Originally we weren't going to go anywhere special this weekend, as it's the significant other's birthday and we'll be celebrating with a good old American bbq in the park on Saturday. It's my last weekend in Germany, though, so we're throwing a train trip together for Sunday night, which means that I have to finish my Tour de Fleece spinning a little earlier than I anticipated. Luckily, when you're not procrastinating in the first place, it's easy to pick up the slack! I got the yak singles finished yesterday morning while listening to back episodes of the CraftLit podcast (I'm working my way through A Tale of Two Cities).
The first time I ended a color repeat and saw the dark blue against the light cream, I got a little panicked because I didn't immediately love it. But seeing the colors blend a little more as I wound the singles onto the TP cores put me a little more at ease. It looks a little better to my eye now, and they've been resting overnight. As soon as I finish posting this, it's plying time! I'll let the plied yarn sit overnight again, wash it tomorrow, and hopefully have time to photograph the finished skein and post before we leave on Sunday.
I'm also still plugging away at the Honeybee stole. I finished the first half, and spent a good hour doing battle with the provisional cast on. I think my cast-on row got slightly felted, and it was hard to find the one dropped stitch because the yarn was so fuzzy! I'm reasonably happy with the joining row, but I've lost some momentum on this project. I want to cast on something new, with German yarn, before I go home. Maybe. I really ought to find a project that's airplane friendly, since the Honeybee stole isn't. I keep seeing the PERFECT project for my new Wollmeise, and it's hard to make up my mind. I just scored a win with the German postal system, because I got a skein of Hello Yarn sock yarn from Mrs. B while she was destashing. It's amazingly colorful, and I love it. Reminds me of old quilts, fruit salad, and insanely bright swimsuits my sister and I used to have as children. I'll have to think a bit about what pattern will make me happy with this yarn. Here's a close-up (color turned out not so great on the full skein shot).
I'd like to digress into a little meta-blogging now, and I have no more yarn or Germany news for today, so you can unplug if you'd like. I feel like I could get to a point where I get stuck with blogging again, although I'm in a rhythm that I really like right now. During this trip, I've been blogging about twice a week: one travel post, and one fiber post, typically. There are a few stories about our trip that I'm sitting on for various reasons, even though they are perfect blog post material. One thing I've learned so far is that I don't think I'll ever be a post-a-day blogger. It's too easy for me to be a hermit while I'm blogging, and not just because it takes a lot of time. But I don't want to be a hermit. Blogging is great, and I'm not going to stop, but it doesn't exactly help me get exercise or fresh air or relax my eyes. While I'm blogging, I can't read, knit, spin, pay any serious attention to podcasts, or get any other work done. It's interesting, because I consider myself a queen of multitasking, but right now the most I can do is have background music on while I work on a post. Blogging is a multitasking activity in and of itself. There's the photo-taking, the editing and uploading of photos, the composition, the editing of writing, wrestling with html, and fickleness of the internet all in that one little verb. I fall into a little blogging Alice hole, and I hate to leave a post half-way finished. The best times to blog are after dinner (especially if I don't have to clean up the dinner dishes), or on weekend mornings. Basically, whenever I have nothing else to do for the next few hours.
I think this might be something I need and/or want to get past, the idea that I must sit down to blog and must not arise until I have a completed post. As I said before, I currently have three or four post topics rattling around in my head (they are mainly travel-related), but I'm finding it difficult to know where to insert them or how to phrase things since they aren't up-to-the-minute current anymore. The other half of the problem is that I might drop down to one post a week again once I get back to work, which is not necessarily what I want. I remember finding it difficult to post more than once a week last semester, and perhaps training myself to blog more in bits and pieces will help me stay at two posts a week. Anyway, I'm babbling a bit, but this is helping me sort out my ideas, which is part of the reason I started blogging in the first place. :)
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