I’ve had quite a few new orders lately from yarn shops all the world over—including New Hampshire, NYC, France, and Australia—so I wanted to give a shout-out to the shops carrying Mochimochi Land patterns. Please check out the fine establishments in my stockists list and consider supporting a local small business by purchasing a printed version of a Mochimochi Land pattern along with your yarn.
If your LYS isn’t on the list, please introduce them to my designs!
The Stackable Cats cross-stitch chart is coming along!
It seemed that we weren’t going be getting to the part where we learn how to make cross-stitch charts in my Illustrator class anytime soon, so I hunted around Ravelry and found a pretty thorough explanation of one method posted about a year ago by Marnie in the Designers group.
It’s a little tedious, but it definitely works, and maybe it will ultimately give me more control over the design in the end.
Once it’s finished, the chart will be available here! In the meantime, cross-stitchers should check out the fun 8-bit designs on Spritestitch, if it’s not already in your RSS.
Yesterday on Ravelry I got wind of Robyn Love’s new knitted city window display at the Lion Brand Studio on 15th street in NY. I must go see this in person!
The idea reminds me of my cities under attack by giant cute things, except way bigger and with more details like tiny cars and pigeons.
You can see more photos from the display at Robyn’s blog.
Just heard Passion Pit on the All Songs Considered podcast about upcoming SXSW performances. It’s happy—a bit reminiscent of The Postal Service, except I think it will take much longer to tire of Passion Pit.
This is “Sleepyhead” from their album Chunk of Change. (Best not to look directly at the video for long though, because it’s super dizzying.)
I think I read that they’re coming out with another album in May. Can’t wait!
Spring just can’t come fast enough, am I right?
Until the temperature stays above 50 degrees for consecutive days, we’ll have to settle for warm thoughts and spring-like images, like this charming Snails and Slugs mobile made by Ravelry user colala.
I want one of these for my bedroom!
You can make your own Snails and Slugs with this free pattern on the Mochimochi Blog.
Kate Jeffery also recently finished an outdoorsy mobile of her own, with cute bugs!
As I mentioned last month, you can get Kate’s dragonfly pattern for free on Ravelry.
Two months ago John set up a new 50-gallon fish tank in our living room and populated it with 25 cory catfish. They are too cute!
I just spent the past ten minutes trying to take their picture, but they’re a bit camera shy. The best I could do was a photo of a single cory at rest.
It doesn’t show up so well in the photo, but one of the cute things about corys is the way that their gills are pink, which makes them look like they’re always blushing.
You can see photos of all different kinds of corys at PlanetCatfish.
I’m now back in NYC after a productive trip to Oklahoma. I was having some amazing toy photography done there by my friend Brandi Simons, for a project that I’m eager to talk about at a future date.
The city always seems bigger after I’ve been gone for a few days. At least there aren’t any giant snails attacking it!
This one-of-a-kind knitted piece is now available for $80. It measures about 6.5″ wide and 6″ tall.
Please email me at info@mochimochiland.com if you’re interested in purchasing it.
One of my Christmas presents last year was Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation by Amid Amidi. I finally gave it a good thumbing through last week, and after seeing so many fun and interesting stills from mid-century experimental animations, I was eager to find what was available on Youtube.
Happily, one of the more obscure-seeming mentions from the book was an easy find. I encourage you to watch at least part of this strange and wonderful 1959 animation made for the temperance board of the Methodist Church, of all things. It’s about the dangers of driving recklessly, it stars an alien who resembles a stylized automobile (or maybe Rainycloud, even), and it’s truly fascinating in its modern design and incorporation of jazz music with the moving images.