friday favorites v.3

Hi there.  

For this week's Friday Favorites, I'd like to share some of my favorite illustrations on Etsy! 

 

this lovely tea party.

 

this little raccoon with his binoculars-- I love raccoons and this guy is so mischievous!

  

tea and stars-- two of my very favorite things.

  

these sweet friends

  

this charming kitty-- drinking tea while wearing socks and mitts!

I hope you've had a wonderful week!  

♥

p.s.:  due to a huge amount of spam, I'm turning off the option for anonymous comments.  
thanks for understanding!

celestarium

  Sometimes, from the moment you first see a knitting pattern, you know you absolutely-must-knit-it-no-matter-what.  Even if it is absolutely crazy and huge and you're not quite sure what you'll do with it after you knit it.

      For me, Celestarium was that knitting pattern.

     Celestarium is a huge circular shawl with beads arranged to form the constellations as seen from the northern hemisphere, with the North Star in the center.  I began this project on December 21st, 2013, right before I went home for Christmas.  This seems like a pretty intimidating pattern at first glance-- there are 6 sets of charts, and the final chart is 8 pages long.  After I got into the rhythm of count-knit-knit-knit-yarn over- bead-knit-knit, though, it became relaxing and fairly mindless knitting.  It was really satisfying to watch the constellations emerging as I finished each chart. 

 

      I knit my Celestarium with Knit Picks Stroll yarn in the Midnight Heather color.  According to the pattern, it should have taken 1200 yards on size 4 needles.  However, even though I went up to size 6 needles (I am a tight knitter and wanted to keep the shawl light and airy), I only used 1039.5 yards of yarn.  That leaves me a skein and a half of yarn to knit up into little dark blue hexipuffs for my Busy Bee Blanket!  ...Well, eventually.  Not now.  I have had enough navy blue for the moment. 

 

My finished Celestarium measures 48" in diameter, though I expect that will shrink slightly since I blocked the shawl pretty severely.  I'm planning to frame it and hang it above my dresser, with a small, framed constellation chart next to it.  I am so pleased with how it turned out!  Finishing the Celestarium has inspired me to start another huge project-- but that's going to be a present for two very special people, so it has to take a secret for now.  I'll be able to reveal it in a few months-- I can't wait!

♥

friday favorites v.2

Hi, and happy Friday!  I hope you've had a great week.

Friends in the US, I hope you have a fantastic Memorial Day weekend!  I plan on spending my long weekend knitting, spinning, spending time with my brother, doing some yoga, and checking out yard sales.  I found six beautiful 1940s handkerchiefs at a yard sale a few weeks ago, along with a very sweet card with Gustav Klimt's The Kiss on the front.  I'm hoping to find some cute vintage home decor this weekend.

Here are a few of my favorite finds this week!

 

This rose and rhubarb cake sounds delicious, and I love how it looks in a fluted bundt cake pan.  

 

John Howe is a renowned Tolkien illustrator who was also a concept artist for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films.  I've always had a special place in my heart for his drawings of Bag End.  His vision of how Bilbo Baggins's hobbit hole should look is now so iconic that it's impossible to imagine it any other way.

 

It's the season for one of my very favorite flowers-- hydrangeas!  The blossoms in this photo look so lush and fresh!

   

These plastic picnic plates from Anthropologie are so summery and bright!  They're illustrated by artist Ashley Longshore.  

How fun are these enormous paper flowers from the blog Mokkasin?  The instructions are in Swedish, but Google Translate does a good enough job that it shouldn't be too hard to follow.

Have a beautiful weekend!

♥

favorite spaces: the alhambra palace at granada

There are places in the world that seem just too magical to be real-- for me, the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain is one of those places. 

  

 I first fell in love with the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain, when I read The Constant Princess by Phillipa Gregory.  It's a beautiful and heartbreaking imagining of the story of Katherine of Aragon, who eventually married Henry Tudor.  The beginning of the story is set in the Alhambra, and the descriptions of the beautiful carved plaster walls and ceilings absolutely mesmerized me. 

  

This is the ceiling of the Hall of the Two Sisters.  In my opinion, this is one of the most beautiful and impressive tributes to the ingenuity of the medieval Moorish people, who originally built the Alhambra Palace.  Not only is this ceiling stunning to look at, but the mathematical complexity of creating this design, and ensuring it would be able to be supported by the surrounding walls, is astonishing.

 

Isn't it incredible that every bit of the beautiful carving in the Alhambra was done by hand?  The sheer amount of work is mind-blowing.  The combination of incredible design and phenomenal, patient craftsmanship, created without modern machinery, is hard to comprehend.

One of the most wonderful things about The Constant Princess was hearing the perspective of a teenage girl living in such an incredible place-- and yet, to Katharine, that was just the latest event in a tumultuous childhood.  This photo, with the views out of the intricate windows, somehow makes the palace seem like it could have been a home to a girl who was the same age as I was when I first read the book.  Incidentally, if you're a fan of the HBO series The Tudors, I think The Constant Princess would be an interesting bit of (fictionalized) backstory to give the television show's portrayal of Katharine more context.  She comes off as cold, stubborn, and kind of one-dimensional in the show (in my humble opinion), but I think that reading The Constant Princess gives much more insight into her character's motivations.

The Court of the Lions is stunning... The arches and plaster tracery are so delicately detailed, and the bolder, more solid lions around the base of the fountain offer such a strong contrast. 

These detail shots of the arches into the Court of the Lions show such beautiful, thoughtful design, and again, an absolutely massive amount of exacting work.

 
I would love to visit the Alhambra someday.  I can't even imagine how it would feel to see and touch this incredibly inspiring work of art in person.

Thank you for letting me share this beautiful space with you!
♥

photo credits: 1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8

friday favorites

Hi there chickadees!  I am switching my 'Much Love Monday' feature to 'Friday Favorites'!  I am not online much over weekends, so it just makes more sense for me to share my favorite bits and pieces from around the interwebs on Fridays. Then I've had the week to poke around online while having breakfast every morning or while cuddling two certain kitties.  Without further ado, here are my spring-inspired picks this week.

 

This bedroom is so beautiful and calming.  

 

These crewel embroidery flowers are so pretty.  This would look beautiful on the bodice of a dress.

 

Nutella pops.  Ooooooh.  I just purchased a popsicle-maker so that I could make healthy no-sugar-added popsicles this summer.  Naturally I'll be trying these chocolate-y, hazel-nutty ones first.

 

Good thing I have these wise words on my side.  Those Nutella popsicles will be basically like frozen vegetables.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.  

 

Alphonse Mucha's La Primavere is so evocative of the relief of spring's arrival after a long, cold winter!

 

This beautiful living room, photographed by David Christensen, is so inspiring.  I'm currently redecorating my living room in white, tan, and robin's egg blue-- I love the pop of coral to warm it up.

I love the delicate hand-coloring on this photograph of the actress Winifred Barnes, taken in the 1910s.

Have a beautiful weekend!

♥

spring spring spring!

"Spring is the time of plans and projects." -Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Hello hello!

As you may have noticed, it's been pretty quiet around here lately.  Two possible explanations would be that I have been traveling the world on a secret mission and had to maintain radio silence, or that I have been trapped in a time-space continuum paradox and had to avoid contaminating the timeline.  However, neither of those explanations is actually the case.  It's just that in the winter, I can't stay awake past about 9:30 at night.  The sun goes down and I can't resist the siren song of my warm, cozy bed.  Now that we're well into spring, though, I have a lot more energy and I'm hoping to get back to posting more regularly.  Really.  I am.  In the meantime, though, I've been posting relatively frequently on Instagram!  I'm JulieRoseSews over there, too.

Here are a few of the pictures I've posted over there lately, to give you an idea of what I've been up to.

One of my favorite thing about spring is seeing all the flowering trees.  My walk to and from the train to work has been beautiful for the past couple of weeks!

I went home to my mom's house for Easter, and the daffodils that my dad planted a few years ago have spread throughout the whole yard.  It was wonderful to see these cheery signs of spring that he planted.


Bucky and Cocoa remain cats of leisure.


I'm still knitting hexipuffs for my busy bee blanket!  I knit this little guy out of Koigu KPPM with thin stripes of Claudia's Handpainted Yarn.  Ridiculously, this is the first striped thing that I've ever knit.


I've also been trying out some art journaling.  This spread was inspired by the lyrics from this song by Of Monsters and Men.  I think everybody feels like that sometimes-- like their internal world is moving at a wildly different speed than the external world.


Another journal page, which is kinda-sorta a self-portrait.


I started on a project I've been wanting to tackle since I moved into my apartment-- sewing new slipcovers for my two living room chairs.  My original plan had been to use the old slipcovers (not pictured) as a pattern, but the more I looked at them, the more I realized that they were probably just sewn as a one-off, with lots of weird little darts and tucks and oddly placed seams to make them fit onto the chairs.  I decided to drape my own muslin pattern instead, and I'm really glad I did.  (Friends who sew:  yes, I totally did fix that bit of sagging and pulling on the back panel.  It lays nice and smoothly now.)  I washed my fabric this afternoon, all 8 1/2 yards of it, and tomorrow I'm going to begin cutting and sewing!  Yay!


Last but not least, Bucky would like you all to know that he works very hard and needs lots of naps.  After all, he and Cocoa helped me drape the new slipcovers.  It's no small task for them to make sure to plop themselves exactly where I am trying to pin or mark at any given time.

I hope you're all doing spectacularly well and enjoying this beautiful spring weather-- finally!  Hooray!

♥

snow to sunshine

Hey there chickadees, I hope you're making it through this crazy winter weather.  And the last, y'know, six months or so before that.  Sometimes that's just the way it goes.

I was lucky enough to escape the NYC and Jersey snow for a few days last week with a little jaunt down to Florida.

 

Bare legs!  In February!  (And yes, I really am that pale.  Let's call it 'luminous,' shall we?  Although I'm sure I blinded a few people who caught the blinding glare off my legs.  I'm a walking geriatric opthamology accident.)

 

 

The walk to the beach through the mangroves is just as lovely as the beach itself.

  

 

 

 

I'm holding onto the sunshine from this wonderful vacation to get me through the rest of the winter.

♥