Heehee, more yarn!

After closing my store, I had a lot of shopping bags that I wasn't going to use. Well, it turns out that my local yarn pusher supplier uses those exact bags, so she traded me some yarn for them. They're mostly cotton, but the cotton appears to be plied with a very thin nylon or similar synthetic fiber.

Here's a couple of picture of the yarns,. Yes, I know the pictures are lousy. I need better lighting to do this right. Still you can see the plying in the second picture.










I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do with them. Given the time of year, it's tempting to try something patriotic with the cones.

Update: Illuminated Crochet Hook

Illuminated crochet hooks are available at JoAnn Fabrics. There's still no sign of them at AC Moore though. I didn't get to Michael's so I don't know if they've got them.

Update: Michael's doesn't have the hooks on their website, so I assume that they don't have it in their stores. AC Moore's website is so poorly designed that I can't tell if they carry the line or not. In fact, I think I want to submit it to Web Pages That Suck, it's so bad.

Crochet Carnival the Second

In the better late than never department: The second installment of the Crochet Carnival! is up at What's Cluttering My Couch and has been since June 15. I've to stay on the ball with these things.

What now?

So I've finally finished getting everything out of my store and either into storage or home. I'm trying to figure out where I go from here.

1) I need some kind of work, preferably something that actually pays money, as opposed to the shop which didn't. I'm looking into some options here, but don't really know what's going to happen or what I'll end up doing.

2) I need to actually start exercising regularly. I've renewed a gym membership that lapsed a couple of years ago, now I need to start using it. Unfortunately, the personal trainer option is expensive, so I'll have to see what I can figure out on my own and with a doctor's help.

3) Household clean up. The Button Lady needs to help out with this as a significant chunk of the mess is hers, but I've got several years of accumulated paper to filter and pitch. This is gonna take a while. What's worse is that at this time of year, I'm really gonna need to work in the wee hours of the morning or after sunset to avoid the day's heat. We can't put in the AC until we clear a path to a suitable size window.

4) Improve the diet. Before I even think about counting calories, I need to work on a) my fiber intake, b) my intake of fruits and vegetables, especially ones high in vitamin C and folic acid. I've installed menu planning software and plan to start using it to come up with suggestions for things I can add to my diet and ways to prepare them. Of course, I'm also going to be scouring my dead trees cookbooks as well.

In addition to all that, I want to start posting regularly on my blogs. Think that's a big enough "to-do" list?