• Daily Life

    a small Aldi accident

    For Reasons, once a week I am stuck in an Aldi for approximately 90 minutes. Aldi, for those who are not familiar with it, is a German grocery chain that also carry Stuff. The Stuff changes twice a week, and covers a wide range of Possible Things You Never Knew You Needed, or sometimes, Things You Really Needed And Can Get Here At A Decent Quality And Fairly Affordable Price.

    Normally I’m fairly brave about this situation and do not come home with Stuff, but I had a small Aldi (smAldi?) accident this week.

    See, there was only one ultrasound jewelry cleaner left, and I’ve been thinking about getting one for ages, and, well, if I didn’t get it then clearly I wasn’t going to be able to, right? Right. So I had to.

    In case you were wondering, my earrings are (after three rounds in the cleaner, and some scrubbing with a toothbrush) *very* sparkly. (They had not been cleaned in a very long time. We will not discuss it further.)

    The Cute Yarn: there was only one package of this and someone had opened it and it in fact only had 4 of the skeins in it, possibly not even all 4 colors, but I found the others randomly distributed through the rest of the two bins the other (non “bright” yarn) packages were in, and I thought it would make a brilliant color-block scarf to go with the AMAZING wool coat that I, uh, do not fit in.

    (In my defense, I ordered the coat from the States & was genuinely trying to buy it to fit me as I am, not as I would like to be, but I forgot sizes in the States run smaller, so…it’s too small. But not so much too small that I couldn’t fit into it if I did get to where I would like to be, so I kept it as #Goals. Plus sending it back would have cost a lot.)

    There was also less cute but very handsome denim yarn that I didn’t take a picture of, but there was ALSO *DIFFERENT* cute yarn for making into silly hats, and…I was weak.

    I don’t even knit that much, guys. *grimaces* And, like,yeah, I get that collecting yarn and knitting are two different hobbies, and in my defense I have a pretty small yarn stash (even if you include what I inherited from my mom, it’s not that big), but…it was really cute and suggested Specific Projects which seemed within my skill set.

    Not the denim yarn, though. It had a Sekrit Hidden Patten which turned out to be for a shawl that’s way out of my pay grade. But who knows, maybe I’ll either learn, or decide on something else to do with it. :)

  • Daily Life

    picture post: blue hair & disney & birthdays, oh my

    I’ve been threatening for many years to dye my hair blue. Last week I picked up a bottle of temporary hair dye. I had hopes it would stick mostly to the grey, of which I have plenty:

    although I had been totally unable to find anything on the internet which suggested it might. After some dithering, I applied it:

    i think it's a good look

    To my delight, it in fact did a pretty damn fine job of sticking to the grey without blueing the rest of it up much:

    Also to my delight and relief, it does appear to be temporary. Two washes and it’s almost gone (it’s supposed to last 7-12, but I’d rather have it gone faster than not at all). I don’t know what my long term plans are for it, but it was interesting to try and kind of a neat little effect for a couple of days.

    Unrelatedly, I popped by the Disney store in Dublin while birthday shopping for my husband and found that their Black Panther figurine set features THREE WOMEN!!!!!

    I may have made a noise normally only audible to dogs. Or, in this case, perhaps cats.

    They also had individual T’Challa and Shuri figures:

    *screams gleefully*

    We had a small but pleasant birthday for Ted, in which German chocolate cake and Marvel figures featured heavily, and I began knitting a scarf I owe someone.

    I did not own a cat, the last time I knitted something….

  • Knitting

    half a scarf

    I’ve been nearing the halfway point on this scarf for a while now, but I have no ability at all to judge how much yarn I have left with regards to how many rows I can expect to knit with it. The last 14 rows went like this:

    oh i probably have two rows worth of yarn left

    okay so maybe it’s four

    …six…

    all right i’ve done ten there’s definitely…a dropped stitch there… *fails utterly to fix it, rips out 3 rows*

    okay well so at least i know i have 3 rows +1 left, there’s definitely not more than 1 row’s worth after tha…

    …okay two.

    ALL RIGHT THREE BUT DEFINITELY FOR SURE NOT MORE THAN FOUR BECAUSE I CAN SEE THE END OF THE YARN AND IT’S DEFINITELY NOT MORE THAN FOUR ROWS AWAY

    …i hope i have enough yarn to finish this 4th row…

    I did, and added the next skein on. The scarf is halfway done now. My phone isn’t good enough to make the pictures turn out well, because the yarn is much prettier and sparklier than this, but I’m far too lazy to get out the big camera and do something about the lighting to show it off more nicely.

    sparklyscarfhalf

    I might add a tier on Patreon where I’ll knit you a scarf, though. :)

  • Knitting

    cowls & scarfs

    I cast off on Indy’s scarf-not-a-scarf-way-too-short-totally-a-cowl-that’s-what-i-meant-it-to-be last week and today nerved myself up to try stitching it together to see if it would make a cowl or if I in fact had to tear the whole thing out and do it again. So I stopped halfway up the seam to see if it would fit over Indy’s head, and he loved it that way:

    knittingcowl

    So I’ve declared it done. O.O :)

    I started a scarf for me. (This will actually be a scarf, I have enough yarn.) The point of pride with this was successfully knitting a second color into the scarf so, woo woo, I’m very impressive!

    knittingtriumph

    I have big ambitious plans to make a matching scarf/hat/mittens set with this sparkly black and blue yarn. :)

    My mother-in-law and a friend who knits came to visit for a couple of weeks, and the friend has left me a big pile of yarn that she brought with her but didn’t do anything with while she was here. I have thoughts for a couple of the yarns (at least a couple more scarves; look, I’m not wildly ambitious here right now, okay?) and I’m sorta chuffed to have the stuff to experiment with, so it’ll be fun over the next several months. Or more. :)

  • Knitting

    I cast on!

    I cast on! I cast on! I don’t know what to do next, but I cast on! (I’ll figure out what to do next tomorrow. I felt casting on was sufficiently impressive for one day. It only took three tries and watching a video 15 times. :))

    caston

    I’m terribly proud of myself. :)

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