wish I was a mermaid

I really really want a pair of these. Then I can really be a mermaid! No matter that I get freaked out holding my breath underwater (I think it must be an asthma thing).

Also, I have a new mermaid phone case :-D I've been eyeing it up for months, and it finally went on sale. (I'm sorry, but $20 for a plastic phone cover? No, thank you. $8.46 is much more reasonable.)

She has a tiny star for a nipple! Love it!

Oh, and I bought most of the new mermaid range from kikki.K. Everyone's mermaids at the moment!

fire in the night scarf

Another sunny day, another distillery photoshoot.

I finished the very soft, very long scarf for Hugh on Saturday night, wove in the ends Sunday morning, and then dragged him out of the apartment to pose for pictures in it!

There were several grumpy faces before he finally smiled. Then there were some more grumpy faces, lol! He's so cute when he tries to be grumpy!

Hugh has been begging me for a Doctor Who-length scarf for ages. I keep buying him really pretty, really expensive wool to make a scarf, and then the scarf ends up too short because I can't afford to buy much. Hugh bought me this wool in Seattle, when he was exploring Capitol Hill one day on his own. It turned out to be the perfect amount for a nice long scarf! It's three skeins of Cascade Yarns Baby Alpaca Chunky Paints, which I assume he spent a fairly significant amount of money on! It's soooo soft and wonderful.

I used the Cinder scarf pattern from Brooklyn Tweed (they have THE MOST BEAUTIFUL knitting patterns you will see ANYWHERE.) I modified the pattern, though, cutting the number of stitches in half because my wool was pretty chunky and it would have been a much wider and shorter scarf. This had the effect of making the cables much more subtle, just curvy bumps along the way, which I really love in the end. I think it was defos the right choice.

finished object: silky salmon hat

You know that GORGEOUS silky, soft, salmony wool that Becky sent me? I made it into a hat. It is now autumn down under, and the weather has been getting a bit cooler. I've been bundling up in the mornings (especially since I leave the house before 7am) and this hat has come in very handy.

 

So has my new Zara puffy vest (with hood and faux-fur collar!), which is my new most favorite possession!

Guess which talented looker made this sign for his work?

Selfies in the car (Hugh was begging me to stop):

Practicing my Blue Steel:

what I'm doing right now

Right now, I am knitting a scarf and catching up on other people's (crafty) blogs.

This is the scarf, though it is now much longer. It is very soft. It will be for my handsome and stylish boyfriend.

That's all I wanted to say. Plenty has been going on lately, but I find it overwhelming to sit down and write about the events of the weekend, etc. This weekend was a particularly big one!

Here in Australia, they do Easter right. You get the day off on Friday, then technically Easter Sunday is a public holiday, too, but because it's a Sunday, and most people don't work anyway, they have to give you the public holiday another day. So you get Monday off as well, a four-day weekend. But for some reason, the universities here give you Tuesday off, too, so I had a five-day weekend!

But's that not all. Easter just so happened to fall this year on the weekend before ANZAC day, which is a day where Australians commemorate the soldiers (known as the Anzacs, or Australian and New Zealand Army Corps), who have fought for their country over the years. It particularly marks the day in 1915 when Australian and New Zealand forces landed in Gallipoli. Australia had not been a sovereign nation for long, and this was the first time Australian soldiers fought in battle as Australians. Many died in the 8-month Battle of Gallipoli, and the young (and vastly unpopulated) nation of Australia felt their loss dearly.

Anyway, all that to say that tomorrow is ANZAC day, a holiday, which means I went to work all of two days this week. A five-day weekend followed by a three-day weekend. And it's good, because I need the three-day weekend to recover from the five-day weekend!

We went to Adelaide for Easter weekend with our friends, James and Emma, and there was lots of wine-tasting, a couple very large sausages, and a rather disturbing incident involving a drunken (and possibly high) cyclist knocking herself unconscious on the side of the road in front of us. Fun times!

That's me, "bitey and an intense, long-lasting sweetness."