Teatime

I've been on a green tea binge for the last few weeks - maybe six weeks. I am hooked on a couple of teas from Adagio, Casablanca Twist and Apricot Green. I drink probably 4 cups a day lately. And the weirdest thing - I know that green tea is good for you and has all these health benefits and they put it in cosmetics (though I don't think the benefits are really absorbed through the skin).

So, today I'm combing the tangles out of my hair after getting out of the shower, and I saw myself in the mirror. Normally, when I get out of the shower it ain't a pretty sight (we're talking above the neck here, below is a separate tragedy I'd rather not discuss right now). My natural post-shower state is a blotchy mess that makes me thank God I'm nearsighted. Today, I swear my skin looked...good! Not puffy and blotchy, and almost like I was wearing makeup. Normally I avoid looking directly into the mirror right after a shower like Dracula avoids sunlight. Today I leaned into the mirror right under the landing strip of bright lights above the vanity, and I was happy with what I saw.

So I'm going to keep drinking the green tea.

And this weekend I swear there will be actual fiber content. Crochet again.

I have had a cone of this Bambu 7, in Denim blue (which isn't really denim but is somewhere between a Royal and French Blue) in the stash for, oh, years. I have played with it, but it's so soft and slinky, it doesn't work in a lot of patterns. You want drape, this is your stuff - it drapes like it fainted. So after screwing around with it off and on for years, yesterday I had that Duh thing - a pattern I made before would be so much slinkier and sexier in this yarn, and God knows, I have enough of it for anything. So the maiden voyage of Bambu 7 around these parts will be an All-Season Shawl. And I am loving it so far - it's lace for dummies again, but it's so damn slinky, it really will look like something when done. But though the pattern is easy, the yarn makes it a challenge - that's why I opted to crochet rather than knit. Crochet, you rip one stitch at a time if you make a mistake. Knitting, you screw up with this stuff and you may as well frog the whole thing, it behaves like a liquid. Even this relatively no-brainer crochet pattern has forced me to go slow and LOOK at what I'm doing here, because the rows are getting long, and it's like crocheting water. I gah-ron-tee the photos will not reflect the PITA nature of this fiber, but I love how it feels so I'd use it again, on something similarly simple.

edited for your amusement:
Oh, yeah. I case you really doubt that there are holes in my memory, check out this entry. I knew I'd finished one of these shawls before, but I had zero recollection that I'd actually started this same shawl with this same yarn two years ago. See here. I stumbled on this by accident while trying to remember something else.

Yeah. So the difference is that now I'm using a G hook, and it seems to be working bettter. But I honestly had no, zero, memory that I'd tried this before, a few months before the aneurysm. I swear, it took out bits of my brain I didn't really need anyway - I can recite bank account numbers and tell stories about my kids' childhoods, but random things like this - Poof! I had no idea that I had tried this before until I saw it in my own archives. For the record, I like it better now.