Lots of stitches...

One thing that I've not been outstanding at is follow-through. I always have big plans but sometimes I just lose steam. I'm great at ambition but not always great at seeing something through to the end. But  again, I am a work in progress, and this is something to work on!

My boyfriend is a James Bond fanatic. I am a Gilmore Girls fanatic. What do those two things have in common? Pretty much nothing, as far as I can tell. Except that there are some really great crochet blanket patterns online for both fandoms.

This summer when we moved to our new apartment, I was kind of bored. I'm a little more than an hour from my old town, which means I didn't have my good friend across the hall anymore or my other friend down the street. I'm a school librarian so I wasn't working over the summer. I spent part of my days unpacking while Boyfriend was at work, but I would also go for a hike in the woods or a 5-mile walk around town every day, and most days I'd also go to a spin class. I kind of wish it was summer all the time... I digress. I decided to pick up a new hobby and I knew I wanted to make something... I started searching for James Bond crafts because I wanted to make Boyfriend a gift. I did end up cross-stitching and framing this, and putting it on his dresser to find. ;) But I'm also of the go big or go home variety, so when I saw this blanket I realized he needed it in his life. The problem is that I had never crocheted anything at all, ever in my life. But that has never truly stopped me from much, so I went to the local yarn shop with a printout of one of the squares and asked if they could help me learn. They explained to me that there is a big difference between knitting and crochet, and they were a knitting shop, but they could teach me that. So I got a quick lesson on knitting and I started work on a cowl. And while I'm glad that I'm making it (I'm still not done with it...), it wasn't what I really wanted to make when I walked in there. So last month I joined some crochet Facebook groups and went back to the craft store. YouTube is your friend when you want to learn new things! And now I'm off and running. 

I'm also working on this blanket for myself, which is a different crochet stitch entirely. I'm halfway through the dragonfly square. This is a good decoy because tonight when Boyfriend came home I was working on the square for The Man With the Golden Gun but he showed no interested in what I was actually making at all. He probably assumed it went with the Gilmore Girls project. It actually isn't that hard. It's just a lot of counting, and it's very forgiving. If I mess up it's easy to pull apart and try again. I'm almost at the top of the gun itself, and then I just have to finish up the rest of the red. I thought this thing would take me years, but this particular square so far has taken three evenings, and the second one was interrupted abruptly when a pipe burst in the garage and I had to go deal with that for a couple of hours. (It got fixed. Technically our neighbors' landlord has to deal with it, not really us, but we got involved in some of the "hunting for the water switch" component of the evening.) Our anniversary is in a little over a month. I doubt I can finish it by then but I do have a few months before his birthday. In any case, I want to make sure this doesn't go to the unfinished craft vault, where many of my prior projects have ended up. ;)

In other news, I get paid on Friday and can put most of that paycheck directly toward my credit card bill. And I am completing day two now of my Very Low Calorie Diet (VLCD). I've been half-assing it for a long time, so I haven't lost much. I've decided that it's time to either get serious about it or decide that I'm just going to be fat. I seem to not really want to be fat. This is another entry. But I'm glad I've done it. It's too easy to say, "Oh, fine, I'll have a cookie and get back to it tomorrow." Really trying not to do that for now!

Also tonight I must endorse The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon. Just awesome. It's by the same creator as Gilmore Girls, Amy Sherman-Pallodino. Go watch it if you haven't yet!