I can't be tied down, I'm like the wind

 Quite a bit has happened since I last posted.  I, again, dropped the spindle.  I have important things to do.  Like start a sweater for Zac:

This sweater start is more than it seems.  I had to do some real designing.  Which meant swatching!  I swatched out the chart from the blue cabled hat that I made the other month, White Frost by Babette Ulmer, along with a panel of regular stockinette plain stitching.  The point was to gather my gauge, but also to gather the difference between cable and stockinette gauges.  This way I can take the width of the pieces and figure out how to make the cabled panels centered on the pieces, to make it intentional, and also make the sweater fit.

So far, So good!  I'm enjoying the knitting on this a lot more than the old one, which is the whole point.  Something... pulled me away from this though.

And caused me to fall down a rabbit hole that is cross stitch.

So, I got enabled.  Hazel, my daughter, as you might know, has been obsessed with Pokemon since around the first grade. (She's in seventh now) She knows Everything about the stuff. She plays all the games, reads the manuals.  She draws them.

I'm.. indifferent about it?  I know it was big for people my age, especially when we were kids, and it saw a resurgence with pokemon go and stuff, but it just really never appealed to me.  On the other hand, I love my kid.

Some online friends were showing off their  cross stitching and it hit me, how absolutely fun it would be to stitch along with them.

So, I started the Epic Pokemon Cross stitch, 151 of the first generational monsters.  18"x32" probably the biggest cross stitch I've ever endeavored to try.  It's bright, it's happy, and Hazel is teaching me all the names of these things.

We've got zapdos (he's got TWO zaps!):

 

and moltres is started (I know it's molt as in molten, but he's a bird, so I imagine one of his attacks is MOLT and suddenly you're covered in feathers):

 

And that's as far as I've gone since I started on Tuesday.

The commission project has been put on hold while I wait for NEW hexie fabric to show up.  I got some, but it turned out the wrong color and I couldn't finish it that way.

In life news, my pollen allergy has not settled down in the least. I've been avoiding the outdoors like the plague.  And antihistamines aren't doing anything to control this.  That is to say, well, I'm struggling. Even going to get the mail can be a hazard. Every 4-5 days my face decides to freak out despite doing all the things to avoid contact/ immediately cleaning up hands and face after being exposed.  I have an appointment to hopefully do something about this allergy, but until then I am trying to keep my face from blowing up every few days.

No new progress on my own sweater, and besides Zac's new sweater I haven't cast anything else on.

I'm hoping to come back soon to share MOAR cross stitching.  I haven't been this monogamously excited in a long while.