Vacation Indulgence, Part II

The part you all came to see, I'm sure!

We didn't have time to do any yarn shopping in New Orleans while we were there, but I stopped at Knits by Nana in Baton Rouge. I think I talked about that one in the last post, but here's what I got, aside from the yarn which became my honeymoon socks:

Dream in Color Smooshy with Cashmere in Raspberry Blaze

String Theory Caper Sock in Peacock – I actually got two skeins of Caper Sock, intending to make His and Hers Honeymoon Socks.  I had them wind the other skein for me so I could start knitting.  Except, I packed in such a rush and a panic, that I really didn’t come well equipped for anything.  I had no sock needles!  I browsed the needles at the shop, but I could only come up with some bamboo Hiyahiyas.  I don’t normally like wood needles but they were pointier than the Addi’s, so I took them.  I was shocked at how much I liked using them!  They were sharp enough and it was nice not to have the clink of metal all the time.  I also didn’t have the ladder stitches I’d been getting badly with my Chiaogoo sock needles.  I may be a convert.

Anyway, I was an idiot and left the bag of yarn in the rental car, so the rental company had to mail it back to the house.  So I only got my honeymoon socks knit, and not his.  Oops.

 

I also got a special package delivered at my wedding venue a few days before the main event, and this is what was in it:

A pin made especially for me by Romi herself! I was so touched - I wore it on my shoulder any time I had Madrona on during the reception. I appreciated so much that Romi took the time to think of me, especially when her own life was in turmoil!

Once we got to Anchorage, I wanted to go to The Quilted Raven since I missed it on our last trip, but we once again weren't there during their normal business hours. However, one of the helpful knitters in the Alaska Knitters group told me that if I went to Cabin Fever next door, they would open up the Quilted Raven just for me. I was a little hesitant but with some encouragement from my new hubby (isn't he sweet?) we went to Cabin Fever and I am SO glad we did! Even if they hadn't opened QR for us (and they did), Cabin Fever would have been worth the trip by itself. They had all sorts of stuff, almost all made in Alaska by local artists. It was all I could do not to buy out the whole shop. I would have beggared myself buying Christmas presents for everybody I know. We did get a hand-painted ornament that will be a great memento of the trip:

 

And I got this Sea Otter rubber stamp as well! Major score for a crafting junkie like me.

I got a few other things that I can’t post, even though the people I bought them for don’t, as far as I know, read the blog. I’ll play it safe anyway.  Once I was finished shopping, they opened The Quilted Raven for me. They had really, really beautiful stuff there, Alaska-unique quilting fabrics and Alaska-dyed yarn. I got one little star of fabric as a cute souvenir for a friend who quilts:

And of course I got yarn:

A Tree Hugger’s Wife Soft Sock (80 wool 10 cashmere 10 nylon, my favorite blend) in Ostrich Fern

Rabbit Ridge Designs Sock Yarn, a surprisingly soft 75 wool 25 nylon blend in Chocolat

Super Indulgent Arctic Qiviut Sock Yarn, 35 quiviut, 40 merino, 15 bamboo, 10 nylon, colorway Rosehip.

And probably my silliest purchase of the entire trip, Qiviut Earrings.

Shut up, they’re adorable and I couldn’t help myself.

Once we got to Homer, there was Community Knits.  This shop is just so funny, and even better, they had a shop dog I got to pet.

I picked up some spinning fiber there.

Northern Lights

And Rainbow Soft

We also got some art at a couple of local galleries.

I haven’t decided where to put the swan yet but the otters are destined for our guest room.

So that was all the loot – but what knitting did I get done during all that free time?

Well, I knit myself a pair of honeymoon socks.

Two new muses were released from Romi’s 7 Small Shawls: Year Two ebook that I didn’t have a chance to even start on before I left, so I started Polyhymnia’s Triangle a couple of days before we left. 

Once again, I have to marvel at Romi’s cleverness.  There are a few different ways to knit a triangle shawl.  Knitting from the center back outward, so that the edge of your knitting forms the top edge of the triangle while the two other sides of the triangle are on the needles, puts your pattern on the bias and means you are knitting some very long rows by the end.  Knitting from the top edge down and decreasing as you go gives you a vertical pattern.  When using the first method, you can incorporate an edging onto your knitting.  If you want an edging using the second method, you normally have to finish knitting, cast off, and then pick up stitches along the two triangle edges in order to do your edging.

In this shawl, Romi used short rows to get the vertical pattern you would end up with in a shawl knit down from the top edge, while eliminating the need for you to pick up stitches in order to add the edging.  Once you finish the short rows, you knit back across all of your stitches and voila – you are ready to knit the edging.

The center triangle (the light blue section in the pictures below) went very quickly.  Once I had knit across all the short rows and had all my stitches “active” again (where the two color section begins), it was a bit slower going, but by then it was time to go home, so I had pleeeenty of knitting time.  When we got in the car to drive back from Homer to Anchorage, I had done this much.

Here’s where I was when we got to Anchorage (it’s about a 4 hour drive):

Here’s where I was after the flight from Anchorage to Seattle:

At that point, I had to fortify my tensioning fingers, which were getting a bit chafed.

This is where I was after the flight from Seattle to Dallas, and I had to stop after that. My muscles were warn out and my brain was fuzz. Our flight out of Anchorage left at 5 p.m., you see, so by the time we got to Dallas, we had been flying pretty much all night! I finished a few days after we got home.

Unblocked, but still lovely. Now that it's done, I've gone back to working on my poor neglected Pulelehua. I just didn't have enough time or energy to finish before we left, so it's my next priority. I also have a Caliz that's nearly finished. Then I have another muse, Calliope's Odyssey, and the April Pins and Lace club shawl on my to-do list.

Phew!  I have more stuff to show off, but this post is already long enough, so I’ll save some for the next one!

Thank You, Thank You

Today is a non-knitting day! Quel surprise! I actually had half a post written about the loot I picked up in Alaska, which I will post tomorrow because it's on my other computer and I don't want to rewrite it (it never comes out as well when you have an enforced do-over). But, this weekend I took up my ink pads and paper cutters, which have been much neglected since I learned to knit. I'm hoping to get a little bit back to my scrapbooking and other, non-knitting crafts thanks to the reorganization of my craft room, so this is a good start.
　
Of course weddings mean wedding presents, and I have gotten many generous gifts. This means the writing of many many thank you notes. But once you go craft it's hard to go back - especially when people know you are a crafter. I have a reputation to uphold, after all. And thus, I made the decision to drive myself absolutely crazy making my own thank you notes.
　
I absolutely wanted to do something simple and easy to assemble, not too time consuming. Originally, I thought to pick up a monogram stamper from JustRite, but they don't appear to be making their "Special Occasions" font anymore and I didn't care for any of the current fonts, so I ended up having to scrap that idea. Ultimately, even though I did spend some money at my local stamp store (LSS?) I mostly ended up using materials I already had.
　

　
In the interests of saving time and labor, I started out with precut, prescored plain white cards from Michaels that came with envelopes of the appropriate size. On the outside of the card, I used my Color Dusters, which are basically little coarse bristled brushes, with two Tsukineko Memento ink pads to do a color wash over a white card. I think the two colors I used were Grape Jelly and Perfectly Plum. It's an easy technique, you just dip the brush on the ink pad and swirl it over the paper, but it turned out much more work-intensive than I remembered. I'm not sure if there was a problem with my ink pads (which were brand new), my technique, or if it was because the colors I was using weren't all that dark or intense (although the Grape Jelly one was pretty dark). It's also possible that it's just been so long since I did one of these that I just didn't remember how long it took.
　
The Thank You stamp is from my existing stash, and I recruited CodeNinja (who had been told that since he did nothing at all on the invitations that he had to participate in the thank you cards) (this was not his fault, because I fake caligraphy better than he does, but still) to cut me some strips of paper on which I stamped four "Thank You"'s, and then he cut the squares from the strips once the stamps were on them. Once that was finished, he cut some dark purple squares for the matting.
　

　
Don't worry, he didn't have to use the scissors in the picture, I let him use my paper cutter.
　
I felt like the inside of the card needed something as well, so I took out some stamps from a wedding collection I had purchased from Stampin' Up many years ago, and put the scroll on the bottom of the inside of the card, and on the top I alternated between the wedding bells shown here and a pair of hearts in the same style. I stamped some of them in the darker Grape Jelly and some of them in the Plum.
　

　
Assembly was easy, as all I had to do was use my tombow adhesive to stick the Thank You to the matting and the matting to the card. Then I folded the card along the prescored line and used my bone folder to get a good clean crease.
　
I finished 25 cards yesterday, and I have enough "Thank You"s cut to get through another 50 or so. I may try to think of another option for the background besides the color wash because it was kind of tedius, but we'll see.
　

　
I wrote and mailed 4 notes. Um...I have kind of a long way to go on that. I don't know that I'll have time to make a hand-made card for everybody, but I'd like to do as many as I can this way. It just makes me a little extra happy to use my own cards, and makes me feel a little bit less like I'm just checking off the etiquette box!

Get comfy!

You might want to go grab something to drink and make sure your seat is comfortable.  I'll wait.  After neglecting the blog for this long, I have much to cacth up on.  I'll try to make it interesting!  Oh, and you might want to grab a snack, because if you're not hungry now, you will be by the time I finished.

First things first.  I'm married!







That last one was taken in the car as we made our escape.  The day was lovely and you can see some additional pics here at our photographer's website.  If you go, and you enjoy the photos, please leave Suzy a comment - firstly, because she is awesome and took very good care of me on a very stressful day, and second, because she promised me free stuff if I sent traffic her way.  She says the exposure is good for her business but I think she just likes giving stuff away.  Oh well - Mama needs some free 8x10's.  My mama, that is.  Hee hee.


You know what the last thing we did before we left was?  Replace the medicine cabinet in our master bath.


Ew.




Yay!




All of our plans to move CodeNinja in, in a logical, sensical manner that left us with minimal mess to manage upon our return, really didn't work out, so I was determined that at least our master suite would be fixed up before we left.  So, just a few days before we left for the wedding, we painted the master bath and replaced all the fixtures (towel bars, etc).  Then the day we left, I put our new wedding towels on the towelbar, and we made up the master bed with our new linens and comforter and 1,000,000,000 decorative pillows.  That medicine cabinet gave us problems, though, and we decided on having one last go at putting it in before we left.  And we did!  So there you go.  Funny stories of my insanity.


Of course, the awesomeness of Ravelry is such that one cannot have a major life event of any kind without receiving an outpouring of yarny love.  This is especially true of Romi's group, and if you haven't joined us there, you should!  My devious mother-in-law, also a knitter, conspired with all my knitmates to come up with this bouquet for the wedding rehearsal: 





So many flowers were contributed, there was even a bouquet for my maid of honor:




Words can't express how wonderful this was, and how happy I was to have it.  Because there was so much traveling involved in the wedding lots of stuff is getting mailed back to me from various places, so I will try to take some better pictures of the flowers when I get the bouquet back.

Anyway, we made good our escape, and I was eventually able to free my hair from the snillion bobby pins holding it up.




The next morning we had leftover wedding cake for breakfast.




Yum.  We had a chardonnay cake with raspberry filling, and the groom's cake was some type of intense chocolate with more raspberry in the middle.  It was done by Sweet Impressions and it was delicious.  Over and over again.  They sent us away with quite a bit of leftovers from both dinner and the cakes.  We carried the cake on the plane and feasted on it for several days.

I haven't really done much knitting at all in the last couple of months leading up to the wedding.  My energy was just devoted to too many other things and I really had nothing left to knit with.  Not even stockinette.

But, while we were in Baton Rouge I went to Knits by Nana and, even though we had a hard time finding them and therefore ended up there right after closing time, one of the staff members was so sweet and gracious and she stayed to let me look around.  I bought two skeins of String Theory Caper Sock and one of Dream in Color Smooshy with Cashmere.  And I started a sock, which you can see me working on in Suzy's photos.  By the time we flew out the morning after the wedding I was well underway. 





That set of flights was not fun, I'm afraid.  Our flight was delayed, but not until we were already on the plane.  Delayed once, CodeNinja assured me we were fine.  Delayed again, and he said, no problem.  Delayed a third time and he said, "uhhh...."  We made our connection, just BARELY, and only because it had also been delayed by about forty minutes.  Then when we got to Anchorage, we discovered our baggage hadn't made it with us.  We picked up the rental car, went to Wal-Mart, picked up the essentials, went to the hotel - and our credit cards were declined when we tried to check into the hotel.  A couple phone calls got everything cleared up (we had not notified them they were traveling so both our banks put a fraud hold on our cards after we used them the first time) but we were TIRED that night!


The magic of Ravelry served well once again the following day.  The Alaska knitters group is super helpful to fellow knitters visiting their states, and I had a ton of restaurant and yarn shop recommendations from them.  We had breakfast at the Snow City Cafe.





I had their version of a monte cristo:




And the hubs (hee) had quiche.




Hungry yet?


They had art on the walls for sale from one of the local schools (to fund a class trip) and I would have bought this knitting hands picture if it hadn't already been sold:






Then we went shopping, and I shall have to cover that in a separate post, because I just realized I haven't photographed any of it.

Anyway, once we were done, we ate at the Moose's Tooth and then headed out of Anchorage, making a quick stop at Potter Marsh to check for birds.  We stuck around for a while watching three swans root for food, and then headed on out to Homer, where we were going to spend the rest of our honeymoon.

In the interests of time and blog space - let me sum up our trip with a photoessay:

Pizza from the Moose's Tooth


View from the deck of our condo in Homer


ABC (apple, bacon, cheese - best idea ever) sandwich from Fat Olive's in Homer


Chocolate cake at Fat Olive's


Breakfast pastries from the Two Sisters Bakery - CodeNinja reckons that after the hotel and the car, we spent the most money at Two Sisters.




Completed Socks


Homer's LYS, CommuKnitty Knits, otherwise known (to us at least) as The Yarn Yurt.


Pizza from St. Elias Brewing company in Soldatna with Blue Zin (blueberry white zinfandel) from Bear Creek Winery in Homer



Sandwiches from Moira's in Homer - the "Busty Lusty" and the "Vermonter" served with yummy pesto pasta salad
 


Dinner at Fat Olive's again - appetizer of beef bruchetta and another ABC



The only birthday cupcake I remembered to take a picture of, from Two Sisters


Our reflection in the window of our condo.


Goodbye Homer...


One last lunch at the Moose's Tooth before we flew out!


Whew...well, I hope that wasn't totally boring, but that's pretty much what we did!  We ate, relaxed, and enjoyed each other's company.  Next post, I promise FO's, WIP's, and yarn acquisitions. 

Payoff

I know it's been forever since I blogged (what with the wedding insanity and all) but hopefully this will make up for it a little.









Let me say these photos do not convey at all how beautiful the end result is, and this shape is so pretty and elegant to wear! I would like to see more designs like this for sure.

Chug chug chug!

I've been working away on Erato. Two more muses are due to be released at Stitches West in just a few days, so I'm hoping I can steam through this one and be ready to start a new one this weekend!



It'll depend on whether or not I run out of yarn, though. It's looking miiiiighty thin, but since I'm alternating skeins every couple of rows, it's a little harder to judge how much I have left than if I were using just one ball.

Of course, I could weigh it, but - where's the fun in that?