What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday ~ 282

Hi All – Yes, it’s Wednesday again, scary how quick it comes round, I know we all say it but it’s true!

Here’s my desk this week, if you have no idea why I’m showing you this then head over to Julia’s for all the details and to join in with this fun hop.

I was putting together a card that uses the House Mouse stamp at the back and that big pink bow which came from a box of Christmas chocolates from the other year.  I’d just scored the card using the Scorpal.  There’s also ink and washi tape on the desk, along with a cuppa and a packet of Liquorice Allsorts!  I brought those back from England with me in May of last year!  There were two packets in the box, that’s the second one!  As much as I love them I only have the odd one when I really feel like it.

Way over on the right, on the edge of the picture you can just make out some knitting, the needle is about all you can see.  Last Saturday I took a young Japanese lady from work to JoAnn’s so she could chose yarn and some needles and then it was back to my house for the rest of the day where I taught her how to knit.  As her first project she chose to make simple fingerless gloves in a ribbed pattern that will be seemed up the side, leaving a thumb hole.  I knitted the same thing with some spare yarn and needles for about 10 rows so she could keep looking at mine if she needed to, and that’s what’s on the right on my desk.  I have to say she picked it up incredibly quickly and has finished the first mitt, I just need to show her how to bind off, then she can start the second one.  Despite the language barrier, or possibly because of it, it was a lot of fun and she really enjoyed the day.

Merry In A Hurry Pt 2

Not only am I currently Merry In a Hurry, I’m also in a hurry too, so not many words tonight!

Here’s my offering for today, another of those “two of the same” type posts:

 

Small cards, directly embossed with an embossing folder and then stamped with two sentiments stamps from a Recollections clear set (Michael’s own brand) using ColorBox Pigment Ink and then embossed with Tim Holtz Holographic Embossing Powder.  Simple and quick, but very, very schparkly!  Oh, and a couple of pearls too!

Wanna see how schparkly?

 

Cool huh?

 

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Challenges:

Sarn’s Rudolph Day ~ Make At Least Two Christmas Cards

ABC Christmas ~ U for Uncoloured

Crafty Hazel’s Christmas Extra ~ Anything Goes

Sister Act Card Challenge ~ Anything Goes

 Penny Black @ Allsorts ~ Get Ahead For Christmas

Allsorts ~ Christmas

Completely Christmas ~ Anything Goes

Deep Ocean Challenge ~ Just one Layer

Hello Deskers

Desk day again, number 281 I believe.  I bet Julia has all the info at her fingertips, pop on over for the details.  And yes, before you berate me, my desk is even cleaner this week than it was last week, and that’s because I had a tidy up!  I did make some cards, four in fact, but they were of the quick and simple variety that didn’t make any mess.

 

So, cards in the centre, Unity stamps on the left that I was going to use but didn’t, a line of little ink cubes in front of them that will be heading to work with some other bits I’m sorting out for a colleague’s two little daughters that like to craft; a lot of pearls along with a scalpel and tweezers, an old pink wash cloth at the front with a bunch of newly washed clear stamps that now need to be put away and the grey blob to the right is a new Lili of the Valley stamp that I won in their daily candy.

On the sock front, the purple Neldoreth’s from a couple of weeks ago are lagging a bit, it has to be said, I’ve just started the foot of the first sock so they’re not much further than when you saw them last.  But get me, I found an error in the pattern and emailed the designer about it so I’m now a bonafide sock designer test knitter helper type person!  The Aquaphobias I showed you last week are at the heel of the second sock now, and then there’s these, I’ve gone and started another pair, not content with the two I’m currently working on!

And these ones are toe up.  I’m not sure what I think of the technique to be honest, there are some definite advantages and they’re knitting up very quickly, but it feels odd decreasing when I should be increasing and increasing when I should be decreasing!  I’ve been calling them my dyslexic socks!  Still, it might be another string to my bow, or yarn strand to my dpn depending on how you look at it!

I’m a bit late calling in on my last few visitors from lat week, so I’ll be hitting them up first before randomly popping round a few more blogs.

Merry In A Hurry Pt 1

Catchy title yes?  I’m still a bit behind with Christmas cards so I thought about a few simple designs that can be mass produced quite quickly, for those time when you need Merry but you’re also in a Hurry!  I’ll have another post on this theme in a few days too.

For my quick cards I went single layer, but you can always make this design up on card stock too and add it to a card blank, either flat or popped up with foam tape.  This would then allow you to embellish a little bit more, perhaps with ribbon or bakers twine.

So here are my cards

Bear with me, they’re pink for a reason!  First of all I embossed the Cuttlebug embossing folder directly onto the card blank, giving me an area in the middle to stamp on.  Both sets of images were stamped with Martha Stewart Watermelon ink and were then heat embossed with Tim Holtz Holographic Embossing Powder so they’re really sparkly and shiny, but of course the camera doesn’t pick that up at all.   The bell on the left is a Kanban stamp, as is the holly branch I added on top, and the sentiment is from a free Hot Off The Press set.  On the right both the reindeer and the sentiment are from the same free Hot Off The Press set.

I also added one or two pink pearls!  Maybe I should replace some of the largest sizes with the small or medium ones, I  think it’ll look a bit better.  But the reason for this pinkness is of course the lovely Jingle Belles, Steph and Lauren.  They will donate $4 per entry to charity as October is Breast Cancer Awareness month on the Jingle Belles Rock Christmas challenge, you have until 6pm EST on Wednesday 22nd to link up your pink themed cards, so please support their efforts if you can.

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Challenges:

Jingle Belles Rock ~ Pink Christmas

Allsorts ~ Embossing

Crafty Hazel’s Christmas Challenge ~ Something New (neither of these stamps sets have been used before)

Sister Act Card Challenge ~ Anything Goes

 Crafty Hazel’s Christmas Extra Challenge  ~ Anything Goes

Sunny Sunday

After a few days of greyness and showers it was wonderful to finally wake up to a sunny day.  It was even more wonderful that the sunny day happened to be on a Sunday, so I could enjoy it with Andrew and not have to look at it from the window at work.  It was cold again though 0C/32F but as we haven’t had that many cold days this Autumn so far I really can’t grumble about that.

We decided on a stroll through some local woods after breakfast as it was too pretty not to do something with the morning.  And everywhere did look glorious.  There’s something about Autumn that makes my heart sing and it’s not just the colours.  I love the earthy, slightly sweet smell of it, the low slanting sunlight through the leaves, the glorious blue sky, the crunchy leaves underfoot after a frost, the warmth of the sun on my face and the briskness of the air.  I think I really love Autumn and Winter more than I do Spring and Summer in so many respects.

 

 

 

 

 

Back home we prepared a little treat to go with our morning coffee.  We have a specialty food store near us called Trader Joe’s, it’s a national chain but there aren’t that many of them around, they have a lot of seasonal products and at this time of year it’s all about the pumpkin.  We missed out on this last year so as soon as the products were in Andrew hot-footed it down to our local one and came back with these magical little beauties, Pumpkin Croissants!  Found in the frozen section in packs of four you let them prove and defrost overnight and then bake them for 20 minutes when you want them.  They do need to cool a bit before eating as they have a soft pumpkinny filling that will probably burn if eaten too hot, but oh my, I can see why these sold out in a matter of days at our local store last year.  We need to get some more of these and stash them for when the snow is flying.

Absolutely perfect with a cup of coffee.

 

For those of you with a Trader Joe’s within a 100 mile radius of your home I suggest a little road trip might be in order… but for those of you in countries without one, I’m sorry.  I’d pack my bags and move to America if I were you.  They really are that good!  Chin, chin.

 

What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday – 280

It’s the second Wednesday in October folks, only two more left then we’ll be in November, I know, you can always count on me to cheer you up right?

Before I show you my weekly desk…. if you’d like to know more about blocking socks, click here, cause I wrote a post about it last Friday; and if you’d like to see some beautiful Autumn photos from our camping weekend we just had then click here, cause I posted about that on Monday.

So onto the desk:

 

On the right is a box of embossing powders that was in heavy use on card at the back, some punches that should have been put away, some scissors and Glossy Accents.  The pile in the middle is a new stamp storage box from Crafters Companion when they had a sale on last week.  On top of that is a paper pad and some Penny Black stamps to be put away.

And I can’t leave you without a sock!  This one is called Aquaphobia and is a great pattern for heavily variegated yarn, the kind that looks great on the skein but when you get it home you haven’t a clue what to make with it.  You can see some pooling on the ankle so I’m glad that the whole sock didn’t end up like that, the pattern breaks the pooling up generally.

 

That’s all from me this week, head off to Senora Julia for all the details on WOYWW and I’ll see you on the hop!  Oh and I need to mention that I can’t leave a comment for anyone who only allows comments from Google+, but I still do look at your desk.

Sparkles Monthly Challenge ~ Autumn Colours

Hello all and welcome to another challenge at Sparkles Forum, our winner and Top3 from the Things With wings challenge have been posted, was it you?

The lovely Vickie has set our new theme for us and that’s to use “Autumn/Fall Colours” on your project.  We’re sponsored this month by Crafty Ribbons with a voucher for the lucky winner.

For my project I went all inky again, and I went a bit mad with the old embossing powders too, lol.

I started off with a scrap of GinaK white stamping card and blended some Memento inks over it with duster brushes.  I die cut some leaves from scrap card using a Poppy Stamps Meadow Leaf die and found a couple of punched oak leaves in my pile of “things that might be useful”, and lightly adhered them to the inked card as stencils and added more colour.  The entire panel was edged with Memento Rhubarb Stalk, covered with Versmark ink and heat embossed with TH Holographic EP.

 

 

The paper was from a Theresa Collins pack and I backed it with some more scrap card to make it the same thickness as the stamped panel.  The two pieces were joined together on the back with some cheap copy paper.  The lace is from JoAnn’s and was threaded through with a scrap of thin dark purple ribbon and adhered to the front, neatly hiding the join.  The sentiment is Penny Black from the Salutations clear set and it was stamped with Black Versafine ink.  The entire panel was popped up on foam tape and added to a piece of shiny Bazzil card in a rich raspberry red colour.

The accent leaves turned out to be better than I’d planned.  They were cut from kraft and had been used as masks for the stamped panel so they were all shades of red, green, yellow and gold to begin with.

 

I dotted over a Fiskars orange glitter pen and very lightly embossed them with Stampendous Aged Taupe Embossing Enamel and then embossed them twice more with Stampendous Detail Clear.  To cover the leaf ends I added a wooden button from Michaels, and with a nod to Halloween approaching, trimmed it with a little piece of orange and white bakers twine!

I hope you find time to join us over at Sparkles this month, my teamies have made some fantastic projects to inspire you, you don’t have to make something with leaves and Autumn greetings on it, pop over to the main blog for many different ideas.

 

Card Recipe:

• Card: Blank from Michaels ~ Bazzil ~ GinaK ~ Assorted scraps of kraft card
• DP: Theresa Collins free with a UK card magazine
• Stamps: Penny Black Salutations clear set
• Ink: Various Memento inks ~ Versamark ~ Versafine
• Embellies: Lace from JoAnn ~ Ribbon recycled from a package ~ Fiskars Glitter Pen ~ Stampendous Aged Taupe Embossing Enamel and Detail Clear Embossing Powder ~ Tim Holtz Holographic EP ~ Button from Michaels ~ Twine from American Crafts
• Tools: Poppy Stamps Meadow Leaf die ~ Fiskars Oak Leaf Punch ~ Heat Gun ~ Cuttlebug

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Challenges:

Poppy Stamps ~ Falloween Fun

Pixies Crafty Workshop ~ Use Up Your Scraps (Pink backing card, white stamping card, kraft leaves)

Sister Act Card Challenge ~ Anything Goes

Simon Says Monday Challenge ~ “O” for…. October leaves

Stamping Sensations ~ Warm Autumn Colours

Crafty Calendar Challenge ~ Bingo (Sparkle, Sentiment, Embossing)

Crafting At The Weekend ~ Anything Goes (3rd and final entry)

An Autumnal Weekend

Just up the road from us is Seven Lakes State Park, we’ve been looking at it for a while and finally booked it up last Tuesday as the weekend weather forecast changed from rain to sun.  And by “just up the road” I mean only 44 miles, so just over an hour after leaving home on Friday afternoon we were sitting in our camp spot all set up drinking hot tea, knitting (well, I was knitting!) and watching two beautiful and colourful balloons ascend into the cool of the early evening.

* Friday 5:45pm 9C/48F ~ Sand Lake Campground *

* Saturday 8am 0C/32F  ~ Mist Rising on Sand Lake*

*Saturday 11am 10C/50F ~ Preparing to launch on Big Seven Lake *

* Big Seven Lake *

* Big Seven Lake  has its own Loch Ness Monster! *

* 12 Noon 14C/57F ~ Goosebumps on legs on Big Seven Lake *

* Big Seven Lake *

* Big Seven Lake *

* Saturday 3pm 15C/59F ~ Hiking Trail to Dickinson Lake *

* Saturday 3pm 15C/59F ~ Campground and Sand Lake from trail *

* Sunday 8am -2C/28F ~ Mist Rising on Dickinson Lake *

 * Sunday 8am -2C/28F ~ Mist Rising on Dickinson Lake *

* Sunday 8am -2C/28F ~ Mist Rising on Dickinson Lake *

 * Sunday 8am -2C/28F ~ Mist Rising on Dickinson Lake *

* Sunday 11am 15C/59F ~ A fungi tree on a hike round Big Seven Lake *

 

* Sunday 12:30 pm 17C/62F ~ Big Seven Lake from the trail*

I’m hoping for more weekends like this before we lose the leaves completely, there may even be another camping trip if we can squeeze it in too.

I Love Yarn Day

Apparently October 10th is I Love Yarn Day which is something new to me but what a fantastic day to explain about the sock blockers from my Wednesday post and to show you what they do!

These are the blockers in question.  The blue ones are from Knitter’s Pride and and jazzy ones were cut from a cheap plastic place mat using the bought ones as a template.

 

And here is a sock before blocking.  The pattern doesn’t have a lot of definition to it and can you see how the foot part is twisted?  The rib at the top also appears to be two different sizes, it has a “waisted” appearance.

 

And here’s the same sock after a bath and on the blocker.

 

 

The biggest difference is immediately apparent and that’s appearance.  Do you see how neat and even it looks now, how the pattern stands out?

The other difference is also a big one and you can’t even see it… and that’s fit.  This sock is a combination of cables and lace, it was a big project for me when I knitted this pair earlier in the year.  It was only my third sock using the lace technique and it was only my second sock using cables and it was my first pattern ever that used them both at the same time and the pair took me 5 days short of two months to knit.

I have had a number of people compliment me on the evenness of my knitting and how good and consistent my tension is.  And I’ve had other people jokingly call me a “yarn garotter” because of that same “even” tension!  What they mean is that I sometimes knit too tightly, hold on to the yarn in a death grip, and I do, especially when knitting a new pattern for the first time or learning a new technique.  The problem with knitting socks one at a time is that I often end up with two slightly different sized socks, the first one is invariably tighter, the second one a bit looser because I’ve relaxed a bit, both me and my knitting tension.  The socks above were finished at the end of April and never worn because the first one was so tight it was uncomfortable to get over my heel.

Enter the sock blockers.  First I soak my new socks in a product designed to care and clean the fibres, I use Unicorn Fibre Wash but there are others on the market.  You don’t have to rinse this product out and soaking the sock allows the fibres to relax again after the trauma of being pulled every which way as you knit!  Squeeze, never wring the excess water out and lay the socks on to a clean towel.  Roll up carefully and apply pressure to extract even more water, and then carefully put your damp socks on to the blockers and leave to dry somewhere.  As the socks dry they retain their newly blocked  shape.

The benefit? Not only does the pattern now look really pretty (I appreciate it more now than when I made them), but finally got I wear these socks for the first time this week.

More info and some good before and after photos can be found here on The Twist Collective.  They demonstrate on flat knitting but the principle is exactly the same.

 

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Sock Info:

Pattern: Cathedral Grove ~ available for free on Knitty

Yarn: Premier Serenity Sock Weight Prints in Violas

Ravelry: My project page on Ravelry

What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday – 279

It’s Wednesday folks, it’s desk day.  I think I’m in a rut, my desk seems to look very similar from one week to the next, I also seem to have mislaid my little tidy fairy too which is a bit concerning I must say!

My big, blue, shiny sock blockers arrived from Amazon!  And using them as a template Andrew traced around them on to the cheap place mat and made me another pair.  Having tried both out over the weekend I’m amazed at how well the cheap $1.49 place mat ones work, despite being thin they’re easy to put wet socks on to, I expected them to be really floppy. Of course, they don’t stand up very well so I used my Cropodile to punch holes in the top of them so I can hang them up over a shower rail or something.  Both sets make a big difference to the look of the socks that I make.  I might pop up a post later this week showing the difference between blocked and unblocked.

 

As to the desk proper, I seem to be working on Merry Hallowistmas as I’m caught between Halloween and Christmas at the moment.  Even the Halloween card you see there uses a Penny Black Christmas stamp and a Martha Stewart Icicle punch, items you wouldn’t normally expect to turn up on a spooky kind of card.  The pennant paper strips and the tiny images on top of the Prisma pencil tin are all for a set of three Christmas cards (posted Tuesday if you’d like a look, and the Halloween card was posted Sunday if you’d like more detail on that too).  And my top tip of the week… see that black, shiny, glittery paper between the sock blockers?  That’s Judikins Black Diamond embossing powder embossed on to black scrap card.  I used it to punch out the black bats and the icicle strip on the Halloween card.  It’s much thinner than store bought glitter card and so was very easy to punch.  I think I’ll try that with other colours for other occasions and see how I get on.

And I can’t leave you without a sock update, this is Neldoreth, inspired by the Beech Woods in Tolkein’s Silmarillion, the most difficult pair I’ve attempted to make so far.  They’re not technically difficult as they’re just cables and twisted stitches, they just take a lot of concentration.  They’re certainly not a mindless knit if I’m a bit brain dead after work, if there’s one thing more difficult than knitting cables it’s unpicking cables!

This is what I hope these socks will look like when they’re done!

Don’t know why I’m showing you my desk?  Pop on over to Julia’s for the details, she’ll be the one with the Sangria in her hand!!