The Pagan Mom Blog

Todays post will be pictureless because I haven’t taken any lately. I am confident you all can picture things in your mind lol.

The shawl is coming along. I have one crescent moon done and the full moon started. With the schedule I have now I can get one or two rows done a day which makes for very slow progress. But it’s ok, I need the hours much more than finishing the shawl. I am however determined to have it done before Beltaine so I can take it on the camping trip and show it off.

We did make our spicy orange marmalade this past week. I am upset about it. I followed the orange marmalade instructions to a tee and it can now be used as an orange pepper glaze. It’s that freaking thin! I think that someone miswrote the instructions. Unfortunatley I am not a canning whiz and do not know how to change things up so that it will come out in marmalade form. Oh well.

I cannot wait for Spring to get here and the first thaw to hit. I am going to be planting tomatoes and strawberries with the kids (as a part of homeschooling) AND we are going to make some trips to various “pick your own” farms around WNC. I want to set up tours to make it educational and get some great organic fruits to can.

So what are you all creating???

When I started knitting I was worried that I would always follow a pattern and never really create something that was all my own. That has totally changed and I am proud of myself.

I had been looking at doing some prayer/meditation shawls and was very intimidated on how beautiful they were and I would never figure out what to do to create my own niche in the knitting world. After taking a basic designing class I started working on my first peice. I went with a trapezoid type shape and then used a program that will take a picture of a symbol and turn it into a knitting graph. I am not a fan of graphs but now that I am using one in the manner of designing I love it. I decided to do a triple moon goddess symbol and I wanted to bead her.

Working on a shawl when you are a slow knitter & designing as you go proves to be a long work in progress. But today I started the beadwork and I have a renewed sense of excitement for my shawl.

Isn’t that adorable? And I love how the dark blue is like a night sky and the silver beads are like stars. I am a nighttime of gal and this is perfect for what I had envisioned. Now I am thrilled and have about 50 million ideas flowing through the brain.

So if you have considered designing but are intimidated by the idea of taking on that task…..it really isn’t that hard. Give it a go, the worst that will happen is something doesn’t work and you figure out how to put your vision into the fiber.

I am so sorry I haven’t been around. With the weather monkeying up my work schedule I just haven’t had time to sit down and write anything. And to be honest by the time I got home I didn’t want to touch a computer lol.

In regards to my last post, for now I am going to continue as I have so far. If it becomes an issue at work I will deal with it then. Not sure what I would do, things are different when you work in a family business. I mean if I sued my father in law over religious discrimination, it would make for bad ju ju with the family. But I don’t see that kind of situation coming up so I am not worried about that. I think it just hurt to think that someone might suddenly change their opinion of me based upon a bumper sticker. Only thing I can do is remain professional, I am not about to try real hard to win someone over.

Moving on to other events, the weather prevented me from enjoying my weekend at Knit Inn 2010. That was frustrating because I REALLY was looking forward to the classes I had signed up for. On the upside I was able to get down there yesterday for the last class, a designing shawls class. I am a visual learner and unfortunatley this was not a hands on class. BUT, I did learn quite a few things. So I am currently designing a basic shawl just to get started. I have several ideas floating around in the head and will eventually get to work on those. I want to get the hang of the basics first. I am still trying to work down my stash and getting there somewhat. When I design the next shawl then I will buy more yarn. Or maybe when I get cracking on one of my projects in my queue in Ravelry.  Whichever I get to first lol.

That’s about it around here. Just doing what I got to do to keep up with work deadlins and keeping kids fed. Ya know, the boring stuff lol.