How Dost Thou Faire?

You know that little voice that always tells you that you have way more time to get stuff done than what you think?

Yeah, it's a real bitch.

And it seems to be plaguing my entire life at the moment.

Take my Fade shawl for example.

I started the bloody thing back in May. I had originally intended to finish it for the Destination Yarn open house in July, but that didn't happen.

So then I moved my goal to done before Ren Faire.

That also didn't happen. 

But surely I could finish it in time for the latest pj party?

Nope.

I'm still on section 11. I'm *closer* to the end. But not quite close enough. So, once again the deadline gets moved.

Ren Faire also hit me like a freight train. I had elaborate plans for my costume this year... want to guess what never magically materialized?

Grandma ended up doing practically everything for us, for which I'm eternally grateful.

I did, however, make myself a giant set of horns because why the hell not?

They were a hit, as I had many people compliment me on them and ask for pictures. Not bad for doing them in less than 24 hours.

I didn't actually take any pics of things at the faire itself, but here are a bunch of pics of me and the friendos.

I also wore a shirt this year that....errrr..... worked better with my corset.

Heaving bosoms... heaving bosoms everywhere.

I bought a few little treasures, too.

I also bought a wee little stained glass star, but I forgot to grab it when taking pics.

But lest you feel like you're missing out, I made a TOTALLY ACCURATE REPRESENTATION for you.

See? You can TOTALLY envision it now!

You are very welcome.

John got me this adorable pair of glass owl earrings.

AND FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER IN OUR TWELVE YEAR RELATIONSHIP HE BOUGHT ME A DAMN FLOWER

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go faint 'pon yonder fainting couch from shock.

Creatively Untitled: A List Post Project

Do you know what D&D actually stands for?

That would be Dead and Devoid of all energy.

It's been taking up so much of my time and energy over these past two- wait, no three... yeah, three  months (we took that long for character creation, one-on-one starter sessions, and me personally working on the campaign setting) that I really haven't been focusing on much else. But we finally, FINALLY have started and from how well things are going, I think I'll be able to take a breather and  actually work on other things alongside this.

So, to get y'all caught up....

LIST POST TIME

*confetti cannons here*

1. First, let's talk about my knitting.

My intention was to have this finished in time to wear to the Destination Yarn open house later this month. Especially because this shawl would feature two different DY colors. 

But after doing the math and having a heart-to-heart with myself... well, for the first time ever, I'm not going to finish a shawl in time to meet my deadline.

I'm surprisingly okay with it. It had to happen at some point and I'd rather it be something that was more of a "this would be nice" thing than a "OH MY GOD THIS RUINS EVERYTHING" sort of deal.

2. I ended up making another moth.

She's quite a bit bigger than my first one. And yes, she does look a little like the Centipeedle in Steven Universe. It was unintentional at first, but as I went along, she kind of grew into it. 

I adore her and she now lives on my lovely new shelf along with my other plushies.

3. I made a mini dice bag for my miniature dice that I use for my crow companion for my character.

Yes, I know that the yarn obscures the cables, but I REALLY wanted to use only scraps for this. It's made mostly with the teeny little bit of yarn I had leftover from Polar Bear in a Snowstorm.

4. We ended up taking both Bethany and Vi with us to Origins last month and it was so much more fun like that. I'll just let the pictures speak for themselves.

5. I'm SUPER friggin proud of this crow painting I did for Lily.

6.  John and I actually did something crafty TOGETHER!

These are traveler's journals we made. And I do mean "we." He did almost all the work on his own! My little crafty goddess heart nearly burst with joy.

7. I've been meeting real life mothy friends and I couldn't be happier. 

8. We've been playing Pokemon Go again. Vi and I have been painting the town yellow.

9. It's actually been a few days since I've started writing this and I'm now on the 5th color of my Fade shawl.

10. I may or may not be planning out the yarn for like a dozen more of these.

11. Yes, that's highly unusual.

12. No, I DON'T know what the hell is wrong with me.

13. And I TOTALLY didn't go off my cold sheep personal pledge and buy another skein of Rios just because the colors were singing to me.

14. NOPE NOPE NOPE TOTALLY DIDN'T

15. 

16. ..............................

17. Damnit...

The Moth-er of All Ideas

Through random instagram browsing I happened to stumble across a few artists who make the most amazing moths and butterflies out of all sorts of crafting materials, like antique linens or embroidery.

I couldn't help but be inspired, so I got my butt over to Ravelry to see about making a mothy friend of my own. Surely there would be some patterns already done up that I could just tweak a little bit?

Nope.

Nothing.

Well, not anything semi-realistic at least. And that's really what I wanted. Not some cartoonish version.

So...

You already know what I did. I made my own damn pattern.

Meet the Jacquard Slate Moth, named after the colorway of Kroy sock yarn I used for him.

Every part of him was pretty much improvised on the fly (heh...)

I started with the wings, making sure I noted where in the color repeats I had started my first one to make sure the second matched.

These were then blocked to their final shape.

The body was done in the round.

I wanted the body to be solid colored, so I had to play with the colors a bit to get them to work out. I'm quite satisfied with it.

The wings were a little too floppy for my liking, so I sewed felt to the bottoms of them.

The legs are black pipe cleaners with more yarn wrapped around them to give it a scraggly appearance.

His antenna are feathers and the eyes are glass beads I sewed on.

You can see here that I was testing out the wing placement.

I wasn't quite happy with it, so I decided to add the little tuft of faux fur to finish him off.

Don't tell the others, but he may be my favorite amigurumi I've ever made.

And I have a feeling that he's going to lead to a whole host of new winged yarn friends.

I know, I know. Having moths, even fake ones, anywhere near your stash seems like an ill-omen and would send any number of my yarn friends into fits. But these ones, I think, will restrain themselves from chowing down on the wool buffet.

A Plethora of Plushies

As I said in my last post, I HAVE been working on stuff. Surprising to most of you I'm sure, I wasn't working much on any of the fifty-million shawls I currently have going.

I was in need of easy, fast projects to help soothe my battered heart and keep me from stabbing people with my needles. So I started making a metric crap-ton of plushies.

I started on this little dude right after we lost Oscar.

I had originally intended to make him out of a different yarn, in worsted weight. But all the worsted I have is pretty muted and dark. I needed something brighter. I stumbled across this bulky MadTosh yarn while stash diving and knew I had found a winner.

Bubbles here (yes, I named him. Don't act surprised) came out so much bigger than I imagined and that absolutely delighted me.

Being able to start and finish a project in just two days definitely helped bring me a little out of the fog. I wanted to keep chasing that high, so I kept knitting.

Next was the otter I had promised John a while ago.

Yep, he's even wearing a little triangle scarf made of some leftover fingering weight yarn.

He now occupies a corner of John's desk at work. It makes me a little sad that he's alone, so I'll probably have to make him a friend soon.

Next up was a long-ago made promise for Kayla in the form of a Junimo from Stardew Valley.

Followed by the LAST DAMN BULBASAUR THAT I WAS COMMISSIONED FOR!

And finally, a birthday present for Vi.

You would have thought I learned my lesson with Bubbles and make it a wee bit smaller...

...Yeah, it got Ashtaned instead.

I do have another plush/art doll thing that I hinted at a while back, but I think it's deserving of its own post.

And lest you think I've abandoned my shawls entirely, here's a progress pic of Fade.

I'm on color 3 of 7 and section 6 of 13. The only problem is that I want to make some changes to the colors I chose...

And I have to buy new yarn to do that.

So much for this being a stash-only project.

But really, did you expect anything less of me?

Of course you didn't.

Six Months of Suck

That's what I'm officially declaring the first half of 2018.

I feel like I've gotten to the point of just being numb. I've tried to just cocoon myself up to avoid having to deal with all of the emotions that have sprung up from so many disasters. And by doing  that, I unintentionally cut most of my support net off when I needed them the most. Because I didn't want to have to relive all of the emotions every time I told someone about the latest travesty.

It's also why I've barely been writing on here. Who wants to read post after post about how things are all going wrong? Sure, I've been working on things, too (if I hadn't, I'd be in a crying, sobbing mess-heap in the corner) but none of it really seemed worth posting on here. At least, that's what I kept telling myself.

Yes, yes, I know. That was my Beaverly brain talking.

To set things to rights, I'm going to do my best to crank out enough posts this week to catch up with what has been going on in our lives. Because this blog has come to serve as a chronicle of not only my creative endeavors, but also of the important events in my life. And it's dishonest of me to try and shy away from the darker parts.

Let's get the list of disasters out of the way in this post, shall we?

First and foremost, we lost our darling old man cat, Oscar.

We knew it was coming. He was anywhere between 16 and 20-something years old. We never knew for sure. But he wasn't doing the greatest, health wise. But fate kind of hastened the end.

I will spare you the details, but it was heartbreaking. No time to properly say goodbye or let him know how much we loved him. I still can't think about it without despair threatening to drown me.

And if that wasn't enough to deal with, a few weeks ago my father-in-law suffered a heart attack, which was probably at least partially brought on by the stupid drama surrounding John's grandma's will.

Before you start extending your sympathy, you should know that I despise the man. Right before this, we had actually been discussing how we didn't want him at our recommitment ceremony because we were so sick of the hateful things he regularly spewed at us.

That's been a whole other thing. John's having to deal with some... well, let's say complicated emotions when it comes to his parents. However, that's not my story to tell. But I know from experience how much it hurts when your parents disappoint you.

I WILL say that the guilt tripping and emotional manipulation trying to force John into spending every waking moment at the hospital at his dad's side is fucking ridiculous. And if shit doesn't stop soon, we're going to have a real problem. It's not like, you know, we have a whole life outside of the whims of a manipulative old bastard...

*deep breath*

Okay, sorry. Let's move on. Because I can go on forever about this particular subject. Especially because John is such an incredible person and I HATE when people don't see and value it.

I wish I could say that we were done with his family in this post, but sadly, we're not. Remember the will from earlier? Yeah...

Let me lay out basic facts:

- John's grandma died nearly 3 years ago
- An uncle stole money out of the estate
- Shit went down in a dramatic fashion
- More shit happened that made everyone hate each other
- Literally this has been occupying our life for NEARLY THREE FUCKING YEARS
- Recently, an auction was forced through some legal loophole that sold off the land that was supposed to be divided among the three surviving siblings
- Said auction property included the land that two large storage buildings were on, so they had less than 3 weeks to get them cleaned out and moved

The fighting and arguing and manipulation and backstabbing has gotten us so fed up with the lot of them that we've pretty much completely written them off. And at least one of the uncles, if we ever saw him in person, would lead to a screaming match at the very least. Though I personally feel like a punch in the face would serve better. Alas, I must hold myself to a higher standard than that.

So, yeah, that pretty much sums up all the bad shit that's been going on here the past few weeks. We need a damn break from everything.

Anyway, thanks for sticking with me through these unintended hiatuses. The next couple of posts will be about happier things, I promise.

Until then, I'm going to go throw myself back into my creative work and try to shove this anger back down.

*deep breath*

And so we go.