Cannon Beach East: Three Things Thursday :: Hand Carved Spoons, Mystery Knit Alongs, and Free At Home Try-on Glasses

Wow. That title is loooooooong. But I can't help that the three things I'm into right now are wordy. So let's get started because there are a lot of words to describe them!

Hand Carved Spoons. Three promising words. The idealist side of me sees a crackling fire on a cool night out in the woods, carving a recently split piece of wood with knives and spoon carving tools. I'm wearing a hat I knitted, of course, and the shaving are piling up at my feet. S'mores are being made and a few beers are probably being drunk around the fire after a long day. The sky is blue twilight with a few stars starting to wink in the navy darkness to the east. The woods are dark around the fire and the windows of the cabin are warm and cheery from the Coleman lantern shining inside. We are laughing and talking and when a conversation dies down you can hear the birds call to each other as they nestle down for the night. Le sigh.

From hatchetandbear.com - hatchetandbear on Instagram

I recently saw an article in Country Living about a woman in Frome, England that hand carves wooden spoons and I got excited. You can go see her website and business called Hatchet + Bear here. Trust me, it's awesome. I'm sure anything I carve will look nothing like her amazing stuff, but it sure sounds like a fun thing to do while out camping. And you all know how much I love a new craft. The challenge of getting it to look like what I see in my head. The thrill of new tools and a new project. The excitement at getting good at creating (eventually). So I threw myself into research on the best tools and where I could get them and loaded up an Amazon cart with all the goodies I ~~want~~ need for this new endeavor. Christmas present anyone?

The next three most amazing words you can put together? Mystery Knit Along. Or KALs for those in the know. Usually you choose a pattern based on what you see of the final project, but the mystery part is you don't know what the project is going to look like. So you just knit along, following the clues they release and get to be surprised by how it turns out. I've seen a few of these on Ravelry and they're usually associated with a show or other fandom of geeky goodness. Since I've been obsessed with Outlander as of late, it should be no surprise that I joined the Mystery KAL for the second half of the season of Outlander. How could I not?! They had a special color-way of yarn called Craigh na Dun for heavens sake! My yarn was delayed a bit and I started watching the pictures show up from those that had already started their projects. I ended up not liking the variegated color-way of Craigh na Dun with the pattern as it progressed. There are lots of beautiful cables and they were lost in the mass of colors. I saw one project where the person used a yarn that was mainly a single color with lighter and darker areas and I loved it! So I bought some more yarn (you can never have enough yarn) and started my project.

I really love not knowing what's coming next with the clues! It really makes me want work on the project more than usual because it's like reading a really good book. What's going to happen next? Ooooo another cable!! I'm really loving what's coming off the needles. The cable along the edge is so pretty! I just can't say enough about this project and I have the perfect shawl pin to wear it with when it's done.

And lastly, FREE at home try-on glasses! I went to the eye doctor for my yearly exam and I ended up getting a new pair of glasses (which I'm still waiting for) and I liked them....but. I really wanted a trendy pair of glasses that didn't have nose pieces. My eyes get pretty dry when my allergies flair up and I'd like to have a pair of glasses to wear to work that not only make me look smart but also ones that I can slide up and look through a microscope and then pull back down without the nose pieces catching in my hair. So thanks to ads on the side of my Facebook newsfeed I saw a website that sells the kind of glasses I'm looking for called Warby Parker. They'll send you 5 pairs of glasses for 5 days for free! You can wear them around all day, take pictures and post them to get opinions and just really try them out for longer than you can at the eye doctor! I got five that I thought would look good but found out that I really didn't look good in the larger frames. So I sent those back and got another 5. I think I've picked my favorite but I'm putting it up to the vote! So what do you think?