The Amazing Adventures of Tom and Bel

Monday, September 29, 2008

(not so) Blue Moon

Apparently, the universe likes me more than I thought. Monday, I got a call from Joann at BMFA. Unbelievably, they had my yarn and shipped it to me! Suh-weet.

I'm so jazzed, b/c it means I can work on the project I'm most excited about right now, rather than just the next one in the queue. I like that idea, too, of course, but I just love this yarn and this stunningly cool colorway. Pics soon.

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Baby's Day OFFF

Ever have one of those days that starts off a little weird but quickly ends with you feeling a bit like it's a ride on the Crazy Train? Such was this year's Oregon Flock & Fiber Festival.

It started, oddly enough, with me trying to convince Boy-O that we didn't have to go. I've been reading The Not So Big Life (particularly the chapter about "nut accumulation") and posited that, perhaps, really, I do have enough yarn. (I know, right? Smack some sense into me - I was attempting to be mature.)
However, the Boy insisted that we go because he knows how much I enjoy the event.

So we get in the car, discover that we are camera-less (gah!) but decide to continue on anyway. (How much do I love this man? He totally offered to go back home and retrieve the camera so that I could get pictures for the blog. What a sweetheart.) I figure, hey, it probably looks about the same as last year, minus the preggo tummy, so no big.

True enough, we arrive and the layout's very nearly the same. I head first to Blue Moon's booth so I can snag some mill ends of STR (I got some lovely skeins that I believe were meant to be Gypsum, and one that I think was Ruby Slippers). Once I've accomplished this mission, I'm happy to wander about willy nilly. We head upstairs to see the prize-winning fleece (fleeces? fleecii?), but that exhibit isn't open yet. (Nuts.)
So we wander around, in a very lax fashion, right up until I realize we've nearly interrupted Debbie New's class. (Whoops.) I am struck speechless by seeing the sight of this awesomely clever lady, and it takes me a moment to recover my wits, stop staring at her fabulous sweater, and sweep the kids out of the space. (Double whoops.)

We decide to check out the barns, and head across the lawn, wandering through the amazing crowd of fiber loving people. This is definitely *the* most laid back fiber event ever. Every one seems so darn happy to be there. Even the non-crafty spouses (spousees? spousii?) of the yarn/roving/spinning folks are smiling and yucking it up.

Just after we've read through the warning signs and told the kids to keep their hands in their pockets, we head into the barn. We get maybe halfway down an aisle when the sheep start making that plaintive sound that they make and baby Z starts giving the same distress call. She will not be soothed, so I take her out to watch a few minutes of the herding dog demo and calm her down a bit. I'm sad to miss the babies (always my favorites), but it's no big deal.

We reconnect with teh family, and after a quick nursing/diaper change/potty break, we decide to get lunch. The Boy-O ducks into the espresso hut and I entertain the kids with tales of the ancient technology called...the phone booth. (Mwaaaa-haha!)
Just then, a blond girl of about 11 or 12 walks by in a very shiny gold lamé outfit with what I think is a black person, but turns out to be a llama with an afro wig and a matching lamé cape.
(Which is where I really regretted not having the camera.)
Honestly, I don't know if she meant any insult (and in truth, it's not necessary that I know) but I certainly found it a strange and off-putting choice. Paticularly since I suspect she's from one of the smaller towns in Oregon where people of color are just a rumor.

At any rate, the rest of the festival was good: I met a couple of the PDX Knitbloggers, I had lamb kabobs (and damn, are those delicious!), and saw lots of stunning spindles and fiber and kicked myself for not being born rich and able to purchase all of it to take home with me.

In a fit of industriousness, I decided to start working on a new pattern I'm hoping to put out in a month of so. I've been pretty excited about this idea for a couple of months, and was sure that the four skeins of STR I got were perfect for this design. Except I opened up my bag for the first time since yesterday and I only have three of those four. (Gah.)
I put in a call to BMFA to check for it, but of course they're still at the festival and I'm not very hopeful that I can get that skein back. Which means I can't do that design as planned. Which means I need to get back to the drawing board on that one to use what I currently possess. So I'm totally thrown off my stride.

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Sunday, September 28, 2008

From the mouths of babes



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Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Preview



Coming soon(ish) to a mag near you. Sorry, that's all you get. Now back to work for me!

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Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Ssssh. Be Vewy Vewy Quiet



I'm reading.

(Who knew it was a full-contact sport?)

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Thursday, September 04, 2008

Books on the Brain

Snagged this one from dear Kim over at Random Fiber Ramblings:

"The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six."
*Look at the list and bold those we have read.
*Italicize those we intend to read.
*Underline the books we LOVE .

1
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Honestly, I think I've read more of these than I've checked; I just can't recall (I'm blaming "mommy brain" for that). I find this list intriguing, though incomplete: it's too heavily weighted toward 19th c. English Lit for me, and I find the fact that The DaVinci Code made the list appalling. (I detest that book.)

("Mommy brain" is the well-known phenom of forgetting everything you know for lists of kid-related info. The payback comes when your kids are a little older and you magically become smarter!)

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Monday, September 01, 2008

Beautiful BSJ

Have I mentioned lately that I love my MIL? It always amazes me how well we get along.
She is someone I'd want to know even if I weren't in love with her son.

When we found out about the baby, part of the thrill was knowing we'd be supplied with lovely baby knits. True to my expectations, Baba has come through magnificently:


Baby is stylin' in her lovely new Baby Surprise Jacket. (I would post a Schoolhouse Press link, but I couldn't find a direct link to the pattern or the DVD). I can't comment on the pattern, but given the vast number of these in the blogosphere -- 4,615 on Ravelry alone! -- and the fact that it's by the great EZ, I'm sure it's a good one.
(I love the February Baby Sweater so much that it's my standard baby gift; I've never even tried another one. But this is so cute; it's tempting me to branch out.)
Thank you so much, Baba J!

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