Muddlin' on

It has been an interesting few days. Work continues on sample shawls for workshops, and I marked a Knitting Accreditation level on Friday afternoon. Friday morning I spent looking for year-end stuff the bookkeeper has requested, and trying to clear off this desk!

Yesterday I went to the spinning guild and gave the reader's digest version of the Triangle Shawl Workshop. It appeared to go quite well... in all about half of the spinners in attendance participated, and, since many of us want to actually spin when we're at a meeting because of the rarity of uninterrupted spinning time, I thought this was a good turnout. The focus of yesterday's workshop was on the design study and I was very pleased to have people telling me that they liked the way I described decreases, and how they would be trying some of this stuff out on other projects.

Today I fixed the two typos on the participant's handouts and re-worked my teaching notes. The word on the top: Breathe! I get so excited about this stuff I gather momentum, so I need to realize that other people need me to breathe so they can hear the information in real time!

Hopefully some of these people will test knit two of the three patterns that were in their handouts! Tonight we have friends coming for dinner.

Tomorrow is another Knit Together day. This issue is getting closer, but I need to contact some retailers, so I took a couple of days to get that done.

Morning knitting these past few weekends has been spent on the Orkney Pi, which I started when we were in Great Britain last fall. I'm about 84% complete now, and I have to make a decision about the next stage. It's 60" in diameter, and it hasn't been blocked yet. If I do the next set out rounds, it will be 67" in diameter when the knitting is over. That's not a shawl, that's a blanket! But it's beautiful, this design by Liz Lovick. I'm almost finished the outer ring of trees.

Now, I'm off to update the Ravelry project for this one, and go visit our 'peeps.'

I was having SUCH a good day...

The latest issue was clicking together, I got a close up of the flowers for the project on the cover of the next issue, and tidied up a few edits to the knitter feature. I had also drafted out the yarn shop text.

I thought "I should call it a day," at that point but nooo, I had to keep going.

I decided to lay out the mini project, a scarf with two pages of text that I need to get onto one half page. Naturally, it didn't *quite* fit, so I figured I would copy the layout into a WordPerfect document and print it for my working copy to test my edits. About five minutes before Darling called, "Dinner's ready!" I got the dialogue box telling me the memory was full. Curses!

Sometimes, when that happens, I can copy the text and paste it over, but not today. I lost everything I did for the previous two hours, including my lovely, creative, abbreviations.

So, I'm off to cry in my rum and coke. This day is officially over.

Two, Two, Two knitters in one...

Day, that is.

After another long day in the office, I've completed yet another book review, and the Canadian Knitter feature for the next two issues.

There's always something to do here at Canadian Guild of Knitters.

Yesterday it took over an hour to take all the spam out of our three e-mail accounts on the cgknitters.ca domain. If anyone knows of a really effective spam-jamming software, let me know!

Currently I'm testing the knitting for upcoming projects, and making more sample shawls for upcoming workshops.

Now that my eyes are squared off, it's time to go and knit!

Wind beneath my wings

Like any enterprise, Canadian Guild of Knitters offers up joyous days, downer days, and all-mixed-up days. Today was the latter, but I'm choosing to focus on the joyous events within it.

It began with a nasty headache. At 6:30 a.m. Not fair! Several Advil (R) and breakfast later, the edge was off of the beast within.

Today was mail day. Mail days can go either way. Usually they're positive, and today's was elating! To those of you who take the time to write comments on your renewal cards: thank you! You place a gust of wind beneath my wings, and I can plod on through the day, even when I am in Advil-ville!

At least four more copies of the Knitting Accreditation Program and a record six knitting bags were processed by our shipping (ahem) department today!

At 4:00, Darling coaxed me out into the beautiful sunny day that I suspect was the reason for my trip to Advil-ville.

People sometimes ask me what Darling does while I'm writing and shipping and databasing. This winter he has taken up watercolour painting - birds, of course. Just after Christmas I set up a blog for his bird photos: it's www.bhp.peyton.ca. Darling has studied the nesting habits of birds since he was a young lad growing up in England. My passion for knitting is very much equal to his passion for bird studies. If you like birds, stop by his blog.

So now it's after dinner, and I *should* be processing more paperwork and survey responses. But I've enjoyed a delicious barbecue burger and a 'big girl' pop, so I'm going to go and knit a few rounds on one of the sample shawls for my upcoming workshops.

To those of you who appreciate the effort that goes into Canadian Guild of Knitters, from writing a half-page article, to processing memberships, to shipping orders -- thanks. It means a lot!