A happy dog and Magritte

We've been continuing our vacation fun for the last two days. Wednesday we stayed around the house for the most part, did a bit of gardening, and gave the dog a toy (a stuffed cartoon chicken). Have you seen such joy recently? It is a sight to see.



[Don't take my chicken... don't take my chicken!]

Yesterday we decided to be more erudite and went into LA proper to the LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). The current featured exhibit is Magritte. I'm sure you'd recognize his work even if you don't recognize his name. Here's one familiar image.



The exhibit was quite nice, but man were there alot of people. I guess there are many of us on vacation and lots of those vacationers were at the museum.

As an unexpected bonus, there was also a fashion exhibit ... very interesting. All examples of haute couture, mostly from the 50s to now. Some of those clothes... crazy! Even more crazy... they had some corsets and bussles on display. The things we women do! In the knitted world, the display did have one red knitted dress from the 1950s that was beautiful and looked like something anyone of us would want to knit and wear now.

Once we left the museum, we wandered around the grounds and wandered over to the La Brea Tar Pits (check out these two links to see some amazing pictures of what the pits looked like in the early 1900s and what they are).



See that "look here" just next to S's left hand... that's a pool of bubbling tar. Can't quite see it? How bout some close ups?





We were ridiculously facinated by this little pool of goo.



Before we left town, we also fit in a little yarn shopping. Seemed like a good opportunity to check out some of the LYSs in LA. Early in our day, we visited Knit Cafe which I thought was very warm and sweet.

Just before we drove back to the hinterlands (our part of LA, laugh), we went by the Knitter's Studio. I realllyyyy liked this shop. Elizabeth, the owner, and the other staff member were very helpful and the yarns... oh the yarns. They had a great selection which forced me to do a little splurg, some sage green 100% merino wool Koigu. I've seen discussion of this stuff online, but hadn't seen it in person. It is beautiful sport weight.

We also bought some worsted weight Monos del Uruguay kettle dyed wool in black for S. He's interested in having a new scarf and picked the yarn out himself. Have I mentioned he has good taste?

As I was leaving I also noticed a woven neck scarf on display. Elizabeth tells me it's from Teva Durham's Loop d Loop. It was knit in a worsted/chunky green cashmere and was beautiful! The image in the link above does it no justice. I ordered the book this morning and this project will have to be on my to do list eventually (although probably not in cashmere!).

This is a store I will definitely have to put on my Shop List for the future! Check it out if you're in the LA area.