Packing up all of your belongings, trying to cushion the breakables and wrap the spill-happy or spiky things adequately, filling your car or hiring a van or hiring someone to drive the van and driving for however long it takes to get from there to here and then the undignity of unloading, carrying, cursing, sweating, arranging and rearranging. Not knowing where anything is for the first however long, everything being in a permanent state of just grubby and disorganised and horrible. It's the worst.
You know what's worse than moving house?
Moving house four times within one year.
Yes, that's right. I moved at the end of last August, the middle of last September, the middle of June and the beginning of this August. Four moves, less than twelve months.
As a result, I've had the sewing machine and my stash packed up pretty thoroughly, and it's going to be a while before I can get my craft room set up to the point where I can just go and work on things. So, instead, I've been knitting.
I took a trip to London to visit my elder sibling and a dear friend, and the very best train knitting is, of course, socks. Why of course? Because they're small and portable, tend to have easily memorable pattern repeats, and, most important, nobody wants to sit beside someone with a handful of frightening looking spiky metal needles!
My big project at the moment is a cardigan, in dark purple. The yarn and pattern were bought for me by my godmother (I was named for her, so for my whole life she's been known as 'Big Lilly') and I really like it so far. Of course, I'm congenitally incapable of following a damn pattern as I'm told, so I've eliminated the side seams, patterned the back (it was plain, with lace fronts in the original), and charted out the lace repeat on squared paper. I know that written out instructions work for some people, but charting just makes so much more sense to me. The cardigan is a delicious deep aubergine-y colour.I'm a bit further along than this picture, but not much. Doing the back and fronts at the same time means it seems to grow slowly, but it isn't really growing slowly. It's just a lovely thing, and I can't wait to finish it so I can wear it everywhere.
My big sewing project du jour is the scrappy quilt for the back of the sofa. Yes, still. I've got the backing for it, and chosen a layout for the blocks, and all that remains really is sewing the stuff together. But I've hit a snag, because my supposedly 60" wide backing fabric turns out to be closer to 57", and with a 60" top, I'm coming up short. I still need to decide what I'm doing with that. It's fleece, so I can't just piece something from the scraps of the top. I'll have to either get different fleece or add a stripe of some other fleece, or shorten the top. I need to get this done, though, so I can snuggle under it on the sofa. My new house is lovely, but a tad on the chilly side.