Another type of art

I've been trying to keep busy lately, so when I came across this, I knew it had to be my new project! In case you're wondering why I haven't been keeping myself busy with yarn work .. Well that's another story for another blog post. But I have a perfectly good reason!!

Anyway, I went out to buy materials to make the DIY paw print art. I decided to keep it simple and just use black paint.

There's my doggies with Yuna, the doodle looking particularly concerned about what's going on. 

We set up newspapers on the ground, and with treats in hand, we were ready to begin! None of the dogs seemed to like having their paws painted, but Yuna was more tolerant than Ellie. I really wanted to do this though, because I know dogs don't live very long and this will be something that will last forever. 

That's the finished product! I put my hand print on too. I know it all doesn't fit together very well since my hand was a bit too big but I think that way really captures our characters and interactions with one another- unstructured messy fun! 

Warning: Cheesy post ahead! My Golden 10 Year anniversary!

So yesterday was my 10th anniversary with my boyfriend! I'm so glad that I got to spend it with him before he jets off to China, and I won't be able to see him for 5 months, which is the longest we would ever be away from one another since we started dating in gr. 8. I think before that, the longest was only one month which felt long enough already.

Anyway, to celebrate, I dug up lots of old pictures of every year we were together.

2005: Back when taking photos in photo booths were all the rage

2006: Trip to Disneyland with my family (Oh my God, his hair.)

2007: That time in Playland where we won all those toys

2008: When we tried to look fancy for my birthday dinner!

2009: The prom! Our last year of high school

2010: Celebrating the Vancouver Olympics

2011: Tandem biking around Stanley Park

2012: Handmade Mario cake for his birthday!

2013: We started getting into pumpkin carving on Halloween

2014: The year we brought Ellie home [edit: found a better family photo of us three :) ]

That brings us to this year!

 2015: Marks 10 years! We dressed up all nicely to celebrate! 

I love making cards! I was pretty proud of how cute it turned out and so I had to share. Although I drew it myself, I copied images from the internet.

We walked around Granville Island where there are so many arts and craft stores. Sadly, no yarn stores (they even had a store dedicated to people who beaded as a hobby, which I would've thought was less popular than knitting/crocheting).

We topped off the night with dinner at Kobe where they offered Teppenyaki! The chef really put on a good show. The picture in the middle is a cocktail drink we ordered just because they allowed you to take the cup home, which I thought would make a great memento.

Anyways, if 10 years passed by just like that, then I'm sure 5 months will be gone in a flash (trying to make myself feel better haha). I am excited about having more time to myself to knit though! Happy knitting guys!



Love is in the Air

Happy Valentine's Day! And it's all about love. Let me spell it out for you!

Yeah, I totally saw another knit blogger spell things out of yarn during Christmas (like 'joy', 'snow' etc.) so I was inspired to try to write words out of yarn too! I thought it would be tough to get the yarn to stay in the right place, but it all just stayed put :)

Despite people's complaints about Valentine's Day being heavily commercialized, I love Valentine's Day! Especially the Valentine's Day cards! 

Those are cards I've collected from the kids at work! Isn't it sweet?

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with my boyfriend today though. He usually makes me plan things, but I can't think of a thing! Maybe dinner, or spend the day with our dog? Whatever we end up doing, I hope it'll be fun! We're not really a romantic kind of couple, but we're usually pretty good at making special days special (I mean that in a good way.. usually!)!



Toasty Toes!

Hi everyone! I finished my slippers! They're pretty trendy if I do say so myself! They look like knit Ugg boots for indoors. And, another more superficial benefit of them is that they cover my ugly toes when I take photos indoors. Surprisingly, slippers are knit completely different from socks (well, at least these ones were).

It took a little longer than expected to finish them because I've been so burnt-out from work, but I think if I just straight knitted, it would take less than a week to complete. By the way, here is the pattern!

For such pretty looking slippers, it was relatively easy to make. The only trouble I had was attaching the band to the actual slipper. Thanks to some quick thinking, I used stitch holders to hold the band in place while I sewed it together.

Another problem I ran into, was finding six identical buttons. I went to the dollar store (because Michael's buttons are so expensive) and bought two giant bags of buttons thinking that there's got to be six matches somewhere in there.

Yeah. The most I found were three of the same. So then, what did I use on my slippers? Well, to be honest, I just used ones that were similar enough. I mean, I don't think you can really tell unless you look really close. At least I've got a ton of extra buttons for future projects!

Too bad winter is almost over. I don't really have a reason to wear these beautiful slippers!



Out with the Old, in with the New!

In a week, it's going to be me and my boyfriend's 10 year anniversary (time flies doesn't it?)! Needless to say, I'm super excited about it, and have been planning meticulously for what to do and what to get. My boyfriend however, decided to give me my gift early! Ta-dah!

I have joined the 21st century and now finally own an iPhone! The phone on the left is my old phone .. even kids have mistaken it for a toy phone before, ha! I've had it for 5 years now, so I guess an upgrade has been long overdue. What I'm most excited about though, is the camera! Remember how after almost every post I complain about my shitty camera? Well, the iPhone camera is supposed to be much better than the camera I've been using on my Window's tablet. Hopefully the days of blurred details on my precious knitted objects will be a thing of the past. I want everyone to see every stitch, every design and every mistake I've made on one of my projects. I hope it doesn't sound too silly being excited about a camera phone, since it's by no means a professional camera, but hey, it's a huge upgrade for me!

 

This is a photo of my current project from my tablet:

 



 

I've edited it to make it look nicer already. And, here is a picture from my new phone!

 Okay, maybe I should've taken the same photo with my two different cameras to really drive the point home, but I think it's pretty clear anyway that the photo quality is different.

 

In case you were wondering why it's taken me this long to knit a pair of slippers that should've taken me maybe only a week, it's because I have been planning for this big event. But no worries, progress is slow, but it's happening!



Eyeing them down ...

Yet again, I've already begun eyeing new patterns and I'm not even finished with my current project yet. My next project however, has already become a raging debate in my head.

Should I make that crochet hat next? My friend actually gave me a written pattern on how to do it, which I think would look awesome for my boyfriend. But .. I also found this really creative and original gem, and I do want to expand on my knitted dolls category! Or I also find the desire to make another huge project extremely tempting. I want to make something similar to this plain hooded cardigan except more multicolored so I can use up my leftover yarn which I just have so so so much of. This pillow can also help eat up leftovers though, and it's a crochet project (which I still want to hone that particular skill) and I've never made a pillow before. Alternatively, I was considering knitting just anything from the knitting books that I got for Christmas since I haven't used them yet (but I have looked through them! .. And then I could also say I used knitting books before, ha!)

Decisions, decisions ... in the meantime, my slipper is coming along quite nicely ..

It almost looks like it's made for a baby, (one of my coworkers actually asked if I was pregnant when she saw me knitting this at work, and seemed surprised when I said no, its for my adult feet), but it fits pretty okay on me when I thrust my foot into this unfinished business although its tough to tell too accurately since its still on the needles. I hope it turns out useable .. the pattern is seriously adorable, which I will show you guys once I'm officially finished with these adult booties!

Cast-on!

I've begun again! Strangely, I love starting anew, but I hate the act of casting on. The first row after the cast-on seems especially hard to knit as well, I think because I always cast on too tight.

As you can see, my new project is on double pointed needles... Will it be mittens, socks, a hat? (The answer is: slippers!) I was originally going to crochet a hat, but I bumped into the cutest slipper pattern ever, so I obviously had to make that first!

I know, white for slippers is pretty risky since it has the potential of getting easily dirty since it will be worn on my feet.. but the pattern calls for super bulky, and this is the only super bulky yarn I have!

Time to lose myself into my knitting .. cheers!

In Today's News...

 

I'm taking quite the break from my knitting needles after the finish of my huge milestone- the Frankenstein sweater. Besides looking at some Ravelry patterns, I haven't done much yarn-related work. So, what have I been doing? Well, I've immersed myself in a mystery game that's using up all my brain power.

You play as a prosecutor and solve mysteries... its a lot more fun than it sounds, trust me.

 



Other than that, my boyfriend and I have been doing more of the 'try something new'. We usually cook dinner together, but this time, we decided to try something different. Not anything wildly different, mind you. It's still a Chinese dish (which is what we always cook), but with some different stuff added in. Basically, its ground beef, some Chinese leafy veggie (not sure what the English name is), with onions, all pan-fried together with soy sauce and sriracha hot sauce on top of a steaming bowl of white rice. It was delicious. We're probably going to cook it all the time now. Since we don't try new things often, once we make something we like, we tend to start doing it all the time. It's a pretty quick fix too. On top of that ... we did something new #2 (which also isn't completely new... more like an improvement of something old).

Remember how we were going to be slushie masters? Well, we tried making another one that hopefully wouldn't fail on us (not even sure how we managed to screw the first blend up). We didn't want to use those gross frozen strawberries though (but we couldn't find fresh non-frozen strawberries in the supermarket.. maybe not in season?), so we used bananas instead! With the advice from some friends, we added some Vanilla yogurt, and some ice, and ta-da, a tasty treat! It tasted how I expected a banana slushie to taste like. Our poor Magic Bullet blender blades still had trouble blending everything together though (I think because of the ice), but hey, everything worked out this time. This success reassured us that we weren't too stupid to make something so easy (afterall, all we had to do was throw things into a blender). I'm going to blame our previous failure on the gross sour frozen strawberries, haha.

Anyway, moving onto cute and cuddly news, my friend recently bought the cutest cat ever. I'm obviously a dog-person, but it was the first time I considered owning a cat. Not just any cat -it had to be their cat. It is so adorable! And besides.. if I owned a cat, wouldn't it just complete the crazy knitting lady picture? Don't all knitters have a cat curled up next to them?



I'm so fluffy, I'm going to die!!

I'm Derp.

This cat looks so cute, and graceful, and sweet, and smart... especially when put side by side next to my husky who really drove the point of cats appearing smarter than dogs as she laid there like a derp when we got back. I'm quite sure if I ever owned a cat though, the animals would be at each others' throats. And I suppose my dogs are handful enough for me.

All in all, I hope my next post will be more yarn-work related. Looking at all the patterns has really gotten me pumped up! Plus, I want to use up more scrap yarn to make way for more yarn that I've been keeping an eye on, heh.

Self-Improvement

I always wondered how some people's knitting blogs got popular. Especially if you knit a sweater or a blanket or something else that's time consuming, I don't see how you can keep up with updated content in your blog to keep readers interested. I mean, besides knitting, blogging has become one of my favorite hobbies so I try really hard to always have some sort of update. My updates aren't really all that interesting though. Just tidbits about myself, some thoughts and some shots of my work in progress.

Well, I looked at other people's knitting blogs and they'd chat about knitting events or yarn or do giveaways. If its a more casual knit blog (like mine), once in a while they mention their other hobbies. Some like to bake, do arts and crafts, photography, etc. I thought about how I can apply that to my blog to give a better experience to my 5-7 constant readers (love you guys.. some I know, some I don't know!). I'm no yarn expert and or professional enough to start my own tutorials or create my own design, so I began thinking of a hobby that I could feature as my secondary focus!

So I began thinking. Well, I love playing videogames!


Playing Diablo 3.. good times

But .. my target audience (knitters) probably aren't interested. Most other knitter's blogs have their secondary focus on something artsy. So, I crossed that off my list. How about my dogs?

My derp dog tries to force my husky to play

Well, I think posting random pictures of them here and there are enough. Honestly, they just eat, sleep and play all day.. rinse wash, repeat. Like I said before, probably not so interesting to anybody else but me. Watching movies? Nah, I think it'd suck all the fun out of it if I felt like I had to review it at the end. I also wouldn't make a very good critic. I usually only rate my movies a 'I hated it', 'meh', and 'I loved it!' with the majority of movies falling under 'meh'.

So I thought really hard, and thought of something interesting! It's a bit odd, but something I like to do. I like to look up relationship building things on the internet, or magazines or whatever, and try them out with my reluctant boyfriend to see if it works. For example, we've tried staring into each others' eyes for 4 min a day (we reduced it to 30sec after the first day), giving each other great big hugs that last 30sec to get some oxytocin flowing, telling each other three positive things about one another, telling each other what the other should improve on (apparently, I need a new wardrobe, and he needs to quit parting his hair down the middle), asking each other a series of personal questions .. etc.

In an effort to build cooperation, we even did a paint by the numbers horse project together

In case you're wondering at this point, I'm not going to start blogging about testing relationship building tactics. I don't think I'd be comfortable revealing too much about me and my boyfriend on the internet. However, recently, we've been trying a 'try something new with your partner each week' tactic. At first we went on lots of dates to new places and tried new restaurants, but today after trying our new thing, I thought we could make it a weekly thing (and maybe blog about it too?)! We tried blending our own smoothies from scratch without any recipes .. just using our gut instincts. It was so much fun and strangely adventurous that I thought I might start a new category on my blog called 'Blend it'! To be honest, I'm not sure if I'll actually do it because my boyfriend is leaving on a business trip for 4 whole months and I also tend to move on quickly from idea to idea (so this may be your first and last time hearing about this), but I might as well tell you of our smoothie making disaster today.

Well, it started with a simple idea. None of us has made smoothies before, so this will be our something new for the week. Turns out, we don't really have a blender, but we did have a magic bullet, so we used that instead. Both of us love strawberry smoothies usually when we go out for drinks, so we decided to make that. We had a bag of frozen strawberries in the freezer, so we threw in a handful of those, threw in another handful of ice, added a bit of water, and some scoops of ice-cream (no exact measurements for anything, so you can set your expectations to a low) and started to blend. Well .. we tried blending anyway. Turns out, we should've thawed out the strawberries first as they were hard as a rock. And we should've also added more water. So every couple of seconds, we had to keep shaking the thing to keep it moving because those little tiny magic bullet blades kept getting stuck. After about 10 minutes of this shake and blend, we had something that resembled a strawberry smoothie. Well let me tell you, it was disgusting, and the most sour drink I've ever tasted. Maybe there were too much strawberries and not enough other stuff? I have no idea. My boyfriend took one sip and gave up. I tried to stay strong and finish the thing so as not to be wasteful, but my boyfriend noticed my suffering and just decided to pour all of it out. You wouldn't have been able to guess it was going to be gross just by looking at it though.

So, that's the story of us screwing up something as simple as a strawberry smoothie. On a positive note, it did give us lots of laughs and a good story to tell. If I decide to continue this trend, next week, I want to try a smoothie with broccoli .. I heard its actually good!

 

My Frankenstein Sweater

I call it Frankenstein because my sweater was made up of many different patterns all flung together. It all began when I was searching the internet, and somebody linked this, saying that they had to have it, and was willing to make it themselves if anybody had the pattern. Well, when I saw the cabled skull design, I thought it was the coolest thing ever too, but there was no way I was going to shell out $1,000+ for it (there was no sale for it yet at the time, but even so I wasn't going to pay that amount of money). So, with a little more digging, I found this amazing person that posted the skull pattern. Awesome, I thought, this is what I'm going to make next. And with that, I bought this:

Those lucky balls of yarns is going to give birth to my cabled skull sweater! So, as I was about to get to work, I realized something. Oh shit, the person only provided the skull pattern, and nothing else. And also .. I never made a sweater before. So, what to do. Okay, no problem, I'll just go online, and use another sweater's pattern as the base and guideline of how to make a sweater. And so, I found this sweater pattern, chosen because its' design is similar to the back of the original Alexander Mcqueen sweater so I can just use it for the pattern at the back of my sweater.

As I was about to start knitting, I realized another dilemma. The guideline sweater pattern is made with dk weight yarn, and I bought worsted weight. At this point, I could feel the dust flying off my brain as the wheels in my head began to turn. Alright, I'll just find a random worsted weight sweater pattern online and see how much stitches they used to cast on. I also needed to make up a pattern for those cabled rings that run alongside the skull which you can see in the original. So after a bunch of copy and pasting, modifying and adjusting, I finally started knitting. You can see how I organized everything and had my own crudely made paint chart next to the neat skull chart provided by the website I found.

After lots and lots of cable work, I was finished with the front! I moved onto knitting the sleeves. It took me a long time to find sleeves that I thought would fit best with my Frankenstein and I wanted everything to be perfect. Using this, I began my sleeves. For some reason, I'm really fond of the seed stitch, so I chose to use that instead of the stockinette stitch that the sleeve pattern suggested.

After casting off the sleeves, I began the back. I had to modify the pattern slightly though, because since the pattern was written for dk weight, it originally told me to CO 146 stitches. However, my sweater only casted on 108 so out of the 4 charts one would be following in theirs, I only followed 2 charts in mine. I went in not quite sure how the end product would look like, but I think it all worked out for the best:

 

Having the back finished means I was done all my pieces! Wow, that only took about one and a half months.. Anyway, Frankenstein pieces, assemble!

As I sewed everything up, I began to have mixed feelings. Negative feelings because I knew I would soon have to weave in ends which I hate. Positive feelings because, wow I was about to reach what in my head felt like a knitting milestone!! After sewing everything up, I almost forgot to knit my collar which you can see me doing here:

When I was done, I was super excited! The only living thing around however was my dog  (it was nighttime approximately 2am). She didn't wake up when I shook her to try to wake her up though. I was a bit disappointed I couldn't share my excitement with anybody until the next day (which I wore to work to get some compliments, haha)! It wasn't too bad though. My dog gave me a laugh because it looks like she's trying to do the Michael Jackson Thriller dance in her sleep.

Tl;dr: