I won't lie, I almost copped out on today's post and thought about back dating it for  tomorrow morning, because it has been a challenging week here at Casa Woolen Rabbit. 
Learning new software is always a challenge and doing it while you are working and planning for a Thanksgiving dinner with 18-20 people attending is a huge challenge, but truth be told, I really enjoy doing this kind of work.  When you are not quite sure what you are doing however it is a long series of "pick and learn" all the while knowing that there really is a much easier way if you knew what the heck you were doing.
 
This song always makes me feel inspired and makes me smile. It reminded me that I need to stay on task with my blogging commitment, so while it's not much, it's something, right? 🙂
Yes, this girl is going back to school…and in the mean time, I will continue to pick and learn my way through updating my new space. 

Normally I would wish you a wonderful weekend here, but you get to hear from me again tomorrow…ha! 
I have a nice conversation in mind for tomorrow, so until then, have a wonderful evening.

Tiles of carnelian, lapis and jade,
The muralist sets his picture.
One centimter at a time.
Every piece alone is precious;
Together they make a priceless whole.
Deng Ming~Dao

Whew…this post almost did not make it up tonight.  You see, I have been drowning in the sea of CSV (comma separated value) files this evening and at this point, I don't think even CPR would help me tonight..ha!  Oh well, I was able to import some important things into the new shop and will have to resort to doing the rest manually for fear of messing up all of the work that I have already done.

Thankfully my day was a bit smoother.  A typical day in a sometimes boring life, but that's ok too.  Tai chi this morning followed by a walk and an afternoon of dyeing.
While the dyepots were brewing downstairs, I was playing upstairs in the studio in between pots with fabric.Yes, my table looks pretty much like the inside of my brain, which is fine because it works well most of the time for me. 😉
This quilt is going to be fun and it is going to be fairly easy which is the best part, right now.  Piece by piece it will becomes something beautiful.

Normally I am not much of a blue person, but just toss in a little gray and I love,love,love it!  This pretty fabric just makes my heart smile.  I know that I will buy some yardage of at least one of them, and it will live inside the big leather/fabric hand bag I am working on for me.
This line of Atelier fabric is absolutely beautiful in all of it's color ranges..so very beautiful!

You should check it out here.

 

Pattern:  Cactus Flower Shawl
Designer:  Romi Hill
Yarn:  Woolen Rabbit Opal
Colorways:  Mourning Dove and Red Hot Chili Peppers
Needles:  US 4 and 5

A while back a group of fellow knit bloggers from the beginning of blogging time got together and knit a mystery shawl together, now called Algiers which was designed by Kirsten Kapur.  We had such a nice time cheering each other on that some of us decided to continue on with another shawl.  Some of us chose this Cactus Flower and others chose to knit Kirsten's Germinate. 
I think that all of us have finished, but not everyone has finished pictures up yet.

I'll be honest with you, I have been finished for a little while.  This beautiful shawl looked at me in her unblocked stage for about a week before I finally filled up a pot of warm water with some wool soak and gently put her in….and there she sat looking at me for almost another week.  Can you believe it? 

Finally, I shamed myself into just doing it.  Procrastination is my middle name at times, just sayin'.  After seeing how Margene had blocked her beautiful version, it made it so much easier for me to envision just how to block this shawl.  It took close to an hour to get it all blocked, but taking the time to do it right makes such a huge difference in the end, so it's time well invested.

The color in this picture is probably the truest color of all of the pictures.  In the top picture I played around in Lightroom for a class picture and I just loved how it came out, so I have used it, but this is a truer example, although the real color is somwhere between the two.  The gloomy skies of November can be challenging to shoot pictures in.

I will be heading down to Southern Maine this weekend for my youngest grandson's birthday, so I will wrangle one of my daughters for a modeled picture.

This was one of the most enjoyable knits I have done in a while, once I got past those first set of nupps. 
Thank you Romi for such a beautiful pattern!

….and I don't have much.  Ten on Tuesday's topic today is 10 Musicians I Would Bring Back from the Dead, and normally I would jump all over this, because I love music….but my body and my brain are just plain tired.  I have been pushing myself both physically and mentally over the last week and it slapped me hard today.

So, I decided to go with this last picture that I worked on for my Start2Finish class.  Kim has been away, so there were no lessons for this week and I have to admit that I missed it.  The class will be wrapping up soon and it makes me a little sad because I have really enjoyed the entire learning process.  So much so, that I talked to Ken this weekend and I am going to research going back to school for an associates in Graphic Design.
Now, I worry a bit if this aging tired brain can go back to school, but why not try, right?

My back is not going to allow me to dye and lift heavy wool for many more years and I figure it's great to have a plan for something that I really enjoy doing.

I promise, I will have a little more for you tomorrow.  Blogging every day is not for the faint of heart, I tell you. 😉

 

As you  can see, Ken had another fun filled weekend of wreckage.  Tearing down walls…all of them!  There once was a wall and a big cabinet behind the washing machine, now there is none.  Where there once was a door opening in the kitchen to the bathroom, now there is a new wall.  No more feeling like you are peeing in the kitchen..whew!

..and that tarp is covering the carefully placed plywood to keep out the cold as Ken says, but in my mind it's there to keep out any potential critters that could be down in our dirt crawl space…eww.  I can't think about that too much or I get much too creeped out, even though Ken tells me I am being silly. 
It is pretty darn cold back here though, I will give him that.

For anyone who has ever been here, you can see a total open concept going on..ha!
The good news is the bathroom will be bigger, the wash/dryer will go into a closet against the back wall with the water heater and there will be a nice tub in there.

Me, I spent most of the weekend working on a new Woolen Rabbit website…so much work!  I did manage to squeeze in a few 5K+ walks and a short Tai Chi class, but other than that and helping Ken when he needed help, my butt was glued to my office chair.

Will the construction be finished before the holidays?  Nope. 
Are there curtains in my kitchen for the holidays?  Nope (kitchen gets a face-lift next)
Will the dining room window treatments be finished for Thanksgiving?  Maybe, maybe not
Come back and see in a few weeks….. Same bat time, same bat channel.

So, it all started with this…. this one very smashed phone that belongs to my youngest daughter Hannah.  Two weeks ago before I visited Hannah and took her out to lunch in Plymouth, I made some comments to my next to the youngest daughter Courtney, who had also cracked her screen about how good Hannah was at taking care of her phone and why couldn't she be more careful..yada, yada, yada. 
(Courtney, not so much…and she knew about Hannah's DESTROYED phone when I said this to her, but as a good sister, she never said a word about it.)

Needless to say when I saw Hannah's phone I was shocked, WORST cracked screen I have ever seen! To put it in perspective however, Hannah has always been given the oldest phone and has never broken one. College kind of changes that for reasons we won't mention here.

I have been lusting after a bigger phone screen because I am blind as a bat, but I had no intentions of upgrading.  I won't say that I was sad however to have the opportunity to get a much bigger phone that I can actually see the words without taking my glasses off.   After I received the new phone from Verizon, we went to the Apple store to have Hannah's phone, which was still working believe it or not, transfered to my 5S and to put Apple Care on the new one.  I was 28 days within the Apple Care on the 5S when we went and it's a good thing we did.  It appeared that the battery on it was dying, so a new one was put in at no cost…that pretty much paid for the Apple Care on that phone.

So if you have stuck with my post this long, you are probably wondering where the dumb comes in.  Well, I couldn't understand why the battery in my 5S was dying when it wasn't really all that old especialy given that I really do not use it nearly as much as my kids use their phones…hmmm.
One of the things I do use it for is streaming Pandora when I am working and I always plug into an iHome type of device which is constantly charging the phone when the music is playing.
Hmmmm…again.  Perhaps…most likely this was the culprit.  So as I thought about it and how I could avoid charging the phone but still hear it loud enough in the shop with all of the exhaust fans running, I remembered this little speaker I bought a little less than a year ago.
Sweet little speaker as you can see by the sand specks here and there that it traveled to the beach whenever we went and it worked perfectly.

Great!  I was feeling pretty good about all of this.  Plugged my phone in and as I was re-skeining yarn and enjoying my tunes, it died, 30 minutes later. 
Dead, dead, dead…sigh
Given that I have never charged it, I figured ok, it needs to be charged, so I plugged it into my computer, as this is how you charge the speaker.
I left it in all night and still in the morning it still wasn't working.  Grrrr.  I spouted off to Ken about it and he suggested contacting Amazon as it really wasn't that old, so I figured that was what I would do.

As I was looking at it and seeing that there was a light on, I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work and it was competely frustrating me.  Then I saw this port.  Holy crap on a cracker, what is wrong with my brain??  Yes, I have the USB cord that came with this speaker which is how you charge the speaker, so why did I think that plugging the earphone end into the computer would charge it?.  ARGGG! 
Of course after I plugged that in for a few hours the speaker works perfectly now.  The only thing I am thankful for is that I didn't bitch to Amazon about it to show them just how inept I can be at times with technology.

…and so, the Dumber part, or maybe this is really the Dumbest part….
I always put some moisturizer on my face before I go out for a walk this time of year as I walk by some open fields where the wind can really whip around.
Well without my glasses on, I reached for the Sombra muscle pain relief rub and used that on my face.  It took a moment for my brain to register both the smell and the tingling sensation before I had rubbed a good amount on my face. 
(Sombra is great stuff btw)

Yes, my walk was a little more painful than usual, but it was not my legs or my back that was barking, but rather my face that cried.
So there you have it…Dumb and Dumber and seriously I think of myself as a resonably intelligent person, but this weekend, not so much!  Ha!
My post of shame…..posting daily will do that to you!

I haven't purchased fabric for anything other than bag linings in a while, but when I saw this line of fabric from Atelier, I was smitten.  There are beautiful grays, plums, golds, reds and blues with gray mixed in, so very beautiful.

I get regular email updates from the Fat Quarter Shop and when I saw this quilt kit, I just swooned and I hadn't even seen the fabric up close and personal.  The beautiful package arrived yesterday and I was SO happy that I ordered the kit.  The pattern is crazy easy, so it will be on my sofa for the Christmas holiday.  I really love it.
Now if they made a few of these patterns in a home decor fabric, it would be perfect as I need to make new kitchen valances.

So very beautiful I tell you….scrumptious!

Remember I told you how much I love my primitive rabbits? 
I have a number of them, but Miss Rita is my most favorite!!

I love this photo of her enough that I think this will become a shop postcard.
I have learned so much in my Start2Finish class and am sad that it is coming to an end soon.  If you ever think you want to take that next step in photography and post processing, this class from Kim Klassen is awesome!

Have a wonderful weekend!!!

Don't be afraid to explore;
Without exploration there are no discoveries.
Don't be afraid of partial solutions;
Without the tentative there is no accomplishment.
Deng Ming~Dao

It's been a while since I have visited this little room located in the village of North Conway.  This is the home of our local Tai Chi Center.  I had taken time away for a few reasons, one of which is the summer heat.  It's no secret that a lot of older people practice tai chi for it's wonderful health benefits, but many of them do not live with my internal furnace, so I knew that it would probably be much hotter in there than I would be comfortable with.  I took the free time this summer to enjoy the beaches and lakes that surround us here and time reading in my little ghetto pool when I was not working.

I decided to go back last week and I am glad that I did.  That first session and my back was so tight and sore.  Enough so that I was a bit concerned, but I went back again this week and I have to say that it has made a HUGE difference in my daily walk especially if I go after tai chi.  I will never be painfree when I do any physical activity, but it's SO much better after tai chi.  I highly recommend it even still!

So that daily walk, yes that one.  A few weeks ago I climbed on the scale and a number flashed, now mind you it didn't land there, but the mere fact that it flashed even for a moment let me know that I have gained back almost all of the weight that I worked so hard to lose 3 years ago and it just pissed me off.  I know, harsh language, but seriously, blerg!
Usually it takes that one little thing to get me to commit to something and so here I am again, back at the beginning.  I know how it happened and even better I know how to get back to where I need to be. So I have been working hard and it is finally starting to pay off.  I know I have a long road ahead and I am making realistic goals.  Small steps with small accomplishments and little rewards tucked in usually works best for me, so onwards and upwards!!

This Wednesday is not actually my work on Wednesday's but the work of Elizabeth Doherty of Blue Bee Studio's using my Emma yarn.

Last year, I met with Elizabeth over lunch to discuss working together for this year's yarn club.  I was a bit nervous meeting someone I had never really met before, but she was so easy to talk with that I felt as if I had always known her.  She had previously designed this lovely sweater using my Airy yarn and wore it to lunch.  I immediately fell in love with not only the sweater but listening to her design process.

After the lovely golden hat based upon the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin was released to the yarn club in August, Elizabeth and I talked about putting together a series of patterns based on this design, which would be ready to the public right away.  (The hat pattern will not be released to the public until February.)

Elizabeth is running a GIVEAWAY contest over on her Ravelry group, The Blue Bee Knits

In order to qualify for this giveaway, please leave a comment in The Blue Bee Knits thread, and answer one of the following questions:

After Copperline and Into Gold, what other accessory would you see in the Metalwork collection?

Or

Which of The Woolen Rabbit’s other colorways fits the ‘metal’ theme of the collection?

FINE PRINT
Comments must be entered by November 30, 2014.
++You must be a member of this group++ to be eligible to win.
Please answer one of the above questions.
One entry per person.
Winner will be chosen at random.

Go take a look and take a chance!  Good luck!