Lalala…

I’ll be making the cream puff ring tonight, I promise! I even have all the ingredients at home already. It’s just that I took a “nap” yesterday when I got home and then, POOF, it was after midnight.

In the meantime, flowers from my “garden.”

Looking over the last several posts, it’s almost like I’m not doing anything aside from baking. Unfortunately, that’s almost completely the truth. Well, I did finish these a month ago.

But I can’t say when the last time was that I pulled out my spinning wheel to do anything other than dust it. Things have gotten serious when the spinning wheel needs to be dusted. I’m actually feeling sort of burned out and blah when it comes to doing anything creative. It has literally been years since I’ve put pencil to drawing paper. I had a couple of genius (to me) design ideas for lace shawls but the will to work on either fizzled out as soon as I’d sketched out the basic design on a post-it and stuck them to my desk at work. I don’t even want to contemplate making any new marker designs, let alone crank out any donuts or skulls from previous designs.

Thinking about the pile of things I’m not getting done, I’m feeling this overwhelming sense of guilt. I feel guilty that I’m not promoting my Etsy shop. Guilty that I don’t feel like knitting or spinning. I carry several projects worth of yarn and needles around with me every day and just stare at them. Even though baking is the one thing I’ve been good about, there’s guilt at the high number of sweets versus basic breads for sandwiches or learning to make baguettes and ciabatta. There’s housework guilt, yard work guilt even ironing guilt. I miss seeing the group at Knitch and I can’t justify the petrol for a 60 mile round trip into Atlanta and back. I feel guilty about that one, even knowing most of the usual group are also not making it downtown. Guilt, guilt, guilt. And is anyone else noticing how strange the word is looking the more I type it, or is that just me?

The biggest thing weighing on me is the art, or lack thereof. To be perfectly honest, I’ve never particularly enjoyed drawing. I’ve failed miserably at keeping sketchbooks over the years and I don’t even doodle. The only reason my Wacom isn’t covered in a thick coat of dust is that I dusted it Saturday in a half-hearted attempt to put my studio to rights. And I actually LIKE pushing pixels around. I enjoy staring at code, making tweaks and seeing the results of my tweaks. Yet look at this blog. It still has a stock template with zero personal adjustments.

I think that I might just have too many things to which I feel obligated to devote some amount of time and as a consequence, I’m not enjoying any of them. The mess that is my studio bears this out. There are piles of laundry on the floor, clean laundry in a basket that Mocha has turned into a bed and therefore counts as one of the piles on the floor. I have boxes with fiber in various states of processing. I have a bag of batts that I’ve been meaning to post on Etsy. My desk is covered with books, yarn, needles, fiber and a stitch dictionary. My work table has scraps of fabric, clay, seeds, onion sets that should have been planted months ago, cd’s, dvd’s and novels. I still have the hamster cage in a corner from having cleaned it out after Tapioca died in November.

The physical clutter is a good view into the mental clutter that has built up in my head. The only thing that even remotely brings me a sense of calm is standing in my front yard and seeing an unexpected benefit from my lack of action. There were some lilies already planted when we moved in that refused to flower in the first two years. I’d vowed to dig them up this year and then they surprised me by blooming a radiant orange. Standing in the newly cleared landscape, running my fingers across my one thriving lavender and it’s under performing companions; watching a fat bee go from one tiny purple flower to the next and seeing the sun reflecting off the daylilies, I am completely at peace. I forget that I wanted a mass of plantings and a wider number of flowers. The lavender I planted two years ago and the lilies that I didn’t are enough while I stand there basking in a heady scent of lavender and nearby roses.

So that’s the solution, I think. Clean up my studio and put away so many of the different interests, leaving a few things for me to enjoy working on instead of stressing about everything I could possibly be doing. My, that was quite an aside.

For the first time in a dozen years, I remembered to dye some eggs for Easter. This probably only happened because I had several scavenged packages of dye that I purchased on the cheap last year, intending to dye fiber. I still haven’t dyed any fiber with the egg dye. I even boiled half a dozen eggs to dye. These are not those eggs. I realized I wanted to dye more, so these are the dozen raw eggs that were in the fridge. No reason they can’t be pretty for cooking. The pink stamp on the end of whatever egg it is I purchase is completely water soluble.

With the pretty eggs putting me in the mood for permanent warmer weather, I pulled out some knits that also reminded me of spring. I have a Wisp going made of Filatura di Crosa Superior, a cashmere and silk blend, in a perfect shade for spring.

Then I pulled Herring out of my knitting bag and worked on that for a bit. In two sittings, I’ve gotten this far (crappy cell phone pics ahead. The actual color is more like this).

And I have this far to go before mindless stockinette. It is completely mindless, too, since it has an afterthought heel.

Can you tell that I forgot which color was designated the main color on the second sock in the colorwork portions? I’d planned to make one sock “grey” and the other “green”, but make the legs exactly the same on both socks. In the first sock, the grey was the dominant color. Instead of using logic (as in the first sock is grey so the main color must have been grey) I made green the dominant color. See how much more it “pops” against the grey in the second sock than in the first?

Nona and others have written some very informative posts if you’re interested in the whys of color dominance and why you should remember which color is which through your entire project. Now I just need a picture of Fish Fish waiting for his fins and eyes to be sewn on to have a trifecta of green goodness. I don’t have one, of course.