Finished: T-Shirt Quilt

I actually finished this quilt on December 31, but it has been in constant use since then because we live in a freezer. Now, on March 27th, the cat is still huddling next to the space heater, and I'm still in my winter coat (which I sometimes wear while cooking dinner. What? I'm tough. Heating is for losers.)

This is my favorite way to make t-shirt quilts: Use a 12.5 inch quilting square to cut out the central design (super easy when you use a clear template), and iron each square to some light fusible interfacing. Otherwise, the material will shift around while you're sewing. Then, cut 2.5 inch strips of sashing. Sew together. If you were really dedicated, you could finish the quilt top in a day.

This took me a year to finish (no, no, not of constant work. 5 days of quilting plus 360 days of procrastinating) because quilting is my nemesis. I bring it on myself by using thick batting and choosing a quilting pattern with tons of right angles. I think it turned out great, but I will never quilt something like this again. Thin cotton batting it is from now on. I'm too old for this.

Finished: Kitty Pi Bed

You know how when everyone has a kid they're always like, "Look how awesome my kid is! I know everyone always says that, but my kid really is awesome."?

How about I just show you these pictures and let you decide if my cat really is awesome or not? Also coloring your decision will be that she is super lazy, scratches our chairs, whines for food, and is terrified of raccoons. She is also adorable, so what does that equal, like average awesome?

Anyway, I made her this bed. The yarn is wool and is from Finland and I knitted it on really big needles then I put it in the washing machine to felt it. If you are super into details you can click here. It's Friday! Look at my cat! Time go buy dirt for my deck garden.

Out.

Finished: Knotty Gloves

I seem to have an ongoing trend with my knitting, in which I finish seasonal items during an inappropriate season. I now have my first pair of gloves, just in time for it to be 73 degrees. (Not that I'm complaining about that.)

People who don't knit, upon learning that I knit, often ask how long it takes me to finish a project. The answer? I have no idea. I started these gloves in December of 2009, and knit most of them during an insane Lost marathon, in which I watched over 100 episodes in 3 months. Then I stopped because gloves are so. freakin. fiddly. Are you aware, for example, that we have TEN fingers? Look at your hands; you'll think "10? It doesn't really look like all that many." Then, try to do ANYTHING 10 times. Say your name 10 times, fast. Do 10 push-ups. Give birth to 10 children. Still think 10 isn't really all that many?

I do like these gloves. In fact, I might even love them. I have freakishly tiny hands, and never in my life have owned a pair of gloves that actually fit. Usually the figures just curl over at the ends, giving me crazy monkey hands.

The stats: Yarn = Tess Super Sock & Baby (Purchased at MD Sheep & Wool 2009); Pattern = Knotty Gloves (free on Ravelry); Needles = Size 1 double points (from a thrift store, but I think they might be Boye). Raveled here.

Interesting fact: Through these gloves I discovered that what I always believed to be size-2 needles were actually size 1. Twist!

Home Improvement: Shower

A few months ago, I got an IM of doom from Jason: "Something is wrong with the shower. It's leaking through the floor." Sigh. Eventually we figured out that some of the 26-year-old tiles were coming away from the wall, and water was getting behind them, running into the bathroom below. Luckily Jason figured this out almost immediately, so we didn't have any ceiling damage to deal with.

So, you know me. We could have just patched the tiles, and that probably would have fixed the problem; but that's not how I roll. New shower time!

Again: you know me. Why pay someone to do something you can do yourself? I think at this point Jason was groaning, but with all that "in sickness and in health, in demolition and renovation" stuff, he sort of had to go along. Before, the shower looked like your basic builder-grade installation from the 1980s.

Then it looked like this:

And finally:

(Yes there is a sock on the showerhead pipe.) At this point money was pried from my cold, stingy hands, and some guys showed up to finish the job. Overheard conversation:

Russian tile installer: I like these subway tiles.
Korean tile installer: Oh yes, American housewives, they love subway tiles.

Um, thanks?Drum roll....... the after:

At some point we will have to install a shower door, because the shower curtain gets sucked into the shower when the water's on. But right now we're just happy to have a working shower, and one that makes you feel like you're in a castle.

Upon seeing the final product, I said, "Wow, that shower is way too nice for this bathroom." (Remember, the rest of the bathroom looks like this.) If you give a mouse a cookie...

Trippin'

I ordered the seeds for my garden (a.k.a The Deck Farm) this week. This is truly the best time of year for gardening. In my mind, my garden is a lush oasis that provides a bounty of vegetables, and it is always 74 degrees and stink bugs don't exist. I have totally forgotten about the time last summer when I picked a green bean and a green squishy worm was burrowing into it.

If I lived in a fairy tale (or in that commercial where all the cat food is spiked with LSD), I would have an awesome witch garden where all the fruits and vegetables were the wrong color. This would be possible because these things actually exist.

Pink Blueberries (image source)

Blood Oranges

Purple Green Beans

Apple Green Eggplant (image source)

Purple Broccoli (image source)

Red Pineapple (Photo © Flickr user hellochris)

Black Tomatoes (image source)

Purple Carrots

If you want read about more, click here.

Patron of the Arts

I would like to tell you a story. One day I saw these colorful and cheap paintings in someone's kitchen on Design Sponge (incidentally, our kitchen is also painted that exact shade of yellow). So I looked up the artist, Steve Keene, and found out that he paints assembly-line style, and has made over 140,000 paintings to date. He also sells 5 paintings "that kind of range from large to medium" for only $21. SOLD!

A few weeks later, nothing had arrived, so I was beginning to wonder if I had fallen for some sort of scam. Then the doorbell rang. Jason went downstairs, and came back up with this.

Yeah. Looks like a lot more than 5 paintings, huh? So I started unwrapping layer upon layer of plastic wrap and brown paper. It was at this point that Jason asked me if I had bought a brick of marijuana. (We've been watching a lot of Border Wars lately.)

All told, I unwrapped 29 paintings. You read that right: twenty-nine. What am I going to do with 29 paintings? Especially ones that have zero straight sides and are made of heavy plywood scraps. Here's one with the cat for scale:

For now, they are sitting in grocery bags until I come up with a plan. Which I will do while hanging out in my house which has been hovering around this temperature (on the left):

Beginning

We've started our first "real" renovation project. There's no coming back from this! If all goes according to plan, I should have after photos in a few weeks.

So Long, 2010

I'm sure you are super interested in my obsessive record keeping, so here goes! In 2010, I read 46 books (1 less than last year), for a total of 14,945 pages. The worst book was definitely The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. Don't waste your time. My best book discovery of the year was Roald Dahl's books for adults. I didn't know he wrote books for adults, but they are funny and entertaining (and not for kids. Unless you have some sort of diabolical plan to warp their young minds.)

I also had the unofficial goal of reading from as many countries as possible (book setting, not author nationality). I made it to 15, which is less than 7% of all the countries in the world. That's a pretty pathetic showing, so I'll keep working on it next year.

I don't have a specific goal for next year, other than to actually read some books from my "to read" list on Goodreads. Right now it stands at 186; I've already requested a few of these from the library, so I'll get at least 3 read before I wander off as usual. I know the covers are too small to read, but look at the pretty colors!

As for knitting, that showing was kind of pathetic. I didn't knit any sweaters this year, but finished 2 pairs of socks, some gloves, 2 stockings, and a shawl. Perhaps I could learn to knit and read at the same time?

Have a great New Year! I will be sitting on the couch, watching a movie possibly featuring people with British accents, and will most likely fall asleep before midnight. Work hard, play hard.

Once again, it is Christmas

In my overly-rational holiday mindset, I (we) didn't put up the Christmas tree this year. I don't really get nostalgic about anything, so it seemed like a lot of pointless work to haul everything up from the basement, wrestle the lights onto the tree, and pull out all the ornaments, just so the cat would have something to mess with. I know. Glass half empty.

But, I did decorate the mantel, and it seemed just as good as a Christmas tree. [I still need something permanently above the mantel, a mirror or painting. Still searching.] I finished knitting 2 stockings, which I thought represented a commendable engagement with the holiday. The pattern and the navy blue yarn came in a kit from Knitpicks, and I bought the red yarn (Knitpicks Telemark) separately. I also have some green yarn for a 3rd stocking at some point.

We also decorated the outside of the house in order to disguise our scrooge-like tendencies from the neighbors. The mini lighted trees were an after-Christmas score last year. I think I got 12 trees for $6 or $7. We had to buy the wreath on the chimney this year for full price, which caused my cold, cheap heart to skip a few beats.

I did get a great bean tower as a gift this year, and let me tell you, next year's deck garden is going to be epic.

San Francisco

At the end of October we went to California for my sister's wedding. I'm not sure if you are aware of this, but California is very far away from Maryland. We got up at 4am for our flight, and landed in California at 10am (Pacific time). This lead to a lot of confusion. What time is it? Where am I? What just happened? So, then we went to Muir Woods. We had tried to visit during our trip last year, but Muir Woods suffers from the most horrible parking affliction I have ever witnessed. There are lots of tall things there. I'm pretty sure they were trees, but then again, I was pretty much walking dead at that point. Either way, they made me feel short. Well, shorter.

We then continued up the coast to Point Reyes National Seashore, where we stayed with some friends of ours, who live and work in the park. Sure, it was pretty, but let me tell you about the sandwich. The most amazing sandwich ever created. By noon we were on our 3rd meal of the day, and stopped at a random roadside grocery store/deli. We bought a turkey sandwich, and proceeded to devour it while sitting in the car. Jason said, "Wow, this sandwich is really good." I said, "Oh my God, it is!" I'm not sure if it was starvation or California-hippie-organic-fresh-happy ingredients, but that sandwich will forever live in my food memory.

We saw this lighthouse. It was very windy and I almost died. Not really, but that would make the story a lot more interesting.

Then came wedding preparations: nails, hair, yarn purchasing, the usual. I don't have any pictures of that because I was in the wedding, and assumed they were paying the photographer big bucks for something.

We walked on the beach (in Bodega Bay) and saw these really gross sea monsters. They are some sort of plant life, but I found them to be quite terrifying. They look like intestines, or brains, or just something that could attack you.

Also there is apparently some sort of large bridge in San Francisco that people like to walk on. The views were nice, I'll give it that, but in all these pretty pictures the loud, stinky, dangerous 6-lane (or 8-lane?) highway has been carefully edited out.

And then we flew home, scarfed some Chipotle at the the airport, and were happy to be home in our own house, amply stocked with lots of TV channels, comfy couches, a feline, and craft supplies.