winter at home

it's cold here! while all my northern-hemisphere friends are hooting and hollering about their sweaty carefree summers, we're bundled up in sweaters, hovering over the gas heater and staying indoors, snuggling with the pups to keep warm. we did a ton of traveling during the summer and fall, and now we've used up all of our vacation time and travel budget so we'll be at home for the rest of the year, and right now it feels nice to be at home, nesting and working in the studio and knitting up a storm. I'm trying to knit a blanket to keep me warm on the couch, hopefully I might even finish it before summer comes! aside from knitting and watching tons of movies, these are fun things we've been up to recently:

• using my handsome new red silicone(!) mini-muffin tins to bake cupcakes and muffins. apple-carrot-chocolate chip muffins were the best so far.

• discovered a cute place called La Castorera right around the corner from our house (thank you Dirk for bringing us there), it's an upstairs space with a nice old-time vibe in the bar and they have bands and music and project movies on Wednesdays, I hope we'll be back there again soon.

• started yoga classes. they're small classes with a nice teacher named Ines who lives in our neighborhood. we use a lot of equipment: pillows and nylon straps and wood blocks and stuff. in that aspect it's different from any other yoga classes I've taken before, but we also did lots of normal yoga stuff. seems great so far, I love being in a small class and getting more personal instruction.

• had a fun dinner with Annie & Matt and friends at a cute and very informal "closed-door restaurant" in Almagro called "Donde Me Trajiste" (where have you brought me?). The food was really not exciting but the whole experience is fun, it's like being invited to dinner at a friend's house, the hosts serve you dinner in their own home. It's a pretty, historic PH house with a bit of a hippie onda, and they perform live music for you while you eat. The "house band" did some fun tango music and later a solo artist played some traditional Argentine folklorico music. Also they served us a delicious mystery cocktail which had pear and basil in it, appropriately called "Que le pusiste?" (what did you put in it?) because they wouldn't reveal what else was in it.

• had a great bike-riding Saturday, rode over to Chacarita and bought tons of fresh veggies & super awesome cheeses at the organic farmer's market El Galpon and then took a break at home, warmed up and did a bit of knitting, then biked over to MALBA, the modern art museum, and looked at the art. Mike had never been to MALBA before! they had a good exhibit of Argentine art from the 1990's, I liked a lot of the work although it did seem weird (given the title of the show) that most of the pieces I liked were made in 2003-2008. Had submarinos (hot milk with a bar of chocolate: you drop the chocolate in and mix it up until it turns into hot chocolate) and pain-au-chocolat and a game of cards in the museum cafe. Perplexingly, a museum guard knocked on the glass wall and scolded us for playing cards in the museum cafe! wtf? we ignored him and kept playing until our submarinos were gone and biked back home, then cooked a delicious pot of hot & sour soup with our farmers-market veggies.

• knitting and more knitting. i made this hat for a craft swap, and now i am working on a slightly-more-subdued version of this blanket (using solid-colored blocks rather than striped blocks, if that makes any sense). I'll upload a picture soon.

• I've been making some new designs for wedding invitations. I've gotten lots of inquiries about custom work for weddings, but I find that mostly people like to "shop" from a variety of available options, rather than inventing something totally new from scratch. So I'm putting together a repertoire of wedding invitations, I'll keep adding more as I have time.

• starting a new website/blog to post pattern and textile designs. This is still in the idea phase, and it's a collaborative project with my friend Julia. the idea is we'll both post pattern/textile designs, sketches, etc. For years I've been wanting to assemble/develop a real portfolio of textile and repeat designs so hopefully this will be an incentive to start pulling them together and developing more work in this vein. I'll post a link as soon as we have something to share!