Last post of the year

Here we are, the end of another year. We have our plans in place for the festivities this evening: order sushi for delivery, pop a bottle of bubbly, maybe play Monopoly! So exciting... We are back to worrying that we'll get Covid by going to the grocery store, yet at the same time hoping for a summery trip abroad. This is driving me nuts. 

The fuzzy knitted thing continues to be fuzzy. I am almost finished the third of four balls of yarn. It will be a long narrow crescent; more of a scarf than a shawl. 

Approximately scarf-sized in depth: 

Pointy on the ends: 

I have just counted and I have about 275 stitches now, squeezed on to a meter- or 120 cm-long needle. Since I increase three stitches per row, I might have to stop when my needle is full, instead of when I run out of yarn! Must knit faster to find out! 

Ho ho ho

 And a Merry Season to you all. 

There hasn't been much blogging lately, but things are happening at a pandemic pace around here. Which means, sometimes a lot at once, sometimes nothing, and who can tell the difference. We are all four boostered, with about 12 person-hours of lining-up between us. We don't have family around, so it'll just be the four of us for Christmas, with one other family coming over for eggnog and pumpkin pie after Christmas dinner. 

There was secret knitting which I can show you after the big day, and I am presently working on some wild and crazy eyelash yarn: 

A scarf fit for a Muppet, perhaps. We shall see. 

Black and white and stuff

I see that Blogger has changed something, and now loads the pictures in the opposite order to what I wanted. What's with that? 

Anyways, I will do a minimum of fussing about, and just show you things in reverse time order! I tried to take pictures of things with neutral colours for Project Spectrum.

This morning I went out to the east side of town to an Egyptian restaurant with a couple of friends. I didn't take pictures of my eggs and tomatoes, but it was very good. Here is a spiced coffee latte.  

Last Friday I went downtown, to the Textile Museum and to the shop in the Art Gallery of Ontario, to see if there was anything there that struck me as a good Christmas present. I has moderate success, and also managed to buy some yarn at the Textile Museum that I now have to secretly and swiftly knit up.

This is a new statue outside the AGO. It's a bit more than life-size, imposing. Just a Black guy standing there. He's big, but not threatening, not heroic, not looking at you. Just being there. I like it. 

My first stop on Friday was the Textile Museum, where they are showing work by Jagdeep Raina. Some of it is painting, some textiles, some mixed-media. I loved this goat on woven black cloth. 

This is a painted quilt called Where the Sun Sets over Toxic Factory Smog. Lots of this month's neutral colours, with that line of green across the middle. 

The Textile Museum has free admission till the end of the year, and the AGO is free with my Vancouver Art Gallery membership, so I should do more museum going in the next little while. 

Christmas is coming, of course. We had thought we'd have some vegetarian friends at dinner, but they have decided to have their own wee family dinner, so we have gone super-carnivore and are planning on Beef Wellington. That will be a new thing for us, but it seems to be pretty straightforward: buy a nice piece of meat, cook some mushrooms, wrap it all up in puff-pastry. I suppose I can make a trip to the nice butcher shop! 

It's Neutrals month

Here we are in December, the month in Mary's private Project Spectrum where we look at neutral colours: the greys and browns, blacks and whites of the world around me. 

It was all totally white around here the other day, because it snowed and snowed all day long. Now it is warm and melty and most of the snow is gone. 

I have not been taking many pictures, because of technology issues. The issue is that Stephen got a new phone and I got his hand-me-down iPhone 8. A step up from the last hand-me-down, an iPhone 6! Anyways, I have to get all my pictures back out of the cloud and it is taking forever, for some reason. I just leave my phone plugged in, working away, and actually leave home without it sometimes. 

Also, nothing exciting is happening. 

I am knitting a scarf with the leftover blue from the two-tone sweater, so that is entertaining. It will be long and thin. It's called Friday Morning, by Kate Atherley, and I think I got the pattern free when she first published it. It's fun to do the brioche, and it does make a nice squishy scarf. 

Her instructions say, "Use a needle a size (or even two) larger than recommended for your yarn, to get a nice squishy, drapey fabric." So you can see in the bottom corner my fabric was super squishy and drapey, and loose and floppy; I came to my senses and found a smaller needle after a few rows, but I couldn't bear to rip out the start. 

Here's to bright blue yarn on grey days!