Sad Day

Today is a sad day for me. After being a licensed family child care home provider for the past 23 years, it became necessary to allow my license to expire when it came up for renewal. Today my final license expired. Although I realize that it was a necessary move, I'm still very sad to have had to give up what has become my life's work. It's odd to walk through the house and see lots of equipment that is no longer needed, and very strange when I catch myself in a store thinking "This would work out really well for the daycare -- oh, wait! There isn't a daycare any more." It feels funny to have a computer full of finely edited documents including a parent handbook and many curriculum ideas, which I won't be using any more but represent way too much work to just delete off the hard drive. And I still will catch myself contemplating about how I could incorporate such-and-such activity into the daycare routine before I remember that all those thoughts are now irrelevant. My Child Development Associate credential, my Special Needs training certification, 12 semester hours of Early Childhood classes have all become moot.

I don't know what I'll end up doing next (except that I'll definitely keep on knitting while I wait to find out what's coming) but I'm sure that there will be something new and different in store at some point. I'll be sure to update when I find out what is coming.

Afghan Design Contest

So in a burst of inspiration (or insanity! LOL) I decided to enter the afghan design contest at Mary Maxim (one of my yarn suppliers). They had four categories available, with first prizes of $500 for each category, and a grand prize of $1500 for the overall winner (the best of the four category winners). I chose to enter two categories - baby blanket and knitted afghan - and have been knitting like crazy for the past couple of weeks. I finally have them both ready to go and I'm really happy with the way that both have turned out.

The full sized afghan (called Double Hearts) uses a combination of seed stitch knitted with a double strand of yarn (1 strand each of two colors) and double-knitted panels with one strand on each side of the afghan. The end result is a pretty afghan with reversible heart panels.
The baby afghan (Primary Blocks) is a riot of bright primary colors, with a center square knitted from four diagonal blocks that I joined while knitting, and then borders of bright yellow with blue corners and an outside border of red. One of my sons pointed out the irony of using pastels (or at least pink) for the full sized afghan and primary colors for the baby afghan, but I really like them both. If I win first prize in either category, they will pay me the prize money and keep both the afghan and the pattern. Otherwise I'll get them back and have two afghans and two patterns to sell on my Etsy site. It's a win-win situation no matter what happens.

Dye-ing to Tell You

So today I had to make a trip to Springfield to pick up some yarn for my contest entries, and my first stop was at Hobby Lobby. I realized halfway through knitting the center section of the baby blanket that I was going to run out of the variegated yarn and needed another skein – and of course I needed to match the dye lot of the skein I bought in March. I had slipped one of the skein bands into my wallet so I'd be able to check since I didn't really want to buy THREE skeins of the variegated yarn and start over, but after nearly three months I wasn't really optimistic that I'd be able to match the dye lot. You can imagine my surprise when the very first skein of the variegated yarn that I laid my hands on was that exact dye lot!

I also decided that I needed to pick up another skein of the yellow just in case I ran short, but I just had to grab that one and go since I hadn't thought ahead to bring the skein band of that color. Needless to say, when I arrived home I was doubly amazed to find that the dye lot of the yellow yarn matched as well!

Now to get busy and finish knitting up these two projects.....