Tagged with startitis

Friday Gauge Check: Sewing it Up

Friday means it’s time for our Friday rituals, the ceremonies of escorting one week out and preparing the next one. Which, around here, is the Gauge Check, where I take a look at my week and figure out where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Sometimes there are goals, sometimes I just talk about what’s going on in my life and my crafting. You are all welcome to join in in the comments.

Last Saturday I turned in my notice at work.

I spent a long time thinking about it, endless hours discussing it with Jack.  I was unhappy, that much was obvious, but was I really unhappy enough to quit?  I’m good at the job, in pretty much every aspect, and the pay is okay, and quitting felt a lot like failure.  This wasn’t even getting into the “first world problems” aspect of the job – I’m lucky to have a job in this economy, etc.  What kind of person was I, that I couldn’t handle a basic customer service job?

The simplest answer to that question is, of course, “an introvert.”  One of the biggest issues with the job is the simple fact that, for me, spending eight hours a day talking to strangers is exhausting.  Every night I come home wanting nothing more than to curl up in my apartment and not talk to anyone.  (Jack is somehow an exception to this rule.)  My weekends are spent primarily in the same place, because I just don’t have the mental fortitude to go out and meet people.  I’m irritable and jumpy and probably a holy terror to live with.  The job is also mentally taxing in the way that you find with customer service jobs – approximately every seven minutes, I get a new person with an entirely new problem, and sure, a lot of them are the same, but the sheer breadth and depth of problems available means I spend a not-inconsiderable amount of time learning new ways to fix problems, or things to avoid, or policies to explain.  Questions about bills, coverage, price plans, outages, the rollout date of 4G in Your Location, details about your closest retail outlet, plus technical support for a wide range of devices that use cellular technology. (Phones! Connection cards! Computers!  Some lady called us because she thought someone had hacked her AOL account!  Why did she call us?  Because she checks her mail on her phone, of course.)

And then there are the customers themselves.  Some of them are perfectly reasonable, civil human beings, with whom I can have a pleasant conversation about whatever they’re calling about.  Some of them are charming, some are funny, some of them make me question their sanity, at least one of them should have been a guest on Coast to Coast AM.  Some of them are angry, all out of proportion to the issue at hand.

Then there was the guy who accused me (and the company I am employed by) of being abusive.  That sent me into a full-scale panic attack.  Somehow I made it through the call, and the next call, and all the way to lunch.  But it’s horrible, and it’s not good for me.

Still, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to actually quit.  Then I ended up having two conversations.  The first was with a friend, who pointed out that victims of emotional abuse have a tendency to stay in unhealthy situations far longer than they warrant, because “It’s not that bad!” is so intrinsically woven into their worldview that it affects everything they do.

Guilty as charged, on that count.  “I hate this job and it makes me miserable, but it could be worse!” was totally my approach to the situation.

The other was with my mother.  Now, my mother is where I inherited my workaholic tendencies.  She just retired after working for 41 years, 22 with the federal government.  But my mother also recently left my emotionally abusive father, and she’s happier than she’s been in years – maybe ever.  When I confided that I was miserable, that the job was affecting my mental health, she told me to quit.  “It’s just a job,” she said.  “There will be others.”

I’m 35 years old and somehow getting permission from my mother made me feel better.

So after all this angst and worrying, I turned in my notice on Saturday.  My boss asked me why, and I explained that the job was driving me crazy.  She immediately offered to reduce my schedule, to one or two days a week.

After due consideration, I accepted.  It’s not that I hate the job so much as I hate having to do it 40 hours a week.  Eight hours a day, five days in a row, leaves me exhausted and stressed and miserable.  Twice a week, with a day off to recover between, would let me have the things I liked about it (solving problems! helping people!) without hitting the point where I’m suffering.

This week, I watched my state of being and my mental health closely, and discovered that I start hitting the first stage of Job Unhappiness (restlessness – can’t focus on anything, everything feels like a slog, will-this-day-ever-end) halfway through the fourth consecutive day.  So two days should be fine.

Anyway! Enough about my job and my mental health.  (Emotional honesty!  Two years ago I could never have had this conversation in a public forum.  I probably wouldn’t have been able to admit it to anybody but Jack – and maybe not even him.)

I finished the Sneaky Mountain shawl!  It still needs to be blocked (so it still looks like garbage) but I see the glimmering potential in the finished object.  My vanilla sock just needs the toe and the heel.  More rounds on the slow-moving SpillyJane Mitt, and I actually ripped back a little of the first Turn a Square companion mitt and made progress on it, too.  Still haven’t gotten new needle tips for my sweater, but I’m making a pilgrimage to a new yarn store tomorrow, so hopefully I can address the problem then.

Hypothetical knitting includes another pair of test socks (yarn is picked out, I just need to find an empty needle and cast on), a pair of flip-top mittens, and a hooded cowl.  (In Pennsylvania I needed a scarf; in Oregon I really need a hood. A hat/scarf combination isn’t quite enough.)

In unrelated crafting news, did you know that there’s only one outlet in my kitchen?  Well, technically there are two, because there’s one for the refrigerator, but there isn’t one behind the kitchen table or anywhere I can reach from the kitchen table.  The kitchen table, incidentally, is a drop-leaf table with two chairs that we found at a garage sale the day of the Knit Picks warehouse sale, and it has served mainly as a flat surface for my crafting since we bought it.  I looked at the kitchen table, where my sewing machine was happily sitting, and I looked around the room at the lack of outlets, and then I looked around the front room to see if there was a way I could rearrange it to fit the table (there really wasn’t), and then I gave up and dragged it into the craft room.  There is also one outlet in the craft room, but it’s in a spot I can reach, and also doesn’t have the oven plugged into it.

My craft room, for those of you who don’t know, is about the size of a small walk-in closet.  Because the table is a drop-leaf, I think I can rearrange the room in such a way that the sewing table and the spinning wheel can co-exist, and my stash will still be (mostly) accessible.  Because I wanted to spend the afternoon sewing, rather than rearranging my craft room, I just sort of wedged it in there sideways for now, which works, but is less than ideal, particularly since the iron has to be plugged into the same outlet, and I have to worry about which one I’m unplugging. Also: tangled cords.  It’s less than ideal.

I didn’t need ideal, though!  (My sewing skills are also less than ideal, and also something I’m planning to improve on, though that will be through practice rather than feng shui.)  It was time to embark upon my very first unassisted sewing project.

Alli at One Pearl Button has a pretty good tutorial for the style of cozy I wanted, although hers is for a Kindle and Jack has the much-smaller Sony Pocket.  Fiddling with knitting patterns and doing my own design work has made me unafraid to mess around with stuff (it’s just fabric, after all), so I gave it a try.  I did a dry run on some fabric I didn’t care about and ended up with a bag (it was a little too small for the book – I could’ve unpicked the stitches and done it again, but I didn’t care that much).  Haven’t decided how big I want the bag to be or exactly how to finish it, so it’s sitting on my work table pathetically half-finished.

The actual project worked quite well.  My stitching isn’t as straight as it could be, but I’m happy with it, all things considered.  I need to attach the elastic and find a swank button, but it’s nearly done.

That’s been my week: lots about work and a little about crafting.  Hopefully with my reduced schedule, I’ll be able to do a lot more of it.  Sewing is satisfying, if not quite as relaxing as knitting – there’s something to be said about being able to complete a project in an afternoon.

If you had a free afternoon to craft, what would you work on?

Friday Gauge Check: Binding Off and Casting On

Friday means it’s time for our Friday rituals, the ceremonies of escorting one week out and preparing the next one. Which, around here, is the Gauge Check, where I take a look at my week and figure out where I’ve come from and where I’m going. Sometimes there are goals, sometimes I just talk about what’s going on in my life and my crafting. You are all welcome to join in in the comments.

Welcome to the last weekend of 2011!  Everyone and their blog-writing dog is dong a year-in-review post, and… I’m just not feeling it.  I suppose I could look over my gauge checks and hit some highlights or something, but.  But it’s late, and I’m tired, and I just don’t have the energy to wade through 2011 a second time.  It was hard enough doing it the first time.

This year was hard for everyone I know, and plenty of people I don’t know, and I’m very glad to have made it to the end.  I have an apartment and a job, a city that’s fast becoming home, and a relationship that is more satisfying and joyful with every passing day.  There are so many blessings in my life, and I will choose to dwell on those tonight, rather than looking toward the things that dissatisfy me.

Jack had two more interviews with the company I mentioned last week.  If all goes well, there will be at least one more, so I’m going to ask for your good thoughts and prayers once more.  I still haven’t heard back from mine, but she did tell me it would be two weeks.

Knitting!  I feel like I’ve made excellent knitting progress, though I think it was more mental than physical.  Remember how I mentioned that I was wanting to make a Turn a Square hat for Jack?  Well, over the weekend I actually pulled yarn out of my stash, cast it on, and finished it, and he’s been wearing it all week.  I had a skein of beautiful dark teal alpaca gifted by a friend of mine for the main color, and a skein of Felici Sport in Seaside for the contrasting color, and it turned out beautifully.  I don’t actually have any pictures, but I’ll try and get one up on my Ravelry in the next couple of days.  It was a lot of fun to knit, just varied enough to be interesting but simple enough that I could do it at work without any problems.  I may have a little bit of a knitter’s crush on Jared Flood.

After that, I decided I probably had enough yarn to do a reverse version of the hat, and I cast on the ribbing and started knitting on the body when Jack mentioned that he wished he had a pair of mitts that coordinated with his new hat and the grey scarf I made for him last winter.  (I’ve made him a lot of mitts, just nothing that works well with the colors.)  I went looking around Ravelry, thinking that surely someone had adapted Turn a Square for mitts.

Apparently not.  Inspired, I ripped the hat out, divided the remaining yarn in half with a little help from my handy-dandy digital scale, and set to work.  It’s still very much a work in progress, though I’m happy with the ribbing as it currently stands.  I’m going to rip back a little of the hand, but I have a good idea that I know where I’m going at this point.  I’m adapting Robyn Devine’s Merrymeeting Mitts for stripes, just because I’m really familiar with the pattern at this point.

I’m a little obsessed with socks right now, because Jack wore his BFF socks tramping around Portland one day, and the soles had practically disintegrated by the time he made it home.  I’m not sure which of us was more upset by this; I suspect it was him.  As for me, I can always knit more socks.  I have since discovered that it may have been due to the composition of the yarn: Merino and Tencel, while lovely, are not optimal for socks.  This knowledge was acquired courtesy of the copy of The Knitter’s Book of Socks by Clara Parkes that I was able to borrow from the library.  (This book, incidentally, is absolutely fantastic, and I recommend it most highly.)  So I’m hypothetically knitting socks.

In reality, I ripped out the cast on of the second Test Knit sock, since I hadn’t actually gotten any further than that, and re-cast it on as a vanilla sock so I can knit on it at work.  Interesting construction, being interesting, requires more attention than I have available, and Jack doesn’t care if his socks match as long as I made them.

While I was head-on with reality, I looked at the two-color pink basketweave scarf in its Hello Kitty project bag that I haven’t touched in nearly a year.  I pulled it out and examined it, being really honest with myself as to the likelihood that I would a) ever finish it and b) be willing to wear it in public if I did.  It was one of the first projects I ever cast on, back in June 2010, and… well, let’s say that my skills have improved considerably since then.  Even if I did pick it up, I imagine that the second half of it would look very strange next to the first.

A pile of pink yarn that used to be a scarf

This is the conclusion I reached.

At left, you can see the conclusion I reached.  It was really satisfying, ripping all of it out.  I need to break down and pick up a niddy-noddy, because that’s an awful lot of yarn to skein around the back of a chair.

Funny story associated with this picture, actually: I ripped the scarf out, was about to start winding it back into a ball (just to get it all off the floor) and decided that I should take a picture of my efforts.  I dropped the ends of the yarn onto the top of the pile (that’s the better part of two skeins there; it’s two solid pink colorways rather than one variegated one as you might think from the picture), snapped the shot, went to pick the ends back up… and couldn’t find them.  I ended up spreading this tremendous tangle across my kitchen floor, digging for the ends.  I did find them, though I’m still untangling the last of it.

This is another (hard) lesson in “if you don’t love it now, you won’t love it later.”  I stopped loving the scarf a while back, riddled as it was with errors and my earliest attempts at knitting, and now I have the raw materials to turn it into something else, something that I will genuinely love and be proud to call my own.  What half-done projects do you have sitting in a bin that might be improved upon by being reduced to component parts?

Ripping projects out is actually becoming kind of addictive.  I’m also thinking about the proto-Emily shawl that’s been waiting for me to think about how to re-make the border, and the Celtic Moonrise mittens that never quite worked the way I wanted them to.  How satisfying would it be just to say, “No, this isn’t working,” and start over?

Ten Things I’d Like to Do, Redux

Last January, I listed off ten things I’d like to do, as a crafter.  It hasn’t quite been a year, but it seems like a good time to take a look at those and see where I’m at.

Goal One: Knit a Sweater.  Well, I still haven’t knit a sweater, but I have a swatch, and yarn, and a pattern picked out.  Give me a few months, and this one will be accomplished.

Goal Two: Try Fair Isle.  Still haven’t done this, though I’ve done slip-stitch colorwork and two kinds of stripes.  I haven’t found the Fair Isle project that makes my heart sing, just yet.

Goal Three: Take Something From Design to Finished Object.  I’ve done this twice (the Spiral Lace hat and the Yawoll gloves) and I’m working on two more.  Design is fun!

Goal Four: Grow My Stash.  I grew it, then I shrunk it down to a single box, and now I’ve grown it again.  It’s about at the point where I can’t really buy much more yarn because I don’t have much space, and I have an entire bin that’s mostly fiber.  I keep thinking about sweater quantities of yarn, though.

Goal Five: Spinning and Dying My Own Yarn.  Halfway there on this one.  Dying is still something I haven’t quite managed, though it’s mostly from lack of time right now.  I’m slowly collecting the pieces to attempt some dying, and one of the things I picked up at the Knit Picks sale in September was a skein of fingering weight Bare.

Goal Six: Take More Commissions.  I did, but I also struggled with them.  Things I am learning: how and when to say no, and not to take on a project that’s too big or too difficult.

Goal Seven: Hats!   I have made hats.  I, in fact, love making hats.  I want to make more hats. ALL THE HATS.  I now live in a climate that requires hats; my life is eminently better because of it.

Goal Eight: Needles.  I don’t have to buy needles very often, but when I do find a project that requires needles I don’t have, I buy them without angst.  I have needles for hats, interchangeable cables in three different lengths, square needles, and multiples of my favorite sizes (mostly US3).  I’ve gotten rid of 90% of the straight aluminum needles I didn’t like.  My needle situation is vastly improved.

Goal Nine: Sew.  I took a sewing class!  I have a sewing machine fund!  VERY SOON, this goal will be met, and I am SUPER EXCITED about it.

Goal Ten: Make More Stuff For Myself.  The Gretel tam!  The Codename: Garnet mitts!  The monkey socks, though I don’t want to talk about those.  I’m still not a very selfish knitter, but I have made stuff for myself, and I have more stuff in the pipe, such as my sweater.

All in all, I think I’ve made good progress on my crafting life.  I’ve also learned to weave, bought a spinning wheel, and made eight pairs of fingerless gloves.

How has your week been?

 

 

 

 

Friday Gauge Check: Making Progress

Personal Footprint Sock #2

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the completed foot of the second Personal Footprint Sock.  I’m actively working on this partially because I finished the red-and-white dishcloth that had been my work knitting, and mostly because Jack is a wonderful man who deserves hand-knit socks.

As I’ve mentioned before, this is based off of Cat Bordhi’s Personal Footprints for Insouciant Sock Knitters (partially obscured in the picture by the sock).  Now, this is a really interesting way to knit socks, and it claims to make socks that fit better than any sock you’ve ever owned.  I have two minor problems with it, both of which are very… personal.  Now, I’d recommend this book to a beginning sock knitter without hesitation.  Also, if you or someone you knit socks for has weirdly shaped feet, particularly if you’ve had problems either buying or knitting socks that fit right.  If commercial socks slide down, but you can’t seem to knit to a pattern and produce good socks either, buy this book.

The socks in this book are incredibly and fundamentally customizable, and she has suggestions for fit issues every step of the way, from toe length to instep height to heel length, and they go together in a truly novel sort of way unlike any other sock you’ve ever knit.  Her instructions are clear, and I believe there are helper YouTube videos linked on her website if you get stuck.

My problems are two, and very minor.  First, the sock is based around a template that you make of your recipient’s foot.  You knit to a certain point in the template, then you do the next step.  That means carrying around the template, which is… well, it’s a piece of heavy cardboard the size of an adult male foot.  While Jack doesn’t have super-big feet, it’s still sort of awkward fitting it in my purse.  I’m sure I could fold it in half or something… there are ways around this (again, very minor) issue.

The other problem, and this is much more difficult to solve for, is that the way the pattern is written, there’s no heel turn.

 That’s why I’d recommend this for beginner sock knitters – heel turns are scary for a lot of people.  A heel turn is finicky and complicated and really easy to screw up. I banished the Ribbed Socks to the UFO bin for several months because I was having problems with the heel turn, and I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s done this.  They’re a major pain in the butt for sock knitters… and they’re also my favorite part of sock knitting.  Not the heel turn itself, but the moment when you finish, and you’ve turned this sort of shapeless tube into something that is obviously a sock.  It’s like magic.

With Bordhi’s method, on the other hand, you knit to a certain point (where the sock hits the ankle bone, I believe), and you slide in a lifeline, knit two rows, and then slide in another lifeline.  Then you take a small piece of waste yarn and tie it around the midpoint stitch of that middle row.  After that, you knit the heel decreases, which are exactly like the toe increases, only backwards, close off the heel, and then slide your needles into the stitches where the lifelines are.

You pick up that single stitch you tied off… and cut the stitch.  I KNOW, RIGHT? You unravel the row, and that creates the leg opening.  So it’s sort of like steeking in Fair Isle, only with less scissor action, and it’s admittedly a little scary.

So I just did that, and I’m about to head into leg knitting, which is pretty much my least favorite part of sock knitting, because it’s just around and around until you get tired of it.  On this sock, anyway, which is a completely plain-vanilla sock.

I’ve able to make this much headway on my knitting because work has slowed down a lot.  I won’t have to work overtime after this week, which is sad because it’s less money, but it’s also less stressful and exhausting, and I’ll have more time to do fun things, like spend time with Jack, and knit.

Speaking of knitting, the neverending shawl search is over!  I decided to hunt for patterns specifically recommended for handspun, and after trying several others, I finally discovered Lucia Tedesco’s December Little Shawl.  It didn’t require casting on 300 stitches – which, considering how many times I’ve tried that and discovered that I didn’t like the pattern with the yarn, was a plus – it’s simple enough to work on in company, and it’s an easily memorable pattern.  I’m at about kerchief size, making good progress, and the only problem that I’ve run into is that the yarn is spun out of some sort of short-staple wool and it makes me sneeze.  So I may have to knit wearing a surgical mask.  Either that, or sneeze a lot.

I wove a little bit this week, and determined that the brown Wool of the Andes that didn’t work for the Skull Isle hat looks fantastic with the gold yarn of the warp.  I’m happy, Jack is happy, the loom is less neglected, and I won’t have to re-warp it to get a project that I enjoy working on, which makes me even happier.

Plus! A super-secret project for my boss that’s got me doing amigurumi design!  It’s exciting and I’m having fun with it (if not with the rather splitty yarn I’m trying to use, yuck).

My local JoAnn Fabrics had some rosewood cable needles on clearance, and I scored 29″ needles in sizes 6, 7, and 8 for about $5 apiece, which is awesome.  I think 29″ is a good small-shawl length, which leads neatly to what I plan to do with my next week.

I’m definitely going to be casting on another (more interesting) pair of socks, probably the Manly Aran Socks out of Wendy Johnson’s Toe-Up Socks for Every Body.  The rosewood cable needles mean that I can finally start the Citron shawl (or maybe the Forest Ridge) with my languishing Malabrigo lace!  Then, if I have time, maybe a colorwork project – I need a June project for my 11 Fingerless Gloves in ’11 challenge, and there are some beautiful ones in my queue – and more weaving.

Also I am taking a Secret Excursion this weekend (okay, I’m going to Tucson to do a yarn crawl and see Harry and the Potters) and might come back with something super-special.

Party in the comments!  Check your own gauge, leave recommendations for wacky wizard music, tell me what super secret projects you’re up to.

Startitis, Overthink, and a Lack of Accomplishment

I discovered that you can get Lego Harry Potter for the iPad, so guess where all my time has gone to?  I have to say that it’s a beautiful port, and the same sorts of things that work for the DS work really well on the iPad.  (Example: spell-casting involves drawing shapes on the screen.  The full-sized touch screen makes it a lot of fun.)  I’ve finished the first play-through of the first two years, and I’m working on Year 3.

I had an interview on Tuesday, and they said they’d be making the decision on Friday, so wish me luck. It’s not a very exciting job, but it would be a paying job, and that would be nice to have.

Knitting-wise, I did finish the first of the Celtic Moonrise Mittens, and while I’m happy with the design, I’m worried about where the thumb hole ended up.  I think I might have to pull out the bind-off, rip back the decreases, and add more length to the hand in order for it to fit correctly.  I’m working on the second one right now rather than throwing myself into repairs right away, because… well, because that’s what I’m in the mood to do.  I’m almost done with the first cable pattern repeat.

I don’t  have anything new on the needles, because I can’t figure out what I want to do next.  What I suspect will come is a lace shawl, because I’ve been poking at shawl patterns for a couple of weeks now.  You may remember that I have this beautiful grey handspun from the Ren Fair, and I think a shawl would be a very appropriate project for it.  (Yes, another grey project!  I’m not sure what this says about me.)  The only reason that I haven’t started the shawl yet is that the instructions start, “Using the long-tail method, cast on 241 stitches.”  Yeah.  I’ll get there.  Just… that’s a lot of stitches.  And if I don’t leave enough tail, I will be left with the unenviable task of ripping back all of the stitches and trying again.

Meanwhile, I found this fantastic sock pattern… and it calls for DK weight yarn. If you need me, I’ll be curled up in the piles of fingering-weight yarn that I bought for socks, repeating to myself that since it’s a cuff-down pattern, I probably wouldn’t like it ANYWAY.  Or maybe I’ll just sneak a couple of DK-weight balls of yarn into my next KnitPicks order.  Jack won’t complain, since they’d be for him anyway.

I’ve been thinking about a rigid-heddle loom (which is a little loom, suitable for tabletop weaving).  The plan was originally to get a wheel first, then a loom, but the rigid-heddle looms are considerably less expensive than my Joy will be, and I can probably start producing salable woven goods faster than I’ll be able to produce salable handspun.  The issue is, there’s not a rigid-heddle class that fits into my schedule during the month of April, as it stands.  However, I taught myself to knit using books and the internet – I should be able to teach myself to weave the same way, right? Hopefully those aren’t famous last words. I’m good with books and following diagrams and written instructions, though, so I suppose we’ll see.

We’ll see as soon as I save up enough for the loom, at least.

I think I’ve actually settled on a sock pattern and yarn, and I’m actually going to get with the cast-on. For the record? It’s not grey.

 

Some things that are grey

Currently and strangely, there are a lot of grey things in my life right now. Not grey in the depressing sense, but the color.

One thing that is not grey but is finished are Abby’s butterfly socks, in time to get mailed. I knitted these socks in a week, and I wasn’t entirely monogamous. Also not grey: the four rows of Argyle State scarf, and the wrist decreases and thumb gusset on my Wintergreen Mitts. Both of those are burgundy. The yarn I spun more of is also burgundy.

The first grey thing is eight ounces of alpaca top, in the most beautiful natural silver-grey. I initially thought about dying it, but it’s such a gorgeous color that I think it would be criminal to alter it. Eight ounces is a lot of fiber, so I think I shall have to wait until I have saved for my wheel.

The second grey thing is the first Celtic Moonlight Mitten, which is now sneakily sitting there and suggesting that it’s too small. The recipient has bigger hands than me, and while my closed fist fits comfortably inside, I am afraid that I should have used a larger needle. I’m considering casting on the second ball with a larger needle and seeing how it looks.

The third grey thing is my computer, which got its DVD-ROM drive replaced. Now I may be able to watch the Elizabeth Zimmermann DVD I found at the library! The little branch nearby also has a Lucy Neatby DVD, and I hear those are also marvelous.

Something that isn’t grey is the skein of laceweight Malabrigo that keeps whispering to me about how it really wants to be a shawl. It doesn’t seem to want to take, “Not now, I’m busy,” as an answer. Neither does that voice in my head that keeps pointing out how i don’t have any socks on the needles right now, and yet I have sock yarn. And this hat in my queue, whining. Whining! I’ve never had a case of startitis that involved the projects complaining at me. Is this common?

I think I need to cast something on now.