Merry Christmas (Like It’s 1999)

I opened up the present from my sister a few seconds after midnight. I really should have taken a picture of the box in all its glory, because she is an artist in that respect as well as others.

A photograph of the contents will have to wait until I am done beading Lark’s shawlette. The coffee table, at this moment, belies all the work I’ve put into getting my house in order. The box of CD’s is there, and the box which holds the Star Wars trilogy I am watching listening to as I knit. I have a lid which is collecting the beads which have holes too narrow for my size 12 crochet hook to slip through. Those beads will be used later for doll jewelry or a beaded bodice, so they will not go to waste.

The bead shop has a notebook that tells them how many beads of a given size fit into a little tube. So I knew how many tubes to buy, to bling out the shawlette. Most of their purple beads were not ruddy enough, but I found some hexagonal 8°’s that are even prettier on the shawlette than they were in the tube.

There are 23 pattern repeats in each row. The beads form triangles with a base of seven beads spaced every other stitch, tapering up to one bead on the last beaded row. And then the rest of the patterned section (34 rows total) is all yarnovers and decreases, after which there are short-rows to shape that long, skinny rectangle into a crescent shape.

So the first beaded row used up a quarter of the beads [7+6+5+4+3+2+1 = 28] and took a movie and a half. When I went to bed this morning, I was maybe halfway down the second beaded row. This will not be traveling knitting until all the beads are in place, and maybe not then. And a Star Wars movie is not the best choice of ear candy, because unlike chick flicks, which are talky and require little visual attention, Star Wars is mostly whoosh whoosh whoosh bang word explode whoosh whoosh word clang banter whoosh.

I did not realize until last night how much Yoda sounds like Grover [on Sesame Street]. Scary, it is.

Where was I? Oh yes, present from my sister. Yarn, much yarn, hand-dyed from Santa Fe, six mini-hanks in a teal that is more green than blue: the Azul Verdoso colorway. If Blessing were human, she would be fighting me for this yarn. We have three-ply with one ply darker, loopy mohair, alpaca, silk/merino, plain mohair, superwash merino. One of the yarn bases is called Deborah, and another is called Harry. I wonder if the dyer was into Blondie?

Six hundred seventy yards of yarny goodness, and I have no idea what it wants to be when it grows up. It will be fun to look up on Ravelry and see what, if anything, others have done with it. But in the meantime I am going back to the couch, and Episode VI. All the beading is added on the purl side, which makes it a little more difficult to see if I’ve gotten them in the right place. I stop at the end of every section and turn it around and inspect my work. So this is slow and fiddly going, but it is my kind of slow and fiddly going.

In a few hours I will pick up a friend from church, and her boyfriend, and we will head down to Secondborn’s for fun, food, festivity and possibly a fruit roll-up race.

Merry Christmas, everybody.