1 PHOTO & 20 WORDS // AN ADVENTURE

"I'm going on an adventure", said Bilbo, dreaming of mountains and dragons. 

My adventure is quite different, yet as scary. 

Let's try and knit socks! 

—————————————

Joining in with Abi over at Creating Paper Dreams for A photo & 20 words. Sort of a day late, but let's ignore that fact. Also, her blog is awesome.

PINECONE & MULBERRY

Pinecone & Mulberry is a very lovely hat I test knitted for Melody. I first thought I would use Brooklyn Tweed Shetler yarn but really did not like the stitch definition on the central panel (i'm thinking it's more of a cable style knitting). So I went through my stash and picked my Malabrigo worsted yarn in the Frank Ochre colorway (yellow mustard for the win!). It's actually the same yarn I knit the friendship scarf with! I just love the quality of it and the colors are all super rich. Definitely a big fan of the brand, I'm planning on trying their fingering weight pretty soon!

The pattern is super simple, mostly garter stitch with a very elegant stitch pattern in the middle. I just love it and seriously can't wait for the weather to get a bit more cold just so I can wear it! 

You can check out the pattern and the other versions made by the test knitters on Ravelry!

PHOTO APPS I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT

I love my iPhone, I love taking photos so it really is no big surprise that I love photo apps I guess. A LOT of the photos that I share here are taken with my phone, like Playing tourist in Paris, all 100 photos taken during my 100 Happy Days challenge or even most of the photos from 1 photo & 20 words. So I'd thought I'd take 5 minutes to talk about my all time favorite photo apps.

PIC TAP GO. is just the best photo app ever. It was developed by Totally Rad, the awesome company who is also behind RadLab, which is a Photoshop/Lightroom… plugin that I use to edit all of my DSLR photos. I talked about it before here and here. PicTapGo is basically RadLab but for iPhone. Which is really cool because it means i can give all of my photos the same look and feel. The filters I use the most are: Light On, Crispity, Shadows, Auto Contrast Mason and Skinny Jeans. The B&W filters are pretty cool too! 99% of my Instagram photos I first edit with the app, it's just the best. 

INSTAGRAM. Should I mention Instagram? I love it. I "met" so many cool people through it, I get inspired every day there and it's just awesome! I'm @alinor89 over there, feel free to share your profile name in case I'm not following you already :)

CAMERA +. I mostly use that app to take my photos because they have that cool feature that lets you set up your exposure and focus separately, which is, you know, really cool! 

ABM. From the cool ladies behind A Beautiful Mess. It's a fun, festive, colorful app awesome to either make collages or add doodles and text to your photos. I definitely don't use it every day, but it's still really cool!

VSCOcam. It used to be my main editing app before PicTapGo was launched. It's really clean and well designed and the VSCOcam community is awesome and inspiring. Also it's a free app (as opposed to PicTapGo) which is awesome considering its quality

YARN ALONG // wanderlust

Joining in with Ginny for the Yarn along. 

I love to read. I love to knit. Here's a little bit about both.

The friendship scarf (i'm thinking of making that a thing!) has been offered and well received, the lovely hat I test knitted for Melody is drying on my balcony and so I can now completely focus on my chèche which is growing by the minute. I'm just about to attach my second ball and the rows just keep getting longer and longer. I just love the yarn (it's a linen coton blend by Phildar), it has a great grip on the needles but doesn't hurt my hands at all. I'm hoping to finish it as soon as possible because it clearly will be perfect for the Fall days. (also, i have so many other things I want to knit right now!)

As for reading, I am in between books right now. I finished The Magicians King last night and am quite not sure what to read next right now. Maybe Outlander? (anyone else watching? I just love it!!). I've been browsing my travel magazines a lot and Afar is by far (haha) my favorite. Amazing photographs and beautiful writing. Also, they clearly have great taste in fonts, right?

PS: here's a sneak peek at my new hat made with Melody's pattern. More on Monday!

PLAYING TOURIST IN PARIS

I spent the last week walking for what seems a thousand miles, in Paris, with a dear friend of mine from the US. It's funny how you can live in the most visited city of the world without really enjoying it that way on a daily basis. So for 6 days I did my best to be a tourist in my own city. We went to the museums (Orsay is my favorite of all time in the history of ever!), walked the stairs to Montmartre, had picnics by the Seine, then drinks by the Seine, stopped by the prettiest english library ever, said hi to the Iron Lady, wandered in le Marais and so much more. So it is true what they say. Paris is indeed very pretty. (even after 4 days of never ending rain.)