'Tis The Season

With Thanksgiving behind us here in the US our thoughts are starting to turn to the Christmas Holidays.

The kids and I made an Advent calendar together today 'Just In Time' to open the first installment on December first.

It was a lot of fun, I'll have to take a decent photo of it for you.

Over the Thanksgiving holiday we ended up visiting Southern California with a brief stop through Los Angeles.

The Last Bookstore is located in downtown LA and is a HUGE shop where you can get almost any book you could imagine, used, for a great price.  The kids went crazy in the children's section, grabbing up handfuls and handfuls of books, begging me to buy out half of the store.  I bought them a copy of A Light in the Attic which they have fallen in love with.  It makes them really laugh.

The shop itself is a beautiful space, I highly recommend a visit if you have the chance.

On the 2nd floor, there is a small but very interesting yarn shop called Gather.  I was smitten by their boxes of tiny 'mystery yarn' balls for $5.  You could make a lot of striped socks for next to nothing.  They also had sock yarn by a British company called The Uncommon Thread.  I picked up a skein of their Lush Twist in a cream colorway called Manuscript.  Very pretty, will have to finally knit myself some socks from it.

I also did some sewing on the trip.  I'm working on an Alabama Chanin style 'coaster' - meaning a very small piece of fabric that you may use to put your coffee cup on.  It has a ton of bead work on it and has been quite slow going.  Sewing with beads has proven to be fun but it is far from a speedy undertaking.  I want to eventually use this technique on a larger project but it will likely be limited to the lower couple inches of a skirt or the lower sleeves of a bolero or something.  Photos of it soon for you.

And in other news, Jay recently left me a comment to a link where you can get EVEN MORE Yoko Saito books in English (thanks Jay!), so check out this shop called Willow Lane Quilting Company - it looks quite cool.