Author: Anna

Shipping off the Diplomats

Posted on by Anna

This has been a busy week of organizing and packing and otherwise getting ready to ship hundreds of gnomes off to Korea for next month’s show at Everyday Mooonday. Here’s what our dining room looks like right now.

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I think at least one of those boxes is just holding packing peanuts for other boxes, but I don’t even know anymore. Shipping is stressful!

Of course, among those hundreds of gnomes are hundreds of gnome diplomats that all of you sent in. In preparation for sending them off on their mission of spreading cuteness and happiness to the other side of the globe, we’ve finally tallied them all: Including the lovely gnomes submitted by Chicagoland knitters at YarnCon, we recruited a total of 332 gnomes to travel to Seoul—I am blown away by this number!

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To celebrate, I’m selecting two random gnome knitters to get a Personal Happiness Labbit that I picked up at Rotofugi.

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There’s no need for suspense, so the winners are… Monica E. and Rosemary S.! I’ll send you each an email for your mailing address.

Full details about the show are coming soon, but first I get to take a weekend off from knitting gnomes, which will be a refreshing break before John and I start getting ready to go to Seoul ourselves!

Soupy Says Goodbye to the Giant Gnomes

Posted on by Anna

Previously:
Project Giant Gnome
Three Feet Tall
Kinda Done but Not Really
Giant Gnome has a Big New Friend

Just as I’m about to ship the giant gnomes off to Seoul, Soupy finally cozies up to the big guys.

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Today I’m going to “deflate” them by removing all the stuffing, so that they’re more compact for international shipping. Then once I arrive in Seoul later in May, hopefully they will be waiting for me to stuff them back up and put them in a show at Everyday Mooonday!

By the way, they now have names! Alfred (in the blue shirt) and Omelet (in the green).

Big thanks to Lion Brand for providing the yarn for this epic knitting project. The full show announcement and info are coming soon!

Adventures in Mochimochi Land: Official Trailer

Posted on by Anna

I’m excited to share an official trailer for my new book, Adventures in Mochimochi Land!

So that’s a little taste of the fun that’s coming June 9th. You can also read a preview of the first story in the book here.

Adventures in Mochimochi Land is coming out June 9th! It’s now available for preorder from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and from Powells, among other places. Signed copies are also available for preorder from me in the Mochimochi Shop. Or if you have a local bookstore or yarn store that you support, please ask them if they’ll carry it!

Thanks to Maureen Boyle for putting the trailer together!

Thank You for the Gnomes!

Posted on by Anna

After a long weekend away at VK Live Pasadena, and a long cab ride back from the airport in a suddenly chilly and overcast Chicago, it was awesome to come home to this on the front porch.

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So many happy packages of gnomes! There were even more inside waiting for me.

The deadline has now passed for Project Gnome Diplomacy submissions, and I want to thank each one of you who contributed, whether it was with a single gnome or a whole gnome entourage. There’s no final tally yet—I’m still playing catchup with the packages, and I still need to get the gnomes that were made/dropped off over the weekend at YarnCon—but I’m more than thrilled with how many we’ve received. I love that you all came through for this vaguely defined and pretty silly project!

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I’m going to continue sharing the gnomes that I un-package on Instragram—they’re all so unique and cool that I’m going to space the posts out over the next week or so, to maximize the gnome fun. (So if you can’t find your gnome on there right now, don’t worry!)

Some of the gnomes are even meeting strange new Mochimochi Land creatures who will join them in their journey to Seoul, like this fellow from Colorado, who encountered a most unusual gnome…

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I’ll be sharing more on this project as we have the final tally and, of course, once the gnomes are on display in Seoul for all to see. (What exactly will happen with them after the show is still yet to be finalized, but I plan for them to remain there as a gift to the people of Seoul.)

If you missed out on participating, I’ve been so happy with how this project has gone that I hope to do something along these lines again in the future. So stay in touch for more creature calls.

Thanks again to all you super gnome makers!

VK LIVE Pasadena Recap

Posted on by Anna

I just returned from a really fun weekend at Vogue Knitting LIVE in sunny Pasadena!

Right here is where I would insert a photo of palm trees, but I have a habit of missing important “locale” photos, and instead this is the only photo I took outside of the marketplace all weekend.

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I passed this place every morning on my run, and I liked the local flavor of it amongst all the upscale chain stores. Pasadena has an interesting mix of the old and the new like that.

The last time I was in the area was for VK LIVE in LA four years ago. So this was a welcome opportunity to return, and it was great to see some familiar faces from last time, plus plenty of new people.

Thursday and Friday morning were a blur of stitching and pinning Mochimochi Land together. Seven hours of work on this might seem like a lot, but spreading it out over two days helps a lot, and I don’t get much happier than when I’m listening to some music on my phone and making little dramas take shape.

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And to me it’s worth it to add all the fun little details for people to discover.

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I set up most of Mochimochi Land in a similar way as I did in NYC earlier this year, but I like to change it up a bit every time, so this time we had colorful sheep, alpaca, and disco gnomes!

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See more from the weekend after the jump!

Continue reading “VK LIVE Pasadena Recap” →

Giant Gnome has a Big New Friend!

Posted on by Anna

Previously:
Project Giant Gnome
Three Feet Tall
Kinda Done but Not Really

Project Giant Gnome has been clicking along! With the first guy done in only a few weeks (thanks to super thick Hometown USA and Wool-Ease Thick & Quick generously provided by Lion Brand), I couldn’t resist jumping headfirst into making him a giant friend.

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Looking at this picture again, I could probably get used to a rug like this in my living room. Because I had the pattern more or less worked out from the first giant gnome, and because I was out of stuffing after using 16 lbs of it on him, I knitted this one without any stuffing, just leaving the hole at the bottom to add later.

But the idea of shipping him off to Korea without getting a look at him first in his full-figured glory just didn’t sit right with me, so I went ahead and splurged on another 20 lbs of stuffing.

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Yep, this is the kind of major purchase that excites me these days. (In case anyone is interested, I order my stuffing in bulk from Batt-Mart.)

And so I got to try out my plan of stuffing my giant gnome from the bottom.

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This was real work! I was actually sweating by the end. Stuffing him just right involved much prodding and massaging, and I even had to sit on him a couple of times to get the polyester to take the shape I wanted. Whew!

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So now I have two giant gnome faces staring at me all day while I work. In a couple of weeks, I’ll “deflate” them again for their big trip to Korea, and I’ll be stuck with about 30 lbs of stuffing at home to repurpose. (That’s going to make a whole lot of tiny kits!)

Why am I knitting giant gnomes? They’re for an art show at Everyday Mooonday gallery in Seoul next month! I’ll share the official announcement with a title and everything soon.

Many thanks to Lion Brand for providing yarn support for this ultimate gnome project!

Adventures in Mochimochi Land Preview: The Hungry Donut

Posted on by Anna

We’ve got just about two months before my new book, Adventures in Mochimochi Land, is released!

As I mentioned in my last post about it, the book contains three utterly weird and fantastical stories set in Mochimochi Land. (Plus patterns!) Today I’d like to give you a taste of the first story, which is pretty appropriate because it’s all about foooood…

I’ll start with a photo that’s not in the book.

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Often, while I’m setting up a scene, my photographer, the wonderful and talented Brandi Simons, is already shooting away so that she can adjust the lighting and camera settings. So we end up with lots of shots of me fiddling with tiny knitted stuff, which make for a fun record of the shoot. So you can see that we set up a miniature world for this story, but the scenery has to get pretty expansive in the background to fill out the shot. I learned that we could have used a lot more/bigger pieces of flat knitted fabric.

OK, on with the story!

And as you can see from the above photo, this story is set in the delectable Delicious District of Mochimochi Land, where half of the citizens are bakers and the other half are oven repairmen.

Our protagonist, Biscuit the baker, is a tiny entrepreneur with her own donut shop.

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But donut shops are a dime a baker’s dozen in the Delicious District, and Biscuit wanted to stand out for once. One day, she had a bright idea!

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She would invent a new culinary concoction that would make her famous and change baked goods forever in Mochimochi Land.

So when the sun went down, she sneaked off to a hidden cave located deep in the Muffin Mountains to retrieve a very secret ingredient.

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(The ingredient is so secret that I’m not permitted to reveal here—you’ll have to see the book to find out what it is.)

Back in her bakery, Biscuit spliced the ingredients together in a petri dish, then put the concoction in the microwave.

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Side note: here’s my dad making that teeny petri dish by cutting the end off of a small plastic vial.

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Before Biscuit could brew a pot of coffee, the microwave sparked and flashed and exploded!

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Leaving behind a very large, very bouncy donut.

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Success! Biscuit was delighted with her creation, and she was ready to conquer the Delicious District with her big bouncy baked good. Little did she know that the donut was going to try to conquer Mochimochi Land in his own very disastrous way…

For the rest of this story, you’ll have to read the book!

Adventures in Mochimochi Land is coming out June 9th! It’s now available for preorder from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and from Powells, among other places. Signed copies are also available for preorder from me in the Mochimochi Shop. Or if you have a local bookstore or yarn store that you support, please ask them if they’ll carry it!