Caught in the Undertow

Boy did I get sucked right under last week. Sorry I went AWOL. Tons of things converged at the same time. I had so little time that I had to wake up early (like before 6 am - yuck) several times to cram everything into one day. Today is the first time I've had time to breathe in over a week. I'm not sure if I should enjoy it or just collapse into a heap. My body is telling to simply collapse.

So now I have some serious catching up to do. Lots of knitting has been going on but nothing with regard to my current projects Rogue and Kiri.

First off, I had to bust hump to get ready for my October workshops. I had less than a week to develop a class schedule, a syllabus for each class, in-store samples for each project, develop supply lists and order supplies for the workshops. I did it but I'm so worn out. I'm hopeful that if nothing else, I'll get some exposure and hopefully build a student base in the coming months. Now my time and energy turns to developing the workshops for November which are due on Monday. The good news is that I don't have to have the store samples ready for another couple of weeks so I can parse my time out accordingly.

With the expenses of supplies and promotions for my workshops, I had to make the heartbreaking decision not to go to the Fall Fiber Festival. We're tightening our belts in anticipation of the impending increases in energy prices this winter and after looking at a room full of fiber, I realized that I don't NEED any more (doesn't mean that I don't still WANT it though). I hated to miss getting to meet so many of you there :( There's always next year.

Me and Thing 1 and 2 spent a couple of days in DC and Maryland last week. My little brother still hasn't been called to active duty and made it to his firefighter graduation - YIPPIE! It was quite an impressive ceremony complete with bagpipes and drums. McGuyver Mom and Ebayman Dad made the trip up too. It has been since early summer that all of us were together so it was really nice to visit even if it was sort of harried.

This is a shot of my bro putting on his IAFF sticker (he was initiated on Thursday). Can you tell how happy he is?



I'll upload pictures of the ceremony, et all another time. It just requires so much energy and patience with Blogger and I don't have it this second.

On Saturday me and Thing 1 and 2 visited the National Museum of the American Indian before we headed home. Its one of the few museums in DC that we hadn't visited and I was anxious to see what it was like. We were most impressed. They did a beautiful job of catching the spirit of Native Americans and other Indians from around the world. If you're in the area, I'd highly recommend this museum as a must see.

So I left y'all hanging last week with a shot of purple and pink. A couple of guesses were close but no one hit the nail on the head. Here's another sneek peek of what I was working on.



Any other guesses?

So what samples have I been knitting for my classes? A short row scarf, a spiral scarf, the secret project, a felted tote bag, felted flowers, Harry Potter book scarves, mobius samples - oh yeah, I've been busy. It has been great fun working on all of these instant gratification projects. I'll have enough samples to give as gifts so that in and of itself is an added bonus.

And thanks to your feedback and the fact that I need some cheering up, I'm going to open up the 2nd Annual Fall Foliage contest next week. I'm dying to see what yours might look like since ours is slowly creeping along. I'd given up on any sort of foliage show until it began to rain yesterday. There's hope that it might be pretty after all. I need to get cracking on my weekly tree shot from behind my house. I'm waiting for the rain to stop though I'd be perfectly content if it didn't for quite a while. Man were we dry! There's some actual color starting to creep in. It does my heart good.

Start scoping out those shots and I'll post the rules early next week. As far as prizes, I'm pretty sure that I have some fall colored roving that I can spin up. Either way, I'll offer up some handspun yarn but I need to ponder what other goodies to throw in. Catch ya tomorrow!