Invitation inspiration

Just a collection of invitations found on the web that have inspired what I plan to do:

 

(from Weddingbee Miss Beagle)

Things completed, and not…

Since we last talked (well, I talked you read) I have completed a few projects.

The sock on my head hat: perfect in its’ sloppiness and the colour makes me want to wear it all the time. The pattern is pretty simple and not too boring to knit, although I did stop just before the decreases started for about a week.

(crappy phone photo taken in our old place, The A keeps taking his camera with him so I can’t use it)

Granny square blanket: as big as I wanted it and the colours look great. Useful when our friend came to visit from the UK as she found it a tad chilly at night and we only have one duvet.

Missing Link socks (not completed) a pattern I made up and knit in a wonderful ruby red Patons Sock yarn. These are for The A and I have shown great example of second sock syndrome, the second one is ready for a heel flat but I have shoved it to the bottom of the knitting bag.

Sock in Progress

The A wearing said sock (ewww look at the nasty carpet we USED to have)

The Two Tone Shrug is an example that you should not only knit in the round as you forget how to purl properly and end up with a funky looking Stockinette stitch, but fear not, I have re-learnt to purl and am currently knitting up and entirely red Two Tone Shrug with a proper stockinette stitch ‘look’.

Still sleeping off winter is the Cobblestone jumper but as my good friend Mitzy Knits says, it will be completed some time after March 2010 ;)

What else? Oh yes! I am steaming ahead with a baby project for a family friend. It’s the Ribbed Baby Jacket (Rav link) I thought she was having a boy, but I was mistaken. I bought a brown alpaca mix wool so to make it more ‘girl friendly’ I will trim the bottom and the sleeves with some red. The mum-to-be has banned all pink so I think it’s just lucky that I thought it was a boy!

Must get back to my knitting now. Next week I shall be starting on the wedding invitations (for real!) so tune in as I get my hot glue gun, printer and sewing machine out after work and cross your fingers that what I have in mind works!

Tempus Fugit

Happy Fall everyone! Or Happy summer to those in the Southern Hemisphere! The above picture is one of my favorites from a fall Martha Magazine.

Since you last heard from me several things have happened:

1. I’ve been granted permission to stay here in OZ

2. We’ve moved house, and I can see the sea!

3. The wedding is moving on, I’ve ordered my dress and shoes, we’ve decided on the rings (Etsy of course) and will be ordering those soon, Invitations will be sent out early next month and the registry is almost complete.

I’m hoping now that I have the first two settled I can get back into a more regular blogging routine, including showing some WIPs, FOs (lets ignore those that are on pause)

We woke up at 4:30am today as The A had to leave to head up north and as I was already awake I decided it would be a good time to finish the Halloween party invitations that I printed out from Martha (the pumpkin and owl invitations) but my scissors seem to have disappeared in the move (we only moved last weekend) so I will need to go buy some new ones and head to Freo knitting early so I can work on them. Interesting TV early in the morning here, I caught ‘Good Morning America’ and the US ‘Today’ show as well as Thunderbirds. David Grays’ new song also made an appearance which reminded me of studying for my GCSEs.

I hope to churn out some more posts this weekend so you will be hearing from me soon!

The BBC list of 100 books meme

This is simple but I got it off That Wife’s blog. Apparently the average total out of 100 is 6, which makes me feel a bit sad about the state of reading these days. I also thought that by having a comprehensive list of books at my disposal next time I don’t know what to get at the library I can just look this up.

The premise is simple, put and X next to the books you have read:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (definitely never cover to cover)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis De Bernieres X
38 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
39 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X                                                                                                                                                             40 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

41 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
42 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
49 Atonement - Ian McEwan                                                                                                                                                                    50 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

51 Dune - Frank Herbert
52 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
54 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth X
55 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
58 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon
59 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante 
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome X
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

42 out of 100 isn’t bad!

Craft update

An update in pictures:

Also on the needles: a drop stitch scarf and more granny squares!

Contemplating a stash enhancing click to the Bendigo Woolen Mills website for the Bella mittens and Owls jumper.

Mundaring Truffle Festival

Every year the town (or Shire as they like to call themselves) of Mundaring hold a Truffle festival.  As someone at The A’s work lent us his car we decided to drive into the hills behind Perth and have a look around the festival.

Even though we didn’t have anything with truffles in it we managed to eat till we burst! Turkish bread with fresh Tapenade and Hummus, REAL Pork Rilletes with French bread, a dessert tray and on the way home a Devonshire tea with mutant giant scones.

To summarize:

A Theory

I have a theory on the massive amounts of Plaid shirts that’s hitting the streets lately. I haven’t seen this much since watching Party of Five and maybe Empire Records.

I believe that when a recession or economic uncertainty hits the plaid comes out of the cupboards/designers heads and hits the streets with a vengeance. I don’t know why; maybe because it’s comforting, you don’t really need to iron a plaid shirt, and it looks good with jeans. I have nothing against it, I am wearing one now with my sweat pants!

I also think that some of the plaid obsession from the under 18’s comes from the Twilight movie and Rob Pattison (he apparently doesn’t like ‘RPattz’, and who can blame him?) just look at this page from Delias online store.

Long live Plaid!

Our Save the Dates

Hello! It’s me! I’ve been intending to write this post for a while but I had an 11 hour day on Tuesday and it’s knocked me out for the rest of the week. But in celebration of the coming weekend I thought I might do a wedding related post.

The A sent out our save the dates last week so it should be safe for me to post about them. As our wedding is going to be a ‘destination wedding’ (the only people who are actually where we are going to get married is us) so we decided to buy various Perth postcards.

For the text I found a font that we both liked and printed out enough of them to stick onto the postcards, addressed them and sent them!

A really drama free save the date that didn’t cost the earth.

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

I won something!

About 2 months ago I was checking out the Australian Cosmopolitan Bride website to find out when their new issue was coming out (turns out I had to wait 2 months) and they were doing a marketing poll  to find out what brides were looking for these days, as an incentive they would pick one person to win some nice Benefit brand Glamazon bronzer.

Yesterday I got a ‘we missed you!’ leaflet telling me to pick up a parcel. Turns out I won the opinion poll!! It made my day.

Tweed obsessed

I think I have become a little obsessed with tweed type yarn. This came with the addition of some Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed, one ball in a beautiful icy blue and one in a wonderful pinky raspberry. I already have 4 balls of light blue Grignasco Tango and 4 balls of the same in red, and of course the cobblestone jumper for The A that is also a silk/wool tweed.

The wonderful thing about these yarns is how soft they are, not the typical scratchy tweed of yesteryear. Now made up of wool, silk, cashmere and alpaca tweed is something that I can now wear with joy (I hate scratchy things near my skin)

I have no clue what to knit with these yarns but the Jo Sharp will probably become a cowl, wristlets or beret/hat.

(Aren’t the photos great? I used natural light near the couch and backed the yarn with some white paper, I love how well the colour comes out!)

Ring saga

I love my E ring and I try and take good care of it. I take it off when showering, doing the washing up and while doing anything that might damage it.

Which is why I was more than a little peeved off when I noticed that on the bottom of it I could see the crack from the re-sizing and that on the inside bottom of it I could see something that looked suspiciously like plastic. The ring is now back at the jewelers where they tried to tell The A that white gold wears off really quickly and that the seller has to re-coat her rings every 3 months (WHAT?!) In the mean time I’m wearing a ring that I inherited with the jewelry box I got from my mother, it feels funny not to wear anything on my finger now!

Jobbing it

I’ve not been able to blog much lately as I started a job last Friday. It’s a crafty one so even though I am just stacking shelves in preparation of their stock take I get to ohh and ahh over things I have never seen before and get ideas for crafty projects.

Apparently I am really good at ‘relaying’, I have no idea what that specifically means but I think it’s the art of grouping things for displays and making it look good. There’s something to put on ye olde CV!

Freo Knitting is on this Saturday (as it is every sat) so come on down if you are in the area.

Still here – still crafting!

Have been away from here for a while. Mostly due to controlling of internet consumption and having other things to do.

Yesterday was my birthday and I took a trip to Calico and Ivy to spend a gift voucher I got from The A’s parents. It’s a substantial haul and as The A said, it should keep me busy for a while! I still have some money left on it for another day.

I got three skeins of Cascade 220 as I have been wanting to do Stephanie Japel’s Two Tone Shrug from Fitted Knits. The blue hasn’t come out very well (phone picture) It’s a lot darker IRL and closer to turquoise.

I also acquired a beautiful skein of mustard coloured Jitterbug sock yarn, 4 balls of Grignasco Tango in a lovely powder blue tweed, and three tootsie rolls of fabric. One of which has bees on it (a bit obsessed with bees at the moment, I’m reading ‘The Hive’ and also ‘Robbing the bees’)

I have also been busy on the wedding front. We paid the deposit on the Restaurant just as we received the confirmation letter from the park. We couldn’t get the Beedawong meeting place as it’s in an area of the park that gets used for concerts between November and April. Instead we booked a Rotunda that overlooks the city and river but with the option of transferring the booking to the Beedawong meeting place if it isn’t being used (fingers crossed!)

On the sewing front it’s all go! I made several project bags as well as a GPS bag for The A, a zippered bag for my handbag that holds lip balms and hair clips, and a sad looking bear who needs me to make some shorts out of some Hawaiian fabric I have.

  

Quilt top pop

On Thursday I popped into ‘The Reject Store’ as I got a catalogue dumped into the mailbox and saw a $25 sewing machine on the back page. I managed to buy the last one, and after a few teething problems it’s going great guns (literally, it sounds like a machine gun!)

I had a go at a few drawstring bags before cutting the pieces for a quilt I’ve had in mind for a while. When you can’t sleep very well and the Da Vinci Code is on the TV you might as well spend the time cutting up strips of white fabric! I plan on using a really soft white flannelette fabric from Spotlight on the back and red thread to quilt along the white. It will also have a white border.

 

There’s also a little progress on the granny square blanket.

They had restocked the shelves at Spotlight and I got two balls of the yellow and two of the white which I got 4 squares out of. Hmmm ‘High Society’ is on, gotta go!

Dying with Kool-Aid

I’ve had a few queries about how to dye with Kool-Aid and seeing as I have some ‘in progress’ pictures I figured I could show you what we managed to do in an afternoon. I think the flavours we had were Grape, Pink Lemonade, Raspberry, Blue Raspberry, Lime and Orange.

What you need: Zip lock bags, un-dyed yarn of your choice (not cotton though as the dye doesn’t stick to it), Kool-Aid, more than lukewarm water

Process: Un-skein your yarn (see picture) and in the zip lock bags pour in the Kool-Aid and enough water to almost fill the bag, make sure the Kool-Aid is mixed into the water and dunk the yarn. Close the zip-lock bag, making sure there isn’t too much air left in it and squish the bag to ensure maximum  the yarn is completely soaked. Place yarn bags outside in the sun and only remove them once the water inside is completely cool. Rinse in coolish water until it runs clear. squeeze out excess water and dry!

Happy dyeing!

I dream of Smooshy

I got a great surprise in the mail yesterday. My mum ordered some yarn from Socktopus (in the UK) and as an early birthday present she sent me a skein of Dream in Color Smooshy. I love the colour and think that it will become either a small swallowtail shawl (that I will use as a scarf) or the basket weave shawl (again to use as a scarf) but at the moment it will sit on the table for me to admire and smell (yes, I’m a yarn sniffer!) which The A finds hilarious!

The pictures are a great depiction of the colour, taken in the kitchen for maximum natural light.

I was looking through my Knitting file on my Pictures and found some pictures of an afternoon of Kool Aid dying that a friend and I did in the UK. I will probably do a future how to post for fun.

Smug Alert weddings

First of all watch this South Park Clip

These days I’m finding it hard to read what a lot of people write in forums, be it on Ravelry or on general wedding websites (Weddingbee being the exception funnily enough) While I agree that spending the cost of a house on a wedding is ridiculous and completely insane I also think that having a budget, DIY, eco friendly wedding just for the sake of saying that you had one (cue fart smelling and Smug alert) is also insane.

A lot of forum posts are becoming a type of brag ‘look at what I managed to make out of lace, card and my oh so expensive Gocco machine!’ (and yes I realise that I post a lot of my wedding craft on here, but it’s mainly to show my mum who is in Europe) There are some genuine people out there who are doing their wedding their own way; be it DIY or big and expensive and they don’t apologize for it. But these genuine people seem to getting shot down, ignored and pointed at (and not in a friendly way) and even getting ‘shouted’ over with long paragraphs of their own stuff by the Smug brides in forums.

I left a group that had a lot of these Smug brides where I saw a lot of this behavior (I’d like to point out that it wasn’t towards me!) and no one said anything about it. A lot of them might not think that they had even done anything wrong… but that might just be cause they can’t see through the smug! They aren’t that interested in what you have to say, they just want the opportunity and audience to talk about themselves. I thought it would be a great opportunity to share some resources, ideas and DIY information but I was wrong.

Have any of you seen this type of behavior? What do you think about it?

I’m posting a lot today, sorry about that!

The easy way to blog

Someone on Ravelry kindly gave out some great blogging information that is proving to be fantastic! It’s called Windows Live Writer, and it’s free. You go here and download it for free, it doesn’t take up much room or download quota. It links up to your blog so that you can write from your desktop, save it, or publish it. It records all the setting from your blog so there’s no need for formatting. You can also link multiple blogs so that you only have to go to one place to write your posts.

I’m just happy that I won’t have to spend ages afterwards fiddling with edits to make my posts look normal. Let me know if you end up using it!

It's so hard

They have an ice cream here called Golden Gaytime... yes I know! It's actually really good and something of an icon. They apparently had a debate wether to change the name but the vote was unanimously 'NO'

The advert they have was made in the early 80's and they still show it, and when you watch it you can see why they wouldn't bother updating it:

Squaring up

There's something incredibly relaxing about making granny squares. Once you get what to do things just flow and you almost get hypnotised by the motion of it. The yarn is Spotlight basic 100% australian wool in white and a sort of mustard yellow. I need to get some more but the shelves were cleared out when I last went (they had a sale)

Thanks to some Ravelry users I got some tips on how to adjust the settings on here. Here's hoping that the issues I have with spacing and paragraphs work out!

Wedding Craft Sunday

I'm not religious so on Sundays I do something else and when The A is away it's Craft Sunday!! Woo!! Can you tell I'm excited? In advance I apologise for the crap phone camera pictures, The A took his good camera up north with him in the hopes of doing some experimental photography (with exposure and the like)

Today I thought I would show you my progress of the paper flowers and felt leaves. So far I have a boutonniere prototype that I'm loving (no one else has seen it)

Would you buy something like this if it was on Etsy and it could be made into your own Weddng colours? I'd really like to know so please leave a comment about it.

The main flowers and big leaves are looking good too, though am thinking that it looked better without the red.

Here's my messy table with all my stuff on it. It will need to be tidied before Tuesday!

A gratuitous shot of my new reading/knitting/computer glasses that I got for $10 (yay for KMart!) It was the best out of about 15 I took, nothing like no make up and messy hair on a Sunday morning! The lighting makes me look like my chin flows right into my neck.... dear god!

And look how nice it is outside!!

NOTE: This post was going to be a lot longer, it took me less than 10 mins to write the long version but have spent almost an hour fixing all the blogger formatting probelms with spacing and paragraphing. I am seriously thinking of moving to Wordpress. ARGG!!!

Books

At first I had a little bit on the side that said what books I was reading, seeing as I was reading things in three days (like 'The Boleyn Inheritance' by Philipa Gregory which I finished this morning) I thought it was a bit useless and ended up not updating it as often as it needed to be.

Anyway, I went to the library (yet again) today and picked up some good ones. I found the wedding section, which was about 10 books in total, and picked up 'Anti-Bride Etiquette guide The rules and how to break them' it has some interesting stuff about invitations and how to deal with sticky situations. Not that there have been any situations but you never know ;) I also got 'Bridal Bargains' which is aimed at people in the US but they have some great insider tips on what to ask for and what you should and shouldn't be paying for.

I got the novel 'Like water for chocolate' which is one of my favourite films and always makes me cry. I have read the book before and thought it would be a quick but fun read while The A is away. I also picked up Suze Ormans' 'Women and Money', Suze is the financial gal on the Oprah show and I caught her on the tv denying a woman who was in debt and who wanted to get a loan to buy a thid car - needless to say she was great and really pounded into the lady, I think that was when I liked her! She makes a lot of sense and as I am already reading 'Five years to financial freedom' by someone else (the book is in the other room and can't be bothered to go look) I figure I might as well read her at the same time! Not that we are in any position to buy a house or car yet but it's a good idea to know what's going on when we do finally take that step. I don't want to sit at the bank and not have any clue what they are talking about and be able to get the best deal (which isn't always the one they offer to you first!)

I have also been experimenting with felt leaves and will take some pics when I can be bothered. They look great with the paper tissue flowers and I have mocked up a boutonniere to see the effect.

Everyday birds

The first thing I noticed when we got to Perth was how different the crows sound here. They make a throaty gargle that sounds like a cat in trouble. I also think that they are bigger, but I got shot down on that one. Everyday we have differnt birds that fly over in groups or in twos and I always ask The A what they are, he doesn't always have the answer so I have fun looking them up online.

The most common ones I see here are:

Willy Wagtail (they 'wag' their tails)



Pee Wee

Crows

Galah

Lorikeets