In Which . . .

. . . well, nothing really.

There just isn't that much worth talking about that is going on here. Thanksgiving was late, Chanukah was impossibly early, and  the relevant birthdays showed up exactly when the calendar said they would but managed to surprise me anyway.  I caught a whopper of a cold, which was an insult to my belief that good sleep, eating, and exercise habits will keep illness at bay. The cold lasted two weeks and led to the consumption of several boxes of tissues and tea and the declaration of a mandatory jammy day in which no one was permitted to get dressed and everyone was required to lounge around  watching movies all day.  It (the jammy day) was most efficacious, which sounds like a dirty swear word but isn't.

I also bought some metal lunch boxes.  During one of my more recent tidy-up-the-yarn/fiber-stuff rampages, I decided that it was vital that I find entertaining, practical, and portable storage for  some of my pointier projects--the kind that would do no end of damage to my fabric project bags.





First I swiped  Matty's Yoda lunchbox.   He used to use it to carry his Playmobil knights, but he was surprisingly willing to give it up and I suspect he objected to the genre-confusion inherent in transporting knights and horses in a space-themed container.  I, on the other hand, thought it would be perfect for my Zoom Loom, which was advertised as coming in a handy carrying case that turned out to be nothing more than a paperboard box with a handle. As if.




Doesn't that look perfect? I'm a little freaked out by the ghostly imprint of Yoda on the inside cover, though; I feel like he'll lop off my hand with his light saber if I get too close to the loom.

Belligerent Jedi notwithstanding, I was so pleased with my lunch-box-as-craft-storage discovery that I decided to add to the collection.  The hardest part was choosing exactly the right theme: whimsical? nerdy? retro-cool?  Evidently not much has changed since elementary school when your choice in lunch boxes could make or break your social standing.

The first choice was easy: who wouldn't want a sock monkey lunch box?  And how much cooler would it be if I actually stored a sock project in it? Nerdvana, right?  I wish I could claim that I was really that clever, but because I am pathetically slow in the uptake, I didn't even recognize the full potential of a sock monkey lunch box until after I had stuffed my sock project inside.  Poor me.  Then again, maybe I am super-clever, just on a sub-sub-sub-sub-sub conscious level.  That must be it, right?



Purchased lunch box #2 was a much tougher choice.  It was easy to rule out Power Puff Girls and Hello Kitty, but the final choice--Scooby Doo vs. Doctor Who--was agonizing.  Much as I love Scooby Doo and the Gang, in the end the Doctor Who box was bigger (inside and out) and blue-er enough to overcome the yucky fan-girl feeling that comes from actually purchasing it.





And so I stored my fairly recently acquired Hipstrings spindle in it, and because the blue box is so big, I could fit the wool and (you can barely see it peeking out from under all that wool) my Emile Henry spindle bowl in too.



Isn't it amazing how the blue of the spindle matches the blue of the lunch box?  There's a reason, although--true to form-- I failed to realize it until  after I had stuffed all of these goodies in: this is a Time Traveller spindle.  Get it?? A Time Traveller spindle in a Doctor Who lunch box!!! And now we have convincing proof that I am a geek and a fangirl and either I am a sub-sub-sub conscious container-to-project-theme matching genius or the Force was with me when I was hunting around Amazon.  I am not a little embarrassed by all of this, and you can read that any way you think is appropriate.

As if my lunch box adventures were not enough, I also went on a little bag making binge.  I found outstanding tutorials for making drawstring bags and those insanely cute little zipped boxes (although I forgot to take a picture of the one I made).



I'm not quite done yet; below are the next four fabric combinations.  I bought them (along with the coordinating zippers) for making the fabric boxes, but I suppose one of them might find itself becoming another drawstring bag instead.



And finally (of course), there was a little knitting that got done during all this nothing time.

First up is the finished (but not blocked) Triinu shawl that I started last year.  It doesn't look too promising right now, but I promise I will block it soon and then (hopefully) it will be magnificent.

And done, which was really the only thing I cared about in the last half of the project.



Another major project to cross off the list:  the ugly duckling afghan. As suspected, it is very brown. It is also 4 inches wider at the beginning than at the end, which has something to do with the 2 year duration of this beastie, a circular needle shortage, and somebody's failure to note even the most rudimentary details in her  project notes.



Again, however, it is done and, as you can plainly see, cat approved.



It is currently doing its appointed duty in the family room and it showed up not a moment too soon when you consider the old school nature of the winter we've been having.  And I like to think of its trapezoidal shape as a brilliant design innovation, similar to the mummy sleeping bag shape.  After all, aren't most of us wider at the top than the bottom? How clever of me to tailor my blanket to that.