I've been seduced by the dark side... of crafting that is

I've been a busy girl! Hard to believe now that school has ended, but I've still been busy. I suppose the difference is I've been busy with fun things. Like finishing up this:

Can you believe it? I've finished Gabe's sweater before he will even be here (another 3 days!!!!) Now I have a bit of a conundrum.... when do I give it to him? His birthday was in February and I'm not sure if I can wait until Christmas. I was thinking I'd bring it along with me to Colorado and give it to him right before I leave, but I really don't know. Any suggestions?

Some other things I've been busy with are working and going to the park. I love going to the park. Now that the weather is nice it's so refreshing to get outside. The other day my roommate and I took her turtle to the park and let him run free for a little while. His name is Pewee and he's super cute. Especially when he gets going. We've all heard turtles are slow, but not him. When he wants to he can really book it!

I have to admit something. I've been busy with something else too. I have been seduced by another craft. I know... I should have started another knitting project when I was finished with Gabe's sweater.... I even bought the yarn to start it.... but while I was at the craft store... well... I happened to walk into another aisle and... well.... I haven't put this down since...
I haven't done cross-stitch in so long and I can't even tell you what made me want to do it again. I suppose maybe the fact that I'm going to be in the car for close to 24 hours might have something to do with it. A girl needs a bit of variety, you know!

I'm sure there will be knitting in my future, but as for now, I just can't get enough of the cross-stitch.

So there are three days until Gabe gets here. Once he does get here, it's going to be crazy busy until I get to CO. I may not get a chance to blog in between. I'll try, but I can't guarantee anything. What I can guarantee is that I'll have some awesome pictures to show you once I do finally get a chance to blog!

I suppose that's it for now. If anyone has any suggestions as to when I should give him his sweater, I'd love to hear them!

So I was tagged...

By Satori. Usually I'm not one to do these things, but I'm bored. Like I said earlier, two days off with nothing to do. Sooooo......

The idea was to show off your favorite coffee (though in my case, tea) mug and tell us why it's your favorite. So here it is. My favorite mug. I bought it while I was in Wales...at a castle no less. It was hand made and hand painted and you know how much we crafters love things like that!

I guess what I like about it most are the colors and the hint of celtic design in them. I'm Irish, I love all things celtic... it's in the genes. If I were to ever get a tattoo (which would require me to get over my fear of needles) I would get a celtic design as a tattoo.

Even the handle of this mug is detailed. I have another mug from the same place. Instead of green and purple it's green and blue and instead of a swirly thing on the front it has a Welsh dragon. I love that mug too.

I love the shape of the mug and I love that it's unique.

So there you have it folks, my favorite mug. Anyone else who wants to give it a try, be my guest!

Patience is a virtue...

And mine is severely lacking. I know it must come as a shock... (on what planet, I don't know) that it is becoming harder and harder for me to wait for my exciting summer to begin. There are, officially, 8 more days that I have to wait. My patience is almost non-existent.

It has helped that these past few days I've been busy working long hours. It not only helps with the passing of time but it also helps my checkbook. I can tell summer is coming with how busy I've been at work. I didn't even have time to think. Unfortunately (but also fortunately) I have the next two days off. I had today off as well and I am going slightly out of my mind. Better to be busy when you have to wait for something than to have nowhere in particular you have to be and nothing in particular you have to be doing.

Though today I've worked non-stop on Gabe's sweater. I'm nearly finished the second sleeve. I'll spare you a picture because, let's face it, it looks just like the first sleeve. Hopefully I'll get that all finished up so I can start something else. Something that's a little more exciting than stockinette!

I wish I had more exciting things to post about... unfortunately for me, there's just waiting...

What a way to start the summer "right"....

And by "right" I mean start a kitchen fire... Don't even ask. I went to put on the kettle for some tea. Everything was going just fine. I stepped out of the kitchen for literally a minute and I heard the water boiling. It occured to me that it usually doesn't boil that quickly... how right I was... I go back into the kitchen to find my tea kettle surrounded by flames! What the hell!!! Turns out earlier on, something had boiled over into the resevoir underneath the burner and whatever it was caught on fire. I put it out just fine, but let me tell you, it's hard to even think what to do when something like that happens. Luckily nothing was damaged, not even the kettle, so I was lucky. A little freaked out maybe, but no worse for wear!

The semester is over, all of my finals are finished (by the way, I got A's on all of them! So much for studying.. I think I'm not going to study much anymore if I can still get A's without studying!) I only have to wait 12 more days to see Gabe! That also means 12 more days to finish his sweater. I'm so close too. Look how far I am on the first sleeve:

It shouldn't take me too long to finish that up and start the other one. I only see one thing that might interfere with that. It seems I've rediscovered my love for video games. It has been quite awhile since I've had the time to play any of my games (we're talking maybe a year or more) and now that school's over and I only have work, I've found myself with a lot of extra time on my hands. Time I thought I'd use knitting, but the games are just so tempting. Well, I'll just have to balance the two and get this sweater finished. That's my goal.

Oh, by the way, some of you asked if I'd still be able to blog while I'm out in CO. Absolutely! I think I might go insane without the internet! I think Gabe would too, so not to worry. I will be blogging all about my adventures in CO!

Two down, one to go...

That's right, two finals finished. In fact, they were the two I was "worried" about (I say "worried" because they were the important ones... I wasn't really worried at all.) To my surprise, I think I did quite well on them. I'm surprise because sometime on Saturday when I was supposed to be studying I decided to screw it and not study at all. So I didn't. My motivation for studying was at about zero so I didn't try to fight it!

I bet you can guess what I did instead of studying... If you guessed knit then you'd be correct! In fact, I knit so much my wrist started hurting. That bummed me out because I was on a roll! I'll post pictures soon, but for now, I have to get ready for work!

Woot Woot!!!

HUGEST SIGH OF RELIEF! My classes are finished! I still have three finals left, but I am not worried about those. I'll spend my weekend studying and then, by Tuesday afternoon of next week, I will officially be finished with school this year!

I went down to my parent's house on Weds. because I had to do go shopping for a dress for the wedding (the dress selection up here just didn't do it for me). I spent almost all of Wednesday morning at the mall... this is definitely something I did not enjoy. I really, really, really dislike the mall and shopping in general (unless it's for yarn). It's just not my thing. After a ton of searching, I finally found a dress I could live with. It's basically a little black dress, a-line, strapless, with eyelets. Very cute. I'll be sure to post some pictures of it once the wedding comes around.

As for the rest of the time spent at the parents house, I basically vegged. I did spend some time outside and took some really beautiful pictures, hence the flower pictures. I'm quite sure spring is here now.

Nothing makes me happier than the sun shining and the flowers blooming!

I also found some time to work on Gabe's sweater. In fact, I'm more than half-way finished the front. I have a feeling this sweater is going to be finished before he even gets here (which, by the way, is in another 19 days!!!!).

Well, now is as good a time as any to start studying so I'd best get to it! Wish me luck!

It's gonna be a busy summer... for knitting that is

Despite my crazy schedule, despite my crazy workload and despite the restlessness, I decided to reward myself. This is mainly because I finished one of my projects in record time. (For some reason I thought it would take me a lot longer). It felt so good crossing that off of the list I have. As I was looking at my list I realized that I only have two more things to do. One paper, which I'm already more than halfway finished with and a very quick project. I can tell you the weight of all this work I have to do lifted quite a bit with that realiztion!

So last night I knit.... and knit... and finished the back of Gabe's sweater...

The color definitely isn't right in this picture, it's not as grey as it looks here. It's slightly more chestnut.

I love this type of knitting sometimes... mindless. Exactly what I need right now. So I knit and watched some TV, talked with Gabe (which, by the way, makes me more and more excited about going out there with all the things he's talking about wanting to do!), and I didn't worry a bit about the last couple of assignments that need finishing.

Then today I rewarded myself again. With these:

With summer coming and no real projects in mind, I had to do something! There are definitely quite a few patterns in that IK that I'm planning on making. I was surprised because a lot of times there are only one or two things I like, but this one kept surprising me.




Here are the ones that I like:


























I'd better get to knitting huh?

Feeling restless

It is down to the home stretch now. I'm so close to then end of the semester I can taste it, not only can I taste it but I can see it... in the form of a massive break-out on my face. Nothing like stress to make the pores on my face want to retaliate.

Despite the large amounts of stress and looming deadlines, I feel restless. I feel unmotivated toward any type of school work, which usually isn't the case when deadlines are near. I feel the way I feel when things in my life are about to change. More than just the obvious change of moving to Colorado for a summer, but the kind of change that redefines who I am. This happens to me, more and more frequently it seems, and it's alway preceded by this restlessness and an urge to get back to my spiritual side. As if I've spent too much time caring about the dramas of life and not enough time caring about my soul.

Everything I do now seems to be under intense spiritual scrutiny. Every action I make makes my mind wonder if that action was demonstrating the type of person I want to be. And if not, what can I do in the future to change that. Because if I want to make any sort of change to this world (and if you've looked around lately, we are in desperate need of change), I must first make a change in myself.

I can tell you, it's tiring to constantly evaluate yourself, your actions, and probably most especially, your thoughts, but I can also tell you, it's extremely rewarding. I've grown so much as a direct result of this. Looking back on the person I used to be up to the person I am now, I can say with confidence that they are two different people completely. Not to say the person I was before was bad, it's just that I've seen that the decisions I used to make didn't work, so I changed my choices to what does work... or should I say did work, because now it seems, I'm about to change again. Into what, I can't really say yet, but it's exciting.

It's hard to focus on school work, which seems so inconsequential compared to soul work, but I'll get through. Only six days of classes left, one paper, one lab report, one portfolio and a couple of finals and I can really focus my attention.

As you can imagine, no knitting has been done. I'm afraid you'll have to wait for awhile longer to see any sort of stitch on this blog.