Tag Archives: everything else

The Cure for What Ails You

With cold season upon us, I thought it was a good time to re-post this recipe. Enjoy!

A few months ago, my friend Jerry told me that he always keeps a jar of his special cold remedy on hand- honey with lemons and ginger- so when he gets sick he can stir it into tea or hot water. I had an abundance of honey on hand from our own hives, so I decided to give it a try. I had no idea I would be needing it so soon!

Honey Ginger Lemon

Jerry was a little sketchy with the details, so I just sliced up one Meyer lemon (that’s what I had on hand; a regular lemon will work just fine) and a small knob of ginger, about the size of my thumb. You can use less ginger if you aren’t a fan. Put the lemon and ginger in a jar and cover with honey.

Cold Relief

I keep mine in the refrigerator and it seems to get better the longer you infuse it. I don’t know that it’s actually making my cold better but adding a dollop to my hot tea is certainly making my throat feel better! I call it Wonder Honey!

Wouldn’t it be lovely to keep a few small jars of Wonder Honey on hand to gift to friends with colds?

My current Work in Progress

Now, y’all know I am never happy unless I’m working on the next big project. Well, this one may be my biggest one yet.

Gibbs-Ferritto Baby

This gorgeous baby will be joining be making his or her appearance at the end of April. We are over the moon.

Arising from the Dead

I have been AWOL for the last couple of months, which I guess makes this a zombie post? Life had been crazy busy with work and family obligations, a couple of health issues and one big project that I will write about next week. But mostly I’ve been trying to slow down a bit and enjoy the lovely fall we are having.

It has always been my habit to jam pack every single day from the moment I get out of bed until it’s time to return. My To Do lists are epic and, most of the time at least slightly aspirational, as no mere human could possibly accomplish all the tasks I set for myself on a given day. I’ve lived that way for as long as I can remember but things have changed in my life in the past year or so and I am enjoying the slower pace that comes along with having other people in my life.

Last year, I was lucky enough to meet the love of my life.

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He is kind, funny, smart, loyal and devastatingly handsome.

Because I am me, it took me a very long time to believe that this amazing man was interested in me, but over time, I realized that we were pretty amazing together.

Last week, on the anniversary of the day we met, in the exact spot where we met, Mike asked me to marry him. It was the singularly most romantic moment of my life.

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Getting engaged quite unexpectedly renewed my urge to write something for this blog  because I was so anxious to share this amazing moment with all of you, who have been with me through the struggles and joys of the last seven years.

So this blog will be returning from the dead. Maybe not with the manic zeal of the old old days, but with a renew dedication to sharing the things that matter with each other.

There are good days ahead, my friends.

Playing with Color

I am a day late with this and I do apologize! I brought back some kind of respiratory bug from Mexico and I’ve just been dragging since I got home. It’s not bad by any means (trying not to jinx myself here!) but it is definitely sapping my motivation.

Better late than never, though!

Selecting colors and putting them together in color stories is one of the most fun parts of what I do. And it has really changed the way I look at the world! I am literally always scouting for colors, looking  at the way colors work together in nature and studying the colors that people put together when they aren’t thinking about color.

One of the best ways to capture color is with photography and two of my favorite apps for identifying the colors in pictures are myPantone and Adobe Kuler. I use both of them all the time because their functionality is slightly different. Both apps let you import existing photos and take pics on the fly.

 

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With myPantone, when you take or import a picture, the app draw out the color story in the row above it. (The row below can be used to save your favorite colors. I don’t generally use it.)

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The pallets are limited to 5 colors, which is a drag. I would love 10 or 12, which is closer to the number of colors in my color stories.

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The app lets you store up to ten photos and palettes at a time but you can export them easily to email.

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This app may seem expensive at until you realize that I spent nearly $1000 for a Pantone book a couple of years ago! The app is a bargain at $9.99.

The Adobe Kuler app is free but specifies colors in RGB numbers rather than Pantone numbers, which makes it less functional for me.

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As in the myPantone app, you are limited to a five color palette, but the cool thing about this app is that you can hand pick the location in the photo you want the color drawn from. The little dots that you see in the picture move around on their own and you tell them where to stop, and you can also drag them to where you want them.

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In the examples above and below, I’ve moved the dots around to get the palettes I want from the picture.

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This app also doesn’t store the reference picture with your palette, which is kind of a bummer.

Both apps give you the ability to tweak the colors and pallets, and have features like complimentary, monochromatic, triad and other palettes based on the one you created.

For more color inspiration, be sure to check out Design Seeds. Jessica creates all her palettes by hand and by eye without the use of software and they are amazing.

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Modern Country Knits is Coming!

10277411_10204167108195715_5419423139784895054_nWhile I was in Mexico earlier this month, I received the final proofs of my new book for approval and just before I came back, I got a sneak peek at the cover.

I am not sure adequately describe my reaction when I opened the email and saw the cover. It was all suddenly very real, and felt so much more professional that I was expecting. I’m not articulating this well at all, I suspect, but my first thought was how legitimate and book-like it looked. Isn’t  that odd?

The book will be available on November 4th and it’s full of patterns by some incredibly talented designers. Mostly gorgeous new designs but also a few of our “greatest hits”, if you will. The patterns that I felt best epitomize the Juniper Moon Farm style. I was just stupid lucky to get to work with all these geniuses!

I was also lucky in that so many lovely people pitched in to help with this book. I hope everyone who had a part in it is as proud of it as I am.

 

 

Tune in tomorrow for a rundown of the way I pulled colors from my vacation pics.

The Caribbean Blues

I spent the last two weeks in Mexico, partly because I felt like I needed a creative battery recharge. When I feel like I am completely tapped out, I’ve found that a complete change of scenery and culture is the fastest way to get my mind working in interesting ways again. Plus we got a screaming deal on place tickets and lodging,  win/win!

I am always surprised by the color of the ocean in the Caribbean.

It’s just so impossibly blue!

I was so fascinated by the way the color changed throughout the day  based on the weather and the position of the sun.

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I decided to make a study of all the kinds of blues I saw. I took pictures of the water at just about every time of day.

Then I pulled the colors out of each photo so I could look at them more closely.  The variety of the hues is really quite amazing.Theme 17

All of these color are extracted directly from a photo of the water. I’ve done no manipulation at all. (The occasionally tans and grays you see are the colors of the sand or the foam on breaking waves.)Caribbean Theme 15 Theme 18

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This little experiment has really changed the way I think about the colors all around us. I’m sure you’ll see it’s influences in our upcoming yarn lines!

The Gift of Sleep

Not too long ago I got pretty sick.  That’s probably a bit of an understatement, actually. I was really, really sick for almost a year.  Then I got some better doctors who figured out why I was sick and what I needed to do to get better.

Besides some amazing and horrible drugs, my rheumatologist prescribed a number of lifestyle changes that she said were just as important. Number on on that list was getting as much sleep as possible. “If you can sleep till noon, then sleep till noon,” she said.

I can’t adequately explain how important those words have been in my life.  For the better part of a decade I had been plagued with insomnia, and sometime didn’t get to sleep until three, four, five in the morning.  The only way I could function at all was to sleep until 10 or 11 a.m., and that wasn’t nearly enough sleep for me to perform well.

But here’s the thing– I felt incredibly guilty every time I slept past 7 a.m. It was something that was ingrained in me since I was a teenager, this idea that it was sort of immoral to sleep late. Sleeping in was equated with laziness in my family.

So, when my doctor told me that getting as much sleep as possible was as important to my recovery as the chemotherapy drugs she prescribed, it was like someone had given me an incredible gift! I had be given permission- no!- I had been given an order to sleep anytime I could. There was no longer a moral component attached to napping. It was so liberating.

And, almost immediately, my insomnia went away. I think that was because my brain was no longer under pressure to get to sleep ASAP so that I could start tomorrow on time.

Today, I make it a project to try to get a minimum of eight hours of sleep every single night.  Some nights I get ten, and on rare occasions I sleep for 12.  And if I find myself getting sleepy at 2 in the afternoon, I take a nap.

In spite of all that time spent snoozing, I am more productive than I’ve ever been. It’s amazing what being well rested does for your ability to function and be creative!

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Do you get enough sleep? And do you think there’s something immoral about sleeping late or napping? Let’s discuss.

 

Surprise! We’ve re-decorated!

Lately, I’ve been making all kinds of changes. Setting new goals and boundaries. Drawing a hard line between my personal life and my work. Re-prioritizing my time and the amount of headspace I allocate to my business and my family.

I thought all of that work would be exhausting but, honestly? It’s been completely inspiring! I am more excited than I’ve ever been about Juniper Moon Farm and the things we are planning for the future.

All these changes seemed to call for a fresh new home for JMF on the internet and this is it!

The site is still a work in progress. We will be unveiling a new shop in the next 24 hours that is easier to use and more functional and we’ll be refining the site design, adding more pictures and stuff, but the main architecture is in place and I love it!

I hope you like it too!

There are good things to come, my friends. Very good things.

Meet me at Jimmy Beans!

This Saturday I will be in sunny Reno, NV at Jimmy Beans Wool. They are celebrating their 10th anniversary and, knowing the Jimmy Beans folks, it will be lots and lots of fun.

I’m coming with a big trunk of garments from our Spring/Summer collection for knitters to see and try on. Trunk shows are a great way to see what you want to knit next. Every time I do one of these, someone comes up to me to say that they never would have knit X had they not gotten to try it on, because they just assumed it wouldn’t look good on them. That’s the magic of trunk shows!

If you’re in the area, come by. I’d love to meet you.

Tell Me Something Good Tuesday!

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Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Tell Me Something Good Tuesday!

I’ll go first. It’s 10:46 a.m. and I have already finished everything on my To Do list.

Your turn! Go on– tell me something good.