An idle mind is a playground for the Devil

That's not exactly my personal philosophy, but it is a repeated line in the latest song to be on heavy rotation in my iPod: Do You Wanna Get Funky With Me, by Peter Brown. Behold, the album cover:

I'm guessing the answer to his question is "yes."

ANYWAY, during the past month, neither my mind nor my hands have been idle. No, not at all. This month of exclusively working on projects for myself turned out to be fun, productive and really satisfying. I almost never make things for myself, so it was a real change for me to be completely unleashed with respect to yarn and project selection. On more than one occasion I found my head spinning with the possibilities: what to start? Socks? Scarf? Sweater? But start I did and, perhaps more importantly, finish I did. I felt very focused this past month, the month of selfish crafting. I often have a hard time finishing projects, or at least those which require "finishing," and it can be a bit depressing to look, day after day, at an almost complete, let me just weave in the ends, attach the sleeves to the body and block it project. So wrapping these puppies up made me quite happy.

One project in particular gave me a real sense of accomplishment. Months ago I hatched a plan to crochet a bunch of flowers, as many as I could get out of two partial skeins of Louet Merlin. The remnants had been lying about for almost two years, and I really, really wanted to make use of them.

I've yet to settle on a final project for les petites fleurs, but at least they're done. I'm thinking that it could it could be neat to join them all in a random fashion with white linen yarn, perhaps make a window covering for one of the windows that looks out into my backyard space. We shall see.

The other thing I am really excited to have done this month was to knit up my first garment sans pattern! I saw a simple sweater that I liked on Ravelry but didn't feel like shelling out cash for another pattern. then I reasoned "I'm fairly bright. I can knit a swatch and calculate gauge. I know how to knit do simple increases and decreases. Bring it on!"

One thing I'm no good at is taking photos. Between poor lighting and nothing on which to balance a camera, it's hard to get shots of me wearing anything that I knit. But I do try. The things that makes me the most happy about this sweater is that it was knit with recycled cotton. I had a sweater that I never quite loved on me and was about to put it in the Goodwill pile when I remembered that I could frog it and put the yarn to a better use. So I did! It was a little tedious, but not too bad and so worth it (read: cheap). It's rare in life that one gets something for nothing, and since I also honed some skills, this project was kind of a twofer.


In other news, I ran the Brooklyn Half-Marathon this past weekend! I was nervous heading in to the race because I really hadn't been training properly and didn't go for a single run in the week preceding the race, but I did carboload with pasta, Jeni's ice cream and white wine the night before (that's something, right?). Fortunatly, the 10,000 of us who ran the race were blessed with a beautiful, sunny day with low humidity and clear skies. The race started with us running two loops around Prospect Park, then heading down Ocean Parkway all the way to Coney Island, where we finished on the boardwalk in front of the Atlantic Ocean. Dawn, Julie and I ran the entire race together, chatting away to keep our minds off of the task at hand, and celebrated with hot dogs (me) and cheese fries (not me) at Nathan's Famous. To quote Ice Cube, I gotta say it was a good day.