Total knitting panic mode

Where do I even start?  With the Christmas countdown on 20 Panic Days remaining and 18 projects on the Get It Done Or Else list, I hurt my hand/thumb and can't knit.  You've heard of "shopping till you drop"?  Well, I shopped until my thumb fell off.  Good grief!  I was carrying one of those plastic shopping bags hooked over my thumb and the weight tore something in there.  My palm & base of my thumb ended up bruised, swollen & miserable.  Unfortunately, in the panic of realizing I couldn't knit, I failed to take a picture of the fairly impressive bruising.

Luckily, minutes before going on that fateful shopping trip, I cast off this slip stitch hat.

So, that's a horrible picture taken in bad lighting with a flash.  In real life, it's "regular black" not the shiny black it appears to be in the picture and the colors are like muted stained glass.  As simple as it is, I think it may be my all time favorite thing I've ever knit.  Too bad it's too small for my head.  December has NOT been my month!  But that's okay.  I have more yarn and one of these days, the coloring in my hand won't be matching those greens & purples in the hat & I'll be able to knit another one.  A larger one, large enough for my freakishly huge head.

So, what have I been doing with all my non-knitting time?  Well, I have to admit, I have watched a Hell of a lot of Netflix, eaten my weight in self-pity Twizzlers, I've thrown a few more temper tantrums than normal, I've threatened to poke out the eyes of anyone who comes near me (with knitting needles of course) and I cleaned out my linen closet.

Yeah, that before picture isn't pretty.  Everyone had just been cramming stuff in there every which way & when ever someone dropped something, they left it where it landed.  For many, many months we've all been putting off changing our sheets as long as possible because no one wanted to have to fight trying to get the door re-closed.

So, the "after" isn't exactly pretty or decorative, but it's a lot less junky.  The door closes now, the sheets may not be folded perfectly, but they are once again stacked by size & the first aid supplies, medications, batteries & screwdrivers are back in their respective baskets instead of all jumbled up together.  Once I finished tossing the medicines that expired in 2007 (why was our family so sick in 2007??) and getting rid of the hundreds of pillow shams that don't match anything we currently own, look what happened -

An empty shelf!  Oh My God!  I have an empty shelf!  Think of all the yarn I can cram in there!

And for those of you paying attention & wondering why I have a kitchen strainer in my linen closet....  It's for cleaning out Poor Fish's bowl.  Or his rocks I should say.

Something else I've been doing is learning to paint making a mess with paint.  Apparently, I can hold a paint brush, but not knitting needles.  Argh!  But the painting has been a lot of fun.  A friend got into mixed media painting a while back & I've been pretty jealous of her creations.  I can't even draw a recognizable stick figure!  Recently, I found this book and have been following the directions and having a blast with it.

Actually, I haven't been following the directions so I've been making a lot of mistakes but I learn something from each of them.  For example, on that page, I was supposed to paint "media gel" over the black lines with a small brush before I watered down the rest of the water color pencil colors.  I failed to do the media gel step & the black lines smeared all over the place.  But whatever.  I had a good time playing with the pencils.  (And now I have the verse from Alice's Restaurant about sitting on the Group W bench & playing with the pencils running through my head.)

So yeah.  Instead of working on Christmas gift projects or shopping for items to replace the handmade ones, I've been attempting to paint & spending all my money on art supplies.  So, if you actually do receive something knit from me for Christmas (or maybe Easter - yikes!) and it's covered in paint, you'll know why.

And, now our power is starting to flicker so I think I'll rush this to a close before I end up loosing it.   We are in the midst of a three day ice storm.  We had freezing rain thunder storms yesterday which were fun!  I just pray (& so should everyone else) that our power doesn't go off.  I'm not sure I can survive if I loose both the internet and knitting at the same time.