Starting tomorrow!

Today is the last day of June! That means...the No Plastic Challenge starts tomorrow!

For a whole month Matt and I will not purchase anything that has even a smidgen of plastic on it. In our tiny town that is going to be difficult, we don't have a Whole Foods, Trader Joe's or anything similar nearby, just Smith's, Wal*Mart (which we avoid like the plague) and John Brooks. I see quite a bit of fresh fruits and veggies in our future, homemade bread (Matt makes the BEST), homemade tortillas, homemade salsa, eggs and beans, along with a few other neat finds we'll show you on our website.

Please don't hesitate to email us (can be found at the bottom of the homepage) or leave comments on this post for suggestions, questions, hints and tricks or anything else you think might be of interest to us.

Natural Soap

I know I know, "why don't you just get Etsy soap? I'm sure you could find some on there that's all natural and comes in natural, plastic-free packaging"

And yes, I very well could and should, but I just had to show you all this soap that I found. In the grocery store. Who ever thunk that you could find this type of soap in a grocery store? And not a cool Whole Foods or Trader Joes either. Smiths. That's what makes this soap so cool to me, I didn't at all expect to find it, but find it I did.

The packaging is all natural, biodegradable and comes infused with seeds so that you can plant it and flowers grow! That sounds neat to me :) And it smells divine, not all soapy and chemically and gross like other grocery-store-soaps.

Shout Out to Awesome Yarn Company

I order a lot of my yarns online as I do not have a local yarn store within an hour's drive. The company I order from most is probably yarn.com, Webs.
They have an amazing selection, awesome sales, and some of the best customer service I've encountered. The last package I ordered from them I asked to be sent using the least amount of plastic possible as per our No Plastic Challenge (even though the challenge hasn't "officially" started yet), and they did. Instead of sending it in a plastic, waterproof bag wrapped in plastic on the inside, they sent just the yarn and invoice in a cardboard box with minimal tape. How cool is that?

And when the package failed to arrive to me, I emailed them asking what was up and instead of getting some automated message about "standards say to wait yadayada days until we can file a lost form blah blah" I got back a personal message stating that they had checked the tracking number and delivery confirmation and the package had been delivered to my post office the week before (why the post office neglected to tell me this, I may never know).

So, if you are in the market for fabulous yarns at great prices and being able to choose from a huge selection, head on over to yarn.com. I promise you won't be disappointed :)

(if you click on the photos they will take you to the yarn shown ;))

Etsy Finds: ACEO

I've been rather curious about ACEOs recently, I hadnot hear about them till I joined Etsy but I have been seeing quite a few cute, beautiful and/or inspiring ones recently and kind of want to seek out a few to post in my creative space (where that is...) Here are few from Etsy that I found and find intriguing, please feel free to share your own favorites in the comments :)

This guy is AWESOME! Elephants are my absolute favorite animal and this one is definitely one of the coolest I have ever seen. Ever. In my life. So cool. Did you catch that I think he's cool?

This one is gorgeous, just gorgeous. The lines created by the brush's movements, the colors, the theme, all wonderful.

This one I find peaceful and happy, ladybugs always made me happy as a child and still do, they are one of the few bugs that don't weird me out :)

The Enchanted Forest Bag - Finished!

So I finally finished and took pictures of The Enchanted Forest Bag that I mentioned back in this post.

I added D-rings to the straps for a little bit of hardware and a pocket on the inside to hold chapstick, change or keys.

I also have a shrug to be listed sometime in the near future (tomorrow or the next day).

And I finished a Hamster Hammock for Delilah that I am thinking about offering custom colors, shapes and sizes for.

What do you think?

Tutorial: Knitting a Picot Edge

Edgings are great ways to embellish an otherwise ordinary project, or even those projects that aren’t ordinary hehe. There are a few ways to do a picot edge, but today I’m going to show you how to a knitted picot edge in the easiest method that I know how.

To make the edge, you can choose to either begin the project with the picot edging, bind off with the picot edging or pick up an already bound off piece and add the edging. The directions after this point are fairly similar but the first row may be different depending on the project. Either way, make sure you have all of the stitches that you want on your needles for the edge.

Knit two rows in stockinette.

On the next row, yarn over and knit two together across all the stitches

Knit another two rows in stockinette.

This next part I kind of fandangled myself after having done a few edgings the “hard” way where you finish the piece then go back and sew the end of the piece together to make the edge. So instead of that, I bind off (or attach while continuing the work, whichever happens to be part of the project, in this case it is attaching while continuing the project) while sewing the edging in place.

This is done on the purl-side. I go through the front of the stitch on the left hand needle as if I’m about to purl then pick up the equivalent stitch that is on the opposite side of the YO rows where I began the first stockinette row for the edging (in this case the cast-on row) and knit the two together.

If I’m binding off at this time I also incorporate that into the work as the stitches are added to the right hand needle. Do this all across the row and you end up with a nice little detail on the edge of your work.

Did you like this tutorial? Did it make sense? What other tutorials would you like to see in the future?

Blog Banners

I've decided its time for my blog to have a "real" banner.

I created these two and don't know which one I should use, what do you think? The first or the second? Or would you switch the fonts? Or change the font colors? Or do something else entirely?

Trimmings

What do you do when you have that piece that is just....ok. Its nice, its functional, its *almost* cool, but its not...quite....there....yet. You know the piece I'm talking about. You may even have more than one of them (I know I do).

Instead of tearing up the whole thing, or frogging it to shreds in frustration, try adding a trim of some kind.

That way, the bulk of your item stays the same, functional, cool piece you created but its not just *almost* cool anymore, its now super cool!

Don't know what kind of trim to use? Something simple, complicated, lacy, ribbed? Come Monday I will post a tutorial for knitting a picot edge for your *almost* cool piece! This will be the first in a series of edges and trimmings. In order for me to know which edges you would like to see, please leave a comment and I'll do my best to give you what you want!

Calculus

So the first week of of the Summer Semester is over.

Chemistry and Calculus will surely be ruling my days for the next eight weeks and I am not exactly looking forward to it. Hopefully I will get to squeeze in some knitting between all the numbers and relax some in order to keep my sanity before the intense Fall semester I have lined up.

It will all be worth it in the end right?

(as always, clicking on the photos will take you to the item in the shop :))

Kitty

So we have a cat?

Yes, its a question. we didn't mean to get a cat, I'm not sure its "ours" per se, but its not anyone else's either....and its at our place?

It used to be another student's cat, but he left Socorro and couldn't take the cat with him so the cat was living with my friend Zita for a while, but Zita's dog scared her so bad she just stayed in the kitchen cabinets and wouldn't come out unless the dog was gone and didn't trust people or anything. So we decided to let it stay at our place and its amazing the turnaround in her personality.

She doesn't hide in the cabinets and the only time she "hides" at all is during the day or when people come over. She comes out and looks for affection, she mrows and we mrow back and then she mrows back and we have a little conversation, she plays a little, stretches out out in the open, she even woke me up this morning so that I would pet her for twenty minutes before my alarm went off. Oh, and she barked? at my neighbor when he was leaving for work this morning.

Maybe this is all normal behavior for a cat, but I haven't exactly owned one since I was a little girl and even then it was a short period of time.

Fiberful Weekend

So this was a very fibrous weekend for me!

I got some knitting done, handpainted some wonderful alpaca yarn that will be going up in SillyLittleYarns later and finished spinning up that purple roving I've had for ages that will make its appearance sometime this week :)

Also, we made salsa yesterday for the first time, and didn't even have a recipe to follow, we just threw stuff together! We will have the recipe and photos on our website if you'd like to see how you can make salsa without plastic too.

Wine and Cheese

Its no secret. Matt and I LOVE cheese. For Matt, the stinkier the better, for me it can be a little more complicated, the texture makes a big difference as well as the flavor, and finding the perfect cracker to pair it with is also hugely important. Not to mention the wine.


While in Denver we decided to have a Wine-And-Cheese night with some friends, each couple picked out a bottle of wine and a cheese or two. Coincidentally, both couples went to Whole Foods to pick the cheese, but we picked very different cheeses, Matt and I found three small packages of cheese we wanted to try, and they found one large block. We also chose two very different wines, Matt and I chose a red and they chose a white (can't remember the exact types, but our red is in the picture above). The other couple also treated us with a mound of grapes to eat between cheeses to clean and open our palettes :)

Divine.

Orange Creamsicle

The other day my momma asked me to send her friend a phone pouch as a gift from her. I didn't have anything in my stockpile that I thought would suit her needs so yesterday I whipped up this one real quick since it was my day off.

This morning my momma asked for two more, so I see pouches in my future hehe.

No Plastic Challenge!

Remember back in this post where I said that Matt and I would not be buying anything plastic for the month of July? Well we got our website started up! It is: http://noplasticchallenge.com and on it we will post blogstyle how we get through the difficulties of this decision throughout the month. We will also post plastic-free recipes (also meat free as we are vegetarian), and various facts, ideas and articles about how plastic is basically ruining the world. Check it out!

If, by chance, you check it out and it says that its not there or something, thats just because we are updating it, and we will be in the process of updating it over the next....well, months I guess? Just try back in 5 or 10 minutes and it should world :) Look forward to hearing from all of you!!

On a separate wavelength, new beanie in my shop! Great choice for those snowboarders in your life ;)

The Enchanted Forest Bag

After being on vacation and working on custom orders for a while, my shop is looking fairly neglected. This morning I cast on a new project, a bag for my shop!

I am knitting two strands of yarn together, one a dark rich black made from 100% Peruvian Highland Wool and the other a fun and enchanting mixture of colors made from Silk, Kid Mohair and Lamb’s Wool. The bag will be felted when the knitting is done, this will fuse the fibers together and therefore allow nothing in your purse to fall out. It is being knit in a very similar way to the bag that I have been using every day for the past….oh…..three years? It is very durable and I get compliments on it all the time!

So keep an eye on my store for this wonderful bag to make its debut!

**Oh, and on another note, this morning was my first morning 'poo free! Shampoo, of course. Instead of my usual shampoo and conditioner, I opted for baking soda and vinegar, respectively. So far so good, soft, shiny, normal straight thin hair!

Conjoined Fruit

While on vacation last week my beau stumbled upon this unusual piece of fruit.
It is two bananas grown as one. Very strange. I have never seen anything like it before, have you? I mean, conjoined twins, kitties, snakes with two heads and the like, but not fruit! Needless to say, we did not eat it, although it would have been interesting to see what it looked like on the inside...

Oh, and don't forget yesterday's post about changing the world! How do you help in your every day life?

Change the World

I ran across this book the other day window shopping at one of my favorite sites to do so and it sounds intriguing to me.

I try to do what I can to make a difference in the world, especially environmentally speaking. I decided to become vegetarian after hearing about how the production, transportation, treatment and resources needed for meat affect the environment. I don't take new plastic bags at the grocery store, I bring my own. I don't use hazardous cleaning materials, I use baking soda, vinegar, lemons and whatever else I can find around the house.

My boyfriend and I have decided not to buy anything with plastic for the entire month of July. It will be hard since just about everything comes in or with some kind of plastic, but we are planning ahead and making notes and are even going to start a website so we can blog about it with the world!

What do you do to help the environment? Please leave a comment with your helpful hints so other readers can learn new ways as well!

Denver Zoo

So while we were on vacation up in Denver last week, Matt and I decided to go to the zoo. We got there nice and early, didn't have to try too hard to find parking, the day wasn't super hot yet, but oh so many children! Evidently, it was Field-Trip-To-The-Zoo day and the buses just poured children into the enclosure. Minus the shrieks, yells, and general craziness of the kids and the hollaring and corralling of the adults, the trip was fun.

We got to see my favorite animals, elephants and hang out in the sunshine :)