Bun hats that is...

Check out these awesome girls who made their very own Space Princess hat from Knits for Nerds!!! (Psst, you might even recognize them as models from the book!)


Shannon

Sarah



Made your own Princess hat? Show it off! Also give some love to Genevieve Miller who created this fantastic pattern!

This just got officially announced:

http://www.gencon.com/2012/indy/pm/events/ligoh/SPAGoH.aspx

I'm going to be the SPA Guest of Honor at Gen Con Indy this year! I'm so excited! I'll be hanging out, chatting, knitting, and will hopefully be dragging along a few super cool guests with me!

Also, mad props to Tom Klubens for this bio pic, because it's hilarious! I was standing in for Jane Ire for the Horrible Gloves shoot so that Tom could check the lighting.

If you're going to be in Indy for Gen Con this year look me up! We can knit, grab a drink, hang out and check out some of the coolest gaming and costumes in Indy!

As a lot of you may know, Kyle Cassidy is doing a roller derby portrait project that will hopefully be a book. So far the photos have been amazing! Dill, my friend Razor (the amazing sock designer from Knits for Nerds) and I drove almost 10 hours to go hang with Lorraine, Kyle, and CVRG to not only see a CVRG bout, but to see Kyle take some of these incredible pictures.

Lorraine told me, "Bring skates! Kyle will take your picture"! and I though, "Cool". I packed skates, outfits, LOTS of make up, everything I would need to look pretty and cool on camera. I wondered what Kyle would have me do? Climb a tree? Bounce on the trampoline (which I did, but that was without skates actually. In fact, that wasn't me. That was Joan of Drunk, and that's an entirely different story)or maybe just skate down the road and look awesome!

So we arrive, and things are in full swing. Dill immediately gets drafted into holding photographer THINGS. It's what he does when there are photographers around. He always ends up holding lights, or those reflector things, or just opening beer for the photogs. There was a little downtime between photos, and Kyle turns to me and says he wants to take my picture.
Um. Erm. No make up? Close up of my face? 10 hour CAR RIDE??? Eep.

I don't consider myself incredibly vain, but I am very, very sensitive about the way my face looks. I was in a pretty bad car wreck as a teen, which resulted in multiple scars, teeth implants, a chin implant, bone grafts,a nose job, and a long, dark time as a teenager in a small town being called "scarface".
Many, many surgeries later, I still have lots of insecurity about the way my face looks. Logically, I know it's not as bad as I feel like it is. I look in the mirror, and I see the way my lip twists, my nose isn't the same nose that the rest of my family has, my fake teeth look strange compared to the real teeth, and the scarred side of my face is skewed compared to the other side.
Other people look at me and see a not unattractive girl with colored hair and blue eyes.

I know far worse things have happened to far better people, but still, we are all human, and we all have our issues.

So when Kyle said that he wanted to take my picture as is, my heart started pounding, I tried to beg off until the next day when I would be armed with heavy scar concealer, and big hair, and possibly a full body shot, or a picture of my feet, or anything besides a close up of my freaking FACE(!!!) but he had an idea, and I know he's a good photographer, so I trusted.

It took me almost a week to be able to pull the picture up and look at it.

This is the result. (click on it to see it big)

And if you look close, you can see the way my lip twists, and that my nose is not my family nose, and at least one of the scars on my face, but you know what?

I don't give a fuck.

That is a cool ass picture, and I love it. I would print that picture on a tee shirt and wear it. I would show that picture anywhere. And if Kyle gets his book published, and that picture makes it in, I will be proud as hell to show it off. For me this is a huge milestone. Seeing myself, and not immediately focusing on all the things that are wrong with my face, but instead just seeing the cool picture that IS my face. I don't have any anxiety, I'm not cringing to see it, nothing.

It feels good, and it makes me feel a little bit lighter, and happy, to maybe see an actual image of me, and not just the way I perceive myself.

So thanks for the picture Kyle. (Less thank you's perhaps, for bringing the Jack Daniels into the house, but the picture makes up for it.)

Oh HELL YES! As many of you know, Amanda recently set up this Kickstarter for her new album. One of cool things you can get with your pledge? A private house party! Some ladies in Indy started kicking up some funds, booked it, and now it's happening at Strange Brew Coffee!

Right now there are less than 30 spots available. The minimum kick in is $80. Is that expensive for a concert??? Yes, it is. But this isn't really a concert. There will only be 50 people, so for you old timer Indy music scenesters, that's less people than we used to cram into Smedley's Dream ! Not to mention that the girl who fronted the cash is going to take a loss on it. So when you look at it as an intimate party with Amanda F. Palmer, $80 is a hell of a deal!

Hell, I bought a ticket and it's happening at my coffee shop! I'm excited that something this amazing is coming to Indy, and I hope to make some new friends that night! Check out the event, buy a ticket, and enjoy what is sure to be an amazing experience!

After often being amazed by the works of totallee.net and Todd Paschall I decided to see if I could work multiple colors in crochet to create kick ass pictures.

I'll admit, I'm not the best when it comes to crochet. It was the first fiber art that I learned how to do, but I quickly abandoned it for knitting. I think crochet is awesome, but I can knit and not look at what I'm doing. I can read books, watch movies, etc. With crochet, I'm always having to look down at my stitches, and I get bored.


So, despite being let's say, not the best crochet artist in the world, I decided to tackle the picture crochet idea. I wanted to make this incredibly cool blanket for Lorraine. (For those of you noticing the Neil and Amanda bit in the title, sit tight, I'll get there) I picked out and rejected photo after photo. Made graphs, patterns, charts, bought yarn, started, cried, tore things out, pulled out bits of my hair, you get the idea. The Lorraine blanket is extremely complicated, so I decided I needed a practice blanket first. As many times as Neil has let me crash at his house, chase his dogs, and fill his bedrooms and libraries with roller girls (Not to mention not minding that I talked his assistant into joining roller derby, which I'm sure makes her schedule a little bit more complicated than it used to be) I figured I owed him a present.


I always liked the pictures he and Amanda used as their engagement photo, so I hunted down one of those. (I love you interwebs)
Photographed by Allan Amato



The actual Crochet by Numbers technique that Todd Paschall uses involves lots of counting. I decided to use my good old reliable graph method.

Erm, which, due to the size of the project, meant that I had to make a GIANT graph!

Pulling all the ends through isn't exactly fun... I cursed Neil and his wild hair quite a few times, as it involved lots of one stitch color changes. Here's what the back was starting to look like.


Oddly enough, to me this thing looked like shapeless blobs... until I took a picture:



Hey! That looks like what I want it to look like!!!

Of course finishing it meant... SEWING! Argh. Couldn't leave the back looking like this though:

So, I sewed a super snuggly fleece type back on. Lenore the cat approved:






And finally, the finished project:
(okay, lies, I still need to seam a bit on the top, but this is my only chance at posting this blog today)



About 2 weeks to complete (including a couple frogs-tearing out your work for you non-fiber people) and around 35,000 stitches!!!
Yay! Finished present! It's not perfect by any means, but I'm pretty happy with my first attempt. Working on the Lorraine blanket now, which involves about 5 panels, at around 18,000 stitches per panel. It will keep her warm in the frozen north at least!

*I originally posted this on ravelry.com, but had a request to post it over here when I was trying to describe it to a friend who is not a knitter. (They DO exist!!!)

I have a very sweet employee named Carly. She wasn’t much of a nerd until she started working for me, but things have changed. Last year, I got her to watch Firefly. At one point she came into work and gushed about how Walsh was her favorite character ever.
Oops.
When she got ready to watch Serenity I went ahead and gave her the next day off of work.

Then I got her into Doctor Who. I kept bugging her to watch it, and she finally started. After about a week she was telling me how much she loved Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor.
Oops.

When she started Season 2, she said that she liked the new guy okay, but it didn’t matter, because for her it was all about Rose. As long as Rose was around, everything was just peachy keen.
Oops.

Now she’s almost done with Season 3, the Martha season. She says she’s still not over Rose, but she likes Martha. She in fact, loves this season. (though she had to watch Blink with all the lights on) So she’s cool, she can handle it. The only person so far that she couldn’t stand was the redhead from the weird Christmas special.

Umm… oops.

I need to find a nice, safe, nerdy show for her where all the characters live happily ever after.

I am not normally one for plucking things out of strangers trash. Dill is. When we first moved into our neighborhood he found a stand up arcade game called Mercs. He took it, fixed it (the screen was black until he hit it with a screwdriver) and we spent a drunken cookout with many friends playing it.
Another time, we were driving and he saw a star wars cup teetering on the top of a trash can. He stopped the jeep, grabbed it, hopped back in and upon realizing it was a Jar Jar cup, scoffed and tossed it in the back of the jeep. A year later, we were going through a box and found the cup. Giggling like idiots, we drove back the the house he had gotten it from, and set it on their porch.
Once, Dill got me involved in his trash collecting. We were still new to the neighborhood, and as we were driving though, Dill spotted a really cool, retro style pink and purple bag. He did a u-turn, and told me to hop out and grab the bag. I started protesting, since the family who lived in the house were all sitting, having dinner in front of their big picture window. I did not want to always be known as the neighbors who went through others trash. He insisted, I figured it would be better to get it over with, and grabbed the bag. It was HEAVY! When we opened it, we discovered a pink bowling ball named Angie inside.

Yesterday apparently, it was my turn. The fates aligned for me to get the ultimate trash find. See, normally I drive a Honda Del Sol. A two seated, very teeny tiny car. But Sunday, we bought a minivan, and I've been driving it around this week to test it out. Then I took a wrong turn, and ended up on a different road than I normally take to go to the store, and saw THIS:

I called Dill and told him about it, and he started pleading with me to get it. After much hemming and hawing on my part, I made several u-turns and fought some wicked traffic to get to the driveway and R2. I felt weird just snatching it from the curb in broad daylight, so I knocked on the door. An older gentleman answered and looked a bit taken aback to find a flustered pink haired girl on his front step.
"I'm sorry to bother you, but are you throwing that R2 away"?
"Yeeeeessss" At this point he looked beyond baffled. I mean, it was on the CURB! Of course he was throwing it away!
"Sooo... I can have it"? I was kind of dancing from foot to foot at this point in excitement. He laughed, told me to go get it, and offered to help me put it in the van.

And now we have an R2, and I'm officially a person who gets into other peoples trash.



We're thinking of turning him into a beer cooler, or a keg holder for the bar Dill is building in the front room.


I wish he had his head, but I think we can get one built. I plan on harassing some of the guys in the 501st at my book signing tomorrow night about how such a thing can be done!