I am OFFICIALLY old!

Yup - it's my birthday.  Kind of a non-starter really but I am going to go and have a crafting evening with my best friends in Deer Park today.  Can't think of a better way to celebrate.  Should I take my wheel? My loom? Knitting? It would only be better if my twin sis, Lya, could be here with me.  Happy birthday sis! 

Funny thing is that I just don't feel an age...some days I feel like I'm still wet behind the ears and sometimes it seems like I've been there and done that.  I do hope to have many, many more years to ponder the meaning of life though.  It's never easy but it's always interesting!

We make the most of it (well, we try, I think) and this week I've been up to my eyebrows in websites, weaving, and listing items in my Etsy store.  Here are a few goodies - http://janellezorko.etsy.com/.  This isn't really meant to be an ad but I so rarely post my work, I thought you might like to see it.

Thanks to everyone today for the happy thoughts and well wishes - I appreciate every one of them!

Family Tree

So, finished A Breath of Snow and Ashes by Diana Gabaldon this week - no small feat.  I adore this series.  It's a story of time travel mixed with historical fiction and each huge book keeps me completely riveted to the end.  In these books A LOT is said about the clans of Scotland.  Since I became a weaver (ha!) last week, I started thinking...hey...somewhere on my mom's side, I think I'm Scots Irish...yeah...I wonder what my tartan woud be...I wonder if I could weave it...

So I call my mom and say, "What do you think our clan name would be if we could trace the ancestry?"  Keep in mind that most of my family is Hungarian or Austro Hungarian or German.  There's something like 1/16th that might be Scottish.  She decides that it might be "Dalrymple" from her father's mother's side.  He ended up with some middle names that included "Augustus Dalrymple" - of whom, it turns out in my research, there really was one mentioned in history.

Soooo, I look up the tartan and guess what?  No disrespect intended...none at all, but I'm not sure I like it.  It's not horrible and I may still try to weave it but here it is -

Well, you can't choose your family - but maybe you can at least find out who they were.  I'm going to research them further.  Maybe it's that I have a milestone birthday coming up - maybe it's that I think it would be a shame to forget.  No matter what, it's bound to be interesting!

Weaving and Bobbing Along

What a few weeks!  I find all of the sudden that I have more time on my hands for various reasons.  That is good and bad.  More time often comes with less money, know what I mean? 

The good part is that true to my "serial hobbyist" moniker, I have now taken up weaving!  I had to go and do it - I found a used loom on Ebay.  Yes, like I needed another hobby...  It sat on the dining room table oh, for about 5 minutes, before I started pouring over the manual to learn how to warp it up.  Those people at Ashford really know how to write an instruction booklet and within an hour, I was ready to weave!  I wove and I wove...and I wove some more and finished a scarf, this time for ME (I tend to give away everything I make).  I was very excited to have finished something without any help and I think it looks pretty good!

Someone who does not look pretty good?  Why, that would be Beanie, my normally fluffy, fluffy Persian kitty boy.  However, around this time of year, he starts to get more than a little matted and being the declawed guy that he is, he bites like a son of a gun when brushed.  So, off he went to Grrs and Purrs for a little salon time.  Poor dude - does he look silly or what?  He's cold all the time now but the sweater lasted all of about 10 minutes as he kept walking backward, thinking that would get him out of it.  He's my boy - no matter what he looks like!