Tumblr Finds March: Interiors, Sewing & Cats

I can't believe it's been about a month since I did my last post of Tumblr Finds! I noticed a lot of great interior design images this month, and lots of sewing inspiration, which can kind of go hand in hand. But, I thought I'd end this post with what honestly makes up most of my tumblr dashboard: kitties!

Interiors & Decor

  

Crib posted on kjerstis lykke, posted on the boo and the boy, on tumblr via Elephant on a Wire
Flour and Grain Sack Pillows from the blog The Style Files, on tumblr via The Architecture Blog
Teapot photo by Hillary Walker Melbourne based photographer, via Le Petit Poulailler

Sewing Projects

  

Stash Baskets found via Knitting, F**k Yeah! from The Purl Bee

Poem Quilt by Berlin Quilter found via Apotospitimou

Vinyl Belt Buckle & Belt Tutorial from A Lemon Squeezy Home, via Stitches and Purls

Cats

  

Girl Knitting with Cat via Mimisaurus

Cat with Leaf via F**k Yeah Felines!

Elizabeth Taylor with a Black Cat via missworld

And you can always view more of my tumblr favorites by browsing the archives, or checking in at emmakat.tumblr.com!

Tumblr Finds February: Illustration, Food & Knit Inspiration

I've finally decided there's just too much awesome stuff on tumblr to go without sharing some of what I've found there here as well. Everything from illustration, fashion, food, politics, public art, and architecture, and much much more. Here's just a small sampling of what I've found this month: 

Illustration

  

"Kittenwillows" by Melinda Jose illustrator, textile designer & artist from Toronto (via missworld)
Nicolas Le Borgne an illustrator & graphic designer from France (via ElChoko)
Animal vs. Cities Series by Sabella Tsiopani an illustration student in Bristol, UK (via breakalead)

Food

  

Vegan Thin Mint Recipe from Chef Chloe via Vegansaurus!
Edible Butterflies from Sugar Robot via BarbieGirlie2
Grilled Tofu with Mustard Caper Sauce from My Recession Kitchen via Finding Vegan

Knitting

  

Bless Cross Short Sweater from Oogaboogastore via Zlaika

Knit Bootie Slippers from A Common Thread via Sheepish Knitting & Crochet

Reusable Swiffer Cover from Relaxalotl via MissViciousLovestoKnit

You can follow my posts by going to emmakat.tumblr.com or just watch the blog for more of these recaps! I'm thinking I may do one of these posts near the end of every month, but the topics may vary!

Architectural Details, More about PDX food & a new look for the Blog

Intuit Center for Outsider Art and 760 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL

While still in Chicago I had the idea to try to take one picture of an interesting architectural detail every day & started a flickr group based on that idea. Well, with the move and everything, I haven't been doing as well with that project as I had intended, but now that we're more settled I'm going to renew my focus. Both Portland and Chicago are cities with a great architectural heritage. I guess I tend to focus on the old historic buildings or at least we've been fortunate to live in areas with a lot of that stuff nearby. Ultimately I hope to cover both old and new, and may find out a little about some of the detailing differences between regions. And I hope others join me, I would love to get a sense of the architecture of different places from this group! I've found it's a challenge, especially since I don't have a particularly fancy camera and since many of the cool details may be high up and far away. So the group rules for now are pretty flexible, especially since I myself haven't been consistent about posting there. But I do promise I will try to be better!

Sullivan Center, Chicago, IL

Medical & Dental Building, Portland, OR

I also wanted to brag about the great lunch we had on Monday at the Pioneer Square Farmers Market. The people selling fresh mushrooms cleverly set up a neighboring booth selling mushroom dishes. They were well prepared, yet inspiring, and seemed like food that might be easy enough to recreate at home. We split their vegan dishes, the mushroom miso soup and mushroom salad wraps. Incredibly good. And there were not one but two vegan pastry booths! One had MINT BROWNIES! It was everything a mint brownie should be. We split that too, because there are so many great vegan goodies here we're starting to get carried away.

Mint Chip Brownies, Petunia's Pies & Pastries

Mushroom Dishes, Pioneer Sq. Market

Lastly, I just revamped the blog layout. I guess I had been ignoring the new features on blogger for a little while. I am happy to report that they are definitely an improvement. I no longer have to go into the html mess to set up a blog that is a bit wider and can accommodate various widgets in a nice clean way. I guess there's also some fun sharing and rating things at the bottom of each post now, so you can let me know that I'm funny, cool and interesting. Hey everyone needs a little reinforcement, right?

Good Job for about a week

Okay, so I did a really good job posting here on my blog for about a week. And then I suppose I got much more interested in this tumblr thing. I can post any old thing I find on the internet without feeling like I really need to get into and be original, so it's sort of like a scrapbook of interests of mine. So if things are slow here on the blog, you will more than likely still see some activity over on the tumblr page, which is here:

http://emmakat.tumblr.com/

And Even if I start posting here again for a spurt, I'm sure with the tests I'm still working on taking, that there will be lulls. But tumblr is somewhere between twitter and blogging...I should be able to post to it here and there.

Cat Calendars, Bird Calendars for the New Year

There's no shortage of cute calendars on etsy, and since 2010 is still fairly brand new, it's not unreasonable to still be shopping for all kinds of desk calendars, planners, wall hangings, etc. Above are a few I found today, with more to browse on a kaboodle list i made this afternoon. This images above are linked and clickable, so you can go to the shops.

Also, I started a tumblr page today, not for any particular reason, so if you're also on that site, I'd love to have new followers and people to follow!

Computational Knowledge Engine

This morning chuck told me that the WolframAlpha Knowledge engine was released today. I of course had know idea what he was talking about, or even if I was sure if he was speaking english. But I went and looked for it anyway. I'm still not sure I get what it's all about, but it seems fun. I searched for my name, and the results are below. A chart that reflects what I've perceived to be true, Emma was not a common name when I was born, but had been in the past, and is currently. You can also search for dates, locations, and so forth, and it will draw statistical information from all over the internet. A pretty cool idea and fun to explore. It's still in testing, so I ran into just a few kinks, but retrying my entry seemed to get it to work.

Birthday celebrations, internet style

Happy birthday to me!
On Etsy there is a page of Etsians with Birthdays. Apparently since I recently signed up for a buyers account for some more secretive Christmas shopping, I'm on there twice. Oops! Also, I get a nice note at the top of every page:

And then on ravelry I noticed a cake appears with my avatar today. A little subtle, but I like it:

So far that's all I've noticed. And it's late. But I thought this was cute enough to share nonetheless. Perhaps I'll find more tomorrow!

Cool for Cats

I woke up this morning with our sweet little cat Lucy sleeping on me and shortly there after nabbed a treasury. So I decided to make it all about one of my favorite subjects, cats. The title was from the Squeeze song "Cool for Cats" one of my favorites when I was just a little cat obsessed kid. I've recently signed up for blip.fm, which I guess is pretty similar to twitter, except for music. I haven't used it a lot so far, but I was able to find that Squeeze song, which made me pretty happy. You can listen to the song by going to my blip profile here. And my blips also show up as tweets. The internet seems to be full of chirping noises lately! Oh, and I almost forgot, you can visit the treasury by going here.

Sidetracked

Well this morning has flown by and I managed to get myself sidetracked with some unexpected things. First off, I grabbed a treasury last night, only to find that some server error on etsy was causing the treasuries to be inaccessible. I awoke this morning to find my empty treasury waiting to be filled. Unfortunately there were more issues to come and my treasury vanished later in the day. Well, because of all issues etsy admin opened up more treasury spots than are usually avaliable. So I nabbed one again and refilled it with my doily themed concept. Wow, okay I just checked that link and it seems to go to my treasury with the wrong title. I think it may be done for. Well I'm done messing around with treasuries for a while, though I am disappointed. At least you can see the screen capture by checking it out on my flickr page here.

Then I came to the blog and decided that it has been bugging me for too long that the width of the posts were too narrow. The major reason I thought this was a problem is because I put some effort a while back into doing a nice layout for a few feature posts and they weren't looking like I intended ever since I switched to a 3 column format. Perhaps no one would be bothered by that but me, but now that it's fixed I feel better.

That little bit of tweeking prompted a "I can master html" mood. And I decided it still didn't look quite right. I decided to solve that problem by replacing the dotted lines between posts and widgets with a few lines of my own design. Nothing too fancy, but I hope that now the page looks a little more unique. I'm still trying to decide what to do with the sidebar space, and I added a few more project wonderful advertising slots to even out the length of the sidebar. So we'll see how that goes, but I am done messing with all of this for today!

And now I am properly caffeinated, and I don't think I can stand anymore tweeking or other ways of sidetracking myself from the 5 to 10 things I actually need to do. It's time to get off the computer!

Tinkers with Tags

I've spent some time on the blog this morning tinkering with tags on my posts. It's still a work in progress. Tagging is fun, but the challenge is coming up with tags I will repeatedly use with enough regularity for them to be useful. And then of course tagging all of my entries, which I have been lazy about. So I'm not sure if all of the tags I've set up are the most appropriate one, but there should now be a little more consistency to them than there was before. And I've added a new Tag Cloud widget on the right which should help me keep in mind which tags have been used most often (they're the big ones, neat!)

Other than that it's been so sunny and nice here in Chicago, pretty much the whole time we've been here. While I am busy looking for work this morning I spent some time pretending to be the cat. We were just sitting in the sunshine together, her on her footstool and me on my couch. It was lovely. Almost makes up for the fact that I've felt sniffly and itchy this morning...

The Balance

of flickr, blogger, twitter, ravelry, facebook...and so on. How is that achieved?
So this weekend I joined twitter. Because I am impressionable. And I read the Slog. There was a post the other day proclaiming that twitter was no longer cool since a Seattle politician was using it. So I react by thinking, hm, one more fun silly internet thing, am I signed up for it yet? No? Well it's really easy to sign up! So now I'm doing that too. We shall see how long that lasts. And how it affects real blog entries. Yesterday my thought was that I had sort of blogged about the trip we made to the Conservatory because I twittered about it, but it's not really the same thing.

And I suppose there's some other major news that I twittered, but have not blogged about. For example we are now CARLESS, Chuck sold his vehicle Saturday morning. It didn't fair too well after hauling a trailer of our stuff & driving across the country for the second time...and well...it costs a lot to park the car in our neighborhood. Plus Transit here is pretty much just as good as having a car, and we will be looking into joining a car-share program for larger grocery runs, etc. And we're both hoping we will be able to purchase some really nice bikes in the near future. It's exciting, but feels very odd since neither of us has really been entirely without a car our whole lives. But there are so many reasons it's a good thing. Even though we both consider ourselves to be concerned about the environment and aware of the impact of the things we do, being carless in the USA, the midwest no less is a cultural shift. I don't think it will actually be that difficult, but it may take a while to feel mentally adjusted.

Also, today is Chuck's first day as a student, he's orientating on the IIT campus as I type. After a 5 year break from school he's a student again. And I can't wait to hear about how his day goes!

Amused to find out that

My Mom shares a birthday with Barack Obama.

Previously, We knew she shared a birthday with the Queen Mum. I'm not sure if we knew that she shared the day with Louis Armstrong.

And due to the fact I just heard it was also Obama's b-day, I've found this neat page from the biography channel.

Treasuries!

Snagged a treasury, got to put to use the Fools Gold idea I've had since I listed some pyrite in my shop last week.

And while waiting for a spot to open spotted a lovely treasury featuring Sara of Rekoj Designs on the front page!

Messing Around

Taking some time away from packing to mess around with the blog. Too much packing becomes too much packing after a week of it. So I mess.

We are near done I think, the major thing remaining being the kitchen stuff. We still have a few items to sell on craigslist & I have to figure out laundry. I suppose I'll clean what I've got, pack it and start living out of a suitcase soon. I have 4 days. Chuck is leaving the day before with the car so that he'll get there the same day I do...with a lot of dedicated effort put into driving. And I get to take the cat. (No one got the better end of that arrangement!)

So today we took a trip for a bit downtown to go up on the observation level of the Smith Tower.
I've wanted to do that for a while, it was nice. Cheaper than the space needle, and you get to see all 35 floors as you pass them due to old fashion elevator construction. I got a little dizzy.

Otherwise It's going. I feel satisfied that I've eliminated a lot of extraneous stuff at this end, but I think unpacking I'll decide to get rid of more. I intended to go through everything to make sure we weren't taking a thing that wasn't essential and/or extremely sentimental, but at some point it's too exhausting...and then it all just goes into a box. But in addition to the trouble of moving stuff, it's also such an effort to find a good space for it. Though we are talking of renting one of the storage lockers in our building I think it's probably a good idea to eliminate what I can.

And so this all sounds exhausting and it is, but I am also thinking happy thoughts about Chicago. My parents are there now looking for a place and last I heard it sounded like they were having good luck. I already have tickets for us to go to the Pitchfork Music Festival, we'll be living comfortably close to Grant Park, which has many free concerts and events. Not to mention all the new restaurants and shops to check out. And when we get there there will be fireworks. Well, I suppose that's actually cause there's a national holiday....but the timing is appreciated.

Polyvore for my Apartment

Just playing around here. First time I'm really excited about this polyvore thing most people use for clothing is after realizing it might be handy for furniture. This plus drawing up the apartment in CAD could keep me entertained for weeks...or longer.

This Just in

I'm a blog tipper:
http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2008/05/egg_press_diy_pillow_kits.html
Yey! The egg press pillow kits are irresistibly cute. I haven't sewn mine up yet, but I know it will be very cute when I do!

Distraction for this evening.

Flickr has video now. This is the best because it means the internets are now fuller of Cat videos. Cat videos is the best. http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=cat%20video&w=all&m=tags

I promise to make more sense after friday, after the exam.

I'm on Ravelry!

Ravelry Screenshot
Originally uploaded by emmakat79

It took about a week before I got an invite, which isn't too bad I suppose. I just learned of the site last week but I knew I wanted to have an account there right away. It's a website that allows you to organize your yarn stash, patterns you've completed, want to complete, knitting needles in your collection and so on. Plus it's part social-network. It's funny that I learned of it last week. I had just picked up the new knitscene magazine the weekend before and several of the patterns had piqued my interest. I also already had several patterns lined up in my head and was thinking how nice it would be if I could somehow make a list online. Shortly thereafter I notice that Leah of Spiderfelt mentioned the site on her blog, and it sounded exactly like what I was looking for. So I finally got an account this morning and I'm starting to fill it up with my projects. I've just got to remember to try not to let this distract me too much this week, I have a lot of studying to do for my first Architectural Registration exam on Friday!

If you're on ravelry, you can find my profile here: http://www.ravelry.com/people/Emmakat

Assorted items

I think I'm going to retire the blog schedule for the time being. If it's going to stay as nice out as it was this week, I don't think I have any chance of succeeding at it. In the meantime I think I'll just keep it in the back of my head and try to post more often.

So last week I went for walks, knit obsessively and took panoramic photos of Kerry Park for the second week in a row. Kerry Park is a spectacular viewpoint of Seattle that I get to walk by on my way to work at least twice a week. So I figured it was about time I start taking some snapshots of it.

Otherwise I've been slow about posting items up on Etsy lately. I guess I haven't really established any kind of routine with the photography and everything else, so it's a little hard to keep to it when it gets really nice out. I've got some stuff I've been meaning to get up for a while now. So soon you'll see more hopefully!