was closing.  The yarn is Lang Yarns Silk Dream, and it's delightfully soft.  I'm also still knitting a pair of socks with stash yarn, but they were boring me to tears, so they haven't gotten much needle time.

4.  Our appointment at the upholstery place was postponed for a week because the owner was sick, but Andrew and I went on Saturday.  We're getting my little chair covered as well as some cushions we have.

Progress abounds.  It's good for me to write this out because right now I feel cranky and suspicious that one day soon everyone I know will figure out that I really have no idea what I'm doing.  That may very well be true, but I'm blundering along.

Checking In

Because I've found I follow through if I publish things on the Internet I'm sure you're all dying to know my progress:

1.  I've decided my first order of business is to make the decision to either buy an external hard drive or clean off my mp3 player.  The mp3 player is full, and there is music on there I won't listen to.  On the other hand, it would be lots easier to move everything to a big hard drive.  On the third hand, moving things to a hard drive means I can't listen to it unless I'm with a computer, which is most of the time but not all the time.  I haven't started this because I can't decide the best course of action, but I'm working on it.

2.  Andrew and I both exercised last night.  I had a bad headache after, which is unfair, but I'm not sore today and plan to work out again tonight.  $1.50 earned.

3.  I'm ready for the toe on the second sock of a pair knit with yarn I already owned.  I started these before making my New Year's resolutions, but I've decided it still counts.  I'm contemplating what I will knit next.  It might be this.  (Ravelry link.  I can't find it on Vogue Knitting's site.  Sorry about that.)

4.  I have an appointment at 9:00 Saturday morning at the upholstery place.

Progress.

New Year's Resolutions

On one hand, making New Year’s resolutions feels trite and doomed to failure.

On the other hand, making New Year’s resolutions might lead to the formation of better habits.  If they don’t last forever, that’s okay.  Even if it just lasts a few weeks, that’s a few weeks with better habits than if I didn’t set a resolution.

And, hey, it worked last year. 

I’ve been mulling over what changes I’d like in my life, and I keep coming back to this:

Love what you have and where you are.

I live a lovely existence.  I’m healthy.  My partner is my favorite person.  We have wonderful, stupendous friends.  I like the people with whom I work.  I have a hobby I love that yields gifts for others as well as myself.  Andrew’s and my extended families are mostly delightful, and they care about us and we care about them.  I’ve also got a lot of nice stuff like yarn and music and exercise equipment.

So I want to spend time appreciating what I have.  In concrete terms, it boils down to this:

1.  I resolve to go through my music collection and really listen to albums.  This might sound like a silly resolution to you, but that’s why it’s mine and not yours.

2.  Exercise.  I have accepted that exercise is always going to be a struggle for me.  I’m an “object at rest tends to stay at rest” kind of person.  Even when I’m an object in motion, it takes very little to turn me into an object at rest… like perhaps an encounter with my couch and the remote control.  It’s a habit I will have to consciously pick up many times throughout my life, and this is one of those times.  Andrew and I have decided on the following plan: The first person home will walk Dexter.  (This is usually me.  I’m okay with this.)  Then we will both exercise.  Then we will eat dinner.  My goal is to do this 4 times a week.  

Now, because I know myself, I am also dangling a carrot.  For every time I exercise, I will pay myself $1.50.  However, if I exercise four times in one week, I will pay myself $2.50/workout.  That means I can earn $10 a week.  Does it seem ridiculous to pay myself?  Yes.  Do I think it will work?  Yes. 

3. I want to knit things with yarn I already own.  I have projects that have been in my queue a long time, and I want to work on them.  I have the tendency, like many knitters, to be wowed by new.  New pattern!  New pattern requires new yarn even though I have tons of yarn already!  I want to spend time with the lovely yarn I already own.

4. One final, short-term goal:  I resolve to call the furniture reupholsterers, take the little chair that’s sitting in my garage to them, and have it fixed.  I have saved money for this, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be done.  So I will do it.

What about you?