I think I mentioned before that I sell a few handmade things at a local place called The Craft Barn. It’s a nice place out in the country, where there are cats running around outside and you can buy farm fresh eggs. Well, last year I was asked to make some vintage style potholders for a regular customer. I made one pair, they were purchased, and I’ve been meaning to make some more ever since. This customer should be making one of her annual visits soon, so I wanted to get at least one new pair made before she shows up again.As soon as these are done I plan to get cracking on those old projects. I put quite a few inches on the baby blanket last week, but was still over a foot short of the suggested 42 inch length. And last night I finally unearthed the pattern I was using to make another pair of Norwegian style mittens. Not that anyone is going to need mittens this time of year, but this project is ¾ done, and it will be nice to see it completed. And there’s a little bear that I started making on my birthday last November, who is just waiting for a head, some stuffing, and a personality!
I still have the cleaning bug, and managed to catalog and store two boxes of needlework magazines last weekend. That hardly made a dent in the piles, but it’s a start. And when I was looking for crochet cord for the potholders, I realized that I need to reorganize that stash. I have several boxes of cord, but each box was a combination of weights, so that I had to rummage through all of them to pull out what I needed.
My brother, the enabler, brought me more yarn from Goodwill this week. The cones of blue are cotton, and the others are odd balls of wool and acrylic. I showed him how to do burn tests to determine fiber content, but he didn’t think they’d let him start any fires at the Goodwill store. Probably not.
Finally, the cats are loving the fact that I brought the scrap afghan out to work on. I piled it on the coffee table, which makes it really easy to move the bulk of it around while I add to it. But try getting the cats off it first! They all seem to thinks it’s their own private nest!
The second project is my pair of socks for the Sock-a-Month 3 knitalong. They are the Friday Harbor socks from “Knitting on the Road” by Nancy Bush. I was concerned that they would be too big, but they fit my feet just fine. The yarn is Softee from Kimmet Croft Fibers, over in Wisconsin Rapids. It’s a blend of Rambouillet wool and Angora rabbit. Very soft indeed. 
I’m finding it very difficult to keep to my “finish two old projects before starting a new one” rule. I’ve stuck to it, but I’ve been paging through craft magazines and pattern books and seeing a lot of different projects that I want to make. The two finished projects shown here have allowed me to start my socks for April, so now I’m up against it to get other things done. My neighbor is having a baby, so I really should start another blanket. I’m almost finished with a knit blanket in baby boy blue, but I need to make a pink one so I’ve got my bases covered. I say pink because my brother brought me some pink yarn this week from Goodwill that should work just fine. He also brought some cream yarn, that I think I’m going to combine with a cotton coned yarn for another boy’s blanket.
For me, organizing is an ongoing process. I’ve used this analogy before: I picture my house, or just a given room in my house, as one of those plastic number puzzles where you slide the tiles around in the frame, with only one blank space, and the object is to get all the numbers in order, moving them around one square at a time. That’s how I feel when I try to clean. Stuff just keeps shifting from space to space, in a different order, but I never seem to complete the puzzle.
