Shades of gray

The first half of my Drawing and Painting class ended two weeks ago. Here are some results:

All: pencil on paper

Sure to be more color in the next half of the year! ;)

FO: Folding Chair

So named because it tends to buckle at the knees a bit, but at this point I am throwing in the towel.

Advice to knitters who are new to knitting toys/objects/chairs, enjoy working with tiny needles, and have to make art projects on a deadline: DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. While I find I do love this chair, it took forever to construct and knit, and exactly one week ago I would have never thought it would be such a nightmare (hence why I made this chair in the first place, foolish past self).
But enough whining, more pictures!!!

Yarn: leftover sport weight Filatura Lanarota Cuzco and Malabrigo Yarn Sock in Tiziano Red

Gauge was 16 stitches = 1.5 in. in stockinette

It stands about six inches high and the legs are about three and a quarter inches apart.

At this point I should probably bring up the construction. As I was in such a hurry to put everything together, I didn't think to take progress pictures (booooo). The front legs are standard glass test tubes and the back legs are two test tubes stacked on top of each other; between the top two is a small wooden block. The seat is wood also, although the seat piece is heavier to distribute the weight evenly and keep the chair from falling over on its back. Everything has a knit cover, and I attached pieces by sewing them together.

That little decorative square is the most intarsia I even intend to do x(

In conclusion, many lessons on what to do and what not to do when creating unorthodox patterns from thin air have been learned. Mostly, MEASURE EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME and NEVER KNIT SMALL THINGS WITH A SMALL GAUGE ON A SMALL TIMELINE.

But overall, this thing is just so darn cute that it may win me over :)

Sun been down for days

Unable to think of a proper title, I opted for the so very original song lyric.

Onwards!
Presenting some recently acquired items:

A cactus

A bangle

Some buttons

A sketchbook

And better-than-classic literature ;)

I just downloaded an immense amount of photos from Phipps Conversvatory, so those should be up soon…am I forgetting anything?

Slowly getting back into knitting, what with school being mean and taking all my time away.

ALSO! I looked through my archives. Oy vey. I deleted a ton of uselessness from three years ago (was I really that annoying?! …Don't answer that), and now Thinking in Magenta is slightly more clean, and well, tasteful.

And with slightly less of these: ;P

Spring break

Began like this:

One of my friends (for the sake of internet safety, we're going to call her Kelly), while a devout Office fan, had *gasp* never seen Season 2. She's up-to-date with Seasons 4 and 5, but it is practically my religion that Season 2 is The Office at its finest.

She also knits :D

Being a good girl and working on WIP's (instead of listening to my naughty desires and casting on much much more), I brought the Pomatomus sock and alternated between working on the foot and knitting up the first of my cousin's gloves. Kelly learned about short row shaping, reading charts, shaping heels, and that Jim is the most adorable man on the face of television all in one day xD

(Behold her lovely Center Square!)

She also adored the aqua Plymouth Dreambaby that was slowly forming the darned second sock. I need to get her to a LYS, stat.

In the name of Elizabeth Zimmerman…!!

I have just discovered that my friend knits.
TWO of my friends.

I started a new school this year, and as fate would have it, class schedules have had me spending a lot of time with a girl I went to preschool with. We have also taken lessons from the same piano teacher in the past (we were even duet partners).
So get this: best friends from preschool become best friends in high school.

Not even kidding. We're so alike it's uncanny. We both:
~Are in the symphonic band
~Are in the same gym class
~Have the same lunch
~Have read most of the same books/like the same movies
~Are huge Phantom of the Opera fans
~Are huge Harry Potter geeks

I really love this girl. She's been super nice to me through the new-school transition, sort of taking me in, and now her friends are my friends, too.
Just yesterday, she was wearing this really pretty orange scarf. I recognized the stitch and told her I knit.

"Really? I made this!"

And so we began a discussion of needles and yarn and two-stranded techniques. Our other friend overheard.
"Are you talking about knitting? I'm making this red and white hat now, but my needle is too small…"
(And today, I lent her my US 10 circular.)

And now at lunch, we talk about Knit Picks and buying patterns and yarn sales and joked about video chatting instead of IM so we could knit and talk at the same time.

Don't you just love your friends? :D

November

Because I like to mess things up :D

NaKniSweMo (National Knit A Sweater Month)
NaFinSweMo (National Finish A Sweater Month)

Mon Cherie: it's getting on my nerves. Because I have been ribbing for a good month, and still have like eight rounds of ribbing to go. I swear it will cast-off by the 30th!!!
Er, I hope.

NaWriNovMo (National Write A Novel Month)
NaWriPlaMo (National Write A Play Month)
School: it does not like me.

So stay tuned for angst, anger, and more angst! And did I mention angst!
:P

Fangirl

I have become one.

The Office season premiere was amazing. Funny, dramatic, cute, full of surprises. Amazing.

AND Pushing Daisies starts next week, and rumors and teasers all have something to do with Olive and—nuns? And apparently, a tribute to The Sound of Music haha.

In other news, there's no news. I still knit. Haruha is inching along. Mon Cherie is inching along. Fall is inching along, as I am reluctantly making the wardrobe change to sweaters and jackets.

Yeah, I feel your pain. How boring can my posts get? :P But hopefully I shall have some art done soon, so you'll get to see something other than my excuses to blog and not research my History project.
Also (hopefully) I'll kick my brain into gear and churn out some new knit designs. Cause the fans demand more patterns!!!

Yes, that is overly exaggerated ;)

BRrrrrrrrrrrrrrAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaIIiiiiiIiiNNNNssssssss

In zombie mode currently. Ugh.

I know, I'm sorry. Posts are coming! I promise!

*crosses fingers*

Aw crap

I finally finished all my friends' gloves and I finally gave them out today on the last day of school and they loved them ( :D ), but guess what?!?!

I FORGOT TO TAKE PICTURES!!!!!!!

stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid me!!!!!

So now I am going to scream into my pillow for a while, and hopefully my friends will email me pictures of the finished products.

*slinks off, pulling out hair*

In case you were wondering, "Where'd the love go?"

First sock is DONE!


Actually, has been done. Since like, April :P Yeah, I know, lots of un-posted and un-updated projects on the list here, but I'll get to them all (eventually).

Here's the deal:

~When I finish all the gloves, I'll go back to Trendsweater.
~When I finish Trendsweater, I'll go back to the second Loooove Monkeys.
~When I finish the socks, I'll go back to either designing a new pattern, or doing whatever ;)

In the midst of all this, I'll be working on my mom's Wisp.
In November, I've promised myself to start a Cherie Amour out of my Manos del Uruguay (for NaKniSweMo).
Plus, my dad announced he'd like a cycling jersey, old-style wool.

Oy. Vey.

Adventures of the Fair-Weather Fan

Yesterday my brother Will had his last soccer game. Both of my brothers play soccer, and I hadn't seen any of their games all year, so my mom dragged me along to watch the last half-hour.

My brother plays on our school's varsity team, so the moms of a lot of kids in my class were there, and once they saw me, they all yelled out to their sons on the field, 'PICK IT UP! C'MON, MAX, GET THE BALL! QUIN WHAT ARE YOU DOING, WILL'S SISTER IS WATCHING!" Everyone said, "Look, it's the Panthers' good luck charm! Where've ya been all season?"

To top that off, one mom even took my picture, claiming it would have to go into the yearbook for a once-in-a-lifetime event.

I'll be blunt: I am not a sports fan. The only games I ever watch are the Olympics and the Super Bowl (and really, just the commercials ;) ). But this year, the Penguins are in the Stanley Cup playoffs (WOOO!!), and last night for their first game against the Redwings (BOO!!), my parents bought tickets for us to watch the game on the JumboTron at Mellon Arena.
This time, I went along willingly ;)

We got there about ten minutes before the game was scheduled to start and got great seats. The Pens are pretty popular (being so far the only winning team in Pittsburgh). Here's pretty much what it looked like before the game started.

Let me tell you, it filled up FAST.

And of course, seeing that I have projects to finish and the average sports game has many commercials . . .

Yes, I knit. So sue me :P And one of Tatiana's gloves is finished, despite the fact that it was hard to concentrate when some die-hard hockey fan sitting behind you cusses at every missed goal, fight, and bad call.

Both the Pens and my brother's team lost yesterday, though. Maybe I'm not such a good-luck charm :P

Two (2!!) FO's: Claire's Eye Candy Gloves and Laura's Across the Universe Gloves

Two pairs of fingerless gloves finished this week! I'm so proud of myself!

First we have Claire's Eye Candy gloves. I used the rest of the unknown blue yarn in my stash along with some of the recycled Marvelous Mohair from the My So-Called Scarf and the (too-small and frogged) Stirling Cloche. I paired them together and voila; Fair-Isle stripes!


The reason for the name is because my friend Claire attracts some of the weirdest guys in our school. She's a really tiny girl and kind of shy, kind of not, but seriously all the guys seem to have a crush on her: dorks, nerds, jerks, and just plain weirdos! She's a good person and hates letting people down, but this is not the kind of attention from guys that she wants ;)

Ooo, and funny story: I knit these on the bus ride down to Baltimore. Of course people asked questions, so I just said that the gloves were for my cousin, and hey Claire has the same size hands, could I measure hers to make sure I get the right size? She has no idea who they're really for ;)


The second pair I started a while ago, but just finished this week because the embroidery took a while to plan and do and for some reason the second glove came out nearly an inch smaller than the first. But here they are in their mellow glory: Laura's Across the Universe gloves!


Me and Laura are both HUGE Beatles fans, only she knows like every one of their songs and I just like the more well-known ones and the album cover art :P But we still get along great and I broke out my dad's old complete Beatles songbook for the tiny photo-shoot above.

I guess I owe it to you: all of these fingerless gloves I've been knitting? They're end-of-school presents for my friends. Next year three of them are going to different schools. I wore my Delovelys once and everybody oohed and aahed over them, so I thought, well why not give them their own?

So far I have three and a half pairs done: I just need to make Paige's gloves and finish Tatiana's (the two fugly gloves look A LOT better now :) ). I'll miss my friends like crazy next year, but hopefully the gloves can link us together!

Class Trip~Part 2

Moving onto:

Day 2
This day was mostly spent at museums: Geppi's Entertainment Museum and the Sports Legends Museum. We started off the day with Geppi's.
If you are going to visit Baltimore, go visit this place! It's all about the history of media and how Americans looked to their favorite comics/TV/icons to pull them out of their everyday lives. It's stocked with first-edition comics for Peanuts, superheros, and hundreds more. Plus our tour guide was really funny and it was just a cool place to go to!

In the pictures, all the movie posters are the originals that were displayed back when the movies were first in theaters, and the comics are first editions. The pictures of scenes from Snow White are the original slides drawn by the Disney artists. If you have any questions about other objects in the photos, feel free to comment :)












Now I don't have a lot of pictures from the Sports Legends Museum, because if you can tell, I am not very much into that kind of stuff. But they did have this station where you can try on famous players' uniforms, and as you can see my friends didn't exactly wear the right size :P



After that, we went to the local mall and ate lunch and bought some souvenirs. I bought a strawberry charm for my phone at a jewelry booth.

A small, sad story: Remember when I went to New York for New Year's? Well while I was there I got a cell phone charm that was a little yellow sparkly ladybug inside a blue ring. Sadly, I lost the ladybug part of the charm and had to replace it with another not-as-sparkly bead. That's why the strawberry is now on my phone. (Picture of the old charm below)

And after the mall came the long, tedious bus ride back to Pittsburgh. Thanks for listening!

P.S. Wanna see more shots of my trip? I'll be adding photos to my Flickr page gradually (as in probably all next month *groan*), since I am about 98% full for my limit this month. This is what happened last time when we went to D.C.! Yeah I know, I can always just upload them straight to my Blogger posts, but hey sometimes that takes too long and you can't always see everything

Plus I almost over that limit, too :P