I was a grumpy mess for much of the weekend. It came in strange cyclical waves. The first 20 minutes of Victor's super-long walk on Saturday were right out of the Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby minus the pea soup shooting out of my mouth. I slipped his leash through my belt loop, knotted it and within 10 minutes all was right with the world again.
Sunday morning was more of the same. Victor acts out at the coffee shop, because they think he is cute and on a non-busy day being cute gets him a treat. So, he didn't stay seated even though he is trained for it (and retrained on a relatively frequent basis to wait calmly for food and treats), and then ate some mystery object off the patio. None of these were earth shattering, but I was pissy. Not his fault. All something to do with my faulty brain chemistry.
So, I went to the grocery store to get the ingredients for a second batch of compost cookies. The first batch were overly huge by my standards and tried to become one cookie during storage. While these could be taken as flaws, they were so strangely addictive that I wanted to do it again! The latest batch will have Reese's pieces, pretzels and mini-chocolate chips. It promises to be almost as addictive as chopped Rolos, Fritos and pretzel M&Ms.
However, I was still grumpy when I got home, so I put away the groceries, started the laundry in the dryer, and proceeded to clean one of my craft dumping grounds. I'd call it a stash closet, but really it is where the bags and projects in progress go to die. I had numerous skeins of yarn (I did this because I was looking for a pattern, which I will just reprint), paper cruft, and 2 scarves, 2 hats and a sweater from the dark ages in bags and pieces. There was also at least one sock (where is its friend, did I ever start you?) and tons of stuff that I could easily clean up and move on, including this piece.
Whoops, this is the back. Not too bad!
This is the welcome banner from the 9902 Welcome Home pamphlet from Ginger & Spice. I don't know exactly when I bought this pattern, but I have made it at least three times. This pattern has been gifted to friends for house warmings, and I know we had a version of this when I was still roommating in Somerville. I had a faulty version of this that I started for our condo, but the silks were blending into the background too many times so the design was very hard to read. Then Saru-chan (I always want to just write "the cat" when she's done something bad) got into the project and snagged hours worth of stitching.
Now, I don't do that much cross-stitching anymore my recent resurgence aside. Partly it was that knitting was my new-refound love, and partly it was the logistics of knitting with a kitty and stitching with a kitty. Every project had the same likelihood of kitty death, but a knitting project was 10 hours of work and 1-2 hours of repairs most of the time. Cross-stitch was easily 50 hours of work and a lot of the time it was virtually impossible to pick out the small sections of damage and replace them.
I am great friends with the closet, closed bags, and latches at the top of the door frame. Those are the only things that protect a project from curious kitty paws or an even more curious doggie mouth. Of course, having my projects often out of sight leaves them much more likely to be forgotten, sometimes resulting in bonuses like this project that was almost near completion. More often it results in having more projects started than I realize as each episode of grumpiness or sadness is met with starting something new as an immediate boost to the spirits. Now just to find the hardware (which I thought I had bought) for the banner and a backing fabric and it will go from blocked to functional.
