I’ve recently started making cards. I love letterpress stuff but an actual letterpress is a little out of the question (for now?). Instead I’ve been frequenting my local scrap booking store quite a lot and bought tons of supplies.
I did my own Christmas cards this year and while they turned out okay it’s pretty obvious it was my first attempt. Some friends saved them and a little over six months later they’re falling apart. I blame Uhu. I got some proper adhesive, paper cutting tools, some new stamps and set to work. Over a full day I produced a birthday card for plentyspace and a wedding shower card for my best friend. I’m really happy with the way they turned out.
I love M. Ward and I can’t get enough of this song so I wanted to share. This is the same kind of song that made me fall in love with his music when I first heard it.
Most challenging project yet (of my three complete knitting projects). The lace pattern was easy to remember but really easy to screw up. As usual I pulled this out and started again several times before I got so far I just had to accept my mistakes. Two major booboos: I purled two rows by accident which put the wrong side on the outside. When attaching one end to the other I wasn’t careful enough about matching up the sides so they are a bit lopsided and scrunched up in places. Luckily I wear this kind of twisted up so you can’t really see the mistakes.
The yarn I used was Debbie Bliss Rialto 4Ply 100% Merino wool and it is beautiful! As usual I over-estimated the amount of yarn I would need as this took up only one skein (exactly one skein - I couldn’t have made it any longer). The pattern called for much chunkier yarn but I love the way the thinner stuff makes the lace stand out. Can’t wait to make something else with the leftovers! Totally worth the price.
The end result is pretty impressive looking and I would make this one again - hopefully in less time (this took me about a month) and with less major mistakes! I’m moving onto very simple dish cloths. Looking forward to doing something easy and mindless.
Working on some ideas for a second table lamp for the living room. Right now I have a the Pottery Barn Milk Glass lamp in red and I LOVE it. I could definitely just go and buy a second one and be totally happy, but I’m trying to find some cheaper options (although, looks like they might be on sale soon).
I made a list of all the projects I have on the go and it’s getting ridiculously long.
Redo IKEA step stool. Much like this makeover on Design*Sponge. So far I’ve taken the stool apart and painted it. Still needs another coat and then I need to Mod Podge the steps. Done and blogged here.
Fingerless mittens. I’ve bought purple yarn and chosen this pattern. It involves knitting with four double pointed needles - something I’ve never done before. I watched a few YouTube videos on it but the pattern is more complicated than just straight up knitting in the round. It’s all knit one through the back loop, purl one repeat and that’s too many new techniques all together for me to figure out. I’m waiting until I can get some guidance from my Mom since I’ve tried to start about three times and had to rip it out due to mistakes / not knowing what I’m doing. If you ever want to learn to knit though I highly recommend watching some YouTube videos, there are tutorials for almost all techniques. Just not putting all those techniques together at once.
Cloth Napkins. Dana is obsessed with using napkins at every meal and the waste is getting out of hand.
Cloth Coasters. So we can get rid of the ugly Kronnenberg cardboard bar coasters cluttering our living room. I bought the material and I’m going to get started on it tomorrow. Got the idea at goodEGG - never thought of making fabric coasters until I saw those.
I’m also making a jewlery box, etching glass spice jars and slowly organizing my craft roomcloset. I need a few weeks off work to get this stuff done!
Books I’ve read Books I want to read Books I don’t want to read
1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment 4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude
6. Wuthering Heights 7. The Silmarillion (no Lord of the Rings) 8. Life of Pi
9. The Name of the Rose 10. Don Quixote 11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey 15. Pride and Prejudice (no Jane Austen)
16. Jane Eyre 17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov 19. Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies (no non-fiction) 20. War and Peace (nobody gets through War and Peace hehe)
21. Vanity Fair 22. The Time Traveler’s Wife
23. The Iliad 24. Emma 25. The Blind Assassin 26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway 28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods 30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran
33. Memoirs of a Geisha 34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver 36. Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian: a novel 39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera 41. Brave New World 42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault’s Pendulum
44. Middlemarch 45. Frankenstein 46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King 51. The Grapes of Wrath 52. The Poisonwood Bible 53. 1984 54. Angels & Demons (no Dan Brown)
55. The Inferno 56. The Satanic Verses (started this - could not finish) 57. Sense and Sensibility 58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 61. To the Lighthouse 62. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver’s Travels
65. Les Misérables
66. The Corrections
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury 72. Angela’s Ashes
73. The God of Small Things 74. A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners 80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved 82. Slaughterhouse-five
83. The Scarlet Letter
84. Eats, Shoots & Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon 86. Oryx and Crake: a novel 87. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion 90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey 93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame 96. Freakonomics (no math)
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
98. The Aeneid 99. Watership Down (reading right now)
100. Gravity’s Rainbow 101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
103. White Teeth 104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers
Over the holidays I tackled my first knitting project. I needed a winter hat. This is a Bernat pattern that got adjusted a lot to make it more slouchy. The yarn is Bernat Satin Medium Camel. I love the yarn - it’s soft and has a nice colour that matches the “Camel” in my winter coat.
I had to rip this out and restart three times until I learned to meticulously check each row as I finished it. The third and final try took me a little more than a day to knit - probably about eight to twelve hours. I think it turned out really well for a first project and it’s keeping me warm this winter.
I had some help in the form of my mom, who is an awesome knitter and showed me learn how to pick out yarn and adjust the pattern. YouTube was also amazing because there’s a video for just about every technique - casting on, casting off, knit, purl, increase, decrease etc.
I learned a lot knitting this simple beret and I can’t wait to try something else!
I love the whole idea behind Seen Reading since I’m ALWAYS reading over people’s shoulders or checking out the books people are reading on the subway. So it’s extra neat to see a video of her process.
