Twinkle, twinkle

After seven years of service, I've decided to retire my old home computer and get a new one. The last week of my vacation and this weekend I worked hard on breaking it in (without breaking it). I even managed to get my old printer working (with a different driver, but who cares? It does print). There is still some software missing - not every thing that worked with my XP software is working with the new Windows 7 version.

But I'm getting there.

One thing that's driving me crazy is that I can't cut and paste pictures here in my blog as I was used to. I make do, but it used to be easier. No idea what the problem is, but the good old Ctrl+X followed by Ctrl+V doesn't work. I think the problem is the Ctrl+V as the pictures disappear all right after the first step. But they never show up again ...

Anyway, what was I saying?

Ah, right. I made some jewlery.

This bracelet is knitted after stringing about a million beads (okay, maybe not a million - the instruction says 1,650) onto a stretchy cord. The knitting part is rather quick, the beading part not so much ...

The yellow/red/gold one is more of a test balloon and it turned out a bit on the wide-ish side for my wrist.

The blue one contains some larger facetted beads as well as some large hearts.

Over pentacost I finished one pair of socks - pattern is Sam from the book 'Sock Innovation' by Cookie A. The cables were slowing down my knitting speed to a crawl, but, luckily, the foot part is all stocking stitch and went much faster.

The second pair I finished just today are Lacy Scallops Socks. I'm not particularly fond of the picot edge, but don't hate it so much I'll be ripping it up. The rest of the socks I love. I even managed an almost perfect matching pair.

Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend

...but, as I can't really afford diamonds, Swarovski crystals will have to do.

Last week I've experimented a lot on beading and some related technics (like chain maille jewellery). As several of those experiments didn't yield satisfactory results, I've got only a little to show.

First is a bracelet in black and white with Swarovski crystals on top. In reality it's very sparkly and I do love it dearly. The picture doesn't do it justice in a the least.


Second is a set of bracelet and necklace. This is mostly normal beads with cheap glass crystals. The necklace should have three rows, like the bracelet, but I did run out of crystals. I'm thinking about adding a pendant, but don't have any real idea at the moment what.



Both pattern are from the magazine I've mentioned last time.

Other than beadwork, I've worked some more on the Castle Sampler.

The left side is a bit narrow, and I probably will add a strip of fabric to extend it a bit for better manageability. At least I now know there's enough fabric for the pattern (I'm still short about 4 stitches, but there's just enough room for them). I didn't center the pattern very well, but this way I've got a bit more wiggling room on the right hand side.

Sigh, my vacation is now over and it will be back to traveling most of the time.
While spending almost two weeks at home I used a guest account for World of Warcraft, and I had a lot of fun trying the game. If I had more time at home, this might turn into a problem (as I would probably continue and spend way too much time in the virtual world)

My character was a Taurus warrior, though I thought her to be quite cute. I thought it hilarious that when you type in the command "/muh", she actually moohed like a cow. Only, if anybody would have told her that face to face, she would have smashed him with her big hammer.
I will miss her ...