Well this is what came out of the washing machine. Everything is nice and dry and my apartment no longer smells like a barn of wet sheep. I am completely in love with the entrelac bags, the colors are just mind blowing. The temptation not to send off the pink/orange one to the fair is huge. I am really pleased with my improvised striped bag. The stripes were set using the Random Stripe Generator . If you haven't played with this nifty program yet, what are you waiting for? And while not being a huge fan of novelty yarns the red cellphone bag with the long fringy eyelash yarn is really growing on me. It has been dubbed the muppet bag.

Felting this batch of little bags has confirmed a suspicion of mine. Knitting and felting swatches is a waste of time. These little guys felted at a far faster rate then the larger bags I have done. Oh, and much smaller, I might add. Some of these came out barely big enough for my flip phone, much less my monster iPod. I am pretty pleased with them, but they could have been a bit bigger...sigh.

This entrelac bag was knit with merino and an interesting novelty yarn. A complete gamble, because the pattern was designed to have the body in wool and have the base, handles and top band in alpaca. The alpaca felts down much more than the wool and gives the bag a slight bubble shape. I didn't quite get the bubble shape, but the bag is still very cool looking. Two of my favorite little purses are here, the stripe one and the brown one. The picture does not do the brown one justice. Labels are all sewn in and the bags are ready to head off for Virginia. Lets hope I make enough money to pay for my bus fare down there.

Mama is a swap-ho

Today started out happy, as I boxed up my aqua and red swap package for Jennifer. It was quite the scavenger hunt around the office looking for bubble wrap, etc. All packed up, in the mail and me, extraordinarily happy that I hadn't done my usual procrastination thing.

Sadly, my day went to crap from there. The second sales meeting that I had planned for this fall was cancelled too. Even though it is through no fault of mine, my Calvinist guilt overcomes me and I had an awful time psyching myself up to deal with the canceling at the hotel. Maybe because our folks had put off signing contracts and hey, the meeting was supposed to be the first week in October. And then there was the merge letter from hell. I have done a million of these, and yet today I ran into issues I had never seen before...boss' signatures that are suddenly in red? Whaaaa?

Enough whining!!!! Cause when I escaped and got home I was plunged back into that happy swap glow. This lovely plump envelope was waiting for me...all the way from Israel. How cool is that? Artemis of course got the right of first sniff and gave the package a complete once over.



Inside was a trove of goodies: cool barrettes (one handmade), candles, Israeli candies, stickers, a bag of itty bitty ladybugs and a big ladybug stamp, spools of ribbon, felt squares, beads, a wee fuzzywuzzy notebook. I think this is the most fun I have ever had with an envelope! The chocolate strawberry candybar will be tonight's first victim...yum. Thank you so much to Ilil for making my first Swap-bot experience such a success!!! I hope that she gets a fab package from her partner.

Oh, and Marissa...you got a lot of postin' to do

Good Times

I have finally jumped into the swap craze. A link to Swap-Bot was on someone's blog as I was cruising the web. Next thing I knew I had gone from a swap virgin to a swap slut...hehehe. See... I should have had sex again before my 42nd birthday, none of this would have happened. Now I am committed to a handful of swaps in the next few weeks. Yow.

My first swap has an aqua and red theme... anything in those two colors. I have been running around acquiring some uber cute objects for my swap partner. While I was putting together my Santas for the Waterford Fair I noticed a bunch of aqua and red scraps in my bag. So I gathered them together and whipped up this little bag for my swap partner. I hope she likes my first swap package!

Two of the other swaps I have signed up for are music swaps. One is a mix CD of cover tunes and the second is a CD of random shuffle music. The cover tune CD has been really fun to put together.

On the topic of music, last night a gang went to World Cafe Live to see the amazingly cool band, Nouvelle Vague (pronounced vog.) They do rockin' covers of 80's new wave to a Bossa Nova-ish beat. They brought the house down with their cover of Bauhaus' Bela Legosi's Dead. Check them out, they're infectious.

Prezzies and Progress

This post is dedicated to Marissa who reminded me at knitting tonight that I was being a very bad blogger. Hey, it was a busy summer and I never seemed to have a good clean surface to photograph on. How could that ever happen?

Any way I am starting off today acknowledging two fab presents from my knitting buddies. Thank you so much Marissa and Sherry, you ROCK!

Marissa brought me back this adorable bag from her vacation in the Phillipines. It makes the best do-dad bag, it already is filled with scissors, a row counter, darning needle, blah blah blah, oh yea, it also fits a set of DPNs.

Which brings me to the fabulous gadget Sherry made for me. She had fashioned these clever point protectors for DPNs. Your needles are kept neatly together and better yet your stiches don't scootch off the needles!

As you can see, there has been some progress on the toe-up socks. They are taking a break though while I knit like a fiend on other things.

In October I am going to be selling some of my handiwork at the Waterford Fair in Virginia. Like a total boob, I miss read the inventory request they sent me. Now I am trying desperately to catch up. There has been a lot of stash reduction, which is a great thing particularly the wee amounts that I cannot bear to throw away. These are some of the smaller cellphone/iPod purses that I have been cranking out. Hopefully they will be popped into the wash this weekend and have the crap shrunk out of them. I am going to have a dining room table full of soggy stinky wool. Yipee.

These happy little fat guys will be Christmas ornaments, also for the fair. Why, oh why, do I procrastinate like this?