So on tuesday I turned 28. It followed a great weekend with my sister, and friend J, and on the day I had a champagney (well actually pink cava) breakfast, followed by a day of knitting and movies.

Thus apart from the addition of a particular notion, my secret project is complete. Two down for Olympic me. Two more to go… it’s going to be close, but i might still do it!

Anyways I got some great birthday presents:

J made me a great knitting needle roll,

It’s lovely isn’t it?  She knows how to indulge my passions. :) <3<3<3

My sister bought me tickets to see The Arctic Monkeys and We are Scientists (who are one of my new favourite bands) so we had a great night out in my old stomping ground, drinking warm beer and jumping around to great music. :)

She also bought me the Patchwork Set postcards by Wee Wonderfuls, which I have been cooing over for months. :)

They are even more lovely in real life!

Today my gifty parcel arrived, but that deserves a separate, non-birthday post. ;)

So the only other things of note are these threads which i got from my favourite crafty second hand store, for 20p each. Bargin!

:D

There are magazines that I keep that I have no intention of ripping up. My collection of cycling magazines and Real Simples are too full of lovely things for me to think about trying to split them all up. However I have kept a ton of magazines that I don’t really use but that contain good stuff I don’t want to get rid of.

In the past when I have ripped out articles I have paperclipped or stapled them together and they have ended up all creased and flimsy that I haven’t wanted to use them again.

However since we are going to be re-doing our lounge (hopefully - at some point) I wanted to make some space, and clear some collections out, and I came up with making each article into it’s own booklet, then grouping the booklets together in acordian folders.

A Short, (and probably obviously) How-To About Turning an Article into a Booklet.

Here is the article as it looked when I ripped it out of the magazine. Note that there are a couple of adverts in there, including the first page, which means we have to open it up to find out what it’s about. That’s going to be a pain.

However if I turn the first page over and stick it to the advert on the second page I will have got rid of them both and the article will read smoothly again. yay! (ok this doesn’t always work but it’s nice to get rid of the adverts that you can, so that you have fewer pages to deal with, and so that you don’t get distracted.)

It’s hard to see, (though if you click on the page it will take you to flickr where you can see bigger versions) but there are four bits of tape - 2 down each side - which you fold over the other side, holding the two piece of paper in place.  (Note - it’s worth doing this on a table cloth, because the tape doesn’t stick to it very well, and therefore it’s easy to turn the two pages over when you want to folder over the bits of tape.)

If your ripped edge is uneven then you’ll need to cut it. Ideally the best thing to use would be a paper guillotine but since I don’t have one of those, (or access to one) I just use scissors.

Then you just go through the article, taping the inner edges together so that it forms a booklet.

And there you have it: A giant hand finished booklet!

Tips and Hints

Sometimes there are ads on the side that you can get rid of. Assuming there is also a full page ad on the back, you can snip off the side ad and stick it over the ad on another page, therefore keeping your booklet slim and distraction free.

Sometime, when you cut off the jagged edge with scissors you end up with a wiggly edge instead. If that happens then tape up as normal…

…but remember to turn the pages over and tape on the other side too so that you cover the sticky bits of tape up with more tape. Then just fold them up and crease the tape so that it sits flat and folds open properly.

Sometime there is a cool picture on the left hand side of the first double spread. It doesn’t have a title so I don’t want to use it as my front page, but it’s inspiring and too good to waste…

…so I replace the advert at the end of the article (left) with the picture from the beginning, by taping the two pages together, as before.

Then I sort them into categories, and put them into the right acordion folder…

…which I label on the spine so that I can store them upright like books.

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Hope that was useful. :)

Shaun White take the Men’s Snowboarding Half-pipe gold for the USA, and oscarcat finishes her first UFO!

Mind you there is still alot to do, and "everything to play for."

As Phil Liggett might say - "She’s dancing on the needles!"

I have been wrestling with the idea of joining the Knitting Olympics for a few weeks now. I even picked out a project.  But with the yarn for other projects mounting up, and the fact that i really need to start looking for a new job, I just can’t justify sitting knitting for 16 days.

However I still think it’s a great idea.

Luckily for me i know Lara - who had the genius idea for us to finish all our UFOs during the Olympics instead.

For me this means:

• finishing the sleeves, collar and making up the secret jumper project
• knitting the second striped sock to go with it’s mate, which i finished in october
• knitting the last third of the first, and then the whole second Italian striped sock i started for W while on our honeymoon
• finishing the second fingerless mitten

plus, whatever else i can find that is surely hidden around the place somewhere.

Thus Team Alien was born. :)

I have also joined:

as run by Wildgeese.

This is all very exciting. Tomorrow I’ll sit down and post pictures of all the UFOs I can find.

ETA: Knitty blog talking about finishing UFOs for the Knitting Olympics, and how challenging yourself is enough to qualify. So i guess it’s officially on people!

Here is the yarn I bought at the Handweaver’s Studio. It’s about 235g (for less than £6 - bargain!)

Here is the yarn split into 3. I know i can make a pair of trainer socks (my prefered sock length) from about 75g of wool, so this should be fine. (Please note that only the top hank is properly tied up. I was intending the tie up the other two, but then in a fit of ‘omg must carry on dyeing’, after the Bluestockings meeting, I just dyes them as they were. BIG mistake. I ended up with two jumbled messes, and had to split them a number of times to untangle each ‘hank’.  My bad. But at least I learnt a good lesson - even if it was the hard way…)

Unfortunately I was so caught up in the actual dyeing that i didn’t take any photos of the process. However i used the very comprehensive knitty article, for reference - specifically the part at the end about handpainting.  I mixed up a dilute dye (about a pint or so) in a jug, and a concentrated dye (about 1/3 of a cup) in a mug, and dipped and dunked and held under, and dribbled until i got what i wanted.

Then, (because we don’t have a microwave) I put it in the pressure cooker, at pressure for about 15 minutes.

When it had cooled down I washed it (in water the same temperature as the yarn) and squished it in a colander to get most of the water out.

Then I hung it outside on our balcony to dry.

Here is the green yarn all hanked up.

And here is a blurry photo of a bit of it knitted up. I’m really pleased with the results, first attempt or no first attempt. *big grin*

So as I said, after my knitting group meeting - since it finished early - I decided to dye the other two balls using the rest of the kool aid.

This one has a much more solid colour, and it actually a quite light pink (i was untangling it late afternoon yesterday, hence the darker photo.)

Special thanks to Kx - my sister - who brought me back the kool aid from her New York trip last year.
xxx

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I forgot to photograph my other purchase from the Handweaver’s Studio:

These were labelled as mixed, so i’ve no idea what’s in them, though they feel natural, and soft. They are about 2ply weight, and the three together cost about £1.20 which is incredibly cheap!  I’m thinking of knitting them with something else - maybe for the cuffs of socks, or an edging or something?  Eitherway they are lovely. :)