So I was kind of relieved my current 4-ounce challenge project, which I’ve already wasted too many precious pre-Yarn School hours on, fill me with ambivalence. But instead of frogging it seconds later, I decided to put it aside for now. Hey! Look at me! I’m exercising impulse control!

By the way, did you notice that the moment the little hand passed 40, I immediately got super tired looking? In fairness to my unusually dull eyes and pasty skin, the electronic glow of an iMac isn’t exactly beauty ligthing, and I always look like shit the month before Yarn School. Shoehorning too much stuff into to little time. Oh! But now one less thing, because I’m dropping out! Yay!

You know, it’s a shame I’m such a little steam engine at heart, because when I do finally quit something–well, it’s just my favorite thing ever! The very worst part of being self-employed is not being able to quit. Man, I miss having a job to quit. Quitting’s as fun as the circus! (And for those few of you who have actually seen me at a circus, you now know how very much I love quitting jobs.)

If they do another 4-ounce challenge, I’ll spin the yarn for and write up my little 4-ounce vest pattern, which I really do like–especially because now I have a very easy, reliable garment pattern that can serve as the low-yarn alternative to my top-down raglan standby. Now all those random collections of 2 skeins have a purpose other than the fictional future socks I pretend I’m going to knit of them.

Modeled by Autumn Howe . (Ah, nothing like a glowing, 5′9″ teenager to make you feel like Norma Desmond.)

Time to drag my ass upstairs for one more batch of dyeing before I haul my weary carcass to bed.

We have one small private room, one shared double, and a few group room slots. If you register for both sessions (Yarn School + Felt School), you get a bonus session in the Dye Lab with the marvelous Adrian of Hello Yarn, she of the penetrating dyes!

Register here.

I love the very beginning of the month before Fiber School! I’m wildly excited, but not yet utterly stressed out. I just ordered the fiber, and I went a little crazy and tried a bunch of new fibers for the shop & dyeing.

I’m re-shooting the Caranaby reknit today for knitty. But this is all I can safely show:

That could be anything!

My 40th birthday came and went with little fanfare and with much sulking and bursting into tears. I honestly didn’t expect to have any emotional reaction, but the day started with my parents waking me up to laugh at how old I am, which I imagine was supposed to be hilarious, but coming before I was really awake, it had the opposite effece and kind of set a bitter, depressing tone for my whole day. My birthday unluckily fell in the PMS zone, which always makes me act like something of an embarrassing stereotype, and yesterday was no exception. Yay. The sucky part is, I’m still 40. Man. I’m seriously not handling this well at all.

Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts.

Drum carder dyeing is my favorite kind of dyeing. Lots and lots of random pots of all kinds of fibers and colors. I love not having to think or plan or make the colors repeatable or worry whether I’ve already done this combination or mix enough dye for a whole batch. It’s like cooking, a pinch of this and a handful of that, mostly you can’t remember what went in it, so you have to just enjoy the little bit you ended up with.

On Friday I ferreted out all the random bits, mill ends, unsatisfying colors, random lonely skeins and sacks of unlabeled fibers I could find and whipped up a bunch of big, sloppy random, disconnected colors. Yay! Maybe I’ll start selling random carding sacks of random fibers so I can do this all the time.

So tomorrow, it’s knitting, stacking hay, setting one last post in concrete, emailing the next person(s) on the Yarn School waiting list, calling Autumn to see if she’ll model Caranby for me, making my mom do it otherwise, finishing the fair book and finding out if I’m really truly finished and, if so, sending it to the printer, paying any outstanding bills, and accepting that I won’t be able to squeeze in anything else from my list and that my August To-Do List was a tremendous failure… and then… THREE FUN-FILLED DAYS! I’m so excited about my little break, I could almost scream.

I was complaining to Suzanne about how I can’t do Weight Watchers without a convenient meeting (I either have to drive 40 minutes each way, or drive 20 minutes each way at 7.30 on a Saturday morning, when any civilized person with the day off should be fast asleep). When I lived in Austin with a meeting 5 minutes away, I was totally on goal. Here, I’m 25 pounds over. And that’s being generous. I was trying to explain how it wasn’t the meeting, it was the deadline and the accountability. She said, “I understand. You want to be graded.” Which is it, exactly. Then she said, why don’t you post something online? Because I don’t want to sit on my fat ass advertising my lack of self-control.

But it turns out, maybe I do, just for a minute. Just in case my imaginary ideal surrogate Weight Watchers meeting thing actually exists and someone can tell me where it is. So here’s what I want. I’m looking for something that’s essentially just like a Weight Watchers meeting, but online. I want to log it at the same time every week, in some situation with other human people doing the same thing. I want to weigh in, get some kind of salute if I’ve done well, and then either stay for 20 minutes (or some other fixed amount of time–no open-ended chatting) with a designated person keeping it on topic–no freeform discussions–and listen to everyone cheer and bitch–or not, if I don’t feel like sticking around. Just like in a regular meeting. Is there something like this online? Anyone?

That’s not entierely true. It’s usefull for wee projects and fine yarns, but man, for worsted and up, knitted fabric is just so fracking unpredictable. Curse you, lying swatch!

Okay, back to my knitting. I want to get it in one more repeat before I hit the hay.

My panel yesterday was a much more pleasant introduction to the process. The panelists were no less thorough and considered, but they were so much more positive, open, diverse in opinion, and certainly were much more humble. The sense was more that the were selecting versus dismissing. They also kept to the clock, which impressed me, both because I’ve got a crap sense of time, and because it just seemed so fair. I don’t know if that matters in the big picture, but I think I would have had a much more positive experience today if all the candidates had gotten equal time. When there are rules, I like them to be followed (hence my love of board games). I have a Liz Lemon-y devotion to rules, especially in a forein situation. I like strong perception of fairness. Otherwise, I feel fatalistic. And I’m just not a fatalist, so that makes me peevish. I’m much more comfortable in a situation that forces me enthusiastically to blame myself. Me fucking up, that I can work with. That I can fix–or abandon, if that’s the better option. Everything else, all those little quibbling elements you can’t control, well… what the hell are you supposed to do with that?

But don’t worry, I can still totally blame myself here. Ultimately, my writing wasn’t up to snuff–too many of their questions, I thought we’d covered in the narrative, but obviously I did a shit job editing it.

And maybe my grousing really just boils down to  a matter of the types of personality I find attractive or disagreeable, And it’s impossible to know whether what I initially found off-putting would have been magically transformed to charming if they had liked the project. Ultimately, who cares?

Meh. I’m going to go dye some fiber. I need to sweep out my brain.

Today I got to observe the review panel for a Kansas Arts Commission. It was very interesting and not a little harrowing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see any of the proposals for the first half of the day, which included the grant’s top marks. But I did get an overall very positive response, and some feedback which should help me refine my narative and proposal if I don’t make it through this round. Sadly, he legislature pretty much obliterated the KAC’s budget for the year, and although I got pretty good marks, I’m not nearly high enough in the scoring to have much confidence. At the end of the day, they tally up all the scores and give you your ranking. Awards are based entirely on points and applicants aren’t participating in the review process in any way, but it’s still gratifying to hear the discussions. The panelists were really dedicated and articulate, so I loved hearing their views/criticisms of projects.

The experience kind of transported me back to high school speech tournaments. All of the panelists/judges get score sheets with several different scoring sections and points values assigned to each. The judges give you points, some with comments, some without, and you try to suss out where you went wrong. Of course, there’s always one that thinks you’re brilliant and one that thinks you’re meh, so you have to kind of read between the lines. I glanced over the notes I got, but I knew I had to rush back for the Earth Scouts visit, so I didn’t fully absorb them. We can request a copy to review later, which I will definitely do so I can work on my weak spots.

Part of me lives for this shit–being graded, revising, tracking my improvement. But the other part of me, the bigger part, the part that’s always broke and short on time–that part just really wants the grant so I can get to work.

I know grant writing needs to be a solid part of my future, so I’m going to plan to attend these reviews whenever I can, even if they’re not grants I’m trying for. I need to learn how all of this business works so we can afford to keep making work and continue with cool collaborative & community projects. Go art!

Here you can see the edge of Hokey Pokey’s reverse bikini line.

And this picture just kills me. It makes me think of two hopeless old biddies in some Merchant Ivory film being simultaneously dreadfully mean and dreadfully polite as they sip their tea. The should both be wearing high, lacy collars and peering through lorgnettes.