Back to a Sort of Normal

Finally, two weeks after arriving home from my extended 2 week teaching trip, I’m almost back to my old energy level. Granted, my ‘normal’ level of energy is probably overdrive for many folks, but it’s the speed at which I’m comfortable. Too fast and I crash, too slow and I lose my balance.

Yesterday I dropped off almost 3 baskets of clothing to a goodwill drop, took a carload of boxes to our local recycling center, mailed a few packages, wrote a pattern, tweaked and sent off several other designs, came home and finished two sleeves and most of the body finishing on this crocheted coat, and taught my Tuesday night class (which was quite small…)

A very good and rich day.

I’m loving the crochet projects I’m working on – it’s a nice counterpoint to the knitting. It takes more out of my hands, but it does move faster so by the time my wrists are screaming I’m ready to stop. Knitting takes less out of me in a physical sense, but the progress is generally a bit slower.

Here’s a hip length jacket that I’m also working on for the same issue.

The more I use the technique of scanning my swatches and using the repeating stitch pattern as a pattern in my computer sketches, the better I like it! And for me the big bonus is that the sweaters actually come out looking VERY much like the original sketch. Groovy. I’ve always felt that design is not so much a function of whether you’re an excellent artist, but rather how you can COMMUNICATE the idea. If you need to cut and paste images from magazines onto a stick figure – and it works – then that’s just fine!