Not quite the way I planned

Tomorrow, Elaine's school is having an evening affair, with an art show, silent auction and a cake raffle. So, I am making a cake.

There's always the problem: what to put the cake on? A regular plate will not come back to me, so I looked at plastic picnic plates I wouldn't mind getting rid of, but they were not big enough to contain my brilliant idea -- my brilliant idea was to recreate something like this. (I should have read that page before embarking on this, I can tell you right now. )

The plate problem was solved by the old Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This is an election sign, heavy-duty corrugated plastic. These things are light and strong and perfect for making plates out of, or even houses. Their only flaw is that it is not easy to cut them in any sort of curve. So, a square plate.

Wrap it in tin foil, and we're all set.

Assemble your sugar-bomb toppings: store-bought icing, Maltesers, Buttons, Kit Kats.

Here was my first clue that this was not quite the same as that previous cake. I only made a single layer, and the Kit Kats were too tall!  I did experiment with cutting them, but decided that was a bit too labour intensive for me today, so I ditched the Kit Kats idea. (Note to self: hide them before the kids get home from school!)

I just swooped the candies around on top, and arranged some artfully around the outside.

Would you bid on this cake?

 

A few leftovers that can be easily dealt with, and we are set and ready to go!

Better late than never

Still a bit tentative Wednesday:

Wednesday

Thursday the flower was full-blown open.

Showing off the macro setting

Friday I didn't take a picture! I did, however, buy 2 balls of sock yarn, a 1962 Vogue Knitting magazine and a bunch of fabric in garish colours that I am not sure what to do with! It was the Textile Museum's sale. As usual, I went with my friend who buys more than me, and she performed admirably, going for the fabric this time. I held back from buying acres of upholstery samples. "I could make a cushion! I could sew all these together and make.... something!!" No, no, I couldn't.... One thing at a time. I did get some wild psychedelic stuff that I think I can make a beach bag out of. We shall see. I've added it to the pile.

Saturday's alium

Oh, look a peony is going to bloom, too!

Will take pictures of the acquisitions and more in the days to come. (And I am eager to see what the peony does; I can't even remember what colour the flowers are.)

Two for Tuesday

Yesterday was bright and sunny, and last night we had torrential rains. All this seems to have been good for the plants!

I wish I had a huge clump of these, instead of the 3 or 4. I hope they divide and multiply and add! Next year, watch out!

The onion on Monday

Opening more and more. If the squirrels don't eat it, we'll be enjoying a full giant onion flower in the next few days.

Yesterday and today

 My ornamental onions are coming into bloom.

Saturday it looked like this:

Sunday it looks like this: 

It would be nice if everything progressed so clearly.

The things we do for our wee children

We are still sifting through years of kid stuff while we move the bedrooms around. Elaine's last abandoned bits are still upstairs and need sorting into garbage; things to pass on; and sentimental stuff that the parents want even if the kids don't.

I think this has to end up in the garbage pile, but I took some photos to immortalise it.

I believe we inherited this pair of pants from Arthur's cousins.

The elastic cuffs on the ankles were useful, especially when the pants were really too big for the kid; this way they didn't drag on the ground. However, when Arthur finally outgrew them, I didn't really want to save them for baby Elaine, as they were pretty ratty by then.

He had, I recall, just got a bunch of marbles from somewhere, and since we didn't have a Crown Royal bag handy, I decided to make a bag out of a pant leg, with that elastic cuff as the opening. I think they call this upcycling, these days. (OMG, look at the stuff people make! Quilts! Stuffed creatures!)

upside-down pant-leg = personalized marble bag

reinforced knee, with my writing

Arthur, aged 3 or 4, squeezed fabric paint on the back

such neat red stitching

All good things must come to an end. The fabric is weak, the paint is stiff, the marbles are somewhere else. Farewell, marble bag.

Never-ending edging

When last we spoke about knitting, I was setting out to knit a fringe on the edge of my Colonnade shawl. Looks not too bad, right? Some progress is being made.

Actually, I am not even done the first quarter of the edge, and when I spread it out, I fear I am maybe only done the first half of the first quarter!

I think it will look good and be fun and funky when it is finished, but when that will be, who can say? Especially because I am thinking of moving on to something else! I'll at least finish that one ball of dark navy, and then I'll try to finish the quarter. I'd like to just whip up a hat, but I was supposed to just whip this up, too!

More on Hot Docs, and funny pictures I take on my phone

I was early to see a movie the other day, and started taking pictures of things like the line-up sign.

The loneliness of the person who gets to the theatre ridiculously early.

This was at the ROM where I saw (eventually) Special Ed. Here's the trailer for the film, and you can see a bit of Ed talking about the movie in this clip. Here is his great masterpiece, Primiti Too Taa. I love Ed. I think we all know some nice guy, a bit idealistic, completely good-hearted but actually useless. That's Ed.

Taking these pictures reminded me I should maybe see what other masterpieces I have stored on my phone.

Craziness.

Last fall, I walked across the Bloor Viaduct. The trees were beautiful and the fence was ... there.

This is not meant to be a picture of a tree, but of the house behind that had a big fire. Terrible, two houses wrecked, families displaced and so on! And I seem to have taken a picture of the tree.

This is Elaine's seigneur's farm. I hadn't seen it because they'd done the work at school, so I was thrilled to see this in the display case in the foyer of the school. She provided the base: a plastic election sign we had in the basement. (And this is so relevant, because Ed once made a house out of election signs!)

Finally, I thought this was very funny:

Now, the green things are poking out of the ground, and we even have a blooming magnolia!

I saw two other movies that same day. We Always Lie to Strangers was extremely funny and delightful, about a town full of music halls and the Lennon Sisters and extravaganzas.

Muscle Shoals was also super, but unfortunately it ends with the song Sweet Home Alabama which I have not been able to get out of my head for 2 days. I will not link to that song or I might explode. Other than that, it was a really good movie about a record studio and the guys who made the music there. Interviews with Aretha Franklin and Keith Richards, among others. Keith Richards ended every statement with a nervous little giggle, and everyone in the theatre then nervously giggled, too. Very odd.

I've done with my volunteering shifts and just have 2 or 3 more shows to see. Fun, fun, fun. I do have to do a week's worth of dishes and forage for some food for my dear family, and next week we'll likely be back to normal around here.

My first Hot Docs movie: Good Ol' Freda

Last night I went to see Good Ol' Freda, the movie about the Beatles' secretary.

She was just 17, you know what I mean! Freda used to go to the Cavern Club on her lunch breaks from the typing pool, and got to know the guys and Brian Epstein. When Epstein needed a secretary, he gave her the job, and she worked with them... from before they were famous till after they had disbanded. She was at the Civic Reception for them, she went on the Magical Mystery Tour, she visited their parents and saw their babies.

Here's a clip, with her talking about her work with the fan club.

And here's a picture of her last night at the theatre. The movie was super, and the Q&A with her and the director, Ryan White, was just icing on the cake.

A woman in the audience stood up and said that she had lived in Toronto when she was younger, and when she was 12, starting to go to the record store on her own to buy Beatles records, her parents moved the family out to the suburbs and her life was more or less over! What to do but write to the Beatles fan club to lament? Freda wrote back, made a connection, cheered the girl up!

She said she answered all the fan club mail! Even after she quit her job and had two little children, she kept going till all the letters were answered. (In the beginning, she had given out her home address, and before long they were getting sacks and sacks of letters!)

It was a really fun evening and a highly recommended film!

Thunder and rainbows

Crashing thunder. I went upstairs to make sure I hadn't been foolish enough to leave the window open on this temptingly springlike day. The window was properly closed, but I stepped out onto the deck, and saw this!

Wowee-wow-wow, you don't get a full, double rainbow like that very often!

It's all about the vouchers

Toronto has the big film festival in September, and I have seen movies there for the past couple of years. It's a big affair. Lots of people see multiple movies every day and one assumes there are scads of movie stars and bigwigs all over the place.

We also have a documentary film fest, Hot Docs. At first glance, a documentary film festival did not turn my crank, but the home cinema is just down the street and there's always a few good ones which I hear about but don't get around to seeing, so I looked a bit closer and figured the thing to do was to volunteer with them and see what happens! I've volunteered for several do-gooder groups before, and at schools, but here, I am not saving the world or educating dear children or doing much but ripping tickets and telling people which line to stand in, but I'm gettin' me some film vouchers.

As it turned out, I managed to get 3 days' worth of volunteering in the office last week, so, along with a handful of paper cuts, I got vouchers for films already -- the usual "pay" is one movie voucher per 4 or 5 hour shift. We also got a voucher for going to the training session. (What they tell you at the training session: you are invaluable but you have no authority; tell the paid staff if anything weird happens or anyone wants anything special. Be nice. That is all. And that is fine with me.)

Quick as a bunny I traded my vouchers in and will see:

Our Nixon

We Always Lie to Strangers


Choir Boys

Muscle Shoals

 I will get five more vouchers, if all goes according to plan, and have a list of about 15 movies I want to see! Can not wait!

Colonnade progress

I am not knitting the prescribed three rows a day; I have gone for days without knitting anything, and then when I do sit down to knit, I have trouble stopping. I recalculated what I have to do and made it simpler: to finish the yarn I have for this project in April, I have to knit two balls a week.

Oh, no, I can't possibly do that!

And then I knit up a ball in one day.

And then I rested my arm a bit.

And then I realized if I kept going as planned, my circular needle would explode. The pattern increases eight stitches every two rows.

Now I have almost 400 stitches on it and can't comfortably jam any more on. So I will add the rest of the length on sideways -- Elizabeth Zimmermann says not to have a big old long bind-off edge on a shawl anyways!

In keeping with the Colonnade theme, I thought I wanted something architectural and solid rather than lacy and delicate. I had one edging in mind which had garter stitch diamonds, but then I thought I'd just continue the lines of the shawl with these crazy fringes.

Cast on; knit a tiny bit; cast off. Four hundred stitches' worth I have to do this! I am crazy indeed. I think the ridiculous nature of this will keep me from over-working my arm!

When that green runs out I will continue in the navy. I also have tidbits of the other colours which I can fit in somewhere. I figure I should use about 3 or 4 balls of navy for this, meaning I will have a couple left over. 

I will get so bored with casting on and casting off, and surely I shall never finish!

Plan for April

I see that today is the first of a new month.

I haven't had knitting plans for a long time, but now I think it is safe to say that I wish to finish this shawl by the end of the month. Or at least, to knit a couple of these really long rows a day!

I have 8 balls, and each now makes about a dozen rows, so that's 100 rows, so... Three rows a day! (This is called fuzzy math.)

(April Fool's: it's really just called "estimating.")

Still knitting

Before we went away, I started a cotton wrap, a Colonnade shawl. I'm making it in dk cotton instead of big fat Manos wool, and I'm not knitting very much at a time, so it is not getting much bigger very fast.

I made the bit in stocking stitch and have finally started on the colonnade part, where I have to k2tog, yo twice, k2tog across the row. A bit tough on the ol' elbow, so I take it slow.

But I am getting there!

This is what it looked like before our trip.

In other knitting news: I needed to find a tiny crochet hook the other day, so got my whole needle collection out and sifted through it, and realized I had about 10 pairs of 6 mm straight needles, and even more 4.5s. Get a grip, I said! Who needs that many needles, really, truly? So now I have a bundle of ones I am willing to part with. I had thought of suspending them in a window, sort of a bead curtain made of sticks, but I can see too many problems with that -- tangling being the biggest problem! So, I think I'll just send them to the charity shops.

Also, a friend gave me a bunch of Vogue Knitting magazines. I stopped buying them a couple of years ago because it was just mindless accumulation of more and more paper. But I was pleased to get this bag of yarn p*rn, as she calls it, and gladly flipped the pages, making big plans in my head. And then I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed, because I guess her cats had been sitting on the magazines and now I am allergic to magazines! They too will be out the door ASAP.

Had a bit of a panic about finding a camera cable, but phew, disaster averted! All is well.

And now for something completely different

As I mentioned, Stephen continues his European jaunt with a couple of weeks in Cambridge. It was snowing, and he was out and about and took these pics of the spiky pillar box! I see from 2005 that it is  on Priory Road and the Riverside, and it was always one of my favourites.

Great how the snow knows to stay within the spikes, eh? It looks like icing on a rather dangerous cake. 

I hadn't noticed before how irregular the top is. Stuck on by some amateur, or bashed around a bit? Ah well, it's well over a hundred years old and still standing!

Snowy punts, as well. 

Were any of the Cambridge peeps at the Science Festival yesterday? Stephen got roped in to doing some demonstrations there about washboard road bumps. I understand he will come home with a flashy purple T-shirt. That was a lot of fun when we were there in 2006! The University of Toronto makes a valiant attempt, but the Cambridge affair was really good.