Winter.

It's been a while. I know. And I've been such a slacker these days ... I didn't even make Christmas cards this year. The biggest hurdle, and you'll laugh when you hear this, I'm sure, is that I don't want to make a mess. I'm having a phase, you might call it, where I can't stand the clutter in the house. I've been going around, filling boxes with stuff that is unnecessary. Unsentimental knick-knacks are outta here. The crafting supplies for crafts I no longer make the time for are outta here. Part of it, of course, is that the tree takes up a lot of space, so the room feels smaller than normal. Another part is just that I'm forced to be indoors more ... we've had a lot more rain than normal, and so our cozy little house is feeling extra-little (and yes, extra-cozy as well). But honestly, we just have a lot of stuff. And I'm finding it so tedious to always be hauling mountains of stuff from the table every time we want to eat, and from chairs when we want to sit. You get the picture. But these things don't have homes, so they just float from one flat surface to another, depending on which one we need to use.

I have, however, been working on this lovely, snuggly, fun scarf. I found the pattern here and you can probably tell what it looks like better from her picture. Since mine's made of fuzzy yarn it's a bit more difficult to see the way it's done. It started out quickly, because we were doing a lot of driving to visit family and back, and what else does a person do in the car? But then it's tapered off now, because my hands start to hurt if I spend too much time knitting, and then I can't work. So I've taken a little break, or I'll just do one section at a time. Regardless, it's going slowly. That's okay. I'll still wear it throughout the spring. And I'm really excited about variations. I've got a plan to do some fun things with the next one, playing with color, and playing with ribbing. I'm excited to experiment. Especially since I have some really YUMMY yarn that I bought about a year ago when I was still all gung-ho on making and selling hats, but that I couldn't bear to part with. And eventually, I'd like to splurge, and buy some yarn from LunaSea someday. She's the one who introduced me to spinning a while back, and if I could bear to start another hobby, or to have more stuff in my house I'd be doing that, too. But I can't bear it. The idea of more stuff in my world just makes me go crazy.
So yeah. It's winter.
And I'm not getting all crafty and inspired as normally I would be. Instead I'm just going insane, as the people around me will attest. Oh well. Hopefully my much-needed birthday trip to Yosemite next weekend will cure me. I'll come home happy, refreshed, and ready to start making stuff!