hello pineapples

Post no. 101

Moving sucks.

That is all.

Posted byHello Pineapples! on Saturday, January 31, 2009 1 comments  

Knitting video games?

I can't decide if I'm excited or confused by this Wii game. I love knitting, I love the Wii (although, I rely on friends to get my Wii fix), but Kniittiing? I guess the trick is that you learn to knit and then knit patterns of different levels of difficulty. You start with a tea towel, move to a sensible hat, and then ... an octopus toaster cover? But of course! That is the natural next step in your knitting career. (actually, it probably is. Once you figure out the practical stuff, then you knit something ridiculous).

Anyway, I'll just have to rent it and convince one of my Wii owning friends to let me play this. But I fear it will be something akin to Cooking Mama's Cook Off, which was the worst game I have ever played in the history of video games. I suspect I will only really love the Rabbids games for Wii. Those are just plain awesome.

Posted byHello Pineapples! on Wednesday, January 28, 2009 1 comments  

filed under: knit, wtf

The flu: a work in progress

As I mentioned before, I'm a huge hankie fan. So when I was trying to think of things to embroider on them, I thought that I'd look for images of a flu and cold viruses. My thinking was that a hankie comes in handy when you're sick. I had trouble finding an image of the common cold that I liked. The images of rhinovirus that I found looked a lot like a ball with stars on it. But the flu looked embroiderable:


Apparently those are false colours, but I liked them and decided that they'd look cool.





Since hankies are often pretty thin, I often just lay them over whatever image I'm using as a template and then trace the image with a washable fabric marker. For this one, I drew freehand, making it look as much like the flu virus as possible. For parts that are supposed to be darker, I coloured them in dark.

This was meant to be a test run for a possible series of hankies to sell, but right now it's taking far too long to complete. The french knots are taking the longest. I might try a smaller or less complicated version at some point. But for now, this one is all mine.

Posted byHello Pineapples! on Saturday, January 24, 2009 0 comments  

filed under: embroidery, work in progress

Cakes and Giveaways

My birthday was earlier this week. I frigging love birthdays. I love all birthdays. Most of all, I love my own. I don't even care that I'm getting older. The best part about birthdays is the cake.



That lovely cake is my very own "cake wreck." It's not a true wreck. They ordered it like that. The woman in the bakery at the grocery store thought it was an odd order, but did it anyway. My friends are awesome.

My plans to post on my first blogiversary or on my birthday didn't happen. Life has a way of getting in the way of blogging. So, I'm going to make up for it today with an Un-birthday/Un-blogivesary giveaway. I'm going to give away these hankies that I made for the Crafters Holiday Market:



I just made a whole bunch to sell at Love, Me. I'm a big fan of the hanky. I have allergies that are usually just bad enough to be annoying. No matter how hard I tried, tissues were everywhere and I probably bought a box of tissues a week. Since I started to use hankies, I've had the same box of tissues in the house for almost two years. But the trouble with hankies is that they aren't always easy to find. So I've decided to help the world out and offer them pretty hankies. These bad boys are environmentally friendly and grammatically correct!

Now, what do you have to do to win a hankie? Just leave a comment and tell me about your best or worst birthday. My best is hard to nail down, since I really do love my birthday, but last year's birthday was a good one. My friends gave me a swatch, made me a cake that looks like a pineapple and took me dancing.



(like I said, my friends are awesome).

The worst was my 19th birthday. Which for many girls in a Canadian university should be an awesome birthday, as it means you are legally allowed to visit the campus bar. For me, it fell on a Sunday and I was in a minor car accident the day before (suddenly slippery roads and the choice between an oncoming car or a ditch, my cousin wisely chose the ditch). To the credit of my friends in my section, they got the RA to let them into my room while I was away and put up balloons and a happy birthday sign (brave, considering I was notorious at the time for having a messy room).

Now, your turn! I'll take comments until Jan. 30 and choose a winner at random. Since I'm moving on Jan. 31, the winner's hankies will be in the mail that day.

Posted byHello Pineapples! on Friday, January 23, 2009 1 comments  

filed under: blogiversary, cake craft

Blog of the Hour: Embloggery

Happy New Year! The holidays are winding down, my New Year's day hangover is subsiding, and I'm about ready to face 2009. Things will be busy Chez Pineapples: I've got a lot of work to do, I'm hoping to blog more consistently, and we're moving to a new apartment. And that's just January.

But let's start the new year off with a new post about a recent blog discovery: Embloggery.


December 9-10, 2008, originally uploaded by thirdpersonpossessive.

It's absolutely fantastic. Not only does Nicole Wolfersberger free-hand embroider the posts (no tracing, no writing it out in fabric pens), she does this almost daily (puts my lax blogging habits to shame!) and the posts are so much more than the embroidery pictured. You can click on links in the images to get a fuller meaning of the the blog post. For example, each letter in this post has a link to a different article or blog on Google and libraries.

The genius of this post is that it says so much without ever "writing" a word on the subject. It's actually kind of refreshing. Blogs that write a treatise on the subject du jour are a dime a dozen. This one is visual and lovely, but is so much more than just the visual. And depending on the entry, you have to work at the meaning. This one is a little easier to follow than other entries.

This blog is the kind of awesome that makes me wish I could think of something as brilliant. At the same time, I'm quite happy that someone else has thought of it: despite the fact that I embroider, I can't even begin to wrap my head around the amount of time and energy that goes into each post. Better for me that I get to admire her work.

Posted byHello Pineapples! on Friday, January 02, 2009 2 comments  

filed under: blogs, embroidery, good ideas

Happy First Day of Winter: Time for Mittens

It's the shortest day of the year and quite frankly, feels like the coldest. I know it isn't actually the coldest, but it's seriously chilly here. I'm really not a fan of the cold. Days like today, when I'm out freezing in my down parka, are the days when I dream of someday living in California. I envy my parents and their desert living.

The onset of winter and cold means that I need to start knitting some mittens. I lost a mitten last winter and have been wearing fingerless gloves since then. They were knit for use in a cold library, not really outside weather. With all the stuff I've had on the go, I haven't had time to start a pair of mittens until now. I also couldn't decide what kind of mittens to knit. My last pair had a cable and were knit in Cascade 22o. They were good, but it is time for a change. And then I saw these:



They're the Kate Spade alpine norwegian mittens. I can't really afford them (although...I just noticed they're on sale now...), but as a knitter, I can never justify buying anything that I know I can knit myself.

Mine are being knit up as a solid purple in Lion Brand Vanna's Choice (acrylic) rather than lambswool. I usually use Kris Percival's Warmest Mittens pattern from the Knitting Pretty book (which was my first knitting book) as my base for any mitten I make. It's a good basic pattern and it's free. I might make another pair in a slightly more luxurious and natural fibre once I figure the pattern out exactly. Until then, I'll just be happy to have mittens that cover my entire hand.

Posted byHello Pineapples! on Sunday, December 21, 2008 0 comments  

filed under: free pattern friday, knit

My albatross in pine

Four years ago, my parents brought us up a desk set from Texas. This desk has never really worked out for us. Too big, not big enough, et cetera. After trying to use it for school and then unsuccessfully trying to sell it as a set (desk, hutch, bookshelf and filing cabinet), I had the genius idea to use it as a craft/sewing desk. This is what it looked like when I first set it up:



There are no photos of what it looked like after that, because that would be embarrassing. It was a giant collector of dust and junk.

The idea had been to do something like this:



ReadyMade always has such good ideas, but I'm not so good with the follow through on them. Somehow, I completely forgot how pegboard worked. I used this crazy spray glue and glued it directly to the back of the hutch portion of the desk. Looked good, except...all the holes were blocked! Drilling didn't really work out. It was difficult to get through the back of the desk (the wood just splintered) and I didn't have the patience to drill through every hole. So the genius organizing idea never happened.

I should have known. The desk was trouble from day one.

As I mentioned, the desk came from Texas. I am not from Texas. My parents were driving through on their way to Canada from California and had stopped to visit friends in Dallas. This friend had purchased the desk when she lived in North Carolina and was going to get rid of it. My mom said, "No! Don't! It's a great desk!" And they rented a U-Haul and brought it to Canada for us, seeing as we didn't have much furniture at the time.

Things were shifted about the truck and U-Haul to accomodate the desk set. When my parents arrived in Canada and opened the back of the U-Haul, they discovered that because things were no longer packed as well as when they left California and had spilled out from containers and boxes.

The boxes of fresh dates had broken open and spilled everywhere. The worst was that somehow, the jostling of one container led to a bottle of clear nail polish breaking off at the neck of the bottle (WTF?), spilling all over the container. Which wouldn't be so bad except that a jewelery case with my mom's pearls also popped open. By the time this was discovered, the pearls were dried into a shellacked mess. We salvaged some, but the necklace was ruined and my mom was heartbroken (they had been a gift from a good friend).

This should have been a sign. An omen. A warning that this desk was trouble. Alas! We took it in and tried to use it. It has been moved around our apartment so many times that I've lost count. And now it is back in the living room, waiting for someone to come by and give me $25 for it. I'm keeping the bookshelf and hoping that he'll take the filing cabinet (with the drawers that would never stay shut because my floors are hopelessly slanted). I swear, if this guy doesn't show up this evening, I'm going to use the damn thing for firewood (it's really quite heavy and made of solid wood, not pressboard). Well, I would if I had a fireplace.

Posted byHello Pineapples! on Thursday, December 18, 2008 3 comments  

filed under: not a craft