...feeling blue and WOYWW

Don't know if it's the time of year or my time of life but I've been very blue for a couple of weeks now. Work feels emotionally exhausting, I'm not sleeping well, I'm in physical pain and when I look at the bigger picture it makes me feel even more hopeless, what with the coronavirus in China, the bush-fires in Australia, escalating climate change, and the self-serving, ruthless people who keep getting elected into power around the globe. I find myself in full-on Eeyore "What's the point?" mode...and my internal Pollyanna is just glad that I'm in the Autumn of my life, not the Spring. 

I've experienced similar periods of mild depression before, and although I really want to just shut out the world and never have to leave the house again, I'm starting to fight back - talking about it to other people as well as reasoning with myself, planning some weekend walks, and making time to do the things I like to do...like keeping track of things in the blogging community. So here is a small collection of three blue things I'm associating with pleasure, not sadness...

• Fabulous feathery ice crystals on the car windscreen 

• a 40th birthday hat knitted for a friend - the Antler Toque by Tin Can Knits 

• Finished Staysail Mitts - a record-breakingly long project - the first mitt took nearly a year to complete (lost in the UFO pile), and the second took weeks (impatience to finish means repeated frogging to correct silly mistakes). 

...and joining with fellow-work-desk-sharers, here is a glimpse of the to-do queue that awaits me on my making table. Ugly Baby still needs knitwear, there's a peg doll still waiting to be brought to life in the big white box, and the package on top of the pile is a needle-felting kit my sister-in-law gave me for Christmas - never tried this before, but will be good to have a go. Onwards and upwards!

...WOYWW - The One With the Back-to-Work Log-jam

I'm tagging along at the tail end of the What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday tour to offer a quick glimpse at the projects currently forming a disorderly queue on my craft room table.  Work and play just don't mix, and after only a couple of days of being back at the coalface things are already getting a little out of hand.

On the left is a VERY ugly baby doll, rescued from the charity shop near work just before Christmas. She has tiny, beady eyes, moulded pigtails that stick out of her head like horns, and a permanently startled expression. I just had to bring her home. I'm thinking of making her a jumper and bootees out of the pinky-purply wool. There's nothing I love more than a charity shop rescue in knitwear.

To the right of Ugly Baby is one completed fingerless mitt and a third of its pair. There would have been two thirds of it but I made a stupid mistake which I only noticed when I got to the start of the thumb shaping, so I had to unravel it back to the cuff. 

To the right of the mitts is a belated but very beautiful Christmas present which arrived at the weekend. It's a DIY peg-doll from Sophie Tilley Designs, waiting to be brought to life. The kit comes complete with a face-painting practice sheet and an assortment of pretty fabrics and lace - the rest is up to me! It is not an exaggeration to say that I have been lying awake at night thinking about how to tackle this project. The dolls that Sophie makes herself are so wonderful, I'm not sure I can do this one justice. She reminds me a little of the cook doll, Jane, in Beatrix Potter's "Tale of Two Bad Mice", but Jane was a very introverted character, whereas Sophie's ladies seem to have a lot more vim and vigour. I will just have to pluck up the courage to make a start and see where my fancy takes me. 

...WOYWW - The One With the January Bug

Three days into 2020, just as I was coaxing myself into a vaguely "back to work" frame of mind, I was Laid Low by some kind of horrible sinus-dwelling Lurgy (the kind where your skull feels like it's being very slowly crushed in a special skull-crushing vice and you have to just lie down in a darkened room, keep still and wait for it to stop). Today is the first day where being upright and mobile has become an option again, so I've stuck some laundry in the washing machine, snapped a photo of my workdesk, brewed a cup of lemon, ginger and honey and am having a virtual check-in with everyone round at Julia's.

I was finding it hard to get motivated even before the Lurgy hit, so I decided to try and finish something I'd already started -  namely some fingerless mitts from the Baa Ram Ewe Mini Knits booklet. Not sure why I abandoned this project one-third of the way through the first mitt, but I managed to complete another third of it before being Laid Low. I'll know I'm properly on the mend when I pick the needles up again - at the moment even just sitting here typing is making the skull-crushing vice start to tighten, so I will wish everyone a "Happy WOYWW!" (sorry if I can't return any visits today) and reach for my audio book instead. It's "Olive, Again", by Elizabeth Strout, read by Kimberley Farr. Sequel to Olive Kitteridge (which was also made into a two-part mini-series starring the wonderful Frances McDormand). Absolutely love both books!