weekends are for everyone

we've started summer hours at work, which means that we can leave early on friday's through the summer. it makes such a huge difference in my outlook of the week just knowing that i get to go home early on friday. we're having a bit of june gloom in los angeles, but i don't mind. the grey skies and drizzly weather are perfect for curling up with a good book or some knitting (knitting pictures to come in the next post).

the sun did manage to peek out for a little while today during my friend's housewarming party. she has a whole room in the house just for her yarn and craft projects. i didn't take a picture of it, but trust me, it's awesome.

tomorrow i hope to do a bit of cleaning and organizing. i also have a date to go to the movies to see drag me to hell. i like scary movies and i hear this one is pretty good. might try to get in one more movie tomorrow as well but we'll see what happens. i leave you with one of the jumping pics i took at the party today (don't you just love the continuous shot button on digital cameras?). have a great weekend!

summer comes

summer is right around the corner here in sunny los angeles. the sun has been shining and it's been hot, hot, hot. luckily i was able to stay pretty cool this weekend and had some fun while doing it. saturday, my friend m and i decided to go to the strawberry festival up in oxnard. i'd never even heard of it before last week but it's been going on for a long time. unfortunately i think everyone else had the same idea as us or at least were heading up to the northern beaches to beat the heat and it took us almost exactly 2 hours to get there in gridlock traffic. there were a couple of times where i wanted to scream and pull my hair out but we managed to get there finally. the festival was a lot bigger than i thought it would be but i was actually disappointed in the strawberry-ness of it. i kinda felt like it was a big fair that just happened to have a strawberry corner. i imagined vendors making all kinds of imaginative strawberry dishes and cute, strawberry themed toys and knicknacks. there were lots of vendors but they were selling random items like name art, dragonfly pins, and handmade purses. where were the strawberries? we did manage to seek out all of the strawberry items. below check out some of what we ate and saw.


strawberry nachos - these were probably my favorite thing that we ate. i love anything with cinnamon and sugar.


official strawberry festival merchandise


my strawberry shortcake from the build your own shortcake bar and the tray of strawberries we bought from a local farm.

it was a strawberry filled weekend because on sunday, my friends and i woke up at the crack of dawn to make a trip out to glendora to see the donut man. if you've never had donut man, you're missing out. he makes seasonal fruit filled donuts along with some other super tasty treats at his shop.


here we are at 7:30am. took us over 30 minutes to get there but so worth it.


the maple and chocolate logs are excellent and the crumb cake donut is fantastic as well.


awesome

after our early morning donut run, it was off to my friend k's house for a drinking and knitting. not sure if those two are the best combo, but it sure is a lot of fun. there was snacks and drinking and a little bit of knitting.





that's a new malabrigo scarf i've been working on. it's the scrunchable scarf on ravelry and the color is sauterne, the most lovely, bright yellow. this weekend i am off to northern california for a slew of bridal showers and bachelorette parties. see you all when i get back!


edgar says have a great weekend!

a day of books

this weekend was the annual la festival of books at the ucla campus. i planned a day out with some friends for book shopping, falafel eating and ice cream sandwiches. the weather was lovely this weekend, unlike the usual 100 degree heat wave that book festival usually brings. we had a great time browsing the book vendors and people watching. the festival seemed well attended even though there were some vendors missing (noteably the cook's library and barnes & noble). i got a few good books - a michael chabon collection, the kind one (from book soup) and a patchwork book from kinokuniya.

we came home exhausted, full of good food, and heavy with new books. all in all a great day. i hope your weekend was fabulous as well.

lazy daisy

just spending a quiet evening at home with my new twilight dvd and my february lady sweater. sadly this sweater was actually supposed to be completed in february and i am way behind schedule. maybe watching vampires will give me some superhuman knitting powers. :)

an auspicious day

i have the pleasure of working basically next door to the nbc building in burbank. normally this fact doesn't play much into my everyday life except for dodging the occasional tourist walking against traffic by my parking garage. today was different though because president obama was going to be on leno, meaning he was going to be a mere building away. while we didn't get to go to the taping, we did decide to do a little obama stalking and wait near the back entrance of nbc where guests usually depart from. we actually go there just in time to see his motorcade leaving.



he's in the second car, not the one closest to me. i actually saw him through the window of the car. we waved at him and he smiled and waved back. it was pretty awesome. there wasn't a huge group of people there. i got the feeling that most of the people were people from the surrounding neighborhood or people who worked nearby like us.



this is what we looked like right before he came.

something else also arrived for me today.



it's my new kindle! my friends got together and got me a big ol' gift card to amazon to put towards a kindle and it came today. i'd been curious about them for awhile but i started really wanting one a couple of months ago when i figured out that i could read while knitting. it's a great way to do some knitting and get my reading done. until now i'd either knit and watch tv/movies or not knit and just read. now i can do both. i haven't played with it too much yet but i look forward trying out a pattern in pdf on it. yay for a fun day!

omg

i can't believe that i just saw president obama leaving the tonight show. and he waved at us. awesome.

pie party and a new hobby

i know i always say this but i really can't believe that the weekend is over already. this weekend was a pretty relaxed one for me. no huge plans. on friday night we had tix to the imax screening of watchmen at the burbank 16 (who knew they had imax?). we had at wait in a very long line upstairs and around the corner from the theater. my friends and i were joking that the signs were leading us to imminent death because we had to go down this creepy, narrow hallway that had no escape. we emerged from the line unscathed though and even managed to get good seats in the back. i actually really liked the movie. i had read the book a long time ago and re-read it again recently to prepare myself for the movie. i'd seen footage at comic con last year (which looked awesome) so i was looking forward to this and was trying not to have too many high hopes, lest the movie not meet my expectations. but i was pleasantly surprised that they managed to get almost all of the back story told in a cohesive way and visually it was great looking. patrick wilson was a really good nite owl and jackie earle haley was the perfect rorschach. i must say though that i couldn't tell that our theater was an imax theater. the sound was really good but the picture quality, to me, looked like any other theater. if you're going to see it in imax, i would suggest going to a theater whose imax screen is dedicated solely to imax films instead of one that is only used for imax once in awhile, like the theater we were in.

saturday was also our day for a pie party. i have a few friends who love the tv show pushing daisies as much as i do. we are so, so sad that the show has been cancelled but i am glad that it will live on in dvd and there have been talks of some kind of movie to wrap it all up. so we decided to have a big pie party to celebrate the awesomeness that is the show.


we have blueberry, cherry and chocolate cream pie. i like that we have 3 pies for 5 people. it's a good thing that i decided to bring ice cream instead.


this is my friend's dog edie asking for a slice of pie. sadly, i had to say no.

i also have a bit of a new obsession.


i bought a drop spindle a couple of years ago. it was a part of a learn to spin kit that also included various rovings and a how to spin book. i tried it once or twice right after i bought it but i never really got the hang of it and put it away in a drawer until now. seeing all of the beautiful batts and rovings and spinning wheels at stitches renewed my interest in learning to spin and, last week, i picked up my drop spindle again. the first few times i tried spinning were not so pretty, but i kept practicing and i had a friend at work show what she knew and now i have a lovely little ball of yarn. the yarn in the picture is my second ball. i am trying to spin enough so that i can ply the two together. i bought a couple of really pretty rovings from stitches west and i can't wait to spin them up.

and that was pretty much the weekend for me. what did you do?

yarn overload

well i am back again after a wonderful long weekend visiting my parents and going to my first ever stitches west. my friend laura decided to fly up with me thursday night since we found that southwest still had some awesome plane ticket deals at that last minute. unfortunately she could not stay for the weekend so she just had a super quick 24 hour trip to the bay area. luckily we were able to fill it in with plenty of fun, fiber and food.

we spent the entire day on friday at the marketplace. i opted out of taking any classes this time around just because money was a bit tight. we got there first thing in the morning and had to wait in a bit of a line, even with our prepaid tickets, but it actually went quickly. i made a beeline for the blue moon booth, as rumors on ravelry were that they would sell out of most things pretty quickly. we got there in time to get a good selection of mill ends and rare gems to choose from. i was very frugal though and wanted to stick to my budget so i only got 2 mill ends.



those are my two skeins of socks that rock hanging out while i eat my tasty vietnamese sandwich lunch. it was really fun to see all of the vendors, and be able to touch and see all of the yarns in person. there were many beautiful yarns but i was very good and only bought things that really called to me. everything else i figure i can order online later.



that's most of my haul. includes mill end from blue mooon fiberarts, a skein of pigeonroof studios' superwash sock in delight, pigeonroof roving in chard, 2 skeins of creatively dyed superwash sock in midnight and a skein of woodbrook worsted from creatively dyed in tree. missing is the bmfa mill end of spawn of braun, which is super bright and candy colored. i started swatching it already and just need to find the perfect pattern. also missing is a mixed bag of handspun yarn from pigeonroof studios in purples and pinks, patterns from cocoknits and some hiyahiya needles i got at the urban fauna booth (which had great stuff). oh and stitches refueled my desire to learn how to spin. i have a drop spindle that i haven't picked up in years and i dug it out again. i am going to do a little bit of practicing before i try using some of the really pretty stuff i bought at stitches.

all in all it was a really fun experience and i hope i can make it again next year. now to actually finish some knitting!