Monday, July 19, 2010

Glad You're Alive!

Before I tell you about our weekend at Da Vinci Days....

1. Wow! You're moving back to New England! Now you can knit lots of warm things to wear during winter! I'm actually going to be home in October....we'll have to plan something!

2. Creepy about your wallet. ugh. Sorry you had to deal with that.

3. The birthday dress for baby Charlotte is ADORABLE!!!! Even as she grows too tall to wear it as a dress, she could wear it as a super cute shirt.

4. Love the vest you are going to make! It's actually similar to the one I made (Kristen Kapur's designs are lovely and really well written). I highly recommend checking out this post on Purl Diva's blog about organizing all the charts. I did something similar and it was really helpful to have until I had the pattern memorized. Also check out this post, also by Purl Diva.

5. I don't like rhubarb. The smell.....ew. We actually had some in our yard and Seth's Mom used it to make strawberry rhubarb pie.

6. Which Ysolda book were you thinking about buying? I have Whimsical Little Knits I and II. They both have great patterns in them. She also has a book coming out in September called Little Red in the City which will be all sweater patterns. You could also just buy individual patterns on ravelry if there are certain ones you want.

7. Weekend Sewing is a good book. It has a lot of cute dresses and kids stuff in it, but I've honestly only made the drawstring bags so far. I'm not brave enough to attempt any garments yet! I think the PJ pants will probably be my first garment, though.

Phew.

Corvallis has a festival every summer called Da Vinci Days, which is a science and art festival. The big event of the weekend is the Grand Kinetic Challenge. Kinetic sculptures are built to ride on roads, climb sand dunes, ride through mud, and float down the river. It's kind of hard to explain....so maybe some pictures will help! :)

Friday the sculptures were judged and the teams had to sing their team song. On Saturday there was a parade of the sculptures along with unicycle riders, electric cars, and solar powered cars. We caught a little bit of the parade while we were biking around town. A few hours after the parade the sculptures take off down the race course, which is mostly on the bike path. Tons of people take off on their bikes to ride along. The sculptures stop at the fairgrounds and have to climb a sand dune before continuing on the race course.

Here's one of the sculptures waiting in line at the sand dune:

Here is the lobster climbing the dune:

Some more sculptures:

This guy has participated in the race for a number of years, and you could tell. He flew right up the sand dune with absolutely no problems.


On Sunday, the sculptures had to ride through a mud bog and then go 2 miles down the Willamette River. I was going to try and catch all of the Sunday festivities, but I ended up skipping the mud portion. It was pretty entertaining to watch the sculptures come down the river, though!





Crazy, huh?!

Well, I have some foodie things to share, but I haven't uploaded the pictures yet. I'll post tomorrow with those :)

Love,
liz :)

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