Something I will do in December

Once upon a time, I started to knit a Sky Scarf. You knit a garter ridge, 2 rows, every day, based on the colour of the sky. Two things stymied me: I was using stash and ran out of one colour of yarn in February, and the colour of our sky changes hourly, so when exactly do you say it is clear today or it is cloudy today?

However, I recently saw a thread on Ravelry that reminded me of the general excellence of this idea (someone made a blanket!) and I am going to do a temperature scarf, with one strand for the day's maximum temperature and one for minimum. I think I will start on the solstice, December 21.

Toronto goes from about -10ºC to about 30ºC, so I need 8 colours if I do a colour for every 5 degrees. Red for hot, icy blue-white for cold, but how to I get from one to the other?

I could just go around the wheel:

That would mean having greens in the mix, and while you know I love green, I don't really think it signifies much about temperature. And I would end up with three-quarters of a rainbow. Naah.

There are other ways of making colour wheels:

I could go up from the pale centre blue to brighter blue... then what? I don't want pinks. I think one tends to do yellow, orange, red as things get warmer, but I'm not sure I'll like that mix... Of course, it would be a rare day to be -10 for a minimum and +15 for a max. I think what I have to do is go stand and stare at the wall of Koigu at Eweknit and pick 8 good colours.

Will I need more than one skein of each colour? Will I be able to buy another, mid-April or next October if I run out of something? Agonizing... (I found another group on Ravelry that quite appeals to me: Pre-process knitters! We are not in it for the finished project, nor for the experience of the knitting, but for the planning!) Maybe I should not do Koigu, with its little wee skeins, but I should buy 100-gram balls of Cascade 220 or something. But does one need 800 grams to make a scarf?! God forbid. No, no, stick with the Koigu, but perhaps buy 2 each of the colours from, say, 5º to 15º? Perhaps I shall stop at the yarn shop this afternoon.

Perhaps I shall show you the big grey sweater tomorrow. I think I can start the sleeves soon!

Twenty or more years ago

Let's see, it must have been 1992 or so, maybe later in 1991, that I made this big ol' sweater.

It is one of my faux-Fassetts, based on his Stone Patch. It is heavy, made from Lamb's Pride bulky, and it was supposed to reflect the colours of the hills around Santa Barbara, California. 

As soon as I made it, though, I thought it looked more like camo.

It also has a bit of a problem with the sleeves. I know, it was the 90s, but still, no one needs sleeves like that.

I wore it a bit, but it is too warm for inside, it's no good in the rain and you can't put a jacket over those sleeves, so there are just a few days a year when it is the perfect thing.

I've known all about these issues for a long time, and the poor sweater has languished unloved in a corner for some years. The other day, I finally shoved it in a bag for pickup by a charity.

Boo hoo! Farewell, crazy sweater!

Another single sock

This month of posting makes me go around the house taking pictures of knitting. So I have for you today a single sock for Elaine.

Funny looking in this state, but that flared part at the top folds down to make a super cute cuff.

And the cuff is all lace columns.

It is school-uniform colour, but the season for ankle socks may be past this year, and besides, one should really have two matching socks. I once meant to have these done for Christmas, but now I make no promises of that sort!

Now to update my Ravelry project page!

NaBlo-half-assed-mo

I see that I missed another day in the daily posting business. Big sigh.

I will have a few pictures for you tomorrow, but right now I am preparing to dash out to a Scrabble club to play "proper" players. Two of my friends have been a couple of times before and say that the club people look down on "kitchen table" players, but of course, my friends have won their share of the games.

And we don't play at a kitchen table, but in a cafe, most of the time! Hmph.

It will be bit challenging to play with a timer and no friendly dictionary to hand, but I think I'll be okay. It's just a game, right?

(Oh, just a picture I snapped a while ago of my 183-point word, MISSHAPE, from triple to triple.... )

The perils of monogamy

I am knitting solely on my Eddie these days.

No second mitt is getting finished. I started these a year ago, it seems. Huh, I'd thought it was more! I "just" need to get the cable knot out of the way and then this becomes subway knitting. It is not quite mitten weather here yet, so there is hope yet, I suppose.

No Kaffe square is getting added to the pile. I am even stuck in the middle of one! I don't need a pretty cushion for my comfy chair, but I hate to leave it at this stage.

And of course, there are other things to knit, and other things to sew...

I had (ridiculously) wanted Eddie finished by last weekend, but now my (more reasonable) deadline is the end of November, which still means I have to give it all my attention.

Getting there, but alas, why can't I knit more, faster and all the time?!

The Mary Collection

Don't get all excited -- it's not a collection of knitwear or anything that delightful. It is a collection of postcards!

Once upon a time, some friend on Facebook posted a link to an image from a postcard of one of the college libraries at the University of Toronto. Who could resist, so I clicked through... and discovered a whole blog about postcards! This was what we call serendipitous, because I had just found a box in my house full of postcards I had collected as a kid. Some from England when I was living there in 1965-6 and 1972-3, some from art shows, some from European travels in the 80s and 90s. It had been several years since I had last cast eyes upon them and though it did give me a small amount of pleasure to look through them, it was not enough to keep them forever. (Okay, I did hold back a couple... )

It turned out our postcard fellow was at U of T, so it was easy to get my cards to him, and he has posted a few of them.

Here are a few of the gems I kept.

I suspect this is from 1972, but might be 1966. Actually, it was glued down to a page in a scrapbook with a big glob of white glue, so I hope I did that when I was 6 and not 12. Anyone identify the building going up in the background?

My mom and grandma went to Expo 67.

I bought this in 1989 at the Vatican Museums. One of my all-time favourite pots, Achilles and Ajax playing a game.

I got this in Santa Barbara when we went to see an exhibit of the AIDS quilt. This is it spread out in Washington DC in 1992. I remember the exhibit well; it was an excellent idea to make the disease real to people who thought it would never touch them, as well as an inspiring piece of textile art.

Last Friday when we went to the art gallery, I had to hold myself back from the postcard rack...

Falling down on the job already

I see I missed blogging yesterday. I shall tell you why: my brother was here visiting for the day.

We went to the Art Gallery and saw the Colville exhibit, along with some drawings of Michelangelo. And had some gelato.

The Colville show was quite marvellous: lots of info about his life, lots of sketches and studies alongside the finished works.

And Michelangelo, what can one say? Obviously they can't just ship David over here to show us, or the Sistine Chapel, but there were drawings of things familiar and not; plans of buildings that never got built; sketches that had been somewhat polished up and completely rough lines. The notes sometimes mentioned that this pope or that had likely held this piece of paper in his hands.

After the art, we had food. Some other friends came over for dinner and we had a grand old time together, before sending John back out into the cold to catch an airplane.

So that is my excuse. I do have a special treat for you tomorrow, though, I prrrrommmisse.

Nature in all its autumnal glory

Some years the trees around town are gloriously coloured; some years things turn to brown mush on the ground right from the beginning. This year we found ourselves driving down the 401 to London (our London) one day in the late afternoon with the sun shining brilliantly on the golden, red and orange leaves. Just stunning. Did I take a picture? No, I did not.

I do, however, have a picture of my hosta. I posted this picture in a thread on Ravelry where Rowan Yarns is looking for a new colour for their Kidsilk Haze. Goldy-yellow, caramel, bits of green...

You can be sure that if they pick my colour and I end up with a package of golden Kidsilk Haze, I will share it with you!

In other news, I am still not at 22 cm on my grey sweater, and things aren't going to get much better tomorrow. I'm also finding I don't have a ton of time to plan and write great witty things! Perhaps on the weekend...

Shakespeare and his collected works

Did William Shakespeare of Stratford, the guy who left his wife his second-best bed, write Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost and Henry V and all those sonnets?

I don't know. (Also, this portrait from the First Folio may or may not be anything like Shakespeare, but it's about all we have.)

Of course, I had always thought so, just like Homer composed (using some pre-existing bits) both the Iliad and the Odyssey. (I was taught Homer by "a naive unitarian.") But now I am liking the "Shake-speare as pseudonym" idea.

(I am not going to link to anything about this! There are a million opinions and convictions and arguments.)

That William of Stratford left not a single letter strikes me as a kind of serious counter-argument to his being a writer. Especially a writer involved in the theatre in London while living in Stratford.

Some people say that William couldn't have written the plays because he had no education, and some other people object to this because genius flowers in the strangest places. The genius of the writer (whoever...) is not in question, but our writer certainly had considerable education in a variety of fields!

Why did he leave no books? Why didn't he even teach his children to read?

I have a number of books about this on hold at the library, so I shall see what I come up with in the coming weeks. Elaine is reading Romeo and Juliet at school this year and Arthur gets Hamlet, so there will certainly be some Shakespearian discussion at the dinner table.

I'll keep you posted about this. (Although really, it is not very important... )

Some progress on the big grey sweater

Is it blue? Is it grey? Is it, sometimes, sort of purple? Did I mention that I'd like this to be done by the end of the week? Ha, ha. However, I am almost at the point where I get to do some purling.

I don't like to use up too much blog fodder in one day in these NaBlo months, but I would like to ask you all who you think wrote the works of Shakespeare. I saw a production last night called Is Shakespeare Dead? about the almost complete lack of information we have about William Shakespeare. So you just watch that and come back tomorrow and we shall discuss the issue.

Bread with pomegranate seeds

What is more fun than a pomegranate? I bought one a week ago thinking I would put the seeds in a fruit salad, but then didn't. So, now what?

Finally I decided something had to be done, and I knew that although the seeds (or arils, to be precise) are yummy just eaten a few at a time, I really should use the whole lot at once.

So I found this muffin recipe.

Since I was lazy, I made a loaf instead of muffins, and since I made a loaf, I skipped the topping. I'm not much of a topping kind of gal anyways; the muffin should be tasty enough on its own. (I also used milk instead of pomegranate juice!)

Of course I did not have my camera at the ready while dealing with the shiny pretty arils, but I remembered eventually.

about to go in the oven

about to be eaten

Very tasty, especially if you like an oatmeal bread, but you have to remember there are the tiny, crunchy seeds in the juicy, fruity arils. The soft fruit sort of melts into the bread a bit, but the crunch is still there.

It's not the best use of a pomegranate, I think, but it fit the bill this time.

One almost finished sock

I do apologize for the blurry phone photos. I shall have to get organized with camera and cable and so on to do this NaBloPoMo properly!

This is a Broadripple sock for Arthur, which I've been working on for a while. The yarn is 6-ply sock yarn, which I've never used before. My, things really do go a bit faster if the yarn and needles are that much larger!

It is a bit scratchy, but I imagine that once it is washed it'll wear quite well. I just have to graft the toe and then perhaps make another one!

The grey sweater still looks much the same. When I get 22 cm on it, I get to do some purling! I am meeting up with some friends for some needlecraft action tonight, so who knows, maybe I can get to 22 cm!

Let's play NaBloPoMo again

I tend to take part in NaBloPoMo in November, although unofficially, and I guess I am going to give it a go again this year. I don't register anywhere and I'm sure no new people "discover" my blog because I don't tell anyone about it. Not very good marketing on my part. Oh well.

This November I am knitting a grey pullover named Eddie. So far the only excitement has been the daredevil thrill of changing things a tiny bit to knit it in the round instead of in flat pieces.

This is one and a bit balls out of 15.

I bet we can't wait till tomorrow to see how much bigger Eddie has become! I would love to get this done in a week, but since such a feat would require knitting up two balls a day, I'm not confident that that will happen. I shall knit diligently nonetheless.

Back to square knitting

I've been absent from Blogland for most of October, but I am back with three more Fassett-esque squares.

This is Zigzag:

I had thought this would be a nice change, since it's only 2 colours per row, and I knit four rows in each pair. It was still an unholy tangled mess! 

Next batch of colours brings in a whitish grey. The Tumbling Blocks pattern was not bad to knit: just blocks of colour, hardly any stranding at all. It looked like a star when I was knitting it, up close, but whenever I see it from a distance it is much more 3-D and tumbling! 

This is Circus Stars: 

I was lazy and fit the fourth colour in with that narrow strip between motifs, but couldn't be bothered to deal with three colours in the stars. Had to keep it simple. 

The whole lot, so far! This is going to be a big cushion if it is 3x3 squares. Maybe I'd better get a pillow form soon so I can fudge where necessary. 

I hope to do NaBloPoMo in November again this year. If nothing happens to distract me!

More squares

The pattern was released for the Kaffe Fassett knitalong, and it seems Kaffe has been influenced by his years of quilting. The knitting pattern is for squares all the same, with diagonal stripes. Like these, only stripier! (And in stocking stitch, which makes it less simple to make an actual square. People are having issues with the increasing and decreasing.) That will make a nice blanket, but I had been dreaming of old-style Kaffe, and don't want a stripy, quilty blanket. Or cushion, which is what I will make.

So I got out my Glorious Knitting and started at the beginning. Some patterns are too big for these 40-stitch squares, but the Toothed Stripe is one I have always loved. Now I know why I never made a sweater -- so many ends to take care of!

I should have striped those big bits between the rows of teeth, but didn't figure that out till "too late." Though we know with these things it is never really too late.

Since I am not waiting for the knitalong instructions to be released, I moved on to the colours for the second clue: 

The grey and purple are carried over from the first square and the new colours totally change the look! 

This is Small Steps. So fun. But, oh, my, ends, ends, ends! I could have done it without changing colours so often, but the zillions of colours are what make these designs so great. Imagine doing these "properly" with 20 colours... 

One last picture to show you the task which awaits me -- sewing in all these ends! Reason #1 to do a cushion instead of a blanket: I can secure these and then no-one will ever see them. The inside of a cushion cover doesn't have to be as neat as the underside of a blanket!

Very scary. For the next square, I will try to do something a bit more horizontal and less bitsy. We shall see. 

A square à la Kaffe

Rowan is running another mystery knitalong, with Kaffe Fassett designing blocks of a blanket. I got my yarn, and was tapping my fingers waiting for October 1 when the first clue will be released. So I decided to just make a sort of Kaffe-like square, to get a feel for the yarn and gauge and to practise with 2 colours per row.

I apologize for the photographer's shadow

Actually it is a bunch of Kaffe-like rows, one after the other, with no cohesive idea. Towards the end/top, I clearly ran out of enthusiasm for red, red, blue, blue and just knit plain rows, trying to get 15 rows of each colour in. Almost, but I think it is about square as it is. 

In a few days, we'll see what the master actually wants us to do with these colours. 

Finally finding the camera cord

Here's some knitting for you!

This is a Bandana Cowl I made for Stephen for bike-riding in the winter. I thought I would give it to him for Christmas, but it just took a weekend of train rides and it was done! Since I couldn't help but show it off to him, and since he will likely need it before the end of December, I guess I need a new Christmas idea.

Cascade 128, in a sort of lava-like colourway. I like how the variegation changes with the shaping. I think I like the very top striping the best.

This is Arthur's latest "pair" of socks.
I finished the first one in January, but it took me a while to get going on the second, and I didn't have enough yarn.

So, a bit of leftovers and we're in business. Glary photo...

And, um, then we have the next project... Kaffe Fassett is designing a blanket or cushion, and I just have to knit along with that! It's a mystery knitalong for Pure Wool Worsted, but I went for Wool Cotton.

The first square will be in these four colours. Actually, the dark grey is supposed to be "rich red," but I couldn't see anything that suited in the substitution yarn, so I used dark grey. 

The original four colours were rich red, raspberry, damson and periwinkle. I have dark grey, something close enough to raspberry, a dull darkish reddish purple, and a blue we could call periwinkle.

So, all fun and games. I am also working on two pairs of socks, which might end up being Christmas presents! As always, many more plans than I can fit in. Today I am sick and miserable, so finding the camera cord and downloading some pictures was about the limit of my abilities.

One more picture, the last of the TIFF pics:

Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson and others on stage after the showing of their movie Learning to Drive. Mr Kingsley (Sir Ben, I believe) said it was nice, after playing a number of villains, to just put on a turban and play a decent man. (The man in the turban might just be Harpreet Singh Toor, who had a small part in the movie and was their advisor on all things Sikh.)

More knitting done

Firstly, I have three hats. I just finished the bottom one, and it seems I started the first one on April 4, finished it on April 28, and then knit two more without putting anything on Ravelry, or taking any pictures. So here you go, three hats for the charity bin.
I also finished something I really only started recently! No years of sitting around for this!

It is my Kusha Kusha scarf. You knit about 40 inches with silk and steel thread, held together with merino laceweight wool. Then you drop the wool and just knit with the teeny weeny thread.

Then, apparently, you try to take a picture of black knitting on a black table.

It is delightful and I hope I will enjoy wearing it when things get a bit cooler.

I have about 3/4 of a scarf's worth of the steel thread left. What the heck am I going to do with that?!

Some knitting and a few films

I finished Elaine's socks!

The yarn colour is called Grape Gumball, and it's stretchy, with a bit of elastic, so a bit tricky to get the tension just right. But cute!

One down, many to go...

I've seen some great movies. A quick rundown:

Dearest. A little boy is taken off the street one day, and we watch his parents, especially his father, try and try to find him. When he's finally found, he's been living with another family for so long... Clever and very sad all around. I was talking to someone else who had seen it, and he said, "I know it's a very emotional issue, but do we have to cry through the whole movie?"

Madame Bovary. When I read this last year in French, after having not read French for years, I found that the vocabulary that was most difficult was the words meaning "elaborately woven silk," or "beautiful embroidery from Italy," or any number of fancy-schmancy fabrics and home decorating thingmabobs.

So it was delightful for me to see the care and time the filmmakers put in to the costumes and sets. The dresses were handmade, each one with a name and a bit of symbolism, like poisonous flowers in the design. (I didn't learn this from watching the movie, but the director told us all about it afterwards.) And of course, it's a great story!

Big Muddy. Just brilliant! Great acting, great scenery, great great great. The stage littered with corpses...

I'll need festival knitting

It's that time of year: the Toronto International Film Festival approaches. This year, like last, I was away the last week of August, which really messes up one's festival preparation.

There are two ways to buy ticket packages for the fest. One is to buy a number of tickets, which one then matches to movies one wants to see. This involves sitting at a computer with a calendar, coloured pens, post-it notes and lots of leisure to check different movie times and make flow charts and time-management lists. In the last week of August, alas.

You can also buy a bunch of tickets and say, "Gimme some movies," and then get presented with some non-exchangeable tickets to movies. You can't say "no romantic comedies, please" and you can't say, "only English-language films" and you can't say you like short films or documentaries or anything. Just five movies that start before 5 pm, please and thank you.

Last year I did this and got a load of madness, mayhem and murder movies. They were all good, but not the movies I would have chosen. (I did choose one movie last year, and it was not as good as I would have liked!)

This year I aimed for the best of both worlds. I got a five-movie TIFF Choice pack, and I am super pleased with what I ended up with. Super, super pleased. This year I seem to have got the Pretty Big Gun pack. I have Keira Knightly and Ben Kingsley and Eddie Redmayne playing Stephen Hawking. (The really big guns this year are Robert Downey, Jr, Benedict Cumberbatch and Alan Rickman.)

I also got what's called a Back-Half pack, which gives me six tickets to movies in the second half of the festival, and I don't get to pick them until this Tuesday! Argh! The off-sale list is growing ever-longer, and I have to force myself to remember that I had thought this was a good idea, and that I would be delighted to see the lesser gems of the fest. I will, it will be fine, there's plenty to see....

But really, who would have thought a three-hour-long documentary about the workings of the National Gallery would be sold out so quickly? Who would want to see that, except me?

I am writing this just as the single tickets go on sale, so the TIFF site is wretchedly busy and I don't have the patience to link all these things. Stay tuned and I will try my best to blog more about it.

I guess I should also tell you about our holiday last week, the knitting I am doing, the festival knitting I will decide upon.... I always think a sock or hat goes well as lineup knitting... Oh, and school starts soon -- another reason to put off most of my festival viewing till the second week!