Not quite!

I'm just tending to some last minute packing and feeding and sweeping and arranging here. Not only are we fleeing the city for a week, but we have to leave the house habitable because a friend will use it for a few days while we are gone.


And, well, there is a lot more to finishing a garment than just knitting all the bits! I just have to sew on a sleeve, do a bit of edging on the front bit, sew all the ends in and block the heck out of it. Pah, a moment's work.


However, I don't have a moment right now, so that'll be my entertainment tonight, I suppose. I won't have internet, or indeed a computer, while we're gone, so just keep your shirts on and I'll show you in a week or so. School starts on the 8th! Whoopee!

ETA: Okay, do you think that this unfinished project, a pair of half-made socks and 200g of Magpie for a new sweater for Elaine will be enough?? What if it rains all the time? We are taking Monopoly, but I'd have to knit while playing to maintain my cool...

Squirrelize me!

Once upon a time I took this picture of myself in a hat I'd got in a swap. Innocent enough, eh?

And then one day, some tourists somewhere took a picture on the self-timer and a chipmunk popped up in the picture.

And because this is the internet, where people have nothing better to do, you can now make your own squirrelized photo, here.

So I did.

Cute, aren't we?

A few random pictures

First up today we have the tree that fell over in a storm last week.


It was a pretty big storm, but this was a pretty big tree! And look how totally rotten the inside was! Worm-eaten mush, and 4 feet in diameter, at least. It took out a telephone pole, but managed to fall just parallel to the road and no-one seems to have been hurt.

Second, I must show you a part of our dinner this evening.


I made a lamb dish from Jamie At Home, which involved some salad greens and this melange of red onions and parsley. (Bowl by Jerry Kry, who -- hey! -- has a web page!) It was just so pretty I had to take a picture. (I left out the pistachios and just cooked the ground meat up in the frying pan.)

And since this is a knitting blog, I will show you the pre-holiday state of play for the socks.


I got this candy-coloured yarn at a swap and didn't realise that someone had already used up about half of each ball. So I will knit up what I have and make two legs, and then stick different coloured feet on. This will be car knitting, and I will come home with two similarly sized leg bits.

And that is all I have for you today!

One of these things is not like the others

I am preparing for my holiday next week, and besides the basics of pasta and breakfast cereal and bacon and eggs and toothpaste and all that, I must think of my knitting.

Of course, the beach top will be finished. Ahem. And the car sock will get revived. The Kureyon sock yarn cardigan which requires fiddling and thinking and so on will not be coming with us, I'm afraid. Not that I have started it, but I think of it!

No, what will be making the trip is some old Rowan Magpie and my new Rowan 17.


It contains many delightful things I will knit one day, but I happen to have 6 balls of Magpie in the stash and there's a nice sweater I could make for Elaine -- plain stocking stitch with a nice collar... easy knitting for the cottage!

So, today I was winding the wool, and noticed that one ball was huge! Turns out most of the 100-gram balls are really about 96 or 98, but this one was 159 grams! I'm tempted to start the size which calls for 7 balls, since really I have six and a half.


Look at the size of that baby!

It will eventually become this:

I'm tempted to make the body in one piece to the armholes and then join the whole thing into a yoke and make raglan decreases, rather than have that bulky drop sleeve. And it won't end up that gargantuan on Elaine, since despite my 159-gram ball, I still am cutting it a bit fine. I'll just start at the bottom and see what happens!

Expect finished pictures of the Acres of Mesh before Saturday! Eek!

Today's mail, and today's harvest

Lookee what I have!



A well-loved Rowan 10. And an eggplant from my very own garden.

I went out to pick it, and to hack down some of the other overgrown foliage, and discovered I really had three eggplants!


Whoo hoo! (Now what do I do?)

The acres are getting smaller

See how boring it is when I just knit one thing? Blah blah same old sweater... (and yet, I couldn't wait until daylight to take the picture outside).


I have finished the front and have started a sleeve. The worrisome thing is: will the set-in sleeves fit in the armscyes? I have not cut the yarn for the fronts, and will gladly knit more (unlikely) or rip back (more likely) when I get a sleeve knit.

Which I am doing as fast as I can. In two weeks we are going on holiday, and although we are going up near Algonquin and not the Mediterranean, I am sure I will need a chichi beach cover-up garment. Perhaps also a large woollen wrap... At least there should be fewer bugs than earlier in the season! In any case, I will make sure this is done by then.

And really, there is not much else to report. Kids are going to camp sometimes; it's really hot today; I grew an eggplant! Perhaps I'll liven things up tomorrow with a picture of the eggplant, because I think it is time to harvest that baby!

Ebay delight

There is one thing I have been stalking on Ebay since I started looking at it. And that is Rowan 10.

People want it because it has Kate Moss modeling in it. I guess... but I want it because I've heard that the pictures are "inspired" by Arthur Ransome's books. Kaffe Fassett modeled by Kate Moss while camping!

I have had three, yes, three, Rowan 10 magazines slip through my fingers, though one was on Ravelry, rather than Ebay. That person only wanted $20 for it -- I was just too slow to respond. Grr.

Today I took the kids out to Toronto Island, and I knew that my latest Rowan 10 auction would close while we were out. So, I bumped my maximum bid up and left it in the hands of Fate. And, I got it! Phew! It has to be mailed from England, but it's mine all mine.

It poured down rain on us at the island, but we did get a bunch of fun in before the downpour. And we saw a bush full of butterflies!

More acres of mesh

I am meshing away. I can truly imagine that I will have a finished beach cover-up sweater by the end of the summer.

The stitch is not hard to remember -- basically it is a purl row, and then *yo, slip1, k2tog, psso, yo, k1* rows, staggered. (There, I have given you all you need to know!) It does get boring after a while! At least I have the stripes.

The pattern calls for a great honkin' hood, with a tassel, no less! I will see how things go. Not sure one needs a hood on a mesh summer garment, in fact.

Also, I think it will add to the riding-up difficulty, which might be large in any case with this thing. This "neck" is very deep; I haven't even started the sleeve shaping yet! I will put a narrow band around the front opening and stick a few tiny unobtrusive buttons on.

I continue to monitor Ebay, but have learned a few things. Recently I saw a Pacific Coast Highway go for a huge sum of money, with the price doubling in the last few minutes. Darn those E-snipers (although I wasn't bidding on it). And then to learn they could just go to Amazon and get one for $59.... I think the one on the weekend went for 79 pounds! And I see that just now another sold for $137.50. Wow. Well, very interesting indeed.

Go buy a ticket!

Some Ravelers have got together and made a blanket to raffle off for Medecins Sans Frontiers. Five dollars a ticket, and you can pick your lucky number if you get there first!

My next project

I went out to the Naked Sheep the other day and picked up a few balls of Noro Kureyon sock yarn. All the same colourway and dyelot, believe it or not!


It wants a 3mm needle, and I want to make a cardigan for me, so don't look for this finished any time soon!


I am thinking top-down raglan imitation of this, from my new-to-me 1967 Vogue Knitting. With a different collar... I'm intrigued by the hem and facing -- no ribbing at the bottom, no icky buttonbands to deal with. I can't use the original pattern, although the gauge will be similar -- in this issue of VK there is nothing above a size 16, and a size 16 in 1967 was a 36-inch bust!

Right now I am virtuously knitting away on my mesh. Started the front. Have also started worrying about fitting the sleeves in.

Oh, and an offshoot of my recent Ebay activity is that I have discovered I am rich rich rich. Once I went to someone's destash sale and got a bit of yarn for a few bucks and some books for nothing at all. And one of those books was Alice Starmore's In the Hebrides, which I just saw on Ebay for over $400US! I guess I won't be Freecycling that right now, though I doubt I will ever use it. I feel like I should pack it away in acid-free, climate-controlled splendour, where it will be safe from getting tea slopped on it!

I've fallen into the Ebay world

Every once in a while I look at Ebay. Not in any systematic way, and I've never bought anything.... until this last week!


I started with a vintage Vogue Knitting magazine, then looked at the books and found Glorious Inspiration and The Best of Rowan!





And actually I have bought another Rowan book and am waiting to see if I get yet more books. Eeeks.

I did stop short of spending at least 26 British pounds on Rowan 10 -- I think I'd love to have it, but what I really want is to come across it for $2 at a thrift store. That seems quite a lot of money! Now, though, I can at least feel virtuous that I stopped at 26 pounds!

And I don't buy yarn, no matter how tempting. No no no, at least, not yet!

My subscription to VK has just been renewed for another 2 years. Really, I have enough knitting patterns now, I think, to last till the end of my days. Maybe if I stop knitting squares and hats and dishcloths, I could knit a garment or two.

There are a few things that right now I really do want to knit:

• a cardigan of Noro sock yarn. I saw this cardigan in my 1967 Vogue and thought I could finagle something?
• something like Fleet or Sunday Best or Whitby in Rowan Denim. I know I have a half-finished denim sweater lying around here, but it's not quite the same.
• A real, super-multicoloured Fassett.
  
  
• a big, fat, huge, cabled pullover. I have big ol' sweaters and rarely find the right occasion to wear them. I don't have a draughty cottage; I don't stroll in the woods on clear, crisp fall days and I don't need a big sweater indoors. But, mmmm. I like 'em.
  
  

But at the moment I'm working like a house elf on the mesh! Finish, finish!

Back almost done! That's only 1.5 balls of yarn! The mesh stitch turns out to be mainly air, so I'll have tons of yarn left, I think. I did make one miserable mistake way down near the bottom, but I'm not showing you and I bet you won't be able to tell when I'm sauntering on the beach in this.