dirty doz: barely fun anymore because i'm kicking this challenge's ass!

as suspected, i finished these guys yesterday. i can kind of see myself wearing them constantly. flash and sass people, who wants to blend in with the concrete of a city or the drear of winter in general anyways? plus anything that facilitates relative comfort while wearing dresses and skirts in the winter is fine by me.

some cloudy day legwarmers

madelinetosh tosh sock in grapefruit

fab hound dress

cute dog c/o db and lots of treat money (tomatoes and strawberries are the way to buy his loyalty)

i've made pickles, legwarmers, popsicles, dog sweaters and numerous other random things i could easily buy, what other random pointless mischief will i get myself up to next?

dirty doz: cloudy day legwarmers

more madelinetosh grapefruit in my life, only this time it's sock yarn so yes, i bought the same color for a different project on purpose. it's a great color! i like to describe it as "neon coral". this is being turned into some cloudy day legwarmers by the end of the day most likely, because it's still in the high 80s with a million percent humidity everyday so i definitely need legwarmers right now. after i'm done with these guys i'll have a bit of this leftover and i have a skein and a half of madelinetosh tosh sock in edison bulb too... something awesome and neon is going to happen.

the lily that i failed to kill

three days after buying this day lily plant, in the 100 degree heat it dropped every single one of it's maybe 20 buds. i wish i'd known it was as sensitive to being dry for one second as a gardenia before that had happened. with no hope of having it flower again this summer i watered it well and often so next summer it would come back and look at how it thanked me! one single glorious flower a month and a half after almost killing it. it was awesome. i saw it developing for almost a week and didn't want to jinx it by saying it out loud but would gesture to db wildly and be like "notice anything especially fantastic right now?" while looking at it and doing the groucho eyebrows in it's direction. the day it bloomed db arranged our deck chairs pointing at it for dinner and we just dorked out about it while eating burritos. it was lovely, plants are so cool.

happy weekend! and more dirty doz updates next week... along with some rad bike related fabulousness. maybe i should rename this blog "yarn, bikes, plants, pickles and pictures with my dog in them".

dirty doz: beyond fab/ridiculous cat shorts!

here are the fabled cat shorts mentioned yesterday, are they not absurd and amazing?

i spied this fabric while poking around on purl soho and seriously jumped from my computer to my pattern collection immediately to see if i had a shorts pattern that would work. i had a hiphuggers pattern but decided that it wouldn't showcase the cats well enough, so it gave me the perfect excuse to nab this one which i'd be eyeing for over a year. high waisted shorts, the perfect canvas to show off ridiculous cat fabric! once these babes are sewn up there will be no more need to lament my lame severely hot weather appropriate wardrobe. oh no! how am i ever going to find a button for the fly that's cool enough?! cat gods, your help might be needed...

2012 dirty doz: uzo's wurstwärmer 2!

so so so, big man has something new and fancy to wear when it gets chilly this year, a scenario that seems almost unimaginable after the summer we've had so far. it's been so hot that even when i was taking this picture db was like "he's going to overheat! be quick!" and then we immediately stripped him. i love this pattern, it's the second wurstwärmer i've knit, it fits so well!

this is the ninth of the dirty dozen. i realized while counting them out with db last night that only two of the 9 have been sewing so my cat shorts (sneak peek soon!) are headed to the top of the "work on this now!" pile. hm... maybe i should've worked on the summer garments i have lined up before the fall dog sweater. ha! what fun would that be? at least i can partly blame the fact that my sewing machine was just excavated from the moving boxes this week. cat shorts up next! ...maybe.

2012 dirty doz: mason jar cozy 2.0

well, i wasn't sure this should count as one of my 12 in 2012 projects because it was so little and fast, but i started and finished it in 2012 so here it is!

i made myself a cozy earlier in the year that i would classify as "adequate". it served it's purpose well, but it was no beauty and i never got around to designing a better one. well i'll be damned that this pattern was posted by melissa of miso crafty knits. i knit it the day she put it up, and it's awesome. it fits so well and took me only one night of watching the olympics to bang it out. when it comes to hot drinks this fall i will be more than prepared. what a great way to sneak more madelinetosh grapefruit into my life too, i kind of want to make everything on my knitting queue this color. so rad!

life is a carrot giver

go home and make your own pops kids! because let's be real, carrots < ice pops.

pic

pickles!

scanning the produce section at the grocery store last wednesday i happened to see "gherkin pickles" in a bin, so i immediately nabbed enough to fill two pint jars to make my own pickles! it was nasty easy and they taste AWESOME. i adapted the ingredients from this recipe but the directions are basically the same.

here's how:
- 6ish gerkin pickles
- 3/4 c apple cider vinegar (i bet white vinegar would be good too)
- 3/4 c filtered water
- 2 tsp sea salt
- 2 tsp dill seeds
- 2 tsp black peppercorns
- 4 garlic cloves peeled and kind of smashed
- 2 bay leaves
- 2 pint jars

chop both ends off each pickle and cut into spears or whatever shape you want.

combine vinegar, water and salt in a small sauce pan and bring to a boil. while that's warming up split the dill seed, black peppercorns and bay leaves evenly between the two jars and pack the pickles in fairly tightly.

pour gross smelling hot vinegar liquid evenly between the two jars. close the jars and let them cool on the counter and then when they're cool put them in the fridge for a day to pickle-ify. no sneaking pickles early! shake the jars up a bit to mix the spices more evenly in the brine.

seriously, they will be the crispiest damn pickles you've ever eaten and they're pretty tasty. i don't think i'll be buying pickles again. my only advice is do it on a day you can open the windows because hot vinegar funk will linger in your climate controlled home way longer than you want it to.

soo good!

weekends

... they start out so normal and then you open a box that has bananashark in it. does this sort of thing happen to anyone else?

weekends are the best. this weekend i'll be at a bridal shower wearing as many floral things at once as possible and bringing massive amounts of glitter into a non-glitter requiring situation, you know, the usual. i wonder if bananashark will be a stowaway...

happy weekend!

karen walker number six

many apologies for this very large picture of my face, i am just that into my new shades. now i'm generally not materialistic or vain, but every once in a while a girl just NEEDS something as ridiculous as a pair of high quality shades to make her life that much more fabulous than necessary. enter karen walker, maker of all shades rad (besides of course, giles deacon). i feel sort of bad because they were pretty expensive, but i also don't. i gave up a vacation this summer! my fave heart shaped shades have finally shat the bed and the combo of those two things could only lead to one end: fancy shades retail therapy.

i figure, hey, i wear my shades on a multi-times daily basis, the only two things i wear more are eyeliner and my wedding ring. if i've managed to make a $5 heart shaped pair last this long (three years!) that's a pretty impressive feat. i've proven i'm capable of taking good enough care of these to last at least that long... even though i do have the tendency to only wreck my nice things. we'll see how this pans out, maybe i'm a grown up now right?

adventures in hometown 2.0

last weekend my parents came to visit db, uzo the puppy grandchild and i down here in our new strange land. i think my dad wanted to make sure we didn't live in a worse neighborhood than the last place we lived (it really wasn't that bad) because he'd been told by a total stranger while up in NH (who had no idea i'd moved here) that the dog he adopted from a shelter in philly was "used to the sound of gunshots but didn't like seeing people hug so he must've seen some bad things in the city". i also think my mom wanted to make sure i wasn't about to fling myself out a window because it's a well known fact that i'm not the biggest fan of cities.

when we were trying to plan the weekend db and i were pretty skeptical we'd manage to keep them entertained because we haven't really gone out and seen lots of stuff yet, but it turned out to be pretty easy. their one request was to "see the broken bell!" and my one request was for my dad to take our grill on it's maiden voyage and the one thing we all like is green stuff so we fled the city and went to Longwood Gardens.

we saw the bell, city hall and independence hall, corny but pretty cool. we ended up going to the reading terminal market, watching the olympics and eating amazing grill dinner, it kicked ass. longwood gardens though, best place ever.

so we went because everyone said that no matter what time of year you go they always have something awesome going on as far as flowers. they had this GIGANTIC greenhouse with tons of different themed rooms of crazy plants. honestly, there's no point in describing it, i live in little plant dream world and i wouldn't have even believed this without seeing it. a room full of ferns, a room full of grey pants, a room full of hybrid hibiscus, a jungle TREE room... very jurassic park, fruit rooms, awesome pools of giant lily pads and maybe 50 different types of water lilies. it just was unbelievable. one thing i learned when trying to choose pics for this post is it's really easy to take pics that make shitty to nice looking things look good, but trying to take pics of wicked awesome stuff that look good enough IS IMPOSSIBLE. i have over a hundred pics of the gardens and they all aren't good enough! i could seriously write about that place forever, but i'm just going to go with it's awesome, you should check it out if you like plants and are anywhere near it ever, and you might get to see some butterflies close up and a crazy disguised caterpillar lowering itself from a tree if you're lucky. also, if you like plants at all, it will be the best gift shop you've ever seen. i got a rabbit foot fern, it's awesome.

super fun weekend, next time we'll run up the steps at the art museum pretending to be Rocky

Cygnus... Vismund Cygnus: Sarcophagi iphone case!

i've done lots of fun stuff the past two weekends, so what am i going to post about? an iphone case, complete with ridiculous photobooth mirrored pic of myself oohing and ahhing over it.

in my endless internet wanderings when i was trapped in the extended stay in NJ for two weeks, i discovered that case mate prints custom phone cases. seeing as i'd dropped my phone while riding my bike home from the bar taking a video of my bro and db doing stupid bike tricks and cracked the case, replaced it with the same case and cracked that one too within a week of receiving it and the stupid crack was catching in my hair all the time... that case was dead to me, i was kinda looking for a new one. it was not going well, so many ugly case out there people, not into it. plus in the scheme of things a new iphone case isn't really that important. when i realized i could print my own with any pic i wanted though, it was one of the fastest goodbyes i've said to $30 in a while. i chose my fave painting from my portfolio, the one that will be on the wall of my living room later tonight if we can tear our eyes away from the olympics long enough to put a nail in the wall. pretty sweet right? ordering it was the last thing i did before my computer got dropped and the hard drive containing my portfolio was lost to the world. just in time!

zinnias!!!

zinnias are the best. my parents have always had totally rad gardens and one in particular has tons of zinnias. when i lived there (and in providence) i'd always nab one for my fave vase that db gave me. they were so hardy and so cool looking you only needed one. well it's zinnia season and i am far from their garden (hence my deck flower choices), but in our adventures this weekend these just so happened to enter my life because db is awesome and I LOVE THEM. aren't the colors amazing? literally, now that we have more than one room where we live, i take them around the house wherever i'm working or sitting so i get to look at them the maximum amount.

silly but whatever, i'll never be the girl that takes a bouquet of flowers for granted. life is short and i'm going to cram as many flowers into mine as possible.