A pizza from my brother.

Well, sort of - he dropped off some veggies on his way to check on DNiece#1's cat (she and her mother are off on a gap-week trip) and I quickly knew what I wanted to make:

Very simple:  bits of mozzarella, slices of tomatoes, and scattered
bits of basil added both before and after baking.

The original quantity; I did not use all the tomatoes and basil.
The cucumber was lovely.  Still figuring out how I'll cook the squash.

Luckily I had some fresh mozzarella in the refrigerator and a bit of pizza dough in the freezer that I kept meaning to use, but had not yet.  It was the right amount to bake in my cast iron skillet.

Of course I made the weekly soufflé for my parents, this time with a side dish of squash, tomato, onion, and basil.  Veggies from the local farmer's market; basil from a pot my mother has on the front porch:

Work was very busy, and I had three side assignments with deadlines:  An article about contracts, AI, and the metaverse; a cybersecurity test question writing exercise (which goes for a few months, with weekly quotas); and creating reference collateral for a professional association's library.  I also have to finish writing a short article about a Supreme Court decision about trademarks - it's at the top of tomorrow's to-finish list, as I'm partly done.

Yesterday my mother and I went to see the Ruth E. Carter:  Afrofuturism in Costume Design exhibit.  Fascinating to see not just the costumes and her mood boards and fabric samples, but also learn the process behind the designs.  Very scholarly and thoughtful, and so many elements considered!

I've been working on the test sock, and proceeding with the commissioned blanket (just a big piece of what looks like checkerboard filet crochet) while my finger healed from the tiny, sharp needles needed for the sock.  Heel turned and transition to leg pattern achieved, so it's round-and-round for a while until I do the top finishing.

Then I have to make another sock.

Scarves and blankets and bears, oh my!

I am working on a couple things that I cannot post about, one because it is test knitting (several of us are struggling with part of the pattern, but persevere) and one because it's a cybersecurity thing and I have to get clearance.  It's fun - but secret!

I can show the scarves and a blanket I left in Texas to go to Warm Up, America:

Yes, you've seen the scarves before.
Except the one on the bottom, that I made last weekend.
Sorry about the colour, I didn't realize it was so yellow.

The purples-and-pinks blanket is progressing, and looking a little less like a wad of knitting:

I won a prize from the Center for Knit and Crochet because I tested a pattern they created from a toy in their collection.  I told them I'd do either knit or crochet, whichever they needed, and they sent both!  So I did both:

Then I felt guilty because when they announced I'd won yarn from their random drawing of test volunteers I hadn't finished putting the bears together and sending my notes.  (I did send some via email.)  So I did that quickly, before my prize arrived:

I'd planned to make the bears fraternal, but I did the crocheted one first and it turned out the sample knitted one is in red, and I didn't want to appear that I was copying.  So there will be another pair in red with blue faces - once I get a few other items finished!

Just a quick one.

I had a quick weekend in the Dallas area, going to a couple plays, seeing friends, and enjoying some almost-normal time again.  The two plays were:

Both are farces, and both productions were really good.  I know two of the actresses in "Boeing Boeing" but had not seen them onstage, just in virtual productions, so when I heard they are in the cast I decided to try and see the show.  I checked against other productions I wanted to see and opening weekend overlapped the closing weekend of "A Flea in Her Ear", which has two people I know in the cast.  So that pretty much determined when I'd be there.

A couple other shows were "maybe" but without friends in the cast, and no group outing to see them planned by locals, I decided to leave Saturday open to visit friends.  I had a good, and long, lunch with a couple I hadn't see since well before the pandemic.  Wife showed up with a couple bags of yarn she was divesting from her stash, which my hostess and I divided after returning to her home.

Then we went up to Fiberlady to visit.

By the time we got there only FiberGuy (his shirt reads FiberladyMan) and Fiberlady were there, so I got to have a relaxed visit with them.  And bought a bit of yarn.  I wore the top I'd made from their Swirl, and I want to make more of them.  So at least one shirt's worth of yarn came home with me.

I ate some treats:

Breakfast from Sweet Hut.

Lunch at El Noa Noa, enchilada and tamales in chili sauce,
very Tex-Mex.  Yes, I polished off the salsa.

The outgoing flight was storm-delayed, so I almost missed curtain for the first show, but they held it!  My return flight was very late on Sunday, so I had a sleepy Monday, but it was a very, very good weekend of friends, food, and fun.

Just do the things.

I attended an online fiber people hangout this afternoon.  A hundred or so of us gather most Sundays at the invitation of somebody we support via Patreon, to chat and to see what he's been doing (brocante-ing, or a vendor show, or developing a pattern, or whatever), and if you don't feel like being "live" you can sit and work on a project and let the discussion flow past.

Today our host showed some yarn he has been spinning, and said that he'd been stuck for a while, but it's Tour de Fleece season and he hoped he still remembered how.  Yes, he does, and we ogled the purple-with-flecks-of-pink two-ply yarn wound on the niddy-noddy.  Discussing how he approached it, the host said he let go of the need for perfection, and focused on just doing the thing, and relaxing into the rhythm, and simply making thread, and yarn.

This reminded me of a memory that FB showed me, from this date in 2013, when I posted:

It's not quite the same, and yet so very similar.  Sometimes loving what you do, and being inspired to do something, don't align, and sometimes they do, and sometimes it's not the main thing you're supposed to be doing, but doing a bit of it can be refreshing - and soul-satisfying.

So I have my job, and do as I should there, and next week I find out how well they think I am doing (annual review time = report cards for grownups), so it's a time of tension and wanting to do some things and not others, and well.........

I volunteered for a couple pattern-test projects.  One I didn't finish, but there was no deadline, and I have been working on it this weekend.  This is for the Center for Knit & Crochet, and I offered to do either pattern, since I knit and crochet, so they sent both.  I decided to use some leftover yarn, and then realized I was doing the knitted bear in the same colour they had used, so I restarted and now have twin blue bears.  I'll do a separate post about them when CKC allows me to do so.  I did find a bunch of errors in the patterns, so scan and emailed the corrections, as well as emailing one immediately in case others had a question.

The other is socks and fingerless mitts for a designer whose patterns I've looked at, and purchased a couple, but she is very big into using beads and I am not big into beads.  This pattern is heavily cabled with NO beads, so it is right in my pleasure place as to knitting.  I don't like working on a deadline, and had those bears first, so I am behind the others.  On the upside, this means several of the errors in the pattern, or places where clarity is lacking, have gotten sorted.  However, the designer wants to see the socks and get feedback within three weeks from the cast-on for the socks, and the mitt a week after then, so I need to catch up.

I had a problem in that I generally don't buy solid coloured sockweight yarns, because I'd rather do plain quick socks which means a patterned or wild yarn works quite well for not-boring socks.  I found a skein of blue semisolid from Bombshell Dyeworks that will not hide the pattern, so onwards to the testing!  This will also be a blog post once we're permitted.

I've also been making soaps again, as some new moulds arrived.  A friend on KnitTalk posted about his designs because she makes chocolate, and he advertises for that purpose, and she saw some with knitted designs.  I looked and saw they are large enough for soaps, so:

I am also trying to finish that purple-and-pink blanket so I can leave it with my friend to deliver to Warm Up, America! at DFW Fiber Fest.  I'll see her next weekend, and can work on some of it while we're socializing, but it's large and unwieldy and won't do for theater work.

Time to get back to knitting - things are on deadline!

World UFO Day

I have heard that we are now to refer to "unexplained anomalous phenomena" (UAP) instead of "unidentified flying objects" (UFO) for what many people think are alien visitors to our planet.  I think it's going to be a long time before people change what they call those.

For fiber people, and other creative types, a "UFO" has another meaning:  "Un-Finished Object".  This is something that has been abandoned, or set aside, for one of many reasons.  Although I want to make progress on the pinks-and-purples blanket, and I was accepted as a sock-and-mitts pattern test knitter, I decided to pull out a UFO of my own and see about making progress.

The yarn is from Woolworths, so you have some
idea about how long ago I might have begun this.

I wanted to get to the end of the current skein, but won't tonight because I have been doing other things today.  It goes back in the bin while I work on the two deadline projects, and because it requires enough attention to not be mindless knitting.

My parents' anniversary was yesterday, so in addition to our weekly soufflé (their request for anniversary dinner) I made some fresh blueberry muffins and dropped them off early in the morning, so they were waiting when my parents got up for breakfast:

I made a half-batch of six, and kept two.

This week I had a number of work deadlines, and of course reading for my class, and I signed up for the Mark Twain House & Museum Reading Challenge.  I will count the same books as for my already-in-progress reading challenge, and since the books we are reading for class are literature, I've decided that I can count the ones I read in full.  We just finished Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the original 1818 version.  Fascinating to read as it is so different from anything you see in the movies.  Our instructor was not born in the USA so she read the book before seeing any films, and discussed how it gives a different perspective.  I quickly decided that I had to look on the book as standing on its own, and not as a precursor to any film, since it really is different.  I recommend reading it if you like such things, and remember that it was written in the early 19th Century (era of Jane Austen, to get an idea of the writing style prevalent then) so it won't be the sort of science fiction most of us are accustomed to read.  Also, the book was heavily revised before the next version, which I want to read for comparison purposes - but first, I have to finish this week's assignment, and prepare my speeches for Wednesday's online production called "Pass the Skull" - I have two of Laertes' speeches, one of which involves quite a bit of movement.  That is hard to figure out with no cameraperson handy!

PS:  I have tried to remove the white highlighting over the text, without success.  UGH.