Iced Sweater

Here is the very chunky, heavy sweater just finished from the sweater design named ICED by Carol Feller.  The pattern is free and can be found here.

It took 8 skeins of chunky weight Lamb's Pride wool (85% wool, 15% mohair).  And after all that knitting and pattern revision, I ended up with only 27 inches of leftover yarn.  That is right living.

See that yarn?  That is the 27 inch left-over tail end from the 8th skein.  (Mug by Jenny the Potter.)

It was a bit large, so I threw it into the dryer while it was still damp from water blocking.  That helped it come down a bit to size, but the front of the sweater has an uneven edge, likely because I have no chest!

Revision details can be found on Ravelry here.  I would knit this up again sometime, but it will be a long sometime before I do it again due to the bulkiness of the project.

NPR Provides Great Fall Recipes

A link for summer garden bounty use:... click here

(all pictures by Susan Chang for NPR)

The garden season will end soon enough, in a fanfare of potatoes and squashes and pumpkins and gourds. As the weather gets colder, they get starchier and more like breads themselves, so it takes less and less effort — a little egg and sugar to sweeten and bind them — to get them to shine in a loaf pan.

Quick Zucchini, Carrot and Pumpkin Breads all found here.

Artist Bloggers and Urban Sketchers

In looking at artists' works on the internet, I came across Urban Sketchers and some beautiful pictures.  You might find some of the artists' work exceptionally appealing.

Urban Sketchers is a web site that features artwork from over 100 invited artists from 30 different countries.  Imaginative, delightful images are found there; it is an absorbing site and a feast for the eyes.

Above is a watercolor from Caroline who lives in Brittany.  Her blog is An English Artist in Brittany, where she shows some of her watercolors.  She says about this piece:

This beautiful 'maison de maitre' at Dinard was built in the late eighteen-hundreds and is called 'Les Roches Brunes'. It was bequeathed to the town and exhibitions are now held here.

 Here is a sketch by Rob entitled Budenfest found here, painted at a train station in Germany on September 10, 2011.

And below is another sketch by Rob from May, 2011, found here on Urban Sketchers where he writes:

It's been a very dry and warm spring in southern Germany this year. I've been zipping around on my little 50 cc scooter with my sketchbook, looking for little scenes like this to enjoy and draw. I pulled off the road at this spot near the village of Hertingen, watching a tractor plowing up the dry soil and enjoying a field of buttercups before me. Warm. Dry. Wonderful! 

Liz on Sketching Architecture featured this picture on Sept. 10, 2011 where she said...

I love the fluidity and forcefulness, the bold 3-dimensionality, adventurous complexity and all the fun games that are played with curved vs flat surfaces and all the crazy decoration. Today while tidying up my study/studio I came across a print out of a photo I took in Rome last year of a building that I didn't have the energy to sketch at the time.

Judy from the Netherlands sketched this on September 9, 2011.  She can be found at her blog where her sketch was featured here where she said...

The room is filled with the colours of the cyclamen. The flowers are totally odourless but when I let their colour "bleed" into the background, I always feel that I am painting flower fragrance.

Below is a scanned copy of my watercolor worksheet.  If you are not familiar with this "painting tool" mixture of colors on a grid, it is merely the original color of a certain named color down the left hand side of the page with its associated color painted to the right of the name.  Across the top, in the same order, are those same colors.  By mixing the colors, one on top of the other (after each color dab has thoroughly dried), the resulting hues are the combination of the two colors listed on the chart, going from left to right and top to bottom.  In using this worksheet, one never needs to wonder exactly what shade will result in the mixing of colors.

This is one of my watercolors from 2001 painted from a photo I took before a luncheon meal outside Volterra, Italy:

This is one of my watercolors from a vacation in Greece in 2001:

(size 11" x 14")

And thus concludes a blog foray into sketch art from various climes and times.