February » 2010 » Untangling Knots

Hello There!

These are my favorite shoes. They’re made by Jeffrey Campbell and have nothing to do with this post.

This evening, instead of working on my paper on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, reading Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of Roman Empire, or reading about Christians in Rome, I played around with the new pages features. I wrote an “About Me” kind of blurb because I never properly introduced myself with this blog. I sort of just jumped in with it. Feel free to read that if you’d like more information than you’d ever want on how I got into my hobbies of choice. I tried to cover the things that I always wonder about other bloggers and ended up writing a novel. I also made a page to keep together all the knitting patterns and how to’s that I share here. Those were listed in the side bar for about a week but they looked too cluttered there so hooray for pages! They’re lurking there under my header.

For the record, I’m really sick of Rome and only one of those assignments is for a class that is actually about Rome.

My Hair Through The Ages

~~It’s that time of year.~~ (I’ll be honest. This happens more than once a year.) In anticipation of a new season, I once again have the urge to change my hair. I don’t know why this happens to me because I love my hair right now. I even trimmed my bangs so that they don’t touch my eyelashes and drive me crazy. (I don’t recommend doing it yourself. Mine turned out fine but I regretted it halfway through just for the amount of hair I got in my eyes). It’s cute and it’s practical. I’m probably going to school in England next year which means that it’ll be a long time between touch ups. The darker color is good for hiding my roots and my bangs are easy enough to get trimmed.

I thought looking at my old hair would help satisfy my urge to change my current hair. It didn’t really work as planned but I thought I’d share anyways.

2004

This was my hair my Freshman year of high school. This was the first time I had really dark hair and I loved it. I ended up dying my hair a solid dark color because it bothered me when my hair didn’t go with my outfit. I was a bit odd.

2006

The first picture is from a year and a half later than the previous. I don’t have any decent pictures from that period because I didn’t own a camera and neither did my friends. Anyways, my hair was dark blond at this point. I think that my natural hair color is a bit like this. Later that year, I dyed my hair a fashion red. The red tones kept fading out and it got old fast.

2007

I went back to being a blond but a bit more so. 2007 was the year that I fell in love with Lily Allen and got my hair cut like hers and dyed dark again. I loved my hair that year and these are the two looks that I really get torn over.

2008

I tried really hard to break the bleach/dye cycle because I was going off to college. Bleach blond hair just makes my roots more obvious than the darker color because of the piecey nature of bleach blond hair. I kept my hair dark and when I got the time-for-change urge, I added a big purple chunk.
P.S. The picture isn’t upside down. I am.

2009

I got extremely aggravated with my long hair and how long it took to dry in damp WA so I had it chopped off and dyed slightly redder. I liked it short but I discovered that I really prefer longer hair. I badly missed how my hair used to look so in the summer I brought back the bangs. I’m so happy I did because they are strangely making it easier for me to let my hair grow out.

I dyed my hair a shade darker in October. Maybe lightening it up a shade (like in the last photo) will make me stop thinking about bleaching it all blond.

Zzz’s

I finally got some knitting finished! I bought this yarn when I was home for Christmas to make a cowl. Last year we had a ridiculous winter and I was preparing myself for the worst. Oddly, it’s been rather nice. I knit myself a cowl anyways. It’s still handy when it’s windy out. It’s just not a necessity like last year.

I played around with stitches on this. Originally I wanted the stitch pattern to make a > shape but I couldn’t get the slanting stitches to look similar enough for my taste. I knit this using 8 mm needles and Plymouth Yarn Baby Alpaca Grande. The color matches the lining of my coat. I had knit myself a cowl out of this stuff last year and I love that one too but it’s dark green so it looks a bit Christmas-y with my red coat.

I adore my cowls. I’m kind of amused by the things they get called at the moment by the fashion industry. Infinity scarves? What? I love how convenient cowls are. I can just shove them in my pocket with my hat so I don’t lose them and they don’t have long tails to get caught in bushes (I don’t know why that always happens to me but it does). I’m also quite keen on how they drape around my neck and protect my chest from cold and rain where my coat doesn’t. Anyways, this bad boy hangs amazingly around my neck because of the ribbing in the middle. I’m very much pleased with it.

I’m thinking about making the pattern available because I pretty much have the whole thing written already on the post-it notes on my wall. I even drew charts. I’d just have to type everything up and take some better pictures.

ETA: The pattern is available now and has been renamed “Zoz”.

How To Make a Floral Headband

This is the last of the epic hot glue fest of 2010. I was holding out until it was slightly more season appropriate. I also was trying to decide if I was going to make this a how-to or just a FO post.

Materials:
Fake flowers – 2 small and 4 large
Hot Glue and Glue Gun
One Wide Headband

You might need scissors or a wire cutter depending on how your fake flowers are constructed.

How To Make A Floral Headband:

Remove flowers from stems. You might need the wire cutters for this but my flowers all pulled off. I figured this out after I busted out the wire cutter.

It should look a bit like this.

Pull off the green bit but be sure to leave the center of the flower in. That would be the other green bit.

Smear hot glue around the center green bit to create a seal. You’re going to want to do this to all of the flowers except one large flower.

Take apart the remaining large flower so you have individual petal layers. Make sure you get all the plastic bits out.

Layer and glue a few petal layers on each side of the headband, covering the headband where it goes behind your ears.

It should look a bit like this.

Trim the flower petals and glue them around the edges of the headband so it’s smooth.

Glue the three large flowers on the top of the headband so that they extend to where the petal layers are. Your whole headband should be covered at this point.

It should look a bit like this.

Glue the smaller flowers on each side where the large flowers meet the petal layers.

Clean up the inevitable hot glue threads and you’re done!

Easy, right? Let’s see that again!

Photobucket

I used the leaves on my fake flowers instead of petals for the sides of this one. I quite like the look of it. I put a few more flowers on it because I had extras.

I think this would look rad with some netting on them, especially the red one. Unfortunately my craft store didn’t have any netting. Boo. I’m tempted to add some later and wear it to my cousin’s wedding but he’s getting married in Alabama (I think) in July and I think my head would get pretty sweaty and gross.

Let me know if you make yourself a headband and send me a picture of it!

Happy Valentines Day!

Happy Valentines day! This is in fact a basket full of all the pink things in my room except my post-it notes and perfume bottle. It’s mostly hair clips and tissue paper from my birthday presents. I’m going to spend my very special Valentines day doing homework. Yay college! I hope you have something more fun to do today.

Itty Bitty Heart

After writing an essay a day for three days in a row, I needed a quick crafty break before I started my regular homework. I quickly crocheted up this little pink heart. I’m going to give it to one of my friends for Valentine’s Day. She goes crazy over every holiday so I always do something to encourage her craziness because I enjoy it.

I finally got around to playing with the manual settings on my new camera (Nikon D90) because the heart was too small for my camera to automatically focus on this closely. I had to MacGyver a weird mirror system to take a photo in focus with me in front of the camera. Thankfully my camera has a digital display but I still had a limited success rate.

For example, I was positive this photo was in focus but apparently not. I think in the future I should probably just adjust the detail/quality level, take a zoomed out picture, and then crop it.

I have a soft spot for over exposure. I actually took a set of this picture with different aperture settings because I couldn’t remember what effects the numbers corresponded to. I should probably dig out my old notes from when I took photography in high school.

Anyways, I made the heart with no pattern out of Plymouth Encore and a 5mm hook. I added the cream details using a darning needle to embroider badly. I think it’s Rowan 4 Ply Soft but there are random bits of cream yarn all over my desk and I just grabbed one so I really have no idea.

My Bad…

Gaahhhh!!! I was hoping to have some knitting to post about by now. This blog just feels so strange if I don’t have any knitting for like a month. I blame two books for my lack of knitting posts:

Culprit #1: That would be The Knitter’s Book of Yarn. I have a smaller project that I keep meaning to cast on but I always end up reading this instead. It’s just fascinating.

Culprit #2: The other problem is that the big project that is getting worked on is from A Stitch in Time. It’s worked with four ply yarn and teeny tiny needles. Weirdly enough, this is my first project with four ply. I’ve been knitting for eight years and I have bags of four ply that people have given me and I’m only just now trying it out. The project is going a lot faster than I thought it would, partially because I converted the body to being in the round. I’m currently working on the back armhole shaping. I have the front shaping and sleeves left before I’ll have something to share. Some of you are probably wondering why I don’t share the WIP. The answer is that it’s a big cream blob right now. I haven’t gotten to the color work so it’s just boring pale stockinette at the moment.

The answer to this conundrum clearly is to add a few more hours in the day so that I can work on a second project. If only….

Fat Dog and the Rubber Chicken

I don’t really get homesick when I’m away at college but I do miss my dog like mad. She is a toy destroyer so we bought her this indestructible rubber chicken. She tries to find a place where she can get a grip on the chicken to tear it but never can. It drives her crazy. It’s pretty cute to watch her nibble away on it.

Pretties!

This weekend I made a Ravelry group for our Uni Knit Night. I slapped together a banner and badge on Photoshop and I realized how long it’s been since I used Photoshop for anything other than photo editing. I also realized that I never made a banner for my blog. Today, instead of doing homework or my study abroad apps, I played with Photoshop and put together a banner. (Isn’t it pretty up there?) I think I managed to master drawing yarn balls with my mouse because I put them on everything I made this weekend.

I didn’t want to jack someone else’s work so I made a little graphic to put on there. And by little graphic I mean a giant one that I shrunk. Since I bothered making it huge, I figured I might as well share the full version with you.

Ta da!! I kind of wasted most my day doing that (I kept changing my mind about things) and it’s so tiny up on my banner. I’m a little ridiculous.