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.