I fell slightly off the thing-a-day bandwagon while traveling for work. I still worked on making something every day, though: this hat is a pattern called Wabbit Season on Ravelry, and it is for my friend Adrienne. I'm glad her favorite color is yellow: this bright golden yarn looks pretty darn cheerful. (It is Malabrigo Rios, for the curious yarn nerds.)

Another thing I sort of made is the redesign of my stupid website, now at least 50% less stupid! Check it out: http://www.torridly.org

My very dear friend Kate has not listened to my favorite band Sleater-Kinney very much, so I spent the past week or so obsessing about a mix to make her about this. Then I packaged it nicely, I think (Kate do not look at this picture if you are reading this and want to be surprised by the mix CD you are getting): 

I made a little book about how I found out about Sleater-Kinney and why certain particular songs are important to me. The drawing on the front is a drawing of Corin (I think it's Corin; I wrote in my liner notes how I did not know what Carrie or Corin looked like until I actually saw them liveand had a weird cognitive dissonance moment of which voice came from which person), which I drew based on the liner notes of Dig Me Out. It is on 3D paper that I had on my desk for some reason but it doesn't look terribly 3D even with the silly glasses. Anyway, I'm pretty happy with it, and I hope Kate will be too, and if you need more Sleater-Kinney in your life (it is my wholly unprofessional opinion that you probably do), you can download the mix I made. 

here's my thing-a-day for all week. these are elbow-length fingerless gloves, knit up from some awesome custom-dyed yarn I got from my birthday. I improvised the pattern: it's a mock cable ribbing that stretches out nicely.

I wonder if there is a long German word for the satisfaction one feels upon completing a knitted item while away from home as it has gotten colder outside and also you have to bike down three miles of Fullerton later and that always sucks. If that word exists, that's my night.

Today's thing-a-day was inspired by my friend Leigh, who makes way nicer-looking versions of it. She has an etsy that is pretty rad for you to check out, and is an all-around excellent lady.

This is my pinboard for displaying all the pins that I no longer wear because I get sad when I lose them and annoyed when people are all "lol pieces of flair" about them. It's made of an old campaign sign covered in mod podge and a scrap of some fabric that I like but don't have enough of to make anything more substantial.

Today I also resurrected my erstwhile blog, as I am prone to do every once in a while. I wrote a thing that was hard to write, and I'm pretty proud that I did.

Today I actually made two things, one of which was rather involved. I made a skirt out of two old t-shirts from my massive stash of old t-shirts that need to get turned into things. The sleeves of one shirt became pockets for the skirt, although they're not deep enough to be terribly excellent pockets. It's possible that the next thing I make will be a tutorial for making this thing:

To celebrate finishing the sewing of this skirt (because actually I do not really like sewing, although I feel very accomplished when I do it; I would rather be knitting, because I have never broken a knitting needle or caused one to smell like it was emitting smoke), I made myself a fancy drink using things from my burgeoning liquor cabinet and my pathetic refrigerator. The drink actually turned out to be delicious, so here is how you make it, if you happen to have the same strange assortment of booze in your home that I have in mine:

• 2 oz. Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur
• 1 oz. gin (I used Leopold's that someone gifted me but use whatever you have that does not taste like paint thinner)
• 1/2 oz. lemon juice
• 2 dashes Peychaud's bitters

Stir with ice and then I would tell you to strain it into a glass and garnish it with some stuff (a sprig of rosemary, maybe?) if I was that fancy, but I'm not that fancy, so just stir that stuff up and drink it in your face.

Day 1 of my thing-a-day commitment is a bit less of a thrill than it maybe could be. I took the gentleman friend out for a birthday dinner and then worked on one of my ongoing knit projects, a brioche stitch scarf to replace the first scarf I ever made for myself which I left on an airplane two weeks ago. I like to think that a flight attendant or cleaning crew member or someone is currently well pleased with that scarf; that makes me less annoyed at myself for having forgotten it. 

It is a day when we talk about nothing but the weather: abruptly at 2:30 this afternoon the windows of my 17th-floor office all but disappeared in whirling gusts of snow. This is the first blizzard of my life, and I'm pretty thrilled by it, and pretty thankful that everywhere I really need to go is within two blocks' walk of my apartment. Thunder and wind and snowplows are all howling outside my window, and Nick and I are both clattering away on our laptops under a blanket. However, the bartender at Longman & Eagle where we had dinner invited us to a snowball fight, and I am not one to pass up an evening's snow-tossing opportunity. As expected, doing fun things continues to get in the way of writing about those things on the internet. It's a good problem to have. 

I set this up just because I got super excited about the idea of committing myself to make something every day in February. I am also a bit nervous because I'm not exactly great at keeping true to commitments I make to myself on the Internet, but it stands to reason that I'll never improve on that front if I don't keep trying. So and but: a thing I made is a scarf on this fellow, whose birthday happens to coincide with the first day of this thing-making challenge! Should you want to wish him happy birthday, I'd recommend doing so by buying a pretty cool book he wrote at http://cadence.cc. Onward! To the future!