Gathered Blouse sweater

This is the Gathered Blouse from knit.wear fall 2012. My yarn is Cascade Elysian, a washable merino/acrylic blend. I've had this pattern queued for a long while but I didn't want to tackle the large number of stitches for the gathers at the neckline. I finally started it when I went on vacation to Honolulu this summer because I figured it was good airplane knitting. The gathered section didn't really take that long to knit. I don't think I made any changes to the pattern except to do my own waist shaping. I was afraid the worsted weight yarn would make it too stiff, but it actually drapes well. The wide neckline keeps it from being too warm. I'll have to see how it wears over time, but so far, I'm very happy with this sweater.

3D printed earrings

It's probably not obvious from this blog, but I love earrings. I don't wear much else in terms of jewelry, but I wear earrings almost every day and I have over 130 pairs. I had already purchased a couple pairs of 3D printed plastic earrings, but I figured it was time to try to design and print my own. This is the first pair I did. I stuck to something "flat" to start with since I didn't know what would work.

This is my second design. This time I went for a much more three dimensional look.

Both pairs were printed at my local UPS Store, using a Stratasys UPrint SE Plus. They came out pretty good. The red pair didn't come out as smooth as I would like and I think it's because there tiny bits of the soluble support material stuck onto the earrings at some of the finer edges. In general, I'm very happy with them and I'll be designing and printing many more pairs in the near future.

Here are the earrings shown worn on my ginormous ear lobes.