Math

   

     I came to a conundrum with what I am now calling my Aegean Sea Mitts. I requested the larger skein of yarn because I thought I would need it and wanted the option of long gloves. The gloves are now almost 10 inches long, 1.5 inches longer than the pattern, and I still have quite a bit of yarn. Since I started with the dark color, it's also the lightest and prettiest part. In order to use up every last bit I realized that I would have to do some increases. Now, I'm not math-adverse in the least. I love solving equations, but coming up with your own equations to solve, that's a different story. I put them aside for a day, but that didn't solve anything. Finally I sat down with a pencil and paper and a ruler and tape measure, measuring the mitt and my arm in various places and figuring out how many stitches I would need to increase, and when. I also had to carefully wiggle the mitt on and off of my arm without dropping any stitches of a 9" circular, needle, my preferred method of working mitts and socks. I'm doing paired M1 increases facing each other on either side of the stitch marker every 7 rows. This will get me a 20 stitch increase by the time I estimate the yarn running out. We'll see how it goes!
   
     While I was mulling this over I worked a few rows on Hitofude. It's such a treat to go to the relatively large size 5s after working on toothpicks for so long. I'm looking forward to finishing that sleeve section (finally) and grafting the ends together.
   
     Look what came in the mail today!

6 luscious balls of Aunt Lydia's size 3 crochet thread. I was perusing the Crochet Today from 2008 I got at a yard sale. Not much that interested me, until I saw the Sunburst Bowl. It was a technique I had never heard of called tapestry crochet, where the colors are floated across the top of the work and trapped there by the working yarn. It looked fascinating and I knew I had to try it. I figured I could pick up this stuff at Joann's, but they mostly had size 10. After searching around the internets I found some at Knitting Warehouse for $2.04, which is quite a bargain. I came up with my own palette which differs a lot from the original.

In reading the project notes on Rav, yarn management does seems to be a pretty big problem with this technique, especially when working with 6 colors. I have to try and constrain my self from starting this until the mitts are done, because there is a deadline there. This will definitely be an at-home only project.

     The whole family seems to be in a Mindfulness Meditation phase. Besides taking my son to UnPlug, I listened to Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief which was a nice introduction but rather short at just 2 hours. Through Unplug I learned about the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. While I have little formal training in meditation per se, my 20+ years of yoga practice has exposed to me to various forms of meditation and mindfulness. My husband was aware of this as an established part of medicine and can receive CME credits for it. We decided to take the Mindful Awareness practices class together this Spring. Now if I could only get him into the yoga studio...

     In this same vein, I'm taking a break from dystopia and crime and reading A Life Worth Breathing by Max Strom. I've never had the pleasure of taking a class with Max but I know that he's quite a rockstar in the yoga world. I also started listening to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. This book is getting a lot of buzz for it's power to transform your behaviors and your life. Change and transformation seems to be in the air all around me these days. The key seems to be going with whatever is manifesting itself for you. These things do seems to arrive on their own timeline and in their own way.