Time for a change?

No, not changing the blog; I've not been here long enough to make any big changes yet! I'm talking changes in other areas of my life.

Like many people, back in March 2020, I was sent home to work. I remember us packing up our PCs, being told it was for two weeks, and updating everyone's schedules to show they would be on a work from home rota for three weeks; we thought we were being very generous extending it to three weeks, sure we would soon be back at work.

Five years later and not only am I still working from home, the role I have has changed four times, and the company has changed hands too. It is quite literally a totally different job from the one I closed the door on as I left with my PC back at the end of March 2020.

But the thing is, I'm quite a different person to that person back then. 

I've produced two children (well, one and a half, Miss 4 was very much in production five years ago). I've moved house and now own my home. My priorities have changed.

And one of those priorities is simply that I would like a room of my house back!

Since returning to work after having Miss 4, one room of the house has been home to a desk and office chair and a PC. Said room is supposed to be for the hobbies cultivated by myself and the Spousal Unit, but it is rather dominated by the fact that I have to work in there three to four days a week.

One of my plans for this room is to rehouse my son, Mr 7, there from the room he shares with his sister, then move the hobby room into the spare bedroom. The spare bedroom is slightly larger than the office and would hopefully give us a little more space for respective hobbies. It's one of those tasks rather reminiscent of the slider picture puzzles you used to get in party bags. You can't move things into their correct location until something else has been moved out the way first! 

Poorly lit photo taken right after The Chair arrived and took over a corner of my living room.

This isn't a project that will be completed within a few days, it's more of a long term, meandering sort of series of tasks. The fact we've set the date to move Mr 7 into his own room as around the time he becomes Mr 8, a date we won't reach until next February, shows that we're not in the greatest of rushes (or rather, we're being realistic about how long we'll take to move furniture from one end of the house to the other).

The very first task is to reclaim the office as a hobby space.

And to do that, the desk (and the PC which sits on it) needs to go. I already have a beautiful wingback armchair taking up space in my living room, which will go into the space currently occupied by said desk.

The logical first step has been to find a new job which will take me out of the house, one which aligns better with my personal values and perhaps offers a greater chance of progression, so by extension will allow us to kickstart the process of rearranging dour house.

Like I said, it's definitely like a slider puzzle.

On The Needles: Temperature Blanket

 Many (many, many) years ago, I made my husband a temperature scarf.

The idea is that you assign each temperature, or range of temperatures, a colour, then record the daily temperature using those colours. I used the historical temperatures for the year we got married and the resulting scarf was about 9 feet long (and thus totally unwearable)!

The scarf I knitted my husband.

Since then, I've seen people using other crafts to record the temperatures through a year or other period of time and I've wanted to revisit the temperature thing in some way. This was helped along by online algorithms last year. Suddenly my feeds were full of crochet temperature blankets and articles about pregnancy blankets (which recorded the person's mood through the duration of the pregnancy).

My other inspiration was the fact that my mum has crocheted each of my children the most beautiful and cosy blankets. When they're feeling under the weather, it's their Naini blankets they choose to snuggle under. As they grow older, they're maybe not quite so inclined to come to me for a hug or a snuggle as they used to, but I know you can get a lot t of comfort simply by wrapping yourself in something made by someone who loves you. 

And they grow out of jumpers so quickly; a blanket is the natural choice for a portable cuddle.

My kids are all IVF babies. Our fun family fact is that they were all conceived on the same day, in the same 'batch' of embryos, and then spent getting lengths of time in the freezer before being thawed and transferred.

When I gave my son the option of a blanket of his first year of life or something different, he asked for one which tracked the time from his embryo transfer until the day he was born. I loved this idea and set straight to work planning out colour schemes for it. 

Can't help but think these colours remind me of macaroni cheese!

His favourite colours are greens, reds, and blues, but he surprised me by opting for rainbow shades; possibly because that was the colour scheme I'd gone for in his dad's temperature scarf. And just like his dad's blanket, we're using black at either end and to mark the divisions between months. I'm planning to use an applied i-cord border up the sides when I'm done too (but I'm trying not to think about that too much right now).

Next up was the massive hunt for a blanket pattern to use. My first thought was something basic, like garter stitch, but I still spent about two weeks scouring Ravelry for alternative ideas. Naturally, in the end, I went with a nice simple garter stitch blanket! 

Of course, what this did mean was that I was totally overloaded with inspiration and promptly made plans for another three blankets (more on one of those in another post).

I'm currently about two 'months' through the blanket, with about five and a bit still to go. Each row is 300 stitches and I work two per day, so while it's easy and mindless knitting, it takes about an hour to knit three rows. It's also proving to be quite a warm knit; great to keep your lap warm when you're in a cold room, not so great when the fire is going and the room is already toasty!

Expect to hear more about this one in the coming months.

Progress so far!