I made some best of 2010 mosaics! Always fun to do…

First, these are most of my knit designs from 2010 – for most months, I only chose 1 of the 2 quick knits club designs, to keep it from getting too big, but all the non-quick knits designs are up there.  And a few extra bits, like the first time I designed using knitter’s graph paper, my first swatch ever that turned into the sideways edge cast-on technique, and then a shot from the sideways edge cast-on tutorial since that was a big deal for me in 2010, and a mystery knit-a-long shot!  I edited the flickr page to link to all the pattern pages, so click the mosaic to find any links you might want.  What a busy design year I had!

My second mosaic is of things I made besides knit designs – all different stuff, mostly craft projects, but also websites, a mix cd, a chocolate sculpture, some handspun, and of course my wedding dress!

And then a fun mosaic of stuff I did, fun times, etc… Some cool press kind of stuff, like being on a podcast and being in the Oregonian, and my trunk show, and other worky-ish stuff like the big photography job I did and Summit of Awesome (but that was way more fun than work!)… and lots of personal life stuff like our wedding and road trip, buying a house, and assorted fun times… and then some neat things I did for the first time in 2010, like gardening and drying herbs from my yard.  Fun year!  (descriptions of each square if you click over to the flickr page)

Side note: Doing this mosaic reminded me that it had been way too long since the last time I’d updated my links/press page, so I’ve gotten that all up-to-date now!  I don’t think I ever mentioned here that I did an interview on Cravings blog a little while back, which might be an interesting read if you want to see me talk about self-employment, recycled materials in crafting, and knit design stuff.  Also, I was mentioned on Stash & Burn podcast’s 100th episode, as an “accessory queen” so that was super duper awesome and exciting!

Lastly, I made a food mosaic just for fun!  (Well, all the mosaics were just for fun…)  These are things I made, and food we ate out that was special in some way, eaten on our honeymoon road trip mostly.  And strawberries that I grew (basil too)!  I just like food photos and I don’t really spend much time in the kitchen, but I’m always happy to eat yummy things that I do put some time into!

And hey check it out!  We’re still waiting on pro photos from our wedding photographer (Kim, seen below, who I know did a great job but is very busy…), but Pete’s parents got us some great shots!  Thank you so much, Pete’s parents! Yay!

So now you can finally see my dress… I like how it turned out enough, and I’m happy it functioned (aka didn’t fall down or rip badly or anything), but I do wish I was a more skilled/talented dress maker and could have made it more flattering… oh well…  There’s an under layer that’s a whole separate dress, made from recycled t-shirts, which is the blue you can see showing through.  That dress/layer is lined along the top with vintage lace, which is showing in some of the shots – I’ll totally be wearing it as a summer dress when it’s hot out!

And here’s how I wore my wedding shoes, laced up very differently from the ebook pattern photoshoot.  That’s vintage hand-dyed lace ribbon (bought at Knittn’ Kitten, where I found much of the lace used for the dress as well):

And I’ll leave you with this cute shot that I like a lot!

The last of my photo-a-day project for 2010!  I made it through the whole year (missed a few per month towards the end there, but still) and now I am so happy it’s over!  I love taking pictures (duh) but I don’t like that every day requirement… it resulted in lots of blah photos when I forgot to take one until nighttime and the lighting sucked, etc… but whatever, here’s December!

30th + 1st – Packed up for my Twisted trunk show, and set up the show on the 1st.  There’s part of my crowded table of goodies… After setting up the show, Pete and I celebrated with breakfast at Cadillac Cafe, which features my all time most favorite breakfast, eggs mazatlan!

2nd + 3rd – More trunk show stuff… got together a ton of stitch sets for Twisted, then my reception party was the 3rd, fun times!

4th + 5th – I brainstormed up this cabled box cover idea super last minute, knit up a prototype of the concept, and it worked pretty darn perfectly on that first try!  Rare occurrence!  And, a food shot, my favorite way to use up leftover pasta – scrambled up with veggies+eggs:

6th – Did my club photoshoot with this backdrop fabric setup, and Banzo saw her chance to pose:

7th + 8th – A Five Guys opened up super close to us, so exciting!  (Cheap grilled cheese with any toppings you want, like grilled mushrooms, peppers, and all the usual burger things you’d expect, plus great fries.)  And Pete took me out for gnocchi, yum!

9th – Wrapped the first of my xmas gifts to put under our tree!

11th + 13th – Missed a bunch of days of actual photo-a-day pictures, but I did pattern photoshoots on these days… Swerve, knit in some self-striping, and my cabled version of Betiko:

14th – And then Pete and I did the official Betiko photoshoot at Reed on this day – I love this campus so much, perfect for knitwear photoshooting!

15th – We put lights up outside our house!  LED lights, strung kind of messily across there… we have plans to try to do a better job with decorations next year, but it was fun having a house to decorate for the first time!

16th + 18th – More pattern photoshooting on these days spent finishing my Betiko pattern pdf… first, the backside of the striped example.  Then, I knit up a swatch with 2-row stripes to show some different things about striping for the pattern, so this can give you an idea of what a garter stitch edged Betiko would look like knit with 2 colors of bulky yarn striped (grellow!):

23rd + 27th – I crocheted up my first of 4 crocheted snowflake ornaments and hung it on our little tree!  I sort of followed this pattern, but it was actually my first time ever crocheting from a pattern (I’ve only ever improvised crochet, oh except for this project, which I need to finish someday) and I screwed it up a bit, but it turned out fine I think.  And, out of date order, I spun up some yarn just for fun while trying to give myself some vacationy time during the holidays, since I didn’t leave town or anything – this is a 2-ply from some “craft batts” (unknown fiber content) I got at a fiber festival a couple years ago:

24th – Christmas Eve dinner!  You may remember that we kind of missed Thanksgiving, due to some superlame food poisoning, so we made what Thanksgiving dinner would have been for xmas eve!  Stuffing with chopped apples and veggie sausage, mashed potatoes, and vegetarian gravy, yummmmm!

25th – Pete’s parents and uncle came into town on xmas day, so most of the day was spent at the airport, or driving to and from the airport (with breakfast at Kennedy School, yum!)… but then we all had a festive xmas dinner at Doug Fir and opened presents together – here’s Banzo participating in the gift admiration (and she enjoyed her own gift, from my parents, very much!) (and some gift highlights in flickr, just for fun):

26th + 29th – I decided to regift myself some handspun by frogging this oversized headband that I hadn’t worn in years, something I’d be planning on doing forever – Pete gave me the yarn for xmas 4 years ago and now it’s good as new to reknit into something fun!  I didn’t take a good photo on the 29th, but for some reason I snapped a photo of Pete’s new watch while we were hanging out at some point:

30th – We got a new piece of furniture for xmas!  A fold-out loveseat for our library – so now we have a comfy place to sit and read, plus a guest room!  We felt silly living in a 3 bedroom house with no guest room, so now our library serves that one more purpose (plus storage room, media room…).  Oh yeah, so this is the day it got delivered from Ikea and I built it all by myself!  (I was told to wait till Pete could help, but I like a challenge!)

31st –  And New Years Eve day!  We broke out this awesome Back to the Future card game Pete got me for xmas and taught ourselves how to play, then brought it with us to play it with friends for a super nerdy-fun celebratory night!  (We also ate fondue – both cheese and chocolate – ohmygosh way too yummy!)

Fun end to a great year!  That’s enough photos for one post, so I won’t do any kind of 2010 wrap-up or best-of, but you can see all the photo-a-day posts for the whole year… they started out happening every week or two, until the trip in October knocked everything off-schedule… Anyway, we bought a house and got hitched in 2010, so awesome year! Yeah!

How the heck are we almost halfway through December already?! Damn!  Well, I’m going to be blogging a bunch of super last-minute holiday gifty related stuff this week, which should have been blogged a month ago… Anyway…

I was really bad about photo-a-day pictures in November.  For a week I was fighting a cold, for a week I was down with extreme food poisoning (that would be the missing 23rd-27th), and more than half of these photos were not meant to be my photo-of-the-day, but just photos that I happened to shoot that day for other reasons… oh well.  Let’s get through these quickly, shall we?

1st + 2nd – Shot the tutorial for November’s club ebook; shot my newish solid color version of my Brimming with Color design, knit at the tighter gauge for a snug fit (have yet to update the pattern pdf or webpage to stick the new hat in there):

3rd + 4th – Awesome grilled quesadilla with bean dip, yum!  Hung the framed lyrics:

5th + 6th – Put in a good chunk of time working on our library, unpacked several boxes, put my cameras up, put up the book-shelves… Watched an old movie (Peeping Tom) while knitting (of course!), and happened to randomly pause it just when this knitting close-up happened!

7th + 8th – Photographed the painted lace for the stenciled frames tutorial.  Started feeling a cold coming on… cold-fighting dinner: plain pasta with olive oil and parmesan, hot apple cider with whiskey:

9th – Made breakfast pasta with the leftover penne – this is a “recipe” I plan to blog soon:

10th + 11th – Did a photoshoot with Pete at Ikea for my new grey Skoodlet, with an extra huge hood!  Still working on updating the pattern pdf to include this version, but the print pattern includes it… Photographed for my mystery knit-a-long:

12th – Gave Pete my cold (luckily only for a day) so he stayed home from work – Banzo helped him to feel better by snuggling up on him, very unlike her:

14th + 17th – Spent days laying out, editing, and partially rewriting patterns into the print booklets – some of the old ones (like the Mr. Pointy hats pictured) were very updated (not the actual pattern itself, just the style of everything), and I’m now working on updating all the old downloadable pdfs as well…. Went thrifting with Pete and Star – scored this bag of cotton for a couple dollars, not bad:

20th + 21st – Got my pattern proofs and spent hours going through them and making edits… Knitting on a big swatch for the mystery pattern:

28th – Knitting cables cables cables yum!  In Blackstone Tweed Chunky yarn, double yum!

22nd + 29th – Photographed my finished+blocked mystery item (rav project page), which everyone will get to see at the end of this week! Yay!  And lastly, preparing all my knits for my trunk show:

So that was my November – busy and went by WAY too quickly!  What a crazy time of year this is!!

Slowly catching up on photos-of-the-day… I waited for the wedding, in hopes of linking to more wedding photos, but I still haven’t gotten them from our photographer (oh I know from experience how long editing photos can take!) so I’ll post about my dress and stuff once I get those… for now, let’s get through October’s photos…

10th – Wedding day!  Here’s a shot I took of the table we sat at, with my bouquet, champagne, and some of those frames:

11th + 12th – These 2 days after the wedding were spent at Disneyland!  The first day with my brothers Matt and Ben, and the second day with both of our parents.  We had so much dorky Disneyland fun!  (Some other fun photos: we had leftover wedding pie and sparkling cider for breakfast, there was a fun crafty window display on Main Street, the Haunted Mansion was all Tim-Burton-ified for Halloween inside and out, the teacups are always fun to take pictures on at night, as was the Submarine – the new Finding Nemo parts didn’t come out in photos like the old stuff did).

13th – This was the day that was spent half in doctors’ offices, and half on the road to Flagstaff, mostly in the dark (so we didn’t get to see that part of Arizona, bummer).  Dinner was at Denny’s in Needles, California, just before the Arizona border, where I asked if they had something vegetarian that I could substitute for sausage, and the server told me she was pretty sure the chicken sausage was vegetarian.  My skillet (with no meat sub) was pretty darn good though (can’t go wrong with potatoes!):

14th – The sight-seeing begins!  The first real day of our road trip was Flagstaff (where we ate breakfast at Cracker Barrel and did a little thrifting and yarn shopping), up to the Grand Canyon, then as far as we could get on the way to Utah, with ended up being Page, Arizona.  The Grand Canyon was pretty darn majestic!  See lots more photos I took in my flickr set, starting on the bottom of this page, through page 9 in the set.

15th – This day we headed up through southern Utah to Bryce Canyon – even more majestic than the Grand Canyon!  Then we took all of highway 12, stopping in Boulder for lunch (and some reading), and drove late into the night till we made it to Salt Lake City.  Highway 12 had the craziest (most terrifying) bits of road we’ve ever experienced – it was hard to get good photos from the road (especially the parts when my hands were shaking with fear!), but I took some video too, which I’ll go through and upload at some point.  Bryce Canyon was the most photogenic part, for sure!  (More shots on flickr here and here.)

16th – Spent the day in SLC, which was a weird city… Checked out Gilgal Sculpture Garden, Blazing Needles yarn shop, thrift stores, In-n-Out for lunch, downtown, and had dinner and a beer in Trolley Square:

17th – Then we headed to Boise, swinging through Pocatello (where Pete’s mom is from) for an awesome lunch and a little thrifting on the way.  We happened upon a fantastic dinner in downtown Boise at Flatbread – yummy pizza, fondue appetizer, and delicious local beer!

18th – We spent the day in Boise, which we liked a lot!  Great record store, nice little downtown, good coffeeshop for hanging out to pass some time, and amazing fries!  Yay for Idaho potatoes:

19th – After stopping in Nampa to check out Puffy Mondaes (yes! awesome!) we drove through Oregon to Bend for the last night of our trip, spent at the McMenamins there.

20th – Last trip day; we ate the most incredible breakfast of our lives at Chow in Bend, then headed up home to Portland.  It was a good trip!

21st + 22nd – Now that the trip’s over, the rest can be quicker… First day back was pretty resty; I washed a bunch of the clothes we thrifted, like my favorite robe ever!  The next day, I decided to cut my bangs:

23rd – Did the photoshoot for Tritops, which was extremely backlit, making my camera not want to autofocus, making me very very frustrated:

24th – Tried making veggie burgers from Nature’s Burger mix (which we found in bulk form at Winco) – added some chopped up mushrooms to the mix, and wee bit of chopped up spinach.  Turned out pretty good, but I don’t know if they’re worth all the extra effort…

28th + 29th – Finally finished up knitting this yarn into an Elizabeth Zimmerman Snail Hat, which still needs to be blocked.  (It’s a quick hat to knit, but since it was a project just for fun, for myself, it took me like years to get done!)  Also got lots of knitting done that day on a new Skoodlet sample!  Then I did the photoshoot for the newly redone Haka hat pattern (now available through Knit Picks!)… here’s an outtake:

31st – And lastly, Halloween!  We put our costumes together super last minute because of the trip… we decided to be kind of exaggerated versions of ourselves in high school… and once we got everything figured out, I realized we were kind of exactly ourselves in 1997 – Pete being his playing a show with his metal band self, and me being my 15 year old Orange County teen in the mid-90’s self.  Don’t we look like we were destined to end up together?  Here’s me in 1998 for real, and, an extra bonus shot of my costume a little closer up (yes, that’s a wig, couldn’t find a good blonde one):

If you follow me on twitter, you know that I’m recovering from some really brutal food poisoning… so this post that was supposed to go up at the beginning of the week got delayed (and then pushed back another day due to a server problem that just got fixed), and everything on my to-do list (including other blog posts) is getting pushed. Sigh. Well, the Mystery Knit-a-Long is running along smoothly, and I think everyone is having a lot of fun with it, so that’s awesome! Happy Thanksgiving weekend, and hopefully I’ll be back here in blog world soon!

Yeah, I’m pretty behind on photo-of-the-day posts, so I’ll start catching up now – from where I left off, 2 weeks before we left on our trip, up until the day before the wedding.  I still have hundreds of trip photos to sort through and edit, but I’m mostly caught up through the Grand Canyon – you can see all the trip photos in my wedding trip set on flickr here.  Barely any shots of the actual wedding, since I’m waiting on those from my photographer; they should be arriving next week, and I’m super duper excited about them!  So, starting way back in September…

22nd + 23rd – We celebrated our buddy Grant’s birthday at OMSI After Dark, fun!  I finished the last of my Tritop sample hats, the tri-petals version:

27th – I had to go to the Apple Store downtown to pick up my laptop, so I walked over to a Thai food cart, grabbed some (super spicy!) noodles, and ate it in the park, overlooking the river and bridges!  A perfect Portland lunch!!

26th + 28th – Enjoyed a buffet brunch at Sweet Tomatoes (aka Souplantation) with Star and Grant – not 100% yum, but I do love buffets!  Got started on my spray painted frames massive wedding project, painting the textured frames:

29th + October 1st – Day 2 of frames project, this time painting the plain frames with lace as stencils (quicky tutorial coming soon!), and then sorting them all out by photo size:

2nd – Final day of framed lyrics project – sorting the printed song lyrics into the appropriate frames, matching up size and colors… the whole project was pretty complex and took a lot of time away from all the other stuff I had to/wanted to get done before the trip (both wedding-related and work-related, like blog posts for example), but I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out, so I’m glad I went with it!

4th – Finished the under layer of my wedding dress – it’s just a strapless t-shirt dress, made with the intention that I could wear it in the future, not just with my wedding dress over it.  My first time making a circle skirt – love it, so twirly!  (Better photos in the future once I take some.)  Also, I went through all my camera stuff to pick out what to take on the trip, and found my old fisheye attachment that I’d forgotten about – fun!

3rd + 5th – Finished my wedding shoes and photographed them for the club ebook; later, I figured out a way of lacing them up that I liked better, which is how I wore them at the wedding, so you’ll see that once I get my wedding photos up.  Finished packing to leave at 6am the next morning!

and now the trip begins (links are mostly to other photos taken along the trip)…

6th + 7th –  The first day we drove from Portland just about all the way to LA, staying in Grapevine that night.  This (below) is a photo of the outside of the top floor of the rad shop where I bought yarn in Red Bluff, HeartFelt Designs.

The next day, we had an exciting time in LA… we went to buy tickets to see Sarah Silverman for $5 at UCB, and walked by a mob of about 15 paparazzi photogs stalking the exit of the bookstore next door.  We waited around to see who they were waiting for – couldn’t even tell who it was at the time, but later found out it was the girl from Veronica Mars (love!) and Mean Girls (also love!) and Big Love and other current things that I guess have made her more famous lately… and you can see us in the background of the celeb gossip site shots!  Weird!

The UCB show was super fun (miss that place!) – Sarah Silverman was opening up for Howard Kremer and the main spotlight comic, Chelsea Peretti, and they were both hilarious!  So many laughs!  Anyway, then we went out with my brothers Matt and Ben afterwards, and ended up at a sports bar in Hollywood called Big Wangs… how? I don’t know. It just happened.  Their mascot is a body building chicken. wtf.  Oh yeah, but we did have a really good dinner with Ben earlier that night – mushroom taquitos at Cafe 101, yum!  The photo is Newcastle out of a Bud Light plastic pitcher at the sports bar:

8th – The next day we spent many hours in LA Friday traffic, driving from our hotel in the valley (because we didn’t make a reservation ahead of time and all hotels close in were full) to Silverlake, then to Corona to meet up with Pete’s parents and Aunt Bobbie for dinner and game playing.  We played an epic game of Zombie Fluxx which lasted about 2 hours – not a good intro to Fluxx for people who’d never played it before, oops!

9th – My old buddy Abe took us to a hip spot in downtown LA – Nickel Diner – for brunch, which included this homemade pop tart! Yum!  We also squeezed in a late lunch trip to Wahoo’s, which we miss so much – blackened mushroom tacos = ohmygosh so yum!!  Then we spent the rest of the day with my family at my parents’ house, where I worked on my dress (which didn’t get finished until the morning of the wedding) and my parents and Pete helped finish making flowers, and then some of Pete’s family came over for a pre-wedding pizza party meet and greet time.  No photos of that, but it was fun!

So that takes you up to the night before the wedding… next photo-of-the-day post will be the wedding and honeymoon trip, with lots of links to more photos!  (Spaced out with some crafty content in between!)

Well, my camera is still in the repair shop (it’s been gone for 4 whole weeks now!) and now my computer is being repaired as well (slightly major laptop accident, oops, but the apple store is awesome and getting Apple Care was the best computer decision I ever made!) – hopefully I’ll have it back in a few days, and for now I’m able to use Pete’s computer, but yeah I’m having a weird technology time at the moment…. anyway… photos that I got edited and uploaded before bringing computer in a couple days ago…

1st + 2nd – Spent the day shooting products for PenFelt, which I love, especially these badges, so cute!  Then the next day editing product photos for Trillium all day long – so many great products!

3rd + 5th – More editing, and also a chunk of time spent writing a guest blog post for an awesome blog (which will go up in October), then I got to start my Game Knit Buttonhead hat for the knit-a-long!  Yay!

4th – Designed for the September club today; brainstormed up the circular needles hanger the night before when I couldn’t sleep, sketched it out in the morning, and worked it up that day:

8th + 9th – Wedding paperwork, fun!  Then I spent the whole day working on a design submission that you can’t see, but I was really happy with how my sketch turned out, hehe…

10th – Tiki karaoke bar party time!

12th – Turned in PenFelt photo job and was tipped with my choice of a badge and ring!  Super awesometastic to the max!!!!

13th + 14th – Used a couple of delicious garden cherry tomatoes in my baked eggplant leftovers lunch, with mushrooms and plenty of mozzarella, yum!  Worked on my final hat from my set of new pattern hats, to be released sooooon!

16th + 17th – Picked these 3 tomatoes today – a yumtastic little cherry tomato, the first ripe full size Early Girl, and then that unripe guy fell off!  Oh well, the weather has been so terrible lately, I fear all the rest are going to die before ripening anyway, so sad… And then some better food action – breakfast with Pete at Jam, one of our top favorite bfast spots ever! Yes!

18th + 19th – Make-a-long!!  First, a shot of my dress progress… that beginning of the top turned into this (so much pleating work, but worth it!) which is still very much in progress… and then I was starting to sew on this vintage lace during the last hours of the make-a-long, around 4-6am, so it definitely counts as the next day even though there was no sleep in between!

20th + 21st – Sliced up the only cucumber that grew into a healthy little edible and didn’t shrivel up and die by the time it reached 1 inch… however, I feared for the ongoing health of this one so much that I picked it at about 2.5 inches!  But, it washed up great, sliced up into a ton of tasty wee slices (no more than an inch across), and I was able to spread them out into lunch, on toast with cream cheese, and several slices into a big pitcher of water.  Cucumber water is my new favorite cold drink!!  Next day, Pete and I had engagement photos taken by our buddies Vivian and Alex – I took no photos throughout the day, since millions of photos were being taken of us, but here’s a computer shot later of me wearing makeup – weird!

Thanks for your patience with me during this last month of crazy busy-ness and technological failure… I can’t wait to have my poor camera back and start taking some decent photos-of-the-day again!  Our wedding trip is coming up super soon (time flies so freaking fast, damn!) so I probably won’t be blogging any tutorials or fun stuff like that for awhile, but you can expect some knitting pattern releases soon, as well as the October club, of course!  And then, after our trip, I’m sure there will be many fun photos to share, stories to tell, and crafty awesomeness to catch up on!

I know I’ve been busy, but I had no idea it had been so long since my last photo-of-the-day post!  Oops!  So, I’m splitting them up a bit – here’s through the end of August for now…

10th + 13th – Making the last physical quick knits club – spun up It’s a Game recycled yarn, and designed the any-gauge version of the pocket case:

12th – Used my clothing line for the first time to dry some sweaters and things – the previous owners even left that full clothespins bag behind, ready to go!

15th + 16th – Stopped by Happy Knits‘ sale and picked up this Austermann Natura (merino, bamboo, cotton, alpaca, mohair blend!) and swatched a bit for an idea I had, successfully!  Knit up just about the whole brim for one of my hats in the set I’ll be releasing soon, at my neighborhood knit night, which is great!  And worked on the hat set pattern all day:

17th – Tested out my custom knit game pieces by playing some pop culture trivial pursuit with Pete!  Fun!

18th + 19th – Spent some quality time at Ikea picking out a new unit for our dining room area (with the gift card my parents gave us, yay!!) – at 104 pounds, it was quite a job to get it into the house and built, but it works fabulously!  The next day, I cleaned up the house a bunch, and we ate dinner actually at the table (which is usually being used as a craft table or photoshoot location) – you can see the new furniture piece in the background there:

20th – Started making stuff for the next day’s housewarming party – made an elaborate, delicious pasta salad (pretty much this recipe, with a few changes), which involved so much chopping (peppers, green onions, pickles, celery, fresh garden basil and rosemary…) with my dull old knives that my hand was super sore by the end!  Totally worth it though!

21st – Housewarming party time!  It went super well, lots of fun, great potluck food, and this photo is during an intensely passionate group sing-a-long to Total Eclipse, thanks to our ps3 karaoke game, yay!

22nd – Elif brought us a gorgeous bouquet of flowers from the farmer’s market, which I had lots of fun photographing the next morning!  And they smelled so good!

23rd – The weather was perfect, and I got this picnic table from Village Merchants a few days before the party, so I did a couple hours of work outside – sketching/planning a new design, knitting on a hat, while listening to music on my little portable speakers, good stuff!

24th + 25th – Got sucked into staying up all night getting Pete’s new website set up, reviews posted, photos added, etc – once I got started, I couldn’t stop!  Also started work on another hat that day… The next night is when I picked up my camera to shoot my photo-of-the-day and got that dreaded error message.  Stayed up for hours going through forums and the instruction manual, concluding that it wasn’t something I could fix (confirmed the next day at the repair shop) – shot this computer photo booth shot of the poor camera and my knitting from earlier that day:

27th – Made these yummmtastic roasted potatoes with fresh garden rosemary!  Gosh, I love potatoes…

28th – Borrowed Alex‘s camera today (check out her gorgeous carded batts, by the way!) and shot allll day for freelance job – had fun using all this different food as props for shooting handmade glass plates, bowls, etc:

29th + 31st – Did little but shoot all day for the next four days while I had the camera – didn’t take photos-of-the-day these days, but here are a couple of the products I shot.  Love ex libris anonymous‘s Dr. Seuss journals!  Roped our trivia buddy into modeling this Flipside hat for me, since I needed a guy model and it didn’t fit Pete’s big head, hah!

30th – And I modeled all the women’s hats myself – here is one of my favorite blooper reel shots:

I’ll catch up to the present later this week… several dates are missing, due to my still being repaired camera, but I’ve been getting point+shoot pictures most days.  And, mark your calendars, this Saturday will be the 2nd official leethal make-a-long!  Post about that coming soon, I promise!

Quite a hectic couple of weeks, as usual – I missed a few days in here, oops…  These days were filled with lots of knitting and pattern making (for Swerve) and also teaching stenciling at the libraries (fun!) but these are the things I took pictures of…..

22nd – Pete’s birthday!  He worked all day, then I took him out for a bday dessert and gave him a few gifts – this Ryan Berkley goat illustration (in a thrifted frame), plus a couple of rad sweaters (shawl collar cardigan and cashmere pullover) to add to his collection.

23rd + 24th – Some house/yard work these days – slowly getting my new studio in order (I know, we’ve been living here over 3 months now, but there’s not enough time in life for everything that needs to be done!  Oh time, I shake my fist at you!) and major yard work – mowing, weed pulling, etc… Too much all at once, and maneuvering our corded electric mower with my right hand while holding the cord in my left, made for an injured hand for a few days.  Not good for knitting!  Learned my lesson there!

25th – I made dinner based on this Chickenless Parmesan “recipe”, with some fresh garden basil!  It was damn good!  That blog – Cooking With My Kid – is my new favorite food site!  We aim to make food that’s easy and tasty, and as healthy as possible while fitting the first two criteria, which is the aim of these kid-friendly recipes, perfect!  Plus, the writer’s husband is vegetarian, so there are tons of no-meat ideas, yay!  (Found the site through Craft blog’s mention of this Bite Sized Greek Salad – love it!)

26th –  Pruned down the basil plant today and stuck the flowers in a shot glass for a mini-bouquet for my desk!  Plus, it made my studio smell like fresh basil for the day! Yum!

27th – Tried to go sell stuff at Last Thursday on Alberta for the first time… didn’t work out so well, long story (only important part, in case you’re thinking about selling there: you have to get there around 1ish, which no one had told me before), but I did get to do some quality people-watching.  And, highlight, I swapped a shirt for these amazing video game earrings by the supernice K8bit!  Love them so much!!

30th – Discovered some of my plants aren’t doing so well – the only flower on the pepper plant had died and fell off when I touched it, as did these two little future-cucumbers.  Since then, 1 or 2 more baby cucumbers have done the same… don’t know what’s wrong, fear I won’t get any cukes or peppers this year, so sad…

21st + 1st – Set up my backdrop system in my studio and did a ton of photo-shooting these days – for the Swerve pattern (did you notice my knit-tastic backdrop?!) and testing for a freelance job I got doing all of Trillium‘s product photography for the online shops!  So exciting!  Here are a silly shot from testing out the light and stuff while first getting set up, and a reject shot (there are oh so many reject shots – this is while modeling a Flipside Hat) of test shooting, uncropped so you can see my super high-tech system:

2nd + 3rd – Worked a bunch on my Sideways Edge Cast-On post, scanning swatches and stuff… these are not even all of the swatches.  I know I always take photos at the Waffle Window almost every time we go, but they are just so photogenic!  Look at that foody beauty!

4th – Taught a class this day, and before and after I worked so hard to get my Sideways Edge Cast-On post up – I’d meant for it to go up the same day that I released Swerve (2 days earlier), or the next morning, but it just took so long!  I did end up editing a few typos after it went live, but at least I got it up that evening!

6th – Some more studio building got done today between workyness – including setting up my yarn-holding coffee can cubbies!  Yay!!  Also, lots of record-listening, yay again, for vinyl in my studio!

Hope your August is going well so far!

Photo time!  Within this chunk of my life, my parents came to visit for 3.5 days and we had all kinds of fun times (like food, yardwork, driving around, house-stuff shopping, more food, farkle, beer, trivia, and some more food), and it was also my frantic club planning, building, sorting, etc time of the month… let’s go!

9th – Spent the day doing some cleaning and unpacking, and finally crushed these dried herbs into jars!  I let them dry for longer than I was supposed to, because I didn’t have jars to put them into, so hopefully they’re ok, probably not the best though.  The whole process was a lot of work for that tiny amount of dried herbs, so I might be using them fresh from the garden most of the time instead of doing this…

10th + 11th – I forgot to take a photo on the 10th, the day my parents came into town, so I snapped this shot the next morning of some of the boxes they brought with them – since we have a house with lots of storage space now, they loaded up the car with these plus several more boxes and bags full of all kinds of stuff from my childhood, artwork all through high school and college, etc… When I have time to go through it all, it’s gonna be so much fun!  Their first full day here, we all headed up Mt. Hood to the Timberline Lodge – we met a dog in the parking lot who was awesome and named Bruno, then we saw this painting in the lodge! Ok, not the exact same dog, but it looks just like him…

12th – The next day of their visit was pretty nuts – I had to teach a class in the middle of it, Pete had to work all day, so I had breakfast and a little pdx exploring with them in the morning, then we went our separate ways and they headed up to the zoo.  By the time we all reconvened in the evening, we were all super tired from long days, and we tried playing Taboo for awhile… our brains were all so wiped out that we all were terrible at the game, it was pretty funny.  Anyway, also, see those rings on the table?  My dad gave me those, which belonged to his parents – family story is that the bigger (non-gold) one was made by my grandpa during the war, from a nickel!

13th – The next morning was Waffle Window for breakfast!  One of my favorites, for sure, and now it’s my mom’s number one favorite breakfast spot in the world!

14th + 15th – While they were here, we took a trip to my local nursery (which is HUGE, by the way!) and I got some new plants for the garden, to try out during my learning time – the more experience I pack in this summer, the more I’ll know how to have an awesome veggie garden next year!  I got a pickling cucumber plant, a California Wonder pepper plant, carrot seeds, and an African Blue Basil plant!  So when I was reheating some leftover pizza, I grabbed some of the basil, and some oregano too, from the yard and threw that on there – oh my gosh best leftover pizza ever!  And, these days started my club-making, lots of unraveling!  (the color in this yarn photo is super inaccurate)

16th – I was having some trouble making my club plans fall into place, so I took a brainstorming walk, browsed craft supplies at Jo-Ann, and headed to Lents park, where I wandered and brainstormed and found this table in the shade to sit down with my sketchbook.  Perfect plan, totally worked!  Sorted out all my issues and got the elements all planned out on paper!

17th + 18th – Taught a class in the morning, did some birthday shopping for Pete on Mississippi (after lunch at the carts), and headed to Scrap and Knittn’ Kitten for some club-related supplies (like recycled mailing envelopes).  Of course, I got much more than club stuff!  Oh Scrap, I can never leave without a huge box full of goodies!  Also stopped at Twisted for this skein of yellow bulky Lanaloft – love!!  The next day, after working hard on club patterns all day, we got to hang with birthday girl Elif and Vivian for some birthday drinks and pizza…

19th – Club package sorting this month included these gorgeous vintage 50’s chevron beads, found at Knittn’ Kitten – I wanted to buy all of them, in all different colors, but I limited myself to these three bags.  Enough for all club members, plus plenty left over for me to play with!  I already made 2 orange ones into a pair of earrings a couple nights ago…

20th + 21st – These two days were Pete’s days off, before his birthday, when he had to work, so we treated these days as his “birthday weekend” and did all kinds of fun stuff, like breakfast at Genie’s, watching a weird zombie movie, him playing video games while I taught a class…. He decided he wanted to have an Angel “party” – this was modeled after a Buffy “party” we had back in October, which meant we bought an assortment of junk food which could vaguely relate to the Buffy-verse (like garlic toast and monster candy, since it was Halloween season this was easy to find).  So we found what we could – Devil Squares, parmesan+garlic Cheese Its, Twizzlers (blood colored), and I drank red wine (like blood) with a bunch of orange juice mixed in – instant sangria!  It was a fun Angel party!  Oh I know we’re supernerds, I know.

Oh then the next day was a little more of a real party – we ate pizza and homemade pesto crazy bread and played games with our buddies Star and Grant, fun times!  We tried out Huggermugger – holy crap that game is tough!  Star and Grant are not just word lovers, but crossword puzzle makers(!) so they did much better than Pete and I did, and before playing this I thought we were both pretty good with words too!  It was fun though, just made me feel dumb, hah… oh yeah and I drank Busch Light, that was silly…

Well that was a wordy post!  These photo-a-day posts are kind of like a diary for me – a glimpse into my life if you want to bother reading it all, but you can also just skim over the photos and leave it at that.  Coming soon… interested in a garden post? You’ll probably be getting one!  And, oh my gosh it’s taking me what feels like years to get this mitts pattern finished, but that’s my next top priority, so you’ll soon(ish) be seeing not just a new pattern, but a new technique!!  Soon, I promise!

I let these pile up for awhile again, but I missed a few days because of sickness (nothing interesting to shoot those day anyway… they may have been shots of cough drops or noodle soup…).  Let’s go!

22nd – A couple nights before this, Pete and I did karaoke out and had so much fun, so we broke out our ps3 karaoke game we’ve had forever but rarely play, and we totally rocked out in our living room! It was superfun!

23rd + 24th – We hung out with Star and went thrifting and to trivia at Zach’s, where Zach was excited to tell me about the Corona on special that I could get instead of my usual PBR.  I hadn’t had Corona since college in San Diego, so I got one for old time’s sake… and felt very silly about it… Anyway, then the next day I forgot to take a photo, but I did take a photo booth shot of this top I got at Goodwill the day before – love it!

25th –  It was a certain little foofhead‘s birthday today!  Our 2-year-old kitten:

26th + 28th – These were sick days, during which I had the energy to make cold brewed coffee for the how-to I did, and not too much else, like take photos-of-the-days…

1st – Enough energy to knit on this hat, and I even remembered to photograph it:

30th + 2nd –  A couple of food shots… sick food (plain wheat pasta with olive oil) on the 30th, then by the 2nd I was feeling better enough to make a yummy wrap for lunch:

3rd + 4th – Tired of sitting on the couch, I worked on the library a bunch!  Yes, we still have a ton of unpacking to do, after having moved in over 2 months ago (we’re busy people!) so I unpacked all the CDs and rearranged things so that the library started looking more like a real room and less like a big storage closet.  On the 4th, we hung out with our buddies in St. Johns and saw some faraway fireworks from the bridge.  This photo actually makes the fireworks look much closer than they were (but it was fun!):

5th –  Spent most of the day working on my mitts design – after gathering all the feedback from my testers, I decided to make some kind of big changes, so I now have to re-test pretty heavily myself.  I’m really happy with how the pattern is turning out, but I probably won’t be able to complete it till after my July club goes out, which means an end-of-July release… man, this pattern is taking forever (I started this design in March)…

6th + 7th –  More knitting and design work, along with lots of Netflix Instant watching… Then a weekend day with Pete – we had lots of fun times out thrifting and eating and game playing, and in the middle of the day we did a wee bit of housework and Pete pruned the crap out of our hydrangea in the front yard!  I wish I’d taken photos of it before, though it was looking a bit weird – I think due to the weather lately, it’s been blooming all uneven, so lots of the flowers are still green, and many of them are already wilting.  We know nothing about plants, so maybe this is normal and we’re supposed to be pruning often.  Anyway, it was taking over our ramp to the front door and our driveway and everything, so Pete cut it all back out of the way, and put some of these flowers in a vase on the table… within 5 minutes Banzo was trying to eat them, so I snapped some photos and we threw them all out, so sad…

8th –  I did a ton of back yard work – mowed and pulled weeds mostly, but the yard still needs lots more work to look decent… in the 90-something degree heat, I discovered that when the doug fir tree is shading part of the yard, it’s a drastic difference in temperature and totally nice to be outside under the shade, so I ate lunch out in the yard for the first time!

I also got the little air conditioner up and running yesterday – so nice!  I’ve never lived in a place with any kind of AC, such a treat!  Between that and our multiple ceiling fans and movable fans, this summer will be so much more bearable than last!

My parents are coming into town tomorrow to hang out for a few days, so it’ll be a bit vacationy for me, fun times!  Sure to be lots of delicious Portland food involved, yay!  Happy weekend to you!

Ok so yeah I’ve disappeared for a little while – holy crap dudes, the Summit of Awesome was so much more awesome than I could have imagined!  It officially ended on Friday, but there were related events happening all through the weekend, so I’m still recovering from all the awesome.  I’ll definitely be posting a way-too-huge post about the Summit sometime this week, but I wanted to catch up on photos-of-the-day first since I’m so behind… so starting with 2 weeks ago…

8th – This day was filled with recycled club yarn unraveling, then wet hot american trivia at night, always a great time!

7th + 9th – I made an egg creation based on this idea for lunch, but I didn’t do a good job of putting together ingredients I had on hand and it ended up looking much better than it tasted… oh well, I learned from my mistakes.  I did a photo shoot for Pete of all the clothes he’s been finding at thrift stores lately, including all these fantastic ties:

10th + 11th – Club yarn-making and designing days – tons of spinning, and I used my thrifted Ashford niddy noddy for the first time ($1 still in the original packaging!)… This month’s club featured the smallest gauge thing I’ve ever designed – lace-weight-ish yarn on size US 2 needles!  (I know that’s nothing for all you sock knitters, but I’m a size 7’s and up kind of knitter!)

12th + 13th – Shooting the back of my own head (without my tripod+remote set-up) is damn tricky – this photo is one of many outtakes.  Club skeining, sorting, packaging, etc….

14th – I forgot to take an official photo of the day this day, which was filled with last-minute club packaging and pdf-building, trips to the post office and Twisted, and the beginning of Summit teaching work, but I did take this computer shot of some very important Summit prep!  My hair was getting so boring, it’s about time!

15th + 16th – Because the club stuff took me longer than expected, my Summit class prep ended up happening all on the day before the conference started – luckily, I’d been thinking about it for a month or two so I was able to get everything onto paper in a day… Then Wednesday was the first day of the Summit – I attended two learning sessions, including getting press for your business with Kari Chapin:

17th – The second day of the Summit I decided to just make stuff allll day!  So, I chose workshops for every session (instead of the learning sessions, which would have been far too responsible), starting with encaustic painting with Bridget Benton – ohmygod it was so much fun!!

18th – This was my teaching day… first, I taught how to photograph your work with your camera, then I made a cup glove with Becky Striepe to relax my brain for a bit, then I taught publishing your own patterns, which went really well!  The whole day was filled with lots of caffeine, so when it was all over and I was hanging out with a bunch of awesome people afterward, I shot my coffee:

19th + 20th – Then during the weekend days after the Summit, with people in town and the Show of Awesome happening, we kept the awesome going – on Saturday I got to hang out all over town with Kim, Diane, Teresa, Kari, and Susan (see photos on Diane’s blog)… at the amazing Twilight Rummage Sale I got some fabulous finds, but unfortunately my camera battery died, so I just took a phone picture (see the stuff shot by Diane here).  Inflatable Party Insects!  On Sunday, I went to Kari’s book signing at Powell’s, caught up on some errands, got in a wee bit of rest and house-cleaning, and then Pete and I were taken out by our loan guy to celebrate our house!  Pete never drinks, but we talked him into some fruity umbrella-adorned drinks and he got nice and silly!  And I did karaoke in public for the first time ever (Stay) – it was SO MUCH FUN!  I didn’t have my camera with me at the karaoke bar, sadly, but I snapped a shot of Pete when we got home and he flopped over on the couch:

21st – It pretty much took this entire day to recover from all the awesome… I had plans to work on my in-progress knit design all day and do other super-productive things, but no, that just didn’t happen.  My brain didn’t really let me do anything but check emails and twitter and flickr and ravelry for many hours, then I forced myself to do dishes and brainstormed a bit about my website redesign, and I got a sudden motivation to make a new site header and a vision of an idea, so I dove in and started it!  I twitpic’d a screenshot of the in-progress header today – the text and photos will be different for each different section of leethal.net… what do you think?

This week is sure to be spent catching up on everything… that pattern I was hoping to release as soon as possible will be no sooner than next week, and same with my site update, but I’m super excited about both of them!

Time has been flying by lately – I can’t believe Summit of Awesome is in just over a week already!  And my club mail-out day being a week from today means that a couple projects I hoped to release this week are not going to be finished until the week after next now, due to all this hecticness and time-speediness… oh well, keeping busy is a good thing!

27th – On this day, I taught a class, but took no photos, and whatever else I did (I think dinner at Ya Hala and a movie at the Academy) also went by photoless, so I snapped a shot of Pete’s new studio space since he spent the bulk of the day moving his stuff over (Banzo was very interested):

28th + 29th – Spent many hours swatching swatching swatching for a knit project, plus a little sketching and brainstorming… then I did the yarn wrapped branches project the next day:

30th + June 1st – Some serious coding on my future new leemeredith.com home page, which I’d hoped to get up sooner, but it’s probably going to be a couple weeks now, since I want to finish my other leethal.net updates to release all at the same time… anyway, this page is done now, and I’m pretty happy with it, clean, simple, functional…

2nd + 4th – Some food shots for you… Pete took a work trip to Seattle for a couple days, so I decided to make something for myself that I could never make for him – he doesn’t eat fish and I do (though not often) so I tried out this recipe for a gourmet-ish version of tuna noodle casserole.  I subbed a bunch of ingredients for less gourmet versions that I had in the kitchen (like Trader Joe’s frozen organic veggie mix instead of the fresh veggies, and basic TJ’s tuna in water instead of “high-quality imported tuna packed in oil”) but it was still totally good and lasted me 3 big meals, so that was awesome.  I’m trying to get into making super yummy salads throughout the summer – such a great summer meal, and so many possibilities, even though I usually end up making the same salad over and over (garbanzo beans and kidney beans, maybe chopped up tomato)… So I made us spinach salads with cold baked honey sesame tofu, shredded Tillamook colby jack cheese, mushrooms+sunflower seeds for me, and dried cranberries for Pete.  The tofu made it SO GOOD!

3rd – Designing mitts!  The design is done now, and I’ll be sending out the test pattern to some test knitters in a few hours (if you want to test knit fingerless mitts, let me know!)  They use a new kind of sideways cuff construction that I don’t think has been done before (not publicly so people know about it at least) – no picking up stitches!  And they are designed for Knit Picks City Tweed yarn (which is great!) because they are going to be my first entry into KP’s Independent Designer Program (which I am a huge fan of and fully support, as it’s a somewhat controversial program)… My camera battery died this day, so this shot was taken by my computer with Photo Booth:

5th – Took advantage of a few hours of gorgeous weather by walking to Fred Meyer for some groceries.  By cutting through our local cemetery, I can avoid walking down 82nd (which is a horrible major street) for a few blocks – much more pleasant!  (Took the photo with my phone):

6th – Yesterday was a super crafty day!  Spent a few hours knitting at a coffee shop with my buddy Kate, then decoupaged a lamp shade with Pete!  It turned out SO cool!  Deserving of its own blog post in the future, I think:

Now today I’m making club yarn and hopefully finishing up another home decor project to show you tomorrow! Yay!

Photo time!  The last week and a half was filled with a little gardening, a ton of awful weather, some good food, and some knit designing!  Sadly, I forgot to take a photo on the 16th, so starting with last Monday…

17th + 18th – I harvested a bunch of herbs that were ready, and some that were past ready, like this flowering thyme… The ones that looked good – sage, oregano, rosemary, a little thyme, and I think tarragon but I’m not sure – I hung to dry in the closet, hopefully they’ll turn out usable in another week or two!  The next day I did a little gardening work too, before the weather turned… I got a few starters (basil, rosemary, and an early girl tomato) to try out and hopefully not kill, exciting!  I’m so happy these rain boots I’ve had for years but never wear make perfect yard boots:

19th + 20th –  I made a milkshake based on the kind I used to make a lot when I was a kid – blend some milk, some vanilla ice cream, a cup of flavored yogurt of your choice (I used Tillamook orange cream, when I was a kid I would usually use peach), and 1 banana.  I also squeezed in some honey as it was blending, turned out yummy!  Built our new Ikea couch, which makes an L shape with our older couch – they discontinued the old model, so we had to find something coordinating, but I think it worked out well!  Also put together that hanging glass light, scored at Value Village for $3, yeah!

21st + 22nd – The weather was really getting to me these days… I know in Portland it rains through the Spring till June, but I don’t remember the last couple years being so freaking cold and dark still at the end of May!  The first shot was a long exposure taken late at night, with a weirdly color balanced pink sky going on:

23rd – Tested out freezer paper stenciling with fabric paint (I usually use screen printing ink) – worked surprisingly super well!  This is what I’m going to be using in all the free teen classes I’m teaching at Portland libraries throughout the summer, fun!

24th + 26th – A couple of food shots for you… asiago cheese toast with fresh sweet basil from the yard, and then last night I made an awesome dinner, delicious and super easy, too!  Wild mushroom & herb couscous with some TJ’s organic frozen veggies added along with the spice packet at the beginning, then while it was cooking I grilled sliced up fake italian sausage on the George Foreman grill, chopped it into smaller pieces, and fluffed it in with the couscous! So so so yummy!

25th – I’ve been designing a bunch!  Working on two or more projects simultaneously, focusing on one this day, another the next… not really the best way to do it, but with so much time off from designing through all the moving business, my brain keeps jumping all over the place and I need more knitting time!  Yay, so glad to be back into design-land again!

Oh that reminds me of another thing I’ve been doing the last couple of days – remember code-land?  Well, I’d been planning a couple of website updates for awhile, and then I decided I wanted my main navigation to have drop-down menus, which turned out to be super complex (for me, anyway) so I spent a big chunk of time yesterday deep in css code-land trying to get it to work… but it’s looking good and now my little shop update is turning into a bunch of new site stuff!  Fun!

Wow this week is flying by!  This post was meant to go up on Sunday when I started it, and now it’s Wednesday night, how did that happen?!  A combination of club mail-out day, yard work obsession, and the last 2 days off with Pete spent house-stuff shopping to the point of exhaustion at Home Depot (lawn mower!), Ikea (couch!), Target (ice cube tray! ok, that one’s not exciting…), and four different thrift stores throughout Beaverton and Tigard…. time flies when you’re trying to work full time and work on your new house full time, at the same time.  So here’s the blur of last week…

9th + 10th – Club work both days – lots of yarn unraveling, dyeing, spinning; then after flipping through home decor project books for theme inspiration, I spent the day trying to figure out my extra club goodies, which turned into doing some silly projects to test out ideas.  One of those silly projects was this super crazy hanging light, made from one leg of a pair of dollar store girls’ tights and 2 wire hangers, plus some red glass marble things to weigh it down at the bottom… it was pretty much a fail… it was inspired by this one from The Big Ass Book of Home Decor, but using crappy materials makes the concept not work out so well:

11th + 12th – Last week Pete and I spent much of our free time thrifting (which we’ve been doing a ridiculous amount of since the move!) – I actually forgot to take a photo on the 11th, so both of these were shot on the 12th, but those glass plates were purchased throughout both days, and are destined for something awesome!  The blanket was a pretty sweet Bins find – crocheted, thick, sure to be warm in the winter, and looks great draped over our black chair:

13th – Library day!  I walked around the corner to our super local branch and lugged 2 bags home:

14th + 15th – More on this later, but I’ll tell you at least that this switch plate is May club related!  Spent quite a bit of time in the yard on Saturday – used our new weed wacker on the overgrown craziness, taking breaks to rest my arms by picking up pine cones for when we start mowing… it would be fun for awhile, treating it like an easter egg hunt, counting the cones and spotting tips buried deep in the grass… until I was in the 100’s and wasn’t anywhere close to done.  I picked up 145 that day and I’d guess it was about a quarter (maybe a third) of the total number.  I love that we have a Doug Fir in our back yard, but damn those cones!

Ok hopefully I’ll be getting back to you in the next day or two with some crafty fun!  And I’ll probably start bothering you with gardening posts soon enough!