Blue Brontosaurus

I've neglected the blog, as I'm wont to do. Sorry about that. I even have a draft saved from last summer's Artsy Fartsy series, but I'm not going to update that just yet. I promise one of these days I'll finish, but today is not that day. Instead, I want to tell you about something exciting that happened to me this past weekend.

I was disappointed that my finals interfered with MDSW this year, and as always, Stitches South fell just a few weeks before that, so I couldn't attend that, either. So my friend ZC invited me up to visit her just outside of Chicago and go to Stitches Midwest with her. Of course I jumped on that offer! I'd never been to Chicago before, and the only Stitches event I'd attended was South, which is apparently the smallest of the four they hold.

We had a great time at the market Friday. Saturday we were joined by a mutual friend and then followed that with dinner with several people from a certain Ravelry group. I got some ChiaoGoo needles, which I quickly put into use Saturday afternoon and hope to review soon. I also picked up a skein of Cephalopod Yarns Skinny Bugga in Fluorescent Millipede (I might have a slight addiction to Cephalopod. Shhh, don't tell anyone.) and a skein from Twisted Fiber Art, which I'd never seen before. I'm having a hard time deciding what that skein is going to be, so I may just have to design something new for it. It's not the only yarn that needs to have a pattern designed for it, but the other one I'm planning is still in the brewing stages, so we'll see which one comes out first.

Sunday, though. Man, Sunday. When ZC invited me up, I started researching things to do in Chicago. Number one on my list, obviously, was to have some real Chicago-style pizza. I can honestly say that it was fantastic. We even had it with my favorite topping - spinach! But once I found out that Chicago was home to one of my favorite creatures, I just had to go see it. That's how we ended up at The Field Museum.

When we arrived at the museum, I immediately headed to the Evolving Planet area, and its Dinosaur Hall. When we turned a corner and I could see the apatosaurus excelsus through the doorway, I literally could not contain my excitement and began jumping up and down. I had never seen one in person before.

Sorry for the quality, but ZC was covertly snapping pics of my reaction with her iPhone, so this is what you get.

To understand how I felt, imagine falling in love with something at four years old, knowing you can never see a live one, but still loving it fiercely. Imagine planning your future career around it. Yes, at four years old I wanted to be a paleontologist. Now, carry that love with you for 29 more years without ever having set eyes on an actual specimen of the thing you love so much. And then you finally, finally get to come face-to-skull with it.

I was in love.

In awe.

Overcome.

You can tell by the photographs.

At long last, I got to "meet" a brontosaurus. Somehow, I managed not to cry. I'm not sure how. It was touch and go for a minute, there.

I wandered around the Dinosaur Hall for at least a half hour, based on the timestamps of the photos ZC took of me. I could have stayed there all day. ZC's husband pointed out that if I were to take part in one of the "Night at the Museum" events, I wouldn't get any sleep because I'd be staring at the apatosaurus bones all night. He's right. I was entranced by it. In the photo above, you can also see a stegosaurus in the background. That was always my second favorite, followed by the triceratops. The Field's Dinosaur Hall has all of these and more. It was magical.

The Field Museum hypes up SUE, who is "the largest, best-preserved, and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found." But in my opinion, SUE's got nothing on this baby. That's probably just because I never felt any affinity for the T. rex. SUE's pretty cool, after all.

It didn't even occur to me until I was writing this up that my hair is also currently blue. Therefore, you get both the blue and the brontosaurus part of my blog name in one photograph!

I'm just hoping I can keep from crying next year when I am planning to attend Convergence in Rhode Island and make a quick trip over to Connecticut to visit the only specimen that can accurately be called brontosaurus.

Baby Crazy

It seems like these days, everyone I know is procreating. Therefore, I have been subjected to the interesting (and often torturous) chore of gift knitting. Or gift crocheting, as the case may be. You never know whether the parents will appreciate the gift as much as they do store-bought presents, and there's always that chance that they won't let the baby use whatever the handmade item is, even if you tell them that it's machine washable.

This month, I had two different baby showers to attend, so my time was filled with making tiny FOs for homo sapiens WIPs (I guess that should technically be WsIP, but that just looks weird).

For my friend Jacque, who is expecting a girl and has decorated the nursery in black, pink, and white, I made a star-shaped blanket, knowing she'd appreciate the sort of punk girl vibe it gave off.

It wasn't the nicest handmade gift there by any means, but it was made and given with love, and that's what matters, right?

Then, for my cousin's impending boy-child, I made two smaller items. I sort of wanted to keep them both for myself.

I'd had this tiny lion in my queue for a while, but I'm terrible at not wanting to seam things, so I knew if I had a deadline I'd actually do it. He was super simple to make, and I modified the tail slightly to have that little orange poof at the end instead of the yellow loops called for in the pattern.

The other thing I made for my cousin was not as cute, but slightly more interesting.

(pen included for scale)

This was fun to see come together. Knit in strips of varying colors and then seamed together, it achieves its ball-like shape through the interlacing of the pieces. I wasn't too excited about it while knitting it, thinking that surely mine wouldn't come out as well as the ones pictured on Ravelry, but I was pleasantly surprised. It was so easy, and the finished item looks so interesting, that it may just become one of my go-to baby knits.

Now, please, everyone I know: stop having babies so I can knit the things I want to.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty

I've done lace. Cables. Colorwork. Toe-up and top-down socks. But I've never tried double knitting. I've never had a strong desire to learn it, as most one-sided knits are warm enough for me. I live in Tennessee and I tend to run hot anyway. There's no reason for me to want two layers of anything wrapped around me. But now? Now I have a reason to learn double knitting.

For this. My friend Neil designed a kitty blanket, and I have a desperate need to make one for this monster:



If your feline friends need a new nap spot, go download the chart.

MDSW 2012

I, like a lot of knitters and crocheters, am a dedicated user of Ravelry. I post in the forums quite frequently, and the group I spend the most time in is a tight knit - no pun intended - bunch of fiber lovers. So when one of us decided that we should have a get-together around Cinco de Mayo, and that said meetup should be in Maryland, it was sort of like fate. It just so happens that Cinco de Mayo is the same weekend as Maryland Sheep and Wool, and my birthday fell on the same weekend as well.

I drove from Nashville to Baltimore, making a pit stop in Virginia to spend the night at the house of another fantastic member of the group. While not the first time I'd met friends from Ravelry (I attend DragonCon every year and room with a few wonderful Ravelers who I love dearly), this time, it kind of felt like coming home. The people who came to the Cinco de Mayo festivities aren't the people I interact with the most frequently of my Ravelry friends, so it was slightly awkward on my part at first, but I'd gotten into a tiny fender bender (no damage) within 50 yards of my destination, and they greeted me with comforting hugs.

We had dinner that night, and explored Baltimore the next day, and by the end of Friday, it felt like they had always been my friends, more than just faceless usernames on some knitting website. But Saturday? Saturday was where the fun was. We headed out to the fairgrounds, and while I'd been to Stitches South and SAFF, a couple of the others had never been to a fiber festival, and MDSW is in a league of its own.
 
I petted some of the critters.

We saw the fluffiest bunny in existence.

And I both bought yarn and had yarn and fiber (and a bag!) given to me as unexpected birthday presents. I already have plans for some of it.

It was amazing. I got to spend days with these people who have seen me at my best and at my worst, and we were immersed in the thing that had brought us together to begin with. We dined, we drank or abstained, we knitted, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed some more. I never wanted to leave. But of course, all good things must come to an end.

So we packed up our things at the end of the weekend, and everyone went back to their daily lives. Except me. I journeyed further north, to New Jersey, to visit with another bunch of friends from the same group. It wasn't a weekend, so we didn't get to spend as much time together as I'd have liked, but we did hang out a bit and go out to dinner. I found out that they are just as wonderful in real life as they are on the internet, and I definitely want to go back when I can stay longer and everyone can get together for a longer period of time. Two of us who are nail polish addicted even finally - months after we'd first talked about it - got to combine our powers and do manicures to match (my hand is on the right, hers is on the left).

And a week after I left home, I got the chance to go to New York City for the first time, with a non-knitter friend acting as tour guide.

After my whirlwind tour of NYC, where I saw most of the major Manhattan sights in 8 hours, I headed back south the next day, with stops in Baltimore and Virginia for rest, and got home Saturday so that I could spend Mothers Day with my mother and grandmother.

I met so many amazing people during this trip, and I love them all. There are others I've already met, and many more who I want to meet, and each one of them is dear to me. Never let it be said that "internet friends" are not real friends, because they most certainly are.

Sewanee

I have what might be considered an addiction to shawls.  I love them - love planning them, love knitting them, love wearing them.  I wanted to make one to sell at our events at the Craft Center, so I set about designing my own.  Sewanee is the product of that labor, and now I'm not sure I can bear to part with the original.

Hey, Assbutt!

I've been watching a lot of Supernatural lately.  It's got a lot of things I love: clever dialogue, sci-fi creepiness, and amazing actors who pull you in.  So I decided that I needed to write up a dishcloth pattern in honor of this fantastic show, and I now give you my second dishcloth pattern: Hey, Assbutt!