AWOL

First of all, thank you for the nice comments about the City Shawl! They were very sweet and encouraging. I took the finished product home to show my relatives over the holiday and they have put their "orders" in... so. much. knitting. to do. Hehe

So. Not dead, just swamped... I have two sizeable project presentations Wednesday, three papers due tomorrow, and one ginormous chemistry problem set to put a dent in before the weekend. And I got a new job! It's in a lab on campus that studies bird calls, so I get to go in and feed the birdies and play with them. Ok , so they don't really like to be played with. They're not bad though. I'm all official with my key to the building and my swipey card. It's a neat job because as an undergrad anthro major we had to take linguistic anthro and learn about how animals perceive/teach/learn their languages. In a way my education is coming full circle and I'm learning to apply it to research. The idea is that I can work my way up a hopefully get to help out with experiments after a while. It's pretty easy right now and the people in the lab are all my age and very nice.

Should be lotsa craftiness to post later in the week (Thurs/Fri). I knocked out some flannel pants for Dan and then went on a shopping spree while we went back home to visit. And I have a wreath on the door that I made. So pictures and details later! Hope everybody had a great holiday. :)

City Shawl

Friday afternoon I downloaded Glampyre's new City Shawl pattern. It got cranked out in two TV-filled evenings flat. No problems with the pattern whatsoever. I was running out of yarn at the end so it only has 104 rows instead of 108, but no big deal. I won't miss 4 rows and neither will the person who gets it for Xmas. It's knit in super bulky 500 yds per lb acrylic chenille from the LYS here in Bloomington (this was in my stash from last year when I wanted to make Vintage Velvets for everybody's Xmas gift, but then the first semester of grad school decided to kick my ass). Think there's some green, blue and purple left also... might make a couple more if there's time over break. Anyhow, here's my ham posing with what he thinks is his swanky new blanky.

Ruffles!

Sonya, you are amazing! Fabulous! Stupendous, even :)
I made Dan tumble out of the car to check the mail after school tonight and he comes back with a nice package.... for me! Mwahahaha. So after whimpering about wanting to open it the whole time we're putting away groceries, I finally rip that puppy open and inside is a BEAUTIFUL blue noodle. It even brought a friend along from its trip -- a lovely journal.
Here's how it looks on:
Thankyou, Sonya! I can't even begin to tell you how perfect it is. So stretchy and bouncy and BLUE!!!! :) It's gonna be worn a whole lot and very very loved.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In other news today, here is another picture of silly Ben. He decided he needed to lick the bowl while I was throwing dinner in the oven. Tell me that's not the most guilty little face ever...

Please excuse the ginormous box of Tampax in the background (hey, it was grocery night!).

World's Cutest Lou-zer

This is a test. I repeat, this is a test. hehe Just checking to see if CJ catches herself making her blogosphere debut...

Here is CJ with her beloved red Honda sporting its brand new Louisiana license plate. CJ and I went to high school together and have been stuck with each other ever since. She recently moved down to Lou-z-ana to put her degree to good use as a lab mistress at LSU. Can't wait to see you and Jon around the holidays!

What became of Ariane's thread...

I like people who are nice enough to send me cool stuff to see that it's being appreciated and put to good use, so this is for Ariane :)


And here are some closeups of my sad free-motion quilting (some of it looks artsy and playful, some of it not so much... but hey, I tried!) :


So that's all I have to show for myself. The back side doesn't look as nice as I would have liked, but it's not so bad. Now to finish all of my projects so I can crank out a couple more of these as presents. Assuming somebody in my family doesn't mind having one forced on them, that is ;)

Photorama!

So, first off......Vintage Velvet is finished! View the official celebratory post at SYNO.


Here are the gutted pumpkins:
Dan's is on the left, mine are the other two. We have one pumpkin left for Turkey Day festivities. The other remaining one has been sitting outside for a month and it's a wee bit, um... smushy. They're on dishes so they aren't actually touching the wood and won't get hot enough on the bottom to burn the place down (cuz we all know renter's insurance isn't THAT good). Gut scraping goes very fast when your mother-in-law gives you huge-ass metal measuring spoons for Christmas. It seriously only took a minute or two to get all the guts out with the 1 cup scoop. It also helped a bunch to make the sides thin enough to cut through easily.
Oh, and yes, we do have X-mas lights stapled to our porch for decoration ;)

Guess who?My brother (Elvis) and his girlfriend Melanie (the angel) and me hiding at the bottom. And Jason (I call him Red) insisited on getting an action shot of Elvis in the fog machine, so here they are choking on the fumes:Poor Meli is gagging! Can't really see Red's Elvis sneer through all the fog, either.
We didn't take any pictures of Ben sitting in front of the machine huffing the fog because we were afraid of being cited for animal cruelty or something silly like that... Ben sure didn't care though, cuz he sat in front of it for over 2 hours watching smoke puff out.

I have oodles more pictures, but I think that's enough for now. More later!

V V Update

This is for Gina again:

Vintage Velvet is going to be bound off tonight, blocked tomorrow, and sent out on Friday :) I'm sorry that I'm late with your beautiful scarf, but some goodies that are going to make the journey with it in hopes that you'll let me slide this once <...insert hopeful angelic little face here...>. Just wanted to give you an update so you don't think that I'm pirating your nice yarn over here.

So no more posting until this is finished, but I have lots of pictures to put up when V V is done.