Bits of June flowing into July

Some sewing was done, some spilling was done. Currently living on lemonade watching clothes dry on the line.

Silly game fact: The basic clothesline DIY in Animal Crossing is one of the few I’m still missing. I love and WANT that cute little stupid thing! When we set up our island, Lex was the only one with a Nintendo account and the only one who had ever played AC before (on her wii & switch lite) so she set herself up as the island representative. Little did we know that she would be the only one to get some the of basic DIY’s to build cute stuff for residents, like the clothesline! Now I have to play as Lex just to build myself one.

We don’t play like we did during the pandemic, but I popped on today to take a picture with my clothesline to show you how cute it is and managed to get a present balloon in the shot, what a lucky rainy day on the island. (Those clothes are never gonna dry!)

It’s pea picking season and off in the distance the mood is Emerald City.

Passenger seat view of some quiet field on some barely marked country road taken because the sky was just too pretty. When I used to paint and draw I would try to create “realistic” looking clouds, it was like a weird achievement level I needed to reach and no matter how hard I tried they always ended up looking super fake to me. I don’t paint anymore, and now when I take a picture of a really beautiful sky filled with clouds, I often think to myself if anyone ever tried to paint/draw exactly this, it would look so fake. I’m just now realizing maybe real clouds always look fake, and maybe I was pretty good at clouds all along?

I’ve said it before.. I don’t know what my problem is and why it manifests as crochet hook purchases, but holy smokes these are lovely. Furls Streamline Metal polished Blush and Silver (small sizes)

My beef – not sure why they can’t they keep their size engraving registered properly, every set of mine has a few that are oddly higher or lower than the rest. I’m trying to let go of perfection in my day to day, but this is still kind of annoying.

I have some larger projects going on at the moment and when I need a break, a quick reset, or want to fall into a simple mindless rhythm I reach for crochet. I saw this pattern and it was exactly what I was looking for. I really liked the squiggle effect that was created when different colored stripes were worked next to each other. I didn’t want the extra work of using a bunch of scraps, then I remembered I had 2 balls of self striping DK weight yarn languishing in my stash.

Long ago I made one lowly sock with that yarn and it turned out the sock wasn’t a favorite, but I still really liked the yarn. Sorry I was rude to you 6 years ago, you are officially becoming a real thing now.

I thought for sure it would work well for this shawl, and at first everything was going great. A little pooling to begin with, then squiggles!

As the shawl grew and my stripes became more drawn out, the colors began stacking and overlapping on top of one another again like they did in the beginning, but uglier, shit. I ended up having to cut and rejoin so many times per row to strategically make it look random. I was not chill, I was not relaxed, I was sweaty trying to constantly think ahead about what color was coming next and how could I get a nice distribution of all colors everywhere. I wanted my squiggles back, and I was going to end up having to weave in more ends than if I would’ve just made it 100% scrappy.

Ok, now that I’m out of the thick of it, it’s so fricken cute (SO CUTE!) and even more so with my freshly washed sundress. Don’t get me wrong it was not a hard pattern in any way, I just went into it thinking this yarn would do all the heavy lifting and when it didn’t I struggled.

It’s been so HOT recently, so I’m saving this cutie for cooler times. Look for me in the fall wearing this shawl and a single matching sock!

Pattern: Kría by Tinna Thórudóttir.

Yarn: Regia 6-fädig in the colorway 6369 Lake.

💘