A few pictures from Monday

Yesterday I had a lunch date downtown. I made my way down there past the US consulate, where a rally was organized. Actually, not really organized, but happening anyways. I think the first notice went up on Facebook Sunday morning. They seemed to make it up as they went along, and that worked just fine.

There were a few hundred people, some of them wearing their pussyhats. I love this sign, Make America vote again!

"It's -15 and I'm from Iran. That's how much I hate Trump!" (Really, only -11!)

Having enjoyed the vibe, admired the signs and taken a few pictures, I carried on to lunch. Nothing special, though I did have a cocktail involving gin, grapefruit juice and ginger beer, which was quite tasty. I really meant to take pictures of the food, because another friend said she would try to recreate the meal at home, but I completely forgot, because taking pictures of your food is crazy... isn't it?

We were near City Hall and I popped in (washrooms in the basement...). This is very hard to photograph, because it is a giant wall of nails.

See, all different sizes of nails. A very 60s work of art. I love how some of the nails are shiny because people rub them!

As I was leaving I met these two. Lego Batman and Robin. I suspect there is more to this story. Oh, yes. 

We have the Toronto sign, and now it has a Canada150 maple leaf added. I guess that's fine, but it's like mixing wool and acrylic to have municipal and federal things together like that. Canada will be 150 years old this summer; a friend of mine is drinking only Canadian wines this year to celebrate. I don't have a project yet...

I like it this way best!

Finally, I was walking up through a park on my way home and came across this sad scene. Or maybe it is a happy scene; the person managed to walk away without their stick.

And I walked home from my big day of decadent lunching and rallies and even a return visit to the Textile Museum, bought some groceries and made supper. The end.

A new hat for someone

A week ago my neighbour and I walked up the hill to Knitomatic for a yarn swap. It's good for us to puff our way up the hill, and I had to donate some old magazines to the swap, and who knows what one might find?

I picked up some dishcloth cotton and a couple of small balls of laceweight yarn. No idea what I'll do with those, but they go in the lace bag and some Stephen West shawl will surely incorporate them in the future.

I also just had to have this single ball of Mille Colori, a wool/acrylic blend in my favourite colours. I grabbed it on the way out to an appointment, but knit most of it at a meeting yesterday about some upcoming fun and games I will tell you about soon! Mostly I just knit around and around, because I got tired of those purl rows pretty quickly.

A great hat in great colours, but I have enough hats for now and so it will go back to Knitomatic to be collected by Streetknit for charity.

Eye Candy Friday

I wonder if any of you follow 70s Dinner Party on Twitter. So many ill-conceived salads... But I do love that sort of nonsense.

I came across this book in a little free library nearby. The cover is so tantalizing, isn't it? The inside, however, was all small black and white pictures, and heaven knows I have enough recipes for everything! So I left it for some other appetizer lover to take, but had to snap a photo so I can always remember...

What my mirror would say

I've been reading some blogs that have this thing on Thursdays. Think Write Thursday, it's called. So, looking for some routine and community and so on, I signed up.

This week's subject is, What would your mirror say if it could talk?

What my mirror says every day

I'm 56, I take a lot of pictures of myself wearing knitted things and post them here and on Ravelry. I sort of know what I look like and I'm not going to agonize about the colour of my hair or the shape of my nose. The mirror by the front door is mainly meant to stop me going out with a milk moustache.

Of course, some people spend time in front of a full-length mirror. I rarely do, not from any philosophical objection, but just because of the way my bedroom is set up -- looking in the full-length mirror is a tad awkward and only for special occasions... of which there are few!

Sometimes catching a glimpse of myself in a reflective window is a bit alarming! Sometimes a mirror in a shop tells you to buy something you shouldn't, and then your mirror at home sets you straight. Sometimes your mirror tells you you are too fat to go to the beach in a bathing suit, but of course, you go anyways, and then are envious of the other "too fat" people who look great, and vow to buy a better bathing suit. Who knows what they think about me!

I don't think any of us in this house are great mirror-lookers. We are vain enough to think we are fine just the way we are.

Gossamer light lacy bed wrap

This is my first vintage accessory of 2017. The plan is to make one thing a month from my extensive collection of old booklets. 

So here you have the "Gossamer-light lacy bed-wrap knitted all-in-one."

You can perhaps see that the gently shifting rainbow colours flow from the orange cuff to maybe three-quarters of the way along. Then I was fudging and finding bits from other balls to finish! Some rainbows are soft and some are just RED, PURPLE, BLUE.

The blue cuff, knit at a slightly looser tension than the orange cuff! How annoying. 

The pattern is not symmetrical top-to-bottom, and I know some modern designers would have you knit up from each cuff and graft in the middle or some such onerous thing. I think this is pretty and it really doesn't matter if your lace points up on one sleeve and down on the other. Another thing our old-timey pattern-writer did was make all the decreases k2togs instead of pairing a k2tog with an SSK. As you can see, this, too, works just fine. The laciness of the lacy bed-wrap:

Full wingspan:

From the back:

Acting "natural":

Trying to look like the model in the book: 

Now for a week of knitting on my "real" project, before tackling another vintage accessory, perhaps a toilet roll cover or a tea cosy. 

Of course I marched

We got to Queen's Park at noon on Saturday, expecting, perhaps, a bit of rah-rah speaking and then a march. We got an hour of garbled, squawky, hard to catch words... "this is what diversity looks like," and "domestic violence," and "minimum wage." We had Idle No More and Black Lives Matter and the NDP, but a PA system in an open park, with excited chattering people all around, was insufficient. I'm sure those people had fun giving their rousing speeches, but next time, I'm going half an hour late, at least!

We did have plenty of time to observe those around us. This woman, for example, was quickly knitting up a pussyhat.

A very Canadian way to hold up your sign: a hockey stick and duct tape.

When we finally got on our way, we admired this woman's Lady Eleanor shawl and asked her about it. She knit it herself, but she said she hardly wore it. But now, she said, she would wear it everywhere! Knitter's pride!

The walk was not very long, about two kilometres. I'm pretty sure that when the first people got to the end point, Nathan Phillips Square, there were still people back at the park; they say there were about 50,000 people! 

I'm sure you have seen a gazillion pictures from all around the world, but here's one of my favourites. I didn't take it myself, but nicked it from Facebook. Here we have Adrienne Clarkson, among other things a former Governor-General of Canada, and Margaret Atwood, great Canadian novelist, both in their late 70s, still marching...

Eye candy Friday

Eye Candy Friday is a thing we used to do in the golden olden days of blogging, and I think it's a fun thing to do. I'll try more regularly to put up a nice picture of something on a Friday, just to brighten us all up.

This past week I went to my favourite little museum, the Textile Museum of Canada. These bits of eye candy are from an exhibition of works by Sheila Hicks. Ammmmaaaaaazing.

These are little bundles all up on the wall. Things wrapped in fabric, in threads, in string.

These below are gigantic. Too bad it was in a museum and I couldn't get someone to go stand there for scale; each of these things could be a floor pillow for sitting on. More wrapping, some sparkles.

Mainly, Sheila Hicks is a weaver, and has made many of these small weavings, often including things like sticks or shells or corn husks. This image also includes the reflection of the photographer!

For some reason, on my way home, I was compelled to take a picture of some tied-up recycling...

A hat for the weekend

A funny picture taken with the camera on the computer, so I am ill-lit and backwards... but I needed a quick picture of me in my pussyhat.

There is a women's march here in Toronto on the weekend, so I will go. I'm not sure what good any of it will do, but better to march than not, even if you're in a different country from what you are protesting. And of course, there are many women's issues one could deal with in our own country!

And, yes, I've read the nay-sayers. And the rebuttals. I think the hat is a nice verbal pun, a marker of solidarity, and an acknowledgement of "women's work."

My hat is made of nice red wool and some Barbie-pink acrylic found on the floor of my daughter's room. It has knots in it and the colours are... terrible. But if it helps focus attention on how intolerable Mr Trump is, then it's all good.

Post and the tube

I saw a few post boxes in London, but I was surprised at how few there were. Have some been taken away because people are not mailing as much as they were? I didn't go searching, so maybe I just missed them. Anyhoo, here's a selection.

Love the George V boxes!

This next one is a cheat, because it's from a Victorian tableau in the Museum of London! It was the only VR I saw, however.

We happened in to the London Transport museum in search of a loo one day, and although we didn't see the displays, we did pop into the gift shop. We saw just how entirely cool the buses and tubes can be made. They sold little buses of course, and T shirts with tube maps, but also so much more. 

An oft-neglected part of the transit system: the upholstery! Each tube line, it seems, has its own upholstery, which they call moquettes, and of which they are quite proud.

Oh, so much to obsess about... If only I'd known this was special, I'd have taken a better picture. Apparently you can see the London Eye, St. Paul's and more in this.

Somewhere on the tube, perhaps the Piccadilly line.

No, wait, maybe this is the Piccadilly line!

This, for sure, is the District line.

Every day we rode the tube, and we had a few bus rides, too. It took us too long to figure out how to get an actual map of a bus route, so we were a tad nervous about just getting on a bus and hoping it would take us in the right direction.

A seat on a bus.

The architecture of the whole business is wonderful, from big to small.

Gloucester Road station, a temple to the railroads. 

Some iconic roundels.

The tile decoration in some of the stations is quite astonishing. I'm so glad someone spent the time and labour to make the stations little design masterpieces. We don't have much like this in Toronto...

Victoria line

And since this is a knitting blog:

This will be a "bed-wrap" or you might call it a shrug. Really, two sleeves connected over the shoulders. More on that later.