Somebody To Love

…how pale I am, in this case.

I wear pants all the time so my legs don’t see sun. Today I shaved my legs for the first time this year, which really made the paleness obvious.

Does anybody else shave with both hands?

I have so many assignments due in the next month that I’m starting to worry that there won’t be time to finish them all. One of them is a website for Web Design, so stay tuned for that addition to this site. As well, I’ll probably redesign to match that site.

August can’t come fast enough.

This is a list of the top 106 books most often marked “unread” by LibraryThing users. The rules: bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Pop a note in the comments if you’ve done this one (and help me keep the dream alive).

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I just noticed that when looking at patterns from books on Ravelry, there is a link at the bottom of the page that says,

“search your local libraries”

which links to the record for the book you are looking at on WorldCat. Very cool.

This weekend has to be one of the first that I’ve really enjoyed in London. Funny, since I wasn’t even in town for half of it. Saturday me and Dean walked from my place to downtown, and spent some time in Victoria park watching the squirrels dig up the nuts they planted last year.

On the way there we got to walk under a train, and Dean managed to get some really good pictures of it.

We also saw another chair in the river.

Later on I dreaded my hair. Sectioning it was a pain, since I’d never done that before. Not to mention I couldn’t see what I was doing on the back of my head at all. I got Dean to help with that part, so if any of the back looks weird you guys can blame him. I’m going to.

(Please excuse the pile of crap). The finished product:

Today was another fun adventure. We went to Oil Springs to visit Brier Run Alpacas since it’s shearing weekend and they were having an open house. One of the alpacas kept yawning.

I gave one of the puppies a good ear scratching and he begged for more attention when I tried to leave.

I also bought some brown fibre to spin. It’s got small amounts of blue silk streaked in it, and is going to be very pretty once it’s spun up. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet, but I plan on taking pictures of the process when I do decide.

I finally got my marks for last term. I was starting to worry that I wouldn’t get them before starting the new term. Not that it really mattered since there was no way that I’d get bad marks. But I was hoping for straight As. It turns out I didn’t quite get that, since I had one B+, but it was close. Much better than last term, that’s for sure.

I’m trying to be excited about next term, but so far I’m ambivalent about most of the classes. I guess we’ll see if I’m more enthused once they start and I have something more than a course outline to go on.

There’s a workshop at a conference in Windsor next month that I want to take. I’m not sure if I can do that without having to pay for the whole conference though, so I wall have to contact them and see. One of my courses this term might get into that stuff so I wouldn’t have to worry about it at all. I find out on Monday though so I won’t have to wait long for that.

This meme came up on the LJ cross_stitch group, and I figured since I don’t talk about my stitching very often this would be a good way to let you all know some things about how I go about it.

1. How do you hold your fabric?
I used to stitch in hand, but then I ended up with cubital tunnel so now I use Q-snaps that someone on the BAPXS yahoo list gave me.

2. Floss licker?
Nope. I use Thread Heaven on my BAPs, and on some of my more important smaller pieces.

3. How do you thread your needle?
With those funny-shaped Boye threaders. Mostly because they are less likely than the wire ones to break, and cheap enough to replace when I inevitably lose them.

4. What needle do you like best?
Size 28, of any kind. Needles don’t last long enough for me to be attached to anything in particular since my skin reacts with them and they get tarnished and rough, or I manage to break them.

5. Are you a needle loser?
Most definitely. I usually end up finding them in the sofa (if I find them at all). A few days ago I put one in the arm of a chair while reaching for the scissors and it disappeared into the stuffing. I’m sure that’s happened before without my noticing.

6. What fabric do you prefer to stitch on?
Anything, really. It tends to depend on the project.

7. Bobbins or floss bags?
Bobbins, because if I kept things in bags I’d lose them or the cats would eat them. It’s harder to lose an entire bobbin case.

8. Are you a scissors collector?
Nope. I have a cheapo pair of stork scissors that barely hold together anymore (these get the most use, and have come in contact with children) and a pair of expensive chrome stork scissors that I treasure. Any others are kid scissors from wherever.

9. Do you do your own framing, and if so, do you lace or pin?
I’ve laced a project once, and never pinned one. But I didn’t frame it. I made it into a book cover.

10. Are you a floss floozy?
I don’t think so. I can’t really afford to buy floss at random. I am collecting all the DMC colours though, buying a hundred or so every time they go on sale.

11. Silk?
I have yet to use silk floss, but if it’s anything like silk roving I’m sure I’ll love it when I finish school and can start using it.

12. Railroader?
No, but only because I’m working on BAPs that I started before I knew what that was. Rather than having the more recent areas looking neater than the rest I am going to start railroading when I finish one and start my HAED.

13. Are you a pattern or designer snob?
That depends. I really like detailed, complicated patterns so I’m currently working on two Teresa Wentzler pieces, and I’ve done some of her smaller pieces as well. But it’s not as if I’ll only work on her stuff. I’ve got a HAED lined up for later and I’m sure I’ll branch out more once that is done. For smaller pieces I’ll work on anything as long as I like it. Though mostly I make my own designs for small stuff.

14. Do you get antsy when you give someone a stitched gift?
A little. I only give pieces away to people who I know will appreciate them, but even so there’s some apprehension since they are usually surprise gifts.

15. Have you reached S.A.B.L.E.?
No way. I’ve been stitching for 15 years and in all this time I still manage to only have a couple pieces going at once and two or three lined up. I don’t get the supplies for a piece until I start it either.

16. Do you wash your projects?
Yes. Sometimes partway through if it has gotten dirty, otherwise when I am done. It seems to help even things out and make the overall look more polished.

I’ve got the rest of the month off from school (bliss!) so I’m using it to catch up on any and all crafty things I’ve been wanting to do but haven’t had time for. Sort of. As my crafty readers can tell you, when we go somewhere we bring plenty of projects and plenty of materials to start new projects because you never know when you will run out of something to do (which reminds me: when I get a car - must keep yarn and needles in trunk).

Unfortunately, I forgot to take into account what happens to my gauge when I am no longer stressed to the roof. So my weaving tension is all off, my Vintage socks are huge, and I stupidly thought that not bringing all my supplies when leaving home for 3 weeks would be a good idea.

I do still have my spindle with the yummy green silk/merino that I can work on, and the Peacock Tapestry (which is no longer grounded since I’m in the mood to put up with its tantrums this month). I’ve got plenty to do.

What is bothering me is that I can’t finish half the stuff I brought to work on since this time I listened to reason and didn’t bring my UFO bag, all my needles, and a bunch of spares “just in case”. Now it’s the case that I need them and they aren’t here.

I was having all kinds of these thoughts when packing on Thursday since my pills and my coat are safe in my locker at school, and not here where I need them.

Still, there is a silver lining. My birthday is coming up and we’ll be driving down to my grandma’s house for the weekend for that (my first birthday party in 18 years and I’m so excited). It will mean a bit of a detour off the highway, but London is roughly halfway between here and there so I can grab stuff from my apartment and my locker without too much fuss.

Now the next time I go somewhere and get asked why I need to bring so much, I’ll have this meandering story to tell by way of explanation.

This holds in life in general right now as well as for crafting. I’m so so unbelievably sick of all this dreary weather.

My copy of Color in Spinning arrived this morning, which is doing a lot to help with the doldrums. It’s such a great resource, but right now all I’m doing is looking at all the bright and pretty pictures and wishing it was like that outside right now.

I’m also thinking I need to start messing with colours that I normally don’t think to use. On Wednesday during weaving class I realized I inadvertently chose the same colours for my scarf that I used for my Endpaper Mitts last year. This is great because I will have matching outdoor wear, but it really cemented the fact that I’ve been in a bit of a rut lately.

I’ve got all of the orange ones done and most of the olive green ones. I’m halfway there! Unfortunately I’m working on a MySQL assignment at the moment and I was on a field trip to Delaware with my weaving class earlier so blocking and pictures will have to wait until tomorrow.

BUT! I might have finished a few more by then. It will be worth it, I promise. At least, it will if you’re as obsessed with cute little knitted leaves like I am.

ETA:

One of the normal-sized leaves being blocked:

One of the smaller leaves for the toe insert being blocked:

A gods-eye-view of my blocking setup:

I didn’t notice until afterwards that the towel I was using is the same colour as the main yarn for the socks.