Maizy and Finn. I must be crazy. There's really no other explanation.

And another shot of Finn looking especially photogenic.

It's here! Finally! After a very cold and wet May and beginning of June, summer has arrived. And I remember: Oh yeah, this is why I live in Portland.
The kids have started up their nightly hide and seek tag games, the windows are open, hammock up, raspberries ripe, and perhaps most important of all, I can put away the rain pants for the season, stop cursing on the morning commute, and ride the good bike  - you know, the one without fenders and fat tires that goes really fast.

Fabric love.

Holy Crap! May has come and gone and we're halfway through June and I have nothing to show for it!! Yikes!


No sewing at any rate. My machine was in the shop for most of the month, and it's been way too wet to work in the garden, so I had no choice but to pick up my knitting needles. With the weather being what it's been lately, it's easy to pretend it's the middle of January and knitting a cozy scarf comes naturally...
The one pictured above is made using a pattern stitch found here using beautiful Manos del Uruguay yarn purchased from a local shop, Knit/Purl.

I also managed to finish up my daughter's scarf from a pattern by Shibui Knits.
By the time I was done, I had something like a thousand stitches on my needles. Ever tried to knit a row with a thousand stitches? It takes FOREVER.  Which is probably why this scarf took forever to finish.

Finally, a little hat for an upcoming birthday gift. I'm quite pleased with how it's turning out, and may need to make one for myself.  This pattern is from the book  Last Minute Knitted Gifts by Joelle Hoverson.  (And yes, it is last minute as the birthday is tomorrow!)

We did have one sunny day in all this rain, this past weekend, and the cat took no time in finding this spot of sun on the floor.   I think her shadow kind of looks like batman.  Watch out!

A little spring color courtesy of my overgrown garden....

I'm such a bad blogger. It's really quite pathetic.  I take pictures, edit them all nice, think of witty things to write, and then nothing. By the time I get around to actually posting it's old news, so I don't bother. 
 Like this set of great fabrics that arrived a few weeks ago. A few prints from Joel Dewberry's Modern Meadow and Heather Bailey's Nicey Jane collections.  Now for sale in the shop.

And how about that garage door? Never posted the photo of it installed. There's still some work to do, but it closes and opens and closes again.  Very cool.

And here's a cute little owl in a tree block I made while visiting my sister in Bellingham.   That was over a month ago. He's aspiring to be in a forest of trees with lots of fellow owls. (Although I forgot him up in Bellingham and I think he got turned into a plant cozy.  Oops.)

I'm not throwing in the towel yet with this blog thing.  I'm just in awe of those people that manage to post on a regular basis. IN AWE!  It's a mystery to me how they do it.  I'm not sure I can.


But I'll leave you with a recent project at least:  
A new dust cover to replace the foam one original to the laptop.  Made with a cheerful print from Sandi Henderson's Meadowsweet collection. The corners are a little bulky and the screen won't latch shut anymore, but I'm planning to iron the heck out of it and see if I can smoosh it a little flatter.

During one of my attempts to clean up my fabric stash, I cut the smallest of my solid scraps into rectangles and got the idea to pair them with two tones of dark gray to create color spot squares.
The inner color spots measure one to two inches and are roughly square. The grey border is 1 1/2". I pieced them together by laying multiple pre-cut squares on a strip of grey one after the other and stitched the whole length at once. After pressing and cutting apart, I did the process again for the next two sides.
I originally started piecing these together with the intent of making a series of coasters, but now that I see them altogether I think I may need to start a new quilt.