All grown up

I once showed you the Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillars from our garden. We had a number of them over a week or two, eating the dill on my back deck. 

Then, they all disappeared. We looked, but couldn't find a chrysalis anywhere. Obviously they don't want to be found, but we worried they'd all become bird snacks.

Yesterday, something flitted by, and I managed to get a picture of this Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly! 

Our baby is all grown up!

(Blogger, like so many other things, has a "new look," Instead of words, they have little icons which are not so easy to interpret, and a new way of sizing photos. I think all is well, and I hope things don't look too weird once I press the little paper-airplane icon to upload this.)

A bit of park knitting

I went to the park with a friend today and we sat in the shade and knitted. I didn't take my big square, the backing for my Kaffe squares -- which is coming along just nicely and almost done -- because I am changing colours every eight rows and that's just too much to keep track of in the park, so I started a dishrag.

We knit for an hour or so, then I came home and finished it off!

The perfect dishrag is not a pretty yellow, because you know it will all just end up coffee-coloured in the end, but my supplies are running low! The yarn used for the "mortar" here is about a gazillion years old and I have been doing my best to use it up forever. Icky beige with splotches. Luckily, it too will fade in time!

I hope to have a finished cushion cover soon, but here is a teaser of the back:

I am using all the colours for the back, but not repeating the stripe sequence. I had to take this picture so I would know what colour to use next! Almost done...  And you notice a jigsaw puzzle started in the background -- 1000 pieces, tomatoes... Pretty terrible, but doable. I'll report in on that later, too!

Years and years in the making

I know these squares have been hanging around for a long time, but I am only now understanding that they have been hanging around for about six years. I took this picture in October, 2014.

In the last couple of weeks I have added two more.

All the 2014 patterns are from Glorious Knitting, Kaffe's first book, and glorious it is indeed. When in doubt, add another dozen colours. These last two are from a "field guide" published by my old pals at Modern Daily Knitting, which used to be Mason Dixon Knitting. These are colourful and fun, but less busy. I hope all my squares can play nicely together, the old and the new.

I need one more of these small squares, and then a big one, the size of all nine of these together. Sew them together, installing a zipper along the way, and there's a cushion cover.

I should be done by 2025 or so!

I finally finished something

The scarf!

I am not sure when I started this, but it seemed like it took forever! Now, of course, it is 30ºC and not at all comfortable wool scarf weather.

I started just making a scarf, garter stitch, about 6 inches wide. Of course, that got too boring. The yarn makes a bumpy texture, so for contrast with the bumps, I made some holes, just here and there.

Even that got a bit boring, and it seemed the yarn would never run out, so I made one end of the scarf wider. It keeps your chest warm under your coat, and somehow it seemed like less knitting! (Knitting is my hobby, but finishing is always more thrilling than just keeping on knitting.)

A lovely, drippy, picot edge. This pond-scum green is my favourite colour, and with bumps and holes and odd shaping, a drippy edge seemed perfect.

It's long enough to do the double-loopy-wrap thing.

I could have squeezed one more row out of they yarn, but pretty efficient, I say!

I did convince myself not to cast on something totally new! I got out my Kaffe Fassett squares and set to work on a half-finished one. Who knows when I last worked on it, but I could not sort out where I was in the chart, so...

Old Kaffe has mellowed somewhat with time and his new patterns don't need quite the fiddliness of some of the old ones. I have cast on for a simple striped square, and will show you my progress next time! I don't even have a picture of all the squares, it seems, and that will have to wait for daylight. So, something to look forward to.

A trip to the islands

It is always lovely to go out to the island. The ferry is now only selling tickets online, and one has to wear a mask while waiting and on board, but that's not hard.

We went early yesterday morning to "avoid the rush," but there was not really a rush. It was really nice to walk around, with the trees and the beach and the wee breeze, but it was still really hot! This summer has been, as the kids say, brutal.

The Centreville amusement park is closed, as is the little farm. I don't have much interest in kids' rides these days, but I do always enjoy talking to the big pig and the chickens at the farm. Next year....

From the ferry

If you click to embiggen, you can see the lifeguard's chair is in the water

On the way home, I stopped at my favourite echinacea flower patch and found this bee. The picture is actually upside-down, so that the bee is right-side-up.

Three things

Thing number one: I did go up the hill and spend my gift certificate at the yarn store.

The green I bought in Vancouver; the new yarn is the mix of petrol blue and browny greenish. It is lovely, and now I have to finish the lumpy green scarf so I can get to work on a light lacy cardigan. There is enough of the multicolour to make a big lace shawl, but I'm trying to be a bit practical.

Thing number two: I got a haircut.

This should last me! After all, my Christmas haircut had to last until July.

I saw my hairdresser last week when she was sitting outside her shop having a break, so immediately booked an appointment. She had just opened, I think. She has only one customer at a time, masks worn, no blow-drying, disposable capes: all very careful. I won't be rushing back in a month, I think, but it's nice to know I can.

Number three: Here is the little park I mentioned before.

This is where my Scrabble lady friend and I met last week. The third friend is staying home after going to a cottage with someone whose colleague then tested positive for COVID-19. No word on that yet!

School in the top left, brown grass throughout. The little maze is cute, and kids scream down the path on scooters into it, while nervous old ladies like me avert our eyes. There will be nice shade trees in a few years, but now one has to be lucky to get the bench in the shade.

Is it worthwhile making plans for July?

1. I have a (very) few plans marked on the calendar for July.
2. Tomorrow I am going to go and sit at a picnic table or perhaps on a blanket in a park with some friends. These are my Scrabble buddies. We haven't yet figured out how to play Scrabble without getting our moist droplets uncomfortably close to one another, and our online game is gone, replaced by a new platform that we don't like. Expect grumbling about that! 
3. (We could just sit outside with masks on and wash our hands after all handling the tiles. That could work!)
4. On Friday I have a date to walk up the hill to the yarn shop. However, it is forecast to be 32 degrees out, and my friend is even wimpier than I am about the heat. I have a gift certificate and so just must go and get something pretty. 
5. Oh, on the 7th of July I can book a time slot to go to the Royal Ontario Museum. Not sure I want to rush out to do that. Maybe I'll book a time for weeks from now and see how things go. 
6. The last item now on my July calendar is to water my new succulent on July 12. That will be an event, for sure. I will start with every two weeks and see how it goes. With time passing so oddly these days, I figured I'd better write it down! I water the other plants when they look a bit droopy, and since they are in the bathroom I do notice them. 

Well, this looks like a very exciting month. Not. So tired of this! 

And now it's almost the end of June

We've been doing the same old stuff.

My neighbour and I walked to the park with a coffee the other day. (I looked at my Visa bill online the other day and noted that practically the only places we spend money now are the grocery store and the local coffee shop.) This new park is nice and I should have taken a picture for you! It is on top of what used to be an asphalt "playground" at an underused Catholic school, and it is now a grassy space with benches and tables and even a young tree or two. I will make another trek to take some pictures.

The kids gave Stephen a new plant for Father's Day!

Too bad I don't have a "before" picture, since it was a lovely sunflower before the squirrel ate it! It's now an indoor plant, with a couple of buds on it. (Must be more assiduous with the picture-taking.)

Other things are eating our plants on the back deck, but sometimes we don't mind, like when one of these (or actually, dozens of these) eats our dill plants.

I believe they are Eastern Black Swallowtails, and I hope we get a glimpse of the butterflies one day.

I have some new knitting. This is the yarn I bought in Vancouver just before we left.

Apparently I didn't share this with you at the time, but I went to Fibre Art Studio on Granville Island and bought this single skein of lumpy Kermit-green yarn.

this photo by Stephen

They squirted me with hand-sanitizer and I was the only person in the shop. I just needed a(nother) yarn souvenir!

Because it is lumpy, or indeed bouclé, I am just knitting it plain, without trying to do anything cabled or lacy or even knit/purl textured, except you can probably see a slit on the lefthand side there. I will put a few of these holes here and there, but it will just be a straight scarf. The colour and texture are exciting enough!

I will note that this week has been filled with turmoil and betrayal and distrust and woe on Ravelry. It is a long story, but it starts with an upgrade of the look of the site. Ravelry was always a bit cute, in a quirky sort of way. You would type the word cake, and a little picture of a cake would appear in your post. There were, at various times, probably a hundred of these little things. Taco, martini, Friday the 13th, mirror ball... would all make little images appear, and now they don't. (This is a minor issue, but it was something especially Ravelry that I really liked.)

The first things I noticed in the new (or ew, as some call it) look was that it is now overly cute, and made me think of an invitation to a 10-year-old girl's birthday party. New colours, new spacing, new navigation, who can handle that?

However, some other people got migraines and at least six people had seizures! The colour contrast, the huge white spaces, the animations on certain pages were actually affecting people's health.

These things happen... and then they should be corrected right away. But the Ravelry team (which is tiny: 5 people run the site for 9 million of us users) has been pretty absent. A blog post from the designer talked about how she loved the cutesiness of it, threads were opened for feedback but then locked, and no answers were given. So disappointing from a team that has been very open and communicative all along.

A survey was put together, basically asking us how much we loved things, with yarn balls with faces to signify answers from "love" to "hate." We then learned that our answers were not anonymous, but linked to our usernames, which also link to our purchases, for example. There are talks of lawsuits, especially among Europeans who have very strict rules about these things!

We'll see how that all pans out, but one lawsuit about causing seizures or violating EU regulations could kill the whole thing. Which would be terrible.

So, that's it from me, some knitting, a new park, a caterpillar and perhaps complete collapse of my main online community.

A thing I hadn't done before

A couple of friends and I went out to Tommy Thompson Park, or as it is commonly known, Leslie Spit. It is a spit of land -- sort of land, made of concrete, bricks, demolished buildings, dirt they dug out decades ago when they made the subways -- that sticks out into Lake Ontario. Lots of birds, scrubby trees, green stuff poking out of piles of blocks of concrete.

There is rebar sticking up all over the place, and people string worn, multicoloured bricks on it.

The city is waaay over there.

From the other side, you can just see lake off to the horizon.

I found all these different colours of bricks. Worn by years of tumbling around. It's a weird landscape!

Someone had stacked up flat bits. Old countertops? Facing from some fancy building? Floor tiles? Who knows?

These are some little things I picked up. Glass and tiles. 

I was a bit restrained, and didn't bring home everything I saw. Three one-hole bricks and a few wee bits of prettiness.

There aren't any people in these pictures but there were a ton of people, mainly on bikes, enjoying the beautiful day and doing a fair job of social distancing. We are still supposed to keep two meters apart from people we don't live with, but can expand our close circles to include ten people. No one knows what that will really mean. If I am in a circle with one friend of mine, I am also in the circle with her three housemates, one of whom is four years old. And if I am in my neighbour's circle, I'm in the same circle with her son, who travels to another town in Ontario for work. I do think it all means we might be able to have a barbecue with a friend or two sometime! I'm still in no hurry to rush out!

Still here

I have started a dozen things with this yarn and taken them out again.

Do I want big lace,

smaller lace,

tiny lace?

Cardigan, I think. Maybe a shawl, for something different.

But, nothing is right.

So, I am back to sewing ends in on this.

We forgot to put the garden waste out for pickup this morning. Our Thursday routines are crumbling!

Progress

(This was meant to be published on Thursday, but I thought I'd get a picture of the blanket to show you... best laid plans...)

Already I can say I have finished one of my June goals. The baby blanket is done, ends sewn in, and any day now I will wash it and it'll be ready to go! I have about 40 grams of yarn left, enough for a tiny Aviatrix hat.

I had fun making one of these in February. I guess I didn't show you because I worried the mom-to-be would see it or something, though that was always pretty unlikely!

Anyways, I made these two hats in February for my cousin's grandchild, who was born in April.

I had to ask my cousin to sew a button on the Aviatrix, the top one! Somehow in all the hullabaloo of those distant days, I missed that step. Probably because I didn't have a button jar in my rental apartment.

Every baby girl needs a pussy hat in case she has to go to a rally or something. (I know babies are oddly shaped creatures, but I would love to see that hat on an actual baby... so tall! Surely that's wrong, but that's what the pattern said!)

I have no pictures of the blanket, but will get right on that!

It's June

Let's pretend all is normal and make a to-do list for June.

1. Finish baby blanket
2. Start knitting Ibaraki, or at least make a swatch to see how the lace yarn on big needles works
3. Sew in some ends on another ancient project, the Kaffe Fassett squares I was knitting in 2014. I have six now, I think, and a half? I have a plan, and it won't be hard, but will take some resolve and perseverance. 

That's all the knitting, and that is certainly enough. 

Other plans are completely up in the air. Who can plan? 

Lots of places are opening up more, but Toronto is still getting over a hundred new cases of COVID-19 a day, so I am sure we'll just be sitting on our porch and carefully going to get groceries. A cottage we like to go to in Southampton is available for a few weeks, but the politics of leaving the city for a getaway are fraught, and we are not sure the public health folks will allow it. 

Have some poppies: