She works hard for the money

Hey, everyone! I just made my first Etsy sale! Got a void in your life that can only be filled with handmade baby goods? Know someone who is pregnant? (Don't we all?) Check it out! I've got hands sewn reusable baby wipes (which could also be used as cloth napkins of any sort), fleece diaper covers, and baby-sized pants with more on the way.

What I did on my weekend vacation

This past weekend I went to the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival. There were sheep. There was wool. There were also alpacas, llamas, goats, rabbits, and border collies. I enjoyed looking all all the fibers in their various stages of processing, from being attached to the animals, to being sheared, picked, dyed, spun, and knitted. Meeting people who do the sheering, dying, spinning, etc, was also pretty cool. I only bought two skeins of yarn: one intended (the wool below) and one impulse (the silk).

Besides the festival, I enjoyed a bean and cheese burrito. Mmmmm... even mediocre Mexican food tastes amazing when you come from the land of Quebec. I really like being in Burlington, Vermont. Being a college town, and this being the beginning of the school year, we did see some stupid college kids, but compared to many other college towns I've visited or lived in during the same time of year, the Catamounts were overall a very tolerable bunch.

Were we to leave Montreal, Burlington would be my first pick. I haven't spent a good amount of time in any of the rest of Vermont, so perhaps there are other places in the same state I would like just as well. Burlington has a nice small town feel, like there is a strong sense of community there. It's nice and laid-back and pleasingly hippy. I know Matt is against living in a hippy town. As leftist as he can sometimes appear, he actually has a deep dislike of hippies (you'll have to ask him what his definition of a hippy is since some might think he is married to one) and is disgusted with liberals. It can be trying for me sometimes. The anti-hippy part, not the anti-liberals part.

I'll leave you with some photos.


Sunset on Lake Champlain


An alpaca


Cormo wool yarn from Foxhill Farms in Lee, MA. One of the sheep who contributed some fleece to this skein is named Carabee.


Silk yarn

You can see many more pictures in the couple of blog posts the lovely Ariadne ladies have posted recently.

Stormie style

My friends Abby and Larry recently had a little baby named Stormie. I crocheted her the Fine Lines jumpsuit/romper thing from Candy Babies. It turned out pretty cute, although I do have a few issues with it. One is that I used cotton/acrylic yarn instead of just cotton. Stupid me didn't read the label closely enough. It ended up kind of heavy and not as soft as I had hoped. And of course, plain old single crochets all the way through are so boring and kind of ugly to look at. Why can't crochet look and feel as nice as knitting? Why???

My first sock ever!

One down, one to go. For all you yarn junkies out there, the yarn is Opal Flamingo.

Done, done and done!

This morning, I finished the baby blanket for Lauren's baby. I could have finished it last night, but as the midnight hour approached, my level of sobriety decreased, and I thought it wiser to finish up in the morning. I guess it works out better this way since I finished the blanket in 2007, and the baby will be born in 2007 too! All in all, this took about four months to finish with a few Christmas presents taking up some of that time too. I started it in the car on the way to a canoe trip on the Niagua River in Missouri this June and finished it this morning on the couch here in Montreal. I also worked on it on a few different Greyhound buses on trips to Vermont and Boston. I'd say it's a well traveled blanket. I'll be sad to see it go, but we had a good time together, and now I know that I can easily make another with fewer mistakes in it. (Don't tell Lauren about that last part.)