New Projects

To judge from this blog, I have done nothing this year but sew the jade anna dress, and make a few potholders.  While it sometimes feels like that is true, there have been other new projects plugging along.

For example, this is my transit knitting, and it will be a hat.  The pattern is Ellinor by Maria Naslund, and I am making it the Amiral colorway of Cheval Blanc's Bamboulène.  This is yarn I received last year in the June Geek and Nerd Swap, and I am happy to be putting it to such a beautiful use.

That being said, this pattern is terrible transit knitting.  The fabric is lace and twisted stitches, and I am using eight different kinds of decrease to maintain the flow of the twisted stitches through each repeat.  It makes for a lot of thinking, and a fair amount of tinking, and the repeats are large enough that memorizing the pattern is not feasible.  This hat has ended up taking far longer than I thought a hat would.

It seems that all my projects lately have taken longer than I thought they would, both in crafting and in my work.  It makes me anxious to finish something and move onto new things.  There is this pile of cottons for example:

They will be contributing to a new project bag.

There is also this:

I will be trying to learn German.  Learning languages of the human variety is not my strongest skill; I am much more comfortable with computer ones.  However, my husband recently received a rather awesome new work opportunity that puts his German language skills to good use, and the likelihood of a move in the near-ish future is high.  Since it will take me a long time to achieve any sort of mastery of German, I am starting now.

I have hit one milestone already.  This is an apfelberliner.

I bought it by walking into a bäckerei and asking for it, in German.

One early morning a little over five years ago, I stepped off a plane in Geneva, Switzerland dragging two big suitcases.  It was the start of a necessary and important period of my schooling, and at the time I "spoke" only a few words of French: bonjour, bonsoir, bonne nuit, and salut.  I can't even claim that I could say "au revoir" because at the time my pronunciation was so bad no French person would have recognized what I was trying to say.  The inability to understand and respond was frightening, but I kept learning and eventually walked myself to a boulangerie and bought a baguette.  It was my first triumph in French, and now, I have done it in German as well.