I spent my weekend "off" very well.

Saturday, I decided that EVEN THOUGH I had spent some money over break - on clothes and on some quilt fabric (but not the biggest bulk of fabric at Sewing Studio's sale...my dad had my mom run in with his credit card and pay for it for me. I love my dad and I love that he supports my "habit" in that way), I was going to break out and go to McKinney for the day.

it was a good day. It's always good to just get out, to take a day where I prohibit myself from thinking/worrying about the stuff I usually think/worry about. Bought a lot of different nice soaps and some things to put on the shelf as gifts and a bunch of vintage glass Czech buttons that will eventually probably wind up on sweaters.

I ate lunch out at my usual place but ordered something new on the menu, which I wouldn't order again. It came on ciabatta bread and I guess "ciabatta" must be Italian for "dried out" because that's how it was.

I also went to Quilt Asylum, and bought some of the Amy Butler fabrics (think: very bright, very large scale patterns, very girly) to eventually make a small quilt out of. Probably one of the simple fat-quarter quilts like "Yellow Brick Road" or summat like. I don't think big scale prints work as well in fussy block designs.

I also bought a new kind of marking pencil; it's like a mechanical pencil that uses chalk instead. I needed to re-mark parts of the quilt and I was sick of those cheapie chalk "pencils" that always break when you go to sharpen them.

This one doesn't break; it's a most excellent tool. It came with about 10 pieces of the white chalk and one of each color of the different colors, and refills are cheap.

Sunday, I just kind of mooched around after church. I quilted some on the quilt currently in the frame, and I cleaned house a little, and I cooked (lamb chops with a glaze that was supposed to be currant with red wine but after I got done making all the substitutions for stuff I couldn't find locally [or didn't want to buy...I don't have much use for the rest of a bottle of red wine - I don't like drinking it and the phenolics in it give me headaches] it was red plum and blueberry juice with balsamic vinegar glaze). Knit some, mostly on the current "simple" socks.

Yesterday, I quilted and also worked on piecing a small quilt (this one is going to be machine quilted; it's made of "winter" fabrics that are so freaking CRUSTED with silver spangle that I'd not want to take my own hand-quilting needle to it. I mean, the fabrics are very pretty and all but they're kind of stiff.).

Watched most of "Trading Places," which is one of my favorite movies ever. I think it's partly because of the just plain goofy throw-away lines (like "Beef jerky time!") and also because of the complexity of the caper involved. (And that Winthorpe doesn't discard Billy Ray after the caper's done; apparently Billy Ray is as much in the "winnings" as everyone else is). And the point where Eddie Murphy (as Billy Ray) just LOOKS at the camera when the two Duke brothers are explaining commodities trading to him in this very low-level, very patronizing way - this LOOK that says "these two bozos think I'm an idiot".

Or maybe it's because there's this underlying idea that a person's inherent value doesn't have to do with how much money they have - after all, three of the "big winners" and people who turn out to have talent for scamming the scammers in the movie are a hooker, a con man, and the butler.

I also pulled out the Hiawatha shawl and knit some on it again.

I missed doing the lace. For me, there's a certain inertia involved with some projects - it's also true of handquilting. There's the whole "put your butt in the seat and get started" activation energy to overcome. But once I do, the work is enjoyable.

I like knitting lace; I like the progression of it. The fact that each row you knit brings you that much closer to the pattern or the picture resolving itself. In a way, it's kind of like doing a jigsaw puzzle or a dot-to-dot picture, only more complicated. Or maybe it's more like something I remember getting occasionally as a homework assignment early on (third or fourth grade) in school. In order to introduce us and get us comfortable with using Cartesian coordinates, the teachers would give us a piece of graph paper and a sheet with "code" on it (paired coordinates like "15, 2") and we were supposed to fill in the squares corresponding to the color and location we were directed to. Like, there would be a whole series of squares we were supposed to color in red, and some that were yellow, and so forth. And if you did it right, you got a picture.

I always liked that sort of thing*. But then I'm both a math geek and a crafts geek so when those two things come together it makes me happy.

(*except when I made a mistake, or, as I remember once, there was a mistake in the coordinates - then it drove me mad because I couldn't get the picture to resolve. I had similar bad experiences with the first time I tried counted cross stitch, which is partly why I don't do it).

There is something very satisfying about knitting lace. And I'm already thinking about what will be next once Hiawatha's done - I have so much lace yarn or other shawl-designated yarn in my stash and so many patterns I want to try. I don't know if the next shawl will be the Southwestern shawl, or if I'll use the brown cashmere-blend yarn and do the Bird's Nest Shawl from Folk Shawls, or if I'll use the blue, worsted-weight and do the Wool-Peddler's shawl (which is what I'm leaning towards, as it's a simpler pattern, and I think I need a brief rest from complex lace after Hiawatha).