Spring break and spring are both in the air. I can’t express how utterly excited I am that I don’t have any sort of school work for the entire week.. this weekend though I’ll be back to the reality of papers and projects, but for now I can pretend that none of that exists and all I have to do is get up and go to work everyday.

One thing I’ve been doing on my lunch hours (which I normally do in the summer, not so much during the school year) is bring a project with me. It just so happens that I’ve been kind of gun shy recently about Evie’s blanket. I just kind of ran out of steam for creating new pieces and with school work draining what energy I had, so it sat.

But this week, we not only have new pieces, we have connection. I decided to see what I had to work with. I knew I’d need a crap load of more pieces, but I wanted to see how the ones I made fit together. So I played with them a bit. I moved them around, rearranging them.

Then when I realized that the only right way to do it was whatever way I decided on the spur of the moment I just started grabbing pieces and connecting them however they connected. I wasn’t sure if I should seam them, or single crochet them together or chain them along.. So I just took some yarn and started at one edge and connected as many as possible. I think It’s coming along nicely, don’t you?

What’s with the yall? I don’t say yall. But it seemed to fit. It’s the middle of the week, Yall!

Anyway remember how I thought that my dementia was just from Tuesday? It turns out it was occuring on Monday too. While at the grocery store I bought some shampoo.. I like to switch it up every now and again to keep my hair folicals guessing. I went for coconut this time because while I may have to endure the frozen tundra in real life, in the shower I can be on a beach somewhere sipping a mahtai. I’m not sure what a mahtai is made of, but it sounds tropical and also alcoholic.

So I go to use my shampoo this morning and I’m looking at the bottle and I was like “huh.. that looks really thick. Weird.” That’s when I turned the bottle around and read the bottom. It was conditioner. And I was >< that close to washing my hair with it this morning.

Last night I did a massive clean attack. You should see the spare room! It looks like a bedroom! Almost. I’ll toss a picture up when it’s completely clean. All I can say is thank you to Jason’s cousin for coming to visit this weekend. If he hadn’t, that room would still be under 6 feet of stuff. It was bad. It motivated me to hang pictures up, put things away, get rid of things.. it was really benefitial. It’s starting to shape up really nicely.

After that was done and dinner was eaten (baked fish with asparagus, califlower, carrots, onions and green beans) I sat down to work on one of the blankets that I’m embarking on. I say embarking, because they really will be a journey. Can someone who needs directions and order throw caution completely to the wind and create the ultimate blankie? We shall see.

The idea was to make a freeform blanket in specific colors. That evolved to make a white tree surrounded by the other colors. So I started to make all these white pieces, but how do you really do this without a pattern? What I did was, I took a piece of spare fabric that I had and a sharpie (dangerous!) and I drew the basic outline of a tree. It’ll do for now to get a sense of how many pieces I’ll need. Then, because I wanted to get a better visual I laid out what pieces I had completed down on the template, just to get an idea of what it’d look like. Currently, it looks like not much. It will though.. stay tuned..

I have a secret to share; babies scare the crap out of me. They’re not clown or spider scary and they, in and of themselves aren’t what I fear. I guess it’s me around babies that I’m scared of. They are so tiny and fragile and breakable and I have a habit of not being able to walk without tripping over my own feet and I often walk into stationary objects. I get scared that I’ll break them so I enjoy them from afar. Like across the room far. From behind bulletproof, shatter resistant glass probably wouldn’t be overkill.

Over the holiday break I was able to see my nephews and my new niece (and I can’t tell you how exciting it is to call them mine. Remember those happy feelings from the holidays? Right here baby). They boys have grown up so fast! In just the six months that we’ve been away from them they’ve got little man haircuts and they run and talk and play. They’re 2 going on 10. It was so much fun to interact and play with them. Sure, they were loud at times and everywhere at once and I got tired just by watching them play (and I definately decided it was good that I don’t have any of my own as I can barely take care of myself and two cats let alone another human being) but that’s what 2 year olds do. That’s the way they’re supposed to be and it was aboslutely perfect. And you know what’s really awful? I miss them like crazy. You KNEW when they were around and when they’re not there? Way too quiet.

My niece is still in that breakable fragile scary stage, but she is the most beautiful little girl I’ve ever seen. I know that she’ll have changed so much by the time we return and it’s kind of sad in a way. I’ll feel like I missed so much. She won’t be as fussy, her teeth will be in, she’ll be crawling and/or walking and almost 1 yr old!

I’ve already begun planning what they’ll be getting for their birthdays and part of their christmas present for 2009 (because I was serious about Christmas this year. I’m going in full force! I’ve already started which I think is a personal best for me as the month of January is not even over yet) and I decided that I wanted to make for them what every child needs - a blanket.

But it couldn’t be just ANY blanket, I mean you can buy those at the store. I want these blankets to be the blanket they snuggle up to for a nap. These need to be the blankets they drag to the couch with them when they’re sick. The one they hate letting go of for even an hour while it’s washed. The one that they cry into when they’re sad and the one they sneak off to college and keep in their dorm room closet.. You know, just in case.

But with such lofty goals how can any one blanket be all of these things? What will mark it as unique and one of a kind and not from a pattern and totally 100% out of control awesome? What will give it the character and attributes that when their friends see it’s amazingness they’ll say with pride that their Uncle Justin made that for them and not want to die of embarassment?

And then it hit me. No pattern would do. No pattern was good enough. A pattern would seem so plain and what I would need to undertake is no small feat. These blankets would have to be crafted like the Shield of Achilles (From the Iliad).

It was no surprise then that I turned to what is known as freeform in the fiber world. Freeform takes crochet and knitting and throws all the rules out the window (Which is exactly what I wanted. The rules certainly couldn’t apply here). You take small pieces of fabric that have been created (called motifs sometimes or scrumbles when a bunch are connected together) and you connect them to create a larger piece and you keep going until you get what you want. I knew just the place that I had seen what I wanted which was from a book called Craftivity by Tsia Carson. When I got to the section that I wanted, I was a bit disappointed. It wasn’t as spectacular as my memory had painted it. I mean it was nice, but it wasn’t as special as I’d thought. It seemed ordinary next to the idea that I had.

Back at square one I was a bit daunted. I knew what I wanted, I had a rough idea of how it should go but I’m a detail oriented person. I like a set of directions to follow. That’s when the 2009 mantra kicked into play (The whole just do it instead of talking about it or thinking about it thing). I decided I just had to let it happen. For them to be amazing the way I wanted it to be, they just had to let go and watch what evolved. If I didn’t like it, I could always rip it out. Nothing was set in stone. It was all very laid back and mellow.

I set a few ground rules for the first one. The colors would be set. I didn’t want to go all willey nilly with the color scheme so I chose five (red, pink, green, yellow and white… two of which will be used VERY sparingly and one more so than the rest) for the blanket. Next I began to determine how I wanted it to be laid out. What sort of “theme” I was going for if you will. Next I decided that it would all be done using a K hook and in crochet. I MAY (and there are big questions about the may as it’s much faster for me to crochet than it is to knit) toss in a few knitted pieces for textures sake. That was it. I had a plan (or non plan) and just began to make shapes that seemed interesting to me or pieces with textures that seemed cool and different.

Here then are a few pictures of pieces. They don’t look like much of anything at the moment other than randomness, but when it all comes together I’m hoping for something so spectacular that even Linus would want to make a trade.

It has been a while since I’ve writen. Far longer than I had expected to be honest. It isn’t that I haven’t wanted to write, its just that the weather has been cooler, the skies grayer and I’ve had nothing of interest to report back.

So I decided to write while I had some down time. Jason and I ( along with our friend Chris) are sitting at Home Delivery Pizza watching the steelers and the jags play football. Not my idea of fun, but it provides some interesting people watching opportunities.

So what have I been doing during these cold gray days? Unfortunately I’ve been shopping. Which, I mean, isn’t a bad thing by any stretch at all I just wanted to avoid it as much as possible.

I did buy done practical things though. My coffee pot ( which I am apparently addicted and dependant on) died on Monday. I was sad because Jason had gotten it for me for Christmas and I  loved it to death I guess. It served me well daily for three years.

I also bought a clock at Target that they had marked down on clearance. I loved it the moment we met. It’s a small circle base with large hands. That’s it. The wall basically becomes the clock which I though was awesome.

I’ve also been in a crochet kick. A very dear friend of mine gave me a ginormously thoughtful gift for my birthday and I just didn’t feel that a simple thank you said enough so I set to work while I watched episodes of Xena and produced a scarf that was both warm and beautiful. It really got my juices flowing as far as creative endeavors go.

This is a quicky as our food just arrived (Broccoli and chicken calzone for the win!). I’ll leave you with a photo of the scarf in question. It’s alternating front amd back post double crochet with a P size hook to create a flexible and loose rib stitch.