Home Sweet Home

We are finally back in NYC, and I am loving the thought of no more traveling for at least another month. Our Christmas vacation to Chicago was lovely, lots of quality time spent with Grams and lots of chips and chocolate and all types of bad (but oh so delicious) food were consumed. I got a lot of wonderful and thoughtful gifts this year, I am especially excited about the knitting books









And a subscription to Net Flix. I plan on spending as much time as possible on the couch watching movies and knitting. Thought my completely empty calendar for January is starting to fill up rather quickly now that I am back.

I brought along the green sweater and some other random yarn to work on some little toys I was designing in my head. The hilarious part was I opened a part of my backpack I hadn’t checked in a while and found this



I don’t know what I was even working on or if this particular yarn was trying to stowaway for the trip. I did start on a new toy but I ran out of yarn so I am hoping to finish knitting him tomorrow and then I think I am going to venture into the world of felting . Oddly I even with being a textile major I never did any felting so the adventure starts this weekend=>

-McK

Tis' The Season

For headaches, insomnia and stress induced eating that is. I am finally done with my “have to get done list” cards sent, presents sent and all of my freelance work done! Sadly I have had very little time to knit this month. I finished all the bells and whistles on Pedro,



He is a Llama of Fire. Since most of you are probably saying “a what?” I’ll explain. At my best friends wedding a while back we(the bridesmaids) were talking about how we didn’t want to cry at the altar during the ceremony so we were coming up with silly things to make us giggle to think of if we thought we were going to cry. Well my friend Amy has a little bit of a Llama addiction so “Llama of Fire” was born. It worked wonders for that day we all mostly didn’t cry, great. Well the next day was not to great, one of the bridesmaids, my friend Wendy’s father past away. It was unexpected and horribly sad and just not good, like most unexpected tragedies. The next day I was in this great store in my college town called Beyond Timbuktu and noticed they had little carved wooden llama beads for sale. So I bought a llama bead grabbed some of dyed red and yellow fabric from my textile class and created a llama of fire bracelet which I gave to Wendy at her fathers wake. It had only been about a year and half since my mom had passed away(also unexpectedly and I just remember needing a distraction something to take my mind away from where I was, and I figured Wendy was probably in that place as well. It worked at least as much as little things can and I know she still has that bracelet even today. So when Gene and I heard that friends of ours were having a spectacularly bad few months I decided to put my knitting skills to use and make another llama as a way to send our love from far away. He made his way to Illinois and is having a very good time with his new family.

The rest of my month has been filled with Sewing. I had 4 projects that all had deadlines last week. So instead of knitting I’ll show you some of the costumes





The pink coat is made out of felt, its for a dance/theater piece where the dancer Velcros stuff to herself, and it makes her look like a Jackie O’ Paper doll, kind of awesome.

Now all I have to do is wrap a few more presents for friends here in NYC and pack to go to Chicago on Friday. So there should be plenty of knitting time in the next week and a half and all I can say is

WOO HOO!

-McK

Brooklyn or Bust...

So this weekend the husband and I were supposed to be visiting St. Louis. Well the lovely folks at Macarthur Airport in scenic Islip NY had other plans. Apparently there is some piece of equipment that helps planes to land in cloudy/rainy weather called an EGS. Well the airport decided to try to fix this piece of equipment and then couldn’t get it working again and cancelled ALL the flights in or out of the airport for the entire day. Well the airport in question is about a 3 hour subway/Long Island Rail Road trip away from our apartment we basically just got our money back and cancelled the trip and made the long trip home. Which was probably for the best especially since there was a crazy ice storm in STL the day before.

BOOOOO

And the whole day was topped off by a ridiculous Cab ride with a crazy Chinese women who pretended she didn’t know how to get to Brooklyn but then complained that we didn’t give her the most direct route (she had places to be and emphasized this by holding up a plastic WALL clock in a gallon size zip lock bag. So why did she need directions if she already knew the best way to take us?!? Then she tried to play the “I have no change” game so we would have to give her an insane tip for a normal can ride let alone a ridiculous one; thankfully we found some dollar bills.

But all was not lost I worked on this guy



His name is Pedro the Llama, he still needs some finishing stuff done but for the most part he only took me about a day to knit. I had to do some finagling attaching the legs together and continuing on with the body. He is also a “ridge back” Llama since It was very late when I went to graft together his back before I started the neck and tail. Lets just say I didn’t quite have the patience for it and he got whip stitched. I will just have to practice my grafting (or lack there-of) on another project.

The sweater is also quite a bit longer, I just finished the waist shaping and am about to start on the shaping for the bust. I think I might start a count of how many toys I finish knitting while the poor sweater stays on the needles.

Toy Count=2

Like I mentioned before, I’m an impatient girl who like results=>

-McK