YarnSongs

Something New

2011-06-29T13:21:00.006-04:00

So I've been knitting away here and there on a few mindless stockinette stitch projects and making a few baby things as gifts, but I have a confession to make: in the last few months, I've been trying a new craft. I have learned to cross-stitch, and I'm not ashamed to admit it!

Well, ok, it is a little (lot) geeky, but when I geek out, I take it all the way.

Project The First:

This is my first-ever cross-stitch project. It says "What little girls are made of" underneath which are the four nucleotides that make up DNA. I used a sweet font from Hard Core Stitch Corps and figured out the nucleotides based on pictures I found online.It isn't perfect up close, but I like the colors and am generally happy with how it turned out.

Project the Second:
I was absolutely bitten by the cross-stitch bug and started a rather ambitious sampler (for a beginner). It is based on the one on the cover of "Cross-Stitch Samplers" but about half-way through I decided that it needed to be tinkered with a bit. First of all, I wasn't stitching my name smack across the front of the design, so that had to go. Then, I wanted to chose a more entertaining quote. It now says "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good." That big tree in the middle is the Whomping Willow and the three animals (soon to be four) are a werewolf, black dog, stag and a rat - Mooney, Padfoot, Prongs and Wormtail. Yep, it's a Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban cross-stitch sampler. It still needs the rat to be added, and the stag looks a bit too much like a goat and needs redone.

Project the Third

I'm allergic to wheat and make this recipe for cornbread all the time. There's always a few cornbread muffins in my freezer for emergencies. Yes, I have cornbread emergencies. Really. So despite having made this recipe over and over again, I still don't have it memorized. Now, it is hanging in the kitchen right over the counter so that I never have look it up again.

Yet Another Project:

I've become interested in combining the traditional with the modern, with playing the medium of cross-stitch against a non-traditional message. I stumbled across cross-stitched QR codes and was smitten. I found one that I really liked that read "Home Sweet Home" and was decorated with a lovely blackwork border. I wanted to make something like that. I decided to use the square QR code as the main part of a little house and then stuck the flowers and such around it. It really does scan with a smart phone and "Home Sweet Home" pops up on the screen, but it's fussy. I should have used three strands of thread instead of just two.

Current Project:

So I used three strands of thread to make this QR code, which is destined to become a birthday card for my brother. It says "IT'S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY." For those of you who spent your childhoods in more constructive ways than in front of the Nintendo, this is a Zelda joke. There's a guy who gives you hints throughout the game, but sometimes you find him a fantastic secret passage to the guy, and all he says is "IT'S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY."

Housekeeping

2010-06-29T09:48:00.008-04:00

Well, apparently a collection of knitting patterns is considered spam in these parts.

The page where I keep my knitting patterns was deleted on me because, apparently, it had been flagged as "spam." Or possibly, as I suspect, Blogger is trying to remove the abandoned blogs that are clogging up their memory banks by 'accidentally' flagging them as spam. It happened to my other blog, the one full of baby photos. Most annoying.

So.

I'm working on getting the page restored, but in the meantime I have been converting my free patterns into Rav downloads. I believe I have successfully formatted and uploaded four patterns:

S(p)ock

Felted Cloche

Jacana Shawl

Little Rugged Raglan

Wow, That Went Fast

2010-06-07T12:58:00.004-04:00

I thought I'd just posted, like, a few weeks ago. Entire months seem to have vanished.

That kind of sums up life here at the SongHouse. Having a baby in the house again makes whole days just evaporate. Before my first was born, I read a quote about life with babies: "The days and nights may seem eternal, but the weeks will fly by." Totally. Really, it feels like one very, very, very long day. And since the baby isn't sleeping through the night yet (she was doing well for a while but cutting two teeth in a row is impeding our progress), my work shift never seems to end; I just get longer rest breaks during the night portion of my shift.

Which is to say that my enthusiasm for anything that takes more than 15 minutes from start to finish is scarce just now. Which means that not much knitting is getting done.

I miss it. I miss being able to hold a thought in my head long enough for it to connect with other thoughts. I liked it when "We're low on kibble" would bump into "I started a grocery list" and would result in putting in writing the fact that the cats are 36 hours from starvation. Or whining and getting underfoot or something.

On a completely unrelated note (snort) I have started drinking coffee again. After walking easily away from it more than 8 years ago, I have remembered that a little caffeine in the morning, and a little more in the afternoon can make such a difference in my mood and my ability not to walk into stuff. I know that the baby is getting some of the caffeine I take in, so I can't over-do it. And I am annoyed by the irony of the fact that at the stage of life when I most need caffeine, I am least allowed to indulge.

There are still little bits of time during the day in which I could be knitting, but I can't or don't want to put the energy into a pattern that requires a lot of concentration, and the brainless patterns put me to sleep. And it's springtime in Canada, and I want to revel in the fact that I won't need wool socks or warm sweaters again until fall. And no, I don't want to be reminded that it went down to 10 C (50 F) at night two nights in a row this week. Permit me my fantasies, won't you?

Actually, I have been knitting a little. I've been trying to knit my bit. My mother lost a bit to breast cancer not long ago and I found out that if you don't have group health insurance (she does) and have to pay for a prosthetic out of pocket, it is something like $500 for a proper silicone prosthetic and two special bras. Crazy. So I've been using up little left-over balls of yarn and making tit-bits. They're fairly quick, and it's real, useful charity knitting. I appreciate the sentiment of making blanket squares or mittens for people in need, but wonder if there isn't a more "bang for your buck/hour" way to help than by knitting. But the tit-bits are useful, easy to make, cheaper than the regular prosthetics, *and* are an act of kindness. So I've made up a half-dozen bits to donate to the cancer clinic at my local hospital.

Some day I'd like to make up some chemo caps to donate, too (I made a couple for my mom, but no extras). I went with my mother to one of her early appointments and she showed me the cupboard full of things for patients to take if they want them - books, used wigs, some medical supplies, and a few donated chemo caps. But the caps weren't of a style that I can imagine anyone wearing. The one that stood out most in my mind was crocheted out of chunky-weight acrylic yarn that looked non-too soft, and was orange. Crossing-guard orange. The only way that thing was going to improve anyone's day was if they got a laugh out of it. Or sewed it shut and turned it into a basketball. I do appreciate the work and the thought that some dear soul put into this creation, and I don't consider myself to be an expert in good taste, but I think I could come up with something that someone might at least consider wearing.

Oh, and I did finish my olympic knitting - on time even! I changed my mind about the yarn, though. The natural stuff was a bit too rustic (er, scratchy and rough) to hold for long hours on a deadline, so I went with some softer orange stuff. Love the pattern (Mr. Greenjeans), but don't like how much the ribbing pulls in. I will eventually undo it and try again with a different stitch pattern.

It's Official!

2010-02-11T12:10:00.003-05:00

I have signed up for the Knitting Olympics on the Yarn Harlot's website. After much deliberation*, I have decided to make Mr. Greenjeans.

My first thought was to make something with the lovely alpaca yarn I have been sitting on for more than a year now. But I started swatching and it really wants to be knit up on 3.75 mm needles, and it also really wants to be something cabled, like Fiona Ellis' Celtic Icon sweater. But the thought of finishing it in 17 days makes me short of breath.

I started rooting through my poor, neglected stash and came across some locally-produced naturally coloured wool in a respectable aran weight. I swatched, and got stitch *and* row gauge specified in the patter. I took this as a sign. Also, I really like the fact that the pattern is top-down, so if I'm especially short on time (and especially keen on finishing before the flame goes out) I can shorten the sleeves or body a bit to make the knitting go faster.

As much as I'd like to make a DK-weight sweater covered in complicated cables, it's just too much this year. I'm nervous about even getting Mr. Greenjeans done before the deadline. As a SAHM, you'd think I would have some spare time here and there, but not so much. My days are fairly peaceful and unhurried (most of the time), but I spend a lot of time with my 4-month old in arms or in my lap, and my 6-year old chattering away at me. Spare time (with both hands free) is unpredictable, at best, and a project that is simple is not only easier to pick up and put down, but if I don't have a chart to follow, it's one less thing to lose as said project gets moved around.

To those of you who are attempting more complicated projects than this, my hat is off to you. For those of you who are attempting simpler projects with as much trepidation as I am, my hat is off to you as well. Go teamofyourchoice!

*Really, if I spent as much time knitting as I did deliberating, I could have a whole sweater (or at least a sleeve) finished already. But I can browse Ravelry with one hand while bouncing a baby on my knee. It's much harder to knit and hold my squee one at the same time.

The Good News...

2010-01-08T09:30:00.002-05:00

We welcomed a beautiful, healthy baby girl to our family back in September. She is sweet and contented and a reasonable sleeper at night. And she's the perfect excuse to make such sweet little confections as these:

Pink cashmere bunny hat on purple lace baby blanket

Baby version of Alice Starmore's iconic St. Brigid Sweater

Smocked baby dress with leaf-edged hem and matching mary-jane style baby booties.

The bad news is that all of these things were made long before Baby's arrival. Since then, my list of things I want to make for her (quick before she's old enough to have an opinion on what she should wear and I can dress her however the heck I want) has grown exponentially, but my knitting time has shrunk down to little, wee baby-sized quantities.

I did manage a little Christmas knitting. I made three chunky-weight scarves of modest size, and made a worsted-weight toque for my husband, which I finished just in time for New Year's. So there is hope that someday I will find time to use up all that pink yarn that found its way to my stash just after that ultrasound tech first guardedly said, "Well, it appears that it is more likely that you are having a girl."

I am, however, finding myself on the computer more often. I can now type, with painstaking slowness, with one hand, and I have learned to run the mouse with my left or right hand. Which means that I'm spending more time on Ravelry, something that is not exactly reducing the size of my queue.

Now, if you will please excuse me, I'm going to try and do another row or two on a pair of baby booties before she outgrows them.

T-Minus Three Weeks

2009-08-26T10:06:00.001-04:00

...and counting

A Silent World

2009-06-09T13:21:00.001-04:00

I have some health problems that mean that my ears, at their very best, aren't perfect. Usually, my minor hearing loss (about 80% of normal most of the time) is just a little bit annoying, and not a major inconvenience. Once in a while one or the other of my ears will become blocked for a day or two, but it isn't too difficult to adjust. It just means paying more attention.

But for more than a week now, both ears have been quite blocked. I noticed that the room has to be very quiet with no background noise before I can hear my computer mouse click. If the radio is on, even at a fairly low volume, while I'm driving, I can't hear the turn signal ticking and find myself checking again and again to see if I have remembered to put on the turn signal. I've noticed that I like driving all by myself this week because I can really turn up the music (to about 8 instead of 4) and, for a few minutes, it feels like I can hear again.

It's been a mixed blessing not being able to hear my kid very well. His whining and squealing and sound-effects and general 5-year old noisiness doesn't bother me nearly as much, obviously. But I didn't realize how much I relied on audio cues to figure out if he was behaving himself. I can't tell where he his by the sound of his footsteps. I can't hear the cat meowing desperately from the other room when he's got her in an over-enthusiastic hug. I can't tell the difference between the other cat making a small noise in this room, or my son making a big noise in the next room. And I can't identify sounds nearly as well, like, say, the all-important difference between plastic and glass/ceramic/metal hitting the floor.

Our main floor is L-shaped, which means that most of the time, I can see what my little boy is doing. The problem is when he's around the corner, or he's "snuck" upstairs. A couple of times, I couldn't see him and called loudly for him to tell me where he was, only to find that he was just on the floor on the other side of the big easy chair - two feet from me.

I can still hear the cordless phone ringing, but I can't tell which direction the sound is coming from. My husband's cell phone was ringing from, I thought, it's charger in the kitchen, and I was waiting for him to go and answer it. Then he reached over me and picked up his phone - from the end table right beside me in the living room. I wouldn't run to the kitchen to fetch his phone and bring it to him (I'm not running for much of anything these days!), but I sure could have passed it to him when it was within arm's reach.

I can't knit and watch tv at the same time anymore because I'm relying too heavily on the closed captions to follow the dialogue. Even if I'm home alone and can really crank the volume, the sound is still mushy and distorted.

It's been a bit of a zen-like experience, all this quiet and minimal conversation. I remember reading about a meditation retreat where people go without talking for 10 hours a day for 10 days. This is feeling like the beginner's version.

I'm feeling disoriented and disconnected. I'm feeling awfully anti-social. It's hard to hold a conversation with someone when I can only make out half of what they're saying. I've been spending a lot of time on the computer this week. It's been nice to have just that little bit of communication that feels "normal." Boy, I hope my ears clear soon.

Perfection

2009-04-23T16:48:00.002-04:00

I'm a fan of Richard Dawkin's science writing, so when I saw his book, "The God Delusion" in the clearance section of my local bookstore for $1.89, I brought it home and started to read it.

Let me start off by saying that while I am an atheist, I am comfortable with religion in general as I encounter it in my day-to-day life. I have no problem with people who have some faith and maybe go to church, or who say "God Bless You" when I sneeze. I don't mind hearing that a friend has prayed over my mother's recent surgery (though I certainly hope her doctor doesn't consider prayer to be a medically valid treatment option). I'm even willing, in the interest of respect and peace-keeping with people I care about, to have a "serious" discussion about whether I'm going to have my son baptised.

I am, however, not impressed with the type who want to have equal time spent on creationism and evolution in the science classroom, or who want to teach abstinence-only birth control, or who knock on my door to discuss their religion in my doorway when it's 10 below zero outside, or who are greatly intolerant of any other religion (or lack thereof). These are the folks that Dawkin's book comes down hard against.

I've just gotten to the part in the book where Dawkins discusses the arguements for the existance of God. From page 104 is the playground version of an arguement that has been around since the 11th century:

"Bet you I can prove God exists"
"Bet you can't"
"Right, then, imagine the most perfect perfect perfect thing possible."
"Okay, now what?"
"Now, is that perfect perfect perfect thing real? Does it exist?"
"No, it's only in my mind."
"But if it was real, it would be even more perfect, because a really really perfect thing would have to be better than a silly old imaginary thing. So I've proved that God exists."

Responses to this arguement can (and I think, do) fill volumes. The interesting part of the discussion here for me is whether a thing really is more perfect if it exists in real life, or only in one's mind. I, being more of a scientist than a philosopher, immediately start thinking of real-life scenarios where this can be examined.

Knitting, of course, immediately comes to mind. Take, for example, the February Lady Sweater, of which, according to Ravelry, there are currently 5,362 projects in various stages of completion around the world. I think it's fair to say that in a project involving a bunch of increases, lacework, dividing for body and sleeves, and so on, that it is likely that every one of those 5,362 projects has something about it that its knitter could point out as being less than perfect. Personally, I could point out a half-dozen small flaw on my version, though I enjoyed making it and will, I hope, enjoy wearing it - once I finally get around to sewing on the buttons.

I wonder if any of those 5,362 projects could be considered perfect perfect perfect. I doubt that even if I knit 5,362 February Lady Sweaters myself (not that I think so highly of my skill, but given that kind of repetition, I'd like to think that I could avoid making the same mistakes over and over) that there would be even one sweater where all the eyelets were precisely the same size, and I never once had to tink a few stitches of the lace section, and all the finishing was done exactly symmetrically, and the yarn had not a single flaw or bit of hay stuck to it.

Once I put my fallible human hands to work and make something of raw materials manufactured in the real world, small imperfections are shaped as the garment is shaped. Only before I knit a single stich is a project still perfect in my mind.

This is part of why my UFO pile continues to grow. I can imagine a sweater or pair of socks or mitts to be a certain size, texture, shape, fit, colour, and to have a certain look or feeling to them. When I start the project, and what's in front of me doesn't measure up to the picture in my head (and not in a micro-flaw kind of way, but in a colours-don't-match, inflexible fabric, 2"-too-wide kind of way), the project gets stuffed in the back of the closet, as though the project and I spending a little time apart will suddenly make those socks fit.

But is a project that doesn't exist actually more perfect that one that does? My husband has put off making baseboards for the living room for ages because he keeps saying that he doesn't have time to make them "the way he wants them to be." I, on the other hand, am about ready to settle for some old, splintered barnboards sloppily glued to the wall. I don't want "perfect". I want "done". Baseboards that exist, in any form, are to me greatly preferable to the imaginary kind, no matter how nice they would look with the window trim.

I think the same can be said for knitting. The FLS that I worked long and hard on, that fits reasonably well and that's made in a colour I like, is still better than one that isn't real.

Books

2009-03-07T08:58:00.003-05:00

I've been seeing those lists of great books where bloggers go down and check off the ones they have read. I'm fascinated by these lists, even though they are all kinda the same. I've wanted to do one for ages, so here goes.

"The Big Read (http://www.neabigread.org/) said that, on average, adults have only read six books on this list. So ... copy this list, remove my yeses and nos, and add your comments (favourable or otherwise) about the ones you have read. Don't forget to include a total. "

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - yes, finally read it last year, then saw the movie

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - yes - read the first 2 books in high school, then made it through the whole series after the 1st movie came out. Saw all 3 movies.

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – no - saving these to read with my son when he's old enough. Seen all the movies.

5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 1984 - George Orwell - yes - for school

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - yes - once when I was younger, and I'm reading The Golden Compass to my son at bedtime (well, we made it 2/3 of the way through, but he got bored). Also saw the 1st movie.

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - saw the 90's remake movie. Great soundtrack.

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - yes (as a kid), and saw the movie I think

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -yes- read a couple plays for school

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - yes, at least 5 times. Got 3/4 of the way through reading this one to my kid.

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - yes- read the book, saw the move

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - yes, at least 5 times, and saw the movie

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - yes- I think I've read this one

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - yes - my great-grandfather was Clement Sherwood Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen - started it (my middle name is Emma), but started it too soon after Pride and Prejudice and wasn't up for another slog yet. I enjoyed P&P, but it wasn't exactly light reading for me.

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - yes, and saw the movie

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - saw the movie

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - yes- read much of this series as a kid

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -yes, for school

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - yes - read the book, then saw the movie

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - yes - I think I read the entire series (and saw the movies)

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - yes (and saw the movie)

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - yes, for school

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - I was going to read this one, as Yan Martel and I both went to Trent, but I was told it had some fairly disturbing parts and decided not to read it after all.

52 Dune - Frank Herbert- yes, the first 3 or 4 in the series

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I have the movie on the shelf, but haven't watched it yet

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - saw the movie

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold –

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - saw the movie

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - yes

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - saw the movie.

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - saw the musical/movie

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - yes

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - yes- I'm pretty sure I read this as a kid

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - saw the movie/cartoon/muppet movie

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -saw the movie

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - yes

87 Charlotte's Web - EB White -yes- read this as a kid, read it to my son, saw the movie

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - yes- read a couple of them, but can't remember which ones

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupe - yes- read this as a kid, watched the cartoon

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - saw the movie

98 Hamlet – Shakespeare - yes-read it for school, saw the movie

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - yes- read it as a kid

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - yes (and saw the movie and the musical)

Total read:28
Read as a kid (elementary school/early high school): 17
Read for school (all high school):5
Saw the movie:25

So apparently I don't read as much as I used to, but still log a lot of couch potato hours watching movies. Well, I can't read and knit at the same time, but movies and knitting go together much better.

I have actually been reading fiction again lately. I went through a phase where I was really craving non-fiction this winter - parenting magazines, sciency books, home organizing books, knitting books (of course), etc. But I've recently read a few novels - I just finished The Friday Night Knitting Club, as well as a thriller (The Ice Station) and a fantasy (Windhaven).

I've started taking my little boy to the library more often again, and I'm finally able to take him into the adult section. There's a few books on this list that I'd like to try to read sometime soon now that I'm feeling up to fiction again.

Yet Another Christmas Post

2008-12-12T11:12:00.002-05:00

It's still two whole weeks until Christmas, people! Does every post everywhere have to be Christmas-related? Some of us only put up our tree two days ago.

OK, I'm going to stop whining now since I want to put in my 2 cents about Christmas.

I was reading a recent post over at Gluten-Free Girl about Christmas memories - do we remember the gifts we recieve or the other, less tangible things? I started to think back on what I remember about Christmas as a child.

There are a few Christmas gifts that I can remember. There was the year I got a pen and pencil box that had hidden compartments all over for erasers and paper-clips and a pencil-sharpener, and a pull-out magnifying glass. It was a fantastic toy. It probably cost five bucks (back in 1986).

I remember the year we got a trampoline. It was 4 feet across and was probably the biggest gift I'd ever seen (until the year I got a bean-bag chair). The trampoline was used, literally, for decades. I got it when I was five and we have pictures of my son bouncing on that same trampoline. My mother finally replaced it last summer.

I remember the year we got a cat. Well, we got an empty litter box and food dish, and a card promising a trip to the Humane Society after the Christmas holidays. I was so excited. It was probably the one time there was something I really, really wanted to get. I was never the kind of kid to covet a particular big-ticket item (though I have a hazy memory of being disappointed by recieving a home-made doll when what I wanted was a Cabbage Patch Kid).

What most stuck with me about Christmasses past were the things we did every year. Putting up a tree. Making a gingerbread house - and watching Santa's chocolate face get mysteriously licked away during the night by someone with four small feet and tabby fur. Hanging the stockings. Waking up Christmas morning to the delicious weight of the stocking on the end of my bed. Chocolates and a candy-cane in the stocking every year. Banana "candles" for breakfast. I can remember being very excited about opening the gifts, but I can't remember much of what was in them.

I remember listening to the Star Wars movies as my cousins (all boys) watched them on their bellies in my Grandparent's rec room. I had a hard time following the plot of the movie and I think I was 10 before I realized they were actually watching 3 different movies. I remember a steamy kitchen smelling of carrots and mashed potatoes and turkey, and eating dinner wearing a paper crown.

The Santa hat on top of the tree. Being raised in an atheist household, we didn't want a star or an angel at the top of our tree. The Santa hat filled the void nicely. As a kid, I thought it was an ironic statement about the "true" meaning of Christmas. Now, older and less cynical, when my son asks, I will tell him that it is a symbol of what I believe to be the true meaning of Christmas - happiness and fun and generosity.

21 Days

2008-10-04T15:58:00.004-04:00

That's how long it takes for a magazine to be mailed from Iceland to smalltown Ontario. Why might I be getting magazines from Iceland, given that I have never been there, I don't have any family or friends living there and have no other conceivable connections to Iceland?

Well, there is this one connection. Apparently, in Iceland, they enjoy knitting. I, too, enjoy knitting. I get a bit silly with it sometimes, but sometimes it pays off.

Teehee. Yup. My S(p)ock pattern got a review in Atlantica, the in-flight magazine for Icelandair.

Way back when I was a teenager, I wrote a list of things I wanted to do before I turned 30. Being published, for real, on paper, was one of those things. I only missed by a few weeks!

So yeah, I kind of freaked out about turning 30 a month ago. I felt really old for a while. But I also used it to my advantage, too. "I'm 30 years old, for goodness sake, I can wear a pretty skirt for no special occasion/buy booze alone/wear eyeliner even though I'm only going to the grocery store/do some fix-it stuff around the house without my husband/etc. if I want to!" It's been fun to let go of some of my preconceptions of myself and see where I end up.

Though it sometimes seems like I've ended up right back as a geeky teenager again. I figured out how to record (I was going to write "tape", but that's so 1994) music from the radio directly into my computer, then reformat it until it's fit to play on my Mp3 player. I listen to my Mp3 player in public now that I'm 30, too. I kind of felt like personal music players were an anti-social teenager thing, but darnit, I like listening to music! I really enjoy getting to listen to a tune or two as I walk home from dropping my son off at school. Oh yeah, my only child started kindergarten just days after I turned 30. Did I mention that? Those two transitions at once kind of threw me for a loop.

So what am I up to now? Knitting away here and there. I have a pullover I'm working on that will be nice to wear once it's finished, but the yarn is splitty and annoying and I'm having trouble getting it done. I started a pair of thrummed mittens but the first one came out too small and I think my son has claimed it for himself and I don't know if I have enough thrum for two pairs of mitts. I've got, like, three pairs of socks on the go (well, more like on the stop since I've made barely an inch of progress in weeks), plus another sweater, too. But it's getting colder and I'm starting to think about what warm things I want for myself and my family this winter. And I got a crockpot and I've gotten all interested in cooking again. And I've been reading again! I don't really have the attention span for books these days, but I've been picking away at a few, and I found a second-hand store that sells magazines for a quarter, so I got a sack full of those to flip through now and then.

OK, enough run-on sentences for now. If I ever manage to finish any of my projects, I'll take some pictures and come back again some day!

100th Post!

2008-08-08T10:33:00.005-04:00

I've known for some time that my next post was my 100th. I was hoping to have something really interesting to share, or at least have some bright, clear pictures of my latest project or FO, but alas, it is summer, and knitting loses some of its shine for me.

And also, I must confess, blogging has begun to lose its shine for me as well. Like so many small-time, infrequent bloggers, I think you may have lost me to Ravelry. I'm not giving up on this blog completely, but posting is going to become even more infreqent, and I'm not going to let it bother me.

I've had a great time writing this blog, organizing all my woolly thoughts in one place, taking photos of my projects for posterity, meeting great people from around the world. And I will, of course, keep reading all of your blogs.

I thought that today, 08-08-08, would be a good day for grand announcements. 8 has always been a number that resonated strongly for me since I was born on 8-28-78. Today is also the beginning of the summer olympics. I am not doing a knitting olympics project this year. The idea of great lengths of time spent knitting seems much more of a winter's delight to me.

I am, however, setting some personal goals for the summer olympics. I won't share all of the details, since they are, after all, personal, but one of my goals is to exercize for 10 minutes every day. It's a small, manageable goal and there's nothing stopping me from doing more than 10 minutes, but the idea is to get and keep the habit going. I'm quite excited about my own little challenges!

I will now leave you with two cute, little projects that I made this summer.

These little mary-jane style booties are just about the most adorable little things I've ever seen! There's something about tee-tiny baby shoes that just gets me every time. They are for my husband's friend who just had a baby girl.

This is Captain Underpants, a great pattern from the Civil Bitch site. A really big hit with my little boy and his (big and little) friends. I was trying to finish it up before my son realized what I was working on, but he caught me just after I'd finished the body. He then pestered me until it was finished. "He need legs, Mom. He needs another leg still, Mom. Now he needs arms. Is he going to get a cape, now?" And so on. Now he wants me to figure out how to make little clothes so Captain Underpants can turn back into Mr. Krupp, as well as a George and a Harold and a Turbo-Toilet 2000.

If you want to see what I'll be working on in the future, I'm Pibble (my favourite 8-bit snake-food) on Ravelry. See you around!

Ahhh, Summer...

2008-07-07T16:56:00.003-04:00

Parks, wading pools, splash pads.

Sunscreen (two kinds), bug repellant, anti-itch lotion.

Sun.

Baby tomatoes in the vegetable garden.

Buying a new hose.

Fresh strawberries, fresh cherries, home-made strawberry jam, home-made cherry jam. And having jam sandwiches two meals a day during jam-making season.

Unpacking from camping, packing to go camping again, planning another trip after that.

Saying "It's too hot to cook and no-one's really hungry anyways," and having nachos with salsa for supper.

Learning how to play "The Log Driver's Waltz" on the guitar (darned Yarn Harlot and her Canada Day post) because I'm never going to get it out of my head ever again anyways. Also learning to play "On top of Spaghetti" on guitar for campfire sing-a-longs.

And almost no knitting. All I'm doing is a few rows here and there on a garter stitch scarf...

I've Been Chummed!

2008-07-01T07:46:00.002-04:00

Lime & Violet over at The Daily Chum have done a little writeup of my S(p)ock pattern!

Oh, and the ears have also been mentioned on the All About Boats travel/knit blog, who apparently saw them written up on Boing Boing, who saw them on the Craft site!

I am totally tickled that the ears have spread their wings and are flitting around the internet without me.

BTW, in case anyone was wondering, I see the knitted ears as totally tongue-in-cheek. Knitting is geeky, pointy ears are geeky, and the two together are just the best kind of kitch, in my opinion!

It's Happening Again...

2008-06-18T10:23:00.003-04:00

Spring has sprung and knitters everywhere are thinking "I'm not going to be able to wear this thing for another four months...why am I sitting on the couch knitting this instead of going outside and soaking up some of this gorgeous weather?"

Every spring, I lose interest in knitting for a while. It warms up and the yarn and needles feel sticky and awkward in my hands. Last night I missed my knit collective gathering because I just completely forgot about it. Come spring, I start looking for something else to do. I've been reading books and playing in the garden and taking my son to the park and cleaning out shelves and drawers. Of course, all play makes for a dull knitblog. I'm really only blogging today because I woke up to a cloudy, 12C day - cool enough to wear knit sweater - so I'm feeling the yarn love again.

I've been working on a sweater for my husband for his birthday. Last week. But (except for today) it's been too warm for a wool sweater so I don't feel any huge rush to get this finished now that I've missed the deadline. I'll take a picture when the sun comes around again. Black-on-black yarn on a cloudy day doesn't make for visually pleasing photographs.

I've also nearly finished a plain, acrylic cardigan for myself. Both sweaters are a the "fussy" stage - put on pockets and zippers and weave in a gazillion ends. I may have to start another little project for when I'm not feeling "fussy," which is, well, all the time these days, which is why these sweaters are taking so long to finish.

Each sweater only needs a good afternoon's work to be done. Usually when I get to this stage, I get a renewed burst of enthusiasm for a project because once it's finished, I can start something else. Starting is my favourite part of any project. I don't have anything in particular in mind to make next right now, which is a big part of why I'm stalling out right at the end of these two projects. I do have a long list of things in my Rav queue, but once a project has sat in the "to do" pile for too long, it seems to lose it's sparkle.

Well, my stash still needs a good spring cleaning. I found a bug in a bag of yarn last week - yikes! Maybe a good stash toss will inspire me...

2008-05-29T09:46:00.003-04:00

Goodness, I knew I hadn't posted in a while, but I didn't realise it had been so long!

I have no excuses. None. Life progresses here like always, one day blending into the next in a most predictable way.

I have been reading a bit. Actual paper books, not even the internets. I read "The Shop on Blossom Street" and "A Good Yarn," both by Debbie Macomber. These are books about a woman with a yarn shop and her customers. Knitting is mentioned at least once a chapter and there's a free pattern in the beginning of each book which several characters knit on through the story. The books are actually four separate stories, one for each of the main characters, that overlap neatly in a few places. The books were a nice, comfortable read with sweet storylines. I'm on the lookout for the third book in the series, but it's been checked out of the library and I have to wait my turn.

I've been knitting away on a plain, stockinette hooded cardigan. I noticed that most of my sweaters are itchy enough that I have to wear them over long-sleeved shirts. Now that it's warm enough to wear t-shirts, at least during the middle of the day, I'd like a couple of sweaters that are not wool. I love my wool sweaters, but no matter how soft they are, they drive me batty by the end of the day if they're right against my skin.

The solution? Bernat Satin in "Evergreen"- 100% acrylic, but soft and with a bit of shine that, from a distance, makes it look like it might be some sort of exotic silk blend or something.

This photo is more true to colour:

I've finished the lion's share of the knitting. Just the hood is left, and the sleeve caps. The sleeves are knit but I still have to sit down and calculate the sleeve caps, which always takes a bit of psyching up first. I also hit the thrift shop this week and picked up a 70% angora / 30% acrylic sweater to frog.

This was a short-sleeved sweater, so there's enough yarn for accessories, but not enough for a garment. I'm tempted beyond belief to make an angora fedora just because it's so much fun to say.

I've been experimenting with brighter colours lately, and am excited about this bright aqua blue. I read a book review/discussion over on the Dress-a-Day site site about what clothes you wear that make you feel powerful. It made me realize that I dress not to feel powerful, but to feel inconspicuous. I was slightly infatuated with knitting with the colour red this winter, and my small foray into wearing brights has been a bit of a revelation for me. While I do believe that dark neutrals (charcoal grey, chocolate brown, navy blue) truly are flattering colours for me, spring weather has made me crave something a little more lively.

I Thought I Hadn't Done Much Lately...

2008-05-05T16:09:00.005-04:00

Then I uploaded the pictures from my camera and found all kinds of little projects.

The biggest one lately is the socks I'm working on for my mother for Mother's Day. I've finished the first sock:

And I'm making good progress on the second (I'm actually farther along than I was when I took the picture), so I should be able to finish by the weekend.

Before starting my mother's socks, I started up a little pair of footies for myself:

The socks were getting a little monotonous, so I made a new sweater for Fisherman Bear (our version of the beloved homemade toy belonging to Little Bear). The old sweater had some structural issues and was getting pretty grubby.

I finally dyed up the alpace that I frogged a while back.

The ribbed bit is the original colour. The skein has been overdyed with a bit of blue. There's a bit more difference in real life than there is in the photo, but not quite as much of a difference as I was hoping for. The colour has still been improved, though. It's still bright red/pink, but it's no longer a screamingly obvious 80's red/pink.

I have to decide soon (like before I start to knit with it) whether to live with the colour the way it is, or try to overdye it again. But I have two pairs of socks to finish first, and I may have picked up another skein of sock yarn for myself while I was getting yarn for Mom.

A Little Rant (And A Little TMI)

2008-04-28T12:48:00.002-04:00

Ok, so to get right to the point, this week I have spent $25 (not a huge amount, but still) on five pairs of underwear that didn't fit once I got them home. And these are, of course, not returnable.

I'm not asking for much. Just something that covers my backside but not my navel. Why on earth do clothing buyers think that anyone who wants low-rise undergarments also want their rear ends hanging out of the back? Are we all supposed to be "Cheeky", as they occasionally declare on the label, these days? The only panties I can find that cover my back-end are so huge that they stick out over the tops of my jeans. And I don't believe my rear end is any larger than average.

And one of the pairs of panties I found were made of bamboo. Bamboo! And they were half-price (whoops - almost wrote "half-off." But we grown-ups don't giggle at those kind of jokes anymore, do we?). They feel so incredibly soft. I've been longing for a bamboo t-shirt like the one my husband has, but haven't found any in women's sizes in my town and I finally found a bamboo garment for myself, on sale even, and it doesn't fit! Gah.

Now, hypothetically speaking, what level of crazy would I be considered if I were to think about knitting up some undergarments? At least then the darned things would fit. And you could buy a small ball of some really nice yarn for $25.

Ahem. Like I said, a little TMI. Sorry. Thanks for listening. I feel better now.

Spring Fever

2008-04-23T07:49:00.007-04:00

Some of us take that phrase literally around here. I've been fighting my annual spring lung infection this past week, and thanks to vitamins, rest, fluids and natural antibiotics, I seem to have (touch wood) made it through without having to wait six hours at the walk-in clinic to get real antibiotics.

The good news, as always, about being sick is that sitting on the couch knitting is actually good for me! I managed to finish a seriously large UFO. I started this blanket....erm....I have no idea how long ago. It was well pre-blog, which makes it at least a year and a half. I would pull it out from time to time, knit a row, sigh about how many gajillion more rows there were to go and stuff it back in the closet. But I recently resolved to finish it, and I finally did!

My goal was to finish the blanket before the snowbank in the front yard melted. I could see the snowbank from the couch, and during the dark zone about two-thirds of the way through any really boring piece of knitting, keeping an eye on that shrinking snow actually helped to keep me at this project. I didn't quite make it in time, but I finished the blanket the same week as the last of the snowbank melted away into a little pile of gravel and dirt.

Did I ever show you the snowbank? No? Here's what it looked like on March 11th:

Of course, as soon as I finished the blanket, we were hit by an unseasonable mild spell. It's been sunny and a glorious 20C (68F) since the moment of the blanket's completion. But it's still cool at night and if you, say, forget to shut the windows after the sun goes down the blanket is soft and warm to curl up under after a day outside.

Oh, happy belated Earth Day! I celebrated by making a quiche with locally grown, organic greens. Also known as the dandelion leaves from my neglected flower beds. Seriously.

I've been hearing about how good dandelion greens are for you and how (and this is the important part) before they flower, how the greens taste much like spinach. I've wanted to try them for ages, but always missed the brief few weeks between the weeds sprouting and flowering. The little dandelion quiche I made last night was quite good. Even my little guy ate it (though my husband refused to try it).

Dandelion Quiche:

Take a big, double handfull of fresh dandelion greens. Wash 'em well, and chop roughly. Put the greens in a frying pan with a little margerine until they wilt and stick together.

Put the greens in a mixing bowl and add some more vegetables: a few chopped mushrooms and a chopped tomato.

Add 3 lightly beaten eggs and a few spoonfuls of milk.

Add seasonings: some shredded cheese, a big pinch of basil, oregano and minced garlic, and a little dash of salt and pepper.

Crumble up a piece of bread (I used rice bread) and press into the bottom of your pan(s) to make a "crust." Pour everything else over the crumbs and bake at 350 for about a half-hour. Makes two 2.5" x 5" mini-loaf pans.

Celtic Knotwork

2008-04-10T09:28:00.003-04:00

I went into the half-price bookstore a few days ago, and found a couple of great books. The first is "101 Celtic Crosses" by Courtney Davis. This is a great book. All 101 crosses are shown both as black-and-white outlines and as a coloured-in version. It's amazing how completely different details pop out in the black-and-white versions versus the coloured ones.

This book, to me, looks like a cable-stitch dictionary...with no written directions. I'm just starting to try and work some of these designs out as cables. This is the one I'm starting with. No, no, not the whole thing.

See the little circles in the corners? The teensy little cables/knotwork inside those circles? Yeah, those.

My first swatch wasn't much of a success, but really, I should know better than to try that sort of thing after 7 pm. But I now have a good starting point for the second swatch today. Even if nothing comes of all this, it's just great fun for me to flip through this little book, dreaming about intricately cabled garments knit in 16 directions at once.

Then, in the 90% off section (who could resist?) I found a book on the history of the discovery marine life, which is probably fascinating to no-one but me, but I'm enjoying it. Nearby, underneath a stack of outdated tour books was another treasure: "The Celtic Double-Cross," a kid's adventure story about the discovery of a celtic cross and a double-crossing Irish wizard (ooo, the pun is almost too much to bear). Aside from the fact that it was, like, 49 cents, the best part of that book?

It came with 50 celtic-themed temporary tattoos.

This is the one that my little guy picked out for me to wear. I think it's beautiful - just the one I would have picked for myself. He wasn't able to stop at just one and is now covered from fingertips to elbows in little tattoos.

Ravelry!

2008-04-07T20:55:00.002-04:00

Oh! And I finally signed up for Ravelry. My invite came pretty quickly, since most of the known blogiverse already got their accounts months ago. Anyways, I'm on there as Pibble, so feel free to come and say hi!

A Pibble, in case you were wondering, is a thing you eat a bunch of to get to the next level on "Snake, Rattle 'N' Roll", a video game from my childhood. Though, the 'net seems to call the things "nibbley-pibbleys', but I could swear that the plain ones were called pibbles, the running ones were pibble-joggers, the splatting ones were pibble-splats and so on. Maybe it's something we made up at home. Childhood memories are funny things...

A Little Taste Of Spring

2008-04-07T10:16:00.003-04:00

It felt like spring this weekend here in my neck of the proverbial woods:

-If the laundry went on the line early enough in the morning, it would actually dry by dinnertime

-I saw my first robin of spring two days ago

-The snowdrops are up! They're always my favourite spring surprise. On Wednesday there was six inches of snow in the back yard and on Saturday there were flowers blooming!

-All the neighbours were out standing in their yards this weekend, blinking at the unaccustomed sunlight and sighing over the state of the lawn/shrubs/paint on the porch

-I haven't been able to wear my heaviest wool sweaters in the house for a few weeks now

-I can wear my heaviest sweaters outside instead of a big, bulky winter coat

-We spent time outside without mittens or toques. It was actually warm enough to sit (as opposed to run around to keep warm) outside in the sun.

I am also starting to re-evaluate my cold-weather knitting, which is another sure sign that spring is coming. I've been working on cleaning out some UFO's. One of the biggest is a one-piece cabled blanket that I started and abandoned at least a year ago, if not two.

This winter, my husband hinted at me making a blanket and I told him that I have two that I started and never finished on account of extreme boringness - no shaping, no pieces, no mini-milestones to make me feel like I'm making progress. I have trouble knitting scarves without getting bored, and a blanket is like six or eight big scarves all knit at the same time.

But I decided to knit on this blanket just a teensy little bit. I like the soft, bulky yarn, and I like the heathered camel colour, which matches my living room nicely. I would knit two little 50-gram balls of yarn a day for a couple of days, and see how it goes. After working on that sock-weight scarf a few weeks back, this felt like a holiday to be able to knit a few rows and see growth. I got into it and made some good progress.

Here's the blanket at about two-thirds of they way done, I think. I'm not totally sure how long it will be when it's finished. The plan is to keep going until I have two or three balls of yarn left, then work the border and cast off.

Now that there is light at the end of the tunnel and I can actually feel that winter is going to end eventually, I want to get this blanket finished before it's too warm to sit under while I'm knitting it.

But I'm also itching to start something new, maybe even something for warmer weather. With a dozen balls of yarn or so left, if I just do one ball a day, I can be finished before the snowbank in the front yard (which was at least eight feet tall in its glory days) finishes melting.

Felted Cloche Pattern (free)!

2008-04-02T12:14:00.011-04:00

Once upon a time, I made a felted hat. I've noticed that I'm getting quite a lot of hits from people looking for patterns for felted hats, so I decided to go back to my notes, write up the little pattern and post it.

Unfortunately, there were no useful notes, but I use my felted hat so much that I decided to try and make another one!

Felted Cloche

Size:
-Pre-felting: aprx. 22" circumerence and 12" length (including brim)
-After felting: aprx. 21" circumference and 8" length (including brim)

Materials: Briggs & Little Heritage - 100 % wool, 215 yd/196m per 4 oz/113 g ball; Colour 41 (Navy Blue) - 2 balls (aprx. 6.75 oz / 190 g / 365 yd / 333 m) per hat
1 set of US #9/5.5mm dpns
1 US #9/5.5mm circular needle, 24" length or less (optional)

Gauge: 15 sts and 23 rows = 4 in/10 cm on 5.5 mm needles (Note - to facilitate felting, the hat is knit at a looser gauge than the 17 stitches to 4 in/10cm recommended on the ball band).

Directions:

Using dpns or circular needle, cast on 100 stitches. Mark beginning of round. Work in stockinette stitch* in the round until work measures 2.5 inches.

*Note - if you don't like the little roll on the brim of the hat, work the brim in garter stitch instead of stockinette.

Shown below: Hat with garter stitch brim

Next row: K3, k2tog around - 80 stitches remain. Continue working in stockinette stitch, in the round, until work measures 8.5 inches from the beginning.

Begin crown shaping:

Row 1 - *k8, k2tog* around.
Row 2 and 3 - k around.
Row 4 - *k7, k2tog* around.
Row 5 and 6 - k around.
Row 7 - *k6, k2tog* around.
Row 8 - k around.
Row 9 - *k5, k2tog* around.
Row 10 - k around.
Row 11 - *k4, k2tog* around.
Row 12 - k around.
Row 13 - *k3, k2tog* around.
Row 14 - *k2, k2tog* around.
Row 15 - *k1, k2tog* around.
Row 16 - *k2tog* around. Break yarn and pull through remaining 8 stitches.

Weave in ends.

Hat pre-felting (on a phone book for scale):

Felting: Put the hat in a lingierie bag or an old pillow-case and put it in the washing machine, with a little soap and some old clothes for friction (I used dark-coloured clothes in case this dark-coloured hat ran), on hot water setting. Check hat frequently. Throw it in the washing machine again if it isn't small enough yet - I had to send my hat through three times.

Hat after felting (on the same phone book):

Cashmere Scarf - Finished!

2008-03-24T08:54:00.005-04:00

I think I wrote my last post during that point about two-thirds of the way through a scarf when it feels like you're making no progress and the scarf is never, ever going to be finished and there's no point in even trying because you could spend the rest of your life knitting the same 4-row pattern over and over again and nothing would happen. Even marking daily progress with a safety pin made it feel like I was just pretending to make progress. The bit between the safety pin and the needles would grow but the entire scarf didn't seem to gain any length at all, almost like the pin was moving while the scarf was not.

But I was released from the No-Grow Zone and got motivated to work on the scarf again when finishing the thing was once again in sight.

It was a little bit short - 40 inches in length - but long enough for a spring/fall, under-the-jacket scarf.

Here it is partially unwrapped from blocking. All those towels at the bottom of the picture were on top of the scarf as it dried to keep the cats from rolling around on it. The smell of wet wool has an incredible attraction for them. I was once foolish enough to leave a wet sweater uncovered overnight and got up in the morning to find that the cat had pushed and clawed and twisted the sweater all up into a nest (throne?) to sleep on.

The scarf was very well recieved when I gave it to my brother on Saturday. A small "Ooooh" went around the room when I said that it was a cashmere scarf.

At 5.75 inches wide and 40 inches long, this project used 60 g of sock-weight yarn (36 stitches and 58 rows to four inches). That leaves 240g of wool from the original sweater...enough for four more little scarves, or three more substantial ones. I would love to have one of these scarves, but I'm not sure I can stand to knit another one. At least for a little while.

I'm Getting So Tired of Knitting With This Cashmere

2008-03-19T10:05:00.003-04:00

No, seriously.

I got a cashmere sweater at a second-hand place (for $3!) and unravelled it. Doubled up, the yarn knits up at something like a sock-weight. My brother is graduating from university and has a birthday, both in the middle of April. Last week, I cast-on for a scarf for him, thinking that I had a month to get it finished.

We finally made plans for Easter, which in our extended family is really a celebration of five birthdays that fall in April. We didn't decide until last week (just after I started the scarf) that we would celebrate The Easter Birthdays on the actual Easter weekend, which is quite early this year. What this means is that I now only have until Saturday to finish this scarf.

It is 50 stitches across and knits up at 12 rows to the inch. I need to do six inches a day to have a gentleman's under-the-coat length scarf by this weekend. And really, I need to finish it up on Friday night so I can give it a bit of a blocking before Saturday morning. I've been marking each day's progress with a safety-pin to help keep my morale up.

I'm knitting this in box stitch (k2,p2 for 2 rows, then p2,k2 for 2 rows) which is one of my favourite non-rolling stitches. Of course, I'll be so sick of it by the time I finish this scarf that I may never be able to use it again!

If the yarn was anything but creamy, buttery soft cashmere, I might have real trouble sticking to this project. But every time I'm tempted to throw it aside, I just pet the scarf for a while, and if I'm really weary I'll maybe snuggle it against my cheek for a moment, and then I have enough patience to go on. I think the fact that the top of a baby's head is this soft is no coincidence - it must have saved many a colicy infant from being tossed into the back of a closet!

It Started When An Alien Device Did What It Did...

2008-03-14T09:09:00.003-04:00

There have been technical difficulties around here lately. Well, more of a panic than any major difficulties. My computer started acting up a little, and that same week two people I know lost everything on their computers. Taking this as a call to action, I began frantically backing up baby pictures. This wouldn't have been a big deal had the pictures and the CD burner been in the same computer, but instead it meant squeezing four years worth of pictures onto a thumb drive, shuttling them over to the other computer and then burning three disks of pictures.

I decided that it was time to make a permanent switch to the computer with the CD burner, which took some further shuttling of files. Now, if I lived alone, this would all have just taken an evening, but life being life, it took days to get this all done.

The switch finally complete, I took some pictures of my latest knitting projects and tried to put them into the "new" computer. The computer said no. I installed the software (duh) and again the computer said no. The last time my camera flat-out refused to give up its pictures was when the battery was quite low, so I charged up the camera overnight and this morning, I tried again to retrieve my photos. Three times I tried, and three times the computer and camera refused to speak to each other. On the fourth try, for no particular reason, they got along fabulously, and I have new pictures to show you.

I finished a whole sweater since the last time I blogged. One of our family's favourite cartoons is Ben-10. I thought about how much time my little guy spends jumping around on the carpet pretending to be one or another of Ben's alien heroes and it suddenly struck me that I could knit a sweater version of Ben's t-shirt, including a knitted Omnitrix (the device that turns the small boy into one of the ten superheroes) on the wrist.

The sweater was my first attempt at colour-block intarsia, and also my first time doing hemmed cuffs, collar and bottom edges. All the yarns used in this project are acrylic because while I may be an optimist, I'm not foolish enough to dress a 4-year old boy in a white garment made of anything but acrylic (he doesn't even own any white t-shirts).

I knit up a little, round, white Omnitrix, added an attached black i-cord around the edge and sewed on the green triangles.

I picked up stitches from the i-cord and knit inwards, decreasing like at the top of a hat. Just before getting to the center and pulling the yarn through the last few stitches, I stuffed the Omnitrix with polyester stuffing. Then, I sewed a big button on the back.

The button goes through a buttonhole on the cuff...

...And you get an Omnitrix that you can turn to dial up the alien form you'd like to transform into!

The project isn't stitch-perfect and it looks decidedly home-made, but my little guy is having a great time with this sweater. Maybe someday he'll wear it and hold still long enough for me to get a picture!

Every Soft, Cozy Craft Has Its Opposite...

2008-02-28T14:12:00.001-05:00

"So as a result of having made armour for a cat, I felt that I had created an imbalance in the universe. The only way to fix it was to do the same for the mouse."

Once Upon A Time...

2008-02-21T08:15:00.003-05:00

I knit a sweater for my little guy and said that I was going to write up the pattern. Well, it was a fine idea, but it got lost among the "after I finish this project" syndrome that seems to overwhelm all my long-term knitting plans.

I'm still trying to clean out my UFOs. I'm not making a big, focused effort, but rather just picking away at them. I'm trying to keep working on projects often enough to remember what I was doing, at least in a general "is this a sleeve or a cardigan front?" kind of way.

It occured to me that the patterns that I started to write up and then abandoned also count as UFOs and are hanging over me in the same kind of way.

I'd gotten bogged down trying to write this pattern in too many sizes - infant's to teen's. Once I made the decision to cut it down to a much more reasonable number (four sizes - boy's 2, 4, 6 and 8), it went much faster.

The Little Rugged Raglan pattern is finally finished, and is posted up on my patterns page!

George

2008-02-20T14:53:00.004-05:00

Yesterday was half-price day down at Value Village, so after dinner I braved the dark and the cold to go out and see what treasures I could find. I found some pants for my little guy and picked up a couple of books for him, too.

We are bursting at the seams with kids' books, but I just can't seem to resist adding a couple new ones to the collection now and then. And, if you'll pardon my shameless Mommy bragging, since he's reading 4 and 5 letter words just past his 4th birthday, I think it's worth the extra clutter.

I was browsing the men's sweater racks for frog-worthy garments (since men's sweaters are larger and you get more yarn) and was disappointed not to find anything that was even a little tempting. I was glancing at the women's sweaters on my way to the checkout when an unusual collar caught my eye. It was made of three knitted tubes, stuffed and braided together. Odd. I touched the sweater. It was an oversized, vintage-80's garment, which meant there was a lot of yarn there. It looked like wool, but didn't quite feel the way I expected it would. I checked the label.

100% Alpaca.

For eight dollars. And at half-off makes it a four dollar price tag. I nearly fell over. When I'd recovered, I grabbed the sucker and giggled all the way to the register.

But like so many good things, there was a catch.

It was bright, screaming pink. In natural daylight, the sweater looks more red than pink, but it still isn't quite the colour I would have picked if given a choice. The colour actually works for my skin tone, but it's a bit dated. And goodness knows when I'll have enough alpaca to knit an entire sweater with again. I'd kind of like to do it right.

I'm willing to dye the yarn a richer red or burgandy colour, but I've never dyed a sweater's worth of yarn before. If I accidentally felted or otherwise screwed up the dyeing of 600 g of alpaca, I might not be able to forgive myself. I believe I need to dye up some other yarn first for practice.

Until then, I'm going to enjoy running the yarn through my fingers as I frog this sweater. When that's done, I'll just have to hang out with the hanks of yarn and love them and hug them and pet them and call them...well, you know.

Wool Vs. Cotton

2008-02-19T09:41:00.001-05:00

I was sent a link this morning to an interesting article comparing the environmental impact of wool vs. cotton. The article concluded that with standard agricultural practices they were fairly neck-and-neck. Phew! I wasn't about to start knitting with heavy, hand-busting, too-cool cotton, but I was worried that I was going to feel badly about using wool. But add to the article's conclusion the fact that Canada isn't known for it's cotton production and all kinds of energy is used up to ship it up here from warmer climates, plus the eco-friendly practices of small farms and wool pulls ahead in this particular race, at least around here.

I'm feeling good about my most recent sweater. It was made from locally produced yarn. The wool was processed without overly-harsh chemicals, meaning that there was a bit of "organic material" in the yarn. In other words, there was enough hay spun in there to keep a small animal happy for quite some time. I had to keep a little dish or piece of paper beside me while I knit to put the little bits of hay into. I still ended up vaccuuming up red-dyed flecks of hay from all around my favourite knitting spots. A small price to pay, though. I would totally use this rustic yarn again...if it hadn't been discontinued.

The sweater is finished and I'm really happy with it. So happy, in fact, that I'm not going to post any pictures while I write up the pattern.

I seem to be getting excited about writing patterns again. I knit up a couple of baby hats and put them up on my patterns page. I made a bunny hat and a froggy hat while trying to come up with a gender-neutral gift for a baby shower. I was thinking that green would do for a girl or a boy, but even with a heart-shaped mouth, the froggy hat still looks like a boy's garment to me. I just got an e-mail this morning saying that the shower will now be held after the baby is born, so there may be more baby hats in the works!

Red Yarn and White Snow

2008-02-02T10:26:00.000-05:00

There was a spectacular winter storm here yesterday. A good 10 inches of snow fell. I can't remember the last time we got that much snow in one day. 36 hours ago I could see grass in my back yard. This morning, it looks like this:

Yesterday morning, after about 5 inches of snow had fallen, I took my little guy outside to play in the snow and to get a start on the shovelling. We cleared off the front steps and did a bit of the walkway as well. This morning, you couldn't tell we'd done a thing. Fortunately, my husband was up to the challenge of re-shovelling.

Ever since seeing this picture last summer, I've had a bug in my head about knitting myself a red scarf to wear during the depths of winter. I even found some red wool in my stash, but there wasn't much of it. I thought about what stitch pattern to use that would not roll and was not a yarn-hog (like reversible cables, for example) and was more interesting to knit and wear than garter stitch.

I never did pick a stitch pattern and never did start the scarf, but it was in the back of my head as I went to my LYS to spend a gift certificate I'd gotten for Christmas. I got there to find a big sign in the window announcing "SALE!" Not only was there a sale, but it was the local yarn (my favourite) that was discounted... and it was half price! Woohoo!

The only catch is that the yarn shop, since changing owners, has decided to discontinue the local yarns. This is mostly because two of their three major suppliers have gotten out of the business. "So-and-so would rather just talk to his sheep than do anything with them," the proprietress told me of one of the farmers. They will instead stock Briggs & Little yarn, which is still Canadian, but there was something special about knitting with yarn from sheep that I could have phoned without long-distance charges.

Bu there were exactly six hanks of a lovely, brick red worsted-weight yarn and I've adopted them all and given them a good home.

They told me that they wanted to be aran sweater, probably a henley-style pullover.

The back is finished and I've made good progress on a sleeve. I'm excited to see this sweater finished. I will not, I think, have enough yarn left over for a scarf, though. Oh well. They say that the key to happiness is to have something to strive for. And surely, a red scarf is not an unreasonable long-term goal.

Another New Favourite

2008-02-01T13:26:00.000-05:00

Pictures of my newest sweater!

Specs: 6 balls of Paton's Classic Merino in Chestnut Brown, with just under one ball left-over.
Pattern: My favourite cardigan template with cables added to the front and sleeves.

I've worn my new brown, cabled sweater a few times now and it is definately a new favourite. Of course, my most recently finished sweater usually is the favourite. But this one fits well, it's warm but not too heavy, and I really love the cables.

They're from The Cable Knitting Handbook by Annie Maloney, a member of my local knit collective. This book is second only to Elspeth Lavold's "Viking Knitting" as my most-browsed book on cable knitting. Here's a closer look at the cable, which is also on the sleeves:

And now that I've freed up that much more space in my knitting bag, I've had room to start a new sweater. Yay!

10 Things I've Done

2008-01-28T13:00:00.000-05:00

There's this meme going around which I've been totally fascinated by: 10 Things you've done that you think other people haven't done.

I'm going to start off by blatantly not apologizing for how boring my list is, though I will apologize for how a couple entries are a bit of a stretch. This is my life and even if most of it has been done before, I've enjoyed it! And so, in no particular order, here are my 10 Things:

1. I gave birth in my dining room. We didn't have a dining room table at the time and it seemed like a good playce to put the big birthing pool.

2. I have seen the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, both before the age of seven.

3. My house was accidentally raided by a dozen cops a few years back. Or at least it seemed like a dozen cops. There were certainly six or eight of them. Apparently, a local informant told them that someone at our address had stuff that had been stolen from a local music store. Unfortunately, we owned (and played) two acoustic guitars, an electric guitar, a violin, a flute and a really nice stereo, and also had some recording equipment that my husband was storing for his brother while he moved. It took some explaining, but eventually, they apologized and left.

4. For my part-time job in University, I ran rats through mazes for drug experiments in a psychology lab.

5. I once had a cardiogram on February 14th. Now what could be more romantic than seeing your financee for the first time in six weeks and then having him hold your hand through a heart exam on Valentine's Day?

6. I got engaged in my teens, got married and it all worked out.

7. I've driven cars with: no 3rd gear, a gas tank in the trunk, a left-turn signal in the ashtray, a window crank that fell off every time you turned right, and a horn that honked when you pushed on any part of the steering wheel.

8. Except for growing out my bangs in Grade 6, I've had the same haircut since I was three.

9. I toilet-trained one of my cats. Unfortunately, the other cat never got the hang of it because she didn't like the splashing, and we had to bring the litter back out again.

10. I live a block from my mother, who still lives in the house I grew up in. I didn't mean to move right back to the old neighborhood. We shopped for houses within a 45 km radius of where we ended up, but the yard was nice, the neighborhood is great for kids, and the house was a half-price fixer-upper.

Lost My Sock Mojo

2008-01-25T17:59:00.000-05:00

There have been some knitting...issues around here in the last two days, and every one of them has to do with socks.

First, there were the little green socks for my little guy's birthday on Wednesday. I could swear that I made them exactly the same as the last pair of socks for him, which fit perfectly. The birthday socks looked great once they were on his feet, but getting them on was more than just a little bit of a struggle. "It's OK, Mommy. They're just snug," he reassured me as I wriggled and tugged the socks up over his ankles. The good news is that they're snug enough not to end up in the toes of his boots like his store-bought cotton socks. But I think they're going to be special occasion socks and not part of the general rotation.

Earlier this week, when cleaning out my knitting bag (which is actually two bags and a basket, but who's counting?), I found four pairs of old knitted socks that needed repair. I took the two socks that just needed a little darning and fixed them up. The next day, I put on one of those pairs of socks only to discover that there was another hole on the other side that also needed fixed. I took them off, put them back into the "to do" pile, and grabbed the other newly-fixed pair of socks and happily wore them all day. At the end of the day, I felt a funny, sticky spot under my heel, thinking that I had stepped a sticker or something. I looked and found a newly-sprouted hole! Sheesh.

I'm glad I discovered this "holes beget holes" phenomenon before going to great efforts to repair the other two pairs of socks, which need completely new heels. If a sock has worn out to the point that it needs darning, is there any hope left for extending its life? Any experienced sock-darners out there, or is a well-loved sock with a hole in it simply done for?

Finishing All Over The Place

2008-01-21T16:09:00.000-05:00

I'm still in a post-holiday-chaos, New-year's-Resolution cleaning and organizing kick. After getting bored with cleaning out cupboards and drawers full of boring, but necessary things, I'm trying to get my knitting bag organized. Or maybe I just want to take out my yarn and spread it around instead of actually cleaning. Something like that.

I think it's once again time to try and finish some long-forgotten projects. The idea is that that once the UFO's in the bag are transformed into FO's, I can fill it with things that make me happy instead of things that make me feel guilty for having abandoned them oh so long ago.

First out was the last thing in. My chestnut brown cabled cardigan is now blocking and is very, very close to finished. I might even get to wear it tomorrow. Yay!

I haven't woven in the ends yet. I rarely do until after trying on the sweater one last time, post-blocking, to make absolutely freaking sure that it fits the way I want it to. Then I weave in all the ends.

The buttons on the sweater may be temporary. I haven't had a chance to go button shopping yet, and found these ones in my Big Jar Of Buttons. I sewed them on so that I could block the sweater properly and wear it in the meantime. I was hoping for darker buttons that didn't contrast so much with the sweater, but I do like the rustic look of these ones. Hmmm...

I'm almost finished my son's green socks, too. All that's left is the cuff on the second sock. I'm going to try to finish that tonight so I have time to block them before his birthday on Wednesday.

And I also finished the back for my husband's big, black stockinette sweater (no picture today, sorry. It's just a big, black rectangle, really). I got all excited thinking that with the back and two sleeves finished that I was in the home stretch and that I'd cast on for the fronts and git 'er done, as my husband himself says. But on searching for the finished sleeves, I found that I'd only actually made one of them. Bah.

Fortunately, I found a nice, small pair of socks to work on instead. I'm really, really trying to get just one thing from the knitting bag finished before casting on for a new project. And very soon, I need to finish sorting out my yarn closet upstairs, and boy, it's hard to organize yarn without starting a new project.

Into The Light At Last

2008-01-18T10:08:00.000-05:00

Getting my son to give up going to sleep with a bottle has been a long, slow process. It's been nearly a year since he actually went to sleep with a bottle, and we're still not finished the weaning process.

When he first (very reluctantly) went to sleep without his bottle, it was only with a parent snuggled right up under the blankets with him. Once he was used to this, the next step was having him fall asleep with someone lying beside him but with only my little guy actually being under the blankets. In the months that followed, I've been very, very slowly moving from lying to sitting, and now sitting farther and farther away. We could have rushed this more, but it would have made bedtime a nasty, tantrum-and-fighting time instead of a calm and sleepy time. I chose the slow route.

Now, after many, many months of work, I am finally sitting out in the hall while he falls asleep. This is fantastic because it is very close to my goal of being able to put him to bed and just leave. But even better is that in the hall there is enough light to knit by! Every night, I get to sit quietly for 15 or 20 minutes and just knit. No tv, no music, no conversations, no oven timer, no laundry that needs put in the dryer. No interruptions. It's turning into my favourite time of day.

But by that time of the day, even with no interruptions, I'm tired enough that I need something completely mindless to work on. Like maybe a sock.

This is a toe-up sock made with some vintage Paton's Kroy for the heel and toe, and some Super Soxx yarn left-over from this pair that I made for myself. The cuff won't be finished until the second sock is done up to the cuff; I was a bit worried about yardage. But the second sock is past the heel now, and I think they'll make a fine pair of little boy's socks.

I Like Cheap (And Tidy)

2008-01-07T15:38:00.000-05:00

The Yarn Harlot had a great post today (which I'm sure every knitter on the planet has read already) about knitting with cheap wool. She mentioned that one of her favourite cheap wool yarns was Paton's Classic Merino. And just guess what I'm knitting my new cabled cardigan out of? Go on...guess!

Yup. In "Chestnut Brown." I know, the picture looks all red-butterscotch colour, but the sweater is really a rich, chocolatey colour. It makes me a little hungry every time I notice the colour, especially since we still have piles of Christmas chocolates in the cupboard.

It's especially tempting to just serve my family a big old platter of chocolates for dinner because I'm also trying to clean out cupboards and drawers and all those places where junk tends to accumulate, and those candy boxes are taking up a lot of room in my tiny kitchen.

I thought I was pretty good about clearing stuff out every so often, but then I read one woman's pledge to get rid of half her stuff in the near future. I started thinking about whether I could do without half the things in my house, and the answer was a surprising "Yes"! I'm not going to quite the same extreme, but when cleaning out the kitchen, I got rid of two of our seven frying pans, and a third of our kitchen towels, and so forth. Things fit into the drawers again! When the dishwasher is full, the cupboard is almost empty! I'm way to excited about a tidy kitchen! I think I need to get out more!

What I Did in 2007

2008-01-02T13:44:00.000-05:00

Another year goes by. As a stay-at-home mom, it feels a bit melancholy to review the past year and think of how little, on first glance, there is to tell about. But then I think more carefully and look back and see that, though it was quiet, it was a good year for me and my family. Sometimes the absence of newsworthy events can be a blessing in itself.

In January, my little boy turned three. I'd finally broken out of the toddler years and this made many things calmer and more manageable. I started going once again to a weekly Mom & Kid's group, which has been wonderful for me. Once a week, I'd go out and talk to other adults who were not family, or friends I've known for so long, they may as well be family. Fantastically refreshing!

In February, I can remember absolutely nothing worth mentioning. I probably took my little guy to the Early Years Center a lot, as it's a wonderful place for kids to play indoors during the winter.

In March, I started this very blog!

In April, my little guy was officially out of diapers. I know I just said that he turned three a few months before, but my goodness, he was stubborn about the whole potty business! It was one of those fights that wasn't worth winning any sooner than we did. I also finished the biggest pair of socks I ever made. I forgot to take a picture before sending them off in mid-April, but here's one finished sock back in March.

In May, I got the news that a relative was in hospital, and responded to the crisis the best way I knew how - by knitting a toque.

In June, I started thinking about ecological knitting, and we went camping during sweater weather.

In July, an old friend got married and DH and I went on our first date together in ages. We also made a trip to the Big Apple.

In August, I got onto a yarn dyeing kick. I also lost the relative who had been in hospital.

In September, we once again went camping during sweater weather. I joined my first knit-along.

October saw me working away on my knit-along sweater. I also worked up the nerve to send some hand-knits off to charity.

In November, I finished my knit-along sweater, and after that I wasn't around much. The whole story, which I can write about about now that I'm a little further away from it, is that in early October, I happily learned that I was pregnant. Well, as happily as is possible now that I know more about what babies are really like at 3 am and what it does to a marriage. There was some panic mixed in there, too, but at heart, I was happy. But at the beginning of November, unfortunately, I miscarried. Physically, I was more or less recovered in a few days, but I was pretty sad for quite a few weeks after that and not feeling very chatty for a while, especially not someplace as public as a blog.

I know that this sort of thing happens to lots of women (apparently as many as one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage), but we don't tend to talk about it. So now that I'm out of the grieving stage and into the healing stage, I'm 'fessing up. It's no-one's fault, it happens all the time, and it's still a live-altering event. And it happened to me. I've made peace with what has happened, but I will always wonder about and miss the child I never had.

In December, Christmas craziness and family celebrations were just the distraction I needed. I suddenly felt the need for a whole bunch of simple new sweaters. I went into what I call my "Comfort Knitting" phase, which I am still in.

Christmas was busy and tiring, as it is every year, but it's wonderful to see my family and my in-laws for big family dinners. I discovered some of those confession sites last month, and suddenly realize just how lucky I am to have a family that truly enjoys each-other's company.

New Year's Eve was an at-home event this year, which is just how I wanted it to be. We turned down invitations to go out, and even offers to babysit, to ring in the new year on the couch with a pile of videos, a bottle of wine and boxes and boxes of half-price Christmas chocolates.

I hope you had the holiday you wanted as well, and that you all have a fantastic 2008!

Catchin Up

2007-12-29T15:41:00.000-05:00

I seem to be knitting faster than I'm blogging these days. It feels like the only thing I have to post is finished projects (I know, poor me).

In an attempt to show a project in progress before it's finished, here's what I'm working on these days, posed with some holiday reading material that was in the sunny spot on the kitchen table:

There was a little picture in a recent edition of Vogue Knitting that caught my eye of a cabled cardi that I decided I'd like to make a version of. When I went back to find it again, it turned out that the pattern was "Twist" by Chicknits. I only looked up the pattern after planning for the back of my sweater to be plain. The pictures of it on the website look so good, I kind of regret not putting the cables on mine. Oh well.

The hood looks awfully cute, too. I find hoods to be awkward under/hanging-out-the-back-of a winter coat, but maybe this one is cute enough to be worth the trouble.

Oh, and I have to decide soon whether or not to add pockets, and whether to do buttons or a zipper. Decisions, decisions.... Maybe this is why I just end up posting finished things. That way I can pretend like I started out with a plan and that I just knit the thing from start to finish without taking time out for dithering.

I have decided that I want this sweater to be fabulous, and that I want to be wearing it as soon as possible. On that note, I'm getting back to it!

Christmas Was Cancelled!

2007-12-28T12:07:00.000-05:00

...But in a good way.

The in-laws came down with the flu. Actually, that's not good at all. I quite like my in-laws and enjoy spending time with them. But after DH being out of town for three days followed by three days of celebrations, I was exhausted. When Christmas dinner IV on Christmas day was cancelled (or at least postponed), I have to say, I was a bit relieved*.

Instead, we stayed home all day for the first Christmas since we've been married. My mom and brothers came over for a visit and we opened presents until nearly three in the afternoon. Not that there was an orgy of presents, but just that my little guy opened his gifts very slowly, playing with each and every toy as it appeared.

In fact, Christmas day was so relaxing that I knit the entire front of this:

It's my own pattern, written mostly by gosh and by golly, knit using Bernat Soft Boucle in Misty Shades (brown) colourway. At 14 stitches to 4 inches, this sweater went quickly, to say the least.

I thought that I had officially "grown up" as a knitter when I made the switch from inexpensive acrylics to real wool, but I'm making a bit of a reversion lately. It came to my attention that wool sweaters are, well, a bit tricky to wash.

I accidentally shrunk one of my favourites early this winter. The knob on the washing machine (on the delicate cycle) was pointed mostly to "cold", but hadn't clicked into place and defaulted to the last setting, which was "warm." The sweater wasn't impressed, and neither was I.

This new one will never, ever shrink. And the whole sweater took less than 3 of the 5-oz balls of yarn! If only it came in more colours, I'd make another one!

*It came up with my little guy that we still hadn't given his cousins the Spiderman mitts. He was in a bit of a mood and got upset because he didn't want to give them away. I told him that they weren't really his to give away. He got angry and cursed the way only a pre-schooler can: "When I grow up, I'm not going to have any yarn in my house! Zero yarn!"

12, er, 5 Days of Christmas (Crammed Into 4 Days)

2007-12-22T14:40:00.000-05:00

This is it. The first Christmas dinner of the season is tomorrow. The toques are knit. The ice-fishing socks, which I scrambled to finish by Thursday night only to have DH tell me that he isn't going ice fishing after all, are never the less, done.

The Spiderman hat that will go with the Spiderman mitts isn't even begun yet. No problem. My little guy has a birthday in a few weeks. If I finish the hat by then, it will be a smashing birthday gift.

The tree is up. The stockings are hung by the couch with care (we don't have a fireplace). Me and my little guy even made cut-and-glue felt stockings for the two cats. The shopping is done. The wrapping is not done, but it's manageable. I'll wrap only what I need for the next day and take four evenings to finish it all.

See, we're headed for Xmas with my father and brothers tomorrow, Xmas II on Christmas Eve with my mother and same brothers, Xmas III here on Christmas morning, Xmas IV with my husband's family on Christmas day, and Xmas V with my husband's sister, who we will have seen the day before, but with a difficult family member invited to join us.

The good news about all the travelling around means that I don't have to cook or clean house much for the next few days. Good thing, too, because I'm wiped out already. I'm fighting another stinkin' respiratory infection. DH is away for three days, but not ice fishing.

My little guy had a red spot on his hand and another on his arm a couple days ago. It was just dry, itchy, winter skin, but I sure got my hopes up for a while. If he got the chicken pox, we would get to just say home and hang out in our jammies for 10 days straight!

Eight Mitts For A Spider

2007-12-19T11:35:00.000-05:00

Once upon a time, three Christmasses ago, the Yarn Harlot made a pair of Spiderman Mittens. I made a couple of pairs for my little cousins that year and filed the idea away for when my little boy, who was less than a year old at the time, would be big enough to truly appreciate a pair of spiderman mittens.

This was the year.

He is almost four. He has Spidey slippers, pajamas, pillows, action figures, videos, you name it. It's kind of embarassing, really, when I think of how much Spidey stuff we have accumulated in the last 18 months or so.

Last month, I made him a pair of Spidey mittens (One ball each of Paton's Decor in Barn Red, Navy Blue and Winter White on 3.75 mm needles for good, dense mittens). This being the first time in three years that I'd worked a fair-isle pattern, the first mitten turned out too small. The next ones were just right. They were a huge hit. So much, that my little guy asked if I could make a pair for his cousin, who turned three at the end of November. So I made a second pair of Spidey mitts.

Then I remembering that Cousin's little brother was having his first birthday a few days later. But after five patterned mittens, I couldn't bring myself to do the "webs" on the baby's mittens and made them plain. I don't think he'll mind. But the first mitten came out looking too large, so I ripped it out and tried again and got a size that I was happy with.

Six finished mittens* plus two ripped mittens makes...eight all together. Spiderific!

*The fuzzy pair of mitts on the left are the ones that were worn this fall. The others are still unworn.

Is It Still Comfort Knitting If It's So Scratchy?

2007-12-11T12:31:00.000-05:00

I'm still in my comfort-knitting phase. Plain stockinette stitch, calm colours, wearable finished sweaters. Mmmmm, mindless.....

When I got out the woolies this fall, I had an "Is this it??" moment. I thought I had made a lot more basic sweaters than what I had in front of me. With that in mind, I planned a bunch of simple sweaters. I pulled out some Briggs & Little Heritage yarn that I had earmarked for a sweater over the summer. I knocked off this simple cardigan pretty quickly back in November.

It would have been finished in even less time except that the yarn is very stiff and scratchy, especially before it's been washed, and it isn't much fun to knit with. This is definately not a "next to the skin" yarn, and I have to choose what shirt to wear under it with care. But Briggs & Little is famous for softening with washing and for wearing well even after a good, long time.

This was my first time trying toggle-style buttons. I like the look of them but, as I discovered when the first photos I took looked a little messy, the toggles don't stay horizontal for long, giving the sweater an untidy feel. Even so, I wear this sweater all the time. So far, I have gotten zero comments about it from friends and family, and that's just fine. Some days, a plain, cozy, flying-under-the-radar sweater is just the thing.

Boring Project, Cute Kid

2007-12-03T15:14:00.000-05:00

I knit up a pair of basic socks for my almost-4-year-old son. After I finished the first sock, I tried it on him to see if it fit. It was a hit - I then had to hurry up and knit the other one as he was running around for some time wearing one knit and one store-bought sock.

I used Paton's Kroy in Country something-er-other colourway. I used 2.5mm needles and made a 48-stitch sock. Using a short-row heel, I had just enough yarn to finish the socks with one 50g ball of yarn.

Once I finished the second sock, I got him to model the socks for me. Camera-shy? My kid? Not in the slightest.

After taking his pictures, he wanted to take a picture of me. The first couple of pictures in the series I won't be showing you since it was early-ish in the morning and I hadn't brushed my hair yet or anything, and...well. But he cut my head off and got a couple good pictures of the sweater I was wearing, which is one of my favourite cold-day sweaters. It's the sweater that I made to go with a shell that I recently sent off to Value Village.

Aside from the fact that it's big and comfy and one of my first early efforts that resulted in a wearable sweater, my favourite part about this sweater is the buttons.

They're unvarnished rosewood buttons that were hand-made by my father. They're so gorgeous, I really have to drop a few hints about him making me some more. If I had a big pile of these beautiful buttons around, I'd never sew in a zipper again!

In Which There Is Comfort Knitting

2007-11-29T14:23:00.000-05:00

I'm still here. I've been knitting up a small storm, in fact. Next to my keyboard is a ribbed toque I'm working on in Paton's Shetland Chunky in a colour that is appropriately named "Thunder Marl" - a dark grey mix, just like the skies have been around here lately. At 8 am, it's been so dark that it still feels like the middle of the night, which makes getting out of bed unappealing, to say the least.

It is now officially Cold around here, with temperatures below freezing every night and many days. This means that all my favourite wool sweaters are earning their keep. One of my current favourites is the Happy Viking Strikke-Along sweater, which I finished a few weeks back.

In real life, I'm quite happy with the cables, but the yarn is an unphotographable mid-grey mix. You'll just have to trust me that they're there.

The sweater turned out a few inches longer than I had planned, but it makes it extra-cozy, really. And I really, really like the patch-style pockets, which always accumulate an amazing amount of clutter by the end of the day. A couple of times, I've misplaced my one and only darning needle only to find it safely tucked into the very bottom of one of these pockets.

Pictures of many more FOs to come!

No Fun

2007-11-12T13:53:00.000-05:00

I'm still here. Still knitting, even. But I've been going through a personal...something. It isn't a Crisis, or a Disaster or anything that alarming. But it is, decidedly, No Fun. Because of my No Fun, I just haven't been feeling all that chatty lately. I have been feeling better today though, thus this tentative, apologetic post.

I will return soon, when the Fun comes back.

Off It Goes! - Part III

2007-10-25T10:31:00.000-04:00

The third and final sweater that recently went off to its new home at GoodWill. This one was the hardest for me to give away. It was the first sweater I ever made from recycled yarn, and was the first sweater I made on less than 4.5mm needles...I think I used 3.5mm or so. It was my first attempt at a very plain, but very well-fitting sweater. I unravelled, I swatched, I measured both the swatch and myself. I knit and knit in plain stockinette stitch on those teeny needles.
When the sweater was finished, I was quite happy with it.

Then I washed it.

I hadn't washed the yarn after unravelling it and had knit the entire sweater with kinky, curly yarn. It looked a tad uneven, but washing it helped even out the stitches. Unfortunately, the sweater grew substantially after it was washed.

At one point, I decided that I would just steek the side seams, make the sweater smaller and then it would fit. I did improve the width, but now the underarms are too snug for my taste. And, I can't even frog the sweater and reuse the yarn.
Every few months for two years, I would take the sweater down from The Top Shelf of the closet, try on the sweater, sigh, and put it back. Finally, I decided that a picture of a sweater is as good as the actually thing if I'm never going to wear the thing again. And off it goes!

Off It Goes! - Part II

2007-10-23T14:31:00.000-04:00

For a while, I was really excited about the idea of a knitted twinset. I wanted a cute, little cardigan with a cute, little sleeveless top to wear under it.

Unfortunately, it was still near the beginning of my knitting career and the vest and cardigan both came out larger than I had intended. They were both still wearable, but didn't really qualify as "cute."

The matching cardigan was done in chocolate brown with the tan and medium browns of the sleeveless shell used as hem and pocket trim colours. I still wear the cardigan. In fact, on really cold days, it's one of my favourites, since it's so big that I can usually wear it over another, closer-fitting sweater. But the sleeveless shell? I wore it a couple of times, feeling absolutely ridiculous every time I did. After almost four years on The Top Shelf of the closet...off it goes!

Off It Goes!

2007-10-18T10:17:00.000-04:00

The seasons have officially changed here in Southern Ontario. While we haven't actually done it yet, taking the air conditioners out of the windows is now firmly on the to-do list. I pulled out some of my favourite sweaters last week, as well as hats and scarves and mittens. I also found the lost remote in the hats box that had somehow ended up behind the couch all summer!

In pulling out the favourite sweaters, I also ended up looking on the Dark Top Shelf of the closet. The place where the, you know, less than favourite sweaters end up. I'm usually pretty good about getting rid of clothes that I don't make use of, but I have a hard time sending off things that I've made, even when I know they're going to a good cause at a second-hand shop. But I finally worked up the nerve to get rid of a couple of sweaters. The first was this lovely thing:

A bright fushia, chunky-weight, 3/4 sleeve v-neck sweater with seed stitch edging and snaps at the front and cuffs. The yarn is Wool-Ease Chunky in a discontinued colour. I got the yarn for 50 cents a ball. All I can say is that it was a serious case of reverse-sticker-shock. I like the fit and style of the sweater, but the colour is just so far out of what I normally wear. I've since gotten better at remembering that a bargain isn't really a bargain if you don't end up with something usefull.

I know that some people say that you should never buy on sale that which you wouldn't pay full price for, but I don't quite believe that. I'm pretty conservative (as in timid, not formal) in what I wear, but I'm more willing to take a fashion reach if it's only a few dollars, and I've gotten some of my favourite clothes this way. I'm glad I was willing to try the bright pink sweater, but after not wearing the thing even once since finishing it a year and a half ago, I think it was safe to pass this one on.

Pocketses!

2007-10-12T09:08:00.000-04:00

I have finished knitting the pocketses of my Strikke-Along sweater. I know that pockets tend to add bulk along the waistline, but I always choose to wear my sweaters with pockets over the ones without. Tissues, cold hands and confiscated toys all need to go somewhere.

I started to sew down the pocket linings since all the dangly things on the back of the sweater were making it difficult to manage. The rest of the sweater now is just plain, boring stockinette stitch, so I'll finish sewing down the pockets when I get bored of knitting for a bit.

I've finished the big cable medallion on the back of the sweater, too.

I'm relieved that the fussy bits are over. Keeping track of the pockets, two different cables and the waist shaping on every row meant a lot of pressure not to make mistakes. Ripping back any of those big, long rows would have been frustrating, to say the least.

I am enjoying doing the fronts and back at the same time as far as the waist shaping goes. It's nice not to have to keep meticulous notes to get the fronts and backs the same shape!

Happy Thanksgiving and Stuff

2007-10-09T12:05:00.000-04:00

I hope all those who had a long weekend this weekend had a good one. We went out to my father's place on Lake Ontario and had a Thanksgiving Dinner there on Saturday. The next day, I pleaded fatigue and my husband and son went to his parent's place while I had a fantastic afternoon to myself. I made a really nice cream of tomato soup to go with the leftover corn-muffins from the day before. Unfortunately, after dinner but before I put the soup away, a big, nasty moth fell into the soup and drowned. I couldn't bring myself to keep the soup after that and dumped out the rest.

I've been knitting away at my Strikke-Along sweater. The sleeves, I'm astonished to say, are finished. I don't know whether it was the shiny, new 4.5mm Addi Turbo needles that I'm using, the simple stockinette of the sleeve (once past the cable medallion), or the joy I'm taking in finally knitting something on needles larger than 3.5mm, but these sleeves just sort of fell off the needles all by themselves.

I've started on the body of the sweater, which is moving more slowly. I'm working the front and back at the same time, which slows things down a bit. I'm also finding that cabling without a cable needle when using such a slippery needle, and while holding on to such a big, heavy piece of fabric takes quite a bit of fussing and paying attention. Not so much that I'm ready to get out my cable needle yet or anything, though. Those little things slip away from me awfully fast, and they're sharp and stealthy both for and in the hands of a small boy.

In other news, today my husband and I are celebrating our 8th wedding anniversary. Time has gone by astonishingly quickly and yet I can barely remember life without him!

Nobody Told Me...

2007-10-03T11:44:00.000-04:00

Did you know it was October already? I didn't. Not right away, at least. September just whooshed by me. The weather was so gorgeous here in Southern Ontario that it didn't feel like September, which is usually cool and rainy. Instead it was all sunshine, warm breezes, blue skies and trees just barely tipped with red.

But all of a sudden it's October, and that means it's time to cast on for the Strikke-Along! Oh, it's always so much fun to ditch all current projects for a shiny, new one.

I am knitting a cardigan using cables from Elepeth Lavold's "Viking Patterns for Knitting." I also cast-on while watching "Return of the King*," starring our Strikke-along poster boy, Viggo Mortensen, since I'm still not all the way over my lung infection-turned-common-cold and I'm watching a lot of T.V. this week.

This project is actually a do-over of an old sweater that had so much potential, but so many problems.

The old sweater:

I especially like the cables on the pockets:

And the medallions on the sleeves that made me feel like I was wearing medieval hand-tooled leather gauntlets:

And the big, fancy medallion on the back, situated low enough that it will still be visible beneath my long hair:

But the cap sleeves and the collar and the garter-stitch hem just never quite worked out, and the yarn ($7 for the whole sweater) isn't worth the effort to fix all that. I do like the buttons, though, and may commandeer them for the new one.

I want to knit the fronts and back of the new sweater in one piece, since my sewing of seams on reverse-stockinette-stitch leaves a little something to be desired. Rather than learn how to seam properly, I'm going to simply avoid the issue and work the sweater seamlessly as much as possible. Since I'm suspicious of my gauge swatch, which is 2 stiches-to-the-four-inches different from the last time I used this yarn, I started with a sleeve:

Sorry about the grey-on-grey. While my energy is still at a premium, it was either a quick photo shoot or none at all today. Now, I've got a disc full of bonus features to watch and sleeve to knit!

*Some day I am totally going to work out some cables from the architecture in the Elf city of Rivendell, or maybe the King's hall in Rohan, and knit up something fantastic!

Thump!

2007-09-28T09:55:00.000-04:00

That would be the sound of me falling over with fatigue after returning from our camping trip. The first night we went didn't go so well (it was a people problem, not a camping problem), so we came home for a night and then decided to go back again. The next night was spectacular.

Our campsite looked like this:

At the top of that sand dune behind the tent was this:

I got there ahead of the rest of the family and spent two fantastic hours here (though if you're going to sit on the sand with the sun on your face and the hot wind in your hair, and read "Dune", a novel about a desert planet, you'd better bring a big bottle of water to drink):

My son spent most of the time we were there like this:

That night, we sat on the beach and watched this:

The next morning, I woke up to this - and not a soul on miles and miles of beach until nearly 11 am:

It was fabulously refreshing to be somewhere with that much sun and wind and space. I brought my knitting with me, but found I had a hard time working on it because it meant putting my head down when there was so much beauty to see up in front of me.

But after four days of setting up camp and tearing it down and packing and unpacking, plus not getting enough sleep and breathing too much smoke from the campfire...I'm afraid I over-extended myself, and now I'm sick. Darnit.

I'm spending as much time as I can on my butt, and am shamelessly bribing my little guy with videos and quasi-junk food to keep him occupied so I can rest. I have a mild form of a chronic lung disease, called PCD, which makes me really prone to infection and I'm trying really hard to avoid having to go on any nasty anti-biotics, so I'm taking my vitamins and drinking as much water and decaf tea as I can. I'm actually at the tricky part today - I'm starting to feel better, but I don't have my energy back yet and the kitchen floor is covered with sand and the dishes are piled so high that I can barely see over the top of them. Now might be a good time to put my head down and do some knitting...

Guess What I'm Doing This Weekend?

2007-09-21T17:22:00.000-04:00

I'm hardboiling eggs.
I'm putting trailmix into little ziploc bags.
I'm scrubbing the cooler.
I'm packing a duffel bag with everything from swimsuits to wool toques.

It's time for our second-annual fall camping trip! After school starts, the campgrounds empty out, and we go find ourselves a nice spot near the water where we'll spend one night.

If my husband gets home from work early enough on Saturday, we'll head to Bon Echo Provincial Park. Apparently, I've been there before (my mother has pictures), but I don't remember it. I was, after all, three years old the last time I was there.

If we end up leaving in a panic on Saturday and there's not much daylight left, we'll probably head to Presqu'ile Provincial Park instead, which is only a half-hour from my house, and which I've been to plenty of times and quite like. As a kid, I found some of my favourite fossils on those rocky beaches.

The weather people are calling for it to be sunny and clear all weekend (yay!), with highs of 23 C (74 F), which I don't actually consider to be swimming weather myself, but my little guy might want to go splashing in the lake.

At night, though, it's supposed to go down to 12 C (54 F). We'll have a fire, a tent, and our warm coats and blankets, but it's still pretty cool to be sleeping outside. Thank goodness I have a new felted hat, and my little guy has a new hat and sweater set! It feels so good to know that we'll be warm because of the things that I made with my own two hands.

It's Fall..And Then Summer Again

2007-09-19T16:08:00.000-04:00

Last week, it was really cool around here. There was talk of frost at night, which, happily for my basil, never came, but it was awfully close. I got to pull out some of my wool sweaters again.

I decided that I needed a new sweater. Some quick hit thing in stockinette, probably top-down and seamless. I found some heathered, pale grey wool in my stash that would be perfect. Unfortunately, the wool was still in the form in which I bought it, which was a thrift-shop sweater. Frog, frog, wash. Swatch. It works up nicely on size 3.25mm needles. Darn. That won't be a quick sort of anything at that gauge. Do I let that stop me? Nope. I cast on anyways, worked away for a couple of days, and took it with me to my knitting group meeting last night. Someone asked what I was working on, and when I told her, she commented that it seemed a bit big at the top. I took a good look at it, and yes indeed, it does look too big. Darn again.

Now that project is on hold until I can face starting all over again. That and it's a gloriously sunny and warm day, as it was yesterday and as it is supposed to be all week. The panic for a new sweater has subsided.

In the meantime, I'm working on finishing the rest of the baby layette set that I started for the last-minute baby shower that was supposed to take place last week. The mom-to-be was indeed lazing around in bed, having just given birth, and didn't bother coming to the party. This actually works out well for me since I only finished a hat in time for the shower. Pardon the dark photo. I only took one shot as I finally set the hat out to block an hour past my bedtime.

At that point, I didn't know if the baby was a boy or a girl, so I opted for an oatmeal-coloured yarn with slightly rugged, masculine flecks of black and tan (I say as though there were scads of unisex-coloured yarns in my stash instead of two - this one, and a super-fine, glaring white baby yarn), and some pretty, somewhat feminine cables. I finished up a matching pair of booties and then started on a sweater.

I've finished the front and one-and-a-half sleeves. That leaves a few inches of one of the widdle bitty sleeves and then the back and finishing to get done by next Tuesday. I'm actually itching to finish it sooner so I can start again on my new fall sweater. Next time, however, I will do my calculations a bit earlier in the day. Starting a new project after my little guy goes to bed and I'm more than a little exhausted might not be the best thing for the quality - and wearability - of the project.

Strikke-Along!

2007-09-14T18:48:00.001-04:00

I have signed up for my first-ever knit-along. It's called the Strikke-Along, hosted by The Samurai Knitter. There's this book of incredibly beautiful (and difficult) Norwegian patterns called "Norsk Strikkedesign." Some very brave souls are actually knitting stuff from this book for the Strikke-Along. I will not be one of them. Fortunately, there is a second tier of sign-ups for those who are knitting something else that is somewhat Norwegian in design or who have some sort of Norse connection (such as living in North America, which was founded by Vikings).

I am going to be knitting a sweater that uses a bunch of cables from Elspeth Lavolds' "Viking Patterns for Knitting," which is one of my all-time favorite knitting books. I'll actually be knitting a do-over of one of my last, great acrylic sweaters. I knit the thing out of Red Heart Comfort - the yarn they sell at Walmart for $7 a pound (I was still relatively new to knitting - I didn't know any better). The yarn was a lovely shade of hunter green, which is what prompted me to buy it in the first place. I later realized that the colour, and texture, of the yarn were quite similar to that of the scrubby pads I use for washing really gucky dishes.

The sweater also had some other fatal design flaws, such as no waist shaping. I have since realized that having very few curves of my own means that I need more shaping to my clothes, not less, for a flattering fit.

I'm going to use the old sweater as a template and re-knit it in a heathered-grey wool yarn. I'm actually quite looking forward to it.

I actually signed up a while ago, but just now worked up the nerve to figure out how to put the Strikke-Along button up on my sidebar. Fortunately, I was able to follow the helpful directions for how to do it, and it worked! I even worked with html, which I find fairly unnerving.

When I was six years old, we got a Commodore 64, the first computer ever to enter our home. My mother quite enjoyed the irony of spending the money she inherited from her grandfather, born in 1890, on a piece of technology that would have seemed mind-boggling to people of that time. When I was about 11, my brother, who was eight, and I started learning how to program in Basic, which we thought was all kinds of fun. Not long after that, we got a Mac, and all our friends started getting IBM 286's, and neither type of computer spoke Basic. The sinking realization that computer technology and computer languages were going to change faster than I could keep up discouraged me from ever really learning on that detailed a level about my computer again. Perhaps it's time I learned a few words of html.

Catching Up

2007-09-11T17:00:00.000-04:00

There have been three birthday parties and a last-minute baby shower over the last four days (and the mom-t0-be failed to show for her own party - probably wasting her time giving birth or something). Until I can catch up on laundry, dishes, and maybe some sleep, knitting time and computer time will be a bit scarce. I'm gonna go tackle Mount Laundry, and then I'll be back.

The Felted Hat

2007-09-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

After looking at felted hat patterns all over the place day after day, I finally just decided that it would be faster to sit down and make one than to explain to myself why I shouldn't make one, and why I should finish something before starting something else.

Then I remembered - I did finish something! I finally put together the little sweater for my son that I'd finished knitting a while back. I originally knit the front plain, but then after seeing the Placed Cable Aran in the fall IK, I decided that I could add a little flair to the front without too much fuss, and ripped back. I only had 30-some rows to work with, so I chose a 4-row cable. If I had planned to do the cables, I would have started them a little lower down, before the beginning of the armhole, but I like them enough as-is not to rip back an in-the-round sweater to add another inch of cables.

"Placed Cable Aran- Fall 07 IK"

So I knit a hat. I followed a pattern. It turned out waaaaay too big. I had that feeling when I was knitting, that feeling that something is really not right, but I ignored it and knit away regardless. I cast off and though that the hat looked really big, like nearly big enough around to be a sweater, but that it was to be felted and would shrink down to normal size. I am such an optimist.

It turns out that the hat wanted to be a bag.

I folded the hat up and set it to block with dpn's sticking through the spots where the straps will go. Now I just need to work up the gumption to knit up a gazillion inches of i-cord for the felted straps.

So I tried to knit another hat. I measured the first hat, re-adjusted the pattern, knit up a more reasonably sized hat, put it in the washing machine in hot water and... it utterly failed to felt. I was fairly sure that this recycled yarn was 100% wool, but I went back and found the label and began to read: "100% virgin wool. Machine wash warm, machine dry..." Superwash. Dang.

I give up on the idea of a felted hat. My brother still needs a hat to go with the scarf I made him for his belated birthday (the scarf, by the way, Jen, does still curl a bit, but I'm reserving final judgement until I block it). I knit a hat for him, a skullcap. It turns out too big, too. Double-dang.

I knit yet another hat. Hats go quickly when they're worked in the round on a 6.0mm needle, but still, this is getting to be a lot of hats. This final hat is knit the garter-and-rib stitch, which is, by the way, much easier to knit in the round than flat.

This skullcap looks just fine. It fit my husband just right.

I look at the too-big skullcap. I look at the label: "hand wash cold." I pick up 30% more stitches than I used for the body of the hat, knit three inches of stockinette stitch and bind off. I put the thing in the washing machine and felt the bejeepers out of it.

Who knew that the bejeepers are the difference between "knit" and "felted"? I am seriously enjoying this hat. I'm almost looking forward to wearing it when the cold weather comes. The only catch is that now I need to knit a matching scarf.

Knock Me Over With A Jaunty Peacock Feather*

2007-09-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

I've been considering making a felted bucket/cloche hat this winter, and I was browsing around the net for a suitable pattern when I came across Las Conchas Fiber Arts. For sale on this page were a number of ponchos, wraps and felted hats that seemed fairly ordinary.

Except for the price.

The Felted Cloche I was looking at was priced at an astonishing $168. For one hat. Even though it is made with really nice yarn, that seems excessive.

"Felted Cloche - $168.00"

Knitting has been undervalued, and priced accordingly, for far too long. The belief seems to be that knitters have to knit and can't stop themselves (OK, bad example), and are constantly producing piles of finished objects that they have no use for, or that it isn't real work if you can do it on your butt in front of the t.v., so it's OK to sell knit (or crocheted) items for barely more than the cost of the yarn. I saw a full-sized afghan at a bazaar last Christmas, which used at least a half-dozen colours of 100%-wool yarn, selling for only $60.

Surely there must be some sort of balance between pricing knits insultingly low and pricing them unreachably high. Or should we be charging $8/hour (minimum wage around here) for the labour we put into knits to be sold? This would bring the price of hand-made items up to the levels of couture or art (I do have trouble swallowing a stockinette-stitch felted hat as art - but this could just be the "if I can do it, it ain't art" mentality).

I would love to make a living wage selling the things I knit. But if I was making $8/hour, how many $168 hats would I be buying?

*No, the hat in the picture doesn't have a jaunty peacock feather, but don't you think it needs one?

Happy News

2007-08-30T10:37:00.000-04:00

I had a birthday this week! I turned 29, in case inquiring minds wanted to know. Depending on how I feel about turning 30 next year, I may decide to turn 29 again, but this is my first, official year of being 29 years old.

Last year, my gift to myself was to start an extra project for no particular reason other than that I wanted to. The sweater turned out spectacularly well. Like, so well that I'm a little afraid to wear it too much lest it wear out, and this is one sweater that I think I'll wear forever.

Hoping to cash in on the good birthday vibe that worked out so well last year, I decided to start another sweater this year. Unfortunately, there were gauge issues, so I decided to leave the sweater be for a while and dye up some yarn instead.

I got some paste dye from the Bulk Barn in a lovely burgandy colour. I even mixed in a little I soaked the yarn in vinegar-water, mixed up the dye, cooked it all together, and ended up with...bright, screaming neon pink yarn.

I washed it a bit. The screaming got louder.

Some component of the burgandy dye (plus the little bit of black I'd mixed in to deepen the colour) didn't stick to the yarn. Possibly I just hadn't added enough dye. But after many washes, the water was still running pink. Even the pink dye wasn't all the way attached to the yarn.

This particular shade of pink wasn't one that I could imagine myself knitting, let alone wearing. I don't think there's anything else in the house this colour. Even the Pepto wasn't this bright.

Rather than fuss with dyeing again with more burgandy dye, since that didn't seem to be going well, I decided to over-dye with the blue food colouring that had worked so well for my self-striping socks.

I ended up with a much more useable grapey-purple...with a fair bit of pink undertones where the yarn stuck out of the dye bath. I really need to get myself a bigger dye-pot one of these days.

My gift from my mother was a shopping trip to Wool-Tyme in Kingston, Ontario, which is just under an hour's drive from my house. I had some other birthday money to spend and had a wonderful time.

The haul:

The yarn - Fine Merino Superwash DK from Luxury Collection in a lovely deep red colour (colour 2015). This was my first time buying an entire bag of yarn like this! The yarn is earmarked to become the Tangled Yoke Cardigan.

The needles - Lantern Moon Rosewood needles, size 4.5mm. These my mother actually bought for me on a recent trip to Ottawa. I'm not using straight needles much these days, but for these gorgeous, smooth needles, I may have to make an exception.

-Addi Turbos, 4.5mm x 24 inches. My first pair of Addis! I've been wanting to try them for ages. Unfortunately, none of the projects in my to-do list are on 4.5mm needles. But I'll make something with them soon!

-The ball winder. This was the real reason for the trip. This is another little gadget that I've been wanting to try for ages, but I haven't seen them in town anywhere. I tried it out for the first time last night and it was a hit all round. I liked how neatly and easily it made a ball of yarn (duh) and my little guy really liked cranking the crank and making the yarn spin round and round. A little later, I left the new cake of yarn in the living room and went into the kitchen. I turned around to find the cat standing proudly over the cake, which he had dragged into the kitchen so he could show off his "kill."

Sad News

2007-08-27T11:52:00.000-04:00

I got a phone call yesterday telling me that the relative, my uncle, for whom I had knit the Sad Hat had passed away.

It was not unexpected, as he was gravely ill. It was a mercy, in a way, that he did not last longer once he was ill enough to be hospitalized. This man lived in a one-room cabin in the bush for nearly twenty years and was suddenly plunked into a pale-green, concrete room in a bustling area of the hospital - so bustling, in fact, that conversation at a normal volume was nearly impossible.

I am especially sad for my father, who is feeling the loss the most, I think. He was an advocate and a navigator for my uncle for decades, and was with him the most at the end.

I find myself grieving more for what should have been and what could have been than what actually was. Because he was, after all, family, and I'm proud to belong to what we consider a close family.

There is a strong family resemblance, too. My father, my two brothers, my uncle and I all share the same dark eyes and the same scrawny/slender build (Angelina Jolie looks just fine to us). All of us share the same arc-shaped eyebrows, the same ones I would caress endlessly on my son when trying to coax him to sleep as an infant.

My father, brothers, uncle and son all share the same middle name.

Family is precious to me, and today I have a little less of it.

Uncle Tony, early 1970's

Dyed and Gone to Heaven

2007-08-25T11:21:00.000-04:00

I've done it. I dyed my own self-striping sock yarn. It took longer than I thought it would, both getting around to the actual dyeing, and the dyeing itself.

I'm happy with how it turned out for a first attempt. They dyeing wasn't perfect, and I've got kind of a semi-solid effect, but that's what I like about hand-dyed yarn - the variation and the "imperfections."

I followed Julie's well-written and helpful article on Knitty, as well as what I remembered (and scratched down) from doing some Kool-Aid dyeing last summer.

I wanted self-striping yarn in three shades of blue. First, I measured out 60 inches of yarn (because my tape measure is 60 inches long) on a sock I was already knitting, then I knit two rows and figured out how much yarn it took to knit a row. It worked out to be 21 inches for a 56-stitch sock on 2.25 mm needles. Meaning that for a 4-row stripe, I needed three 84-inch sections on a hank of yarn.

It was a big hank.

I went into the back yard and set up the patio chairs so that their centers were about 120 inches apart, and then started winding. The new neighbours, who I have yet to meet, must surely think I'm soft-headed if they caught sight of me going round and round the patio chairs with white "string" and a measuring tape. I'd have taken a picture of what a 240-inch hank of yarn looks like when wrapped around lawn furniture, but if the neighbours spotted me photographing such a spectacle, they would surely have me hauled away in a funny truck.

After tying the yarn in a whole lot of places, I spread it out on some plastic wrap on the floor of the open-air "treehouse" in the yard. Note to self for next time: plastic wrap + wind = trouble. Next time, pick a less breezy day. Or just dye indoors and be reeeeeally careful.

Dyed!

Julie's article said to use 1/2 teaspoon of food colouring in 1 cup of water, which I did for the medium blue, then halved it for the light blue and went up to 3/4 teaspoon for the dark. I then poured the dye over the yarn, wrapped the plastic wrap around it, rolled it carefully into a ceramic dish and put the whole works into the microwave (this is the "cold dye" method in Julie's article, with the exception of heating in the oven instead of the microwave). I did end up with a colour gradient, but it was more subtle than I had hoped. So subtle that it said "badly dyed mid-blue" instead of "cleverly dyed in three shades of blue." Some remedial action was necessary.

"Take a picture of me!"

I mixed up some more dark blue dye, dipped one end of the hank into the dye (which is how I'd do the whole thing next time), and put it back in the microwave again. The mid- and light-blues are still pretty subtle. The lightest colour is more of a pale highlight than a true stripe, but the dark- and mid-blues now have sufficient contrast.

Dyed again

Despite the fact that I already have more on the needles than I like, I couldn't possibly resist starting the socks to see how this yarn knit up.

And look - it stripes! I am excessively pleased with these socks. The bright colour, the little surprises, the cutesy stripes. You'd think I'd cured malaria instead of dyed some yarn. If I wear these socks for the first time and they don't turn my feet blue, my joy will be complete.

Next Scarf

2007-08-23T09:36:00.000-04:00

I saw this great swatch for a side-ways cable yoked sweater on Eunny Jang's blog ages ago and was immediately smitten. Imagine my delight when not only did one more issue of IK arrive in my mailbox this week when I thought my subscription had already expired, but that sweater was in the magazine!

Normally, when I get a knitting magazine, I start at the beginning and read every page, prolonging the excitement of seeing the new patterns. This time, I skipped right past everything and went straight to the Tangled Yoke Cardigan.

Isn't it lovely? Sport-weight yarn, simple body and sleeves, shaped waist, and lovely, interesting cables around the yoke.

If the appropriate yarn had been in the stash, I would have cast on right away (I really must stop thinking that "stash" is equivalent to "yarn store". It would save much disappointment...and closet space). I did cast-on for my brother's birthday scarf. Though I have finished my mother's birthday knitting, it occurred to me that her party is likely going to be the next time I'll see my brother...meaning that I once again have a knitting deadline!

I had the Tangled Yoke Cardigan on my mind when I cast on, though, and I'm making the scarf in the same garter rib stitch pattern as the cuffs and lower edge of the cardi. I like the strong lines of this pattern for a man's scarf.

The garter rib pattern is deceptively tricky, though. The pattern (which I've seen in stitch dictionaries before, so I shouldn't be violating any copyright here) goes: right side - knit, wrong side - k2p2. The trick is that the front looks like k2p2, and the back looks and feels like reverse stockinette.

OK, in the picture the difference between the garter and the RSS on the wrong side of the scarf looks totally obvious, but in real live, and especially in low light, the difference is much more subtle. Unfortunately, the alternative, which is to work the k2p2 across the right side and purl across the back means (shudder) a whole lot more purl stitches.

S(p)ock Pattern!

2007-08-21T09:51:00.000-04:00

I wrote up this little pattern earlier in the summer and submitted it to Knitty. I finally heard back yesterday - meaning they considered using it for a good, long time. Unfortunately, it was not included in this Fall's issue of Knitty. But I got a lovely e-mail from the editor, who suggested that I put the pattern on my blog, and goodness, when Amy Singer makes a suggestion about a knitting pattern, who am I to ignore it?

So here it is...or rather, here with the other patterns.

I would say please don't laugh, but really, this is exactly the kind of pattern that is supposed to inspire laughter. I mean, how seriously can anyone take knitted ears? heehee...

Finished Socks and Everything Comes Unravelled (In a Good Way)

2007-08-16T12:36:00.001-04:00

The pink Tofutsies socks are finished (except for weaving in the ends, which I always leave to the *very* end of a project) and with quite a comfortable gap between now and the birthday they are intended for. I didn't really need to get them done quite so soon, but I really enjoyed this yarn and these colours. I also wanted to get them crossed off my list, so to speak.

I realized a while back that though I talked to him on the phone and wished my brother a Happy Birthday back in June, I had missed getting him a gift. So I decided that I would knit something completely inappropriate for summer and call it "intentionally late."

With a hat-and-scarf set in mind, I set off to the local second-hand shop to see if there were any sweaters suitable for frogging available in the colours I had in mind (for this brother, who leans towards the earthy, Zen, anti-consumerism sort of mentality, re-used yarn would be happily received). The first sweater I found was of such lovely yarn that I wasn't sure I would be able to part with it since it would make a lovely sweater for me, so I got a second one just in case.

The first sweater is charcoal-grey chunky-weight lambswool. The original sweater was almost too nice to frog, but it had two strong strikes against being worn as is. First off, I tried it on, and though the sweater was too big for me, the neckband was too tight.

The second problem was that it was a Men's Extra-Small. I didn't even know anyone made sweaters in size Extra-Small for men. Heck, most of the men I know would feel a bit wimpy about wearing a size Medium, no matter how well it fit. So I felt OK about re-purposing the sweater.

Before:

I got out my favourite frogging tool:

...and set to work. This machine-knit sweater came apart quite easily. I got all the crochet-chain style seams ripped out and the sweater down to its component pieces in under a half-hour. I did have to cut the shoulder seams as they had been re-inforced and serged, but only lost a couple rows worth of yarn.

Then, I wound the yarn up on my make-shift swift (makeswift?), tied it in a few places, washed it and hung it to dry to get the crinkles out.

After:

The sweater yielded just under 600g (about 1100 yd*) of yarn...for six bucks! And in this small town, chunky-weight yarn in 100% wool is pretty scarce at any price.

The second sweater was a bulky-weight that was hand-knit in Peru. Sweaters like this appear in the local mall just before Christmas and sell for up to $100. I'm sure the money was well-spent, but the sweater was a better as an idea than as garment. A women's size large, it was a whopping 26 inches /66 cm across the chest. It was also three dollars, which made it very hard to resist.

This was knit from a hand-spun style yarn that was very "grabby" and difficult to frog. It took way longer to un-do than the first sweater, even though there were fewer yards of yarn. I found myself thinking about who-ever knit the sweater in the first place, what s/he thought about knitting something that would be sent so far away, and mostly, if s/he would mind that I was ripping out all that hard work.

I hope the knitter was of the mind that it is better to re-use the yarn and make something that will be worn than for all that effort to sit at the back of someone's closet, unused, and that it is a greater waste for the time and skill to come to nothing than for it to move on to something else.

This sweater yielded 890 g / 770 yd of bulky-weight yarn. It looks like it's an undyed, natural deep brown yarn. The skeins on the right that look way larger and curlier are the one that haven't been washed; the ones on the left have - and what a lot of dirt came out of it! I'm not sure the sweater had ever been washed. It did have one of those "dry-clean only" labels on it, as well as a warning about wearing the sweater with watches and jewelry, stating that there was no warranty on snags caused by the wearer. Well, no wonder it wasn't worn much.

*yes, I measure in yards and inches. I am Canadian, but I read a lot of American knitting publications, and that's the way I learned to knit. But I can't wrap my head around ounces, so I also measure in grams.

A little more sock

2007-08-09T15:31:00.000-04:00

The second pink sock progresses! I finished turning the heel today, which means that the sock is once again portable and mindless. Or rather, it will be mindless once I finish the gussets. I still have to stop every time I reach a decrease point and check to see whether I have to do a decrease on this row or the next one.

I have been experimenting a bit lately with cuff-down socks, but I still prefer the short-row heel that I usually do with toe-up socks. It's faster and, in my mind, simpler, since there's far fewer numbers to keep track of. But for these socks for my mother, who has a high arch, I think a flapped heel and gusset will fit her better.

There's a bit of brown thread at the beginning of the heel flap because this time, I remembered the trouble I run into every time I do a heel flap...Which row did I start it on, and which row do I start to count from to make the two heel flaps the same length? So I finally remembered to mark the first row, which makes ending up with two same-sized heels much simpler.

I want to get these socks finished because there's so much that I want to be working on right now. I got this way about this time last summer, too. It's not fall yet, but it's time to start thinking about starting the sweaters and things that I'm going to want to wear when the weather turns cool again.

But...there are two sweaters for myself, one for my husband (in a heavier gauge than the boring black sweater), a hat and scarf for my brother, as well as a couple hats for my little guy who has grown out of a bunch that he wore last year, all on the to-do list for the fall. And there's still a bunch of half-abandoned project in the knitting basket that need to be finished. So the deal I've made with myself is "One in, one out." I finish something, and I can start something else. And since these socks are close to finished and there's a deadline for when I need them done by, they're the project I most want to get done.

One-Stripe Socks

2007-08-06T16:25:00.000-04:00

My mother's birthday is coming up in about a month. I wanted to make her a pair of pink socks for her birthday (pink being one of her favourite colours), and I wanted to get a start on them to avoid having to work exclusively on one project as the deadline approached.

I went out and got some Tofutsies sock yarn, which is 25% soysilk, and I got a very bright, happy pink colourway. The yarn is so soft and the colours are so bright and cheery, and so different from anything I've knit for myself, that I'm finding myself working on these socks almost exclusively, despite project monogamy being the very thing I was trying to avoid.

When I started these socks, I decided to do the ribbing and find out whether the yarn was varigated or self-striping, and then think about whether to do a pattern or leave the socks plain.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that not only was the yarn self-striping, but in a way I had never before encountered. On a background of pale pink, the dark pink stripe is continuously spiralling around the sock! Well, except for where I interrupted the pattern by doing the heel. If I use this yarn again, I'd get a contrasting (or matching) solid yarn for the toe and heel.

I have very little experience in dyeing yarn, but the process fascinates me. I have white sock yarn in my stash and dye in the kitchen cupboards. Sometime this summer, I want to dye my own self-striping sock yarn. But this one-stripe business? I have no idea how it's done. It hurts my head to think about how to dye up yarn that does this. The only think I can think of is that it's a very, very long colour repeat.

I've started the second sock. I thought about trying to make the stripes match up on the second sock, but that made my head hurt, too, so I just cast on and will hope for the best.

Most Boring Knitting Ever

2007-08-02T15:32:00.001-04:00

After finishing the Little Rugged Raglan, I needed a new flat, stockinette-stitch project to work on in the car. I dug through the stash and came across some yarn that I had earmarked for a sweater for my husband, and decided that he is long overdue for something larger than a toque.

I'm making good progress on his sweater considering how infrequently I'm working on it. I finished one sleeve and I'm half-way to the armholes for the back. I'm doing only little bits and pieces in the house because it really is the most boring thing I've knit since making a white, garter-stitch baby blanket a few years back (my friend was expecting a baby, but my own son was only a few months old and I was too sleep-deprived to deal with anything more complicated).

The sweater is, first of all, larger than the ones I make for myself, what with my hubby being six inches taller and much more well-built than me. It's on 3.75mm needles, so there are a lot of stitches. Double, in fact, the last sweater I made for myself. And it's black. And it's a mostly acrylic blend yarn. And the back and sleeves are just miles and miles and miles of plain, uninterrupted stockinette stitch.

The front will have a zipper with big cables running along each side, plus generously-sized pockets, so the sweater won't look overly boring, but I'm not sure it's technically possible to make a less interesting back and sleeves.

Maybe that's why I'm currently working so intently on a pair of socks with bright pink stripes.

Feelin' Way Too Responsible

2007-07-30T08:58:00.000-04:00

This weekend, I did a very grown-up thing and passed up half-price yarn.

I don't need any more yarn, and it was a department store that was having the sale, but I still wanted to go. For my son and husband, I have concluded that acrylic or yarn with a high acrylic content, such as most of the yarn at a department store, is really the way to go. They're just too hard on anything else.

My husband would not completely destroy a wool sweater if it was dressy and he was under strict instructions not to wear it while collecting firewood in the forest, which he did with the second sweater I made him, but fortunately, it was an acrylic sweater and it survived. My husband just thinks that wool is far too itchy, and we agree to disagree on this subject.

The reason that I didn't go to the sale is that it would have meant taking a tired, cranky, temper-tantrum-y little boy out of the house. We had already been to the grocery store that morning and barely made it out with the two things on our shopping list without a major meltdown. Taking him yarn shopping would simply have been too much to ask.

Some days I don't like being a grownup.

Neckline Dilema

2007-07-27T21:19:00.000-04:00

I finished the back of the little blue sweater I'm working on. It really didn't take long once I actually sat down and worked on it, what with there only being six inches to knit. The stitches for the back neck are being held on that lovely, red string. Now I have to decide what to do with the front.

Way-back-when, the original plan for this sweater was to have a zippered placket on the front. I even bought the little zipper. But now I'm thinking that a zipper next to the neck of an active little boy might not be all that comfortable, and would probably result in whining, if not actual injury. So I need to pick something else.

This is going to be a plain enough sweater already, so I was hoping not to do a plain, round ribbed neckband. A buttoned placket might be a softer alternative to the zippered placket, but it just strikes me as a bit...1970's or golf-shirty or something.

Until I went back to my original pattern notes, I had forgotten that I was going to put cargo-style patch pockets on the sleeves. Will these pockets provide enough interest to balance a very boring neckline? Or maybe I should just embrace the plainness and put on a rolled, stockinette neckband.

Whatever I decide, I need to pick a neckline before I knit more than another inch or two. Maybe I'll just work on some socks for a while...

P.S. I finally figured out how to adjust the time stamp on my posts. It was off by several hours. I'm not *actually* posting anything at 7 am. Trust me, I'm completely incapable of any type of verbal communication for a significant length of time when I first wake up in the morning.

New Toy, Old Knitting

2007-07-23T13:35:00.000-04:00

My husband decided that he needed a camera for work purposes, so we figured that the most sensible thing to do was for him to take my old camera and for me to get a shiny, new one! It's a Kodak EasyShare, and it is, for the most part, quite easy. I just had to learn that though the "point" part of "point and shoot" was faster than my old camera, the "shoot" part was slower. I ended up with quite a few pictures of shoes and chairs before figuring that one out.

We took the camera with us to our friend's wedding this past weekend and took nearly a hundred pictures - and the battery still had juice left! This is a nice change from the old camera which only took about a dozen pictures before the battery wheezed and complained.

This past weekend, I finished a hat project which I started sometime last winter. There was a scarf made in this same pattern which I finished and enjoyed, but the matching hat just never seemed to get done.

I'm trying to clean out my knitting basket a bit before starting some new projects, a couple of which are sweaters and take up a lot of space in the basket. So the hat was finally finished!

I'm also picking away at these socks. They're very plain socks in Lana Grossa Stretch Cotton. I've never worked with yarn that stretched before, and am making these socks a little smaller than I normally would in hopes that they'll be snug-fitting and stretchy.

Another abandoned project is being pulled back out of the far back corner of the knitting basket. I started this sweater for my son last...winter? Fall? It was coming out too big and I knew he wouldn't wear it right away, so it got put aside. But it might be just about right this fall, so it's time to get it done, too.

Warning: Not For The Squeamish

2007-07-16T15:18:00.000-04:00

That is, those who may be squeamish about seeing knitting all undone with its innards exposed and such.

I swatched for the Minisweater and found that I had almost double the gauge given in the original pattern. Did I think "Goodness, what a lot of extra knitting time" (which it was)? No, I thought "Good, what a time-saver for my calculations. I'll just double everything!"

I should have written that down somewhere.

A few inches into the knitting, I realized that the original pattern had said to keep the first and last five stitches of each row in garter stitch, which I had. But I'd forgotten to double the number and had an awkward, skinny strip of garter stitch running down the sides of my knitting.

Three choices: rip the whole thing, keep the skinny strip of garter stitch, or drop the stockinette stitches that should have been garter and re-knit them. I chose to drop the stitches.

I wondered for a while how to knit it back up, since garter stitch would require moving the needles to the back-side of the work every other row. Fortunately, I had a pair of very short sock needles. They were quite fiddly to work with, but they did the trick.

The repair is not perfect. In fact, it looks a fairly spectacular mess in the photo. I tidied it up a little since then and I'm hoping that blocking, washing, being behind the collar, and dim lighting will make it less noticeable over time.

The Minisweater was taking forever to finish and when it came time to take it off the needles to try it on when dividing for the armholes, I realized why. That's a lot of stitches. Nearly 500, in fact.

Here it is stretched out over two circular needles. My cat is wondering if I've put the blanket on the floor for just her.

I did manage to finish the Minisweater in time for Saturday night. It was the most knitting I've done in a week's time in ages. I did not end up wearing it out as my plans fell through. I was actually out at a another grown-up event that Saturday, but it was waaaaay to cold to wear this. Instead of a lacy camisole top and a little knit shoulder-cover, I went out in a long-sleeved shirt, sweater and raincoat.

But it's a really nice feeling to think up a project, find the yarn and have an FO in less than a week.

While the knitting is finished, the finishing isn't. It still needs a good blocking, and I still haven't figured out what I want to use as a closure. The fetching sock-needle in the photo is just temporary, I promise (and please pardon the laundry hanging in the background).

Now, if it ever gets to be summer around here, I'm all set!

Little Rugged Raglan

2007-07-10T16:06:00.000-04:00

The "Little Rugged Raglan" is finished! And it finally stopped raining long enough for me to whisk my little boy outside for a quick photo shoot. It was a very quick photo shoot since it's eighty billion degrees out this afternoon, but it was cool enough this morning to dress my little guy in a sweater and hat for a minute or two while we stood in the shade.

I bought 4 balls of yarn for this sweater and had one and a half balls left over after finishing the sweater. I decided to do a matching hat, and that didn't use up as much yarn as I thought it would, so I have started a little scarf. The Bernat Denim-Style is quite generous with the yardage per ball.

I am going to write up the pattern for this sweater since it was so quick and easy and, if I say do so myself, awfully cute. I've actually written up the one I made, and now have to do the calculations to figure out a couple more sizes.

But first I have to make a Minisweater. I have another grown-up party to go to this weekend (that's two in two weekends - I'm on a roll!) and I got a new top, since it seems that all my other tops are mommy-t-shirts and sweaters. I got the top home and decided that it was a little more daring than it looked in the changeroom and that I need something to cover my shoulders a bit. As luck would have it, I have some light-weight yarn in my stash that matches the deep purple colour of the top exactly. I'm a bit worried about finishing the little sweater by Saturday, but here goes!

Once More Into The Woods, Dear Friends

2007-07-05T10:02:00.000-04:00

According to Google, this is a quote ("Once more into the breach, dear friends) from Shakespeare's Henry V as the king rallies his troops for war. I always thought it was some politician in WWII who said it, though it may have been quoted by some such politician at the time.

This quote often pops into my mind whenever I have to do something again that was difficult the first time around. Not that camping is that difficult. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't go. But goodness, there's a lot of preparing and cooking and packing to do beforehand, and a lot of unpacking and cleaning and laundry to do once we get home again.

I am almost finished the unpacking from our most recent trip, but am slowed by the rain. I can't finish the laundry until I can hang things on the line again (I could run the dryer, or I could ignore the laundry a little longer...guess what I chose?).

This weekend, we are staying in town. This Saturday, my husband and I are going to our first grown-ups-only party since before our son was born. Woohoo!

The party is to celebrate the upcoming wedding of an old friend of mine. It occured to me that I'll have to wear something to this wedding, so I went shopping for a dress yesterday. One of the stores I shopped in didn't have any mirrors in the individual changerooms (which bugs me), and I had to go out into the hallway to see how the dress I was trying on looked.

It wasn't quite working for me, being a bit too stiff and wide in the hips, but it wasn't so bad that it justified all the staring from the teen-aged girl next to me. Then I realized that she was staring at my socks. I was standing there in a formal black dress and my hand-knit socks with the purple and yellow stripes, plus the cream-and-black faux fair-isle bits. I thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head. Sometimes, I forget how these things can look to non-knitters.

In knitting news, the little grey sweater was finished in time for my son to wear it this weekend, and I will take pictures as soon as it finishes drying on the indoor laundry rack and I can convince my son to model it for me. The good news is that the sweater survived strawberries, chocolate-covered raisins, juice and ketchup. Only a little got on the sweater, and it all washed out.

Not so the last sweater I made for him. It was a grey, cabled lambswool sweater which was hand-wash only lest it fuzz up and obliterate and the cables. I knew this, and didn't mind hand-washing it, but forgot that little boys get their sweaters dirtier than grown-ups do. The first time he wore it, someone gave him a piece of red chocolate, which he drooled all down the front of the sweater. So it's washable yarns only until he's a bit bigger.

Camping Knitting

2007-06-28T09:38:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, we piled ourselves - and a lot of stuff - into the truck to go camping. It was cold. Really, really cold for camping. According to the weather people, it was supposed to go down to 5C the first night, but we were on a lake with a cold wind, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was less than that. Fortunately, I had packed all my favourite warm, knitted things.

With red on my mind, I packed my red, wool sweater, which I knit from a couple different patterns as well as from the seat of my pants. The sweater's first incarnation had a hood, as one of the patterns I was knitting from was Mariah, but I found that the hood pulled the sweater back too much, so I frogged it and knit a collar instead.

Here we are posing by a little creek, where we pulled over to let our bones stop rattling from driving for an hour on the rough logging roads that lead to the campsite. Note to self: next time, remember to take the family pictures on the first day of camping, as on the second day, the hair is not tidy, and there will be serious bags under my eyes.

A close-up of the red sweater, taken just after I'd finished the new collar (I've tried and tried to get better pictures of this sweater, but it resists me...)

Since I knew there was going to be so much driving time, and that due to motion-sickness issues, I can only knit straight back-and-forth while driving, I started a new project. This is a raglan sweater for my little boy, knit in Bernat Denim Style, a surprisingly soft and light cotton-acrylic blend.

This sweater is going really fast, which it should, since it's a boy's size 4-ish knit on 5mm needles. Since taking this picture, I sewed up the other sleeve and tried the sweater on my son to make sure his head fit through the neckband. If it didn't fit, I was going to have to put buttons down one of the raglans, which would have been cute, but wasn't in the original plan and would have meant some backpeddling. Fortunately, it fit, and the neckband has since been knit.

I was going to do the neckband on dpn's, but found, to my surprise, that I don't have 5mm dpn's in my collection. I did have two 5mm circulars, and remembered that, though I found knitting socks on two circulars a bit fussy, the technique would work just fine for a nice, short collar.

All that's left is to knit a big pocket across the front and darn in the rest of the ends. It should be ready in time to go camping again this weekend!

Must Remember That It's Summer, Now

2007-06-21T14:38:00.000-04:00

It's the first day of summer today (or does it start tomorrow?) and it's warm and sunny. I feel like gardening and being outside. It will not snow again for months and months.

But after seeing this photograph, I just can't stop thinking about knitting up a cozy, red, wool scarf. Not that I have enough red wool in my stash for a scarf. One more reminder that The Knitting Goddess really doesn't like it when people try not to buy yarn.

Respect For The Goddess

2007-06-20T15:00:00.000-04:00

The Knitting Goddess is in a mood these days. Apparently, She does not approve of those who say out loud that they are going to try not to buy yarn for a while. But, being in a kind state of mind, she did not cause any great calamity to befall that which I have been knitting. No, instead she brought before me a much subtler test of my mettle.

I arrived at my Knit Collective montly meeting last night to find that a glorious feast had been set before us. There, at the end of the room were three conference tables piled with many, many balls and hanks of wool - it was real wool, with nary an acrylic to be found - and it was all for sale.

Once I'd managed to pick my jaw up off the floor, where it had dropped, I learned that this was not a completely random act of Goddess. There is a woman in my Knit Collective who does missionary work in an orphanage in Kenya, and one of the things she does is to teach the teenaged girls how to knit and sew, both to clothe themselves and to make garments to sell. She asked for donations of yarn and fabric, but after doing this for a few years, found that the woolen yarn wasn't up to the task of life in Kenya, and that acrylic stood up much better to being washed in the river. So only acrylic will be boarding the plane this year and she wanted to find the wool a better home than the boxes in her basement, and thought of us.

Not only did the Knitting Goddess put temptation in my way in the form of gorgeous yarns, but the money I spent on yarn would go directly to help young, orphaned girls in a third-world country. And then, when I openly admitted defeat and went to look more closely and shop from the bounty She had spread before me, I found...

Another 300 grams of the yarn I bought yesterday in a grey tweed that will complement the brown I already have very nicely. There's also a ball of both forest green and deep brown Lopi, a ball of white wool, and three balls of soft, beautiful green wool that might become a sweater for my little guy, if there's enough.

I passed the test, and I was rewarded.

I will remember that She smiles on those who shop for yarn, and understand that it is part and parcel of being a Knitter. I hope she doesn't mind if I still try to knit from my stash for a while, though. I'm having trouble shutting the closet door again and fear I might get yarn caught in the slider thingies. Surely She will understand.

Green and Brown Knitting

2007-06-19T15:55:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking for a while about "green" knitting. That would be green as in Eco, not the colour, despite how delighted I am with my new green socks.

More and more I've been reading and hearing about ways to reduce the emissions and toxins and such that I have a hand in creating. I'm trying to get greener in other areas of my life, too, by shopping at my end of town and thus driving less, and now that there's something at the farmer's market besides asparagus, I'll be heading there for produce more often ('cause, really, there's no excuse to be buying fruit that's been shipped from Chile at this time of year).

I've also been thinking about the yarn I use. Is it cotton that was grown with pesticides? Was it made in Turkey? Is it acrylic, which is a petroleum product? Was it dyed with nasty chemicals?

Partly, I don't wanna think about this kind of thing, because knitting feels so wholesome and harmless, and it bothers me to think of it otherwise. But I suspect I'll start reading yarn labels beyond fiber content and gauge. I'm not sure how much a yarn's environmental impact will colour my shopping choices yet, but I'll be paying more attention, certainly.

It occured to me recently (because some days I'm quicker than others) that there is a way to get yarn that has exactly zero environmental impact and is completely free: knit the yarn I already have. So my goal this summer, for reasons of ecology, closet space, and guilt-inducing UFO rays, that this summer, I will knit from my stash as much as possible, and I will especially try to finish some of the UFO's. Cause, really, a sweater that's already half-knit is a lot faster to finish than a brand-new project.

So, starting tomorrow, I'll do my best not to buy yarn and not to start any new projects. Why start tomorrow? Because look what I found at my local second-hand store today...

That would be 300g of bulky-weight, chocolate-brown tweed 100% wool yarn (and one ball of white Lopi). The brown yarn is called "Kamouraska Yarns Tweed" from "Les Textiles du grand moulin." It is, according to the label, made in Canada. A Google search yielded exactly zero results for this yarn, so I think it's safe to say that this yarn is officially discontinued.

I am now puzzling over what to make with 300g of bulky yarn. It won't be a sweater, since there's just not enough yarn. Maybe a vest? It could be the matching hat-and-scarf set I've been wanting for ages, but I don't know how much I'll want to wear dark brown in the winter. And any hat knit at 11 stitches to the 4 inches can't be all that graceful to wear. Wrap? Shawl? Doesn't look like quite enough for that, either. Do I need a very sturdy felted bag? Hmm... This may be why the original knitter decided to part ways with this yarn.

Pink No More!

2007-06-15T22:06:00.000-04:00

The pink background has been steadily getting to me lately. Nothing I knit seems to co-ordinate with the pink background ;)

White will do nicely for the time being.

New Socks!

2007-06-15T09:37:00.000-04:00

Despite a brief scare that the digital camera had, in fact, taken a long walk off a short pier, the thing co-operated long enough to take some sock pictures, but they had to be taken indoors as I was afraid to go too far from the charger, which for some reason keeps the camera working by mere proximity.

The green socks are lovely. They are made from Super Soxx yarn in colour 630.0044. This yarn has one of those funny sock labels that lists how much yarn you need to make, say, a men's sweater. This must be one of those things left-over from when knitting a sweater at 36 stitches to 4 inches seemed like a reasonable thing to do, and sock yarn only came in one colour. A solid-colour sweater knit from sock-weight yarn would be an epic project, to say the least, but would result in a wearable garment. But self-striping yarn? Goodness. The mind reels at the teeny-tiny stripes going round and round such a sweater.

The cotton-and-wool socks are finally finished. Unfortunately, they didn't turn out as well as the green socks. The trouble is that, despite having the same number of stitches as the last pair of socks I knit from the cottong, they are too narrow. It might have been O.K. if I hadn't done the fair-isle bit around the leg, but that makes the socks so un-stretchy at that point that they are very difficult to get on.

So the question is: what to do with them now? I have choices.

1. Leave 'em exactly the way they are and just know that it will take a few minutes minutes of tugging to get them on. This means running the risk that, first thing in the morning, I will always choose socks that are easier to get on just so I can get to my tea a few minutes faster.

2. Rip back to the heel, increase a few stitches and re-knit the leg, leaving out the fair isle (or possibly duplicate-stitching it on later)

3. Rip back the entire sock because the feet are borderline for being too narrow as well.

4. Put them in the knitting basket with plans for #2 or #3, but keep getting distracted by other projects and never get to it.

Hmmmm....

Sad Hat Update

2007-06-12T21:36:00.000-04:00

The hat that I knit for my very sick uncle was dropped off about a week ago, with thanks. On the weekend, I was, to my surprise, invited to visit, so off I went, taking along my brother, who had come to town just to visit our uncle.

While we were there, my uncle told me that he though the hat looked machine-made, which was, I believe, a compliment. He showed me how he wears the hat, without the brim folded up, and joked that it made him look like a gnome, and told me that he wears it at night when it cools down. This says something about just how sick he is that he's wearing a wool hat at night in what most people would consider to be air-conditioning weather.

It was a very difficult trip to make, but I'm awfully glad I went. It's the first time I've seen this relative since I became a mother and I think we've both changed in the time that passed. He was far chattier than I remember, and I think I've become more tolerant and harder to ruffle. Being less grossed out by bodily fluids didn't hurt, either.

In current knitting events, the good news is that I think my digital camera has come back from the great electronic beyond. It just took a few days to sulk because I was thinking of replacing it, I believe. The bad news is that there are still no pictures of the finished green socks because they're in the wash.

Yes, I wear wool socks up until it hits at least 20 C, but wasn't going to let a warm, sunny day stop me from trying out my new socks! It was 32 C today, plus the humidex, and I went barefoot all day for the first time this summer. I also wore a skirt in public for the first time since I was a bridesmaid almost four years ago. I've decided that even though skirts feel somewhat indecent, at least compared to my beloved jeans, that if you buy them long, they actually cover more skin than shorts. This not only protects my chicken legs from the sun and the viewing public, but also saves precious leg-shaving time in the shower.

A beef or two

2007-06-04T11:19:00.000-04:00

My digital camera may just have gone belly-up right when I almost have an FO to show. Nothing too exciting, but finished is finished...or will be today, hopefully.

I am mere rows away from finishing a pair of socks with little to distinguish them from other pairs of socks except for an unexpectedly charming green self-striping colourway. I was going to take a picture when they were finished, thinking that really, they would be done any time now. "Just a few rows until the ribbing. I'll finish these today," I thought. The next day, I though "just the ribbing to do. I'll finish these today." Then "just half the ribbing to do..." and so on. They just don't seem to be getting finished.

There's a mathematical term for this. Someone-er-other's paradox. (Google says: Zeno's Dichotomy Paradox). If you have a set distance to cross, you must first cross half of it, then half of that, then half of that, and you'll never actually get there. I think Zeno must have been a knitter. Working on something really big on really small needles.

So instead of a picture of socks, I have a picture that I found in a magazine* recently. I can't quite decide what to make of this picture.

"From yarn to ground beef, GLAD press'n Seal Wrap has a custom form-fitting seal you can use for more than food."

My first reaction was excitement that yarn be featured in any sort of ad. Then I realized that they were trying to make yarn look like ground beef. This feels very strange for me. It goes without saying, I hope, that yarn is one of my favourite things. Ground beef, however, is on the list of my least favourite things, what with being a vegetarian for a dozen years now. I do still buy meat for my husband, but ground beef is just so...well. I'll save the adjectives lest I offend any meat-eating readers, but I don't like handling ground beef, even in its little sealed packages.

Making yarn look like meat then lead me to wonder what the fiber content of the yarn is. Synthetic? Real wool? It seems to run thick-and-thin a bit and is not spun too tightly, though this may be the photo people unravelling the yarn a bit to make it look beefier. I'd like to think that it's real wool, though I am a bit conflicted about announcing both my vegetarianism and my preference for wool fibers in the same post. I'd like to think that sheep are treated reasonably well and that if they weren't being used for wool production, they wouldn't be bred in such numbers at all. I really should look into how wool sheep are treated, though.

I'd like to imagine that this was really nice yarn. The photo set-up people handled and twisted and arranged this yarn, this lovely, soft, warm, wonderful yarn, and were so absolutely enchanted by it that they couldn't help but take some of the extra skeins home and were finally compelled to learn to knit just for an excuse to keep handling the yarn. That would totally make up for them turning yarn into beef.

*My inner science student insists that I quote my sources properly: Harrowsmith Country Life, April 2006, p. 31

Sad Hat

2007-05-28T14:51:00.001-04:00

All knitting projects have been temporarily abandoned in favour of a sudden, new project. I’d like to say that it’s some fantastic new pattern or yarn that I just couldn’t resist, but it is a simple pattern that I have done ad nauseum. It is a knit of necessity.

A close relative of mine, who I haven’t seen in years and, if I am completely honest, who scares me a little, is in the hospital in serious condition. The hospital is only a few blocks from my house and I could, if I was invited, work up the nerve to go. But this relative is very, very shy when he’s feeling his best, and I don’t think he’d like for me to see him in his present condition.

I still wanted to do something, though. I thought about flowers, and still might send some as well, but the idea of knitting a toque seemed much more appropriate. This man, last I heard, wears toques year-round. He simply doubles up in the winter. And I am a knitter, and my first response to emotional crisis is to knit. So I have started a black, ribbed toque in a sport-weight yarn that will be light enough to wear indoors.

Family is an amazing thing. I’d like to think that I am a compassionate, open-minded person, but I think that, if we were not related, this man and I would not otherwise have any connection, and that makes me sad. Sad that someone could live so much of his life in comparative solitude. Sad for the injustices that may have had a hand in leading to the present situation. Sad that he’s going to have to give up the home that he and the rest of the family worked so hard to get for him. A little bit sad that I’ll be losing a special way of being involved with my husband and his family – my relative lives out in the middle of nowhere, and a few years before we met, my husband was his closest neighbour. Many of my husband’s family still live in the area and have helped and been a real community over the years.

So I knit and feel sad and think about family, how the sharing of genes and histories and people we love in common creates such an amazing bond between people who otherwise might have very to do with each-other. I think about what it means to have people in my family who live off the beaten path, both literally and figuratively, how it has taught me about compassion and the dignity that every person, regardless of their circumstances, has a right to.

There isn’t much that I can do to change, or even improve, the current situation. So I do what I can. I knit a warm, new hat and hope that it provides a little warmth and caring at a sad time.

Like We Needed Another Reason To Watch Degrassi

2007-05-22T09:00:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, I watched Degrassi Jr High and Degrassi High, feeling very cool because the kids in the show were way older than me. Like, two or three years older. Eons, really. But I watched it anyways. It felt like I was passing myself off as older than I really was.

So, like many adult women who still remember the lyrics to The Zit Remedy's one-hit-wonder ("Everybody wants something, they'll take your moneeey"), I was intrigued by the "Degrassi the Next Generation" show when it came out. I only saw a couple of episodes here and there (but I got to see the one guest-starring Jay and Silent Bob) and I can't really follow the plot of current episodes, what with having missed 95% of the back-story. But this weekend, when the show came on tv, I watched it. The episode was a rerun, the first episode of season six, according to the internet. Apologies to anyone who saw and wrote about this episode way back when it first aired, but I'm a little behind.

The episode was about illegal street racing. Emma, the heroine, is there in her leggy, blonde, 18-year-old in a sundress glory, talking to a cute, muscle-bound guy, when she pulls out her knitting!

The plot thickens.

It's her latest obsession, she announces, fiddling with yarn and needles, which appear to hold a small, blue swatch, but not actually performing any knitting. Disappointing, there.

But the next day, once more at the meeting of the motor-heads, she pulls out her knitting again:

(from the transcript)
At the races, Emma walks over to Sean and hands him a bottle of water
Emma: It's thank you water for being nice to Peter.
Sean: Yeah he's alright.
(Emma pulls out her knitting needles)
Sean: That chills you out, huh?
(Emma nods)
Sean: 'Cause I talked to Manny and uh...did something happen last year?
Emma: I had some issues, body issues.
Sean: You mean, like-?
Emma: You can say it. Anorexia, but I'm better now. I mean I'm working on it. It's day by day, but this (holds up her knitting) helps and if you're nice I'll knit you a sock, but just one.

Wow! The star of a major teen drama just announced that knitting is helping her deal with body image issues and stress!

Score one for the knitters. Now, if only she'd knit something more interesting than a swatch, we could really land some young knitters.

Sleepyhead

2007-05-18T09:20:00.000-04:00

This morning, I wandered into the kitchen, thinking that I was awfully hungry considering that it was not very long since breakfast. There, on the kitchen counter, I found the (cold) breakfast that I had made, but forgotten to eat.

Perhaps decaf in the morning isn't such a good idea, after all.

O.K., I'll Bite

2007-05-15T08:21:00.000-04:00

There's this meme...

(bold - done, italics - want to do, plain - not in the plans)

Afghan - I started one ages ago. Two of them, in fact. Both are still unfinished. Afghans are big!
I-cord
Garter stitch
Knitting with metal wire
Shawl
Stockinette stitch
Socks: top-down
Socks: toe-up - my favourite way of doing socks
Knitting with camel yarn
Mittens: Cuff-up
Mittens: Tip-down - I've never seen this done. Sounds interesting.
Hat
Knitting with silk - so far just a swatch in a silk-blend
Moebius band knitting - I tend to rip out knitting with the moebius look and can't bring myself to do it on purpose.
Participating in a KAL
Sweater
Drop stitch patterns
Knitting with recycled/secondhand yarn
Slip stitch patterns
Knitting with banana fiber yarn - I've never seen this, either, but I'm intrigued.
Domino knitting (=modular knitting)
Twisted stitch patterns - see, the first time I tried knitting in the round, every stitch was a twisted stitch. But I've done some arans with twisted stitches since then, too.
Knitting with bamboo yarn
Two end knitting
Charity knitting
Knitting with soy yarn
Cardigan (zippy hoodie) - with or without the hood, my favourite kind of sweater to wear
Toy/doll clothing - My son and I made a Fisherman Bear for him, and then Fisherman Bear got a sweater.
Knitting with circular needles - another favourite
Baby items - blankets, sweaters, hats, booties
Knitting with your own handspun yarn - I have a teeny-tiny hank of handspun that I made on "spinning demo" night at my local knit collective, which I have yet to figure out what to do with.
Slippers
Graffiti knitting ?
Continental knitting - I have tried it, and see how it could be useful, but it's not one of my regular knitting tricks.
Designing knitted garments
Cable stitch patterns (incl. Aran)
Lace patterns
Publishing a knitting book
Scarf
Teaching a child to knit
American/English knitting
Knitting to make money - I don't know if I made any money or just broke even, but I've been paid for knitting.
Buttonholes
Knitting with alpaca
Fair Isle knitting
Norwegian knitting
Dying with plant colors
Knitting items for a wedding - oh, wait, I did finish an afghan! It was a wedding gift.
Household items (dishcloths, washcloths, tea cosies…) - you'd think that with the amount of tea I drink and the amount of knitting I do that I would have at least one tea cosy by now.
Knitting socks (or other small tubular items) on one or two circulars - I found this to be fussier than dpn's
Knitting with someone else’s handspun yarn
Knitting with dpns
Holiday related knitting - I have since figured out that knitting for birthdays instead of holidays is much less stressful
Teaching a male how to knit - I keep offering, but so far no-one's taken me seriously
Bobbles
Knitting for a living
Knitting with cotton
Knitting smocking - if only I or one of my friends or relatives had a baby girl...
Dying yarn - I'd like to try doing some of this over the summer with really long repeats
Steeks
Knitting art
Knitting two socks on two circulars simultaneously
Fulling/felting
Knitting with wool
Textured knitting
Kitchener stitch
Purses/bags - I don't seem to be using any of the bags I've made except for storage so far, but I have a felted bag in the UFO pile in summery colours that I'd like to resurrect soon.
Knitting with beads
Swatching
Long Tail CO
Entrelac
Knitting and purling backwards
Machine knitting - sometimes I think it would be nice to have a knitting machine for, like, a month, finish off all the UFO's (if that can be done by machine) and use up all the yarn in the closet that has been designated for a particular project, but never seems to get done.
Knitting with self patterning/self striping/variegated yarn
Stuffed toys
Baby items
Knitting with cashmere
Darning
Jewelry
Knitting with synthetic yarn
Writing a pattern
Gloves - I've done some flippy mitts, but never gloves.
Intarsia - I made father and son scull-and-crossbones hats...big hits!
Knitting with linen - there's some recycled linen in my closet that I've yet to decide what to do with. It's a summer weight and fibre in a wintery deep burgundy.
Knitting for preemies - I almost italicised this one, but I hope no-one I know has any preemies
Tubular CO
Freeform knitting
Short rows
Cuffs/fingerless mitts/armwarmers
Pillows
Knitting a pattern from an online knitting magazine
Rug - I crocheted a little throw rug once to use up some acrylic yarn bits. It was very repetitive and took forever.
Knitting on a loom
Thrummed knitting - I wanted some thrummed mitts for this winter, but never started them. Maybe next winter.
Knitting a gift
Knitting for pets - my cats have a fine selection of knitted toys.
Shrug/bolero/poncho - I made a poncho during the fad, tried it on once, and never wore it. Sigh.
Knitting with dog/cat hair
Hair accessories
Knitting in public - I gotta work on this one

To Boldly Go Where No-One Has Gone...In A Long Time

2007-05-09T09:57:00.000-04:00

I got a new front door, so I had to clean out my knitting bag.

Hang on, this connects.

We live in a very old house, and the front door was, I believe, original to the house, and was non-functioning. Or rather, it functioned only a very little - I could open the inside door and retrieve our mail which was deposited into our old-fashioned mail slot. The knitting bag, as well as a knitting basket, used to live by my non-functioning front door, the bag hanging from the knob and the basket sitting in the corner. But this past weekend, my husband installed a new front door, which, get this...opens!

A working front door is a wonderful thing. It means I can now brush off the fundraisers and religion peddlers face-to-face rather than shouting my lack of interest through the glass (there are some worthy charities that come door-to-door, but even if I normally donate to them, I don't give them money in person on the principal that it just encourages more people to come knocking). But a working front door means cleaning out the whole area in front of the door.

This morning, I cleaned out both my knitting bag and basket, since they were both so full that my current WIP doesn't fit into either. I went right to the bottom of the knitting bag, which I haven't done since at least as far back as Hallowe'en, since I found candy from said holiday at the bottom of the bag. I also found:

-the safety instructions for my hairdryer
-beads (I have no memory of every making a beaded project)
-notes for finished sweaters
-Disney's "Reading Quest with Aladdin" CD (very attractive but far too slow-moving for my son)
-a sock to be repaired
-4 sizes of loose dpn's
-fishing line
-Christmas Candy (in addition to the Hallowe'en candy)
-a floppy disk (no idea what's on it)
-8 WIP's
-corks - I wanted to make some Korknisser
-countless, countless yarn labels and small balls of yarn

I am now, of course, highly tempted by those unfinished projects, most of which are small, since the large UFO's are stored in the closet. But I would really like to finish my cotton/wool socks or my lacy cardi, plus some design submissions, which I haven't forgotten about but don't seem to be making progress on currently.

But now the knitting bag and basket contain a reasonable amount of projects and no longer bulge obscenely. The bag is once again hanging from the front door, but it is now light enough and no longer spilling over the sides, meaning it can be moved without risk of catastrophe.

Wool-Cotton Blend

2007-05-07T08:41:00.000-04:00

What do you get when you cross this sock (based on the Welsh Country Socks from Nancy Bush's "Folk Socks" book, knit in Scheepjies Invicta Extra)...

With this sock (a plain sock knit in a recycled cotton blend)?

You get this sock! And yes it is sock-singular right now. I seem to be suffering from a wee bit of second-sock syndrome on this pair, which is strange, because this was a quick sock to knit.

I used two strands held together of Scheepjies in dark brown (left-over from the Big Brown Socks) for the toes, heels and long cuffs, and one strand of the cotton and knit on 2.75 mm needles. My knitting notebook says that the plain cotton socks were only 44 stitches, and they fit quite well, so I used that as a guideline. But the sock is a bit smaller than the original and I think I should have gone up a needle size. My notes say that I swatched with 2.75 and 3.0 mm needles, but I neglected to include the rather important detail of which ones I actually used. I'm hoping that the sock will loosen just a little when it's washed.

I'm wearing a pair of...pardon me...store-bought socks today, and I'm noticing that they don't fit so well, either. They're baggy in the toe and have uncomfortable seams. I'm thinking that perhaps I'm fussier about the fit of my socks ever since I knit a few pairs that were just right.

I've noticed the same thing with my clothes, too. I'm finding myself shopping more and buying less. It takes a lot of trying on to find something just right. I'm not willing to buy something almost-right anymore.

Jeans, which were always a challenge to find, are now an epic quest. Last time I bought jeans, I think I tried on almost 20 pairs before finding some that fit at the waist and rear-end and leg and were the right length. Which is fine, because I like shopping and I like jeans. In fact, it takes a significant occasion to pry me out of my nice, comfy jeans and into, say, a slightly dressy pair of cords.

But I like wearing clothes that fit the way I want them to fit. I think that's one of the things that drew me to knitting in the first place. Or maybe I've just watched too many episodes of What Not To Wear.

New Socks!

2007-04-30T15:04:00.000-04:00

I finished my knee-socks! Finishing off the two cuffs was one of those jobs that's much more trouble to think about than to actually do.

I'm really happy with the fit, except that the foot is just a teeeeny bit too long, as usual. You'd think that eventually I'd figure out that if my socks keep turning out a bit long, then maybe I shouldn't use the last pair of socks to figure out how long to make the next pair of socks. Well, maybe next time I'll get it.

The Specs:

Lana Grossa Meilenweit Bosco; 56-stitch socks on 2.5mm needles

The pattern: generic toe-up socks with 2x2 rib along the back of the legs, increasing 6 stitches along the back when I began the ribbing, then increasing 4 more stitches (in stockinette) for calf shaping. I kept going until, according to my little digital scale*, I had used up nearly half the ball, then started the cuff.

I also worked some eyelets into the cuff and wove some I-cord through it. There was a pair of Entrelac socks in the Spring '07 issue of IK which looked like a lot of trouble, but I really liked the drawstring around the top. If I had undone my I-cord (which I made after I finished the first sock) I would have actually had enough yarn to finish that second sock and avoided that whole ripping back/yarn moving business, but I really liked the drawstrings!

When I went out in the back yard to take pictures of these socks, I found this daffodil blooming in my garden! There are many shredded blossoms and buds nearby. Some local creatures have been busy out there.

Is it just me, or does this guy have an awfully guilty look on his little face?

* I have decided that for the sake of the safety and dignity of myself and others, I will not post the story of how I got that scale, but suffice to say, I didn't pay retail!

Slow Motion

2007-04-28T12:39:00.000-04:00

Everything is progressing very slowly around here. I am still sick, and recovering slowly. I feel not too bad, but my energy just refuses to return. I am on more antibiotics, the name of which I read over and over trying to remember it, but it refuses to stick in my brain. It starts with 'c' and ends with 'ine'...I think.

Knitting is moving slowly, too. I have a pair of toe-up knee-socks that were finished but for one cuff, and then I ran out of yarn before I ran out of cuff. Darnit. So that meant undoing part of the other cuff, ripping back a few rows, moving the yarn over to the other sock and finishing both cuffs to the same length. But ripping back ribbing, in sock-weight yarn, is fussy, fiddly, eye-straining micro-surgery. I actually considered ripping out the entire cuff just to save myself trying to get the ribbing back on the needles. But fussy as it is, getting ribbing onto the needles again is faster than re-knitting two cuffs. And ribbing is, I think, one of my least favourite things to knit. If it wasn't so darned useful, and occasionally even attractive, I'd never do it.

So, I took a deep breath, got out the socks, put them back for a while, got them out, then put them back again. Finally, there was a moment when my head wasn't foggy, my son was quiet, and I had my nerve up, and I took my tiniest, pointiest sock needles to hand and ripped back. Both socks. Oh, and before I could rip back the finished sock, I had to un-do the sewn bind-off, which is stretchy, pretty, and a major pain to undo.

All this trouble for what has to be less than two grams of sock yarn.

These socks better turn out to be favourites after all this!

Magic

2007-04-24T07:49:00.000-04:00

Something has been bothering me since that last post with the Superman picture. It's that cape. I can imagine how the suit would stretch as little Clark grew, since his expanding body would put pressure on the suit. But there's nothing to make the cape grow larger, except for far-fetched ideas like the wind pulling at it or some kind of kinetic association between the yarn of the cape and the suit, or just plain cartoon magic.

Then it came to me.

Here on Earth, we may not have the technology to make yarn like Superman's, but Ma Kent surely knew the magic of blocking.

Ma Kent

2007-04-23T10:22:00.000-04:00

If I could get my hands on some of this yarn that stretched and never wore out, I'd knit much more intricate things for my son, too!

Spring

2007-04-19T13:34:00.000-04:00

During the fall before last, I planted a gazillion-and-one crocuses all through the front and back lawns. Since then, the squirrels dug up and ate a gazillion of the bulbs, leaving...one. This one crocus is all that has survived, but last spring it bloomed fearlessly in the middle of the front lawn, and just today I found it again.

Finally. Spring has arrived! Mostly. I think. I'm going to give it a few more warm days before I go and wash all our hats and scarves and put them away.

Biaxin Blues

2007-04-17T12:27:00.000-04:00

That cold I mentioned a while back? Took a turn for the worse. Meaning chest x-rays, nasty antibiotics, the whole bit. I'm takin Biaxin, which is knocking the stuffing out of me almost as much as the lung infection did. And my least favourite part is that one of the side effects is that the medicine makes a nasty taste in my mouth all day long, like I've been licking pennies or something. I've been rinsing regularly with Listerine because it tastes better. Bleh.

For a while there, I wasn't knitting on anything because I was too tired to bother. But I'm at the point now where I'm starting to feel better, but shouldn't push myself too hard, which means... lots of time on the couch and knitting is happening again. I finished the second sleeve for my red cardigan.

And I started on the back. I'm almost at the narrowest part of the waist, and a few inches from the stockinette-stitch part, which will go faster.

I keep getting the urge to cast-on a plain, worsted-weight type sweater since this red cardi is not going to be wearable in the weather we're having these days. It's been snowing on and off for almost two weeks now. Siiiiiiiiigh. But I maintain my hope that someday, eventually, it will be spring. Maybe spring is waiting for me to finish this sweater. Yikes! Better get cracking...

Whoops Times Two

2007-04-09T12:45:00.000-04:00

I'm starting to feel like my last post was a bit of a mistake (whoops #1). Not my decision to try and write up some patterns, I'm still OK with that. But writing down, in detail, all the steps required kind of made me a bit woozy. It's a lot to take in when it's all written down like that. I was all ready to start my swatch when I chickened out and started swatching with a similar-weight acrylic from my stash. No commitment this way, and much less frightening.

Why, you might be asking, if I'm complaining so much about how nervous the design process makes me, am I bothering? Well, because if I never did anything that scared me, I'd never do anything. I am also, of course, more nervous about new undertakings when I'm sick and my energy is low. Easter Weekend entailed some travelling which took the wind out of my sails. I'm highly tempted to just work on my boring, I've done very similar patterns before, I know it will work out, plain sock.

Oh, I did finish my brother's Big Brown socks, and sent them off with my mother to take to him today, and just now realized that I forgot to take a picture of the finished pair (whoops #2). Darnit! You'll just have to take my word for it that I finished them and that there are two and that I did not just keep taking pictures of the same sock.

I keep forgetting to photograph gift knits. I have knit so much stuff that I've (happily) given away but forgot to make any kind of notes or take pictures. I have vague memories of the projects, but nothing to work from should I want to make something similar in the future. Maybe I should stick a little note on top of my wrapping paper saying something like "Have you photographed this yet?"

Going for Broke

2007-04-05T14:36:00.000-04:00

I have decided to submit a few designs to some knitting magazines in hopes of getting one of them published. Part of me thinks I’m not nearly talented/experienced enough to bother with this, but the other part says, it’s worth a try. Fortune favours the bold, and all that.

Take my last post, for example, when I found almost exactly the colourful, chunky wool I wanted the day (or two?) before. I’m not normally a new-age, mystical person, but I worked through The Artist’s Way last fall because I thought I wanted to write. By the end I figured out that what I really wanted to do was knit. Since then, I’ve noticed more and more that by saying out loud (or in writing) what I want and then being open to unexpected ways of getting it, that I’m actually getting some of the things I ask for. It isn’t a magic genie. Obviously, if I want yarn, but I don’t go shopping, I’m not getting yarn. But there’s something important about letting the universe know what you want. Sounds weird? Try it. Write down ten (reasonable) things you want and, in a month, see how many you’ve got. What have you got to lose? A scrap of paper and a little ink?

But this pattern writing kick of mine means that for the next little while, I’ll be knitting things that I don’t think I can show you. But, I can tell you how I’m going about it.

Here’s the challenge I’m putting up for myself: Ten submissions with $100.

I want to make ten submissions this spring/summer. I don’t know yet if it will be ten designs to one magazine or one design sent to ten magazines (or likely something in-between), but ten is the goal. I’ve also given myself a budget of $100 for yarn, envelopes, postage, SASE’s, etc. I don’t know yet how much postage will cost to send a big envelope to the States yet, and I’m a bit worried about whether the budget will be entirely eaten up with stamps.

For each submission, I need to include a swatch, schematics, an artistic sketch, written description of the garment, and a little bit about my goals and previous experience. With each submission, I also have to include a Self-Addressed Stamped Envelope (SASE) so they can return what they won’t be using.

Here’s the steps involved in getting the submission together:

1. Get a rough idea of the garment I want to design. This is one I’ve had brewing in my head for a while now, so this step wasn’t too scary.

2. Buy yarn. Step two is easy. Ish. Yarn shops? Not scary. Choosing the yarn to use for my first submission was, as with all decisions I make, a bit slow, but fun. Especially since my LYS is expanding and there’s new yarn every time I’m there.

3. Get organized. For me, this meant finding a binder, as well as a notebook and a pencil-case that have the three-holes in them so they can be snapped into said binder. I don’t have a space were I can leave things spread around…and have them still be there, unscathed, when I return, so all my notes and papers and things need to be kept all together where I can get them out and put them away quickly.

4. Start swatching. The first swatch is also not scary. It’s plain stockinette to see if I’ve got the right needle size to get the gauge suggested on the ball band.

5. Block the swatch. Check. It’s drying on the kitchen table right now.

6. Survey the market. This translates into pulling out an issue or two of every magazine on my shelf and then going to their websites to see if they have a tip sheet, and more importantly, a deadline for the next issue. I found tip sheets for Interweave Knits, Vogue Knitting, Knitter’s and Knit.1 on the web, as well as this very helpful article about how to put together your first submission. I could not find tip sheets for Knit ‘n Style, Knit Simple, Knit it! or Family Circle Easy Knitting (I think FCEK might have gone under – their web-site has been completely deleted). Of course, I can always write to these magazines and ask if they are accepting submissions and if they have a tip sheet available. I was tempted to run off to the book store and see what other knitting magazines there are out there, but thought of my budget, and decided that buying extra magazines can wait until farther along in the process.

7. Decide which magazine to submit to first. Ummmm…I’m still working on that one a bit, but I have it narrowed down to two: Knitter’s and Interweave Knits. Knitter’s has a deadline coming up soon, and they also have a good description of what they’re looking to see for their next issue and my design sounds like it’s a good fit. IK has a deadline about a month later, so if Knitter’s rejects my submission quickly, I can submit to IK, which is my Holy Grail. Well, VK might be Holier, but I get the feeling that until and unless I get a few publishing credits under my belt, I don’t have much of a chance with them!

8. Draw up the schematics. I’m almost finished the rough draft. Next, I have to figure out how to make it all neat and professional-looking.

9. Knit up a swatch. I’ll start this when my stockinette swatch is dry and I can make some calculations. This, for me, is the nitty-gritty of the submission. I’m a bit nervous about this swatch.

10. Draw a lovely, artistic sketch. I may have to recruit some help for this one. I can’t draw. I can now, after a few years’ practice, draw a reasonable schematic, but something with colour and texture, and maybe even – gasp – a person in side the sweater? Not a chance. Fortunately, I have a few people I can go to for help with this one.

11. Write up a description of the garment. Writing about knitting? I can do that. In fact, I like writing about knitting so much that I started a blog.

12. Write up something about me. I’m more nervous about this one. How do I describe my limited design experience? Ummm…this line of thinking is making me anxious. On to something else, please.

13. Put everything together. Put my name and info on every page, cajole my printer into printing everything square on the page, cross my t’s and dot my i’s etc.

14. Take the whole works to the post office. Figure out how to do an international SASE. Hope that I don’t blow the entire budget on one submission and curse myself later for not putting more designs into one envelope.

15. Bite my nails until I receive a reply.

Repeat nine times more. (Phew! What am I getting myself into?! Don't panic...one step at a time...b-r-e-a-t-h-e...)

So what is it that I’ve actually gotten finished? Well, lots of prep work, but not much (OK, nothing) that will actually go into The Envelope. But the laundry is done, the Big Brown Sock is blocking happily next to my swatch, and my Mom’s taking my son out for a couple of hours this afternoon and I’m going to try and get going!

Ask And You Shall Recieve

2007-04-04T15:27:00.000-04:00

What's this new yarn? Why, yes, it is five shades of Lopi (or something very similar). Why yes, it is enough to make a colourful, chunky/bulky weight toque. A couple of them, in fact. And best of all, it was only two bucks at my local thrift shop. It was a dollar a bag for yarn and this was stashed amongst two bags.

This lovely Lopi came with an equal amount of uninspiring pink and white acrylic which I will donate right back again, since my yarn storage capacity is...well.

I have a closet with sliding doors, one half for clothes, the other half for yarn and linens (sheets, not linen yarn). And the yarn half, which is the larger half of that side of the closet, is bulging to the point that I'm having trouble shutting the closet doors. I'm afraid there's no room for bubble-gum pink acrylic that's so stiff, I had to check twice to see if it was that stuff they weave lawn chairs out of. But pretty, blue Lopi? I'll make room. Maybe I don't need all those spare pillowcases. Plus, I'm already packing up a bag to donate to the thrift shop!

Oh, oh! And I'm almost, almost finished those brown socks. All I have left is to graft the toe of the last sock. I was half-way through grafting when I was interrupted by someone who shall remain nameless *cough-myonlychild-cough*. When I started again, I found the number of stitches on the top and bottom needles were no longer equal. Meaning I have to un-graft (bleh) a ways back and try again. But then I'm done!

The home stretch

2007-04-03T09:02:00.000-04:00

The second big brown sock is coming along. I'm almost at the end of the ball of yarn, and then I'll be almost at the toe, and then I'll be almost finished!

I have been using four 2.25 mm needles and one 2.0 mm needle. I decided to go down a needle size for my odd-stick-out. It seemed...safer, somehow. Here is a picture of the foot of the first sock, on all the same size needles:

Here is the one on two different sizes:

I keep hearing a line from an old commercial for laundry soap or something where two kids ask each other: "Can you see the difference? I can't see the difference."

I'm seriously craving something else to work on. Something a little more colourful. It has been grey and blah outside and inside for the last few days (I have another stinkin' cold) and brown? Not the most cheerful colour. I'm also craving a quick-fix project. Something I can pick out and start and finish in a day or two. A nice, bulky-weight toque or something. I wonder if my husband would mind a nice, variegated toque in shades of pink and blue and purple?

And then there were four...

2007-03-29T10:56:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I was knitting away at the toe of the Big Brown Sock and playing “Hardware Store” (spread out all the little plastic tools, the cash-register, and army guys for currency) with my three-year old son on the kitchen floor. I was at the part of the toe where I switch from working the sock stitches over four needles to just three. It’s too easy to get disoriented and put my decreases in the wrong space when all the stitches are evenly divided on four needles. So I put half the stitches on one needle, then I took the extra needle and put it down…somewhere.

When the game was over, I got up to start dinner. While I was peeling potatoes, my son asked if it was ok if he started a pretend campfire. He showed me a sliver of wood that came off the little wooden crate that used to hold tangerines and has now been promoted to bunker/doll bed/table/etc. My Spider senses should have started tingling about now, but no.

After dinner was cooking, I walked through the kitchen and took a closer look at the campfire. It was made from the old newspaper I provided and not a piece of orange crate but…two halves of one wooden sock needle.

Darnit.

And I have no-one to blame but myself. I’m pretty sure I left the sock needle in the immediate vicinity of his toy hammer. From the perspective of a small boy, there really weren’t any other options but to snap the firewood.

On the plus side, I was thinking about getting a nice, short, wooden cable needle. If I can sand one end reasonably smooth, I'll have not one, but two new cable needles.

So for the next sock, I can do the leg on three needles (in fact, I did the last sock leg on three needles), but for the heel, I’m going to have to either use a metal needle a size smaller or a wooden needle a size larger to make up the fourth needle (I already spend too much on yarn and needles and can’t justify buying another set of these for the sake of one needle just yet – maybe if I use these again for another sock). Elizabeth Zimmerman swears in one of her books that it doesn’t actually matter if one of your dpn’s is a different size than the others. I might just try it.

I finished the first sock yesterday and the leg of the next is going to be started today. I already worked the cuff of the second sock while I was dithering about what to do on the leg of the first. I counted up the days I have to finish this project and divided up the sock and, so far, I’m on schedule. I have a sock schedule. I’m such a knitting geek.

A Foot

2007-03-28T15:52:00.000-04:00

So much brown, so many stitches...

The Big Sock is getting a wee bit boring and I still have another one to do. It was almost a year ago that I last made a pair of socks this big, for my other Brother of the Big Feet. I'm the oldest of the three of us and both my brothers stand nearly an entire foot taller than me. Speaking of which, I forgot since the last pair of big socks that it is going to have to be nearly an actual, imperial, twelve-inch foot of a foot. Yeesh. Well, actually, it's only 11 inches, but close enough.

I am meters away from being finished the first ball of yarn. It is a very strange feeling to actually be finishing a ball of sock yarn, it happens so rarely. I bought 3 50g balls of Sheepjies Invicta for these socks and I'm going to be fine for yardage. There's only another 1.5 inches of sock left before the toe, which can't possibly take half of a 50g ball (though now that I've said it out loud, I'm worried again...).

I am itching to work on something else. Anything, really. Knitting monogamy isn't really one of my strong suits these days. Knitting is, usually, the only thing in my life that's all *mine*, that no-one cares if I finish it or not. Just before starting the socks, I got the desire to make up and chart an original cable pattern. For me, it takes many swatches and charts before I get something that works, and my interest is much higher for those cables and swatches right now than for another 4 inches of rib-and-stockinette. Though it will feel good to at least have one sock finished. Then, if I don't get the other one done in time, I can, as I have before, wrap up one sock to present at the event, then finish up the other one later. A little embarassing, but it makes everyone laugh.

Yesterday, it was a stunningly beautiful treasure of an afternoon, a full 18 degrees and sunny. I sat out in the sun and knit a couple inches on this sock, which would have been difficult with swatches and a notebook. I would have dropped something into the mud, for sure. I did find out, though, that sitting in the sun and looking down at what I'm working on results in a Knitter's Tan: the little bit of skin showing at the part of my hair is a bit pink today.

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21 Days

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A Little Rant (And A Little TMI)

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Thump!