Busy, busy, busy & not going backwards.

I'm sure life used to be a lot quieter than it is now.
It seems every spare moment is filled with work and even then the 3 of us struggle to keep up.

For example for the last few weeks Daisy and I have been dyeing yarn for Wonderwool, this means the wholesale is piling up and finding enough yarn to update the site with is a struggle.
I've managed to sneak away a couple of kilo's for this weeks update, which will be HERE tomorrow night (24th of April 2014) at 7 pm UK time.
Here are a few of my favourites....

And then when we come home from the show we need to start thinking about dyeing the May clubs and the 3rd quarter of yarn for the Kaleidoscope.

Plus Phil and I have just moved house and like all newly moved people we want to spend as much time as possible making it our home. 

Unfortunately most of our time is spent working so there are still piles of books everywhere and piles of pictures waiting to find their places on the walls.

Luckily we have an amazing landlord who wants the house to be perfect so he is helping us solve all the problems as they occur.
But even still we still have a kitchen wall we need to paint, its dark wood panelling and makes the kitchen very dark and pokey.
And I'm desperate to spend time in my tiny garden and plant herbs.

Plus I have the book which has a very strict timetable, I've been panicking about being behind by 7 weeks, but I have just finished NO 2 blanket and have gone back to NO 1, which was already half finished.
NO 3 and 4 are both DK blankets, so shouldn't take too long, I'm hoping to have caught up with myself by the summer.

My lovely Valerie is the only person (except Daisy and Phil) to have seen NO 2 and thats because she's my tec editor, she seemed to really like it and was overflowing with compliments.
When I look at it I see what I could of changed to make it better and console myself with the fact that its sister blanket (NO 4) will be even better.

Let me explain I go through several emotional stages with each design I make.
The first is at the design stage, where I feel this design is going to be the best thing I have ever made.
The second is while I am making it, constantly changing the design in the places I've got it wrong.
And the next stage is when its finished, most of the time it looks like the design, and I'm glad to finish it and it is kind of OK, but by this time I am already designing the next blanket which is going to be even better.
And a few years later I hate it and am embarrassed that I made and designed it.

Such as my original Triangles blanket, which I designed 7 years ago.
I'm really embarrassed by it now, the colours are all wrong, the corners of the motifs don't meet, its just wrong, wrong, wrong.....

So a couple of years ago I decided to remake it, but I got very bored very quickly and gave up.
At this point in time I promised myself I would never try to go backwards again, for me its frustrating and boring and I waste too much time.

However last year I re-visited the triangle motif and redesigned it and then had a whole year of designing triangles. Culminating in the Kaleidoscope blanket, which I can't show you so here's Twinkle, Twinkle instead which was the second from last triangles blanket of last year.

I've just finished the swatch for NO 4 and it measures 6 inches, which is massive for me, I can't remember the last time I made anything with 6 inch motifs, so I am a bit concerned its too big, as it is I have to take a border off the design to make it a sensible size.

I want to be working on it now, to see if it works, but instead I should be adding the update yarn to the website, writing a mailing list mail, printing patterns for Wonderwool and generally be doing something more important for now........