Becka’s Project Journal

It isn’t even remotely warm enough here to wear sandals yet, but I couldn’t resist and bought these.  I wear sandals from the first day it is almost warm enough in the Spring until October or November, so I treat myself to a new pair every summer.  I don’t own tennis shoes, I wear my hiking boots only when I have to, so it’s either cute sandals, maryjanes or my Dansko clogs.  I have been addicted to Born sandals for the last few years and they had these in GREEN!  I have been looking for green sandals and these are perfect with their ankle straps and big buckles.  Now if it would only warm up a few degrees and stop raining…

Here’s the edge of my shawl with a few more row. I finished the bit you saw last week, picked up 187 stitches along the edge of that and started knitting perpendicular to the previous piece.  I have about 6 rows of this section left to go.  You can see that it is starting to make a slight scallop shape. There’s one row that has some purls where it should have knits, but I am leaving them alone.

For my birthday yesterday, Andy and I both took the day off.  (It was his birthday too.) We went to the Como Park conservatory for a while and just walked around in the steamy greenhouses.

Since St Patty’s day is coming up soon, here’s a freebie embroidery pattern to stitch up and celebrate.  It’s a lucky little sheep in a field of shamrocks.  Click to download  a pdf version of the pattern. 

This is the beginning of this shawl: Andrea’s Shawl You knit the lace edging as a long strip, then pick up stitches along the straight edge and knit the rest of the shawl.  This is the first shawl I have made and this edging is for some reason very entertaining.  Which is good because I have to do about 95 repeats.  The best part of this project is the yarn.  It is a new one from Cascade called UltraPima and it’s 100% cotton.  I usually hate knitting with cotton yarn, but this is really lovely.  My photo doesn’t even come close to showing you how pretty the colors are.  (If you click that link, the Cascade photo really shows you what it looks like.)  It is super shiny and the colors just glow.  I am working with 2 greens – 3744 & 3745

39 Squares:  Found this fun little stitch-along this morning. To celebrate her 39th birthday, she is embroidering a 1 inch square every day (39 total) from now through April. Should be fun to check in and see the progress.

Needle ‘n Thread: Mary is starting a goldwork embroidery project.  This first post is showing how she is padding the areas that she is going to embroider with tiny bits of felt.  This will give the finished piece a 3-d effect, making the gold stand out.  I am really excited to follow along on this one.  I have seen finished gold embroidery but not step by step.

Me neither.  But to celebrate, here’s a freebie embroidery pattern for two sweet little strawberries.  Add some french knots for their seeds. 

Work of a different sort this week.  This is the summer camp schedule for the Textile Center.  I stayed home from work sick one day last week and this is what I did while I watched the Olympics. 39 sticky notes.  Color coded for age level, letter codes in the corner for how many hours, whether or not it uses sewing machines or dye lab space, notes about who is on vacation, what teacher does what class and weeks that some classrooms are already booked.  It is an intensely complicated project.

This very well might be my favorite thing I have ever found on etsy.  I am so completely and totally in love.  The artist is Virginia from StickManJewelry. (Her shop is on vacation if you click over there right now, but she’ll be back soon.  Browse the sold items.) My dragon is tiny (1/2 inch) and perfect.  I have loved dragons for just about forever, so it took very little deliberation (about 13 seconds) before I bought this one.

When I am working on something new, I always have good intentions to do a real work in progress post and take pictures every 1/2 hour to show you the project.  Then I get caught up in working, bury the camera someplace and forget to take any more pictures.  That’s the case with this one too, but I did remember to take a photo of the fabric before I cut it up.  This is what the fabric looked like for “Intersect” below, before I cut it up in to 1 1/4 inch squares.  That piece is about a fat quarter (18×22 inches).