Pairs of socks knitted in 2014

  • Roxanne's socks
  • Brian's Cascade socks
  • Shirley's lacy socks
  • striped Meredith socks
  • striped stranded #1

Friday, February 16, 2007

Projects that lead to insanity

Every so often, I'm overcome with guilt for not making this blog more about knitting. After all, if it's titled "Naomi Knits," maybe it should have some yarn-related content. Maybe I shouldn't use it as a soapbox for whatever thoughts are bouncing through my head. Perhaps I need to confine my topic to knitting, or even just continue with my usual slavish imitation of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. Then again, it's my blog and I'll write about whatever I feel like writing about.

The last several weeks have been very busy for me. There's a new staffing grid at work. The upside of this is that there are more nurses on night shift, and every so often I get to eat lunch during work. (Thank God for Pepsi, or I'd probably collapse from hypoglycemia!) The downside of this is that now the staffing office calls me much more regularly on my nights off to beg me to come in and work extra shifts.

Consequently, I have a backlog of projects that I've photographed over the last few weeks and have yet to show off.

To begin with, I love stuffed animals. When I found an adorable pattern for miniature teddy bears in a knitting book, I was unable to resist the pull of its cuteness. (Yes, that is a US quarter in the picture next to it.) Next, I realized that the bear needed clothes and crocheted it an outfit. Lastly, I shipped it off to my mother-in-law, who has made dollhouse miniatures for years and therefore was truly able to appreciate the insanity that this project represented. (Total time: 20 hours= one half pair of socks.)

When I'm not knitting, I've been working on dyeing. I've been dyeing yarn with Kool-Aid and food coloring for about a year now, but lately I've progressed to dyeing roving. Ever since I blew all my Christmas money at the Wool Peddler on superwash wool roving, I have been experimenting to see precisely what happens when you dye roving with my usual methods.

And here is the single I spun from it:

And here are the socks I am knitting for myself:

I'm not sure how much time I have spent on this particular project, but so far the total is at least 45 hours, and I only have the cuff of the first sock done. I don't suffer from insanity--I enjoy every minute of it.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

Physical fitness sucks!

Due to the growing size of the American population--both collectively and individually--the health-care system I work for is trying to increase the amount of exercise people get. Exercise is important, and does an amazing amount of good things. I think it's great, and I recommend it whole-heartedly to my patients.

However, every time one of my patients says "but I hate going to the gym!" I have to agree with him or her. I hate going to the gym too. I hate jogging, I hate aerobics, and don't even get me started on Pilates.

Working as a nurse, I'm on my feet for most of every twelve hour shift. I'm walking, bending, reaching, and moving patients the majority of the time. I love my job, but some days it's really hard physical work. And when I get home after a long night, I just want to sleep for as long as possible until it's time to go back to work. (To my yarn, especially that skein of Knitpicks Shimmer I've been promising to make something out of for weeks: I love you, but I'm afraid to do anything with you because I don't want to screw it up. It's not you baby, it's me.)

On my days off, when I'm not frantically trying to do laundry, clean, or do crazy things like making something for dinner that didn't come out of a Hamburger Helper box, I like to spin and knit. (More pictures soon!) The last thing I want to do is go to the gym.

So when I went to the doc last week for a checkup and saw the box on the form about "How often do you exercise?" I wrote "never--I'm a floor nurse." And then I got to thinking: How much exercise do I get in twelve hour shift? Several studies have been done on how many steps nurses take, so I thought I'd wear a pedometer myself to test out my progress.

While I forgot to switch the pedometer over to the actual step counter, it registered 5.27 miles walked last night. And when you consider that out of any hour I'm working, I'm sitting down charting for about half of it, this works out to about 960 calories burned. I've got to start thinking of exercise in other ways than just going to the gym.