The Word on the Street, August 30

This week, Liz is planning to narrow down some craft ideas for future sales.  In addition to a Pinterest board that she has dedicated to craft and DIY ideas, she keeps a small file drawer at home with ideas as well.  

Liz really likes to work with materials that she already has on hand, but draws the line at crafting with cat hair.

Erica worked on the huge afghan some more, and discovered that she could multi-task.

That’s right, folks. Knitting and reading. Some said it couldn’t be done; some said it would be easier to just listen to an audiobook. But Erica lives life on the edge.

In addition to mastering the knitting/reading combo, Erica also teamed up with her awesome fiance to design their wedding invitations, which are 8-bit themed, and pretty darn cool.

Sam is first and foremost completely impressed by Erica's abilities  because she tried knitting and reading once and almost broke her brain. 

This is one of the projects Sam finished this week. The lighting is TERRIBLE, Sam apologizes.  She whipped up this baby hat (it's purple, brown, and green) in just a couple of hours for a friend to give as a gift to another friend. Sam's been experimenting with carrying colors behind her work so that she can do as many stripes as she wants without weaving in a bunch of ends. If Sam were an evil genius with minions the minions would be made to weave in all of her ends. Because she hates weaving in ends, is what we're saying here.

And that's what's keeping us busy this week!

The Word on the Street, August 22

Liz spent some time last weekend painting a big Totoro on one of the walls in the house of her friends Aaron and Melanie.  Aaron’s birthday is coming up, and Melanie decided to transform the Florida room in their house into a Totoro room for Aaron.  They have been hard at work since buying the house less than a year ago, so Melanie actually painted an accent wall in the Florida room while Liz painted Totoro. It was a paint party (a great kind of party, in case you’re wondering).  Needless to say, Aaron loves Totoro.  Liz’s fiance, Eric, helped to get Aaron out of the house for long enough for Liz to get Totoro painted.

Isn’t he cute?  Liz was pretty proud of her work.  This Totoro is almost 3’x4’ - a pretty big size.  Since Liz had never painted a mural or other wall illustration, this guy took about 5 hours to complete, including a dinner break for some excellent vegetarian Thai food.  If you’re not familiar with Totoro, well, now you are (Liz hasn’t actually seen the movie or read any of the graphic novels herself *gasp*).  Edit: since writing this post last week, Liz actually did watch the movie My Neighbor Totoro recently while nursing a hangover.  It’s really cute!

This week, Liz hopes to continue on some big projects that are taking a while to complete.  Ask her to crochet a hat for you and she’ll have it done in an hour, but afghans and detailed illustrations are hogging several weeks of time.  She has a short work week coming up before taking a few days off with Eric to head out of town for some upstate Michigan beauty and wine tasting.

Erica hasn’t crafted much this week, unless you count two rows on the (house cover) afghan for her mom that she’s been working on for almost a year. She and Kevin have been working hard on booking DJs, lining up hotels, and designing wedding invitations for their wedding in November.

Sam’s been crafting away, but a few things she's made are presents, so she can’t share those just yet. She did make a pair of these mittens for Applefest:

Cables and stripes are going to play a large part in most of what she’s making this fall. More pictures to come!

That’s what’s keeping us busy this week!
 
 

Caturday!

Caturday is EVERY day!

Here’s Lola, Liz’s cat, just being a lazy piece of fatness - but we wouldn’t want it any other way.  

Sometimes, Lola pretends that she likes to play or be brushed, but she really just loves laying around the best.  She is an extremely strange cat, in that she doesn’t play with yarn or get in Liz’s way too much while she crafts.  Given, Lola is no spring kitten being 10 years old, but even when she was a much younger girl, she didn’t get into much trouble.  The most annoying things about Lola include her hungry meow (especially in the wee hours of the morning), her enjoyment of chewing on plastic bags and packaging materials, knocking over cups and drinking glasses, and her weird affinity for laying on and rubbing her face into stinky shoes.  She typically sleeps on the back of the recliner - not the seat, the back - which is quite a balancing act for this 14-pounder.  Lola loves to look out the window, lay in her bed, and occasionally tear-ass across Liz’s apartment for no apparent reason at all.

Sam’s cats Harper and Henry are much less chill than Lola. Just last night she had to put down her knitting to break up a fight they were having about who got to sit in a window. There were three open windows. Cats are dumb.
 

This is Harper having been rudely interrupted by Sam while attempting to neutralize the threat these jeans posed to her family’s health and safety. Harper will similarly neutralize threats in the form of toilet paper, blankets, sweatshirts, and paper towel. It involves a lot of writhing and kicking with her back feet.


Henry prefers to help by laying on things, like this folder with WWII information,


or my knitting patterns.

For all of their quirks (Henry’s water glass thing, Harper’s shark eyes, or how both of them like to hide under the kitchen sink until you’re doing dishes and then come out and scare you, just to name a few), they are Sam’s tiny babies and she loves them. They even tried to rescue her when vacuuming the stairs scared up the BIGGEST MOST SCARY BUG IN THE UNIVERSE and Sam dropped the vacuum and ran.


Erica’s cats are young, and therefore super stupid. But cute as hell. It’s a tough life for Sneezy Beezy the Siamese-y and Xena: Warrior Kitten. They love the fish-on-a-string toy, the catnip mice from Auntie Sam, but most of all they like sleeping. All day. They’re like stupid little furry naptime best friends.
 
Like most cats, 85% of their day is spent napping, while the other 15% is spent eating, destroying things, and pooping. Despite the copious amounts of pooping, they have brought much joy into Erica’s life since she adopted them 10 months ago.

But seriously, life is never bad when you get to come home to this silly little cross-eyed face every day after work:

Happy Caturday everyone!

The Word on the Street, August 6

This week, Liz hopes to get more work done on the past projects that she mentioned and also get started on making some felt flowers for her wedding (pictured below is one prototype).  Oh yeah, we forgot to mention – Liz is getting married next year!  She hopes to make a lot of the décor for the wedding herself.

Erica had a crazy week and weekend, where unfortunately not much crafting got done. She did get to get more acquainted with her sewing machine toward the beginning of the week, however, and whipped up this little gem.

She had purchased a really cool shirt for her fiance, K-Fed, but it turns out that even at close to 6 feet tall, this shirt was way too long on him. Now it has a new life as an awesome book/stuff bag. She thinks that she did a pretty good job on it since it was a free-hand patternless design, and a couple people have asked “Where did you get that bag? I love it!”

Sam had a four day weekend and was looking forward to knitting with fall colors in preparation for Apple Fest which is coming right up. However, part of Sam's brain must have fallen out during the week because every single mitten, hat, and sock she started was coming out HUGE! She couldn't figure it out, she was knitting a gauge swatch and everything. In fact, that's all she completed over the weekend, a ton of gauge swatches:

Just when she was about to quit knitting forever Sam realized she was counting all the stitches in a two inch section of knitting...and then not dividing that to get the stitches per inch which is why everything was coming out twice as big as it should have. As embarrassed as Sam was by this stupid mistake she was also relieved to know it was an easy fix and she has now successfully embarked on some mittens that are the right size.

And that's what's keeping us busy this week!