Look, it's possible that you woke up this morning in a totally spotless house, having enjoyed nine full hours of deep and restorative sleep, ate a delicious and healthy breakfast, noticed, as you glanced in the mirror, that you are looking particularly radiant these days, and then settled into your work day and are absolutely smashing your to do list for the week. ⁠ And if that's you, that's great. I'm truly glad to know things are going that well for someone in the world. ⁠ But if you maybe awoke, sweaty and confused, to the sound of a cat [...]

Look, sometimes the best thing about a trip is opening your mail when you get home. Especially if you had the excellent forethought to arrange to have THIS arriving in the mail while you were gone. Because really, have you ever seen anything so lovely?⁠ It's one of Seven Sisters Arts' Flower Power quintets, plus a skein of Celaeno to to with it. And no, I do not quite know exactly what I'll do with it (though I suspect brioche will be involved), but when has that ever stopped me from getting yarn when it's this gorgeous!

Ooof. No really. Ooof is pretty much all I can manage right this second.⁠ You see, I went away last week on what was supposed to be a lovely, calm, relaxing, refreshing, restorative trip. The sort of trip where you hang out somewhere pretty and take nice walks and eat good meals and sleep and just generally unplug for the week and maybe see if your exhausted, overwhelmed brain can kinda piece itself back together again into something resembling a functional human being.⁠ And instead, it was filthy and dangerous and just generally awful in ways I am not going [...]

Sometimes? Sometimes a person simply has to give in and embrace the nonsense and just do the thing. And if the thing happens to be using a wood burning tool to decorate a scrap of leather to affix to a knitted potion bottle? Well then that doesn't seem like it hurts anyone so sure, why not.

Don't mind me, I'm just wandering around my house (and yard...and over to the beach...and possibly other slightly trespassy places) to collect some treasures and make a little tableau for some knitted potion bottles. That's perfectly normal right? Yes, uh huh, perfectly normal.⁠ And yes, yes I know it looks like a hot mess right now, I super duper pinky swear it will look cool (for some values of) by the time I'm done with it. This is not the weirdest thing I've done for a photo.

Ok, let's talk about the guts of these.⁠ There are two basic ways to make knitted fabric have shape. Either you do it with increases & decreases (or other fabric manipulation), or you do it with a teeny tiny bit of brute force. For the potion bottles, we're doing a bit of both. You give the fabric more or less the right shape (round vs square) to start, then you rely on a little bit of help to shape it from the inside.⁠ That means you need something you can shove in your bottle. Which sounds a bit daunting and [...]

You realize this is all your fault, right (the collective you, not so much you personally)?  I was perfectly content to knit one single teeny tiny pointy hat, inflict this indignity upon Miss Fizzy, laugh at her perfectly justified outrage, deal with the bloody gouges she dealt out as retribution, and go on with my life.  But you marvelous people made it clear that your lives would not be the same if I did not share this with the world. So, since I am both fairly agreeable and naturally inclined to such nonsense, succumbed.  I knit a few more.  Then [...]

Ahem...if you happened to have signed up for the super-secret, one-time-only, pointy hat mailing list, go check your email. ⁠ And if you don't happen to have signed up for it, don't fret! The pattern will be available to everyone on Thursday. You know, assuming I don't die from an absolute overabundance of cute before then. Which is more of a danger than you might think!

I am doing a sneaky. I am doing a sneaky with the good folks over at Gauge Dyeworks, and I am absolutely dying to tell you about it. But I can't just yet. ⁠ It is, in fact, going to be weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks until I can show you more. But if I have to sit here, filled with excitement and glee and longing to tell you all about our nefarious plans, well then you have to suffer just a tiny bit too.⁠ Look at this amazing tiny blip of glee...and just imagine what we're going [...]