The Greatest Day of the Year

Happy Valentine's Day

I love Valentine's Day. Everything pink and cute and all about love.

When we woke up this morning, Mike and I exchanged gifts...



I got him chocolates from the candy store in New Hampshire where I worked during high school (in the traditional red heart chocolate box) and he got me a miniature rose grown at Half Moon Bay in California.

The card in the picture is my present to Strawberry Shortcake and an example of the postcards I wrote to my friends. (I used a typewriter on the front and rubber stamps for the back- a movie quote or song lyrics. Examples include: "Here's looking at you, kid", "Nobody puts Baby in a corner", "Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world", and "We are the champions, no time for losing".)

Total Cupcake count: 6 knitted, 120 frosted, 1 eaten by a shark.

I worked on the squirrel mittens!!!



If you'll remember, as of the beginning of this blog, the second squirrel mitten looked like this:



Now it's a real squirrel with a whole body! Maybe Strawberry Shortcake will get to wear them before it's springtime!

Socks and Mittens

I promise that I will work on the second squirrel mitten. I promise that I will work on the second squirrel mitten. I promise that I will work on the second squirrel mitten.

I seem to have lost knitting steam. I made five cupcakes- enough for Valentine's Day, I hope. I've already given one (another white one) to a friend for her birthday. She loved it so much that she just kept squeezing it the whole time we were eating dinner. It was a wonderful response. Another, I made into a pincushion. This one lives with a jar I got for SS for Christmas, and her cyborg ponies. (Notice that one is a unicorn).

The other three live in a pyramid, courtesy of LP. I think that these will be enough for the friends a) who I will see on Valentine's Day and b) who will appreciate them.

So, I can stop knitting cupcakes. For now anyway. I still have tons of crazy sparkly pink yarn and fiberfill, and who knows what else I can do with that! (Maybe some crazy stuffed animals are in my future...)

Also, I never thought I would ever want to knit socks. But then I just thought about them and thought about them.... and I want to make me some socks!

Mike likes the long socks, so maybe we'll go yarn shopping soon and those will be a Valentine for him. That he'll get in say, June, when I finish them! Also, I love that it's a vintage pattern, and it says "Men in the forces prefer extra long socks, which dispense of knee caps" as an added incentive to make them!

I also like these ones, because the pattern says that they are easy, beginner socks, and I have never made socks! Plus, the design isn't that ugly. I would definitely choose a different color though.



But for now, I will make use of these rainy days and watch movies and finish the mittens I started for SS at Christmastime. We have some great movies in the house right now- The Way We Were, Fraggle Rock : The Beginning, Kiko's Delivery Service (Miyazaki- so great!), as well as An Inconvenient Truth and many teen-dramas for LP & SS.

Barbie Art

I am in love with making Valentine's. I don't consider myself an artist or a crafty person at all (a weird admission on a knitting blog, I suppose), but the past few years I have gotten fairly crafty with my Valentines. I stopped giving Valentines once I grew out of the Scooby-Doo variety, but have recently started up again. I think it's because Christmas seems to always sneak up on me, and I don't have time to make everyone something unique (hence all the scarves), but it gets my (limited) craftyness itching, and then I have the entire month of January to funnel that energy into Valentines Day.

Last year, it was cut up paper cards, and this year hand-stamped / typewritten postcards. I'll post pictures after Valentine's Day since I think there are some card-recipients-to-be that read this blog and I wouldn't want to give anything away.

In the meantime, though, drool over this collection of magnificent art/jewelry

The only type of jewelry I really go crazy for is earrings, and I love big circular and dangly ones. I particularly like the long earrings of mismatched face-parts. And several of the Ken pieces I could easily see proudly worn in the Castro.

And, on the long continuing Dazzleaire / button sweater saga: I am now in contact with the guy who outbid me (in order to use the yarn to make trout fishing flies! A whole new world of yarn use I never knew about!)- he is open to me buying the whole lot (4 skeins- 3 mocha and 1 autumn) or just 1 or 2 skeins of mocha, which is all I think I'll need... I can't really afford the bid he made for the whole lot, but don't want to not have enough AGAIN! I also don't want to use just one skein and end up with more of this crazy brown acrylic yarn! Advice?

A Wonderful Day

Several amazing things happened today:

1. I woke up with a wonderful man
2. I got the yarn for my button-sweater after all (see post below)
3. At work, a wonderful customer gave me a rose for no reason! (Not a creepy man, but a sweet, lovely British woman, a professor at Mills)
4. I decorated cupcakes
5. I was accepted to Lewis & Clark University Law School
5a. They gave me a $16,000 annual Public Interest Scholarship, narrowly beating out the $15,000 merit scholarship I was given by Vermont Law!
5b. They also offered me a $500 travel reimbursement so I can afford to visit them
6. I bought plane tickets for Mike and I to travel to the East Coast to visit VT Law (as well as Philadelphia, my friends still in college, my mother's house, and friends in Boston)

The Affinity Between Knitters

Here's to the kindness of strangers!

I emailed the winner of my mocha Dazzleaire yarn and explained my situation. Much to my pleasure, here is the response I got:

"Since you are in the middle of knitting a sweater, you may have the the yarn."

How wonderful! I do have to pay the higher price that HE bid ($3 more than I wanted!! 50 cents each for the first six skeins and $17.50 for the last three!!) But at least I won't have a crazy-multi colored sweater. (I'm not as color-courageous as Strawberry Shortcake- see comments to the last post).

Now I just have to find the right buttons...

The devil named Ebay.

The only skeins of the yarn I need to finish the buttony sweater (Dazzleaire Mocha) were on eBay today. LP and I were watching like hawks to make sure I won. I had it until there were 7 seconds left, and then someone swooped in to outbid me. I can't believe it. Now I have to either a) connive to get the winning bidder to sell me the yarn or b) take out my sweater and make something smaller or c) wait, who knows how long, until some more of this discontinued yarn appears and then go through the crazy headache of eBay bidding again.

UPDATE: Does anyone know where to buy discontinued yarn? Any secret online yarn stores...? Please keep your eyes open for skeins of this yarn at thrift stores!!