Bits and pieces

Have I shown you this yet? It's the very beginning of the latest iteration of Truly Tasha's shawl.

The yarn is actually a dark purple, not the nice clear blue you see here. I plan on doing the body of the shawl in this purple, and the lace edge in a lighter shade. I've had the yarn in the stash for years, literally, waiting to find the perfect thing to make with it. After a little knitting, I discovered that this yarn is perfect for this pattern. It's a great piece to take along when I need something simple to knit.

I had a nice long huge rant written here about unemployment and well-meaning people who try to make you feel better but unintentionally make you feel worse, but I deleted it. You come here for the knitting, right? Instead, I changed my sidebar bit about myself to more accurately describe the blog: let's stick to the knitting.

Or more accurately, let's talk about something besides the knitting for a few minutes. About two months ago I checked a book on Arts and Crafts antiques out of the public library because it had some nice pictures of jewelry in it. I took the book home and looked at it more carefully, and for the first time in a long time, I felt a movement in my creative bone, almost like an earthquake. I called my sister, who makes jewelry, and told her about it, and she got me turned on to Precious Metal Clay.

PMC is a clay that is composed of a metal, like silver, and some sort of binder to make it malleable. You work with it just like you would any other clay, let it dry, then smooth it out or put in additional details before firing it. When it's finished, you have something made out of silver. While visiting with my sis, I fashioned something to make into a pin, and next time I get over there I'll do the finishing work so she can fire it for me. But this is just the beginning -- ideas for jewelry are almost leaking out of my hands. What should I do with these ideas while I get a handle on the technique?

The Arts and Crafts book got me going so much I ended up photocopying some of the jewelry and pasting the pictures into a notebook for future inspiration and reference. I learned to do this in art school a century ago, but never applied it until now. I've been saving little clippings and postcards and what-not for years, not realizing that it was because they tickled my creativity bone and forgetting about the inspiration scrapbook. As I've been going through the house, thinking about packing to move sometime in the next six to nine months, I've been running into these clippings and they're working up into a nice little notebook.

Last time I mentioned that our weather was gorgeous. Well, a few hours after I wrote that, it clouded up and it's been raining ever since. We like rain here, because water is so scarce in the West. I've been working hard on the yard and the lawn because if we need to up and move this summer, I want everything to be manicured so it will be easy to find another sucker -- I mean, renter -- quickly. So...

Rain, rain, stick around
Soak and soak into the ground
Send that grass up waving high
Bring another renter nigh
When we've packed and boxed our goods
and moved to other neighborhoods.