March Break trip

Ah, home sweet home.

On my holiday, I made a dishcloth

And another, that has good texture on both sides

Okay, enough about knitting!

We went to Saint Lucia for the week the kids had off school. We stayed in a resort with pools and restaurants and all-inclusive drinks in reclining chaises, so it was pretty good!

Elaine and Stephen in a kayak

Mary and Elaine on a banana boat

That banana boat ride was a bit adventurous. Elaine and I both are blind as bats without our glasses, and our glasses are photosensitive, so they are our sunglasses as well. But I figured if we lost them we would be very, very sad, so we undertook this adventure squinting and glasses-less. Our companions on this ride were two ladies who spent the whole week wiggling their fingers at each other, so I hoped no signals would be relayed to us from the boat, as two of us couldn't see and two couldn't hear. Actually, we were meant to just sit on the big inflated thing while they towed us around, and many people had done this without mishap, but we somehow dumped out in the briny deep. Salt water up the nose! But so glad we didn't lose the specs!

An upside-down crab claw on the way to the kids' pool

Our adventures outside the resort were the really exciting bits, of course.

One day we went to Pigeon Island, a big rock from which, after climbing up up up, you can see (on a clear day, which we didn't have) Martinique, or any attacking navies, or Spanish gold ships to plunder, and which is no longer an island. They built a causeway, connecting the island to the mainland and making a nice big bay for a marina at the same time. We climbed up to the place where the British in their wool uniforms banged away with their 24-pounders at the French.

Cannon pointed toward Martinique

Not much to defend against these days

Ruined building

We were told by just about everyone that St Lucia had gone back and forth between the French and English 14 times. So people speak a creole (actually, Kwéyòl) as well as English, and are mostly Roman Catholic. It's been British since they secured it from Napoleon, I believe.

The inside of a big seed-pod we found on Pigeon Island

The causeway, complete with Sandals resort

A surprise treat: a pillar box! The kids took up their old pose somewhat reluctantly

Another day we took a catamaran cruise down the west coast from Castries to Soufrière, seeing the Pitons, the botanic gardens and the mud boiling and stinking in the volcanic crater; having a meal in a restaurant perched on a hillside; and whooping it up on the boat!

The restaurant had a great view of the Pitons

The restaurant was very colourful 

And the restaurant had the best faucets ever! Water poured out through the shells

We've got the moves, baby. Dancing on the return trip on the boat

The thing that will remain forever fixed in our minds, however, must be the ziplining.

Before: all suited up with hairnets and harnesses

Elaine zipping along

You may have read the adventures of the Yarn Harlot on this ziplines.  She mentions "braking." I somehow imagined a mechanical thing. Also I imagined something a bit more high-tech than a clothesline strung through the rainforest. Alas. Our brakes were our own tender hands in work gloves, and when someone (ahem, me) got stuck, we had no "rescue," but had to pull ourselves along the wire backwards, with those same tender hands. Our family suffered only one injury on this trip, and that was a blister on my finger from accidental braking!

My wound! Can I get an "awwww"?

But it was on the last of the 12 lines, and although this "walk of shame" was immortalized in a video my wretched son took, you will never see it!

After! Success!

All in all, it was a blast!

Finally we shook off the last of the sand and got up bright and early to get the bus to the airport. Little did we know there was a foul-up at the Toronto airport and everything was delayed and messed up. We spent five hours in the teeny little Hewanorra International Airport, knitting and reading and watching people mill about anxiously. Ultimately, of course, we returned home safe and sound and slightly tanned.

Off for some fun in the sun

I should come back with a scarf and a few dishcloths... 

and a tan and a big smile on my face!

Quick camera question

Which one:

Canon Powershot Elph?

Or Nikon Coolpix?

We want high quality photos, lightweight camera, a few of the standard options... Big viewing screen on the back.

We felted the bag at my friend's house yesterday, but I completely forgot about a picture! Next time I go I will have to take a coffee cup. It came out gorgeous!

Not gonna run out of yarn

I took a wee bit of a trip to the yarn shop the other day, and was lucky enough to find the same kind of yarn for my blanket! I had bought the Rockpool green in the discount basement years ago, and there was no more of that colour, but I did luck into several other colours which will go quite nicely.

I wish I had done this before starting my first half-hexagon, because I would have maybe made it a full hex, and in a different colour. The blanket will be a bit lopsided, with all the green on one side, instead of, perhaps, down the middle. Perhaps, maybe, whatever.

What I did, in fact, is make the centre of that piece in the yellowy green.

I went on to make the slices in rusty brown and light green.

And am making a whole hexagon in between those bits in the yellowy green again.

Really, it'll all flatten out! I mean to do full hexagons over the slices, and then another half in between those, and then I think it'll be a nice big blanket. Am wondering about the edges, but we'll worry about that in a bit!

(We all survived the day of boys yesterday, but it was a bit wild towards the end! The cake got 90% eaten; no one spilled root beer, that I know of; and there was just enough leftover pizza for breakfast.)

Hiding from teenage boys

Arthur is celebrating his 15th birthday today! There are a bunch of boys downstairs, playing D&D and eating junk. Which, of course, I provided.

Later I will give them pizza and cake:

I found this Kit Kat cake via Pinterest; here's the original. 

It's just a double-layer chocolate cake, iced and surrounded by Kit Kats, with Smarties on top!

My plain old birthday cake tends to be the Six-Minute Cake, which I knew in my childhood as Timmy Cake, since my cousin Tim used to make it a lot. Some people call it Wacky Cake. I was making cupcakes with it the other day to take to Elaine's class, as it was her birthday. There's a girl in the class who can't have dairy, egg whites or gluten, so a cake that she can eat has to be pretty darn special! But I was stirring things up and thought, "Huh, no eggs, no butter... All I would have to do is get some gluten-free flour!" So I did, and I made the recipe just as is, but with gluten-free flour and 2 tsps of baking soda rather than one. And it was perfect! Another triumph for Timmy Cake!

And now I've written this blog post; I think I will venture downstairs again to witness the chaos before ordering pizza. Luckily the next birthday is my own!

A blast from the past (with brackets)

The ol' knitting mojo is indeed rising. I was stymied for a while there, but then I made the buttonhole bag (to be felted next week, now, I believe) and the juices started flowing. My latest ridiculous project is the resurrection of Basalt.

When last you saw it (July 2008, according to Ravelry!) (which now has 2,000,000 members, as I'm sure you know) it looked like this:

Now, it looks like this:

Please forgive the crappy photo; it was snowy and wet and miserable today and there was no light and certainly no taking the knitting outside!

I took it all apart some time ago, and rather foolishly (no, not really foolishly, but I might be in trouble anyways) used a lot of the yarn involved in the jazzy baby blanket a year or two ago. (Oh, did I ever show you the picture with the baby: 

Isn't he cute! And he matches so nicely!)

So, I now have to make at least two half-hexagons and 2 little slices to make a flat thing one could wrap a baby in, and I have about 2 balls of yarn. Can I do it? Can I find more?

The fun never stops.

Some old pictures

I finally got a big memory card for my phone camera and so have been blithely taking pictures without that constant reminder that my memory is full. So, I haven't taken the pictures off till now. I even have pictures with snow! Ancient history!

This sign was up on a post nearby. "I don't know you but I know that" and then lots of little tags. It's nice to see that people participated by taking them! The ones that remained said, "You are creative; You are sensitive; You've been hurt; and "Your mama loves you in her own special wal." Which we have to assume was meant to say "way." Handwritten typo!

Someone else (one assumes!) was also thinking of love -- this must have been around Valentine's Day! They decorated the school fence with wool hearts, about five or six of them.

Bad lighting and not very adjustable camera! Also, the way I tend to hold the phone leads to a lot of these odd-angled photos.

A fine use for pink tweedy novelty yarn!

Some old, some new

I made this dishcloth earlier this month and just didn't get a picture of it till now. Ballband dishcloth made of red Lion's Brand cotton and redyellowblue Bernat. It's gone into the drawer of things being saved for the future.

These little hats will also go to that drawer, and eventually get given to Children's Aid, most likely.

 

I helped a friend pack boxes of gifts at a community centre before Christmas and, frankly, was appalled at the crap hats people had donated! So I am determined to make a bunch of nice hats in a variety of sizes, and unisex in colour and style, before next Christmas comes around. Norma wrote about this issue regarding the Red Scarf project. Make nice stuff! Don't give crap knitting to charity!

The perfect I-cord thingy.

Small, but not crappy.

New and improved and almost done

I used up every last scrap of the Vero yarn and made my bag a few inches longer.

Got a different coloured cup and here's your new, improved before picture. (Yesterday's attempt for comparison.)

 "After" should be later this week!

I'll start a buttonhole bag renaissance.

Lots of pictures of knitting

My friend and I went to the yarn shop and, after several false starts and semi-decisions, chose a dark grey solid DK wool and three colourways of Vero, a variegated yarn that is stocked close to the Kureyon. We bought two balls of each colour, and only used one.

You can see I started at the bottom with the black/brown/grey mix, which has that wee bit of bluish in it. I was quite alarmed to see the rich chocolate brown towards the middle of the ball!

As one has come to expect, I first thought I would have lots of yarn, then thought I wouldn't have enough yarn, then thought I would put more black at the top, then thought that would make the bag too big, then worried it would shrink too much, then thought it was perfect, then thought it was not...

The handle, surrounded by garter stitch because I think it makes a sturdier handle and stronger top to the bag.

Where stocking meets garter! There's the orange at the bottom; green, which was alarmingly beige in the ball, in the middle; more orange at the top. I changed balls every five rows. Though I may have cheated on that when I did the handle because we wanted the orange at the edge.

The new bag with the old. How much will it shrink? Will it turn out too small? Will it shrink lengthwise a lot and widthwise not very much, making an oddly proportioned bag? Should I add more length now, before the final step of tossing it into hot water? The older bag was made with different yarn at different tension; who knows what it looked like before it was felted; we'll use a different machine; there are two yarns in the present bag: will they felt at the same rate??? Oh, my nerves.

And for posterity, the "before" picture with teacup. As I recall from the olden days, this is obligatory.

Edited to add:

Oh, dear. Look at this. I had to go browse through Stephen's iPhoto, back to 2005, where one gets distracted by kiddie shots and so on, and found these.

Unfelted, with teacup: 

 Felted, with the same cup:

I think I need to rip back to before the handles, and add in a few more inches! Oh dear, oh dear.

Sky scarf update and even more knitting

Guess what? I have actually been knitting.

The sky scarf had a bit of an issue with yarn amounts.  I ran out of the white-cloud colour, and didn't feel like buying more, didn't feel like fudging and pretending the sky was clear when it wasn't (though it's just knitting, who cares?) and had about 3 or 4 feet of scarf.

 

I bound the end off with the beginning and made a mobius thingmabob. It's too short to wrap again, but it sits snugly enough around the neck that one could wear it and it would keep you warm. Which is all we ask, isn't it?

Of course, then I wondered what to do with the rest of the sky colours. This little hat will fit an 8-year-old or so. Clear skies below, dark clouds above!

I have still more of the light blue and the greyish, so I am making another little hat. Fun and games.

Future knitting news: I have a friend who always admires my buttonhole bag which I made a million years ago. The inspiration long ago. The recent kick in the pants. $650?!? I could make you that! Here is bag #1, which I never use, and (oh, my, this was a challenge to find) bag #2 (scroll down a bit) which comes out for a few weeks in the fall because I am so coordinated that way, y'know. (It doesn't look that garish in real life, I assure you.) My friend and I are going shopping for yarn tomorrow and I will just whip that bag #3 up in no time at all. (Pattern is here or, more prettily, here; Ravelry projects here.)

I also just have to mention this. I read that entry in 2006, and sent off to the Victoria & Albert website a picture of my buttonhole bag. But now, that website is not the same as it once was. And for some reason I didn't put the picture on my own blog! So, lucky for me I didn't have a blog when I made it, and had to borrow Ann and Kay's.

Phew, that is a lot of stuff for one day!

Edited in March 2014: A lot of links no longer work, but I've updated as best I can!

Now I have red hair

Got a bit carried away at the hairdressers the other day. It's a shade called "Fuchsia Red," liberally applied here and there.

Much fun and games going on around here these days. We are thinking of summer travel, dealing with spring birthdays, knitting a teeny bit, baking cakes and making waffles... It never ends, and I rarely have a camera!

The run-up to the 12th birthday

Two dozen chocolate cupcakes ready to take to school tomorrow. I even made a half-dozen gluten-free ones, because one of Elaine's good friends can't eat the regular ones. So this time, the girl who usually doesn't get any, gets more and bigger than anyone else. Nothing is really fair, I suppose!

Knitting has been very slow around here lately. I finished the pieces of the Botticelli and sewed in a few million ends, but then things got mixed up and it's taken me a while to get back into things. Every time we have people over, I clear my knitting stuff out of the living room and take it upstairs. So then, I have to make an effort to get it back next to the comfy chair!

Excuses, excuses.

Knittin' needles in space

It's February 2

And it is a great tradition of the blogosphere to share poetry on this, St Brigit's Day. Some years I forget, but I got it this year! And what better poem for a grey, wintry day...


I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud  
By William Wordsworth

 

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed—and gazed—but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

I think I am done

I have sewn everything up and put a little edging around the whole thing. I may yet take the last bit of orangey-brown and crochet more edge, to stop the curling here and there.

I must say that I am not too happy with these squares. I don't mind a bit of unevenness and tend to embrace the crazy in blanket design, but this really doesn't turn my crank. The colours were not all chosen at once, but there are too few of them to mismatch properly, if you know what I mean.

The yarn is superwash, so I will toss it in the washer and see how it all turns out. If those flippy bits don't learn to behave, more action will be taken. Perhaps.

All the squares

Sixteen squares are knitted up and blocked. They are clearly not all the same size, so some garter-stitch bits are being inserted here and there.

It'll be done this week, I figure.  I have only a bit of the yellow, quite a bit of lilac and almost a whole ball of the browny-orange that you see in the closer mitered corner. I might cave and buy another ball of something for the outer edge. We shall see.

I now have a baby to give this to. A colleague of Stephen's just had a baby who had some initial difficulties and scared the pants off all of us, but who seems to be improving now. One forgets just how risky this baby-having lark is. Suddenly, a tiny thing happens that turns out to be incredibly difficult and dangerous.

Anyways, enough about that! I'm sure that a knitted blanket won't help the physical well-being of the baby, but it might give a teeny boost to the parents who have been through such emotional ups and downs. At least, that is what we knitters like to think.

Wild things we found long ago

Once upon a time, in 2002, we faced the choice that so many young(ish) homeowners face. Renovate or move... Our house was built in 1911 and probably had 4 bedrooms as well as a "second parlour." Someone came along in the late 1970s and took all the interior walls out, making a giant master bedroom on the top floor, and a giant bathroom and two sort of bedrooms -- separated by the staircase but with no walls around them -- on the second floor. The people we bought the house from had two small children and a live-in nanny, who slept behind a huge and wonderful curtain -- they obviously had chosen the move option!

We now had two little kids and the prospect of rooms with walls was very appealing. So, we got some guys to come and move stairs, redo the kitchen, make walls, take the roof off and put it back on again, slightly different... It was madness.

But! At one point we took down the wallboard above the living room fireplace. The previous, minimalist owners had built the wall straight up, and we wanted a mantlepiece.

And we found this:

It's clearly the Eiffel Tower and something we call the Empire State Building, but I suppose it is just a generic skyscraper.

 

It is not really wallpaper. The paint is rolled right onto the wall somehow. You can see here the plaster and the image are cracked together.

 

It was very intriguing and we wished we could save it, but there were problems beyond a few cracks:

We covered it up again, and it sits there hidden behind our present wall.

I don't know if this was original to the house. The Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. Early skyscrapers that kind of look like this are the Royal Liver Building in Liverpool; and the Woolworth Building in New York, built in 1913. I would bet, though, that it is from the 20s or 30s.

This past weekend I went to the Toronto Archives and found out that the first person to live in the house was a Mrs Agnes McIvor, in 1911. Much more research can be done in microfilms of assessment rolls and city directories. We found a few names scribbled on hidden walls during the renovation, too, and we'd like to see if we might match up previous owners with those names. It's kind of like genealogy for your house.

One day, if you're lucky, I'll scan an old photo of the wallpaper we found under the kitchen sink in our very first apartment. It had scenes of St Basil's Church in Red Square on it. Maybe there's a trend here and we should look into some modern architectural wallpaper. Here's houses. Here's Paris. Ah, Paris....

The sky thus far

My sky scarf is slowly but steadily growing.

Every day since December 1, 2011 I knit one ridge, choosing two yarns from among bright blue (no sky is ever really that colour, indeed), softer blue (rather grey; no sky is ever that colour, either), white clouds (with pink and yellow) and grey clouds (with occasional brown and green bits). I have also added sparkly yarn on a couple of rows, but I don't think it really shows up here. Those were days when we were teased with a bit of snow.

I know the colours are not really sky-like, but a) it makes a more beauteous scarf, I think and b) I'm working with stash, so I did what I could. 

The eyelet row signifies the first of a new month.

Today is bright and sunny, a double blue row. I must say I like those the best. 

January square

We start the new year off right, with January's square done by the third! Stephen gave me Lynne Barr's Reversible Knitting for Christmas, and this is one of the stitches in it.

I like both sides, and now can't even remember which is her side A and which is B.

I think I like the top picture better, for a garment. For a blanket, this is not actually a very good choice of stitch -- people's fingers and toes will get caught in the drop stitch floats.

As usual, the whole melange on the floor. 

Looking at my yarn supply, I could make this blanket 20 squares instead of 16, I think. Or I could put sashes between the squares, instead of just sewing them together. Of course, we have to see how they all block out, and how much fiddling will be needed to get them together!

Just for good measure, I also darned two socks for Arthur this morning. I took care of another pair by deciding I have to take the toes completely off and reknit them. Not a chore I look forward to, but then, nor is darning. There are still several socks in the darning pile!

A new year with new plans

Oh ho, what shall I do in 2012?

I seem to have joined some of those groups on Ravelry, like 12 in 2012, and the more dangerous Stash knit down group, where I have pledged to knit 12 things for charity in 2012, plus I may have said some things in the thread where people are doing 12 12s.

My list from that group in fact is:

1. 12 socks (six pairs)
2. 12 dishcloths
3. 12 afghan squares
4. 12 gifts
5. 12 things for charity
6. 12 hats (some baby, some adult)
7. 12 projects from books I haven’t used. I have so many patterns I look at but don’t knit!

I think the items from #3, #6 and #7 will overlap quite a bit with #5, and #2 and #4 might well be almost identical! Of course, that's only 7 times 12. The trick will be keeping track -- and I might well just knit away as usual and not bother with the keeping track. Bad to be so casual about it already, on the first day of the year!

Other plans:

1. Finish Botticelli
2. Finish Sunday Best, abandoned in the summer, I think
3. Make something with my Rowan 4 ply -- maybe just a ton of hats, maybe a blanket, maybe I can get Elaine to choose some pattern.

Generally, I think I will tend towards smaller things, rather than sweaters.

Someday soon I will count up my 2011 knitting!