I had a long weekend and what did I do?

A whole lot of nothing. Well sort of.

I picked up some shelves from Ikea for my study Saturday morning, and took my tall son2 to lunch. Hot dogs, a drink and chips at Ikea are only 2 bucks! Cheap date. I then built the shelves, and moved them into the study. As anyone knows building the shelving is the easy part. Populating the shelving is the hard part.

One of my goals was to have a safe place for the cheapie blue and white china collection. My cheapie blue and white china collection was begun by my mother giving me the tea set on the top shelves.

Over the years I sort of refined my criteria to only blue and white, and nothing that cost more than $20. This meant I had to wait 3 years for one tea set, the Chinese style one beside the boxes
but the average cost has been about $4. See? Cheap blue and white collection.

The other part of my concern is shown in the picture above. To the left of the knitting needles is a shelf with my knitting, crocheting and about half of my embroidery books. It was convenient to put things of top them. Acting as a shelf is not good for books, and I wanted to get them to a safer place.

Then there was the ever increasing problem of just too many books. The books you see here are just a small part of it. We have books on bookcases under the stairs, books on piles in my bedroom, books in drawers of coffee tables, books in the kitchen, books on and off the living room bookcases, books in bathrooms. Books were beginning to take over the decor and my husband who is not into books was starting to become aware of them. This would be a crime of the same magnitude as when he realized the extent of the linen stash (and no he has not seen the yarn stash yet). Clearly the books needed a home.

I spent the rest of Saturday just putting stuff on shelves, moving stuff around and deciding how I could get all of this stuff into this very tiny room. I am very pleased. This is the finished product. I just noticed something distressing. The shelf is pretty much full. There won't be room for the rest of my Tom Clancy collection, there is distressingly little room for more needlework books (the bottom 2 shelves), and the brown shelf? That was full before, and it is full again. I do have more space for blue and white china though.

My knitting and crocheting has been sort of slow. I did finish sock one of dad's black socks, and I finished my sister's. I wound several skeins into two balls for socks, I wound some lovely Red Bird Knits Romney Sock yarn , colourways cornflower, into a ball. I did everything to avoid starting another new project. I think I am going to have to give in. After all I would not want to end up with moths attacking that lovely Blue Moon yarn. Much better to keep the yarn moving, right?

There still was significant knitting learning happening. I tried my hand at some old lace patterns from The Complete Encyclopedia of Stitchery, and made a discovery. Knitted lace is not hard at all. Just like crochet, it's all repeats, and all you have to do is learn the rows, and away you go. I thought that when I was working on big yellow acrylic yarn. I tried some on the Romney Sock yarn, and it was a whole other disaster. I had to go back and practise combined knitting decreases in both directions. Annie Modesitt, I sure hope you do make it to Edmonton soon.

My biggest accomplishment this weekend was that I told the guy who has been my swift that I needed a real swift. He thought it was a good idea. My dear Mr. Needles was looking crooked at me as I wound the ball I had just wound to one ball into two (for socks) so I told him that I really could use a ball winder for Christmas.

So though my weekend was entirely devoted to needlework, I feel sort of smutty, as if I had turned my back on my work. The only way to rid myself of this feeling, is to knit more, crochet more.

Does anyone know a good laundry service?