Chicken Sitting

Upon returning from our vacation in San Francisco, I've found myself weighing the pros and cons of urban versus suburban living. It was so great to be in a city where you could walk to anything, take public transportation if you needed (and bonus: the buses in San Francisco are all electric which makes me crazy-happy), and in general you are surrounded by people who live smaller than those in the suburbs (a whole week without seeing a Hummer or 40 thousand SUVs made me MIGHTY happy). But when I came home my parents were out the door on their vacation and along with taking care of the cats, parrot and fish I was asked to take care of the....chicken. Chicken?? Yup, there's one on my back porch right now. Score one: suburbs. Apparently some of the roasters at the farm got sick and my Dad has been nursing this guy back to health (I used to have a huge crush on Tristan in All Things Great and Small that aired on PBS, so I love the idea of having a vet in the family). So he's peeping on the porch and I'm trying not to get too attached to this being that might end up on my dinner plate in the future. He's been in a box, but Andrew and I heard a racket on the porch today and realized that he's now big enough to get out of the box. So Chicken and I took a walk around the shade garden today. I was hoping that he'd dig a little in the dirt and find some buggy protein, but he mostly just pecked at my ferns. He also followed me wherever I went and if I started running, he'd chase after me. Did I mention that I'm trying not to get attached to him?

Anyway, back to our vacation in San Francisco. Did I mention that besides having electric buses and a soon-to-be-enacted ban on plastic bags, San Francisco is also a crafty city? I happened upon a flyer for the Craft Gym while I was putzing around the city and managed to sign up for a class in bound-resist dying. First of all, how amazing is it that I actually managed to sign up and go to a class on my vacation? I am the queen of "oh yeah, let's TOTALLY go to a yoga class in that cool place during vacation" only to return home yoga-less. I consider it a testament to the coolness of our friends and of Andrew for not even batting an eye when I suggested that I'd take 3 hours on the next-to-last day of our vacation to dye fabric. So sign up I did, and then blissed out while messing around with fabric, thread, and lots of clothespins for a few hours. Here's my fabric - I just played around with different techniques:

As is the case with felting, dying fabric turned out to be a magical and surprising experience. This helped me to let go and just experiment a bit without worrying about making it look like "something". It took a few moments for me to dive into the dying experience, but once I did, I just messed around with color and had some happy accidents. My favorite part is this checkerboard pattern which I created by making an accordion pleat, trying and failing to sew the according together, using clothespins to secure it instead, and ending up with this. See? Happy accidents:)Of course, I didn't make it out of San Francisco without visiting the LYS in the neighborhood we were staying in, and one afternoon I went there with Sophie. I was worried that she'd lose interest in the shopping experience and I'd only have a short window of time to browse around, but we got involved in trying to find the softest ball of yarn in the shop, and she took the challenge seriously (bless her heart). After much deliberation, she settled on a wonderful fuzzy, pink yarn so I bought it for her and told her I'd make her something out of it. It was a toss-up between pillow and hat, and I'm going to do the pillow thing because it enabled me to use my knitting machine.

Can I just say how flippin' cool my knitting machine is? When I first considered getting one I thought: Will I still be a real knitter? Should I just get one and not tell anyone I have it? But the more I use it, the happier I am to have one. Truthfully, I have no interest in learning how to knit a sweater or anything complicated on the machine. For just basic, flat pieces of knitted fabric, it just rocks. Here's the world's softest yarn all ready to be made into a pillow - all done in one afternoon:
And that, my friends, is why I love my knitting machine.

Know what else I love? Pegboard. Oh, YEAH. I just installed some in my getting-cooler-by-the-minute craft room and now I want it all over my house. For real...picture hanging would be a snap, you could install a shelf wherever in an instant. Pegboard, people...it should be in every household.