Updating my sidebar reminded me of the other spazz I needed to get out of my system:

NORO!!!!! This yarn is amazing. I'm in so much love. I have a strong hunch that it's largely because this is the first hand-dyed color-changing yarn I've crocheted with, but, I did buy some K1C2 stuff (color 518, Meadow) for another project, and it's not nearly as exciting as the NORO!!!!!

This was my birthday-money yarn splurge, so I let myself get a whole 5 skeins of Noro Kureyon. (If you happen to click the link to take a look, pull up one of the pictures full-size, to get a much better idea.) I thought about getting a more expensive kind, buuut, I prefer my scarves to be ridiculously long. (Actually, the scarf isn't going to be as insanely long as I'd like, since the stitch pattern I'm doing requires me to make it wider as I go, not longer, and I don't want to risk making it so long that I wind up only having it be like two inches wide when I run out of yarn.) I picked up two different rainbow-y blends, and one of blues and purples, and it's actually been a pretty surprising challenge to make the colors work the way I'd had in mind. I hardly *ever* go back and re-start something when I have a minor problem with it, but this time, I actually did - knowing I could stand the tedium of re-doing something, thanks to the absurd amounts of fun it is working with something colored like this stuff. (So many subtleties! Melissa freaking LOVES subtleties. And colors.) I'm really glad I did start it over, since not only am I now making it longer (once I'd gotten a better estimate of the amount of scarf I could get from the yarn), but have a plan for the colors. I'm really only just starting to get into working with colors in my yarn-stuff... I mean I have some, and, I mean, it's COLORS, I'm an artist, this should not be a stretch for me. But it's still a different medium, and... it's not like I've sat down to draw a lot of blankets in full-color, y'know?


It was kind of a gradual realization, but it made me *really* happy to find myself thinking of crocheting as another art form. Because it really is, and I also find myself doing it a LOT, when the mood grabs me (which is usually, y'know, all winter). It's art, but it's *useful* art, art that can be worn and used and enjoyed throughout a normal day's routine. If I can ever find the attention-span for it, I can make my own clothing, and customize it to however I want. I'm not really brave enough to invent my own patterns for anything more complicated than iPod covers and things, but I nearly always work in different colors, and am learning the intricacies of substituting different yarns, and definitely tweak just about everything I do to better suit me. Tweaking is the little sister of Originality.

...I was talking to one of the girls I work with, I don't remember what specifically, but it was about cooking, I think I must have been describing the spices I'd used for the curry I'd had for lunch or something. She looked at me somewhat bemused by all the spices I'd listed off, and laughed, saying she could never be that creative in her cooking. And she said something to the effect that I really was an artist, even in cooking. And I can't even describe how happy it made me to hear that, like... I wouldn't say I'm an amazing cook or anything, my range is really pretty limited, but within that range... again, it's all about subtlety, it's all about the little details that really make a thing special - which is what I do through everything, in my drawings, my writing, my photography, my Photoshop work, apparently my cooking, even my crocheting (where I am incredibly proud of how even and perfect all my stitches are getting to be).


Alright, I said something thoughtful, I really need to pull myself away now. Achy as my neck and back are from cooking all day...I have a massive pile of dishes to go contend with, before Tom adds to them tomorrow.