We (and by we, I mean Paul) did a ton of driving today, and since I didn’t have the yarn I expected to have for a work project, I got the chance to work on one my “just for fun” projects (You might recognize this blanket from here and here). I found the perfect  yarn to use for the border at my LYS  just a couple of weeks ago (many of the squares are made with Lana Grossa Wollywasch, the border yarn is called Merino Magic) and I had to buy all 5 balls of it to ensure I could complete the blanket with it (I think I’ll use 4, but I quickly realized the 3 balls I bought initially wouldn’t be enough, so I had to be on the safe side!). I got the idea as to how exactly I would crochet the pieces together when I was helping a customer plan her own afghan project. Other than the border skeins, the entire thing is from scraps and although the colors are a little crazy, I like it. It kind of reminds me of stained glass (… from the 1970s).

In addition to hooking, I spent the day spotting tons and tons (and tons!!) of pronghorn in Wyoming. It’s always fun to see them on the road, but we found this herd right by the rest area, and they didn’t even get spooked while we took photos. (Note: Of course, it is always dangerous to approach wild animals and I am in no way suggesting that you do!). It was very cool to get the chance to watch them, since whenever we saw them in Bozeman they were so, so skittish.

Tomorrow we’re hoping to blow through Colorado and Oklahoma, and maybe even part of Texas. Now that the move is “real” (haha) I’ve been looking at Fiber Groups in the San Antonio area and was pleased to find so many on Ravelry. I’ll have to do some more research, but so far, I’m excited. And thank you to everyone for your well wishes, we are hoping this move will be a very good thing.

It was early enough in the day that we saw snowshoe hairs and marmots on the trail, in addition to hearing birds sing and all of that. Which is the good thing about travelling with a toddler- they’re able to wake up early and get moving!

Tegue was full of the giggles the whole time. He found Paul to be very entertaining.

We also drove to Yellowstone and did a quickie tour of the Park. Tegue got to see the big things: Old Faithful, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone and the mud pots. He also pointed to a bison and said (we think) “Doggie!”

We stayed at the Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel, and the elk gathered outside there most nights. This was the #1 reason  I wanted to stay there, so I could watch the elk.

Paul and I have never stayed overnight in the park before, so even though everyone else was pooped, we decided to get up at 6:30 AM and drive to the Lamar Valley to see what we could see. We saw a wounded bison all alone, a couple pronghorn, a pair of coyotes travelling together, a pair of sand hill cranes, a black bear, and a ton of bison (including my favorite: baby bison!) crossing the road. The clouds were so low that we were nearly driving through them, and the cars were so few and far between that the park felt like ours. So, if you ever travel to Yellowstone, remember: get up early if you want to see the animals, especially if you go in the height of tourist season.

And now to share some pretty photos of where we live. We went on a walk/hike (it wasn’t that strenuous, really, to call it a hike) a few weekends ago. This path is on some private property, but whoever owns it is nice enough to let the public enjoy it so long as you stick to the rules. I like that.

There’s a great view of our town from up there. Amazing.

Lots of wild flowers and a path that looks like it might lead directly to the sky.

We even saw some prickly pear flowers to remind us of Texas. It is much, much cooler here than it is in TX right now, I am thankful for that!  I am really loving Bozeman this summer. When I walk home from work, it almost seems fake: birds chirping, colorful poppies and gardens everywhere, and even the occasional bunny hopping out to say hello. It’s kind of dreamy. You can see some more hiking pics on my flickr page if you like.

We were in Glacier National Park just two days ago and I can’t believe it. Coming back is always hard! The blog will likely be quiet this week as I get back into the grind. In the mean time, you can check out some of my photos for entertainment.

Here I am about to jump off a cliff. Not really, but I was pretty close to the edge.

And here’s an overview of part of the road (now you know what they mean when they say hairpin turns! Check out a scarier example of the road here.).  The Beartooth Highway was built in 1936 and has the highest elevation in Wyoming and Montana, if you couldn’t tell by the photos. Luckily for me Paul has lots of experience doing all of the mountain driving. Generally I sit in the passenger seat and try not to look over the edge. In the above photo, you can also see a HUGE plume of smoke, which was coming from the Gunbarrel forest fire (it’s burning through about 41,000 acres of Wyoming, but they are letting it burn to try to promote new growth in the area). The smoke cloud got amazingly large as we kept driving. There was plenty of pretty scenery to be had, you can check out more of my photos of the highway and Red Lodge (the town on the other side) right here.

It was a loooong day but I love these kind of trips–I keep seeing things even when I close my eyes to go to sleep because my brain can’t process them all. We really are fortunate to live in such a pretty state– I want to take full advantage of the rest of summer while it’s still here. 

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Anyway–in craft-related news, I just wanted to remind you: there is still time to enter to win a free copy of Kayte Terry’s new book, so head on over and comment (on that post) if you haven’t already. Good luck!

Seriously, WTF? It’s 34 degrees out and still snowing. It’s JUNE. It’s bad enough that there’s no beach nearby, and that it’s been raining off and on for weeks–but this? this? Oh the humanity.

p.s. dear apartment complex: I think it’s safe to turn the heat back on already!!

And here are my muddy feet from our hike today, with dandelions. We heard lots of thunder, so we ended up turning around when we were almost to the hard part (ie. huge elevation gain, and fast). But, we got a good 3 or so miles in anyway. By the way, it’s not a great idea to walk through mud in sandals, although I can’t say I didn’t enjoy myself. So much for my clean new Keens, not to mention my dirty toes.

And in Blatant Self Promotion news, I have an article in the newest issue of Make magazine. Woo-hoo, a real article! It’s about Montanan artist Gary Bates, and let me tell you it was hard to condense all of the information into 300 words.

You can’t read the text from my screenshot, but if you do a google search for him and the title (Earth Wind Inspire– HAH!) you can get to that page of the online edition. Or, of course, just check it out at the bookstore. They feature lots of neat techy projects.

Happy weekend!

Somebody got his Master’s degree. Yay!

And we’ve been doing some day trips, including one to yellowstone last Friday. It is baby bison season, and they are all SO cute. They are the little orange furballs looking exhausted in the above photo.  I took some better/closer pics with Paul’s camera but he hasn’t uploaded them yet.

We also did a little tour of the Old Faithful Inn, which was pretty interesting. The Inn opened in 1904 and was one of the first of it’s kind–rustic–since before that, national park hotels were made to appeal to wealthy people from the east coast who felt comfortable in more familiar surroundings. Montana was still scary wilderness at that point. The builders  were actually allowed to use materials from the park to build the hotel (including 500 tons of volcanic rock and all of the trees you see–which originally had the bark ON, although they removed it later). The bent branches you see making up the levels form when something happens like: lots of snow builds up and the branch grows around it, or a tree falls and rests on the branch, and the branch grows around it. So the crew (of fifty men, who built the hotel in a year) went out and found those injured trees for their curves. The inn’s roof also extends to 76.5 feet at the peak, which is the average height of a lodgepole pine, the most common tree in the park. And in case you were wondering, the altitude is too high for termites, and due to climate and lack of bugs, it actually takes a fallen tree, out in the elements, one hundred years to weather away in Yellowstone. Crazy! You can watch a little video about the inn here.

We also stopped by the Grand Prismatic Spring again– like everything in the park, it looks different every time. The colors you see in the ground are bacterial mats– different bacteria grow in the different temperatures of the water, hence the color range. So cool. As you can see in the photo, there was still a good deal of snow in the park. It is finally getting nice and warm though (as indicated by my first accidental sunburn of the season), and it is SO nice to go outside.

Here’s Paul on the trail. Of course I picked the super easy one since I have basically been hibernating all winter, and I was panting nonetheless. It’s the elevation….yes…. I’m still adjusting after nine months, that’s it.  Everything is still all dead around here, but in a few weeks hopefully it will turn spring-like. Of course, they are predicting snow later this week, but I’ll take my 68 degree days when they come.

I wore one of the shirts I made a few months ago that I’ve yet to show off, another Built By Wendy 3964 (first version, which I loooove and wear all of the time, is here). See how I am standing outside in this picture? Very exciting. Anyway, I think i could make a hundred of these shirts and still want to make more. I wear them over long sleeves or under a sweater in the winter, and they are nice and breezy for summer without leaving my arms feeling totally bare (plus they don’t creep up like t-shirts, thank goodness). The pattern is kind of difficult but it gets easier every time, and if you do simple things like leave off the bias-cut ties (and put a seam at the neckline with a button/loop closure instead) you can save yourself some yardage. It’s also a great use for the fabrics that I only have a yard of (just about all of them), when I can find two that go together. These two are from Reprodepot– Alexander Henry’s Chickadee and Moda dots.

I also had a  baking urge this morning– I’ll share the results later this week. Hope it’s lovely where you are.

I set myself up with an embroidery project for the plane (I must have been inspired by Floresita), and in case I got bored in New York (yeah right) and wanted to stay home. I almost n-e-v-e-r make time for embroidery, it is truly time consuming, but I’ve had these patterns for a couple of years now and I thought it would be a good change of pace. I used a bird transfer I ordered from Colonial Pattern about and referred to their suggested colors and made it up as I went. I haven’t done a lot of embroidery, but I think it came out pretty well.

The guy next to me on the plane asked me what I did with the things I was making. I said “I’ll use it to dry dishes.” And he was incredulous, “No, really, do you make pillows or what?” At which point I said that I could do that, but I just like to add a little bit of color and art in my life even for mundane uses. I don’t think he followed. I guess I might turn this into something other than a tea towel, but if it remains a tea towel, that would be fine with me, too.

In other news, I posted some photos from Wave HIll Gardens. I had never heard of Wave Hill but I read about it on someone’s blog while in New York and thought “Hey, that’s here!” so my brother and I made the trek. And it was a trek- make sure you get your directions straight before you go– although wandering around the pretty houses in Riverdale is not a bad way to spend time. I love that my brother lives in NYC, because I don’t think I could have convinced anyone else to go there with me, even though in reality it is not that far away.  One thing that was good about living in Queens was that I could never be the lazy one (it was bad too, trust me), and I went all over in terms of exploring the city. My theory: yes, it may take an hour to get there, but what else am I doing, really? Once my more adventurous friends moved away, it really started to piss me off that no one would ever come to Queens, and that everyone who lived in Astoria was always flocking to Manhattan. Sigh.

(Photos from a paper flower menagerie exhibit by Jun Eun Park in the Sun Room)

So during my 6-day vacation, I hit 4 boroughs (Brooklyn: flea, Queens: Egyptian food, Bronx: Wave Hill, Manhattan: everything else). More photos on Flickr, of course, because I think that’s all I have to say about the trip. See also Kayte’s post about our visit to the Crochet Coral Reef.