Moving from Harlem to Hollis

I know nothing about Hollis, but I understand it's part of Queen's which is part of New York City. Right?

 

Knitting on the sweater has paused for a day or so because the recipient is staying at my house! Drat. However, we are having a good time and Christmas is coming....

Can't get enough of Louis Armstrong

People who live in New York seem to think that Christmas is better there than elsewhere. Today we start a small series on New York-centric Christmas songs, with Louis Armstrong and Christmas Night in Harlem.

Santa Claus wants some lovin'

Groovy.
I'm halfway through here, assuming I only go to Dec 25. I hope I can keep it up! I still have a few up my sleeve.

And, polka

It's the Andrews Sisters! Fun and wholesome singing ladies.



It would get the gang dancing, I suppose!

It snowed and snowed on Thursday. My brother is driving up from London on the weekend, so I hope the roads are clear by then.

Sweater is not done, will likely turn into a Christmas present, but I'll do my best.

Snow and some awful stuff now

It is snowing!

Snow coming straight at the door makes the wreath look extra Christmassy

Just in case we were to get carried away with festiveness and warm fuzzy feelings, I think we need to see Bill Nighy, from Love Actually. Here he is a has-been rocker, recycling his old hit for the season. (Naughty language to follow, NSFW)

(After about 2:10 it just goes into the beginning of the movie.)

 

Then, of course, he has to sell the record, and he goes on the radio. Oops. Crass commercialism is all around us, folks!

More snow and something nice tomorrow.

Keepin' warm with love and knitting

This isn't really a Christmas song, though they do mention the weather in December! We are looking at snow this evening, I hear. And we don't care how much it will storm, coz we've got our love to keep us warm....

Eddie is progressing quite well; new deadline in sight; the possibility of meeting the deadline is not too bad, really.

The expanse of the front

decreasing the raglans

The pattern calls for the pieces to be knit flat and seamed together, and has three stitches before the purls on these raglan decreases. After a few rounds of the whole thing, I realised I didn't need all those three stitches, since if I'd sewed it up, one or two would be lost in the seam. So I just got rid of one on each side. I hope this will be not noticeable in the grand scheme. It is pretty low down in the raglan. I have miles to go... I do really like the look of the purl decreases. A little something to keep one from going mad with all the stocking stitch. I have three balls of yarn left, which I think will do me!

Outside, we finally got around to raking the garden a bit, cutting down hosta sticks, picking up the spruce cones and so on. This is the daylily patch, raked!

I bought some purple cabbages to grow in the summer, but they didn't do much, and now they are frozen and fallen over. Pretty colour, but I wish they'd grown better!

Indoor farming: this is a carrot top! You can put the top of a store-bought carrot in a saucer of water, and since the carrot is the root, it nourishes the green bits. Not a great photo, but you get the idea. They say you can do it with a pineapple top as well.

I think he might be saying Merry Christmas

No, probably not saying anything about Christmas after all, but I like it!

Christmas lights

I had to include this live version of this song, because I never would have thought the singer looked like this! Not your usual ho ho ho here, but probably not an uncommon Christmas story. Oo oo oo ooooo.


About Eddie: I have finished the second sleeve, joined the sleeves and body together, and am happily decreasing stitches to get to the top! My first pause will be when I get down to 400 stitches -- then I get to decrease only every alternate row, after a few rows of decreasing every row. That Kim Hargreaves is a pretty clever designer, I must say. When I get a few more rows done, I will show you the lovely decrease line. Now, though, it looks like an octopus...

Another rockin' Christmas song

One of the things I learned from the movie Jingle Bell Rocks! is that John Waters put out a Christmas record. (He is an oddball, for sure. I just read his book about hitchhiking across America.) This video takes the sound from his album, instead of from an original recording, and the quality is much better than other videos I looked at. Groovy.

   

Can I find an appropriate song?

Today is the 25th anniversary of the Montreal massacre. I think I will not give you a song.

A friend of mine was in Montreal at the time, studying not engineering but law. It being December, she was revising for exams, and had unplugged the phone because she had had a few phone calls during the day that had distracted her from her work. Her parents were home in another province, and although the murders had not happened at her university, they called her to make sure she was okay. No answer, no answer, all night! When she finally put her books away and remembered to plug in the phone, it rang immediately.

I was working at a legal newspaper and my boss was a Montreal anglo man, who was either horrible or actually quite nice but very good at pretending to be horrible. I never could be sure. He came into the office the morning after the shooting and said something like, "Some crazy French-Canadian guy went nuts and shot some people and now everyone's calling it 'violence against women'!" Oh, heavens, he was difficult.

Marker of Change, memorial consisting of 14 coffin-like benches in Vancouver by artist Beth Alber

And now there are ceremonies and vigils and memorials, and we hope things are a bit better. But those two memories will stick with me: the frantic parents and the dismissive jerk.

Sweaters and songs

I am knitting away on the second sleeve of Eddie the sweater. Last night I sat by the fire, drinking eggnog and knitting away, and this morning I looked at my pattern and ripped out three perfectly fine rows, because I had gone too far! So, yay, I get to purl a bit now. I have noticed that I clearly thought this "knitting a sweater" would be the work of an instant: my knitting chair is still surrounded by the yarn for the Kaffe squares. I haven't switched projects, I've just inserted this one into the stream somehow. Very odd. Anyways, I will have everything on a long needle for the yoke before you know it.

Today I will not have a song for you, but I will tell you about a crazy movie I saw last year about this time, called Jingle Bell Rocks! People search out obscure records of Christmas songs, and there is a not-tiny sub-culture of people who, in the olden days of the 20th century, used to exchange mix-tapes of their prize Christmas ditties. Just watch this, and tomorrow I will have another great song for you:

Just some fun young guys

Once again, the Christmas message is obliterated by the love song. For your Christmas dance party!

 

Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Day 3 of Christmas songs you might not know. Of course, this is a song we always hear, but Sister Rosetta Tharpe gives it her own organ wailing twist.



After having this great idea of mine, I was surprised this year to get advent e-mails, containing links to YouTube Christmas songs! My friend has so far sent a rollicking Jingle Bells and Veni Veni. I wonder if we'll ever overlap.... Unlikely.

Day 2 here

Time for another Christmas song. Nothing here about peace on Earth, though; just hoping Santa brings us the right man!

That's done with, then

So, there goes November. Not much NaBloPoMo action here, I'm sorry to say.

I do have an idea for December, though!

First I shall show you my sweater:

no flash

with flash

Flash or not, it's about halfway done. By Christmas, certainly.

My December idea is to share non-standard Christmas music with you. No Jingle Bells or Fa la la. Today we must start with the saddest song of all, The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot.

 

Just some flowers

My Christmas cactus is a bit early this year, and only got the two flowers on the whole plant, but I always find it so great when it blooms at all! It usually lives in the bathroom where the light is better for plants, but we let it come into the dining room with its pretty flowers.

Tonight we are having some friends over for dinner, so there is much fussing to be done. Unearth the table, and so on.

Tomorrow I will show you my sweater progress. I did not keep up the "ball every two days" pace, but I have a sleeve and body, so about half of it done.

November's almost over

I went to the Textile Museum today, because I happened to be in the area having a lovely lunch with a friend.  I am a member, so can just pop in for a quick visit (and should do it more often).

They have a great exhibit of Oriental rugs of all sorts on now. This one is quite high pile; some were much flatter. This is just a part of the border of a large rug -I love the variations in the orange background colour.

There was another exhibit called Urban Fabric: Portraits of a City. There were some great photos, and this map of Toronto, made of metal, mesh and wire (and who knows what else). I don't have anything for scale, but it's several feet across.

A close-up of the university area.

I also got some divine things in the gift shop, some for me and some for other people!

I got pictures off my phone, and off my camera, and will sort things out and have more for you ... I won't say "tomorrow," but soon!

A day at the thrift shop

Today the kids and I went shopping. Arthur needed trousers, but otherwise we had no plan.

For less than $100 we got fourteen Christmas cards, eight placemats, five books, three pairs of pants, two little tins to put treats in, two secret things for presents, one belt, one bag of buttons, a T-shirt and... an enlarger!

Almost an entire enlarger; we are just missing a crucial lens.

We passed on the pedestal Christmas cake stand. Took note of the many balls of Phentex available. And admired many candle holders and candles before pulling ourselves together. Elaine and I didn't even really look at clothes, and once Arthur pounced on the enlarger we were sort of overloaded!

Best: we've got a loyalty card full of stamps now, so next time, 30% off!

Saw some movies

Last Days in Vietnam. I saw this PBS movie in the theatre earlier this month. Apparently it will be on TV next spring some time, with additional footage. At its present length it was super-interesting, very suspenseful and surprisingly touching.



It was sort of stunning to hear interviews with men who had been soldiers and marines at the embassy on the last day, when those huge helicopters ferried people away all day long. It was absolutely shocking to see some sailor's Super-8 film footage of smaller helicopters landing on the little ship he was on -- when another came, they had to shove the first one into the sea, and they did this over and over again. Now is the time to collect all this material; what other footage is out there?

There is a whole playlist on Youtube where you can watch more bits of it. See it if you can!

Today I saw a film from what we'd call my comfort zone, Keep On Keepin' On.



Music, friendship, struggles, nice people. Really a good time.

Temperature scarf

I made my way to the yarn shop yesterday, after a brief conversation with my resident physicist, who tells me that green should be at 0ºC. Who ever heard of that? Oh, well, it kind of makes things easier to just have a spectrum of colours.

Red for hot, through green at 0, to blue and indigo for cold. I'm hoping I don't have to get more colder yarns, because it's already freezing during the day, and, in fact, snowing at this very moment! (I will resist the obvious temptation to use some sort of fuzzy or sparkly yarn for snow days.)

The darkest blue, on the right, will be for -15º and lower, bright blue for -10 to -14, pretty variegated icy colours for -3 to -9, and green for -3 to +3.

Green variegated for 4 to 10, yellow variegated for 11 to 15, yellow/orange for 16 to 20, orange variegated for 21 to 27 and red for 28 and above.

I was worried that I'd need more on either end of this scale. That is why the colours have to stretch to a bit more (sometimes) than the 5 degrees I had initially thought.  Also, it's the time of year when all Torontonians forget that it ever gets warm here. We are bundled up for our months and months of cold and can't think beyond that. Really, it'll be 28 degrees here sometime in the next year??

I'm sure that if next October I find I need more 10º yarn, I won't be able to match dye lots or even colours, but then again I am equally sure that I can't need more than 160 metres of any one colour. Right?

This all gets lovingly put away till the winter solstice, when I shall cast on. Cast on what, though? A plain garter or seed-stitch scarf? A 10-stitch blanket? I think I'll find a two-row lace pattern and make a scarf out of that.

But who knows, it's weeks away and I have a man-sized sweater to finish!