Monday, July 30, 2007

Computers are evil...

...but necessary.

*sigh*

We got a new motherboard. It's much faster and the graphics are much clearer and cooler, according to my son. But we (I) have to reconfigure all our email accounts again. I voted to not bother and just read our emails from the host website. It wasn't a big hit with the rest of the family. So we (I) have to find time to call up the provider and get all the necessary gobblygook from them. I also have to re-load the program for my camera so I can upload pictures. I have to find the disk first.

I've been spinning some tussah that I dyed a few weeks ago for the Mystery Stole #3. At the rate I'm going, it will be winter before I get to the knitting part. I think we're at clue #5 or something and I haven't even started.

Michael's is having a sale on Paton's Classic Merino this week! The down side is that the wool is shipped in 4 balls dye lots. Instead of worrying about matching dye lots, I just bought a whole bunch of different colours. I could either knit a colourful sweater or a bunch of different coloured hats. It's all good.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Bad news - Good news

Bad news - my computer died last week. It's the motherboard and it's completely fried. We had just bought a larger external hard drive to back up stuff but hadn't done it yet.

Good news - the mother board will be replace with a faster better one and it's done by my cousin (cheap but reliable). We're not sure if everything will be intact until the new board goes in.

...fun stuff...

I finally sew the buttons and button holes on my green cardigan. I'm using the good ol' standby - shell buttons. I'm still thinking of re-knitting the collar and shortening the sleeves. It's not hard to do...just need time.

One more day (ok, 2 days) to the new Harry Potter book. We're going to head over to Chapters Friday night to eat their cookies and treats and line up for midnight. We didn't do that for the other books but this is the LAST BOOK! I heard that someone scanned the book and posted it online. I'm not even tempted to go look. It's not the same reading it off the computer.

Monday, July 09, 2007

Marvellous weekend of dyeing

I had the most marvellous weekend of fibre and dyeing.

Saturday was the Twisted By Choice Dye Day. We worked with Procion H and silk. The colours came out brilliant. I've never used Procion H before and bought the starter kit last year. This was a good opportunity to play with something new. The process was quick and easy. I like the fact the colours are in liquid and it took very little prep time. The skeins are drying right now and we're going to get together again on Wed to do the steaming. Silly me forgot my camera but I took a couple of pictures with Teal's camera.

Sunday morning was a short trip to Granville Island. One of the few rare times that I'm there and not pick up any silk fibre from the Weaving Studio. I did pick up another kit of Procion H plus a few extra colours to play with. The rest of the afternoon was spent mixing colours, re-skeining some of the silk floss to prepare them for dyeing, and working on my swatch for the Mystery Stole #3.

Something about mucking about with all that fibre makes me very happy. And now I sit here at work, thinking of all my fun stuff at home. It's going to be a long Monday.

P.S. Tammy...punch needle embroidery is really fun. Really fast too. Costco in Burnaby has a kit with three patterns, floss, & needle for $10.00. :D

Sunday, July 08, 2007

Kwik-E-Mart Madness



We couldn't help ourselves. They transformed one of the local 7-Eleven stores into the Simpson's Kwik-E-Mart and we had to go see. It was so crowded there! I think every kid within the area was there buying Squishies and do-nuts.

Monday, July 02, 2007

More reasons to love needlepunch embroidery!

It's smaller than rug hooking. Talk about instant gratification! Compare to knitting a sweater, it takes no time at all. It's something you can do in the summer when it's too hot to knit and certaintly too hot to rug hook. Ok, it wasn't that hot today but I'm anticpating that it will be a very hot summer. And rug hooking patterns in minature works well for needlepunch embroidery.

The finished size for this project is 3.5" square. No sweaty hands. No heavy wool fabric or scratchy burlap draped over you. In this piece, I tried playing with different loop lengths to get the watermelon and the heart to "pop" out more. The ouline was done on the lowest setting to create a bit of shadow between the main objects and the background.

I tried the technique here on the snowman one the left but not sure the results was what I wanted.

The snowman on the right was done increasing the loops each row going towards the inside, making the body rounded. It was much better but you can't really tell from the picture.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Happy Canada Day!

I have lots of reason to say I'm proud to be a Canadian and I wrote and rewrote a post about today but nothing sounded right. I think it would take me a lifetime to go through all my reasons...my lifetime, to be exact.

So...Happy Canada Day, everyone. I'm going to sit on my deck and think of what it means to be Canadian for my family.

Cheers!