I can’t think of a title right now. A . will have to do.

The weekend was very nice, but I’m not feeling very good right now and it’s casting a shadow of yuck all around me. I’m trying to figure out why my tummy hurts when I haven’t eaten anything yet! (And no, I’m not hungry!) Ugh.

Enough complaining though. Saturday was Paul’s birthday. It was a really laid back day; we didn’t do much of anything. I got up early and went to the store to get a few things to make him a nice breakfast. While I was cooking breakfast I made him his favorite cake:

He was never a big fan of pineapple upside down cake until I started making it for him. He’s the same way about gravy and mashed potatoes. It’s just a little ego boost! After we ate I gave him his gifts. He had a feeling about the ds, but he was really happy with it and surprised with the Transformer games and accessories I got for it. He spent a good chunk of the day playing around with it. I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, so he went to his parents house while I stayed home and napped. They gave him a gift card for Hastings, and while he was there he helped them completely rearrange their living room and move a new couch in. Not how I’d like to spend a birthday, but he didn’t mind it.

Sunday was just a boring, lazy day. Yesterday we had a barbeque and invited his parents over. It gave me the perfect excuse to get Paul to help me move our ugly old couch out of the living room, “To make more room!” It’s currently residing in the start of our hallway, but it’s covered with a blanket and looks much better there. I now have a huge amount of space in our living room, patiently awaiting a new couch. Hopefully one that will be coming within the month!

Paul went out to the garage yesterday to get the charcoal and noticed that one of the little birdies had died. He disposed of it’s body. It made me sad, but to counteract it, Paul told me that he saw one of the other little birdies flying precariously around the garage. I hope the others make it!

Over the weekend I had time to finish the left front of my Central Park Hoodie. I’m up past the ribbing on the right side now. I think it’s going to take me about a month to finish the entire sweater. It’s been about two weeks now, give or take. I’ll try to get some pictures tomorrow, I need to track my progress! I found a couple more sweater patterns that go up to my size yesterday, so I’m going to get around to queuing them sometime today. I’m wondering if I’d look good in a vest? The kind you wear a long sleeved button down under? Hmm…I just don’t know. I guess I’ll have to do a search for pictures of plus sized girls in vests. I’ve never worn one before!

I love having the option of seeing how people get to my blog through searches they’ve done.  The funniest?

“How to open Mario cherry sour candy” (or something to that effect…I can’t remember word for word what it was now)

The strangest?

“She makes love with a crochet hook“

Uhh…what?

Day before yesterday I put my hubby to work on fixing the window in the back door. It’s been broken out for awhile now, and the board we had over it was loose and letting hot air in. I had him screw a board over the top and the bottom window and now it’s not only nice and dark back there, but not a wisp of air is coming through. It’s not pretty, but it did the job.

He had to go into the garage to cut the board to fit and when he did, Moxie came bolting out of the garage carrying something. She dropped it and we noticed it was a baby bird! Paul and I both freaked out a bit, got it away from her, only to have Gutter try to take off with it! After wrestling it away from him, Paul picked it up and took it back into the garage to see if we could find it’s nest. We let the wrens nest in the garage because we don’t keep anything important in there and they help keep the bugs down. We looked around a bit before realizing that the poor thing didn’t have a nest, but the mommy wren had plopped them right down on the garage floor against the wall!

Paul carefully put the little thing back with its siblings and we disposed of a fifth one that had moved away from the group and died. We finished up quickly in the garage and left them alone in hopes that mommy wren would come back and take care of them.

I decided to check on them this morning and get a picture of them and they’re doing great. They look pretty plump so mommy is obviously still taking care of them. We don’t go in the garage too often, so hopefully they’ll get big and strong and continue the fight against black widows and water bugs in our yard!

Anyways, here are the beads I talked about yesterday.

I’ve really been enjoying incorporating beads into my knitting. Several years ago my Aunt Noreen taught me how to add beads to my crochet. She’s amazingly talented and has a good 75 years of crafting under her belt. For some reason though I loved the look of beaded crochet, I never enjoyed doing it. It was too bothersome to string the beads on first and then crochet because I would inevitably add too few beads or colors in the wrong order. I’m loving adding them to my knitting though because I can place them one at a time without pre-stringing them. These are on the large side, about the size of a pony bead.

These ones are 2/0 seed beads; small but not tiny. I love the colors so much! The beads are kind of frosty looking, the package of the smaller ones say they’re matte. I’m not super educated on beads or beading, so I don’t know the difference. I got the beads at the swap meet in Golden Valley. GV is about 10 or so miles out of Kingman and though it’s building up fast it’s still pretty small. The lady that owns the bead shop thingy is set up year round (It’s an actual building in the open air swap meet…there’s a few long term buildings) and she’s open four or five days out of the week. She’s got this little bitty shop, but it’s stuffed to the ceiling with beads and beading equipment of all sorts. I love it there! She’s got 6/0 seed beads by the hank and she’s very reasonable with her prices. She’ll even split the hanks in half or into single strands; it’s awesome! I’m not sure what I’m making with my beads yet, but they’ll be going in to some sort of knitting.

Here’s my yarn. Nothing special, but I took a picture for my ravelry stash and decided to share. I love the color so much! One thing I love about Caron Simply Soft is that it may be acrylic and it may be cheap, but it’s so soft and I love knitting with it. The only complaint I’ve really got is that it tends to pill. I think it may be because it’s pretty loosely plied, but it’s not a huge problem.

I’m off to knit now, and do more laundry. I’ve been going nuts washing up everything in the house and getting it organized. It’s amazing how I’m always complaining about not having any clothes, yet when I go nuts and do all the laundry and put it away instead of throwing it on the bathroom counter, I’ve got a decent amount of clothes! Funny how that works.

I realized this morning that I hadn’t posted anything in almost a week!

The craft room is still clean!  Success!  I’m really hoping that with all the junk I threw away and how I organized it, the room will stay cleaner than before.  I even threw away about 30% of my stash when I cleaned!  I’d decided to get rid of a lot of partial balls of yarn and a lot of the acrylic.  I’d originally planned on donating it somewhere, but truthfully I couldn’t allow myself to because there was Gutter, Moxie and Cordova hair strewn through it and I smoke.  Most knitters and crocheters I know don’t smoke or if they do, they keep it away from their stash.  I smoke in the house and I’d hate to foist stinky yarn off on some unsuspecting crafter.  Anyways, the room’s still clean, but the dust is already threatening to take over again.  One of the trials of living in the desert.

Paul took a couple of vacation days this week so he could recharge his batteries.  Today is his first day back to work for the week and I can finally get back on schedule!  I loved having him home, but things tend to get screwy when he’s here on vacation.  I don’t clean, I cook things that are bad for us…mayhem people!  Truth is, I already miss him a little because him being home was fun *wink wink*, but I’m kinda glad to be sitting here planning the rest of the day like normal.

I’ve been knitting away at the Central Park Hoodie.  I’m finished with the back and I’m currently working on the ribbing for the left front.  The back seemed to take a long time, but I think that’s (in part anyway) due to putting it down for almost a week to work on the craft room.  I checked and my gauge is pretty much on, just a tad larger than necessary.  I’m cool with that though…I personally like things to be a little larger than too snug!

So; nothing too interesting going on.  I’m mainly just happy to have some things done that I’ve been wanting to do for awhile now.  Not much new on the crafting front.  Oh!  But I did pick up some new yarn on Friday and some beads on Saturday.  I’ll get pictures of the beads tomorrow.  The yarn is nothing special, just some Caron Simply Soft in Deep Plum.  It’s the same color I did Hammie’s Hedgerow coat out of.  I loved it when I first bought it and want a sweater out of it too.

I finished my craft room this morning.

Please excuse the nasty floor and wall. It’s my dream to one day either own a new house or tear up everything in this place and redo it. The state of this place is more embarrassing than the junk in it sometimes!

Anyway, I’m just glad that everything is finally cleaned up and put away. Now I get to start on the rest of the house that I’ve been neglecting since working on the craft room!

I’m still going. I made a huge dent yesterday and I’m really hoping to be able to finish it today. I’ve been putting things away as I go in both rooms and the back room is staying clean as I put things away in there.

I can’t wait to be finished with this so:

1. I can start crafting again. It’s only been a few days, but I miss it.

2. My back can recover!

I worked all day yesterday and it doesn’t look like much, but it’s getting dealt with, slowly.

I see floor!

I think I’m trying to put off getting off my butt and getting stuff done. I promised myself…just one more cigarette. Then it was, until I finish this cup of coffee. Now it’s; after I post because I PROMISED I’d post! I crack myself up sometimes

I didn’t get the back finished like I’d hoped, but I’m closer. I took a break on throwing shit around cleaning to watch a couple of movies with Paul last night and managed to start the arm decreases. It’s been easy going so far, but sweater backs usually are. We watched One Missed Call and it was good (with a nice twist at the end) but it made me really want to see the original Japanese version. They’re so much scarier than the American versions. Then we watched In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale and it was mediocre. Jason Statham was hot hot hot as usual, but I thought that with a cast of Ray Liotta, Matthew Lillard, Ron Perlman, John Rhys-Davies and Leelee Sobieski it would be really good….shoulda known that Burt Reynolds would ruin it. LOL, kidding, kidding. He wasn’t the only bad bean, but meh…if you’re watching strictly for entertainment and you’re not paying too close attention to the poor script it was okay.

Anyway! Paul and I played with the idea of making something Yoshi related for his Mom for Mother’s day. She loves Yoshi (from Mario fame if you don’t know who he is) and she loved the star mobile that Paul made me for Christmas a few years back. I took his idea of Yoshi cut-outs and morphed it into the mobile idea. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the money to get the supplies soon enough and when we did get them, we didn’t have enough time to finish before Sunday. So, it’ll be a just because gift or a birthday gift. This is what we’ve got so far:

The stars will be the base of the mobile and there will be 12 Yoshis total, with a baby Mario in the center. As you can see, I’ve got two done so it’ll be awhile before it’s finished.

As for what else I’ve been doing? When we moved the living room and bedroom around night before last, we threw things all over the place. My craft room was a disaster area before, but now? It looks like something Squalor Survivors would post on their site.

It’s even falling out in to the hallway. I’m working overtime trying to get it at least somewhat presentable and it’s not going to be easy. I’m moving my sewing stuff, painting stuff and probably my paper craft stuff in to the old bedroom. I’ve already started:

I’ve put my ancient computer in there and I’m in the process of cleaning it up so I can play Sims and Sims 2 on it. There seems to be a problem with the cd drive though, so I don’t know if that’ll be possible. If not, I’ll start using it to categorize my craft stuff. The computer took up the tops of two of my file cabinets in my craft room.

I set up my sewing table in there and I’m going to use the space under the table to store totes of fabric and other sewing related stuff.

I made little shelves to store my paint bottles out of the old dowels from the closet. When I pulled the closet out last year I kept the dowels…good thing…they’re perfect size for my paint and now I can see what I’ve got without rifling through a box!

I made a makeshift bookcase out of milk crates to store some of our books. We don’t have nearly enough book shelves to house all of our books and this works as well. I just put some small dowels through the sides of the milk crates after I stacked them and voila!

I took the shelf from the living room that was housing all of our music collectibles and other junk and put it above the tv in the new catch all room. Now when I’m in there sewing or what have you I can watch tv or a movie. I’ve already got a disc of Keeping Up Appearances in the dvd player.

So that’s what I’ve been doing. Busy work. I’m hoping to get some semblance of order back to my craft room soon because I hate seeing it look like that. If I can just keep making a dent in it every day maybe it won’t take too long to finish.

I didn’t get much crafting done at all this weekend, it was way too busy!  A birthday, Mother’s day and a trip to the swap meet took up pretty much all of our time.   I was hoping to finish the back of the Central Park hoodie, but I only made it up to the arm decreases.  I’m hoping to finish the back soon so I can start on the fronts.  Paul and I also worked on a Yoshi (from Mario fame) mobile for his Mom, but it’s a large project and it’ll be awhile before we finish it.

I’ll try to get some pictures up later today or tomorrow of what I’ve been working on.

I decided to make a new header because I was tired of looking at the old one!  I loved the close up of the beaded stole I was making so I thought it would make a nice new header.