Sick day

I woke up yesterday morning with the beginnings of a cold – not too surprising considering the amount of stress in my life recently – and decided to cancel my dye-fest day, and take it easy instead.  So I slept in, took naps throughout the day, and sipped chicken soup, which I had (coincidentally?) made earlier in the week.  In between I cut up citrus peels for candying.  (Being sick isn’t an issue for making candied citrus peels – it takes seven days to make, during which it is sterilized (boiled) daily, and then it’s put through a canner at the end.)

So now I’ve got the bergamot and Seville orange peels candying, along with a batch of Meyer lemon peel.  (I made lemonade, too.)  Maybe later in this long weekend I’ll make mandarin orange marmalade.

Autumn Splendor-wise, I have now finished knitting all the blanks and will dye them today.  Tomorrow I’ll dye the panels for the muslin, since I expect that to be an all-day affair.  In between I’ll work on weaving another dark panel.

Book-wise, I’ve finally put my finger on the thing that was bothering me: three of the topics are how-tos, and two are philosophy.  They don’t go together into a coherent unit, so I’ve decided to focus on the how-tos rather than the philosophy: how to approach learning, how to think about your work, and how to do and/or design a large project.  Philosophy can be tucked in as it fits.  This gives me a “spine” to the project (as Twyla Tharp suggests in her book The Creative Habit), and also gives me a better idea of my audience.  So, conceptual progress.  I hope to write more later this week, but it’s hard to feel inspired when fuzzy-headed and congested.  Hope this cold goes away soon!