Wednesday Artist Profile - Amanda Sainsbury

Finally, another profile! I've been having severe motivation problems now that the weather has gotten nicer... Even finding it hard to get my rear over to my studio. (Not good! This is when I should be building up inventory!)

I've seen Amanda Sainsbury's work around Etsy a bit lately - she has a really strong design sense, in my opinion, and her work catches my eye every time.

5 Small Knitted Buttons. Aren't they neat? And aren't her colors great? (Maybe that's why I like her work so much, I love her color sense.)


She makes trim in all sorts of lovely colors, too!


Or how about a selection of knitted beads? In purples, too - purple is sooo the color this year. :)


She also makes fabric that you could use to make something fantastic... (She has some Orange Circles fabric that just really appeals to me. Go check it out.)

OK, one last photo of some of her yummy Spring Knitted Buttons...


Lovely shop. And outstanding photos, don't you think? I've been noticing that the overall quality of photos on Etsy seems to be improving... Or maybe there are just enough experienced sellers now that the folks that wind up on the front page are just all doing a stellar job with their photography. It's great to see!

Knitting

I seem to go on knitting jags. I just started a scarf with some gorgeous silk/wool Manos del Uruguay yarn.


I bought the pattern from Sand & Sky Creations, a fellow member of EtsyFAST (street team). She did the scarf in a lovely soft grey yarn - I'm thinking her looks better! :) You can see the cabling better with the plainer yarn; having cables and all this color may be overdoing it a bit. But I still like it (more interesting to knit cables than just a plain old moss stitch or rib or something).

At any rate, check out her Etsy shop! She makes really lovely knitted items and sells patterns, too...

Preparing for Camping...

So, when I was little, my family went camping every year, mostly in the Adirondacks, but also in Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and PEI (Anne of Green Gables lived here!), even to Nickerson State Park on Cape Cod (great bike trails on the Cape). My Mum was a school teacher before she retired and my Dad was a baker, so he would close up the bakery for three weeks and off we would go. How fun! We were quite the sight, I'm sure, especially when all my brothers came along too (I have four older brothers). We would use the van that my father had for the bakery, pull a tent trailer, bring a kayak (a Folboat that we made ourselves! it was untippable, great for kids, but really easy to paddle, too), a little Sunfish sailboat, bikes for everyone, army surplus hammocks and a huge tarp... Crazy, lol.

We stopped going when I was about 13 or so (parents divorced, I was the only one left at home with Mum at that point) but I have great memories. Which means I now drag my family camping!

We're heading up to camp near Camden, Maine the end of June for a week and are running around finding equipment. We've been with Bella before, but now that Conall is along, too, we needed a bigger tent (hooray for LL Bean) and a rooftop carrier for our little Subaru WRX (no SUV or mini-van for us) (though if we had another kid we'd need one [I like this one]. Why do they make car seats so darn HUGE? no way could we fit three in the back seat, argh; I'm sure some manufacturer could come up with a smaller but still safe car seat in the name of decreasing the number of SUVs on the road for goodness' sakes... I digress, lol). Our sea kayaks will continue to languish in the garage, alas, until the kids are bigger (very tippy, unlike the Folboat).

I'm having all sorts of fun making lists of things to bring. I'm a list kind of gal, lol. And I'm knitting, too, just in case it's cold. Check it out:



Little Man Conall in a funny bulky sweater. I used Knit Picks Wool of the Andes Bulky in Cape Cod and a basic sweater pattern from the Yarn Girls Guide to Kids' Knits, and it knitted up lickety split. (Good thing what with my short attention span for knitting projects...). It even has simple ribbing throughout, whoo-hooo. And I actually sewed it together! Good grief! I hate seaming! LOL. I'm making one for Bella from the same yarn, a raglan sleeve sweater (for some reason I find raglan seams easy to sew neatly). Hooray for bulky yarn for kids sweaters. And hooray for Knit Picks for making affordable yarn - nice not to spend a fortune for a sweater that the baby is just going to drool all over anyway.

Knitting Hats

Hey, it actually snowed a little last night and this morning! Fun! Bella and Carlos are out playing in it, Conall is actually napping a bit, and I'm fighting with Adobe to download some photos. Don't know why I'm having trouble today, harumph.

Anyway, I've had my hands pretty full since Mr. Conall put in his appearance, and when I have had a minute to myself I've been knitting. I tend to go on little knitting jags - I'll get really involved in a new project for a few days and then my attention span expires and the project sits unfinished for months or even forever. Do all knitters have this problem?

A great solution to it, though, is hats - especially hats for babies/toddlers! Easy to knit (I'm hardly an expert) and I generally manage to finish them (I'm a pretty slow knitter, too) before losing interest. So, here are two hats I just finished...

Theoretically, the cloche on the left (knitted from some hand-dyed yarn I picked up at the New Hampshire Sheep & Wool Festival last fall) is for Conall. It's still kind of big for him.

And the cupcake hat (with the kind of lame pom-pom) on the right is for Ms. Bella - but it's kind of small for her, though it does go on. Cute pattern, huh? I found it on-line....

http://www.nakedsheep.com/cupcakehat.html

I altered the colors a little (pink does not get along with red-haired Bella) but it came out pretty good, I think - and I managed to knit it pretty quickly, too, on some pesky double pointed needles, which always feel pretty awkward using.

Oop! Frozen Toddler Bella and Papi have come inside for some hot cocoa - and my Mum just arrived too, have to scoot!