While I wasn't blogging!

When I was studying for my exams I bought a lot of things to reward myself. First of all some yarn in the most wonderful colors! (This is Debbie Bliss: Pure Cotton!)
And then some more yarn (Rowan: Bamboo Soft). I started to knit something with this right away. I figured that knitting would be much easier during my studying days because it doesn't mean as big of a mess as sewing usually does in our tiny house and it can be done while sitting on the couch without having to move an inch. Lazy me! I'm really much more into small projects when knitting. I once knit a pullover for myself. It took forever and I wasn't even happy with the result. This one experience was all I needed. No more of that. Gimme socks, scarfs, mittens, hats... or dish cloths!
Anyway, this time I fell for a pattern for a baby hat in this book (another reward-yourself-for-being-so-hard-working):
Lucinda Guy - "Originelle Strickideen" (ISBN 978-3332017960). The English title is "Handknits for Kids: 25 Original Designs for Boys and Girls (ISBN 978-1570763106). There are really lots of nice patterns in this book! I don't know why they changed the cover for the German version, because I think the English one looks a lot better and the pullover on the cover is one of the very few things I don't like, but hey, who cares.Oh yeah! I must not forget: I bought even more yarn. This was definately a great purchase, because it's sock yarn. I finally found some vegan sock yarn. I really spent a lot of time looking for that over here and it's almost impossible, especially when you want nice colors and/or variegated yarn. I bought this on Ebay from Fauveline. It's a cotton/acrylics/viscose fiber-blend. I just started with the first pair, so I can't really say how good it actually is, but I have high hopes! (Btw: The pictured colorway is called "Rumtopf".)
Last but not least I bought this pendant along with three others from Madison Craft Studios after seeing one here at creative little daisy. There were so many beautiful designs to choose from I could hardly decide which ones to buy.
I can't show the other ones that I ended up buying, because they are supposed to be gifts.

Now comes the really strange part: My English exam was a text commentary and the title of the newspaper article was "Lessons in human buy-ology" by Vicki Haddock. The article was mainly saying that we buy too many things and we use shopping as sort of a very questionable "therapy". Can you tell that this is very true for me? Shopping does make me happy and I use it for lots of different reasons. It's definately time for me to think about the reasons why I buy things more often. So thank you Vicki, I learned my lessons. Oh, but I already bought some other things that I didn't receive yet (BEFORE I read the article!), so they don't count, right?

Guess what else I got and what was totally for free! The wonderful Riccarda nominated me! I am now officially a We all saw that coming, right? I mean it was just a matter of time...

No, for real: Thank you so much Riccarda. I feel very honored and I discovered my nomination at exactly the time when I needed it.

Edit: I just found Vicki Haddock's article here if you want to read it.