My mom and her friend were in town last week and I’m finally resurfacing after their visit. Whew! The ladies loved the weather (but I feel cheated out of my autumn, boo!) and did some hardcore shopping, but my favorite activity of the past week was the International Quilt Festival last weekend.

This was my first time going to the quilt festival and I was blown away by all of the amazing handiwork. There were a ton of quilts on display, and so many were truly awe inspiring. Seriously, you’d walk up to a quilt and think, “wow, amazing!” And then you’d check the details and see “handpieced, handquilted”, holy crap!

This galaxy quilt was my favorite. The lighting wasn’t optimal for photos, but trust me, it was awesome.

I wish that I had more detail photos of it. Quilters really know their color theory and composition. I could only hope to be that creative with fabric someday!

I also love this one, it was one of the big money winners. You can see some of my other photos from the show here, and a bunch of the juried quilts on flickr.

There was also a gigantic market, and I may have purchased a couple of things. The ladies were getting a bit restless at this point, but I luckily had some tips of the must-see booths in the market. Most of these are fat quarters purchased relatively cheaply, and I also picked up a Nigella fat quarter set. I see more box bags in my future… Maybe one day I’ll even move on to sew something else!

Urm, from last weekend. I seem to have left my blogging mojo somewhere, and can’t seem to find it. It doesn’t help that I’ve been busy like a bee lately at work and haven’t really crafted much recently.

A friend of mine from way-back-when visited last weekend, and I showed her all around Houston. Which means we left town. We didn’t go far – we drove down to Galveston for the day to check out the Moody Gardens aquarium (I heart aquariums with big red poofy hearts!), the shore (windy!), and an Amy-guided tour of the island (rainy!).

The Mardi Gras arches were meant as a temporary exhibit, 20+ years later one is still standing. The girls can be seen here partying like it’s March.

Ok, I did show other-Amy a bit of Houston, mostly unphotogenic things like shopping and drinking. We also checked out the Mercer Arboretum before she left.

Pretty and spikey! The Arboretum would be the perfect place to visit in spring, when the lilies are actually blooming. It’s easy to forget that it’s autumn when it’s 90 and humid. I miss the gorgeous colors of the northeast fall so much! I seriously can’t wait for the day when we leave Texas. See ya, TX, wouldn’t want to be ya!

In kitten news, we’re down to a pair of black kittens! Meredith has been invaluable for sending suckers over to our house to adopt the others. Bruce and Jet continue being adorable and have become super buddies.

Aww! The cats are all big cuties until you leave your yarn lying around.

I’m usually very good about keeping the yarn behind closed doors since Silver loves to gnaw on it. This will teach me to forget! Whoever did this did an excellent job of running around the chair and table – it was so bad that I needed to cut it. Thanks, cats, for putting the tangle in my Tangled Yoke cardigan!

i feel like I was the only person around not holed up reading a certain book this weekend. Instead, I went to the Menil Collection and visited another Broken Obelisk.

Now I need to schedule a trip to Seattle to see the third obelisk.

Yesterday, I braved the 94-and-freaking-humid weather and some incredibly persistent mosquitoes to do a sock photoshoot.

Sockpalooza sock #1 is complete! I need to figure out a better name for it. I’m a terrible namer of things, when I’m allowed to pick names we end up with color coded cats and a plant named Droopy.

I’m knitting the second with an eye to writing up the pattern, but I do need to replicate my first sock mistakes (like one or two too many gusset decreases). I’m still a bit torn about handling different sizes – the easy way would be to call for different yarn weights and needle sizes, the harder would be to rechart everything. Recharting isn’t difficult per se, as I already have a larger leg chart completed, but it is pretty error prone. There are three charts for the sock – one each for the leg, heel, and foot pattern. They’re all basically displaying the same thing, with some minor changes for edge stitch treatments.

The heel is my favorite part:

There’s a pair of stockings in Handknit Holidays that has a similar pointy heel, and I love it so!

I’ve always been amazed at the flora in Houston. It’s very green and lush here, and there’s an abundance of palm trees and bamboo. Palm trees! So cool. This time of year is definitely gorgeous around here – there’s lots of rain, but everything is flowering like crazy and the temps are ideal.

Our backyard is a different story. There’s no grass, just a series of shrubs, each larger than the next. And ferns! Ferns belong on a forest floor, not in our backyard. Rob has Big Plans for this space.

However, it’s not all bad. All those little flowers in the background?

Jasmine! It looks remarkably similar to the Jasmine of last year at our old apartment. There’s also Jasmine growing next to our driveway, so I smell it when I get home every day. I’m beginning to associate the smell of Jasmine with spring down here.

The big shrub in the foreground has a brother next to the garage (it also has a big ass rosemary bush behind it). The garage shrub has pointy leaves that always scrape my legs as I walk by it when doing laundry. Annoying. But it’s slightly less annoying these days:

It suddenly has two gorgeous flowers, this one on a stalk about three feet tall. Ok, Rob will let this one live… for now. I’d love to tell you what this flower smells like, but I’ve developed a cold and can’t smell a damn thing. I blame the northeast – this is the first cold I’ve had since moving down here (I used to get at least one cold a year). Damn you, Cleveland!

Coming next: I slipped and fell on Yarnzilla. Lesson learned: don’t shop for yarn when tipsy.

Yarntopia had their anniversary sale this past weekend. I wasn’t planning on going, since most of the sale yarn was wool (and it’s already heating up here in Houston), but the planets aligned in such a way that I ended up in Katy, surrounded by yarn.

Yarntopia had some non-wool on sale, and I bought a bag of GGH Scarlett in basic, lovely black for 40% off. I need to surround myself with more black yarn, since that’s by far the color I wear the most.

Even more exciting was the Fleece Artist – not on sale, but awesome all the same. They had just gotten in a shipment, which included the brand new Sea Wool:

This stuff is 115 grams of YUM. It’s got a great twist, and is soft and pretty. There’s no way that this will become socks – it deserves better than that. I’m open to project suggestions.

However, the yarn has these funky undyed bits throughout the skein:

The clumps pull out (carefully!), but still! I spotted about a half dozen of these, I’m sure there’s more.

And the free pattern on the label?

Looks like a Jaywalker to me.

Rob and I missed SXSW last weekend, but we did something even more Texan – we went to the Houston Livestock and Rodeo Show. We really weren’t planning on going, but we met these people at a restaurant who convinced us to go. We were discussing the rodeo and the wacky things that get deep fried these days, and they told us about the wonderment of macaroni and cheese on a stick. On a stick! Seeing such a thing in the wild is worth the price of admission alone.

I’ll cut to the chase and say that we did not find the elusive mac+cheese on a stick. Trust me, I searched. How disappointing! However, we had no problem finding turkey legs, various sausage products on a stick, or $7.50 beers.

We did pay extra to actually see the rodeo, in our requested Cheap Seats.

The rodeo was ok. I have no idea how the bucking animal things are scored, but 83 is the score to beat. There were also timed horse racing things where the time difference between competitors was within tenths of a second. Rob’s favorite moment was when the announcer called someone “A Mountain of a Man.” We now refer to Silver as A Mountain of a Cat.

My favorite part was all the animals. There were your standard cows and horses, and tons of bunnies! We saw a sleepy one and this hairy guy:

Sheep! This guy was very chill and let Rob rub his super-wooly head.

Does anyone know what breed of sheep this is?

I was in search of alpacas and llamas, but they weren’t in their designated area. This was the last weekend of the rodeo, so they probably got to go home early. I did ask someone from the Contemporary Handweavers of Houston if she knew where I could find an alpaca, and she was full of local spinning information – I may have found a local connection for renting a spinning wheel.

Naturally, there was knitting. I totally geeked out and knit while watching the rodeo.

Astute readers will recognize Nate’s dear Koigu. This is a swatch for the Leyburn sock pattern from pepperknit. I think this is a really cool pattern – it’s really simple and suits the subtley-variegated Koigu well. I’m not in a huge rush to make socks right now (it’s been in the high 70’s here), but I’m definitely putting these on my to-knit list (along with the sculptural Twisted Flower pattern, swoon!).

ETA: The colorway is P335, for all you Koigu diehards out there.

A not-so-unknown kelp! fact – I am not a huge fan of Houston, the city where I happen to currently to be living. Houston makes me cranky. I’ve been known to purse my lips and mope when I think of this city. But all that’s going to change – no more blaming Houston for my problems. Why the sudden change of heart? Because we just bought a house! It’s an adorable small bungalow-ey place about four blocks from where we live now. We lucked out when we first moved here about a year and a half ago – we knew we wanted to live in Montrose, but we selected our current location pretty much by chance. I love where we currently live, and I’m pretty psyched that we found a house so close by!

I’ve love to show off some photos of the new place, but Rob was in charge of photography. Instead of sweeping views of the front porch or gorgeous shots of the interior, we have these:

Thrilling. Rob’s main concern in house hunting was the sturdiness of the roof and electrical system. My concerns were: Does it have a porch? What’s the neighborhood like? Oooh! Pretty!

I absolutely love house hunting, it’s amazing to see the crazy places that are out there. Like the vacant garage apartment (at least half the places that we looked at had them) that was stinky, moldy, and icky, but had a HUGE widescreen TV. Or the place where the owner was a complete slob, with clothing lying around in the kitchen (unmentionables drying in the kitchen!) and an open container of soybeans chilling on his bedroom floor. Or that 70’s era apartment we saw way-back-when that had a mirrored wall along the staircase going up to the apartment, and a set of gigantic stained glass windows in the dining room with shades embedded in them. So much fun!

Now for the packing and moving and purchasing. We definitely need to buy a fridge and washer/dryer before we move, and we also need some decent furniture. Between the two of us, the nicest piece of furniture we own is probably the Ikea filing cabinet we bought last year. I have my eye on a fancy-pants couch, now I just need to convince Rob that he wants it, too!

I’m telling you, I love aquariums!

The Basalt Tank is blocking like a champ, which means that it is still sopping wet after 12 hours. It will do battle with the dryer this evening!

So last weekend, Harlot thing, knitbloggers, fun! Well I met Sarah, and chatted with said Sarah, and she mentioned that she had plans to visit Houston this weekend to hit some museums, including the MFAH. I’ve been wanting to see the Gee’s Bend quilts, so I totally crashed her party. Well, if you call going to a museum a party. I met up with her and her friends Jaime and Noah and checked out the exhibit, which was great. Jaime took an awesome photo of us in the tunnel between the buildings. I was a bad photographer and took a single picture – this mask in the entrance to the gold section. Ah well.

Naturally, we had to check out the local yarn shops. Sarah had visited Yarntopia on Friday, so we swung by Yarns 2 Ewe for some hot Koigu action. I picked up the summer Knit.1 magazine soley for the Cropped Cardigan pattern. Super cute. I’m planning to use some Classic Elite Renaissance that I picked up when Yarntopia first opened. However, I don’t have enough yarn, and Yarntopia is almost out. HCW last weekend carried it also, but their dye lot was crazy different from what I have, so I don’t think I’ll have much luck unless I find more of the same dyelot. We shall see how this turns out, I’m already planning on 3/4 length sleeves…

Friday, fabulous friday, I heart you! Work bites the big one!

Thanks for all the awesome words on the mittens. I wish I lived in a cool climate so that I could actually wear the damn things. I think that my cutiepie mittens are destined for decor in our study – it’s the Cold Room, because 80% of the air conditioning in the house gets piped in there.

I got a package today – a necklace from Art School Dropout. Pretty cute, huh? I’ve had the website bookmarked forever, and finally got around to buying something. Blue, I am full of love for you. White, you’re cool too. My current everyday necklace is this teeny little bird one from Small Things designs, and I’m kind of tired of it. Although I did get a compliment from someone at the YH event last weekend. Thanks, random knitter!

Seen outside the Menil last weekend – a Knitta Please antenna cozy. Rob was mildly horrified.

I’m off to spend my hard-earned moola in a tax-free Texas this weekend. Wahoo!