off into the great blue yonder

Hello all!

Well, where did the time go? Twelve days and it's been total madness. Where have I been this time?

Funny you should ask. I have after brief but very intense deliberation decided to go back to school. What the heck – why? Well, because I've been feeling a little directionless on some level, not with my work, or my friends, or my knitting, but just in a kinda general, time to kick it up to the next notch kind of way. In a I'm-about-to-turn-30-and-should-have-some-sort-of-plan kind of a way. I just dropped my application for a second bachelors degree in Painting/Drawing at CCA, my friendly local art school…(we'll see if I finish or if I bail out for grad school, south africa, or points unknown after the first year!)

So…I have been up to my eyeballs in FAFSA, application forms, portfolio shooting on my front porch, soul-searching and the like, for the last two weeks. I'm both excited and totally petrified. I mean, I have anxiety nightmares about waking up and realizing I never finished school the first time (visiting my deploma which lives in my parents' house strangely doesn't alleviate the dreams.)

Anyway this will be a different kind of FO show – I just sent off a disc of images to some stranger I don't even know at the Enrollment Offices of CCA(C) (the last C is silent!!! ha haha ha) so why not show you, who know me in a real and/or cyber kind of way? So here we go…






















And in other breaking news (well, not really, but I only just got to write about it now) I will be travelling with my family to Ecuador in two days time!!! EEEEK and there is much to be done. Wanna see what a chicken with its head cut off looks like? Drop in and visit me tomorrow.

So I will be gone from blog land for the next month or so, but I'll be back with some (hopefully!) fine pictures of the Galapagos, the Amazon, and the area around Cotopaxi volcano. And hopefully some lovely raw "smelly yarn" as Elaine Kim likes to call it. (The smell would be the lanolin they leave in the wool – good stuff!)

And here is hoping that life is splendid for one and all this June! I'll miss you all!

the slow progress of habu, fo show, and wine tote party

Greetings all,

Well, after my last post, the sun decided to come back out after all! (Ok maybe I shouldn't take credit for that…)

I'm in many-project mode these days. My main projects, the Kusha Kusha Jacket (kit #75 from habu) and the Swallowtail Shawl are really long and involved (read: they're taking forever), so I keep starting other little projects to entertain my very brief-attention-span brain.

OH and by the way, I KNOW you want to know where I got that little project bag. Well! Tammy George (aka pUnK rAwK PuRl) works at this cool downtown Oakland store called Entrez! Open House. This is one on the lines they carry. The coolest thing about this little bag is that the inside lining is oilcloth, so it's waterproof! Nifty.

So here is a little FO show. Actually, to be totally honest, some of these are from quite a little while ago, but never made it to the blog, so here they get their brief time in the sun!

This is the Snood pattern (what a great word! snood...SNOOD) from the DomiKnitrix book which I so love, by Jennifer Stafford. I was a bit short on this great sparkly black yarn, which was discontinued to my dismay, so I shortened the hat a bit.

I think it's meant to be roomy enough to stuff a big fat Renaissance bun into, or a head full of dreads, or something. Anyway making it smaller seemed to work fine.







And this puppy is rather old really – it's one of a set of two Noro hats, one for me, one for my husband. I love Noro Kureyon's springyness and big fat self-striping love. The pattern is by Saartje Bruijn from the Netherlands, and it can be found here.

I also ended up making this hat shorter by decreasing faster than the pattern calls for at the end – the mildly conical shape of the original seemed.....well, too gnome-like for a gal like me.







This cute little number was a knit-along held back in February by Síle Convery of knit-one-one. We had it a the Pub, which is one of my all time favorite East Bay spots. I think I've seen the pattern as a "bow tie" scarf, but we called it the Heart Scarf and did it for Valentines Day.

The yarn is something from DiVe called Autumno – sort of variegated, self-striping, and tweedy all at the same time. And really soft. I have one more ball of the stuff – don't know what I'll make of it. Probably, knowing me, another scarf.









Speaking of knit-one-one, I attended a fine party there on Friday night. It was a Felted Wine Tote party, and the totes came out adorable! It was really my first time felting anything more than a swatch. I know I shouldn't have been surprised that it worked, but I was! How does a floppy, big bag come out so petite and structural and with this cool bucle-like texture? Wow. The magic of wet wool.













And I'm sorry, but you all simply must look at this picture:


If that is not the funniest picture of Kate Freeman (who is wearing a post-felting felted bag knit by Peggy Vincent of Baby Catcher fame) I will eat my hat. Either one of them.

You'll have to swing by Síle Convery's blog to see the pre-felted version – I took the picture with her camera, so hopefully she'll upload it! – which Kate wears like a big banjo-pluckin'-type overalls. Really, it was that big.

brief summer in the bay and the swallowtail shawl

hello all!

I guess it's been awhile! Summer arrived… well, for a few days anyway… here in Berkeley. We had a week (almost) of global-warming-inspired, freakish, humid heat, and I spent as much of it outdoors as was humanly possible. Now it's grey again, as is to be expected of summer in the Bay.

That's me out at the Albany Bulb – a local favorite of East Bay-ers everywhere, but particularly those with dogs. Do I have a dog? No. I wish. But I do have a client who runs a company called Metro Dog, doing boarding and training and walking and such things for lucky Bay Area doggies…







So I went for a walk with said client on a sunny day out at the Bulb, and visited the constantly shifting outdoor gallery of, I supposed what must be considered to be Outsider Art.

I think the story goes something like there was quite a large – what, colony? – community of homeless folks living out on the Bulb, which juts out from Albany in a particularly Bay Area landfilly kind of a way.

Most of them have moved on now, but they left behind an incredible sculpture garden of statues and murals made of / painted on the random urban detritus which society throws away and never thinks about again.

The place is constantly changing, like a dreamscape out of the Sandman or something, like a living thing. Faces materialize out of the broken concrete, wings sprout up into the sky. It's a fabulous place to take a walk when you're feeling a bit low on inspiration.

I guess it reminds me that if you have the eyes to see, then life is just chock full of little surprises and unexpected beauty. It's greatly augmented by a sunny day, of course, but even in the fog and the cold (like the fog and the cold which have descended again this week) a cheery kind of magic still occurs in funny little ways.


Well, on the knitting front, I started my swallowtail shawl. And boy, is it a b*tch! Lace is a challenging thing.

The Malabrigo Laceweight is a pleasure to work with, which is a good thing, because if it weren't, I'd have thrown the whole piece out the bloody window. Have any of you done this pattern? Anybody want to enlighten me as to why the Lily of the Valley border patterns NEVER add up properly? No matter how many times I count or how closely I follow the chart… dammit.

This picture shows the scarf before I got to the bleeding difficult part. The little leaves were a pleasure to knit. This border… well, all I can say is, at least the variegations of the yarn hide some of the wiggliness I have knitted into the shawl.

What else can I tell you lovely people? Oh if any of you reading this live in the East Bay, please come and join me and my client Síle Convery of knit-one-one at Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe tomorrow night at 6:30. We're having our bi-monthly (or rather…twice monthly, I can never remember the proper word for that) knit-out night. Great fun, really! And really good meatloaf (yes such a thing is possible!) at Rudy's on Wednesday night special.

Maybe I'll see you there!

knit-one-one knits out a success!

Hello all!

A quick post before bed – no pics tonight, but more in the next post, I promise. The Swallowtail Shawl is going interestingly – it's pretty wiggly-wumpus right now, but I'm trusting it will pull itself together…

Finally worked up the nerve to felt my swatch from my Habu Kit #75… and it worked!! I'm new to felting, so it still seems like magic to me… the Mithrail-like fabric, with a few swishes and rubs in hot soapy water, shrunk and became fuzzy and soft, just like the sweater is supposed to be… so tonight I cast on and knit the first six rows of the back of the sweater. Whoo!

Anyway I just wanted to report that the first official knit-one-one knits out night was a great success. We met at Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe in Emeryville, and about ten ladies (and one brave gentleman!) graced the resin-filled tables with food, laughter, and diverse projects.

I think the event will happen every 1st and 3rd Wednesday at Rudy's, until further notice. I wholeheartedly encourage any of you who are reading from the Bay Area to come join us! It's always so inspiring to see what everyone else has going on.

A tasting of projects to inspire…

…the most adorable knit elephant toy ever, from Kate Freeman…
…wild stripey magic loop socks knit on impossibly tiny needles, from Tammy George…
…beautiful yarns cunningly procured by Elaine Kim while on vacation somewhere in the midwest (was it Ann Arbor? boy I'm getting senile…and check out her newly refurbished blog!)
…a new flick glass shipment was shared all around, and several ladies have new glittering goodies around their necks now…
…and guest appearances by Kate's lovely parents…

Anyway really great fun, and the more the merrier so maybe I'll see some of you there next time!

More soon, and in the meantime sunny smiles from Berkeley…