This year I spent the holiday eating too much, and decided to avoid the Black Friday and after Thanksgiving Day sales to work on some much neglected craft projects.
The first project isn't really something that's been neglected, but was pretty crucial to my knitting world. At the Tuesday before Thanksgiving stitching session with my knitting group I ran out of the pink yarn that I had been knitting my pink and black bathmat with. I vowed inwardly to find some pink yarn soon because I didn't want a UFO floating over me, and the bathmat is something that I kept mentioning to my husband that I would make.
On Wednesday night my husband and I drove around to the various craft stores searching for the perfect shade of pink yarn to match what I had been using to make the bathmat. Unfortunately, that shade of pink has been discontinued. I'm sure the yarn could've been found at one of the local yarn shops in my area, but I really just want something very inexpensive for my bathmat because after all-it's a bathmat. I found an acceptable shade of pink yarn at the local Michael's and I think it's turning out to be a decent choice even though it's a bit more slippery than the original yarn I had been using.
Whenever a long holiday weekend approaches I think about how I would like to spend the time. Various ideas flit through my mind. I spent part of Thanksgiving Day knitting the bathmat between meal preparations and knew that I didn't want to spend the whole weekend working on that project no matter how noble that would be.
I have papers and other memorabilia from my great grandfather that I had been going through and documenting my findings, but I learned last weekend that I could only sit and go through the things for a short period of time-so that project will have to sit on the shelf for awhile.
I started embroidering a miniature rug for one of my dollhouses some years ago. This project made it onto my list of New Years Resolutions for next year, but I've considered taking it up again just because it's been sitting idle for so long.
While installing the tile bathroom floor I made in another dollhouse I found and repaired several electrical problems in the house. One of the electrical problems has remained. I considered fixing it over the weekend.
Then there's the miniature diner that I'm making. I made some progress on the project some years ago, but this too has gone unfinished.
I also have another miniature rug that is in the planning stages. This is a life-sized 'Tapestry' needlepointed rug from an old craft magazine that I plan to scale down to 1/12th the size and make it for one of my dollhouses.
After discussing my dilemma with my husband who put them in perspective by saying that some of them were fairly small and others were large ongoing projects. His suggestion was to work on the diner.
I worked a bit on the diner. I made a pattern for the diner's floor, but because I'm lacking the correctly sized piece of thin cardboard, I didn't get much farther with that portion of it. So I moved on to making the diner's furniture. This mainly involved gluing and then as anyone who has done much crafting or miniature work, there isn't much to do with the project until the glue dries. It's sort of akin to genealogy or blocking knitting. You can order a document or you can block a knitted object, but once those tasks are done you can only sit back and wait either until the document arrives or the knitting dries.
The next day, my thoughts returned to the rug that I had started long ago. I had made a partial pattern for it on paper and because I had been so pleased with my cross-stitch pattern making software I decided to recreate the pattern on my computer.
By using the software I was able to create a pattern for it. The size is a bit smaller than I had originally planned, but I think it will still work for its intended room.
