Tonight's fruit salad

I'm taking dessert to a gathering of friends tonight, and when offered the choice of fruity or baked, they went for fruity. So, I am taking the simplest of fruity desserts: a bunch of fruit cut up in a bowl.

First the grapefruit. Then a couple of perfect kiwi fruit. (Then, I get the idea to document this!)

Dump a basket of blueberries in.

Mmm, a mango cut into little bitty pieces.

A couple of clementines, sections cut in half.

Finally, a banana.

I worried that the banana would get brown and icky, and was going to add it at the last minute, but I decided it had to be in there now, to absorb the grapefruit juice/Cointreau mixture I poured over the whole thing.

So, that will sit in the fridge for a few hours and be, one hopes, super perfecto this evening!

I will add some knitting content, too, though not my own knitting.
I was downtown the other day to visit the wretched dentist.

Free picture of bright blue sky

There was a guy sitting with his hat out for change, and clearly he'd been to some place that distributed our knitted contributions.

I was glad to see a nice blanket of squares being so useful and appreciated, but I didn't have cash to give him and didn't think he'd just want to talk knitting, so I crossed the street to take this picture. When I turned around, I saw I was in front of a shop selling this scarf of squares. Kinda the same??

I took some pictures

I still have not been knitting. Did I tell you the last crazy thing I did? It hurt to do anything with my right arm, so I thought, aha, I have to go to Arthur's school for a meeting and I will occupy myself, and get so much exercise -- I will walk home from the school! That is fine, except the school is about five miles away, and it's been a while since I walked five miles all at once. I ended up with Plantar Fasciitis, which is fancy talk for "sore foot." I am getting some orthotics and have been stretching and so on. Tired of this advancing decrepitude, though!

Around here, the leaves are mostly off the trees.

The garden has been trimmed up and is ready for winter.

a hinge on the back shed

And the back gate. I remember when we built this, we thought the kids would never be tall enough to reach this latch. Ha, that didn't last long!

Here's to opening doors and gates!

An unassuming building in Rome

I was looking around on Flickr and found this picture, which is the start of pages and pages of pictures showing the before, during and after of the renovation of this building.

(If you start at that picture on Flickr, click the arrows to the left, which may be counter-intuitive. I actually went through from finish to beginning, not so good!)

They work on the inside and outside, the roof, the design; plaster, concrete, wood... As always, the floor caught my eye!

It is, as they say, bloody amazing.

We are going to Rome in March! Alas, not to this building, though.

Repinked

Got some pink back in my hair, to liven things up.

(Crappy Photobooth shot, my apologies.)

Blog, oh blog

Hello out there in blog land.

I have not been to Rhinebeck. I have no new yarn to show you.

I have not knitted anything, though I did think of sewing up the bits of Botticelli that I have. I'll see if that hurts my elbow or not.

I did go to the Creativ Festival and looked at sewing machines. Of course, I preferred the $1000 one over the $500 ones, and didn't end up buying anything but a few beads.

I made this necklace and Stephen said it was "eclectic." When I asked what the heck that was supposed to mean, he said it had too many kinds of beads, and it should have maybe only one kind of bead. It actually has a mere six different beads in it!

Luckily I stopped going to him for fashion advice some decades back.

The thing that spurred me into blogging today was this blog by someone calling himself Jean-Paul Sartre. I especially like the last entry:

"It has been over a month since I have updated my blog. I am seized with an urge to apologize. But to whom, and to what end?" 

Ah, Jean-Paul, what can I say?

Typing, not knitting

It seems everything in the world requires using one's right arm. Moving things about, cooking, sorting that box of miscellaneous crap from the basement.

One of the slightly crafty things I've been meaning to get to involves a book I got at a yard sale last summer.... Now I say that and am not sure if I mean 2011 or 2012. I think it's only been hanging around for months, not a whole year!

He was a pirate.

It's a Selfridge's Schoolboys' Story Book, and the bookplate in the front informs us that it was given as a gift in 1927. 

Glenbill brilliantly caught Folliburn's best batsman. 

The stories seem to be about boys of age 10 or so, often at a boarding school. There is a story called A Priceless Fag. There are strange tramps, heroic exploits and great sportsmanship. Haunted houses that turn out to be not haunted, of course. 

And these illustrations, which are perfectly serious and now, totally camp. There are probably about 10 of the colour ones. The paper is brittle and yellowed, so it seems crazy to carefully frame them. I can scan them; I thought of scanning pages of text, printing them on modern paper and doodling on them with my bright-coloured Sharpies. 

And then what would I do with them? 

Skrewed

My arm still hurts, and it was not getting better, so I went to the doctor. Tennis elbow!

No knitting, no extra mouse-clicking. I'd like to say no dish-washing or grocery-hefting, but we must be reasonable.

So, I leave you for now with a Mason-Dixon washcloth that I made for a swap. I'll be baaaaaack!

Now that was a good movie

Jayne Mansfield's Car was the last of my festival movies. Set in 1969 in the South of the US, it deals with a Daddy (who was in WWI), his three sons and a daughter (the boys were in WWII, in varying degrees) and his grandchildren (who are eligible for the Vietnam draft). The matriarch of this gang left long ago and went to England to marry a gent played by John Hurt.

She dies; the two families meet when her body is brought back to her homeland.

War is somehow on everyone's mind -- they either succeeded or failed at it themselves; their kids think about it differently than they do; it is noble or terrible. Everyone is crazy.

Scenes are often separated by a completely black screen, just for a moment. One of these black screens appears about a minute before the end of the movie. Don't start to applaud then; it's not over just yet.

Two more movies

This week has been crazy busy. For one thing, it's still the beginning of September. Elaine is getting used to a new school and Arthur's school misprinted the agenda books, so we don't know when the late starts or early dismissals are and the phone line isn't updated and the webpage is terribly out-of-date.

And then, I decided to go to the film festival.

Monday we saw The Company You Keep, a thriller for old people. It was quite exciting and intriguing and, like Cloud Atlas on the weekend, quite good to look at, with some great scenery for Julie Christie's hangout at Big Sur and the big ol' chase through the woods in Michigan. (Perhaps both were shot in British Columbia!)

One nagging thing is that the chronology is all wrong to me: the crime that Robert Redford and Susan Sarandon are charged with took place "around" 30 years ago. That was 1982. (Believe it or not.) They were members of the Weather Underground, which had sort of petered out about 10 years before that. (So maybe our movie takes place in 2000? No clues to that, unless gas at $3-something a gallon is a clue. No mention of Sept 11, no mention of the Occupy movement.) And they were student radicals at that point, so maybe 30 at the outside. Robert Redford is 76. Susan Sarandon is 65. But, quibbling aside, it was a fine way to spend an afternoon!

Tuesday the Ikea delivery truck came with all sorts of stuff to assist us with the moving around of bedrooms. Arthur got a new shelf/room divider which should make life easier for him down there in the basement, and we got new furniture for Elaine's new room. But! We can't set anything up for her for another 10 days because our painter is not available till then, and no point getting all excited till the room is lavender instead of sunflower yellow.

Yesterday, we figured that both of us going to a movie at dinnertime for two days in a row was maybe not a good idea, so the morning found me trading in a ticket at the box office, before a lunch date, before a movie. Yesterday's movie was called Beijing Flickers and it was a tale of a few friends in various states of misery in Beijing. Our hero's dog runs away, his girlfriend leaves him for a richer man, he tries to commit suicide but stands on the wrong railway track and the train just passes him by. And so it goes. Interesting.

Last year I saw three movies, and each one was better than the last. This year has certainly been a mixed bag so far, and none of the movies has been totally wonderful. Nothing has been bad, but nothing has been as super-fun as any of last year's picks.

Tomorrow I see Jayne Mansfield's Car. Another movie full of senior citizens -- Robert Duvall, John Hurt: what could go wrong?

Tonight Arthur and Stephen are going to Lunarcy! which promises to be "zany" and tomorrow night,  or is it Saturday, Stephen goes to The Lebanese Rocket Society, which should be "poignant" and "riveting." I'd like to see both of them, but then, there are another dozen movies I would like to see!

Ah, and I must tell you my knitting-related story! I was in line, waiting for The Company You Keep, and had to dig around in my pack for something... ticket, perhaps? So I took out my bike helmet and my knitting and whatever. The woman next to me, who was wearing a necklace sort of like this, asked me what I was knitting. So I told her it would be a hat, but my arm was sore and I was trying to be moderate. Her friend said I should learn to do things with my other hand (hint: not a knitter) and the first woman (a knitter) said, "Yes, that would be easier than being moderate!"

Post-apocalyptic knitting

We went to see Cloud Atlas at TIFF yesterday.

Oh, my goodness. Six stories that are sort of interwoven. Many super actors playing multiple gender-bending roles each. Wild scenery, crazy makeup and costumes.

Costumes including Tom Hanks' hood of the future:

Another pic of the wrap/poncho/hood is here, and a trailer that will blow your mind is here.

Today's treat: Robert Redford's The Company You Keep.

A new school year means new resolutions

Well, guys, there are a lot of things I would like to knit, and a lot of things I am in the middle of knitting, and a lot of yarn strewn about the house.

and a sunflower in the front garden

WIPS, off the top of my head:

1. the sock-in-bag, which will continue in the bag and get worked on now and then. 
2. Botticelli's border. Ay ay ay. I haven't looked at it since it misbehaved while in London. It's only about 18 stitches wide, and it's a simple zigzag of yarnovers and k2togs, but I have messed it up more than once. I have to knit several more miles of it and then sew the whole thing together. And it will be a lovely fall sweater, so let's just get right on that!
3. I unearthed Sunday Best a while back and need to make the remaining 75% of that. So nice! Want, want! Must knit...
4. I bought some yarn a while back for mittens, and mitten season is approaching much faster than we know. Hm. 
5. I have a nice shawl barely started. 
6. I'm going to the Film Festival next week and need something simple, on a circular needle, easy to carry around. Hmm, a hat?

Okay, let's stop there!

I went back to look at those goals I'd made at the beginning of the year. Some I'm way ahead on; others might just get a big FAIL next to them at the end of the year!

1. 12 socks (six pairs) 3 socks done
2. 12 dishcloths 9 done
3. 12 afghan squares 4 done, all in January
4. 12 gifts 8 so far, and likely a 9th, but I haven't sent it off yet!
5. 12 things for charity 12 done
6. 12 hats (some baby, some adult) 11 done
7. 12 projects from books I haven’t used. I have so many patterns I look at but don’t knit! Oh, my gawd.... No idea. a couple of stitch patterns here and there?

On top of all this, I over-exerted myself with the knitting over the Olympics and then seem to have continued to hurt myself with occasional knitting and much "mousing" on the computer. So my right arm hurts in the elbow-like region, and I should just leave all this and go read a book, I believe. Just don't expect the FOs to be flying off the needles! Waah!

Out of town

Stephen is away at a conference in a far-off land, and the kids are I were at loose ends this past week, so we hopped on a train and went to London. The Ontario London, not the British one!

We visited my brother and his family there. We played mini-golf, at which we three are all pretty terrible, and my brother is not bad, so it was a rout, I tell you. We also took a drive to Grand Bend, a beach town like Southampton, but totally dedicated to teenagers who want bikinis and tattoos, it seems.

Elaine creating the world. (Alternate title: Mary is too lazy to raise the camera more than a few inches off the beach blanket.)

The kids stood on a tank in a park one evening. And that is really all we did!

We were just there for a few days and then we got back on the train and came home. Elaine, modern girl, played Angry Birds on an iPad; Arthur played Tetris on a 20-year-old Game Boy we came across one day.

And I knitted. This is the border for my Botticelli. I only need about another 5 or 6 feet of it.... It is a simple pattern but somehow I messed it up and didn't feel like undoing it to find the error.

So I went back to work on the go-anywhere sock. I've been carrying this around for some time, making a bit of progress now and then.

Now we have a week and a half till school starts up again! Some of us are thrilled with that notion, I tell you.

Closing ceremony and picture show

There is a bit of last-minute show-off stuff to do before this Olympic athlete heads to the hot tub.

Just to show that I really finished everything, I give you a picture of the button on the bonnet. In fact, I only sewed this on in the last day or so, despite finishing the knitting long ago.

I made a nice, simple beret. I hope it will fit my mom, but will have to play with it more. I blocked it over a plate to make it nice and beret-shaped, but one can, of course, just yank it on like a toque.

I finished the beret and still had a) yarn left and b) more time! So I cast on 88 stitches and made another hat! This is #7, I believe. I made these two with my new needles, which are in fact ChiaoGoos. They are so pointy because I see that I bought the lace needles. Nice!

The toque has the typical Mary top, because I didn't have enough red to finish! A bulls-eye for any passing birds, I suppose.

See, hats with different colours at the top...

I still had time left on the clock, and I am doing another dishcloth swap this month, so I got to work on a Citrus Slice rag. It's quite small, but so cute! Finished this during the closing ceremonies last night. Which were fun. I went and ate dinner before they were finished and didn't get to see Eric Idle, but I did stick around for the Spice Girls.

And the final lineup... darn, no lime slice. The almost complete final lineup!

More 'lympic knitting

This is the dishcloth I started on our holiday. Just plain, in sort of candy floss colours.

And this is my most recent hat. It took me way longer than I thought it would, partly because I am no longer on holiday and have other things to do, and partly because it's on 4 mm needles and it just takes longer than a hat on 6 mm needles, and also because the wool is scratchy and hard on my hands.

I dyed it with Kool-Aid at some point in the past, and it looks sort of pink-camo, don'tcha think?

I have several more bits of this, certainly another hat or two's worth, but I am putting it in the Goodwill bag because it's no fun to knit with.

Nice pattern, though. I would certainly make this again, but perhaps not right now! I have one more hat to finish and then I am off hats for a bit! Barely a dent was made in the miscellaneous hat-friendly yarn stash, but it's a good exercise to just knit little things more or less nonstop for a couple of weeks.

The final hat of these games will be a beret in the red Cascade 220. I'm nervous about the size of the band, but if it is comfortable on my head, it will probably fit my mom. I got some new needles last night, at the knit night of a new yarn shop down the street! (Silly me, I thought it was the grand opening, but that is next week!) The needles were instantly put into use on this hat and I am not sure where the package is, but they are delightfully pointy and smooth as anything. I'll find the name and let you know.

Other things we did on holiday

We managed to fit in some non-knitting activities in Southampton.

Once we went to a place that sold wooden furniture, plastic gewgaws and yarn. Elaine was delighted with this large green ball! (Not delighted enough to want to knit anything with it, but delighted nonetheless.)

I was more taken with the Peaches & Creme. The solid colours were either not very thrilling, or that nice green in the double-weight stuff! I think this is what you need to make Absorba the Great, but it's too heavy for your average rag. I got a couple of balls of variegated, and two balls of Kroy sock yarn, which you know I'll get around to knitting some day.

We also picked up some jello moulds! Make little jelly bundt cakes! And a very useful "beach umbrella screw thingmajig" that you screw into the sand to hold your umbrella up. Now we need to go to more sandy beaches to get some use out of both umbrella and screw. 

We watched sunsets. This one was spectacular because of the clouds. 

We went and visited a colleague of Stephen's who has a great cottage on Georgian Bay. The weather was a bit grey that day, but we toughed it out, eating a lovely lunch on the deck, watching the clouds go by. That same day we saw a potter Stephen knows, Steve Irvine. Really fantastic to see his workshop and kiln and then his house with all these great pots around! He makes pinhole cameras, too, out of clay!

Oh, another sunset, with clouds that seem to distort the sun on its way down. 

One evening before sunset we walked to the big flagpole. Somehow we didn't take a photo of the flag itself, which is 25 feet high and 50 long. You can see Stephen's video of the flag flapping in the wind here, though. And this picture gives you a sense of how high the dang pole is!

We went out on the point near here and found a kite lying in the bushes. We followed the string back to where it had been held down by rocks. It was quick work to get it back up and we reburied the end of the string further out on the point and left it there again.  I hope the owner was a bit puzzled when/if he came back to retrieve it!

A final sunset, with pile of rocks.

Now, back to the grind. We are in the process of moving Arthur's bedroom to the basement/man-cave/former playroom. So playroom stuff is all over the house, Arthur's stuff is all over the house, holiday stuff is all over the house... The fun never ends.

A bag and a hat

I made Arthur a case for his little laptop. He went on a bus trip for a school course with his computer in a padded envelope, which has a certain coolness indeed, but, really, one needs a case hand-knitted by one's mom to be truly cool, as we all know. I started this weeks ago, it seems, and it was all done but the button before we went away.

It's two strands of ancient Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece held together. I made a vest of this yarn in 1992 or so, ripped that out, maybe 10 years ago?? I still have a ton, too.

Arthur does not have a purple Mac. He does have a purple computer with an Apple sticker on it, though! And now it is all snug in its case.

This is Olympic hat #4. More of that black and gold Patons Classic. It's called Heel Stitch hat, but I used the modifications found here.

Then, of course, I modified it further, by decreasing the number of stitches cast on to 96, because I knew I would be short of yarn. I think it will fit a child of 8 or so. I couldn't jam it on Elaine's head, but that might just be because her hair has got very bushy lately. 

I don't recommend 96 stitches, because it would be better to have an odd number of stitches in the decrease sections. Ninety or 102 would be a smidge more elegant. 

Heel stitch: knit one, slip one all across the row; then knit one row plain. I think it would look good in a variegated yarn or something like Kureyon, alternating with a plain yarn. 

And now an exciting tale for you: Once upon a time, I was looking at Ebay. I don't do it that much anymore, because perhaps I don't really need all that stuff, but I do look occasionally for things like Rowan Denim yarn. Before we left for our holiday I found 25 balls of black denim! Black! Ooh, la la, my little heart skipped a beat, and I bid on it. I had sort of put it out of my mind, but luckily I marked my calendar and went to watch the last minutes count down. At absolutely the last moment, something like 2 seconds before the auction ended, a snipe bid came in. No time for me to respond, but!!! It wasn't higher than my bid! So, yay me, I not only got some yarn, I beat the sniper, and actually ended up paying 2p less than my bid. (Yeah, plus postage for 1.25 kilos of yarn!)

The package was mailed from England, and would have been delivered while we were away. It's waiting for me at the post office and after this long weekend, I can pick it up on Tuesday. My choice now seems to be down to Fleet or the Artist's Smock. I'm thinking Fleet, since I've wanted it forever. But then I think something like the Artist's Smock is also very nice. I'll think again when I get the yarn on Tuesday!

And I will sort holiday pictures, too!

Back with some knitting

We had our week of fun in the sun, and it was very fun and very sunny. Our cottage was just steps from the beach, so although we had to carry chairs and towels and shovels and cameras and kites and sunscreen and books to read and knitting and water and, later, a beach umbrella, it was quite convenient. And if we forgot something we could always go back for it!

Today, knitting pictures. We took lots of other pictures, but let's keep it simple to start.

I had got off to a shaky start with the Olympic knitting, and had to rip out what I did during the opening ceremonies. Lucky me, though: I had a two-hour car ride the next day. It soon became clear that the blue yarn I had was not going to make a whole hat, so I added in some white.

Alas, that was not enough, either! So we end up with a pretty stupid looking hat, I'm afraid. It's Hermione's hat from the Half-Blood Prince, but really, it should be all one colour! It will do. And it was quite fun to make, with a little eyelet here and a cable there.

Best part: taking pictures of it in a Peacock melamine bowl! We had two of these in the cottage. I have a soft spot for melamine, I must say.

Next up, I went for something totally straightforward to knit, since it was black. That brown stripe is all the brown I had, and I threw in the gold stripe as well. I made the hat quite pointy on top and added the jaunty pompom.

We decided not to take our own jigsaw puzzles to this place, since the blurb said they had puzzles and books. Unfortunately, the puzzles were either too silly (cartoon dinosaurs) or murderous (1000 pieces of the Golden Gate bridge in the fog). We got the bridge done, and the one rock, and bits of the sky, but had a couple of hundred pieces left when we had to leave. Stay tuned, and some day soon I will tell you how it all worked out.

After my two pretty standard hats, I was ready to go fancy-pants.

This booklet has escaped recent purges because I love that hat on the back cover. Two big circles on the sides, plain bit in the middle, crazy Grandma-lady grinning. So, with sock yarn and a tiny cable needle and short rows, I made the circles. So fun!

I just guessed at the placement of the chin strap. I need a baby to try it on! Still need to find the tiny button, and then we are done with that.

I also made another hat; finished it last night and have no picture yet. And! We went to a place called the Southampton Market where I chanced upon some Peaches & Creme cotton yarn. There were even 1-pound cones of the stuff, but the colours were a bit blah. I got myself two balls of variegated cotton, and then picked up two of sock yarn. (What was I thinking??) So I have a bit of a dishcloth started, too.  Oh, and we had to go to the local thrift store where I found 3 pairs of wooden needles... as if I needed another set of 4.5 mm straights...

Much more holiday blahblahblah to come, folks!

Off to the beach

We are going away for a week, to the lovely shores of lovely Lake Huron.

We shall take a kite and a telescope to look at the moon and a lot of yarn. I hope to bring back a finished hat or two.

I hope the weather will be as good as it was a few years ago when we were there!

See you in August!

And another thing

I was looking through dishcloth patterns recently, because I had signed up for a swap and wanted to see lots of options. I came across the Optical Illusion cloth and just had to whip one up.

Some people do the blocks in stripes, but I think ye olde quilting way of doing it with light, medium and dark colours works just great, even in knitting.

My dark colour yarn, on closer inspection, was too thick and would have messed up my tension, so I improvised with the two colours I had (rather than going upstairs and rummaging around. I was on a roll).

So there you are, an optical illusion dishcloth! Kinda cute, non?

The written pattern is a bit funny, but it's garter stitch and slanted, so I'm sure most people can figure it out... I did every odd row plain knit, and every even row "decrease at one end and increase at the other." For numbers, just knit until you can pick up the number of stitches you need for the next block. It's sort of Log Cabin style, but the last block is seamed to the cast-on of the first block. Clear as mud, right?