mittnz, progress report and "image"

So here is the 6th pair of mittnz

Only 3 more pair to go, and I started another pair (bright pink!) last night, doing about half of the ribbing before I got too sleepy to remember it is supposed to be K2, P2, not some other odd permutation of that count!

Which means I need to think about picking out the yarn for the other 2 pair to be knit and getting that packed up for the car trip.

I'm happily anticipating the arrival of "The Yarn", which is supposed to arrive tomorrow (according to the UPS tracker). Just about this time every year I start knitting a sweater that will be a Christmas present, and I figured that getting it before I start on a cross country car trip will be good as that will give me lots of swatching time. And hopefully it will be well underway by the time we return!

After thinking about possible ways to put color inside the shadow box frame that will hold the balloons, I decided to do a strip of beading that will go all the way around.

Here is the little "map" I drew of where the colors need to go based on the painting the DH did on the plastic for the back.

This little piece of beading is the bottom, dark blue edge of the mountains, and I'm starting to make the transistion there to the green section

My thinking about doing this beading strip is this:

1. The reflective quality of the glass will brighten the inside of the frame and improve the look of the piece

2. I can stitch through the beadwork at the top and the bottom to attach the balloons and "suspend" them in air

I can tell you that working on this strip reminds me clearly of why I don't do bead loom work. This folks, is the beaders version of 999 rows of garter stitch ---- it's boring, best done while watching an interesting TV show or movie!

At least one of you has noticed that I've been playing around with the format of this blog. The answer to the question asked on my last post about this is -- Yes, all of the above!

Part of the issue at work here is I'm working on revising my website, and that always leads me to examine what all of my studio online presence looks like. Right now I'm trying to decide if I should change my Etsy shop as well and make the whole "who are you?" issue clearer by having everything carry the same name. (When I first set up the Etsy shop I was deliberately trying to create a different "persona" for some of my fiber arts things, but all of this work has merged since then!)

So be patient with me here as we have a sort of mini "identity crisis" and try to figure out what we want to look like.