Saturday 20 March 2010

I heart iPhone

I got my iPhone 2 wednesdays ago. I totally love it. Because of SkipNorth and being so hectic at work I've only just got a cover for it and, naturally, I wanted it to be polka dot. It was proving pretty hard to find a suitable one and so it occurred to me to let loose with the shoe paints on a plain one. So I found a cheap leatherish white one and....

Step 1: Take some address labels and hole punch them. Then spend ages trying to get the buggers off the backing sheet and place them strategically on your plain phone cover. Alternatively find some circular stickers the right size and use those.
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Step 2: Coat with 3 coats of lumiere jacquard paint in metallic red.
Step 3: Peel off the stickers, and discover a number of them have let paint in at the edges.
Step 4: Use cotton buds to remove excess paint up to a point.
Step 5: Seal with two coats of flexible varnish.
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Step 6: When dry, add iPhone.
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Love. Love. Love.

I am really enjoying discovering the many apps. I've only paid for one so far, which is called Toodleoo and is an amazingly useful to do list. I've got KnitCounterLite which is basically a row counter but also prompts you on increases and decreases, a camera one that lets you upload straight to ravelry, a ravelry hotlink, a knitmap hotlink (which tells me of any knit shops within 1, 2, 3, etc miles of my current location - it works out exactly where I am itself), and others that tell me how the tubes are running, tracks messages on twitter and link to my email. Awesome. Pooch is still very annoyed and thinks me disloyal, but as I said to him, as soon as he trains to be a chartered landscape architect, I'll buy a Sony phone.

I've spent a fair bit of time in the last few days finishing my lecture for my old school which I'll be giving on monday morning. I have managed a bit of knitting though, and also made a new strap for my watch, since the old one, which was plaited wire, was catching on my connie's henley cardigan - which is definitely not to be tolerated.
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Purty.

SkipNorth Epic

Though I say so myself, I think this was a good one. It all went to plan, everyone seemed pretty happy and there was some good shopping for all. All criteria for success. Full photos are here but here are some selected highlights. 


Wicked treat on the drive up:
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Haworth high street (it's actually the first time in all these visits I've ever seen this):
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Just a hint of the epic yarn swap:
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Now that truly was immense. I have never seen so much yarn outside of a shop. It looks like our combined donations (on behalf of what we all took from the swap) amounts to well over £300, all for p-hop. Hoorah for all of us!


My own personal gain from p-hop was firstly these amazing vintage embroidery cotton organisers. 
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Aren't they gorgeous? I also got some random yarn and some other embroidery bits. 
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I didn't buy anywhere near as much as I have in the past during the weekend, but I did do very nicely. One of my best purchases has to be the alpaca from County Alpacas, the farm owners who came to talk to us on saturday night. 
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They told me the name of the alpaca it came from but I've completely forgotten - may have been Irene? Beautiful stuff and a tiny carbon footprint seeing how the furthest it travelled was to the other side of the county to be processed at the mill. I bought it for an interweave wrap that Knit theKnits modelled very nicely during the weekend. In fact there were many amazing FO's being modelled which were all inspiring, but I think it is the emerald beaded bracelet that I've seen queued most often since then. It was even more amazing in real life than it looks on ravelry.  


BTW - Ravelry would seem to no longer be 'beta' and has a nifty new homepage. Very nice!