When Flax & Twin came out with this adorable owl tutorial, I was ALL over it. I KNOW I KNOW the owl thing has been going on for like 5 years now, but man I can’t get enough. LG has an owl obsession and we collect the cutest ones we come across. When I saw the tutorial I thought “I can be lazy and just use decorative card stock, and hang them as a banner across her curtains in her room!”. I have a lot of owls to make to get there, probably 12. I made two initialy to test the theory.

I found that it all works perfectly, but would do better if it had the paper-board backing, because the little ball head thingies don’t really stay in place because there is not a very thick space for it to cling too on the back. But it’s fine and you can totally get away with it. LG promptly destroyed the blue one (cry!) but I wanted to give both girls a chance to play with them because really, I made them for their enjoyment. The pink one is also a favorite, with the sparkly wings and pale blue eyes.  ♥

I got all of my supplies from Joann’s. Your best bet being the large bag of assorted sequins (lots of wonderful colors, more then in the individual smaller bags) and a large bag of assorted white buttons, this will make your $$ go a bit further. Then I found for the ball head thingies they had some special ones that came in clear and pink crystal, WAY too fun to miss out on though bring the price up a bit on creating these little sweeties. I found it most certainly worth it, and they were sold out of the size and color I wanted anyway. I had to buy the card stock because I didn’t have any in the colors I wanted, they had the thicker papers mixed in with the thinner ones so it took more time then I wanted to pick out what would work. I wound up getting a “book”  of card stock that I found in the baby section with ginghams and polka dots which I used for the two above excluding the sparkle paper.

Today I made a second one with a fancy flower paper I had picked out and some textured orange paper with a kind of linen/canvas feel to it.

There will be lots more to come, and I want each one to be unique! I would also love to make a few fabric ones as well, eventually, and I have enough fabric in my stash to keep me in owls for a while! I want to see about getting some pretty letter stickers from Joann’s, and maybe make some solid colored tummies for the owls and spell out something in the banner… would be super cute. I also think this is going to be a MUST for her 3rd birthday invitations if she’s still into owls next year!

My blogging will be sparse until the book is done. I’ve been busy collecting accessories and props…

This is from that cool antique shop I photographed the Summer Petite Purls issue at…

I coded up and took a few photos for the Fall Petite Purls (such a wonderful issue, so proud!)…

Someone got a haircut…

Kept busy making fancy school lunches…

and tried to enjoy the last warm days of the year…

Read about the story here: http://www.denverpost.com/music/ci_18904986

“The conclusions are grim. Unless the symphony works fast to slash salaries, find new sources of cash and ultimately change the way it does business, its very existence is in question… We’re talking dead: a major city without a symphony orchestra.”

I’m not usually one to post these sort of things, I’m sometimes wary of giving money because I don’t know where it’s going to go and if it ever actually gets there, but in this situation I know exactly where the money will go and that it goes directly to the source. I think about those 79 musicians (and the paltry pay they are receiving due to pay cuts, and this has been going on for a while now) and I feel incredibly sad to think of those 79 musicians out of a job, Colorado without a symphony, and the world with less music. Music, I think is probably as important to most people as it is to me. Its an emotional outlet, a way of expressing ourselves, a way of feeling different things. I listen to the Classical XM stations in the car all the time with the girls, and it’s always the best way to calm them down when they are irritated. BG and I call it “Ballet Music” and she requests it most every day. I can’t imagine the world without music.

I know the power of knitters, I know if we come together we can do amazing things. I want to ask that if you have $10 you are able to part with, to donate it to the Colorado Symphony to help those 79 musicians. 1,000 knitters times 10 is 10,000 and 1,000 knitters times 50 is 50,000 (more then one musicians salary). Any amount I believe will help, if you have more to give that is wonderful as well!

DONATE TODAY

I will add this is very personal for me because my good friend and Petite Purls co-editor Allegra Wermuth is a violinist in the Colorado Symphony, she did not ask me to post this, I simply feel compelled to do something and when I saw they had a donations page I wanted to donate and thought maybe someone else would want to donate too. If we can in any way shape or form help the Colorado Symphony, and help even one of those musicians keep their job, we will have done something amazing.

I just donated $50 and added this line to my donation request:
“I would like this money to go towards the salary of a Colorado Symphony musician.”

If you donate, please comment below (no need to mention the amount). I believe when we all come together to do something, other people are compelled to act as well, for every action there is an equal or greater re-action.

*Please note I wrote this while a 2 year old and a 4 year old squealed their heads of so kindly excuse my writing. What must be done, must be done!

For the iheartfaces.com photo challenge of the week! So hard to select which photo of my two daughter’s eyes I like best. I’ll give my hazel eyed doe a chance, it is so hard to pic a favorite! Her eyes are the strangest color, it’s nearly impossible some days to pick a color. They aren’t brown, but they aren’t green. So I call them hazel!

On Fathers day we ran down to the lake for a nice little swim. The husbeast had lots of fun with the girls in the water and we found a good spot where LG could stand in the water and be relatively safe (she fell in the pool a few weeks back when he took them to the pool). It’s been 80-90 degrees here in Georgia. The lake is very close to our house, within 1 mile, half a mile in some spots. The problem with this gigantic lake is many people don’t like to go in it due to fears of ecoli etc. I know for a fact there is ecoli in that lake, and I know some really nasty stuff runs off in it. It’s too big to control well. Word has always been the lake is safest when its at full pool and right about now it’s only a few feet shy. We had a big drought two years ago and I didn’t stop a foot in it. Its called Lake Lanier and many people do swim in it all the time, it’s just one of those things. We live in a worried, worried world! It’s strange to live so close to such an amazing lake and feel like it’s not always safe to go in.

So the girls had fun and I had to tell LG to stop drinking the water a few times. She was a bit more scared of it then I expected, and then I remembered she doesn’t  get out as much as BG used to at that age, and really has never been in a pool of water but once or twice. How sad! BG had swimming lessons at 6 months and loved them. So she stood for a long while just watching and then later the husbeast took her in and she loved when he spun her around in the water. LG tans like crazy, her skin was always darker from the get go but in some photos its a bit amusing how much darker she is. Poor BJ is just pale-pale-pale. No amount of sun makes her darker, she just burns and is pale again (just like her mommy though as I’ve gotten older I’ve tanned a bit easier).

Not much going on here except the usual. Designing, Knitting, Taking pics, Knitting Swatches. The girls enjoy their 3 days a week at daycare/pre-school and BG has started ballet lessons.

Today is a “girls” day in which I am home alone with them all day so I cant really work well so try not to, focus on them and clean up the house, off I go to do dishes.

I’ve always loved the Petite Purls home page, but after we made the site a bit wider back 2 issues ago I felt a bit frustrated with the “plain-ness” of the inner pages, and how I could only use horizontal images for the home page. I wanted to have more fun with the site. About a year ago I discovered an fantastic photographer named Jasmine Star, who is just amazingly brilliant. She was in school studying to be a lawyer when the took a 180 degree turn and decided to take up photography, before she even knew how to use a camera. She jumped right in and rocked it hard. She is incredibly intelligent about all things social networking and how to leverage your brand online. I find her to be a total inspiration. Her photography is amazing.

She has a really sweet website and blog, she’s very fashion oriented as she’s in a fashion industry (Wedding Photography).

I was analyzing and thinking a lot about  the Knitting-Pattern-Industry (that is just what I am calling the part I was thinking about) and how we have so many publications, and online publications. I started thinking about the magazine metaphor. There are sites that take the magazine metaphor more deliberately, allowing you to actually turn the page. Loads of sites do this, to some extent even Amazon does. Lots of sites outside our industry do this. I’ve never seen anyone in our industry do something like Jasmine has done (and not often found outside of it), which I found surprising considering how many publications there are. It smacked me in the head and sort of screamed at me in regard to online “publications” in general. Our little magazine will never be printed, but I wanted it to FEEL like it is a true publication.

Having an extensive background in website design I started thinking, why aren’t more people using the magazine metaphor in a really excellent and amazing way, unique to each brand. It almost seems overwhelmingly obvious how great and versatile this is. I feel like lots of publication should be doing it, it’s such a neat way to translate from print to web.

Sometimes with web design we get caught up in HTML and grids and code, and forget about how amazingly fun and creative print layout can be. I started thinking “wow, if I do it this way I can change the pattern index page for EACH issue and have a bit of fun with it, or even do fun and funky layouts for articles, I can take it ALL THE WAY” – from a graphic design perspective, while keeping it 100% in the ultra-usable HTML type interface people like to work in online.

This is how the re-design for Petite Purls was born. I’m a layout and typography geek. Don’t ask me to illustrate an amazing logo, or create some kind of fantastic 3D scene in photoshop. Don’t even ask me to draw something life-like, hand me a blank page and give me a color palette, photos and text to lay-out and I’m your girl (oh yeah, don’t forget the fonts!).

I have a lot more crazy plans for this, and can’t wait to be able to get more creative with my layouts. Thank you Jasmine Star for being so amazing, I hope you are flattered by the imitation, which is why I 100% wanted to put it out there that this is who inspired me.  I hope I am not the last person to use this wonderful metaphor because I get so scared to think of the beauty of print layout getting completely lost in our digital world. Typography is such an important part of design and sometimes it feels very lost, it’s a testimate to the power of fonts and layout that you can recognize an entire era just by seeing a war poster or magazine cover, and it is suddenly becoming nostalgic just to hold a hard-back book in your hands to read.

Many designers, artists and writers know the thrill of an empty journal or sketching book. There is something fun about going to my graphics program to design the index page for each issue, instead of getting stuck in the doldrums of a set design and template system most every website follows, in which I always go straight to HTML. It was an amazing epiphany for me, and one that doesn’t even have to be translated with a blank book or magazine page used as a back-drop in the more literal interpretation of the concept, but this was where I started (the blank page) and what I wanted to show, that you can translate from print to web, and still leverage the power of basic HTML. That as a web-designer who for years only ever experienced being creative at the very BEGINNING of the process, but never after unless it was a re-design. Here I have a limitless palette (within the constraints of my style guide and brand). I suppose it’s a paradigm shift in my thinking (and maybe one loads of others have had before me and I’m WAY late to the party!).

I feel like I’ve just barely scratched the surface in how much fun I can have with this layout and how it opened up my way of thinking about web-design.

PS. If your getting married and looking for your dream wedding photographer, Jasmine just might be it! Mad props to her for being completely 100% brilliant and for being my inspiration.

PSS. I also did the photography for the entire issue! Sqeeeeeee!

For anyone who has read my blog for a *very* long time, you may remember that back when I used to spin (pre-kids) I adored spinning with Shetland Combed Top. I have loads of it in my closet (if the moths don’t find it that is). I adore Shetland sheep, I also have a Shetland sheepdog. I’ve never actually met one of these sheep in person though, and I always imagined I would like them. I went to a petting zoo a little while ago, and they had some sheep. They bleated very loudly and often, they were sweet but didn’t win me over.

So the other day we went with the grandparents to another very nice petting zoo that featured all small animals. Miniature Jersey Cows, Miniature Alpaca’s and the tiniest goats I’ve ever seen. We had almost left when we found another section to the farm and there was an adorable little set of Shetland sheep of various ages.

They were so incredibly sweet and docile, I fell totally in love. The dream of all knitters is of course to have a farm with sheep. I share this dream. I am planning to go back to this petting zoo at some point just to sit and snuggle with these adorable sheep.

Want to see a wee baby Shetland Sheep? Momma sheep was a little leery of all the visitors but I got a shot of the cute baby.

I’ve been working on getting all ramped up for the Summer issue of Petite Purls. I’ll be doing all the photography and I am very excited! Lots to keep working on with the book, and LG starts daycare tomorrow so I can get more work done, 3 days a week just for a few months this summer, crossing my fingers she will enjoy it.

I was wandering around Raverly the other day and decided to check out the recent FO’s for my Milk pattern, and I was just about blown over by newborn sweetness. Click any of the images below to go to the ravelry project page for that person!

Mamakyrie made this out of Dreams in Color Smooshy. Blog post here. “It fit my newborn perfectly in the smallest size” was a note in her project page which makes me very pleased.

Mybonnykate used Elann Peruvian Baby Silk for her adorable little boy version. Lovely to see in her project notes as well “The newborn size fits my nine-pound three-week-old baby perfectly.” but always keep in mind that the newborn version won’t fit a newborn for long, as not very much clothing ever fits a newborn for long, but when I wrote the pattern I wanted to have a size newborn that fit properly. I always remember bringing my girls home and how some things that would say “0-6″ would not fit well at all and in those first days you want to see your perfect little newborn in a perfect fitting little top.

Ittybitty used Cascade Yarns Heritage Silk and it looks exactly like my Wollmiese version! From her project notes “I was a little afraid of the crochet edging, but finaly it’s more simplest to do than it looks, and the result is adorable.”

I must tell you all when I wrote this pattern the only things I had ever crochet where half of an amigurumi bear that I never finished, and a 1 stitch blanket I once made about 5 years ago and never finished. Around the time I was working on this I was also working on the crochet blanket LG sleeps with every night. The hardest thing about crochet is reading the patterns, but there is nothing easier on this earth then a crochet blanket. Go here and make one right away, you will not regret it. You will not longer avoid crochet edgings, in fact you will seek them out!

I adore the color combinations on this one below knit by Tentacles in Vintage Purls and Bella Baby Sugar (I’ve not heard of these yarns before). The Vintage Purl I think is the multi-color and I love how soft and pretty it is. Perfect colors for a baby.

*All photos used with permission

I thought I would share this very cool little epiphany I had recently. I have curly hair. Curly haired girls know you never brush your hair when its dry. Some straight haired people have no idea about this. If you brush your hair when its dry, the curls separate and turn into a 1980′s nightmare. It’s not pretty. I only ever brush my hair when it’s wet. It was a bit of an adjustment as BG’s hair got longer, I realized WOW I can comb it when its dry and it will actually make it look BETTER! Shocking…

A while ago I was at my hair appointment in Buckhead (Atlanta) and my wonderful hair colorist of over 8+ years told me not to comb/brush my hair when it was wet, he said to finger comb it and put some product in and not to touch it. I thought he was silly. I went home and to humor him I tried, it didn’t go well. I wound up brushing out the underneath part. I tried again a day or so later and this time I didn’t hit any bad snags. Not only did it dry wonderfully, but it looked much better then when I combed it, and then put some product in and let it air dry. The curls looked really good, way less frizz. I am guessing this is because the brush/comb doesn’t get a chance to separate out the curls, and the natural grouping and curls that form while wet get to set.

I have not brushed my hair in a month!!! I occasionally will use one stroke underneath if it was all crazy and windswept or something but this is maybe once a week. Its wild, its amazing and my hair is SO MUCH BETTER FOR IT. So curly grrls, give it a try! I sometimes let me hair air dry, and other times I defuse it. I alternate between Bumble and bumble Curl Conscious Calming Creme and DevaCare Arc AnGEL (which seems to be better if I am not going to defuse at all and it has a better hold but is not as soft and “light” but I love them both equally. I use the Bumble when I am just having a normal day, and I use the DevaCare if I am going to go to a lot of trouble to make the curls look nice and want better hold for a night out or important event. The Deva seems to need a bit more care in how it’s applied but holds better.

As for knitting, I have a little tip. If you want to tell the difference between cascade 220 superwash vs its felt-able version:

The felt-able comes in hanks, the superwash comes in balls… clever of them to do that but I wish I had realized that before I spent a lot of time knitting something that needed to be felted, in what I didn’t realize was superwash. #facepalm

I’ve been hiding, hiding and hibernating because I finished two big sweaters for a yarn company and anytime I finish something “big” I take a mental break. The luxury of being at home with the kids is I can put the world aside and just be home with them and stop thinking about anything else but them or trying to set my mind to other things. We’ve re-orgnized stuff and I’ve been busy  moving my yarn and sewing stuff to a new location (aka out of the bedroom where it did not belong) and having more of a space to work on the book and keep things organized. I am hurriedly working away on sketches and swatches. In-between that I scour internet forums reading about photography which is honestly a nice little escape for me. I love to read, I love to learn and I love learning new things. So I devour it all and just enjoy myself, viewing it as an escape from being a SAHM and an escape from my other “work” of knitting and petite purls. Speaking of the latter, I’m knee deep in the code for the spring issue. Wish me luck!

I submitted a photo to the Pioneer Women photo assignment, and got picked in one of the “groups” which was a lot of fun and got lots of hits to my flickr and the photo was even explored which is a first for me. Go check out the finalists, some really amazing photos she picked and the theme was “sisters”.

I have a fun idea for a little jacket knit out of some of my favorite yarn, and I have enough so when I get the time I’ll try to zip it up, it’ll be super simple and easy and seriously cute for a toddler. It’s going to be better for spring and fall but by the time I finish it I’m sure it will be summer, that always happens to me with anything I knit for myself, never on time! I’m better when I am working on someone else’s schedule, the pressure of not wanting to let that other person down is always enough to motivate me to finish.

We had two crazy weeks of insane warm weather here which I 100% enjoyed with the babies, and now it’s back to cold-overcast-and-dreary. My mother always said; “this crazy Virginia weather” and I can often here myself speak those same words, “this crazy Georgia weather”. It seems the weather is crazy all over the place.

In crazy dog news, Toby slept with BG last night, snuggled up with her on the bed for most of the night. BG seems a bit more interested in him lately (beyond just bothering him) and he’s getting more responsive to her when she wants to play fetch with him. Sheltie’s are a strange breed, and they are very particular about who they like. Toby has not ever been terribly interested in the babies, he likes that they drop a lot of food but beyond that his interest level in them is about the same as his interest level in Willow when she lived here (she’s with Grandma now). He didn’t bat an eye when she left, in fact I think he was pleased. It would be a welcome change if he began to bond a bit with BG, he’s always had a disdain for anyone below 4 feet tall, but maybe we can convince him that 38 inches isn’t so bad.