anywhoodle…
so i went out to run some lunch errands today (nothing like spilling half a bottle of orange drink in your purse to motivate you to go purse shopping…my husband loves the logic, i thought it made perfect sense ;]) and darned if when i got back i didn’t discover a stowaway:
(okay, not really a stowaway. i don’t shoplift, i promise.
i have the receipt from knitch to prove it! ;])
the reds are a bit rustier IRL, in fact all of the colors are just a bit muddier, not nearly as clear as they are here, but still beautiful. i know you all share the pain of having to take yarn photographs in crappy light and end up with less-than-reality color representation.
i have been lusting after this colorway for over a year, and when knitch started making efforts to carry BMFA, i decided to wait and see if fate decided to throw a little luck my way. patience certainly has its rewards. =]
things that i believe…
i believe that the two-party system in this country is irreparably broken.
i believe that voting for one guy just because he’s not the other guy is not only dangerous, its ignorant.
i believe that before a country tries to fix the world, it needs to fix matters at home.
i believe in less government, not more.
i believe that with the hardships this country is facing over the next four years, choosing a candidate primarily because they are against women’s reproductive rights is really thoughtless.
i believe that experience matters when it comes to the most important job in the world.
i believe that a viable candidate sticks to their principles and does not shift with the tide of popular opinion.
i believe that real change requires REAL CHANGE, not choosing between six of one vs. half a dozen of the other.
Before you make your decision this November, please do the right thing and look at ALL the options. I encourage you to check out the Libertarian Party, as well as all of the other options available.
Don’t just vote, consider all the options, then vote with intelligence in whichever direction is right for YOU. =]
eye candy friday!
a couple more recent faves. if there’s one thing living in georgia affords me, it’s an abundance of flora & fauna to photograph. =*~_~*=
abaxial—atlanta history center
lazy sun daze—roswell, georgia
o hai!
had you going there for a minute, didn’t i? thinking i had fallen off the face of the earth. you’re so silly.
ahem!* HI! =]
so truly, the radio silence has been deafening over here. rest assured i’ve been keeping up with everyone else, though. grace gently thwapped me the other day and asked if i was ever going to post over here again, and whether ravelry was the culprit for my lack of blogginess. the truth? ravelry had nothing to do with it. about 7 months ago, knitting came to a dead halt at my place. it could have been the 4th big project disappointment in a row that i had to frog due to fugliness, or it could have been the hat, the lone item my husband ever actually requested, that i ripped and re-knit the first 4 inches of 6 times to get a nice comfy gauge, and finally got fed up with and shoved into the bottom of my bag (plus his incessant nagging over whether it was done—to his credit though, it was a pretty cold winter for a guy that has to work outside), but whatever it was, one day i sat down and just had absolutely no desire to even look at my own knitting or yarn. none, zero, zilch. scarily, i actually even considered selling off my entire stash at one point to help finance my growing photography efforts, but that seemed a little extreme. i still loved knitting, i just didn’t want to do it anymore for a while.
i actually wasn’t even on ravelry during that whole time either. i think i’ve logged in 5 times in the last 7 months. ravelry….what can i say about it? it’s a fantastic resource, especially for cataloging, assigning and displaying your stash & projects. i made a decision months ago to stay out of the forums, and in the interest of not being unkind, that’s all i’m going to say about it. i do wish there was an option to completely block being able to see the forums if you don’t want to, but that’s only because i have days where curiosity and hope get the better of me and i make the mistake of taking a stroll through the forums and end up being ridiculously saddened or angered. so yeah, ravelry not the culprit for me, and not ever taking the place of blogging.
so what have i been up to, you ask? mostly taking pictures. photography has long been my number one dream & inspiration, and at the last Yule my husband generously gifted me with a Nikon D40x, my first DSLR. (i asked to start a little lower on the food chain since i’m coming from a strictly manual film background, and all those crazy hijinks like remembering to change my white balance or to deal with sensor crop sort of gave me hives at first) I made a resolution last year (07) to start making photography more of a priority in terms of my free time and mad money budget, and this year made it even more of a priority and started giving it a budget of its own. i’ve been spending a lot of time out shooting, attending local guild meetings, assisting pros on professional shoots, and organizing and maintaining the atlanta grid project on flickr. my photography has been improving by leaps and bounds, and i’ve been having a blast discovering parts of atlanta that i may never have spent time in otherwise.
so after all this talk of photography, i should probably show you some pictures, eh? here are a few of my recent favorites.
this photo i took of vash at the dog park last week made it all the way to #5 on explore before settling down at #11:
here he is looking a bit less spazzo ;]
new leaves at the atlanta history center
this selfie was taken in may, about 2 weeks after my last haircut (yeah, i’m totally due). the hair actually started out deep indigo blue, but as it fades it shifts through blues & purples:
that’s all for now. i’ll be back with an update on the reappearance of knitting in my daily endeavors, as well as some other things i’d like to talk about in regards to the current status of my creative life. i truly hope all is well with all of you, and to the eleven or so of you subscribed to me who have stuck it out these last few months and not unsubscribed even when i’ve forgotten to get in touch with you….thanks. =*~_~*=
bloglines burp…
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- Brooklyn Handspun (145)
- Evilsciencechick (1)
- january one (1)
- Knitography (76)
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- Turtlegirl’s Bloggy Thing (200)
- whip up (200)
- Wicked Stitches (154)
- yaiAnn (18)
- Yarn & Order (120)
- ysolda (200)
either y’all started posting/updating like maniacs, or bloglines belched again. excuse you! ;]
(these aren’t the only blogs i read, just the ones that suddenly flipped out…)
my goodness…
but we’ve been busy. between all the holiday prep, test knitting, swap making, sewing, camera shooting, and work making a couple sly underhanded attempts to kill me, i almost forgot that i had a blog. i’ve set the spindling aside for now. i’m sure one of these days i’ll figure out what i’m doing wrong, and i have a couple new ideas to try, but with deadlines and the holidays looming, i just don’t have the heart to do anything i’m not currently required to do that may result in frustration. after the holidays, we’ll see.
in the meantime, i think my already tenuous membership in the girly-girl club might finally be permanently revoked. always a member in probationary standing to begin with, today i let my true colors be shown. i was all set to come to work and take a few sneaky photos of my test knitting to show you, only i don’t have my camera. because i forgot my purse. now i realise that women everywhere forget their purses from time to time. but i didn’t even realise that i didn’t have mine until well-after i arrived at work. damn. i guess it helps that the only thing i might have remotely needed was my wallet. my cell phone was in my pocket, my keys and my earrings were in my hand, i had my lunch bag and my knitting. come to think of it, except for my lip gloss i didn’t really need anything in my purse. except my camera. and my hearing aids.
anywhoodle. since i can’t take new pictures, it’s time to get around to showing you what my fantastic swap partner from ravelry’s “wes anderson and other odd ducks” swap group sent to me for the dia de los muertos swap.
my partner was blackrayne, and she did a fantabulous job. look how she spoiled me!
beautiful wrapping
awesome card
yummy candies
amazing swap loot! see that fantastic felted skull?
closer lookins:
sweet little catrinas project bag from messie craftie
awesome sugar skull stitch markers, which is too funny, since i also sent the same to my spoilee. these are made by melissa, a local knitter/spinner/awesome person. she has more adorable stitch markers in her etsy shop. (i swear she has a shop, but search as i might i cannot seem to make the linky go clicky. maybe later)
gorgeous louet gems sock yarn hand-dyed for me
seriously cool papier-mâché devil/demon rattle
…and i just realised that i completely forgot to take a close-up of the skull. it’s amazing. i’m thinking i might eventually embroider some sugar-skull-esque decorations on him, but for now he sits on my desk watching my progress.
ETA!!: i just discovered that on blackrayne’s blog, she posted a pattern for the skull! quick! go make one now!!
blackrayne, thank you so much. you really know how to spoil a girl. =]
i’ll be back soon with that test knitting and photos of foliage, which i finished over a month ago and have been wearing with the still-to-be-woven-in ends tucked up underneath.
in the meantime, if you’re local to atlanta and enjoy photography, you might be interested in checking out a new project/group i’ve started: the atlanta grid project. this project is directly inspired by and modeled after the portland grid project. essentially, each month a new square of a grid map of atlanta is randomly selected, and the participants make an effort to visit that grid’s area and take photographs during it’s month and upload them to the pool. i’m working on a website to go along with the project. the first grid will be selected on january 1, 2008. we would love to have you join us, either in body or in spirit.
small little insignificant note: i don’t know what in the blue heck is going on down there in some of the older posts that is making entire paragraphs pick up the link code for the flickr photos, but i’m tired of futzing with it. the best i can figure is that something gets screwed up when i try to center the photos. so i’m not centering the photos anymore. i hope you don’t mind. i do mind, but i’m tired of making 6,000 useless edits to a blog post to fix it. i’ve invoked the law of diminishing returns here. ;]
this spindling thing…
is *really* starting to piss me off.
sorry for the short & lame, i’m just super aggravated now and this is the only place it makes sense to rant. i’m just one more drafting disaster away from shoving the 4oz of merino/tussah that instigated this madness down the garbage disposal so that it can stop taunting me from the back of the closet.
mark my words.
NaNoMo?
i wonder if i can still switch over to NaKniSweMo instead…at least i could fail at that a hell of a lot slower. =*~_~*=
monkey see
while progress was made on secret swap projects, a nearly finished second sock lounged in the background. here are the wip shots from friday night. the gussett? instep? decreases and two pattern repeats have been finished up since then.
the ubiquitous monkey socks by cookie a in blue moon fiber arts socks that rock lightweight dutch canyon. i started these the last week of september, so i suppose you could call them my socktoberfest socks even though they won’t quite make the cuttoff. ;] i think it’s highly amusing that my dutch canyon monkeys pooled entirely differently from these dutch canyon monkeys. knitting with this yarn is such a wonderful experience. the yarn is crisp and smooth and flows evenly. i’ve had a little splittiness, but i do attribute some of that to my preference for bamboo dpn’s. the colors of the yarn are so saturated and complimentary to each other that it’s too much fun watching them slip through my fingers over and over again. this is one of those yarns that really makes the process of the knitting as enjoyable as having the finished object, if not more.
my favorite cast-on ever for top-down socks is german twisted cast-on, using this tutorial from knottygirls jen & la. i especially love the way it looks with 1×1 twisted rib.
if you look very closely at the first finished toe, you might see something a little strange.
a perfectly executed, evenly tensioned inside-out kitchenered toe. i think i must have missed the part of the directions that told me to turn the sock inside out first. or i managed to read the directions consistently backwards.
a full report on this pattern once i’ve finished them up. =]
bigger and badder
erm, so…i had this entire post written last night, and then an errant hand move on my laptop’s touchpad caused the page to jump back, somehow deleting the entire post in the process (apparently i never hit “save” and it never auto-saved, either) i hyperventilated for a few, and then had an epiphany whereupon i realised that NaBloPoMo wasn’t meant to be an exercise in masochism. so i let it go and went to bed. good for me. what you see here is an attempt to rewrite the entire post, which will have to suffice for nov 1-3. i’m okay with that. =]
last night i made time to take snaps of a few small fo’s for both here and ravelry. first up is the most recent fo, a noro striped scarf a la brooklyntweed.
pattern 1×1 ribbed, 2-row striped scarf [directly inspired by brooklyntweed]
yarn 4 skeins noro silk garden [silk 45/kid mohair 45/wool 10]
colors 211 [2], 247 and 249
dimensions w 5″ x 90″ [!]
i was thoroughly smitten with jared’s take on this simple striping trick with noro silk garden, and i have to say that until i saw his version, it had never occurred to me to stripe noro like this, nor had i managed to come across examples anywhere else. [it really is nice and comfy here under this rock, i swear. you should have seen what happened when i discovered bloglines earlier this year.] as soon as i started i fell in love, and it’s just about all i can do to go buy bags and bags of the stuff for the twelve projects i have in mind. my enthusiasm was tempered a bit by some of the results of my own color choices. a few colors that ended up next to each other on mine just didn’t make me happy at all, and a couple knots in the dark value skeins threw off the flow by forcing a drastic color change in the second row of a stripe. but then again many of the color matches were phenomenally inspiring and overall this project was a fantastic exercise in color theory.
next up is a pair of lmkg hand/wristwarmers made sometime late 06/early 07. [i only know that i finished them the night before a dick dale show, because i wore them and he told me they were cool] i made these out of one skein of colinette cadenza, with a good quarter skein at least left over that i could have lengthened them a bit. the stitch pattern works beautifully with the color changes, and i could stare at these colors all day long and never get tired of them. the photo doesn’t quite catch the little bits of deep red plum and jade green scattered throughout the turquoise, but the color is absolutely that blue and saturated. i love these and couldn’t wait to start wearing them again as the weather started cooling off. i still may remake them longer, since i also cast off too tightly on one and the fit is a little tight around the knuckles.
pattern hand/wrist warmers in twisting rib from last minute knitted gifts
yarn 1 skein colinette cadenza [100% easy care dk merino]
color 85 jay
this yarn is one of colinette’s “easy care” yarns, and i do wash these on intermittent hand wash in a lingerie bag in my washer, then block flat. the colors have not faded a bit, and pilling is almost nonexistent. anything that’s going to get worn on my hands needs to be easily washable to a degree and needs to stand up to it. so far, this yarn definitely passes, while being incredibly soft and, admittedly, a little splitty to work with.
last up we have an fo courtesy of the wayback machine. i honestly can’t remember when i knit my so-called scarf. guessing would put us somewhere in the 2004-06 range. i had four equal balls of the remains of four skeins of lorna’s laces bullfrogs & butterflies from an unsuccessful attempt at the fiber trends felted clogs, which required two strands of bulky yarn held together. i didn’t want another felted project because after working with the gorgeous variegated yarn, felting it melted all the pretty color changes together and i wanted to salvage what was left in a pretty stitch pattern that would show it off.
pattern my so-called scarf from sheep in the city
yarn somewhere between one & two skeins lorna’s laces bullfrogs & butterflies
[wool 85/mohair 15]
color black purl
dimensions w 4.75″ x l 90″ [!]
i love how the color shifts created a mock argyle pattern along the length of the scarf. it starts out crossing evenly & regularly for the first 1/3-1/2 of the scarf, then everything sort of spreads out and falls apart. its sort of abstract how it happens. one of these days i’ll get an action shot of it.
and with that, i’m going to sign off for the day. this post took a ridiculous amount of time to rewrite—i’ve been off for a haircut and a stop at borders while you’ve been reading, love. ;] tomorrow i’ll show you my current wip, which [depending on the status of a couple other projects desperately needing finishing for a swap thats past due =/] may be an fo by then. after that, i’ve got another post already shot and ready for a monday debut.
=*~_~*=
