I just realized that I never posted a picture of my ribbon from the State Fair! Here it is - Cheese!
I had a fantastic weekend and hope that you did too. My friend Alison came for a sleep over on Saturday. We know each other from high school in Missouri, and now she lives in the Bay Area. Sunday we played with my friends/basically family, Joyce and Zoe. Joyce is an art teacher at a local high school. Every now and then we get together on a weekend and play in her ceramics lab. I took three semesters of ceramics in college and I just LOVE it.
Alison took a picture of me working on one of my pieces. This is my tallest bowl so far (taller = harder to make), and it felt great to pull it off. I have a ton of small handmade ice cream-sized bowls. Hopefully this one will be big enough to serve side dishes once it’s fired. A few months ago I got really inspired and made some stamps out of Sculpy. Here you can see me stamping some sakura petals on my bowl after taking it off of the wheel and letting it set up in the sun for a while.
I took some house related pictures tonight, but all of the inside ones turned out horribly. It was too dark by the time I got around to it. So I will leave you with this picture of Andy outside of our bedroom in our X-Chair hammock with our furry sons.
I will DEFINITELY be going to this. Would anyone be interested in a crafty fieldtrip from Sacto to SF to hit up the exhibit and Britex? How fun would that be!?
Andy and I moved in to our new house a little less than three weeks ago, and we’re settling in nicely. We haven’t done very much remodeling-type work or bought very much decor yet, although we have been gifted a LOT of furniture. A higher-up at work happened to be moving at the same time as us, and gave us some really nice furniture, including a nice solid coffee table, two side chairs, a great bench that we’ve placed at the end of our bed, and bar stools for our island in the kitchen. Wow, we are so fortunate. Also, Andy’s parents had a leather sectional that they wanted to replace, and so it is in our living room with those two club chairs that I bought. In addition to the chairs, the only thing we have purchased is fireplace glass. It is used in gas fireplaces in lieu of boring old ceramic logs. The flames come up through the glass and it looks fab.
Great Aunt Bettie and I went to lunch and the LYS on Sunday. We always have a lot of fun together. Hi Aunt Bettie! (Forgive the blurry picture - iPhone picture taken by the LYS lady.)
I bought some Cascade 220 wool to knit Christmas stockings for Andy and me. I am making a very simple pattern with not so simple intarsia colorwork. I found some cool images of birds and placed grids over them and tweaked them in Photoshop to make the color pattern. The biggest hurdle so far was wanting to use enough stitches to get decent detail on the birds, but not having to use tiny needles and light weight yarn. So last night, after more than a week of planning, I cast on 120 stitches with the worsted Cascade 220, and will lightly felt the finished stockings. I have a feeling that the felting will make the birds look even better by smoothing the transitions between colors. Let’s hope I’m right.
I haven’t been this excited about a craft project since working on my fair purse.
Hopefully I can upload some pictures this weekend - we’re having issues with the internet at the new house.
I have been doing some major fantasizing about how to furnish our 75% larger house. One of the only items so far that I had really focused on and drooled over is Crate & Barrel’s Ankara chair.
The beautiful wood and awesome lines would look so good in our Modern home. But at $699, it was not going to happen.
As part of my fantasizing I have been trolling all kinds of interior design blogs. I have seen more than a few mention some insane deals they spied on overstock.com, so I decided to poke around and see what they have to offer. And guess what I freaking found for $299!!!!
OHHHH YES YES YES YES YES! YES! YES! YES! Ah, sweet victory. Click the pic to go to the link.
And you know what else? Shipping by Crate & Barrel is $70. With Overstock, I bought myself a “Club O” membership for $20, which gives me 5% on everything for a year, giving me a $30 discount (so -$10 overall), and … on top of that… FREE SHIPPING. OH yeah! GO get ‘em bargain hunters!
Remember how I said that although I was really sad, there was some really exciting stuff going on? Well, I didn’t tell you at the time, because nothing was settled, but - we’re moving!!!
We own an adorable 1931 Tudor in pretty-much-downtown Sacramento. We have lovingly updated it and when I tell people who have been over to our house that we’re moving, they all say “What!? You’re leaving your cute house!? With the awesome backyard!?” (and of course additional comments regarding the state of the economy and questions regarding our sanity). But trust me, we have thought about it long and hard and everything is working out beautifully!!!
We put our house on the market on Thursday the 30th. The next day we had an offer for $10k over asking! We haven’t met him yet, but we love our buyer. Every dealing with him has just been really open, frank, and positive. So we’ve made sure to treat him the same way.
That karma has been returned to us in our role as buyers for our new house. We had only been looking in very desirable areas around downtown. Financially we could get into those areas, but only in overly-urban areas or in really nice areas but only in barely-bigger/less-updated houses. So we expanded our search to the closer burbs.
Our realtor, Jeanine, predicted it correctly - we knew it was our house the second we walked in. Actually we pretty much knew when we saw the Open House ad online. We saw it alone on Sunday the 2nd and then Jeanine and Uncle Rainer came back with us on Monday the 3rd and we put in an offer. So basically we put our house on the market, sold it, and bought a house in four days. We are moving to the ‘burbs! Really, really nice, established, green, close to the Sacramento River, good school district burbs.
Seriously, the house is so freaking cool our heads are about to explode. We knew we loved our new house, but we’re finding out that it’s highly desirable because it is a “Streng Home.” From what I understand, the Streng Brothers built homes in Sacramento and the surrounding area in 70s, and their architect was Carter Sparks. People are pretty obsessive about their Streng homes. And I’m not knocking that in the least. We are FREAKING EXCITED about our new house! Look - there’s even a Flickr pool for Strengs. I’m now a member and can’t wait to post some pics.
I have SO much more to say about this topic. Look for many interior design and landscaping posts to come! I will leave you with a few pictures from the real estate posting of our house. I can’t wait to get in there and put our stamp on it. YAY!!!
I GOT IN!!!! YEAH!!!!! I got “Honorable Mention” in “California Creative Arts Crocheted Exhibits”. =)!!! That’s above “Award of Merit!”
I WILL get a gigantic ribbon to hang on my wall!!! I am so pumped, if you can’t tell from all of the exclamation points. The judge’s notes on my letter read, “This is a great combination of knitting and crocheting.” Why, thank you very much.
Now I’m visualizing Vogue Knitting or some publisher seeing it at the fair and wanting to hire me as a pattern writer ;)
Aunt Susan died on June 28. “Live big, love better” was her last message.
She fought that gdsobmf leukemia like a champ. Her positivity and radiant spirit never dimmed and there are literally hundreds of people who love her and will keep her spirit alive.
She meant so much to me. Thankfully I was able to say so at her memorial celebration last week. She was so giving with her love, and she loved it when it was reciprocated. I figured that speaking at her memorial would be the last time I could do that for her in a big way.
On Friday she was sitting up and joking, Saturday she took a turn for the worse, and Sunday she died. The leukemia came back for the third and final time and took her.
Since then it’s been a whirlwind. None of us ever imagined she would die.
I could keep talking, but I think my own journal is the place to do that. I am just so grateful to have had her in my life.
I don’t want you to worry about me, so I’ll also say that there is some positive stuff going on in our lives as well (which is totally confusing me -sadness mixed with happiness). I hope all is well with you, I’ll be back shortly.
