Impromptu Card-Making for the Win!

Hello, crafty and sundry!

Well, I have been keeping rather busy lately. First, we had visitors from abroad; I’d not seen my sister and her husband in years, so it was great to have them around. Of course, I was doing my bit to spread the knit-love too, naturally. My sister had learned before me (I think), but she’d never taken to it. So I switched to right-handed (wrong-handed, blargh!), and showed her the rudiments of knitting rib. It turns out part of her problem was reading the wrong side of her work as she went, so she made some lovely seed stitch before we got her pointed in the right direction. She was feeling very enthusiastic after our sessions, so that pleases me. She can knit or not knit as she sees fit, but it pleases me when I can make knitting make more sense for someone.

I, of course, continued work on my actual project as well. I was doing another pair of Talena Winters’ Just Plain Socks, which is a pattern I rather adore. In spite of her mock-cranky face, my big girl is extremely fond of her new socks, and it was very difficult to get the first one off of her so I could finish the pair. I’m thinking I should probably make a pair for myself as well — after all, who doesn’t like custom-made socks?! Plus also, quite happy to keep pimping for Talena Winters, because she is a total sweetheart.

But before I get there, I’m trying to do a bit of stash-busting. The wool in question is Jenny Watson Pure Merino DK in WM10 (Denim), and I had two 50g skeins to use up. I poked around Ravelry until something that looked appealing for me popped up, and settled on a set of armwarmers. I’ve got to say, I’m sort of skeptical. 30 stitches around in DK isn’t that many. But it goes over my hand, so I’m just going to knit on for now and see what happens. Worst comes to worst, I pick it back and add a few more stitches to the pattern. We’ll see once I get the first one done and tried on properly.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day here in the United Kingdom, and of course, that means cards. Apparently, none of the cards have ‘Nanny’ on them this year (our preferred method of addressing my mother-in-law in her grandmother duties), so my husband bought some crafting stuff so we could make cards. Now, I’m not into card-making per se, but I like to think that I’m pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. He’d said something about a vase and flowers for our big girl’s card, so that’s what I whipped up. Our little one sort of ended up with a sheep-esque theme from the womb, so I figured that would work in a pinch. We’ll worry about doing any lettering and signing tomorrow after the glue dries… glue and felt… I don’t think they’re particularly good friends, considering the quantities we had to goop on to get things to stick. I’m happy that we managed to cobble something cute together though… even if at the last possible minute, ha ha.

Past that, I’ve been trying to poke at my Steam library a little bit. I’m limited in what I can play based on the age of the graphics card I’m using until the other one is repaired… but you know what? It might be ancient, but it actually runs Dragon Age: Inquisition. In a tiny window. On low settings. I moved to playing it over on my laptop to get a proper fix now that I want one, but it was of amusement to me that I can clearly demonstrate over and over again that the card I took out is defective. I still need to mail that back, but that should happen next week.

As for games played, I knocked out Hero of the Kingdom over the course of a couple of days. It’s a cute little point and click, and I’m probably going to pick up the sequel at some point. And then I got grumpy ’cause I wanted to play things in windows and most weren’t in windows, so I dabbled in Sims 4 for a bit instead. My broken brain tends to get fixated on weird things like that in spells. It’s also wanting to find games that are knit-friendly, so things like Sims are great ’cause they just sort of putter along slowly while your hands and brain are elsewhere.

For now, it’s time to join my husband in watching part two of The Hogfather in remembrance of Terry Prachett and all the joy he brought into our lives.

<3