I went through all my old archaeology photos for this challenge.  I found that I use diagonal lines quite a bit.  Here are several of my favorites.  There has been no editing, with the exception of a little contrast/color intensification and some cropping, in some cases.

Most of the sites that work well for these are historical sites, where buildings, corrals, or fences provide the diagonal lines.  But I take a lot of landscape shots while I am in the field as well, and I realized that, in many cases, the landscapes I like the best have a diagonal line within them, be that a stream, a hillslope, or simply the lines of the road.

historic farmhouse

2 snow tracks

wary cattle

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little bunny

I think that, within the circles that know me as a knitter, I am pretty famous for my baby gifts.  Not that they are the best, most technically-advanced knitted items ever, or the most stylish, or even the best-fitting.  But every friend who has a baby gets a knitted baby gift from me.  Which means I have knitted literally dozens of little hats and booties over the years!  Recently, I have diverged occasionally into hand-decorated onesies, as I realize that they may be the more practical alternative for a baby with a summer birthday.  But, for the most part, whether they expect it or not, everyone gets something knitted from me.

The thing is, I am a short-attention span knitter, so little hats and booties are quick and easy and some of my favorite things to knit.

Two friends recently gave birth only 2 days apart, just as I was experimenting with knitting little stuffed critters.  The result was two baby gifts of a hat and "matching" animal.

Asher's hat

Asher's bunny

I made these two both striped to make them match somewhat, but unfortunately I didn't have any cotton in the same colors as my wool.  I needed the wool so that the bunny would felt up, but I didn't want scratchy wool on tender baby scalp.  So this was as close as I could get!  (I'm not sure why the turquoise yarn on the bunny looks so weird in this photo, but it doesn't really glow.  The color combination is well-balanced overall.)

Gabe's hat

Gabe's centipede

These two come from near-identical skeins of yarn, both gifted to me, but about 4 years apart!  As a result, while they are both soft greens, the hat is more of a seafoam green, while the centipede is more of a sage green.  The color difference in the photos is not quite as distinct as in real life.  They actually clash.  But, they are almost the same yarn, so I decided they should be a pair, too.  *smile*  The hat is supposed to have straight blocks of knitting and perling, but I knit into the back of all my stitches, so it comes out as more of a swirl.  I kinda like it that way!

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Wedding Invitations

Announce Every Event in High Style

• High-quality, full-color printing
• elopes included or upgrade to matching versions

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This is what my back yard looked like just a few days ago:

fall

And this is what it looked like this morning:

early winter

We finally got that snow to stick last night, even if we did get only about an inch.  The wind has been blowing hard all day, trying to make the snow leave, but it is holding steady as a thin crust on the ground.  I have been waiting until my pansies gave up the ghost before I pulled them out and planted bulbs for the spring, but they are pretty tough little plants!

tough pansies

snowy neighborhood

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I am not much for Halloween decorations besides carved pumpkins (and I mostly carve them just so I can have pumpkin seeds!), but for some reason this year I got inspired by a trip to our local Wal-Mart.  They had painted old milk jugs and the like and put them all over the store as decorations.  Most of them were pretty crude, and I think it was a sense of, "I could do that, and better!" that got me started.  But I got home, went through my recycling to find appropriate bottles and "necks," and then this weekend I went ahead and painted them.

milk Terminator

OJ and margarine Frankenstein

salsa and gatorade Grey

milk and Del's Skull

soy sauce Vampire

I think the Terminator is my least favorite, since I didn't really have a good idea of what the picture looked like, but that sunken eye just screamed Terminator when I first saw it.  The Vampire was actually a witch at first, with the jug handle for her nose, but I just didn't like the way she came out, so I re-did it and I like Vlad a lot better.

It took a while to figure out how I wanted to weight them down.  The ones in Wal-Mart were taped together at the neck before painting, but I didn't think I had anything to put in the bottom for weight.  T had suggested just using water, so I painted them all in 2 parts, and then tried to figure out how to attach the heads to the necks.  Then, today, I remembered that I had a good bit of decorative gravel left over from some plantings I did, so I put a handful of gravel in a wad of newspaper and taped that to the bottom of the heads as an anchor.  I then put the anchor into the neck, and filled around it with more gravel, which you can see pretty well in the Frankenstein base because it was so short.  It would have been a lot easier if I had remembered the gravel and put some into the bases, taped the bases to the heads, and then painted them, but oh well!

I'm not going to put them out until Halloween day, because I am still nervous about the wind around here blowing the heads away, anchors and all, or simply tipping them over.  The latex paint doesn't stick very well to the plastic, and they scratch and peel pretty easily.  We have decided this year to put out a "Take One" basket on the porch, just because it will minimize the difficulty of dealing with both dogs and trick-or-treaters.  But I think that Diezel and Cara have their Halloween costumes picked out already, and they'll be disappointed not to be able to "wear" them!  *smile*

Frankendog

"You're fired!"

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This is the hat I mentioned that I made for T.  It needs to fit under his hardhat, and it can't come down too low on his forehead, but because he shaves his head, he needs his ears and the back of his neck covered.  So, I invented this hat:

DSCN1790

DSCN1789

It's kinda hard to see in the left-hand pic, but I knit a slightly-shallow regular hat from bottom to top, and then picked up stitches from the bottom sides and around the back.  I have used this technique for adding ear flaps before, so it seemed like a logical leap to just add a whole "mullet" flap.  *smile*  I actually knit it the first time, and then this weekend T asked if we could bring the flap a little further in front of the ears, and longer on the neck, so I pulled the flap out and started again.  I was short on yarn, so the grey stripe went in at that point. 

I kinda wish I had a pattern to knit hats from the top down, since I could have just bound off part of the front and kept knitting as a single piece, but this works too.  Come to think of it, I think I saw Peruvian women in the Andes knitting their hats from the bottom up, starting with the flaps and then joining them together to make the rest of the hat, but I could be wrong about that too!

I offered to knit him a neckwarmer; basically, it would have been a knitted gaiter, but he said that his throat doesn't really get cold.  This hat is what he wanted.  I realize that it looks goofy, but it's functional and he loves it!

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Gabe's centipede

I am still going on my knitting binge.  I spent Monday knitting another little critter that isn't felted yet, and also knit a scarf from some really nice, slightly nubbly variegated wool yarn.  Then yesterday I knitted a different kind of critter -- a centipede, complete with 100 legs!  Both were quick and fairly easy.  The scarf was done in a pattern that used the same technique as the twisted rib from my neck warmer.  But instead of having any rib pattern, you knit the second stitch and then the first, all the way across, and you do the same on the pearl side: pearl the second stitch, then the first.  The third-to-last stitch is a simple knit or pearl, depending if you are working the RS or WS, and then the edge is 2 stitches of garter stitch on either side.  It went quickly, and I love the basketweave pattern it creates!

basketweave scarf

The centipede is simple too: cast on 56 stitches, knit 6 rows in stockinette, knit a row with 50 loops, knit 10 rows in garter, knit a row with 50 loops, and then knit 6 rows of stockinette.  The loops are extremely time-consuming and nearly drove me batty, since it felt like I needed a third hand, but otherwise it's pretty straightforward.  Sew up the belly, stuffing with polyfill as you go, and then add eyes.  Super cute!

Yesterday I also got to see a good friend that I used to knit with in grad school.  She's an archaeologist, too, and has been working on the same project that I have, only for a different company and in UT instead of NV.  As she was finishing up some field work, she drove through Utah Valley on the way home to CO, and I met up with her for lunch.  She is an absolutely amazing knitter, does fabulous cabling and creates all her own designs.  She had a beautiful felted bag with cabled Celtic knots that she made, and her current project is a hooded scarf with pockets on the end.  She sure makes me feel like I haven't attained my full potential when it comes to knitting, but she is an inspiration, too!

Tomorrow I get to try out a new knitting group that I located in the area.  I am definitely looking forward to getting out and meeting some new people, and I hope at least some of them will become friends.  Wish me luck!

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It's a neckwarmer, not a caterpillar

I am still on a knitting jag, and this weekend I tried something completely different.  A good friend saw my last post and asked for a scarf, but she lives in Texas.  I know that it can get chilly there in the winter, too, but I didn't think she would need a full-length wool scarf.  So instead, I made another pattern from the one-skein book.  It is a recycled silk neckwarmer that buttons around the throat, and I actually had some recycled silk yarn leftover from a previous project.  I didn't have enough for the whole thing, however, so I opted to make the ruffles from the recycled silk and the remainder from a nice, reddish-purple acrylic yarn.  I know, I usually don't like to work with acrylic, but I know my friend has a lot of allergies and was worried about using wool, and I didn't have a good color of cotton on hand.

It took quite a bit of work to get this finished!  I had to cast on 104 stitches, which I did twice because I didn't have a long enough tail the first time.  I tried using a combination of cotton yarns for the body of the piece the first time, but the colors were all wrong with the beautiful, jewel-toned silk, and plus I screwed up the pattern.  When I pulled out those stitches, due to the crazy, fuzzy nature of the recycled silk, I had a very difficult time picking them up again, and ended up pulling everything out and starting from scratch.  But when it was finally done, I thought it looked pretty cool!

twisted rib pattern

The pattern has you start with 2 rows and then K2tog all the way across, creating the ruffle, which I had never done before.  Then you knit the body of the piece, and finish by picking up stitches around all three sides, creating the buttonholes on one side in the process.  Double those side stitches and cast off, and you have the remaining ruffles.  A pretty brilliant pattern, I thought.  But my favorite part was the pattern of the body, which they called a "twisted rib."  It calls for 3 rows of K2 P2, but on the fourth row you knit the second stitch before the first, leave it on the needle, then knit the first stitch, slip both stitches, and then P2.  It creates a simple, easy cable, and since I am terrible at cabling, I loved it!  I went through my grandmother's button collection that I inherited to find the buttons, which I think are perfect.

It feels nice on, and I think it fits my friend's style.  Plus, the silk yarn is made from recycled saris, and I know that she spent some time in India, so hopefully that will be additionally meaningful to her.  And now there are a couple more neckwarmer patterns I want to try!

cozy neck

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Last Christmas, I got a great new knitting book called 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders, edited by Judith Durant.  I have perused the book many times, but have been in a bit of a knitting lull, so I haven't used many of the patterns yet.  I knit myself a checkbook cover (p. 64) and tried the Baby Squash Hat (p. 112) as a gift for a friend's newborn, but that was about it.  What appeals to me about the book is that is doesn't require large amounts of either yarn or time to complete the projects, and I am definitely a short-attention-span knitter with lots and lots of partial skeins in her collection.

One of the items in there that caught my attention is the Little Monster Bear (p. 155).  It's a felted piece, and I haven't done much felting, and had never done a 3-d toy before.  I tend not to use wool much, since most of my knitting is either baby gifts, scarves, or hats, and I'm mildly allergic to wool.  However, having just dug out several remnants of wool yarn to knit a new work hat for T (I'll post a pic of that too if I can get it off his head!), I knew exactly where my wool was for a felted project.  I decided to just go for it, and if worse came to worst, I would end up with a felted dog toy.  *smile*

I followed the pattern, which was very straightforward, basically consisting of increases and decreases, and some I-cord.  The head/body, arms, legs, and ears are each knit separately, and then sewed together and stuffed with a little polyfill, including tiny bits for hands and feet.  I didn't pay any attention to whether my knitting fit the gauge, and used slightly different weights of yarn, one of which was pretty knobbly.  I knew he was going to come out looking rustic and homemade, and that was fine by me.  The pattern called for button eyes only, but I decided to embroider eyes on, as well as a little X for mouth and nose.  I also added a tail, basically using the arm pattern and leaving off the I-cord, so I just had a "hand" that I sewed to his backside.  When I was done knitting and assembling him, I thought he was adorable!

before front

before back

I knew the stripes on his back didn't line up, and the different gauges of yarn meant his arms and legs didn't match each other.  The pattern called for long tails on either end of the arm and leg pieces, and I used them all, filling in gaps in the stitches where you could see the polyfill in his hands and feet.  Even so, I was a little nervous about felting him, since I was afraid he would shrink way down.  But I mustered my courage, knotted him into a pillowcase, and threw him in the wash with a pair of jeans on the hottest, longest cycle with the least water, as instructed.  And when I took him out:

Fuzzy Wuzzy

Adorable!  All I could think of was the children's rhyme: Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair, Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy, was he?  Well, technically speaking, this little guy had no hair, but he sure was fuzzy!

I actually took a pair of scissors to him and trimmed down the extra fuzz, so that he was a little cleaner and you could make out his face better.  He really didn't shrink very much, which was a relief, and even though his mouth-and-nose X got blurred, I still think he's adorable.  And you can't see the polyfill anymore!  Altogether, I am super happy with him, and I am looking forward to making more projects from this book!

trimmed

less fuzzy

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I posted a series of pictures to my blog just a few weeks ago from a daytrip T and I took to see the leaves change color.  I love the colors of the changing leaves, and in the mountains near here there are conifers, maples, and aspens, which give a full range of color.  I cropped and tweaked most of the photos just a little, since they were mostly taken from a moving car, and to ensure that the full vibrant beauty of the leaves was visible.  But I decided to go over-the-top with three of those photos in Picasa, and see what happened.

brilliant

This photo actually hadn't been edited at all, this is the true original.  I wondered, how on earth do you top that?  I cranked up the saturation, then cranked up the shadows, highlights, and fill light, and here's the psychedelic version of that shot:

uber-brilliant

I had another shot that I had already cropped and increased the saturation on a little (you can see that the evergreens on the far side started to turn blue):

Mammoth Lake

Well, I did almost the same thing as before but in a different order.  First I cranked the shadows, then the saturation, and then the highlights.  Here's what you get:

Mammoth Lake on fire

Now, the whole point of these pictures was color, so while I toyed with B&W on some of them, it just didn't seem right.  But this shot, which I had already cropped, worked really well with the focal B&W, and then I just intensified the saturation to make it pop a little more:

setting fire

spot fire

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