Happy Sunday, guys and dolls, lads and ladies, blokes and betties. I hope your Valentine’s Day, or Lunar New Year, or whatever today means to you, is going well. Here in San Francisco the sun was shining through my window and the weather was nice enough to not have to wear a sweater indoors. Perfect for a day of sewing and blasting iTunes while simultaneously having a solo dance party or kareoke fest every hour or so. I have way too much fun by myself.
Moving along! One of the ongoing projects is vamping up or apartment. Within the next month or so I volunteered to take on the intimidating task of making a slip cover for our couch… so in efforts of preparing for that monster project, today I’ve decided to do a smaller scaled slip cover of sorts, for my sewing machine. read more »
1. I stumbled upon this “remix” of this British WWII poster today while searching for something totally unrelated and I sat and stared at it for a while. I love this. It isn’t so much a goal, but very good things to keep in mind. Don’t stress out. Life’s way too short. And also, never stop getting excited to create, whether it’s a hat, a tool shed in your backyard, or simply jotting down your thoughts in a journal. read more »
I just finished working on this little neck warmer number. It was pretty easy to make, just kind of time consuming. I really like the way it came out. I used a half double crochet for the entire piece, then made 3 little button holes, and voila. I saw these adorable elephant buttons and had to use them for something.
The bright lime green goes perfectly with the cherry red buttons. Mmmm. Looks like candy.
P.S. Speaking of elephants, does anyone else remember Sharon, Lois & Bram’s Elephant Show?!?!
In my world, birthday-time is synonymous with a time to knit or crochet something awesome. This time it was for my good friend Aleece who turned 24 today! Cue the 24 theme song:
So, in about a week I put together The Garden Scarf.
I am currently trying to become better at crocheting so I purchased this book about a month ago when I was feeling a little down and uninspired.
It was definitely a good pick me up. Debbie Stoller, author of the Stitch and Bitch books, is such a great writer. Her books are anything but dry. Anyway, this pattern can be found in this great book. And now… the photos… (I really need a better camera, oy).
Crocheting the flowers was a pretty pain-free process. The most tedious part of this project was sewing the flowers together. As often happens, I did not follow the pattern 100%… because it got a little confusing (I miss Kate!), so I winged it. I think it came out pretty well considering my improvisation.
Yay! Next on the crochet agenda is a beanie. I reallly really love knitting beanies, because I love knitting things that I don’t have to pay attention to. I’m a big knit-while-watching-TV kinda gal. Anyway, word on the street is that it takes half the time to crochet a hat, so I’ll be the judge of that. And I’ll let you know, of course.
So, yesterday was my mom’s and my sister’s birthdays. Yes, they were born on the same day (separated by 30 years, of course). Silly me, I didn’t even remember until around 4 o’clock. I blame it on my looming quarter century birthday and possible pre-senility. As my sister so kindly reminded me yesterday when I apologized for not wishing her happy birthday sooner, “It’s ok, you’re halfway to 50. Your memory problems are understandable.”
Every year I try to be more creative with their birthday gifts, but I think this year I fell short of my own expectations. That’s ok. I got my mom a 6 month subscription to Netflix. I figure it’s the gift that keeps on giving. And since Arianna is really into French culture, I figure French films should do the trick. I got her Amelie and Paris, je t’aime. Although, since I can be kind of a cheapskate sometimes, I bought them used on amazon.com. I now have learned my lesson and will never buy used DVDs as presents ever again. Paris, je t’aime came in a blank dvd case. So it essentially looks like a bottlegged copy. Ew. But lucky for me, my sister could care less.
BUT because I am an advocate of handmade gift giving, I have still managed to crochet some adorable make-up cases that hopefully they’ll appreciate.
In other news, my roomie Kendra and I have started our semester long trek to become PHP experts. Wish us luck. My plan is to rebuild/redesign this blog from the ground up once I grasp php. So far, all I know how to do is download XAMPP which has Apache, MySQL, etc. And that was a success! It’s all about the baby steps.
