Intentions set

Aiming for thoughtful and well meaning, not always achieving it, but getting better at not repeating the actions and responses that happen out of habit. Not over thinking, not over critiquing.

August life is life-ing and this is where we are currently at.

What this bag is saying: Yeah, of course I have a Costco membership, but last year Sam’s Club had $15 memberships, so I got one for there too, now I go once a week just for the $1 soft pretzels. It also says I like eggs.

Maemae sorry you’re just a dumb little lady who doesn’t understand how completely safe and loved you are. Worst part, she’s awful cute too, looking like one of those 1960s soft sketch portraits of a towel covered baby, you know the ones you’d see on the packages of pastel colored toilet paper at your grandma’s house. (Northern Bath Tissue specifically)

We’ve tried so many recommend things to help her adjust to civilized life, we now think she just really enjoyed being wild and free. So we give her space, every window seat, every motion activated bird to murder and let her set the tone.

Mae’s origin story/family lore is constantly evolving. It usually has to do with whatever food we’re eating or item that has her super curious and engaged. Like if we’re eating takeout and she prowling around us. We’ll say.. “oh you must have grown up in the dumpster behind Chipotle, your mother was a burrito wrapper and your father smelled of onions”. The next iteration could be about a sandwich shop, or her childhood growing up in an anthropomorphized plastic bag (yeah, she grew up living in the bag, but it was also her mom), or an overly complicated back story about her early days outside a Chinese buffet. All of her beginnings are tragic, it’s the only way we can explain her F.U attitude.

This space is changing. I’m excited and absolutely dreading it. I feel like I need to pare down by half, these might be some of the hardest days of my craft life. Fully intent on not being an absolute bitch through this transition. (so I’ve told everyone)


You may not have known this about me, but I’m obsessed with good smells and smelling good. Not in a candle, air fresheners or fabric softener kind of way, I can’t handle most of those. It’s more of a really good shampoo, or a walk past the perfume counter in the mall kind of way. I’m also the one who will stop to tell you how good you smell and if it’s really really good, ask what you’re wearing. I’m not a sweet candy body spray girl, I don’t like strong musks or vanilla either and I certainly was never a yellow perfume person (I know yellow isn’t a scent, but if you like perfume you’ve probably noticed yellow colored ones can be pretty heavy). Back in 2018 this Chanel was my first yellow perfume purchase and it was incredible, I don’t think I’ve ever been complimented more on a fragrance than with this one, literally every time I wore it everyone wanted to kiss me. There are still a few sprays left in the bottle, but it’s turned a bit more old powdery Avon lady than I’d wear. I was sad to see it discontinued in 2023. The only other perfume that I was able to work my way through several bottles of before it was also sadly discontinued (WTF!) was Sheer Veil by Vera Wang (circa 2005), I wonder if current me (if I could magically smell it again) would still be madly in love with it?

Some of my past single one offs: (I was a child of the 80s) Electric Youth, Exclamation, Colors by Benetton (then had adult money in the 00s) Estée Lauder Pleasures, Clinique Happy, Ralph Lauren Romance, Tommy Girl, Le Labo Santal 33, Glossier You – I was completely anosmic (nose blind) to this, it had no smell at all to me!

Some future scents I’m curious to try: Anything from Diptyque, but specifically L’Eau Papier or Volutez, Juliette Has A Gun – Not A Perfume ..but I’ve heard it too can have a anosmic effect? There are so many intriguing scents out, I’ll take any recs you got!

Current wear (on my second bottle) and maybe my all time favorite: Dior J’adore Lumière (I think it might be called J’adore Eau de Toilette now, it’s the pink one in the ugly bottle). I sometimes wear it to bed just so I can trap it in the sheets and smell it all night long. I don’t know, there’s something romantic about being able to smell a pillow or a shirt and the lingering scent is that of someone you love.

💘

Fact 1: I grew up with my mom wearing Angel by Mugler, it’s imprinted on me, I can smell it from a mile away.

Fact 2: When I took that perfume bottle picture I was like damn that looks straight out of a magazine, good job bitch.

Fact 3: I contain multitudes and every one of them smells good.

I know, I know, but I live for the aesthetics of useful beauty in my everyday tools. Lately I’ve been buying different colors of the metal streamline hooks from Furls because they seem indestructible in comparison to the resin ones.

Old habits still get me though, how could I resist these glittery pink cream soda ones (Libra Streamline Swirl).

They look like pretty candy.

We like a little bit of everything around here and on no cook nights it’s called girl dinner aka sad girl supper. Always pickles, usually includes a hard boiled egg (not pictured), chips or crackers for crunch, walnuts for me and some kind cheese, fruit/veg of choice, currently it’s watermelon, garden tomatoes and cucumbers. That orange was crappy.

The state of my mind right now, foggy vague concepts, surface calm, somewhat translucent.

💕

Bits of June flowing into July

Some sewing was done, some spilling was done. Currently living on lemonade watching clothes dry on the line.

Silly game fact: The basic clothesline DIY in Animal Crossing is one of the few I’m still missing. I love and WANT that cute little stupid thing! When we set up our island, Lex was the only one with a Nintendo account and the only one who had ever played AC before (on her wii & switch lite) so she set herself up as the island representative. Little did we know that she would be the only one to get some the of basic DIY’s to build cute stuff for residents, like the clothesline! Now I have to play as Lex just to build myself one.

We don’t play like we did during the pandemic, but I popped on today to take a picture with my clothesline to show you how cute it is and managed to get a present balloon in the shot, what a lucky rainy day on the island. (Those clothes are never gonna dry!)

It’s pea picking season and off in the distance the mood is Emerald City.

Passenger seat view of some quiet field on some barely marked country road taken because the sky was just too pretty. When I used to paint and draw I would try to create “realistic” looking clouds, it was like a weird achievement level I needed to reach and no matter how hard I tried they always ended up looking super fake to me. I don’t paint anymore, and now when I take a picture of a really beautiful sky filled with clouds, I often think to myself if anyone ever tried to paint/draw exactly this, it would look so fake. I’m just now realizing maybe real clouds always look fake, and maybe I was pretty good at clouds all along?

I’ve said it before.. I don’t know what my problem is and why it manifests as crochet hook purchases, but holy smokes these are lovely. Furls Streamline Metal polished Blush and Silver (small sizes)

My beef – not sure why they can’t they keep their size engraving registered properly, every set of mine has a few that are oddly higher or lower than the rest. I’m trying to let go of perfection in my day to day, but this is still kind of annoying.

I have some larger projects going on at the moment and when I need a break, a quick reset, or want to fall into a simple mindless rhythm I reach for crochet. I saw this pattern and it was exactly what I was looking for. I really liked the squiggle effect that was created when different colored stripes were worked next to each other. I didn’t want the extra work of using a bunch of scraps, then I remembered I had 2 balls of self striping DK weight yarn languishing in my stash.

Long ago I made one lowly sock with that yarn and it turned out the sock wasn’t a favorite, but I still really liked the yarn. Sorry I was rude to you 6 years ago, you are officially becoming a real thing now.

I thought for sure it would work well for this shawl, and at first everything was going great. A little pooling to begin with, then squiggles!

As the shawl grew and my stripes became more drawn out, the colors began stacking and overlapping on top of one another again like they did in the beginning, but uglier, shit. I ended up having to cut and rejoin so many times per row to strategically make it look random. I was not chill, I was not relaxed, I was sweaty trying to constantly think ahead about what color was coming next and how could I get a nice distribution of all colors everywhere. I wanted my squiggles back, and I was going to end up having to weave in more ends than if I would’ve just made it 100% scrappy.

Ok, now that I’m out of the thick of it, it’s so fricken cute (SO CUTE!) and even more so with my freshly washed sundress. Don’t get me wrong it was not a hard pattern in any way, I just went into it thinking this yarn would do all the heavy lifting and when it didn’t I struggled.

It’s been so HOT recently, so I’m saving this cutie for cooler times. Look for me in the fall wearing this shawl and a single matching sock!

Pattern: Kría by Tinna Thórudóttir.

Yarn: Regia 6-fädig in the colorway 6369 Lake.

💘

making of a musselburgh

I was dreaming of the past.

I was recovering from the trauma of knitting a lace weight Thinking Cap and was knuckles deep in an all consuming Oslo Hat phase when I first saw the Musselburgh pattern. Curious about its construction, I bought the pattern in 2020 and subsequently tucked it away for the future. I finally got around to making my first one a year or so later and just now another. I can’t help but love an unfussy looking hat, and I say “unfussy looking” fully knowing parts of these hats are fussy as hell. There is a beautiful satisfaction for me in a knit that is minimal and unassuming, almost like you could run out to any shop and pick one up ..but you can’t, you never could, never this color, never this fit, never this custom, never on a hot summers day. Only if you’re a knitter, a maker, a crafts person do you know the time and attention it took to get here. Only then could you, if you wanted to, spend more time and more money than most would making yourself one. That’s one of the best things, it’s why skill costs money, and if your getting my skill for free, it’s because I really like/love you. Otherwise it’s always a no.

This pattern is an any yarn, swatch/check gauge as you knit hat. It begins with a center out/pinhole cast on, working increases for the crown of the hat (this bit need some focus), hours of knitting round and round for the body (super easy part), then decreases again for the opposite crown (again needs a bit of focus). Resulting in a long rounded tube that gets stuffed inside of itself to form a hat, double thick with a fold up brim. I save the beginning and ending sections for semi quiet times when I can pay attention and leave that breezy middle section for anywhere, anytime mindless knitting.

I started by weighing my freshly caked yarn, 108g. I did this because I only had one skein of this cute pink yarn and the adult large size that I wanted to make required 100 more yards than I had. I decided I would just shorten the middle section so I didn’t accidentally run out of yarn. To do that accurately I weighed my yarn after finishing the beginning increases, 98g. Then taking the starting weight and subtracting the current weight (108g – 98g = 10g) I now knew the increases used 10g of yarn and I needed to be sure and save the same amount (10g) for the opposite end decreases. This let me confidently knit away on the middle, weighing the cake occasionally as I crept closer to that 10g mark, switching over to decreases once there. I think I would still do this even if I had enough yardage, it really utilizes every bit of yarn. You could also incorporate other colors to make up the difference, the pattern has lots of tips and suggestions for color changes, stripes and the like.

I cast on with the larger of the recommend needle sizes for my fingering weight yarn, you should go with a size that gives you a fabric you like. Remember it will be double thick all over and four times thick if you fold up the brim. I chose a US#2 / 2.75mm and was getting 8sts per inch.

I also started with dpns, then switched to 16″ circulars for the body, then back to dpns. This was the least frustrating for me, I tried Magic Loop for the cast on and struggled.

The Musselburgh pattern is available on the designers website ysolda and ravelry.

Yarn is deep stash Madelinetosh, back when sale skeins were $13 and they would offer odd singles of one off colors. This is pretty bubblegum meets Molly Ringwald has no name.

Currently I’m feeling very sentimental, a smidge hormonal and embracing my baby era, not like having babies, fuck no, baby era as in I can’t put my emotions to words, so I just start crying. I’m also itchy, rosy cheeked and newly 50. Don’t worry I’m good, but it’s a weird time to say the least.

💕