On my birthday outing to the craft expo last week I got a ball of sock wool. It’s a very pretty variegated blue, which makes me very happy because finding pretty sock wool is pretty hard around here.

Pretty sock wool = fun project for Becca + new socks for winter. Yay!

So I’ve been poring over patterns, ones that I’ve been saving for months. I wanted a nice pattern but one that wouldn’t get lost in the changing colours of the

I finally landed on Becca Compton’s Vinnland pattern (ravelry).

(knitting and photo by: Bockstark)

This post is way overdue!

Just before my birthday I received an email with the following from my friends Wendy and Renae…

Did you know your birthday’s coming?
Have you ‘happy-birthday-to-me’ been humming?
Well we know it too and we have a surprise
So keep Sunday free for a birthday drive
You won’t know where you’re going
But we’ll bring you home all a-glowing
We’ll pick you up around about 10
And have you back we don’t know when
so YAY! For birthdays, surprises and friends
this poem is now at its end

This in and of itself made me smile the rest of the week.

When my birthday came, they kept the secret right up until we got there, even trying to convince me we were going to a karate expo… it was a nice try, but didn’t quite convince me. We ended up at the Craft Expo and had a wonderful time!

Thought you might like to come along with us…

This is the adorable little train we caught from the car park to the building – cute!

We took a beading glass, made a beautiful bracelet, and bought Renae over to the dark side of jewellery making.

I thought I took more photos during the day, but we were having too much fun flitting from stall to stall! I did, however, take some quick shots of the goodies I bought home…

I could not have had a more wonderful birthday outing!

Bec and I share a birthday, so I’ve made her something for the past two years – but this year it was a race to get it finished.

With the cooler months getting closer (please please please) I thought she could use some gloves for getting to work in the morning. After wading through a ton of patterns (and adding a ridiculous to my “MUST MAKE!” pile, I finally settled (with some help from her mother) on Liz Thompson’s Berry Hill fingerless mittens (free Ravelry download).

While still a relatively quick knit, the cuffs took far longer than I had anticipated – being a twisted rib. Overall, I really liked the pattern, it was easily memorised and very sturdy.

The cuffs where quite long, which I thought would slip nicely under a jacket, but I did add two buttons to jazz it up a bit. Bec’s far more stylish than me, so I thought a little pizazz was in order.

I’ve been a little lapse in the blog updating of late, so here goes with some catch-up.

Week before last the shutterboo challenge was suitcase. Well, I didn’t have a suitcase, so I made do with what I had. Bethany sportingly agreed to be my ‘runaway’ with her rather inadequate suitcase, I stole – er, borrowed – Alex’s camera, and we had a great time shooting from all weird angles. A ton more ended up on my flickr, and I have to say, I’m actually really happy with them.

This is the one I ended up with:

Last week the topic was blue, and again Beth was my model – anyone else willing to let me take odd photos of them? Especially since I accidently wrote on her hand with a permanent marker and she was ‘feeling blue’ for three days…

And this week - *sigh*, this week I had an incident with my camera. The topic was doorknob, which I was actually quite looking forward to, and then my camera decided to delete them all while transferring them to my computer. Okay, so I may have played a small part in that – but I’m still not entirely sure how it happened. Either way, I tried to reproduce the photos, with decidedly disappointing results.

*phew* and that’s shutterboo all caught up. Next week – reflection.

Anyone who talks to me regularly knows that I have a bit of a crush on my brother’s new camera. It’s just so perdy! Last week I wanted to get out of the house for a bit and he had a study date so he, oh so kindly, offered to let me borrow his camera. I was so shocked at the unusual offer that I basically just grinned, grabbed and bolted… then got really peeved because I didn’t have anywhere in particular that I intended to go.

I putted around a bit and ended up at the river, as usual, coming home with a headache and more than a touch of heatstroke, but I had fun.

I’ll posting these all here together because a lost of them make me think of Lisa and her farm and I wanted to show them to her.