This is a free and easy pattern for everyone to enjoy. Please check out the Mochimochi Shop for more patterns that you’ll love!
Halloween is sneaking up fast like a silly little ghost! Get ready for it with a zero calorie, zero stress knit: by popular demand, here’s the pattern for Tiny Candy Corn! Continue reading “Free Pattern: Candy Corn”
Needles ready? It’s now officially time to enter the 4th annual Mochimochi Photo Contest!
Once again, we’re looking for the cutest, funniest, most interesting photos of Mochimochi Land toys. All you have to do to enter is upload your photo(s) to the Mochimochi Friends group on Flickr by November 15th.
Winners will receive cute goodies from Japan and gift certificates from Mochimochi Land and Knit Picks, who are again generously sponsoring!
Eligibility
To be eligible, your photo must contain at least one knitted toy made from a Mochimochi Land pattern. This can be a pattern from the Mochimochi Shop, a pattern from Knitting Mochimochi, or one of the free patterns on the Mochimochi Blog. The pattern may be modified, but not beyond recognition from the original design.
How to enter
Simply upload your photo(s) to the Mochimochi Friends Flickr group. If you don’t have a Flickr account, it is free and easy to register (though we recommend signing up as soon as possible, because it takes a little time for your account to be approved for sharing photos in a group). You can upload as many photos as you want, within reason.
(All photos uploaded since the deadline of the 2009 photo contest last year are already entered in this year’s contest!)
Deadline
The last day to enter the contest is November 15th, 2010. We’ll announce the semi-finalists shortly thereafter here on the blog, then everyone will be able to vote for their favorites! So be sure to check the blog in November.
Prizes!
First place prize will be a bunch of cute goodies from Japan, a $25 gift certificate to the Mochimochi Shop, and a $50 gift certificate to Knit Picks (thank you Knit Picks!).
Second place prize will be a handful of cute goodies from Japan, a $15 gift certificate to Mochimochi Land, and a $10 gift certificate to Knit Picks.
Third place prize will be a $10 gift certificate to Mochimochi Land and a $10 gift certificate to Knit Picks.
So get those needles clicking and those cameras snapping!
The first candy corn of the season is always exciting! These guys were part of my show that opened last night, and the real thing (which is pretty much equivalent size) were served as refreshments.
No official caption contest this weekend, but let’s resume it next week!
Last night was just amazing. The opening went better than I could have imagined, with a fantastic crowd of good friends and other generally awesome people.
Thank you to everyone who came out! Thank you especially to everyone at gallery hanahou for making it happen: Koko, Azusa, Erika, Gabe, and Laura. And Cascade for supplying allll of the yarn that went into this installation!
I was thrilled that the show got some some great press, too!
CRAFT
Trust Your Style
Mr X Stitch
Pattern Pulp
The Village Voice
and others.
My installation will be up at gallery hanahou in NYC through October 29th, and more photos will appear here soon!
It was a full day of stitching my installation together today, and I think it’s really looking like something now! It’s amazing what a difference a bunch of mattress stitch and backstitch makes to pull things together and add cohesion. No photos today—my hands were too busy!
Well, just for fun, here’s one photo that I took a while back when I was doing the shoot for the invite.
The opening is tomorrow night (or tonight, if you’re reading this on Thursday)—I can’t wait! If you’re in the NYC area, please join me 7-9 pm at gallery hanahou in Soho. Then the show will be up until the end of the month. (The gallery hours are limited to weekdays noon to 6 pm.)
If you’re nowhere near the NYC area but are instead closer to Seattle, be sure to check out “Plush You!,” which is opening this Friday (5-9 pm) at Schmancy and other venues! I don’t have any work in that show this year, but there will be tons of amazing plushes from all kinds of plush makers.
Two more days until my show opens! That means that the knitting part is basically over (a relief), and I’m up to my knees in stitching things together. To save time at setup, I came with many larger pieces of the installation already assembled, but now it’s time to attach all of those to the ground and sew on all the extra little bits that will hopefully make the whole thing interesting.
I started with the river—here it is halfway stitched on.
The difficult part about the assembly isn’t so much all the stitching, but it’s the leaning way out over the table to sew on the stuff in the middle. All this back-bending backstitch isn’t my favorite thing, but I’m sure I can endure a couple of more days of it.
Tomorrow will bring more stitching, and then something needs to go on those white gallery walls too…
So today was the big first day of setting up my show! It was exciting and a little traumatic.
My wonderful friends at gallery hanahou were nice enough to set up a platform for the installation, and then they helped me attach the ground layer blanket. It fit perfectly!
You can see the pieces from Stina Persson’s show, which just ended, still up on the walls. Her work is amazing, and it felt a little weird to be displaying my silly knitted stuff right next to her nuanced watercolors.
Next it was time to get the model train set up and working. And work it did not, except to go halfway around before it derailed. That was kind of devastating, since it worked at home just fine, but the softer, slightly uneven surface didn’t seem to be helping. I was freaking a bit, but John was cool-headed about the whole thing and spent several hours making different adjustments until it was working pretty much perfectly. So he definitely earned his “World’s Best Husband” mug today.
While John was working on the train, I got started on the stitching things to that big blanket.
I have to say, in a larger room with white walls, the whole thing looked much smaller overall to me, and I was definitely thinking, “is this all I did with most of the first half of 2010?” But I guess I just have to concentrate on the details—no sense in second-guessing anything at this point.
Tomorrow will be all about assembly, and not at all about trains!
Thanks for the great captions for Tiny Acorn! It was hard to choose a favorite, but John and I settled on Wendy’s:
Tiny acorn dreams of putting down roots in Paris, where his love of berets and Jerry Lewis will be appreciated.
That means Wendy gets a free PDF pattern from the Mochimochi Shop. Congrats!
Honorable mentions must go to several others:
From catspaw:
Why yes, I am partial to berets.
From Jason:
He doesn’t want to follow in his father’s footsteps, but he knows he didn’t fall far from the tree.
From DKW:
Being an acorn isn’t all it’s cracked up to be – Unless of course, you’re having a nutty day.
From JL:
People may think he’s a little nutty now, but one day we’ll all be looking up to him.
From Livi:
Sometimes I worry that I’m going to seed
From Melissa:
He just fell hard for that little hazelnut next door, but she’s just not ready to put down roots yet.
From Rachael:
They call me a nut. They all put me down. But what they don’t know is, my cap is a crown.