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.
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!)
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!
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.
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.
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!
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 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.
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!
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!
