My Evenstar necklace:




And a small present to myself ... ;-)



The shawl pin is from Scotts Mountain Crafts on Etsy. It is light as a feather and even more beautiful in person, I assure you!

renaissance2010
Turning to photography as a creative outlet during a valiant fight with breast cancer at age 34, renaissance10 survived and set up a photo contest to help raise funds for the Lavender Trust, a nonprofit that provides information and support to younger women with breast cancer. In the first two years, the competition brought in over £65,000 (that's $107,260.73 U.S.!), with entries from 130 countries last year. Renaissance10 recently joined LiveJournal to meet other passionate photographers and find supportive friends.

curiouscupcakes
Holy buttercream frosting! If you have a sweet tooth for sugary goodness or a wandering eye for whimsical confection, this is pure ecstasy iced in deliciousness. Hailing the beloved cupcake as the artisinal canvas of choice, you'll enjoy recipes, photos, and bountiful tips to bake up a batch, whether your taste leans toward French classics or funky and flavorful.

mission101
With New Years in the offing, it's an ideal time to reflect on past accomplishments, make peace with disappointments, and refocus the lens on future goals. This community welcomes you to create a bucket list of 101 things you plan to accomplish in the next 1,001 days. Offering support, guidance, and inspiration, this is a great way to jumpstart those pesky resolutions.

Wherein we detail the list of awesome Christmas presents!

I still have yet to use the Fyberspates gift card from my in-laws; I'm a) waiting for them to repopulate the website post-Christmas, and b) waiting for myself to use the yarn I have (i.e. finish something already) so that I don't feel like I'm carrying coals to Newcastle.

The Signature US #1 needles, on the other hand, are employed as we speak. And yes, best beloved, they are exactly as wonderous as you've heard. Completely worth the outrageous price. (And I've heard they're starting to make circulars. Be still, my beating heart!)

Dan gifted me a Yankees hat and jersey, which is made of awesome. Also an Evenstar pendant straight out of Lord of the Rings, which is beautiful and sparkley and supremely geeky!

On the aforementioned end table are the following:

The Midwest Gardener's Cookbook, by Marian Towne. This book looks incredibly interesting, and is filled with common sense recipes which are simple and look delicious. It may cause me to rethink what I usually plant in my garden!


Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting by Marianne Kinzel. There's one particular project in here which I very much want to make, but I'm going to have to do some serious finishing of projects before I can even contemplate starting it.


The Enchanted Sole; Legendary Socks for Adventurous Knitters by Janel Laidman. There are so many lovely patterns in this book! And I love all the stories that go with them. The way to my heart is truly through a good fairytale.

Home is Where the Wine Is, by Laurie Perry. I loved her first book, and am halfway through this one already. (Just don't tell that to The Anarchy Archives or Way of Shadows. I'm fickle.)

Victorian Lace Today, by Jane Sowerby. This has become a ubiquitous lace-knitting book since its initial publishing. The patterns do seem to uphold the book's reputation, and I'm excited to start using it!

A Gathering of Lace, by Meg Swansen and Elaine Rowley. Ditto the comment to VLT; everything in this book is gorgeous! These will keep me in projects for years to come.

Scarf Style, by Pam Allen. There are some truly cozy and interesting projects in here, which is good since while useful garments, scarves are my kryptonite. I'm hoping that some of these will be enough to curb my impatience!

And there you have it. I hope that your Christmas was equally pleasant and fruitful!

Holiday debuggery

We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:

• If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go.
• If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account.
• If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate.
• If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase.
• If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help!

Tweaks

• There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out!
• Some of you reported formatting issues using the Rich Text Editor (i.e., line breaks were being removed incorrectly). We've implemented a fix! Thanks so much for your patience.

Give a little extra!

We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity.

Celebrate with holiday vGifts!

Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends.

Photos of the week

We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics!

For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!

i_hope_that
For many of us, the holidays can be kind of rough. If you're searching for a network of understanding friends, this ultra-nurturing community encourages you to express your heartfelt wishes and offer other members encouragement and acceptance. Not for the terminally snarky or emotionally-challenged, this is a good-spirited place to lend comfort and support.

diygifts
Feeling crafty? If you've got a few last folks on your holiday gift list, this is a great place to seed your creativity and generosity. You'll also discover wonderful DIY tips to decorate your home and entertain guests. Offering a no-frills-no-skills attitude that welcomes the cash-challenged and arts-phobic, you're sure to get ideas and make friends in the process.

cooking_club
A fun and friendly community dedicated to those who love to cook, whether you're a meat-and-potatoes type, an aspiring gourmand, and/or a vegan. In search of a brilliant dish to use up those weekly leftovers? Post your ingredients and you'll be whipping up a feast by dinner. You can also share favorite recipes. For Type A chefs, you can spice up your culinary repertoire with exciting cooking challenges.

Unlike the rest of my weeks, this Saturday was very knitterly indeed. It started with Knit Morning at Borders in Brentwood, went through dropping off Georgia's christmas present at Hearthstone in south county, and up through a three-hour techniques class at Kirkwood Knittery.

I enjoyed that class very much. We learned Continental knitting (which I speak fluently), English knitting - a.k.a. "throwing" (which I did not speak at all, despite that being how I was originally taught), and progressed on through Finnish (I think?) and Norwegian purling, and ended up at Portugese knitting.

Of them all, the Portugese was the most surprising. I'm actually rather likely to use it when knitting something unpatterned, or ribbed (to wit: my half-finished Margot); despite it looking wacky in the extreme it's amazingly fluid and uses very few movements. I really wouldn't want to try a k3tbl with it, but for knit and purl it's very cool.

I also had my first attempt at trying stranded knitting using one color in each hand. My swatch looks rather dismal, and only some of it can be blamed on my 'strands' coming from the inside & outside of the same ball -- in other words, they're the same color and it looks not at all impressive from the right side. But hey - however inept it may have been, I have done it, and that means it's no longer scary!

My experiments in crochet are proceeding apace; I've produced one mushroom, which I think is rather cunning but which Dan thinks should be shorter and squatter, in order to more accurately resemble a Mario mushroom. My tension is abysmal, which is to be expected.

Beyond that, I have done exactly nothing. There is a sock in my purse, because there always is, but I haven't touched Snowflakes or TQS in weeks. I think the rush to get the last-minute shawl completed before Christmas started the burnout and the even-more-last-minute pair of office gloves put on the final touches this year. And if I have learned anything at all about my creative process, it is that there's no use in forcing it. What I am still learning is that I don't need to feel guilty about it. I'll go back to eye-crossing lace when I'm ready for it, and not before.

Expect updates sometime well after 12th Night.

stepstomarrow
When granddaughter, Jada, was born with leukemia, a donor-match was located and Jada made a miraculous recovery. In honor of her grandaughter's health, Jeanna has decided to walk across the country (in the dead of winter) to raise awareness and build support for the bone marrow registry (all that's required is a cheek swab). Follow Jeanna's remarkable journey as she travels the United States by foot.