Perhaps life *is* all cross stitching and knitting

 It's been a few weeks and I've been doing a lot of good stuff!  There's reading, cross stitching, some knitting and spinning.

So, without further ado, I suppose I'll start where I left off last time.

Pokemoning Progress!

I finished page 2!  Woohoo!

At this rate I'll be done.. uh, in awhile.  It's OK though.  No one is expecting me to finish this any time soon.  I keep thinking that I wished I worked on it more, but then again, I have a lot of fun things I've been doing and I like the idea of spreading my fixations around.

I finished the first sock:

The great fitting experiment is turning out to be a great success! I am well into the second sock, but Zac's on nights, so my knitting time is being usurped by youtube crafting.

A few weeks ago I won a prize from one of my thread families.  It was a stuffed moogle! I immediately put her on my bookshelf next to the tonberry and Vivi:

And then I ordered yarn for making a chocobo.  Had to be done.  Had to.  There's a very cute pattern I found on etsy for one and I kind of want to make a few of them, to match the color evolution from final fantasy 9.

Well, I had to start with yellow, naturally:

Because it's crochet, I have to take it slow.  Crochet bothers my wrist a lot.  I can do it, but I can't do it all day like I can with spinning or cross stitch or knitting. So, for now, I have the wings done and a tail feather.  The rest will come in the next week or so.  It's very exciting, and already very cute!

There was also some reading in the last few weeks.

I read The Twisted Ones, The Seventh Bride, and The Raven and the Reindeer.  All by T. Kingfisher.

The Twisted Ones was a horror book, but I wouldn't say it was her best.  I much preferred The Hollow Places.  It was OK.

The Seventh Bride was its own fairy tale.  It wasn't a retelling of anything.  So it was similar to Nettle and Bone.  I enjoyed this one a lot.  It was about a teenager who found out she was betrothed to this dood.  She's just a poor daughter of the miller, so she doesn't have a choice. When she gets to his mysterious estate in the woods, she finds out that she's -get this- the seventh woman he's taken advantage of in this way.  There's some great creepy elements in this book, and the usual impossible tasks that are so fun to read. It was good.

The Raven and the Reindeer was a retelling of The Snow Queen.  I have thoughts.  Mostly about Disney.  Disney should never have said they based Frozen on The Snow Queen.  There was nothing in this story that had anything to do with it.  It made me mad at Frozen again, and I haven't been mad at Frozen in years.  I hated that movie, I thought it had incredibly bad storytelling without any charm.  Like,  I literally walked out of the theater confused about it, cause within the first ten minutes of the movie I was lost-- not cause I'm dumb and can't follow a story, but because of what the characters were doing in the movie.  It made no sense.  Those rock monsters didn't say to lock Elsa away.  I don't know why they did that.  Whatever.  And the whole line, 'you can't marry someone you just met.'  uh, have you met princesses?  They mostly marry people they don't have a choice about.  stupid.  I don't have a problem with love at first sight stories.  It's storytelling for children, it's supposed to be simple.  NOT TO MENTION the snowman, the one that can talk, that guy?  He sacrificed himself for Anna in that room.  But that wasn't the big sacrifice the movie wanted so it didn't matter.  dumb.  Dumb.  Also the rock monsters pushing Anna with that guy in that scene?  That whole song didn't match the rest of the movie.  bad.  Bad.

This story, on the other hand, was GREAT.  There was *actual* lesbian representation. And the story was fantastic to boot.  Good narrative.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Now I've come to spinning.  I told you there'd be spinning.  I jumped back into the polwarth sweater spin:

I've worked on it for a few more hours.  I brought my wheel back upstairs for ease of use.  There's been a lot of youtube in my life these days.  It's been good.

Last weekend, I was spinning and talking to some other pocket friends.  They showed off their hauls from the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool and I had a sad about it.  I only went to that show a few times, but it was magical every time I went.  I always came away with something unexpected.  Like that one year I brought home a batt.  Or the time I got a new spindle and some angora blend.  Good stuff.  Well, I decided to drown my sorrow in an etsy purchase.  From the same lady who dyed the polwarth.

This is the photo from the listing.  It's by Cashmere and Coconuts and it's also Polwarth.  If you can't tell from the bird picture, this colorway is Kingfisher, and I thought it was so very apt considering I've read 9 of her books this year (and I'm reading another one and have yet another in my TBR pile).

And, very like me, I started as soon as it showed up yesterday:

I'm spinning it on my Eel Wheel.  There wasn't anything on it before, so I figured it was allowed. XD

I'm planning on spinning straight through the color sequence (starts blue, ends red) and chain plying it to make a three ply and keep the colors together.

It reminds me of hibiscus flowers, to be honest, so I'm thinking about having it done by July, for our hawaii trip.  I'm thinking about doing some kind of a themed travel project.  Should be fun.

I am not sure the next time I'll be posting.  This is the last week of school, and next week I'm getting lasik.  This is Very Exciting, but I'm not sure what healing will look like and how long till I'll feel back to normal.

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!