When I was a child, children still played outdoors, free of adult supervision, and in all sorts of weather.

I grew up in the Central Valley of California, and there were two types of weather that were particularly inhospitable to play. One was the Tule fog a dense fog that sometimes settles for days or weeks at a time; the other is the north wind, a strong, dry wind that whips through the valley and is hot or cold depending on the season.

While I did not enjoy either type of weather all that much, the north wind had one redeeming feature: If it barreled through at a time that was neither too hot nor too cold, and if I could talk my closest friend, Sue, into rollerskating with me, we could skate up the street into the wind, one of us with a folded sheet in hand, and when we had gotten far enough to make it worthwhile, we could unfurl the sheet, and use it as sail to blow us back down the street to our homes.

And that is what this weekend was like. I definitely felt that I had the crochet wind at my back.

In addition to keeping up with my African flower hexagon meditation, I got to work on a second pair of Victorian texting gloves.

Last weekend, I made my first pair using Cather DePasquale’s free pattern. This Saturday, when my mother and I went to go visit my cousins David and Robert, I took the opportunity to begin work on a second pair of Victorian texting gloves while my mother drove the first leg of the trip from Raleigh to Rocky Mount.

I drove the second leg of the trip from Rocky Mount to Raleigh, and when I got home, I continued to work on the gloves, getting this far before I went to sleep:

This morning, after wresting with some color challenges presented by the African flower hexagon meditation, I found myself somewhat relieved to return to the black Victorian texting gloves where there were no decisions to be made, just work to be done, which I did, and before it was time for lunch I had gotten them done:

Another bonus aspect to this pair of gloves is that they are made with yarn from my October 2011 stash acquisition, so not only have I made a gift that I enjoyed making and that the recipient will enjoy using, I have reduced (however little) my available stash and cleared at least a small bit of yarn clutter.

With the Victorian texting gloves completed, I turned my attention to the Fantascot I am making for my mother.

One thing missing from the otherwise excellent directions is a chart with an overview of how the pieces fit together. The advantage to this method is that it encourages creativity.

The disadvantage is that it can sometimes be a bit difficult to figure out where to put what, and since I prefer to draw my designs out so I can see how the pieces fit together, I got out my graph paper, and my Crayola Twistables, and created this chart which has most (but not all) of the elements accounted for:

I then used the remaining daylight to work on the Fantascot. Here is what I had already done when I started out this afternoon:

and this is the progress I made before sunset:

Tomorrow my first order of crochet business is going to see if I can find some essential notes to a project that has languished for a couple of year now, and if I can find those, I will then get the pieces out and spend what is left of the week attempting to get if finished before Christmas.