Home Improvement

During my Junior year of college, my roommate and I would make it a point to sit down together and watch "Trading Spaces" everyday on TLC. We were both sort of crafty types and longed for the day when we would have more than a dorm room to decorate. Now that I have a house (7 years later), I'm finally getting to do all those home improvement projects we lusted after.

My favorite decorating style at the moment is Mexican Folk Art. Thus, the kitchen was transformed from boring white:

Into an exciting blue, with lots of Talavera tiles:
Tiling was not nearly as difficult as it seems. We got a combo adhesive/grout that was already mixed, so pretty much all we had to do was glue these to the wall. The only challenge was cutting tiles to fit at the edges, but we were able to rent a wet tile saw that was incredibly easy to use. This post is a little misleading, since we're not actually done - we ran out of tiles, even though we thought we were way over-covered. This then involved a 140-mile round trip to Home Depot - yet another disadvantage to living in the boonies. Overall though, I'm very happy with how it turned out.

V-Mail

There is a great post over at Letter Writer's Alliance about V-Mail - mail to soldiers abroad during WWII that was written on a set form, then reduced and sent overseas via microfilm in order to reduce weight. In keeping with my own resolution to write more letters, I made my own version of this form, free for you to download as a PDF!
Just click here...

Half

It's half a sweater! Proof that I've actually been knitting it, not just saying that I have. It takes a long time to knit a sweater on size 4's. The good news is that it fits perfectly - I can't wait for it to be wearable!
P.S. Like my pants? :)

Lunch Break

I try to get outside everyday at lunch, mostly just to see what the weather is since I don't have windows in my office building. (There should be laws against that kind of thing.) I took pictures today:

And look at this: Seagulls??? In NEW MEXICO???

Le Slouch

I have a couple small amounts of yarn from a present last Christmas, so I've been looking for some small projects. Thus, I present Le Slouch:

I used one skein of Plymouth Tweed & my fancy new Knitpicks Options needles in size 9. I should have used size 8's for the ribbing, but I didn't have size 8 DPNs, and there weren't enough stitches to stretch around a circular. I wish this hat was less slouchy, but maybe that's what it's supposed to be like and I'm just not used to it yet. We have an extremely large number of hats here at Chez RangerSarah, so it was fun to add another style into the mix. And I finished it in 2 nights!