The Day After Dithers

It's the post NaNo doldrums.  I have sooooo much on my agenda in the next three weeks.  6 to 8 weeks really.  But I can't think past Xmas yet tho I will need to soon as I'm leaving for Longiew WA on New Year's Weekend for a week or two visit.

But first there are the Xmas fiber art gifts to be concerned with. Also my Mom's 80th Bday on January 3rd.  And the 3 Virtual Author blog tours I'm participating in in the next two weeks with accompanying giveaways. The first on the 6th. And a fourth review copy review that should go up before New Years.

Today tho I gave myself a little bit of veg time.  I watched the first half of season 3 of The United States of Tara over my wake up coffee.  6 episodes.

Then I pulled out my bags and boxes of thread projects in progress to rummage through them and get my bearings.  At one point I had my lap and legs covered and Ed's side of the bed on my right and the area next to the bed on my left.  I bet that was an interesting sight.  Head and shoulders breasting a rainbow surf of fiber.

After a bit of fiddling with this and that I settled for a time on the mini-diaper bag I'm making for my new 3rd cousin (grand-daughter to my cousin) which doesn't need to be finished before I leave for Longview but its concept needed to be proved to insure I don't waste more time putting in stitches that will have to come out again. Like the hairpin lace fiasco the week before Thanksgiving this diaper bag project also had to be unwoven when I discovered the circle had three to five twists in it.  I not sure how that happened but my best guess is that I twisted the chain and the evidence took all of two rows to manifest itself.

The second time I didn't work the first row directly into the chain but worked a row of single crochet before slip stitching the ends together.  It was much easier to keep that strip flat and to tell top from bottom.  This project is using a new stitch.  The Catherine Wheel.  I'm working it in Aunt Lydia's Bamboo size 10 in White and Coral and possible some accents of green and brown.  I'm thinking the brown mostly for the bottom to avoid using white where it will get the most contact with grungy surfaces but to justify that there should be an accent or two of brown elsewhere.  

I wish I had batteries in the camera so I could have shown a pic of the twisted version and now of this one which is looking good as I approach the end of row three (counting the row of SC) and can see no twist in the nascent tube--an unintentional Mobius Strip--as before.  I'm anxious to see the bag grow--I think I made the circle bigger this time around--but I decided I needed to set it aside and start working on an Xmas project.  But every one I thought of was missing something--something not yet bought in a couple of cases but mostly it was thread colors that were still on the hook with other projects.

For example my Kelly green was involved in the bright zig zag bookmark pictured above that I began last June!!!  The same week I began the pink, purple and peacock zig zag and the primary color block and the black and white zig zag.  None of which are completed yet.  To get the Kelly green freed up tho I had to free up the red, yellow and blue that was in use for the primary color squares bookmark.

Both of those bookmarks were in the exact state seen in the picture above tho that picture was taken last summer in August.  The PPP zig zag has progressed since then and is nearly long enough to suit me but it wasn't in play today.  I set about finishing the primary square first and making those last three squares took less than an hour!  And just as Ed got home from work about 11pm I was starting the last stripe of Kelly green in the zig zag.  The green stripe at the top in the picture is the last stripe before the middle red stripe after which I began a mirror image of the first half.