Hooked

The other day I went to a favourite spot, the Textile Museum. They are showing an exhibition of hooked rugs, called Home Economics. Astonishing! Let me just show you a few pictures, in no particular order.

I was sure this was modern, but no, early 20th century. Kaffe Fassett could have made it. Wonderful colour and pattern.

These two are, um, from 1840 and 1910. 

There was a wall, two storeys tall, full of animals on rugs. Dogs, bunnies, horses, deer, birds. On the right in the picture below you can see lobsters in a chequerboard.

The one below was under glass so there are reflections of the overhead lights. It was made by Emily Carr. The blurb said it was taken to England from Victoria by a family who kept it for 100 years, before it was put on Ebay! 

I actually started this exhibit at the wrong end, so this modern rug by Barbara Klunder was the first that I saw. It shows Canada's national heroine, Laura Secord, and her cow -- I'm sure she wore clothes while running through the woods to alert the British about approaching Americans. It's quite fantastic. 

Another fantastic rug. Look at the colours of the ocean. 

Now this... This is not a modern rug, but another from the early 20th century, around 1930. I would guess it was made some time after the popularization of photography!

The sheep is made of longer loops of yarn than the background

The wheels have shadows! Shadows!

Just some wonderful stuff. In the top right above, the background is sort of "marbelized" with different browns.

I can imagine how delightful it would be to get up on a cold morning and step onto a hot pink rose-strewn-anchor rug.

This is a modern piece, telling the world that craft is inherently utilitarian; most of these pieces were made just to keep feet off cold floors and brighten things up a bit.

Another shawl?

What have I gone and done now?

Sometime last fall I bought a bag of wound-up fancy sock yarns, no labels showing. The yarn I used for the balaclava and hat were in the same bag.

There are seven balls, five with labels tucked inside the centre-pull balls. Actually, there might have been other labels, that fell out of the balls, and since I couldn't tell what was what I may have just tossed them. There's a dim and distant memory (from a month or two ago). 

I have started to make a Clapotis out of these seven balls. That should turn out to be about 700 yards, surely enough to make a gigantic scarf.

They seem to all be from the Unique Sheep yarn company. Little taster-bits of 25 grams each. The pinky-grey is also a bit green in some lights, and is called Japanese Garden. The charcoal with splashes of pink and orange and purple is called Fireworks.

Now I have started on an unmarked ball of various browns. Very silky, very brown.

I'm one ball away from half-way done, if you know what I mean. I do like the look of a Clapotis, and this is the first time I've made a full-sized one. (I did make a narrower scarf once.) It'll be done in no time, right?

I'll need to go out and get a brown coat, I think.

Show off -- a Christmas sewing project

I made Elaine a tote bag for Christmas. It's purple!

Nice big pocket on the outside, for, you know, the map of Paris or the paperback On the Road. And a little purple notebook for those jottings one must always be making.

Exquisitely lined in more purple. There's also a cell-phone-sized pocket inside. Not shown: the ultra-clever strap with a key-ring on a clip -- no more fumbling around for keys.

The most exciting thing of all is the little pouch with an actual zipper!

I watched a Craftsy class about bags and zippers, which was quite good. I wish I had watched it before buying the zipper, because it tells you to just use the middle part of the zipper, not bothering with those pesky end bits. If I'd known about that, I'd have bought a longer zipper, to make this just a wee bit bigger.

It is just about the perfect size for all those little things young ladies have to carry around with them. And so clever!

Next sewing project might just be pyjamas. I bought fabric and pattern months ago, but am slightly hesitant to do anything other than just straight lines! Meanwhile I have cast on for ... three or four new knitting projects. New Year's startitis!

Showing off another FO

Another wee hat for 1000 Stitches for Syria. This is also made from odd bits of sock yarn, 80 stitches, 4.5 mm needles. Apparently this pink had quite a bit less yardage than the black and white did, because the hat's just about 6 inches high, and I used every scrap. The last few decrease rows were made with yet another yarn.

I'd like to go off to the LYS to drop these off, but my foot hurts! I didn't tell you yesterday about my misadventure in the hotel swimming pool... I was getting in the deep end of the little pool by going down a ladder, thought the deep end wasn't very deep, and stepped down... into nothing! My head went under and my foot, flailing around for the bottom, landed crookedly. I sort of have a bruised baby toe, which sounds ridiculous, but which actually impedes normal walking quite a bit! (Also, it is finally super cold: -15ºC today. That might have something to do with it as well.)

Might sit around with my foot up, might venture out. We shall see.

Here we are in 2016

Back again for another year...

We spent New Year's at a ski resort here in southern Ontario. Those of you who follow the weather here will know that is a ridiculous thing, since it has hardly snowed this winter at all.

They did have a few cold days when they could make snow, so there were a couple of runs open, but there was not enough natural snow for tubing, no ice for skating on. And of course, the "hill" is not really up to BC skiing standards. Which is all actually okay since I haven't skied for years, the kids are moderately interested but you can't do much in one day, we don't own any equipment, etc, etc.

All the windows had mesh on them

So we watched people ski, we played some board games and ate some chips, we listened to the pop radio station they play all day long to the lift lines! They did have a great fireworks display at 10 pm on the 31st, which we could see perfectly from our "slope-side condo."

But then, sadly for us, the party continued till 2 am in the pub, and we could hear the whole thing.

Of course, I needed car knitting, even though it is less than a two-hour drive from here. Everything I have, as always, is at a point where I should have the pattern with me, or I need to think a wee bit, so I started something new.

I'm not sure if I showed you the yarn I got at a Textile Museum sale in the fall. I got a bag of 8 or 10 little balls of leftover sock yarn. Some of it is pretty fancy wool/silk/alpaca, but there were two balls of pretty ordinary stuff, black and white mottled. It was wound, but I imagine there was most of 2 50-gram balls.

I held the two strands together and cast on 80 stitches on a 4.5 mm circular needle. The fabric turned out to be not as dense as I might like for a hat, but we were zooming down the highway when I found that out and there was nothing for it but to carry on. (As it turned out, 80 stitches was not quite enough for an adult-sized head, either.)

Two-by-two ribbing till it was long enough for a hat, and I still had quite a bit of yarn left.

So I continued on to make a balaclava. (Cast off half the stitches, rib three rows, cast back on again.) For maybe a 10-year-old. 

You can see it is a tad tight on Arthur.

It will go in the 1000 Stitches for Syria box.

Ah, and looking at my phone pictures, I see I did get one of Arthur in his new hat! Photo-bombed by his dad...

It's Christmas Eve, babe

The stockings are hung by the chimney with care. You can see we need to go out and get more wood. And we should clean out the ashes! My pile of knitting on the left...

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a very wonderful 2016!

Another winter solstice comes

My Temperature Scarf is done!

It should, I suppose, be called the Temperature Cowl now.  

Some have called it "garish," and some have called it "nice." 

I like it and it is certainly warm! 

What I have used/have left: 

Darkest blue, for -15ºC and lower: used 25g, have 25 left
bright blue for -10 to -14: used 26g, have 24 left
pretty variegated icy colours for -4 to -9: used 40g, have 10 left
green for -3 to +3: used 92g, have 8 left
green variegated for 4 to 10: used 87, have 13 left
yellow variegated for 11 to 15: used 74g, have 26 left
yellow/orange for 16 to 20: used 71g, have 29 left
orange variegated for 21 to 27: used 61g, have 39 left
and red for 28 and above: used 30g, have 20 left

I needed two skeins of the yarn for everything from -3ºC to 27ºC. Most for -3 to +3!

I'd love to see what other places need. Hmm, when we retire to Vancouver, I'll do another one, but in laceweight yarn!

This thing is huge.

Done doodling

I finished this up a few days ago, sewed in all the ends, blocked it nicely. You will notice that I didn't end up doing the leaf edging. I thought I could get it to work on the wavy edge, because Stephen West does suggest doing a few rows of garter before casting off. But in fact the width of the knitted-on edging didn't work in the dips of the knitting; everything got squashed together too much. Maybe if I had stuck with it and blocked it, I could have got it to work, but I decided that perhaps I'd best just do what the designer told me to.

 Now you get lots of detail pics:

The very end

The long cable up one edge

A wee bit of the long wavy edge

The lovely wavy edge

The whole thing laid out on the floor

Everyone seemed to do this pose

A bit cold for these outdoor shots

It'll be very warm, I think

I ran out of every scrap of yarn. I knew the red wouldn't last, and indeed I ended up using all the red, all the orange, and a bit of another reddish sock yarn you can see in the top picture here. I did four wedges of the green, interspersing a few orange short rows here and there, and had about a foot of the green left before the last increase row. I used the thrift-store yellow for that row and a couple beyond, before casting off in all the little tidbits of red and orange.

 I kind of like it, but have enough wool shawls! I am donating this to a group here in Toronto collecting woollies for refugees. It will certainly keep someone cosy and warm.

So much for November

That NaBloPoMo was semi-successful, I suppose. I got off track mid-month and never really got back on. I really should write something on the last day of the month, just to show I haven't given up altogether.

What I am doing these days is Doodling all the time!

600+ stitches crammed on a metre-long needle

I am still on the third clue, although the fourth was released last Friday. Sometime last week I wrote on Ravelry that I sure hoped the last clue wouldn't just be to finish off the 644 stitches with i-cord... and guess what, that's what it is. There is an optional flourish, which I don't like at all, so I am searching for a nice knit-on edging.

The two places I look for such things are probably the most used books in my collection. There are others I like to gawp at, dreaming of one day making something out of them, but the ones with patterns that I actually do use are Nicki Epstein's Knitting on the Edge  (Rav link) and Jan Eaton's 200 Knitted Blocks (Rav link).

My Doodler is meant to evoke the fall leaves that were so colourful when I was choosing yarn a month ago, so I think I am going to make a leaf border in my leftover scraps along the 644-stitch edge. We know from past experience that this could take forever, but somehow I think it will not make me as crazy as an i-cord edging would, and it will look way cooler.

Luckily my books agree on a simple, leafy border that should only take me a year or two to complete over 644 stitches.

Did I mention that there are six hundred and forty-four stitches here?

Gingerbread space ships

Today we have the traditional gingerbread space shuttles and rocket ships.

I used this recipe, but I'm not icing and stacking them! Some go in the freezer for later, but some might just get eaten now.

The Golden Cup

Isn't that a book title?

One of my new old cups is gold!

Can you see the photographer's reflection?

Not real gold, of course, but bone china, covered with something golden and shiny.

You can see on the saucer the coating is worn away. Surely not from excessive use. I wish I knew more about how, when, where my mom came across these! It seems this cup is not ancient, but from the 1950s or 60s.

Still knitting away. The thing about a shawl is, you're almost always going to end up with 500-stitch rows, and you just have to resign yourself to them. Slog, slog, slog.

Teacups

My mom had a few nice china teacups. And now I have them. All different, most of them too small for a comfortable cuppa, but so pretty! I'll show you some individual ones as the days go by.

Second Clue

All set for the third set of instructions coming out tomorrow night. We have a piece completely surrounded by i-cord, and two clues to go.

I'm not too keen on the big cable, but it is certainly an interesting way to do things, and I do like the i-cord edge. I made two moderate twists instead of one humungous one for the last couple of cables, and I wish I'd done that for the whole length. Next time...

About a month to go

The temperature scarf's year ends on December 20th. Or, indeed, when the spiral comes around to the level of the first row!

It's getting colder; I haven't used orange for a week or so. But the nights are still above freezing, so I don't know if I'll get any blues in before Dec. 20.

Was away, now I'm back

Hello out there in blogland.
I was away for almost a week in BC, visiting three sisters, two nieces, one nephew, one great-niece and one great-nephew, and a dad. And a spouse/in-law or two...

Historico-crafty-wise, I have a few photos for you.

This is my niece's son, Tomas. He is standing on a blanket/rug made from my 1970s poncho! My mom crocheted this originally as a square with a hole in for my head, but it is made of indestructible acrylic and when I stopped wearing it as a poncho, she repurposed it. It is lined with something warm and has been used as lap cover, crib blanket, rug, for generations, apparently... Quite a delight to see that in action!

This is my dad's scooter, complete with a nice warm scarf in the basket. A scarf I made in 2005, in fact. My brother-in-law used it for a while, I think. Nice to see that still being used, too. My dad is 97, and now he has a new pair of socks that should see him through to his 100th birthday at least. I seem to have not taken a picture of the completed pair, though I remember laying them out on the floor to admire them!

Enough for now. Tomorrow I hope to show you my MKAL progress. I did get quite a bit of knitting done!