Annabel

This is going to be about yet another knitting project. I seem to be on a roll. I'm sure I'll have a different kind of needlecraft to talk about again at some point though, so don't give up if you're tired of all of the knitting. At least this one features a lovely alpaca (with her very nice owner)!


This bit will be a sweater. I'm just making it up as I go along and that doesn't always work out so well but I'm hoping that this will be one of the cases where it does. Especially as this project is using some very special yarn. It is from an alpaca named Annabel whom I met at the Sheep and Wool Festival last fall.

Doesn't she look friendly? I did have a picture of myself with her but it is too out of focus so you can just imagine that picture and look at this one with my friend, Thea's, hand in it. And her green bag that is one of her trademarks.

I was on a roll at the festival and bought mostly yarn that I had an idea for or that was fairly practical and it was all appropriated and used within 4 months. Except for Annabel's yarn. Which is just too soft and perfect to be used for just anything but of which I don't have quite enough to make anything big. So I'm worried that I may not have enough for this project but my idea is to make a 3/4 sleeve, black and white striped pullover. Combining Annabel's black with leftover ivory yarn that has been piling up from many projects. My stash is getting fairly out of hand for my New York apartment so I'm fairly proud of the fact that I'm using yarns from it. And Annabel's yarn is getting a proper use. Hopefully.

Too Much Tea!

So I seem to have had too much tea to drink around 10 pm. And I've now gone gung ho and uploaded all of my Renegade photos (including my aftermath photos of some of my purchases) to my flickr account. Renegade was great but I think it's taken me a few weeks to get over the heat in that swimming pool. It was about 10 degrees cooler in the rest of Greenpoint than it was in the pool that day! But I did get to meet Kimberly and Sarah and it was my first trip to Renegade with bloggers to meet so that was really fun!

A Wise Owl Once Said. . .

"Hello!"

This is about all that I have finished lately but I hope to have the beginnings of a new project to share tomorrow. And I may finally post a few of my photos from Renegade. Or they may just go to my flickr pool. We'll see how motivated I get.


The owl is from an Olympus kit that I bought at Purl last fall (sorry, I can't seem to find a link for it any longer) and finally got around to making. Of course his tail is my favorite part. I seem to have a weakness for tails on dolls / toys.

I'm not much of a seamstress and I'm not sure that I'd ever before made something by myself from a paper pattern (with only Japanese instructions, no less!) and so I'm hoping that this will give me the confidence to finally try my Betsy Ross pattern from LAST YEAR's Renegade Craft Fair.

Tagging

Well, I saw this fun little questionaire on Aesthetic Outburst and Abbey said that rather than tagging people, any interested people could kind of tag themselves. And, as it was a fun list of questions, I decided that I'd do just that!

Here Are the Rules: Answer the following questions about yourself. At the end of the post you pass on the questions to 6 other bloggers and list their names. Then write them a comment telling them that they've been tagged and ask them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know that you've accepted the challenge and refer to your post.

1. What did you do 10 years ago?
I was in school — high school! (Sometimes it feels like time really flies but then I think about something like this and it doesn't seem to go by so quickly after all!— that's a good thing.)

2. Five items on your to-do list today:
Do the dishes!, finish my knitted string bag, watch my netflix'd Garbo movies, make a dessert to go with my husband-cooked dinner (thanks P!)

3. Snacks I enjoy:
Ice cream! Any way it comes — milk shake, with fruit, homemade, etc. In response to Abbey's response to this question, I LOVE salty snacks as well. At my favorite ice cream place in Oklahoma they have a really great flavor that is chocolate pecan and it's a little bit salty and pretty fantastic.

4. Places you have lived:
Several places in the Oklahoma City Metro Area and Brooklyn, NY

5. What would you do if you were a billionaire?
This is a tough question! I'd buy a house in the country for sure and I'd probably buy my dad a sailboat because he's always teasing me that I'll do that when I'm rich but other than that, it's anyone's guess!

6. Buckminster Fuller — he seems to have been a bit of a nut and there's an exhibit about him coming up at the Whitney in NYC.

This tagging bit is tough though! I don't know many bloggers as I've just started with this so I think I'll just pick a few the blogs that I most often comment on so that they might have a chance of possibly knowing who I am! If any of you think that this is as fun as I do, I guess you should consider yourselves officially tagged. If it's a nuisance though, please ignore the tagging!

Curious Bird
Chez Sucre Chez
mummysam
Bridgman Pottery
Littleshika
my polaroid blog

The Mysterious Case of the Dolly's Head

A very odd thing happened to me today.

I've been looking at issues of Selvedge for quite some time and yesterday finally forked over the huge cost of a single issue, for the sake of some pretty articles (especially those on small / doll houses which is an obsession of mine). But the cost was more than made up to me when I was reading an article on dolls and ran across this:


It give me the heeby jeebies on it's own but, when compared with this family heirloom (from my husband's grandmother), it takes on a whole new dimension of bizarre-ness. She (his grandmother) claims that her porcelain doll head came from a shipwreck that her brother (a diver) found sometime when she was a girl, living in South Texas, so it must have been found in the 30's. Her mother made it into a doll by fashioning a body and a dress for it.

Where did all of these bisque heads come from? Did they ever have any non-scary features (eyeballs and such)? Why are they all turning up as just heads? How have they all managed to age in such a similar way? Why do they all have such pinchably fat cheeks and cute, Shirley Temple curls? So many questions, so many childhood memories of books about terrifying dolls coming to mind . . .

If These Heads Could Talk . . .

Broadway & about 77th (NYC)

These guardians of many old buildings are fascinating to me. I can't really find much reason for their being on so many buildings but I will continue to look and think of plausible reasons.

I like to think that they are supposed to be guardians. If you know anything, please do share! Look for more examples here to come to inspire your imagination for reasons.

Amsterdam Ave between 79th & 80th

Two Finished Scarves

I know it's been in the nineties in New York this week but you just can't stop a knitter! No amount of heat seems to discourage me from knitting away. Or from getting out on my stoop to have the projects photographed (you should have seen the looks we were getting!)

Cream of Spinach Scarf

How do you like the little t-shirt, bulky scarf look? Maybe I'll start a new trend (or not!) Don't ask me what I was doing with my arms. That's just how they fell.

This scarf began in early May and finished yesterday evening. It is some very nice, semi-solid Blue Sky Alpaca which seems to work well with the pattern to have a nice drape. Or at least that's how I choose to see it! I hope my grandmother likes it. In 6 months. Well, now there are only about a dozen or so more gifts to make. . .

Jury Duty Scarf

This is the scarf that I was using to demonstrate the double-knitting tips. I think it's one of my favorite scarves I've ever made for myself. I'm sure it will be getting some use. When it's a little colder, maybe. Like it was at the courthouse this week. It was jury-duty time for me on Monday and Tuesday! And, if you've not been before (as I hadn't), let me suggest an engrossing pattern to work on because you will find yourself sitting for hours. Not that I have a problem with jury duty, in theory. Just with all of the waiting about that is involved. But look at the work that got finished! (I think I did at least 1/3 of this scarf during those 2 days — not to mention reading about 100 pages of Posession which is fantastic so far.)

I've included a chart this time, just in case anyone is enamored with my pattern and would like to give it a shot. Also, I'd like to add a tip on how to set up the double knitting: you should cast on the number of stitches, based on your gage, for how wide you'd like for your piece to be. Then, on the first knitted row, knit into the front and purl into the back of each stitch. So the purls will become one side of the scarf and the knits the other. This chart has to be knitted on both sides simultaneously (so, in other words, knit each box of the chart twice, once with the knit [in color A] and once with the purl [in color B] in each pair of stitches — Each side will be the exact reverse, color-wise, of the other side).

Shopping Fun

I know I've been bad about writing here regularly (already!) but I have a bit of an excuse this time — I've been in jury duty for the last 2 days! So in the interest of something entirely for fun, here are a couple of purchases from an extended shopping spree of the last week or so.

A bizarre bird jewelry dish from the ever-wonderful anthropologie (he's looking at me with a weird expression. . .)


My new friend Maggie from MummySam (thanks Sammi!! She's perfect! I love the way the print in the piece of fabric peeking out of her jacket looks like a tie.). . .

An addition to my fledgling salt and pepper collection (I know that I said I'd only have strange figural ones but I thought that these were just too cute to not get an exception — and they are pearlized — PEARLIZED!).

I'm completely spoiled but I'll say that it's all in the name of my birthday in a few weeks (although I know I'll be getting more great things to play with then too. . .)

White Space Wednesday!

It's white space wednesday again! This is one of my favorite photos from my days of darkroom photography (when I could rent time in a darkroom for $8 per WEEK!!! if you can believe it). It's an old house that belongs to my Uncle's family which is located near Perry, Oklahoma. And I do believe that rural Oklahoma is generally thought to be the Capital of White Space.

Daffodils!

This post must be started with a love letter to Paper Source. Not only is their "do something creative every day" slogan tempting, it's just the most fun place. Even though I don't have ready access to one of the stores, I still love ordering things from them and thinking of how cute the stores that I've been to are. So I couldn't resist getting one of the paper flower kits.


As I have a wreath for Christmas and one for the fall and the fall one tended to be up all year, I decided that the time has come to have a summer wreath. And thus the paper flowers became a paper flower wreath. And it's so simple! All you do is make the flowers according to the package directions and then fashion the stems into a wreath-shape. And this is my new-and-more-welcoming front door:

Mosaic Maker Fun

This is a fun and quick thing to do! And it's pretty silly to see what a mosaic about you looks like. Thanks to elsie marley for the fun idea.

• Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
  
• Using only the first page, pick an image.
  
• Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s mosaic maker.
  

Questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food?
3. What high school did you go to?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.