Eye Candy Friday: Farmers Market Edition

I like looking at foods second only to eating them.


Have a good weekend, y'all! I'll be spending mine recovering from a very long week by sleeping, looking at bodies, and *gasp* sewing. If it's not entirely disastrous I might even show you the results. (Of the sewing part.)

Eye Candy Friday: I do still drool over yarn.

The drooling doesn't cut into my reading time much.

This was the only thing I actually asked for for Xmas last year: a whole pound of Henry's Attic Andromeda. It's luscious and wonderful and a good deal, being undyed and unskeined, but damned if I was going to wind it into hanks by hand. So I put it away and forgot about it for awhile, and then finally...

... I broke down and got myself a Mama Bear Swift. I like it because it's good for both winding and unwinding.

I love this stuff even more now that it's off the cone. It's a 50/50 worsted wool-silk blend, very similar to Lorna's Laces Lion & Lamb, or Sundara's Aran Silky Merino. (In fact, I feel like I heard somewhere that this is the base yarn Sundara uses... but I could be totally making that up.)

But seriously. How can anything be so simultaneously shiny and fuzzy? (Shuzzy, if you will.)

Next week: I try my hand at dyeing. Figure I'd better make a mess of the kitchen before we get around to remodeling it.

Shiny Floor Friday

Since my house is the best eye candy I can think of these days, I couldn't resist one more transformation montage:

We pulled down the hideous "wood" paneling...
...tore up the lovely shag to reveal even lovelier linoleum...
...then scraped, patched, sanded, primed and painted the walls......sanded and finished the floors...
...and finally, installed the trim. (I learned to cope moulding joints! I'm a craftswoman!)

Have a good weekend, y'all. I guarantee not one but TWO finished objects in the next week. You can probably guess what one of them is; here's a sneak peek at at the other.

Ok, ok, twist my arm.

Unanimity is a rare thing, but it's easy to understand in this case:


I don't think there's a word for this stuff besides be-fucking-yootiful. The depth, the softness, the COLOR! I can't stop ogling it.


Now my only problem is that mistake about 4 rows back. It wasn't bothering me that much on the mitt itself, but every time I look at this picture it's like it's eating my face. I can't see anything else. Rip rip rip.

ps. why is it that everything in IK always looks so much fun to knit, and yet like nothing i'd ever wear?

My eye candy is made of mouth candy!

My friend Joohee recently decided that if we make gingerbread houses at Christmas, then making gingerbread churches at Easter is only logical. While I don't entirely follow her reasoning, I can't argue with the concept of adhering food to food with other food.


At least as much candy ended up in my belly as on my crenellated cathedral. I thought I wouldn't ever want to look at sugar again, but two days later I was pillaging like a pirate.


And now, without the slightest attempt at segue, I leave you with a progress shot of the hourglass, lounging in the goldeny morning glow of my east-facing house. (I love spring.)

Particularly welcome.

It is my favorite kind of day in Portland today -- cold and bright, of course. It's particularly welcome after weeks of cool and damp, and it reminds me of the last time we were graced with such crispness: right after Christmas, when The Lady snapped this bit of eye candy.

She has quite the eye for lillies, it turns out. I'm slowly realizing, however, that we may need to be a two camera household. This strikes the logical half (or... uh, 80%) of my brain as silly and superfluous, and it strikes my bank account as impossible. But that doesn't change the fact that I have no pictures of the Shedir I started a few days ago. Both it and the pair of Anemoi have to be done and out of the house by Monday though, so don't be afeared. Documentation is imminent.

Happy Friday, y'all. Enjoy the long weekend!

Happy Friday!

El Tracks, originally uploaded by furplepig.

Earlier this fall I spent a lovely couple of days in the Windy City. Not only did I get to visit some college friends I hadn't seen since graduation, but I also got hours at a time to wander the city on my own. It was paradise.

Eye Candy

Snake River Gorge near Pullman, WA

By the time I'm done with what I need to do each day, and can make myself sit down and relax and knit or sew or chat, I've pretty much spent whatever energy I have. And when I wake up again in the morning, I snooze until the very last possible second before I have to scurry about the very cold house, throw on my clothes, and get out the door. Everything but work, class, sleep, making gifts, and making my lady happy feels like a luxury I can hardly afford.

This picture reminds me that I manage, fairly frequently, to carve out narrow swathes of my time to sit with big, immovable geological features at sunset.

Winter and the Bridges of Konigsberg

I love Portland. I love it in more ways that I have time to detail for you right now (I'm on my lunch break), but I'm not sure that I can settle down here because the winters just kill me. My whole soul feels damp and deflated when the sun doesn't come out for days on end, and I am not generally a damp and deflated sort of gal. To wit: This summer? Illness of a loved one, parents' divorce, other crazy family shit, and the usual business of earning a living and trying to be a good human. And I was fine. I was great. Now? I realize I'll have to rip out my sideways scarf because I miscalucalated the row length, and suddenly I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

So. Given that, I have to be, I require myself to be, deeply grateful when the sun does show its face, which it's done now two days in a row and maybe three days this week. It gives me the push I need to try something new, like printmaking. Thus I give you my very first Eye Candy Friday:

This is my backyard, folks. How lucky am I?

I'm pretty happy for my first attempt.

As for my knitting life, it was by no means safe from the giant hole that winter dug. First there was the dog incident. I came home one day a couple of weeks ago, to find this:



...along with Sebastian, the lovable but not terribly bright greyhound, greeting me cheerfully as though nothing had happened, and Maya, the lab/shepherd that could probably get into Harvard looking at me with that "I swear I tried to stop him, Mom" look of equal parts sheepishness and disdain.

Sigh. Swear a bit. Thank Sebastian for not attacking the the actual knitted portion, as he and I would still not be on speaking terms if he had. Sigh again, and put the whole mess away for awhile.

Then one morning I woke up with the words "Bridges of Konigsberg" on my lips. This is a little nugget of elementary graph theory that you can go read about if you like, but the relevant bit is that it saved me from being totally overwhelmed by the task of untangling my yarn. Let me demonstrate:



The yarn has only two ends, one of which is obviously in the shawl itself, and the other is somewhere in these tangled islands. Starting from the shawl end, the yarn first travels through the big clump at the lower right, and since there's only one strand between them, it never returns to the shawl. From there it travels to the pie-shaped clump to the left and the big messy one up top. But because there are 2 (an even number) of strands between these bottom two piles, I know the yarn returns to the first clump again and never goes back to the "pie". That other trip, you will notice, is marked with a "5". There were an odd number of strands between those two piles and no other two, so the free end had to be in that largest pile. Who knew discrete math would come in so handy?

(Um, I shouldn't imply that finding the free end ended world hunger or anything. I still got horribly frustrated and ended up handing it to The Lady who very patiently undid the whole thing -- which pretty well illustrates one of the key differences between us. I'll analyze something to death before I actually dig in and do it, and she's happy to work things out with her hands.)

So, very long story short, I'm finally working on the leaf lace shawl again and fully expect to finish it this weekend.

And then there was the Print o' the Wave stole that had to be started over, the super secret project that's languishing untouched, and the scarf that was supposed to be a mindless distraction from lace and ended up eating up two full evenings and much of my presence of mind... but then I did some yoga and ate some fruit and the sun came out. Just you wait and see what I have for you on Monday.