Persephone Grey

Progress has been made on the house! I'm not sure that I've had a major (positive) update like this to share since the hallway, all the way back in July. It's always tough to photograph our house, since all of the rooms are quite small, but I hope that I can do it justice. Our master bedroom, which was previously seafoam green, full of cracks and scuffs, and bedecked with frilly curtains, is now cleaned and patched and painted the color of grey of a persephone book cover (I just went to my paint guy, who is the best paint guy in the world, and asked him for a grey the same color that he'd made the primer for another room -- and it's lovely, don't you think?)

I realize now that that photo above may be a bit confusing -- that thing in the lower left corner, at the foot of the bed, is my cedar trunk -- it's just the exact color of the floor and so kind of makes it look like the floor overlaps the door somehow. The door up there on the right goes into the study and the other out into the second floor hallway.

Now for some before and after:

This is the "before" photo of the same corner as the photo of the chair at the top of the post. It was taken almost exactly a year ago, when we were just looking at the house.

This above little tiny pressed-flower artwork (which I love -- it's from my favorite antique store in my hometown) is hanging in the little space between the closet door and the wall with the windows which you can see in the "before" photo above, thus making these two photos a kind of set.

An immediate "before". The other before shot was taken just after purchase of the house back in January but this one is just from a few days ago. Those white smudges are patching of some of the cracks.

And the fourth corner (below). I don't have a good "before" photo to pair with this one so I'll just let it stand alone. This corner did have the biggest crack of all though -- it went all the way through to the hallway (the door to the hallway is just outside of the frame of the photo, to the right -- that's it reflecting in the mirror).

Power Outage

Every time there is a power outage here (which is really quite frequently -- we're up in the mountains), I am dismayed to notice, yet again, just how much of my day-to-day life requires electricity. Not even just batteries but plugged-in electricity. No cooking. No machine sewing. No knitting in front of the television. No blogging. No dish washing (the boiler is oil powered but is triggered by electricity). Really unbelievable. Surely I can think of something to do about this?

On the upside, last week these fantastic ornament kits from Alicia came and I'd not had time to get started on them, despite my huge excitement, due to all of the aforementioned "distractions".

Aren't they terribly cute, all packaged up?

I actually only stitched up the polar bear before the power came back on (they're used to the power-out drill up here, as I said) so the rest will have to wait for another day (including this guy's little blue scarf) but I had so much fun stitching him in front of our (smoky) fire, with a cat on either side. Hooray for an occasional power outage!

Great Steps in Quilting

This week I've had several quilting "breakthroughs". Which I suppose is really the fun in learning something new -- when I learn something new. When it's challenging. It's certainly tough sometimes though.

Everything's still a bit wonky but that's "handmade", right? At least that's what I like to tell myself.

To make those 3 little objects up there (the top one is a Dresden Plate doll quilt I made just because I wanted to try to make a Dresden Plate, and the bottom photo is of 2 potholders for PP5), I purchased and learned how to use a walking foot (how did I ever sew anything without one of these? It's the coolest thing ever!), really learned how to machine quilt in general (using this hugely helpful post), finally managed to make my square corners more pointy (reread Denyse Schmidt Quilts for info on that), and actually finished one of my own quilting projects (I'd finished quilting projects for swaps but not a single one of the projects I'd started for my house). Of course I still have tons of room for improvement but every little bit helps!

Happy Halloween!

If you celebrate that sort of thing. . .

(made from this pattern)

Halloween Swap

Here is the first bit of promised swap-info. This was from the Autumn/Halloween Swap on ravelry. It was the first ravelry swap I participated in, and I joined the day that I finally joined ravelry. It was a lot of fun, although I do find the flickr swaps a bit more active and easy to post updates too. But maybe it's just because I'm more familiar with flickr. Probably so.

Anyway, above you have my lovely swap goodies. I must apologise here to slippergirl for taking so long to get this photo posted. At least it's up in time for Halloween! As I mentioned, I've been somewhat preoccupied with this Christmas crafting.

I am especially happy to have some point protectors (believe it or not, in the 10 years I've been knitting, I've never owned a single point protector -- and there were certainly times when I should have been using one!) and crazy flavors of candy corn. I've never had either of these before. And I think I'll be using the yarn for yet another gift in the next couple of months so that's certainly a good thing to have! Thank you so much, slippergirl, for all of the fun loot!

Below is a photo of the things that I sent to my swap partner. My favorite thing to make/gather was the "boo" wall hanging. I just had a few Halloween bits about and once I started sewing them together, it became one of those most fun of all projects where it all just seems to magically work out and go together and fit. That doesn't happen often, I can tell you! There is also a skein of cascade 220, some Martha cupcake papers, candles made near my house, a tin full of candy corn, fingerless mitts, knit by me, and a project bag I sewed up.

Not included in this photo but in the package were a whole bunch of candy corn and a great Halloween pattern designed by Thea. It's felted (which my partner, Cary, seems to like to do), and super-cute. If you knit and are into Halloween, you should go check it out!

Blogging Holidays

For all of my on-again-off-again relationship with Needle and Dime, I am just realizing that I've never before actually blogged through a holiday season. How do people do this? I find that I'm spending most of my time making Christmas gifts (with a little bit of swapping on the side -- more to come soon on that front). Christmas gifts which I can't really blog about here. Hence the lack of posts lately. But, as I've hinted, I have a few swaps ending soon and will be back with show and tell very soon! (And you know that there will be a huge post right after all of these gifts are given!)

Knitting Again

You may have noticed that I'd not been knitting much for some time. Quilting had taken over all of my spare time. But I guess that it must have been the yarn crawl, although I didn't buy much yarn on it, that sent me back to thinking about knitting. And the sheep and wool festival in Rhinebeck this past weekend was the last straw. I bought a lot of yarn. More than I'd bought in the entire past year all put together.

Last week, the week between the yarn crawl and the festival, I knitted these ornaments for the Trim the Tree swap. Then today I've started knitting this (progress pictured above) while watching this fun new find. Full of wonderful cardigans and sweaters. I forsee a lot more knitting in my future. Especially now that it's so chilly here (in the 50's over the weekend! -- fall has arrived).

planned to be socks

planned to be two pullovers (not both for myself), the finishing for a pullover begun last year, and one skein of tbd (the red-orange one)


vest for Patrick