caffaknitted

Happy New year!

Just a quick post to wish everyone Happy New Year!

I've been very absent with the holidays, lots of traveling.  Rest assured I have many new projects in the works.  I'm planning to make this the best knitting year ever...hopefully for all of us.  I'm not much for New Year's resolutions, but this year I have several that are knitting-related.  Maybe I'll post them later.  That should encourage me to pursue them more aggressively.  Or, maybe just make their inevitable abandonment that much more embarrassing....

A Christmas party fit for Midas

If you would like to make your Christmas, and everyone else's a lot brighter, try making a tuxedo out of golden wrapping paper!  That's what my brother and I did this weekend in order to spruce him up for the Espresso News Christmas party.  As you can see, he even reflects off the tile floor.  It was glorious!  All you need is a suit (my brother found his at a goodwill), 2 rolls of golden wrapping paper, and a hell of a lot of scotch tape.  Also too finish it off...a giant green velveteen bow like one of those meant for a 5 foot wreath, and voila!

Also attending the party in attire that was just as festive, but maybe a little less classy....UiJin, my beloved husband, as sexy Mrs. Claus!  Note how much nicer his legs are than mine....

Overall, this year's party was a blast.  

Knit-wise, I'm busy finishing Christmas gifts.  I don't normally knit so many gifts, but we're broke, so I hope everyone likes scarves! ;)  Actually, I hate knitting scarves more than anything.  I'd rather stick a fork in my eye.  Just kidding...kind of.

Mr. Abominable

This weekend was our annual Espresso News Christmas Extravaganza.  More on the party with pictures tomorrow, because today what I want to share is the gift I made for the party.  I drew Kelly's name for Secret Santa this year, and decided to make her a yeti!

While in NYC, I visited Purl Soho...lovely shop...and I found this brushed suri from Blue Sky.  It looked like it had been spun directly from a yeti!  So then I knew just what I needed to make.  I wasn't actually sure what a suri was, so I googled it.  Turns out it's something like a fuzzy alpaca.

By the way, if you google "suri", then what you get is, of course, a million pictures of Tom Cruise's daughter.  Funny that they named her after a fuzzy alpaca...

The pattern for Mr. Abominable is up for sale.  It is downloadable from Ravelry or you can find it on Etsy.

It is a fairly easy and quick knit.  Makes a great last minute Christmas knit!

Coraline

I'm a devout follower of Amy Singer on the Knittyblog.  Those of you who also read her blog probably know about her Coraline box.  Coraline is a new stop motion animation film coming out this February.  It is based on a book by Neil Gaiman.  This film looks amazing!  It combines all my favorite things...dolls, knitting, miniatures, and stop motion animation.  Every tiny detail of this movie is handmade.  Working on a film like this would be my dream job! Visit the site!  You'll need a few codes to access the various short films about the movie:

sweaterxxs

moustachio 

stopmotion

buttoneyes

armpithair

puppetlove

The mystery box Amy received was one of 50 sent to different bloggers that are followed by the Coraline staff.  Check out the knittyblog to see the contents.  Less than half of the boxes have turned up so far.  Can you imagine getting such a treasure in the mail??  

New York!

Wow.  It has been a long delay between blogs this time.  I naively thought I'd be blogging from NYC.  I even uploaded an app to the iphone especially for that purpose, but we were way too busy.

We had a blast!  The Luvable Hugable opening was especially awesome.  Everyone who works at the gallery is really cool.  It was great that so many people came to see Henry and his wives.  I enjoyed meeting all of you, and love knowing the pieces you bought are going to good homes.  I sold about half of the pieces, but there are still some wives left.  If anyone is interested, they can be purchased from the Gallery Hanahou shop online, along with many other amazing toys.  Outside of plushy goodness, we mostly ate, drank, walked, and shopped.  My friends Robbin and David were such kind hosts to my whole crew, and I miss Robbin already.  I became smitten with her dog Oscar and his best friend kitten Gus while we were there.  It was all I could do not to sneak Gus into my suitcase.

Now for pics!

Here are Henry and his wives at the gallery.  

Amazing pieces from Sewn by Blythe.

Table of luvable and hugable goodies.

I have loads more pics, but I also have loads of work to do.  I'm off to knit!  I have something very special in store my my secret santa this year, and it must be finished by Saturday!