blue skies

Saturday was all early morning drives up the PCH to Malibu and playing with this: 

... which came in the mail on Friday night. I knew how to sew years ago, before I left for Vietnam, but was never really good at it; I'm much worse now than I was back then, which is frustrating. My first foray back into sewing is a cute but very simple a-line skirt pattern: 

Simple as the pattern is, I still managed to make a dazzling array of stupid mistakes (see below for the perhaps the stupid-est one) - fortunately I still have my old seam ripper? 

Mostly I just love the sky blue fabric with its' birds, which reminds me of the big vast California skies from my early morning drive up the coast.  I've lived in Los Angeles for almost a year now and do not do this nearly enough. 

It was dark by the time I finished sewing (I took lots of breaks to avoid getting too frustrated - it's like the opposite of riding a bike, forgetting everything you used to know)  so I don't have any pictures of the skirt yet, but, yay for sewing and lazy sunny weekends!

it's june!

Oh my god, how is it June already? This year is flying by. The Ingenue sweater, not so much - I finished the body (finally!) and am making my way through the first sleeve now. In a perfect world I'd be knitting a lot faster, but, I work all the freakin' time and type like a maniac for most of it, which means I can't knit in the rare free time I do have, or my arms would actually fall off. 

Speaking of work, I went to NYC for one last work trip, where I ate cheese cake and was too busy to do much else:

mmm, cheesecake...

... and then came back to LA, where I had one glorious day off and ate this: 

... because I was feeling nostalgic for New York. Magnolia cupcakes in LA = proof that California really is the best state now. 

I also bought yarn for the first time in months! Having vowed to buy no new yarn at the start of this year, I figured six months was a respectable amount of time to wait before venturing into one of LA's many awesome yarn shops. They're not particularly summery colors and it's rapidly getting too hot to imagine being near wool, but, yay nonetheless! 

summer snapshots

It's so hard to believe the summer is almost over! I don't have any new knitting to post at the moment, so here are a few snapshots of what my summer has looked like so far ...