All that idle knitting

Once upon a time, at the beginning of the pandemic stay-at-home time, I finished some previously half-done knitting; I started knitting things and didn't actually want to keep them; I used up yarn someone gave me and basically knit without knowing what would happen to all the things.

Winter is coming and the pile was growing on my living-room flat surface, and not everyone in the family wants to just look at knitted things. I needed to find a place where they could be used. 

I heard about a group called the Encampment Support Network that is helping people who find themselves living in tents in city parks. They were having a winter clothing drive, so today I took them hats, a few scarves and a couple of hand-me-down fleece vests. 

These hats are called LOSY, or Left-Over Sock Yarn hats. With two strands of sock yarn held together, a hat like this can be knit up in a couple of days. Look how much sock yarn I had lying around the house! Every little amount can be used, adding splashes of colour. 

That green hat above is really too small for an adult head. I asked if they wanted stuff for kids and was relieved when they said they didn't need kids' things. So now I just need to find an 8-year-old. That white one is super warm, using some leftovers and some yarn a friend gave me; the multicolour in the front is scraps of Kureyon. (I showed you another hat of Kureyon last time; that one went to my neighbour.)

You may have seen these scarves and cowl before. If I weren't already awash in nice scarves, I would have kept them, but it's sort of hard to justify having a scarf for every day of the week, and probably almost every day of the month! They'll keep someone else warm. 

Used items were welcome, too, so I finally got around to unpicking my embroidered name from a scarf I wore to my English school in 1972-3. 

This is a perfectly good scarf, but one I haven't really worn for almost 50 years, so let's just pass it on...

All these things had to go in a bag for their trip to the clothing drive. I found this gem in my bag of bags... I believe the last time I was in Loop was 2006. So they get a vintage bag from a cool London yarn shop as well! 

(Added later: I just saw on twitter that they had so many donations today they are not taking any more!)

I got my walk in by taking all these things to a storefront a few kilometres away, met a friend for a coffee and walked home. I came past an old shopping plaza that is halfway torn down. You can see the stylish 1972 arches along this outside wall. Someone has been painting rainbows. 

As I got closer I wondered if this was a really bad paint job or a really good one. 

In each arch the colours move up a bit, but all have the rainbow colours dribbling down into each other. 

I really like it!

How time flies

Well, what has been happening? 

I have started a sweater for me, but can't get into it. So I am knitting little things with odd balls of yarn. I find things around the house: not only balls of yarn but half-finished sweaters and piles of squares for blankets and all sorts of things. 

Here's a sample of recent knits:

A scarf made in brioche stitch which is very soft and squishy but which eats wool like crazy. This is apparently all the worsted-weight yarn I have, so a nice, scarf-sized thing instead of a cushy wrap.

This Noro Kureyon was left over from my springtime sweater. It's a good pattern but I had to add the cuff and lengthen it to cover my ears. 

This is something called a LOSY hat. LOSY stands for left-over sock yarn. You hold two yarns together and knit on 4 or 4.5 mm needles and use up lots of bits! Another hat I would lengthen for myself. Maybe I just have a big head!

In other news: I went to the optometrist today and have ordered a new pair of glasses. Très chic, I say. You can see them in a couple of weeks. My retinas and ocular nerves are very healthy, thanks for asking. 

I got a new cookbook, and unlike with most cookbooks, I mean to make every single recipe! It's the Moosewood Restaurant Favorites. Tonight's dessert was Chocolate-Chocolate Chip Cookies. Pretty darn chocolatey, with 1/4 cup of cream cheese in with the butter. I haven't quite figured out if that adds anything, but it doesn't hurt. 

This week I've been going to what I call the "old-lady exercise class." Of course it is outdoors so I am not sure how long we can continue. We go to a piece of the park next to the daycare playground, so sometimes there are leaf-blowers and sometimes there are sad two-year-olds and sometimes there are garbage trucks. We use wands, or long sticks, to push and pull. My wand was holding up beans in the garden till last week. One woman uses her blind husband's white cane; I am not sure if he just stays home while she is at class or what! Anyways, it is a bit fun and gets us stretching and what-not so that is good. 

The other day I made it up the hill to Spadina House, which has great gardens. I especially wanted to go there in the spring when the chestnut trees were in flower. Finally they opened sometime recently, so I popped in the other day. 

Phew, there's your round-up!

Yet another new thing

Elaine was here for a few days and I offered her this recently finished shawlette, made from a variety of odd balls of cotton in summery bright colours. 

She said it seemed to be a useless garment. I think she was objecting to the combo of "cotton" and "scarf." 

But I'd say not entirely useless! Lovely when you don't want to be too hot, when it's spring or fall or winter and you just want a little something. Perfectly useful! And dang colourful, too. 

Peyto Lake bag

Many years ago, I went to the Rockies and took this picture of Peyto Lake, which really is this kind of shocking colour. 

Recently I was looking at Spoonflower, a place that will print anything you like (that you own) on various kinds of fabric or on wallpaper. I think they were promoting something to do with lakes at the time. 

So I tried it! It cost about $15 for this bit of fabric, with my lake picture arranged all over it. 

You can get quilting cotton and slinky polyester and all sorts. I got Twill. You can arrange your art in stacked or offset bricks or make a giant single picture. 

It was only a small bit of fabric (a "fat quarter") and I am still best just sewing straight lines, so I made a bag. I threw more involved ideas around in my head, but kept coming back to, "just make a bag."

I lined it with this mauve fabric which I believe is linen. Who knows how these things end up in my cupboards? 

The bar code and order number are on the selvage and I could have hidden them but I like them there. 

I cut the fabric for the handles off one long edge, and so have one with clouds and one with mountains. 

A nice, unique, summery bag to throw my wallet and sunglasses in!

Some things I have made

Once upon a time, I found myself a necklace of these triangular stones. They are just rocks, grey triangle rocks. It made for a very heavy necklace, and it was quite short. 

Recently I found this necklace of giant diamonds! Alas, not real diamonds, but lightweight, plastic, enormous diamonds! 

I added my diamonds to my rocks and I have a longer necklace, that is still quite heavy of course, but not close around my neck. The blue gems are in my bead box, awaiting their fate. 

I also took this pearl necklace apart and put it back together again. It was originally two short strands; now one longer one. Once again, unfortunately these are not real pearls, and certainly not natural golden pearls! 

Stop taking pictures in front of the window

I am knitting, although it is really hot! This is a square for a COVID-19 charity/art/memorial thing (atop a jigsaw puzzle that was easy enough for a while).

 

And here we have a hat of some leftovers and hand-me-downs. It'll go in the charity box. Super warm, I think. 
 

I started knitting the hat because my other new project was already driving me bonkers. 

I think it took me a couple of days to get this much knit. Two and three-quarter millimetre needles, tiny, tiny woolly yarn. This will one day be a lovely cardigan for me, light and airy and warm, but right now it is a hot sticky chore. To knit a hat on 4.5s was a delight, and it went so fast! 

This is the state of the sweater at present. I suspect it will not be ready for the coming autumn, but maybe next spring! 

The green yarn of the border was bought in Vancouver as a substitute when I couldn't go to Fibres West, and the petrol-bluish mix was bought recently. I gave someone a bunch of pattern books and she sent me a gift certificate for the shop up the hill, so I was compelled. 

It's still so hot, I can't even imagine wearing a sweater, but I shall continue....

We had a week away

Even in the COVID times, it is possible to get away from things for a while. Stephen and I decided to take a break a while ago and had a hard time finding a place to rent, but we managed to get a wee cottage for this past week in the town of Picton, Ontario, in the heart of Prince Edward County, or as Torontonian middle-aged hipsters say, The County. 

The town is open for business, but restaurants have patios, lots of take-out available, stores have limits on how many people can be in at once and everyone is masked indoors. We did most of our own cooking and only went out a few times to eat. We did get more ice cream than usual, the most exciting being Campfire flavour at Slickers! It really does taste like slightly burnt marshmallows. 

We went looking at antiques. 

Up the street from our little house was this buddha/gnome combo, and I happened by when a Giant Swallowtail butterfly was checking it out. 

We went to a few wineries. Most interesting fact: Waupoos cider is not made at the Waupoos winery but at the County Cider Co, although the winery does also have cider. Too complicated!

We went to the beach! I had been following Sandbanks park on twitter because they often were so crowded they closed the park by noon. It was so busy we just decided not to bother at all, but to try our luck at the smaller North Beach. It was lovely, very slowly sloping sand and the water was perfect. I did find it a bit odd that a place with such a curvy, inlet-ish coastline didn't seem to have many beaches. 

In our quest for ice cream, we went to the Sunflower Fields ice cream place. The ice cream was fine, but we were a few weeks late to see the flowers in all their glory. 

And of course there was knitting. I made four dishcloths, trying my best to use up the whites in my collection. 

All different sizes!

Now we are back home, doing whatever one does. Hard to believe it is the middle of August! 

More thrills at our house

 I went to the big thrift shop a couple of weeks ago with Arthur and we picked out a ... challenging... jigsaw puzzle. Finally today we finished it! One thousand pieces, tomatoes!

This took us about twice as long as usual. We got the yellow ones and the peppers pretty quickly, but then it was a slog. Phew. 

We had our usual tuba O Canada today, and a bit of Friday-evening-hanging-around afterwards. A tenant who lives in the same house as Tuba Guy is moving tomorrow, and was putting out stuff to get rid of by the side of the road. OMG, I didn't know I was living across the street from another knitter until tonight, and a knitter with style! 

Several balls of nice wool! Great colours! The same as some stuff I have but have been ignoring since we came back from Vancouver! 

It's in the freezer for now, just in case of cooties. I'll add it to my pile... 

The thing that attracted me to her pile of discards was this plate! 

She put it under a plant pot. I think I will put it on the wall. 

(Blogger has a new interface, and I don't know why the pictures are gigantic and not centred. Or maybe that's just me...)

August, it's August already

Wow, what has happened to the time thing? The whole summer, poof! I feel like this summer has whisked by. Then again, who would want it to go on any longer, with pandemics, heatwaves and, in other places, massive unrest?

Of course, we do have another whole month of summer; September can be very summery; but there's that business of school, which is more fraught than usual this year, even though (thank goodness a million times) I don't have little kids. Stephen will be teaching somehow, Elaine will be online-classing. 

Enough handwringing. What's up for August? Pretty modest goals!

• The Kaffe Fassett squares will be sewn together. My pillow is 26 inches on a side and my knitting is about 24 inches. So, hmm. 
• Will I start the lacy pullover I have been thinking of, or will I start something new with some hand-me-down yarn a friend gave me, or will I finish off another long-forgotten work-in-progress? 
• In non-knitting news, we are going to rent a cottage by a lake (not Huron, nor Erie, but Lake Ontario this time) for a week. I hope we will just hang out, maybe go to a winery, maybe have lunch on a patio, get some knitting and reading done. The provincial park with the nice beach is experiencing huge traffic problems and usually closes midday because it's already too busy, since it's within easy driving distance of Toronto and no-one is travelling abroad. So, that's a thing. 
• I may just become a great-aunt in the last week of August. The mom-to-be was weeks late being born herself, so perhaps I won't hold my breath!

And that's it. Surely something else will happen, but no huge plans are in the works. 

All grown up

I once showed you the Eastern Black Swallowtail caterpillars from our garden. We had a number of them over a week or two, eating the dill on my back deck. 

Then, they all disappeared. We looked, but couldn't find a chrysalis anywhere. Obviously they don't want to be found, but we worried they'd all become bird snacks.

Yesterday, something flitted by, and I managed to get a picture of this Eastern Black Swallowtail butterfly! 

Our baby is all grown up!

(Blogger, like so many other things, has a "new look," Instead of words, they have little icons which are not so easy to interpret, and a new way of sizing photos. I think all is well, and I hope things don't look too weird once I press the little paper-airplane icon to upload this.)

A bit of park knitting

I went to the park with a friend today and we sat in the shade and knitted. I didn't take my big square, the backing for my Kaffe squares -- which is coming along just nicely and almost done -- because I am changing colours every eight rows and that's just too much to keep track of in the park, so I started a dishrag.

We knit for an hour or so, then I came home and finished it off!

The perfect dishrag is not a pretty yellow, because you know it will all just end up coffee-coloured in the end, but my supplies are running low! The yarn used for the "mortar" here is about a gazillion years old and I have been doing my best to use it up forever. Icky beige with splotches. Luckily, it too will fade in time!

I hope to have a finished cushion cover soon, but here is a teaser of the back:

I am using all the colours for the back, but not repeating the stripe sequence. I had to take this picture so I would know what colour to use next! Almost done...  And you notice a jigsaw puzzle started in the background -- 1000 pieces, tomatoes... Pretty terrible, but doable. I'll report in on that later, too!