a week of letters

Here I am again, ready to finally wrap up a week of mail and letters =) and what a week it was. Very interesting indeed.

First of all, my incoming mail, not just from the past week but since before Christmas already. November was a bad month mail-wise but the letters started arriving by December and kept coming

so here are letters from Emma, Renee, Päivi, Martina, Jenny H, Alesha and Emilie and a charming little package from Jenny M =D it was filled with sweets ^^

and here are some of the charming details:

Finnish stamp nr 1. It has braille on it, if you look closely you can see the bumps

Finnish stamp nr. 2... they just have the cutest stamps there

I wrote back to most of the letters already, and in fact today received a new letter from Emma =) and I didn’t take pictures of everything. But I took a picture of this weeks outgoing mail:

there’s a letter to Rin from Australia whose interview was on Julie’s blog last week and I just had to write her a letter. And a letter to Martina from Slovakia. And as you can seen I’ve been trying to be creative. I browsed through Rin’s fabulous blog and was amazed by her creativity when it comes to mail art that I thought I might try some things myself. I’m still so inexperienced in this … these two envelopes were my first trys. The one to Rin features a Harry Potter fan art of Luna by myself that I printed on the envelope and I added a few dashes of colour. For the other I cut out a flower from some paper that was still in my arts-drawer. I do want to try other ways of making envelopes, from other colourful paper maybe and I browsed through old pamphlets from museums that I was keeping, goddess knows for what, and cut out a few things. I have a few ideas, maybe I can show you more next week.

Yesterday, though, I had another idea. I love stationery but it’s basically impossible to find anything cute here in Germany. So a few weeks ago I bought coloured printing paper in A5 with the intention of just using it like that, as stationery. Unfortunately I didn’t pay attention and got paper that’s a bit too heavy to my taste (160 grams). Nevertheless I played a bit with quotes and pictures and printed three designs (the one on the left though is printed on 90g plain white paper using a scan of one of my favourite postcards)

The quote on the left is from Lord of the rings. This to be exact. A favourite of mine.

The one in the middle is a Wicked design. The quote says “The only obligations I am under are the ones I assign to myself”. It’s from the novel.

The one on the right is a Huna design. Huna is the traditional Hawaiian philosophy and the quote are the seven principles.

I’m really happy how these turned out and I have a few more colours I can play with and I’m sure I’ll find more intriguing quotes to put on paper =) I might even dig out the old typewriter again.

Knitting on Wednesdays

So, here I am from the winter break… yeah, I’m trying to make you believe that the long absence was totally planned :p I won’t bore anyone with details of the holidays but get straight to the point of todays post: Knitting on Wednesdays

I had planned to present all the lovely finished Christmas projects but of course I forgot to take pictures of most of them… so here is just one of the many presents I knit last year, my sister’s cardigan:

This is the pattern and it’s the third pattern I knit from the book New England Knits. The patterns are really well written and I love most of them and I can’t wait to embark on the next project I did some changes, I omitted the third cable because I wanted to add waist shaping. I’m so glad I did, my sister has a lovely waist that needs to be shown off :p It fits perfectly and she has worn it a lot already and gotten compliments for it so this present was a huge success =)

Then I have a personal success to report, the first finished stranded colour work item:

Perianth in Regia cotton, lovely pattern, lovely yarn. Unexperienced knitter, it looks wobbly but I’ve read before that blocking will make a huge difference so let’s wait and see until the other one is finished.

And there are these to projects on the needles:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Shalom cardigan (which I’m knitting in a quite different gauge, so lots of changes) and Caprio which is about halfway finished.

So this is it, more on Friday!