First Blogiversary!

Yeay! I made it to my first Blogiversary!!! (To be fair, it was yesterday, but after 8 hours in the recording studio, I had no energy to blog. Incidentally, this marks the first time I've ever used my Adobe Photoshop for anything other than cropping and red-eye reduction...wow, I'm lazy.)

Okay, the fun part! BLOGIVERSARY CONTEST!

Leave me a comment answering this question that my bf came up with:

If every ball of yarn came with a prize in the middle, what would you want that prize to be?

Prize #1: 2 skeins of Claudia's Handpainted in "Pink Posey"

Prize#2: Opal Rainforest in "Parrot"

Prize #3, #4 and #5: Sockblocker keychain with mini sock pattern

Good Luck!

Some Tour Pics

Warning: no knitting content :)
Here are some pictures from the Korea Tour I went on:

The food was good (and very spicy!), but the translations were sometimes weird..."Fork Velly" (Pork Belly) gave us all a giggle:

The streets were lined with food cart after food cart - occasionally seperated by a stand selling sunglasses and hair bling.

One of my favorite meals: huge dumplings submerged in a spicy simmering casserole of mushrooms, beef and greens.

Again, bling seemed quite popular over there, as you can see from these gowns (there was a whole block of shops with glittery dresses like these).

I'm glad I got to go out a little, but this was a working tour, after all. One of our rehearsals with violin soloist Sarah Chang was filmed by a Korean TV crew. She's playing Vivaldi's "Four Seasons", which we are recording with her this week.

A little heads up: I nearly forgot, but my Blogiversary is on Thursday! I will definitely be having a contest then! Stay tuned...

I'm Baaaaaack!

Wow! Crazy fun trip to Korea, but it was lots of work too (actually, it's not over yet; we're doing a recording starting tomorrow)! Since I can't stuff all my pics on one post, I'll do the knitty things on this post, and the non-knitty pics on the next one.

The flight to Korea is 14 hours one way. (talk about a sore bottom!) When I wasn't sleeping, I was working on this Knitwhits Flore Hat Kit. It's a layered flower petal design in cotton yarn, sized for an infant.
I dragged this hat with me on all our bus trips to the various concert halls (Traffic in Korea is a major pain. It would take our bus a good half hour to go around the block. Being able to knit kept me sane.)

On one of the bus trips, I showed my little hat-in-progress to the woman pictured on the left. As it turns out, she is none other than the famous knitwear designer Melissa Leapman!!! She was at our concerts! Melissa mentioned she knew the designer of the Flore Hat, Tina Whitmore, and said she'd tell her I was knitting her hat. I was totally blubbering and rather embarrassed that all I had to show a famous designer was a couple rows of knitting... I was even too shy to fully blurt out the name of my blog.

My friend brought her baby Ayano on this tour. She's wearing the booties I knit for her!
And yes, the Flore Hat is for her too!

I didn't see too much yarn-related stuff in Korea, but I did buy this ultra-cool metallic crochetted bag from a vendor in Insadong. Turns out he went to the Parson's School of Design here in NYC, and currently teaches crochet in Korea. This was the only non-reproduction souvenir I found in Korea.

Packing, last minute knitting, etc.

I'm off to Korea tomorrow, so my life has been rather dedicated to lots of rehearsals and concerts lately...I've hardly had time to pack, knit, or decide what knitting to try and take on the plane (so far I'm planning on a baby hat and a pair of socks on bamboo needles, with metal back-up needles in the checked luggage)

Anyhow, just to show that I'm still working on those Lozenge socks during rehearsal breaks:
Here they are lounging on a first row seat of A Very Famous Hall here in NYC. (I think I'm not supposed to take pics here, so I'm playing it safe. Used my crappy cell phone camera.)

I also made a reversible name bib. The general bib pattern is in this book, but all garter stitch was boring, so I knit the baby's name into it. I didn't like how the "wrong side" looked, so I picked up stitches along the bottom of the name panel on the back, knit another name in contrast color (next time will try different language), grafted it to the top of the panel, and seamed the side bits. Added buttons to match the name colors, crochetted an edge, and voila!