I really can knock out some plying with all of Abbatoir Blues and Lyre of Orpheus, but this has been going through my head today. You’re welcome.

12 days ago I went into the hospital for surgery to replace a bulging disc in my upper neck. This was the first time I’ve ever stayed in the hospital. Cthulhu willing, it will also be my last. There are huge chunks of my memory that are either fuzzy and dreamlike or just gone. Sort of like being on an alcoholic bender, but much more scary.

The two big things I have to show for all this is a 2″ gash in the middle-right of my neck and 3 extra bottles of painkillers. Mmm….painkillers. They’re mostly for the incision and muscle tension. The gut-wrenching agony from my right side is gone.

I brought my knitting purely out of optimism that I’d be fine right after the operation. Um. Yesterday was the first time I worked on something – a double-knit hat and some cross-stitch things.

The couch is calling me once again. See you.

I’d decided on a shawlette, as she had plenty of hats. First I was going to use some Shetland fingering weight that I’d just finished; just the right amount for a Holden, and it looked like a pretty fast knit. But the yarn might have been too much for her mom, who has been going through chemotherapy and is currently pretty delicate. So…

There was a silk hankie that I’d bought a while back that needed to be spun. So I started spindle spinning. Ridiculously slow, but the yarn was coming out okay. I’d spin a spindle full, wind it off and ply it on my hummingbird spindle, then knit straight off the spindle to save time. This took a hell of a lot longer than I’d planned.

Even with spinning to fingering weight, there wasn’t quite enough to finish. So I bound off with some bamboo/silk that I’d used for Anabel’s socks. Plus I had to leave out the final repeat of the lace pattern, which makes it about an inch or two smaller.

Although…

I’d like to start making up some cross-stitch things of my own. Not necessarily anything as huge as a sampler, but something in between super-tiny and huge.

I also want to make a lot more amigurumi this year. Some handspun things, but cotton works a lot better for me than animal fibers. So probably not.

Speaking of handspun, I’ve been working on some handspun sock yarn. At least 3 ply, and hopefully some cabled yarns. At last I can turn my tendency to overspin into an advantage. I’ve got some cabled experiments from last year, so I’d like to try working with that and see what it looks like.

As for everything else, there are some things going on here that have completely taken all my fiber crafting oxygen away for the time being. But we’ll see how that goes. Figuring out new things to make this year may be the absolute least of my worries.

There wasn’t a hell of a lot of time between November and Giftmas that A wasn’t pretty much right beside me or I was job hunting. Not much at all. I did work on it for an entire day when A was at her FLL state semifinals. Which got me to…the strap on the back to secure the scarf.

After that, it became a lot tougher to get Mom Crocheting Time®. I tried working on it in bed. A would inevitably run in to talk about what she was reading that night. I tried working on it while waiting for her after school. Yeah.

Finally it was Giftmas, and the scarf was roughly…3/4 completed. So I had to tell her about it. At least I could finish the damn thing before she went back to school.

She was thrilled it was a panda. The only thing she asked was, “How did you work on it without my seeing?”

Not easy, boo. As you can see, I hadn’t finished…