Cool Stuff

I met with Tuulia the other evening for coffee and she presented me with the coolest stitch holders! They're made from fiber optic beads with little Swarovski crystals embedded in them! Kiitos Tuulia!




Marcus and I were browsing in the video section of the local Barnes and Noble and I found the Robin of Sherwood series from the 80's.
Oh Joy! Oh Rapture! I bought the Jason Connery series and plan to go back for the Michael Praed episodes.

Handicrafts and Canoes Don't Mix

Bad News

I went to the doctor's the other day and found out I have to have more surgery on my left foot...

Cirque du Soleil and Socks

Tini and Heiko, my friends from Kiel, came for a weeklong visit before they headed down towards San Francisco. We were lucky enough to get tickets to Cirque du Soleil's Corteo which was inevitably delightful.
Tini brought with her several presents: delicious smelling coffee beans, cool buttons and some more socks! Whoo Hoo! Socks! I love socks! While she was here, she finished a delicate lace scarf...God is it beautiful! What a talent! I wish I could knit like that - it just makes my eyes cross. FairIsle I can do easily, but knitted lace? Nope.

There is Something in the Air... is it Spring Cleaning?

My two biggest passions are books and fabrics. Nancy was blogging about her fabric stash the other day and mentioned that other bloggers were reorging their stashes too. Well so am I. Over the weekend I removed most of my books from my major bank of bookshelves and put all my fabric on the shelves instead. As you can see, I have a good-sized stash. Colossal even. I admit I am a bit of a hoarder, but in my defense I make costumes for theatre productions every so often, so my stash is, by those standards, quite small really...
I still have three shelves of literary books to redistribute, and have devoted one side of my stash to my sewing and embroidery-related books and magazines. The fellows from IKEA are showing up sometime this week to drop off 6 bookshelves for my living room...

Snow!

Well, wouldn't you know it. It snowed last night. It's the latest Spring snowfall since 1972 in this neck of the woods. Jynx wasn't having any of this nonsense!

Last night at about 1:30 the full moon came out and shone its delicate light on the snowfall for an hour or so. I caught a glimpse of the snow fairies frolicking in the pale moonlight, but perhaps it was only a dream.

Gloves and taxes

All of my friends have been making the most gorgeous knitted things; Tini has her delightfully intricate socks, Karin her wristlets extraordinaire. I am one giant jealous lump! Waaa! I wish I had the time to knit something! I'm too busy with my friggin' taxes, work, etc. So to appease my envious ego, I got out the first pair of finglerless gloves I ever knit. They were made sometime in 1993, and I wasn't clever enough to know how to finish the fingertips, so I just made fingerless gloves. I experiemented with fairisle and made up patterns like a crazy fool. The yarn came from an autumn trip to Asheville, North Carolina, where my mom and I watched the leaves turn vivid reds and crimsons. Many of the yarns were picked because they were the colors present in the trees and Blue Ridge mountains.