Just a Quick Reminder!

Today is the last day of the grand blog counter crochet poetry contest and pattern giveaway! You have until 11:59pm CST to submit your crochet-themed poem as a comment to the original post (here!) to enter to win. The winner will receive a copy of every pattern I sell. Second place will get a Toy Bundle, and the third place winner will receive my three accessory patterns (Newsboy, Shooting Starf, and Sweet Cocoa Cloche). The odds are still excellent, so if you’ve got time to knock off a limerick or a couplet, YOU could be a winner!

Flu and Back Again

Squeamish readers, read no further! We’ve had the flu at our house this week. Not fun. Fortunately the boys were sick first, and I was sick while they were sleeping. Well, mostly. I was still sick in the morning when they woke up (feeling better), and even when I’d stopped I was completely exhausted. There are few realizations more ominous than that you have been sleeping solidly for the past three hours while your children…have not. I was relieved to find them still in the house, even if repairing their unusual mischief was messy and time-consuming. We recovered! And we’re feeling much better today, thank you.

Unfortunately, I seem to have lost my groove. I was on quite the roll before I got sick, but the two days spent in a vomit-filled, nauseated haze might as well have been ripped from reality. (One of my most vivid memories from that time is lying face down on the sofa, composing a riddle about vomit. “What rhymes with ‘comet,’ but looks like a stream…?”) I can’t quite remember what I was working on, what I meant next to do, what I was planning … I’ve been derailed and sidetracked through an excellent Anne McCaffrey novel that I finished today, and now I’m trying to see where to pick up. Aside from the living room floor, I mean. That one is obvious. There’s not really a point to this post, I suppose, other than to say hello! from the other side of a sickness-filled vortex of incoherence that knocked us flat. If my next project seems to come out of nowhere, – this is why.

Also, washing hands in soap and hot water is a basic but excellent way to prevent the spread of disease! Just a friendly PSA from an early victim of the flu. Flu Season! It’s here.

Almost Inexplicable

After the ‘fire hat,’ I turned to the project I had intended to begin in the first place – hats for the boys, in virulent warm colors. I wanted to make hats. I tried to make hats. Turns out I had hat fatigue.

After some time alone with Ravelry‘s pattern browser, I decided to make a baby sweater – despite the facts that a) I have no baby, b) even if I had a baby, I’m not sure what the odds are that I would want to wrap said infant in such violent colors, and c) my eyes, my eyes, someone please help, my eyes. The pattern I picked is Beth Koskie’s Crocheted Baby Sweater, a simple free pattern available online. (Again, I’m not sure why I chose it, given my well-documented dislike of large stretches of double crochet in worsted weight.)

Still, despite all indicators to the contrary, I like it. It’s cheerful. It’s a completed sweater – an uncommon accomplishment for me, even in baby sizes – and I especially like the button I chose:

Like a small obsidian promontory thrusting up out of boiling magma. Now, isn’t that a cheerful image?