The Longest Scarf

The longest Scarf is the shortest one I have ever made. It's just not working out with me and the Knifty Knitter. The yarn us called Sashay and I bought it on a whim. I thought, with its plaited edges, it would be easy to knit with.

Unfortunately it proved super slow to knit with as I tried to loop it around the pegs. Then I ran into some really tight tension.

Realizing I would grow old with this thing, I alternated one row of Sashay with two rows of regular burgundy yarn. This only mildly improved things. After a foot and a half, defeat was at hand!

Some projects are not meant to be :)

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6

Unintentional Fibre Week!

Hi friends, It has finally cooled down enough to feel like I can do things again. Our house is an oven and the other week it was regularly hitting +30 C (86-89 F) and it was extremely oppressive. It was hard to keep the birds cool and despite being tropical birds, they were suffering as much as the people. My husband came down with a dreaded summer cold as well!

It was so hot I couldn't even bear to read to keep my mind off of it. Sleepless nights abounded. The craftiest thing I could get up to was warping a loom for a new tapestry. It required very little thought and the only decisions to be made was selecting colours.

By good fortune, I also had an eye appointment which was very close to one of Calgary's premier wool shops, Gina Brown's. Thank goodness tapestry wool is inexpensive :-)

Muffin loves fibre arts as much as I do...and I have had trouble keeping him out of the tapestry wool :-)

It is HOT!

I'll be back when I can form coherent sentences :S

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.6

Draw Something!

I'm in love with Draw Something. It's a game where someone else has to guess a word and draw something in retrun. Some people simply write out the word, so I'm only trying to play with friends.

It's awfully addictive! My old laptop died, so I replaced it with a 7" Samsung Galaxy Tab. It's so easy to draw on, especially with the big red crayon shaped stylus I bought to go with it. I'm screencapping my favourite ones. Naturally, I do draw a few stinkers too.

They say you should draw every day, and I'm definitely doing it :-) Check out this public album as I add more items to it by clicking on the duck.

From Draw Something

Printable Castle Card - New!

Here's something fun and new I worked on all last week! It was actually an old idea that I was finally determined to make reality. While folding strips of paper, I had a flash for a fun folding card.

Here it is, available from my Artfire shop! More pictures can be seen at that link too. There's lots of room to customize the card, so I hope to make some more samples. Stickers, hand lettering...so much potential for customization here.


A lot of effort went into designing this card - the best designs often do look effortless, but it took about 20 hours from idea to blogging :-)

Here is the original concept art. I'm not great at drawing on the computer, so I still do everything the old fashioned way. I used CorelDraw's colour picker to go from there.



Then there was much testing! As you can see, it's easy to, hehe, flip things the wrong way :-) Each piece had to be tested to make sure the size was right and that it would all line up according to plan. The colour in the final card also got a huge boost - the original colours were too light.



All in all, this was a fun card to make, and I hope others will enjoy making it and making it special for a birthday boy.

Nanaimo, BC

My suitcase was barely unpacked from California when Mom and I were off to Nanaimo. Every year a group I belong to has its annual conference in a different Canadian city. Nanaimo is a small little city on Vancouver Island. Unfortunately, I was unusually rainy, cloudy and icy cold, even at the beginning of June. Maybe it was a blessing because I didn’t do a lot of picture taking. I'm still sorting out California! Here's one to get started at least. Nanaimo is a harbour city. The actual airport is 20km outside of town, so if you're brave, you can take a seaplane and be there a lot faster :)
Harbour, Nanaimo, British Columbia, a photo by Calzephyr on Flickr.

Somewhere New, Somewhere Blue

I'm back near an ocean! Will tell you all about it soon.

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.4