mish-mash

Are you lonesome tonight? Check out this product (do you think they will start creating haptic yarn someday? Weird!)

The Felted Secret Pal signups are coming to a close. Lu, our fearless leader over at Maglia! will be passing out our partners this Sunday. If you are interested in participating we would love to have you! Please go here to sign up.

Socks- How could something this small take this long. I decided to just go for it the other night with the sock issue. I was making progress and then I dropped a stitch and it quickly unraveled... I thought of the Weezer song, "If you want to destroy my sweater,- o-woo-o-woo, take this tread as you walk away, as you walk away...."
In short I frogged it back to where the leg part ends. Even though it is frustrating I am taking it as a total learning experience.
I have been thinking a lot about how I react when I can't do something right or when I mess up on something. Knitting is wonderful in that it teaches me that I can pull something apart and start over and it will all be okay. This is part of my yoga training talking too, but I love how it overlaps into my crafty side too. I can mess up and still be alright. Everything doesn't and can't be perfect- BUT if the intention is there for perfection you will some day get pretty darn close.

It is interesting when I met the Procrastinknitters last week for SnB I was helping someone with their project before the person who was going to help me showed. The person I was helping was stuck. She had started to purl in a row of knitting and had attempted to go back and fix it which resulted in a mess. When she realized she couldn't fix the problem she just froze. As I was helping her get things back to where they should be I realized how different I was from this knitter (with the exception of the socks). She had to have her project coming out EXACTLY as the patterns said, and if it strayed from that she would stop until help could be administered. There was gleaning over an added stitch or a flubbed attempt to pick up a dropped stitch- it was simply stop. I on the other hand will just shrug my shoulders and keep going. My projects don't come out sloppy or wrong, but they definitely have a personality to them. Most of the time I just make it up as I go and hope it works.... I totally am jealous of my friend who has her work exact, her projects are clean and simple looking. No wonky stitches, just neat rows.

What do you do? Are you a rogue knitter, a person who lets the needles do the thinking. Or are you a perfectionist knitter, following the pattern to a "T" (what DOES that expression mean- think about it, isn't it a silly saying?).

Pictures... (admit it you just scrolled down until you saw a picture.)
Per Iris' request I am putting up a few pictures of another obsession I have- GLASS. While in college I worked in a shop in downtown Truckee, CA that sold stained glass, blown glass, glass jewelry, glass windchimes... You name it was probably in there (yes, right next door to the famous "Squeeze In" you can see it in the link).
Needless to say, after 2 summers and a few winter breaks of working in the shop I decided I HAD to learn how to do this too. I took up stained glass because it is the one that takes the least amount of equipment - no kiln, no fire- just a grinder, a cutter, flux, copper foil or lead and you were good to go. Stained glass is a lot like knitting. I have a "stash" of glass
just like I have a stash of yarn. There are colors involved and color combinations to be made. There are lots of different types of textures you can choose from and do you want hand rolled or machine rolled sheets of glass? I haven't done much glass since I took up knitting- the portability of yarn and needles has me. But I have been thinking about make a few little projects as Valentines.
Here is the first project I ever did about 4 years ago now.