Mother's Day and Hemlocks

It has been almost a week since Mother's Day.  What a wonderful day to tell our moms how much we love them!  I made a couple of cards and and started a Hemlock blanket for my mom, weeks if not a month+  ago.  I like knitting for fun, but it can be pretty time consuming, as I found on this hemlock blanket.  I attempted to knit on the 6 hour car ride to my parents house but didn't finish in time.  I had finished just-in-time to wash, block it and snap a few photos before jumping back in the car for another 6 hours for my FIRST DAY OF MY NEW JOB Monday morning.  My mom waited 2 days for it to dry before throwing it over the couch.  For details on the hemlock patterns see the links at the end of the post.

My first week of work was great, but at night I was so exhausted.  I'm still getting in the groove of 45 minutes of traffic, but I'm lucky to have found a design related 8-4:30 job!  Unfortunately I also discovered my car needs a new radiator this weekend, and we've been busy getting things set up to get it fixed.  After 10 hours of Andrew working at it, it's all new!  I'm lucky also to have a boyfriend that enjoys working on cars.

Hopefully, as I get settled in with work stuff I will be able to juggle my blog and apartment hunting a lot better than I have the past week.  Here are the photos from the process of my cards and blanket.

Custom Stamp set.  I use this more than anything.

My messy work station

I didn't have a square envelope so I made some special ones

I fastened them together with an eyelet and they opened in opposite directions

The beginning of the hemlock

The start of the fan and feather chart

My first attempt at blocking

My mom took an after shot on her ipad so I could see my hard work.

Thanks to these websites I was able to knit my very first Hemlock Doily Throw.  I was very happy how it turned out, and am excited to make another, but bigger.

Hemlock + Fan/Feather chart

Brooklyntweed: The Hemlock Ring Blanket

The Rainy Sisters <The PDF for the Hemlock pattern>

The Fan + Feather Chart

warm hello + thanks

I recently had a great opportunity to meet with someone and wanted to say thanks.  This is the card I sent:

 

 

notes to friends

This week I put my pretty paper to good use and made hand-made cards for a few of my favorite people.  I'm pretty obsessed with yellow,gray, and dark blue for the time being as you can see in my cards.  I even got to the post office and mailed them out in a timely manner.  The next cards I'll be making are for birthdays.  This month alone I know of 8 people's birthday off the top of my head.  So happy birthday to all you March babies!

 

 

where to start

I recently became really inspired to continue my blog from Korea, but didn't want to use the same one.  Blogger makes it easy to have more than one blog using the same name and what not. Last week I went through all the design templates and fonts and uploaded my portfolio cover for my background and got everything ready.  And now I've just been procrastinating because I wanted to document all of the design things I've been doing for the last 3 months, while unemployed. But I haven't so I decided today is the day I just start from fresh.  Someday I may add a photo or two of projects I have accomplished. But today is a new day.

This week I have done a little card exploration.  The photos I took weren't the best, using my IPad, but you get the gist.

The Thank You card is for a graphic designer that agreed to meet with me last Saturday morning for an informational interview.  She was very nice and down to earth.  She answered all of my questions and gave me some great perspective as to the graphic design industry and where I should start.  I asked her to meet with me because I feel we share a lot of the same tastes and hobbies.     Here is her website - l belle

After helping shovel some very wet and heavy snow yesterday, Andrew's mom Vicki, and I went to Archiver's to use some coupons.  I got some really pretty paper to make some cards with and a stamp set "hello friend" that I am very excited to put to use.

 

The newly fresh snow was really inspiring.  Unfortunately I loaned my zoom lens out this same morning, but still captured how peaceful and heavy everything was after the loud windy ice-storm the night before. 

I feel this is a good start to my new blog. I have many projects I'm currently doing, but I can't give them all away just yet.

Happy March

- Manda Sue