100th Post...and a giveaway, of course!

When I started this blog over a year ago I really didn't think that I would ever make it to 100 posts.  That seemed like such a high number and I really never thought that I'd find anything to write about and my interest would trail off, as it usually does with most projects I start (um, hello, have you seen my WIP basket?!).

Well, there have certainly been times (such as the last couple weeks!) when I've completely fallen off the face of earth, when I haven't had the physical or mental energy to put words onto the page.  But overall, I've come to rely on this blogging experience as a way of connecting to a community of people who I wouldn't have otherwise known existed.  It's been so great knowing that I'm not the only yarn hoarder out there or knowing I'm not the only person who thinks about knitting 24 hours a day...that's right, even when I'm asleep.

As a thank you for being faithful readers of my little ol' blog and for also providing me with wonderful blogs to read every day, I'm having a giveaway to celebrate my 100th post.

In honor of spring, I've chosen three different sock yarns in various shades of green.  I noticed little buds on the trees just today and the sun is shining...so I felt the need to celebrate by giving away some spring-inspired yarn!  They're all in shades of green, a color I hope to be seeing a lot more of in the coming weeks.

The first yarn is Valley Yarns Franklin Hand-Dyed in a colorway whose name escapes me at the moment.  The colors range from bright kelly green to a blue-ish teal....mmmmm, lovely.

The next skein is Berroco Ultra Alpaca Fine in the Pea Soup Mix colorway.  I'm currently in love with this yarn, as it's my chosen shade for the Socks Revived Contest that I've entered.  I had an extra skein hanging around, so I thought I would share my obsession for this particular shade of green.

 

And the final skein is Rabbit Ridge Super Soxx in the Leaves colorway from Rabbit Ridge Designs, a local Alaskan dyer out of Anchorage.  It varies in hue from very light celery green to a forest green.

And here they are all snuggled up together.  Don't you just want to take them home?  

Well....you can!  Or at least you can enter for the chance to take them home.  ;)

There are three ways to enter my 100th post yarn giveaway:

1. Leave me a comment telling me what your favorite sign of spring is and you'll receive your first contest entry.

2. Become a follower of my blog and let me know this in a separate comment and earn a second entry.

3. Blog about my giveaway on your own blog and then come back and tell me about it in a comment and you'll receive a third entry.

**DEADLINE to enter is April 7 at midnight Alaska Time.**  

I do hope you'll enter.  Thanks for sticking with me through 100 posts....and here's to 100 more!

An Actual Bloggable Project

I feel like I've been away from the blog for awhile, but I actually have something to blog about today and I'm happy to be back!  All the work I've been doing is on secret projects, but this one I can actually show you!  Or at least a small piece of it anyway...I don't want to give it all away right this instant!

And, coincidentally, it's a project in a green yarn.  Just in time for St. Patty's Day.  (I really didn't even realize that until just now!)

So, this is just a snippet of the design in progress.  Like I said, I don't want to give it all away, but I'll be able to reveal it soon enough.  It's a sock design for the contest on Elinor's blog, Exercise Before Knitting.  Truth be told, I've never even finished a sock, let alone thought about designing one, but this contest called to me and I got started on it right away.

I had a thought rattling around in my brain for awhile:  Cables Meet Spring.  And then this opportunity came along to get it down on paper and then, after that, translated with needles and yarn into a sock.  I'm just about finished with it and then I'll be sending it off to be test knit and will be releasing the pattern just in time for the April 19 contest deadline. Speaking of....anyone interested in test knitting a sock for me?  Send me an email at allison@alaskanpurl.com and let me know!

Oh, and I just might be blogging from my very own brand new laptop!

I caved and bought myself a MacBook Pro last week.  I know, I know.  I was trying so hard to be patient and wait until the summer, but I just couldn't hold off any longer.  It got here today and I immediately got it out of the box and began playing with it.  You have no idea how excited I am to be blogging from my recliner!

My next post will be numero 100...be on the lookout for a 100th post giveaway in the next few days!

Haas Family Photo Shoot

Back in December when I was home in Ohio for the holidays, we got our family photos taken by the wonderful Cassidy of Cassidy Dawn Photography.

She blogged about our shoot today over on her blog and you can see some of the great shots.  She does such an amazing job at putting everyone at ease.  It's no small feat to get my dad in front of the camera...and he was actually smiling too!

The third shot from the bottom is of me and my brother and sister (I'm the one on the left).  I think it's my favorite!  Well, it's hard to say that with all the cuteness of my nephew going on.  He's such a ham.

You can read all about it here.  Enjoy!

Mother Nature is mocking me...

Remember the other day when I wrote about spring being in the air and how I was excited about it?  Well, Mother Nature must read my blog and want to contradict me, because today it is snowing upwards.  And sideways.  And in swirls.  And there is a blizzard warning.  And it's supposed to snow/rain through Wednesday.  Awesome.

I wish I could get a picture of it, but now that I'm safely inside after coming home from work, there's no way I'm going back out there for a photo!  And the windows are smeared with the sleet, so I can't even take a photo through them.  You'll just have to picture the blizzard in your mind's eye.  For those of you in the Midwest or Northeast, this should be no problem.  ;)  It's not quite the Snowpocalypse here, but nasty all the same.

So, I guess that means I'll have to hunker down by the fire and knit the weekend away.  *sigh* My life is so hard. ;)

Still working on the samples I need to get done (the process is absolutely dragging on), so I have no FOs to show, but I have been spinning up some of the Pink Cocoa batts from Corgi Hill Farms when I need a break from knitting. I've gotten through one of the two 4 oz batts and, if I say so myself, my spinning is getting more and more consistent. There are a few thicker spots, but it's already so much better than my first and second tries.

This photo doesn't really do it justice...

(Pardon the awful yellow light in my bathroom.  It's so dark in the house with the wintry weather going on outside and I"m certainly not taking any photos outdoors today!)

I did, however, take some photos yesterday (when it wasn't a blizzard outside) of some new fiber I have acquired.  I tried really hard to get some colors that I normally would not be drawn to.  I know, I know, the second photo has some purplish hues, which I usually buy, but the yellow is definitely not a color I  go to.  And it seems that yellow is in both!  Hmmm...I may have just added a new color to my 'usual' color palette.

Both are Hedgehog Fibres Silk/Merino Top.  I'm so excited to see how they spin up!  I'm going to have a lot of handspun hanging out here soon.  I'll have to find a good use for it all...I'm sure it won't be a problem. ;)  I've got lots of babies to knit for here very soon, and yarn is small quantities is perfect for baby knits!

Gray, gray, go away...

We actually saw the sun yesterday! It made a much welcomed reappearance in the sky. It took my eyes forever to adjust to the drastic change in scenery!

You may have noticed that (with the exception of yesterday) my postings have been few and far between in the last few weeks. I think it was the gray of February sucking the life force out of me. I just had no desire to do anything crafty. There were 5 days last week in which absolutely no knitting was done in this house. Do you know how rare of an event that is?! That only happens once in a blue moon, in the case of vacations or serious stomach flus. I've been feeling so down and exhausted and crabby that I couldn't even eke out a few rows of stockinette on one of the samples I'm working on. Stockinette. In the round. Should be practically mindless, right? Well, not if you had a serious case of the Februaries like I apparently had.

Each winter here in Skagway gets harder and harder for me. The first couple were great. The novelty of the darkness in the middle of the day really made it easy to not see the sun all that much. The sun is setting at 2 pm? How cool! Now, in my seventh winter, the lack of sunlight has really become unbearable. And no matter how much liquid vitamin D I chug or how much I sit underneath my sad lamp, I still get so lethargic that some days it's painful to get out of bed.  

But then spring comes, as it always does, and I start to get overly excited that it's still light out when I'm leaving work...And then when it's still light out when I go to bed...and still light when I wake up at 2 a.m. to go to the bathroom. Luckily we've not really had any truly bad weather this winter. It makes it a bit easier to get through.

Spring is definitely in the air here. Everything is melting! This is what our front yard looks like.  This is pretty much what it's looked like the entire winter.  With the exception of the foot and a half of snow we got back in early January (which melted almost as quickly as it came), our yard has been pretty bare.  What little snow we got drifted to the right there in the photo and has compacted into ice.  And now it's disappearing with our 40 degree temps.  We now have a yard full of really slick ice and pools of mud.  Why, yes, it is as awesome as it sounds. ;)

And with the spring temps come some much needed blue sky.  This was the view from my knitting chair (aka Alaskan Purl Designs central!).

Speaking of my knitting corner, things are looking a little bit cluttered, huh?  

I'm thinking that I need to set up a desk to keep track of my designs, submissions, etc.  I have a design ideas notebook and some folders for each of my designs, but I feel like I need to move out of my comfort zone and into a more professional space, even if that space is just a small table in the corner of the spare room upstairs!

I'm muddling through the process of setting up a small business (it's kind of freaking me out to do something so adult-like!) for my designs and (possibly!) an etsy shop, so I think a little bit of organization is in the works.  That's what spring is for, right?  

Well, I'd better get to bed.  I've been going to the gym at 4:30 AM all week to get into the habit for the summer months and my wake-up time of 4 AM comes around really quickly.  Pretty soon it will look like this at that time of the morning!  Just a couple more months... sigh....  

An old (but recently discovered!) FO: Foliage

As I was digging through a bunch of knitting stuff the other day, I happened upon a hat I completed a couple years ago.  It was so nice to see it after such a long time!  I don't know that I ever wore it at all.  It somehow got sucked into the knitting void without ever seeing the light of day!

It's Foliage by Emily Mooney from the Fall 2007 Knitty (Rav it).  I can't remember many details, but I do believe I used Knit Picks Risata sock yarn in Marionberry held double throughout.  I'm pretty sure I used a little over a skein.  

It's so sproingy and comfy...and the yarn is stretchy enough that it fits comfortably over my big head.

As usual, I take my blog photos right after work to catch the nice light.  Well, that, and I do it when I'm alone so that I don't have to hear the incessant teasing I would hear if Jeff were home.  He thinks its weird I take so many photos of yarn and yarn-related things.  I think he buys way too many power tools.  We agree to disagree on these points. ;)

However, the one bad thing about trying to take pictures while I'm here by myself is that I always struggle with taking decent shots of myself modeling FOs.  I do have a tripod and a remote control for my camera, but I find it very difficult to get the good angles I want when I'm in front of the lens.  Add in the fact that my house has such poor lighting and you see why I hardly ever have any decent photos of myself on here.

Until today.   I figured out that if I crouch down just right in our downstairs bathroom that I can take advantage of the natural light coming through the window while balancing my camera on the toilet.  Certainly not ideal, but it sort of worked! 

Apparently taking toilet pictures is very serious business. This is my the-camera-went-off-before-I-was-ready look. No smiles just yet.

Okay, here we go. I finally got a smile out at just the right moment before the shutter snapped. And then a split second after that I had to lunge for my camera as it toppled ever-so-precariously near the edge of the back of the toilet.

That was a close call.  Note to self: Shut toilet lid before next photo session. That really should go without saying, but I thought I'd throw that out there. ;)