It turns out that sewing patterns don't have the catchy names that knitting patterns do. So instead of calling this shirt by its numeric name, I'm calling it my bird shirt.
This was my first non-dress pattern, and I found it pretty straightforward. There are gathers in the front and back of the pattern, which made it an easy fit for me. I've found store-bought woven shirts to restrict my movement, but this shirt fits me quite well.
I didn't include the lace written in the pattern, and the only other modification I made was to the sleeves. The sleeves as sewn were a bit flyaway, and not really to my taste. I just sewed a pleat into them, and they were perfect.
I'm really enjoying this sewing thing, and I've even got more FOs to show you soon! Also: I cut my hair! I think it made a dramatic difference, and I love it!
I documented the unusual construction of this sock when I knit the first one. The increases are all on one side of the sock, and they are mirrored in the second one. One thing I found interesting about this pattern is that it is written the same way for both socks (with the exception of the placement of the fancy stitches), and then the orientation is rotated right for the first sock and left for the second one.
This was my first time working with Yarn Pirate yarn, and I really enjoyed it. I love this colorway! In fact, I've been looking longingly at the ones for sale/trade on Ravelry and wanting to use it again. I think I'll resist, though. Having to run a mile for sock yarn is a powerful deterrent.
The second pair of socks was knit virtually unblogged. I started the first one when I was stressed out at Christmas; I was worried about gift knitting and procrastinating about finishing my final painting for class. I thought this pattern and this yarn was a perfect indulgence project. The socks look complicated, but they just flew off my needles.
Pattern: Chalet Socks by Nancy Bush in Folk Socks Yarn: Wollmeise Sockenwolle in Granatapfel (dark) Needles: US 1.5 Modifications: I knit an extra pattern repeat on the foot instead of continuing in stockinette.
I said a lot about this pattern when I knit one sock for Minty. It's a beautiful pattern with a lot of little nice details. You know, a standard Nancy Bush sock! Also, I think it says a lot that I was willing to knit this pattern for three sock. You should knit a pair.
We were told that our time in Costa Rica was great for seeing lots of animals. They're a lot more active just as rainy season is beginning. We had some incredible luck and got to see so many!
Costa Rica is incredibly bio-diverse. It has 3% of all species living there. When you consider how small Costa Rica is, this is huge. The country is as bio-diverse as the Amazon, but packed into a much smaller area.
We got up early to go bird watching, and on the hikes we took our guides were really talented at locating and identifying birds. We bought a bird book towards the end of our trip (I really wish we had it on the first day!) and we checked off probably 30 or 40 different types of birds that we saw. I never had much interest in birding before our trip, but it was a lot of fun!
We saw several different reptiles. We had a couple of sightings of the Jesus Christ Lizard, an iguana, and small lizards were in abundance. We saw twotypes of poison dart frogs. (They weren't scary as they don't attack, but they're beautiful and they make a lot of noise!) There were geckos that would make kissing noises in the lodge at dinner, and frogs that also croaked from the swimming pool at night. The scariest reptile sighting was of a fer-de-lance snake. They're the most dangerous poisonous snake in that region, and we were within about a yard of it on a hike. Our guide saw him and got us out of the way fast. I spent the rest of the day trying to recover from that adrenaline surge!
On a different hike, we also saw this guy (an eyelash viper), who was sleeping on a branch. He was several feet away from the path, and only about 18 inches long, so he wasn't quite as scary.
As for mammals, we really lucked out! A sloth took up residence in a tree not far from our cabin, and we would stop and check on him every time we passed by. He stayed there for several days, and I got pretty good at finding him in the distance.
You can count his toes in that picture!
We saw all three types of monkeys that live in the region: howler, white-faced, and spider. The spider monkey I saw was hanging from his tail trying to get a good look at us!
We were extremely lucky on one of our last hikes-- we got to see a wild cat sleeping in a tree! I had never heard of this cat before-- it's called a margay.
One of our most interesting sightings of an animal was with a coati. We had seen several on the property at our resort. They're very cute and curious.
The last day at our resort, when we came back from breakfast, David said he saw a coati leaving our cabin-- just the tip of his tail as he left. We started packing up our things, and the coati came back! He was only a few yards away from me! We watched him climb up to the second floor of our cabin (we were on the stairs peeking up to the second floor), and start nosing around in my things. He sniffed very carefully some toothpaste on the floor (a bag had been knocked over) and we warned him away from it. And then, he grabbed my eyeglasses case (with eyeglasses inside) and TOOK OFF with it! We tried to warn him away, but it happened so fast, and he had disappeared into the jungle!
It was funny, and we were surprised, but also quite sad about the loss of my (expensive!) glasses. We shouldn't have let him in the cabin. We talked about what a good story it would make, but what an expensive good story it would make. I tried looking down the hill, but I couldn't find where he stashed them.
The coati did come back, but he didn't bring my glasses back with him.
We had to leave without them.
Later that day, I checked my e-mail and I had a new message from the resort. The next couple to stay in our cabin had several things stolen from them, and the staff had found the stash, including my glasses! They're getting mailed to me! Apparently, things got kind of bad with the coati, and the resort had to keep our cabin unoccupied for a couple of days. It was an unusual occurrence, and the coati was going to be re-located to an area where there weren't humans to mess up its habitat.
So, that's my best attempt at portraying our honeymoon in Costa Rica! We had a wonderful time, and I cannot recommend a trip there enough! You can see all of our pictures at my Flickr set here. I don't have all of them labeled yet, but I hope to get it done eventually.
Regular knitting and sewing content will resume shortly!
I did some knitting in Costa Rica. I planned for two projects, one easy and one difficult.
On the left, La Digitessa knit using Wollmeise yarn using the La Digitessa colorway. On the right, my own pattern using the Crown Mountain Farm Sock Hop yarn. I wanted something that was mindless but still interesting, and something that was impossible to mess up the pattern. I settled on randomly inserting 8 purl stitches across 20 stitches on the top of the foot. Impossible to mess up because there was no pattern, and it was kind of fun.
When we weren't relaxing, David and I also did a lot of activities offered by the resort. We hiked a lot, soaked in tide pools, went horseback riding, went kayaking, waterfall rappeled, went bird watching, zip lining, and stood under some amazing waterfalls.
The first part of our honeymoon was to stay at a remote, all-inclusive resort on the Osa Peninsula. When I was planning for this trip, I wanted something *easy* that would still be fun and relaxing. This was definitely the place.
Our resort was remote. We had to take a small, local flight to
arrive there from San Jose. I thought one of those tiny planes would
be scary, but it was actually a lot of fun. The windows were large,
and since the plane never got very high, we could see so much of the
landscape along the way. As we flew over completely deserted beaches
lined by the rain forest, I kept thinking, OMG, I've arrived in
paradise.
Once we arrived at the airport, we had a 45 minute drive on a very
bumpy road to get to the resort. Because it was the beginning of rainy
season, the resort didn't have many guests. At the most, there were
six guests other than us, but one night there was only one other
couple. We loved the personalized attention, and the other people at
the resort were a lot of fun, too.
Our cabin (the honeymoon one, of course) only had one wall. Well, there was a small bedroom on the first level with four walls, but the main level, the second floor, only had the one. The only reason it was private was because we were in the middle of the rain forest. Our view was of the jungle, and the ocean in the distance.
We got into a pattern of relaxing in our cabin before lunch, and then doing an activity after lunch. It was a great mix of relaxation and adventure.
Besides, we got to witness so much just being in our cabin. We saw a lizard eat a grasshopper. The grasshopper was only slightly smaller, so it took a good 20 minutes for the lizard to finally win the battle. We had bats that lived in our cabin and swooped down to eat bugs at dusk. Also, the rain forest is NOISY (in a good way). We could almost always hear four or five different birds calling to each other, and we often heard monkeys (howler monkeys are quite loud and can be heard 1 KM away), frogs, insects, and bats calling out to each other. All of it with the ocean waves crashing in the distance.
Our resort had to be all-inclusive because there was really no other way to get food! The main road was a good mile away (up the mountian, to boot) from our cabin. Fortunately, they served excellent food, and they always had something vegetarian for David. We really enjoyed the pina colatas and coco locos at the bar because they were made with fresh, local ingredients.
It got dark early (relative to NJ right now) and fast in Costa Rica. The sun would start setting around 5, and by 6 it was pitch dark. I really enjoyed watching the light fade in our cabin.
The cicadas would start chirring just as it got dark, and keep it up for about 10 minutes. Then the glass frogs would start after it got really dark. We never saw one, but they made a very distinctive "ping".
We would fall asleep around 8:30 or 9:00. This is much earlier than normal, but we didn't have a lot of electric light in the cabin, and I was usually exhausted by the day's activities anyway. Besides, when we had early morning activities, it wasn't as big of a deal to get up at 5am!
Well, it's been awhile. We've recovered, slowly, from March. Having a wedding to plan has helped a great deal, and the planning has effectively taken over all of my free time and most of my free thought cycles. Seriously. I have forgotten how to have a non-wedding conversation at work (unless it's directly about work, and then I kind of manage).
For instance, this is one thought process I remember having recently when having lunch with a friend.
"OK, I shouldn't talk about the caterer or the RSVP list, because that's all wedding stuff. I know! I'll tell her how my sister's dress didn't fit. Oh, wait, that's also wedding. Hmm, I could tell her how I'm almost done sewing another honeymoon dress... "
You get the idea, and now I'm doing it to you!
I have been knitting, but not a lot recently. I've had to make a conscious effort to just relax a little bit every day, and the uncomplicated projects I'm working on right now are about all I can handle.
This is the beginning of the Piedmont Park Hoodie. It was being sold as a kit when I visited Knitch in Atlanta a few weeks ago, and even though I have run almost three miles to pay for the yarn, I think it's worth it. I got to try on the store sample, and I loved how it fit. I also have been loving short-sleeved sweaters recently!
I have had some issues with gauge that I'm still trying to figure out. The gauge on the pattern seems to be impossibly tight, and even at a larger gauge I've still had to add rows to make it the correct length. Strange. I'll probably try to get in touch with the designer if my changes don't work, but it's too much to contemplate right now.
The other project I've worked on recently is a Charade Sock in Socks that Rock Terra Firma. A simple-but-interesting two-row repeat and a comforting color really combine nicely to make a de-stressing project. In fact, the first sock is already done, and I'm working on the second one. How's that for a change?
I've been sewing a lot recently. I've found it hugely satisfying, and quite useful. I'll try to having sewing updates soon, but with only eleven days to go, I'm not promising anything.
Again, thank you so much for all of your kind thoughts and support.
For a very long time, I've envisioned wearing flowery dresses on my honeymoon. It seems so appropriate for a tropical place and a happy time. There wasn't anything in the stores like I imagined (is there ever?), and I decided that I should sew the dresses myself. This past Thanksgiving my mother (an amazing seamstress) helped me get started.
This pattern is New Look 6557. The only modifications were to take it in at the seams for fit, and to shorten the waist pieces by about an inch because apparently, I'm short waisted.
The second dress was made over Christmas vacation, and my mom did a great deal of it. It's Easy Stitch 'N Save 5292. We put a seam in the center of the bodice because it otherwise would have been way too wide.
It has a very wide, swingy skirt, which is a lot of fun.
The third dress is another version of New Look 6557. It's supposed to be a ribbon-edged halter top. When I got done with this one (oh yeah, this dress was all me), the top gapped horribly if I tried to tie it up as a halter, so I instead sewed the ribbon to the back of the dress in a wider-set configuration.
I'm so happy with these dresses. These are the first garmets I've sewn, and I'm so pleased with how they turned out. There's a fourth dress in the works, so I should be set for our trip to Costa Rica in a little over a month!
It has not been a good week for our family. My grandma passed away sometime on Monday night. It was a surprise, but it seems that she left peacefully in her sleep.
I've called her Baum ever since I could talk. I think it started out as my attempt at "grandma", but the name stuck, and she loved it. When I was two, Baum came to take care of me after my brother was born. She was worried that I would waste away in her care; I was a pretty skinny little toddler and a picky eater. Baum figured out that I liked pumpkin pie, and she fed me that all the time. By the time she left, I was a pretty chunky toddler.
Baum and my grandfather were missionaries for 40 years in Haiti. They ran a Christian radio station there. I grew up listening to the tapes of Bible stories they acted out for their station. Because of this, I even knew the obscure Old Testament stories, like the story of Balaam and the donkey. We were often worried about them, the political situation being what it was, and we often missed them, but they always came back.
Baum had five children, twelve grandchildren, and I'm not certain of the number of great-grandchildren, but it's a lot. She and Granddaddy celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary last year. She was loved by, and will be missed by many, many people.
This little blog has been neglected, as of late. It was necessary, but I still miss all of my blog friends. Thanks for all of the support this week. It was very touching to me, and (more importantly) to David. Our little corner of the internet is a wonderful place.
I finished two sweaters over a month ago that I've neglected to post about until now. The first is one I've mentioned several times as it was in progress.
Pattern: my own, which I called Improvisational Tweed Yarn: Jo Sharp Aran Silkroad Tweed (red) and Kathmandu Aran Tweed (purple) Needles: US 8
I knew early this year that I wanted to do something with this yarn. After spending a lot of time on Ravelry browsing sweaters, I had an idea of what I wanted. I didn't really do much planning beforehand; I just cast on and went for it. It's knit bottom-up, but I provisionally cast on for the sleeves before joining the yoke, and then knit the sleeves down after it was finished.
The sleeves are seamlessly set-in using Elizabeth Zimmerman's method in the Knitter's Almanac. I still don't think I understand this method at the very end-- things tend to get a bit wonky. But this version is better than the last time I tried it!
I used moss stitch to give me some texture once I got to the yoke. I like the effect, and it's repeated on the lower part of the sleeves as well.
It's a comfortable sweater, and I've enjoyed wearing it this winter.
I apologize that I haven't blogged about this second sweater before, but you see, the last time I worked on it was before I started blogging. You have one of those sweaters, right? This one I got all the way to the neck, and abandoned it. I felt bad that it was knit on size 11 needles, and that I spent so much money on the yarn. I was certain it wasn't going to be flattering.
I finally decided this year that I didn't care if it was flattering or not, the sweater should be finished.
Pattern: I got this pattern from elann.com in 2006, and it does not appear to be on their website any more. Yarn: Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Superchunky Needles: US 11
It's chunky and oversized, and it's incredibly warm and comfortable. It's not something I'd wear on a hot date, but when the world is all yucky outside and all I want to do is take a nap? This is the sweater.
