archives: life

my first visit to seattle

I have only a short mental list of cities in the US that I’ve never been to but want to visit, and Seattle is one of them. (I think the lone other is Austin, Texas.) I’ve been to Portland several times and like it there, but Seattle was yet to be explored. The weather decided to show me a good time on the one day I had for sightseeing, giving me some blue skies and puffy clouds! I did all the typical stuff, with my friend Jeff as my guide while his wife, Holly was at work (we met up with her in the afternoon).

space needle

view of puget sound

view of downtown

chihuly museum and garden

chihuly museum and garden

chihuly museum and garden

monorail

starbucks

pike place market

fremont troll

I was wholly satisfied with just a photo of the outside of the first Starbucks (coffee is coffee), but I’ll admit I was bummed that the fish throwers didn’t budge when we lingered at first and launched one when we were on our way back, too far for a good picture! Still, I got to see all the sights and eat some really delicious food. Dinners at Staple and Fancy (the tasting menu) and Kickin’ Boot, and a lunch with a view at Sky City Restaurant, the rotating restaurant at the top of the Needle! (Pricey, but a reservation gets you automatic access to the top of the Needle instead of waiting in line.)

knitterly retreat

This long weekend, my best knitter friends and I met up at a former barn-turned-meditation-center-now-airbnb-rental in rural Connecticut—it is our ninth such get together in six years! We played in the picture-perfect snow a little, but we mostly sat in our claimed spots on the couches, knit, and watched the Olympics. Oh, and we ate our weight in cheese and homemade bread. It was nothing short of perfect, except half of our group couldn’t make it this time.

knitting with friends

snowscape

follow your arrow shawl

icicles

photo shoot

silos

diana and specs

happy!

I knit on my Frankenshawl—I mean, my Follow Your Arrow. I finished Clue 4 but had forgotten to bring another ball of the yarn along. We also shot a quilt I finished and brought with me, but I can’t show you that yet!

resolutions

gazing inward

Every year I make resolutions—some concrete, some vague—but I’m not particularly committed to the idea of New Year’s resolutions. Or rather, I don’t beat myself up too much if I forget about them. I think that’s healthy, but I’m also thinking that this year I’d like to hold myself to them a bit more. For instance, every year I think about how I wish I blogged more. And while “more” is quantifiable, there’s no way to be systematic if that’s my resolution, and if there’s anything I am or like to be it’s systematic. So until it warrants a revisit, I’m going to try to blog at least weekly in 2014. Will I have FOs to show every week? Of course not. Which means I’ll hopefully learn to give up my grip on WIPs and start posting them, too, plus some pictures of my life as it unfolds.

With that in mind, I am going to have to recommit to documenting! My camera is heavy but that’s just not a good enough excuse. I’ve joined up with some friends at a daily photoblog, FewandFar, where we will be posting daily photos. I hope this will keep me inspired and dedicated—all the changes to Flickr have definitely not been encouraging me to keep up with it.

I’ve also felt a little lackluster in the cooking department. Despite reworking our kitchen so that it’s incredibly useful (a 6-foot workspace!), I have been so very lazy. With that in mind, I’m thinking of making my way through some of the cookbooks that do nothing but take up real estate in my small Brooklyn apartment. It’s time they earned their keep! Books that will hopefully make many appearances include Essential Pepin, The Essential Madhur Jaffrey, and a new one I bought for us for Christmas: Smoke and Pickles by Edward Lee. (FYI those are affiliate links.) New recipes will hopefully be added to our regular rotation, and we’ll stop ordering delivery so many nights a week!

So stay tuned as I craft, eat, and photograph my 2014!

rhinebeck 2013!

Last year we didn’t go to Rhinebeck, so this year we were itching to make the journey. As in the past, we opted to do an up-and-back, cramming all the yarny goodness into one day.

rhinebeck 2013

rhinebeck 2013

rhinebeck 2013

rhinebeck 2013

rhinebeck 2013

rhinebeck 2013

I bought more yarn than I intended, snagged some Christmas presents, hugged some dear old friends, ate some fried food, and left exhausted and happy.

(In case you’re curious, I wore my Madigan, which was last year’s “Rhinebeck” sweater for me, though I did not attend the festival.)

 

pepperknit.com is new and improved!

Big changes today! If you only read the site via your RSS reader, please click through and take a peek: We’ve redesigned! We’ve changed the layout and colors, added some fun features, and best of all: The entire site is now responsive! That means that it automatically looks awesome no matter what kind of device you’re reading it on. My analytics tell me many of you come here on a tablet—no worries, the site is already resized for you. Need to take a peek on your phone? No problem.

v3 preview

My web designer is available—that is, he’s in the next room—to fix any bugs that might arise, so don’t hesitate to let us know if you catch any problems. Plus there are still some tweaks we might make in the coming weeks. Hey, why not use the new contact form that we put on the About page! And if you’re curious to see what it used to look like, click here. (Every time someone does a redesign I immediately forget what it looked like before, and I wish they would show me! It’s like when you walk by a storefront you see all the time and there’s a new business but you can’t for the life of you remember what was there previously.) Let us know what you think of the new look, and stay tuned—I have a post waiting in the wings.