Gremlins and Glitter, Part 2

If you saw my last post then you know I was pretty excited about the prospect of playing with glitter yesterday. Unfortunately, my subconscious mind worked out the ramifications of me playing with glitter and Friday night I dreamed that the yoga studio floor was covered in glitter (red, white and blue - I must have been feeling patriotic as well) and I couldn't clean it up before the next class started. Luckily that was just a nightmare and the glitter I actually spilled on the floor succumbed easily to the vacuum.

It was fabulous creating with plaster gauze, a very user-friendly sculpting medium. Life Coach and artist Anne Gregson did an amazing job leading the workshop. I left with a gremlin that I've named Patsy, which is "past" scrambled. My gremlin is very fond of hindsight, starting most of her speeches with "if only you had..."

If only you had found yoga when you were a teenager, you could have done all those difficult asanas before your body aged too much...

If only you had become a forest ranger like that career test suggested, you might not have spent 20 years in a job you hated...

If only you were young enough to go back to school and major in something fun and creative this time...

If only you had saved lots of money so you could take off for six months to hike the Appalachian Trail...

Yeah, this gremlin needs to be tamed so I can focus on the present. And here she is...

It turns out that my gremlin looks a bit like my mother. (Sorry Mom! It was completely unintentional.) The horns (not the parts that look like my mom) were fun to sculpt and, although it's hard to see in the picture, are covered with glitter.

Going Visual

The start of my 2011 creative adventure is being guided by Shannon Kinney-Duh's Inside Out e-course, which started two days ago. It's wonderful so far! I'm really looking forward to the next four weeks of exploring.

Part of the course is creating a visual journal. Today's assignment was to find words in old magazines and put them in the journal. I wasn't really feeling creative, but I ended up having lots of fun gluing the words onto the pages.


When I spread out the words on my desk, they seemed to fit into groups and some clearly were part of the same thought.


Yoga had a whole page, of course.


Looking again, I see messages I hadn't planned. Or, at least, not the part of me that thought it was doing the planning.

Finishing What I Start

When I started knitting again a few years ago, the first thing I did was finish a scarf I had started seven years earlier. Indeed, it took me seven years to knit a scarf, but I did finally finish it. Of course, the coat it had been meant to go with was outgrown by my daughter years before it was finished, but she was gracious enough to pretend she liked it anyway.

Leaving projects unfinished has become a bad habit. When the yarn dust settled after my Christmas gift-giving knitting, there were two partially-finished projects left on my needles. Both projects had been started, and abandoned, in 2009. I decided to start the new year with a clean slate and finished everything I started.

The first project was a lace ribbon scarf that I was making to use up some leftover yarn. I knitted a couple of hours a day for 3 days and it was finished. Rather than leaving it lay somewhere, I blocked it right away and it was ready by the next morning. That was all it needed. I'm wearing it as I type this, because I really like it.


The other project was a pair of mittens - my first attempt at mittens - that I knitted from a skein of beautiful alpaca yarn I had picked up at a harvest festival. When I followed the pattern my mittens turned out too short, so they had to be taken apart at the top of the fingers and made longer. One was done. The other was waiting. It took less than 30 minutes to fix and I now have a soft, warm pair of mittens that I could have worn last winter if I had taken just a bit of time to finish them.


Once all my needles were empty, I tackled a quick knit that helps me meet my One Small Change goal for the month: replacing our disposable kitchen sponges with reusable, eco-friendly alternatives. I found a pattern for knitting scrubbies. Strips of tulle are knitted with the yarn to make them good for scouring pans. I just happened to have a roll of tulle that I bought years ago for who-knows-what, so last night I enjoyed the satisfaction of a quick knit.


The pattern, by Julie Anderson, is available for free on her blog.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the scrubbies is the needle size. They just happen to require size 10 needles, the size of my new Buddha knitting needles, gifted to me at the holidays by a yoga student. How awesome are these?