Jolly Stitcher

No fear. This one's for my knitting group and one gal in particular, J, who is taking herself away from us and trotting off to a faraway state.

There's really so much "no fear" stuff I could talk about here.

• The shirt itself is clearly bold, and tells all passers-by, "Yes, I knit. And if you don't like it, you can go to hell."
  
• The shirt is for J, who is moving to a brand new city where she doesn't know anybody, and no matter how much of an adventurous soul you might be, that is always a little scary. J is also the person who introduced me to whipup. Very important.
  
• The shirt is for my knitting group (everyone will eventually get a slightly less fancy version). When I first moved to Illinois nearly two years ago, these were the people who eased my fears about finding a place on the prarie
  

About the shirt...
I did the design in Photoshop and then made a screen out of it. (Do you like the rough texture of the lines? I do.) I had been wanting to make a logo for my group for a pretty long time, so I'm glad I finally did it. J's shirt has special embroidered embellishments---a big CU later---in honor of her exit and the fact that we meet in Champaign-Urbana, you know, the hub of my rural area. I really like it, and am eager to get some more of these out to everyone else. I also made a few patches, thinking that they would be cute on a knitting tote. If you're a person out there in the wide world and would like one, let me know.

And yeah, this would have worked for last week's competition as well. Durn modern materials.

Transpanencies with UV protection

Last weekend we broke out the old silkscreen in a flurry of excitement, hoping that I could use it for a whiplash entry & a going away present. Everything would have worked out just fine except for an equipment malfunction that was totally not my fault. I've always had transparencies of my designs made at some copy place and I've exposed the screen with the design and it's been great. But not this time. It seems that staples has some fancy transparencies with UV protection. So now all I have is a really great design of an 8.5 by 11 rectangle.

Going to try again tomorrow.

In the meantime my crafty man made this. It's so lovely. He made the frame from salvaged mahogany trim that he refinished, and the photo is one he took at Manassas a couple of years ago.

Walking Foot

My walking foot came in the mail yesterday! It is more wonderful than I ever thought a little piece of machinery could be. I work on an old machine---nothing fancy about it---and I was afraid I might have to give it up for some tasks, but this foot changes everything. I bought it because I think that the next quilt (and possibly all other future quilts) that I make I want to machine quilt. And I started working on a dress for Beebs using this MunkiMunki fabric. It's a super cute, comfortable knit, but my old machine said that it really wasn't comfortable with knits, so...

Before & After

I got special notes from by back tack cohorts. Rock on guys!

I got some of our before and after pics uploaded to Flicker. I love looking at these and seeing how far we've come.

So far I'm really surprised at my inability to navigate the blog/photo sharing software. I don't quite grasp the groups/sets/shared groups etc. Why the heck not? This is my job. I make web ware like this!

Which brings up another point. A big reason I haven't done a craft/renovation/fam blog yet is because I was thinking that of course I was going to build myself some swell system with nifty graphics and even cooler code underneath it all, and I would get to try new things and it would be really super, and blah blah blah. At the moment there is just no space for that. I spend all day coding, and in my little free time I really need to pick up the needle and the thread and make something that involves my hands and not just my head. So thank the good lord for the insta-blog.

Our House

Home!

Whoo hoo! Another post. I'm in back tack and this is great. Much more to come on that.

We had 2 lovely passover seders. It was so nice to get company out at the house-in-progress.

Beebs with the seder plate:

About Farmer City

Farmer City (the town where we live) is about what it sounds like. A year and a half ago, my husband, Elie, and I moved out here to Central Illinois from the DC metro area. We decided to make the leap as big as possible and move to small, rural town where beautiful old houses can be had at rather reasonable prices.

Enter the house. We bought a wonderful 2 storey brick farmhouse that needed someone to bring it back to its roots. We (especially Elie) have been working on the house for a year and a half, and it shows. See the before and after post.

Start

Here I go, starting a blog. The idea is so have a place to share our progress on our house restoration and my works of craft in progress with friends, or anyone else. What finally got my to start a blog? Hoping to get into back tack 3.