Hobblies

There are a few extracurricular activities I picked up over the weekend:

• blog-modification - I had been satisfied with my pre-fab blog template until I saw the modifications that were possible, on other people's blogs. Note the changed background on this blog. It's a shot that Tscho took of me when we went to the Lavender Festival in Sequim back in 2002.
• knitting - There's a Sunday night knitting group and it's full of people that I enjoy so I thought I'd pick up knitting ... again. It's something I do for about a month once every decade. The time has come to do so again. It was fun. As people arrived, they'd ask each other what project they were working on. Responses included "prayer shawl" or "scarf for my brother" or "afghan". I took perverse pleasure in saying, "A strip". Yes, I am knitting a strip. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it when it's done but I do want the flexibility of it being something other than a scarf. I'm thinking that it may become a tube top.
• window cling design - Yes, you absolutely read that correctly. See, our front door is composed of 15 panes of glass, each 6.5 by 11 inches. That means that passers-by can see me sitting on the couch. Not that I'm paranoid but I'm afraid that people might notice that I'm always sitting on the couch. So, I've decided to make window clings that look like stained-glass for each pane, or as many as I can until the kid's window cling kit paint supply runs out. I made my first cling yesterday and, man, was it ever gratifying! The outline was a total mess (wouldn't come out of the tube evenly) but the filler paint was easy to use. Then, a mere 14 hours later, I had a fully functional window cling that I could just slap up onto the glass. Talk about quasi-instant gratification!