Cafetière gitane

I was already coveting Habu paper yarn and others, but now with these examples I’m positively lustful!

A Dutch designer called Greetje van Tiem makes yarn from old newspaper; Italian artist Ivano Vitali is already all over that.
I love how the comments from the dezeen.com post are teeming with people who want to buy some, to make some, and who’re already trying to reproduce the result. Enthusiasm is fun.

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We’re being very, very quiet here for the passing of 2007. It’s just Mom and my brother and me. We had quite the domestic day. In the morning we did all the shopping for groceries in the next village over and joked with the butcher. In the afternoon, I put on a stew for tomorrow, then dyed some recycled sweater wool in food coloring dye, then prepared the upside down apple pie for the evening meal.

I have enjoyed quiet New Year’s Eves several years running — big parties in the streets are not my type, I have a deep phobia of the sudden popping noises of firecrackers — but this one might take the cake with its exceptional calm.

We were done eating our wonderful roast duck meal at about 9.30, and an hour later the pie had been gleefully consumed, too. Mom dozed in front of the TV while me and my brother puttered each at our laptop for a while.. It’s now just gone over into 2008 and Mom’s in bed already!

I might follow soon; I got up after a mere 5 hours of sleep last night. I only wanted to post this recipe I improvised for my stew, because I think tomorrow it’ll be the yummiest start of the year, along with the New Year Concert of Vienna.

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Wah, I am still really bad at updating this, uh. Let’s do it in reverse chronological order, shall we?

In culinary news, yesterday I tried this recipe for experimental dark chocolate chip / bacon cookies.

I messed up and put the bacon bits and chocolate chips in the dough at the same time as the flour.. So the whole thing ended up less bit-heavy that it should have been: the chocolate and bacon got chopped fine fine fine by the food processor. Still, an interesting experiment, and I will know better next time! I like the result a lot. It was also my first time ever making sugar icing, which is easier than pie! Yay for icing.

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One (picture-less) FO! A day to remember, then.

Yesterday I dragged my brother back to Le Comptoir, and bought a second skein of yarn for the odd shoulderette object. The lighter blue I’d picked was all sold, so I settled for a darker, petrol blue. Yes, my FO is made out of two - no, actually, 3 - different colors. I did wonder how silly it would look, and I thought perhaps I would even frog and knit it back up while striping all the while… Since the ridged design even naturally lends itself to that.. But I decided against. This was to keep me warm now that winter-y temperatures are there, and I needed/wanted it sooner rather than later.

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I can be extremely short-spanned some days (also, language-mangling, if you notice). For example, the title of my post yesterday had to do with that I’d meant to write about my Endpaper Mitts project (ravelry link) - but I completely lost sight of that as I wrote out the rest.

What I wanted to say yesterday: I have frogged what I had so far, as it was but the swatch for the project. The plan is to cast on again tonight (as soon as I post this, actually), and perhaps manage to knit the whole ribbed cuff of the first mitt in the time it takes to watch Bones. That is rather optimistic, but you never know.

As for the lack of picture of yesterday, I remembered that I have the yarn, if not the FO, to show.
This is the wool I used for this weird non-capelet thing I made, which my brother has taken to calling my Persian armor. I still intend to lengthen it so it falls past my shoulder, which would modify the look of it and hence the visual connotations, I think (not that they bother me) - but I’ll need to buy more yarn for that.

No pictures this time, I’ve missed the right daylight window to snap up the new yarn I bought in Nantes. I was away for a weekend of professional networking, which I am unused to, and it made me feel strangely afloat and vulnerable. Obviously the way to regain my footing and manage some semblance of control over my surroundings was to buy yarn! And needles - I needed big circs for some of the more bulky threads I’d bought recently, and I managed to acquire both 6mm and 7mm circulars. Too short, yet useful anyway.

I used them already, knitting a sort of shoulderette thing from the blue 100% wool I bought at Le Comptoir in October. It’s inspired from the Noro Hat from Saartje de Bruijn (Ravelry link). I knitted two of those last year, one in Kureyon #165 for me and one in Iro for Mom, and I love the effect of the horizontal faux-rib so much, I used it for this shruglet-noname blue experiment. It stope right after covering my shoulders so far, and I think I’ll go back to the shop for a second skein and lengthen it some.

I might even manage to take a picture of it, too! I’m wearing it right now, it’s nice and warm.

Let’s ignore the previous, sad half-life of this here limping blog and start anew with vim and vigor! I got my ravelry invite a few days back - a week, two weeks? - and I borrowed my brother’s camera to take snapshots of what yarny things fill my life at the moment; in short, I am hopeful I might be able to stick to blogging about crafty topics this time.

I recently knit an Edgar for the one I call sister-friend, whose birthday I was late celebrating.
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I left this place dry out and collect dust, and there’s just no excuse for that, but! I need to mention that, behind the scenes, I’ve spent my summer creating a proper studio I can craft in, sorting out my supplies, and thinking stuff up. Since then - September - I also went back to school to learn literary translation and started a creative sort of part-time job… in short, time is sorely lacking these days.

Nevertheless, without blogging about it I’ve continued to knit. I’m saying this here so it forces me to go dig up the pictures and post about the stuff I made.

For now, suffice it to say that I am waiting on pins and needles to know if I get included in this meathead knitalong, and that I’m stroking a few hanks of Kureyon while pondering what I’ll knit for Norovember. I finally finally got my hands on some of it in October, and it is such glorious wool, I totally understand now why so many others rave about it. I’ve become a raver too. These colors!

Posting pictures soon. I promise.

put-together book for sale - picture uploaded by hillarylang

Today’s been filled with administrative struggle - battling it out with rude civil servants, which I do not like to rag on normally, has taken its toll on my mood.

But when the mail arrived and I got Hilary’s wonderful booklet in my hands, I couldn’t not smile! It came to me so fast.

The same pile of mail contained a letter from the French customs asking me to provide a proof of purchase for my 842 painting that they hold ‘in custody’.

Printing the paypal receipt and sending it on is just a tiny annoyance in the grand scheme of things. Right? Right.

I uploaded some of the works in progress on Flickr and had to stop because I have reached my upload-limit for the month. Gotta be careful about that til I can afford the pro account, and not rush to upload the fullsize originals when I can do with resized…

Anyway, for those interested, the woven choker experiment-in-progress and the last of the 3 knitted necklaces, as well as a badly lit picture of the bambbo scarf, are up over there.