Portland news, hair makeover, and stuff…

I’m hard at work on this ebook (another little peek for you above, mmmmm cables!), hoping to be able to release it this week!  So I just want to take a quick break to show+tell you some stuff…

I’ll start out with a couple of Portland things – first, tomorrow (Sunday) is the Craft Writers Talking event at the Hollywood library!  We have a fantastic library system in this town, and they are bringing us yet another awesome free event, which should be a very useful talk to those of us who are interested in making craft books!  The talk is with Portland craft writers/bloggers/crafty superstars Susan Beal, Diane Gilleland, and Alicia Paulson (books pictured above), and they’ll be talking about “books, blogs, craftiness and everything in between” (according to Susan).  Yet another event that makes me feel incredibly lucky to be living here in PDX!

And then also in Portland news, I’m so excited to be participating in a project to help support Knittn’ Kitten (which I recently wrote about)!  A bunch of us Portland crafters will be designing projects which use materials found at the Kitten, and giving them out for free at the shop, with a new project being released each week.  Here’s the list of participants (so far):

• September 22 – Heather Mann (of Croq, Dollar Store Crafts, Craft Fail)
• September 29 – Teresa Sullivan
• October 6 – Diane Gilleland
• October 13 – Joey Groendes
• October 20 – Christine Blystone
• October 27 – Susan Beal
• November 3 – Me!
• November 10 – Bridget Benton

You can pick up the project sheets each week at the shop (ask for the pattern at the register), grab the materials you need while you’re there, and each of us will post about the project of the week on our blogs (and/or twitter, etc).  And there’s a flickr group!  Not just for these projects, but for anything Kitten-related, so post your rad vintage finds and projects!  You can see a peek of the project Susan’s planning on her blog, and I’ve seen a couple of glimpses at other planned projects – I think it’s so cool that every project will use different techniques (like sewing, beading, knitting, crochet, embroidery, etc) since the Kitten has some of everything!

As for some personal updating… Pete’s studio is up and running!  The site isn’t done yet, and his space isn’t finished, but he worked on his first job a few days ago and it went well!!  As for my new expanded studio space, tons of work to do and no free time to do it, so I’ve been fitting in little spurts of work here and there, slowly getting things in order.  Can’t wait till it’s done and I can show you a tour!

And lastly, check it out, I DIYed a haircut for the first time ever!  I don’t have a before picture, but you can sort of see in some of those hat pictures from a little while ago – my bangs had been at that super annoying length where they’re in my face all the time, but not quite long enough to tuck behind my ears, so I would always wear a clip or a headband.  I had plans to cut off all my hair again, but kept putting it off for various reasons, until I decided I wanted to try bangs with longer hair, at least just to see if I like it, then chop it all off soon if I want to.  So I tried doing it myself!  Figured, I’ve got nothing to loose; if I screw it up, I’ll just go have it fixed, chop it all off like I planned to anyway.  I think I did ok!  Especially for a first time…

So then I finished my hair makeover with some dye yesterday, which did not turn out how I’d meant, but eh, it’s different (for me), which is cool.  I picked a color called burgundy, which was the color I wanted, imagining it to look something like this (more reddish, like a dark purpley shade of red) on my hair.  And this is what I got (black in the shade, super dark purple in the light):

If/when I get sick of it, maybe I’ll go pink again!  For now, I think I’m happy with the look!