Yarn Along

The Nanook sweater just has an inch left to the bottom.  It should come off the needles today.  I also intend to weave in all the ends and block it today.  You know.  It’s the boring, ugly part.  That project was so good for my brain and while doing all those plain stitches I was able to figure out many things.  I’ve been allowing myself to swatch for another project after every completed skein.  I used to hate swatching.  Now it’s a method of bribing myself.

I’m swatching for submissions.  I haven’t submitted any designs to publications in awhile.  Either I was busy working on a design I intended to self publish, or their style/mood board didn’t match up with anything I had in my sketch book.  For whatever reason, now I have 4 submissions I’m putting together.  It seems like a lot, but 3 of them are smaller accessories, and the 4th is a bigger, but very simple project (at least size-grading wise).  I’ll likely not get all of them accepted, and they’re due over the course of the next 2 months, so we’ll see.

Maybe I’ll get some emails back from editors, maybe not. Either way, I’m having fun.  All 4 submissions are with companies/editors that I would love to work with, and I happen to have things in my sketchbook that I honestly think is what they’re looking for in their current call for submissions.  So it’s time to swatch up a bit, and write out some proposals.
What will be, will be.

While I’ll be waiting the long weeks to hear back from these submissions that I’m working on, I’m starting up a quick shawl project for a friend of mine.  I picked Brooklyn Tweed for her, which I like, and Knut liked when I made his mittens.  It’s so earthy and tweedy.

So yesterday I got out the ball winder and swift and wound up the new skeins.  Nothing mesmerizes my kids more.  Everyone in the room could be yelling, but that swift starts spinning, and everyone stops and stares at it spinning around.  That’s the way simplicity goes.

David and I are reading “Along Came A Dog” together.  This is always a book that surprises me.  It’s really boring for the kids at first, and very charming for the adults.  Then somehow the kids get swept up in the charm of the relationship between the chicken and the dog, and they start catching onto the humor, and the whole messy life of this little red hen.

It’s one of my favorite children’s books.

Linking up with Ginny today for the big Yarn Along.