Oh, hello! I've been here, peeking in on my shady little glade. Frogs are croaking here. Mud is squelching. Winter's muck is being parted by new growth. In our yard, tiny choirs of tiny daffodils (my favorites are called 'Minnow') are starting to pierce the ground and prepare their songs. Our yard is still filled with brown — dead leaves, colorless stems of dead grass, old blooms, withered things — but everywhere below the surface the season is changing.
I come to the change a bit sullenly. Our winter here has been very mild, with almost no rain, and only one (beloved, wonderful) snowstorm. I guess it could always still happen, of course, but it doesn't feel like it will. As you walk around town you smell it — winter daphne. The fragrant harbinger of future blossoms. I do love it. And so it begins. Our plum tree is already dropping its first freckled fairy petals. The spirea begins to swell with its little buds. I have the bedroom window open behind the curtain every night now, and now we listen to the cold night sounds, and the early morning crows. Spring is coming.
I'm happy because I heard back from the distributor (Wichelt) about the discontinued fabric (I unknowingly chose) for this new cross stitch kit and they still have fifty yards in stock, out of which we can make four-hundred kits. I'm seriously thrilled by that number. I thought it would be, like, four. Or three. So I bought the fifty, and it's on its way. Yesterday I also ordered all the floss from DMC, and so it will be on its way soon, too. This will be another design, like First Snow, that will fit into an 8" x 10" ready-made frame. (I'm going to do one for each season, and just this morning I got my idea [pop! right into my head!] for my summer design.) I'll give you more details on this one for spring and will start taking pre-orders probably next week. If there is more interest beyond the four hundred, the manufacturer has agreed to dye more fabric (at, naturally, a higher cost, and with a six-to-eight-week lead time), but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We've sold 492 First Snow kits of the 600 we originally made, so I'm a bit worried we could go over the 400, if everyone does want to do a series of seasons, and I do want everyone who wants one to be able to get one. With my luck I'll probably sell four kits, total. Well, weeeeeeeeee'll see. Now I'm just rambling. We'll figure it out when we get there, no worries.
My creative mania, as it reduced itself from a rolling boil to a gentle simmer, seemed to also direct its interest (I'm speaking about "it" in the third person because I've lost control and am now disassociating, apparently) toward hand-dyed speckled sock yarn. Exclusively. Only hand-dyed speckled sock yarn. I mean??? This from the woman who has only ever, in twenty years, knit one sock. But, seriously, how pretty are these yarns? And these? Why am I so late in understanding about these? I saw some of them recently at Close Knit and Starlight Knitting Society and Twisted and I walked by them without a backward glance, fixated on All The Solid Colors. Now, just weeks later, I have gone back and bought them, and for fun I literally open my iPad and staaaaaaare at them on-line, all of these freckly wonders, and try to choose between them. I have a pattern picked out for a new Easter-ish sweater for Mimi, and have ordered several other skeins to work into the granny-square blanket, etc. I've bought yarn with sparkles in it. I really never thought I would do that.
