A Clean Desk

Look what I've been able to do two nights in a row. Yep. I actually have attained a state of clean deskness. I do love my Longaberger organizing baskets. They do such a nice job of helping me find a place for everything. Now if only I could have a state of clean bookcaseness and clean closetness to go along with it. One goal at a time though. I don't want to get too ambitious.

Actually, now that I have cleaned my desk, I find that it's easier to remind myself to put something away after I am done using it. It actually makes the process of going to bed with a clean desk much easier if you don't completely cover it in clutter all the time. Perhaps this goal won't be quite as challenging as I thought it was going to be.

To give myself a little reward for positive first efforts, I decided that I could start a nother little project for myself. Recently, I created some holes in my favorite pair of mittens. I've never actually made mittens before, so I thought it would be fun to make a pair for myself. When I found Laurie's pattern for "Fiber Fish", I knew I'd found the perfect thing. Fun and cute and an opportunity to play with some interesting techniques that I hadn't used much before -- mitred squares and entrelac.

Fiber Fish Pattern and Auditioning Trekking Yarns 110 and 108

I really liked the Trekking yarn for these mittens (in addition to the way it shades the entrelac so well, I also like the fact that it is superwash and contains nylon, so the mittens should be durable) but had a lot of difficulty selecting colors. It's hard to judge what you're going to get by looking at pictures of unknit skeins. Flickr to the rescue! Did you know that you could search Flickr for Trekking XXL and see almost any colorway knit up? Very cool. You know, Flickr is one of those things that I always know is out there, but I completely forget when I am doing yarn colorway research. I was really glad I remembered it this time.

Even so, I still ended up ordering two different colorways from Carodan Farm -- I just couldn't decide between colorways 110 and 108. Once I had them both sitting on my desk, however, I really liked the strong contrasting colors in 108 and I thought that the contrast between the yellow and blue would make for more interesting mittens. I spent a little time this evening getting started on the cuff for my first mitten. The mitres don't take very long to get the hang of and are easy to execute. I'm thinking this might be good knitting for while viewing a certain football game over the weekend.