a study in stripes

I'm currently finishing up on two projects, both with stripes of vibrant color. One is a felted make-up bag the other is a soft cap for a newborn. Both are going to be gifts. The bag pattern comes from Melanie Falick's Weekend knitting: a stash bag designed by Leigh Radford.

The cap, which, if knit with size one needles and fingering weight yarn, seems to fit perfectly on a newborn baby's head is called Gooseberry cap from Suvi Simola.


The cap especially rewards one with a sense of instant gratification because it knits up so quickly. If you have lots of babies popping up in your life (which I do with all of my cousins) this is the gift to knit them using leftover yarn from your sock stash.

flowers on friday

No words . . . just light and color.

knitting in the backyard

The season of fall feels like it's upon us, even though it's a week off on the calendar. I've started my final year of studies here at the School of Design, so my life right now is moving fast and I've had to snag moments to knit between classes, catching the train and falling into bed in the evenings.

The night before my first day of class Garrett and I opened a bottle of champagne and had a campfire in the back yard. I wandered around admiring the flowers in the garden and thinking about what I'll do with this space next year.



These ladies have been my favorites, probably because I've never planted them before. Their colors hint at the season to come and their blossoms have attracted several varieties of honeybees to our backyard. I have to be careful when I cut flowers for the house so that I don't take a fuzzy-buzzing stowaway into the house with me, because I don't know how I'd get the unintended guest back outside without injury to either party.



Here's my "wall" of flowers between our yard and the next. It's made up of sunflowers, giant zinnias, borage, cleome and dahlias.

Frost warnings are already out for our area, so I'm going to have to say goodbye to these blossoms soon.

september flowers

Some of my mother's zinnias in a tiny rocking chair that she had when she was a child. Very sweet.

apples + cinnamon

I spent the weekend at my mom and dad's where thousands of apples are ripening on their apple trees. My dad tied beer cans with a mixture of beer and molasses in them to the tree branches this past spring and the result: no worms!

My sister and I walked down to the tiny orchard at the end of their garden in our colorful skirts and picked apples in the sunshine on Saturday afternoon. We then carried the buckets up to the kitchen and started the process of peeling, chopping, simmering and seasoning that would result in a winter's worth of applesauce.




I only managed a few rounds of knitting this weekend, the rest of the time I was either up to my elbows in applesauce or tomatoes. My grandmother was over for most of the weekend helping us. We made an apple pie on Saturday evening. One person rolled out the dough, another peeled and cut the apples and yet another mixed the seasoning for the pie.




No one wanted to roll out the top crust. Finally grandma took over and rolled out what was left of the dough. She said it didn't need to be pretty, it just needed to fit on a day like today when we were all exhausted from working in the kitchen.



The results were delicious.

flowers on friday

Here's what's blooming in the garden today: dahlias, zinnias and asters.