I have a love - hate relationship with knitting with wire and beads.

I love (usually) the end result, but I often hate the process.  It's hard on my hands - and knitting needles - and it makes me crazy trying to get nice even stitches.

Still, every so often I just have to do it.

Several years ago, we spent Christmas with my family at their cabin in the mountains of New Mexico. It was cold and snowy, and I spent the evenings knitting wire and bead bracelets.  Here are a couple of them:

The pattern is from Interweave Knits, I think.  I really should find the issue, because I want to make more of them!

As part of my Summer of Indulgence, I bought lots of beads.  See?

Beads and 26-gauge copper and brass wire in colors I love and will wear, and a progress photo of my first (and possibly last attempt at this pattern.  Have you ever tried k3tog with wire?)

Using the pattern in Lace Style, I made this:

I do like it, but the cuff style is not my favorite.  It would make a lovely candle ring or something, and itwill certainly serve the desired purpose: showing knitting as an art to hig school students!

For some, this is the summer of the sock.  For others, it's the summer of shawls.  For me, it's the summer of indulgence.

Yes indeedy, I'm going to indulge myself in any way that pleases me.  There will be no knitting to a deadline, no  veggies planted because they're good fo me, no weekends full of to-dos.  Instead, there will be weekends left open to explore new places and new things, plants grown because they make me happy and knitting - whether sweaters or swatches - because it makes me smile.

I've begun laying in supplies, much like frontier women did for the winter.

So far, I've amassed many (20?) new knitting magazines for my reading pleasure.  I'm also digging out some old issues that inspire me.

There's a pile of beads, 24- and 26-gauge wire and metal knitting needles.  Several years ago I knit bracelets from beads and wire - quick, fun and different.  I've been asked to take part in a "craft and hobby as art" demonstration this Fall, and knitted wire might be just the thing!  Tonight, Ken showed me a pile of multi-colored twisted pair telephone wire, and immediately I had a project in mind for it.

Yarn has been purchased.  Not a lot, mind you, but yarn for specific sweaters that I've wanted to make for several years, and that will be worn a lot.  Some yarn is being re-purposed; bought with a specific project in mind, and now I've changed my mind.  Other yarn is becoming available as sweaters are picked apart and unraveled.

There is a summer quilt in my future.  It's bright, silly, funny and quirky, and the owner of the quilting store is reserving judgment until she sees the finished product. It's going to be great fun to make.

Fabric for clothing has been purchased.  There was a time when I made all my clothes - tailored suits for myself and the then-current spousal unit too.  Now I rarely even sew on a button and I miss the impeccable fit that self-made clothes have.  We'll see if I can remember how to tailor.  Britex Fabrics had 50% off on remnants sale last week (their remnants are divine: 1 to 3 yards and more of the most wonderful Italian wools and blends, for example, already 50% off of ridiculously high per-yard prices) and I got enough Italian stretch wool fabric for 2 suits and a skirt for less than $100!

There's a pile of flour sack dishcloths next to a pile of embroidery transfers.  Crewel yarn and canvas, needlepoint yarn and different canvas.  

The vegetable garden is well under way.  I've planted 16 tomatoes, some herbs and lots of beans.  There are still cucumbers, squash, corn, more beans, eggplants, greens, carrots and radishes to plant.  Fortunately for planting - but not for getting veggies - it's still cool here.  Aside from the week of hot weather in May, it's been at least 10* below normal for the past couple of weeks, and will continue that way to mid-next week. 

Fun gardening is happening too.  The formal rose garden is becoming an English cottage garden.  The new patio plantings are tropical.  Areas of the yard that have been ignored for years are being turned into secret garden hideaways.  I'm having such fun!

In other news, I've started making new recipes that sound good.  Mr. Ken isn't always thrilled with them, but he's eating them anyway.  We've found a couple that are keepers.  Ken is eating some things he's not crazy about, and not minding too much. 

The front room is full, completely full of (mostly) donated bookshelves, desks and the like for the museum where I volunteer.  We should have a new gift shop sometime this summer, and I'll have a front room again.

Photos, inspirations and an updated blog and new links to follow soon, but now it's back to work.  (Yes, it's 10 pm.  I'm working on an install that will probably take at least 3 more hours, but that's OK.  I love what I do, and it allows me to do all these other wonderful things!)

Memorial Day weekend provided an epiphany for me.  For 3 days, I ignored personal email, voice mail, work email and such and did only those things that made me happy or that I wanted to do for my self, not because I should or because someone else wanted me to.

At the end of 3 days (which felt like 4 because I telecommuted on Friday) I was rested, refreshed, sunburned and happily tired.  I'd also accomplished many tasks and realized that I was rapidly becoming a grumpy, frumpy drudge.

And it's really true.  Daily life was drudgery, work was drudgery, weekends were too. The house was a cluttered mess, I was behind on answering email, sending packages and cards, and I resented every responsibility (real or imagined), even Ken and the cats.

And I finally realized it was because I hadn't done anything just because I wanted to in ages.  Examples:

• much gardening work on the front flower beds
• lots of volunteer work at several different places
• working too many hours and too many late night
• craft projects that "should be done"
  
• cooking the same "safe" meals over and over
• exercise? diet? 
  

There are more examples, I'm sure.  But now, let's examine these.

Gardening:  I wanted to plant lots of veggies - tomatoes, beans, peppers, squash, corn, herbs - and build more raised beds.  I wanted to finish my Roy G. Biv garden, which had gotten pushed off again.  I wanted pretty pots of plants by the door that we actually use.

What was I doing?  Lots of work on the front yard, which does need to look OK since it faces the street; however, we don't use the front door or front porch currently.  The side and back porches and doors, which we use daily,  were boring and badly in need of sprucing up.  The patio serves as our living room in the summer, and it certainly needed work.  Veggies?  Just a tiny little plot.

Volunteer work: Necessary to nourish my soul; 'nuff said for now. 

Work Work:  Necessary on many levels, especially since I like being able to buy yarn and plants and food.  But is it really necessary to work 50 and 60 hour weeks?  Why haven't I taken time to go home for "Christmas" yet?   All work and no break makes Diann a grumpy woman!

Craft projects: Our master bedroom needed a new look, so I was trying to make a quilt.  My MIL loves the socks I knit for her and wants a purple shawl, so I've been working on those.   And on and on...

This soft green silk yarn is calling me, I want to knit Sandrine, I really need some embroidered dish towels, there's wreaths and clothes and mending and needlepoint and crewel and sewing and quilting and yarn to dye - what am I waiting for?

Cooking: Ken is a picky eater - he's from NYC, and there's nothing in CA to compare; just ask!  His mother is a continental-trained European cook: when asked what food he remembers his mother cooking, his answer is Coq Au Vin, Sauerbrauten and the like.  I remember enchiladas, pot roast and so on.  Ken won't eat mushrooms, olives, okra, sweet potatoes and yams, Granny Smith apples, figs, plums and squash, and most fish.  My cooking rut is enormous - I make the same 5 meals over and over because Ken will eat them.

I love to bake: bread, pies, cakes and cookies.  I love preserving food, and making sauces, and experimenting with new recipes.  

Exercise? Diet? Me time? : Last fall, I started using SparkPeople and lost 10 pounds (3 between Thanksgiving and New Years Day!).  I've kept those 10 off, but haven't lost any more.  Exercise takes a back seat to everything else and that's bad.  Going out to lunch is SF is a great excuse for a brisk walk, unless you head to the food court in the building and get take out!  We have 2 pianos; you'd think I might make time to play once in a while.  Personal tune ups?  The monthly massage-pedicure-facial hasn't happened in at least a year and maybe 2!

This may all sound negative and sad and stupid, but it's been a revelation and a relief! 

Random thoughts, because I'm too tired / frazzled / busy to string thoughts into a coherent post.

1.  There's a lip balm in my purse, in my DayTimer, on the vanity and on my home office desk.  Two are Chapstick Mint, 1 is Burt's Bees and the one in my home office is new: Good and Plenty (licorice) flavored!  It's so good I'll have to be careful or the chapped lips will get worse, not better.

2.  Ken's parents survived the recent Santa Barbara fire, as did their house.  They were evacuated on Wednesday; by Thursday night both sounded stressed.  FIL played golf Friday morning and MIL had a massage and got her hair done - they sounded much better that night.

3.  We went to the symphony on Saturday night on a whim.  Back when we dated, we had season tickets to the symphony but that seems like centuries ago now.  It was fun, and we are planning to get season tickets to the SF Symphony so Ken can see Michael Tilson Thomas.

4.  Work continues to kick my butt!  This week is the last really crazy one for a while, and I'm ready for a calm patch.  I do love it, but the constant deadlines are making me a little nuts - I was dreaming about installations last night, which is so NOT a good thing.

5.  Knitting progress is suffering.  I am making lots of swatches, but have a hard time concentrating on anything very complex - more than 2 x 2 ribbing, for example.

6.  Naps are wonderful.  (I sat down Saturday afternoon to have a cup of tea and read for a bit.  Ken woke me 2 hours later so I could dress for the symphony!)

7.  I'm behind on gardening too.  The seedlings are growing and healthy, but this weekend I've got to plant the beans!

8.  Even though little progress is being made on real projects, everything inspires me.  The color of the sky, lacy leaves against a building, petals falling to the ground - all suggest new projects to me.  I'm capturing as many ideas as possible in photos so they can tide me over the next completely uncreative phase (which I know will come).

9.  Life is just plain wonderful!

Yesterday I agreed to help a new co-worker with a project (she didn't think she needed any help, but our manager and several other folks thought she did).  I worked on my half of the documentation until midnight Wednesday, and had a good review completed by noon today.  Tonight we're doing the installation, so it's going to be another long evening. (That's a safe assumption: it's just after 10 now and I've been working tonight since 8:30 and will probably end up working until close to 1 am.)

That means I'll probably leave the office early again tomorrow!  More hooky playing!

(Last week, I did the grocery shopping while playing hooky.  Not very exciting, but it freed up Sunday for gardening.)

Speaking of gardening, besides the little veggie garden, I also worked in one of the flower beds on the patio.

  A couple of years ago, I ripped out some pathetic ferns and planted tropical-ish house plants.  They're protected from frost by the patio roof, but still can get rained on.  The experiment has been quite successful so far, and this year I started trimming and shaping the plants.  That created a bit of space under the larger plants for some color - geraniums and impatiens.

This is the rest of that particular flower bed.   It's about 10 feet long and a couple of feet wide, separating the house from the workshop.

The weather was finally good for gardening - not raining, not too hot - and garden I did.   Every spare moment all weekend was spent in garden-related activity of some sort.

Usually the raised beds are planted by mid-April at the latest; this year I've not even ripped out the remains of last years plants yet.  It's been raining at odd intervals, and while we do need the rain, it's not good for tomatoes to get rained on in cool weather.

This is a brick-bordered flower bed at the edge of the covered patio.  I haven't planted anything in it for a couple of years because I'm planning to redo that section of the yard, including ripping out the brick border and lots of concrete paths.  This year it dawned on me that I'm not going to get that done this summer (more likely in the fall) and that vegetables are annuals!

The little tomato plants sure look silly in those big old cages!  If I wait a couple of weeks, the plants are big enough to make it difficult to cage them without damage.  

Here's the rundown:  2 tomato plants (yellow pear, red cherry), 1 habanero chile (Ken's choice*), 2 basil plants, 6 spinach plants and 24 marigolds.  The marigolds are to protect the other plants from insects and such.

Last week was long and hard - Thursday I did get to work about 3 and left Friday morning at 2:30!  Conference calls at 4 am and 8:45 were the icing on the cake...but I was able to sleep until noon, quite possibly for the first time since college (when I wasn't sick). 

The weekend was fabulous - gardening and plants and knitting and reading - and Monday I had jury duty.  Fortunately this county has a "one day or one trial" rule, so that's over with for another year.  Just in case I actually had to report, I telecommuted for work, which meant I was able to garden from 6:45 to 8:15. 

It's amazing how much gardening can happen in 90 minutes.

Last year I started a Roy G. Biv garden along the driveway.  (It's a long driveway; Roy G. Biv is 50 feet long - up to the front edge of the carport.)  Starting at the carport end, last year the violet, indigo, blue and green sections were planted with mostly perennials or self-seeding annuals.  It's filled out nicely and some of the annuals I'd forgotten about (Antique Shades pansies) wintered over and are flowering!

Yesterday I planted the orange section - Lion's Tail, orange Siberian Wallflower and an orange gallardia or African Daisy as well as California Poppies.  Ken loves them, and Lord knows, they do reseed.  A couple more perennials are needed - daylilies, perhaps - and then it's off to the yellow and red areas.  I have a couple of plants for each, as well as a couple for the blue and violet (which shades to black) areas.

There was even time, while watering in the new plants, to weed and trim the green and blue sections.  It looks much better!

A little knitting has been done, but I've been so drained - not tired, just out of patience and concentration - that it's been mostly swatches.  

Reading has been mindless murder mysteries which are familiar and comforting.  I ordered a bunch of books from Amazon - they arrived last Wednesday - and I finally opened the box Saturday.  Knitting magazines are piling up too. 

It's going to be a great couple of weeks!