The riders are doing it, why can't I?

In in news of the TdF, it was an exciting week. Heck, no, not on the course! Two teams were pulled out for positive drug tests and one man (the leader!) was fired by his team and pulled out for suspicious activity! Me, I did a crochet cast off of my pinwheel jacket and started in on the first row of crocheting. My wrist is starting to act up again and at this rate, I will also need some steroids...

Continuing with the Monkey socks

Yes, I keep this sock in my purse. We had a fire drill at work today so Svitlana and I walked ourselves to Starbucks to get a drink and found a nice bench to sit at and wait out the fire drill. I, of course, pulled the sock out of my bag only to find that one of the needles had been pulled out so I spent my time putting the stitches back on the needle before we were able to go back inside.

Hockey fan!

This made me smile on the way home one night. Another hockey fan out in the open:

What is it with all the people from Buffalo? There's a lot of them here in DC!

From earlier this week

Sunday, I was down in Charlottesville taking the amaryllis class with Donna at Studio Baboo. I was incredibly tired but I did remember to take a picture of the new pattern:


Monday night was knitting at Clarendon. I met up with Anne (blogless) and we had dinner and shared this dessert called the Chocolate Coma:

It was REALLY good.

Continuing saga of the beads

My phone rang this morning. I was hoping it was from someone I'd wanted to hear from. Well, sort of. It was someone I wanted to hear from with something I didn't quite want to hear. It was a woman from UPS calling to say that yes, your package was supposed to have gone to Alexandria but we never pulled it off the truck so she just wanted to let me know that it was going back for delivery TO MY HOUSE AGAIN! ARG! Also, they were really sorry for the mistake. Well, I really appreciated the attention to detail and the phone call. So, I told her that if I don't manage to intercept the UPS guy and that package goes back to the shipping office, send it to Alexandria. I came home at lunch on a day when I put more code into production and we had network problems of all sorts to wait for the f-ing UPS man. I don't think he usually receives as excited a greeting as he did today when I opened the door and saw the brown uniform. So FINALLY, I have those beads for the amaryllis...which btw, is life size.

Other general administrative things

This


and this


will be going to etsy Monday night.

Pinwheel Jacket - TdFKAL update

I knit enough to be able to separate out the sleeves on Thursday. I was a bit tired so it took some dedicated alone time at home to be able to do the provisional cast on they had in the instructions:


Yes, it is just a circle clump that's just getting bigger.

More beads that I have forgotten about

So I have a room upstairs in my house that has most of my beads. By most, I'd put that at about 90%. Tomorrow I am going down to Studio Baboo to take the French Beaded Amaryllis class with Donna DeAngelis Dickt. I got a heads up last week that this required 20 hanks of beads for the flower itself. Yes, my jaw did drop to the floor when I saw that. The peony was only 8 hanks of beads. Um, yeah. So I called up to Margola on Monday and ordered myself 3 master hanks of 9/0 3 cuts. 3 master hanks = 30 regular size hanks. Due to the package requiring of an actual human signature and a snafu with those bastards at UPS, I will be getting my beads next Tuesday when someone (probably Helena) signs for them at Bead Obsessions. Yeah...this is AFTER my class. So, I went hunting in my bead stash and found that well, I have about 24 hanks of size 11/0 jet lined ruby, 19 hanks of 3 cut jet lined ruby that looks more like a jet lined topaz, and 20 hanks of this one red, but they're of two different dye lots. I think I'm going to bring them all down with me tomorrow and see if they have another bag to match one of the off dyelots. Those would be the two bags stacked on top of each other in the bottom half of the picture.

I went biking on Sunday!

And took a few pictures. I really really love watching the planes land at National:


And scenes of the DC skyline



This last picture is a picture up King St. To my left is the Starbucks on King St. that's down by the water. I decided to take some Yarn Harlot type pictures but instead of the traveling sock, it would be my bike. This is another one of my favorite things - empty city streets early in the morning before everyone really gets up.

Red glass cab necklace

Red glass cab necklace
Originally uploaded by jyiu7

Mine, mine, all mine!

Chinese tourquoise necklace - finished
Originally uploaded by jyiu7

Chinese tourquoise necklace - finished

I missed free food

I totally missed free ice cream at Haagen Dazs in May! It was free scoops of new flavors! I'll have to put this on the mental free food calendar to check next year! Found it on one of my usual forums. Appropriately, my friend who posted it said, "Judy must be asleep..."

Quick Monday Update

Mystery Stole 3

I've finished the second clue. Yippee! I'll post a picture...tomorrow?

TdF Knit Along, and general TdF thoughts

Gotta love looking at those nice cyclist legs! My Pinwheel Jacket circumference is now more than 24 inches which means I have moved to the 24 inch circs and regular sized needles! Yippee, again! And this first ball is lasting quite a while! I've got about 21 stitches between each marker (8 marker total) and when I get to about 40 stitches between each marker, I can compare it to see if it spans my back so I can seperate out the sleeves. While doing all this, I am watching and enjoying the TdF. There is no clear winner this year but it's still entertaining. I took the bike out yesterday and decided that the bike is going to stay in the car cuz I may be taking a lot of the obsessiveness out while on the bike. I don't think that means that I'll be watching any less of the TdF. Whee!!!

What have I done in the last 7 days?

I started a spiral strap for the red glass cabochon that I have gone and reset. The original necklace was one of my first efforts and the glass piece could fal out very easily:


Then, I started on a new necklace. This one is all for me. Earlier this week, it looked like this:

Now, it looks like this:

I still need to weave in a few ends. I wore this out yesterday without the fringe to get a feel for it and it definitely needed fringe. But as I started putting the fringe on, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. I think it's okay now.

Then there was July 4th. I live here by the nation's capital and work over in Rosslyn, VA in Arlington. My parking spot at work is about 1.5 miles from the Memorial Bridge. The Memorial Bridge is the bridge between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery. So I went to a cookout, and then drove into work with some friends and went down by the river to catch the DC fireworks. The square structure is the Lincoln and the tall thing is the Washington Monument.

I also FINALLY got around to weaving in the ends from the Flower Meadow Shrug. I still don't know how I feel about shrugs, but this one certainly keeps me warm!
 

I've also been chugging away at the Mystery Stole. Clue 2 is pretty easy and it feels like I'm flying through it. I did about 10 rows Friday night and another 16 or so rows yesterday.

And finally...

Tour de France!

Yes, it's that time again when I begin to obsessively watch the Tour de France (TdF). I've even joined the TdF Knit Along and I'll be knitting the Lara Pinwheel Sweater from elann. I got started yesterday with the Prologue:

It's a circle jacket in cotton. I started on dpns and was able to move onto a 16 in circ that I remembered I have. So yeah, watching the TdF makes me want to go ride a bike. So much so that I'm skipping the morning presentation to go out riding by the Potomac! I can watch the Primetime showing :)

Sometimes, one gets a little obsessed

Design and construction. You must understand how to build it, come up with a design that fits your parameters, and then go. It can be a piece of clothing, or a house, or a beaded flower, or software. It doesn't matter. You need to see the vision and understand how it needs to be built first. Then, you can pass go and collect $200.

I've often times complained about a lack of talent in the 2D arts. I can't draw. I have no interest in flat peyote stitch. But you've all see the necklaces and flowers I'll design and make.

For me, it never really seems to be a slow understanding. When it clicks, it clicks and the light bulb turns on bright. That happened this week for me with the OS Commerce software I use on the shopping cart for the flower patterns and the use of CSS. CSS = Cascading Style Sheets.

I've known of this website for a long time. It's called Zen Garden. It's really quite amazing if you go in and dig around. The concept behind it is simple. You have a basic html page, with each section enclosed in a div with an identifier. Using a style sheet and some artistic talent, you can rearrange that page to your heart's desire. It's a call to graphic artists out in the world to learn to use style sheets to really make the technology work for you. You're no longer hardcoding. Today you feel happy, so we'll plug in the happy style sheet. Tomorrow, you feel like crap and you plug in the dark and dreary style sheet. The presentation is different but the contents is the same. We now return to the software model of model/view/controller.

Wow...I'm really having a moment here. I think I need to talk to some computer people a little more. Anyways, go check out Zen Garden. It's really amazing.

With the inspiration and the light bulb in the on position, I started the first step in the makeover of the websites at Judy Yiu Designs. The shop is based on a preexisting template. I hope to make the main website something that is modifiable with CSS, but that will take a little longer as I try to figure out what I want it to look like, and study the various Zen Garden examples some more.

On the eve of another class...

• I'm sitting here wading through the 50 bazillion emails generated from Mystery Stole 3. I have also printed out Chart 2 twice. The first copy was taped together incorrectly...confirming my suspicions that I'm basically useless on a Friday night.


• I'm feeling very clean and exfoliated because I left early this afternoon and went to Sugarhouse Day Spa in Old Town Alexandria and got the Sugar House Scrub. It was my first time for a body scrub and it felt really nice. It's quite amazing that I'm staring at my arms and feel that I can see the difference! One of these days, I would love to go away for a weekend to some spa.


• After the scrub, I went to Bead Obsessions to pick up a couple of things and say hi to Loretta and found out that I've got 5 students in class tomorrow for the intro flowers class and one is even trekking down from Philadelphia! For all of you non east coasters, Philadelphia is something of a 3 hour drive away from DC...maybe 100-150 miles.

Hmm...unfinished things...

I've been entering projects into my ravelry account and I seem to have more unfinished objects than I'd care to. Wait, I think I have weaved the ends into Flaming Moth...and since it's gigantic unblocked, I don't know if I really need to block it. If I block it, I could probably use it as a lap blanket...except for the fact that it's triangular. And then there's Charlotte's Web. I need to add the fringe on and block. Yes, fringe makes the piece. And I've got two socks (Monkey and Grasshopper) on the needles as well as 2 shawls (Maple Leaf and MS3), though in my defense, I can't finish MS3 cuz only the designer, pinklemontwist knows what this thing looks like and she's only given us 1 clue (2nd clue coming soon!). I should go to sleep and stop trying to organize my knitting life.

In trying to relax

I got to dog sit for a couple of hours this weekend. I found out where Braidy's favorite spot in the house is:


I've got floor to ceiling windows in the living room. She's sitting on the back of the couch looking out one window and there's another one behind her.

I had a hard time working through the stole over the weekend but was better able to concentrate yesterday and today. I needed some rest. I finished Clue #1 tonight. Now I await Friday and Clue #2.

Wow

I saw this and went..."Hmm, one could use 2 shawls inspired by peacocks..."