The QWERTY Bird

Without getting poked in an eye.

I mean, unless you’d like to see the world a bit differently, like all of us knitters do. We always have needles on hand after all. For us knitters, all time not actively doing something that precisely prohibits knitting, is time that could be spent knitting. And just because there’s something you couldn’t conceive of doing while knitting, doesn’t mean that we haven’t conceived of a way to do just that.

If we don’t have knitting along, we’ve forgotten it. Reminders, please? If we do have knitting, we might not even knit at all, but it’s beside us, just in case. Small projects for working in waiting rooms and in line. Larger projects for being in one place for a few hours. Complicated patterns for times when no one is speaking to us, and easy ones for social gatherings. 

Any space of time between this and that, or here and there is time for knitting. If you find yourself waiting for someone to grab a project bag, always a few steps slower behind you putting needles away…congratulations, you are friends with a knitter.

Here’s a few things you are going to hear a lot.

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This is obviously the second article. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. This is what we discovered during the first few months.

It’s easier mentally to keep track of a daily budget. And helps to stop the total budget from running out mid-week, or mid-month.

Include anything that isn’t a fixed expense. Basically, if it wasn’t a mandatory bill every month, it went in the budget.

Find an amount that’s challenging but won’t leave you giving up in despair. We decided on twenty-five dollars a day. An amount that wasn’t so challenging that we’d never meet it, and binge ending through budget despair, but still required a good bit of ingenuity. Why have a challenge that isn’t a challenge? Also, because I’d been reading a lot spend-fasting articles, and because I’m a glutton for punishment.

Preparing for a daily budget is important. We balanced the bills in both halves of the month so we weren’t “broke” the first half and spending all our “free” money during the second half.

We found a lot of cool ways to save. Including just procrastinating spending a lot.

We picked our sacrifices. Turns out, cellphones were an easy toss. Nutrition, and haircuts, an absolute no. If trying to include something in the budget made us throw our hands up in the air and say toss the budget this week, we decided it was better to have it as an outside expense, rather than spend a ton more after giving up. We figured that out the hard way.

Does it work? We haven’t necessarily met our saving goals, but we paid down the credit card. We paid for eyeglasses and major car repairs, including two new tires and a leak in the coolant, and a three day vacation. All out of our debit account, instead of with our credit card. You can read the entire up and downs of it here.

Now onto Part Two.

It wasn’t working. It stopped working, I should say. We had made a lot of good habits, (Mainly that almost everything I might enjoy buying at a thrift shop isn’t needed, and now must come off a specific scavenger-hunt list. You can read more on how I changed my relationship to shopping, and stuff in general, here.) But we were still spending a lot more than we’d have liked, at the expense of keeping our savings account happy. We’d slipped back into old habits, and this was being was being reflected in the amount we’d dug into our overdraft the night before every payday.

So, on a sunny Thursday in June… well the long and the short is, we went to the bank and retrieved fourteen twenties, and fourteen fives. And it worked, mostly. No more scrolling through the banking app on the phone mentally adding up how much was left in the weekly budget. If there was money left for the day (loose change) or the week (bills), it was in the teapot. We only physically spent from each day’s bills. It worked out until we had a giant argument because instead of sticking to the budget, hubby was just running a tab on the lunch truck.

(It turns out that if someone agrees to something but struggles to follow through on it, their heart isn’t in it and it is definitely worth finding out why!)

So we brought everything back to the table, literally almost. (Partners have great ideas. If the other partner listens.) He wanted to take clothing out of the budget.  The reason? We don’t buy clothing often enough to warrant it. We both, due to proportions, find finding clothes that fit a struggle, so we’ve often gone with the philosophy, if it fits well, and it’s a good quality item that will last, buy it regardless of price (with-in reason), because that seldom happens. So, because spending the same amount over a longer time, is still spending less, we buy the clothes we need, find quality items by thrifting when we can, and don’t worry about trying to fit a ninety-dollar bra, into a twenty-five-dollar-a-day spending limit. (If you think that’s outrageous to spend on a bra, well, I’ll give you my boobs.)

And sometimes you just need a card, like at gas pumps. Its easier or sometimes the only payment option (Costco). So we started taking out fourteen twenty-dollar bills every week, which left us seventy in the bank, which is roughly our two-weeks expenditure in gas, and we just fill it up completely when we need to and forget about calculating it. (So I guess gasoline really isn’t in the budget anymore, but we’ve decreased spending proportionally to compensate.)

For a while we were very strict about only spending one bill per day. Our grocery trips went up, but because we mostly buy fresh, and I’m limited in how long I can manage energy-wise in a shopping trip, it was okay with us. And it helped us build a really good habit. But now we’re somewhere in the middle, we don’t spend our entire budget the first day in a mega-giant hundred-dollar grocery shopping trip, leaving us annoyed at our budget, and struggling with it the rest of the week. But it’s more practical because spending more than a day’s worth at once can save more over all, and we’ve settled on a happy medium of a few days allowance at a time.

There is still barely anything in savings.  However. We have had a ton of unexpected expenses that we able to pay for promptly and in full without feeling the pinch or having to delay something that would affect our safety, like having a tire blow out on us. I finally felt really dumb when I looked over at my hubby and said, “I just realised I shouldn’t feel bad that most our savings have been used up on emergencies because that’s what an emergency fund is for…” He facepalmed.

I also have just realised that now everyone knows that the spare cash cache is a teapot. (See what I did there?) Good luck figuring out which one of all of the them, in a timely manner though. (Hubby has put a moratorium on buying teapots.) Time for a new system or hiding place, maybe? Although most of the time I’m just like, Oh you need five bucks, sure. I’m staying in the garden and I’m not climbing back up those stairs, its in the teapot…

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

Everyone has a dragon they need to slay. And by dragon, I mean project. And by dragon that needs slaying, I mean a project that just, needs, doing. And has been put off for a very long time for a few vague-but-specific reasons that are little, but always add up to it never being started.

For example. You know almost everything about how to do it, but need to learn a couple specific skills that you aren’t sure you can master. Or you’d like to start research into how to begin, but you don’t know what you don’t know, so you can’t begin to research, because you don’t know what to research. Or the project just requires you to do one specific task before you start, that you can’t admit to yourself that you just hate. So somehow you never get around to doing it. You understand.

My dragon to slay was a knitted sweater.

Imagine being an expert knitter who hasn’t knitted a single sweater. You could easily be mistaken for a novice! Imagine it. A knitter who doesn’t knit sweaters. Is there such a thing? She must be still learning, she’s always working on socks and hats and dishcloths. Meanwhile, I’m knitting socks with my eyes actually closed (practiced so I could watch TV at the same time), and writing my own patterns for lace stockings. Doing five hundred rows of lace border on a Victorian shawl. But I haven’t knitted a bloody old boring sweater!

Okay, I’ve knit one, but can you really call something knitted out of Red Heart worsted weight yarn (universally known by most knitters to be the scratchiest brand of acrylic, or at least it was when I last bought it), and knitted so tight, with needles so small, so that it stands up by itself, like cardboard, a sweater? I didn’t think so.

So there was more than a few reasons I wasn’t knitting a sweater. I was just plain old terrified. I was certain that I was incapable of picking out the right fibre to match the right pattern. And then, even if I did that, there was no way I was going to be able to pick the right size of needles and gauge for the desired feel of the knitted fabric. And then, however to pick out a pattern that will actually fit? I don’t use patterns! And lastly, I loathe sewing and picking up stitches because there’s no right way to do it. Ah! And just thinking about picking up a darning needle to sew together a knitted seam was enough to make me rewrite a whole pattern to avoid it, why have side seams, when you can just knit it on four needles? I was, of course, just plainly not meant to knit a sweater.

However, envy got the better of me. I know a woman. She was slaying dragons every week. Beautiful hand-spun, hand-dyed, and handknitted colourful dragons, e-ver-y week. Damn it. If she could, well I was going to!

I lamented to her that I wished to knit a sweater, but never do, and when she asked why, I automatically and replied that I find them too hot, don’t like wearing sleeves, and…Lightbulb realization. Apparently that had been holding me back too. Her suggestion: a sleeveless cropped sweater, and she suggested a pattern to start with that she had already knitted. Great, at least I have someone to summon when I inevitably start to throw it against a wall.

Well didn’t I figure out quickly that my first few reasons for feeling incapable of slaying this particular dragon, were easily fixed. I just needed to approach things in a slightly different order. Which meant not following my instincts of trial and error, lumping it, and following some instructions.

First, a beginner pattern. (So it wasn’t too hard.) One that the fit does not need to be exact. (So I don’t have to worry about fit.) Done. I made the Mount Pleasant Top by Meghan Nodecker you can find and purchase the pattern on Ravelry (Facebook for Knitters) here. Second. Patterns have these things called instructions which include the weight of yarn to be used. And third, a gauge. This wonderful thing that says how many stitches and how many rows should form a two- or four-inch square of fabric. More instructions! Who knew? Having it come out the right size, and very un-cardboard-like. Easy peasy.

I started with the recommended size of needles, knitted a swatch, adjusted needle size. Repeated until the desired gauge. It never came out exactly, which I lamented about to my friend, who I then received a very sarcastic text from, stating “Guess you just can’t knit it then. Haha.” Which I promptly ignored.

Fourth. Measure myself, and pick a size. Fairly standard, and also easily done. Next time, I will go with my gut instinct, and knit the waist in one size, and the bust in a size larger, because I already know that my waist-to-bust ratio is larger than most, but I was very focussed on following instructions, and so I just picked the size recommended, and kept toddling along.

Then came casting on the stitches. I learned the method required (long-tail) which uses a double strand of yarn, and requires you to pre-determine the length you need before you start, (unless you have two identical balls, or are able to work from both ends of one ball), listened to the warning in the video about making sure I pre-calculated and didn’t run out of yarn, and then promptly ran out, nine stitches before I’d finished the required three-hundred and twenty-four! I did this twice.

Four attempts later, I had the stitches on, and was working my way up the scalloped lace trim. Fortunately, the rest of the sweater was pretty uneventful. The entire thing just went round and round quite hypnotically with barely an added stitch here, and an added stitch there for increasing, and half-a-million stitches later, I was up to the bottom of the collar. The shaping (leaving stitches here, adding stitches there, in order to create the shoulders) was minimal, and soon I was facing the my last battle: the biggest thing holding me back from making a sweater.

Picking up stitches (creating new stitches out of a side seam)! And sewing knitted seams! (I once was teaching a knitting group and ended up in a five minute rant about how I hate sewing up knitted pieces so much, and patterns shouldn’t need this and blah, blah, blah. Cue the laughter when someone wasn’t paying attention, and turned and asked me the best method for stitching up the side seams on her baby sweater.)

Turns out my real fear was that there wasn’t a neat, simple, right way to do it. I was afraid that I would have to just kind’ve stab at it around the shoulder holes, until I had enough stitches to begin going round and round for the sleeves. Well. There are many, neat, right, ways. And there are also YouTube videos for learning all of them. (There are YouTube videos for everything.) I still hate both, and I always will, but now they are tolerable to do.

It turned out that this pattern was really and truly magical. Four rows to knit after picking up the stitches for sleeve one. Repeat for sleeve two. Repeat again for the collar. And this miraculous thing alled a three-needle bind-off! A method of casting off knitted stitches that sews two needles of stitches together into a lovely sturdy, straight seam (in this case both shoulder seams), with no…sewing…required!

I was so proud of myself that I couldn’t even wait to wear it until it was actually done. I wore it out to a coffee shop, stripped it off, and sat there with my coffee and my darning needle, stitching in all the little ends. Dragon slain. Dead. Stomped on. And sat on, with my sword stuck in the ground beside me. (Okay my dark side is running away with me now.) Not really. We just needed to make friends. Just enough to get things done.

And we might meet up again. (The yarn I used for the top is starting to pill, so I think I’m going to unravel it, adjust the sizing, use a different colour balance, take out one skein of wool and use another, and do the whole thing, all over again.) And the whole thought of that, it doesn’t even make me blink.

My husband and I are trying to see if we can spend less than twenty-five dollars a day, every day, for the foreseeable future. (Minus fixed expenses: rent, car insurance, life insurance, car loan payments, utilities, phone bills, and subscriptions. Although subscriptions are a debatable expense, obviously I’m using my Microsoft Office one right this moment, but I don’t really need a subscription to AcornTV, just so I can binge watch Doc Martin and Midsomer Murders.)

This means that everything else including groceries, gas, pet supplies, household items, toiletries, hobby supplies, clothing, gardening supplies, and any other item that might come up (husband’s morning coffees), need to somehow come out of $175 a week.

Twenty-five dollars a day seemed like a good amount, not small enough that we’d be driving ourselves insane trying to figure out how we were going to eat by Wednesday dinner (paycheque comes in Thursdays at midnight, so our budget week starts Thursday and ends Wednesday), but not large enough that we are able to stay inside it without noticing. It needed to be an amount that required a little ingenuity to stay under.

We did a few preparatory things. I remember reading an article that said the best thing anyone could do to help their budget, was to split rent payments. If you always paid all your rent in one pay period, and none of it in the other, the money in that half was going to be spent regardless. So by setting aside half the rent in the pay period it wasn’t due, then only half of it would be due in the other one, and it would always feel like you had more money during that pay.

We were doing the same thing, paying all our pills in the first half of the month and often running out, then using the second half of the month’s money to spend wherever. It felt like free money, because we had no bills to pay. We made a few phone calls to change billing dates, and presto, only the rent, internet, and one car payment come out of the first paycheque, and everything else comes out in the second. It is still only a sixty-forty split, but it’s a huge improvement.

The other thing I did was make changes we could to fixed expenses. We tried to discount anything we could, checking car insurance rates with the agency, making sure we had the cheapest internet provider, and the cheapest mobile phone provider (we decided mobile phones were a want, not a need, and switched to a VOIP service, and boom, our cellphone bills went from thirteen-hundred a year to seventy-five for the first year and ten a month thereafter). It wasn’t directly related to our daily spending limit, but definitely would help the amount we would be able to save in the long run. We calculated that at the end of every month, if we’d done everything right, we’d have close to a $600 surplus.

We started Christmas Day of last year. For the first few pay periods, we were really strict the first week, but indulge ourselves the second one. But since then, we have figured out a few things.

The first was that all the money was being spent on the weekend. No surprise there. So we ended up splitting it: one-hundred dollars for Thursday to Sunday, and seventy-five for Monday to Wednesday. Eating and driving during the second half of the week, is nice too.

We also learned very quickly what we were willing to sacrifice, and what we were not. I, for instance, am absolutely not willing to go without a haircut every eight weeks. (I’m post-chemo, I have healthy hair for the first time in my life, its growing out beautifully, I love my hair dresser, and yes it is true that regular cuts every six to eight weeks are what keeps your hair healthy, your hair dresser is not just trying to make money.) I’ve read the spending fast articles where people give up everything from public transit to haircuts and pay off insane amounts of student loans in incredibly short amounts of time. But. (Sorry. Still not happening.)

We were also not willing to sacrifice health and nutrition. No living on starches because they are cheap. The hubby has an insanely physical job, I’m recovering and re-building my strength and stamina. (I’ve been relying on a super nutritious diet in order to lose a lot of the weight I gained during treatment, because I’m limited in the amount of activity I can do, and having lost twenty-five pounds over the past six to seven months, I have no desire to reverse that trend.) But after discovering that brussels sprouts, which we love, are the same amount per pound as pork, we swapped those for giant cabbages! And now we buy whatever cuts of meat are on sale and learn how to cook them.

If an unexpected expense came up, it was really easy to just say to ourselves that the budget was blown, so who the hell cares, we’ll spend what we want and try again next week. So we just decided that certain things were important enough to come out of our surplus. (Haircuts. Car repairs, because they are heckin’ expensive. The guinea pigs’ new cage tray. Paint for the bedroom. And so on.) We wouldn’t stress about fitting those in. But we’d stick to the budget for other things.

I think the thing we most often ask, say or tell each other is: Can we buy it tomorrow? Can it wait till tomorrow? Or. We can pick it up tomorrow. After all, spending the same amount of money you’d normally spend on something, but over a longer amount of time, is still spending less.

It’s now four months later. Obviously we haven’t quite learned all our lessons because we just counted up how much we went overbudget last week, and now we’re going to try to figure out how to make sixty-five dollars last for the next six days. And we still have never had a month where six-hundred dollars went into savings, although that might soon change. But half-a-grand in car repairs were paid up front, the credit card is paid off, money is going into savings, and we’ve only ended up in overdraft once. (Timing issues, mostly.) And spending habits are definitely changing.

Let’s see what the next four months holds.