Awesome Haul

Oh man. So Cassie and I went to Michaels to spend all our money at the yarn sale.

You will be glad to know that we were successful.

My excuse was that I got most of it to make hats to sell. (I did get some Lion Brand Homespun in a lovely teal colour that I'd been eyeing for a while...it's awful to knit with, but the fibre is nice! I'm prolly going to end up taking it apart ftw.)

On the way home we stopped off at the dumpster, which was suuuuuuuper full of lovely things. Check this out:

Sooooooooo much stuff! We had to ...borrow.... a shopping cart to get it all home. I'm super excited about all those plastic shelves, finally a proper way to organise my fibre! Plus lots of random shinies! This is my absolute favourite:

GOD YES.

It's squishy and has a multicoloured flashing LED inside it! I almost bought one of these a couple months ago, so I was soooooo excited to find it!!! Dumpster diving ftw.

Plans

I just finished reading Sweater Quest, by Adrienne Martini and it has inspired me! First of all, it's a great book, it has a great flow to it, and I read it in a couple days because I couldn't stop! I totally recommend it. It inspired me to work on more interesting/challenging projects. I've made a few shirts and a sweater before, but now I want to learn Fair Isle...not on the same scale as Martini, I'm going to try a hat first. A wander through Ravelry came up with a few patterns I liked; atm I'm leaning towards Tracery Tam, but still considering Joni, Midnight Sun Tam, Floppy Fairisle Hat, or Star Flower Tam. Too many choices! The Fornicating Deer Chart definitely deserves an honourable mention though.

I also want to make socks! I haven't made socks before, mostly because I'm not really a big sock person...I tend to wear thick tights or nothing. But I think knitting socks is something I should know how to do, so I picked up some orangey-greeny sock yarn from Michaels, and I'm going to use Knitty's Universal Toe-Up Formula.

I've finished a couple more hats, which I'm happy enough with, but not really excited about. I'm going to take them to Rare Funk sometime next week...I meant to take hats this week, but I had a whole bunch of assignments to catch up on, and couldn't seem to find the time.

This hat is crocheted, I started it about a year ago, but only just finished it. I've made a similar hat before, I really like the spiral pattern. Acrylic single-ply yarn, it's really soft and I like it! It does pill a bit though.


This one is 100% wool. This is the first hat I've knitted, and I didn't use a pattern (of course) so it's a liiiiiittle wonky...but still wearable! I am reasonably pleased with how it turned out.

Next I'm going to see if I can make red and aqua look good together. This could be interesting, here's the yarn I've got:

It will at least be distinctive.

I also got some colourful tape for hula hoops! It's actually hockey tape from the sports store, it's cheap and colourful and I got a whole bunch of colours. So now my hoop has a few different shades of blue on it, so exciting!

I'm making a couple more hoops for friends, which is exciting, I've made back the cost of the materials already. Not sure if anyone else wants to buy hoops from me, but I still have pipe left over, so possibly I'll just make myself some different sizes.

In dumpster diving news, I found 21 tubes of watercolour paint the other day.

They were all in clean packaging, I don't know *why* they were thrown away. More free stuff, I guess, but still. No wonder everyone hates north america.

I'm home for thanksgiving this weekend, and I found some yarn bombing! I wish I'd had a camera with me, but no. In true London, ON fashion, it had been burned by someone...wtf?! It looked like it had been nice before...

Yarrrrn Bombing!

As you may (or may not, that's cool too) have noticed, I have not yarn bombed anything in *quite* a while. That has now been remedied! I was feeling all restless last night, so went out and put up a bunch of tags! And here they are:

A little green knitted tag on the bridge into the park. Tags in the park get taken down pretty much immediately, so this is a test to see if the bridge counts as the park. I really like how this picture turned out!

Bio-hazard logo! I crocheted this aaaages ago, but for some reason had not put it up until now. The black yarn is acrylic (well, I assume acrylic, the label says "100% unknown fibres") and the green is wool, I'm interested to see if the wool felts at all. I loooooove biohazard logos, I want to make a sweater or something with one eventually.

A green and grey crocheted tag. The stitch pattern is from The Complete Book of Crochet Stitch Designs: 500 Classic & Original Patterns, though I added the colour changes. I really like how this one blends into the tree.

I have no good reason for calling this one "Bench Press," but I'm going to anyway. Knitted with some random yarn, possibly not by me. It's one of those random bits of abandoned knitting that just seem to spontaneously generate themselves.

Making bobbles with varicoloured yarn is really really satisfying. Crocheted with acrylic.

Knitted pink lace. This is more of the scary "100% unknown fibre" yarn, except this is even worse than the black stuff, which feels mostly ok. This stuff is a little like knitting with sandpaper. It's bright and stands out, which is nice, but I'm so glad it's almost all gone.

Green acrylic and novelty yarn! I was doing stripes, but then I got bored, so there's some lace at the top for no good reason. This one is visible from the Perimeter Institute! I sort of want to make something that says "<3 PHYSICS" and put it up near there.

Because I was soooort of near Michael's when I went out to take pictures today (it was dark when I put stuff up), I visited the dumpster briefly. I was wearing sandles with no socks, so I wasn't really planning on going it, but then I saw buttons! And there wasn't too much glass (and I didn't hurt myself until I got home again by walking into my bike!) so yes. I only checked out a couple bags, and look what I found:

I am super excited by a lot of this stuff, particularly the yarn (YARN), the shape cutter thingey (which works!), and the dowels (I'm going to make spindles!). The white things are envelopes, and the things with pictures of wine are fake wine labels to put on top of real wine labels, so you can pretend you're drinking blood, har har har. There were thirteen packages of them...I'm not sure what that implies. Also, buttons!

Organization

I cleaned ALL DAY TODAY. FUCK. And I went through my gazillion bead containers and reorganised most of them. So I am accomplished, I guess?

We went for a bike ride to a dumpster (which had a disappointing lack of interesting stuff in it). I tried to jump a curb, but it did not work, and I fell off and scraped my knee. It was more lulz than painful, so I am going to try again in a bit, because I'm *sure* I could do it at some point.

I really want good software for organising my swaps, particularly ATC ones. I keep agreeing to trades, then forgetting to mark them as traded, and ending up making the same things again (which is LAME). A spreadsheet isn't bad, but it could definitely be improved on...hm. Maybe this could be a PROJECT I could work on to figure out how to program again. I vaguely intend to take another computer science class at some point, so this would be useful beyond just swap organization.

Anyway, I have been very good about actually managing to do things recently, so yaay!

And, because blog posts are boring without pictures, here are four jellyfish ATCs I made for a jellyfish ATC swap. I really like how these turned out, I made an extra one to keep. They are secret hidden jellyfish, can you spot them?

The background is washed inked background, the jellyfish are mod podge. In real life they are all the same-ish colour, but I had difficulty taking consistent pictures.

OH! Also! This guy is SO GOOD! I don't know what kind of music this is, but it's SO GOOD! We met him briefly at Harvest, because his music was SO GOOD! So yes, check it out, I ENDORSE it.

Dangle Bombing

As you may (or may not) remember from this post, I found a bunch of styrofoam balls covered in plant-y things in the Michaels dumpster. A friend and I put them to excellent use, stringing them on yarn and dangling them from a trellis on campus - we call it "Dangle Bombing"! It's like yarn bombing in that it's not permanent or damaging to property, and is awesome and exciting! Plus things hanging from strings are so much fun.

Anyway, enough talk, picture time:


Photocredit to Gaelan, who didn't want to put them on flickr himself, so I did.

It was difficult to get pictures because the balls blended into the background so well....which was part of the point. We climbed up on the trellis and crawled around to put everything up, and the construction workers who were on lunch break nearby were really confused about what we were doing. They didn't really seem to get it even after we explained, but ohhhhh wellll.

I really like making art out of things that would otherwise have been thrown away.


Coming soon:
I'm going to make a introductory guide to dumpster diving, since people seem interested! I'm not a freegan, so it really will only be an introduction, but I'll have pictures and such.

Exciting Things

Look what I found at the Michael's dumpster this time! A gazillion dried flowers and random styrofoam balls with nature-y things on them. The dried flowers are gradually being passed out to people who can use them (I can't, they're scented and I'm allergic...I stole several peacock feathers out of them though!), and we have made MOST EXCELLENT use of the styrofoam balls, which I will talk about when I get pictures of it. But for now it's a SURPRISE!


I went back with my sister, and we found her a really awesome portfolio case! In perfect condition except for where the plastic got cracked a little, but that is easily fixed with duct tape! It's enough to make me go to Michael's and "accidentally" break things I want.

And now, for a bunch of ATCs!



Also, the following ATC, which is what I did with the background from my last post. I am...reasonably pleased with it.



In less exciting news, I sweated so much at a rave that my phone broke. :( It stealthily deletes texts now, and the camera WORKS, but exits before I can take any pictures.

Censoring Myself

...sort of. So, I bought these labels to attach to my yarn bombing:



They say "Zilliah Bailey" and "zilliah.ca." They iron on but I'm sewing them on to be safe.

(Sidenote: look at my awesome tiny craft iron! )

Anyway, so now my yarn bombs are traceable to my website, which is traceable to here and my flickr. Plus I had to use my real name to get the website, etc, etc...and while I don't really think yarn bombs count as graffiti, certain other ...art-related things do. So pictures of graffiti aren't going to be public on my flickr anymore, and I probably won't blog about them (had I? I don't remember.). Oh well. At least I'm self-censoring instead of someone else doing it? I'm only going to censor things that have legal repercussions/fines. (If you want to see these secret pictures that may or may not exist, just message me on flickr, and I'll friend you.)

Bleh, I don't know if I'm overreacting, but a friend who yarnbombs was putting up a tag and got stopped by a police officer, who said it might be considered "mischief" and that they'd been noticing all the yarn things, so drawing attention to less cosy street art is probably not the best plan.

It seems unfair to talk about yarn bombing but not show anything, so here's the piece I put up tonight! Green acrylic yarn in a lacy pattern from this book (which is quite good, it has written and diagrammed patterns, which is nice). It's the first piece with a label attached!



It's on a tree! This is the first tag I've put up that fits around a normal-sized tree! Very exciting. Sorry for the terrible picture, my camera doesn't seem to like darkness.

On the way back I also stopped my the Michaels dumpster, and found these awesome plastic bucket things:



Ooooh, maybe I could use them for dying yarn, I wonder if they're watertight....

Dumpster diving ftw!