it's in the wee things

I have never been too particular about the design of my knitty notions. As long as they were practical and functional, I was happy. After seeing the contents of Adrian's knitting bag, I began to rethink this stance. If you sneak a peek inside my bag, most of the stuff in there is pretty utilitarian. I use Altoids tins to carry safety pins, markers, and plain ol' tape measures. I've also got a lot of scraps of yarn and ball bands and old raffle tickets and crap. Ahem.

You would figure that with all the cute Japanese fabrics I have, I would make myself some adorable little notions pouch or bag or whatnot. Well, I took some of that delightful fabric and asked the brilliantly talented Caro to do it instead because she is a total pro. And dude, she rocked it! The wee pouch and wee box bag she made me are fabulous:

But you all know, I am a huge fan of Caro's work. New to me, however, was karatstix. After seeing her adorable gauges in Adrians's photo, I immediately checked out her shop, which is the same thing everyone else who saw Adrian's photo must have done because her shop had been picked clean in a matter of hours. After checking out her past sales and seeing some gauges she had made with a teeny herding dog, I placed an order for a set of custom gauges with a wee Malachi herding sheep:

Dude, can I tell you how much I love these gauges and the matching stitch markers? They are so sweet! Karatstix is all sorts of awesome! So now I'm all set - my notions have been infused with some wee cuteness.

itching for the stitching

The last few nights, I've fallen back into my insomnia. I sleep about 4 hours total every night, finally conking out at 4 or 5 and waking up at 8:30 or so as Matt is leaving for work. While I'm weirdly awake in this nightly quasi zombie-like state, I can't knit or crochet or do anything productive. For the most part, I've been reading and watching a lot of documentaries on PBS. (I could tell you tons about bees and about the samba schools at Carnivale because those were the last two docs I watched. Yay.) I tried working on my hexes, and that was going well for a while - until I became distracted again. This time, the distraction was a welcome one, however. It was totally spur of the moment. Actually, it came to me while reading my bicycle manual because I am trying to figure out how to take it apart since I want to paint it. I've seen some awesome embroidered bikes on Flickr, so I was doubly inspired. There's actually another reason why it occurred to me to embroider a wee bicycle, but I'll get to that at in a week or two.

On the topic of embroidery, I have heard that some folks are interested in doing their own graffbroidery or emroideriti or whatnot, so Matt and I (or mainly Matt - ahem!) came up with a PDF to share with you all. Hope you have fun with it!

Crafty

ETA: For anyone who is interested in stitching a bicycle of their own, Carson Ellis has an awesome bicycle pattern available through Sublime Stitching that is fantabulous.

graffbroidery? or embroideriti?

Hey, remember this project? You know, that single, same piece of embroidery that I started last summer and totally forgot about until a few weeks ago? I finally finished it. Who knew that the way to finally finish a project was to actually pick it up and work on it? Who'd have thunk it? Amazing, no? I know, I know. It's a radical idea. Back to the graffbroidery or embroideriti, though, I think it was all the satin stitch that made my interest in this fade a bit. Next time, I'll stick to chain stitch & split stitch and fill 'er up with a ton of French knots in a progression of tones. I am envisioning this already. Anyhoo, now that I'm done with this piece, I kinda love it, despite the imperfect and time-sucking satin stitch (and I am so relieved - seriously, this should have only taken me a couple of days). I am actually looking forward to the next one because this vision I have - I have to make it happen now.

Matt and I are working on a couple of other collaborations, and soon - very soon - I will have something fun to share with you all.

summer-summer-summer-time

It finally feels like summer in New England, and I am loving it. Of course, lately, knitting has come to a complete stand-still around here, and there is buck-all crochet. All I want to do is work on the garden, bike around, read, and hang out with friends in our backyard. So there's been a lot of that and very little else. I'm feeling a little guilty on not working on a couple of projects for a couple of wonderful people I know, but dude, I just can't focus right now. I'll get back into the swing of that next week when we return from our trip.

*disclaimer - That's not my bike, but it matches the dahlias I brought in from the garden and I heart it so.

i know what bees like

When we first started gardening upon moving to Cambridge 3 years ago, Matt intentionally chose flowers for the front garden that would attract bees and butterflies, like beebalm and sunflowers. Since then, our little garden has grown; we've added a variety of other plants and flowers, including coneflowers and my accidental planting of some drumstick allium bulbs (thinking they were narcissus), which the bees seem to especially love, contributing to this bee-feast. There are dozens and dozens of bumble bees, honey bees, and all sorts of bees buzzing about doing their bee thang in this front garden. Seeing the crazy amounts of bee activity of the last couple of days, it has finally dawned on me - we have a bee garden. And this gives me a little bit o' joy.