Roses are red

I've been bit by the yarn bug pretty hard this year. When the weather starts getting cooler I always have the urge to dust off my crochet hooks, buy some pretty yarn, and make a scarf of a hat.

This year I've started experimenting with pieces that can be worn almost like jewelry. I do like scarves and hats, but when I get into the office in the mornings I have to take them off. I wanted things I could wear all day without looking like I'd just come in from outside.

The nice thing about crochet is that is can be very sculptural while still looking soft and delicate. There are so many fancy stitches, but even the most basic ones look wonderfully textured and touchable.

I've made a few lariats so far. The one I'm working on right now is in shades of oatmeal and a lovely deep reddish-brown.

This is the second one I made:

It's done in a very soft, slightly fuzzy yarn (Lion Brand Jiffy yarn). Narrow as the lariat is (it's about an inch and a half wide), it is also surprisingly warm. It can be worn a lot of different ways. As a belt, a scarf, looped several times around the neck or just once.

I've bought so much yarn these past few months that I'll be making a lot more. I'm also playing around with crocheted bangle bracelets and belts.

And in the end

Two months left to go in this year. I can't help but wonder where the time went, as I do every year when the trees are stripped bare and I find frost on my windshield in the morning. Spring and summer went by in a rush, and autumn is tiptoeing towards winter, promising snow and ice as it goes.

I forgot about daylight savings this morning until I stepped out my front door into sunlight. I'd grown used to driving to work in the dark, used to the reflection of streetlights and headlights on the pavement, used to rounding the curves on the hill and seeing the city lit up in the fog just ahead of me.

This morning was misty and cold, and my breath blew out in clouds as I scraped the frost off of my car. I could see the crows strutting in the front yard and every bare limbed tree let shreds of the rising sun peek through. Another year come and gone, and so much has happened, and yet it's like nothing has happened at all, or not enough.

I wonder if there will ever be a year where I feel its passing and think to myself "I'm sorry to see it go"? In a way, I always am, but it's not so much that the year itself was so wonderful, but more that it never lived up to what I had hoped, and now it's gone.

So I drove to work this morning in the sharp air, watching the leaves scuttle across my path and blow down the hillside, taking with them the last bits and pieces of October, the ghost of so many seasons past gone off to haunt someone else for a while.