Berry Baby Hat

I have a pen pal in Sweden, Eva, who's pregnant with her first baby which, of course, means a handmade present from me. One of the projects on my list of things I want to make (a very long list at that) was a Berry hat that my friend Mary told me about. It's a great little hat and I highly recommend it if you're looking for a hat to knit for a baby. It's really easy to make and you can get it done in no time at all since it's so small. It's also a great way to use up some extra yarn because it doesn't take much to make it, especially for the top part.

I wanted to make one in the colors of the Swedish flag, but the blue ended up being way darker than I realized when I ordered it. Just as I was finishing the hat, Chris asked me "Why are you making a hat in Michigan colors?" For Ohio State fans, it's pretty odd to be making something that looks like it's for University of Michigan. He let me off the hook when I told him it was supposed to be the Swedish flag.

Since the first hat didn't have the colors I wanted (and since it was such a quick project), I decided to make another one out of yellow and gray just because I like that color combination. They're also gender neutral which is a plus because I don't know if she's having a boy or a girl yet. I hope she likes them!

Pour Moi

I haven't been working on too many projects lately that I can post about, but I did finish up a project last night that I can share since I made it for myself. :)

I used this pattern once before which started out horribly. I'm happy to report things went very smoothly this time although I'm still not sure how I feel about the pattern. There's something a little awkward about the way the lining fits and I think the straps are a little wide given their length. I'm going to try this out at least one more time, mainly because I already have some of the fabric cut given the issues I had the first go round. I'll adjust the straps and think about what I can do with the lining.

What I do love about the pattern are the pleats and the band at the top. The original pattern calls for making the outside all one color, but I really like mixing up the fabrics. Fabrics which I LOVE by the way. They're a bit summery for this time of year (since I intended to make the purse months ago), but I love them. I think the green and white polka dots are a perfect match for the Amy Butler print, if I do say so myself.

Bigger and Better

I already felt fortunate to have a craft room in our old house, but now I have an even bigger and better one that is finally what I will consider to be done. I painted it back in June with some bargain bin paint I got at Lowe's, but for some reason, it took me forever to finish it off. That was partly due to waiting for our old house to sell to get the rest of the furniture for it, but we had that in August. Finally, last week I hung all the stuff that had been sitting around, got things organized and now it is fantabulous.

I have a nice big craft table that the previous homeowners conveniently left behind. A little bit of paint, and it fits right in! Chris found an extra leaf for it in the basement so it's even bigger than I first thought it would be. I really love it because I have enough space to cut fabric without having to move my sewing machine out of the way.

I have room to leave my ironing board set up all the time. Nak, you know how much I hate ironing but it isn't nearly as bad when things are always out and ready to go!

I have my fabulous bookshelves that need some filling because now I have bookshelves in my dining room that hold most of my books. It's been a long time since I've had more shelves than books!

I even have plenty of floor space leftover to do yoga!

One of my favorite new things in the room is this fabulous thread organizer! I got it last week and I can't even tell you how much a $10 (with coupon) organizer from Joann makes me. I had a clear plastic container that the spools sat in before but it's so much more convenient having them hanging on the wall right there. And if I fill it up, I have room to hang more!

I have been creating things in this wonderful new space, but it's not the time of year when I can show any of them!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Another year older and I don't care because I love my birthday :) I've gotten some great gifts including a couple of handmade items. One is this photo that my parents got me from Rocky Top Studio on Etsy. She has a lot of beautiful photos and I think her mandalas are stunning.

My dear friend, Mary, made me a kidlet which has actually been on my list of things to make.

It's designed to hang on a doorknob, peg, knob, etc and keep all your little things organized. I have no doubt I'll be putting it to use since I do love to be organized. Thanks Mary!

Hope everyone is having a great weekend!

Trees = Good, Fallen Leaves = Bad

I'm a little behind in my posting, but here I am nonetheless with a post about last weekend just in time for this weekend. It was a beautiful weekend here in central Ohio which left lots of time for Chris and me to work on raking and bagging the 8.5 billion leaves in our yard.

That is just one of the piles in our front yard. There were more in the front, more in the back and we already filled a bunch of bags. So far I think we've filled about 20 yard waste bags and a couple of plastic containers. The raking isn't bad but the bagging is HOR-REN-DOUS.

To maximize space in the bags, Chris uses his tried and true method of standing in them to squash the leaves. I'm a little too short to pull that one off so I lean over the bag and push the leaves down time and time again. Did I mention that it's horrendous? We're going to invest in a leaf shredder which should help tremendously but I don't know if we'll have one in time to help much this year.

I at least got out of some of the bagging because I had more bulbs to plant. Don't they look beautiful? :) I don't think there's much yard work more anti-climactic than planting bulbs. Right now it just looks like a freshly turned pile of dirt but I should have lots of pretties come spring. We got more tulips, irises and hyacinths to go with the tulips, crocuses and other assorted bulbs I got earlier this fall. I can't wait to see how they all look in the spring!

Red River Gorge

I finally went through all of my photos so now I can write about the weekend getaway Chris and I took for our first anniversary on Halloween weekend. It was a short 3-day trip, but it was nice to get away for a few days.

We rented a cute little cabin in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky. It's about an hour east of Lexington and very rural. About the only thing there was to do in the area was hike, hike, rock
climb and did I mention hike?

We got there on Friday afternoon and headed to Natural Bridge State Park because it was an absolutely beautiful afternoon. There's a sky lift that you can take to the top of the natural bridge which we decided to do and then hike back down. We didn't realize it was the last weekend the sky lift was open and the woman at the counter said the weekend before there was a 2 1/2 hour wait to get on the sky lift! It was also peak time for the leaves, but that's insane! We didn't see the most gorgeous leaves ever but we also only had to wait for one person to get on the lift in front of us.

We did some hiking around at the top of the mountain and walked along the Lovers Leap path. We couldn't resist taking a pic in front of the sign since it was our anniversary weekend. No leaping done by either of us though. It was a very long way down!

This is the namesake Natural Bridge. It's a natural sandstone arch and has stood for millenia. Unfortunately it wasn't the best time of day to be taking a photo of it because we were looking right into the sun but it was still pretty cool to see.

We climbed to the top of the bridge and my romantic hubby thought to take a pic of our shadows holding hands. Awww, isn't he sweet?? :)

As I mentioned, there wasn't a whole lot to do in the area other than hike. Except that is for HOEDOWN ISLAND. I mean, come on now, how can you not have a fun at a place called Hoedown Island???

I'll tell you. You can't have fun when Hoedown Island is deserted. Yep, that's Hoedown Island in the middle of the photo and sadly, it's deserted. No hoedowns for us...

On Saturday we headed to the Red River Gorge in the Daniel Boone National Forest. There's about a 35 mile route that you can drive through the forest and part of that is through the Nada Tunnel (pronounced Nay-da, not Nahda, as we learned from the locals). It's a 900' tunnel with one-way traffic only that was originally built for a logging company in the early 1900s.

We decided to hike instead of driving all around and let me tell you, it was some of the most intense hiking I've ever done in my life. We took the "Rough Trail". Really, that's it's name and it was seriously rough. It starts out at the bottom of the gorge and winds its way up and down various elevations for about 8 miles. We didn't go the full length, but I think we ended up doing 4-5 miles round trip. I honestly don't think I've ever hiked in an area so densely packed with trees. A lot of were standing, a lot had fallen. We had to walk around a number of them to avoid walking through creeks and streams and we both ended up in the water once or twice.

We didn't have much daylight left after hiking the Rough Trail (we got a late start because it was raining all morning) but did make a short trip to see the suspension bridge. It was cool although I DID NOT like when Chris bounced up and down making the whole bridge shake.

Our final adventure happened overnight on Saturday. It was about 2 or 3 in the morning and I woke up to this crackling, rustling sound. It didn't really register at first and then I realized it was coming from the kitchen area. It sounded kind of like something rustling around in a cellophane wrapper. A noise that I most definitely should not have been hearing because Chris and I were alone to the best of our knowledge.

I woke Chris up and he heard the noise, but it didn't really register with him at first either. We do own two dogs and a cat so late night noises wouldn't normally be that strange. I reminded him that we did NOT in fact have any pets with us. Big wimp that I am, I wouldn't get out of bed to see what it was. Chris, big wimp that he is, got out of bed, but was too afraid to go out into the kitchen to see what it was. We couldn't turn any lights on in that area without actually going into that area so Chris took the bedroom lamp and leaned out the bedroom door to get a look at things. He could see the kitchen table with some food that we'd bought on it untouched but we could also still hear the rustling. He banged on the wall a few times and the noise stopped momentarily. Then it started up again so he BANGED the bedroom door shut and the noise stopped for good. We were both still too wimpy to go out and see if anything was out there so he closed the bedroom door and we went back to sleep.

The really odd part is that we couldn't find evidence of ANYTHING in the morning. No food was missing, no packaging was torn. It was completey bizarre but we definitely heard something inside overnight.

There you have it, our big Kentucky adventure.

Lightroom

While I love photography and technology, I have to admit that I’m lagging behind when it comes to my photo editing software. I use Photoshop 7 and I honestly cannot tell you how long it’s been since it was released (I quickly checked online but couldn’t find an answer). It’s served me well over the years, but it is starting to become a pain because I know there are inexpensive and even free programs available today that make editing photos much quicker and easier.

I’ve been browsing around and decided that I wanted to upgrade to Adobe Lightroom 2. Photoshop CS4 is too much money to spend considering that I don’t use most of the capabilities in 7. I downloaded a trial version of Lightroom last night to try out and I think it’s too much for me! I feel like an old fuddy duddy, but it seems like too much information to absorb. The thing I liked about the advertising for it was their tagline of spending more time behind the camera and less time at the computer, but I think the learning curve is going to be so high that I’ll be spending a lot of time at the computer. Just about all of my photos benefit from a little editing, but I don’t want to spend a ton of time with photo editing software. I know some people really enjoy that, but I'm not one of those people.

The basics like cropping and adjusting colors are fairly intuitive, but they have this whole cataloguing system for saving your photos that I’m not really interested in. I was reading about it online today and there’s a >20 minute video tutorial about it! I’m someone who hates reading instructions and I don’t have any desire to spend that much time learning about a cataloguing system. I have a very easy system of putting original files in one folder, saving duplicates that I edit in another and that’s it. Takes me all of a few seconds to put things where I want them. I couldn't even figure out where my photos were saving last night. I have this new Lightroom folder that has half a bajillion subfolders and I still couldn't find a jpeg amongst them. Granted, I didn't try that hard, but I don't want to!

I also don't like that a large portion of my screen is filled up with various toolbars, bridges and boxes. You can minimize them, but it’s kind of a hassle. I’m sure it wouldn’t be a big deal if I was using a big fancy monitor, but I have a laptop with a 17” widescreen and I don’t want to look at a tiny version of my photo. I’ll give it a little more time but I'm not a fan.

Has anyone use and loved it and thinks I'm crazy for not wanting to deal with it? Or do you use something else that you love and suggest?