Lee Does Stuff

May 1st – 8th photos

Now for this most recent week… settling into the new house, starting to unpack, and starting to get back into normal life routines…

1st + 2nd – We’re still excited to have our own washer+dryer, and watching the clothes in the front loader is fun! hehe we’re silly. Finally got back into a knitting project – that hat I was mentioning a couple posts ago:

3rd – Spent some time unpacking boxes of books and starting to get the library set up!

4th + 5th – We had a weird/stupid day, with Ikea having discontinued the items we needed, terrible weather, and other frustrating and stressful things, so we tried to end the day on a good note with our buddies, eating happy hour veggie burgers at Kennedy School and playing cards. Fun times! Then I found the desk I had wanted from Ikea on Craigslist, so the next day we drove out to Gresham to pick it up and stopped at a couple of thrift stores in the area while we were out there. The insanely bright rainbow was spotted outside a Goodwill:

6th – In order to get the huge corner desk into Pete’s Prius, we had to take it almost completely apart, so the next day I had to put it all back together again – not easy! But I did it!

7th – Had fun with a photoshoot in our front yard! This is my favorite plant we have – our Satomi Dogwood tree:

8th – I finally tried making quinoa for the first time the night before (I’d eaten it before, but not made it myself), and had tons of leftovers, which I played with for lunch and dinner. I’m totally in love with quinoa! It cooks exactly like rice (my rice cooker makes it so easy and good!) and I can use it exactly how I use rice, but it’s way healthier! This is my quinoa, 3 bean, and grilled mushroom quesadilla, photographed before piling a ton of cheese on top and a second whole wheat tortilla… who says vegetarians don’t get enough protein?!

In case you don’t know about quinoa, here is an excerpt from wikipedia:

In contemporary times, this crop has become highly appreciated for its nutritional value, as its protein content is very high (12%–18%), making it a healthy choice for vegetarians, vegans and athletes. Unlike wheat or rice (which are low in lysine), quinoa contains a balanced set of essential amino acids for humans, making it an unusually complete protein source. It is a good source of dietary fiber and phosphorus and is high in magnesium and iron. Quinoa is gluten-free and considered easy to digest. Because of all these characteristics, quinoa is being considered a possible crop in NASA’s Controlled Ecological Life Support System for long-duration manned spaceflights.

Cool!

April 21st – 30th photos

This was the week of total insanity – fun and extreme work – with my brother visiting, getting the keys to our house early, Bridgetown Comedy Festival, and the move!

21st + 23rd – Packed all day, dropped off a ton of stuff (almost literally, hah!) at Value Village, then picked up Matt and Chelsea at the airport and brought them to check in at the Jupiter – definitely one of the coolest hotels in Portland, so I was excited to see the inside of a room there. Tiny, but super cute for sure, with the mustard yellow mural-ish painted wall. A bit out of order for aesthetic reasons, on the 23rd we got the keys to our house, spent some time moving a few things in and checking it all out, then that night was the most packed-with-shows night of the festival, so I shot the schedule:

22nd – The first night of the comedy festival, we spent the whole night at the Bagdad for opening night funniness – this is the ceiling:

24th + 25th – The 24th was pretty darn beer-filled, as the city of Portland encourages – we each got sampler trays at Hedge House with our dinner, to try all the deliciousness that New Old Lompoc has to offer. Also on the 24th, we scored the elusive Voodoo $5 bucket! We had stopped by Voodoo to grab a dozen for a small empty-house gathering we hosted on Saturday afternoon, but how could we resist paying less for a ridiculous bucket instead?! Well, each of us ate a donut, and what you see in the photo was left over… so on the 25th, we took it with us to the festival and passed it on to the comedians:

26th + 27th – Bonus of the house closing early – time to paint! Spread over 2 days, we did the primer coat then 3 coats of orange, to get the bright and bold final result! Yay!

28th – Moving day! We highly recommend Thunder Movers, by the way. It was our first time ever hiring movers, and after countless moves, between the two of us, doing it all ourselves, it was such a relief after all the packing and house-buying stress to have the bulk of the moving done by pros.

29th – Pete was unexpectedly called into work a day early, so I spent all afternoon, till 10ish at night, at the old apartment getting everything off the walls by myself, the job we’d saved for last – I don’t think either of us realized how much we had screwed/nailed into the walls of that place! Not a fun time, but it got done…

30th – Our final day getting the apartment cleaned out as much as possible to hopefully get our deposit back, that part of the day sucked, but then I got to finally spend the remainder of the afternoon and night resting in the new house! Banzo had a bit of a tough time adjusting for the first couple of days, as most cats do, but I think the biggest reason she was freaked out was that after moving her over, we weren’t able to be there with her much, since we had to deal with the apartment, and Pete had to go back to work. So, on her 3rd day in the house, once I was there with her for a few hours, she started settling in and acting more like herself:

Ok that’s all for this set… not much else to say… I went yard sale shopping today, that was kind of awesome – scored a great coffee table, painted teal with 3 levels, a couple other house items, some great vinyl, and some rad toys! Maybe a thrifty finds post is in order! Oh yeah, I also bought The Big Ass Book of Home Decor at Powell’s, so I’m super excited to spend some time with that!

April 13th – 20th photos

It’s about time! Splitting these up into sections – this section goes from just after the April club was mailed out and my focus turned to full time moving-related work, up until the day before my brother got into town…

13th + 14th – Packing/moving errands day – boxes, tape, etc were purchased and serious packing started. I wanted to devote some focus to my car before the move, since I hardly ever drive (I fill up my 10 gallon gas tank once every 3 or 4 months) and I know I’ll have to start driving more now that we no longer live walking distance to so many places… so, I started out by washing it, then I took it in for a check up to make sure nothing major was wrong with it (nothing was! yay!) – this photo shows what happens when you pretty much ignore your car in the rainy city of Portland: plants take root!

15th + 16th – Packing packing packing! Both in my studio:

17th – Spent some fun crafting time embroidering an octopus on some baby overalls for my friends’ son, who is due in less than a month!

18th – Caitlin and Patrick’s baby shower! Portland celebrated with us by giving us several afternoon hours of super nice weather, yay! Notice Susan‘s amazingly delicious vegetarian pigs in a blanket (or, pigs in blankets?):

19th + 20th – These 2 days were pretty much spent packing all day again, not so photogenic – exhausted Banzo is much more picture-friendly! And, the 20th was the day we signed the final papers on our house!

Well that’s it for now – I’ll probably do the next photo-a-day set tomorrow, then the final set, up to the present, on Sunday… then next week hopefully I’ll have time to post some higher quality content! I’m actually working on a new hat pattern! (At least a couple of weeks till that’s released though.) Actually, it’s going to be a tutorial for a new knitting technique (hopefully new – I’ve never seen it in a pattern before, but I’m always afraid when I think I’ve invented something new, that it’s probably been invented several times by other designers and I just don’t know about it…) and then a set of hat patterns that use the technique.

I guess a smart thing to do would just be to ask you, my dear readers… have you ever read a knitting pattern that has a brim or a cuff that’s worked sideways, and the rest of the item worked in the round (hat, socks, mittens, etc), that uses a method other that picking up the stitches, or sewing the 2 parts together? No spoilers yet for what my technique uses, but any feedback on this question would be oh-so-helpful!!

April leethal quick knits club!

First of all, this post is much belated, so because of that, and because the May club mail-out date is later than usual, I’m extending the May club sign-up deadline through Wednesday (the 5th) – May’s theme is Home Decor, and I have some fun ideas brewing! (Sign up for just May, or for a 3 month subscription at a discounted price!)

So, April! Fruits + Veggies theme! It was a fun one! My favorite part is the spun yarn pattern – I managed (with much trial and error!) to design a mini produce bag with just 10 yards of yarn, a square of reclaimed vintage lace, and an extra little bit of recycled cotton yarn, plus a loop of t-shirt fabric for the handle. With big needles, yarn-overs, and dropped stitches, it expands to hold a totally decent amount of fruit! (in the pictures, it’s holding a lemon, an apple, an orange, 2 tangelos, and a lime):

That spun recycled yarn is double stranded orange cotton, yellow lambswool, and a couple secondhand threads (green + orange), all spun and plied together – it’s called Trees Keep Growing:

And then to complete the bag, everyone got the square of lace, t-shirt loop, and extra bundle of orange cotton:

The dyed yarn pattern was a bit different this month – included were 4 fruit+veggie dish scrubbie designs (well, 3 really, because the orange and the tomato are the same shape) and the members get to choose which 2 they want to make. The yarn was divided into color sections with one end starting with red, to knit up either a strawberry or a tomato, and the other side starting with orange, to make either a carrot or an orange, and green in the middle for both leaf tops:

This yarn was kind of nuts to dye – after balling up the whole bulky sweater worth of yarn, I decided to skein it all together as one gigantic skein, to make the dyeing easier – but it made the washing, drying, etc, much harder (wetter and messier!)…

But, it worked, and everyone got a 15 yard chunky mini-skein with 5 yards of red, 5 of green, and 5 of orange – called If it is Growing:

The main extra crafty goodies were a kind of embroidery kit – a sheet of paper with drawings of a bunch of different fruits + veggies, a piece of fabric (like a mini tea towel), and a sheet of carbon paper for transferring:

Using a pen (or a mechanical pencil with no pencil sticking out, my favorite method), with the carbon paper blue side against the fabric, on a hard surface, trace the drawings you like, how you want them on the fabric, and tah dah – transferred! Then embroider over the pictures however you want… or you could trace over them with fabric paint pens, or get creative with some other method…

And the final extra bit of fun – everyone got 2 of these fruit+veggie blank greeting cards. I got them at Scrap reuse center (also where the carbon paper came from); the photography is by J. Christie Studio:

A complete April club package:

And all the stuff hanging in my kitchen (I love how useful this club kit was!):

A note to anyone interested in these patterns – sometime in July the last 4 months of club patterns will be released in an ebook, and separately (like the first 4 months were), so that’ll include the earmuffs + earflaps, cuffs, picture frame + photo patch, and these 2 designs!

Wecome to our Home!

Well that whole blogging every few days while moving thing didn’t happen! Oh man it has been a chaotic couple of weeks, wow! Got completely moved out of the apartment on Friday afternoon, keys turned in, energy so drained from days of non-stop heavy lifting, cleaning, etc that I could barely manage to write up my Threadbanger roundup and get it posted by like 7pm then watch stupid shows on hulu (like Flash Forward, so bad but I watch it still) for hours and let my brain and muscles heal a wee bit…

Then yesterday I finally had a whole day in the house (except for a walk to my local Food-4-Less to stock the fridge with some necessities, like new house cake and frozen pizza, already missing being able to walk to TJ’s), so I shot all these photos and planned to write this blog post right away. But, after taking the pictures of all the box madness, I felt the need to make the living space more livable, so I moved boxes into their rooms and moved furniture around, and now at least we can function in our main living space, even with most of our possessions still boxed up.

So, finally I’m back to blogging today, starting with this introduction to our new house post! I’ll be dividing photo-of-the-day posts up into a couple of sets, instead of doing a massive 3 weeks of photos post all at once… so those will give you a glimpse into the last few weeks of fun and work and moving craziness… Now the tour begins! Above is the view from the front door, living room (pre-box-moving, duh) and dining area back there where the fan is. Notice not just a ceiling fan for most summer days, but an air conditioner for those few superhot 100+ Portland days each year, yay!

One of the first things we did was hang that little framed welcome to our home cross stitch, thrifted awhile back… Now that we have the space, we’ll eventually get the rest of the L pieces for our couch so it wraps across the window – great light through those big picture windows! And Garbanzo’s cat tree is the perfect height to sit with us and look outside.

Our view from the front windows. (Here’s the outside view, taken before the house was ours, but I don’t think anything has changed.)

Our orange wall! The house closed a few days early, allowing us the extra time to paint a wall before moving day, hooray! It used to be the same blue as the other living area walls you can see in the top two photos – so much country blue! I don’t mind the blue as much now that the orange gives some contrast, but we do plan to eventually cover all the blue with our own shades (thinking of making one wall green and the other a yellow/orange, perhaps).

The kitchen is a bit smaller than our apartment kitchen was, but we’ll be able to make it work just fine – so happy (relieved) that there’s a dishwasher, and the gas stove and the fridge are both super nice! That window looks into the back room, which is a converted covered patio…

…and that big carpeted main section will be transformed into 1k Labs! They put in a nice, new sliding glass door for us, which looks out onto the huge back yard:

Yes, we desperately need to buy a lawn mower, and learn how to do yard work, then learn how to plant things that we can eat! (Planning to start with tomatoes and carrots!) Exciting and overwhelming! That shed is pretty awesome – easily fits my bike, plus another bike if/when Pete gets one, and all our yard stuff once we get it. (No garage, but we don’t really need one.) Oh, and that tree in the back there is gigantic, and has a squirrel feeder!

On the other side of the back room is the laundry room – with our brand new, super awesome washer and dryer! Woo yay!! (Mostly yay for no more apartment complex laundry stupidness or laundromats, but also yay for finding an affordable deal on a nice front loader!) Yeah, we’re feeling like such adults lately, being excited about buying a washer/dryer and stuff, but not feeling like we actually are adults, really, weird, hah…

And that is my studio! I was originally going to get the master bedroom, but those extra days before moving day allowed me to see the rooms in different times of the day and levels of overcastyness, and I discovered that the smaller bedroom gets amazing light!! That skinny little window, facing west with no overhang or trees in the way, is magical! So, I opted for the space sacrifice (this studio will be smaller than my apartment studio was, bummer) and went for the happyhappy sunlight – there are even green walls to make it happier! Since there is a ridiculous amount of storage space in this house (3 big closets just in the hallway alone, plus a huge attic!) I think I’ll be ok, just have to get more creative with all my supplies.

And then the ultra-tiny 3rd bedroom is going to become the library! We love calling it that, though it’ll function more like a storage room, but we’re going to try to make it look awesome, lined with bookshelves all around! No more stacks of books piling up around the living room because they have no space to go!

And lastly, the bedroom, which inspired my roundup – not sure what solution I want to try for a headboard… I really liked our makeshift shelved headboard (made with Ikea shelves and fabric panels) but I don’t think it would work here because of those wall-mounted lights, which I like having (though I want to make new shades). It’s weird having a huge bedroom, after years of our bed and clothes crammed into a space barely bigger than the bed itself, so that my studio could live in the real bedroom room.

I made a flickr set of house photos, which has some more, and most of them have notes about details… Once everything is unpacked, set up, decorated, looking good, I’ll take new photos, but that could be months away!

Oh and as for the whole questions thing… I answered a few smaller questions in the comments, but I will still be doing the answer posts, and feel free to continue adding to the list if you think of anything you want to ask! The answers will just be spread out now, since I wasn’t able to do it during the move.

Something is better than nothing…

Turns out packing is a ton of work! Hah, every time I move I forget how long it takes… so I don’t have any time to do any real blog posts for this week and next, sorry! My brother is coming up from LA tomorrow (yay!) to go to Bridgetown Comedy Festival this weekend, which we are also going to (yay again!) and then official moving day is Wednesday, a week from tomorrow!

So, I did this silly threes thing (below) that Kimya Dawson had on her blog, just to put something up here… I hate having an empty blog for too long, soooo, I’m going to copy something Cosy did awhile ago:

Ask me questions! Big or small, about anything, here in the comments. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find bits of time between all the excitement in the next couple weeks to do blog posts every few days answering them! Big questions that will require photos or more time will be saved for later, so ask anything you want me to talk about… Hopefully I’ll get a few fun posts out of it!

Three names I go by:
1. Lee
2. leethal
3. Lee Anne (but only my grandparents)

Three jobs I have had:
1. college radio operations manager, and DJ
2. counterperson at local pizza place, in high school
3. college theater stage crew

Three places I have lived:
1. San Diego (Hillcrest neighborhood)
2. Long Beach, CA
3. England, University of Sussex campus

Three favorite drinks:
1. coffee with soy milk
2. beer
3. orange juice with pulp

Three TV shows I watch:
1. 30 Rock
2. Parks & Recreation
3. Glee

Three places I have been:
1. Scotland
2. New York
3. Wisconsin

Three places I would like to visit:
1. Chicago
2. Canada
3. Ireland

Three favorite old TV shows:
1. My So-Called Life
2. Mary Tyler Moore
3. Buffy

Three favorite dishes:
1. The Loaded Bowl at Jam, with tofu and black beans added
2. Mac and Cheese at Hedge House
3. Drunken Noodles with tofu

Three makeup/beauty products I cannot live without:
1. face scrub
2. wee bit of moisturizer
3. baking soda (for hair)

Three things I’m looking forward to:
1. after we’re all moved in to the house!
2. Summit of Awesome
3. Bridgetown Comedy Festival

Make-a-Long results!

Oh yeah, how did the Make-a-Long go?! I’ve had to dive head-first into packing this week, as our moving day quickly approaches, so I kind of forgot to blog about it sooner…

I think many of you had fun with it! I followed along on twitter and facebook a bit througout the day, but didn’t reply much since I was busy making! Looking through the flickr group now, fibrouspics’ lemon ginger cheesecake looking amazing, I love notfroggiknit’s yellow/orange bracelet, and all of her food looks awesome, and esea’s soft ruffle top looks fabulous!

Plenty of blogging happened too! Read about make-a-long fun at Craft Evolve (with the ruffled shirt), Big Girl Feet (love the colors in that granny square! and the tiki quilt is awesome), That Yarn Store, and again (about the cheesecake), Genuine Mudpie (shirt reconstruction!), Designed by Diana (cute PJs and apron), …Beachcombing Day, and Green Stockings Crafts & Design. Hope I didn’t miss any!

As for me, how about first I’ll show you what I made, then I’ll tell you how it was and lessons learned… I got up around 8am, made some coffee, and started on an embroidery project first:

I worked on that till finishing around noon (more on the project later, which is related to my April club, with its fruits + veggies theme):

Sometime during the morning, I made myself a breakfast quesadilla, with asiago cheese, yumm! I’d planned on food being a part of my make-a-long day, thinking I’d make a supergood dinner, and maybe bake something, but that ended up not happening because I was too immersed in the crafty stuff, so this is my only food photo:

After the stitching, I headed into the studio, got it cleaned up, and finally did the sunny photoshoot I’d been needing to do forever (more on that later). Once it was clean, it was time to mess it up again! I dug through some old stash and pulled out a collection of partly done projects and to-be-done clothing repairs/reconstructions (these are some, there were more):

I decided to start with this top that I’d started sewing maybe 4 years ago – it was being a bit of a fail, so I’d set it aside with plans to fix and finish later. Well, make-a-long day was later! Ok so it’s still in the fail category, but I still plan to try to make it work, after which I’ll blog details (if I can’t, I’ll have to blog about it over here instead):

So after giving up on that, I moved on to a black skirt I’d started sewing maybe 8 or 9 years ago and forgotten about – it’s the one in the top left corner of that photo above. It’s super plain, I don’t know why I wanted to make it in the first place, but eh, it was still fitting, so I decided I may as well finish it. I did so successfully, but man was it boring! Definitely needed to be spiced up… Crochet Adorned to the rescue! I’m not doing a project directly from the book, but I am using a pattern from the back – pretty pineapples…

This is as far as I got that day, and I’m sure I won’t have time to finish it till after the move; when it’s big enough (one pattern repeat maybe) I’ll hand sew it along the bottom edge of the skirt, and possibly make some more crocheted embellishments up the side or something. See how boring the skirt is? This is the back of it in the photo, with the zipper, since the front is just plain black (of course, once it’s all done, I’ll blog the finished skirt!):

After crocheting for a few hours, I moved on to what would become my only completed sewing project of the day. Shirt sleeves skirt! This one will get its own blog post later – I love it!!

When that was done, I was well caffeinated and still getting so sleepy. I had this in my to-do pile for like a year, so I decided to get it done, then crash. It’s the alpaca applique I ironed onto a sweater back in November ’08, which was fine as it was, until the edges (especially the legs) started to come off. So I needed to sew it on, but hadn’t ever gotten around to it – so happy it’s done now and I can wear it!

How did the whole 24 hours thing go? Well, my main lesson learned was never to schedule a make-a-long for 2 days before a club mail-out day!! I had been trying to get all the club stuff done early, but things took longer than I’d hoped and I stayed up later than planned Friday night trying to get more done, pushing my sleep schedule so I slept later than planned on Saturday morning. But, much worse than that, being stressed about getting the stuff done right up until sleeping resulted in absolutely terrible sleep that night, so my intended 8 hours was more like 4ish decent hours and 4ish hours of tossing+turning half-sleep, or laying in bed not sleeping at all…

So, my main problem was sleepiness all day – if I had a full night’s sleep and wasn’t stressed out, I would have no problem at all staying up 24 hours. Then on the other end of things, all for the same reason, I knew I had so much work to get done on Sunday (and really didn’t want to be working on the club during the make-a-long because that would be against the whole point of it!) so if I stayed up till 8 the next morning, I didn’t know if I could do it. So I crashed around 6am, slept till 10, and finished all the club stuff on 4 hours of sleep. Better than no sleep at all!

Those were the bookends of the day; as for the middle, there were some interruptions there as well… in between the crocheting and the sleeve skirt, there was a bit of a gap. I took a nap for about an hour and a half, the only way I could make it into morning, and then Pete and I went out to dinner with friends – it wasn’t planned, but I didn’t want to say no to the invitation because of the making. I knew I was already failing at the 24 hours straight plan, especially after the nap, and I had to eat something, so I got coffee with my food and had some social interaction thrown in there. So from about 7:30 to midnight, the make-a-long was paused.

The only other problem I had, which wasn’t a huge deal, but I’ll be better about it next time around, was that my plan to not have any plans didn’t work out so well. I thought, just planning to make stuff nonstop the whole day, and leaving what that stuff was up to whatever I felt like doing in the moment, would be the best way to do it; but it ended up resulting in all those still not finished projects, and gaps of time throughout the day that were wasted trying to figure out what I was in the mood to make… Next time, I’ll have a pile of projects ready to go, and I can still choose what I feel like working on, but with some limitations, there won’t be so much indecision, maybe…

Ok that was a lot of babbling, sorry about that. In about a month and a half, something like that (maybe May 22nd?), I’ll arrange another make-a-long, on a weekend with no deadlines in front of me, and hopefully the date will work well for you too, and we’ll all give it another go! Yeah!

Brimming with Color!

Did anyone wonder what all the dyed Imperial Stock Ranch was for? This is what! (rav link) (I actually started out designing The Shapeshifter with it, pre-dyeing, resulting in this prototype, which didn’t work out; then I started designing Twisted Ankles with it, making this hand-dyed pair – then overdyeing, but that wasn’t working out for the context either, so then this hat happened!) For now, I’m just showing you for fun, but in October the pattern will be available to all!

Update 7/04/10: Turns out I got to release it earlier than I’d thought – the pattern is for sale to all now in my shop and on ravelry! Hooray!

It’s for the Twisted Single Skein Club! The same club that I designed Ocean Breezes for last year (which, coincidentally, will also be available to all in October!) – Twisted is the coolest yarn shop ever, by the way (duh)! So yeah, the hat… it’s pretty basic, bulky, so quick to knit, and versatile – wear the brim up or down for different styles:

And the pom poms! Optional, of course, but one skein of yarn is plenty for the hat plus 3 or 4 of them if you want (or fewer huge ones)!

The top is a little bit interesting, easier to see in these pre-blocked shots with the harsher lighting (click to see bigger on flickr):

So, the Twisted club members all received the skein of Imperial Stock Ranch Lopi yarn, the pattern (with pom pom tutorial), 5 packets of Kool-Aid, and pdf versions of all the dyeing tutorials! Fun!!

Designing this hat with the hand-dyed yarn in mind, and designing the dye jobs with the hat in mind, are what inspired me to do my next ebook on yarn dyeing! The project is on hold till after the move, but I’m excited to get going on it!

April 4th – 12th photos

This has been a long and hectic week! Lots of yarn, food, crafting….

4th – Easter was a weirdly normal Sunday… Pete’s stupid company decided it was a good idea to have stores open, so he went to work as usual, and I stayed home and worked pretty much as usual. But I wanted to do something special, so I made cookies! We’ve been trying to use up all the food in the kitchen before moving, so I gathered all cookie-friendly ingredients, and made coconut, oatmeal, white chocolate, and dark chocolate chip cookies. (weird – I just found that last Easter I also made coconut chocolate chip cookies, I guess it’s an accidental tradition now!):

5th + 6th – These days were filled with yarn for the club. First, winding a ridiculously huge skein (almost 700 yards of chunky wool), since I had to dye it in 5 yard color sections, and I chose to try doing it all together in a massive skein, divided into 3 sections. It was messy… but it worked… Then, more unraveling, and spinning for the recycled spun club yarn, which I really love this month:

7th – We finally got over to Burgerville for the seasonal Rosemary Shoestring Potatoes – yummmmm!! They have so many fantastic seasonal items throughout the year, and these fries are definitely one of my favorites! (ps – if I ate meat, I’d be way into that turkey burger, yumm spinach!)

8th – I needed to buy some fruit for my club photoshoot, and to test out the produce bag (so happy with how it turned out!!) so I walked to Limbo, grabbed an assortment, carried it home in the bag (and got a compliment on it at the store) and then I had all this fruit that I wanted to use up… I also happened to have a bottle of cheap red wine in the fridge from a long time ago… So, I tried making sangria! Total success! I had my whole “recipe” typed up here, but then I thought, I’d rather just give it it’s own blog post… soon… yumyumyum:

9th – Forgot to take an official photo of the day… this is the day I finished designing and knitting the other club pattern, dish scrubbies, and photographed them, so this is from that photoshoot. (By the way, here you can see the intended purpose of these cup things that I have in my studio – they are from Ikea in the kitchen organization section.)

10th – Make-a-long day! A post with everything I worked on is coming soon; here’s a peek at the mess of craftiness I had going on. Linda’s book is the only one I ended up using directly, the rest of my projects were either finishing old things I’d started years ago and forgotten, or improvised projects I’d been planning for awhile…

11th + 12th – Club prep days… Of course, I was extremely sleep deprived on Sunday, but I had tons of work to get done, so the day is a blur of writing, printing, cutting, winding, sorting…… And then I did all the distributing, packaging, shipping label printing, all on the mail-out day (usually I try to get more done ahead of time!) which ended up being ultra chaotic because I ran out of packing tape halfway through the packages! I knew I had more somewhere, but I wasted something like 40 minutes looking for it with no luck! Anyway, I ended up messily finishing the packaging in line at the post office right at the last minute – they went out on time, but man, it wasn’t pleasant…

Now that the April club is out (and it’s a good one!), the make-a-long happened, and I have no more major deadlines or anything for awhile, my focus gets turned to the move! Extreme packing starts today! Woo!!

Make-a-Long participation details and making ideas!

Update 9/16/10: the 2nd make-a-long is happening on Saturday, Sept 18th – use these same links and info to participate again!

Ok this Make-a-Long (tomorrow, Saturday!) is getting a MUCH bigger response than I’d expected! Exciting!! A couple of things have been asked about several times (and some fantastic ideas have been shared), so I thought it would be a good idea to do one more post about the event before it starts… First, exactly how do you participate (especially if you don’t use twitter)?

I’ve just set up a facebook group, a flickr group, started a ravelry forums thread, and then there’s the twitter hashtag, and there’s this blog, and the blog-world in general. If there’s another place you think I should set something up, let me know… I’ll address each thing…

The facebook group is here; I’m not super facebook-literate (I kind of hate it, but eh, everyone uses it, so there I am), so I’m not sure exactly what you can do on the group. Post messages to the wall, and share photos for sure – facebook people, you can go further if there’s more ways to interact through groups… So, go ahead and post stuff there throughout the day, share photos of what you make during and/or after, and post later about how it all went!

The flickr group is here; it’s up to you how you use this group. I will be waiting until a day or two after it’s all over, then sorting through and editing all the photos I took throughout the day and uploading them to flickr. If you want to, you could post photos to flickr all throughout the day. There’s also a discussion board over there, so feel free to use that!

If ravelry is your discussion board site of choice, I started a thread there where you can post your progress throughout the day and talk about making. Of course, if you have another forum (on ravelry or elsewhere) where you talk about making, get some members to join in the make-a-long and chat about it there!

You can also post about your making progress, links to photos, etc here in my blog comments, or do short posts throughout the day on your own blog! If you are posting on your own blog, be sure to post a link to it either here, or on one of the other message boards – next week, once all photos are shared and everything, I’ll be writing a post with lots of links!

For me, I think twitter will be my main outlet to all you makers throughout the day, with the hashtag #makealong. If you don’t know how twitter hashtags work, it’s very simple – a word with a hashtag (#) in front of it becomes a link to a search of all tweets with that same word. To view all these tweets, without clicking on a hashtagged word, you can go to search.twitter.com and search the word (makealong, in this case).

If you happen to use TweetDeck, you can search the word using that little magnifying glass icon at the top, which will create a column for all tweets with the word, so you can keep track of make-a-long tweets throughout the day! Of course, when you tweet about what you’re making, or anything make-a-long-related, include #makealong somewhere in the tweet!

The other question I keep seeing pop up is “what should I make?” – whether it’s meant to be hypothetical or literal, I’ll try to help you out!

Personally, I plan to use a bunch of the craft books that I fall in love with, purchase, then let sit on my shelf collecting dust because I only design my own projects and never do crafts just for fun! I also might be going back to some online tutorials that I’ve favorited and wanted to try out. So, you could try the same – look at your bookshelf, bookmarks, or wherever else you have project ideas stowed away for later use…

As I said in the first post, making can include anything, not just crafts, and I’ve loved reading some of the things makers are planning on doing! I hadn’t even thought about food! It looks like many people will be cooking/baking during the make-a-long and I think I might join in!

Some other thoughts for genres of making besides crafting:

gardening – it’s Spring!
home projects – like furniture hacking, room makeovers, wall decals, painting a mural?
art projects – maybe you majored in art like me, but haven’t touched a drawing pencil or paintbrush since you graduated, like me…
computery – like redesigning your blog/website, or backing stuff up with the Archive-Along!
writing – or zine making, or book-making
photo-related – organizing old photos and putting them into albums, perhaps

I’m sure there are many more I’m not thinking of… And how about some craft genres? Maybe you’ll see something on the list that will remind you of a project you were forgetting!

clothing reconstruction
clothing embellishment
home decor projects
jewelry making
yarn making (spinning, dyeing, recycling)
weaving
crochet
knitting (finishing old unfinished objects, perhaps?)
paper crafts
print-making (stamp carving, freezer paper printing, to name a couple varieties)

Ok those are some, but there are so many more, of course! Just trying to get your creative juices flowing, or something… I did a roundup on Threadbanger today with Spring sewing projects, and I also linked there to some other sewing roundups I’ve done. Threadbanger is a great resource for project ideas, if you want to find some tutorials to use during the make-a-long (all the roundups I did in my first year are here, but I haven’t updated that for the last yearish because I suck! sorry!)… Here are some other great online places to find crafty tutorials:

(If you have other favorites, share them in the comments!) Ok that’s enough listing! If you’re making something that I didn’t mention here, or have more ideas, tell us in the comments to help out those having a hard time figuring out what to make!

Now I need to try to get sleepy, so I can go to sleep early, wake up early, and get making!!