Jul 25

Favourable

I started making wedding favours yesterday! Yes, for my June 2011 wedding. We decided on little 125mL jars of homemade jam for favours – my mum is actually making most of them. Mum and dad live on the coast, where it is nice and temperate and wet, so they grow strawberries and raspberries, blackberries are a weed and everywhere in August, rhubarb, and even a smattering of blueberries every year. Mum is taking care of all the jams except for blueberry and peach – those were left to me because mum is more comfortable with the other berries. Plus, I wanted to at least make a few of the favours!

We found some wonderful fabric at a quilting store (My Sewing Room, Calgary AB) that is perfectly drawn prints of….. FRUIT! We bought fabric for each type of jam, so we don’t need to actually put the flavour on the label.

DSC05382 DSC05383

Mum’s jams on the left, mine on the right.

We are going to use the fabric to cut out circles to elastic or tie to the top of the jam jars. Today, I decided to find out what diameter of circle we will actually need to use. I got out my:

  • pinking shears
  • scrap fabric
  • jam jars!
  • a few round dishes
  • an orange Sharpie

The orange sharpie was the only thing near to hand that I thought would be easy to see on my scrap fabric. It was that or a charcoal pencil, which I dismissed as being too messy.

First, I tried one of our smaller dinner plates, because that’s what mum and I talked about in the store.

DSC05378

That’s that big mound of fabric in the front. There is a jam jar under there I swear! Then I traced a cereal bowl onto the fabric with orange sharpie and cut it out with pinking shears. Too big still. Little glass bowl was too little, but $0.50 garage sale metal food storage dish was perfect! Here’s a photo with the measurements.

DSC05380

5.75″ it is! I now have just one question… how does one get orange Sharpie off white bowls and glass plates?

0
comments

Jul 22

Second in Section

What with getting engaged, and now planning a wedding (June 2011!!), life has gone a bit crazy. I’ve barely knit since coming back from San Francisco. I seem to be able to waste as much time as I want looking a wedding blogs, wedding dresses, wedding everything online. I’m going to try to make myself have one wedding-free day each week. We’ll see if it works. In other news, I finished Evenstar before going on our trip:
DSC05372

Oh yeah, and I entered it in the Calgary Stampede Western Showcase and won second place in the whole knitting section! Here’s me when I discovered it:

DSC05370

I have now officially earned (well, won) money for knitting! Second place gets you $125 and a pretty blue ribbon. The big teal shawl on the right in the photo got first. It was great to see everything so well displayed – every time David goes to the Easter Show on Sticks and String, there are horror stories of how badly displayed the knitting is. Well done, Stampede.

I’m probably going to knit myself a wedding shawl (this one took under 2 months, I’ve got 11 until the wedding!) and mum asked if I’d still be able to submit it to the Stampede. The answer is a very large “maybe?” Knitting take-in was June 30th this year, and we’ve chose June 25 for the wedding, so if stuff stays the same, yes, I will be able to enter my wedding shawl into the Stampede. Or I might make a different one for the Stampede. After all, I have set a precedent!

Second in Section!

2
comments

Jun 27

K2tog

P and I went to San Francisco last week. Most of the time, it looked like this:

Fog

Or this:

Fog

But we looked like this:

Looking Smug

Because of this!!

Show off

Who needs sunshine, when you have a sparkly ring?!

4
comments

Jun 11

Life with Evenstar

I’ve been spending a lot of my free time lately knitting. Knitting away on the edging of my Evenstar shawl. This is the ginormous shawl that has a deadline that’s coming up in a couple weeks. I’ve been exclusively knitting this shawl since I started it, not wanting any distractions, or anything to detract from my knitting time. The edging is 56 repeats of a point, and I had been pushing myself to do up to 4 in a day.

‘Had’ is the operative word in that last sentence. On Tuesday, I looked at the little tally on my pattern print out (I make a mark each time I complete row 20) and I thought ‘ that can’t be right!’. But it could: I only have 7 repeats left to go! That is this much:

DSC05076

I can now actually see the beginning (and end) as I’m knitting.

So with only 7 repeats to go, and more than 2 weeks until the deadline, what is a knitter to do? Cast on something else, of course.

DSC05074

That is the Eunice pattern from Cookie A’s book Sock Innovation. I recently started watching Round the Twist, a video podcast by Carin, and she has decided to knit every sock out of said book. I caught up on all 40+ episodes over a few weeks, so I’m joining in after she has already completed a different set of socks. I also need to do this to start using up some of that Sock Summit stash. The yarn I’m using is Wool Candy BFL in the colour ‘Robin’s Egg’.

DSC05072

I’ve been having a bit too much fun with this sock – I need to put it down and finish up that last little bit of Evenstar, and then block it. That’s why tonight I’m going to watch The Two Towers and knit, and tomorrow will be Return of the King. Those two movies should be just the right amount of time to finish 7 beaded points.

2
comments

May 27

Bead star!

DSC03679

That’s right, I’m on the beaded border now! I started the border on May 25th, and I have do have a deadline for the shawl to be done – June 30th. In between now and then I have a week’s trip to San Francisco (not planning on bringing the shawl, I’ll be too busy seeing things!), a couple weeks of unemployment, and some work. Let’s call it 24 days, because I also have to block this baby. The edging is made up of a a 20-row pattern repeated 56 times around the edge of the shawl. That means I need to do 2.33 repeats per day. So far, I’m ahead of schedule, but I have spent the past few days hanging around the house and knitting.

DSC03680

I am cautiously confident though. I feel like I’m getting a rhythm going with the beading. I pick up 3 beads on the crochet hook at once, which saves a little time, and the actually knitting is pretty easy.

I did have to make up my own way to start this border though. It is a knitted-on border that knits 1 stitch of the border together with 1 stitch of the main shawl every other row. This attaches it and means that there isn’t actually a bind off in the whole project, keeping it nice and stretchy. You start the border with a provisional cast-on so you can graft the start and the end together. The pattern had instructions on how to do this without cutting the yarn. I couldn’t wrap my head around that part, no matter how hard I tried, so I just cut the yarn and moved on. It will look just the same, I’ll just have 2 extra ends to weave it. I think it is worth it for the lack of headache.

DSC03681

The pale pink line you can see in the photos is a lifeline – I ran embroidery floss through the live stitches of the body of the shawl before I started this edging, in case I messed up.

The beads are slightly darker than the yarn, and are a nice matte, frosted finish.

3
comments

May 15

And in the darkness bind them…

So that Evenstar shawl I’ve been knitting. It’s pretty huge right now – I’m on the last clue before the beaded border, and I’m really starting to believe that this shawl will be 5′ across when blocked.

I’ve been doing most of my knitting at work. I work in the dark. This hadn’t been a problem, and for some silly reason, I felt myself too good for lifelines. I regarded them as training wheels – I don’t need those any more, I can do this! Well, now I think they are more like PFDs: something that might feel cumbersome, but is definitely needed because you never know when your boat might flip over.

There have been mistakes. These mistakes have all been on the last repeat. Maybe I get excited about the new row that is coming, and mess up the last few stitches, or who knows what.

I saw a mistake about 4 rows down from where I was one day. Remember that this shawl is at about 600 stitches around. I was not going to rip back that many stitches! I dropped the stitches in question, and fixed the mistake (I missed a YO, which left a blip in a YO border in the pattern).

A few days later, I noticed a bigger mistake. I couldn’t tell if it was further down than the first mistake (because I’d knitted on it for a few days) or in the same spot. So I dropped those stitches down, and tried to fix. It was big and scary, I was dropping 7 rows in a complicated lace pattern, but I persevered. When I had finished, the mistake was gone, but I’d messed up the stuff beside it pretty badly. The ’stuff beside’ is the main motif of the Evenstar shawl, the stitches that look like Arwen’s pendant from the movies.

I dropped again, this time dropping and re-knitting the Evenstar bit. I was not looking forward to it, I put off starting by knitting a whole row of the shawl, till I got around to that part again. The Evenstar motif has a wacky little increase/decrease where you end up making 7 stitches in one group. It was that part that I didn’t want to do without the end of the yarn being free.

But… I managed! I showed my knitting who was boss!

No photos of the scary process, because I didn’t want to pick it up and put it down and disturb it by getting the camera. All is well – I’m hoping blocking will even it out a bit where tension changed (I tended to re-knit with smaller needles than I’m using on the whole thing, because it made maneuvering easier) and if I need to, I may employ some judicious duplicate stitch.

It was stressful, but I was very proud of myself for not crying, not sticking it in the back of a drawer, or martyring myself by ripping back to the easiest place to pick up stitches, the stockingette band 71 rows below.

0
comments

May 12

Spring Magnolia Stamps

I’ve had my Magnolia spring stamp kit for a while now, but I’ve been knitting so much on the shawl (which is now giant by the way) I’ve been neglecting most other things when I have free time. That includes laundry and cooking as well as papercrafting.

The other night, I decided I needed to colour a bit, so I made a few cards with the kit.

DSC03670

DSC03674

DSC03676

I just have to say that Robin Hood is one of my very favourite historical and/or fictional characters, and probably the first book character I ever had a crush on, so this stamp made me extremely happy.

Just some simple cards to get back in to the swing of things. This doesn’t mean I’m not still working crazily on the shawl… there is a deadline that I’ve set myself for that to be finished, and that’ll come up quickly.

0
comments

Apr 26

Evenstar Start

I started the beautiful Evenstar shawl last week. This is a ‘mystery shawl’ project, meaning: I signed up on the designer’s blog, and she is sending out clues every two weeks. Each clue is the next section of the shawl, so you knit that clue, and eagerly await more emails. You don’t know what your finished project is going to look like! The clues started in February when I was busy with work, and trying to get rid of a few other projects that have been hanging around. Clue #6 was just released. I 5 days, I’ve managed to get this far (this is clues #1 & 2):

Evenstar Shawl

Not too bad! The first part went very quickly, and I got very excited, but the thing to remember about this shawl is that the stitch count will double every so often, so it makes a flat, circular object when finished. I have to keep explaining to people that I am not knitting a hat, or a bag, but a flat thing. It’s just got too many stitches on a short circular, so it is scrunched up. Currently, my rows have 280 stitches in them. Tomorrow I am expecting to finish clue #3 – that’s when it doubles again.

When it changed from 144 to 280, it took some time to adjust to the new longer rows, but I eventually felt like I was knitting at a respectable speed again. I’m scared for 560.

Evenstar Shawl

You might ask, why would one go through all this knitting without knowing what the finished project will look like? Some designers just know how to play on the strengths of people’s obsessions:

Evenstar Shawl

Yes, that would be the Evenstar Shawl and all the yarn (Yarn Chef Creme Brulee, colour ‘Dusk in Provence’) on my Tolkien shelf. The little grey edition of The Hobbit is the one that dad read to me at age 4, which I then read by myself at age 5, and is the book that started it all. The pages are brown, one falls completely out (the one with the ‘attercop attercop’ song), and there’s obvious tea stains, but I love it. I love all those books up there. The yarn is sitting in front of LotR, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales. There’s also a whole bunch of other related stuff behind all those books.

Obsession? Moi?

1
comments

Apr 19

A Year in the Making

Linen Market Bag

My linen shopping bag is done, a year and two weeks after I started it! (Ravelry Link)

I originally started this project with the idea of finishing it and taking it to Sock Summit to hold my purchases. I got partway through, and abandoned it for some socks that I also didn’t finish for Sock Summit. I think it turned out for the best, because I don’t think the haul I got at Sock Summit would have fit in the bag, stretchy as it is.

Linen Market Bag

The yarn makes me happy – I traded with someone on Ravelry for it, so it was essentially free, which is always good. This is also the project that I told myself I had to finish before I started on my Evenstar Shawl, and I’m ecstatic about being able to start that tonight. I’m about to get out the ballwinder and swift – I couldn’t even wind the yarn before finishing this, it would have been too tempting.

I did make a modification to the pattern, based on some comments other people had made about the project on Ravelry: when making the handle, I only cast on 70 stitches, instead of the 145 recommended, which I think made the handle just the right length. I am pretty short, after all.

5
comments

Apr 17

Birthday Cake 2010

2010 Birthday Cake

This year, I had a task: to make a birthday cake for myself and my friend K, as our birthdays are 4 days apart. The deal was that she’d make dinner, and I’d make the cake.

My birthday was Good Friday this year, and cake day actually ended up being Easter Monday, so I decided against anything with chocolate in – we’d all be chocolated-out. I looked through my favourite cake book, Sky High, and picked out a couple choices. After consulting with K, we decided on the Marbled Lemon-Blueberry cake.

2010 Birthday Cake

The first step of the recipe is to make jam for the filling. I love that ‘make jam’ was the first step, it made my day. And then I made jam! It was also a good thing I had to blender-ize the blueberries, there’s been a rash of food tampering at supermarkets around here, pins and tacks and the like. People are scary. I made the jam on the Saturday, when cake day was Monday.

2010 Birthday Cake

I find it is so helpful to divide up recipes like this into multiple days. Sunday was cake-baking day:

2010 Birthday Cake 2010 Birthday Cake 2010 Birthday Cake

You use some of the jam to make some batter purple, and swirl that in to the cake pans.

2010 Birthday Cake

Monday was the part I’m always least confident in: icing the cake. This recipe had you make a buttercream icing, which I’ve never done before, and I’m not exactly sure what sort of texture buttercream should even be. When time eventually came to eat the cake, I scraped all my icing off, because it just tasted (and felt) like eating butter. Everyone else seemed to like it though, and I generally scrape the icing off store bought cakes too.

Cake Building Process

As you can see, I had a bit of a structural integrity problem here. You’re suppose to trim off any domed bits from your cakes, so you have perfectly flat surfaces. If I’d done that, all the marbling would have been cut off! So, I decided to glue it together with jam and icing, which mostly worked. I found the icing ended up looking pretty sweaty in the end, even after being in the fridge. I feel like the lemon juice didn’t like mixing with the butter.

I’m not sure how the cake in the book has swirls so dark, and icing so white. My swirls were much paler, and I followed the instructions for how much jam to add to the batter. I also don’t know how you get white icing out of yellow butter, and eggs with yellow yolks.

Cut Cake Cut Cake

Some cell phone photos of the cake at the party, after slicing off everyone’s pieces. Yes, I made a cake that is labeled ’serves 16-20′ for a party of 8. It was delicious!


0
comments

Apr 16

Purple and Pears

Still having fun with the dotty backgrounds, but this card is for a challenge! Kraftin’ Kimmie is sponsoring this week’s CPS challenge. I love so many of the Kraftin’ Kimmie stamps (the Moonlight Whispers are my absolute favorites – and the punny sentiments they have too!), and another great thing is that they’re a Canadian company! Go Canada go! Whoa, total Olympic flashback there….

DSC03645

I wanted to “pear” this stamp with this great Basic Grey pear paper, so I coloured most of her dress with colours taken from the pears, then I decided I wanted to do a purple dot background. The background is: BV04, BV02, BV17, V12, V15, V17, RV10, RV93.

DSC03646

I chose a deep purple to use for mats, and also some pale doily-print paper from the same Basic Grey collection. The ribbon was white, but I coloured it with my V17 Copic so it would match. The sentiment is from Flourishes’ strawberry stamp set.

This stamp is going to get a good workout in my cookbook-scrapbook, I can tell. :) First task: Mum’s scone recipe.

1
comments

Apr 15

Recipe Book – Cornmeal Muffins

A while ago, a few years actually, so well before the papercraft supply binge of ‘09, I decided to give myself permission to buy scrapbooking products. I gave myself very restricted guidelines, because I didn’t want to make a scrapbook – I just loved all the papers and other supplies! I decided to make an 8×8 recipe book, so I could only buy food-related supplies. That has obviously gone out the window now, but I did use some of my new techniques to make my first recipe page in a long time.

DSC03641

These are the cornmeal muffins my mum always made when I was a kid. Nice and simple, great for showcasing homemade jams. :) Here’s an online link to the recipe too. We obviously made them without the jammy centres. The recipe is from an old Canadian Living book mum said.

DSC03640

I made a dotty background again, and loved it! Again, I used some of my newest Copics. Skin: E00, E02 / Apron: RV93, RV95 / Dress: R27, R29, R59 / Hair: E59, E15, E17 / Background: YG03, G25, BG75, G28, Y26, YG95. I’m happy because I think I managed to have the red dress and green background, and not make it look like Christmas.

This stamp (from Kraftin’ Kimmie) usually has a teapot in her hand, and she did up until this morning. That’s when I remembered my stash of kitchen stickers, and pulled out this one and stuck it over the pot.

1
comments

Apr 14

Dotty Backgrounds

I think I’ve discovered my new favourite technique:

DSC03635

That background was inspired by Crissy Armstrong’s tutorial video on how she does her fabulous backgrounds (you can findĀ  it here). I was made aware of the video by Happy Thoughts & Inkspots.

A rather large order from Paper Garden Projects arrived yesterday, 15 minutes before I had to head to work, so I was itching all day just to get back here and play with my new markers! I used BV04 &BV02 for the dress, and YR16, YR02, YR04, YR07, & YR09 for the dots. The thank you stamp is also from PGP. I love it, but the only purple ink I had was a dew drop-sized one, and inking that stamp felt more tedious than the dots! I loved doing the dots, I think I’ll use that technique a lot!

DSC03632

I really like orange and purple together!

0
comments

Apr 11

(almost) Start to Finish

So last year, I bought myself this:

DSC02683.JPG

Eventually I managed to turn this:

DSC02696.JPG

into this:

DSC02698.JPG

Which then turned in to this:

DSC02706.JPG

After sitting for about 10 months, it took 2 days of knitting in the evenings after work to transform in to this:

Handspun Hat! Those ends hanging down are exactly how much leftover yarn I had. They don’t end very far out of the frame! (I have since woven them in and trimmed them off).

Handspun Hat!

0
comments

Apr 07

It’s in the water

I bought the VIP kit from My Favorite Things when it was up for sale in March. That meant I got one of April’s stamp sets weeks for everyone else will have a chance at it!

I thought this pregnancy set was adorable, and once again all the sentiments make me smile. I know a bunch of people having babies, so I thought it would be a handy set to have. Last night I stamped the main image a few times on white, and then went through my scrap bin for good shirt patterns. Once I had all the panels coloured up, I made them in to cards. It was nice to do it production-line style like that. I’m experimenting with E Copic markers for skin, I had been using Rs. When they’re that pale though, it’s hard to tell.

DSC03623

DSC03620

DSC03619

0
comments

Apr 04

Deep breath in…

DSC03582

I just had to buy this yoga set (called ‘Serenity Now’) from My Favourite Things when I saw it. I love it when I go to yoga, I just sometimes have trouble motivating myself to actually go to yoga.

I think MFT stamps are perfect for paper-piecing. I paper-pieced the girl’s top using a very large flower print from the same package as the background paper. As you can see, the flower was so big, it just shows up as an abstract design on her shirt.

I usually shy away from pre-packaged ‘ephemera’ because really, isn’t part of being ‘ephemera’ being found stuff, thrift-store stuff, vintage stuff? I tend to think so. That still didn’t stop me buying an ephemera pack from K&Co. As you can see from how well the flowers match, it is in the same line as the background paper I used (the strip with the text is MME).

DSC03576

I made three yoga cards in one night, all using various bits from the ephemera pack, and one of my other loves of paper crafting: mixing and matching paper collections! I’m not generally one for the matchy-matchy (no matter how nice the first card in this post looks!). This card uses K&Co for her shirt, K&Co ‘ephemera’, DCWV ‘Old World’ (pink paper), and KaiserCraft ‘Devonshire’ (text paper).

To keep everything neat on the image, I stamped it twice on white paper, once on the patterned. I coloured just her chest on one layer, then cut shirt and arms as one piece from the patterned and glued that to the piece with just her chest coloured. Then I coloured her arms on the second piece of white, cut those out and glued down.

DSC03579

This one is my favourite – I spiced up the green dot paper by stamping the little ‘Ohm’ dot from the stamp set in a similar-coloured ink in a pattern guided by the dots (it’s not quite a subtle as it seems in these photos). Again, I paper-pieced her shirt and coloured the rest with Copic markers. I coloured my ribbon (it was white) with a Copic marker so it matches, and wove it through a paisley.

DSC03580

0
comments

Apr 03

How do YOU emboss?

Paper Garden Projects has a challenge to use your favourite type of embossing on a project. While I love the dimension and texture you can get by using embossing powder, I don’t do it a whole lot. I think this has something to do with the fact that I tend to use a stovetop burner as my heat source. I remember using the lightbulb in my desk lamp as a kid, but my current little lamp doesn’t get hot enough. I did figure out that I could use the toaster, but the toaster lives in a cupboard, and the oven is right there….

DSC03583

So I made a card that used my Cuttlebug, and an embossing folder, a technique known as ‘dry embossing’. I used the dotty folder to pick up the dots in the the papers, and sanded the embossed paper a little, to pick up the texture.

There is no end to the love I have for these pirate stamps by Kraftin’ Kimmie, and the text stamps always crack me up too!

DSC03585

I decided not to fussy-cut (cut around the very edge of the stamp) this image. Instead, I trimmed the top of her hat and sword, then got out my Nestabilities Labels 7, slipped that on to the image with the hat and sword out of the way of the blade, and cut it that way. She’s too tall for any of the cutting dies I have.

0
comments

Apr 02

How did that Knitting New Year work out?

Well, it’s April 2, my birthday, and the day I said I’d have all my WIPs done. None of them are done, but one is much more on its way to being an actual knitted object!

DSC03592

My Euroflax linen shopping bag has gained a few more tiers of squares since it was last seen on the blog (a shameful almost 12 months ago). I stopped working on it soon after that photo (about 8 squares after, to be precise), and only picked it up again this March. It is such a satisfying knit, I don’t know why I put it down! The most stitches you ever have on your needles is 29; and each square is fast to knit, giving you the feeling you’ve accomplished something!

As you can see, my Revolutionary Stitch Markers are doing a great job of holding the live stitch each square is left with. The pink one on the bottom of the bag signifies square #1 (there’s also one on square #5) which helps me figure out where I am if I get lost.

DSC03594

I was expecting to have most of March off, but I lucked in to a job that was just supposed to be for a week, and ended up being stretched out to almost 3 weeks. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – I just didn’t get as much knitting done as I thought I would this month. That’s why I’m not too mad at myself for not meeting my goal.

The bag just needs that triangle (the top 6 pale squares) put on the other side as well, then the handle knit. I think the handle might take a long time, but it’ll be great to be done.

1
comments

Mar 23

Skull Shirt

DSC03552

Another one of my new Greeting Farm stamps – I love this punky little girl with her skull shirt and her leggings! I’ve been having great fun colouring her, and making her hair exciting colours.

The green paper behind her is from a K&Co mat stack- the twist with this one is that the papers all already have adhesive on the back. I thought it would great, take a step out of the card-making process! Turns out, the adhesive isn’t all that great, I’ve already had to pull it off and put real glue on the back and stick it back down.

The jewel clusters are also K&Co, I used them and black stickles to give the card a bit of bling, for the Anya Ink blog this week. I also used a sketch from the Club Anya Saturday Sketch blog.

DSC03554

1
comments

Mar 22

Fuzzy Feather Boa

DSC03562

When I first saw this stamp, I knew I had to pull out my Martha Stewart flocking for the boa. Just a little bit of glue, and some fuzz to give this glamour stamp a little more oomph. The layout is from The Sweet Stop Sketch blog, and they wanted fuzz on the card too.

I tried to keep the look vintage and soft and girly, so I pulled out my wide lace again, as well as some new but vintage-looking flowers. I used a rub-on for the sentiment – I rubbed it on to some vellum so you can still glimpse the lace through it.

DSC03565

Caardvarks is having a Lace challenge on now!

4
comments