Friday Favorites

This week I have a few boring favorites, but they are all favorites that have been occupying my mind.

Virgin America

If you haven't taken a Virgin America flight yet and it's available to you, please try it out. I love Virgin America. I think it's great that you can watch TV as soon as you sit in your seat. Even through take off and landing. It's also a very inexpensive, comfortable, and fun airline. We just booked a flight down to San Diego next weekend to get some sun and drink some wine with friends. I will be lucky enough to take Virgin America again on the way home on Monday morning!

Essential Kettle Sock Yarn
A few weeks ago I redeemed a gift card that I received for my birthday. I ordered the Essential Kettle Sock yarn sampler from Knit Picks. It's 12 skeins of yarn in 6 different colors along with 6 sock patterns. I started making a yellow pair of Spring Forwards and the yarn is really great. It's soft and airy and will look great with my new Dansko Marcelle's!

Sylvi!

I think Liz turned me on to this. I thought it was well above my comfort zone for knitting. And, well, it might still be. Sylvi is a beautiful knitted jacket that has an amazing cabled back. I just started it and I am making it with Cascade 109 in Persimmon color. I'm imaging that I will wear it on the streets of Rome in April. I hope!

What a Difference 3 Years Make

Some people (like my sister), says that she couldn't really tell the difference between the new closet and what was there before. Now, I would say, that's because Rob and my dad did such a great job making it look like it was always there. Here are some before and after pictures of the basement. Hopefully this paints the picture.

Here is a short list of everything we did in the basement:
1. moved garage built ins to the basement and repainted all cabinets for increased storage
2. painted the walls and added trim around all the walls

3. Installed new washer and dryer and new laundry counter top, sink, faucet, etc.

4. installed cork floor

5. built a bathroom in the area where the old canning closet was

6. installed a new hot water heater

7. built a new closet to close in the furnace and hot water heater

8. Rob will let me know if I forgot anything.

BEFORE:

AFTER (and process of):

B is for...

(Since I was running a little behind on the ABC knitalong, I had to do A and B right next to each other)

B is for ... Basement
The basement closet is complete. Thanks dad for all your help!

A is for...

This is some blogging fun that my friend, Liz, did last year and I have now joined in on this bandwagon. It's the ABC Knit along. The idea is that photos should reflect the personality of the photographer; the subject should be of importance or meaning to them. This means that all photos will not be related to knitting, but some of them well. They will all be related to things that I love. There are 52 weeks in a year and 26 letters of the alphabet, allowing 2 weeks per letter (Weeks 1&2=A, Weeks 2&3=B).

Example: - "A" is for... Alaska, asparagus, alpaca, astronomy...

So. A is for Amalfi Coast!

That's right, we are going back to the Amalfi Coast in April. If you remeber back here we visited the Amalfi Coast in March 2007 and loved it. When Marc and Michelle told us that they still liked us after we went to Thailand with them in April 2008, we decided to go back to Italy. Rob and I loved Italy so much, especially the Amalfi Coast. It's really one of the most relaxing and romantic places in the whole world. I can't wait to go back and makes lots of memories with two of our best friends.

House Updates

There has been a lot of work going on right now in the house. Thanks to dad and Rob getting to work. A few picture updates of the bathroom and the closet downstairs (the closet to close in the furnace and hot water heater).

FO Spring Forward Socks

I finally finished these socks. The Spring Forward Socks from Knitty. These socks are made with Seattle Mariner's colored sock yarn that my friend Becky purchased for me at the Stitch and Pitch in August. It's really nice hand died sock yarn and matches the team color perfectly. If you are on ravelry, you can check out the sock details here.

Bathroom Pics

I realize it's been 10 days since I last posted. My parents got here without any problems and despite them being sick, we've been having a lot of fun. I forgot my camera on our trip to Victoria, but we had a good time anyway. Taking the ferries are always a special treat for us and for our visitors. You just can't beat that scenery.

In the meantime, I took some pictures with my new lens. I'm not that skilled yet with my camera. I do think it's cool though, that you can see so much more depth with these photos of stewie and brian.

Saturday Bathroom News

I'm trying to post a lot of pictures of the bathroom while we are working on it so everyone can see the progress that we are making.

After Rob stayed up most of Thursday night to finish the tile installation (I helped on the subway tile). We decided to take Friday night off so we could let that tile sit for 24 hours. Instead we had a bottle of wine at home and then went out to listen to some live music at a small cafe in Madrona that we like. It's called St. Clouds. They had good music and I had a great Festivus Sidecar, which was awesome.

This morning we got up, took a dip in the hot tub, and ran to grab some paint. We went down to Benjamin Moore and instead of the typical Historical Colors that we have used in every other room in the house, we decided to get jalapeno pepper color. Here are some pictures so far.

Bathroom Madness

Well we're still working on the bathroom and I don't know why we always bite off more than we can chew with home improvement projects. Mom and Dad Raspor will be in tonw Thursday of next week and we'd like to have the upstairs bathroom at least functioning so we can leave them to the bathroom in the basement.
It's fun when my parents come to town because we get to put my dad to serious work. We have a whole list of projects that he can work on during the day and hopefully we have some fun too! Here are some updates of the bathroom so far.