Oh Nuts

Whenever possible I try to include a knit item in with the Christmas present that I give to the sibling that I have for that year. Two years ago I made a scarf for my sister to take with her to school, and last year I gave my other sister a pair of hand warmers that I made. This year my sister's friend T from school joined us for Christmas and was included in the sibling secret Santa and I picked her name. Since T is still in college I wanted to make sure that the presents that I gave her were light and easily transportable. So I decided to make her a hat using pretty yarn that I had found on sale at Jo-ann Fabrics earlier in the year. After finishing the hat, and including a pom-pom on top since my mom and sisters said it finished off the hat, I used the rest of the yarn to make a coordinating ear-warmer/headband. The pattern that I used for the hat is called "Horizontal Rib Hat" and I found it in a knitting book called 'Sock Yarn One-Skein Wonders.' For the ...

A couple of months ago three of my siblings re-painted and re-arranged their rooms. Since I have my own room now, the only changes that I have made so far have been to get rid of the bunk bed that was there and replaced it with two single beds, one is for guests or if my sister comes home to visit. I also moved a tall shelf-thing from where it had been at the end of the bunk beds to the corner next to my bed and moving a canvas picture from in between the windows to a different wall. During all of the re-painting and re-arranging of rooms, I had the idea to get a stencil and paint it in between the windows in my room. It took me a while to figure out what type of stencil I wanted to get and what size. The stencil that I ended up with is a set of 3 small-ish size stencils with an owl and flowers on them. After I had bought the stencils they sat in my room because I didn't know if I wanted to paint them all white and then go over them with another color so that they didn't bl...

While it took me twenty-eight days to do it, but I won NaNoWriMo this year. But the writing of my novel is far from over because there is still quite a bit that I would like to add to it. Now that NaNo is finished I need to find the motivation to finish it and not let it sit and collect dust on my USB drive. During the month of November there was one day during the beginning and then two days this past week where I didn't reach the daily word goal of 1,667 words. But I managed to make it up by writing anywhere between 1,000 and 3,000 words each day to keep moving forward. Since all writing platforms (eg Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc.) all have slight variations on what they consider words, like hyphenated words and that sort of thing. According to Word, numbers, when they are written out like 1234, are counted as words, which I thought was interesting but I kept it. And when I went to validate my novel after reaching 50,048 words the website added a few more words making t...