Superstitch

The Great Outdoors!

Well I have a way to upload pictures now! It turns out that the awesome photo printer i got for christmas will upload my pictures onto the computer. Yay! These pictures are from the first weekend of my spring break, march 10th. My youngest sister Allison, 16, is part of a competitive rowing club and they had a regatta at Town Lake in Austin. It was the most gorgeous day, and there was a lot of sitting around and waiting since she was in 2 races, at 2 pm and 4:30 pm, so we sat outside on a blanket, reading, knitting, eating and talking from around 1pm through 5, it was alot of fun!

what i did all day.... sit around and knit!

what sarah did all day... read!

Joseph, the youngest sibling, he turns 9 on saturday, everyone say hi joe!

here is allison out on the water, kickin ass and taking names! She won a gold in her doubles race, a silver in her single race, and a bronze in her quad! (its hard to see in the smaller version of the picture, but if you open it up you can see how hard she's working! She's a champ)

her leisurely row back to the dock

It was a great day!

home, sweet home

I'm still having trouble uploading my pictures, but sarah snapped a few pictures of my new place, so i thought i would share. Seth and I just moved from a 2200 sqft house we shared with my other sister (not my lovely co author) into an 800 sq ft duplex.... its hard fitting everything, but to quote my favorite man on television, we're making it work.

here is the "charming" (read small) kitchen. Thats it, to the left of the cabinet there is the back door, which opens onto a tiny deck with the utility closet....

the back door....

the little porch with the utility closet, i dont really like the idea of having to take my clothes outside, but i suppose i will get used to it...

well, thats all the house photos i'll bore you with today, i have tons more to show once i get my camera to work again. Hopefully i can do some before and afters soon to once we have everything settled in.

spring break? not for this girl

Instead of a nice relaxing, fun spring break, I get to move! Oh the joy. Seth and I moved about 15 minutes from our last house to a duplex closer to school. The rent is way cheaper and the location is great. So it's a good move in that respect but still... moving sucks! I took a ton of before pictures of the new place and i'll be taking some afters once I get all of the curtains put up and everything set up. I've been working on organizing my new craft room too!

here is where i'm at with the pretty clementine shawlette

California, California, it's such a wonder

Elizabeth  is four years older than me, almost to the day. I decided to be born the day before her birthday, and have been paying the price ever since. We've had joint birthday parties for as long as I can remember... at McDonalds, at Celebration Station, at the duck pond, the pool, the park, the backyard. Celebrating my birthday was never something I did on my own.

When I graduated high school, I thought the rules might have changed, that I might be able to go on my graduation trip to California by myself. No such luck. My mother invited Elizabeth along, and while cruising over the Golden Gate Bridge, windows down, music blaring, Elizabeth, my mom, and I convulsing in laughter over something stupid one of us just said, I came to a realization; My birthdays were always so happy because I was sharing them with the closest friend I've ever had. Any perceived disadvantage was all in my own head. I let go and we ended up having the vacation to end all vacations. We toured wineries, I ate my first In-N-Out burger, I hugged a redwood, we found an entire store devoted soley to Legos, we drove down Lombard Street, we rode a boat to Alcatraz, and shopped until my debit card melted.

I was over at Bird In the Hand earlier tonight, and her photos of Alcatraz inspired me to share a few of my own, along with some of the other photos I took during that charmed week in California. I hope you enjoy them.

Benziger Winery:

Muir Woods:

San Francisco:

and, finally, Alcatraz Island:

So these are my pictures, my memories. It really was a great week. So sunny! It's nice to remember right now, as storms of biblical proportions have been plaguing Central Texas nonstop since Sunday.

Sun... I miss it.

Dirty Little Secrets

Ok, before I start the post, I have to transcribe the conversation Elizabeth and I just had about my job in Inter-Library Lending in my school's library.

Sarah: I just pulled a book for the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America.

Liz: Was it Everybody Poops?

(Sarah doesn't breathe for the next ten minutes.)

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Anyways, on with the post.

I've seen the Six Weird Things meme floating around on a number of blogs over the past month or so, and now that I'm in Austin for Spring Break, and I can make Liz do whatever I want, we're totes doin' it. But! With a twist! I will write Six Weird Things about Elizabeth, and she will write Six Weird Things about me. I've already got about ten weird things about her floating around in my head, but I bet she's going to have a hard time with this. I'm about as normal as they come.

That's us in the middle, weirdin' it up already, at such a young age!

Here we go!

Six Weird Things About Elizabeth, by Sarah

1. Elizabeth is a freak for Nerds. Seriously. She would probably pole vault over my lifeless corpse for a half-full box of them. If she could, she would grind them into powder and snort them like coke. I can just see her now, in a disco club's bathroom, hunched over rainbow-colored lines, rolled up Washington at the ready... it's a sad, sad picture.

2. If you ever have a particularly hairy customer service issue that you have to work out over the phone, Elizabeth is the one you want navigating that web of hell for you. I call the cell phone company because my phone is broken, they laugh in my face (or ear, as it were). I put Elizabeth on the phone, and I can expect not only a new phone, but a dozen roses, a box of Godivas, and a note of apology on my doorstep the next morning. Well, not really. But still. She's got skills.

3. Elizabeth has [redacted] cats! I mean, I like cats almost as much as the next person, but that's pretty much ridiculous. I guess I can't make too much fun, she really does seem to love them. I mean, I drop a french fry in between the couch cushions and she's ready to behead me, the cats dump out an entire paper shredder and roll around in the confetti and she act like its the cutest thing she's ever seen. The cats, being typical felines, are kind like, well, I guess sorta okay with her. I'm more of a dog person myself. At least you know when they like you.

4. You may not be able to tell by reading her relatively demure craft blog, but Elizabeth is a total badass. She got kicked off her high school color guard twice. Supposedly it was because of her "attitude problem," when really it was because she wouldn't let her sadistic coach sit on her back while she did push ups. She also made her, ahem, inexperienced senior year Spanish teacher cry when the hag tried to humiliate her in front of the entire class for talking when the entire class was talking. Don't mess with Liz, she messes back.

5. Whenever Liz shows me something she's made, I usually tell her how great it is, and then she usually expends a ridiculous amount of energy telling me exactly how and why it sucks harder than a black hole. She is so, so, so wrong. Just about everything she touches is glorious. Whenever she shows me a new sweater or purse, I usually try to convince her to give it to me as a "Happy Wednesday!" or "Congratulations On Showing Up to Work On Time Today!" present, so I take her disapproval of her own work as an insult to my taste. And that's mean.

6. Elizabeth gets trapped in the closet on a nightly basis. It is maybe a little less weird than it sounds, but not by much. Seth usually goes to sleep well before Liz, so she sets up camp in their giant, giant closet. She sits in there with her laptop and a knitting project, watching Scubs DVDs (ohmygod, how awesome is Scrubs???) or talking online to me. she says its downright comfy in there, with a pillow and a quilt perhaps... But I still think she's a nutjob. A sweet, funny, talented nutjob, of course. Can you tell that I just remembered that she's about to start writing about me?

Six Weird Things About Sarah, by Elizabeth

1. Sarah likes to make up words. Well, maybe not make up, but abbreviate. It all started with "totes inapropes." Totes means totally, inapropes means inappropriate. It's kind of caught on in our family, and you really haven't lived until you've heard your eight year old brother tell your sixteen year old sister that her outfit is "totes inapropes."

2. Sarah will not ever, never let things go. I told her once that I was "exceptional" at crochet and now whenever we talk about crochet she calls me "exceptional." I was trying to tell her that I can pretty much read any pattern and make it happen, and it just came out wrong. That was months and months ago, and still. I am Liz the Exceptional. The last time she was in town I was talking about making knitting patterns for different magazines and I made use of the phrase, "knitted garments." Sarah immediately got her Tim Gunn voice on and didn't stop making fun of my pretentious vocabulary for a solid hour. She still brings it up when she thinks I'm getting a little too big for my britches.

3. Sarah is obsessed with mermaids. OBSESSED. It started at the impressionable age of 3 with the Little Mermaid, and continues to this day with a velvet mermaid poster she is coloring in with markers. She's crazy. (Sarah would like me to add that she would never, say, walk up to you on the street and ask you if you had accepted The Mermaid as your personal lord and savior. She likes to keep her crazy under wraps.)

4. Sarah would much rather sing a conversation than speak it, any day of the week. If a lyric to a song is even remotely related to what we're talking about, believe me, she's singing it. If she can't think of a real song, hell, she'll just make one up on the fly. She's pretty much a master improvisor.

5. Sarah has a 256 gig hard drive hooked up to a 1998 Sony Vaio laptop, worth probably about $30.

6. When Sarah gets mad at me, she touches my face. She knows it makes me want to kill her. So maybe all those times she tried to leave a thumbprint on my forehead she wasn't mad, but suicidal. Hmmmm...

That was fun!

AAAAEIGNWEGNWEGN!!!!!

Typepad just ATE MY REALLY LONG POST. And it was a GOOD ONE. I will attempt to recreate... but it won't have nearly the heart the first one did.

Not funny

Really, its not funny, but i cant stop laughing when i look at these pictures....

   

Here is poor sad venezia, this was after i had ripped out my 10 rows of color work....i'm not even stretching it out ya'll, this is just how bad it is.

And here is thermal, its a good thing i ruined the first one, it was too big! Not nearly as big as venezia, but still too big! I dont understand how i over estimated my own fatness this bad twice in a row! I swatched for both of these bad boys. I really need to figure this out before i knit more huge tent sized sweaters...

I did restart Thermal, i'm knitting the size smaller... lets all hope it works out.

Catching Up

It really stinks not having a way to upload photos, i feel kind of silly blogging about projects if I cant show you what i'm doing! My temporary fix, until i get a new camera cord, is to upload my pictures through seth's laptop which has an sd card reader. I've been wanting to share these photos since the 22nd! So here we go!

This is the yarn i bought to keep myself happy and busy while i was house sitting from the 22nd through the 27th. The orange is Araucania's Nature Wool, i bought it to make the Clementine Shawlette from the new spring Interweave. The green, i cant remember the brand now, was bought for the backyard leaves scarf pattern from either scarf style or interweaves holiday knits magazine, i have the magazine. The brown/aqua/yellow/white is artyarns ultramerino sock yarn. I LOVE it! I started a pair of jaywalkers with it, of course.

This is where i was on the 22nd with the clementine. I am much, much farther now, but i dont have any pictures yet. I'm at the point of the middle repeats so its a very easy project to set down and pick up whenever i get bored with what i'm working on, which happens every hour. I really love the way the variegated yarn is looking with this pattern. I will definitely try to get a more naturally lit and more current progress picture soon.

Here is my pretty little sock! The ultramerino comes in 191 yard hanks which isn't enough for a pair of socks, so to try to make it stretch i used some knitpick's pallette in dark brown from my stash. I dont think its making the stripes go far enough though. I'm halfway down the foot now and even though the toe will be done in brown too, i dont think there is enough stripes to do a whole other sock. I guess i'll have to break down and buy another skein, i really hate the idea of 22 dollar socks....I'm not even sure why i'm knitting socks, i know i wont wear them out of the house, i'd be too paranoid about ripping them or getting them dirty. I just really like the pattern and wanted a small project.

Sad day for knitting...

This is what my thermal used to look like.....

Not so much anymore. I got out of my car tonight and didn't realize that the sweater had fallen out of my bag but the ball of yarn was still in my bag.... i dragged poor thermal down 25 ft of rocky, dirty, leafy driveway before i realized what was going on. It was NOT salvageable, the yarn was snagged in a million places and blackened and full of twigs.... poor, poor thermal. I did cast on again tonight with a fresh ball of yarn, i guess i need to order an extra skein now.

In other sad knitting news, Venezia bit the dust as well. This happenned about a week ago but i've been too sad to document its death. I made a swatch that measured 6 inches tall by 8 inches wide, compared my gague to the pattern, chose a size and started. Well alot of people in the knit-a-long were concerned about fit so i decided to take my own advice and try mine on. Man it was HUGE! Like 8 inches of ease, my camera is a bit under the weather right now or i would take a picture of the hem i still havent ripped out, its so ridiculous. I'm putting all the yarn for the venezia aside for right now. I only bought one ball of all the colors i needed to start on it and i cant afford to buy the rest of the yarn to make it so i figure that project is going to be recycled into something different. I may try it again in the fall with knitpick's pallette or a similar cheaper yarn. I bit off a little more than i could chew with the cashsoft, financially, though its an awesomely soft yarn.

I wish i had more fun and exciting progress pictures to show you... soon i hope. I will be starting on Domiknitrix's little red (or in this case, black) riding hood in the next day or two. I will be working almost exclusively on that for awhile as it is for a friend for a trade. I'll be back with pictures soon!