Great Expectations…

I know, it has been while since my last post, I feel like I’m in a Saturday evening confessional, “Bless me Father for I have sinned, it has been two whole weeks since my last blog post…”

Sorry, the Catholic upbringing, you know…

I would love to have said, I didn’t post because I was knee deep in felt and that when I finally did put something on my blog, I’d have all these finished panels to show and that I’d be ready to put them together, and since that was to be my main focus for March, my one down month, I was expecting to have actually accomplished something, the month had started so well…

Sigh, I forgot a number of other really important things.

One, I have a life outside of my studio.

Two, that life involves other people.

Three, March is the transition month in North Jersey where the ground thaws, and the soil can begin to be worked and if you want lettuces and spinach, and arugula and radishes to eat in the next couple of months, or at least have them come from your own soil, then the process begins now…

Four, Spring Break for my lovely daughter started with her arrival last Thursday night, at midnight, she couldn’t wait to get home.

So, the bottom line is I didn’t do anymore felting.  I didn’t weave another pick on my mohair yardage.

I did however finish the cashmere top I was sewing. (I decided that after looking at the photos, I shouldn’t have worn that belt.  Too much.)

I did finally finish the knitted sweater I started a couple years ago and furiously worked on while I was in California.  I’m really really happy with the way it turned out. Thank you to all the knitters out there who guided me through this one, it was a real stretch of my limited knitting skills.

And so we get into the expectations.  I thought that once my daughter came home, she would immediately jump into the goings on in my studio and become my second hand.  I have to stop thinking like that.  I have to stop thinking, “Oh, this would be a good job for Brianna.”  This isn’t her job, it’s mine, and although she is talented and driven, she is on break from an intense major, and wants nothing more than to sit in her room and watch Star Trek movies, all the while crocheting things from the yarn she ferrets out of my studio.

This is what was on my desk when I walked into the studio this morning…

She did help me wind all the skeins into balls last night so I could finish setting up the loom for another run of scarves.  I’m leaving in another couple of weeks to Peoria, Illinois, and I’ve mostly sold out of all the scarves I wove prior to my trip to California.  So that jumped to the top of the priority list…

And then of course, there is my lovely  husband, who has also returned from sunny Tampa Florida, and will be here all week, which is a good thing really, since I don’t get to spend a whole lot of time with him, since we are both always on the road, and his birthday is this week.  It is no secret anymore, that I’ve undertaken this monumental task of creating a Lancaster Family Album, all digital, combing through hundreds of thousands of images that are stored in this house in often complete disarray, all the way back to 1974.  I don’t really know if it is as important to the rest of the family that I do this but I’m having the most wonderful time reliving events, finding images I didn’t know we had, and reducing everything down to a few Gigabytes.  So, in honor of my husband’s upcoming birthday, I’ve completed another two years, a marathon task, and I’ve reached the year 2000.  Only 13 more years to go…  That took a good chunk of my days last week.  1999 is much more difficult than previous years, because Christmas 1998 started the digital camera era.  So in addition to piles of images in boxes, in no particular order (whoever invented date imprinting on photos should get sainthood), there are hundreds of images that my husband has carefully archived by month and year, in a networked hard drive, that can be accessed by any computer in the house, and I’m forever grateful that the keeper of the digital images has done a much better job of recording events than I did tossing envelopes of photos, unmarked into a box in the cabinet in the den.  Sigh…

Here is the page for Halloween 1999.  Brianna is the dog, and Eric is the Civil War Soldier with the drum, he was inspired by our family vacation to Williamsburg, VA.  ( I of course made both costumes…)

Oh, and we did get the garden prepped and soil tilled, and lettuce and spinach and arugula and radish seeds planted… 🙂

Stay tuned…