August 2007 Archives

Oh, Bella. Bellissima Bella. "Four-square with sashing" is such a practical name, you deserve something indicative of the surprisingly harmonious blend of colors and patterns of your 196 squares. You pretty, pretty imperfect-but-oh-so-cool-that-I-did-it-all-myself quilt!

Bella was an exercise in so many things: navigating through the quilting section on eBay, navigating through the fabrics at Joann and The Cotton Shop, deciding what fabrics I liked (the ubiquitous Amy Butler, now I know why crafters love her work), calculating how much fabric for the sashing, binding, and backing that I needed, calculating how much batting I needed, and figuring out the best way to quilt, or tie, this. It was great fun.

Now, if I can only remember the details...

Video Link: From Elise.com, a video of women's faces in 500 years of Western art.

You can blame the blog absence on beautiful scenery like this. We're currently living in the German countryside, and everywhere you look you see beautiful green meadows and forests stretching for miles and miles (or should I say kilometers, ha), and endless blue sky dotted with clouds. Redondo Beach, California is very much a lifetime ago.

This was taken on the day after our move. We decided to look for the crag tantalizingly called Große Wacht (Big Sentinel), a mere 10 minutes, or so it seemed, from our house. This entailed riding down our hillside, into the valley, riding up the other hillside, crossing fields of wheat, getting lost, taking a break, spotting people with backpacks (climbers!) getting lost, and following them into the woods, where we finally found the crag. And what a crag! It made the hour-and-a-half that it took us worth it.

Dear knitblogger friends, once in your life you must, mustmustmust, go someplace you've never been to. Someplace far and away from your comfort zone. Be a stranger in a strange land; leave the tourist traps behind, take your guidebook and camera, and see how people really live. It's an amazing experience.

I'm going to leave comments closed as I make a few changes to Yummy Yarn. I upgraded my cms, so I'll be playing around with this 3-year old layout as well as redo all my categories. Spam hit the blog fairly hard while we had no internet access (6+ weeks, yo), so I'm still working on banning those. Finally, we'll be climbing in Spain until around mid-December, so I'll schedule some posts to fill the space while we're gone. Finished objects galore!