The Brisk Blog

Spring Cleaning

2011-06-02T09:00:00.000-07:00

It's funny how predictable I am. Every year I go through similar cycles, with jobs and friends and activities and even foods. One thing I can always count on is that around March I'll start to feel antsy in my living space, and finally in May I'll make some moves to change things.

This year I started by cleaning out my apartment of any unnecessary "stuff" (aka crap) and either throwing it out or giving it away. I got rid of an entire dresser's worth of clothing (and managed not to refill it at the clothing exchange my friends and I threw last month) and yesterday got rid of the dresser as well.

Thursday I rearranged my kitchen, creating more counter space and clearing out the piles of debris that had been forming in the room over the previous months. Still not quite satisfied, I then turned my attention to an extreme source of tension over the last couple weeks: my craft space.

This entire month I've been thinking about how to best arrange my craft supplies and work area. For a long time I've had my sewing machine in a totally ridiculous, polar-opposite-of-optimal location that really does not lend itself to my wanting to sew. Not that I'm a big sewer, or that I aspire to be one, but it'd be nice if I didn't dread repairing the odd pair of jammy pants just because I don't want to fuss with the lack of sewing space.

And the rest of the craft zone was pretty much a disaster as well.

So finally, after redoing the kitchen (since it didn't take that long, really) I turned my attention to the craft space.

This is not the first time I've completely rearranged my craft area. But while it's been in adorable working order before, it's still always had a lack of good work space.

Also, note the sewing machine location. I mean, come on, how are you going to sew with that little space, and that much crap bordering each side of the machine?

Anyhow, I pulled everything out just like last time and eventually resituated all the counter space to be far more useful. And voila!

A far more functional craft space is born.

Already this weekend I've re-covered four throw pillows, repaired my jammies and shirt that have been sitting in the craft zone for almost a year, and re-sized some straps to a new tank top from the clothing exchange.

Yay spring!

Fancy Cookies

2011-05-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

My friend had a baby shower recently and the definite hit of the party was this plate of delicious salted chocolate chip orange pecan cookies. They were so good we started pulling them out of the bag they came in before the person who brought them even had a chance to sit down. At plating time there were roughly 50% fewer cookies than there should've been, and until they were all eaten we clustered around them like vultures, trying to justify our decisions to have a sixth or seventh (and hide them from people who hadn't yet had a first).

Cookies that good leave a definite impression, and since the shower I haven't been able to get them off my mind. Finally this weekend I messaged the cookie person, Emma, and asked for the recipe, which she thankfully sent right over. I had a batch made within 3 hours, and by the end of the night had eaten 13 of the 16 cookies I'd baked that afternoon.

If you'd told me 10 years ago that one day my favorite cookie would feature orange zest and chocolate chips, I would've hit you in the face. I've always hated fruit plus chocolate (in truffle form at least) and nowhere was this more true than in terms of the orange-plus-chocolate combo. But these cookies are AMAZING!

They're made with a blend of whole wheat and all-purpose flour, and oats, which gives the dough this great homey, comforting, wholesome texture and taste. The pecans add crunch and caramel flavor, and the orange citrus is not just a delicious accent, but a visual and olfactory excitement as well. Throw some semi-sweet chocolate into the mix and voila--you'll find yourself eating 13 cookies in a single day, too.

But the coup de gras has to be the coarse sea salt, sprinkled (in my case liberally) over the balls of dough right before they go into the oven. As a child (which is not to suggest that I don't still do this, mind you) I loved going to the movies with chocolate in one hand and salty, buttery popcorn in the other, and shoving bits of both into my mouth for a salty-sweet combo. These cookies are a (far more) sophisticated version of that move. I feel cheated, in fact, that I've had to wait 30 years before tasting the deliciousness of sea salted chocolate chip cookies.

I'm not sure where the recipe came from so if you recognize it as yours feel free to let me know and I'll happily give credit where it's due. If you don't recognize it, I suggest you familiarize yourself with a batch of your own post haste (I don't want to be the only fatty in a bikini this year).

From Emma:

Salted Orange Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies

1/2 cup butter, room temp
1/2 cup canola oil
zest of 1-2 oranges
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt (plus more for sprinkling)
1 cup oats
1 cup pecans, broken
2 cups semi-sweet choc chips

Pre-heat the oven to 350. Cream butter, oil, zest, and sugar. Add eggs and then vanilla. Dump flours into bowl, and before mixing, add in the baking soda and salt and mix into the flour with your tsp before incorporating everything together. Add oats, nuts & chocolate chips. Spoon onto a parchment paper lined cookie sheet, sprinkle with sea salt, and bake for 9-11 minutes. Cool on a rack. If you can stop yourself from eating them all.

The cookies actually test better if you stick the dough in the fridge overnight. Nuttier. But you can't go wrong whipping them up in 15 minutes either.

How to Flatten Vinyl

2011-05-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

I haven't even started on Peanut's new sweater. What an awful pseudo-girlfriend I am.

I have, however, been working on a different project, which has involved an awful lot of sewing and a little bit of gluing. I can't get into details, though, because it's for a product I'm designing with the intention to eventually try and market it and I wouldn't want you to swipe my patent-less idea. :-)

In any case, part of the design for this mystery thing involved using clear vinyl, so I headed to the (lame) craft superstore in our town mall to pick some up. Lucky for me there were several odds-and-ends folds of vinyl sheeting in the half-off section, so I grabbed a medium-weight flat and picked it up for roughly $7. I didn't need as many yards as I wound up with, but who knows--maybe I'll want to make myself a see-through dress some day.

Having worked with vinyl before (the Happy Hooker has an adorable crocheted ipod case that's an animal face on one side and a clear vinyl panel on the other)

I knew that stored vinyl can get wrinkled, but I've never tried to unwrinkle it before.

Clearly, ironing is out of the question, so how do you make folded vinyl flat again? I pondered this as I drove home from the store, thinking that microwaving would probably work, but since I'm smart I made sure to Google my options before actually throwing any plasticky sheeting into the oven.

Google had a couple different suggestions but the one that appealed to me the most was flattening via hair dryer. As someone who still occasionally uses the hair dryer to get wrinkles out of the shirt I'm already wearing, I am familiar with the process.

I'm happy to report that blow drying vinyl works a helluva lot better than blow drying cotton. I cut a few squares out of my big fold, stored it away, and then put each square on the carpet (maybe not the best placement but it didn't melt or anything). It took about 30 seconds to a minute to get a nice flat piece of vinyl from what was previously a bumpy lumpy mess and wound up being one of the easiest things I had to do in the process of making the mystery item.

This morning, thankfully, I finished my project (wouldn't want to leave any loose craft ends before The Rapture) which means now I'm theoretically free to start working on a new pattern for Peanut.

I'm sure he will be thrilled to get a new sweater just in time for summer.

Baseball Redux

2011-05-11T12:47:00.002-07:00

It didn't fit.

I knew it was a possibility--I've knit from this pattern before with dubious results (especially on Minnie's Chug-shaped body) but I'd hoped that was the fault of knitting inexperience.

It wasn't.

The pattern, which (for its sake) shall remain nameless, is, frankly, a fail.

Oleg and I headed over to Elaine and Ken's on Saturday for a brief birthday hello, and while there delivered the new sweater to Mr. Peanut. However, though he may not look it, Peanut is an elderly gentleman and the sweater, with its awkward arm placement, did not go on very smoothly.

Once fitted, Peanut had a helluva time trying to move around in the thing. Witness:

All of us were disappointed, me especially. I'd wanted to make a nice treat for my buddy, instead I wound up making him a torture device. But from failure comes further inspiration--"Screw that pattern," I said, "I'll make a better one!" And that's exactly what I'm going to do.

Since Peanut's joints are creaky with age, I've decided to redesign this little baseball look so that he can put it on front-wise, instead of over the head. This means I'll have to split the back, and add a way of fastening it (I haven't decided what, but I'm thinking either velcro or buttons, or both). And because the arms (which are really the greatest fail of this particular pattern) are a little too far out, I'm going to reshape the chest piece to bring them in closer--you know, in a more dog-like shape.

And here's the good news: once I'm done, not only will Peanut have a dashing new sweater, you'll have a free new pattern because guess what? Suck it, old sweater pattern, I'm posting the redux so no one ever has to suffer through your dummy tight arms again!

Clipart Can Be Scary

2011-05-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

Often in my capacity as gym manager I wind up creating fliers, posters and other junk. Most of the time I throw in some dopey clip art courtesy of Google, like this:

The criteria I use to choose artwork is will it do and how long have I been working on this? If I've been searching for more than 5 minutes, I generally pick the least offensive/most applicable piece of art, or scrap the idea of art altogether.

Sometimes my clip art searches unearth some real gems, though, like the thing that came when I searched "break clipart" to ornament a back in 15 minutes sign.

This is mostly funny because it's titled "A Colorful Cartoon Gym Teacher and Gymnasts Taking a Break." Since that's exactly how my staff and I look, I printed it out on a staff meeting memo.

Anyhow, long story short it was during a recent clip art search that I came up with something awful that made me wish Craftastrophe was still up and running so I could post it.

But then my boyfriend said why don't you just post it on your own blog? and I thought, hey, yeah, why not?

So here's the first (definitely not the last) of a new set of craftastrophes, courtesy of the Brisk Blog. I give you
GOLLUM BRIDGE SPOOKY BRIDE MUSICAL DOLL BRIDE OF GOLLUM!

Looking at this thing makes me want to narrate it ala Randall of Nasty Ass Honey Badger fame.

Oh my God, what is that? Is that Gollum as a tranny? Oh my God, that's disgusting.

Is that wire hair? Why does it have wire hair? Jesus Christ.

Apparently this $50 mess of awful has been mounted to an old musical toy so that you can (why would anyone want to do this?!) wind it up and watch tranny-Gollum spin around to a Brahms lullaby.

This falls firmly under the category of Things I Will Never Make For You.

{buy awful tranny-Gollum}

Boyfriend Sweater

2011-04-28T16:08:00.000-07:00

Lately the number of times I've found myself delving wholeheartedly into a new craft have been few and far between. My mother's new pair of gloves (rendered entirely redundant the day after I started knitting them when the California sunshine came out in full force and said, 'Hey, Bay Area, welcome to early summer!') is not even half finished, the lone tube of magenta knit perched accusingly on my coffee table for the last few weeks. And even less frequently than that do I choose to embark on a project that involves--shudder--sewing.

But the other night I was hanging out with my boyfriend and my buddy Elaine said, "You should make him a sweater." And it's been a long time since I've made a sweater, but since my boyfriend is the most adorable thing ever, I thought, "You know what, I should."

This, by the way, is my boyfriend:

Jealous much?

His name is Peanut and he's an older Pomeranian gentleman who rocks a short coat and relaxed demeanor like nobody's business. And I heart him--see, that's what his egg says, "I heart Peanut."

I haven't made a dog sweater in more years than it's been since I actually voluntarily sewed with yarn (there's just something about the texture of yarn for sewing that I hate) but Peanut is pretty awesome and one pattern in particular struck me as the only right choice for him. So the other night I grabbed a favorite color combo and set to knitting.

The sweater I chose to make is knit in four pieces: a back, a front, and two arms. You have to knit them on regular needles (can't recall the last time I did something on anything other than a pair of double-pointed metallics...) and then set them aside. And then you have do another thing that I kind of hate: block them.

Blocking is weird. If you're not familiar with it (though I don't know why anyone reading this blog wouldn't be--welcome, person who randomly wound up here by Googling something weird like pterodactyl baseball or kitten stirrup pants!) it's just a way of relaxing your knitting into a flat piece. Plain knitting (without any fancy stitches) tends to roll in on itself, which makes sewing the edges together all but impossible, so once you've made a piece of flat stockinette (that's just a fancy way to say "plain") fabric, you have to do something to flatten it out.

roll in, much?

Two popular blocking methods are to soak the thing in water and let it dry, or to iron it. I find both unsatisfactory, at least with acrylic yarn. Blocking robs the fabric of some of its bounce and fluff and leaves it oddly thinner and looser than before. But if I have to choose a method, I think ironing is the way to go. You've gotta use steam, and use it sparingly, and if possible iron just the edges so they flatten (though, as was the case for this project, sometimes you'll have to block the whole thing to completely eliminate the rolling issue).

Once blocked, the parts look much more like sweater puzzle pieces.

Then comes the next step: sewing.

When I first started knitting dog sweaters (long story...sad, too) I was a very new knitter and found the piece work very confusing and incredibly time consuming. After a while I figured out I could eliminate a lot of steps by rewriting patterns to be knit as one piece on circular needles. It was a pretty successful endeavor, and a great way to learn more about knitting and teach myself some pattern writing in the process. It also made me hugely more confident about my knitting chops in general, which lead to better and more complex endeavors.

In any case, my dislike for sewing flat pieces of knitting together continues to this day. Yarn begins to unravel when you're knitting long seams with it, and it feels squeaky, and if you're sewing for too long your fingers will get sweaty and then the squeaky, unraveling yarn will become moist, and that's enough to make you frog the entire project right there. Not to mention that after the first seam I tend to get impatient (or maybe just bored) and the quality of my stitches begins to deteriorate, making me like sewing even less.

But I was mentally prepared for all of this, and since I knew it'd probably be the only time I'd sew knit pieces together this year, I was okay with it.

Most patterns tell you to use mattress stitch when you're sewing pieces together. Let's see if Google can find you a graphic illustration.

Hey now! That's not what I meant, Google!

So if you're not clear what's going on there, when you knit something it's got a front and a back side. The front side looks like this:

And the back looks like this:

When you use mattress stitch you sew the yarn under the back loops (shown above) so that they've hidden by the knitted loops on the front side (previous image). Kind of clever, I guess.

Anyhow, I was pleasantly surprised to find that my years of crafting experience have made me a much more capable mattress stitcher than I'd previously been. Check out this quality craftsmanship:

Pretty darn lovely, I have to admit.

But still painfully tedious, especially when you have 6 seams to create.

After a while, though, the sweater finally started to take shape.

And five episodes of Sons of Anarchy later (I know, but my real boyfriend kept telling me it was a good show and damned if, even though it's about bikers, it is. I credit the Hamlet allegory...) I did a little round of crochet edging and voila! It was done: a boyfriend sweater for a furry boy friend.

Stay tuned for what's sure to be the cutest follow up post ever: Peanut models his baseball jersey boyfriend sweater.

So Long, Old Friend

2011-04-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

Craftastrophe is about to shut down.

Back in January, the site's founders Samantha and Karen, mentioned the option of closing the site down and the rest of the writers (who've been on "staff" since last summer) gave a resounding please, no! But life interferes, as it tends to, and over the past few months they've concluded that it's time to put the baby to bed.

A lot of this is Regretsy's fault, of course. I came on board to Craftastrophe at the suggestion of my friend Stephanie, who saw their open call for new bloggers and forwarded it to me with an emphatic, "You should do this!" And while I'd seen the site (probably via Stephanie as well) I wasn't an avid reader or anything.

The same can be said of Regretsy, minus the part about me eventually blogging for them.

If you read a blog that trashes other people's crafts, it's likely to be Regretsy. And this is not because Regretsy is inherently better or funnier, but because the woman who started Regretsy was already famous when she created the blog. And if you didn't know, being famous gives you a leg up on publicity. It also makes it really easy to get books published, which in turns brings in more readers, and on and on.

Being more of a mom n' mom operation (and Canadian to boot), Craftastrophe couldn't really compete. In years past Craftastrophe was easily clearing several thousand hits per day, but over the recent months traffic has dwindled to the point where the expense of the site is exceeding its income, and Karen and Sam have made the executive decision to pull the plug.

My boyfriend said I should ask to take over the site myself, but honestly I have so many side projects going on at all times that the thought of another endeavor (at least right now) is more tiring than fun.

One of the things I've been trying to put together over the past 2 months is a book proposal, which is almost finished. It feels like bad luck to talk about it before it's done though so I don't want to say anything more, but the majority of my before-regular-job hours have been taken up by it, so much so that today I woke up thinking, "You know what, let's not work on the proposal today."

Nevertheless, I am bummed to see Craftastrophe go. I'd been the top trafficked writer since September (which meant a $100 bonus each month) and looked forward to my weekly search for awfulness. But everything comes to an end eventually, and now that I'm not posting for them anymore, maybe my own blog will experience a resurgence in update frequency.

I can hope, right?

Gloves for Mom

2011-03-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

The other night I was out to dinner with my mom and she said, "You know that blue yarn you used to make my gloves?" I thought back and remembered--it was a variegated wool that I picked up at the fancy yarn shop in town.

"Yeah," I said, "Why?"

"I lost one of my gloves so I was wondering if you could make me another."

"I don't have any more of that yarn," I said, "But I could just make you a new pair..."

And so I have a new project to motivate me to test-drive yet another pattern. I'm using Debbie Stoller's magenta wool blend (love that yarn line!) which is the same yarn I used to make Mom a cowl at Christmas. It's such a great color that my original plan to use the magenta and a purple yarn from the same line completely fell through, and I wound up using just the magenta for the project.

I've started the pair and the pattern works (yay!) so I can add it to the collection of finished gloves. Working on a bigger project based around my patterns, but shh--I'm not ready to talk about that yet ;-)

I also just finished a rapid crochet project to accomplish 2 goals: 1) get rid of some yarn! and 2) make a blanket for my boyfriend's freezing cold apartment. It took me about a week and a half to do because I was very determined not to be cold anymore. Haven't photographed the end result yet but I will--it's a striped number with some cream, black, grey, brown, red, and green shades to it. That's right, I managed to use up a bunch of my yarn stock with this thing.

Now I can finally go buy more yarn...

Substitution

2011-03-04T10:38:00.000-08:00

Well hello. Obviously it's been a while since I've posted. This is not because I've stopped crafting, of course, but because I've been spread pretty thing lately. Between the real job, the social life, the crafting, and the other hobbies, blogging has certainly taken a back seat--I mean, it's way more fun to do the stuff than to just sit and discuss the stuff, right?

And though I've been crafting, it's definitely been slow-going. I was working on a pair of leg warmers (pictures at a later date...) whose second piece was a headache. I'd started them because I've decided to try and knit (or crochet) up all the yarn in the house--no small feat--and I had these two almost-entire lovely rolls of soft grey acrylic yarn.

I'm not a fan of acrylic yarn. It's fine when you're beginning, or if you're making something like a beer coozy or a phone case, but for clothing items it's mostly harsh. Over the past few years, yarn producers have started coming out with some better blends of acrylics that maintain the low price of the standard bulk skeins but have a softer feel. The yarn I had was Red Heart Soft in Charcoal, which I recommend as a better option for those beginners working on beer coozies.

I started the leg warmers in a Chevron stitch and they came out absolutely adorable, but as I neared the end of the second warmer I realized, "Oh, crap, I'm going to run out of yarn." When the whole point of a project is to use up the yarn you already have, the last thing you want to do is create a situation where you need to buy more of that yarn.

But that's what I did. And without even a bobbin of extra charcoal yarn in the house, I set out to try and find a third (argh!) skein.

What the hell, Red Heart? Why did you discontinue this yarn?! Or at least, why does it appear that way? I went to the local stupid craft store (I call them stupid because they stock a lot of overpriced junk, and their yarn inventory always dip to near empty and stays that way for weeks before they re-stock anything) but I couldn't find the yarn even though that's where I bought it originally. I thought. I was pretty sure.

Pretty sure meant a trip to Walmart. I know, right? But they've recently started stocking yarn, and I go once a month to pick up a prescription and I thought, "Well, maybe that's where they have the yarn." But no, they did not.

I even tried the local artisinal yarn shop on a long-shot, but as expected they only had fine Merinos and NoRo yarn or fancier acrylic blends. No Red Heart anywhere on the shelves.

Over the weekend I toyed with the idea of dragging my boyfriend (who lives in the city) on a quick and painless (meaning one shop only, and only for that single skein of yarn) trip to another craft store, but quickly nixed the idea. He's sweet to say he'll go with me, but who wants to do that to a man? I decided finally that even though it would mean waiting a little while longer, and paying shipping, I'd try to find it online.

But it is gone! Gone, gone, gone. No charcoal soft yarn anywhere in sight.

Fellow crafters, I'm sure you can relate--nothing sucks like running out of a color and having to find a suitable substitute. It means dragging your partially-finished project around in your purse and holding it up to potential candidates to see if it will be obvious that it wasn't your first choice. I tried a Vanna White charcoal, but it had too sleek a look, and was just a shade too dark, and I knew that the last 2 inches of leg warmer would just scream "replacement yarn" if I went with it. Eventually I settled on an odd choice: a grey yarn that was exactly the same shade as the original, only with the occasional weird fleck of cream or tan. It's very weird--not your usual speckled yarn, which is why I chose it. The base yarn was right, and the flecks were so few and far between, and so poorly woven into the grey, that they were easy to pull off. I finished the leg warmer that night, after about 10 minutes of knitting, and sighed in relief.

And then I was on fire to finish all those crafts I'd left sitting in my craft space, untouched, for the past few months. One of these was the Bulltrue Medal I'd started embroidering way back when I was blogging on the regular last summer.

That's right--it's finally finished! And it came out pretty well. The fabric was too dark to use my charcoal transfer paper on the front so I drew the image on the back, which meant I wound up free handing the last few bits of the grey diamond and you can totally tell when you compare the left side (thick) to the right side (skinny). But I'm still happy with it, if only because it's finally finished.

I will be trying to post more frequently. I'm still writing for Craftastrophe which is a fun way to keep writing posts about crafts (though with crafts like these, I don't think I'll be inspiring anyone to pick up the knitting needles any time soon. At least, I hope.

Coming Along

2010-08-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Oh, little craft blog, how cruelly neglected you are!

It's not that I don't love you. It's just that when there are a million things on your plate, something has to go in order for you to scarf down the whole meal.

Obviously I haven't been doing much in the way of crafting lately. Even at our bimonthly craft nights chez Stephanie I mostly focus on eating brownies. However, there are two things I've been working on lately that I really wanted to share but just haven't had the time to until now.

One is the thing I alluded to in my last few posts, the special project that was (cue fancy reveal music now!) for Stephanie. Steph loves cameos and zombies, so when I saw the "Lolita" cameo (a female skeleton in profile) I felt like she needed to have it.

After browsing Etsy for a while I figured out that I could buy the supplies to make at least 3 full necklaces for less than it would cost me to buy a completed one, so that's what I did. I got 6 of the cameos, and 3 settings, some chain, and some jump rings and clasps, and after a few shipping hiccups I finally put together the awesome: one for her, one for me.

And four other cameos left over to do whatever I want with.

The other thing, the incredibly slow-going thing, that I've been working on is another Halo 3 inspired embroidery, the Bulltrue Medal. You get the Bulltrue Medal when you manage to kill someone in the middle of a sword lunge, which is a tricky thing to do. I feel like I should get some sort of medal for attempting this piece, which is far more complicated and annoying than the crossed swords I did a while back. Hopefully I will have a proportionately greater sense of accomplishment once they're finished.

Because the fabric I chose is too dark for the black carbon paper I used on the swords, I drew the image on the back of the piece and am embroidering it upside down, which is proving to be the least efficient way that I could go about working on this. Oh well. It's still coming out alright, though when I look at it up close I can see that my heart's not in the attention to detail quite the way it should be.

But it's coming along and looks pretty good so far, if you ask me.

Give me another month and it'll probably have some eyes, and maybe it'll be completed by Christmas. :-p

Crafts On Hold

2010-08-02T10:54:00.000-07:00

I've been anxiously waiting to finish a piece for a friend but have unexpectedly found myself sitting on hold for the past week and a half. I ordered all the parts off Etsy and 3 out of 4 arrived within a few days, but the final piece (which is a stupid yet integral part) has yet to show up. I'm also getting frustrated that the seller has so far not responded to my conversation asking where the heck my stuff is!

I'm thinking that I will have to just reorder this part from someone else and wait another week for it to show, but I'm bummed because (if you hadn't noticed...) my posts have kind of slowed (too many non-crafting projects going on :-p) and I was looking forward to putting up some fancy photos of my work. Oh well.

Will show off my accomplishments as soon as possible. Until then, keep an eye on www.craftastrophe.net (I've been the top trafficked poster for the past 2 months in a row, woo hoo!) and check back occasionally (I might just surprise you with something fancy and new).

The Fantastic Notions Case!

2010-07-20T11:44:00.000-07:00

I've have crafted a busy world for myself, thus my latest reason for being MIA (from this blog at least...) for the past couple weeks. It's not set to get any better, either--this week is chock full of activities, from visiting with my newly-returned-from-Brazil lady friend and her new daughter to helping Oleg move, I am booked solid.

But nevertheless, I wanted to finally post the photos of my new notions carrying case, which I made, and which is such an ultimate success that I'm super proud of it.

Like many of my projects, I laid it all out on the ironing board in the kitchen. This is just the planning phase, but it gives a good idea of where I was going with it. I wanted something to hold all my needles (3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 10 1/2) and crochet hooks (dwarfed by the number of knitting needles) and a few other things that are necessary to my yarn-work process--thimbles, embroidery needles, scissors, measuring tape, stitch holders and markers.

After sewing elastic holders to the gold piece of fabric, I finally sewed the lining into the outer shell, which was a long piece of blue vinyl that I've had sitting in my fabric stash for-ev-er.

It all came out exceptionally well, and travels perfectly, folding in three's to make this cute little hand-bag sized contraption.

When unrolled, it looks like this:

Ta da! Now I never have to worry about whether or not I have the right sized needles, or scissors, or hooks, and my knitting bag isn't anywhere near as disorganized.

Being this busy I don't expect to have much time for blogging for the rest of the month, but I will be working on a new craft (as soon as my Etsy-ordered supplies get here): a brief foray into jewelry making.

Julie/Julia

2010-07-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

This weekend was not only very busy but marked the end of the second (and final, thank goodness) compulsory clinic of the summer--aka the longest week ever.

The culmination of all my busy-ness was Sunday's 4th of July Parade, in which I walked with 20 of my competitive and precompetitive gymnasts, their parents, and two other coaches. I've been in charge of organizing Bay Island's entry into the parade for the past 5 years and thankfully it has gotten easier: this year instead of doing the traditional meet-at-the-gym-stupid-early-and-carpool-to-the-parade-and-then-back thing (that wasn't my idea in the first place), I had everyone meet on the parade route, and get picked up from the parade route at the end, and no one had to go to the gym at all. This meant a huge reduction in time and stress, and I was only parade-bound from 8 am to 1 pm. Piece of cake, right?

Post-parade, friends and I had a barbecue chez Adam and Stephanie where I enjoyed a delicious grass-fed cow burger, one beer, and some of Stephanie's flag-patterned granola ice cream fruit concoction before sort of falling into a doze beside Oleg on the couch.

Now, I'm officially on vacation. Huzzah!

So what do I do on vacation? Today, I ran errands. Later, I headed into Oakland to help Tamar with her campaign to make Mosswood Park the "Dolores Park of Oakland" by sitting next to her and some friends on blankets while everyone drank wine and listened to disco radio. When I got home I wrote a draft of a script for a movie we're planning to film over our trip to Tahoe this weekend, and by the time I was done it was almost 10. Bed time? Nope, time to knit.

I have this really fantastic yarn I've been wanting to knit with since I got it in January and I finally started working on a glove only to discover that the yarn is perhaps too fantastic for its own good. Knit up in a solid piece it's too much, which meant I had to figure out a way to use it wisely, and sparingly. I decided to do a Katey's Glove in white and use the fancy yarn as trim, which seems like it'll work out okay (I have the glove finished and the bottom piece of trim done, but not the top and thumb edges that I was just too tired to bang out before heading off to bed tonight. Not, however, too tired to blog...).

But this isn't what I really wanted to write about tonight. What I really wanted to write about was the stupid movie I watched, Julie/Julia. I watched it on Netflix Instant not in spite of, but because of the mediocre reviews I'd heard. For some reason that (coupled with the constant visual presence of the movie poster in the Netflix scroll bar) intrigued me. Plus, I kind of like watching what I consider throw away television while knitting because it means that if I miss much of the on screen action, I don't really care.

My friends (and the reviews) were right: it's a mediocre movie. In addition, Meryl Streep as Julia Child is nothing special (unless you have some sort of Julia Child impression fetish. Or Meryl Streep fetish). But for the most part Streep/Child is totally innocuous.

Amy Adams (who I actually find adorable) plays a character that I found completely insufferable and whose failure I was rooting for even as I ignored the majority of what was happening on the TV. Unconsciously, as the movie went along I found myself liking her less and less until finally the movie reached a pivotal moment where she, as Julie, discovers that Julia Child hates her blog.

And I said, "Ha!"

That was my favorite part of the movie.

But then while I continued to watch the conclusion, and the resulting hullabaloo that came with the sudden blogosphere fame that Julie Powell enjoyed after the New York Times published a piece on her (thanks for that, you bastion of journalism you...) I was struck with this one cycling thought: why can't I think of some stupid project to write a blog around? True, I have many blogs, most of which are silly and some of which involve projects, but it seems like the ones that go crazy big are the ones that involve the type of solid structure that the Julie/Julia Project had.

Stephanie recently posted a blurb about the 17 year old high school blogger who chronicled a month of living by the pages of Seventeen Magazine, which is the same kind of thing that Julie Powell did: blogger hands out arbitrary-but-clearly-defined assignment, then writes about it, achieves internet fame and glory. It made me feel like I'm missing something by blurring the lines of this blog to include the things I've been writing about recently rather than keeping it fiercely relegated to the crafting world.

But I'm not all about crafting. I mean, I like making things (and if it weren't 1:59 am I'd prove it by finally posting the photos of the new kick-ass notions, needles and hooks holder I made last week) but I also like not making things, and playing video games, and writing other, snarkier blogs than this one, or movie scripts, or watching movies, or reading books, or listening to and/or playing music. And I like driving. And eating. And eating while driving.

Anyhow, what I'm getting at is that I kept trying to figure out what thing would be my thing if I wanted to create some assignment for myself and I kept coming up empty. And it made me kind of angry, because there I was sitting and watching this dumb movie about this mostly annoying woman who in the middle of her 29th year (which is, shock, right where I am) stumbled upon the key to her ultimate success with a simple assignment that could've come out of the pages of Blogging for Dummies.

It bothers me that people (and I'm here including the inventor of The Snuggie, which will forever--hopefully--be the epitome of stupid inventions that make me want to smack my head in why-didn't-I-think-of-that?-ness) have dumb, completely obvious ideas that so thoroughly take off as to set them up for life.

For life.

Except it doesn't just bother me. It infuriates me, because not only doesn't it seem fair, it makes me feel like an imbecile for having failed to think like an imbecile. If we lived in a Snuggie-less world and Oleg came to me tomorrow and said, "Hey, check out my invention: it's a blanket with sleeves!" I would say, "That is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Haven't you ever heard of a robe?" (Which is not to suggest, by the way, that I don't have imbecilic moments or even tendencies. I know I have moments of idiocy--just not the right ones). And then either he wouldn't invent the Snuggie, or I'd mock him while he did only to be cut out of his bazillions when it finally went global.

And that so sucks. Because I'm rounding the bend to my 30th birthday--in fact, I officially rounded it two weeks ago--and I'm not even close to a good stupid idea.

Sauce of the week?

My best hair styles?

Puppies on ice?

(That could be good, actually. Oh, wait, it's already a thing. I mean, eew, it's already a thing. Also, a less creepy thing more along the lines of what I originally meant).

That's all I've got for now. Maybe I'll dream up something better tonight. Til then, here's this:

So Tired.

2010-06-30T22:51:00.000-07:00

This week is the second week of compulsory clinic, which is where I teach all the munchkins their beam and floor routines for the competitive season. It's long, and tiring, and Monday I was at the gym for 13 hours, and Tuesday I was at the gym for 8 hours, and today I was at the gym for 8 hours...and suffice to say, humans were not built for more than 5 hours of gymnastics at a time. It is just too much.

The worst part is that I have no time to actually exist beyond work. This morning (after sleeping a full 10 hours) I got up and finally found a little bit of time before I had to go to the gym. I considered knitting but got sidetracked while trying to assemble all my materials. The sunglasses case that I've been using as a notions storage space broke a few weeks ago, and I've outgrown my home-made needle purse (I want to carry more pairs than it can handle) so instead of knitting I found myself very calmly and quietly beginning a new project: pimped out knitting supply carrier.

I took out my tupperware bin of fabric and found this swath of blue vinyl I've been holding onto and decided that would do fine. I also chose a cream and gold speckled something-or-other to line it, and after ironing both I laid out the project on my ironing table. The new carrier will hold 7 pairs of needle, 5 crochet hooks, 2 stitch holder, stitch markers, measuring tape, scissors, thimble(s), pen and maybe a few other things if there is space.

It will be exciting to use, but it was even more...not exciting, but nice to start making. I'm sick of spending my only waking hours at work or too tired to do anything more challenging than be horizontal.

The good news? Family vacation in 7 days.

Counter Point

2010-06-28T13:34:00.000-07:00

Oleg read my last post and said that while he found it well written, he completely disagreed with me. After we talked for a while, he concluded that we were on the same page about the media as a whole, but that he didn't think I conveyed a few things. Here are those things.

1. While I don't make a point of sitting down in front of the nightly news every evening (two points for alliteration!) I'm nevertheless aware of what's going on in the world. I get information through various channels (mostly my thoughtful and more informed friends who talk to me about things--which means I manage to get the same news as everyone else, only minus the commentator blah blah blahs--but I also occasionally read internet news and Mother Jones (what, what!) and, of course, you can't miss the big events when you use Twitter as much as I now do).

2. I'm not anti-being-informed, nor am I trying to lay down a patina of justifications to promote aggressive ignorance. I think it's good to know what's going on around you, but I don't like the obsessing over it, or the compulsive, indiscriminate consumption of information. I also think it's interesting to take a step back and consider why as a society (and world) it's so much more acceptable to behave this way toward information that is deemed "important" vs. information that is deemed superficial. Like I said to Oleg, if I'm some shallow idiot who spends the majority of my time in a pedicure chair, can you really tell me that Karzai is more relevant to my life than Heidi?

3. I don't feel very strongly about any of this. This is probably the point that gets most clearly lost because I made a hefty argument in one direction (rather than bandying the points back and forth in a vague, inconclusive way). I listened to NPR (and btw, that wasn't the first time I've ever listened to NPR...I just don't have my radio perpetually tuned to it, like some people (cough cough, Oleg, cough)) for about a month, off and on, and that post was the result of my main impression, which is point 2: I'm not sure I buy into the concept of one type of obsessive media involvement being more valid than another. But I don't have any problem with NPR, and maybe (since it did work alright as a thing to do while knitting) I'll keep listening to it.

But just as likely, maybe not.

Picture is Unrelated

2010-06-24T16:30:00.000-07:00

Today is my day off, and I'm pretty psyched that the weather is kind of shitty. Nothing makes me feel worse than being a lazy shlub like sing song happy sunshine all over the place, and for the past month that's all Alameda's been offering.

It's been like living inside a cupcake with a Disney soundtrack. Okay, maybe not exactly like that (which when written out reads more like a re-imagining of the fourth circle of Hell) but definitely far too cheery to allow for some good old fashioned lazing.

Sunday being Father's Day I spent the afternoon with my parents. We had lunch and then went for a bike ride around town with Adam and Stephanie, reveling in the warm weather and bright blue sky. Last Thursday was equally beautiful and stirred this super productive bug in me. I rode around town on my bike running errands and then completely re-caulked my bathtub (stabbing myself in the thumb during the process).

But luckily, today it's shitty out. It's gray and windy and the one time I left the house (around 11, to go buy milk and yarn) it was cold even in my warmest article of clothing (a leftover shark sweatshirt that friends persuaded me to take after one of our clothing exchanges). By the time I got back I felt zero compunction about curling into my papasan chair and knitting while the day wasted away outside.

While I knitted, I listened to NPR. If you know me, you are probably surprised.

For the most part, I don't indulge in news (pop or world or other). I find it largely irrelevant to my personal experience, and fail to see the benefit in knowing about current affairs. But for the past few weeks I've been conducting an experiment in being aware. It's sort of in the same vein as my attempt to cut refined sugar out of my diet or eat fewer processed foods, which is to say it's largely arbitrary, I'm pretty uninvested in the outcome, and the decision to try it is primarily motivated by a shruggy "well why not?" sentiment.

Anyhow, I've been listening to NPR occasionally in the car while driving to and from San Francisco (and have to agree with Patton Oswalt--as radio, it's mostly unlistenable largely because of the break music. Tibetan scream singing, indeed...) but today was the first time it occurred to me to listen to it online, while knitting.

When I was a heavier knitting (and by that I mean in frequency of projects, not my actual size) I often mentioned how much I wished there were a cheap and easy way to get audio books so that I could listen to those while knitting (instead of listening to and occasionally glancing up at Law & Order episodes). Yes, music was always an option, but for some reason sitting and listening to music while knitting does not feel engaging enough. It's too relaxing and meditative, and I want my brain to feel like it's getting some sort of stimulation (knit one, purl two, cable 6 is not enough). I visited the limited selection of free audio books online, but The Island of Dr. Moreau read by a volunteer who sounded like Kenneth Parcell wasn't really doing it for me, so eventually I defaulted back to the TV.

Until today, that is, when it occurred to me that I could easily combine knitting with my political awareness experiment, so I went to NPR.com and opened the streaming morning edition. I listened to it through about 40 rounds of a glove before finally being interrupted by a bunch of work-related calls, and now that everything is hunky-dory over at the gym, my thoughts have returned to the question of "awareness" and the importance of that to my individual life. And no matter what the subject matter is--General McChrystal or the effect of the BP spill on Louisiana's local economy--I keep coming back to the same thing, which is that for me listening to NPR feels very much the same as listening to segments from E! News.

If you are a fan of NPR, you are probably offended by this, but bear with me because here's why: regardless of the subject matter, news channels are all offering basically the same thing, that is second or third hand summaries of events bolstered by paragraphs upon paragraphs of subjective conjecture.

I listened to one segment the other day about Tony Hayward's upcoming testimony before Congress, and whether or not people "felt sorry" for him. Crisis communication expert Joanna Biddolph spent ten minutes clarifying that her remarks about feeling sympathetic for Hayward were based in her perception of him as a fellow human being, but had nothing to do with his role in or responsibility for the spill. Listeners called in and offered their own predictable long-winded perspectives, other talking heads popped in with a point or two, and the whole thing left me wondering, "How is this any more relevant to my life than whether Brad regrets dumping Jen for Angelina?"

Today I heard ten minutes of speculation as to whether David Petraeus will have a more productive (if less amicable) relationship with President Karzai then Stanley McChrystal did. The soft consensus was that he would, though everyone agreed we would have to wait and see. Maybe I'm missing something, but it strikes me as ultimately pointless to listen to a bunch of news correspondents basically showing their guesswork. Everything said amounted to a 50/50 prediction that would be easy to look back on in the months to come and clarify with a, "Well, this is why things didn't turn out the way I predicted," or "This is exactly what we said would happen (pats on the back all around)."

I fail to see the point in this kind of information, especially when it's filtering down through so many officials, politickers, and pundits that it's impossible to feel confident in its validity. And this is what really kind of annoys me about the whole NPR thing: considering how low news media really is on the totem pole of information prioritizing (does anyone actually believe that anybody who knows anything about anything is still giving out honest, un-spun, un-deniable information anymore?) how can people listen to these reports without continually asking whether or not what they're hearing is even true? All I think about when I listen to NPR is how little I trust what they're saying because for the most part the people they get their information from are the types who are most concerned with covering their asses, not letting the rest of the country in on the secret.

It becomes clear how starved news media is for genuine information when they actually come upon an unassailable fact. At one point while driving last week NPR broadcast a Wiki-leaked recording of a helicopter attack on what ultimately turned out to be a group including a Reuters reporter and his photographer, and then a father and his children. It was almost entirely incomprehensible--the recording was noisy and the recorded were speaking in military jargon that made zero sense to a civilian like me, but boy did NPR have a field day discussing its finer points; the commentators were so effing excited to have this little sliver of genuine information that they picked it over until there was nothing left to say about it. It reminded me of when Paris Hilton's sidekick got hacked and the tabloids got a chance to print her text messages which they then spent weeks and weeks dissecting only to ultimately come up just a tiny bit less empty than they had been before the hack. Okay, yes, fine--thanks to this recording we have confirmed that war is a bad thing, and innocent people are killed during it. But did we really not know this already? How is it that we're as surprised to find this out as we are to learn that Paris is a shallow bitch? And why are we wasting so much time discussing it?

My impression so far is that NPR is the equivalent of a pop-culture stroke job for intellectuals. People who listen to NPR generally like to make an outward show of avoiding tabloid news because they think the subject matter is frivolous, but when you boil it down the subject matter doesn't really matter. Both types of infotainment contain the same basic elements--a one or two line summary of what actually happened followed by hours (or even days) of mostly frivolous dissection which leads nowhere--and this kind of intense scrutiny of second-hand experiences seems like a total waste of time to me. It's just another way to distract yourself from your own reality and get bogged down in the details of something other than.

I care just as much about listening to someone try to predict what Karzai's relationship with Petraeus might look like in three months as I do about suffering through Ryan Seacrest speculating on whether Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt are trying to have a baby. Both stories ultimately leave me with the question, "How is this relevant to my life right now?"

And it isn't--it's just a bunch of talk that doesn't go anywhere. I might as well be listening to Seacrest for all the difference it's going to make to my life. Yes, it is good to know about things that are happening--that's fine, and even potentially useful--but to suffer through the yammering on and on, and to behave like the discourse itself has more worth than any other brand of yammering, is stupid.

Halo Swords

2010-06-15T11:28:00.000-07:00

Steph asked why I haven't posted any photos of the finished swords yet, and the simple answer is I'm busy. This week is compulsory clinic at the gym and the first week of summer camp, both of which I have a hand in. Yesterday I was up at 7:30 am to be in by 8 am and then stay until 8 pm. Today my schedule is less demanding--in at 12, out some time after 6...--but I'm still tired and looking at a full week of similar days.

Add to that I've been on hold with Capital One for the past 30 minutes trying to close an account I don't remember opening and have no information for (something tells me this is going to be a whole bureaucratic clusterfuck, and their hold music is pure awful) and things today feel pretty annoying.

Though this really has nothing to do with my failure to post photos. So here they are!

Oh my God, the hold music for Capital One just got worse...

Here's a detail shot, so you can see my increasingly precise embroidery skillz...

And the finished project, framed and ready to hang (I don't know where).

I'm going to blame my busy schedule for the lack of any progress on my current project, the Bulltrue medal, that I haven't worked on since last week's Craft Night.

Would write more but it's getting late so I should probably dress myself, review the floor routine one more time, and hope this hold music comes to an end before I have to go to work.

Embroidery is the New Knitting

2010-06-09T13:13:00.000-07:00

I finished my sword. Swords, actually. I used the armor emblem as a model, which features two crossed swords (which, now that I'm looking at the emblem, are crossed much lower than they are in my piece--oh well)

and embroidered them in white on blue fabric. Because the fabric was dark and patterned with even darker peacocks and vines, I wound up having to draw the image (via carbon paper) on the reverse side and embroider it backwards. I kind of liked that, though, because it left me with an incredibly neat and clean reverse side (and the front of the piece looks no less fantastic). It took me about 4 hours to do the whole thing, which is not the best time-to-product ratio, but that's the nature of this particular craft--if you rush it, things look sloppy.

This morning I got started on my next project, which is going to be the Bulltrue medal

(which you get for killing someone who's in the middle of a sword lunge). Seems like a good progression to go in. I don't know why exactly I'm so interested in Halo 3 themed embroidery--probably because playing Halo is pretty much the exact opposite of embroidery, and I'm all about juxtaposition.

I have some other medals printed, some weapons I want to do (shotgun, sniper rifle) and plan on eventually making Master Chief himself. And after that? Zombies (because I play Left 4 Dead, too).

3rd Annual Indie Mart

2010-06-07T11:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Indie Mart (hello to any visitors who've come to the Brisk Blog by way of a business card you picked up yesterday! And if you expected robots, you're probably looking for my buddy, Adam).

The night before the sale Adam, Steph, Oleg and I spent some time figuring out our display, and semi-early Sunday morning we loaded into our respective cars and headed out to Thee Parkside to spent some time sitting at tables on Wisconsin St. and watching hipsters stroll by.

The weather happened to be beautiful, which meant a lot hotter than I'd expected for San Francisco. In a black t-shirt and jeans, I was over-dressed. By noon, I'd said, "It's so hot I feel like I'm going to die," at least a dozen times, cut off the sleeves of my shirt, rolled up my jeans as far as they'd go and taken off my shoes. It wasn't enough, so finally Stephanie and I made a cursory trip around the mart to see if I could find a thin, cheap dress to buy. Most things were thick and heavy, or vintage and overpriced, and I was beginning to lose hope when we unexpectedly stumbled on a seller who not only sold everything she had for $10, but happened to stock a thin pink dress that was exactly what I needed. I changed clothes and we resumed sitting in the sun for the next few hours (we all have sunburns to prove it).

Our table, full of dinosaurs and robots and finger puppets, proved incredibly popular with the children of Indie Mart. This dude got two puppets and seemed pretty stoked on them.

People also really liked Adam's prints of poster art (minus the text) and tiny paintings of swimming robots and dinosaurs.

My favorite thing was hearing the noises people made when they put puppets on, because everyone's was different from the noise I usually make when wearing them, and seeing the puppet shows that happened later on in the day when everyone was a little tipsy.

Our display for the puppets was pretty cool, thanks to some mannequin hands that Adam had been purposelessly storing in his house for the past few years. We spray painted them various colors and stuck them in an egg crate and voila, wound up with a sweet display.

After a few hours of sitting, we got kind of bored and Adam said he wished he had a giant grumple puppet to play with, so I made one. Turns out I'm awful at large-form embroidery with yarn so the eyes came out kind of janky, and after three tries at making a mouth I gave up and did a make-shift temporary tape smile for the puppet.

All in all, it was a fun day. The economy is still crap so it seemed like most of the vendors sold less than they expected, us included, but it was no biggie.

Sitting in the sun that long really took it out of me, though, and last night I slept 11 hours to compensate. How crazy that being stationary in heat can get so exhausting.

This week I'll probably be less about crafting and more about other activities, but I think when the urge does strike again I'll tackle another embroidery project--maybe this time, I'll make a sword.

Nothin' But a G-Thang

2010-06-02T10:41:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to have finally given Adam and Stephanie their house-warming gifts because it means that I can post the embroidery piece I made for Stephanie: a gravity hammer.

For anyone who doesn't know (and I'm guessing most of the readers of this blog don't) a gravity hammer is a weapon from the hugely popular and wildly successful Xbox game, Halo 3. Two years ago Stephanie bought Adam an Xbox for Christmas under the assumption that this was a selfless gesture as she'd have zero interest in playing video games herself. Boy was she wrong! After they started playing Left 4 Dead, Stephanie realized that she was a total gaming nerd, and henceforth we have been gaming buddies and Halo 3 team mates.

While Steph finds the standard run-around-and-shoot-folks Halo games a little tough, she excels at a special game (that goes up for one weekend every month) called Grifball. It's kind of like football, only there's 4 players to a team and instead of tackling one another, you smash your opponents with gravity hammers.

Stephanie is the best Grifball player I know, so it seemed only natural to give her something that would forever memorialize her skillz.

I also like using the foofy, lady-centric medium of embroidery to make something so traditionally out of the female realm. I will probably keep it up, so look forward to an embroidered Master Chief in the future.

In other crafts, the grumple army is continuing to grow. I managed to make a handful over the weekend, though not as many as I'd planned on, and a few last night and the night before. Indie Mart is Sunday and I want to have as many finished puppets as possible by that date. I'm at around 45 right now, and I think I can plan on bringing at least 60 with me.

It's getting more difficult to decide what colors to use, but any time I have that thought it's immediately followed by, "Whatever--it's not like it matters if you have too many pink ones," and then I just grab some more yarn and keep knitting.

Last but not least, my Craftastrophe post this week also addressed the intersection of the gaming world and the craft world, which (when you get right down to it) are not that far apart. Give it a look and see what you think.

Indie Mart

2010-05-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

The Grumple army is slow growing, but I'm hopeful that I'll be able to add a good number of members over Memorial Day weekend. The gym is actually closed for Saturday and Monday, so I have an unprecedented three days off in a row! It's a break I definitely need and I'm psyched to spend it relaxing and reading and crafting.

This morning I spent about an hour winding bobbins of yarn so that my craft bag is full of new colors for Grumpling, and then I made one little sock monkey inspired Grumple (pictures next week) who turned out pretty adorable. I anticipate making more because I'm guessing he will be pretty popular.

All of this finger puppet making madness has been inspired by Adam's invite to sit with him at the upcoming Indie Mart and sell knitted things. I've never heard of or been to Indie Mart before, but I expect it's exactly what it sounds like, and that it'll be a nice way to pass a Sunday, and maybe make a few bucks.

In any case, I like my bag o' yarn and am ready to start whittling it down.

Side note: with all those balls rolling around together, strings tend to come undone. I decided this morning to start taping the loose ends down and half-way through that changed my mind and started using rubberbands. It works awesomely well and is so simple I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner. If, like me, you struggle with craft bag messiness due to unravelling balls of yarn, I strongly suggest buying yourself a little bag of bands and straightening that mess up. So much easier!

Grumples!

2010-05-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

We are going to eat your face.

Multiplication

2010-05-11T11:04:00.000-07:00

We're past the two-hand mark.

I have to come up with a name for these creatures. Any suggestions?

The Army Grows

2010-05-06T11:32:00.000-07:00

So I made good on my plans. Tuesday night I came home after work and finally, after weeks of inactivity, got crafty.

It took me a while to get going, mostly because I felt a sort of knitter's-block when it came to the kind of puppets I wanted to make. Originally (with the first batch) I just free-knit and decorated at will, and those guys turned out pretty awesome. At last week's craft night I attempted to recreate the magic but wound up with sort of weird results.

I sat for a while, contemplating the best direction for my puppet knitting, and then made a quick decision not to fix what isn't broken. One of my favorite puppets (and the first one I ever knit) was this guy:

So I grabbed a ball of yarn and made him a brother. And then a mother. And another, and another.

Seven puppets does not an army make, but I figure that if I try to make at least one every day from now until June, I'll be able to join Adam at his whatever-festival with a sizable puppet army.

The only drawback is that they still take me between 45 - 60 minutes to make from start to finish, and that seems like an incredible time investment for something so tiny. If I'm going to sell them for a reasonable price, I will have to decrease that by at least half.

That is, if I can bring myself to sell them.

I Like To Read

2010-05-04T11:32:00.000-07:00

It's Tuesday, so if I don't want to slip into blogging obscurity that means it's time to author a post. Unfortunately I've been lazy about bringing my craft bag in from the car so I still don't have photos of the finger puppets. Instead of heading out to get them I've decided to write this post bare (well, not naked...just without photos) in the hopes that it will motivate me to write a second post on Thursday featuring the puppets. I'm also planning on spending some time tonight making new ones, so it's possible I'll be able to get more photos and then actually have something exciting to show off :-)

I wrote out a little calendar for myself the other day so I could get a visual idea of how my time is breaking down and it made me feel so stupid. Based on my calculations, I have more than enough time to fit in all the stuff I'm saying I don't have time to fit in, so there's really no excuse for not getting to things. Hopefully I will continue to be motivated to fill up my time with worthwhile pursuits.

One thing I did that I haven't done in a long, long time was go out and buy some books. Mostly I've been relying on the library for my reading needs, but I happened to have a gift certificate to a book store in town and this weekend I decided to finally make use of it. I discovered writer Lorrie Moore and bought a book of her short stories, as well as Bright Lights, Big City (which I've wanted to read for a while but is never at the library). I also got Push because I picked it up in the store and found it compelling enough to read (and since it's been movied I doubt it'll be checked in for a while) and I Am Legend, which was also moderately compelling when I flipped through it (though, vampires? Really?). I haven't seen either movie version of the books I got so I have no preconceived notions going into reading them. Lastly I got Gideon, which I wasn't too attracted to just by reading the synopsis or flipping through the pages, but it won a Pulitzer and I'm curious to see whether I think that's any reflection of its readability.

I've been reading Bright Lights, Big City for the past 3 days. I really like it, and I'm sad that it's so short, and that I'm devouring it so quickly. And I doubt anything else that McInerney wrote or writes will ever compare to it--it's got that first-book thing going for it--so it's not even like I feel like I've discovered a new author to follow. I know this is most likely a singular experience, which is kind of a bummer.

It's been a long time since I read a book that I really liked, and that I felt both sad and excited about finishing. I've read lots of books that were average and then a few that were a little above or below, but nothing since Snow Crash has really pulled me in. I miss when reading was like that.

So here's a list of books that completely sucked me in. If you like this blog, you might like them, too.

Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Captain Correlli's Mandolin and The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts by Louis Des Bernieres
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
1984 by George Orwell
The Gunslinger by Stephen King
Less Than Zero and The Rules of Attraction by Bret Easton Ellis
Fight Club and Diary by Chuck Palahniuk
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Sofa Issue

2010-04-20T14:34:00.000-07:00

I guess I only blog on Tuesdays now.

This past month has been odd, which is why the lack of crafting and blogging about crafting. As usual, everything has decided to happen at once. My friends and I all seem to be going through a period of transition, though it's hard to figure out exactly from what to what, and suddenly stuff that was figured out and taken care of is up in the air.

Times like this are weird because they so clearly illustrate how impermanent everything in your life really is and they make you go all introspective and emo. As cliché as Palahniuk's Fight Club has become, there's always been that line about the sofa that's stuck with me long past the expiration of the book's cultural relevance:

"You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled."

(Remember when Brad Pitt was hot?)

That's how I've been feeling lately--like I thought I had this sofa issue handled, and now all of a sudden it's a big question mark again.

On the one hand, it's a little stressful. On the other much-more-Zen hand, it's good to be reminded that regardless of how comfortable you might be at the moment, the sofa issue is never really handled. It's easy to forget that there's never a definitive answer or solution for anything because life is nothing but impermanent and ever-changing, and while you might have figured out your job or your housing or your hobbies for now, eventually those things will all change. They have to, and the only thing you can do is try to be prepared.

Sigh.

In any case, my lack of blogging and motivation to blog or make things worth blogging about is just like everything else: temporary. Adam mentioned to me that he's doing a festival soon and will have extra booth space, and he suggested that Brisk and I come along for the day. I said maybe I'd make a bunch of finger puppets, and then Adam remembered that he has a box of mannequin hands (who knows why...) that would make for a pretty awesome display. It'd be worth it even if no one bought any, so I think my puppet army might actually come to fruition now that I have a goal and a timetable to put it on.

The cowl I was working on is still unfinished, and I'm really not sure what I'm going to think about it when it's done. It could wind up being another project that gets all the way to the bind off before I finally decide it's stupid and frog it, or just as easily could wind up awesome.

I guess the only way to know for sure is to pick up my needles and get the thing done. Like most things.

Aaaaaand...We're Back

2010-04-13T11:14:00.000-07:00

I feel like such a schmo for how little I've been crafting (and blogging about it) lately. I promise I really have been busy with other things, though.

Why Is This A Thing? takes up a lot of my free-to-mess-with-the-internets time, and at least once a week I have to muster enough creative energy to compose a Craftastrophe post (today's post was short but sweet...) and when other things come up, my crafting life seems to take a back seat.

Last weekend I was planning on driving up to Portland to visit an old friend. Oleg and I got 4 hours up I-5 to Redding, stopped for lunch, then spent an hour and a half waiting on the side of the road in a podunk non-town while authorities cleared the highway of a 20 car pile up that we'd avoided by about 20 minutes. We discussed our options for a while and as much as I wanted to see my friend, I made the call that I'd rather not die driving through snowy Californian mountains in the dark and we headed home.

I spent the next week house-sitting at my parents' place, hanging out with the chugs, Minnie and Louie.

House-sitting isn't awful, but I much prefer being at my own place so a week of living at my parents kind of sapped any creative urges I might've had. I brought some knitting with me but didn't work on any of it the entire time--just watched a bunch of cable television in awe (I don't have live tv at my apartment...just streaming Netflix and Hulu). What a bunch of crap there is out there. And no, buddies, I shouldn't watch America's Best Dance Crew--it's cheerleading, only less interesting.

I did manage to finish the hat for Kaili in time to give it to her for her birthday, however (and thanks to the Portland debacle we actually stopped by and saw her for a minute, cracked out on sugar and spazzing over some deflating balloons). I'll still try to get a picture of her wearing it eventually.

The only other thing I'm working on right now is my first cowl (that I decided to make just in time for summer). I'm using this grey yarn I really like: Lion Brand Wool-Ease in worsted weight Oxford Grey.

I've been shying away from acrylic yarns over the past few months but this is a really nice blend of acrylic and lamb's wool--very soft and easy to work with. I've found that when it comes to natural fibers it's just as easy to find scratchy, tough-to-knit yarns as it is with acrylics. This blend gives you no hints of artificality or natural roughness--it's just really, really soft.

I also really want to pick up some of the new bamboo yarn from Debbie Stoller's Stitch Nation line, Bamboo Ewe.

It's a 55/45 blend of bamboo and wool in worsted weight that comes in lots of vibrant colors, and like the Lions Brand yarn it has an amazing soft but firm texture that I'd love to knit with.

Oleg and I had a conversation about bamboo yarn one day when he said, "You should figure out how to make yarn out of bamboo because it has a bunch of great antimicrobial properties that would make it ideal for hats and scarves." To his surprise, I told him that bamboo yarn was already a thing, and a few days later I picked some up so I could make him a hat and scarf.

I enjoyed working with bamboo yarn so much that I went on an Ebay shopping spree. Unfortunately I discovered that you can't trust listings when they say "worsted weight" because your yarn might just show up and be fingerling, and unless I want a lot of bamboo socks I'm SOL.

Bamboo blends can be pricey when you're not getting them online, but Stoller's yarn is completely affordable at about $4 a skein even in the store (the Lions Brand is the same, price wise) which is part of the reason I'm so excited about it (I also like that she's increasing awareness about bamboo blends...hopefully other yarn companies will follow suit).

Unfortunately I can't afford to buy things I need, let alone things I really don't need like more yarn (I have a cabinet full. And a shelf) so my Bamboo Ewe experiments will have to wait.

For now, I'm happy working the Wool-Ease cowl. I'm not using a pattern; I browsed Ravelry for a while to find a good one, but it's basically just a giant leg warmer and I figured I could handle that on my own. What I'm not liking is how often my stitches are falling off the needles. Time to get some circular 11s...

Crafting For The Adorable

2010-03-31T12:56:00.000-07:00

Seems like it's taken a while, but I've finally picked up the knitting needles again, this time to make a birthday present for a little buddy of mine, my boss's daughter Kaili who's turning 2 this weekend.

Kaili's just about the cutest kid I've ever seen, and a few days ago my boss mentioned that she wanted to commission a hat for her because she couldn't find anything nice and simple in the shops (I guess they're all shaped like pumpkins, or have bear ears attached). Since I'm heading to Portland this weekend and will be missing her birthday party, I decided to just go ahead and make her a hat as a gift (material goods are a perfectly acceptable substitution for actual love and affection, right?).

I wanted a yarn that would flatter her, and since she's a little blond ball of awesome with blue eyes I decided to go with the same steely grey yarn I used to make the special order elbow length Rococo gloves a few months back.

Yeah, those ones.

I figured that the blue would make her eyes pop (in an un-scary way) and that the muted color would go well with most outfits. Though, now that I think about it, she does wear quite a bit of pink...

Anyhow, I've got the first part of the hat band finished and am working on the body. There's a craft night at Stephanie and Adam's this evening so hopefully I'll be able to finish the project before I leave for Oregon. I'll have to get photos of Kaili modeling the finished product--not because I want to showcase my own abilities, but because she's just so flippin' adorable.

The hat pattern I'm using is a free one from Ravelry--and yeah, hats are simple enough that I shouldn't even need a pattern (and truthfully I'm not following it verbatim...) but sometimes you just need a quick reminder on all those decreases for the crown.

Team Awesome Clothing Exchange: Crafty Shopping

2010-03-29T10:15:00.000-07:00

This weekend Nnekay and Heather hosted one of everybody's favorite events, the Team Awesome Clothing Exchange. I don't know who first suggested it, but for the past two years the ladies of T.A. have gathered every few months or so to give their closets a good purge, and to do get some free new-to-you duds--a total win-win!

Most of the time when I go through my things with the intention of clearing out some space I'll wind up hemming and hawing over certain items, but when you know your things will end up in the hands of a good buddy it really gives you that extra bit of motivation to get rid of it. As Stephanie summarized, "I love when I feel unsure about something until I see one of you put it on and it looks way better than it did on me, and then I think, 'Yeah, I should give that up."

It's also awesome that we're all very different shapes and sizes, from six-foot tall Mary to five-foot-two Tamar, and no matter what winds up in the pile it can theoretically find a home with one of us. I didn't even need a mirror while trying things on yesterday, I just stood in front of Nnekay and asked her if the thing I was wearing looked good (and if it didn't, I threw it to someone who'd wear it better).

The clothing exchange is like a thrift store shopping experience minus all of the annoyances of travel time, fitting rooms, budgeting, and lines...plus you get to drink wine!

You also get to try on fantastic outfits, or laugh while your friends try them on! See how Nnekay and Heather found matching shirts? How about those sweet red cords? And don't overlook Tamar in the pink "buttcheck" long-johns and silver sequined party dress. Awesome.

Clothing exchanging can get pretty tiring, though. After a good two hours of trying things on and flinging them from friend to friend, you can get pretty wiped. Once everyone's filled their take-home bags with the clothes they want, the hosts collect the rest and drop it at the Goodwill. That's free shopping, wine, and charity.

This was my favorite ensemble of the evening (next to the no-pants look I cultivated for the majority of the time...): lu'au hat, disco tank, leggings as pants (noooo!) and Mary's size 9 party boots ala 1998.

Best. Look. Ever.

Etsy Wetsy

2010-03-23T14:58:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a leisurely bike ride around Alameda during which I spent a while thinking about blogging, and Etsy, and the great puzzle that is web traffic.

Thus far, the Brisk Blog post that's gotten the most traffic was The Bain of My Etsystence, where I discussed my frustration with the Etsy Treasury (apparently I'm not alone in my experience) so I thought today that I'd head back to that topic and talk about my overall impressions of Etsy, and what it's meant to the Brisk shop.

I started knitting fingerless gloves last summer with the intention of both creating a catalog of patterns (that I would eventually sell in addition to the gloves) and accumulating a large stock of ready-made pieces that I could list in an Etsy shop. I spent about five hours every day knitting, before work and sometimes after, and finished around 40 pairs of gloves by mid-October. I felt like that was a good number of items to have available, and patterns to have completed, so I recruited my models and we had a long photo session at one of Stephanie's craft nights, and then I was ready to start listing.

I'd done some research into Etsy before starting to list with them so I did as they advised and posted one item at a time every few hours (this supposedly helps generate traffic to your shop by putting you in greater rotation in the just-listed areas). I didn't do things that I would've had I known better, namely make all image titles descriptive (glovesfingerlessbluehearts, for example) instead of just leaving them as the default numeric label that my camera gives them, but I did start this blog, and pay attention to tags, and make sure to use important keywords in the first 140 characters of text (which is what will show up when a search engine is displaying Google-ish results).

However, that's not enough to generate traffic to your Etsy shop. Etsy itself is pretty clear on this--you really have to work the system to make people wind up in your store. You have to get Treasury listings happening (especially if you ever want to wind up on Etsy's front page through more than just a wish and a prayer), you should post in the forums every few hours, you should try to join an Etsy Team (which is essentially a group of shops that cross promote), you need a Twitter, a Facebook, and YouTube and Flickr accounts don't hurt either.

I've played with all of that, and I've played with search engine optimization (thanks, Oleg) and monitored everything via Google Analytics (thanks, Stephanie) and after about 6 months I have to ask the question: if I'm doing all of this promotion for my shop, why do I need Etsy?

I don't feel like I get any traffic to the Etsy shop simply as a result of it simply being part of Etsy. Most of my traffic comes through word of mouth from my friends, through Twitter, and through this blog. In fact, if I look at Analytics today, this is what I see:

The two blogs that I help maintain, this one and WhyIsThisAThing, have had roughly 500 visits a piece this month. My Etsy shop (which I have not been promoting lately, partly because of how I've been feeling about Etsy overall and partly because I've been focusing much more internet effort on Brisk and WITAT) has gotten 1/5 as much, a mere 149 visits--18 from Google (one person searched for "Christopher Ross Belt"--WTF?) which I'm sure Etsy has a certain role in just by being the thing that is Etsy, and 45 that came directly to the site (typed the words into the address bar) and the rest via Twitter and blogs and Flickr, etc.

And I'm not saying that I expected any different, but I'm wondering if it's worth my while to bother continuing with the Etsy shop at all. My listings are starting to expire, and I haven't bothered renewing any of them. 20 cents, btw, seems a completely fair price to me for a four month long listing--that is definitely an Etsy win. So is the small percentage they take of each sale, I think about 3%--totally fair. But is it useful to be aligned with Etsy?

I'm starting to think it's not. At least, not that much.

For all the traffic I bring to my blog(s) I might as well just depend on myself to get people shopping at Brisk, and not worry about doing the same amount of SEO (that's Search Engine Optimization, something you need to Google asap if you 1) are selling online and 2) don't know what it means) for a completely different site. It's true that no traffic is bad traffic, and having an Etsy shop doesn't hurt Brisk, but all things considered if someone asked me for advice about starting their own Etsy shop, I'd probably tell them that if they're really interested in generating online sales, they need to be prepared to take initiative on their own and not assume that Etsy is going to do anything for them at all.

You can create a shop with Paypal (Adam has one) and then focus all your energy on a blog. You can list a few things with Etsy, which I think is what I'll be doing from now on, and use it as sort of a tertiary means of generating traffic to another web address, but unless you really, really want to bust your ass working the system that's specific to Etsy and get immersed completely in the Etsy way of life, then I don't know if you're going to get what you want from the site.

I've sold almost all of my gloves at this point. Most of the sales were around the holidays (prime glove time) and the majority were to people I knew who'd seen the gloves and wanted to get them for themselves or friends. I sold three pairs through Etsy (though I think one was to a friend of a friend) and got another order from a repeat customer who wanted an extra long pair of elbow length gloves (and that lead to a Twitter user ordering her own custom elbow length pair, which I handled through Paypal and not Etsy). I also sold one pattern to a very nice lady who said it worked just fine, which I was very happy to hear.

So for any of you who are reading my blog because you're in a similar boat, starting an online shop or thinking of starting an online shop, that's been my experience. It hasn't been bad, and I haven't been depressed by it (one of the things Oleg kept telling me was that as long as I'm having fun, it's all good) but I'm not trying to make a living from this. This is a side-project I work on when I'm not at my regular job. If you're in the same place, and especially if you like blogging and Twitter etc., then I'd say do what's most fun, which is probably not playing the Etsy game; no one has fun stalking the Treasury page, believe me.

If you're really serious about becoming an Etsy behemoth though, be ready to put in those long hours--I mean, no one else is going to do it for you.

Spring Forward

2010-03-22T10:51:00.000-07:00

Last week was incredibly lazy. Most days I woke up early enough to get up and be at least mildly productive before going into the gym, but made the executive decision to stay in bed and enjoy semi-consciousness instead. But this kind of thing can only go on for so long before you find something to take your mind off it, and now it's 9:35 and I'm up at the computer starting to get back in the swing of things, which means it's time to post a blog (finally).

This weekend the nice weather continued and I was struck by the desire to revel in the open air, which is why Oleg and I wound up taking a tour of random Oakland locations that are pretty.

If you're not an Oakland native (Oleg's from San Francisco) then you probably have no idea but there's a ton of naturey stuff in this city that's perfect for enjoying the outdoors.

We started by walking around the Morcom Rose Garden, which was completely empty of flowers but still nice and airy and good for a post breakfast walk.

It looked like this, minus the roses.

The garden is one of my favorite places in Oakland because it's right in the middle of the city (off Grand Avenue, home of Lyn & Lu's cafe and the best breakfast in the Bay Area) but it's a serene, natural place that feels completely un-urban, and un-city-like. You might as well be in rural Connecticut for all your know, but guess what? You're in Oakland!

It's a real life representation of the complexity that I love about this city--just when you think Oakland is one thing, it shows you another side and you're not so sure.

From there we drove up to Piedmont and decided to take a walk around Mountain View Cemetary.

No, we're not goth.

The cemetery is very pretty and incredibly not morbid (as cemeteries go) so people make frequent use of it as a place to walk their dogs or run or, like us, stroll. But if you're not from Oakland, you'd probably never notice it, let alone think it was a good idea to take a walk through it.

Oleg was skeptical at first but eventually came around to agree that it was a nice place (though it would be nicer without all the dead people). My response was that the dead people weren't doing anything to anybody, but this might be a result of my own lack of hang ups about grave sites. They bother me about as much as house plants.

Anyhow, since it's spring all the weeds are blooming and there's tiny yellow flowers all over, making it even cheerier than usual (for a cemetery).

From there we started back to the car but made what we thought would be a quick detour to the Chapel of the Chimes.

No, I did not set out to take Oleg on a religious tour of Oakland.

A few months ago our friend Kevin took some photos of Adam and Stephanie, and one of the locations they visited was Chapel of the Chimes.

Don't they look sharp?

After the shoot all I heard about for a few days was how awesome and beautiful the place is, and since those kinds of statements make me instantly curious to see for myself, I said we should check it out. Also happy to try his hand at disproving claims of awesomeness, Oleg agreed.

We're happy to report that Chapel of the Chimes is in fact awesome and beautiful, and that our friends are not liars with no taste.

It's a mausoleum, which I wasn't really expecting (I thought the "chapel" or the "chimes" would be the more important thing) with complex architecture featuring lots of open space, gardens, and fountains.

Oh, also, shelves and shelves of entombed ashes.

Oleg was perplexed as to why so many of the ashes were in book-shaped containers, and I agreed that it was a little weird, especially considering how shelf-like their final resting places are. I suppose there's some sort of allegory to the book-of-your-life going on with that decision, but it's still kind of weird.

We spent a fair amount of time walking through the place, and did eventually manage to find the actual chapel, which is probably the least impressive looking part of Chapel of the Chimes. We also passed a post-office-box-looking spot that was the home of Upton "Buddy" Sinclair, who is not the Sinclair responsible for The Jungle (buried in Washington, D.C.) but someone whose parents must have been fans.

From Piedmont we drove up Broadway Terrace into the Oakland hills and down past Lake Temescal (where we didn't stop, but this is what you missed out on, Oleg)

and then wound up turning into the Mormon Temple.

If you're a kid in Oakland, chances are you've watched fireworks from the viewing platform at the Oakland Temple at least once. It has nothing to do with being Mormon, or even religious; it has to do with this incredible effing view:

The Mormons were smart to pop their flagship Oakland location in a spot offering such a pristine view of the entire Bay because it gets so many of us non-believers up there, and once you're there, you might as well go Mormon, right?

Or not.

We walked around the temple for a while then drove on up Skyline Boulevard past the Chabot Space Center and down Redwood Road to Redwood Park.

When I was little my family was pretty poor, which meant that all the activities we did together had to be free, or relatively free. We wound up doing a lot of hiking, which is how I wound up getting to know so many of the Skyline area trails. In the 80's they were less maintained but absolutely gorgeous as a result, and if you were a kid it was very easy to imagine you'd been plunked down in some sort of medieval fairytale.

I spent years running around in this environment with friends, making up stories and games, and it was a truly magical part of my childhood.

Oleg and I weren't really in our hiking gear though so we stayed out in the picnic area at the front of the park and spent most of our time relaxing on a picnic table and watching a near by family play Mother May I.

It was a lovely way to waste the day, and to put a cap on my week o' laziness.

In the coming days I'll be posting another Craftastrophe (so many to choose from...) and working on Stephanie's and my new project, gamelikeagirl. Stay tuned--there will be crafts soon.

Enjoy The Lazy

2010-03-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

I'm on a crafting break.

Not on purpose, I just haven't felt like working on anything lately. Maybe it's the sudden arrival of Spring, who shows up in California unannounced and looking very much like Summer. Weeks of rain have been trumped by unexpected sunshine and warm temperatures, windows are open, snow boots are off. Even the gym is getting more pleasant to be in--our giant warehouse is freezing all winter long, necessitating a ridiculous number of layers (I'm usually in 5) but yesterday I went up to my locker in the employee area and pulled out my emergency shorts that haven't seen the light of late afternoon since October of last year.

Right now I'm writing with the windows open, the air flowing in over the rumbling street traffic, and as a result things feel stupidly pleasant.

Not that I'm complaining. It sounds like I could be, but I'm merely stating facts. I'm not busied with making stuff, I'm just enjoying the nice weather, and I'm okay with that.

I think it's really important to have a balance in your life between productivity and laziness. You have to be relatively productive some days in order to truly revel in the days when you choose not to be. I've spent a good amount of time being uber productive lately, especially in the crafting world, so I feel totally okay with taking a quick break from it.

Break is kind of a funny thing to say, though, because I'm still working a full time job, and maintaining a few blogs and Twitter accounts, and contributing to Craftastrophe, and having a relationship and seeing friends and parents and still finding time to sleep and eat on occasion. Really what I'm doing is being down in my few moments of down time, and I guess since I tend to be sort of a busy body it feels like being lazy.

That is pretty awesome.

But I know me, and I won't be able to keep this up forever. Next week I'll probably find a new endeavor to preoccupy me before and after work hours, and I'll be sure to take lots of photos so I can share the process with everyone.

For now, I'm off to enjoy the summer...er, spring...sunshine.

How Much Is Too Much Awesome?

2010-03-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

As you may or may not have heard, my most recent foray into new and exciting crafts has been embroidering. I started off with some flower outlines, which I worked on until I felt I was okay enough at technique to attempt something more complicated than the equivalent of needlework paint-by-numbers.

This is the last piece of the flowers that I worked on, practicing chain stitching (orange) and filling in (pink).

I might go back to it if I can think of something awesome to do with the finished product (suggestions?) but for now it's relegated to sitting next to the remote on the coffee table.

For my first stab at what I consider real embroidery, I decided to take an idea I'd had previously and tweak it to embroidery specs.

My buddy Adam makes super fantastic paintings of robots and zombies and dinosaurs and other things and for a long time I've wanted to take his art and use it in a collaborative kind of way. I've already made a screen of the penguin-buster (so I could give Adam a penguin-buster shirt for his birthday, and also make some for the rest of Team Awesome) so when it came time to pick an embroidery subject it was a no-brainer for me to head to Adam's blog and grab some inspiration there.

I went with the first dude on the on page, this guy:

I like his whole "What, Me Worry?" air, and his relatively simple lines that I figured would lend themselves to a beginner embroiderer like me.

I sketched out a free-hand drawing of Cla1r@nc3 on some of the new fabric I got at the White Elephant Sale, then set to.

The process is pretty slow, but also very low-stress. I get why Marin picked embroidery as a medium (though her stuff is so far beyond what I'm doing that it doesn't even belong in the same category). She makes really, really beautiful pieces based on hunting and skeletal imagery, like this gorgeous pelvis piece:

In any case, after a night or two of stitching while watching archived Daily Show on Hulu I had most of Cla1r@nc3 finished.

This morning when I got home I decided to use the hour and a half before work to try and complete him, and after half an episode of Mad Men he was pretty much all done.

I think (after examining the original painting while writing this post) I'm going to go back and fill in his eyes and monitor thingamajig with some yellow floss and then he'll be done for reals.

It's encouraging to have completed him with relatively little difficulty, and whatever I make next will probably move in a more advanced direction. I don't know if embroidery will become a mainstay in my skill set, but it's a fun distraction for now.

Last but not least, my first Craftastrophe post went up yesterday. It's a horrific example of crafting failure that I find gross enough in nature as to not want to include the photo here--but I encourage you to visit the post and see it for yourself. The lovely ladies at Craftastrophe have given all their new contributors lots of freedom as far as posting goes, and lots of encouragement to post often, so I might put something else up before my next scheduled time (1pm on Tuesdays, which is 10am Pacific Time). Keep an eye out--not just for me, but for all the other posts which I'm sure are even in their level of awfulness.

Alright, time to head to the gym and hope my voice stays strong enough through another Level 4 practice that I don't lose it--things have been touch and go...

And Adam: find some wall space, because embroidered Cla1r@nc3 is yours if you want him <3.

Fun New Things

2010-03-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

My voice is finally back, and yesterday I used it to complain through the Oscars at Stephanie's house.

I don't care about the Oscars at all, so I'm not going to waste time blogging about them suffice to say that the show would've been better had all the presenters been suffering from laryngitis as well.

Earlier in the day Adam (Stephanie's awesome husband and my soul-twin), Stephanie, my mom and I went to the Oakland Museum White Elephant Sale. If you live in the Bay Area, you've probably heard of this thing--it's a huge benefit sale for put on by the OM's Women's Board and it happens in a ginormous warehouse on the Oakland waterfront.

Most years, Mom and I go for the preview sale (we get passes from a friend and get to shop before the actual sale date, which is how the cool kids do it) but this year we were both busy and sick (alternately, and sometimes together) and just couldn't get there, which meant that for the first time ever we had to go on the actual day of the sale. The last day of the sale, to be more specific.

Impressions?

1. Hipster central! Way to be Bridge-and-Tunnel, The Mission.
2. Clusterfuck.
3. Nothing left.

We did manage to find a few things, though (in between getting bumped by glassy eyed folks stunned into a shopping daze). Steph picked up an antique thimble and a fondue pot, Mom got a few greeting cards that she was really stoked on, and Adam helped Steph compile a stack of records for the bargain price of 50 cents a pop. I was mostly interested in the Craft section, which is usually awesome but, lo and behold, was severely lacking come the date of the sale. It lead me to truly appreciate those yearly passes we get, and to feel sorry for anyone who has to restrict themselves to coming to the sale weekend. If you've never gone to the preview sale, you are seriously missing out.

I was hoping to find some embroidery floss, fabric, and a more comprehensive book on embroidery than the one that I'm currently using. It was a win for the fabric and the book, but as far as yarn and thread went the vultures had already picked the bones clean by the time we showed up.

Still, I took home enough fabric that I can be embroidering for the next year without having to restock, and a giant needlework bible by McCall's to refer to while I do it.

When I finally got home last night I started working on a new piece of embroidery that I may or may not give to someone special (will have to see how it turns out). So far my skillz are mediocre--I get the concept, but my lines aren't the tidiest and every once in a while the floss bunches and I wind up with little thread puckers. But it's about the process, and each time I make a stitch I think I'm getting better at it. It seems to take longer than knitting, but maybe it's just because I'm slower at it, or concentrating harder on what I'm doing. In any case, it's a fun new thing, and fun new things are good.

Crusty Pede

2010-03-05T11:13:00.000-08:00

I feel like I haven't posted anything in a while, even though it's been only a few days. This is what happens when you get sick, have to go to a real job, and start spreading your focus outward to maintaining various other blogs and Twitter accounts.

This morning I'm home briefly between a drive back from the Sunset and office hours at the gym. My vocal chords are still raw--fault of last night's sushi dinner in a ridonkulously loud Marina restaurant that sent me back to pen and paper as a means of communication (possibly would've had to do that even if I hadn't been suffering from a sore throat). I feel very David-at-the-dentist--is this going to be forever?--but I think that if all goes well I should be better by next week. Have aloe juice, tea, hot water with salt...will make use of it all.

In my little island of time between personal life and work life (at times called "craft life") I've managed to finish disc 3 of Mad Men's first season (not a craft...) and finally start teaching myself to embroider (oh, there you go!).

Here's the little project I've started working on.

Originally I was going to try and freehand a quote or maybe even a picture, but then it occurred to me that it might be good practice to just outline a bunch of the little flowers, so I think that's the plan for now. I have a lot of the same fabric (well, a dress's worth...) so I will probably try something more advanced after this practice run.

I don't think I have the right kind of needle for embroidery, though. The one I'm using is really, really thick, but it's the only one with an eye big enough to fit embroidery thread, and it seems to be doing the job for now. If I get more invested in this craft I'm sure I'll get it together to shell out a buck fifty for a better one, anyways.

In other, more exciting craft-related news, a few days ago Stephanie suggested I submit some writing samples to the lovely ladies over at Craftastrophe because they were holding an open call for contributors, and lo and behold they asked me to join them! This means that at least once a week I'll be authoring posts for the Craftastrophe blog, which it pretty exciting.

We've had to restrict our Etsy-based posts over at Why Is This A Thing? because there's just too much crazy stuff on Etsy and if we let ourselves, that's all we'd write about. Being included as a Craftastrophe blogger means I now have a separate channel for craft-related WTF's, which I will absolutely be taking advantage of. Look for my first post this coming Tuesday, around 1pm.

Okay, it's time to leave for the gym. Cross your fingers that no one calls the office and makes me use my poor little vocal chords.

Are You Effing Kidding Me?!

2010-03-02T00:04:00.000-08:00

This weekend I somehow managed to strain my voice (I suspect a number of culprits, none of which included screaming my head off at a rock concert) and for the first time was not just having trouble speaking, but was actually rendered physically incapable of making sounds with my vocal chords.

It was very odd, and very frustrating. I spoke in a whisper for three days, unless it was really loud in which case I used a little notepad that Oleg is convinced someone will someday find and read through with hilarious results.

A sampling? For sure:

Because yesterday found me still pretty much incapable of making noise with my mouth, I started calling folks at work to get my classes covered. I felt otherwise fine, but a silent gymnastics coach is about as useful as a blind watchdog, and since my voice wasn't even at 50% I figured it'd be best to take the day and make like Depeche Mode--enjoy the silence.

This is how I wound up at home, on my computer, at precisely the right time to get in on the Etsy Treasury.

I was so proud of myself. There've been at least 2 times in the past when I could've attempted to build a treasury but have miscalculated the time or just ignored it and let it pass by. Tonight, however, I was vigilant. I was at my computer around 9pm, and the Treasury wasn't set to come down to the arbitrary 332 listings necessary to open up the flood gates for the masses until at least 10:30 (by my generously padded estimate).

In preparation for this momentous achievement I started sifting through my favorite Etsy items and sellers, trying to choose the best group of 12 to present for my first Treasury. It took a while, which was good because I had to sit and wait until 11:30 before the Treasury got close to opening.

And then it was time.

Three listings left.

Two listings.

Refresh, Firefox, refresh!

One listing.

36 seconds.

Refresh.

16 seconds.

Hurry up, stupid Etsy.

And then HUZZAH! It expired!

Now what?

I scrolled to the bottom of the page and it still had the message that I needed to wait until the treasury dropped below 333 (meaning 332...) before I could create my own listing.

I hit refresh again and DOUBLE HUZZAH! there it was: the mythical little window into which I could type my Treasury name.

I was so happy--so very briefly happy.

I didn't have anything awesome picked out, but I had a name (I tell you, this time I was boy scout prepared!). I set my cursor over the little window and clicked into it, and then

WHAT THE FUCK?!

the window disappeared and all of a sudden the Treasury jumped back to 345 listings.

Are you kidding me?

I mean, for reals, are you kidding me?!

After all that time stalking the Treasury like I'm trying to win some concert tickets on the radio circa 1992, you give me roughly .05 seconds to enter or a name or perish? THAT IS SO UNFAIR! (And in case you're wondering, yes I'm sure that this was through no fault of my own--no extra browser refreshing took place, there was no accidental delete key hitting; this was an Etsy FAIL, plain and simple. And by that I mean, this is exactly how Etsy intends the Treasury to run, and it is stupid).

I feel like I've been a really good sport about the whole Treasury thing since I first learned about it last fall. I didn't gripe about how lame the system was, or how hard it was for me to manage to even try to be home at the right time to make one, I just sat by and browsed through treasuries made by other, luckier folks and thought, "It's okay, one day I'll be there at the right time and it'll be my turn."

Well, apparently not.

Apparently you need to be a wizard capable of light speed reaction times or else consider yourself shit out of luck.

Etsy, that is officially bunk.

After such an underwhelming experience I'm tempted to completely give up the Treasury, and maybe Etsy altogether. I mean, do I really need this hassle? I can make invoices through Paypal. My blog gets way more traffic than my Etsy site. Maybe I should just sack the whole thing and run my shop through Blogger.

It's definitely tempting--I guess I'll have to see how I'm feeling once my shop listings expire next month.

If anyone has advice/stories to share, feel free to email me--I'm all ears (and no voice): briskknits@gmail.com.

Pictures of Lily

2010-02-24T13:13:00.000-08:00

No, I'm not talking about the song by The Who. I'm talking about actual pictures, of my dog Lily.

If you're not a person who's ever experienced a strong attachment to an animal, it's probably impossible to convey what that relationship is like (especially if you're one of the it's just an animal ilk who uses rational arguments about anthropomorphism and displaced maternal feelings to deride the legitimacy of the human-dog bond). But if you have ever really connected with a pet, you'll understand what I mean when I say I loved my dog more than almost anything in the world, ever.

We found Lily on an Easter Sunday. I was learning to drive and my parents had let me take control of the family station wagon on the way to breakfast. After we ate I suggested we stop by the Alameda animal shelter because we'd been thinking about getting another dog (we already had a family dog, the loyal and wonderful terrier Virginia). My parents both knew, they later said, that it would be closed, but they let me drive over there anyway.

The Alameda SPCA is off the end of the street I currently live on next to a marina. It's tucked away on a dead end road after a series of left turns, surrounded by boats up on blocks for cleaning and weird little rental shacks and mooring stations. When we pulled into the parking lot I finally connected the dots and realized the place was closed. I was about to turn the car around when suddenly there was a flash of movement near the door and the three of us simultaneously noticed that outside, tied to a bike rack, was a little white dog.

My family, my mother in particular, is known for having a soft spot for animals. If there's a dog on the street, my mother will stop her car and get out to help it. If someone gets sick and can't care for their pet, they will come and stay at our house. And a few months ago my mom got into fostering (with Muttville) and that's how they wound up with their house guest, Luigi, who really is a super sweet funny little dude (if you're interested in adopting him).

So it's no surprise that in the presence of an animal in need, we piled out of the car and scooped her up. She was shaggy and goofy looking and I suggested that we offer her to our friend Dana, who was also talking about getting a dog, but my step-dad Jim (who had the fluff ball curled in his arms) looked up and said, "Well, I don't know about that..."

Being responsible people, we of course posted "dog found" signs around the neighborhood and listed Lily with the ASPCA, but no one responded and after a few weeks we decided she was ours for good. We named her after the Easter flower in honor of the day she was found, and I trimmed her hair to reveal the most adorable face on any dog, ever.

Only a few days after bringing Lily home my parents headed off to Chicago for a week, leaving me to watch the dogs on my own. This meant that Lily bonded most closely with me, especially since for the first few nights she was nervous and unable to sleep and the only way I could get her to lie down was to put her on my chest and pet her until she finally drifted off. From that point on she slept with me, curled in my arms like a little doll, and every morning I woke up to her sleepy face tucked snugly under my chin.

At her first visit to our family we learned Lily was about a year old, and in spite of their roughly 8 year age difference Lily became fast buddies with Virginia. Ginny had started to slow down around then, but with this new young puppy in the house she immediately perked up, romping and playing like she had when we'd first adopted her (from the Oakland SPCA) in 1989. Virginia went on to live another 9 years with her bestie by her side, something I don't think would've happened if she'd remained an only-dog.

Lily, as you may know, lived only a few months more after Ginny left us. In fall of 2005 Lily had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Virginia died of old age shortly after our 17th anniversary on Halloween of that year, and Lily hung on until summer of 2006 before her little body finally gave out.

Knowing that she was dying was terrible and painful, but it also meant we had a lot of time to prepare for losing her. One of the ways I handled this was by taking hundreds and hundreds of photos of her, so while she's on my mind today I'd like to share some of my favorites with you.

For more photos from the Brisk photo files, check out my flickr account at http://www.flickr.com/photos/briskknits/.

Famous In Iceland?

2010-02-23T01:21:00.000-08:00

Inspired by Stephanie's recent blog post (one of my favorite NSLT features, Fun With Keywords) I decided to visit Statcounter this evening and check out my own Fun With Keywords.

Unfortunately for me, my blog postings don't include as much Googley fodder as Steph's seems to: popular means of finding my blog via Googling seems to be by looking for "Briskknits.blogspot.com" or "Brisk knits Renee" or the slightly more interesting "Do you like gloves?". My favorite so far, though, is "buy puppets," but only because I love the idea of some person out there (and so far there's only been one) entering that into the Google and somehow finding themselves on my blog.

Whoever you are, heart.

More interesting at this point is the visual representation of visitors to this blog who, amazingly, seem to have come from many places around the world.

Check it out: someone out there in Iceland has been to my blog!

Also pretty amazing is that I've had (single) visits from Estonia, Turkey and Pakistan.

So what gives, Russia?

Then there's pie chart detailing the duration of everyone's visit, which is equally interesting.

More often than not, people stay for 5 seconds or less, which is kind of crazy to me. I'm trying to picture what happens when I click on a link and I think in general I tend to spend at least 15 seconds evaluating where I've wound up before concluding that I don't want to look at it anymore, but maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all of us are taking things in far faster than we realize, and if nothing jumps out at us immediately we're gone in 4 seconds or less. If so, how bizarre!

The next biggest chunk, however, is longer than an hour.

What?

So either people are completely disinterested and close the browser window before even taking the time to scroll half a page down OR they're so enamored that they stick around for more than 60 minutes.

That's longer than an episode of Mad Men!
That's more time than I spend at lunch with my parents!
That's like four finger puppets knitted and accessorized!

That is, simply, awesome! Double heart to my yellow pie peeps.

Last but not least, there's another pie chart displaying trends with my returning visitors.

So let's look at this: I have (for yesterday) 175 new people. Welcome to you guys (and kudos if you stuck around past the 5 second mark)! Then there's the 32 of you who were coming back for a second, third, fourth, or fifth time. You rule. Now onto the special few who've been back for 5 to 10 visits--only 3 of you.

This is where it gets most interesting: who are those three? I can't even happen a guess because it seems equally likely that they're friends, or people I haven't met in person, or maybe even people I've had no contact with whatsoever.

Whoever you are, I'm intrigued.

Oh, and if you're wondering who those 2 people are that have been to the Brisk blog more than 10 times, I'm 99% sure it's Oleg and Stephanie. Maybe I'll have to make them special Elite badges for their own web pages, ala Yelp. Or maybe I'll just tattoo BRISK across their knuckles (because knitting, as we all know, is totally hard core).

The Bain of My Etsystence

2010-02-22T14:11:00.000-08:00

So for anyone who's unfamiliar with the Etsy world, one of the primary means of promotion within the Etsy community is The Treasury: a gallery of user-compiled collections in the same style as the Etsy home page. In fact, it's from this treasury (for the most part) that the Etsy wizards choose what will show up on their front lines (note the "Handpicked Items selected by" credit above the choices). Sometimes they take an entire Treasury listing by an Etsy user, other times a staffer will pick and choose featured items from a selection of Treasuries and compile a unique page with them, but either way The Treasury is the gateway to Etsy homepage stardom.

This being the case, it's in every Etsy shop owner's interest to try and get into a Treasury collection. To do this you can try one of two things:

Cross your fingers and hope someone else lists you

OR

Make your own Treasury collection, stealthily including the one-allowed listing from your own shop.

I have been trying to do this FOR MONTHS.

Why so difficult, Renee?

Well, to put it bluntly, loyal reader: the Treasury creation process is retarded.

To create a Treasury page you have to wait until enough pages expire that the number of listings comes down to 333. Why 333? Because this is the number of magical craftasticness chosen by the splendiferous craft fairy Etzmerelda with her wand of sparkly bedazzlement. Any more and the fantastical land of Etsy will implode, any fewer and all the crochet Amigurumi will wither and die.

But really, the choice seems utterly arbitrary.

Because Etsy Treasuries have a 2 day lifespan, and listings are expiring every hour, you basically wind up stalking the Treasury, waiting for enough pages to breathe their last gasp so you can get in on the creation frenzy. Unfortunately if you have a life that requires you to do things like work, eat, sleep, or leave the house for any reason at all, it's really tough to coordinate being at a computer at the precise moment that the Treasury hits 333, and if you miss this moment, you're screwed.

Le sigh.

Still, in spite of my continued Treasury fails (or probably because of them) I've compiled a pretty decent group of favorite Etsy shops and listings to use to make a Treasury page, and (having no craft news of my own) it's from this selection that I'd like to share today.

Jackie Peppermint

I've mentioned this shop on Twitter for Follow Friday, but I just can't get past how much I love Jackie Bos's illustrations.

Check out this awesome set of pillows:

If I could draw, I like to think I'd draw like this--a little Dali, a little vintage, all awesome.

Baby Animals

Oh, how I love finger puppets. This shop makes me want to get more into sewing, a craft form that I continue to shy away from for no apparent reason.

These finger puppets are the animals that my finger puppets would choose to ride if and when they amassed enough numbers to form a proper army.

Box of Birds

Another awesome illustrator, the Box of Birds shop also features a selection of super cute felt items that (again) make me want to take up sewing in a more serious way.

This print is totally cute.

BBQ Your Heart

I bet that if I showed LoveFoxx this shop, she would start sporting selections.

This hand-painted shirt dress thing is just one representation of the Shanghai designer's eclectic style, but visit the shop and you'll find awesome coats, shoes and bags that will make you wish you had the kind of lifestyle that would justify such sweet threads.

Whale and Bee

I don't know what it is with me and illustrators--maybe it's my love of paper goods or my jealous feelings at their drawing skills--but Whale and Bee is another place with adorable and unique images that make me smile.

The banana print is pretty fantastic, but I also like the mixtape friends print and the rabbit ninja notebook.

Karing is Shering

Ahh, jewelry. There's so many jewelry makers on Etsy, but this is one of my favorites. The wings ring makes me feel like I could so get into metallurgy one day.

Love.

Timeles Vixen Vintage

Steph doesn't agree with the vintage section on the Etsy (see: not handmade), but here's my bid to change her mind. Check out the awesome, Steph:

You have to give it to Timeless Vixen for collecting so many fantastic dresses in one place. Yes, they're super expensive, but they're so pretty that I don't even care. Some day maybe I will have enough money (and be tall enough) to wear this.

Until then, it's back to the gym for this girl.

I Don't Want To Work, I Just Want To Knit Finger Puppets All Day

2010-02-18T12:00:00.000-08:00

I am in love.

I am so in love, I think it's about to border on obsession.

Yesterday, I made my first finger puppet.

This guy.

Then at craft night, I made three more.

Now all I want to do is knit these funny little things.

There's something about the simplicity of them coupled with interminable variety that's just infatuating. Add to that the fact that you can't look at one without busting a seam giggling and it's a finger puppets FTW situation.

Here's some more photos of my growing finger puppet army.

Inspired by Oleg's mustache party fuzz monster:

The red hat was an experiment that turned out hilarious.

This is where I kind of lost my mind a little bit.

So that's what I'll be working on for the next few weeks, I think.

Another benefit of craft night (apart from hanging out with Team Awesome) is getting the occasional gift. In this case, it wasn't a gift so much as a delivery, but it was still awesome.

Adam had a 100 robots contest (of sorts) to see if he could paint (and sell) 100 robots. He did, and the results were (like most things we're involved in) awesome. I of course got in on the robot action but I didn't care what number I bought so Adam assigned me number 99. This was fine with me at first, but eventually I got really impatient because it meant I was going to have to hold out to the bitter end before I could take my painting home.

Finally, after months of waiting, I got to take my little dude with me last night.

Here's the little dude, in all his (forgive me) awesomeness:

Another thing that finally happened was the gift exchange where Stephanie gave her previously undisclosed craft away. This means I can (also finally) post the original photo, sans unicorn, so here it is:

Best bacon scarf ever.

Here is Ryan, enjoying the bacony goodness:

I told Steph she needs to write out the pattern because it's by far the most awesome looking bacon scarf I've seen; she's still debating, since when she was actually in the process of making the scarf she was just doing it ad hoc. If you want to see a pattern come to fruition for reals, comment on this post and she'll see it--and maybe it will motivate her.

Last but not least, I also finished the FREE pair of gloves won by lovely miss Amy Gibbons, aka Bagsofblessing. They will ship out today to find a happy home, I'm sure. Amy opted for the Lily's Gloves in a light blue yarn, and they look fantastic!

Yes, Those Are Lollipops

2010-02-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

The crafts are back!

After a brief hiatus from craft-related blog posts, I've finally gotten it together to put up some photos of the stuff I've been working on.

First off is the baby hat attempt, which I was sort of planning on giving to Joel (see previous post re: lemon eating adorableness) until I realized the hat was too big for his 1 year old head because, duh, when I wrote it I used the toddler/child size measurements. Oh well--I'll just have to find another kid to try it on, and maybe keep it.

So this is how it came out:

Front

Back

To make it, I knit the body of the hat in the round (the pattern is made with a series of shifting slip stitches and decreases) and then pulled up about 18 stitches at the base to make the cable strip. When the strip was long enough (it's a heart cable pattern...or so they say) I decreased to about 4 stitches and then sewed them into the top of the hat.

I was toying with leaving the strap as a kind of free-floating accoutrement, but in the end I sewed it into the hat so that it lies flat against the body.

This is not my favorite creation ever, but I had to start somewhere, so that's that.

I also finished a pair of elbow-length Hinoki gloves in gray, a special order for Apasara. I l-o-v-e-d the yarn I used (and thankfully over-bought, so I have 2 whole skeins left--YES!) and I super love how the gloves came out.

Nnekay stopped by to have some coffee the other day and I seized the opportunity to make her model them.

They're so soft and comfy, and again I'm left wanting a pair.

By the way, if you're wondering what happened with my desire for a pair of the Rococo gloves in that dark blue-gray, I went to knit them and felt like a nerd for doing the same pattern again so instead I made an elbow length version of Marin's Gloves. When I was finished with the first glove I felt underwhelmed, like I should've stuck to my instinct and just made another Rococo even if it wasn't original. Now I have this single long glove hanging out with the rest of my in-progress projects (hello, angry face glove...) that I will eventually need to decide what I want to do with. Perhaps I'll post a photo soon and you can tell me what you think.

Finally, in gym news, we've implemented these spirit days for our team girls. I always hated that crap growing up, but the kids are so psyched about it that I don't mind encouraging them. Previous spirit days have included Twin Day and Senior Citizen Day, both of which were pretty cute, but nothing compared to this past Saturday: Valentine's Day Day.

Spirit day works like this: the kids know about it a week before hand and come in on Saturday morning with their costumes in tow. At the end of work out we give them about 2 minutes to get dressed, then they come out on the floor and line up at the edge. Kids who've dressed up come out front and the rest of the team votes on a winner, and the winner gets a dorky prize from a prize bucket. Mostly harmless, usually very sweet, sometimes fun even for the coaches.

Valentine's Day Day had only 2 entries: Jewel, who had a sign that said, "Free Hugs!" in gold glitter, and a dual entry: Nichole (Jewel's little sister) and Sarafina, who'd made heart-halves that they wore sandwich board style to form a completed heart when they stood beside each other.

It was so cute that the whole gym went, "Awwww."

I never do this, but I actually went all the way upstairs and got my camera so I could take a photo.

Yes, those are lollipops.

That's Jewel to the left, and about half the Level 4 team behind them. Super cute, and really amusing to me, a former spirit day abstainee.

Sometimes, I really love my job.

Music Monday

2010-02-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

Not all crafts need to be tangible--at least, not at first.

There are a handful of things I've been involved in on a (nearly) life-long basis. You know about a few of them--gymnastics and crafting take up a fair amount of blog space--but one of these things hasn't yet enjoyed its moment in the spotlight, and that's one of my favorite additions: mix cds.

Coming from a long line of musicians meant that I was raised amongst a smattering of instruments (piano, drums, guitars, bases, even the occasional trombone) and records (The Who, Ritchie Valens, The Hollies, and Duane Eddy were my favorites). When I was little, you'd regularly find me happily rifling through my parents' collection, spinning vinyl before I could tie my shoes.

Like any child of the 80's, I eventually moved on to making mix tapes--by holding my tape recorder up to the radio and standing very, very still. When the 90's hit and the dual tape deck became a staple of every home stereo system I nearly lost my mind with excitement. Emily (my long-distance BFF) and I spent most of middle school mailing elaborately decorated cassettes from Oakland to St. Louis and back again. My walkmans lost buttons, plastic casings, head phone covers...I went through them like chewing gum.

When Napster exploded I was in the epicenter: Boston, 1999. It was there that my roommate Emma and I figured out how to hook the computer up to a boom box and started making our first MP3 mix tapes. I thought this was the best thing that would ever happen to mix making--and then, heart of hearts, on came the cd burning revolution, from which I haven't looked back.

Almost a decade later, I still have a reputation with my buddies as a mixing addict. You'll know we're friends when I finally open my purse to reveal your own personalized mix cd. You'll know we're best friends when you have a shelf of them.

In the spirit of Twitter's #musicmonday, today's blog has zero to do with knitting, crochet, sewing, or screening, and instead contains a throwback to my younger years: my most recent mix cd.

No, you can't listen to it, but you CAN visit http://www.playlist.com/ and build your own version. And Emily, don't peak--this one's for you.

1. Purple Mushroom by Punk Bunny
2. Bounce by MSTRKRFT (featuring N.O.R.E.)
3. Awesome by The Bloody Beetroots (featuring The Cool Kids)
4. Don't Stop The Rock by The Freestylers
5. YES by LMFAO
6. Back Of The Van by Ladyhawke
7. Forever by Walter Meego
8. Little Secrets by Passion Pit
9. Only If You Run by Julian Plenti
10. Can You Discover? by Discovery
11. Through A Keyhole by Walter Meego
12. Low Life by Steve Aoki
13. It Don't Move Me by Miike Snow Vs. Peter, Bjorn and John
14. Yeah Yeah Yeah La La La by Calvin Harris
15. Mind Drips by Neon Indian
16. Psychic City by YACHT
17. The Equalizer by Junior Boys
18. So Insane by Discovery
19. Baby Please by Walter Meego
20. I Am Not A Robot by Marina and the Diamonds

Completely Unrelated Adorable Stuff

2010-02-11T14:00:00.000-08:00

Tuesday afternoon my step-sister, Harper, and her family were visiting from Green Bay, WI so my family took the opportunity to have a big brunch together at a local grill.

Harper's son, Joel, is pretty much the cutest baby ever.

See?

I was thrilled to see him again and took the opportunity to sit across from him at brunch. Lucky for me, there happened to be some lemon slices garnishing our appetizers, which meant I got to catch a video of Joel indulging the odd proclivity he has for super tangy citrus. That's right, the cutest baby ever LOVES eating lemons. But try telling that to his face.

My Friend Flickr

2010-02-09T14:35:00.000-08:00

The older I get (and I'm only 29) the less I care about anything related to popular culture. I haven't watched actual television at home in at least 6 months, maybe more. I don't listen to the radio. I couldn't care less about print media. Even the blogs I follow are individuals--never news-based--so I'm generally out of the loop when it comes to trends and gossip like who just died or got married, or what special thing, Grammy, Emmy, or super bowl, is happening on the tv this week.

Who's this guy? I literally have no idea.

This is not to say, though, that I don't indulge in my own level of American consumption. I watch TONS of streaming Netflix. I cannot overstate that. TONS. Last night I spent three hours watching Wire in the Blood, season 6, which I'm torn between thirstily gobbling up or slowly savoring--it's the last of the seasons on the instant queue, and had been hiding behind The IT Crowd (three seasons, all watched) until I noticed it on Sunday when Oleg and I went to watch season 1 of Weeds, also on instant. I like Wire in the Blood and other crime shows (have watched ALL, literally ALL, of the Law & Order seasons--classic, SVU, and Criminal Intent--on instant. That's roughly 25 seasons of television. ALL) because I can follow the narrative really easily in spite of how much time I spend looking down instead of at the tv.

I also love the Hulu. And I call it that, because I like to sound like an old man. The Hulu is a more infrequent indulgence because I can only watch it in my bedroom, and usually if I'm watching tv, I'm knitting, and being in my bed isn't exactly conducive to a productive knitting session. So my Hulu shows (The Office and 30 Rock mainly, but sometimes Parks and Rec or Always Sunny In Philadelphia sneak in there, too) are more like a surprise treat to snack on right before drifting off to sleep. This is also partly due to the issue I've been having with one of my drivers that makes the computer crash after about an hour and 20 minutes of streaming video.

All this is just my long-winded way of explaining that I take a longer, more roundabout route when it comes to finding out about things that other people heard about days, weeks, or months ago. This is why (even though I love photography, and have a TON of photo credits on the Facebook) I've only just now discovered what a useful resource Flickr is, and is going to be.

If you're interested, check out the new Brisk photostream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/briskknits

It's sad at the moment, with its piddly five photos, but I promise if you subscribe to it (is that what you do on the Flickr?) it will fill up very, very soon. Team Awesome could also refer to itself as Team Take-A-Lot-Of-Crazy-Photos, if you know what I mean, and I'm trying to be relatively good about documenting the crafting process as things get built and created and invented, and then (sometimes) torn out.

Anyhow, I'm excited to have found a new toy to play with, and also kind of dreading how much time I foresee it taking up. But oh well--when I figured out how to work the Twitter, it was the same thing.

Paid employment beckons. Bye for now.

Lovely Liz

2010-02-08T10:24:00.000-08:00

*For FREE GLOVES contest, click here*

What a lazy weekend. I have to admit, since the vacation things have slowed down to a crawl in the Brisk shop. Not knitting wise--getting sick is great for knitting, and I finished a few gloves during my convalescing. But illness coupled with lots of gym stress has meant an extreme lack of effort in the internet world, so for that I'm sorry. Now that I'm back on my feet I plan to get things cracking once more.

A while ago (if you recall...) I knit my first pair of child-size gloves for the lovely Elizabeth, a former Bay Island Level 6 gymnast and all around awesome kid. I asked her mom, Marlene, if she could send me a photo of Liz wearing the gloves, and this morning I opened my inbox to find some cute pictures of Liz playing the piano (she takes lessons with my mom).

So anyone who's interested, I'm happy to add children's patterns to the catalog--just ask, and I can convert them for tiny hands :-)

This week I have a random assortment of plans. My apartment has been in semi-shambles for the past 2 weeks and desperately needs a cleaning. That's my least favorite plan. I also have a few knitting projects to work on--the winner pair of gloves for Amy and a pair of elbow length Rococo gloves for Asparasa.

One of my projects while sick was knitting a happy glove companion to the angry face glove

and after five fails I finally finished the darn thing only to realize I'd made it too long. So much for freehand knitting--next time I'll write out a chart. But this means I have to unknit the top part of the glove and redo it to correct length before I can actually call it, and its pattern, finished.

There are a few pairs of gloves that have yet to make it into the Etsy shop, which is completely inexcusable as I've had photos for them for weeks now. And the photos are super cute (thanks, Tamar!) and--AND--the patterns are also awesome. So I guess I should add "add those gloves already!" to my to-do list.

Right now, in addition to blogging and finishing my coffee, I'm in the midst of scanning a bunch of library books that are already (I suspect) overdue, paying bills, and getting ready to go my other job (where there's a whole separate to-do list, a much less enjoyable one...).

Sigh.

Too bad you can't be lazy all the time.

Sick Busy

2010-02-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

*For FREE GLOVES contest, click here*

Phew!

This week is flying by. Took a two day mini-vacation to Avila Beach over the weekend, then returned to the chaos of gym life. Yesterday I started feeling a little ill which isn't surprising--when I'm under a lot of stress, it eventually starts to effect my health. Didn't think things had been wearing on me enough to manifest in a cold, though.

Luckily I have today off to recuperate. There's so much stuff I need to do, especially after having been out of town, but I don't think I'm going to be able to take care of it today. Cleaning the house sounds exhausting, as does driving around running all the errands on my to-do list. I think all I'm going to accomplish is this blog post, and then finishing the screen I'm making and printing a few shirts.

Wanted to post a photo of the elbow length gloves I made last week, because they came out so nicely. Yesterday I made an elbow length glove in the same color but used Marin's pattern. I'm not sure I like it as much as the Rococo version, so I might just have to finish this pair and sell it, and then make the Rococo pattern gloves for myself.

See how cute they are?

In contest news, we have our first winner! The lovely Amy Gibbons (aka Bagsofblessings) reached and surpassed the 20 referrals mark, and now she's getting a FREE pair of Lily's Gloves. Woo hoo, Amy!

There's still four more opportunities to win--see contest details here if you're a new visitor!

Alright, energy is running low so I'm off to work on that screen and maybe take a nap.

Shameless Self Promotion Part One

2010-01-28T12:55:00.000-08:00

Do you like gloves?

Do you want gloves, but (like me) have zero extra money?

Don't you wish there were another way?!

Well, there is! And here's how:

The first 5 people to refer 20 friends to the Brisk shop on Etsy will get a 100% FREE pair of custom knit gloves, any style, any color, from the Brisk Catalog.

That's right:

100% FREE GLOVES!

Gloves make people happy. See how happy Stephanie is? You could be this happy too!

To get credit for your referrals, referred buddies need to do two things (pay attention here):

1) add Brisk to their Etsy favorite shops,

and

2) send me a convo message with your name so I can keep track of how many referrals you've made.

In return, your referral gets to take 10% off their first Brisk order, so everybody wins!

Contest will continue until we have 5 winners--and will be followed by another (possibly more fun) contest :-)

Best Gloves Ever

2010-01-27T10:40:00.000-08:00

A while back one of my customers emailed to ask if I'd be able to knit an elbow length pair of gloves in the Rococo pattern. I said sure, and a week or so later I picked up this lovely iridescent gray blue yarn and started knitting.

Last night I finished the first glove and tried it on and I am hopelessly enamored of it. I like it so much, in fact, that as soon as I'm done with it, I'm hopping right back on the wagon and making a pair for myself.

It's incredibly difficult to take a full length photo of one's own arm, but hopefully the pictures can capture the awesome:

Since I haven't got much else of my own to mention today, I'm finally going to be able to include some of the awesome blogs I've come across in my internet marketing binge. An unexpected result of all the Twittering I've been doing is that I've found a TON of really, genuinely fantastic creative people out there whose stuff I totally admire (and aspire to one day ape the style of). So here's an unordered, unspecific list of a few of those super coolios (don't be offended if you didn't make the list--there are SO MANY of you that I'm going to do this all the time from now on...)

First off, this is my new favorite place: A Journey Round My Skull

Described as ""Unhealthy book fetishism from a reader, collector, and amateur historian of forgotten literature," the blog author posts the most amazing illustrations and artwork, totally obscure random stuff with an incredibly diverse but still comprehensive sensibility. L<3VE.

I'm also completely enthralled by Apak Studio, the collective endeavor of artists Aaron and Ayumi. Love both of their individual sites but especially love the stuff they post here.

They have an Etsy shop as well.

And last but not least, Trelabela makes vinyl wallets with awesome embellishments. My favorite is the octopus.

Visit her Etsy shop as well and see the rest of the coolness--water buffalo, plaid bison, and green floral ram are waiting for you!

Okay, off to the rest of the day--let the busy-ness begin!

Angry Face!

2010-01-26T13:21:00.000-08:00

What a stupid morning I'm having. Paypal broke, I got a street cleaning parking ticket (I thought I had my neighborhood parking schedule mastered!) and then I ripped a 10$ bill in half trying to put it back into my wallet. Add to that the major drama going on with my staff at work (three people out with family emergencies) and it feels like there's this annoying flurry of irritants buzzing around my head.

But I'm managing to remain happy in spite of it all.

Last night I finished up my first experiment in color pattern writing, and it came out pretty cute.

Meet Angry Face:

For my first real try at Fair Isle knitting, I think he came out alright. What do you think?

Exploding...Oh, Uh, Nevermind

2010-01-25T21:20:00.000-08:00

What a lucky thing--off early today and home with plenty of time left to craft. This means that not only can I play with the new Fair Isle glove pattern I'm working on (it's probably not what you're imagining), I can also post the promised photo of the pair of Marin's Gloves I just finished in deep turquoise.

I really feel like you can't go wrong with this pattern. When I originally wrote it (for the awesome miss Marin Camille Hood,

a truly talented artist in her own right who will maybe one day teach me to embroider half as good as she does...) I used a lovely cream white yarn, and the gloves looked great. Then I knit a pair in burgundy, and they also looked great. Then I knit a pair in bright sunny yellow, and they looked great, too! And now that I see them in turquoise I think this might be my favorite color so far, until I remember how great they looked in all the other colors and I have to think these are just the undeniably great looking gloves.

Maybe I will have a contest to see if there's a way to make the pattern not look great.

Speaking of contests, I have some in the works and will hopefully get those going soon. Don't have the energy to do it tonight, but within the next few days...maybe.

Last but not least, I want to give a shout out to my friends Bess and Emily in Missouri for taking the coveted spot as "First Fan Photo Posters" on Brisk's Facebook Page. I've known them forever and when Em asked me to knit a pair of the Hinoki Gloves for her sister Bess's birthday I was totally stoked.

So, apparently, was Bess.

Would love to add to my collection of fan photos, so if you have some Brisk gloves and you want your 15 minutes of Brisk fame, email me at briskknits@gmail.com or find Brisk on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/briskknits) and upload it there.

Alright, off to do a little computer messing about before settling in with some knitting and Hulu (my other boyfriend).

Methface Update

2010-01-25T13:54:00.000-08:00

Been having some problems with my RSS feed to Twitter. The whole thing is kind of confusing, so hopefully I managed to straighten it out. It's one of those things where I've looked at all the configurations and nothing appears overtly out of whack, so fixing it is incredibly difficult.

This post is going to be pretty short and imageless, so my apologies if you came here expecting something awesome. Still planning on having a few contests coming up which should be pretty fun and give everyone a chance at winning some free gloves (woo hoo!) but don't think I will have a chance to get that sorted until tomorrow.

Before I go, quick explanation of the title: my buddy Stephanie is an internet stat obsessive and remains consistently amused by tracking where all of her blog hits are coming from. To this day the most popular keyword search is "methface," so I figured I'd get in on that.

More (funner stuff) soon...promise.

Sleep Deprivation

2010-01-23T16:04:00.000-08:00

Can't believe I'm not more beat on a mere 4 hours of sleep. When I finally got into bed last night...um...this morning...at 2:30 I, of course, couldn't fall asleep. I was still thinking of marketing strategies and ideas, and patterns and color schemes. And when my alarm went off I, of course, had a moment of WTF?! before accepting that I really did have to get out of bed right then.

Luckily, I love my job. Last night I got lost on this train of thought about how sometimes even when you love your job, it's hard to motivate yourself to want to go there. I've had a hard time readjusting after the long holiday break from December to January, but I finally feel like I'm back in the swing of things, and this means I have a much more positive attitude toward work, which makes my job much more enjoyable and, as a result, my life as well. It also means I'm a better coach, and that my kids are happier, and that makes me happier, and in general the whole shebang results in a much happier Miss Renee.

When I had my lame office job in New York, though, there was no amount of positive thinking that could've made me want to be there. Once at a staff meeting my boss (at the gym) told everyone to try and let go of bad days by going into the bathroom and smiling into a mirror a few times because it would trick your brain into thinking you're happy, even if you aren't. This was good advice, and it's true (whether it's because it genuinely tricks your brain, or just makes you laugh at the ridiculousness of taking a bathroom "smiling" break), but I can't imagine trying the same thing if I was working in a job that I genuinely hated.

I can imagine some self-help jerk telling a person that it's all in the way you look at a situation, though, so I guess I just want to throw it out there that having worked both jobs that I've loathed, and jobs that I've loved, this positive thinking stuff is, in some ways, bull...oney. Or rather that no one should let anyone else tell them they aren't trying hard enough to like their situation. If you have a job you hate--I mean truly hate, hate the people, hate the work, hate the place--then it's not your attitude that needs to change, it's your job.

The point of this seemingly random story is that yes, I was up ridiculously late trying to lure the search engine spiders, but it didn't matter because even though I had to drag myself out of bed this morning, I was happy to do it because I really love my job. I love my kids, and I love what I get to do with them, and I love what I learn from them, and that makes such an amazing, awesome difference to my quality of life.

If you haven't tried having a job you love, I seriously recommend it.

Me and some of the munchkins at Level 4 States last year.

In more Brisk related news, I got another order for Marin's Gloves (officially the most popular pattern ever) in a "deep turquoise," which I think it a brilliant color choice. I've finished the first and as soon as I'm done posting this I plan to finish the second.

Oh, also, I've had an idea for a contest that I'm really excited about so stay tuned for that.

Alright, off to knit!

Bed Time: Randoms From My Favorites

2010-01-23T02:02:00.000-08:00

I like how "bed time" becomes increasingly subjective the older you get. When you're 10, it's 9pm weeknights, 10 on weekends, no ifs, ands, or buts. Now that I'm 29, it's 11...no, wait, 12:30...I guess I can finish this movie, so maybe 1...oh, except the computer crashed and now I'm messing with the internet again, so whatever, I guess it can be 2. 2 am is reasonable when you have to be up at 7:30 in the morning, right?

Sheesh.

The thing is, internet marketing is completely taking over my life. It's a good thing I have the gym to pull me away from the computer once in a while, otherwise I could seriously see myself spending 10, 12, 15 hours a day on this. I'd become some super pale weirdo hunchback that weighed like 80lbs because I'd never leave the house to buy food anymore, who after eating the last of the pasta in the cupboard finally turned to a purely condiment based diet (I've got mustard for days...) until finally someone is forced to break into my apartment and drag me kicking and screaming (weakly, due to low blood sugar and most likely anemia) from my desktop.

But why worry about iterations of the future that may never come to pass? For now, I think I'm okay to spend the next 10 minutes finishing a fun post.

One thing I've spent a lot of time on recently is browsing through other sellers shops on Etsy, and I've actually found some really awesome things. Because I'm awesome, too, I'd like to share them with you, so here we go: the first random sampling from my Etsy favorites page (if you want to see more, you can always do so via my Etsy page, just click on the "Favorites" link on the right hand side).

These are all things I found today. First, something that was on the front page:

Hand Dip Dyed Green Peacock Fringe and Leather Chain Necklace by ThreeHorses

I've never seen a necklace like this (which is not to suggest that they have never previously existed, just that they haven't existed in my world) but I think it's really amazing and I kind of want to buy it.

Hedgehog Playing Stand Up Bass by Barkingbirdart

All of the art in this shop is awesome, but the thing I found was this hedgehog picture. So random, but I really like the style. Visit the shop and look for the print of two birds dressed as an owl and a bunny rabbit.

Hedgehog Clay Sculpture in Blue Raspberry by Iktomi

Yes, I was on a hedgehog kick. But this is the thing that started that kick. Totally without purpose beyond being cute too look at, but that doesn't mean I can't enjoy them.

And since it's officially 2 am, I only have time for one more:

Old Fashioned Carousel Ride Brass Pendant by Factorygirlashli

Found it browsing around on various craft blogs, but it's pretty awesome, and the rest of the shop has some good finds in it, too.

Alright, that's it for me. Gym life beckons...

It's Business Time

2010-01-21T11:39:00.000-08:00

I love stormy weather. It makes me feel so cozily confined to the house, and relieves any feeling of obligation to go outdoors.

Today being my day off, and stormy to boot, means I'm at home still in my jammies. There's a cup of coffee beside me, Walter Meego is singing about knowing what he wants, and how to get it, and I have zero plans on going anywhere before sundown. But does this mean I'm being lazy? Nope--exactly the opposite. I have so many projects I'm looking forward to working on today, and this blog post is just the beginning.

Last night Stephanie hosted craft night, which is just another loose excuse for Team Awesome to hang out, featuring crafts and wine. Since I started the Etsy shop, though, I've been using craft night as a photo session, getting the ladies to model gloves and take photos in the corner of Stephanie and Adam's living room with our janky (but awesome!) set up. For fun, I also took some "behind the scenes" pictures last night.

Adam's the only guy that regularly comes to craft night (yes, he has a choice even though he lives there...) and he makes awesome paintings. Right now he's finishing up the 100 robots series (mine is number 99). Here's Adam helping me rig my backdrop. See that light? It's balanced on a wooden trunk because it's too short. If you didn't know what "janky" meant before this, you do now.

Heather's craft is usually beading, but she's also started making these awesome feathered fascinators recently. She's kind of working on both things in this picture, and laughing at me because I failed at using my camera for a second.

Mary is not only a gorgeous lady, she is also a scientist and 6 foot ballerina (I dare you to find another one of those in the world) and last night her craft was sewing the ribbons onto the new pair of toe shoes she'd just gotten.

Stephanie is a knitter and crocheter, and she's been working on a special project for someone, which unfortunately means I can't post the photo of it like I wanted to. I promise to share it once it's done, and in the hands of the recipient. For now, here's Steph and a friend.

My craft last night was taking photos of Tamar, who I've wanted to use as a model for-ev-er and was super excited to photograph. I forced Nnekay to help me, so she started by putting some make-up on Tamar.

This took a while (apparently there were some mistakes) but eventually Tamar emerged looking lovely as always.

I had 3 pairs of gloves I needed photos for, and Nnekay helped me style them. Trying to think of new ways to model gloves has been a continual challenge at craft nights. None of us has ever thought so hard about how to hold your hands, but you can tell the group is getting better at it when they start independently telling each other, "That was a cute photo, but the gloves aren't prominent enough."

Here's some of the out-takes:

And here are the final photos that will be going up on the site (as soon as I take the rest of the detail pics of the gloves):

Karen's Gloves

Sock Monkey Gloves

Grapevine Gloves

After she was finished modeling, Tamar enjoyed her payment (courtesy of Mary)

Is that all, you ask? By no means!

Once I'm done with this post, I have a choice of activities: new screen for printing, finishing the baby hat I started work on

(though it's still not dry from blocking...so I guess that's more of a non-choice) finishing a pair of gloves for my mom, or the pair I started working on at Steph's last night, writing up patterns, making a mix cd, and a finally taking care of a whole slew of photo editing activities...

Let's just hope the rain keeps coming so I wind up feeling like a curmudgeonly shut in.

Finally!

2010-01-17T12:45:00.000-08:00

What a funny weekend I'm having. Everything outside is gray and rainy, perfect weather to do nothing in, but I'm being exceptionally (well, not exceptionally, but very) productive today. I got up and out of the house by 10:30, then went to the grocery store and restocked my fridge (with a new non-dairy diet I'm trying out. I bought vanilla soy milk as a substitute for cream in my coffee--the coffee thing being a whole 'nother story featuring quitting caffeinated coffee only to feel relatively disappointed by the taste quality of decaf and then wondering whether it was worth it to even try finding a cream sub or if I should just call it a day with bean-related beverages--and very warily took my first sip only to find I actually prefer it to the way cream made the coffee taste. This is just a long-winded way of recommending that anyone who's been considering switching go ahead and do so. I don't know what I think about using vanilla soy on cereal, but it's definitely a coffee win) and FINALLY managed to screen some Team Awesome shirts.

Part of me wants to keep the image from the rest of Team Awesome until I can show them in person, but since most of them don't read this blog anyways I guess it's safe to post images (Hi, Stephanie and Nnekay!).

So here are some photos of the set-up process.

This is the screen. It's a simple idea, accented by the little unicorn icon (points to you if you recognize its source).

Impressions of screen printing thus far are:

This has lots of speed potential as far as producing many things in a short period of time goes (with lots of set up and a good financial investment...)

Fabric ink is a lot thicker than I thought

and

This is something I need to practice at.

I started with a shirt that Steph gave me because it was a broken in, not-anybody's-favorite kind of shirt and I didn't think Steph would be angry if I completely botched the print.

It came out pretty well, though I think I used too much ink on it (especially, in retrospect, since it's such thin fabric). Second I printed the long sleeved shirt I got on sale at Old Navy for $3. This one came out the best. Third I printed the thing I was most interested in getting right, a gray sweatshirt for me. It came out the wonkiest, but I kind of expected it to be the hardest to print on because it was the only thing that didn't lie flat (I was screening over a zipper). This was also the moment that the screen decided to bleed from the edges (I'm sure a common occurrence with brand new screens) so the print wound up with a couple stray lines on its sides (that I think I managed to wipe off with a wet sponge).

When I finished (took about 10 minutes to screen all three shirts) I put them on the ironing board to dry, where they will hang out for the next 24 hours.

Here are the finished shirts.

And the blue one, solo.

I'm glad that I finally got it together to really work on this craft. I had another graphic idea (also finally) so I might spend some time working on that today as well.

In knitting news, a lady convo'd me on Etsy to ask whether I had any patterns for gloves that featured cables. I wrote back to let her know I did indeed, though it's not written up yet (formally, that is. I can't send out the mess that is a pattern written for my personal use or it would make zero sense--abbreviation central, and not just the standard ones). I finished this pattern months ago but haven't bothered writing it up so I'm going to use this as a reason to push myself into action.

Here's those gloves:

Lastly, I'm working on a pattern for a baby hat. I'm almost finished knitting it, but as I was falling asleep last night I kept thinking about how I don't like to top so I think I'm going to have to rip it out and re-do that part. Will post photos when it's done.

Alright, time to continue this day of productivity (so I can have a night of unproductivity).

A Few of My Favorite Things

2010-01-14T14:28:00.000-08:00

Today being my day off I've devoted myself to non-work-related pursuits. I put some laundry away, remade the bed with new sheets, and mended a few clothing items that have been in dire need of help.

I also spent about 2 hours on ebay. It's ridiculous, but once it occurs to you to look for one thing, that process reminds you of 8 other things you meant to look for, and then eventually you find yourself still unshowered at 12:30 pm and searching for things you had no idea you even knew existed.

When I was in college I used ebay one year to do all my Christmas shopping. It was SO incredibly easy, especially compared to the other options (braving the Boston winter to head to some lame mall and wander aimlessly beneath fluorescent lighting only to come home empty handed and smelling of Cinnabons being the least appealing yet most likely contender) and during the course of browsing for others I also came upon what remains the coolest, most awesome piece of jewelry I've ever owned: a ring made of 3/4 inch long gold hatched lines with two silver butterflies perched on them at varied angles.

It's impossible to describe accurately (especially when you can't think of the right words, and aren't sure that "hatched lines" are a thing...) and unfortunately I can't post a photo of it because I either left it on a Boston sink or at an ex's house--in other words, it's gone 4 eva. Since losing that ring I vacillate between feeling resigned to the loss, hoping it's hiding in some still-unpacked box at my parents' house, and trolling the web to try and find it.

This leads me to my post subject: some of my favorite Etsy finds. I love to look at stuff on Etsy, and this holiday season I got to do a lot of browsing (most of my gifts, at least for my mom, came off the site) but no buying for myself, which meant marking a lot of things as favorites to hang on to for later.

Since I'm not doing any crafting at the moment (was going to screen print, finally!, today before re-reading the instructions and deciding I should follow them, which means pre-washing the shirts I bought at Old Navy last week...) I might as well share other people's crafts. Many are sold out, but I've linked each photo to the creator's store.

Enjoy!

Adorable Red Glass Cupcake Ornament with White Frosting and Silver Sprinkles by Kiwi and Kiki

Sylvan Lace Ring by Nurit Design

Bordeaux Cocoon Scarf with Flower Broach by Knittingshop

Whole Lotta Love Three Heart Set by Red Hot Pottery

Butterfly Tattoo Stockings by Tattoo Socks

Custom Wedding Cake Topper - Hand Sculpted and Painted Owls by Red Light Studio

Hot Air Balloon Necklace by Regal Rose

Unicorn Vintage Porcelain Gold Scroll Cuff Bracelet by Retro Atomic

and because I'm a total nerd,

Halo Xbox 360 Master Chief Adjustable Ring by Plastic Paradox

T-Shirty Goodness

2010-01-11T22:38:00.000-08:00

After the crazy busy-ness of the holiday season I needed some time to decompress, which is really just a euphemistic way of describing a weekend of utter inactivity. It's been tough to motivate myself to get back into the swing of things, especially when I'm not really sure what swing I'm most interested in.

I did finally unpack the screen printing equipment last week, and I even made my first screen (which will possibly go into use tomorrow, or maybe Thursday if this lazy mood continues) which is a Team Awesome graphic that's just for fun. But I've also been faced now with the question of what I want to print, and since I've never really considered it before it's taking a long time to figure out.

Mostly I'm overcome with a longing for change, which I think is part of the reason I'm having so much trouble working on the same things I've been working on for so many months. This is not to say, by any means, that I'm sick of knitting and pattern writing--I'm not, and I have every intention of continuing to toy with them. I guess this is just the time of year that I start feeling existentially bored--though for the first time since returning to California what I feel isn't so much boredom as desire. I want something, but I don't know what. Anyhow, this is really just my long winded way of explaining why the blogging and shop updating has been slow for the past 2 weeks, and (I suppose) to excuse myself for taking another few weeks to really get cracking again.

I do have a few fun projects in the works, and hopefully I'll be able to come up with more challenging ones in the days to come. For now, here's a teaser of the Team Awesome screen:

I screen, you screen...

2010-01-05T11:22:00.000-08:00

Resuming the normal day-to-day activities after a long vacation with a visiting friend is really, really hard. My buddy Pj flew out from New York the day after Christmas and spent a gluttonous week and a half with me and my friends. It was great, but now I'm having trouble getting back into the swing of things--or rather, I feel very unmotivated to get back into the swing of things. Add to that the little cold I think I picked up over the weekend and you have a double dose of not-wanting-to-do-anything.

Luckily I happen to be very good at forcing myself to do things even when I don't want to do them, which is why this morning finds me working on a pair of Rococo Gloves knit with some of the new yarn I bought over the holidays.

Ebay yarn sales are a wonderful thing, but I need to be careful or I'll wind up with no money and a lot of bamboo yarn. Check out what I managed to amass in just thirty minutes of browsing:

3 balls of Norma Jean Idol Berroco Metallic Yarn

Six balls of 60/40 split bamboo and cotton yarn in turquoise, green, and plum.

And 11 skeins of hand dyed wool.

Should be enough to keep me busy through at least a few craft nights.

But I also have my newest project, screen printing. This morning I finally opened up the screening kit I got for my birthday and laid everything out on the new counter work-space. When I finish this post I'm going to go watch the instructional dvd and have another cup of tea, and we'll see if I actually attempt to screen anything today. I left my camera battery charging at work, though, so I have limited means of catching pictures of what I'm sure is going to be an at least sometimes amusing learning process.

Wish me luck!

Craftastrophe

2009-12-22T19:29:00.000-08:00

It's weird when your job is the least stressful part of your day. This morning I woke up fully conscious of all the things I wanted to get done before coaching at 3:30, but my bed was so warm and cozy it made leaving it really undesirable. I finally managed to motivate myself out from under the covers at 9:30, and then the busy part of the day began.

I started by finishing the last part of the pair of Lily's Gloves that was ordered through the Etsy shop last week (yay, strangers!). Luckily I'd completed the second glove the night before (at 2am...) and only had the thumb to do; I quickly took care of that and packaged up the pair (the first to go out featuring not only a Brisk business card, but two Brisk buttons as well!).

Finished Glove

After dropping the gloves by the post office, I finally started on an errand I've been planning for the past month: craft space revision.

My mother asked what I wanted for my birthday this year (it was yesterday--hello, 29!) and I told her I wanted to learn to screen print, so last night I got all my screen printing materials and some books on how to use them. Unfortunately, my craft area (thus far limited to knitting and sewing, yet still straining to contain all of those materials) has been getting increasingly cluttered and I knew there was no way I'd be able to add another activity in its current state.

See for yourself:

Originally I'd planned on getting a table and a set of drawers to go under it, but over the course of my day (browsing the many Alameda thrift stores) I concluded a simple dresser was a better bet and eventually settled on a reasonably priced three-drawer piece from the Salvation Army. I traded my comfy Nissan for Mom's cargo-loadable Honda Fit and hauled it over.

And then the fun started. And by fun I mean long process of completely rearranging everything in my crafting area. It was kind of a craftastrophe (badump bum).

Here's some photos of the rearranging process. My strategy was basically to throw everything into the middle of the living room while I moved furniture around.

It was a little daunting, but the nice thing about growing older is being better able to predict the outcomes of your endeavors--this is not the first time I've thrown everything in the house onto the living room floor, and I'm sure it won't be the last, so in spite of the length of time it took I had every confidence that I would eventually get things back into a nice, neat order.

And I did! It came together really well and I'm really pleased with the results, though I don't think the new space will suffice for very long. I will probably have to get rid of some things to expand my craft space further, but until that happens I think this will do.

New cuter craft space.

Once I had all that sorted I headed to the gym. I taught a super cute beginner girls class that had two whole students and we mostly worked on a really fun bar skill, a sole circle dismount, that was my favorite thing to do on bars as a kid. Then I spent a leisurely hour trying (but ultimately failing, thanks to our decaying office technology) to make a thank you card, and then I left early to come home.

Tonight I'm hoping to finish up the last part of my Christmas gift knitting and maybe wrap some things for some special people in my life. Tomorrow is my last day of work at the gym until January and I look forward to a nice break that will allow me to test the limits of my new craft space.

The Brisk Catalog

2009-12-15T11:49:00.000-08:00

This is a catalog of all the Brisk patterns available on a knit-to-order basis. While listings in my Etsy shop will expire or sell out, you will always be able to view and order from the entire catalog here. For more information about ordering, contact me at BriskKnits@gmail.com.

Timeless Gloves

Paparazzi Gloves

Mary's Gloves

Marin's Gloves

Aimee's Gloves

Chessboard Gloves

Colombe Gloves

Stephanie's Gloves

Amanda's Gloves

Heather's Gloves

Nnekay's Gloves

Lily's Gloves

Katey's Gloves

Nosegay Gloves

Fenambosy Gloves

Hinoki Gloves

Rombo Gloves

Leia's Gloves

Melody Gloves

Rococo Gloves

Tsuga Gloves

Phoenix Gloves

Ceylon Gloves

Check back often--gloves will be added to the catalog as they're listed in the Etsy shop!

Thanks, Facebook Fans!

2009-12-15T00:03:00.000-08:00

This will be a quick post, again.

Tonight I spent a long time gift-knitting, but amazingly finished relatively early (11:30pm) and decided to spend a little quality time with the computer before bed. Of course this meant checking the Etsy account, and lo and behold what did I discover but another sale! Yay! This time it was Lily's Gloves

--a pair that Heather bought at the last craft night, which means I have an additional knitting project to lump in with all the other holiday things I've been working on. But I can't complain, because it's really exciting when I open my Etsy account and see that something's been sold.

Also exciting (though totally dorky) is that I managed to convince everyone on Facebook to suggest the Brisk fan page to enough of their friends that I'm up to 102 fans, which means I get to change the url to something easy to remember. Instead of www.facebook.com/randomstringofnumbersandletters&:32978jdjioadna.d209482 (or whatever) I can now direct folks to www.facebook.com/BriskKnits. *Kind of* awesome.

Alright, time to go and post on one of my other blogs...

Craftastic!

2009-12-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

I feel like this post should be an ode-to-busy-ness. I've been really busy lately, specifically with trying to knit all the special orders people have requested for Christmas, and with my own Christmas gift projects. I finished up the pair of gloves for Elizabeth, though I forgot to take a photo of them before dropping them by my mom's place (where Liz takes piano lessons). Hopefully they fit her (fingers crossed)--I brought them to the gym and tried them on another kid to make sure they were approximately child-sized. Assuming they do fit, I'll try to snag a photo and post it later.

Apart from Christmas knitting, I'm also in the midst of Christmas and birthday other-crafting. Today is my step-dad Jim's birthday and he's incredibly difficult to shop for. My mom and Jim have pretty much everything they need at this point, and our family makes a concerted effort not to buy pointless gifts for one another, but that being the case finding something that is neither stupid nor a duplicate of something else is really, really tough.

Luckily, I am a genius.

My parents leave lots of notes for each other, but they're usually post its on the bathroom mirror, so it occurred to me to make Jim a custom note board. I bought a frame and some cork from Office Max and tailored the one to fit the other. I also got some giant push pins that I personalized with photos of the family.

This is what I've spent the past few hours working on, but it was worth it. He'll like and use it, and it's unique, and not (for once) chocolate-related.

In progress...

Land of the push pin faces...

Voila!

Sold!

2009-12-04T10:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I brought my glove inventory over to my mother's house and she bought about half of it (spoiler alert: if you know my mom, you're probably getting some gloves this Christmas). On the one hand I'm really happy to have sold so many pairs, and that they'll be going off around the country to spread the glovey word, but on the other hand does it count as success when you're primarily selling to your mother?

Kidding aside, I'm sure most businesses depend heavily on moms (and dads, and friends) for their first year at least, and without all of the awesome people supporting this endeavor I'd be having a lot less fun doing it.

At last night's craft-night I took some photos of Mary wearing the three new pairs of gloves I'd finished, then forgot my (dwindling) glove stock at Adam and Stephanie's, so now I can't list the gloves on etsy because I can't finish taking the pictures of them. D'oh.

Instead, I'm going to finish up my first pair of child-size gloves, Marin's Gloves in light purple for Elizabeth, a newly-turned 10 year old gymnast of mine, and one of the most awesome people I know.

Elizabeth and Nicole (also awesome)

This weekend is our last gymnastics meet--Level 4 State Championships--and it's both fantastic and weird. Every time a competitive season starts (in August) I'm reminded (more and more heavily with each passing year) that it'll be over in a flash, and every time we get to December I remark on how true that feeling was. But as weird as it is to be finishing the season, it also means that now I get my weekends back, and we get to do more inventive things with the kids during workout (instead of just practicing routines all the time).

With that, I'm going to head back to the couch and finish Elizabeth's first glove. I took measurements of her hand but I never trust numbers on paper, I have to see the glove on her to decide whether the pattern is right or not. Maybe when they're done I can get her to join the Brisk models on the etsy page.

Yummy Sensibilities

2009-12-03T00:26:00.000-08:00

I can't decide if it's a good thing or a bad thing that the past few days I've been very distracted, thinking about the projects I want to start working on. Yesterday I stopped by the Alameda Yarn Co., where I usually go for my yarn needs, and picked up two skeins of lovely Peruvian wool--one in black for two pairs of gloves that will go to my aunt Karen in Virginia, and the other in a light green to make a present for a friend of mine.

Here's the green yarn:

Tonight I knit the first glove for one of my aunt's pairs. The pattern worked pretty well and when I finish this post I'm going to type it up and add it to my personal book of finished (and verified as functioning) patterns.

Here's the glove:

When I first started writing patterns I went on this extended binge where I just wrote and wrote and wrote. Now I have these two mini-notebooks full of patterns--I'd guess about 200 in all--and I'm slowly plugging away at them. Sometimes they work perfectly on the first try, and other times I have to edit them and re-edit them and even re-re-edit them. A few prove to be completely non-functioning and need to be totally rethought (those are the least fun to get halfway through and then have to unravel).

A few weeks ago one of the notebooks completely broke in half, and I decided that I should probably invest in a sturdier format for pattern storage (beyond my computer files, which I maintain pretty diligently) so I wound up with a lovely 5 x 8 binder full of relatively professional looking instructions, and I'm excited to fill it with even more. I have about three patterns I can transcribe from the messy handwritten versions, and that's what I'll be doing once I finish this post.

Completely unrelatedly, since last week was Thanksgiving my parents packaged up a good deal of left over turkey and cranberry sauce for me, on which I've been living pretty steadily since. Yesterday I made the most beautiful looking (and tasting) sandwich ever, and my inner foodie came out and snapped this photo:

Chalk it up to my "yummy sensibilities."

Buttons!

2009-12-01T11:41:00.000-08:00

I spent the last few hours finishing some button designs and then ordered a batch from www.punkit.com. It seemed like a pretty decent deal--$23 flat for 100 buttons, and you can use up to five designs in a single order.

So here's the final photos:

I also finished up the black pair of gloves I posted a hint about yesterday, but I'm still not sure what I want to do with them so I'm going to keep them to myself for now.

Craft night is Thursday so I think I'll spend some time knitting this afternoon in the hopes that I'll finish at least another pair by then (because craft night is where the models are...).

New Projects

2009-11-30T10:03:00.000-08:00

I have a lot to get to this morning, but after such a long weekend of lazy indulgence I wanted to write at least a small update.

I got a reply from my custom orderer, Spolivka, who bought a pair of Marin's Gloves in yellow. He was very complimentary and said, "They fit her perfectly!" Yay! So happy to hear.

Stephanie and I had a good time playing with gender roles last night discussing some new knitting ideas I had while our respective male counterparts played Left 4 Dead 2 on my Xbox (then had fun reversing those roles while she and I shot up zombies and Adam tried to teach himself to knit. We were ultimately more successful, as Adam gave up after the cast-on).

We were discussing the two library books I picked up this weekend and plan on delving into over the next few days. Mostly I'm toying with some designs that depend less on the stitch pattern and more on shaping. I don't want to post the whole image yet (because it will probably turn into a gift for someone special...) but I here's a hint:

and another:

And last but not least, I took a bunch of button photos and will be working on producing them within the coming days. Adam's button guy is on tour with Megadeth for the next 2 weeks so I might have to go with another company for a first batch so I can get them out right away. All this and more to come, so check back soon.

Spreading the Love

2009-11-26T09:57:00.001-08:00

Self promotion is hard. Anyone who's done what I'm in the process of doing--opening an online shop and trying to get it off the ground--can probably testify to that. I'm not even really sure how people manage it, apart from lucking into the favor of the cool kids--the weloveindies and cuteables of the world--but I'm determined to persevere.

This morning my projects will include the terminally unfun (thus far) self-promotion attempts (though at least they don't involve standing on the corner spinning a giant cardboard arrow with my business name on it...yet) and the more fun flier and button designing.

My buddy Adam paints and writes zines and was in bands, and he makes buttons for all of those things. He and his wife, the awesome Stephanie (hi, Stephanie!) even made buttons for their wedding last year. I like buttons, so I want to make some buttons for Brisk. I'm toying with a few design ideas--some will feature photos, others will hopefully feature drawings by Adam--and I'm actually looking forward to working on that today.

My mom is a pianist and I almost think that even if it wasn't my endeavor, she'd be all about the fingerless gloves. She plays gigs outside sometimes and always says that the gloves I made her are perfect for played in colder weather because she can still use her fingers, and she's intent on spreading the word to the Bay Area piano player community. She asked me to make a flier to hang in her piano studio, and I'm less excited to attack that project, but help is help and I'm not going to refuse it. I've been trying to figure out how useful flier promotion is these days. Does anyone really check out the wall next to the Starbucks pick up counter? I'm not sure whether it's worth my while to try and make a few extra fliers and put them out...but again, help is help, and it can't hurt.

Blog Now Open!

2009-11-24T13:59:00.000-08:00

This is the third blog I've created.

For someone so theoretically anti-blogging, this is entirely too amusing. However, only a fool would open an online business and fail to take advantage of the blog-o-sphere--and Momma didn't raise no fool.

Hopefully this blog can contribute something interesting and not just serve as yet another place-filler in the blogger world. We'll have to wait and see, I suppose. Look forward to posts about upcoming plans and projects for my etsy shop, Brisk, and other unplanned non sequiturs.