When I started the gauge check, in December of 2010, I was still doing a lot of processing about the end of Hurricane Isabel, and I was also helping some friends of mine negotiate a difficult and painful breakup.  I was doing a lot of thinking about the nature of relationships, good and bad, and learning how to build a healthy, solid partnership in the wake of abuse.

I’ve come a long way since I started this blog.  I’ve finished school, changed jobs, moved across the country.  I’ve worked to rediscover the person I was before the storm and embrace the person I’ve become after it.  Yesterday I took the last class required by the state to become a foster parent; all that’s left is paperwork (and a bigger apartment).  If all goes well, by this time next year, I’ll be a wife and mother.

Right now my life is in kind of a holding pattern, and my gauge check really reflects it.  It’s increasingly become a weekly report on what I did over the weekend, and I’ve found it to be more of a struggle to talk about something interesting with each passing week.

So for now, I’m retiring the gauge check.  I suspect that I may pick it back up when my life starts moving again.

What I’m going to do instead will be a series of reviews/book reports on my knitting library, tentatively titled Why I Picked It Up.  Why will start with the books I’m not knitting out of for the Year of Good Intentions, explaining why I picked it up (obviously), what I like about it, and what purpose it serves.  I’m going to talk about why I buy craft books, because I’ve realized that there are reasons beyond patterns, and what I look for in a book that’s coming home.  Once I finish with my own library, it may continue on as a sporadic feature that includes books I brought home for the library, which will include a section on whether I’d buy it or not, and why.

Going into the new year, I’m thinking about doing a segment on fiber, where I try spinning or knitting with a new fiber every week.  The Big Shiny Idea involves two of each letter of the alphabet, one rare and one common (where possible), although I could probably spend several months just working on C.  There are a lot of breeds of sheep that start with C, I’ve discovered, and that’s not even counting non-sheep breeds like camel and cashmere.  We’ll see how that shakes out.

So, the long and short of it is the hiatus of the Gauge Check, but lots of new stuff to keep you interested.  Don’t worry, I’ll still be talking about my crafting – just right now, there’s not much of it.

In the meantime, I’m going to go back to playing Dragon Quest VIII.