Colors, Glass, and New Ideas

The Holidays have come and gone and I have to admit that I'm relieved. I truly enjoy spending time with both my family and the Boyfriend's family, but it is an exhausting experience. It's also been nice to have the traffic back to relatively normal again here by my apartment. Now, I can just sit back and enjoy all of the wonderful gifts that I received! Oh, before I get this blog started, I wanted to note that I often have links to sites throughout each post. Keep an eye open for these links in case you want to know more about the various products that I mention here.

For Christmas, the Boyfriend's step-mom gave me 14 skeins of yarn in various bright colors. I've never had so much yarn at one time! I've spent everyday since Christmas sifting through my collection of knitting and crochet patterns trying to find something epic to make. The yarn that she gave me is Red Heart's Super Saver yarn. It's worsted (4) weight yarn made totally from acrylic. The colors are freaking awesome, but the feel of the yarn is a bit...well, scratchy. It's difficult to make any wearable items from this yarn, which doesn't make it a bad yarn, it's just not a wearable yearn. Despite this I've already started making a scarf using pink, orange, and blue yarn. Oh yes, it's going to burn your retinas when you see it :)

Because each of the 14 skeins has 364 yards of yarn (that's like a zillion football fields), I asked everyone for ideas on stuff to knit or crochet and got some pretty good suggestions. While trying to decide on what to make out of all this new yarn, I've come up with some new ideas for knitting and plan to use my Hobby Lobby gift card to follow through with these ideas. My hope is to eventually get my hands on some bamboo yarn. I've been dying to knit with bamboo as it is super soft and it's a sustainable material. Also, I'd like to try to do more felting with real wool rather than the soy wool I've been using. Because my Rasta scarves get so many complements, I'm cooking up new ideas using the same color combo.

My mom got me way too much for Christmas, but I'm very thankful for it. Part of my move towards being more eco-friendly involves the conversion from plastic to glass. Mom helped me get started by buying me 4 beautiful glass bake ware/food storage pieces from Crate and Barrel. I'd love to link you to the pieces that I have, but I can't find them on the website anymore and think that they may no longer be available. Mom also gave me two glass milk bottles from Farmhouse Wares that I plan to keep filtered water and juice in. By the way, Farmhouse Wares has very pretty stuff for those of you that dig rustic, country, or French Provincial decor. They even have things like honey and tea. I used the cash that I received from family for Christmas to buy a glass canister for our sugar. Pretty much if it's normally packaged in plastic, I want to transfer it to glass.

Summer can't come fast enough for me. I have a topsy turvy that I can't wait to use and may even have the chance to make a composting bin (free soil, yay). Kaya will be happy if I can successfully grow catnip again :)

With a lot of help from my family, I've now got several new items in my apartment that make it far more personal and less like a hotel. I'll save the details on this for my next post and will have some pics for ya.

What gifts did you receive during the Holidays?

I'm dating Buddy, the elf...

In an earlier post, I promised that I would share some photos of the Boyfriend's Christmas decorations. No surface in our apartment is safe from a santa, snowman, or Christmas tree. Even since I took these photos, the Boyfriend has added more decorations. Only a few decorations are mine and I'm pretty sure I didn't capture any of them in these photos. I apologize for the poor quality of these photos...it tends to be pretty dark in our apartment at this time of the year and my camera just can't seem to deal with that. Maybe Santa will fix that for me ;)



Yes, the Boyfriend has a Christmas village.



Most of his ornaments are sports themed. I tried to capture a picture of my one fairy ornament but the light was just too low. My poor fairy ornament looks lost and confused amongst all of the football players.



Yep, that's a Miami Dolphins Santa. Because Santa was tired of the old red suit this year. The Boyfriend also has a Vols Santa and nutcracker.



More snowmen, more Santas. The counters in our kitchen are also covered. There is a third Christmas tree in the kitchen and several Christmas hand towels. This really may require two posts.

Too Long

I apologize for not having posted anything in so long! Thanksgiving, work, and a few special events have taken up nearly all of my time. The boyfriend and I successfully crammed two Thanksgiving dinners into one day! We started the day by eating with his mother's side of the family and ended it with dinner at my aunt's house. He and I had already had Thanksgiving dinner with my dad's family early in November, which made things immensely easier on everyone. We ate at my step-sister's place and got to see some of her newest flower arrangements. She puts together these amazing arrangements with dried, silk, and fresh flowers. I'm hoping that she will soon start selling these arrangements or maybe even doing events like weddings. If I had photos to share with you all, I would, as you have to see her work to believe it.

I worked Friday through Sunday and attended the boyfriend's step-sister's wedding on Saturday. Her wedding was really beautiful. She and her husband are both Georgia football fans and found a classy way of doing the whole wedding in red and black (the team's colors, of course). Both the wedding and reception were at an old train depot in Georgia. I was surprised to see how nice it was on the inside! Because the train tracks are still functional, a train passed by during the reception, which was an unexpected but cool addition.

Earlier last week I had a sort of casual job interview. I didn't get the position that I had applied for, but did get a different position with the same company. Yesterday I stopped by their office and picked up the largest packet of information and forms that I've ever seen! Because of this, I will be busy filling out papers and getting copies of every type of identification just short of my DNA. Hey, I'm just happy that I got another job. Gotz to pay the bills somehow. The individual who is hiring me gave me the name and number of someone that could help me get yet another job at a mental health facility. I called as soon as I returned to my apartment and of course got no answer. Despite leaving a message, I know that I will never get a return call (and I realize that no one will ever answer my calls). I will continue to try, though. If you want a job in which you get a phone, but don't ever have to use it, consider a job in the field of psychology...just sayin'

On a more crafty note, I did knit up a really cute teal/aqua cowl neck scarf. I've been messing with it by adding bows and ribbons. I'm still totally undecided on how to finish it off. Also, I'm a bit frustrated that my circular-knit stockinette stitch curled up. Even after blocking it, the edges still stubbornly rolled right up. You can really see how bad the curl is in this photo:



For lack of a real model, I used the alien head candle:



I've also started on a crochet shrug. The stitch is really pretty and I'm loving it so far. The only problem is that I'm out of yarn and I'm not even half way done :( Boo, I guess I will have to make a trip to the craft store after I get some extra cash this Christmas. Speaking of Christmas, the boyfriend is a Christmas fanatic...now surface in our apartment is untouched by Christmas decorations. This story requires its own post, which I hope you will be seeing tomorrow.

Sick

My poor boyfriend came home early from work today sick with flu-like symptoms. He has been coughing like crazy (which always worries me since he has asthma) and has a nasty fever. One of his coworkers is out of work this week due to swine flu. Of course I'm taking him to the doc's office in the morning. I really hope that he just has a cold or even the "regular" flu. He told me that he hasn't been sick like this since he was a child. Poor boyfriend :( I too am starting to develop some similar symptoms but have been experience these off and on for over a week now. As long as we are both well by this weekend, I will be happy. Not only do we both work on the weekends but my best friend's son's birthday party is this weekend! Any suggestions for an awesome gift for a 4 year old boy? Ooo I should make the boyfriend my "big veggie soup" that I came up with a few years ago. It's yumtastic:

On a totally unrelated topic, my mom recently asked me if I would be interested in going Christmas shopping with her this week. It was pretty good timing as I feel obligated to get my Christmas shopping done before Thanksgiving. My apartment is very close to the largest shopping mall in the city, which means that I most likely won't even be able to get out of the parking lot of my apartment complex between November and the first of January. The traffic in this area during Christmastime is freaking insane. This was something that I pondered over when we first moved into the apartment. I just kept wondering if emergency vehicles would be able to get to us if we really needed them. My roommates are totally convinced that all will be well...did I mention that all of my roommates are boys? I guess the one good thing about living so close to so much shopping is that I don't have to drive very far to get to the stores :) Online shopping is something that I considered but every time I think about the trouble that I had with amazon.com during Christmastime last year, I think better of it. Have you all started doing your Christmas shopping yet?