The Silence of the Llamas

 

The Silence of the Llamas by Anne Canadeo - the 5th Black Sheep Knitting Mystery.

Can you imagine driving into the country side in Massachusetts along with some of your friends during the fall, stopping by farms buying pumpkins, apple sauce, apple cider, fruits etc.? Your final destination is a fiber festival, held by a friend - and also to support one of your closets friend who has a stall at the festival, Maggie.

 

The merry festival ends abruptly due to animal cruelty, and the knitting group finds out, that there are several suspects to consider. Or are their farm friends caught in the middle of a battle regarding land protection? The animal cruelty escalates and suddenly they also have a murder at their hands - they chose to stand by their friends while figuring out whi they can actually trust.

 

While they are sleuthing, they are knitting items to sell for a charity. I love reading about charities - they knitted a blanket in "Knit, Purl, Die" - and in another book I am currently reading, they are making caps for preemies, just like I did a few years back. Feels good once in a while to support various causes with hand crafted items - and love how the authors encourage their readers to participate too. In this series, recipés, patterns, links etc are shared via the knitting store's bulletin board.

 

July 2012 Tea Swap - Part 1

You do know that Pinterest can steel a lot of your time if venturing on to that webpage? On the other hand that site is full of ressources and ideas, that you suddenly remember to use, if you have pinned them.

Fran called the July swap out with a "Hello, Summer" theme, and for me summer is not only nice weather but usually also a little bit of travelling. Soon I realised that I would have to use 3 different techniques if I wanted to created the card idea that popped into my head.

Wanted to make a double card, but had "only" found a tutorial, that will do for some of the idea - and luckily I managed to alter it just a little bit to fit my idea.

The card's front needs to show my interpretation of travelling, and an idea that I got from a pin on Pinterest seemed perfect - plus I do like to do some weaving ;o) I always save maps from my vacations so it was easy to photo copy parts of a Manhattan street map + a US map onto some thin photo paper, however not glossy photopaper as I wanted to ad something more to that frontpage.

I remembered a freebie digistamp from Beyond the Fringe Crafts that I saved about a year ago - made me smile when I first saw it as immediately thinking "Travel souvenirs" - I believe most of us have our "thing" when it comes to travel souvenirs weather it be maps, photos, small replicas, posters etc.

Well this is the swap card as it looked when I sent it off to Jayne :o)

Stamped coloured with COPICs and the red border is WASHI tape.

Enjoy your tea, Jayne :o)