A Few of my Favorite Blogs

Hello there!

 Sometimes I do crazy things. However, crazy things are always more fun when you have a good friend with you. :) I guess I'd better just tell you... I'm going to run a half marathon with my friend. Ugh. I still am not sure how or why I agreed to do it, but now I have to. It's sort of strange, too, because I don't really enjoy running. Biking? Yeah. Hiking? Love it! Running? Ick. But I guess we will see how it goes. :)

  I have recently discovered Vogue Pattern's line of Vintage inspired patterns, and I love them so much that I would order them all if I could! As it happens, though, I can't order them all, but I did get to buy two of them. :)

Aren't they just the cutest! I had a very hard time just choosing two patterns, I'll tell you that.

 Now, I suppose I should get to the subject that the blog post's title says this is about. I follow quite a few blogs, some cooking blogs, some sewing blogs, and some really cute vintage-inspired blogs.

 1. David Lebovitz Living the Sweet Life in Paris

His blog has some of the most AMAZING recipes, and I've learned a lot about Paris and its restaurants since I started following the blog.

  2. Casey's Elegant Musings Celebrating Inspiration and Creativity

This is such a fantastic blog! Casey, the writer, is a very talented seamstress and knitter and she has the most fabulous closet of vintage inspired clothes I have ever seen. She has lots of tutorials on handy things, such as how to draft a pattern, sizing for vintage patterns, or how to sew scallops. She is quite the inspiration for me to start sewing my own clothes.

3. Two Peas and Their Pod

Another blog with yummy recipes. Every time I open an email with one of these blog posts, I nearly gasp at how yummy whichever recipe is on there looks. :)

  4. Just One Kind of Folks

My momma's blog. :) I love her.

 5. Sweet Dreams Cake App

This is my best friend Kenzie's mom's blog. It has lots of very handy cake decorating tutorials on it and some pictures of the beautiful cakes that she creates. :)

 6. Craft Passion

This blog is just filled with crafting wonderful-ness. :) It's the blog that I won a giveaway from, for the cute pear coin purse that I made.

 I think that's it, but make sure to visit all the blogs, you are sure to find all sort of goodies on them, whether a delicious recipe or a knitting pattern or helpful tips on sewing. :)

 Happy Blogging!

 Maddy

Will you join me for tea?

Hello there everybody!

I live in one of the strangest states. For the past two days it has been sunny and warm, even slightly hot if you stayed outside for a long time. But Montanans know that that weather is not here to stay, not in the spring. So, today it is snowing and slushing and being very wet, and I figured it would be a good day to stay inside and knit and read and have some nice hot tea.

Speaking of tea, my tea party was such a blast! I had such an amazing time and I got some cool birthday presents (my friends know so well what to get me!) and it was just so much fun. The food was fantastic, thanks to my wonderful mom who helped me plan the whole thing out. We had scones, cucumber sandwiches, baguette sandwiches, strawberries, and a wonderfully delicious lemon yogurt loaf cake. The cake was so delicious and moist that I had a very hard time waiting for my friends to come so that we could eat. :)

We were all dressed up, which was hilarious and perfect, and Kyra got some very cool pictures of us!

We each had a different tea cup with different saucers and I made a fabric napkin for each of us. Plus, we got to use my great-grandmother's beautiful crystal, which was so fun. :)

Kyra did my hair, and she did a very good job!

We went outside and posed with our bikes, since we each have an awesome cruiser bike. :)

I really love this one of all our feet. I mean, just look at how cute our shoes are!

Kenzie's mom made these amazing sugar cubes for us, and I just could not get over how adorable they were! We absolutely loved them. :)

Cam got me this super fantastic jewelry holder that has a little giraffe on it! It's perfect for all of my rings. :)

She also got me the cutest candle ever. It looks like a book and says A Guide To Afternoon Tea Service. How perfect is that?

And Kenzie, well she is super talented, so she got me this cute yellow teapot and knitted a tea cozy for it! It was the first time she'd ever knitted anything like that. She is very ambitious in her choices of knitting projects. :)

We talked. We ate chili. We played Sequence. We even went on a bike ride to the park while we were all dolled up. It was so much fun. I'm so lucky to have the best friends in the world. :)

So, after that long, fun day we settled down to watch New Year's Eve (which is just a great movie) and then went to sleep, after much chatting, of course. :)

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough." -Mae West
"Don't cry because it's over. Smile because it happened." -Dr. Seuss
"The happiest people don't have the best of everything, they make the best of everything." -Anonymous

Happy Tea Drinking!

Maddy

A Super Cute Easy Pattern!

Hey there! Happy May!

So, today I'm actually sort of busy, since I'm having an amazing tea party later with my friends! But I decided I would squeeze in a quick post. :) I'm having a tea party because I was in Texas for my birthday so my friends didn't get to celebrate it with me. It's going to be sooo much fun, we have lovely tea cups and mis-matched saucers and a cake that I am just DYING to eat. We will also have the very traditional cucumber sandwiches and scones. AND (yes, there is more) I get to wear my adorable new dress from Forever 21! It's fantastic. The weather has finally decided to be nice too, a sort of miracle considering how the weather has been the past few days, so we can all go ride our cruiser bikes outside. In our tea party dresses. Heck yeah.

So, in case you couldn't tell, I'm excited.

Well, as the title of this post suggests, I wanted to share with you a really easy knitted dishcloth pattern. It's not even a pattern, really, because it's so simple. It's a perfect project for a beginner knitter.

So, pretty much what you do is you buy some yarn (cotton dishcloth yarn), I suggest Sugar 'n' Cream or Peaches 'n' Cream yarn, you can find both at Wal-Mart or Joann's or Michaels. Using size 7 or 8 needles (depending on how you knit. Some people knit very tightly, some loosely), cast on 35 stitches. I've gotten this number from lots of trial and error, and have found that it's a good size when you are finished. Then work in garter stitch (knit every row) until it is the length you want it to be. Cast off. Weave in ends. You are done. Seriously, it's that easy. If you want a bit of a fancier one, you could make a whole one in seed stitch (on an odd number of stitches, knit, purl, knit, purl every row. Always start and end with a knit stitch.). Sometimes if you mess up on seed stitch you end up with ribbing, but that's not too bad of a thing to happen. :)

I have made lots of these, and I'm happy to say that by now I can knit them without looking, all because of muscle memory. It makes it a good project to do when you are watching a movie or something. Here are a couple of my favorite ones:

This one was kind of fun to make, I got to experiment with carrying the colors up the side of the dishcloth. I like how it turned out!

This is one I am making for my mom. It's seed stitch with a little section of stockinette stitch. It's very lovely yarn that my mom picked out. :)

I REALLY like this one. It's actually part of the "One project per week for one year" thing I did. We all know how THAT worked out. Anywho, it's a lovely rainbow of fantastical colors! I even like how the back of it turned out.

This is one I am working on right now, as with the black and white one, I am practicing carrying the extra colors up the side of the dishcloth. I can't wait to see how it turns out. :)

These dishcloths aren't knitted, but I just thought I'd show them to you. It's from a very easy pattern and I just love how many colors you can make it in! I might even do a tutorial someday about how to make them... :)

So, as you can see, it's very easy to end up with a bunch of these cute things, and they are, as the title says, super cute and easy. There are seriously hundreds of free dishcloth patterns out there, so go look!

I'll have a post up soon about my tea party!

Happy May and Happy Knitting!

Maddy