Rainbow Sweater!

This is going to be a very short blog post because I have been spending a lot of my spare time painting bedrooms. I will try to have pictures of that for next week. In the meantime, here is my rainbow sweater, which I have finished and is now blocking! I'll try to post a picture of myself wearing it later when it's warm enough for short sleeves again.

Have a great week!

-Assunta

Out with the Old...

Sometimes celebrating a new year means saying goodbye to things that aren't working anymore. The same can be true of a new house! Since our escrow finally closed at the end of December, my sweetie and I have been having fun doing some demolition work on parts of our condo that we don't like or that need to be updated. 

One of the first things to go was the built-in furniture that you see behind the bed here. (This picture is from before the previous owners moved out.)

Here are all the pieces of that furniture after we deconstructed it. The room already feels much bigger!

Next was the soffit in the master bathroom. It housed a lens for a fluorescent tube light that we won't be using anymore, and was much sturdier than it needed to be anyway. It also detracted from our nice, high ceilings.

Adam and our new reciprocating saw made short work of that. He has since cut it down all the way to the wall and patched and textured the wall so it's ready to paint. Will still have one more soffit to take down in the other bathroom.

Speaking of paint preparation, here I am getting ready to sand down some doorframes so that we can paint them again without them getting too thick.

Here is one of our door frames before sanding (left) and after (center). It is so nice to see natural wood under there! It turns out this green paint (that seems to have been the unifying theme of the house) comes off much easier than expected. The image on the right shows a chunck of paint I took off a door in one piece, just by grabbing it and pulling. I only really needed to use the sander for some stubborn spots, and for the layer of paint below the green one.

Another thing we need to do before we can paint is get rid of the popcorn ceiling. The contractors are coming today to scrape it and I can't wait to see how it looks when they are done! We want to do most of the work ourselves but decided it was worth it to hire this one out.

Are you making any changes this new year that you are excited about?

-Assunta

Happy 2017!

I can't believe how long it's been since I've posted. It's a whole new year already! I have been busy traveling and crafting for the holidays. Also, our home sale finally closed so my husband and I will now be able to put our creative energy toward fixing up the house! Here is a barage of images to show what I have been up to for the past month. I hope to resume my regularly blogging schedule starting next week. Apologies for the image quality, many of them were taken during our holiday road trip and all without the aid of my light box.

Before we left on our trip I knitted this dress for my niece for Christmas. She is about 1 1/2 years old now!

These crocheted stacking animals are also for my niece. The leaves on the palm tree took me forever! I was working on that tree for a big part of our journey north.

While visiting my husband's aunts and uncles in Sacramento we came across a shop called Rumplestiltskin. Since I love everything to do with fairytales and yarn, I just had to go inside and pick up some gorgeous wool for spinning!

While in Portland I made this baby mermaid costume as a custom order for a friend who is expecting in February!

I received a Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer amigurumi kit for Christmas.  Here's Rudolph in a hotel in Redding, on the way back to SoCal. 

Now I am working with my Sheepicorn yarn from Electric Sheep.  This is how much I had knitted at our last stop in Santa Cruz.

I hope your year is off to a wonderful and crafty start!

-Assunta