Part Two, Part Two, Part Two!

Thing the first, LA people: hope you’re not too shaken up. Don’t you love how the news is all OHNOES!!! LA is falling into the sea!!! every time there is a quake? As if the San Andreas was a divergent fault. Which it isn’t, it’s a slip fault. So LA might become part of San Francisco but it won’t fall into the sea. Hi, yes, The Big One has been due since before I was born. You get used to the earth shaking you about. Although the 7.1 in 1999 was scary.

Thing the second, there’s only about a week left on the contest. August 4th is the deadline for Package 1 entries so if you were waiting to do it, now is the time.

Goodies in the Mail:

More coffee from Alice. This stuff is so good we’re stockpiling it.

A package from Julie. This was a surprise. I knew I was getting the Koigu but the espresso? The tea? The maple syrup?? YUM. Thanks Julie!

And random other bits:

Tuesday (for many reasons) was a really bad day. So J. brought me roses. Which helped, actually.

I love Moleskines. But better than Moleskines by themselves? Moleskines with Lamys. Oh boy, do I want about ten of these pens.

Rachael nominated me for one of the Make My Day Awards! How cool is that? And to return the favor (or pay if forward, as it were), I nominate the following blogs:

1. Rachael.
2. Lauren.
3. B.
4. Adriana and Julie (since they both do team blogs they count as one)
5. Danielle

Hope your Thursday is full of good things.

Also, I think it’s high time I did a destash post so look for that tomorrow.

 

I Met The Navy

So J. decided he was up for meeting the Navy today. Armed with my trusty 24-70mm lens (I saw two other people with the same lens and we all nodded at each other) and the wheelchair, off we went.

Historic Dockyard:

Lots of people dressed in Tudor clothing. Lots of old crafty stuff and old guns and stuff. We avoided the Mary Rose because ships underwater? Creep me out.

HMS Victory:

Boats in dry dock always make me sad for some reason. Still, beautiful ship.

Demonstrations:

It’s a demonstration of a helicopter boarding a “suspicious looking” ship. Awesome to see.

Random Ships:

HMS Richmond and a ship from the Japanese Navy. I got walked over at this point. People in wheelchairs are invisible, you see. J. says we should fix spikes to the front of the chair.

HMS Illustrious:

We came up alongside it and I surprised myself by bursting into furious tears. I wanted to run up the gangway and explore the ship. I wanted to be able to jump up and down in excitement. I wanted to not be in that damn wheelchair (that makes doing things like this possible). Just when I think I’m getting better at dealing with this whole health thing something new pops up to make me mad enough to spit.

Believe me, I’m paying for it today by going onto it. But (as weird as this sounds) I have wanted to go on an aircraft carrier since I was a kid. And today I did. That’s worth the pain, a dream literally coming true.

Don’t you agree?

Here’s to dreams coming true. It should happen way more often.

 

Stonehengea

In a word: awful. Totally one of those things where you did it once and now you need never ever EVER do it again. Granted, I heard from a lot of people that this year was just total ass for some reason and that it isn’t normally that manic.

Do not attempt to go if you are not completely able bodied and up to the 1km hike. The disabled taxi service meant waiting in the pouring rain for an hour. And while most people were really good about getting out of the way, some people just got run over for standing there (not my fault, J. was driving the wheelchair). Still, wheelchairs don’t shrink just because you don’t feel like moving!

Do not assume that just because it’s summer, it will be warm. Or dry. I was warm enough (thanks to the Squirc Hat, Clapotis and some snazzy Endpaper Mitts from Adriana.) But I was soaked through four layers.

Do not forget that mass (drunken) humanity is an ugly, ugly thing. The amount of trash strewn across the ground was incredible. Which I don’t get. No one would walk into the Vatican and leave cigarette butts, beer cans and more plastic bags that you can imagine lying about.

Still, there were good things. The people who were really into it and not self important neo-druids or the drunken festival goers. The woman who wished me a Happy Solstice. The disabled taxi service driver who put up with sheer mud stupidity for twelve hours straight and didn’t kill anyone.

And the aforementioned Endpaper Mitts that arrived as a total surprise in the mail yesterday and kept my hands warm. A hundred million thanks, Adriana!

I’m recovering now and I have caught a bit of a chill. I think some warm food and some Starbucks is in order, don’t you?

 

Things You Regret After The Fact

Knitting string bags (or at least trying to) out of Sahara, watching Euro 2008 (Holland aren’t playing today, which is a bit of a bummer) and eating American junk food all the way from Saipan.

Thanks Missy! By the way, that little tiki fabric thing? Is an awesome reusable shopping bag, I’ll try to get better pictures but you can get your own here.

Also trying to cut out sugar means my tastes have changed so radically that it’s bizarre. Jello is too sweet, ditto pudding. Pop tarts taste fine going down and then hit you with the sugar. But that’s ok because J. is immune, we’re already out of the Cheetos. Me? I’m sticking to honey and cottage cheese. I’m looking forward to that cornbread though. Mmmm… chili.

J. is threatening to go get Chinese food too. Oi.

This is the worst sort of lazy Saturday. Tomorrow though we plan on going to the park in Winchester. Which will be better.

Hope you’re having a great weekend.

 

An Experimental Hat

Many moons ago I bought one of those Knit Picks Palette samplers. 30 balls of fingering weight wool.

The idea was to have yarn that I could just play with. Fiddle around, mess up and otherwise get creative with. After frogging the Endpaper Mitts I cast on with the frogged yarn to sort out the Square Circle Hat Pattern to be written up. Alas, I just can’t seem to get the pattern sorted out in a way I like. I mean, it’s a hat. It’s a very nice hat. I love the way the colors blend and play in the hat. But it’s just not quite how I knit the first one. So I’ve designated the sampler for hat experiments or whatever sort of vague crazy idea pops into my head.

I’ve put the first prototype up in my Etsy shop, as another experiment. But don’t be alarmed, there will still be Free Knitted Stuff. I have a pair of Koigu socks slated for the FKS page in the nearish future. I’ll just knit and tweak and fiddle. It’s quite a relaxing prospect. Fiddling. There should be more fiddling in life.

And I wanted to share this absolutely gorgeous necklace I got last week from Wyrding Studios. It’s the White Rabbit neckline from the Wonderland/Mad As A Hatter Collection. I want a Flamingo one too.

And now I think I’ll make a cup of tea and get back to the slog. Have a good day!

 

Redrawing The Rainbow

Thanks to the every wonderful B and the awesome Adriana, I can has purple! And orange! Woot!

While I am well aware that B and I agreed on this swap a week ago, it was still perfectly timed and showed up the day after I the flu last week.

That’s a load of Swarovski crystals, a skein of Mama Blue Sea Merino in a luscious Ruby color, two skeins of Crown Mountain Farms Sock Hop in Respect (it’s handspun! *squee!*) and a skein of Dream in Color Smooshy in Visual Purple which is, as I told B, the exact colorway I have been lusting over for some time now. How’s that for an awesome package?

And Adriana hand dyed some orange yarn for me in a really cool gradient technique. Apparently she dreamed up this idea as she was falling asleep so we’re both very keen to see how they’re going to turn out. I highly recommend knowing a yarn dyer. It’s awesome.

Since I’ve got such pretty new yarn, I’ve decided to redraw my rainbow of socks.

• Pink: The Knittery Merino Cashmere in Orchid
• Red: Mama Blue Sea Merino in Ruby
• Orange: Deegu Handpainted Sock Yarn in Venice Beach
• Yellow: Crown Mountain Farms Sock Hop in Respect
• Green: STR MW in Rainforest Jasper (I think it’s MW anyway, it might be LW.)
• Blue: Austermann Step in Fjord - for Mr F
• Purple: Dream in Color Smooshy in Visual Purple

And since I’m redrawing it, that makes these part of the sock rainbow.

These are the Orchid No Purl Monkeys I am knitting for a friend. They were not originally part of the sock rainbow, but they are sufficiently pink to qualify.

Hoorah for color! Hoorah for yarn!

 

Another FO and Yummy Mail

I sometimes watch films where all the people are in university and I miss being a student. I miss the life, I miss the real sense of purpose because I feel that more often than not, my adult years are spend floundering in a sad approximation of a real adult (I’m getting better at it though). I miss the optimism the most. How anything was possible when I was 18, either because I hadn’t learned yet that sometimes possibility isn’t quite enough to become actuality. And as in all wistful memories, I glossed over all the parts I hated. So I’ve got this thing to do (long story, Big Test) that means studying. Lots of studying. And note taking and maybe even flashcards. And all of a sudden I am damned glad that I am not a student anymore. Or rather, I’m damned glad I was never a student who had to operate in pain, fatigue like whoa and fibro fog. I can’t even remember how to spell my name some days, I have to retain stuff I’m going to be tested on? Oi.

And re: the last entry. Yes, that is my wedding dress. Or rather, was. After being trampled upon, bedirted and otherwise quite ruined, it found it’s way into an obliging trash can. I suppose I’m supposed to hang onto the thing but for me our wedding was so stressful (we did it ourselves, it was thrown together in 6 weeks and we tried to do it as cheap as possible) that it was one of the bigger triggers in my current health issues. It feels better to take beautiful pictures than keep the damn thing.

As for the cloning picture, there are many tutorials out there. Processing wise, it was fairly easy. But where I messed up was photography wise. I forgot to take a blank background shot (ie: without any clones wandering about). And I didn’t realize until after one of the shots was finished that there was a lens flare. The sun had just come out and thusly changed the lighting.

So most important: tripod (or other level surface), blank background shot (like the canvas on which you’re gonna put all your clones) and keeping the lighting as close to unchanging as possible with each clone shot. I also cheated and moved around the clones. There’s a wee Mr F back on the log in the picture whereas really, he was about four feet from the camera. Oh! And really mark out where your clones will be. What happened with us is that we couldn’t exactly remember where we’d been standing in the shot before so a lot of the clones overlapped. Hence the moving them about.  For the processing side what I did was use Photoshop CS2 and picking one image as the background, making each successive image a layer and then using the erase to history eraser (I had to duplicate the background layer to get this to work but then I’m no Photoshop wizard). I hope to get a lot better on the processing side of things as it’s all new stuff to me. And I of course hope to be a much better photographer. For really awesome cloning photos, see this Flickr user’s work. It’s fantastically photographed and processed.

And now knitting!

This scarf is gorgeous, lovely, fantastic and full of chic. I, sadly, am not. However I do really love this yarn. It feels a bit odd knitting it (it’s a chainette construction) but the knitted fabric really does feel and look like crunchy silk. It turned out really super long as well.

f I were to do it again, I would widen the knitted sections (you lose all the lovely stitch definition by making them so small) and twist the stitches along the dropped columns a la Clapotis. But that’s all academic as it doesn’t bloody suit me at all.

I will, however, use this yarn again. I’m looking at this (pdf) adorable cardigan for starters.

• Name: Phiaro Scarf by Katie Himmelberg
• From: Knitscene Winter 07/Spring 08
• Yarn: SWTC Oasis in Natural, 3 skeins
• Needles: as pattern
• Mods: I didn’t braid the fringe, I just couldn’t face it.

And I got some yumtastic mail as well. Rachael (La Fuji Mama) recently posted on her blog something called the Tim Tam Slam. Tim Tams are Australian biscuits and the slam part has to do with sucking tea up inside them and then popping the entire tea-biscuit gooey chocolatey mess into your mouth asap. I commented that while I’d heard of it, I’d never tried it because you can’t get Tim Tams here.

So Rachael went and sent me two packages of Tim Tams! I admit to them not lasting long at all. And many a Slam was attempted before we really got the hang of it. (The trick is to move FAST. Also, have wide tea cups.)

Thanks Rachael!

And that’s the last of the catch-up stuff. For now. I hope to post at least once a week. I’m thinking Wednesday because not only is it WIP Wednesday, but it’s On My Desk Day too. Granted, my desk is a shared one and it’s currently a complete mess. So we’ll see.

But for now it’s back to Real Life Stuff. Don’t you wish that some days you could call in kid once in awhile? I can’t do my tax return today, sorry, I’m currently seven and want some cookies.

Oh well.

 

Blog Award

Just when I was desparing that the current blog award was going to pass me by (I’m not the happiest of bunnies by a long shot), I got nominated by B! Which made me perhaps a little happier than it should have. I’m not depressing! I have a neato blog! Yay, me!*ehem* Thank you, B, as ever.

And now it is my turn to nominate ten others that make my day (in the non-Clint Eastwood way). Firstly, this was HARD. Secondly, this is a mish-mash of my daily reads. Not all of them feature knitting but most do, in some form or the other.

1. A Beautiful Life: I read it for the inspirational pictures, ebay finds and shoes.
2. Belle Epoque: The craftiness, pictures and recipes alone make this a winner.
3. Coloursknits: Everything she knits seems to be Habu and the photography alone is fantastic. I aspire to pictures that good.
4. Fashionist: I used to read Go Fug Yourself but I found it made my brain drip out of my ears. I much prefer Fashionist, street fashion and photography from San Francisco. Because they are normal people wearing fantastic clothes.
5. Folk and Fairy: While Jessica does knit (she’s on Ravelry) I read this blog for all the fairy tale wonderfulness. And the pictures taken by Jessica herself are fantastically otherworldly.
6. Klosekraft: Stephanie blogs the sort of life that one only dreams about. She lives in New York, cooks things that have me wanting to run to the kitchen and knits all the things I wish I could wear but can’t. I just don’t have that sophisticated style.
7. La Fuji Mama: Our birthdays are close together, we’re both expats and we have a penchant for French pastries. Plus, she lives in Japan! How cool is that?
8. Snowangels: I read it for the pens. And the yarn porn. But mainly the pens.
9. Ysolda: What’s not to love? The baking, the hats, the video tutorials that keep you from tearing out your hair… Wonderful.
10. Yvestown: I just love the whimsy.

And that is all I got for today. Have a good one!

 

They Say It’s Your Birthday…

Well it’s my birthday too! First of all, a HUGE thank you to Missy, B, M, Rachel and Jan (on Ravelry) for the fantastic birthday wishes and cards/gifties. I was honestly verklempt when I checked my email today. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

As birthday’s go, today was pretty good. Firstly we did the laundromat thing (lots of interesting people and the miracle of having a dryer! I’d forgotten how nice it was to not have to wait for all your clothes to air dry in a damp house) and then I had a doctor’s appointment. There was lots of not nice things there, including a scheduled ECG to check for heart wonkiness and blood tests (I hate needles). But then we went to a local American restaurant for dinner. While the dinner was very nice the dessert had Mr F and I in fits of giggles. We got this cookie sandwich sundae that was so outsized that as soon as it came to the table I started chanting: “Piggy Wiggy! Piggy Wiggy!*” It was HUGE. Mr F and I toasted to my 30th birthday with our spoons and then dug in. I never in a million years thought I’d spend my 30th birthday attacking a giant sundae and giggling like a kid. It was fun.

But before all that, we did a little FO photo shoot.

Another Fountain Hat…

• Name: Malabrigo Fountain Hat
• Pattern: Fountain Hat by me
• Yarn: Malabrigo Worsted in Bobby Blue, half a skein (ish)
• Needles: US 6, 8 and 15 (plus several in between 8 and 15)
• Mods: Made this slightly shallower.

And Mr Not-So-Greenjeans:

• Name: Mr Not-So-Greenjeans
• Pattern: Mr Greenjeans by Amy Swenson
• From: Knitty, Fall 2007
• Yarn: 6.1 skeins Malabrigo Worsted in Bobby Blue
• Needles: Options US 7 and 8
• Mods: Like how. Changed the cable pattern. Lengthened the body considerably. Lengthened the cable pattern on the sleeves. Worked a plethora of short rows at the collar.

Close up of the cable pattern.

The two main modifications: cable and collar.

I absolutely love this sweater. It’s super cozy and cushy. I expect to get a LOT of use out of it. And I love the color.

And now that you’ve waded through all that, I’ll announce the Birthday Bonanza Contest winners. I put all the names for each color in a bowl and picked out a winner. The grand prize was all the fiber related names into a bowl and then picking a winner.

Light Pink: Rachel
Hot Pink: Jen C.
Red: Adriana
Orange: Hanna
Yellow: Suzy
Light Green: Tuesday
Dark Green: Gladys
Turquoise: Danielle
Blue: Stephanie
Purple: Karen
A Pinch To Grow On Grand Prize: Yvonne

Congrats to all the winners! That’s me done on contests for awhile, let me tell you! Thanks to everyone who entered, linked or otherwise took part. It was a lot of fun!

And just to end out this rather crazy long post, a few more pictures:

I took this leaning across Mr F through the car window on the day before Christmas and then promptly forgot all about it. It was so beautiful, I’m glad I even got this picture. (Click through for bigger.)

Happy Thursday!

* From Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. The scene where Napoleon gets that gigantic ice cream sundae? It was very nearly that big. Well, not quite. But still.

 

Options and Sparkle

I know I owe people replies and emails but I figured before I replied, I should get the Options details down. Firstly, I was wrong when I had two sets of the Options. I have sort of an extended set of the Options but only one of them. The extended set includes the following:

• 3 x 24″ cables
• 3 x 32″ cables
• 1 full set of Options tips (US 4-11)
• extra tips for sizes US 5-8
• 1 full set needle size ID tags
• 12 end caps
• 4 keys
• 1 plastic case

If anyone is still interested, please let me know.

And while there is no knitting content (I never got around to it yesterday), I do have pretty sparkly pictures anyway.

Mermaid Dreams pendant from Wyrding Studios. I got this for my birthday. Now I get what all the fuss is about! This is absolutely gorgeous.

Don’t forget, I draw contest winners on Thursday!