Hot Ducks and Sparkly Seahorses

I have been having quite the busy weekend! My parents and my cousins are in town so we've been jetting around visiting some local shops and street fairs. Here are some of the things we've seen:

Some really hot ducks at Old Mystik Village, the poor lady on the right was panting!

Here's an example of one of the cutesy little shops in the village.

Cutesy shops sell cutesy things, like these kissing manatee salt-and-pepper shakers that came home with me!

Henna tattoos happened, oh yeah.

After the glittery gel stuff flaked off... apparently it will be there for a few days!

Then we went to a local park for OpSail, where all sorts of tall ships come into port and commemorate the War of 1812. That's a big coast guard ship near the horizon.

This is some sort of hovering boat that landed on the beach to bring the sailors to shore from their ships.

Glittery seahorse tattoo done by my future niece! This has not yet washed off, either...

My adorable little cousins, sporting their own henna tattoos and face paint done by my future sister-in-law.

And best of all, I taught Olivia how to spin a little bit!

Tidbits

Here's a random collection of things I've come across in the last week or so that I love:

1) This might be the single most precious knitted thing I've seen in a long time:

Photo from needled.

How flippin' adorable is that? A sheepy carousel tea cozy! I don't even brew my tea in a pot like that, yet I still want to make one! Those colorwork braids are really fun to knit, by the way.And apparently the kit for this project is on sale at Kate Davies' new popup shop.


2) A little girl spindling:

If she can do it, so can you! (You being Katy, and Bridgit, and any other person I've been trying to convince to spin lately).

3) There's an excellent post on swatching by Jane Richmond over at her blog. The way she swatches for knitting in the round is something I honestly never thought of before! Basically, you cast your swatch stitches on to a circular needle or single DPN, knit across, and then instead of joining in the round, you just loop the working yarn across the back of the swatch and begin knitting again from the beginning stitch! This emulates knitting in the round because you are always knitting on the right side, without wasting time swatching stitches on the other side of the fabric that won't be in your gauge measurement. So simple, so brilliant!

4)

Yes, this is still funny.

5)  If you're interested in  The Knitter's Curiosity Cabinet that I spoke about earlier, you can enter to win a copy of it by leaving a comment over at Knitspot, Anne Hanson's blog. She also shows some more photos of the book itself.

That's all I've got for now! Have a lovely Friday, everyone. :)

Work-In-Progress Wednesday #2

Happy 4th of July WIP Wednesday!

See everyone else's WIP Wednesdays here!

I'll keep this short-and-sweet because I've got a bar-b-q (or as Connecticans say, 'picnic') to go to!


Color Affection:

Sanguine Gryphon Bugga

This shawl is still progressing nicely, however it is getting increasingly more difficult to figure out interesting ways to photograph a lot of stripey fabric all bunched up on a needle! I think I'm about halfway through the short row section now.


Lillypad Socks:

Verdant Gryphon Bugga

I finally got around to fixing my frogged mess from last week and have made progress on the heel flap, yay! I love successful and productive knitting. Maybe I'll actually finish this sock sometime soon so I can get the pattern out to testers and get this design on the road!



Super Secret Swatch:

Malabrigo Yarns Chunky

The super secret swatch has turned into a super secret knitted mess. The stitch pattern wasn't... cooperating... with the circular needles and now my knitting is stuck! I can't get it off the circular! I've been trying for days. The stitch involves wrapping the yarn a few times around the needle which works fine on straights but then runs into serious issues when you move from the needle to cord of a circular: since the cord is so much thinner, there's basically no way to get the stitch back onto the other needle when it's time to knit it on the next round. Grrrrrr.


Olive Theory Socks:

BMFA Socks That Rock Heavyweight

New project! I started the third design in my series of socks inspired by How I Met Your Mother characters. This one is for Marshall. I'm not sure how I feel about the pooling. I love the colorway ("Harlotty", named for the Yarn Harlot!) but it's doing some crazy things on the cuff of this sock. I'm currently undecided if I should keep going as is or try to get the colorway to stripe by changing the stitch count or gauge.

How much does the colorway of the sample item for a design influence whether or not you purchase or want to knit it? Do you think color choice has a big effect? Also, how do you feel about pooling (or flashing, as it's sometimes called)? It seems to inspire very love/hate reactions. I don't mind it, and I think sometimes people can do some really neat things with pooling colorways.

Anyway, gotta run, but have a lovely holiday and/or just a lovely WIP Wednesday!

Botanical Style

Do you ever just look at a designer's collection of patterns and go, 'Wow! I really dig their style!'? I feel like I do all the time and it never fails to inspire me. Today a long-awaited package arrived in the mail from Hunter Hammersen over at Violently Domestic:

Full info about the book here.

(Sidenote: it was pretty hilarious to receive a rather nervous text from the Fiasco along the lines of "ummm... what's Violently Domestic??" when he picked up the mail. Mwahaha!)

The Knitter's Curiosity Cabinet is a beautiful self-published book of patterns available both digitally ($18.95) and in printed form ($26.95, includes the e-version as well). I recommend the printed form because it is a truly lovely book and there's nothing quite like flipping through page after page of gorgeous patterns. I also just adore the concept of this book, as well. Hunter provides a quick look at the history of curiosity cabinets and I enjoyed reading how she interpreted the botanical prints she used for inspiration into knitted garments. The book includes 20 patterns, 2 patterns (1 sock, 1 accessory) inspired by each floral print.

My top 3 favorite patterns from the book (all photos from their Ravelry pattern pages):

Rubus suberectus socks

Linaria bipartita socks

Chrysanthemum frutescens socks

Most of the patterns involve of lace and chart-reading, and the details are just so, so lovely. A look at Hunter's designer page on Ravelry will show you that she has a definite affinity for knitted accessories of many types, but especially socks. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that I adore nearly every single one of her sock designs. The crazy part? I HAVEN'T KNIT ANY OF THEM YET! I've just admired them from afar, purchased them like crazy, and have not yet knit a stitch. This must be remedied as soon as possible, right? I think my first project will actually be a hat, though, because I really like the stitch pattern and just ordered some CY Traveller yarn with my Afghans for Afghans donation gift certificate:

Chrysanthemum frutescens hat

Do you find you tend to love all or just some of a designer's patterns? What makes them stand out for you? Which ones are some of your favorites? Do you even have to knit them to be a huge fan?

Blog Fail

Oh gosh, what a busy weekend! On Saturday the Fiasco and I headed down to Long Island to visit my family. We spent the day driving and then swimming and hanging out by the pool, which was lovely. On Sunday, we went to Robert Moses State Park on Fire Island, the beach of my youth. I always tease the Fiasco because he thought the beaches here in Connecticut were "real". They are not "real". They are sandy little spits of land covering bedrock bordering Long Island Sound. They're pretty and they'll do, but they are small and calm and contained., like Hole-in-the-Wall Beach shown below.

Picture from here.

It is not very large and is bordered on each end by rocky headlands, it's a good example of a "pocket" beach. But the barrier beaches off the south shore of Long Island are huge, wild, and fierce.

Photo from here.

Dropped by the glaciers eons ago, they are miles and miles long, backed by sand dunes and surrounded by water. That photo doesn't fully convey the size of the beach, it's probably easily a few hundred times larger both length- and width-wise than any Connecticut beach. And if we're being honest, sizes matters. You need that huge expanse of open land to really feel the awe of the ocean. And because it is a nationally protected seashore, there is no development on that part of the island. I didn't realize how special that was until I lived in places like Florida, Virginia Beach, and Connecticut where the entire coastline is developed. You'll have a lovely beach with a strip of giant hotels or apartment complexes just behind it, it's not right! Long Island is not a perfect place by a long shot, but it does do its beaches right.

Who doesn't love a little map action?

Anyhow, all that is to say that 1) I didn't take any pictures of my own this whole weekend (bad blogger!) and 2) I've hardly knit a thing in 3 days (bad knitter!). And what did I do with my evening instead of blogging or knitting? I played a role-playing game for the first time in my life. I am now officially as cool as all those pimply, lonely, 13-year-old dorks rolling dice in their parents' basement you see in stereotyping TV dramedys. Except I'm doing so with my Fiasco, my future brother-in-law, and a couple of their friends in their garage and we are thankfully at this late stage of life largely acne-free. I am playing the part of a Native American plant shaman and am having an unexpectedly good time with it. (For the curious, the game is Rifts.)

What's the dorkiest thing you've done today, or ever?