A Fine Mess

More medical nonsense over the last few days BUT! I attended a game of the Star Trek Adventures RPG. The Game Mistress had never GMed before so her friend had gathered a bunch of his nerd friends (including my husband, but I got to tag along) to be a test audience.

it was fun! Had a great time technobabbling such things as: could we get past the transporter room bottleneck by simply storing evacuees in the pattern buffers until later? (That one did not stick to the drawing board—fucking with the transporter never goes well.) Could we isolate this virus in the computers by pulling out the infected isolinear chips and the way they seem to do on the show all the time with no ill effects? (She gave us that one even though technically the era we were playing had never mentioned isolinear chips.)

She got very flustered, bless her, but largely because she was running the pregen adventure and it’s very linear. Best laid plans, and all that.

I now have 2 systems I want to run as solo RPGs (and possibly as games with my nerd family? My brain fog feels a bit better since my last medication adjustment so perhaps??) It turns out I’ve actually had the solo rules for the Star Trek game for a few years so I dug those out to take a gander. And you know what else I found hidden in a dusty corner of the home server? Star Trek fanfiction I wrote when I was 14, which was very exciting/embarrassing. I must have carried it in every laptop I’ve owned since mumble mumble when it was written to eventually get backed up here all these years later.

In craft news I’m making my little flower motifs for my wheelchair blanket, and also picked up a knitted blanket that’s also modular so I can switch back and forth between little projects and not go mad.

I fell in love with the colourway of the Origami Blanket a few years ago but couldn’t confidently crochet at the time so I put a pin in it until later. I can crochet now but I’m already crocheting all those flowers and miss knitting a bit but cannot face another sock until autumn, so! Knit pinwheels it is!

Each designer has generously provided the patterns for free!

Origami Blanket, Kirsten Ballering
https://haakmaarraak.nl/free-crochet-pattern-origami-blanket

Pinwheel Blanket, Ksenia Naidyon
https://www.purlsoho.com/create/2025/09/13/pinwheel-blanket/

My birthday present to myself was a bag of Yarnsmith Create DK in my best approximation of that colour palette. That arrived yesterday, so now I have one complete Pinwheel block!

29 blocks to go. It didn’t really take that long? I could finish this in a couple of months, if I assume I make half a pinwheel a day. I won’t, because I’m like that. But in theory, yeah.

This is actually A Few Years’ Round Up.

Honestly the last few years are a bit of a blur but I try to take a lot of photographs so I can look back and remember that stuff actually happened. I found some pictures of notable knitting projects:


It looks like the original image of my Little Cotton Rabbit has broken but I made him in 2020, I think. I made a load of new little clothes for him recently though. I’ve made 3 frogs so far but this is the only photo I got before I gifted them all away. I plan to make more. Eventually. There have been some patterns for whimsical little clothes released since I made mine, and I simply must make a pumpkin costume, I must.

Little Cotton Rabbit: https://ravel.me/bunny-in-a-dotty-dress
Frog: https://ravel.me/frog-48

Gloves for my permanently cold little handsies.

Crosswise Cadence Gloves: https://ravel.me/crosswise-cadence-gloves
Firewalker fingerless gloves; https://ravel.me/fadewalker-fingerless-mitts

 

Moving round ups to Monday when I'm usually more able to actually do them. It's not the last day of the week (in my calendar, at least) so it bothers me because it feels like I should be looking FORWARD on a Monday not BACKWARDS but. I will get over it.

I know it's Tuesday. Shh.

Last week I was annoyed that my cough that I thought I got rid of is back! I think it's possiby not anything to do with covid but is in fact my allergies so we've kicked all out non-organic food again and I'm working on lowering my histamine levels to rebild my histamine tolerance after it's been wipes by having covid again. Very annoyed, it took me about a year and a half to fix that last time. I know what I'm doing this time at least so perhaps it'll go quicker.

In the meantime I've been knitting my log cabins squares while I wait for more yarn  for other blankets.


I haven't done maths for this project yet because I'm not sure how many squares I'll actuall ymake overall. Our bed is bigger than it was when I started it, but we were originally planning to keep it in the living room so it may not need to increase in size to match. We'll see!

I might rip back the last section of the one on the far right, I'm not keen on the beige/brown/grey and it's not in keeping with the colours of the squares I've made so far. I'll wai tuntil the point where I'm decided which leftover balls to mix n match together to make more squares so I can determine if it will be echoed elsewhere or not. I feel like a few of Kureyon colourways have sneaky sections of beige so it might be fine.

These work up very fast, if I hadn't had other things going on earlier this year I could easily have finished the blanket by doing one every few days. I Was intending to have it done by my next anniv ersary but I moved the date back a year to the milestone anniversary when I picked up a load of other more urgent blanket projects but I might not need to tbh.

I also started a playthrough of Apothecaria! I need to tinker with the style I started writing it in before I'm happy I think but Im enjoying myself. I signed up to the author;'s patreon and got most of the DLC for the first £3ish payment which is so much value for money it feels like stealing! It's recommended to keep a physicl journal for it where you write in it like it's your character's actual journal and make sketches of things they encounter etc etc which sounds amazing but I am not sure I;m ready for that level fo committment yet. I'm writing on Scrivener and once I get into the swing of it I may start writing some of it up in a journal and doing some artwork later. I actually started writing in 3rd person POV because that's what I always used to write in but it is contributing to the entries being SO LONG so I might stop that and do it the other way instead after all.

I've been looking the journals shared by other players in the author's discord and they are so wonderfully creative, it's really such a joy to look through them all. I've been feeling incredibly down this year overall for various reasons so it's nice to feel such untainted pleasure from something so whimsical and fun.

I'm using my Frodor Pavlov tarot deck to play it with and I'm thrilled to have an excuse to use that more regularly and also want it to inform the general vibe of my playthrough so I'll be keeping an eye on that as I play.

I just realised that I am likely to be knitting blankets for the next year. I need to finish this pink/purple/blue one for my brother's stepdaughter, but I also have a Paintbox Log Cabin Blanket on the needles that I want to finish for my 4th/1st anniversary (I was married on Leap Day 2020) because my husband has been wanting a big colourful wool blanket for us to snuggle on the sofa with.

5 down, at least 20 more to go?


I also want to make myself a woollen lap blanket for winter when I use my wheelchair because my leggies get cooooooold. And I want to make a super king sized bedspread for my bed. And something for my mother to wear on her lap when she sits outside in her fancy new swing seat because she's always cold.

I was actually going to use the Hue Shift Afghan pattern for some of those but I think I might be sick of it by then so I need to find another.

Sure wish Ravelry didn't give me migraines.

I'm hoping, perhaps optimistically, that I can do enough crafting in a week that I will have interesthing things to share for future me when I look back at what the heck I even got up to.

This week I mostly knit on my next Hue Shift blanket.

 
I also attended a cider and sausage festival :O and a virtual geogame in my local city, and a picnic, on consequetive days! And now I'm absolutely knackered.

I joined Ravelry in my mid teens and for about 5 years was a daily visitor. I dreamed in knitting. I had a project in my bag at all times. Eventually I started working but I spent my lunch break on the rav forums. I soon walked into a mental and physical breakdown which left me with multiple chronic illnesses and was unable to knit for years... and when I was I found that Ravelry gave me migraines and neurological symptoms that, while something I'm already prone to, had never been triggered by a website before.


A project made in my lunch breaks at work


Ah, shit. I can tell already I will have to finally learn HTML for this.