Friday, October 13, 2006

Might as well face it, I'm addicted to yarn

Just got back from my lunch hour, and what did I do? After picking up a falafel sandwich, I walked over to Knitty City and picked up Stitch N' Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook, 2 skeins of absolutely beautiful red soy-silk yarn, a set of #7 needles, a knit counter, and those little rubber thingies that go on the ends of needles so you don't poke someone's eye out. It is sort of dangerous to have such a nice yarn shop so close to my office. The temptation is terrible. I can't go in there and not buy something.

While I was off on Columbus day, I sorted through a bunch of yarn, rolling a few long oblong skeins into balls, and making room for the yarn stash I bought last weekend. Now I just bought more. More yarn. With the amount of yarn I have right now, I could probably knit/crochet socks, sweaters, and blankets for my whole block. I'm already thinking of converting the bushel we got when we went apple picking two weekends ago into a new yarn storage container (surely it would be perfect--just line that bad boy with calico in a cute print a viola! Yarn storgage!), and god-forbid I should finish the container before buying yarn to store in it. Too much yarn. I have too much yarn. Then again, is there ever such thing as too much yarn?

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Our Krafty-scary Halloween Wedding...

It's true. Hubby and I got married on Halloween, 2004. Some people thought we were crazy. Others thought that it was the coolest thing ever. I'm with the later of course (as though you could even question it!). Since it's a beautiful fall day in NYC, and the temperature is close to the 72 degrees we were blessed with on our wedding day, I've been thinking about it quite a bit today and thought that I'd post a couple of pictures of some of the krafty things we did to make our Halloween wedding so special.

Our bridesmaids all wore the same black corset dress, but I wanted them each to look slightly different since each girl had a blessing during the ceremony which represented and element/season. Purple was winter/air; Green was spring/earth; peach was summer/fire; and blue was autumn/water. I hand sewed all of the shawls and gave my father, the florist (believe it or not, I did floral design in high school), long pieces of the same fabric from the shawls to wrap around each floral bouquet. Hubby spent quite a bit of time making 20 little "poofs" of fabric for each bouquet to frame the flowers. I though the effect was really pretty and we got lots of compliments on how great everyone looked!



Our infamous Halloween wedding cake. You have no idea what a pain in the pa-tooty these cake toppers were to make. Each cake had a Styrofoam circle that I covered in saran wrap, glued faux grass to, mounted the moving and/or light up Halloween fixtures, completed decorating the Halloween scene, and wrapped the rim of each piece of Styrofoam in Halloween ribbon. I cannot even explain to you how many people took pictures of this cake--they had never seen anything like it!!!



There is more to come... I have to find a good picture of our table centerpieces that I also made, and the innumerable other things we did. It was a very unique wedding!

New Shadow Box...

I made a bridal shadow box for myself a while back, and ever since I did, my mom has been begging me to make one for her. The one I did for my hubby and I is very basic--a I dried the flowers from my bouquet and used some of those, some silk flowers (for the flowers that fell apart), fabric from my bridesmaid's shawls and bouquets (which I also made), and styrofoam, pretty paper, and our wedding invitation in the center, and viola! A pretty shadow box:



My mom wanted one that was similar, but one that also had her and her boyfriend's masks. For anyone who doesn't know, my hubby and I got married on Halloween, so we had a masquerade reception and asked people to dress up (elegantly of course). Everyone in our bridal party work fancy masks--us, the family, everyone. It looked awesome and was so much fun. We tried really hard to make sure that our Halloween-themed masqurade reception was fun, but not tacky and I think we suceeded. Anyway, I bought a ready-made shadow box for my mother, and glue gun in hand, went about inserting the things she wanted showcased. Her shadow box also has our wedding invitaion (with the fancy paper/styrofoam combo), but also has her masks, her corsage, and the place cards we made for the tables. Hubby and I loved the idea of having each table named for a particular horror movie, so instead of numbers, we had laminated mimi-movie posters and all the place cards had miniature movie picks to correspond to the table the guest was sitting at. My mom is terrified of The Exorcist, so of course we had to sit her at that table!




The interesting thing about the little castle place card holder in there...I actually had to chop the front and back of it off in order for it to fit. I like to think that you can't really tell that I sat the thing on my cutting board and hacked pieces of it off with a butcher knife and then sanded it down and painted it...but if you're really looking at it, I think you can tell. But honestly, who in their right mind is looking that closely at a place card holder???

Thursday, October 05, 2006

To knit or not to knit...

Many die-hard happy hookers look distainfully on knitting. "It's only two stitches;" "It's harder to work in pieces when knitting;" "Two sticks + yarn = confusion. I only have two hands;" "It's cooler to say your a hooker than a knitter." I never had an opinion one way or the other to tell you the truth. It's all yarn. Can't we all just get along? I just didn't know how to knit. Then again, a little less than a year ago I didn't know how to crochet either. Go figure. Well I've decided that I absolutely must learn how to knit. Why you might ask? It's not like I don't have plenty of crochet projects I want to work on; I've got the huge yarn stash, the multitude of hooks, the patterns I gaze longingly at and think "Oh yes, it will be mine." It's simple really. I want to knit socks. Socks! Yes, I've heard of crocheting socks, but somehow, all the holes make me think that it is probably not such a good idea. None of the crochet patterns for socks that I've come across seem like they are better in theory than in practice. So yes, I'm going to attempt to teach myself how to knit. I found this really cute blog on the Bust website, called Knitting with Cat Hair...a woman after my own heart. She recommends checking out KnittingHelp.com...so that is what I shall do. (By the way--how cool is that blog title? And how much do I covet her logo??)I'll keep you posted!