The perfect knitterly weekend

I've been putting off this post because I'm scared that my words won't do the event justice.  But last weekend (17-18 May 2014) as my ultimate knitterly dream weekend.

It started with breakfast on Saturday.  D and I rolled out of bed (a little late) to run a few errands before heading to our favourite local cafe for breakfast.  En route, I found the perfect scarf - I'm obsessed with this colour at the moment.  I'm not sure what it's called - magenta? pinkey-purple? I'm not sure but I'm obsessed... so I've been looking for a scarf or cardigan in this colour for weeks and finally I found something within my price range.  This chevron beauty (pictured with the other colours I'm obsessed with at the moment) only set me back $20!

Then we went to breakfast (which was DELICIOUS), and then we sat at the cafe for ages doing this:

After a few hours of hanging out at home, I left D at home to study and I hopped into the car to Canberra where my incredible friends not only let me stay the night, but they took me out for a belated birthday dinner:

Then there was the knitting:

But the real festivities started the next morning when, bright eyed and bushy tailed, we went to the Old Bus Depot Markets' Celebration of Wool Day!  The Old Bus Depot Markets are an old favourite of mine.  They open every Sunday in Kingston and sell a great combination of food, plants, handmade goods and other knick nacks. Once a year around May, the have a special Celebration of Wool Day which sees yarn vendors from around the region to come and sell their wares.  It's basically the closest thing to a sheep and wool festival that we get in this area and this year, it did not disappoint!

In fact, I had so much fun, I didn't end up with that many photos - but here is a collage of a few that I took (very last minute as we were on our way home):

And of course, we could not resist buying some lovlies to bring home (unfortunately that's our combined haul - so only the Paris bag, the navy and pinkey purple sock yarn and fibre came home to Sydney with me):

Those bags are made by the amazing and talented Michelle of Buttontree Lane and you can might be able to get one here.  The navy, pinkey purple (yeap, it's that colour again) yarn, the red yarn and those cute stitch markers (sitting on top of the hedgehog bag) were from Little Plum Yarns (who had a table full of incredibe colours - I had to physically restrain myself from buying more)... You can get some here. The pink yarn right off in the distance is Quince and Co which is exclusively sold in Australia at one of my favourite yarn stores - Suzy Hausfrau.  I did also get a little spinning fibre but I'm not sure who the vendor was... and I'm also not sure what type of fibre it was - it was just labelled as "wool".

And because we managed to find some spinning fibre, we decided that I should have a whirl on my friend's spinning wheel!  My very first spinning experience (unfortunately that's not a picture of me spinning - that's my amazing friend setting up her wheel for me to try):

To be honest, I wasn't totally enamoured my spinning... I think I'll stick with knitting for now, but I'm glad I tried it and I might try it again in the future, maybe when I have a little more bandwidth and a little less knitting mojo.

Speak of knitting mojo, it was running HIGH after the market so we popped on a movie (Midnight in Paris) and got knitting:

Of course there was a long and boring drive home, but the entire time, I was kept company by some of my favourite podcasts: Down Cellar Studios, The Knitmore Girls, Prairie Girls Knit and Spin and The Knit Girllls (who I sometimes just listen to instead of "watch"). 

As knitterly weekends go, it was pretty much perfect...

Oh, and that blue knitting you keep seeing in pictures, that's D's Brownstone... it's going well *touch wood* :)

XOXO
Bee

The opposite of knitting...

For what was meant to be a knitting blog, there's been a conspicuous lack of knitting posts lately, and that's because there's been a lack of knitting in my life.  In fact, it's actually worse than that, there's been a lot of the very opposite of knitting - frogging.

First up - my Marin.  I was knitting this for a friend of mine - her birthday is in September and I thought I'd get an early start on it (given my mojo lately, it might get to her in about 2 birthdays time)... I had been plodding along on it at a steady pace around Christmas time, then I put it down and it went into my knitting bin (which is literally a tiny purple wheely bin) for a while.  Then I picked it up again when I was visiting Canberra and was lucky enough to snag a knit date with my favourite knitting companion. Ahh it was bliss...

We spent a few hours happily knitting away... I felt the Marin was starting to look a little strange but didn't think much of it until I got back to Sydney and was re-reading parts of the pattern to find where I was up to and I saw this:

I had totally forgotten to do that after I'd started back on this project after it's hiatus.  There was just nothing to be done but to rip it. So I ripped..

And ripped...

Until it was just a ball again...

As heartbreaking as ripping back the Marin was, this next project was even HARDER to rip back...

D's sweater is something I've been working on for literally, YEARS and for a while, I've known that it's not really working out.  In fact, I blogged about it here.   The pattern is not clear, I'd done a tonne of mods but hadn't kept a good record of them, and the whole thing was looking really "off".  But I've had the thing in hiatus for ages and so on D's birthday, I pulled it out to have a look at it and my heart sank.  I just couldn't keep knitting on a project that I didn't think would work.  So, with a heavy heart, I decided that this huge pile of knitting had to go.

I immediately went on to Ravelry (where I'm "stealthknits" by the way), and found a sweater pattern by a reputable designer that a tonne of other Ravelers had knit (successfully!) and seemed to be something D would wear: Brownstone by Jared Flood.  Within 15 minutes of deciding to stop knitting on the original sweater, I had picked the pattern, bought the pattern and had cast on for the sleeve.  It's going well and I'll share some progress pics soon...

But I just don't have the heart to rip the original sweater.  There will come a time that I have to rip it out so I can use the yarn - but until then, I think I might just leave it the way it is...

XOXO
Bee

Market Madness!

I am not ordinarily a morning person, and on Saturdays, D and I like to sleep in... but this Saturday, I was up, showered, dressed and in the car by 7:15am to go to the markets!

In August, one of my good friends is getting married and I am super duper excited to be one of her bridesmaids.  One of the things she wanted to look into was doing her own flowers for the big day so we decided to head out to the Sydney Flower Markets.  We had done our research and found that if you want the best quality flowers that day - your best bet is to get there at 5am when the markets open, but if you're looking for some bargains, you're better off getting there around 8:30 or 9am as the vendors are getting ready to pack up.  For the actual wedding, I'm sure my friend will be there at 5am sharp, but for practising, we thought we'd try for some cheaper blooms (and have a teeny bit of a sleep in too) so we arrived by about 8:30am and this was the first thing I saw:

I instantly fell in love with the coral roses (see them on the right hand side of the picture) but forced myself to focus on the task at hand - finding the perfect wedding flowers!  So we explored:

After roaming the markets for about an hour, I was feeling super accomplished - my friend had a really good idea of what she wanted, and we'd picked up some cheap flowers to experiment with, but those coral roses were still calling my name.  So as we were walking out, we ducked by the same flower vendor from earlier in the morning and he had just reduced his prices from $5 per bunch to 3 bunches for $10! It was a sign! I couldn't resist any longer and I bought 2 bunches of the coral roses and a bunch of the white ones too.

I won't share the pictures of our practice wedding flowers but safe to say, I had a TONNE of fun experimenting, and the bride is super happy with her choice.  In fact, we had so much fun that I didn't get home until about 10pm!  But when I did, my mind immediately turned to playing with those coral and white roses. I think here's a good place to not - I am not a florist, nor do I have ANY experience arranging flowers ahead of today but I thought I'd do a little post about what I did...

This is what I started with:

I cut off most of the folage from each rose - leaving just a few leaves at the top, and I cut the stems down to a length that I thought looked nice in my vase (making sure to cut them on an angle).

The white roses didn't have many thorns but I was surprised to find that most of the coral ones were very thorny - with teeny tiny little thorns that were difficult to remove (so I didn't).

 

By the time I was done - I had a LOT of leaves and stem cut offs to throw away (luckily my apartment block has a green waste bin).

 And I was ready to start arranging!

I had a few Silver Dollar Eucalyptus leaves which were leftovers from wedding flower experimenting that I added to my arrangement to break up the roses a little. I absolutely love how they sort of poke out of the round arrangement. Basically, I used the two types of flowers and the leaves, I just got playing and poking and changing and switching until I was happy with how it looked.  Here's the finished product!

I absolutely LOVE how it looks on my kitchen island! I wish it could be a permanent fixture.

XOXO
Bee

26

Today I turned 26 and it was lovely.

My birthday this year fell on the same day as one of my very best friends' last night in Australia.  He leaves in the morning to start his incredible new post doc in Paris! So we celebrated in style. And it was glorious!