Dawn Brocco's Life and Design Blog

I finished the afghan the other day. I need to work on the pattern, but I can sometimes need a break between finishing the actual knitting and beginning the pattern. This time can be fraught with instability. Do I start another design right away? Do I go hog wild on housework and avoid designing for a few days?

This time, I decided, quicker than quick, to go through and toss all my knitting mags. I hang onto knitting mags forever. Even upon threat of death I won't let them go.

Once in awhile I would sell issues I'm really not interested in, but ever since the PO did away with Bound Printed Matter, postage is just too high for selling relatively heavy magazines.

But, all of a sudden I had the urge to LET GO.

(Maybe my subconscious knows we're actually gonna get to sell the house this time around, and so, it's warning me to lighten up the moving load?!)

So, I just flipped through them all - and there were plenty!, ripping out articles or patterns that inspire me and then filled one of those boxes that hold 3, 1 gallon jugs of spring water with mags.

Then I went through my 2 design binders. Another holds measurement charts, so this one wasn't touched. But my inspiration binders were filled with clippings from years ago. 90% got tossed into the recycling box.


Next is the top shelf in my office closet. Old binders, plastic paper sorters, boxes that various electronics came in. Most is going.

I've already begun going through the yarn manufacturers' binders. Some are so old and the color cards SO outdated, it's just a waste of space.

I don't throw these out. I rip the yarns off the cardboard sheets they're mounted to and throw out the yarns. Then I recycle the cardboard or paper sheets. It's time-consuming, but more ecological. And, even better, if the paper sheets are useable on one side, I save them for scrap paper. Eventually they'll get recycled, or I'll use these scrap paper sheets for working out pattern details. No use wasting good paper.

I've been doing this since high school, as my family can attest. There'd be a huge pile of schoolwork/homework papers of the previous year in my closet - all used on one side. It's just too bad there was no recycling programs back then.

Got another bedroom put together. I painted all its woodwork the other day, as well as the entire hall's (6 doors and baseboards), and our closet doors, and painted its closet doors today.

Here's the 2 rooms that have been renovated


This is the smallest of our bedrooms, about 9' square with a 5' x 7' nook in the rear. To the left, out of view is an old wood dresser with 2 of the lamps whose shades I yarn wrapped in pale yellow. The yellow counterpane afghan and pillow was a design in - House of White Birches' "101 Knitting-To-Go-Projects", called Golden Ferns Counterpane Afghan and Pillow.



This is the 2nd bedoroom upstairs, 10' x 14'. We had to strip 8 or possibly 9, layers of wallpaper, then spackle, sand, spackle sand, ad naseum til the walls were smooth, then oil primed, 2 coats of paint and all the woodwork repainted. A lot of work to get a plain-looking room!

These 2 lamps also have my yarn-wrapped shades. Hard to see, but atop the bed is a handspun, indigo-dyed check blanket I wove eons ago. The check bolster is in Shetland wool yardage I wove, again, eons ago.

No curtains on the windows, no area rugs on the floors - the simplest and freshest I could come up with, to appeal to the widest buying audience.

*Only* 2 more bedrooms to do (hahahaha), bath door to replace, 2 doors to put up on my office and yarn/shipping room, reshellac a few large rooms' floors and upstairs hall floor, repaint a few rads, put new mulch in the front beds, rake the willow fronds from the lawn in front of the pond, and, of course, rip out and put in 3 rooms of carpet, then touch up paint on 5 more windows, baseboards and 5 doors, once the carpet is in, and rearrange some furniture - all in, what?, a week, 10 days?