Oh Hot Reservoir, This Is My Jelly

-and other things that I should never type or say again.

It has struck me that, at this moment, I have exactly twelve hours until my first class of the fall semester. It has also struck me that I've read at least seven books in the last fortnight, and that's a bit excessive. It continues to strike me every day that, if I continue to use the word "struck" in every single sentence, someone is going to lose it, and it's probably going to be me.

Speaking of things that have struck (whoops, there that word is again), Hurricane Harvey has been... rainy and wet and like nature, so I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this topic. I've enjoyed a lot of time wandering around in the rain and wading in the running creek. True, there could be something lurking down in the depths of the murky water, but you'll never know until you lose a limb, and I'm all about new discoveries.

I spent a significant amount of time stepping gingerly into the water, despite my knee-high boots, just trying to gauge its depth. After skirting the foggier parts of the water and taking pictures of the lush, green undergrowth, I had a moment of reckless abandon, and decided that it would be a marvelous idea to just walk blindly across it.

I. Messed. Up.

Have you ever been wearing an awesome pair of socks, and thought, These socks are great, I'm just going to walk innocently through the kitchen, only to step on the single wet spot in the entire house? Do you remember the betrayal you felt as you realized your sock was no longer performing its sole duty of warming your cold little tootsies, and was suddenly freakishly frigid and damp?

Imagine that horrible instant, and then multiply it by a thousand, because, in my ill-devised plan, the bottom of my sock wasn't the extent of the disaster. Water poured in from all sides around the top of my boot, and cascaded in rivulets down my right calf, forming an almost-delicate pool around my socked foot. Horror filled my soul as I realized what had happened. My beloved sock, indeed, my entire right leg, was... WET. With water. Blech.

Was I ever in mortal peril? No. Was I in danger? No. Had I been hurt, even a little bit? Only in my tender heart.

You can stop looking disappointed any time now.

After squelching back to the double-wide, and struggling to open the door due to a swollen wooden door frame, I finally got the boot off. And immediately proceeded to work on my hat pattern. It's not much farther than last time I mentioned it, but progress has been made, and I've memorized the repeats.

Besides working on my *ahem* if I do say so myself *ahem* lovely hat pattern, I've reupholstered a few chairs. While hacking up the old and disgusting suede coverings, it's been brought to my attention that, if you don't clean up after your cat, or clean at all, for more than a decade, your stuff is probably going to smell like death. And possibly like ammonia. And maybe like felted hair from a sweaty cat anus. 

But what are the odds that someone's going to neglect housework for that long, right?

Vaguely related to the upholstery (such a subtle segue!), is the subject of my loss.

Not of my dignity (good luck finding that), but of a secure handle on my yarn swift. Before you cry with despair, just know that I can fix it (CAN WE DO IT? YES, WE- I'll stop now)! I just have to find some glue that works with metals, as hot glue is all I have at present, and I can't see it being a particularly successful binder.

Drowning in Yarn and Covered with Cat Hair

... Basically, a summary of my life.

In the feverish grips of elation, and finally free from the constraints of academia, I began on a harrowing quest to complete the ultimate amount of garments possible within a fortnight.

Now that I am nearly halfway through my glorious two weeks of liberty, I have been delivered a stunning revelation. 

This was a terrible idea. Help.

It's not all bad, and it began innocently enough. One moment, I was washing an owl cardigan in the bathtub in preparation for blocking, and generally enjoying life. The next, it was 2 in the morning, and I was sitting on my bedroom floor with pins in my mouth and despair in my eyes, staring in horror at the sweater that wouldn't block exactly to size. *knitterly scream*

This is why you double-check gauge. Learn from my mistakes, children.

Mmm. Look at those owls. Hawt.

This is technically not a new finished project, but, rather, an addition to a previous one. Nearly a year ago, I knitted myself an open cardigan. Now, you might that it's not a huge deal that the sweater lacked buttons or a zipper. And you would be thinking wrong, because creating a zipper-less sweater is the most freaking annoying thing that I have ever done to date. Hands down. 

The sides of the sweater would flap around as I walked, like the wings of an angel. If the angel had fallen from heaven, gotten drunk, drenched itself in tar, and decided to dance the macarena while walking down the street, that is.

The more my little angel wings flapped madly around me, the more I began to hate the sweater until, finally, I bought a zipper, and vowed to end the insane flippity-flap-flapping. In an afternoon, the wee flappers were contained, and I could silently stalk- 

Whoa, wrong word. Walk. I can walk. Silently. 

I picked gold for the zipper purely to represent my heart of gold, and not because that was the first zipper that I looked at. *suspicious cough*

I know that I'm already working on a hat design and all that, but I couldn't help but knit this Hermione hat after I saw that I had a yarn that was perfect for it. I actually finished an awesome audiobook (called We Are Legion (We Are Bob), for those of you who'd like to know) because of the amount of time I spent sittin' and knittin' on this hat.

Those cables! So stunning! Those bobbles! So bobble-ish!

Slip a Stitch, Karma's a B-

-ig and influential factor in all of our lives. That's definitely what I meant. Gosh, get your mind out of the gutter.

I can feel Autumn approaching. I can feel it. I realize that it's possible I could be hallucinating from the extreme Texas heat, but I'm going to take the positive route and believe that nature is changing in my favor. When I'm in class and decidedly avoiding any additional participation than what is necessary, I daydream about falling leaves... And then I snap back to reality and notice that in my imaginings I've been staring at a classmate's dandruff slowly drifting down to the floor. Ew.

It seems like I haven't been working on much, but, upon reflection, I have actually made quite a few things (I am a marvelous thing factory. I do things, I create things, I destroy all things that get in my way, etc). Besides making copious amounts of coffee, and drinking it with almost an almost indecent regularity, I've been sewing, knitting, and generally avoiding the pathway of my fellow classmate's dandruff gently wafting through the air conditioned breeze.

But enough about dandruff and coffee, we're here to talk about things.

The first thing I made was a creepy (or cute, if you're into the devil) bunny with mismatched button eyes made out of green fabric with black polka dots. I don't have a photo, but, trust me, it was literally a cuddly Satan.

My next projects (please note that, although this is a perfect blog, completely free of inaccuracies, I may or may not be recalling the projects in the proper order of production) were two dresses for my sisters Victoria and Hannah. A while back, I was given some bags full of random fabric pieces, and I managed to create both dresses completely out of those fragments! Being a remarkably professional photographer, I can tell you that I most definitely did not rush around after my morning study session to find these items and make them look as if they hadn't been squished in a closet. I also didn't take one single picture of each and declare it "good enough". That's just not how we do it here on ATBOTBS (what an acronym).

During one of my many weekly adventures down at our house in Dripping Springs, I discovered a skein of Lion Brand Fettucini that had just been ignored and shoved into the school closet's craft box. Made  out of 100% undetermined materials, I had to use it to make a project that looks like its maker was 100% unsure of what to create. Thus, in an afternoon, the Banana Basket was born. 

I'm also working on a pair of beautifully detailed Coffee Cantata socks, but I apparently lost the entire project somewhere. I have no idea how that happened, or where the heck it is, but some field mouse is probably overjoyed at the prospect of a cabled, socky, dinner. Mouse: 1. Katherine: 0.

Because the sock has proven elusive to me, I've started creating a pattern. That's right, I'm getting creative again (*Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared plays ominously in the background*)! It's in the early stages of fabulousness, but it's getting there, and I'm excited to see where it goes.