Thank Goodness It's Friday

Wow, it's been a crazy week, with everything I've had going on, family visiting, teaching a friend to make books. I haven't had much time to knit and I won't until sometime next week. I'm working on a couple of books right now so that I can enter them in a student exhibit here. This would be the first exhibit my work has been in if I get in. I think I will since I'm an intermediate student and the others submiting are mostly begining. But you never know. There were some pretty good people in my class this last semester. I'm also working on secret projects that I can't share until they're done (ie for a certain holiday coming up). :)

I'm also thinking about taking a letterpress class this summer in the evenings. I think it's a great skill to have along with bookbinding, for obvious reasons. But I think it would also be tons of fun. I love learning the historical way of doing things, which may be one reason I was so interested in bookbinding to begin with.

So tomorrow will be a busy one, but I'm also hoping to catch up on my sleep since I've been lacking in that department for the last couple of weeks. Plus I seem to be getting sick, which is not good, so I'm going to try to nip it in the bud.

I have quite a few projects planned for the near future, and one that I'm really excited about. I ordered some undyed yarn online (super cheap) and I'm going to hand dye it with kool-aid like I've seen on tons of sites lately. I'll probably use the knitty recipe. I haven't decided what colors, but I think I'm going to try a few different shades since I ordered 4 skiens. I can't wait. Also, I have my gardening which has been on the back burner for a while. My sweet peas I started indoors a couple weeks ago are like 4 or 5 inches tall already and have tons of leaves, so I need to harden them off soon so I can transplant them outside. I only planted the seeds outside on Monday so they haven't come up yet, I plan on seeing which way grows more/better/taller, seed started indoors or out, although I'm already off to a bad start for my little experiment since I didn't plant them at the same time! Ah, if only I had enough hours in the day!

All in Working Order

I updated the links on the side bar so all of them should work now. I guess the Dan Weggeland link was having problems. You should also check out the Weggeland Family page since they put new pictures up! :)

This was a very full weekend. I've been having fun with my family in town. I'm going to make my mom a felted bag as well but I think I'm going to use this pattern for hers since she needs something a little bigger (I'll probably alter the pattern just a bit). We had fun going to a yarn store together. She got a beautiful red/salmon color of Cascade 220. I think it's going to look beautiful!



This weekend I also went to the Third Eye Blind concert on Saturday. It was a blast. They are one of my favorite bands and I've seen them 3 times now!

We also started planning a trip to the Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City Utah, which is an amazing experience. I went for the first time last summer with my grandmother and we had such a fun time. I'm excited for this summer for a couple of reasons, first because they are doing my three all time favorite plays and second because my mother and I are going to go together! The plays we are going to see are "A Mid Summer Night's Dream", "Romeo & Juliet", "Love's Labours Lost" and Camelot. They usually do two non-Shakespeare plays each summer and I'm excited to see Camelot since I've never seen a production of this before. I seriously can't wait! We are going to have sooo much fun!

I Love a New Project

I love starting new knitting projects, which is probably one reason I usually have about 4 going at once, I can't wait to finish one to start another. I found some super cute free patterns online that I'm going to start ASAP. I've been looking for a while for a cute felted bag pattern and I just so happened to find one that I LOVE. I took it into the great little knitting shop up the street for me (so bad, I know) to see what fun yarn I could use and they actually had a sample of the purse all knit up. It looked a little smaller than it does here in the picture so I'm going to double the strand and use a little bit bigger needle, if that's possible. So we'll have to see how that turns out. I got two great shades of purple to varigate it. Purple is my favorite color and although I already have two purple purses, I don't have a knit one! :)



The other pattern I'm really excited for is the Paris Loop. It's kind of a poncho but shorter and I think more "spring-y". The bad news at first was that the yarn used in it is discontinued and looking for a substitute that is fun and springy, yet relatively inexpensive was next to impossible. I finally found a yarn at JoAnn Fabric of all places. I actually looks a lot like yarn I used for a scarf a couple of years ago that I love, I'm just worried it's going to be too fuzzy. I also am having trouble locating a 16" circular size 17 needle!!! But I think all the trouble with be worth it. It's a very simple pattern and I think it will go very fast, which is great for my short "project attention span". :)

Sunshine Here I Come!

So we're all going to St. George this weekend to go to the Peter Breinholt concert at Tuachan.
It's gonna be great, we're going to camp in Zion's on Friday and then play all Sat. Then Sunday we'll hit church down there and then eat lunch at the Temple. It's supposed to be 80 all weekend. I can't wait! Maybe I'll even get a tan. Probably not since I think it's genetically impossible for me to tan for some reason, but you never know...

I'm also excited because next week my parents are coming to town for my sister-in-law's graduation. That's gonna be a blast. Fly safe Mom and Dad. :)

I'm So Crafty

Wow, sorry it's been a while since I've posted. I just didn't have anything interesting to write about. Not that I have any mind boggling news now, but hey my weekend wasn't totally lame! I was pretty crafty (although I should have been a little more productive) this weekend.

On Saturday I did some cleaning and then decided to start on some crafts I had discovered this last week which included: guitar pick earrings, rhinestone studded flip-flops, planting sweet peas and working on my knit bag.

The guitar pick earrings turned out so cute. I love them. I even turned a pick I got from a Maroon 5 concert I went to last year into a charm I can wear on a necklace! It Rocks! (Pun intended)

The flip-flops were just an idea I've had for a while. Old Navy was having a 2 for $5 thing so I bought a pair for my sister too. They are super sparkly and will be fun for the pool this summer.

Two summers ago I planted a whole box of sweet peas in my backyard and they grew all summer until they were huge! They got to be around 4 - 5 feet and I just put some stakes with twine around them to support them. I love sweet peas. They are my favorite flower so I bought 3 different kinds and I started some inside and the others I'm going to plant directly into the ground and see which way works better. The place I'm living right now has these huge 6 or 7 foot fences and I think they will look so pretty growing along them. It's gonna be great. One of the varieties I got said they can grow to 15 feet tall!! I'm so excited, I'm going to go home and plant the rest tonight.

My Book "Threw Up"

Did you know that books throw up? Gross huh? Well, not really because "throw up" refers to how the spine curves as it opens. Whoever thought that one up was on something! So I went to this bookbinding lecture this weekend all about how you should sew a book to get good throw up. Yeah, I guess there are quite a few things that can affect the way a book works, which is pretty cool (at least I think so). So this picture of a book I made a couple of years ago has pretty good throw up, but the drape of the paper isn't good for the size of the book I made. I should have made it bigger since the paper is so thick so that when it opened the pages would lie flat. Oops, anyway, the curve the spine makes is good, but I also could have made it more flexible to help the pages lie flat. There are a few things you can tweak in a book to make it better. I've had fun learning so many new things about sewing a book. I'm starting another roundspine on raised cords so I'm going to experiment with one of the new techniques I was taught called "packed sewing" so that I can see if it will make a difference. We'll see how it turns out.

Other news, this weekend I finished the brown shrug, it's cute and I can't wait to wear it. I am starting a purse next. This girl in my bookbinding class has the cutest purse she knit so I'm trying to copy it without a pattern. I'm just going to play around and see what happens. It's just out of plain cotton yarn but she crocheted some really cute designs in contrasting yarn on the outside and I'm going to put something cute on mine. Should be fun!