This holiday season has been a tough one for me, but I’ve been working hard to find joy alongside my sadness. Happy holidays to everyone, may your days be filled with as much joy, peace and love as can be packed into them!

It’s been a hard year, but I’m thankful for: My husband. Derek has been my rock through this year’s tumult and I love him more and more every day. My family; immediate, extended and in-law. The hole in my life where my dad is missing is painful and hard, but the rest of my family [...]

Today is National Bundt Day. Stacie pinned The Food Librarian’s celebration of the bundt cake recently and since I love a bundt cake (delicious cake, little to no frosting, perfect for unfancy days without a lot of fuss), I decided I need to join in. I baked the blueberry lemon bundt from martha stewart and [...]

Today would have been my father’s 58th birthday. Instead, he is gone and I am still desperately trying to piece back together my absolutely shattered heart. It seems fitting that I share my inadequate eulogy for my father here today. I’m going to be spending the day with my husband, celebrating my father with a

Mom with Derek and I in our backyard in June, 2011. Today is my mothers’s birthday. I’m sure if you asked how old she is, she’d tell you she’s “old enough to know better.” I cannot tell you all how wonderful my mother is. She’s my support, my good friend, one of my biggest cheerlead

Seen in the parking garage when leaving Sock Summit late yesterday evening: That blob on parking guy’s knee there? Let’s take a closer look: Yup. Parking lot yarn detritus. The knitters were here.

My birthday this year is bittersweet. I’m excited to be turning 30, excited for the start of a new decade of my life and excited because I just plain love birthdays. But it’s a hard day in that it’s the first birthday my dad isn’t here to sing happy birthday to me. When I turned [...]

I do not profess to be either good or speedy at cross-stitch. I generally leave the cross-stitch pieces to my mother (who is very good, and far speedier than I am) but not too long ago I came across some great, simple pieces on etsy that have called out to me. One of these is [...]

I’m writing a second blog these days, one that is more personal. As a part of my coping and healing process, I’ve started writing letters to my father. I kept writing them in my head, but wanted to record them in a less sieve-like way for days when my memories have faded. Obviously, I’m not [...]

Recently I had a request to knit a tiny Papa Smurf, after one of my older sister’s friends saw my tiny gnome army. Since I knew I had both blue and red remnants at home, I agreed and set about the task. Using the teeny tiny mochimochiland santa pattern, I improvised the color placement (making [...]

One of my Christmas gifts was a copy of Knitting Mochimochi by Anna Hrachovec. The book is full of wonderful gems like a knitted tv and couch, pencil and tiny “human beans” among other things. My personal favorite is the Pig With a Wig. The pig itself is knit with about 1/3 of a skein [...]

Dad, October 2009 with two dumb goats and a bull. Two weeks ago, in the wee hours of the morning, my father unexpectedly passed away. He was 57, and it would be an understatement to say that my family is devastated by the loss. After a whirlwind trip to Maine, I’m back to the chaos [...]

What a year. I keep saying that 2010 has been terrible (and it has) but as I looked back through my photos for the year I realized it was also full of a large number of great things. Recapped here for you, 2010 at Casa de Baya. January: I knit a kidney for my mother, [...]

It’s been a long two months, but right now we’re relaxing and gearing up for a low-key holiday celebration with my in-laws. We’ll be eating lasagna and spending time together, in a modified version of our normal crazy huge Christmas celebration. There will be gifts, delicious food, and–most important

It’s been a rough ride around here lately. In addition to a host of other things, my beloved husband threw his back out very badly; he has been laid up for 2.5 weeks and on bedrest for 12 days. I’m not looking to throw myself a pity party, but yesterday all of the frustrations of [...]

Anyone who knows me knows that I have occasional compulsive tendencies. I go off on wild tears and do things like bake ten kinds of cookies for four people for Christmas Eve, collect all available cds from a band I decide I like or get wrapped up in a book so much that I stay [...]

I’m super excited to share a new pattern by my friend Kiersten, Rhetoric. I test knit the pattern and while I think we got most of the kinks worked out before its release, there were some moments of great consternation along the way. Because of the nature of the cables and the way that they [...]

In a crowd of knitters, if you mention Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Baby Surprise Jacket, you’re likely to be met with one of two reactions. Either they’ll have knit it, probably more than once, or they’re intimidated by the scant instructions and “trust the pattern” nature of the knitting. I ha

Surprisingly hard work. We’re about halfway done, then it dries for 48 hours and then we put on a new coat of stain/sealant. It needs it.

Just before my birthday I got an itch to spin and knit myself a sweater. I looked at patterns, picked several I like and then started researching fiber sources. I wanted it to be fairly soft, but also to have some sheen and to wear well so I turned to one of my favorite fibers [...]

I learned how to play cribbage when I was fairly young. My parents were friends with a couple who had two boys about my age; they would bring the boys over, we’d have dinner and then the grownups would drink beer and play cribbage while the kids watched a movie or played together. The real [...]

I love a good semicolon; the way it transitions from one sentence into another without a hard, hard pause. When I saw this pattern for a comma, apostrophe or quotation marks I was smitten. As I was showing my husband the nearly finished item, he smiled and told me that I “should knit it a [...]

It’s been awhile since part one but I wanted to share the trio of 3ply handspun yarns that I finished on my last spinning kick. I wanted to get these up because I’ll be spinning a lot in July since Tour de Fleece starts in just a few days. I’ve been participating in Tour de [...]

Three years ago I married my best friend, my unwavering support, my biggest cheerleader. Each day I wake up to find that the impossible has happened and I love him even more today than yesterday, and know there’s no one on this earth that I would rather share my life with. Happy anniversary, my love. I [...]

Spring has sprung, bringing with it the ever changing rain-sun-rain-sun-hail-rain again cycle that is one of the things I love most about living in the Willamette Valley. My crafty desires have been following the path of the weather, changing on a whim. I have nine knitting projects in progress right now and as they all [..

It’s been raining fit to drown us all here lately, and my peas and my broccoli raab seem to be drinking it up quite happily. At the same time, I’m seeing some progress with my indoor seedlings. This is not the first time I’ve helped with indoor seedlings (we had a huge garden growing up), [...]

Cat grass. the BobCat likes to eat plants, so I planted some just for him, that are safe for him to eat. I’ve been doing a bit of navel gazing. About growing and changing and how that impacts friendships but also how that impacts how I understand myself. Earlier tonight I sent a text message to [...]

OR, can she knit nearly fifty-one thousand* stitches in sixteen days? The Knitting Olympics asks knitters to challenge themselves with a project that will stretch their limits and test their mettle as a knitter. Or cause a repetitive stress injury, whichever might come first. I chose Tonk’s Snow Peacock for my projec

I’ve been doing some more test knitting. This time, I test knit ViolinJodie’s new shawl pattern Verdaia (ravelry.com link). I ended up taking an impromptu trip east to stay with my mother for a week, which saved me a little money on postage as this was a gift for her. We got a little bit of [...]

1. Collar and Back, 2. Christmas Gnome, 3. Just One Yo., 4. Sheldon, 5. Mittens!, 6. Herringbone Neck Warmer, 7. Mup’s Invader Hat, 8. Waffles Baby, 9. Waffles Baby, 10. Chevrons, 11. Teeny Tomte, 12. Lace Ribbon, 13. Aspen Grove Shawl, 14. Elijah, 15. Peapod No. 2, 16. Top Down Bonnet and Mittens Created with fd̵