OMG Chilies

NY can cater to almost any food craving. Sadly if falls woefully short in one very important, vital to my existence, area. Green Chili. When you have spent summers in Santa Fe with it's green chili cheeseburgers, green chili cheese bread, green chili breakfast burritos, green chili on and in anything it can possibly be in, it is difficult to just give up on the habit. A couple weeks ago a there was a NY Times article about going to great lengths to bring home regional food. One guy in DC talked about using his mother as a green chili mule, freezing them in little ziplocs and bringing them on the plain. Up until this year that has been my preferred method of smuggling the green chilies to NY. This year, I'm going bigger.


Yes, I hauled that 25+ pound bag of roasted green chilies all over the Jack Daniels Chili festival (the website may say Loaf and Jug instead of Jack Daniels but that is way less cool). These puppies are going in a styrofoam bog and being overnight to their new happy home in NYC.

The green chili shortbread I picked up probably won't make it past the airplane ride, they are a little addictive.

Gotham Skies

I am blogging from my home-home in Colorado today. My flight was eventful and included being delayed because of Air Force One, a massive storm, and really bad turbulence. The important thing though is that I am home and not in NY. Yay for a much needed break.

Besides coming home and the fall tv season premieres, this week marks the fall pattern release from The Sanguine Gryphon. A steampunk themed collection which includes a sock pattern I designed!!

I give you Gotham Skies!



Pictures are from The Sanguine Gryphon taken by photographer Kris Northrup.

The collection is here.

My pattern is here.

I want to thank The Sanguine Gryphon for including my pattern, and I would like to thank Stephannie for editing and teaching me quit a bit while doing so.

Hocus Pocus!

I am so excited to present to you my newest pattern(s) Hocus Pocus: A Halloween Cowl and Bag! This design started by accident. I was attempting to chart the pattern of a sweater seen in a picture from one of our historical fashion books at work and rather than look like the very swedish design in the picture it started looking like an owl. I decided to just roll with it and what developed was this Halloween pattern.


My favorite thing about August is you can start ignoring the fact that it is still summer and begin to collect the halloween magazines and catalogues that seem to come earlier and earlier every year. This year rather than just read the Halloween Martha Stewart Special, I put my hands to work creating a little Halloween so I could share it with all of you.


Purchase pattern here:

$7.00 USD
The E-book includes both the pattern for the cowl and the Trick or Treat Bag. The cowl is fairly quick and easy, the bag requires a bit of finishing work including felting and stitching, so give yourself plenty of time to finish before Halloween.

My favorite thing about October besides Halloween (and my birthday, 30, there is no way I am that old!) is Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool festival! I know for sure I am bringing this bag so keep an eye out for it. My mom had suggested filling it with candy to hand out but I told her that I plan on stuffing it with yarn. Besides, unless you handing out Artichokes French or Maple Cotton Candy, the Rhinebeck crowd probably won't be interested. Speaking of Rhinebeck, Leila and I went to the Dutchess County Fair last weekend. I will post the pics of chickens with hats, and carnival games soon.

Strands: A Cowl

So here is a quick and easy cowl I worked up over this summer. I am calling it Strands. The columns of circles remind me of strands of beads.



The pattern is very quick and easy. The product is very cozy.

The ruffle at the bottom flares out around your neck providing excellent coverage preventing any wind, snow, or rain from sneaking it's way in under the collar of your coat and surprising you. I know it is a bit silly to even talk about snow in the muggy August heat but hey, a girl can dream about winter.

To purchase the pattern go here:

$4.00 USD

Knitting Through a Heat Wave

The view from Madison Square Park

It has been hot hot hot this month. Thankfully it cooled down this weekend making it possible for me to sit here and spend some time in my computer room (cooled only by a fan). The only thing I can think of to do in extreme heat is knit and go to the movies. It may sound counter intuitive to play with wool when we are breaking heat records here but it is an activity that requires very little exertion so there we have it.

At the request of my mom I knit a new version of Pollen and Bubbles with a wide brim and a shorter body out of some Madelinetosh DK. I have added the instructions to the original pattern for sale through Ravelry.

I have also been working on a super secret pattern for Sanguine Gryphon. I can't tell you much about it yet, you will have to wait for fall. What I can tell you is that, OMG Gryphon's yarn is gorgeous. It's my first time working with it and certainly won't be my last. The colors are so rich. When I opened up the package of yarn at the office my coworkers all stopped dead in front of my desk to look at it, and I work in a costume shop, we get pretty stuff in there.

Now a gratuitous picture of Shake Shack, knitting (soon to be Sockhead Hat), and some Stieg Larsson.

Bones X Stitch

My life is littered with random items from my time working at Pier One. I never intended on buying that much stuff when I worked there but when your job is to try and sell it to others, you end up selling it to yourself subconcsiosly. I cannot even tell you how many glasses or dishes ended up going to goodwill because I was never going to have those charming dinner parties I thought of having when I convinced myself to buy them.

Anyway, I have a ton of picture frames thanks to this compulsive shopping habit. I recently just finished this project that has been half done for roughly a year. Inspired by Day of the Dead stuff I made these cute little skeleton's for this Pier One frame.

For the free PDF of the skeleton patterns go here.

Graduation at Hogwarts, Clinton, and a Cold

This last weekend I had the opportunity to get the heck out of New York and attend my little sister's graduation from Yale. I decided I would document this with a bullet point blog entry.
-Yale looks like Hogwarts. It may be a juvenile observation, but it really does. Throw in some professors and deans wearing funny robes and hats carrying ornate, old fashioned flags and props and it really does feel like your at that new Harry Potter amusement park.
-I got to see President Bill Clinton speak which was just incredible. Wicked smart that 42nd.
-I saw Aretha Franklin get an honorary degree.
-I saw the Secretary of Energy get an honorary degree.
-I failed to use my NY honed celebrity spotting skills on any of the celebrities who attended which makes me a little sad. I'm usually really good at that but I missed both Denzel Washington and Steven Spielberg who were both apparently there.
-No matter what SPF sunblock I use it seems to be an inevitability that I will get sunburned at graduation, thankfully though it was not a repeat of the Santa Fe lobster red burn of 04.
-After having suffered from really bad allergies all year, I was finally feeling a little better up until Saturday morning when I was getting on the New Haven bound Metro North when I came down with a cold.
-I had trouble regulating my voice since I could barely hear so there is a good chance that I spent a weekend yelling at my sister's friend's families and misinterpreting everything they said. Actually this is not really new since I am partially deaf, I only ever hear half of what people say anyway. Have you ever played that kid game, telephone, with a partially deaf person? The results are way more interesting when you do.
-Every road in Wallingford CT is named either Barnes or Main, or so it seems when you have no sense of direction and are driving around trying to find the super cute downtown area.
-Despite what I hoped, people will practically sit in your lap on a crowded Metro North train despite coughing up a storm and blowing through a box of kleenex.
-Those people are also the ones desperately trying to open novelty size screw top bottles of champagne to mix with their orange juice at 8:00AM on a Tuesday.

And on a completely unrelated note... As of last Friday I have been in NY for 5 years. I remember last year when I told myself, I should really try and be getting out of hear by 5. Yeah, that didn't happen so much.

Well I think that just about sums up my weekend. Happy Graduation season everyone.


See what I mean by Hogwarts? Either that or imagining Lyra Belacqua running around from roof to roof.