Posting in this coming week will probably be light. I collect the "big" ecology papers on Monday, along with the Soils lab books - so I have those to grade. And I also have final exams to write. And I am still battling the rash. I decided not to take the Zyrtec/Zantec combination yesterday to see how I'd fare without it.

I think I'm going to need to take them until the rash goes away. The rash seemed to get worse, and I woke up around 3 this morning itching badly.

Sometimes I hate plants.

I did finish one thing this weekend. This is the first pair of socks that is for my mom's birthday:



It's one of the Online yarns, I forget which line it's from. They're just simple socks but I think the colors in them are pleasing.

I also spent a little time tidying and ironing fabric in my sewing room. I think one of my summer projects is going to be to get the room cleaned up again. (If I ever get it REALLY cleaned, to the point where it wouldn't be too annoying to move stuff out/move stuff to the center of the room for a couple days, I'd really like to wash down the walls and then paint them some kind of pretty color - maybe sort of a shell pink. Right now the walls are off-white. I've seen a lot of sewing and craft rooms where the person did something really creative and pretty with it, and I'd like to do it with this room. But there are enough spiderwebs in the corners I'd have to wash the walls first, and before that I'd have to be able to move stuff out/move stuff around well. I suppose what I could do is temporarily move to the guest room from "my" bedroom (I'd want to do that anyway until the fumes from the paint were gone: the sewing room is right off my bedroom) and then I could stack boxes of fabric on my bed and in the bedroom. (Most of the space is taken up with the fabric/yarn storage boxes.)

Another thing I want to do is go through all the old accumulated magazines (I am bad about getting rid of old magazines) and ONLY save the ones that have projects I am likely to make in them. (But I will be saving all the old Interweave Knits. And all the "Pieceworks.")

I suppose if I decided to get rid of the run of Knitters' and of Vogue Knits, I could probably swap them on one of the Ravelry "destashing" groups. Or sell them outright.

(I also have a lot of stuff like old Better Homes and Gardenses. What I really need to do with those, is, if on the first read, I see a recipe I want to make or a decorating idea I like, tear the page with it out and put it in a notebook and chuck the rest of the magazine, instead of filing it and assuming I could find that thing again. I think I was also saving them with half a thought I would donate them to the hospital or something, but that's one of those good intentions that paves a bad road...I have a couple ugly stacks of dusty magazines now).

I also wound off some yarn to have ahead:



The rightmost yarn is an indie-dyer sockyarn in a colorway called "opal." I haven't decided on a pattern for it yet but I may look in that "Knitting Socks from Handpainted Yarn" book to see if anything appeals to me.

The middle ball is a variegated pink (no colorway name given, just a color number). I'm going to use this for a second pair of the "Weasley Homestead" socks (I just like that pattern - it's on Ravelry but you can also find it here. It's sort of an elongated basketweave - not hard to knit but it's more interesting than plain stockinette (or rib). Since this yarn is pink, I'm going to call them "Redheads Should Not Wear Pink." (because the Weasleys were all redheads, and supposedly that's an old fashion rule).

The two left-most balls are going to be used for another one of those Lace Ribbon Scarves. It's a Knitpicks sockyarn. The colorway is called "Tea Party."

Wait...

No, I don't think KnitPicks was making a political statement AT ALL. IIRC, this line came out in early 2009, before that movement was on the national radar. And also, it's from a line of yarns designed to evoke childhood memories (There's another one called "Tree Fort," for example).

Yes, that kind of tea party. The stereotypical little-girl activity, where you dress up in borrowed necklaces and your mom's high heels, and pretend to serve your dolls or stuffed animals.

I actually did those as a kid - well, not in the dress-up clothes; my mom actually didn't have that many pairs of high heels and really, she wasn't a big dress-up person, so for me, the super-feminine dressing-up-and-borrowing-lipstick thing didn't happen for me as a kid. But I did have some of those little china tea sets (which broke distressingly easily; I think one of the ones I had had two of the plates glued back together, and the other one had the teapot with a big crack in it). And I liked to set up some of my stuffed toys (I was not a big doll fan as a kid; I vastly preferred stuffed animals for some reason) and pretend they were having a tea party.

Which may be part of a reason why I'm so fond of the teeny tiny food from Re-Ment: they remind me of those happy childhood days of playing with my stuffed animals, or playing with my dollhouses (I think I've mentioned those before: I had two, one inhabited by a family of toy mice [many of them named from characters in books I'd read: there was Amos, the father - named for the mouse in Ben and Me, the mother was Caroline, from the Little House books. One of the children was Raymond - there were a couple of books, I forget the title and author, but they featured either mouse detectives or mouse spies (or maybe mouse gangsters; I just remember them sneaking around a lot - maybe it was actually this last, because I seem to remember them planning to "knock over" a cheese shop*) that had a Raymond Mouse in them]. Later, I had another one with an Edwardian-era family (dolls this time) living in it, and I used to try to research : would they have had a telephone yet in the nineteen-twenties? What kind of toys would the children have had?)

Part of it I think was the simple appeal of tiny things, but I think another part had something to do with having a tiny world, where the inhabitants had everything they needed, courtesy of you, the creator of the world. I actually made salt-dough food to put inside the icebox, and I tried to find tiny real books to go on the shelves...and the beds had sheets on them that I sewed out of my dad's old handkerchiefs.

So the Re-Ment stuff makes me smile, because it reminds me of my childhood. (And oh, how I would have loved it if it had been available when I was a child!)

And I admit it, sometimes, to amuse myself, I will take a few of the pieces out (I have a box I keep them on, on my coffee table - I really want to get something like one of those "typesetter's boxes" with all the tiny cubbies to hang on my wall so I can put the things in there) and set up a little tableau.

Like, "Sunday afternoon at the coffee house." (Though to be really ideal, I'd need a couple of tiny Re-Ment laptops with wi-fi access, and maybe a couple magazines or books to stack on that table):



It amuses me that Thalia (the "perky Goth chick") has a beverage that superficially resembles Caf-Pow.

(*ETA: yes, mouse gangsters. The book - and I remember it as being part of a series - was called The Great Cheese Conspiracy And my Raymond wore "glasses" (made from wire) like the Raymond in the book)