peppermint rose

Have I mentioned that I watch and listen to a lot of knitting podcasts?

Well, I do.

One of my favorite video podcasts is The Stockinette Zombies.  Megan and Amy knit beautiful projects, and sometime they host knit-alongs.  One of their recent knit-alongs was called the Crazy KAL-- basically, giving in to the urge to cast on ridiculous, crazy projects!  I participated by starting my Busy Bee Blanket.  That fell into the 'crazy' category because a) it's a blanket knitted from sock yarn, b) I didn't actually knit socks at the time, even though this blanket is designed to use up leftover bits of sock yarn, and c) mine is going to be made of more than 600 little knitted hexagons!

The lovely ladies of the Stockinette Zombies randomly selected prize winners for the KAL... and I won a prize!  

Yaaaaay!

I won a gorgeous skein of worsted weight superwash merino wool by Cakewalk Yarns, in the Peppermint Bark color.  It is some of the softest, squishiest yarn I've ever knit with.  

I knit my lovely prize into a beret.  I used the Cabled Rangoli Hat pattern, with a few modifications (all the technical details are on my Ravelry project page.)  This was my first cabled hat, and my first project with bobbles!

I'm calling this my Peppermint Rose beret after one of my favorite childhood movies, which some kind soul has put on Youtube! I just discovered this and it's taking all my willpower to finish writing this post instead of dropping everything to watch the movie right this second.  A movie about a magic garden, starring a bunch of girls with fab hair and ruffly bloomers?  You bet I loved it.  I can't tell you how many times my family was subjected to it.  I brought it home pretty much every time we went to the video store (remember those?).

...Now I'm going to go do something important and grown-up.

I'm definitely not about to go watch that movie.

Nope, not me.

I hope you're having a great week!

♥

confessions of a blog-lurker

Hi everyone!

I hope you're having a great day.

So I know it's a bit late for this, 26 days late to be exact, but I have a New Year's resolution regarding blogging.

I am going to do the unthinkable (to me): leave more comments.

I read a huge number of blogs.  At the moment, my Google Reader has...let's see... 970 unread posts.  Nine hundred and seventy.  If you have a blog and you've commented here before, I'm probably subscribed to you.  But I almost never comment!  It's not that I'm not interested, or that I don't want to participate in the blogging community.  I'm just a shy, lurking blog-reader.  It's kind of ridiculous.  (Fun fact, though-- there is a Wikipedia entry for 'lurker' about people who do this!)  There are blogs I've been reading for years, and that I'm emotionally invested in, like The Little Things We Do, home of the cutest baby on the planet, Fern.  I think I've commented maaaaaybe three times?  That's just silly.  But I worry that I don't have anything worthwhile to add to the conversation, or that I'll be repeating what someone else already said, and I psych myself out and don't comment.  

Note to self:  it is a blog comment.

It doesn't need to be a work of literary greatness.

And anyway, I love reading comments on my blog!  I enjoy each one-- I never think, "Hrmmm, this comment ends with a preposition!  It lacks a witty-yet-relevant pun!"  Chances are that nobody else things those things either.  

So anyway.  I'm going to try to comment on at least three posts every day.  And I'm keeping myself accountable by posting it here. 

Baby steps.

Baby steps to commenting more.

(that last bit is a reference to the movie What About Bob? and if you haven't seen it you really should.)

Have a fantastic weekend!

♥

moonrise kingdom

On Tuesday night, I saw Moonrise Kingdom.

It was one of the cutest movies I've ever seen.

Y'know what's in that basket?  A kitten.

I've gotta admit, I spent a lot of the movie worrying about something happening to that kitten.

I blame The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Which I hated.

But this post isn't about a movie I hated.

It's about a movie I loved.

So anyway.

One of my very favorite actors in the world and one of my earliest crushes, Edward Norton, is in Moonrise Kingdom!  Yay!

He is LIT-trally the only man on the planet who could make high-waisted khaki shorts look good.

I loved the storybook aspect of the movie-- interestingly, none of these books actually exist as published works, Wes Anderson just wrote passages from them, but he's currently working on a side-project of animating the books that Suzy brought with her.  Yay!

I absolutely loved the whole movie.  Although it did make me a little melancholy that these two twelve-year-olds did so much to be able to stay together, and it made me very conscious of the fact that I don't currently have someone to go on adventures with.

(Except my best-friend-in-the-whole-wide-world, Marissa, of course.  But I mean a male someone.  A male someone who isn't one of my cats.  You know what I mean.)

If you saw Moonrise Kingdom, what did you think of it?

This awesome piece of embroidery is one of my favorite quotes from the film.

Have a fantastic evening!

♥

the illusionist

Tonight I finally, finally bought my own copy of The Illusionist.

It is my absolute favorite movie of all time.

Every time I watch it I'm just blown away by how beautiful it is.

"What do you want?"
"Nothing."

"Then why are you doing this?"

"To be with her."

“From the moment we enter this life we are in the flow of it. We measure it and we mock it, but we cannot defy it. We cannot even speed it up or slow it down. Or can we? Have we not each experienced the sensation that a beautiful moment seemed to pass too quickly, and wished that we could make it linger? Or felt time slow on a dull day, and wished that we could speed things up a bit?”

The love scene from The Illusionist is by far the most beautiful one in any movie, anywhere, at any time.  
There's no explicit nudity (amazingly) but you probably shouldn't watch it at work.  
Your computer might explode from the perfection of it.








I almost didn't post this because this movie is so special to me and so close to my heart that I had a moment of wanting to keep it hidden.  But it's too perfect not to share.

If you've seen The Illusionist-- what did you think of it?

♥

happy birthday doris!

Happy 88th birthday to one of my very favorite leading ladies...

Doris Day!

My favorite Doris Day movie is 'Pillow Talk' from 1959

Doris and her co-star, Rock Hudson

Doris Day is known for avoiding the public eye, but she recently did an interview with Terry Gross from the NPR show 'Fresh Air.'  You can listen to it here!
Who is your favorite classic starlet?

Oh, and Bucky says hi.  He's so excited to have someone around who has to lay down most of the time.  I've been nose-to-nose with him for the better part of the last two days.

I hope you're having a great day!

♥

hugo

I am so excited that Hugo did so well at the Oscars. 

Cinematography

Art Direction

Sound Editing

Sound Mixing

Visual Effects

It comes out on DVD tomorrow and I can't wait to get it within the next few days.  I'm hoping for a good amount of behind-the-scenes content because the film is so visually stunning that I would loooove to see how it came together.

images from here

♥

that thing you do

You guuuuuys.  One of my favorite movies, That Thing You Do, is on Netflix right now!  Basically, it's the story of a 1960s rock band with one major hit song.  It's a really fun movie, and Tom Everett Scott is completely adorable as the leading man, and Liv Tyler looks so ridiculously pretty.  Go watch it!

I've been feeling a bit under the weather lately-- by 7 p.m., I'm so ready for bed.  I think it's just belated exhaustion from everything that's happened during the last month.  I haven't been taking particularly good care of myself recently, because there were other people who needed care way more than I did, but now I'm paying for it.  So I'm going to try to get back to yoga more often, and I think I'm also going to cut out sugar, at least for a few weeks.  I just feel so sluggish after even a little bit of it lately.  Alright.  Yeah, let's do that.  Has anybody else tried cutting out sugar?  How'd it work for you?  

Also, since I've been so narcoleptic lately and sleeping instead of blogging, I'm extending the etsy shop giveaway until February 20th.  Yaaaay!  Enter it!  There are only two completed entries right now, so your chances of winning are excellent.  

Hope you're all having a fantastic Thursday evening!  Or whatever day you read this.  I hope it's a good one.

♥

hugo ♥

This has not been a great year for me.

It started out with two heart-shattering break-ups-- the really, really bad kind, where all you can do for a week or two afterward is cry and get sick.  One was with someone who I genuinely thought was the love of my life. The other was with my exact opposite. I was his anima, he was my animus.

The summer culminated with the sudden and devastating loss of my dad.

I'm emotionally exhausted.

Life doesn't feel magical anymore.

Tonight I saw Hugo with my mom.

It's such a beautiful movie, visually and thematically.  It felt so poetic.

It was reminiscent of Amélie, especially in the color story and the mix of reality and fantasy.

It made me feel more alive than I have in months.  I plan on seeing it at least two or three more times.

Have you seen Hugo?  What did you think of it?

♥

also, the Cyber Monday sale has started at Julie Rose Sews on Etsy!  enter the coupon code 'CyberMonday' for 15% off any order.

♥

♥

sometimes, if I don't know how to handle a situation, I ask myself, "what would Matilda do?"

this would be much easier to follow through with if I was telekinetic.  but still.

♥