Somewhen Designs

 Well, the plague got me, although it took 2.5 days after Stephen's test before I tested positive. So I've spent the last few days in a haze of sore throat, congestion, and feverish fatigue, forced to do nothing but sit in bed or on the sofa, alternately napping, reading, and watching EFL matches whilst knitting.  It's really, really hard not to feel guilty about this. I am SICK, objectively sick; I have the masses of used tissues and the line on the test strip to prove it! Yet I struggle not to feel bad that I've called out of 3 days of work now, that we relied on Doordash to feed us all weekend because neither of us had the energy to cook, that I've been reading novels instead of studying. I'm glad I cleaned and tidied the house on Thursday while I was still feeling well, or I'm sure I'd feel guilty about that too. Even now, whilst writing this, I felt compelled to prove myself not entirely useless, and cut up the pineapple that's been languishing ...

February is always a challenging month even though it's so short, and this year it's getting to me more than usual. Last month's snow has all melted leaving the world grey and gloomy. The news every day is frankly appalling and I'm struggling with what a customer at work described yesterday as "cosmic and spiritual exhaustion" - feeling a duty to stay informed and fight back by contacting my elected reps as much as possible, but also feeling deeply overwhelmed by it all and just wanting to hide. Lots of changes are going on at work too, and that's stressful in the moment and also making me even more anxious to get finished with my coding course, pass my exam, and get a new job (with the added dread of trying to job hunt in the current uncertain climate, for a job related to the medical field.) Oh and my husband just tested positive for covid, because we need one more thing going on! In the face of all this I've been priorizing my afternoon walks and tr...

I don't remember when I first came across the concept of a temperature blanket - in which you knit or crochet a stripe, square, or other section every day in a color assigned to represent that day's temperature - but I've wanted to make one for quite some time. And this year, as I started to unpack my craft room and came across a box of rainbow colored wool, I decided it was time. Most of my colors are KnitPicks Palette, with a big cone of Holst Garn Tides (a wool/silk blend) to provide my main color. The other yarns are Holst as well. I decided stripes are boring and instead I wanted to knit half square triangles. I also want to keep track of both the high and low temperatures for every day, because that's more fun. There will be a plain grey square to mark the separation between each month - both to make the math work out to a rectangle, and to give me quick reference points to make sure I haven't skipped a square. So I picked out my colors, did a lot of math, spe...

  Long (long) time, no blog posts.  It's been all Instagram all the time for several years now, but with everything going on with Meta - deeply unsatisfactory algorithms and app functions, removal of any even pretense of fact checking or protection of vulnerable people - I'm wanting to step away a little bit. Maybe we'll save IG for the reels it really wants me to make. Maybe Facebook doesn't need all my photographs, they can go here instead.  First up: The name changed! This was "Glanalaw" for a long time but I wanted to have continuity between my other social media and my (mostly defunct) Etsy shop. So we are Somewhen Designs here as well. If you're a reader from the old days, you'll want to update your bookmarks. Otherwise, welcome! On that note, a (re)introduction. My name is Gillian, I reside in Ohio with my husband and a multitude of cats. Mostly you'll see posts about knitting, sewing, my garden, and things I've baked, but my interests a...