Important: become a bone marrow donor

In 2008, a friend of mine got very sick with leukaemia. In 2009, the son of a friend got sick with leukaemia. The first found her way through with several doses of chemo but the kid is still struggling with it and needs a bone marrow transplant.

Like these two cases, there are lots of them, spread around the world. The good news is we can all register as bone marrow donors and our data becomes part of an international bone marrow donors database. This means that - in the event that we are compatible with someone who needs a transplant - we can be helping someone not only in our country but basically anywhere in the world. This means hope to patients and little hassle to donors.

So, to make it quick, here are a few links that answer most frequently asked questions and addresses to where to register in some countries. Please consider becoming a bone marrow donor.

Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide
World Marrow Donor Association
Informação em português
South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, US

I´m poladroiding anything that appears in front of me

I know the poladroid ship has sailed long ago but I am in utter love with this, it might even be the beginning of an overload of polaroid-like pictures around here. Please do let me know if I use them too much!

This is my adapted version of Saartje´s booties, pattern to be found here. It has transpired that these booties were immediately put to use. I´m a happy (adopted) auntie.

Ravelled here.

They knew I wanted to model my latest hand-knit...

Snow isn´t the most common phenomenon in Portugal, happening every now and then in the north and mountain areas. But I guess someone knew I needed a good background for my Koolhaas hat pictures, right? Maybe not, but who cares. It was a beautiful, beautiful Sunday seeing the snow falling outside and then going for a walk and being a kid all over again. (Any Canadian reading this might be laughing their socks off, but guys, you know, this is more of a summer country than actually a winter country! Do come by in Spring, though, it´s lovely.)

Now I´m back to Lisbon and it´s cold, though not the snowy type of cold, and I´m already thinking about summer, which will begin (for me) next Sunday, back in Buenos Aires. The holiday season goes by too quick.

P.S. Photo above by my sister.

Looking back on 2009

2009 was a good year. Not only did it bring me personal happiness, but it also brought me the enthusiasm to carry on working as a freelancer designer and illustrator. Knitting was a huge part of it, not only because of the creation of abbrigate*, a huge thing on itself, but also because I challenged myself as much as I could pushing me to try and do things I didn´t know I could or knew how to do.

In knitting terms, it meant knitting a huge blanket, knitting a sweater in the round (with cables!), and another one, this time top down, with a zipper sewn in.

I missed my goal of knitting with more than one colour on a given garment, but that I´ll leave for 2010.

For now, I wish everyone as much as I wish for myself: peace and health. For me, though, I´ll add lots of practice on the ability to embrace uncertainty and face change gracefully. I´ll fake until I make it.

Happy 2010!

We´re shipping!

abbrigate*´s kimonos are shipping! It´s so much fun to look at them and think about how this project has been developing. It feels a bit like a child, albeit a professional one. I´m proud of it - if I may say so myself - and I look forward to the new challenges 2010 will bring along. A new pattern is being written as we speak, and that´s when I found out I could design knitted garments.

Sometimes we just set ourselves too many boundaries and it feels good to overcome them, a little step at a time.

Have you seen google today?

Just a quick post to say that I love it how it looks today. Have you seen it? And bzzzzt!, I travelled back in time.

And back to work.

A short break after...

Last week I paid a visit to a friend in Rio de Janeiro, resulting in a short break from work and blogging. Those few days were very welcome, specially now that the end of the year is so near and I´m looooonging for holidays.

There were lots of things going on, though, but being away from the computer prevented me from blogging about them.

I visited a painting workshop. It goes on during a whole Sunday, starting early morning and finishing in the evening. It´s an amazing, albeit exhausting, experience. It is very intense, not only because one discovers a lot about him or herself, but also because these discoveries are shared by the other people visiting the workshop, the models and the teacher. We come in at 9 am being just a bunch of people and leave in the evening feeling a bit like family.

Exercises are crazy fun: we start with quick poses (about 10 minute each) and end up, eighteen paintings later, painting dancing and singing models. Who, by the way, are great fun to work with. (One of the models is a painter and you can see what he has been up to here.)

See photos of all the exercises here.