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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

I been spotlighted at whiplash, it makes me feel all fluttery! And kinds of lousy for not having extended a better welcome to readers-future-friends in the entry itself, and for not having updated the blog in a while.

For my own records, there was an entry in Mama Urchin’s blog linking to me here too - I’m using this psot to keep track, as I am likely to lose the link otherwise. How would that be bad? you ask, and let me tell you: I know it wouldn’t matter, not to a normal person who sanely has integrated the fact that life is all about moving *onwards* - but I am neurotically afraid of losing and forgetting the past, and accordingly to the neurosis I collect; links, lint, everything.

Another link, this time both for me and you, because I find the project all sorts of fascinating: brown dress, ‘a year-long performance project’ in which the artist made herself a little brown dress and swore to wear it every single day of an entire year. Very inspiring, and well worth a look! She posts a journal there with her reflections about the ongoing project, and of course pictures of the dress in situ(s).

Since the previous post I knitted and beaded a second necklace, this one with the grey yarn, and then a third one from the pale green, which I have not photographed yet.

Yesterday I went shopping for cabled beading thread to reinforced all necklaces with, and for closure mechanisms. Since I also started weaving the grey yarn in a strip to see if I can make a woven chocker, I ended up bringing back home a series of little crocheted flowers to embellish that project. Even though I felt utterly reasonable, like I’d proved how damned restrained I can be (I didn’t allow myself to even look in the direction the shelves full of beads!), I still spent about 75 Euros all told..

But this is because I succumbed to

A. wonderful smooth 100% bamboo yarn, expensive but so hard to find around here - I bought it in grey and deep green to try and knit an elegant, summer, slytherin-y scarf (possibly suitable for a man if I manage; I’m not sure sure that the pattern I came up with will be unisex, but I hope).. I kinda told myself I would sell the resulting accessory if it’s nice enough, to alleviate the spending guilt; and

B. two large table cloths / light bedspread type 100% cotton garments, which I simply HAD to buy as there are a few garments Mom bought recently for her summer of which I badly want to try and rip the pattern. I got them for 50% OFF, they were both cheaper than their equivalent, on-the-roll, by-the-yard type fabric would have been, so I refuse to feel guilt over them. They’re different patterns and differet colors, and I’m now looking at the stripey, candy-colored one wondering if it would be the right lining for a bag based on a tablemat that I’ve been pondering lately.

The downer of the shopping excursion: I seem to have completely lost the turcmeric-dyed fraction of felted rope that I also intended to make a necklace out of. Maybe I forgot in the bead shop?

I even had posted the pictures of it as a WiP in the Fickr pool and now, I might ever have the rest of the process to show. Sadness.

I’ve also been watching a lot of football… I’m enjoying the World Cup. I shall now go back to doing just that, while knitting this bamboo-Slytherin experiment!

Speaking of art and craft and manufactured handmade series of things (yes, we were speaking of those, in my own head anyways)…. Because I am nothing if not easily amused by ‘meta’ stuff, or, um, era-commentary, let’s say, I bought something today: one of these.

The 842, to be precise. See, I am broke, so I had to pick a high number to spend less on it — check the formula and you’ll see what I mean. This one seemed more appealing than most possibilities though, because it’s all 2s. 2×2x2-2×2-2, is what it is. I like that in a number.

Unrelatedly, I picked up from where I had stashed it a happenstance, unfinished project based on yarn, and finished it!

I’d started making a large swatch in seed stitch with this thick (8mm needles) pure acrylic yarn I bought, the day I bought it. Which was some time last year, but please spare me; I am slow.

When I had taken the needle and slid it away from the knitting to start unraveling what was, after all, only a warm-up tryout knit, I’d noticed how the knitting curved to form a perfect hemisphere, and how gorgeous the knitted seed stitch band looked.

The texture and stitch definition was just… eye-catching. I decided then and there that I should try to make it a necklace, a neck-plate-ish thing like I’ve seen in museums except you know, in yarn and not in bronze.

I did think, though, that it would require something more than what I had so far, beads to weight it down and give it a more refined shape perhaps, something to put it more firmly in a ‘jewelry’ category instead of ‘wearable, supple accessory stuff’.

Don’t ask me where that line is and why it seemed important to me at the time; I doubt that’s a permanent state of affairs.

Anyway, today I realized I had the right beads for the job, and I finished it. I blurred Mom and her interior fleece-y robe here, because I know she’ll be unhappy with me otherwise. I already had to push to have her let me take the picture.

I have more of that yarn in that great blue - that I already knitted a fun pointy not-quite-beret with - some in grey, and some in a pale green I like very much. It’s pure acrylic, but it has the feel of a felted wool of some kind; I think the thread itself, so thick and round that you can weave it in other ways (I plan to, as well), is actually a knitted icord of very fine thread, felted chemically, or something like that. Anyway, it has a very interesting texture, I feel there is more to explore with it (and someday I will find and post the label / brand / numbers etc, perhaps).

Edited on June 16: I put a somewhat better, later picture of the necklace up on Flickr here. I think it does a better job of showing the detail, despite being perhaps too heavy on the contrast. It’s the same picture inserted in the next entry of the blog, too.