april snapshots

above: painting the backs of my ikea bookshelves

There hasn't been much knitting since I got back to LA. In the midst of starting a new job and moving into my new apartment and everything else, I hadn't really felt the urge to knit - which is immensely frustrating! But I've gotten a few bits and pieces in, and now that I'm sort of settling into a routine - albeit a routine where I work 12 hour days 6 days a week - I'm trying to pick up more projects..

... like this Ingenue sweater in Sanguine Gryphon codex that I started this weekend ...

... or this tea leaves cardigan for my BFF. It was *supposed* to be a 30th birthday present but she turned 30 in February. 

I also made this Crooked Paths hat, which I promptly gave away and never got the chance to properly photograph. It was massive on me.

But mostly I'm just settling into life back in California! Hopefully soon I'll be settled enough to find the cord that connects my real camera to the computer :) 

home!

Sunset on Lake Titicaca

We're home, after an insanely fast journey around Peru > Bolivia > Chile > back to Peru. It was an awesome three weeks, and we saw some of the most extreme and beautiful scenery I've ever seen in my life: 

Salt flats in Bolivia

A red lake! 

Also we stood on top of a semi-active volcano, for slightly longer than I am comfortable with.

Though I don't have any photos to show for it yet, there was also much knitting, thanks to the insane amount of time we spent on very long bus-rides. I also taught myself how to do nupps on the plane ride back, which was harrowing. In any case, photos of FOs and WIPs to come - for now, I'm just happy to be wearing more than the same pair of jeans and dirty sneakers for the first time in three months, and am eating way too much exciting food. 

new york handwarmers

While we were visiting California, my sister asked for a pair of fingerless handwarmers for her New Years trip to New York; though I actually suspect these won't be warm enough for New York's insanely cold winters,  I do think they'll suit her life in slightly-less-cold San Francisco. She chose the yarn herself - Cascade 220 in Palm - and I bought it for her as a thank for letting us use her car for the week. The pattern itself is improvised, mostly because my mom's printer wasn't working* and I couldn't be bothered to go on the internet and find an existing pattern to print. They're not the most shockingly original things (just a K2P1 rib all around) and unfortunately I've since lost the notes I scribbled (along with my entire knitting notebook!) but she seemed happy enough:

above: modeling her Marian cowl and new hand-warmers.

* later, it was determined that the printer wasn't working because no one had removed that little orange sticker over the new cartridge that says 'remove before printing.' Heh, oops.