Cunning, don’t you thinK?

My Dear Boy,

I hope you are well and that you get this soon in your travels. Thanks for the credit you have forwarded. They have helped as Maddie is still sick with the damp lung. I have made you the enclosed to keep you warm in your travels.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Love, your mother.

Firefly is one of my favorite TV shows!! I was so excited when someone asked me to make this hat for them.  It took much research, but I figured it out, finding many useful resources along the way.

This is the portion of the episode “The Message” where the hat makes it’s appearance.

Also, this hat is sort of cultish.  Looking for knitter’s interpretations of this hat yielded thousands of results.  One of the most prominent of these was Keiyla’s Blog, where, out of knitterly devotion to accuracy, she breaks down and analyzes the meaning and construction of this hat.  It is wonderful.  Look at it.  I can wait.Firefly

 

DaVinci’s Flying Machine

I finally have the photos to show you!  I am very excited, and I hope you enjoy!

(Wings are now available as a Made-To-Order set through my Etsy account.  Follow the link)

A Little Bit Random Monday

I have many new photos to show you, since this weekend I was briefly permitted to carry my camera, since I wasn’t actually working.  Not that I am going to be giving you photos of the faire itself.  I somehow ended up too busy to snap them.

Since a variety of things have taken place this weekend, it seems only fitting that it is followed up by a random post.

• Saturday, I worked a block party in the city.  It was fun.  The hosts were very nice and accomodating, and children were all well behaved and respectful.  I even learned a new face!
• 
• Yep, it’s Spongebob.  Before I could finish the detail, the fire truck showed up, and the younger was too eager to play.
• Right after this event, I hopped in the car, drove north, and ended up at the fair.  I had so much fun walking around, not working!
• Ellette had fun too!
• We found this dress at a thrift store.  For $6!!
• The top hat is one of mine, that is now adorning the happy head of my boss’s wife.
• Ellette is very proud of her new mug.
• And I had dozens more top hats to make.  I just received a shipment of headbands.  The 14 or so hats I had drying on my table have been mostly adorned, need to be sewn in place and attached to the headband.
• I am excited for top hats.
• Yet they are still driving me bonkers!

• This is the chess piece for the wonderland fashion show this fall.  This is the queen, and will be on a hat of some sort for the show.  I have yet to see the final product.
• Just after I finished the queen, I mapped out many of the other chess pieces, which will be turned in to the complete game board eventually.
• That is – if I ever get time.
• Speaking of game boards, I blocked the pieces for the Catan board, but didn’t like the result.  I am going to start over.
• I know, it sucks.
• But I am a perfectionist.
• Since Bristol started, my house has been a massive dusty mess.  I am going to spend some quality time with Mop and Broom this week and try to clean.
• I say try, I mean try.  I never seem to get it right.
• I stopped complaining about the mess and why doesn’t anyone help me clean when I realized that the majority of the mess is my craft stuff, strewn about the house.  Oops.
• I will figure it out one day.
• I actually have a quite lengthy list of what needs to be accomplished this week, and deep down I know I will only cross off two or three things by Friday.
• But sitting here writing isn’t helping me work.

Surrounded

Somebody help me.  I don’t think my captors are listening.  This is an SOS from a little, green, tormented pixie.

They have me surrounded.  They are hiding behind the doors, under the tables – even inbetween the couch cushions!  They are sneaky things, they are.

And, for the love of cupcakes, they know how to torment a girl.

It started innocently enough.  I received orders for various knitted items.  First, a few mushrooms and a 6″ chess piece.  Then, it escalated beyond control.  My dining room table is littered with wool top hats.

That’s right, wool.  Oh, the sheep are out to get me.  They’re pretty sly.  They inflict me with a crazy passion for their fuzzy fleece, and then they through 110* temps at me.  Try knitting when the fibers felt through your sweaty fingers!

And, even though knitting in this temperature is torture enough, I keep getting orders for more wool items!  And the sheep are throwing their woolly offspring at me!  Balls of yarn are falling of the shelves, rolling out of my closet, hiding in my laundry basket.  They want to tempt me with their colorful softness, luring me with inspiration.

Somehow, I can’t seem to stop.  I spend my spare hours sitting in front of a fan, drinking ice water, and trying to knit in stages.  Retreating to air conditioned coffeeshops and tempted to move into the flooded laundry room just so the fiber won’t stick to my digits.

Somebody, please!!  I am begging you!  Take the wool away.  Get it out!  Geez, take the cotton and the silk too!  Don’t leave me anything that will tempt me!  Please, tell the sheep to leave me alone!

And then bring it all back again when the weather hits 60* this fall.

Just A Weekend

I have searched the house ruthlessly for the camera, and discovered not too long ago that Odin had taken it to work with him.  This is my frustration.

Ellette and I are packing up for the weekend.  We are staying at Rose’s house with other folks, because Rose lives 15 minutes from the Renaissance Faire site.  And, pray tell, why should one wake up at 6am when one could wake up at 7?  We are putting together our costumes, accessories, necessary equipment, food for the weekend, changes of clothing, child occupying devices, yarn, games, and wine.  We are almost finished.

Packing like this – for two days in which we will be housed in the comfort of someone’s home – makes me feel a tad foolish.  How much could one person need?  Then I remember I am packing food for 3 people, games for the dozen of us that will be at the house, two sets of costumes (which, truth be told, I do not want to spend any more time in than necessary – you have to be mental to want to be strapped in to a heavy velveteen bodice in 95* heat for more than 6 hours – or maybe at all!), two changes of clothes (one for self, one for munchkin), pajamas, soap (because we are sweaty and dusty by the end of the day, and nobody wants that in their house), and nobody wants a bored 6 year old.  Or a yarnless pixie.  Heads could roll.

Writing this just reminded me that I haven’t actually packed my toiletries or herbal first aid kit yet.  Be right back.

Last weekend, I spilled blue dye on the sleeve of my not-chemise.  I was looking to replace it anyway, so on Monday, Odin and I went to Vogue Fabrics to find appropriate fabric.  This afternoon, I finally got around to sewing up a chemise (which I had wanted to take a photo of for you, but Odin has the camera!).  I think it is one of my finest pieces of sewing yet, since I actually followed the instructions instead of looking at the pattern and improvising.  It may help that no buttons or zippers were involved this time.

So, chances are I will be MIA for the weekend.  I have several ideas for next week’s topics, including a search for UFOs and some wonderful photos of the DaVinci wings.  Keep checking in!

 

Oops

Time sort of got away from me again.  I want to say that this post will catch up and put everything right, but, unfortunately, I would be lieing.

My summers are usually like this – frantic, fast-paced, exciting, and exhausting.  At the end of the day, I want to shower and sleep, not write about the adventures I just had.  My apologies.

So, in recap, my summer looks like this: 3 days a week I am working at the coffeeshop and Ellette is in gymnastics.  2 days, it is just me and Ellette (last week we took a trip to Tom Thumb craft store to purchase a load of things she can make by herself so I can get work done), and the weekends are pretty much swallowed up whole by the Bristol Renaissance Fair, which opened last weekend.  In between, I have a few face painting gigs and a Faerie Festival in Elgin.  It would seem I would have a lot to write about, and I suppose I do.  A lot of it would be simple repetition.  I am making a hat.  I am felting a hat.  I am decorating a hat.  I am making another hat.  I am felting that new hat.

My bouts of zombie working are punctuated by self-preservation knitting.  I am working on the Racerback from Knitty, which is just over half completed, and a pair of purple knee high socks for Ellette, of which only one is ready for the heel turn.  I have been putsing with sewing up bustles out of scrap fabric, and the first one looks ok.  It did inspire me to begin designing a knitted lace sampler bustle.  Math for that is being done now.  Unfortuntately, I have photographs but can’t figure out how to upload on this new desktop we’ve got.

My creativity has been a tad consumed with the opening weekend of the Bristol fair.  I am a rose seller and have to be quick and witty.  I have been consumed with costume updates and basket adornments.  I have been searching for photos online from the myriad photographers roaming the site but can’t seem to find any just yet.  I will update more about fair another time.

Yesterday, I had every intention in the world to update, or at least to sing the praises of my wonderful partner, who for some strange reason has been doing all of the right things lately.  I love it.  He found out Cirque du Soleil was coming to Chicago and decided to give me an early birthday present (my birthday is in August).  He bought tickets for the two of us, my daughter, and my younger sister, and last night we went to the show.  It was amazing.  I have always wanted to see a show live – I have been feeding my soul with dvds and youtube clips.  The Ovo performance lived up to my expectations.  My favorite was the duet Spansih Web act.  I think being in the aerial acrobatics class has given me a new appreciation for watching people perform, especially those apparatuses that I find cumbersome or painful.  Spanish Web is a 2″ in diameter nylon rope.  It can give terrible rope burn (I believe I uploaded a photo of my feet after a routine on the web that had me hanging by one foot for 3 minutes).  This act was a husband and wife duo (I can only assume; I don’t actually know).  Because Ovo was all about insects, the two on the Spanish Web were spiders.  They did many tricks where they were tangled up together, dependent on each other for support.  It was very romantic, and the two would “steal” kisses throughout the performance.  I lamented rather loudly after the show that I wish I had a partner I could perform with.  Hint hint nudge nudge.  There was one point where the woman was hanging by one hand, with another bracer on her foot, and her husband, who had to be a bit heavier than her, hung from her foot.  I know how painful it is to hang from your foot on the web, and I cringed to think how painful it was to have someone hang from you.  But they were very graceful and beautiful and did not show any discomfort.  It was a magical evening.

Today, I am driving my sister up to Milwaukee. That is my day, nothing too interesting.  I will update again as soon as possible, and will try to keep it at least once a week for the remainder of the summer.

 

It’s Sunday Night

I haven’t posted in a while, and quickly had to delete my last post because I made a greivious error that nearly sabotaged my Knitty chances.

I posted about the scarf I made, without realizing that the Knitty staff will take as long as they please hemming and hawing over patterns before approval, and this process can take up to 2 weeks before the issue goes live.

I, being rather impatient, jumped the gun by a few months.  Luckily, I caught the issue and deleted any virtual trace of the scarf from the world wide web.

It sort of killed my blogging buzz.  I apologize.

Instead, I have been working relentlessly on hats, that seem to be sprouting from every available orifice.  The miniature top hats are now available at a yarn store in Andersonville – Sifu, down on Clark St.  This makes me immensely happy.  The lovely owner, Lisa, has also requested several more hats to round out her display.

Next weekend begins the Bristol Renaissance Festival, and represents not only the loss of my weekend availability, but also the requirement for even more mini top hats for La Paloma.  All I have been doing lately is making mini top hats for other people.  It’s been sort of driving me up the wall.

So, this weekend, I decided to not knit top hats.  I kind of went the anti-hat direction.  I have been working on socks.  Knee-high socks of my own devising for the little pixie who wants really really badly for her mother to actually make her things with all that prettiful yarn falling out of boxes in her studio and closet.  I am just about ready to turn the heel on the first one.

Also, because it is summer and I want a summer knit for myself, I cast on the Racerback Tank, which I have been completely enthralled with.

I have been relatively well behaved at not buying yarn, which makes me feel crazy when I wander in to yarn stores just to feel their wool but saves my wallet from further injury.  A while back I discovered a vest I had knit all of but never added buttons to that I had loved the pattern for, but hated the end product and stuffed into a bag to be forgotten.  Well I found the seams and tore it apart, wound up the yarn and tried to guess how many skeins of Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece I had actually used for it, so I could begin a new project with the old yarn.  I kind of really like Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece – good fiber memory without being too heavy and warm.  It is a good transitional seasony yarn – if that makes any sense whatsoever.

I’m a little beyond caring if I make any sense whatsoever though.

I still can’t find the charger for my camera battery.  I was using Odin’s camera until I found out it’s his work camera, and if anything bad happened to it, he would be in deep dog poo.  I’m trying to find a replacement charger, but things have been a bit hectic around here.

My studio is overflowing with top hats in various stages of completion.

And it is Independence Day Weekend.

And the house is full of people this weekend, which always throws me for a loop.