An orange car

We are still in the month of Orange here at Mary's own Project Spectrum. Many things have changed and I am in Vancouver again. 

We have moved in to our new condo (where we are not living permanently just yet; it's like our summer cabin) which is lovely and very close to the beach for sunsets, but we have no furniture! We got a table off a Buy Nothing group and have two hardware store patio chairs. We have ordered a bed frame and will get a mattress next week (we hope, as we are sleeping on airbeds now and that is not great). We looked at dish sets and everything is white and boring, so we went to the Sally Ann and got a few nice blue dishes. A free table was on offer in Victoria, but we were hesitant to rent a car and pay to take it on the ferry to pick it up, but now our brother-in-law is coming over to the big city and will bring it with him! Yay! So, next week things should be looking up. Then some carpets, for sure. Painting will wait till our next trip here, I imagine. 

Meanwhile, we saw an orange car, a 1938 Ford, as the guy told us. He had parked outside the groovy coffee shop so could sit there and watch us looky-loos admire his fancy car.  

In other news, I have started a blog of old family photos, so if you would like to see my parents in the 1940s and other delights, head here. 

Orange roses

Amongst all the peonies and red roses these days, I finally found some orange roses for June. 

We are running around in a bit of a flurry because Stephen and I are off to BC again tomorrow. Next post: our Vancouver view! 

June plans

Ah, June. The month of ORANGE. I'll be on the lookout. So far I have seen a few orange things:

The big plan for this month is that we will go back to Vancouver to our *new* condo. We are not going to move into it full-time for a year or so, but we are looking on it as our cottage, our bolt-hole, our pied-à-terre. So, pretty exciting. I have wish-lists online and when we get there I will press "checkout" and get some essentials delivered. A kettle, a bed. 

Meanwhile, I shall make my last sleeve and turtleneck for the sweater. I hope to get that done before we go. 

I think I will be in the mood for something small and simple when I am done that. I might get some orange cotton and make us a dishcloth or two for the new kitchen. I might finish a fancy winter glove. I might make another crazy big sweater. 

Okay, not planning...

And that was May

May was the month of RED in my own little Project Spectrum.

I didn't make anything red, since my black and blue sweater is occupying all my time. 

But I did take pictures of red things. First we have the tulips, which were just spectacular this year and carried on blooming for ages! No big rain and wind storms to wreck them, I guess. 

A Canada150 tulip still holding on. 

Yellow tulips with subtle red edging, and one gone a bit rogue. 

So red. 

Another garden bursting with tulips!

These had the sun shining through them so amazingly!

A blooming tree. I'm going to guess some sort of crabapple, but I don't know for sure. 

A peony, perhaps more pink than red, but so pretty!

A reddish building. 

A red we see so often: lights on a car.

More car stuff: a cute little vintage MG sports car and a kids' car-like thing. 

And finally, the whole rainbow! A sticker on a bench outside the library. 

Tomorrow is June, and I'll have to start looking for orange things. Meanwhile, a picture of the black and blue in progress: 

One sleeve to go, and yes, it's supposed to be different lengths. And different colours and different patterns. I have a plan! 

A sock with roots

Despite my last post, this has nothing to do with redness. 

Someone I follow on Instagram is doing a thing... a pop-up art show in an old-growth forest in BC. And she wants socks to hang on a line. Well, how could I say no? Luckily I have a basket full of socks with holes in which no longer fit anyone. She wanted plain coloured ones, which was a bit of a challenge, but I did find one. 

I knitted some roots dangling out the bottom of the hole, since darning this was not going to be much fun. I used Habu silk stainless steel yarn so the pieces can be shaped and twisted, but then I put beads on the ends so that weight sort of counteracts any other shaping. 

I did leave a "tap root" which can stick out here or there. 

There was a tiny hole in the top. How to finish that off? Since I was working with a small bag of miscellaneous beads instead of the gazillions of beads I have elsewhere in the house, I found a hot pink bead with an S on it, and it was Stephen's birthday, so -- problem solved. 

Sometime this summer, my sock will be a part of something exciting!

Today it is May

One thing I enjoyed in the olden days, when every dang knitter had a blog, is a thing called Project Spectrum. People worked on projects of different colours as the months went by. I just thought of this the other day and realised I could do an 8-month version: 

• May: RED
• June: ORANGE
• July: YELLOW
• August: GREEN
• September: BLUE
• October: INDIGO
• November: VIOLET
• December: NEUTRALS

We also used to like using the coloured-text tool. Those were the days. 

I am not sure I have a red project to be working on, but I will keep my eyes open for redness and think about red through May. 

I think this is the last time I saw a rainbow, last summer: 

And I shall have a rainbow of projects!

Time passes yet again

If you follow me on Instagram you might just think that all I do is go for walks around and look at pretty flowers and trees. Not wrong, really. 

I have also knitted about 13 inches of boring charcoal grey ribbing. I need about 7 more! And then, I get to make the yoke of the sweater. So that is very exciting. I may never finish...

There are some other things going on but perhaps they are not blog-fodder just yet. The end of April will be a very busy time with the university term ending and people moving and much confusion. I do at least have an appointment made for the first dose of the vaccine, so that is something! 

Let's have some more pictures from the last week or so: 

We watched the sunset from a patio one night

A very old sidewalk stamp. This might require a whole blog post one day

It's April

I will not do an April Fool's post... yesterday I saw that heavy snow was forecast for Vancouver and that reminded me not to believe anything I read today. 

But I will show you some pictures and make a bit of a list for the coming month. 

I have made a sleeve. You saw the beginning of it last time. So now that is done (for the moment) and I have started on the body of the sweater. (It's dark grey ribbing, all the same, so not very interesting to look at.) I don't know if I've shown you this picture before, but I snapped it around Christmas time as I was on a walk through some swanky fashion shops in Toronto. Unfortunately I have no idea what shop or who might the designer be. 

When Kid #1 saw it, the eyes lit up, so I decided to have a crack at making something like it. 

The ribbed side is a charcoal grey, with a more useable sleeve shape, and it will be a raglan sleeve instead of a drop shoulder like that. I am using a pattern called Rugged Raglan, even though we won't end up with anything very rugged, I think! We haven't decided on the colour for the other side, or the cable pattern, but I am leaning toward some colour we can call Highlighter Marker. 

That will be my main knitting for the foreseeable future. We go back to Toronto on the 25th I think, so I have plenty of time to make the body rectangle, and then I have to join the sleeve in and make the top part. Perhaps there should be some trying on and consultation, but we'll see how things go. 

I don't really have any other plans, so perhaps a to-do list is not needed! Let's move on to some pretty pictures of what I have been doing!

Vancouver is full of flowering trees these days. Whole streets are lined with frothy pinkness. When the sky is blue, the combination is so beautiful!

We went to Stanley Park yesterday with a friend who was looking for a certain cultivar of cherry, but although the ornamental plums are blossoming everywhere, and we just call any pink or white flowery tree a cherry, we learned that the cherries need another week or so before they are perfect. We did a lot of walking around in the park looking at other delights. 

Of course, a favourite, Girl in a Wetsuit. 

Today I was walking on Kits Beach and saw a small sailboat had come ashore, perhaps last week when it was very windy. 

The tiller

The waterline

And that is how April begins. As long as that heavy snow doesn't really materialize, it all looks good. 

Trying to blog more

I seem to have fallen out of the habit of blogging, and I would like to get back to it. Once a week shouldn't be too much... but we shall see. 

I like to make something out of a cookbook once it's come into my possession, even (or especially) if it's tattered and missing parts. So I found the pages on Dunk Sauces in that James Beard book, and look, there's one starred! (A dunk sauce is what a modern person would call a dip, I believe.)

We have some shrimp and we'll find some veg and bread, and that will be a fun picnic at home. 

Yes, those are green onions and not chives, nor green pepper

I have also started a big knitting project. I tried about five different things with some pretty laceweight yarn, but nothing thrills me. So I bought some dark grey wool-blend yarn and am making a sweater. 

More as the story unfolds... 

A new cookbook

 I am very fond of the system of Little Free Libraries people have made. Give a book, take a book. 

The other day I went to put back into circulation something that I can't even remember now, and I picked up The James Beard Cookbook. I have been searching for years for Beard on Bread, so thought this would be a decent substitute for now. And so well-loved; someone had used this book a lot! 

The first thing I noticed upon getting it home: the entire middle was missing. I do not have pages 129 to 348. I go straight from Baked Fish to Chicken Fricassee. 

I flipped through a bit in the front half, and some days went by before I started in on the second half. 

Someone had had a bit of a misfortune. Could have set the house on fire, it seems!

Ah well. Perhaps it was not meant to be. I will find something in the first half to make, just to say I did it, but then, it's back to the street for this one!

The dress is done

The dress made with the muddy, grizzly-bear-coloured yarn is done. The dress is very cute, and I made some super-cute leg-warmers to go with it, but I still question my choice of yarn! 

The leg-warmers are just the cuffs of some 2-year-size socks. I thought I wouldn't make real socks for a kid who can barely even sit up on her own these days, let alone walk. 

Yesterday I went to Dressew, a sort of Vancouver institution on West Hastings Street. There was a line-up to get in! I found my buttons in record time and didn't stick around to get tempted by fabric. Luckily I have a cousin with a full range of tools in town so I was able to borrow a teensie crochet hook to make the button loop. 

Now I just have to figure out how to get it to the family. The kid won't fit it at all till the fall, I think, so no rush. I'll collect a few things, perhaps. She might even get a matching chapeau!