I needed a bit of cheering up today and ended up buying this beautiful red malabrigo yarn. A cheerful cardigan for myself is in order!

I know I’m probably terribly behind the times, but have you seen these?! Embroidered Penguin Classics!

As a graphic designer and a sometime embroiderer I really appreciate the skill behind Jillian Tamaki’s work on these. I love them, they’re beautiful.

Note: I’m having some colour issues between lightroom & exporting for flickr… my original raw file is wonderfully vibrant and accurate, my exported sRGB image is as you see above. While I expect some desaturation, this is the worst I’ve seen and I’m trying to think of a solution as it seems to be mainly confined to the saturation of blues… in the meantime I hope you can take my word that the turquoise is stunningly intense, not the cornflower blue you see above.

Lately colour has been at the center of everything I’ve been creating, designs and knitting and crochet projects. I’ve been particularly attracted to bright and bold combinations of green and blue, and when I received the Tangled Yarns newsletter on Friday I ran in to the shop at closing time to check out their just arrived shipment of Cascade Ultra Pima. I needed to know without delay if the colours were as striking as they appeared… and I’m happy to report the colours are magnificent!

Pima cotton has a beautiful sheen I think mainly due to the extra long staple, it has a slinkiness (technical term ;) and a beautiful drape without (hopefully) being too heavy. I had a project in mind that was practically screaming to be made up in this:

Pinterest

I think it will look fantastic! Or at least be very colourful and comfortable :)

Blooming Flower Cushion by Lucy at Attic24.

I’ve also started the cushion covers to match my ripple blanket, I’ve decided to crochet the Blooming Flower Cushion by Lucy at Attic24.

In fact, I think I’ll get back to it right now!

Have a great week!

Oh my goodness! This lady had some mad origami skills!

Please pop on over to her flickr stream and appreciate them all!

Found via Erin Loechner

I’m in such a creative mood this morning, I want to make and look at colourful objects, my head is bursting full of knitting and sewing pattern ideas. Wouldn’t it be perfect if you could bottle this feeling for when you had the time to take advantage of it?

Let’s hope that work cooperates with my wishes!

I need a little inspiration on this Thursday morning.

You might remember how irritated I was when the Vogue Knitting Magazine app for the iPad was released but was only available to US residents (however failed to mention this in their email announcement)?

I’m very pleased that after receiving another email announcing the app last week I checked again and woo! available to all! I’m even more pleased that they have done a decent job in digitising the magazine (it hasn’t been redesigned specifically for digital viewing), the quality of the pages are very good.

It is a pity that the 360° views are loaded from the Vogue website, they’re helpful and a necessary addition to a digital edition of a magazine. For wifi only iPad users such as myself viewing this away from known networks it was a bit disappointing – I’ve given up hope that QLD Rail will ever install their often talked about wifi network.

There is also no option to print a pattern from the magazine, so I will need to take screen shots and print the pattern pages. I don’t know about you, but I scribble and make notes all over knitting patterns :)

Now for some pretty screen shots!

Again I have to say, what makes this digital magazine release an absolute winner for me is that they have created their own application to easily download and organise magazines. I know many companies aren’t doing this because they take issue with the Apple iTunes system and the method of approving apps etc… but it’s my preference and if a magazine is offering their editions this way I’ll download them.

Do you have an iPad? If you tried any magazine apps that you’d recommend, or even just read about one, drop me a line I’d love to hear about some new ones!

I’ve been given some beautiful house warming presents, and the appearance of a pile of yarn around the same time that just happened to coincide with moving, so I’m calling them house warming presents too, happy days :)

Absolutely beautiful hand screen printed linen tea towel from Maya Muse Textiles (I’ve only just realised this is upside down…)

Wonderful ice cream maker :) This photo shows my first attempt at coconut milk, sugar free ice cream – delicious!

And some yarny goodness – some of which has been bought for me to make sweaters and gifts for other people, and some of it is for me… all the green yarn is for me :)

I spent this morning editing and updating themes and even though I rushed the changes up I’m pleased with how everything is looking.  If you have any problems – funny search results, broken links, missing images – please let me know.

I also started experimenting with silicone mould making… yes, I’m making them in cupcake cases :) More on this project later, but if all goes to plan I’ll have some little resin lovelies to share next week!

Down to the boring bit, putting it all together… this is how I spent a large part of my afternoon, but at least I had some episodes of the Australian version of Who do you think you are? to keep me company.

I’ve never watched this show before and a lot of it is pretty interesting, some of the stories more than others. I took these photos while watching the John Butler episode and that’s my favourite so far, partly because his story is fascinating and partly because he’s obviously just a really nice and genuine person.

So here I am with this stack of hexagons still to join. At least I have found the perfect fabric to line this with, I’ll save more photos until I’ve got it all sewn up (boom boom) :)