Roundup of 2017

According to my page on Ravelry, I have knit 29 items. Twelve of those were my monthly vintage accessories, but I managed to knit other things as well. I'll make the accessories italic.

Let's look:

1. Pussy hat
2. Gossamer Light bed-jacket
3. a hat I gave to charity
4. a tea cosy that doesn't keep the pot as warm as I'd like
5. a dishcloth that is in the to-be-gifted drawer
6. jazzy yellow scarf that I have been wearing lately
7. slippers
8. gigantic Westknits marled shawl
9. a pretty shawl that I don't really like... a problem, perhaps, for next year
10. a hat
11. two dishcloths I gave to my niece for her wedding (she thanked me for the potholders)
12. my toilet-paper cosy, which I admire daily
13. a cowl for charity
14. a cowl of crazy novelty yarn, for charity
15. a Koigu leftovers hat... not sure where that went
16. a scarf using up lots of leftovers, very bright
17. another dishrag sitting in the drawer
18. another cowl given to charity
19. the ski hood that Elaine is happily wearing these days
20. shawl made for Elaine that she, so far, is not wearing 
21. a sock for Arthur
22. a hat that is getting quite a bit of use
23. cowl for charity
24. Esjan which was a very successful Christmas present for a friend
25. some crocheted flowers which are on a wreath
26. Vertices Unite
27. another sock for Arthur
28. skinny scarf for charity
29. gloves which I just finished today!

Two WIPs from this year: Elaine's sweater and a Clapotis which will go to charity.

Happy Christmas! I bet I'll have a bit more to say before the end of the year. 

Pre-Christmas post

I have been to the grocery store every day for ages, it seems, picking up the final ingredients, every time. I think now we have enough cookies and we'll not starve on Christmas day. But I have thought of one more thing I need...

I made a few kinds of cookies, and dreamt of many more. Last night even Elaine suggested we have enough, after we'd made chocolate thumbprints and cuneiform gingerbread.

The chocolate thumbprints are from an old Better Homes and Gardens magazine, but I can't find the exact recipe online. You can see last year's cookies here. This year we used chocolate sprinkles instead of multicoloured, just to shake things up.

The gingerbread came first from here and then from here. I just noticed that the first recipe says to bake the cookies a bit first, and then incise them, and I'm kind of intrigued by that. Do you work on the hot gingerbread, do you cool it, do you have to work fast? We didn't do that.

We used the second recipe, rolled out two big slabs, and copied the text on that page (to the best of our poor ability, cuneiform-wise).

We ended up with slightly weathered-looking slabs, not very readable, except perhaps by experts. Tastes good, though!

More excitement at the Honest Ed's site. They've taken down all of the building except the front. Now they are sawing steel in the freezing weather, 30 feet up.

More to come, I suppose!

If you want way better pictures with a way better camera, look here. (I have no idea who this person is, but their pictures are public, so enjoy!)

Plans for today: put up the tree! Get that one thing from the store! Deliver a card that I forgot to give to a person when I saw them a week ago! Eggnog!

Where are they now?

Two things, one quite old and one made this year, were spotted being worn by actual people.

Elaine seized the vintage ski hood:

It fits her much better than me, and she quite likes it. Good!

My brother came for a visit, and wore his sweater, a 50th birthday gift almost eight years ago:

He says he doesn't wear it very often because it is too warm to wear inside, and it's not suitable outside if it is raining or windy or anything other than perfect sweater weather. Yeah, I know all that... Today was pretty perfect, and it was nice that he wore it to show me!

Patience rewarded

Yesterday was the day when members of the AGO could buy tickets for next spring's show by Yayoi Kusama.

The site opened at noon. I was at the Textile Museum, so Stephen clicked and joined the queue. He was in at maybe 12:05. So were thousands of other people.

When I left the museum, we texted and I found he was still in the queue, with "more than an hour" to wait. We got home, we had dinner, we sat by the fire, and finally at around 10 pm, that "more than an hour" changed to "59 minutes." We were ecstatic, as you can imagine, and indeed, we eventually got our tickets for next March.

These big shows come to the AGO often enough. There was the big Bowie exhibit a few years ago that was very popular. But I have always been able to get tickets when I wandered in; I've hardly ever prebooked a time slot like this. We had been warned, but I was surprised, to say the least!

She is certainly one of the big names today, and her stuff is interesting. I sure hope it is worth the wait!

Three on Thursday

Three things I will do in 2018. Maybe it is too early for this sort of thing? Naah.

1. A π shawl, perhaps Shipwreck. I have some lovely laceweight that has been marinating and aging for a while and will be perfect.
2. My Koigu sweater. Hmm, did I ever blog about all that, shopping for that lovely yarn?
3. I was thinking of doing a square a month again, to make up a blanket by the end of the year. 

And then there's all those UFOs... I'll make a parade of them before too long. 

I made a glove

I have started to make gloves before, but ended up with mittens because I chickened out about making the fingers.

Turns out fingers are fiddly but not too terrible.

It helps, it seems, to use sport-weight yarn instead of fingering. The mitten has 48 stitches and these fingers have 16. Somehow, it seemed doable. And it was!

My only quibble is that my baby finger is lower on my hand than the others, but this pattern doesn't accommodate that. I'm sure there are patterns where you knit the baby finger first, then a couple of rows around before starting the others.

I have made the cuff of the second glove, no hiatus here.

(And, for extra bonus points, I took all these pictures of my right hand, all by myself!)

Saturday sky and more

Here is some sky for you. Little clouds over the demolition of Honest Ed's.

While I was there this afternoon I took a few other pictures as well . 

If you enlarge, you can see the sign for Ladies wear in the stairwell

I think this is all great urban planning, but not everyone does

Yesterday I went to the ROM to see two exhibits: one on Vikings and one on Christian Dior. Both had necklaces, and so much more, but the lighting in each was not super bright, and most of my pictures were not stellar. 

All the Viking beads strung together. 

The Dior exhibit was simply amazing! Day dresses and suits, cocktail dresses and evening gowns, along with beaded and embroidered panels, shoes, and a few pieces of costume jewellery designed to go with some of the dresses. Fantastic!

I realised that there were some pieces of knitting that hadn't been documented correctly. Tsk tsk. So, here are a couple of dishcloths I made. 

The upcoming week is not too full of excitement; I might even get some dishes washed. 

And now it is December

Oh, here I could take a day off if I wanted, but there are things to report.

I hesitated about my December project. And we all know, she who hesitates is lost.

I was going to finish my Alice Starmore million-colour, super warm mittens. But then I thought, maybe I'd best just have a look at what else I could knit! I found a few things, then made a list and used a random number generator to decide for me what I should make, because who could make such a momentous decision?

The list was:

1. Gloves from a wartime Red Cross booklet -- these booklets came in the Yellow Pages, to encourage knitting for the troops
2. Some other fancy lady gloves
3. Those WIP mittens
4. Doll dress -- I have two booklets of doll clothes patterns, my daughter is now 17; when will I ever use them?
5. Stuffed animal -- I have patterns for dogs and donkeys and ducks and cats and birds and ....

Well, my random number generator chose number 1. I looked at the pattern again and the size for ladies' gloves is 6.5 inches around the hand at the thumb. Mine is closer to 8 inches, and I always thought I had kind of delicate hands, at least compared to the rest of me! Luckily, I can make the men's gloves, though they tell me I must use khaki, navy blue or airforce blue. We'll see about that!

Now I just have to find an equivalent for "Special Heavy Red Cross Service Yarn." It knits up on 3 mm needles at 26 sts/4 inches, but I think it's quite densely knit. I might use my Kauni, or maybe Felted Tweed. Probably some DK weight, to get a nice warm glove. I could always swatch, I suppose. 

Three on the last Thursday of NaBloPoMo

Well, we made it to the end of November! I feel like I just sort of made do with a lot of my blog posts this time, but I did do something every day, most often with a picture. So that is a bit of an accomplishment, for sure.

Now, what three things shall I talk about here?

1. My husband is in the UK, at a conference. He gave his talk yesterday, apparently a great success. He wore his spiral-defect chaos sweater, and some Hokusai wave socks. He posts pictures of beer on Facebook, though, so it's not all work. 
2. I saw some rock climbing movies last night. OMG, as they say. Usually when I work at the cinema, I do an afternoon show, and people who are able to go to afternoon shows tend to be retired, really. People who go to rock climbing movies at 8:30 at night tend, it turns out, to be 30, fit, buff, and very keen. The doors opened at 8 and I was ripping tickets till the show started. Pouring through the doors, filling every seat in the house. The four short films were amazing as well. They didn't really make me want to take up rock climbing, though. It's all bleeding fingers and broken backs. Drone photography maybe, rock climbing, no. 
3. Tonight I am going to a book launch. My daughter had a friend in elementary school whose mom is an artist, and someone has written a book about her. Her work is full of little almost-hidden things. Often a bit creepy, but I really like a lot of it, so will be happy to have the book. 

Tomorrow is December 1st! I might find it hard to break this pattern of posting, so watch this space!

I have remembered to link this post with others who are posting Three on Thursday. Go there to find more blogs.

WIP Wednesday

I can hardly show you my sweater, which looks very much the same as it did on Monday, though not exactly the same.

What other works in progress might there be lying around?

I told you earlier about the yarn someone gave me for charity knitting. I started a Clapotis with some cotton-blend fingering-weight yarn. (Is it the most knitted scarf ever?)

I'm not very far along, but I'm not in a rush.

I only have about 100 grams of fine yarn, so it won't be much of a scarf, but it will keep me amused on the go, where I can't take the sweater, and it will maybe delight some child. We'll see how it goes. 

Speaking of delight, I was walking past our neighbourhood fancy hat shop and spotted this purse! Where do I get that fabric? Very cute. 

Our neighbourhood fancy hat shop also has these gems. I wonder who shops there, and who ever wears these hats. There is a royal wedding coming up, of course.

Worn bricks

I showed you these bricks the other day. We like them because they are kind of odd, and they sit outside looking arty and not cluttering up our house.

They were collected on Leslie Spit, a piece of land that juts out into the lake. It's mainly made up of the fill they had after digging the subway tunnels decades ago. Since then, all sorts of rubble has been added.

You can find marble countertops and concrete chunks and bits of old road. It's not a very "nice" place, but it's very popular amongst migrating birds and, therefore, birders. It's also a place to get away from the city. Green stuff does sprout up between the bricks!

And you can find cool worn bricks there. Someone found lots of bricks and made this.

Once we played tourist in our own city and went on a bus tour. We saw all the places where things used to be. "This is the site of the first fire house. This is the site of the first town hall. This is the site of a school." But all those first things were built of wood and burned down! There were a couple of big fires, the second in 1904. The brickworks had opened in 1889 and they were ready and able to supply material for building a bit more permanent city after that. Now it is a park/market/space, quite a nice place.

Coming from woody Vancouver, I was shocked at the bricks of Toronto when I got here, but I have got used to all these brick houses.

picture stolen from here

Even modern, tall buildings here are covered in bricks, which does still strike me as crazy.

And that is the story of the bricks!

Returning to a September sweater

I started this sweater a couple of months ago but had to put it on hold. For one thing, I wanted to knit the sleeves down from the shoulder rather than up from the cuff, and had to ponder that for a couple of months, apparently.

I think I have it figured out. The sleeve is very nearly a straight drop-shoulder, but with just a bit of shape. I picked up stitches at the top, bit by bit, and am now knitting the sleeve in the round. The pattern has very long sleeves, with thumb holes near the seam to keep your hands warm while you're sitting on the beach on those cool summer evenings. (At least, that is what the pictures in the book imply.)

It is also meant to have a hood, but I think we will not bother with that. I already have a tiny lacy bit at the bottom hem, the sleeves will end in casual curling stocking stitch, and I suppose there will be some sort of ribbing around the neck.

One thing at a time; I hope to finish at least the one sleeve this week, maybe even both!

A progressive dinner

I do love my street and my neighbours. Many years ago now, three of us got together and figured out how to have a dinner party where you go from house to house. Three households host and each other household brings a dish: an appetizer, main dish or dessert.

We eventually settled in to one of these dinners a year, in November. We always talk about doing one in the spring, when we can sit on porches and decks and balconies, but that rarely happens. We also used to try a February one, but too many people are away skiing or in the Caribbean or generally avoiding Toronto in February.

So, November. Last year, and I think the year before as well, I picked the wrong weekend... hardly anyone was around, no one wanted to host a course, it was just not a success.

Last year two women on the next street got wind of things and offered to host, though! Oh, dear, moving off our block for dinner! It was good, and they were so keen that they said they would do it this year, too!

Then one of them moved to Victoria.

But we gamely carried on, and I whispered from the sidelines while the other did the e-mailing and calendar checking and nudging. As it turned out, last night we had a great success, with several first-timers showing up, and a new house that piqued my real-estate envy quite a bit.

(No one knew exactly how some of the newcomers came to be on the e-mail list. Kind of funny, but a great thing, as it turned out.)

The danger of a potluck sort of meal is, what if everyone brings lasagna? or what if there are seven desserts and no salad? I think that rarely happens, actually, and all the worry and nagging about that is probably not reasonable. For example, I wondered if I should take a piece of pork (whole loins on sale last week, so I got one and cut it up into meal-sized chunks) or some veg. I had heard of a quinoa salad and some other thing that I can't remember, and decided to take the meat... bad choice, there were another three plates of meat, and no green salad, no roasted parsnips and beets, no cauliflower cake. But, all was fine! No one complained (except me, just inside my head) and we all survived and were happy to come together and have a nice meal, most of which we didn't have to prepare! And asking people what they were bringing did not do what it was supposed to, because not everyone responds, people change their minds... just do whatever you like and don't fuss, is now my potluck motto.

I don't have any pictures, because it is kind of rude to take pictures of your neighbours eating dinner. It would have been especially rude, I thought, to take pictures of the one absolutely fabulous place we went for dessert. Collectors, artists, travellers... they had so much cool stuff, so nicely arranged, I felt like I was in a gallery. But, we'll just have to get invited back, because I didn't take pictures.

Next up, one hopes: knitting!

Saturday sky

Lots of other things percolating away in my NaBloPoMo brain, but for today let's just look at the sky.

I am cooking for the street's progressive dinner; I have picked up another half-knit project; I am thinking more about bricks. One more week of daily posts!

It's Friday

Cause for celebration: I finished the sock!

The toe is plain beige for a few rows, of necessity. I had to text Arthur to get him to measure his foot, and I still couldn't believe it... It's just as big as I could possibly make it, and I hope it will fit!

While doing this sock photo shoot, I wondered if I had ever shown you my bricks...

Everything looks better with a bit of sunshine on it.

Three things on Thursday

Today I will show you three pictures. Two would make great bases for blankets, perhaps!

Brown, green, grey, some lines

Grey, white, splash of colour, diagonal bits

This one would be a pretty weird blanket, and the hardest part would be to get the reflection in the big ball.

Of course, this is a tree found in a shopping mall. It's pretty alarming how we start decorating for Christmas in the middle of November. But we do, apparently.

WIP Wednesday

Wednesday, home of the works-in-progress.

One thing is taking all my time these days, no fooling around with stray bits of knitting: I am making a sock and that is that.

You may remember I made another sock out of this same yarn. More stitches, cable pattern on the leg, wild pooling around the heel.

First sock, huge orange blob on heel

I made a collage...

Top pictures, the crazy first sock; bottom, the more well-behaved second sock. I'm sure they'll never actually get worn both at the same time, so it hardly matters, but ...  interesting. This is October's vintage accessory, so I'm keen to get it done!

Of course there are other WIPs in the pipeline, and I am happy to tell you that I can use one of them for my December vintage accessory. Apparently the Alice Starmore fancy-schmancy mittens I started making almost a year and a half ago qualify in this challenge, which is to knit things published between the 1880s and the 1980s. Alice Starmore's Book of Fair Isle Knitting was published in 1988, so, yay for me!

Pretties in the bathroom

This summer I bought this cut glass ball. I guess it was once part of a chandelier? It dangles in the bathroom window facing south, and at just the right time of the morning, if the sun is shining, it casts little rainbows all over the place. My fave thing is to spin it, making a disco ball effect, if you know what I mean!

I wish I had a better camera.

And for a bonus, the Christmas cactus is really doing very well. Also hard to photograph, because the super-pinkest bits look white in this. In real life, it's just as pink as pink can be. 

Monday's almost done

Oh, no, I quickly have to post something today!

I can tell you what I have been doing with my time today: baking, knitting, watching Netflix. Very productive.

Yesterday we talked to Arthur, poor dear, away at university and having to study and write and work hard. Also, it snowed. So he was moaning about his lot, as university students do at this time of year, and I, his soft-touch mom, decided that if he just had some baked goods, he would be fortified to manage the end of term better.

Brownies that are kind of soft and a bit gooey do not pack well.

I have made the heel of the sock and am gusseting away... Nothing exciting to show.

Ah, but the Netflix! The other day the dear ladies at Mason-Dixon Knitting introduced me to W1A, a BBC show about the BBC. Hysterical. Canadian Netflix is missing the third season, which makes me a wee bit upset. Since I have already watched two seasons in two days... and I still don't know what W1A means. Is it a postal code? Never mentioned.

I'll try to think of something thrilling for tomorrow, but I believe I am doing NaBloPoMo pretty well thus far. Ten days to go!

Finished, half-finished and not started

I finished my Vertices Unite and it is ready for action. Not sure what sort of action, since it is the leventy-hundredth shawl in my collection. The scratchy sock yarn does soften up in a bath.

It is sunny today, but everything is damp. Here's a bit of the shawl on the hedge.

Here we have the sunny colours, and a bit of an idea of the whole thing.

I tried to take a picture of it all spread out on the floor. Awkward lighting.

Anyways, done. No one will see it all at once when it is worn, all scrunched up around a neck!

Now I shall concentrate on finishing up October's sock. I have started the heel and figure I can get it done by the end of the week if I put my mind to it.

Projects not yet even thought of....

Someone on Ravelry was offering a couple of bags of yarn that she hoped would be used to knit for charity.

I scored two skeins of Butterfly cotton, and I know I can get a scarf out of each of those. Bits of pretty wool -- might become blanket squares. Hats, cowls, perhaps I can get mittens out of 85 meters of wool?

There is more nice stuff and another bag full of yarn I don't want! I know someone who knits a lot of scarves to sell and I will ask if she wants some of the acrylic. Fine white baby yarn... what to do with that? It'll all get to a good home eventually.