Swapping and snowing and sewing

This January, I did another dishcloth swap. I haven't done one for a while, but thought I'd try it again. I knit a very loud cloth for my swappee, but didn't take a picture! Dummy. And she did not post one, either, so I have no record of my jazzy cloth. Oh well.

I got this little sweater-shaped cloth and a couple of teabags. So cute! So white. I was a bit distressed when it got coffee on it the other day, but figure it is meant to be used and will look grimy soon even if I never spill coffee on it.

It snowed all day today. Allllll dayyyyy. I shovelled twice and Stephen once. The mound of snow in the front yard is enormous.

Here you can see the snow is about 8 or 10 inches deep. Those are nice big plant pots out on the back deck. Usually we get a bit of snow and then a bit of rain or slush or melty days. Now, no thaw in sight.

In other crafty news, I am keen to sew a pair of fingerless mitts from old T-shirt fabric. Like these. Of course, I was able to dig up some old shirts, and all I needed was some good thread. I went off to Michaels, which is miles away and should be kind of special, but although I found my thread, I was disappointed with the whole store. Not the right kind of baking cups, not the right kind of beads, the stencils were expensive... And then! I got home and found that 2 of my spools of thread had leapt out of my bag at some point in the journey! I guess I took my mittens out of the bag and flung the thread away. Darn. I'll try again.

I am also gearing up for the Olympics. The goal with my knitting was to accomplish something but not wreck my arm. Now the goal is to finish a sock, a shawl and a hat. Ridiculous. I still want to not hurt my arm, though, so might have to downsize my ambitions a tad. But heck, I have 2 weeks and more!

Training for the Olympics

Anyone knitting for the Olympics? Although I tend to knit during the Olympics, and especially the winter ones, I've never actually signed up for anything official on Ravelry, but this year I am a member of Team Canada, I've got my project tagged with all sorts of official things and I'm ready to go.

I will be moderate in my knitting. The challenge for me will be to not get carried away! No hurting of the elbow or wrist! No knitting into numbness.

I am making the Popcorn Cloche, a hat which I should certainly be able to finish in 2 weeks without injury.

This old pattern is knit flat, but I will knit it in the round. And I kinda doubt I will finish it with a ribbon around the brim. I got some green Rowan 4 ply wool just before Christmas and I'll use that doubled. I did a very quick and dirty swatch today and that seems like it's going to work.

I'm also entering the WIP event -- I think they should have called it WIP Wrangling, but I believe it is WIP Dancing. And the work in progress that I shall be tackling? My Colonnade shawl... It makes me heave a great sigh just thinking about it, but perhaps the thrill of the Olympic competition and all the chit chat on Ravelry will make me persevere. In moderation, of course.

All this starts next Friday, February 7. Until then I will plug away at Elaine's second sock. It would be great to get that out of the way before the games begin.

Blanket show-off

My denim quilt/blanket is finished. I realised when I was putting the final touches on it that I should have "signed" a piece and sewed it in, but I didn't. I do have little tags I sometimes sew into knitted garments, but they seem so little. So, it is an unsigned piece as yet.

The whole thing. I think of this as "upside down" but it really doesn't matter

You can see where I unfolded the cuff of a pair of capris

Here I need to tell a story: I wanted to put this pocket from that same pair of capris in, but I also wanted the piece to be long(ish) so I cut (thoughtlessly!) from quite far down the leg, and by the time I'd got to the pocket, my straight line had led me perilously close to the edge of the pocket. If I'd started higher up, I could have got more fabric outside the pocket. There was also a rivet in the corner of the pocket, and I didn't want to wreck my friend's machine by getting that under the foot. Anyways, a moment of despair followed. Finally, I just cut the edge and rivet off and sewed right through that dang pocket, fancy embroidered stuff and all.

A nice square corner, with the other pocket 

The whole pocket with rivet

That khaki piece on the edge is one of the major causes of wonkiness and unsquareness

Green geometric bit! Love it

Things look straight in the narrow view, but in fact they are not

I'm very happy with it, and various people have sat with it over their laps in recent days, so we can call it an all-round success, I think. Funny story: I went to our local stationer's/art supply store to get a skein of embroidery cotton for the ties. What do they cost, $2 or so? This shop only had packages. I was offereed 16 skeins for $18 or, for another dollar, 105 skeins. Since 16 is already a lifetime supply, and that was the good stuff, I went against my thrifty nature and passed on the 105, which were identified only with "Made in China."

My sewing is now on hold because I don't have a machine, but I am plotting to get one of those rotary cutters and hit the thrift shops to search out gigantic pairs of faded jeans. I have knit a sock and have planned my project for the Olympics. I'll report in on that this coming week.

New hobby, old idea

Once upon a time, about maybe almost 10 years ago, I found the Gee's Bend quilters. Undoubtedly, via Kay at Mason Dixon Knitting, who translated a quilt into knitting. (This was novel at the time; she's done it a zillion times since then, I think.) My favourites of the quilts were the work-clothes quilts, all faded jeans and overalls, pocket shapes showing where the quilter had laboriously picked them off.

I was smitten with the idea of making one of these, and so I began hoarding old jeans, despite the fact that I don't really sew; and I don't really sew, I think, because I've always had hand-me-down machines that messed with me: funny tension, weird ways of bobbins, just frustration from start to finish.

This Christmas my friend was between houses in Toronto and left her shiny new sewing machine (and her serger, a complete mystery object) with me. I had a teeny frustrating second with it right at the beginning, and abandoned it for a week or ten days till she returned. She decided that a new needle was the answer, and said would I like a regular needle or a denim needle! Oh, indeed, sewing denim, could I really? Would that work??

I unearthed the heap of old jeans and started log-cabinning. My limit, obviously, was the length of a pant-leg, so I ended up making 5 squares and somehow having a gap that was not really square-shaped at all, which I filled with strips, in the bottom left here.

The two rows are not yet sewn together, and I have to figure out some sort of backing. We have 2 pairs of black jeans: really faded and not very faded. At least 2 pairs of blue jeans, probably 3, as well as the teeny bits I cut off a pair of jeans the kids wore when I made 3- or 4-year-old Elaine cut-offs! Brown and khaki and a couple of other bits. I didn't pick the pockets off, so there are 2 in there, fancy lady-jeans pockets with embroidery. The single bit with pink stripes, the gold and blue swirls and the bright green and black and white geometric bits were treasures found at the Textile Museum sale, in the tent where you could fill a bag with scraps for $2. I know some of the jeans have spandex in them, but mostly it's all cotton. I think.

My work space is not ideal, so you get the black and white carpet peeking out under the quilt. The iron is downstairs and the sewing machine is upstairs, plonked on a table where there is not quite enough room. But this whole thing has taken me only a couple of days! I have to sew that big seam and back it and I am done. I will get some embroidery floss, I think, and tie it here and there to hold it together. Then I think it will be a beach blanket? Maybe Arthur will want it on his bed? I thought of making it big enough for our king-size bed, but even I have not hoarded enough jeans for that.

So exciting.

We were talking about me actually getting my own machine, but I'm not sure that, having made this thing I've been thinking about for so long, I would make much else! I would love to be able to make clothes that fit me, but these straight seams and winging it with the cutting might be my limit. Will ponder this. I do have the offer of someone's mom's machine, which maybe I could try, with my new-found confidence and experience.

And I've knit half a dishcloth!

I finished a sock

I finished the dragon-skin Harvest Dew sock.

This looks like a Christmas stocking, all short in the foot. I can assure you, that's a size 13 sock, draped over a rounded chair arm. Really, it's long!

Great detail on the top of the foot. It gives you a bit of fun in that last, long slog to the toe.

The very exciting texture. Because the slipped stitches pull things in a bit, and because Arthur has really big feet, and because I perhaps foolishly used 2.75mm needles instead of the called-for 2.25mm, it really ate up the yarn. Alas, shortly after I turned the heel I weighed the remaining yarn and had just about 50 grams left. Minus most of a foot, now. So the "mate" will be a bit crazy. But, heck, one day, when Arthur starts worrying about matching socks, I might start buying 150 or 200 grams of the same sock yarn.

I also finished and mailed off my sister's scarf:

It's got 2 and a half balls of fuzz in it, so it is quite long. Long enough to fold around a neck, at least.

On to the next task, then!

14 WIPs in 2014?

I saw a New Years blog and was reminded of the cute 21st-century practice of doing 8 things in 2008, 13 in 2013 and now 14 in 2014. We certainly never tried to do 97 things in 1997, I'm telling you.

Do you suppose I have 14 works-in-progress that I could try to finish up in 2014? Let's count, shall we? The links go to previous blog entries about the project... some are quite old!

1. second mitten
2. green sock (one could count the second sock in here, I suppose)
3. Elaine's socks (and she for sure gets two)
4. the cotton shawl with the miserable edging (sigh)
5. Malabrigo scarf
6. Botticelli
7. Sunday Best
8. that beautiful golden shawl you might not have seen but I have knitted about an inch on it

That might actually be all the things actually on needles at the moment. Some are easily doable. Okay, all of them are doable in the next 12 months if I put my mind to it.

Then there are the fantasy knits: I have a sweater's worth of Rowan 4-ply wool. I have many balls of sock yarn, dishcloth cotton, denim, and still more Felted Tweed that now I want to make fingerless mitts with. I belong to a couple of groups on Ravelry that have monthly challenges/knitalongs and would love to join in. I will make no promises about those things, though I have pledged to make a dishrag for a swap in January.

If I finish one or two of those things a month, I'll get them all done by the end of the year. Some will take a week and some could take several months. Perhaps I shall start by putting them all in lovely bags and finding all the bits and patterns and missing balls of yarn.

Or perhaps I should just keep this list handy and soldier on. Yes, probably that would be best. And really, as soon as I find the camera, I'll take pictures.

Here we go with 2014

Happy New Year to you all!

The kids have been off school for more than a week; we've done Christmas and a three-day trip to Montreal. Last night a rollicking party, the highlight of which was finishing a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle we'd found under the tree when we got back from Montreal. The fairies who checked the lights were on and brought our mail in left it for us. No pictures just yet, though.

Today I hope to clean up the house a wee bit and perhaps knit on a sock or something! I resurrected an old project for the train trip, and also have two socks and a mitten I want to finish right this minute. The old project is my Malabrigo scarf thing and is now super old (as are, it seems, most of my WIPs) as I think I last wrote about it in 2011. I'll just, what did I say, "polish it off." Right.

Other super-exciting knitting news: I learned that my sister-in-law was visiting Boston just about the same time I learned about The Unofficial Harry Potter Knits magazine, and I prevailed upon her to pick up a copy for me! So now, of course, I have a dozen other things I want to knit right this minute.

Maybe a New Year's resolution should be, Just cast on everything and it'll all get knitted up in a year or six...

Just give me a moment and I'll get some photos of all this stuff up.

Icy

We had what we call an ice storm. That means that icy, ooblecky, rain-like stuff fell out of the sky and coated everything.

Before they get in their cars, people have to scrape the ice off their windshields and then their tires. Trees fall over and knock down power lines. Streetcars can't use their overhead wires. And everything looks twinkly and shiny and treacherous.

I hear, though, that no one is in the grocery store! Maybe I'll just slip out (ha ha) and get some food. And one last present. It seems better than staying here where there are dirty dishes and laundry. Wish me luck!

I'm going to start keeping track of books

I find that I get lots of my ideas about books to read from other people's blogs. I also find that with teenagers instead of toddlers, I have way more time to read! I don't fall asleep at 9 pm and I can read on holidays instead of chasing around and sweeping all the time. I'm not sure what happened in those years between toddlers and teenagers, but I certainly notice that now I have more time!

So, I am reading a lot. I see things I think I'd like to read; I put a hold on at the library; at some unspecified time in the future, the book will arrive. Sometimes I even forget where I heard about a book, some are revelations and some are, of course, duds.

This September I saw that there was a movie at TIFF of Thérèse Raquin, by Emile Zola. (I see they have retitled it In Secret.) It has that cute Tom Felton as a sickly and pale husband, who has to be disposed of by the lovely and talented Elizabeth Olsen and her tall, dark, handsome lover, Oscar Isaac. Now, I like a good movie, but I do like to read the book first, so I decided to read Thérèse Raquin, and in the original French. Heck, it's only 32 years since I got a BA in the subject, after all. It was surprisingly easy to get back my ease of reading in French, perhaps because this is a book about people who live in a city, hang around home, kill off husbands... all pretty straightforward vocabulary.

Chuffed with that success, I took on Madame Bovary.

In this book, I bet 17 different kinds of trees are named; 37 different fabrics; there are furnishings, kinds of clothing, architectural bits, carriages and medical terms. Sometimes I knew what the words meant but things still didn't make sense. I had an English translation nearby -- I still often wondered why he'd put that sentence just there. A bit more challenging, for sure.

I have a stack of other books by the bedside, and I even bought some more French books. Now, I think, a thriller in English, though. And starting today with Madame Bovary, I will put a list in the sidebar of books I have finished.

Bonus December post

Ha, even though NaBloPoMo is over, I am bestowing upon you all a new post! And it is even about knitting.

I am doing the December challenge for the Socks from Stash group. The only challenge this month is to start and finish one pair of socks. I do have Arthur's green socks to knit, and my second mitten, but at the moment I am full of confidence about this. Because, really, how much do I have to do in December....?

So here I go, casting on:

These are the Undulating Rib socks by Ann Budd. The cuffs and toes will be green, and the pretty multicoloured stuff will be the main body of the socks.

I thing Ann Budd must be the tightest knitter in the world, because she knits the tops of the socks on 3.5 mm needles, and the rest on 3.25s. I am going 2.75 all the way, and wish I could go smaller to get a denser fabric. I haven't knit Elaine socks in a long time and am not sure how these will fit -- she is likely not as tiny as I imagine.

Grand finale

A mitten.

Finished today at 5 pm: just in time, one might say.

I made the top of the hand like a sock toe, except I did a few decreases on the baby finger side before I started on the index finger side.

And now I know I can knit one of these in about 10 days with no serious injury, so I'll make sure I have the second one before Christmas.

One last distraction

If I can just keep you amused for another day, we can get through this month. I think my sister-in-law is meant to be writing a novel, so I hope to hear about that, too.

The other day I found a nice leather glove in a mud puddle. It looked like it might have been run over a couple of times, too. I picked it up and carried it around, let it drip on the cafe floor while I met some friends, carried it home on the subway, lay it on the cold air vent to dry out.

And then I took it downstairs...

This collection has been growing for a couple of years. One year there was a bumper crop of abandoned hand-wear around the 'hood, and I realised, in about March, that I could have had a wall of gloves like this one if I'd only collected them instead of just rolling my eyes at them as I went by. So the following year(s) I have picked them up if they seem truly abandoned and a bit interesting. No pairs left at the bus stop -- someone might come back for them or someone who actually needs mitts to keep their hands warm can have them. And I now avoid the plain. black, stretchy, dollar-store ones. I meant to display them in a somewhat artier fashion, but it's still a work-in-progress, you know, so they are just pinned up in a mass on the wall of the laundry room, with the Earth and a calendar Emily Carr.

Now there is a new glove on the wall. Leather, with decorative buttons! Very small, though that might be an effect of having been soaked in a mud puddle and dried on a vent.

It is somewhat ironic that the same week I found this, Arthur "lost" a brand-new pair of store-bought waterproof mittens by forgetting them in a classroom at school.

Today, who needs Tom Jones if you've got the New Groovement? My nephew Geoff Mason is the timbales player. If you are in Victoria, I think they play reasonably often. Oh, look: in fact, they are playing this weekend.

Just some Tom Jones

Tom Jones with Jools Holland. And who could ask for anything more?

 

A blog I found

One of the things I never think about with NaBloPoMo is that other people do it at the same time. And not just knitters. There is a blog where registered bloggers list their posts and you can check out other blogs, with the idea that you get more exposure, more community, more readers.

There are a ton of things there, but not my blog, because it didn't occur to me until last week that this was at all organized. I've never registered for NaBloPoMo in previous years, either. 

I clicked around a bit there and found one gem of a blog. First I thought, wow, cool idea: take a 19th-century book about London and wander around seeing what's there now. And then I thought, when I saw all the photos and the links and the research, wow, what a lot of work! 

The blogger also offers a list of sources, including a Pinterest page where you can lose yourself for hours. Fashion, history, hospitals... 

I will check back and see how the tour of London progresses!

David Bowie Is

I went to the Art Gallery of Ontario this morning to see, for the third time, the David Bowie exhibit. 

 

One can't, of course, take pictures inside the exhibit. If I could, I would have taken pictures of this sketch he did:

or this suit that was there on a faceless mannequin: 

but as it is, I just had to get these off the AGO website.

The costumes were the highlight for me, especially the ones by Alexander McQueen, and I could have spent all day watching the videos. There are good pictures here, from when the show was at the V&A. I love especially the Union Jack coat:

As I left, humming Boys Keep Swinging, I took this picture of the back end of the gallery building, with weird purple sky and, if you look carefully, a row of pigeons along the top of the beige wing. 

I have a thumb gusset

The lower yarn on the right is the spare yarn holding the thumb stitches

My glove/mitten debate continues.

The hand seems a bit big at present, and if I were to make mittens, I would decrease a few stitches or maybe go down to 2.25 mm needles from the 2.5s.

If I'm making gloves, I have to start soon on the pinky finger, although the pattern says to start with the index finger and move outwards. My pinky is, I think, about 2 rows below my index finger. And also maybe change the needle size.

Mittens are warmer and simpler to knit; gloves look cooler and are more interesting to knit. Some people make short little finger tubes and then mitten-like covers that can flip on or off. I do kind of like that idea, I must say.

If I don't spend days pondering this question, I hope to have a finished thing by the end of the week, which will be the end of NaBloPoMo.

Surprise from the Saturday sky

The sky this morning was nice and blue with white fluffy clouds. The tree has lost all its leaves and it was pretty cold out on the deck in my jams.

Over to the east-ish, thicker clouds, but a reminder that summer will one day come again. (I know, it's barely gone.)

On the deck, evidence that winter is definitely on the way. Forget summer for 6 months; we got snow!

And I scurried back inside.

Creative Mornings

One morning, a year and a half ago, or so, I went to a talk someone had told me about. And then the next month I went to another and then another and another. This morning was the second anniversary of the first Toronto Creative Mornings talk, and, if I'm counting correctly, the eleventh time I'd got somewhere for 8:30 in the morning to listen to a talk.

Creative Mornings started in New York but has now spread far and wide. I can imagine looking up a CM talk if I were travelling! In Toronto, they are usually on a Friday morning towards the end of the month and the speakers have included lots of people who design things on paper or on the web, or who talk about how cities could be designed, how toys can be designed... and a butcher. Today's talk was by George Elliott Clarke, Toronto's poet laureate. I hadn't even known we had a poet laureate.

Mr Clarke was meant to be talking on the theme of Bravery, but he mostly told the tale of his life (in about 20 minutes or half an hour).

He told about having the art teachers mock him for colouring his valentine pink instead of the correct red, or giving his traced elephant an anti-gravity belt (clearly not proper).  In high school he wrote songs in an attempt to be cool, then learned about poetry to write better songs, then wrote poetry -- I wonder if anyone ever played one of his songs at a school dance... He went to university, got a BA and then a job not at all in his field, which provided him with material for writing poems and publishing a monthly paper, which led him to working in Ottawa for someone who inspired him to get a PhD. Now he is a professor, though he hadn't set out to do that. The story is not a straight line, and there's a combo of hard work and good luck and, sounds like, good friends along the way.

These days, with a kid in grade 11 and one just looking for a high school for next year, education and working and getting through school and finding one's way and "success" are always on my mind.

It was a really inspiring talk, with a couple of poems, like this one, thrown in. Lots of things to think about as I try to nudge or back off or encourage or protect or shove my kids, who have no patience with being told what colour to make their valentines, along the road.

More phone camera pics

I passed this "vintage" shop a week or so ago. They had several "seasonal" sweaters hanging outside.

This was my favourite. It reminds me of a gingerbread man sweater that was in a Vogue Knitting holiday issue in the 90s.

I've never made a Christmas sweater, though there were a couple through the years that I always meant to make. One had coloured intarsia lightbulbs connected with a green "wire" that you would have to duplicate stitch on. I can knit a lightbulb, but all that duplicate stitch scared me away for... 25 years, about.

Funnily, I can't find any of those old faves in the Ravelry database!