Out and about on a Wednesday

Today I had a million things to do, but all fun. Actually, I had three things to do: play Scrabble, go to the ROM and have lunch.

Guess what, I forgot my camera; just had the one on my phone.

I lost the Scrabble game, though it was close. Once I had ONGOING on my rack, but it was late in the game and there was nowhere to put it. I did, however, start off the whole game with TOKENED, which is pretty good, if I do say so myself.

After Scrabble, I dashed off to the museum. I met my friend and we wandered pretty aimlessly around, spending quite a bit of time with ancient Greek vases (the red and black ones are lovely, but a good geometric vase is quite a special thing, I think)

and the odd mosaic floor, which looks like the pattern in Monkey socks, don't you think?

Wow, must remember to take a real camera next time.

The only thing I really wanted to look at was the Malagasy textiles, but there seemed to be no sign telling us where they might be. We strolled through a few centuries of wooden cabinets and silver tea sets, wondering how big a house one would need to have space for stunning art deco sculptures and such.

Shortly before we had to leave, we found ourselves in Asia and Africa, and there, over in the corner, were a couple of cases of very nice woven shawls and wrappers from Madagascar. Beautiful, but I didn't get a picture. Another time.

We had to head out to meet another friend for lunch, so we went down the Stair of Wonders, which I always enjoy. It's one good thing that came out of the recent renovation of the museum, I think. And there we saw some wonders, indeed.

Giant butterfly, big old bug.

Lunch: excellent company, okay food! And home to find the house elves had not been hard at work in my absence.

Now that I've got the phone and computer in the same place, I will see what else I have on there! Ten more days of November to go...

The true reason for NaBloPoMo

... must be the kick in the pants from embarrassment! How can I show you half an inch of knitting and call it a glove?

I'm closer and closer to calling it a mitten. I might have made gloves in August, preparing for the chilliness to come, but now it is cold and I want mitts, so my fingers can huddle together for warmth.

Things I am actually knitting

I certainly am not knitting as much as I did before, and I am still inclined to have more than one thing on the needles at a time, although I know this is not as efficient as just knitting one thing till it is finished.

In fact, I just started these Knotty gloves the other day. I bought this yarn especially to make these a couple of years ago, I think, and so for a couple of Novembers, I have said, Gee, I wish I had those gloves! Maybe this winter, I will have them...

This blasted thing! I took it to Rome in March thinking I could just use my airplane time and get back in the swing of things, knitting-wise. It took longer than I'd anticipated (though I should have anticipated that) and the final horror is the edge I decided to do. It isn't that bad once I sit down to do it, but it seems there's always something a bit more exciting to do. I am almost at the middle of the shawl; you can see the centre stitch in the bottom corner.

And Arthur's dragon skin socks are still at about the same point they were last week.

Okay, no more time to blog; gotta go knit!

Some of the sock yarn

Today I took pictures of easily identifiable, largish quantities of sock yarn. There are still a few bags of single 50g balls, odds and ends, things without labels. I am also noting here how many projects there are shown on Ravelry, because one of the sock group's challenges for 2104 is to knit with one's stashed yarn that has the fewest projects. Most people seem to be finding their fancy indie-dyers' yarn is top of their list for that; I seem to have scratchy, discontinued commercial yarn.

So, here goes:

San Francisco. This likely came from the basement at Romni, and the reviews on Ravelry are not encouraging. Cheap and cheerful, though. There are 152 projects on Rav and only 4 comments about it felting to itself or snapping or feeling rough. Ah, never read the reviews; only the discontented bother to comment. I hope that, come January, you'll see a pair of Arthurian San Francisco socks fly off the needles.

Comfort Sockenwolle. This has 216 projects. Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, one of Stephen's former students, who was living in Germany, gave this to me because I had helped her and some others sew up a blanket for another student's new baby. I think I started this once but was uninspired by the colours, or maybe thought it was too thin.

Fortissima Socka Color. Or, in this case, zebra yarn! There are 219 projects with this yarn, but the same company makes a lot of similar yarns with slightly different names. I suspect this looks better in the ball than as socks, but we shall see.

Lang Jawoll Cotton, 341 projects. I have 4 skeins of this, and another in an orangey colourway. One could make a big thing with all that yarn. A big shawl, at least (which I need like a hole in the head).

Jawoll Magic.  A whopping 4399 projects! I once started socks with this but the pattern and yarn were not that well matched. I think a plain pair of socks or maybe a small shawl (another hole in the head) is likely.

Lions Brand Sock Ease, used in 5368 projects! Bright enough? This is destined for Arthur, I am sure. Also from the sale bin. Do I ever buy full-price sock yarn? I would say, no.

Patons Kroy FX. My most popular sock yarn today: 6918 projects. I got this in Southampton the second time we went there, so a year ago August, just as my elbow was telling me to never ever knit again.

Wow, I can't tell you how glad I am to be at the bottom of this list! This was not a lightning post, with all the linking and so on, and I was making shepherd's pie at the same time. Hop up, stir onions, sit down, check Ravelry, hop up, add meat, sit down, load a picture... What a day. Now the pie is ready for the oven and the sock yarn has been tamed. Only laundry and all that other stuff to do now. Onward!

Blogger's acting weird

(The title of this post refers to the fact that when I type in the header line, an error message occurs. The body seems to be okay. I just hope it publishes properly when the time comes.)

It's just no good to post without a picture. I have ideas, but I seem to have them late in the day (or in the middle of the night) and then don't get pictures.

Ah, well, I will tell you my ideas, anyways!

I will show you my sock yarn. I have started a sock for Arthur, green and textured. Elaine, who earlier in her life rejected knitted socks as "scratchy," has dug hers out recently, only to find that her feet have grown. So, I need to get on that. And I have started something else that looks like it might be a sock, but really it is destined to become a glove. Or a mitten, if I wimp out. I have had this pattern and yarn for at least a year, and maybe two. Gorgeous orangey yellowy greeny.

I would like to get my sock yarn under control. I am a member of the Socks from Stash group on Ravelry, and although I haven't yet taken part in any of their monthly challenges, I look on in awe. There are some interesting challenges coming up, like knit with the yarn that has fewest projects on Rav, or knit with the colour you have the most of. So I need to do a bit of diving to see what exactly I have.

If I can do all that, heck, it's fodder for several days.

I would also like to show you my Denim stash. I have been acquiring bits and bagfuls and should sort out what I have. Hmm, I wonder how long it's been since a real "flash the stash" photo...

Knitting, but not my own

I have a new sweater.

Sorry, this is a terrible picture

I bought it on Ebay for not that much money. It was on the German site, priced in euros, hardly anyone looked at it. I nervously even upped my bid in the last minutes, but it was not necessary!

It is made of Rowan Denim, so one part of my brain says I can rip it and reknit it if no-one ends up wearing it! It does fit me and I will certainly give it a good go. It's not super soft, but I think it will soften up. I washed it and air-dried it. Maybe a run in the dryer would soften it up.

I made Arthur try it on, and it actually fit him better than me, but he said he didn't like it because it is not fuzzy. For him, the perfection of a sweater lies in its fuzziness, or, as I believe he means, softness. Indeed, it doesn't seem what you'd call cozy, but not every sweater has to be cozy.

You can see that the knitter "rowed out," or did something weird so that every other row fades differently. I think also that one sleeve is of a different dye lot. It was more evident when the fabric was wet, but you can see in the picture below that things are not perfectly and totally the same colour. (That diagonal line is just a shadow or a wrinkle or something, not a big line on the sweater!)

I wonder if the neck is made according to the pattern, of if it gaped too much and so these nifty decreases were added.

A fine set-in sleeve. It's a mark of some kind of excellence that the sleeve shrunk just right and the armscye shrunk just right and it all fits together so nicely. I have enough trouble even with non-shrinking bits and set-in sleeves!

I still mean to make my own Denim masterpiece, but it is nice to have one ready-made! The knitting is well done and the design is simple and attractive. All in all, a great deal, I say!

Some of you may have noticed that I missed a day or two here in the NaBloPoMo business. I took these pictures on Thursday with the best of intentions, and although it is nearly midnight, I am writing this on Friday!

ETA: This sweater is called Scarborough, from Rowan 45.

I went to a rally

I went down to City Hall today to yell about the stupid mayor. While we were listening to speakers (who didn't know how to use a megaphone) and shouting slogans (hey, hey, ho, ho...) the council was meeting and shouting and the Ford brothers were generally acting badly.

This is someone else's photo I saw on Twitter. My pictures are held hostage until I find the cable to download them! Under the sign that says You Had A Good Run on the right, you can see my lime green coat. No head, unfortunately.

I'm not sure this will do any good at all. It's very embarrassing to have a mayor of the largest city in Canada who is such a buffoon. More and more allegations are coming out about shenanigans in the mayor's office. Surely anyone with a bit of sense would resign??

Tomorrow, knitting, I promise!

After I walked up the hill

I told you about the art I passed on my way up the hill the other day. Once I got to the top of the hill, I returned a book to the library and made my way to the thrift shop.

I was really on the lookout for wine glasses. We have an eclectic collection so nothing really has to match, but we've had a couple of breakages lately and I wanted to stock up. I poked around and was trying to decide between four mismatched ones, each one perfectly fine, and a boxed set of four which were quite nice, too. But then, I was totally distracted from that task by seeing a glass pedestal cake stand.

It's quite hard to take a good picture of a glass thing. You can see the shadows of the blobs that decorate it.

Here is its scalloped edge. The whole thing is very heavy and will withstand the zombie apocalypse, I am sure.

I would invite you all over for cake if I could!

And you could have a glass of wine, too; I bought the boxed set and have had nagging doubts about that ever since. If I had bigger cupboards, I'd go back for the mismatched ones.

Sic transit gloria mundi

I was looking back at a few old posts lately, partly because I was trying to find when I started the Louvre floor "blanket" and things like that. It is disheartening to see that a lot of old links don't connect to anything anymore. What do you do about that?

I did dig one picture up on the Wayback Machine. This is my headmistress from when I was at school in Brighton in 1972. I recall she was terrifying.

Miss R A Clarke, headmistress from 1961-77

It seems a huge job to fix things from 2005, that likely no one reads. But then, it seems bad to leave links one knows are useless.

This is why some designers hate doing webpages. Things change and one could spend all the time updating, chasing new links, adding new info, deleting out-of-date info. I think I will try to fix things that I come across, but won't go on a fixing crusade. I am kind of glad I found the fearsome Miss Clarke, though!

It's street art, not graffitti

I was out on a walk yesterday and noticed that the wall, holding the houses above from falling into the road, had been painted.

Very clear, bright colours, attractive pictures. But a bit odd, nonetheless. The word FAILE was all over it, obviously meaning something beyond my ken. A bit of research tells me that is the name of a street-art pair from Brooklyn who were paid by our fair city to give us something nice to look at. (Tsk, that Wikipedia page is not totally up to date.)

According to the National Post, they couldn't actually be here themselves, but art-directed the project from afar. Some people object and some don't; I suspect most, like me, didn't even know about the "controversy." You can see a series of photos of the work in progress starting here. 

I quite like the boy asleep with his horse.

It's all certainly better than the tagging, painted over in various blotches of industrial-strength grey, that used to be there.

Saturday sky

This was around noon today. 

Now, a few hours later, it is grey and threatening. Happy November.

I think it's finished

My blanket of scarves is done, I think. Here it is on the king-size bed.

I still have a few swatches and there are places this could be filled in, but I think in order to preserve some sort of reasonable design sense, I should stop here. 

Which way does it go?

I did throw this in the washing machine on gentle/fingers-crossed, and it is now drying sort of flat on a rack. It didn't suffer any grave damage in the machine, and even came out a bit neater and flatter here and there.

Opposite the Louvre floor squares are the "hmm, let's try this" swatches. From left to right:

• Classic Elite Maya in dark brown and soft grey, knitted to sort of resemble a design on a medieval floor tile. As I recall, I was going to use this as a badge on some sort of tunic but never did;
• grey Lopi in a bear-claw pattern. This was going to be gorgeous: big and lacy and drapey. However, it never got bigger than this;
• the grey version of the chains you saw before; 
• and another big Lopi lace idea. That phase lasted until I knit all my Lopi into this, some time before 2005. Now I don't think I'll knit with it again because it bugs my nose!

The swatches I have left are a bunch of whitish acrylic Aran cable samples and a bunch of denim bits from a short-lived experiment some years back where I was going to knit a swatch a week, or even a day! I have about 4 of each of those, but think I'll just put them back in the cupboard till next time. I also have a fun fur scarf or two, but those are just too loud and furry! I could also go round this with a crochet hook and some "unifying" colour, but that also seems to go contrary to the whole crazy idea. 

When I started this, in my mind I called it "Around the corner from Gwithian Beach," Gwthian Beach being this blanket on Ravelry. Pics of the real blanket from the book are here. (I wonder how far Kay got on that project. Well, I can hardly criticize someone for starting blankets and 10 years later still only having three squares.)

Words on a fence

Enough with politics.

This is a fun little neighbourhood project. Pieces of plastic pipes with words stencilled on in pretty colours.

People can move them around; they all have hooks that go on the chain-link fence that surrounds a horrible asphalt schoolyard. The school is not much used, actually, these days.

It's fun and brightens things up and certainly causes no trouble, as far as I can see. And that's got to be a good thing.

Local politics gets interesting

Last night I was at a high school info night, checking out one of many possible schools for Elaine for next year. A friend of mine who is a municipal civil servant rushed up to me, suggesting things I should tweet about local politics. She, indeed, is too smart to tweet about her employer. (I was saying things like calling the mayor "an ass and a terrible orator." I know, fightin' words.)

Of course, I didn't take these pictures

There is both a lot to say, and not much to say. You may have seen Jon Stewart say a few things. You may have read about our mayor in the Economist a few days ago, or seen his ridiculous news conference yesterday, via Gawker. We've even made the Times of India. Here's a timeline of events, but it ends in October, and the fun really started just this past week.

It's just gob-smackingly stupid. How did this guy get so far? How much farther will he sink before he realises he's actually in trouble? He only smoked crack because he was in a drunken stupor. (Oh, well, that's okay then?) He regrets getting hammered in public. He's embarrassed and would like to move on now, please. (Um, no.)

I have a number of friends who know a lot about addiction and alcoholism, mostly from a professional point of view, but some from personal experience, and they are unanimous in saying it's all very interesting and newsworthy and crazy, but really, the guy needs to step aside, get to rehab and get some help. It won't stop him from being a jerk, probably, but it might slow down the train wreck. 

I'm going to City Hall next week to nudge him.

(If all of this makes no sense to you, I am glad. There are actually better ways to spend one's time than thinking about Rob Ford, lying, crack-smoking mayor of Toronto.)

This blanket is getting weirder

My blanket of scarves now includes all I ever knit of my Louvre floor blanket (three whole squares)

and a swatch I made in 2006 for a hat. I know, who swatches for a hat?

When we went to Mull in 2005, we saw some gorgeous rusty chain. So I eventually had to make a rusty chain hat. And I guess I was very careful with worrying about the gauge on the stranded knitting, so I actually made two swatches, this blue one and a grey one.

There is a niche on the other side of the blanket which needs filling in, so the grey one will appear eventually.

Then somehow I have to wash the whole thing, which is made of wool, acrylic, silk, cotton, mohair, viscose and something angora-like. That will be an adventure! I suspect I will toss it in the machine on gentle and see what happens.

Anyone watch QI?

The lovely* and talented Stephen Fry hosts a British TV show called QI, which stands for Quite Interesting. They have been making it for 10 years now, but I discovered it on YouTube about two or three years ago. Last spring or summer, my Stephen was tickled pink to get an e-mail from the QI elves, as those who slave away to make the show are called, asking if they could use his video of dominoes falling over.

They didn't actually end up showing his video, but Stephen Fry got his own set of dominoes and knocked them over with a bright pink feather. It was fine, but he did not say "boom" like my Stephen, which I think is what makes the whole thing so exciting, really.

*Proof that Stephen Fry is lovely:

Sort of knitting content

Once upon a time, in 2006, I showed you Stephen's favourite sweater. The cuffs were fraying and there were holes appearing and it was a wreck.

I can tell you that it is still his favourite sweater. It was terribly, terribly falling apart -- the cuffs were totally frayed, the buttonband had come unsewn from one side, there was a big dropped stitch disaster on the shoulder -- and I felt like the queen in Franklin's video. (He talks about it here, but the video doesn't seem to be on that page anymore. So, here ya go.)

 

I kept refusing to mend the sweater. He has other sweaters. I would knit him a blue one, or green. Cables, whatever, just let me make you a new sweater. No, he says, I like this sweater.

Finally, I was somehow tricked into mending this one. I reattached the buttonband, mended a few holes, hooked up the dropped stitch, and hacked the cuffs off and reknit them. Here you can see the renewed sweater with plain black cuffs and the old bits I'd cut off.

He is actually very grateful and loves his new-old sweater even more now. I still mean to make him a replacement one day, but since I've put it off for seven years, a while more won't hurt.

Adrift and rudderless

Well, it's day two and I am drifting dangerously already.

Our neighbourhood party last night was a fine success. I must say that my après-party day has not involved much action. I emptied the dishwasher and picked up a few stray glasses and took various plates and things back to people, and played a lot of Facebook Scrabble.

We now have at least 3 big pieces of brie in the fridge because everyone thought it would be lovely to have some brie. Also, the veg and dip, usually a surefire munchable dish, was apparently too much to handle, so we've got a ton of raw veg all nicely cut up. I wonder if you can make brie-vegetable soup.

Oh, look at this: brie and vegetable pie!

I think that is my good deed for the day, finding you that recipe.

Doin' it

I will attempt NaBloPoMo again, posting every day this month.

This post, however, will be terribly short as I have to dash off to meet my sister-in-law, come home, make a cake and have a party for some wonderful neighbours who are moving away.

I can tell you that I have made these.

Get square pretzels (yes, some newfangled invention, I am sure) and put a Hershey' kiss on each one (one tends to be limited by the number of kisses in a package).

Put them in a slow oven, maybe 175F, for about 5 or 6 minutes. When they come out, quickly squish a Smartie on each one. Put them in the fridge -- mine continued to melt for a while till I figured this out.

Also, it's probably a good idea to put parchment on the cookie sheet before you even start!

Until tomorrow, then!

Part of the knitting pile

I've been knitting a bit, and sorting stuff out a bit.

I had started on a pile of Arthur's old socks: cutting the toes with big holes off and reknitting new, whole, longer toes. I did one successfully, but the second one was a big waste of time. I got him to try it on to see when to start the toe decreases and the sock was too small around to fit his ankle and leg comfortably. So, the new bit got ripped back and the old bit is sitting somewhere awaiting its fate.

Since my good intentions were thwarted there, I decided to cast on a whole new pair of socks. If you can't do something quick and small, just do something bigger. Harvest Dew recently caught my eye, and I had just the yarn to make the slip-stitch pattern look like dragon skin.

This is some On Your Toes I had in the big box o' sock yarn. If Arthur plays his cards right, he might even get a matching pair this time, unlike the singles I've been making him lately.

My other big pile of half-done knitting-related stuff is this:

This is a blanket of scarves! Some are long and one or two are wide, and there are a ton of bits that will get stuck on the outside of this.

These are a few sock yarn squares (and one apparently left over from 2006's blanket).  (Oh, heavens, I just looked back through old blog entries looking for this blanket. I knew I'd started in England, which means before the summer of 2006.... I finished it all up in 2009, with a 2-year hiatus while I thought of how to border it! And I know the sock yarn blanket was a fantasy thought up many years ago as well.) Anyways, this strip will get added to the scarves and then I will think up the next bit! I have a pretty huge number of squares that "will one day be blankets." Now it looks like they will all be one blanket!

Meanwhile, I seem to have lost half a sweater back. I know it's around here somewhere...