Rycrafty

Jan 24

Rycrafty’s First Knitting Pattern

The husband’s Metroid hat has been done for a while, and now I’m writing up the instructions. I took exclusively design classes at Sock Summit this past year, because I would like to try my hand at designing. I think a fun, video game-based hat is a great place to start. The hat part is pretty simple, but I’ll also be able to try my hand at writing out clear instructions for the claws/earflaps, which were more involved.

For the past day or two, I’ve been agonizing over how to lay out the pattern. I made myself a fun little graphic for the front page:

I really like the name Rycrafty, so no sense in changing it up, right?

I’m hoping to have the pattern out (free!) before the end of January. I’ve got some deadline knitting I’m also doing, but I really want to get this pattern out there.

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Posted in Knitting designing metroid hat metroid toque

Jan 23

A Week In Woolies – Jan 16 – 22

Let me say this this week. It was cold. Damn cold. At least at the start of it.

Jan 16: my day off, so I went grocery shopping. All the accessories (and the lack of scarf) are inappropriate for walking in the weather, but I as I was driving and only walking across a parking lot, I did it anyway. This is not recommended, what if your car breaks down/you’re in an accident and you have to get out and wait for police/emergency/whatever? But I hate being too bundled up at Safeway. Those fingerless mitts were my first knitting-in-the-round project, and sit low enough on the back of my hand that it is easy to pop my thumb out of the thumb hole and pull off the gloves underneath without taking them off.

Jan 17: This is what -50C with windchill looks like. My thrummed mittens (like wearing your largest pair of oven mitts out of the house, but so warm), my super-long-Bob-Cratchit-scarf, my warmest (and itchiest, sigh) hat, all topped off with the dreaded puffy jacket w/furry hood. Yes, I needed both hood and hat.

I take a bit of a perverse pride in saying that I continue to walk to (and from) work in all weather, but when I was done work at midnight and it was -50C with the windchill…. I wussed out and P came to pick me up. Unlike a co-worker who rode her bike home that night. Had we known that at the time, P and I would have stolen her bike and forced her to ride home with us in the car.

January 18 & 19: Much like the days before, but I switched up hats to amuse myself under my hood. I really like the black and white one, it is the Side Slip Cloche from Boutique Knits. I just wish I’d made it a little bigger, to fit my giant head properly.

January 20 and 21 the weatherman lied to me. Each day it was forecast to be warming up that night, and as I’m heading home around midnight, I dressed to be a little chilly on the walk in, but better on the way home. This is not the way to plan, because the weatherman lies! Thus my surprised (and red) face after my walk in on January 20th.

January 21: only 1 hand-knitted item! That white hat is one of the few storebought hats that has ever fitted my very large head. ‘Onesize’ hats do not fit. Ever. If I want a nice hat (like that one) I have to go to an actual hat store, where hats come in sizes, and even then most of the womens’ hats don’t fit. My Ulmus shawl is a nice big one for keeping the chin warm (or up to the nose, as on Jan 18th), and was the only pop of colour in this outfit. I hadn’t worn all those white things together before, I think I was a little afraid of being mistaken for Bonhomme or something.

Then, on January 22nd, Mother Nature proved just how exciting Calgary’s weather can be… we had positive temperatures again! From -50 to +1 in 5 days. I pulled out my Odessa hat, the lightest and non-wooliest hat I’ve knit myself in celebration. Only 70% wool, and knit by me in 2007! Although, the prize for oldest knitted project goes to the wristwarmers from Monday, knit in 2003. P and I worked at the same time on Sunday, so he took the photos for me. The first few were accidentally taken with the ‘Dali’ Hipstamatic lens. Fun, but not too great for details. The shots were too fun not to include though.

I think this ‘week in woolies’ thing would be fun to do with a bunch of other knitters! Let’s see all those carefully hand-knit items out in the world, being worn. After all, isn’t that what they’re for? You don’t need a camera phone, you don’t need to make little collages*, just post a photo of some sort! Let me know if you’ve done it, and I’ll include the links in next Monday’s Week in Woolies post! Heck, they don’t even need to be hand knit, just show us what you look like bundled up for winter every day!

*If you like the look of the collages, try FD’s Flickr toys for something free, or if you have Photoshop, check out Pugly Pixel’s photo layouts!

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Posted in Fashion, Knitting week in woolies

Jan 21

The Sauerkraut Experiment

Way back when, in my last CSA post of the year on October 15th, I mentioned I was going to try making sauerkraut with all the cabbages I had. Today, after renewing our share in Sundance Fields, I decided I should probably post about how that went.

I chopped up a lot of cabbage. LOTS of cabbage, but the right amount by weight, according to Martha. All that cabbage filled my 3 biggest mixing bowls. Then I added a little salt and some caraway to each bowl and got squishing. I was very concerned that it wasn’t all going to fit in the 3 jars I had, but after a lot of massaging, I dumped one mixing bowl into the other. Then a bit later, all the cabbage fit in one mixing bowl. Then, it only half-filled that mixing bowl! There is so much water in cabbage! It all packed very nicely into my thrifted mushroom jars. Apparently I have a thing for mushroom kitchen accessories, my favourite vintage pyrex pattern to find is this one. You can see them in a bunch of my other food posts on the blog too.

I followed Martha’s schedule for letting sit and opening the jars every now and then to release the gas. One jar made a satisfying ‘psssst’ sound every time I opened it, which was reassuring. Then, I kinda forgot about them. I remembered about a week or two after you were supposed to put them in the fridge, then I put off checking on them because I was scared of what I would find. When I did get around to it, one jar had gone disgustingly, stink-up-the-whole-kitchen fuzzy. The other two though, were fine! I tried a little forkful, and then spent the rest of the day saying to myself ‘Do I feel sick? How is my belly?’ but everything was ok.

Then I realized that while I had fun making sauerkraut, I didn’t know what to eat it with. I’m not a big sandwich person, so I found a recipe for sauerkraut fritters. They weren’t bad, with some goat cheese on top, but not amazing. I think I’m just not a huge sauerkraut fan (except when friends K&E put it in their stuffing at Christmas. YUM!).

Have you ever made something more to see if you could, than because you’d eat it/wear it/use it when you’re done?

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Posted in Baking & Other Food canning csa 2011

Jan 18

Maple-Bacon Donut/Doughnut

Hello, friend…

A few days ago, someone decided to make it ‘international bring doughnuts to rehearsal day’, and one of our lovely actresses brought a huge tray of doughnuts from Jelly, a gourmet doughnut bakery.

Dee-licious.

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Posted in Baking & Other Food doughnut

Jan 17

A Week in Woolies #1

After my post last week about my mis-matching of knitwear in the winter, I decided to start a little series on the blog. ‘A Week in Woolies’ means I will try to remember (that’s the hard part) to take a picture of myself with my iPhone that includes my hat, scarf, and mitts/gloves.

I figured it would be fun because there are so many pictures of in-progress knits on this blog, but not many of things being really worn. Modelling shots of the finished object don’t count. We’ll also be able to see patterns in what I wear (I can already tell you I wear my blue/green Clapotis all.the.time.) and if I look like ‘that crazy knitting lady’ as I’m walking down the street.

Here we are, starting with the photo you saw last week.

As it was a new idea, I wasn’t too great with remembering to take photos, but I seem to have the pose down pat. I also thought it would be fun to put in the temperature range for each day, because you will see a definite down-surge in matchiness as it gets colder. I would rather my ears and fingers not freeze off than look cool.

The blue gloves on January 13th are great warmer-weather gloves. I bought them at The Bay a few years ago because they match that blue-green scarf I wear so often, and because they’ve got little conductive fabric patches on the index fingers and thumbs so I don’t have to take them off to operate my iPhone. It’s a little fiddly making sure you’re pressing with exactly the right part of your finger, but it is better than taking them off.

January 14th I’m actually wearing at matching hat & mitten set knit from yarn I spun myself! I use the term ‘matching’ loosely, you can’t see mitten #2 but it was a yarn that had loooong colour changes, so let’s call it more of a ‘coordinating’ set than a ‘matching’ one. The scarf I’m wearing there (which I also wore on the missing Jan 12th – didn’t take a photo because it was too warm most of that day and the scarf very soon moved to my purse) was my gift in Kimberly Michelle’s ‘Made By You’ gift exchange. It’s lovely and soft and warm, and goes pretty well with my new hat and mitts! It was made by new knitter Teale. Thank you so much!

January 15th the temperature took a nosedive and I was under-dressed in the hat department. And, truth be told, the coat department. The historical weather data on The Weather Network doesn’t seem to include the windchill, but on most days when it is that cold, there’s also the lovely biting wind that makes it feel 5 to 10 degrees colder still. Luckily, P dropped me off at work, and a kind coworker drove me home that day so I didn’t turn blue. Those pink and purple mittens though? Great for the cold, as they’re lined so they’re really a mitten inside a mitten.

Summary of the week: I felt fairly coordinated all week, up until the 15th when I made choices that were bad for both matching, and the weather.

Forecast for this week: The temperature is going to hover around -30C until Sunday or so, so I will probably be wearing my hated down parka for most of it, and the warmest knits I own. I try to deny the fact that I live somewhere where an down puffer coat is necessary, but when the windchill makes it -40C*, I give up and just put the damn thing on. Until that point, I’m very happy to deny the coldness by wearing my regular wool-blend coats (the white one is Anthropologie {$45 on Boxing Day!}, the grey is Soia & Kyo) with various layers of sweaters underneath.

What do you look like all bundled up?

*fun fact: Celsius and Fahrenheit match up at -40. -40C and -40F are the same temperature: F-ING COLD.

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Posted in Fashion, Knitting matching knits week in woolies

Jan 14

Husband Hat

So the hat that I promised P ages ago, the one he really really wanted me to make, was based on a video game. You may have heard of the Metroid series of games – basically there are creatures called metroids that look like this:

They’re greenish, have 3 red ‘eyes’, and claws that will latch onto you and suck your energy. P wanted me to make him a toque (‘hat’ or ‘beanie’ for my non-Canadian friends) that looked like a metroid. As you saw before, we bought yarn together in appropriate colours. Cascade 220 comes in a great selection of colours, including a heathered collection, which I find just gives a bit more life to the colours.

(the greens are heathered, the red and white are regular)

Then I made a very technical sketch:

And then, I started designing my very first hat! I knew going into this that the hat part would be easy – it was the claws that would be the hard part.

Nothing comes up on Ravelry when you search for ‘metroid’. Searching for metroid hat comes up with a lot of pictures of fleece ones, and some crochet ones – crocheting the claws would be much easier, but I’m a knitter through-and-through. I also wanted to make the claws functional as earflaps – it gets really cold here, and I didn’t want to make P a hat that didn’t actually keep him warm! That’s why we bought wool to make it out of.

The big question is: Do I know enough about knitting to make the fabric match my sketch?

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Posted in Knitting metroid hat

Jan 12

A Knitter’s Woolies

As a knitter, I knit a lot of things. Things like hats and mitts and scarves are fun because you don’t need to be super-worried about fit. Scarves – not at all, mitts and hats – small enough that starting over isn’t a huge chore.

As a knitter, I love fibre and all the different colours it comes in. I want to buy all the fibre I can fit in my house, and then some.

As a knitter, I love the millions of patterns available to me through the internet and books, (almost) all categorized by Ravelry. It is through browsing patterns on Ravelry that I realized that there is an immense number out there.

The above statements add up to – I like knitting little things, in different yarns and patterns. Meaning…. a knitter’s woolies will rarely match. There’s too much fibre out there to knit with the same thing twice! The same goes for patterns!

Today I felt like I did a very good job of coordinating my cold-weather-wear, so (for once) I wasn’t that girl with the blue/green scarf, red mittens, and beige/rainbow hat. Pink hat, purple/pink scarf, purple/pink mittens… not bad! Not to mention the permanent fixtures of the purple glasses and purple purse.

I feel like I’m starting to reach that point where I’ve knitted enough to start having things that coordinate, although the above group is the only proper ‘set’ I could create. I think some blue/green/grey mittens might be the next thing I should knit. Which leads to…

As a knitter, I hate knitting the ‘shoulds’. I just want to knit what I want in that particular moment. So I do. And while the matching was nice today, tomorrow I might put on my grey hat, maroon scarf, and store-bought fleece mittens, and I’m perfectly fine with that.

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Posted in Fashion, Knitting matching knits

Jan 10

Responsible Honeymooning

We did the responsible, adult part of our honeymoon prep yesterday: bought travel insurance, and got some vaccinations.

Poor P had a shot in each arm, one for Hepatitis A, and one for tetanus. I just had the tetanus one because I got my Hep A earlier in the year. We’re also both currently on a series of pills to prevent typhoid fever.

We went to a travel clinic, and what I really wanted there was advice on whether we should take any preventative malaria drugs. Reports I find on the internet vs my travel guide vs actual info I have from people living in Costa Rica don’t all agree on whether or not you should prepare yourself against malaria. I decided to trust implicitly in what the travel clinic nurse said. She pointed out the one little area on the map where there is enough risk to recommend taking the drugs. It’s on the Caribbean coast, but north of where we will be. Our area, south of Puerto Limon, just had some hash marks that meant wearing long sleeves at dusk should be enough mosquito protection. I’m happy not to have to take that stuff, because a nurse acquaintance said that some of them can have crazy (literally) side effects, and if we had to take the drugs, to watch for mental problems.

The nurse did say that some studies have been done of the effect of taking the vitamin B6 – it seems to make you less tasty to the mozzies. She did warn us that you can overdose on B6, so to get it through a multivitamin.

The people at the sloth sanctuary we are volunteering at said in their info package that we don’t need to worry about rabies vaccinations, which is also nice. P and I have agreed though, that if you’re slow enough to let a sloth bite you, you probably deserve it.

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Posted in Travel honeymoon

Jan 07

Rehearsal Snacks

I have a reoccurring problem. It happens to me every day, between 3pm and 4pm. I’ll be sitting at the table at work, trying to work, and I seem to lose control of both my neck and my eyelids. My eyelids droop, my chin heads toward my chest… it’s a terrible case of what I call ‘the 3 o’clock sleepies’. Between my love carbs at lunch, the buzz of the fluorescent lights, and the fact that we’re in a windowless room, I just can’t help myself. If I worked in an office, I could get up and go for a walk around the cubicles or something. But I’m meant to be recording the blocking the actors are doing, or reading along with what they’re saying (which really doesn’t help the sleepies) in case they need me to yell their next word. It isn’t a situation that I can just leave. What pains me is worrying that people will notice, and think I’m bored or disrespectful. Really, I just can’t control it. Eating protein helps. Endless glasses of water also help, but then I have to pee – see above re: being tied to the desk.

I pinned this recipe on Pinterest the other day, and made a batch of energy balls for rehearsals this week. I made this first batch almost exactly as the recipe says, only substituting cocoa nibs for chocolate chips. I even had the ground flaxseed! Hm, I left out the vanilla just because I forgot it, no other reason.

Here are the balls in action, sitting on my (heavily annotated) costume plot:

As soon as I feel the first drooping of the eyelid, the first little bit of dizziness that resisting that pull creates, I snack on one (or all 3 – they’re tasty as well as useful). It’s helped! I’ve staved off the sleepies for 4 days in a row so far. We’ll see if it still works on Sunday, which is usually the day of me wanting to take a nap all through work, not just at 3pm.

What I love about this recipe is that, even though it’s delicious as written, it is endlessly adaptable. I would love to try putting some cinnamon into a batch. I’d love to try some dried fruit, like cranberries, although I think the balls would hold together best if you chopped the fruit fine. Dried wild blueberries would be delicious, and small enough to begin with. Various different nut butters of course (I used natural peanut butter, but I bet it’d be delicious with hazelnut butter!), different varieties of honey…. As I said, endless. And delicious. And good for you! I think… nuts are good for you, right? Protein?

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Posted in Baking & Other Food pinterest

Jan 03

Living with a lighting designer

This used to be the track light in our kitchen. Once, it had 4 lights on it, but light number 4 gave up the ghost and just wouldn’t work, no matter how many new lightbulbs we got for it. Light #3 was in about the same place at the end of December, and we decided that the fixture just didn’t meet our needs any more. To work in the kitchen and have enough light you had to turn on that fixture, the living room light, the light over the sink, and the light over the stove. Not so you could see the sink or the stove, but so there would be enough light to see the counter properly.

At the very end of December we went down to Home Depot and bought this for ourselves:

There are more of them, there’s a wider span, they’re brighter, and the white glass shades help it give off a great light. Plus, it looks a lot nicer!

P is a lighting technician and designer, so a lot of thought went in to exactly which light would point where. Part of the problem was that that fixture is centred over the space between the island and the counter, not the counter itself. That meant that when you stand at the island (kneading bread/icing cupcakes/chopping veg) the light was coming from behind you and casting a nice head-and-shoulders-shaped shadow on your dough/icing/knife. Not ideal. With the length of this track, we had room to point the light you see in the far right of the photo at the left side of the island as you see it, and the far left left at the right side of the island. Now when I stand at the island, the light is coming from such an angle that I don’t cast a shadow on it. We also put a light in the centre of the track and pointed that directly as the island, but with the fill from the two angled lights, my shadow isn’t a problem.

Applying lighting design at home!

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Posted in Uncategorized

Jan 02

Starting as I mean to go on

P (voluntarily) took me yarn shopping on one of the last days of 2011, so I can knit him the hat I’ve been promising him since the summer. All 4 skeins are wound, and the knitting has started. Let’s hope it keeps going this smoothly.

It’s a pretty specific hat, so I’m getting a great start on that resolution of mine to start designing knitting patterns!

I also got a skein of this on the trip:

Fleece Artist Kidazzle – after reading The Knitter’s Book of Socks, I decided to try to find a sock yarn with mohair in it and see how it wears. Ravelry calls it a sport weight, but it seems like a fingering weight to me. I might use it for the Rick socks that were too tight for me when knit out of a very thin ‘fingering’ weight yarn I had in the stash. The Rick pattern is a spiral which puts a huge compression on the sock, just like one of those Chinese finger trap things I used to play with as a kid. The more I knit on it in the smaller yarn, the smaller it got. The cuff at 2″ fit over my heel, but when I had 5″ of cuff, I couldn’t put it on at all.

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Posted in Knitting designing

Dec 31

2012

(I’m learning so much from PuglyPixel in the last month! I used her photoshop letterpress tutorial for the graphic above)

I like making resolutions. I wouldn’t say I stick to them terribly often, but I try. This year, I’m keep coming back to two things I want to do.

1. Get rid of excess negativity.

2. Stop re-reading/re-watching things.

The first one, for me, really relates to the internet and things like FML, FailBlog, and lists like that one that went around last week of ‘the worst Christmas tweets’ that was basically a giant list of people swearing at their parents for not buying them and iPad and/or an iPhone 4S. FML is one of those trainwreck things and I just can’t. look. away. I think they’re bad for me because most of them make me think things like ‘I’m so much smarter than that’ and ‘I’m so glad I’m not you’, and it was all too easy to read that for a few minutes while waiting for P to finish work, or trawl the archives for hours when I couldn’t sleep. If you’re not familiar with it, FML stands for ‘F*ck my life’ and people submit little statements along the lines of ‘Today, (insert embarassing/awful/painful story). FML.’

As a farewell to FML, I want to leave you with one of the few gems. I read this and actually laughed out loud. Then a few hours later, I remembered it, and laughed out loud again (at work!). When I tried to tell P about it, I couldn’t even read it off my phone without bursting out laughing, it took a few tries for me to even get it out.

Today, I had a dream that I was trying to pop a balloon. Nothing I did was working, so I put it between my knees and tried to pop it that way. Immediately, I woke up to the sound of frantic hissing and meowing. As it turns out, I was trying to pop the cat. FML.

The second resolution is something I realized over the summer. I’ve always re-read books, especially my favourites, like Lord of the Rings and Sherlock Holmes. But we live in a house full of bookcases, and only 50% of the books are mine. While I’ve read a lot of P’s books, I haven’t read them all yet, and my to-read list in Goodreads is 40+ books long. And yet, this summer, I started re-reading Terry Goodkind’s Wizard’s First Rule series. This is a series of more than 10 tome-sized books. That was at home, and on the Kindle app on my iPhone I’d be re-reading George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series in line-ups and other stolen moments. So that’s 2 enormous series that I’m reading concurrently, while I have a large pile of books I’ve actually bought, plus all the ones P has bought that I want to read, sitting gathering dust? That doesn’t seem right!

Also, I like to watch tv or listen to podcasts while I knit. A few months ago I sat down to knit, turned on Netflix, and started watching Stargate-SG1. For the 5th (or more) time. I stopped halfway through an episode when I thought about the 70+ unlistened-to podcasts sitting in my iTunes library. And the thousands of shows on Netflix that I haven’t yet watched.

I try not to knit the same pattern twice, because there are just so many patterns out there that I want to try them all! I want variety! I’m going to try to apply that way of thinking to my reading and watching habits. I already have been since about November – my un-listened-to podcast number is down to 34, and I’ve been enjoying Mad Men, Weeds, and The Tudors on Netflix.

This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, as I like reading the book before seeing the movie, so I will at least be re-reading The Hobbit in 2012, and every now and then a girl needs to read one of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, and not a pastiche.

What else do I want to do in 2012?

We’ve got just about everything booked for our (belated) honeymoon in Costa Rica, and I can’t wait
I want to start my own business, being a wedding DOC for crafty, independent couples in town. DOC and craft consultant!
I want to knit more – planning my wedding ate too much knitting time in the first part of 2011
When the two of us have time off together, I want to spend it together not our current ‘together’ which usually defaults to each on our own computer, albeit in the same room.
I want to keep up better with my friends, online friends included.
I want to learn how to really use my new camera
I want to learn something new about Photoshop every week – this month I’ve found great tutorials on PuglyPixel.com, and thecoffeeshop – can you recommend any other sites?
I want to try my hand a designing a knitting pattern – more than one if it goes well!

(I edited this photo of the two of us with Coffeeshop’s ‘Perfect Portrait’ action. Not bad, although my left eye seems to have turned into a black hole!)

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Posted in Life new years resolutions

Dec 28

It’s a Christmas Sweater!

And not one of the reindeer kind, either.

My orange and purple Wollmeise sweater is finally done! I used the free pattern ‘Paulie’, Wollmeise yarn, and buttons from the yarn shop of my heart, Churchmouse Yarns & Teas.

I used almost every single piece of the two skeins of orange Wollmeise (colourway ‘Kurbis’). In the body of the sweater I alternated yarn balls every two rows, but I used just one ball on each sleeve. The button band/collar is a combination of the two balls of orange. I’m pretty sure I still have enough purple left for a pair of socks.

I personally can’t get the shawl collar to fold over like it does in the pattern photo, but I think it looks just fine flat as well.

I could do with a tiny bit more ease in the sleeves, but it isn’t unmanageable, I just probably won’t wear any but the tightest-fitting long-sleeved shirts under there. T-shirts work fine though.

There are 11 purple stripes in the body and 14 on the sleeves, and with the amount I had left from my two skeins of Wollmeise, I couldn’t have made it anything but a row, maybe two longer in the body, so it worked out perfectly!

I sewed the buttons on with some of the Wollmeise – I separated 3 of the plies, and used that as thread to sew them on. How perfectly do they match?! I didn’t have the yarn with me when I bought them, but I saw them and just knew. I think they’re shell, but the coating that makes them orange has an interesting rubbery finish. They’re almost too big for the button holes, but they do fit through, crisis averted there!

My very patient husband did this photoshoot with me yesterday afternoon. There may be snow on the ground still where we were, but Calgary has been having unseasonably warm temperatures for most of December, so it wasn’t too bad being outside in just my sweater. I was thankful to put my coat on when we were done though! I think P took some awesome photos with our new camera, and even had fun playing with the 4pm setting sun when I asked him to. Here’s a bonus photo of my lovely man looking very dapper in the hat I bought him for Christmas:

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Posted in Knitting, Sweaters orange and purple wollmeise

Dec 27

And the presents begat presents begat presents….

I got what I wanted for Christmas! Or rather, Boxing Day. Since the summer I’ve been dreaming about a new camera. P was on board, but thought we should wait to check out Boxing Day sales to hopefully get a good price for the one I wanted, the Sony NEX 5N. I’d found a great price at a local camera store, and it turns out that none of the sales could beat their regular price! Boxing day we were out picking up a few other things just across the street from the camera store, so on our way home we stopped in and picked up my new toy.

I love it! I’ve had lots of fun in the less than 24 hours I’ve had it so far playing with various settings. I got Christmas tree bokeh!

And some good close-up shots of yarn, with nicely blurred backgrounds!

(apparently, I’m easy to please) My other camera was very good at taking pictures like this, but with everything in focus in crisp, distracting detail.

But, purchasing this camera has led to a lot of me looking at websites and figuring what I can buy now that goes with the camera.

I want to keep it safe, but have lots of bags that I love already, so I really want a Crumpler Haven (size small).

The Haven is the squishy inside of a camera bag, without the camera bag! Pick this up and put it in whatever bag you’re carrying that day.

I want to be comfy carrying the camera itself around, and nothing sounds better than this Black Rapid camera strap designed specifically for women.

There’s also a book about this particular camera (David Busch’s Sony Alpha NEX-5N Guide to Digital Photography), which I think would be good. While you can easily use this camera as a point-and-shoot, I bought it because I want to learn more about photography, and the book looks like it would help with at least the basics of that, with instructions particular to my camera! Sadly, the book doesn’t seem to be carried by Amazon.ca, and Chapters lists it as ‘Rare and Unusual’.

Of course, as I bought an interchangeable-lens camera, there are lenses to buy. I’d love a macro lens for crafting & Etsy detail photos.

There are a few other Sony E-mount lenses too. My camera came with the 18-55mm, which from the description seems to be a good-for-everything lens. The Carl Zeiss one on that page looks like fun, but it’s $1000+! Any photographers out there have tips on which would be the next lens to buy on that page?

So I got the present I wanted…. and now I just want more. First world problems, right?

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Posted in Christmas, Photography sony nex 5n

Dec 26

Christmas Open House

This year being the first year that I’ve had more than 3 days off for Christmas in a while, we decided to try doing an open house again. We chose an open house format for our party because many of our friends would be working no matter what date and time we chose, and this way they could stop by before or after work. I had great fun baking up a storm, and because way less people came than we expected, we’ve been having great fun eating all the leftovers and not cooking at all.

After everything was set up, I realized that my camera battery was dead, so all photos in this post were taken with Hipstamatic on my iPhone.

We bought all these tiny teal Christmas balls last Boxing day for something silly like 90% off. We were going to use them as wedding decor, but decided it was too much effort in the end. I really wanted to turn them in to some sort of chandelier-y thing, and it worked! We knotted them on to fishing line at random intervals, and knotted a blue jingle bell to the end of each string for weight. I thought it was very whimsical and festive.

I baked. A lot. We had Lime Linzer Cookies, Brown Butter Shortbread, Lemony Slice & Bakes, Peppermint Meringues, Chocolate Spice Drops, Eggnog Coffee Cake, mince pies made with mum’s homemade mincemeat…

And that was just the baking! For savoury, we did our favourite caramelized onion dip, spinach-avocado dip, pizza monkey bread (with chicken chorizo and goat cheese), Caesar salad devilled eggs, and curry chicken wonton cups. Plus veggies, naan, and chips for dipping.

I used these printables from Hostess With the Mostess for the food labels.

It was great to see the people that did come, and I know those that didn’t are probably having a busy holiday time. Hey, it meant we didn’t have to cook for a few days afterwards!

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Posted in Baking & Other Food, Christmas

Dec 24

Festive Food

I need only the slightest excuse to bake up a storm, and when I found out about the 4-theatre potluck dinner / evening of games and entertainment (and booze) that was happening, I just had to bake. I decided to go with a literal red & green theme. I’d had these cookies pinned on Pinterest for a while, so they were my red component:

The tiered baking racks are one of my favourite items we got off our wedding registry. We ended up with two sets, which has come in really handy with all the Christmas baking I’ve been doing recently.

For my second item, I looked to one of my favourite baking books, Baked. Once I’d leafed through, the answer was obvious – Grasshopper cake to compliment the red cookies! So I went out and bought a bottle of creme de menthe, which came with a lovely layer of dust on the bottle. Now that I’ve used my 3 tablespoons, I’m sure it will gather more dust until I make that cake again.

Here’s the evolution of a layer cake:

And the final product:

At said party, our group also contributed the ‘Joyeux Noel Coward’ tree,

and a ‘spirited’ manger scene, complete with knitting shepherds (shepherds shown before & after heads) :

I’m the Grand Marnier bottle with the glasses.

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Posted in Baking & Other Food, Christmas

Dec 19

Festivus Ribbon Trees

I spent a couple hours last night watching Mad Men and making some cute little trees to put around the house this Christmas. Christmas crafts are one of my favourite things in the world (they were my mum’s business, our house was always CHRISTMASED-OUT in November when I was growing up) but the past 3 years have been very busy at this time normally. This year I have different contracts, and two weeks off for the holidays, so naturally I’ve been crafting my little heart out.

I had a lot of ribbon leftover from the wedding in teal and apple green, which paired with red (or pink) is one of my favourite takes on the colours of the season. I went through my ribbon stash and found some red velvet, some printed twill, and some metallics in our wedding colours too.

I went to Michaels to buy a styrofoam cone, and ribbon was 70% off that day only. So I bought some ribbon, and a second cone. Oops? I used a trick P taught me for cutting many lengths the same – find something the right size to wrap it around, the make lots of wraps, and cut them all at once. My little sudoku book was just right to give me 4.5″ lengths when I cut the ribbon at each edge.

Then it’s just a whole lot of pinning until your ribbon runs out. My lengths of ribbon weren’t exactly all the same (I cut the printed twill between the words, and the wrapping method isn’t quite an exact science) so I paid more attention to the bottoms being all at the same level, rather than the tops. I tallied up the empty ribbon spools afterwards, and they added up to 41 yards. Don’t use that as your guide though – some were partially used, some of my ribbon wasn’t on the rolls, and I have a bunch of 4.5″ pieces leftover. I also used ribbon ranging from 1″ wide to 1/4″ wide. I’ve seen this project done before with more uniform ribbon, but I love the mix & matchiness of mine.

The tops were tricky to figure out – I wrapped each top in the wide teal grosgrain before I put the last layer of loops on. On the shorter one I wrapped a ribbon around the top to cover the raw ends and pins of that last row.

On the taller one I made proper loops from the ribbon and then pinned carefully, so no raw edges were showing. I used some of my extra pieces to make little loopy toppers for both trees.

The shorter tree is almost entirely stash ribbon (minus the candy print and the diamond-y print), and was my original plan of teal, apple, and red. Tree number two ended up teal, apple, pink, with a bit of red.

Crafting lesson I learned last night: When bringing your giant box of 500 pins to the coffee table, make sure you’re really actually holding on to it. I had to clean up 500 pins from our wood floors before I could start. It doesn’t help that our floorboards have settled since they were put in, and they have pretty substantial cracks in between them. I ended up using a rare earth magnet to get the pins out from between the boards.

*I’ve just discovered Pugly Pixel, which is where I got all the awesome frames for my photos! It takes way longer to get the images ready now, but I like the ease of making groups of photos, and I’m learning so much about Photoshop using her templates.

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Posted in Christmas

Dec 08

Double-Photo Christmas Cards

I got inspiration for my holiday cards this year from this post on Papertrey Ink’s blog. (Have I mentioned that would happily buy everything they sell, if I only had the money? Because I totally would.) I ordered the tri-fold card bases, and while those were in the mail (plus, ahem, some stamps) Cinnamon Buns and I went through the wedding photos and picked our favourites out. When the card bases arrived, we got to work.

You can switch up how you fold them up, we decided to go with this orientation.

We stuck a photo of us to the front with permanent glue dots (glue dots make this project so easy!)

People who weren’t at the wedding, or didn’t use the photobooth (shame!) get a silly photo of us inside, also stuck down with permanent glue dots.

Those who were there get our favourite picture of them from the photobooth, stuck down with temporary glue dots so they can take it out and frame it/magnet it to the fridge/whatever they want to do with it.

I used these two sentiments on the middle panel inside, with both ink colours shown above. The two faint red stamps in the upper left were some Colorbox pigment ink, the bright red and the greenish-blue (the two colours I ended up using) are Tim Holtz’s seasonal distress inks in the colours Festive Berries and Evergreen Bough.

We didn’t have a printer at our wedding, so people had their photos taken in the photobooth and never got to see them. I’d always planned to send out photobooth photos in the thank you cards, but I wanted to get the thank yous done and dusted and we didn’t have wedding photos back yet. So we revised that plan and decided to send out photobooth photos with our holiday cards this year. We’re also including a little business card-size insert with info on where to find all the photos (including the photobooth ones) online. I think all this completely makes up for the lack of printer at the actual wedding!

If you got married this year, are you milking the wedding-photo-gift possibilities this season? I know I am!

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Posted in Christmas, Wedding

Dec 06

The Randomizer: Cinnamon Bun

The random number generator seemed to have a thing for family, which really, is what a wedding is all about. Here are 10 of our wedding photos chosen by the RNG.

I love this photo because my beloved bouquets are in the front, and we look so relaxed. In actuallity, we weren’t relaxed at all because we’d just taken off our shoes (quite a production for me) and were doing our best not to get our dresses dirty. I’m actually boosting myself off the ground with my hands!

This is the first family portrait we took – we were going to start with the largest group of my relatives, but had temporarily lost my dad. This is his sister (my aunt), her husband, and their two sons. In my head, my cousins are 10 and 12 because that was how old they were the last time I saw them before the wedding. They’re both in university now! That’s what happens when your family lives in England, and you’re in Canada.

I think I actually shared this one in my details post. Our ceremony decor – Ikea rug, garden centre orchid, wire table and ‘joy’ Christmas ornament from Michaels, book paper runner by Mr CB.

Us welcoming the same aunt and uncle to the reception!

Groomsman E looking very dapper in our home.

Various members of Cinamon Buns’ family – in this photo we’ve got his dad, step mum, two uncles and his mum.

I have curly hair so I’m always amused when I get my hair styled and they blow it straight, then curl it. Then again, all I do on my own with it is put it in a pony tail, so I trust hairdressers.

Cinnamon Buns dragged me over to the photobooth as soon as we’d finished dancing with our parents to show the guests how it’s done. I think it worked really well to have us run over there and ham it up while people were still hanging around the dance floor, it sort of broke the ice around the photobooth.

Mum, in her lovely outfit, giving me a much needed hand.

Cinnamon Buns and the groomhandles greeted all the guests before the ceremony, this is one of his cousins (well, technically his mum’s cousin’s son, but I don’t know what that makes him to CB. I say cousin, and call his dad CB’s uncle. Close enough!)

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Posted in Wedding wedding details

Dec 03

Santa or Gandalf?

This was something else I bought at the craft fair I went to yesterday. He’s the perfect fit for Christmas in my fantasy hobbit house!

I have always loved these types of carvings – they had some beautiful large wall pieces of old, wise, bearded faces with knots and bark incorporated into the carving. As I won’t get my hobbit house until we win the lottery, I decided to buy a little Santa to bring out at Christmas. Most of the Santas had been painted red – she said too many people called them Gandalf or Dumbledore before she started painting their coats red. I didn’t tell her about my hobbit house dreams.