Is this the longest first two weeks of January for anyone else? Being on the internet is tough right now so let this week's blog be a pallet cleanser for you.

 Here's what I was up to this week:

• Continued work on the crochet sweater

• Started an Animal Crossing Isabel up-cycle project

• Afghan Square Purse

• Got new fish for my aquarium

• Redesigned my website

• Finished reading A Tempest of Tea

Crochet sweater: The crochet floral sweater I started last week is definitely a "Slow fashion” project. I have quite a few little flowers already made, but they still need their granny square outlines. My goal is to see how many flowers I can get out of one skein of yarn. This will give me a better idea of how many granny squares I’ll get from the amount of yarn I have. My current total is 18 flowers and 2 completed squares. I suspect I will need around 58-60 granny squares to make the sweater. I have two skeins of each color. So fingers crossed it's enough yarn for the project!

Isabel Sweater: A few years ago I got a pack of patches from a Nintendo booth at a local con. I didn't really know what to do with them for the longest time, however… My mom gave me a few of her old cardigans recently and an orange of one perfectly matched the Isabel patch in the pack! Even though it has a sticky back, I don't really trust it. So I appliqued it on to the sweater to make sure it's secure. I think this sweater is pretty cute as is, but I want to add other little embroidered AC designs to the sweater to make it very nerdy/cozy. Stay tuned, this might become it’s own blog post!

Afghan Square Purse: I started working on this afghan square pattern 2 years ago. I completed the square while recovering from surgery in May 2024, and it has sat as an UFO (unfinished object) Since then. Originally I wanted to make it into a cardigan, but the yarn was kinda expensive and I would need a lot more of it. I was hit with a bolt of inspiration while organizing my yarn last week to make it into a purse! Some experimental folding assured me it would look decent and after stitching it together I am very happy with how it looks. The folded edges make the design really pop. I have been convinced by friends, and my partner Z, to make a leather strap for it. I happen to have a few extra pieces from my Imogen cosplay that I could use, so? I think I have a cute new purse y'all!

FEESH: Some folks may know that keeping aquariums is one of my favorite hobbies. One of my 2 show tanks has been filled only with plants for the last year due to life being life. WELL this past weekend I desperately wanted to get out of the house and see how my surgery recovery was going, and a trip to the fish store seemed like the perfect way to do that! I had a couple of ideas in mind when we walked into the store. Welp… those plans went out the window because it was slim pickings.

I'm guessing we just got unlucky with the stocking schedule, because some of what I wanted was still in quarantine and many of the tanks were empty. So we wandered around the store for a bit googling different fish species. Eventually Z and I found ourselves enamored with a few different varieties of Blue Eyed Rainbow fish. I really liked watching their behavior in the store, so we took home 10 of the Blue Eyes Spotted Rainbow Fish. I think I want to get up to 30 of them, but that will have to take multiple future trips. So far my current 10 are doing well, and exploring all over the tank. Which I love to see <3

Website: I have had a couple of pain points on my website for a while. Updating my "Reduce, Reuse, ReCrafting blog was a frustrating process because I had to individually link to each post (it's due to how I set up my home page). However, I discovered a new tool in my website builder that made my life MUCH easier, and now my website blog page updates automatically as soon as a blog gets published. This is a DELIGHTFUL change. I decided to run with the momentum I had and also updated my Reduce, Reuse, ReCosplay page and added new photos to my cosplay gallery. I think these changes make my website quite a bit easier to navigate, and they certainly make my life easier!

A Tempest of Tea: Even though this story was a little more intense than what I wanted to read, I did really enjoy it. I think the intensity of the ending is a little muted by the amount of info dumping that was packed into it, but all of that info made me very interested in what book 2 will be like!

What have you been up to this week?