I wanted to write about last weekend for the whole week

Sorry, for leaving you hanging with the promise of a picture before disappearing. (In my last post I promised a picture of a finished stole.)There has been a lot of teaching this week which is good but a bit time-consuming, the weather has been a bit crazy so that every time I had the time to take a picture it was raining (in between the rain it was blazingly hot), and then, in the evenings, I absolutely had to watch soccer, of course. You know, the German national team has reached the finale of the Euro 2008. I’m not much into soccer otherwise but these games are really exciting.

Apart from that there’s the usual craziness that is June and July, kindergarten summer party tomorrow for which I spent one morning cutting out cardboard squares and attaching pieces of string to them while the other mothers talked about how disappointed they are that there kindergardeners are neither interested in playing tennis nor golf. I reminded myself that this was a good networking opportunity and told everybody that I’m teaching voice, guitar, piano, and recorder. I don’t know if I left a favorable impression though, I was un-showered, and without make-up since I planned to work-out later that day like every morning, and somehow these mothers and I never clicked. For the party I will have to bring the cucumber salad, and I volunteered to supervise the “Sackhüpfen” (sack race).

I also volunteered (I don’t know what has gotten me, I’m not the volunteering kind, usually) to scan the kindergarten group photo and photoshop something on it before having it printed on tees as gifts for the kindergarten teachers.

I wanted to write an elaborate post about the things I do for my son but then, here you have it in a nutshell: I hang with people that feel like aliens to me, I spend my time and energy on things I find boring and confusing, and I’m smiling all the time while I do it. I’m secretly hoping that it will rain tomorrow, though because then there will be the play, and the buffet but no sack race.

Last weekend I spent a most enjoyable day, and I have thought about the fact that I spent the best portion of that day all alone for the whole week. I feel seriously unsocial. I thought I’d spend a whole weekend bonding with my son, well, either that or arguing with him the whole time, because my husband was visiting a friend, and then, what happened was that my mother-in-law knocked at the door in the morning because she wanted to take my son to the museum. Off they went and suddenly I had a day to myself at home. I know myself and so I was certain I’d spend the day surfing the net, eating too much, and feeling terrible afterwards.

Instead I pulled out the sewing machine, and spend five hours on it, barely stopping to pee and drink tea. I even skipped lunch. I made myself a new knitting bag because I was coveting the Charming Handbag from Amy Karol’s book “Bend-the-Rules Sewing”, and also I was sick of the way my lace knitting in its plastic bag looked on the kitchen bench all the time. If you want to see hundreds of these bags, you can click here.

This is how the bag hangs int he kitchen when not in use.

I made the bag bigger by enlarging the template by 150%, I put a pocket in that is big enough to hold my lace charts (which makes the bag quite stiff), I lengthened the handles so that I can put them over my shoulder, and I added a button closure and a loop through which I can thread the yarn. If I were making it again I’d make the handles broader, and maybe use facing on them. Also I find that I really like bags that can be zipped up. I tend to lose things from open bags. Which is not an issue with this one as it’s destined to wander from kitchen to TV, to backyard, and back only.

Bag from the outside. (The color is truer to life in the picture above.)

Interior view. (Sorry for the bad pictures, every time I pick the camera up it starts to get cloudy or rains.)

I also finished reading “Spook Country”, and I enjoyed it so much that I promptly started reading “Pattern Recognition” for the second time. Sometimes I forget how much I love William Gibson’s books, and they keep getting better and better. Also I knit something like 130 rows of the Mystic Meadows stole since Friday. It is getting into that state where it’s annoying me for not being finished yet because I want to cast on for the next two shawls. So I’m trying this new tactic of not starting something new but taking that “being annoyed, and a bit bored”-energy to finish something first. Which leads me to furiously knitting lace while watching soccer. Which isn’t recommended usually, especially for beginning lace knitters.

So, how was your weekend? Wait. It’s already the next weekend, isn’t it? Any plans?