which member of something positive are you?

quiz created by heatherbat


Crap. R, don't you laugh at me. You... wanker.

About half moved into the new place. The Mate did something very, very nice; he gave me a whole wall for my crafting stuff. Now i've got an eight foot table, a set of wire cubes (like the ThreadBear yarn cubes) for my yarn, and a bookcase for my growing craft books section. Life is good.

Not much other crafting news. Kitten (formaly Biddy on this blog) is going to teach me to follow a sewing pattern. I know how to sew, basicaly; my grandmother let me learn when I was little, and I can knock out a pillow or a stuffed animal... as long as I am designing it. Patterns scare me. Kitten promises that learning patterns won't hurt... much.

No picture of the purple fruit hat; the mother-to-be showed up at faire this weekend, and I gave the hat to her. But here is a sketch:

My take on the fruit hat.


Knitting on the sophie bag is going well; i'm about 14 rows into the body of the bag. Granted, I knitted some of it while at Musicalie at Ren Faire, so the decreases are a bit... off. Just a few stitches. Not too bad, and i'm not going to rip back. Not for 2 stiches on a felted bag. Not worth it.

Well, that's it for now. Hopefully i'll have pictures of my new craft area soon.

Have a good Memorial Day weekend if you get it off,
mouse

Finished the fruit hat, with it's ginormus leaf. I mean it, the leaf is huge. Will come to the kids ear, I think, once she is born and wears it. Wearing it now would be... sticky.

Yey for me! I followed a pattern, with only one little mistake! That leaf is cute; it has a little ridge of slip stitches running up the center, and the shaping is simple and nice. I know, I know, big deal, but I've never really followed small, complex patterns before. I'm more of a 'yeah, yeah, I get it, make it get smaller at the top' kind of knitter. Does this mean I design my own stuff? Kinda; I incorporate a pattern into my brain, and my brain disects peices of it, which show up other places. Why? I dunno, just how my brain works, I guess.

But I did that leaf... maybe I can do lace or something...

Now, I know that Caroline reads the blog (Hi Caroline!) but i'm just not sure anybody else does. Anyone wanna drop me a note to say 'I read it' so I don't feel so lonely?

/cue sad music and big eyes.

Speaking of big eyes; go see Shrek 2, if just for Puss in Boots. He's so... catlike it's scary. We were squeeing the whole time because of the catlikeness of this cat. hairballs, licking himself, and an ego the size of the entire world. And evil. Very evil. Like... purring to make you pick him up and then clawing your eyes out. And subtle things... like staring at himself adoringly in a passing window. If cats could talk... they would be Puss.



when I find a picture of the Big Eyes i'll put it up. Seriously, this is a smart, funny movie. The kids won't get all the jokes... but you will. There's movie homages to many things; Lord of the Rings, Ghostbusters (Squee!) and just about every other great movie in history. So, so funny.

Ahhh, summer vacation. So, I'm done with school for the semester, and I am very, very happy. I didn't think I'd make it. 13.5 units... plus a full time job, plus another 'job' that took me out of town every weekend. I'm not sure how I made it, but I did.

And I think I might have pulled a 4.0. 0_0

So, that's good. I got a bit of knitting done while waiting for Biddy to get her newest tattoo, done by the incomparable Pat Fish. Go check her out. She's witty, sharp, a wonderful artist, and has two beautiful Irish Wolfhounds.

For those of you who've never seen one:


So there. That's what they look like. No, the dog, not the boy. Man, you lot are picky!

So, I'm sittin' there, watching Biddy get a lovely still life painted into her arm, and I'm knitting away with some scrap Paton's Canadiana in an eggplant color. My goal? A quick version of the ever popular fruit hat. I was going to do a grape. Then both my brain and Biddy point out that grapes come in bunches. Now, this gift is for a very fertile friend of mine, but I certainly don't want her to have an entire bunch of babies! So I change my plans for the stem and leaf, and now it's a plum hat.

Right...

I finished it up the other night, and managed not to kill myself with the DPNs. Go me! Don't mock me. I'm the girl who manages to cut herself on butter knives and phone booths. I actually cut myself on a lollipop once. No kidding. For a while my mate wouldn't let me cut my own food for fear of hurting myself. Anyway... I added a stem, and pulled out the eye gouging green scrap yarn I have for the leaf.

I think, "I can make a leaf..." and then I proceed to knit what looks like a run over frog, or perhaps the lost paddle to a very relaxed canoe. No, no, this won't work!

So I comb the internet and come up with a leaf pattern I think I can do. I'd share it... but I forgot to bookmark the site, so all I have is the pattern. And we all know not to ask for somebody else's pattern, don't we? See Wendy (May 07 post)if you're unclear on this.

More on that as it develops.

I also was struck by the thought that I should start another project. Why? Who cares.

I saw the Sophie bag mentioned Rob's blog, and I just had to start it. So I dig up some worsted type yarn (Don't worry, I waited 30 minutes after eating inspiration to go Stash Diving. Don't want to get a brain cramp, after all,) and came up with some GOD awful yellow yarn I bought at the Torrance Handspinner's sale in August. Now, you have to understand, this yarn came in a HUGE hank. Like... bigger than a newborn baby. Ok, a small newborn. But big, I tell you. And it's scratchy. And it was cheap; 5$ for the whole thing. So I bought it. And 4 others of different colors. The dye is spotty, the yarn is scratchy, and it felts.

I'm in love. :D

So I pull two chairs a few feet apart and begin to wind it into a ball. By hand, since I seem to have misplaced my craftMum's ball winder. Whoops... Anyway, I wind. And wind. And wind. Mate reads to me from Hunter S. Thompson's The Great Shark Hunt to keep my brain busy. I love that man. You pick whether I mean my mate or Hunter S.

At some point I realize that I'm turning the ball once for every 3 pulls off the skein. I look down, and great googile mooglie! The ball is bigger than my head!

So I stop. I make a second, normal sized ball with what's left of the skein and put Godzilla ball away. I kit back and forth on the needles I have on hand (Gauge? We don't need no stinking gauge... I know, I know, bad knitter... but it's not like it's a garment, after all.) which was a size 8 or so. Give or take; these are Honey's old needles, given to me when her eyesight faded. No numbers to be found.

Knit, knit, knit.

I love bag patterns. Back and fourth, then pick up the edges and away you go! So... on Mother's day, away I went... only to realize that the circular I grabbed in my dash out the door was a size 4.

Yes, going from size 8 to size 4... I knew it wasn't gonna work , but I started it anyway, just to see.

Hoo Boy! Not pretty. Looked like a pear with a glandular condition. So last night I ripped out the size 4 disaster (And we all know that most women aren't size 4, and the media is teaching us to be that size. DOWN WITH SKINNY MODELS! ::cough:: um...) and dug out my NeedleMaster kit and set to work. I'm a inch or so up the sides.

Maybe it's time for me to read the pattern, eh?

I should shut up; this post is huge. Have a good weekend, and if you're around the LA area, come see me at the Renaissance Faire; I'm the 'dim' Scottish woman playing with yarn in the street.

Trying again to switch my templete. Don't mind the dust...

Well, blogger has updated all sorts of stuff... Anybody have a clue why their new templates won't work for me? I get the either the sidebar down below my main section, or vice versa. It's like the screen isn't big enough... Anybody else having this problem?

Hey there!

So, I've been evicted. That sucks. I have finals. That sucks. I had to basicaly quit the Ren faire, though I might end up going back if I can get somebody else to spend 2.45$ on gas for me.

So what did I do? Start another project, of course!

It's basicaly a Sophie bag, from MagKnits, but I used some scratchy but feltable yarn from my stash (rug yarn? I dunno what it is. I have a approx 3 lb ball of the stuff... ball's larger than my head.) and whatever needles I have on hand. Yes, gauge is off. No, not enough that it should be a big problem. I'm only kinda following the pattern anyway; the handles are what really make this bag, and I'll be doing that... eventualy.

Currently using my dad's high speed internet. It's a sad, sad day when your parents have a better internet connection than you do. But heck! Maybe in the new place I can get DSL! Yes, this is me looking for a silver lining, why?

Back to work. I've got finals due,

mouse

Ok! Everything figured out!

Turns out I had two blogs! Both pointing to the same url, so it overwrote itself. When I'd sign in as one (and click "remember me") it'd go to one blog, and then it'd go to the other when I'd sign in as the other.

D'oh! But it's figured out now.

Also, I switched to blogspot because I'm going to have to kill my website (long story involving being hurt badly by a person and having to find a new place to live. AKA, being raped by Souther California slumloards and having to tighten the ol' belt).

I don't think that's even a sentence. Anyhoo, I found the old posts and shoved them in, and am trying to fix up the blog again. Be patient... If there's anybody left out there, that is...

I'm being seduced!

No, not by a man (that happened long ago, thank god!) but by a new craft.

A creeping, money sucking, insidious craft!

Quilting! Be afraid. Be very, very afraid...

How did this happen? you cry. You are a spinner, a dyer, a knitter... a felter, even, but never a quilter! Have you no shame? Haven't you taken up enough of the house with your craft stuff? Don't you already have so many WIPs that you can't remember what everything is?

yes.

But.... but... Well, ok, here's the thing. Months and months ago I was helping my friend Red make her wedding dress (ok, i was helping by picking out colors. That's the extent of my sewing skills, really,) and we stopped at some fabric store in the Valley. Like, totally fershure! Anyway, while Red was looking at useful stuff, I was off poking in yarn bins. No, they had piles of Bleeding Aorta (red heart) and nothing else. So, despondent, I pick through the books.

And this book... it… attacked me. Snagged my fingers and vomited it's ideas into my brain.

I never knew quilts could look like this. I mean.. wow.

But I'm not a quilter, and I don't have the money/time/space to become one. AND I can't sew.

So I put it down.

...

So the thought has been eating my brain. Seeping and pricking and making my fingers itch and my sternum vibrate with want. I want to create quilts like that.

My problem? I can't remember the book title! I thought it was "Stained Glass Quilts," but those look more like this and not like what I was looking at at all! These (and these, and these) were more like it... So I decided that it must have been a watercolor quilt book... but none that I have found have had the kind of... looking through a dark window into a garden look of the ones that are eating my brain.

I'm going insane!

It doesn't help that I just got a sewing machine. Now I want to do it even more.

Somebody stop me before it's too late. Or find me that damn book, one of the two.

O

...Blogger ate a bunch of posts? WTF?

Anybody know how to get them back? I'm missing... like 3 months...

[ETA] and it ate my template! ARG! I liked that template! Sheesh. I just can't have nice things...

...

Dyeing experiment went well. Screaming purple on the linen. Will post pictures when it's all put together.

Poor Wendy. People are being... stupid. Come on, people! It's a copyrighted pattern! I made Wendy a button...



A few thoughts on this:

A) Copyright is good. Copyright makes it possible for people to design stuff and get paid for it. This is a Very Good Thing (to paraphrase Big Evil).

B) It's a poncho. A poncho, people. How hard can it possibly be? The reason that particular poncho is neat is the yarns, and you can pick yarns out, can't you? I mean, come on! I did a search and found 342 hits with "knit poncho" pattern free. Poke around a bit. I mean, come on! A poncho is two rectangles attached in such a way that your head fits through a hole it the middle. Make up your own! It's not like this is a pattern that uses extensive charts and patterns, and has lots of little tricky bits that you couldn't possibly figure out on your own.

I guess that's what's bugging me about this. I'm not the smartest pumpkin in the patch, but I'm pretty sure I could figure out how to make a poncho. Especially with the pictures that people have provided. Don't be stupid. Use your brain. If you don't want to buy that pattern, make up your own! Maybe then you'll have 32 people a day ask you for that pattern, and you can say:

Don't be stupid. Be creative.

This rant brought to you by mouse.