Mired

I am suffering from creativity overload. Geez, I know. Poor me. There are so many things running around in my head that none of them seem to be able to find the teeny tiny window of available free time and squeeze through it. Instead, I sit down after getting the girls in bed and look at my incredibly messy office. Messy because there are so many half-finished projects loitering about. Messy because there is a constant stream of paperwork to file and process. I have to choose between trying to catch up on the most urgent family business, catching up on knitting pattern business; and fun new design thingies.

Instead, I sit here for an hour catching up on blogs and answering e-mails about playdates, then updating my Netflix queue. I must write up a to-do list and prioritize it, but I promise I won't subject you to it. Instead, I am going to subject you to random pictures from my day. You've been putting up with that for ages now anyway, so here comes a bit more!

Did I mention that the Yarnery had my baby hat pattern at their booth at Yarnover, and they sold out of all the copies they had, plus another store placed an order for some? Very exciting. Now I just have to print more out and get them shipped. Woot! And because I know some of you are going to ask, this is a picture of the baby hat, and no, I don't have an online store, but if you really want a copy and you're outside the Twin Cities, e-mail me at shellyk at shellykang dot com and we'll work something out.



The girls and I spent more time outside this afternoon. I spread out our ugly lawn blanket and tried to do a little knitting while they amused themselves in the sand box. My first hand-dyed self-striping socks are almost knit up. This is one of the many things I'm trying to ignore tonight. When a pair of socks gets this close to done, it is very hard for me to restrain myself from just working on them constantly to finish.



I've been thinking a lot about yarn-dyeing lately. More, even, than the blog would indicate. I want to do a lot more of it. Like, enough that maybe I could sell some. I know a few of you have expressed an interest in that, but I am so teetering on the brink. Am I good enough? Can I produce it quickly enough that I can make a decent return on my time? I still can't find a base yarn that I'm perfectly happy with. The Knitpicks is fine, and probably the best price for the quality I've found online without looking into wholesale prices. I still want a superwash wool/nylon fingering weight with the texture of Koigu, or at least with the texture of Regia or Opal. But even buying base yarn at the Knitpicks price, I would have to charge at least $20 a skein plus shipping to make it anywhere worth my while. Even then, we're talking less than minimum wage. If I'm going to bother dyeing yarn, I want to do multiple colors of self-striping - like at least 4 or 5 different colors of stripes. I'm just not very efficient yet, and the only way to get that way is to *do* it and figure out how to save time.

In the mean time, the girls were happily digging in the sand again. We got a good rain last night, and Julie found some earth worms in the sand box when we opened it up. I tossed them into the grass and hoped they'd recover.



Sophie is very excitedly practicing her walking skillz. She's getting better, and it is awesome to watch the look on her face as she stands up and takes teetering little steps. She is so proud of herself, so happy, so shocked to be actually doing it.



We came in when Sophie plunked herself down in my lap and continually made the sign for nursing. I put on a video tape for Julie (she is in love with a set of Disney song videos that our friends across the street loaned us. I'd be fine with that except now she is obsessed with Princesses. Help me.) This is what she looked like when I came downstairs after putting Sophie down for her nap. She was in a complete TV-induced zombie haze. It's really pretty scary to see, and the reason why I limit her TV-time to about an hour a day.



We remedied the situation by pulling out the finger paints. Every finger paint project ends up looking like the exact same thing - a brown mess entirely covering the page. But that's okay. It's the process that counts here.



Finally, a collection of some of our favorite little kid books. I borrowed them as inspiration for a little project I have brewing in my head, and Julie was very upset when she saw them in my office today. I told her I'd have them back to her when she woke up in the morning, so I just took a few pictures and they're stacked up ready to go back upstairs as promised.



You know, having too many ideas and not enough time is not always a bad thing. It does give me plenty of chance to let the good ideas ferment and bubble to the top and the less-good ideas sink back into the mire to pop up again later in a better version. If only there were a few more hours in the day!