It looks like in response to the overwhelming response VeganYumYum received for her awesome vegan cupcakes topped with marzipan knits, she posted a tutorial on how to make the yarn balls, as well as how to create the knitted texture. You can see her detailed step-by-steps and clear pictures at the post How to "Knit" Marzipan.

And I dare you to say "no" to these cupcakes with "knitted" marzipan! So cute!

They already have a number of vintage patterns that are most likely public domain, though I'm not entirely sure as that requires they were published before 1923 or before 1963 and not resubmitted for copyright later. My favorites of their current patterns are the Lacy Gloves, the Tulip Gloves, and the Gwen Cardigan (above).

Also not to miss are the techniques, which are a quite handy and free resource for those just learning to knit, as well as those who need a refresher on a technique they don't commonly use.

But the one section I'm most excited about would have to be the listings for local yarn stores in the states and abroad. It's a sparse collection so far, excluding the Seattle-area (mwahahaha!), Australia, and Canada. If you have a bit of extra time, please do help add to the section. As any fellow yarnophile knows, the most exciting part of traveling is popping into the local yarn stores and picking up a number of goodies for their homeward-bound flight. Having shops in Rome listed would be handy right about now, but I'll have to make it my duty to do the grunt work while I'm there.

Took me a while to get a picture, but I've been loving and wearing it for the past month. After a huge and undocumented manhunt for the perfect buttons, I finally found these glorious vintage glass Czech babies. They really make the sweater pop and are absolutely perfect for what I wanted.

What may not be as obvious is that I had an impressive collection of pop-up books as a child that I ruined from over-use. To this day, I have only one book from my childhood collection—the only book that somehow managed to survive because it wasn't about monkeys or dinosaurs.

And so, I now present one of the best features I've seen yet on PingMag: Welcome to the amazing world of pop-up books!.

Flickr user elewa has some stunning Miyazaki-based knits on her photostream. Miyazaki is a master at creating breathtaking and inspiring animation that opens viewers' imaginations, so it's not surprising to see more and more crafts based from his most notable films. In fact, I look forward to seeing more Miyazaki-based crafts gorgeous enough to make me drool.

I've been working on her Airy Wrap-Around since early April, using Lane Cervinia's "Softer" in a lilac color. It's the same yarn the pattern calls for, and I believe it's also the same color shown on the model. The price is very reasonable, but I would probably look for a substitute if I had known how much "shedage" this yarn would produce. I actually had a woman stop me in the post office a week or two back who wanted to commiserate on how the weather here is so bad when it comes to dogs shedding their coats. I was dumbfounded for a moment, as my dog doesn't shed, until I realized my coat was covered in fine strands of mohair fiber.

I'm hoping to have this puppy done by this weekend, just in time for the sunny weather predicted for Saturday. I've already picked up the front stitches and am well on my way through the second 50" wrap, but the picture above is the first wrap. I made a few mistakes with the end, which you can read more about on my Fitted Knits Along post, The Errata is Your Friend. The post title says it all.

And here's The Manflesh Mother wearing her new scarf. She seems to love it—wore it as soon as she opened the package Saturday night, and all day Sunday. It only took me about a month to block it after it was finished, and then another two weeks to give it to her. Good thing it's made from silk and serves as a nice Spring scarf.

It's also quite sturdy for a silk scarf. I think it would make a perfect weapon for any unplanned attacks. You know—in the event that you need to stave off a swarm of enemy ninja or defend your houseboat against marauding rum runners.

My first signs of this addiction started when I began hoarding fabric as a teen. Influenced by my knitting-obsessed older cousin whom I admired, I taught myself to knit many years before this fabric hoarding began. But fabric was my love, my life, my passion. Perhaps in part because I had easy access to a fabric store but not a yarn store. Or perhaps because we were living in the Dark Ages of knitting from my birth onwards to college, when it was just so hard to be excited about the limp and lackluster yarns available.

So despite my inability to sew, I favored collecting yards of fabric over skeins of yarn. Sometimes, I even hacked up these pieces of fabric and performed dodgy sewing operations using the hideously awesome 1968 dusty rose Singer my grandmother gave me (the very same Singer I was a fool to relinquish to a sewing store when I tried to get it serviced and they convinced me to buy a Janome). Sadly, I had no guidance on the art of sewing—every one of my creations was ill-fitting and poorly seamed. Let's just say that it's rather disenchanting to create ugly garment after ugly garment without the ability to easily salvage all that fabric you hacked to bits. This is where knitting should have entered, for with knitting you have the ability to frog and save that yarn over the once-cut-forever-gone issue of sewing. Yet, none of the yarns were very exciting. I continued to collect yards of fabric, hoarding them away and taking them out once in awhile to pet and admire.

And then—after I moved into my first apartment in college—I finally developed an obsession for knitting. There was a yarn store a mere block away from me, so I bought two skeins of some green yarn just shy of crossing the line to novelty yarns. I dusted off the needles (also inherited from my grandmother), and started a simple ribbed scarf. Then The Manflesh stole my scarf, and I had to make another. And then another scarf, just because. And another. And finally some gloves since I was bored of scarves. And then a sweater, because I was bored of gloves. And soon I was knitting regularly each Winter.

At about this time, we were on the cusp of exiting the Knitting Dark Ages—better fitting patterns were slowly starting to appear. Knitty was born. Debbie Stoller hit the knitting scene dashing like a cheetah on fire. With all of this and a yarn store a mere intersection over, what followed was a decent into madness, made slow only by my poor college and jobless post-college existence during the next four years. The yarn overtook my fabric stash, creeping and crawling out the closet and into my floor space. The Manflesh started to complain. And we all know, when The Manflesh who hoards scraps of metal he plucked form the street starts to complain, there's a serious issue at hand.

But the worst was yet to come. Then came the job and money. Just try and guess how fast a small collection of waste yarn from past projects exploded into a yarn stash entity in a mere year and a half. It wasn't pretty. I know there's worse out there, but it wasn't pretty. I even attempted a weak de-stash via Etsy, selling off 12 skeins of Jamieson yarns that were going to be made into a colorwork Trogdor scarf before I decided they were too scratchy.

Lately, I've been better. I still buy yarn, but I actually went back to the store and returned 3 skeins of Cascade 220 because I knew that I only needed one U-Neck Vest (from Fitted Knits). I also knew that if I can't pick the right color the first time, I ain't gonna get it the second time from the same yarn store with the same color stock. And then there was that Knitty-Noddy email, the one that tempted me to buy some special HandMaiden Sea Silk in special extra large yardage amounts with special colorways made just for them at a special price. I'll admit that I refreshed the damn secret webpage millions of times the entire weekend, whimpering as each special colorway depleted. But I never bought a single skein.

Then something like this blasted No Sheep for You book has to come along, and they actually have the nerve to host a fiber swap! How the hell is a fiber addict ever going to resist? Especially a fiber addict who's addicted to Bam Boo by Classic Elite (and has hoarded multiple skeins in every single colorway)?