Just thought I'd pass this along

This little girl, the sister of a friend of Arthur's, is cutting her long hair tomorrow, her 7th birthday, to donate it to make wigs for children with cancer, and collecting pledges. Her original goal was $500, but they have made over $3000 already! Go, Tricia!

More on the weather

Our school fair was today, and we were all anxious about the weather.

8 am: Looks bad, been raining in the night.

9 am: Looks good, set-up begins outdoors.

11 am: The fair gets under way, clouds come and go.

3 pm: Time to clear up and go home.

3:30 pm: The heavens open in a miserable downpour.

So, success, I suppose!

I had great success at the rummage sale, as well. I got a cool tote bag, and three old Interweave Knits magazines, including the ones with the Swallowtail Shawl and the Icarus Shawl! (Ravelry links) So I am pleased as punch.

I must also tell you that I met Liz on Thursday and we hit several TO hot spots.

The Textile Museum, for Afghan war rugs -- very odd, but some were rather compelling. There was one that looked like a carpet a young boy would drive Dinky Toys around on, with the town all laid out, surrounded by tanks and helicopters.

We got to John's Italian Caffe for lunch (mine was an eggplant sandwich with goat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes: delicious) and Lettuce Knit for, um, yarn.

I was looking for more brown Manos and came away with bright blue Malabrigo laceweight. Ah, what fun... And now I have those shawl patterns! I have a million plans, but they all start with, "Let me just finish up this and this and then I'll start this, but, wait, what's this...?" Ah, well.

Weather report

This is what the forecast is for tomorrow, the day of our school fun fair.

Grr. Candy floss in the rain just isn't going to work.

But I do love the little icon, don't you?

Finishing and starting

I have been busy... Got Arthur's socks done. I thought I might enter them in a local fair, but the legs are clearly different lengths!

And I started this slightly ridiculous thing (Ravelry link). It's a VK pattern, and it's supposed to have sleeves and huge long fronts, and I can't imagine how it would sit properly on a human body. But I shall just make the wrap part and forget the sleeves. I started with 3 skeins of Manos; the pattern calls for 700 g of yarn. Well, so I went up the hill, and got the last skein of this colour in the shop. That gives me 400 g.

Today I am off to meet the visiting Liz, and there may be some yarn shopping involved, so I'll report back on that!

WIP Wednesday again

I have not kept up with my WIP Wipeout posts. I have wiped out a few WIPs, I suppose, though I still have a few!

The Jaywalkers are close to completion. A few more stripes to go. I started these a million years ago, or in fact, in October last year! Well, hmm, now it's May, so perhaps these had best get wrapped up, pronto! (Also, yes, I must sweep the fir needles off the porch... perhaps even paint the porch...)

And that's the only WIP I've been working on. I could make bold promises about the next one in the queue, but we all know how that works out! I can say that I've started yet another new project to add to the list... oops.

This wool was given to me by Alison some months ago. Um, in August last year! (The blog does help a girl keep track of these things, doesn't it?)

I have started a couple of things with this before, but stopped because of the pooling of colours. This time I decided to plug on ahead, and I think that the splotches will place themselves randomly enough. Though after only a couple of inches, who can tell for sure? These colours are not my usual muddy greens, so I'm a bit alarmed whenever I look at it.

This pattern is called Plain and Lacy Stripes II in my stitch dictionary, and it is really only one right side row, but you move it over one stitch on alternate rows. So:

Row 1: *K1, yo, K2, skp, K2tog, K2, yo*
Even rows: P
Row 3: *yo, K2, skp, K2tog, K2, yo, K1*

Clearly you need selvedge stitches, since the pattern begins or ends with yarnovers. I have 5 repeats of the 9-stitch pattern, and 3 garter stitches at each edge. One ball of Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn, and we'll see how much of a scarf we can get. It's 420 yards, so it should be fine.

Okay, the last pictures of Kiri

Kiri from the back:


And Kiri in the mirror:


I thought I was being so clever, taking the picture of the mirror and the blank white wall. Oops, I forgot about all the reflection!

I'm now hard at work on the second Jaywalker, have turned the heel! Pictures in a day or two...

Kiri complete

In just one week, I actually finished something!

Why did I put this off for so long? It was fun!

Kiri turned from a little blob like this















to a lovely thing like this!













Its edges were all scrumply like this















and they became nice like this!
I used two and a half balls of Felted Tweed, on size 5 mm needles, casting off with 7 mm. There are 10 rows of leaves, which I think translates to 9 repeats of chart 2.

And all in one week!

There's only one problem... it's a bit purple! I like this colour mixed in with the other FT colours I have, but I'm not sure about it alone in one big spread. I certainly can't wear it with my red coat.

I got quite obsessed with it, and so it went rather quickly, but every 10 rows I got caught by the change in the chart (usually you start with a yo, k2 tog, but on row 10, you just yo and then knit straight). And, what I really didn't enjoy was the hiccup in the middle of the row! For my next trick, I will try a shawl without the "track" down the middle. And I would like to decrease instead of increasing... Maybe I should have made Birch! (Ravelry link)

I'll let it dry and then try for some modelled shots.

You all know her

Meet my Kiri.


It was all just too much for me.
Sewing in all those darn ends (ha ha, darn ends!) on the baby blanket made me want to start something new.

Alison reminded me of that lovely felted tweed sitting waiting for me. I really liked this shawl from Mustaa villaa, but needed a bit more excitement.


I've also been thinking of Kiri (That's a Ravelry link, or go here and click the link in the sidebar for a .pdf. ) for a while, and she was (wink, wink) easily available. I could actually find the size of needles that I wanted right away! (I'm using 5 mm, which are a bit large for this yarn, but I think it'll make it drape and fall the way I want.)

It was meant to be.


And since it's Polly's pattern, I had to try a "drape it on a plant" photo. Maybe it'll work better when the shawl is a bit bigger!

Books, read and unread

I saw this on Stephannie's blog, and just had to jump in!

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

(I'm not going to do all that; I'll just bold the ones I've read through. And that might mean I read them 25 years ago and might not remember very much about them! My husband seems to have read the ones I haven't, hmm. )

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

And now I'll get back to listening to the CBC and sewing in my ends.

What I did this weekend

I finished knitting the baby blanket.

I didn't really finish the baby blanket.

There is still some work to be done!

My teeny bit of advice to anyone wishing to attempt something like this is: have something in mind to copy. When my knitted piece had to have more stripes than the bit I was imitating, I had to stop and think about shaping and size and how and where to slant the piece... Since I was copying someone else's creative genius, I didn't like having to come up with, you know, my own ideas! Of course, my slants and shapes are not always like the original, but it's good to have something to deviate from, as well!

I had this book, and was looking at this quilt, part of which is on the cover of the book:


It's an indoor flash picture of the open book, so the whole thing is wretchedly distorted here. I would stay away from trying to knit the bottom right corner, but the rest lends itself marvellously to the whole short-row wonky-square knitting. And of course, the short-row tutorial by nona is indispensable, as well!

And then I had a party.

Quiz: Did I make this salad, or did someone else?

Distraction

While I quietly do the last bits of the baby blanket, I'll just ask the world this question: Where are all those great clothes of the 70s? I mean, what did Cher do after her shows -- give the stuff to the Sally Ann?

I bet there are vaults of these Osmond Brothers suits in some basement.



I just noticed how quiet that audience is! Wow...

And here, some I hope we never find:

Progress report

My Gee's Bend baby blanket is coming along.


The square on the top now has a sideways strip out to the right, which will likely continue on the whole width. I'm beginning to worry about my yarn quantities, so I think I'll be as efficient as I can. Strips knitted in between the squares, bound off in the middle, as obvious seams. Whatever little border I can contrive.

I got another book from the library! My oh my, I might have to take up sewing! Gorgeous! So much inspiration! Ahhhh!

Log cabin, Gee's Bend, donated Anny Blatt wool

A couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail offering some "wool" for our charity project. I was leary, because people do tend to dump crap yarn when they get an opportunity! But, this was no crap! Seven balls of Anny Blatt 100% wool, gorgeous colours. (Though somewhat dated when seen all together, I must note. Funny how certain colour combinations remind one of certain eras.) This came together with the other very decent yarn which inspired the Disco Queen jacket.

It just so happened that I had a book out of the library about the Gee's Bend quilters, specifically Mary Lee Bendolph. (I especially love this one; it looks like books on shelves.)

Other knitters have admired the Gee's Bend quilts, and have done something about it. Here's Kay admiring a quilt; here she knits another. Kay tends to keep her lines straight, though! Luckily, there are all sorts of knitters around, including people who will knit garter stitch squares that don't end up straight! The secret: short rows. Nona even wrote a tutorial on the whole wonky square issue!

So, when I see a picture like this...

I can sorta knit it!


I think this is a quarter of a baby blanket, but it might end up a sixth. Too garish? Would a baby in Zimbabwe appreciate it -- well, yes, they would like a nice colourful wool blanket, but maybe only a kooky knitter who admires not-straight-line quilts would really love it...

And this is the next piece. The quilter has log-cabinned clockwise, and knitting can only go counter-clockwise, I think, so I will fudge, but the whole thing is fudging, really, isn't it? Onward and upward and wonky!

A book-with-knitting swap

I have joined a book swap! We need to find a book written before 1960 which involves knitting in some way, even some teeny way; make a bookmark, and send a package off to someone somewhere! I have a few ideas, but must see who I'm giving the book to, before I make any big decisions!

It is so lovely out right now. Spring lasted about 3 days, and now we are well into summer, it seems. Soon I will begin to complain that it is too hot -- already Elaine and I have crossed to the shady side of the street while out walking at noon.

Get down, baby!

Took a break from whatever I was doing this week, and made a Disco Queen Baby Surprise Jacket.

It needs glittery buttons, don't you think?

I mailed the blue socks to my dad for his birthday, and they fit and he has worn them. So, hooray for socks. Now, my mom's birthday is in July, and she's only going to be 88, not 90, but I think she might qualify for a knitted gift as well. I'm thinking shawl right now, but her birthday is not really in shawl season. But, who cares... she'll need it some day, and that's what I want to knit, and maybe socks, but not right now, but I might change my mind, but.... oh, never mind me...

No more Magknits!

I just read on Grumperina's blog that Magknits was no longer around!

Go read their statement... Sad for us, but it seems a sensible thing for them to do, really. And although I used some patterns, I certainly never supported them by even clicking on an advertiser. I guess there is no free lunch!

Lucky me, in the middle of my Jaywalkers, Grumperina's put that pattern on Ravelry. I'd best go download it properly -- I'd just been counting on being able to go to Magknits to read it when I needed to! Odessa is hers as well, and it's a great hat pattern.

In other news, Rosie mentioned a book swap. I dashed right over and joined, my first ever swap!

Saturday sky on Monday

Yesterday I stepped out of the house and saw this cardinal in a tree, with the clear white con trail across the sky, and thought, "Ah, Saturday sky!" It was really Sunday, and I'm posting it on Monday... but you get the point.

This past weekend the weather has been divine! Green things are popping out of the ground, and we even barbecued for lunch on Saturday! Ten degrees, people, plus 10! I took an actual photograph of actual blooming crocuses, but it's on the other camera and there are issues with that camera at the moment...

[Those issues have been resolved, so, look! Flowers!]



I see it's snowing in Britain. I'm tempted to say ha ha ha, but I know the chances of us getting through April without another snowfall are small.

We went to a little farm in the city yesterday looking for baby animals to photograph for an upcoming fair, but there were no babies yet! Just a few chicks under a warm red light, which makes for not so great photos....

But, Arthur did manage to catch this cow in a quiet moment.

(And I took a fine picture of his friend flying through the sky, but it's on the other camera....!)

[And here's that one too!]

More moss, and the sock on the town

I was thinking about mossy yarns the other day, and I remembered these lovely bits of handspun that I'd come across on my mossy West Coast travels.

The first ball, which I bought at a craft market on Hornby Island, had been once made into this scarf, but it was too short, and too tickly, and it got ripped.

The second ball came from a gallery on Pender Island last summer, and had just been sitting around... I think it even came from island sheep, spun and dyed locally.


So, I got my trusty 7 mm short circular needle, the two yarns, and a couple of afternoons, and came up with a nice warm hat... in April, just as I'm thinking I might one day be able to leave the house without a wool hat!

It's nice and slouchy and funky and very very mossy!

I did a few other things yesterday as well. I took my sock (my poor neglected sock!) out for a walk and took its picture at Honest Ed's.

The Yarn Harlot gave the knitters of Toronto a list of places/scenarios in which to take pictures of socks, and we seem to have been rather diligent about this! There's a flickr group here.

I knew I couldn't go to her talk, so I didn't go all out to collect lots of points, but I got a few.

Here's the sock on my deck, looking toward the CN Tower.

And now the sock had better get to work at getting longer, turning its heel and speeding toward the toe!

April goals include finishing this sock and the Jaywalker, and if I can do that, with perhaps a bit of fun on the side, I'll be content!

The sock situation

The sock situation here is what the Brits would call dire.

Well, I think it is, anyways. Maybe it's really the sock-desire situation, or the sock-yarn-stash situation.

Let me elaborate.

• I have one pair of socks almost done, and that is a good thing, as there is a special date associated with them, but I can't tell you more about that right now.
• I have another pair of socks mostly done (a heel and a foot to go). This pair was started months and months ago, and really, let's get on with it.
• I have obtained yarn for three more pairs in recent days... and I already had too much sock yarn! I want to use some gaudy stuff to make plain socks, and some plain stuff to make lace or cable or some nice patterned socks, and I have a bunch of yarn and a bunch of patterns and not enough time.
• It takes me a long time to make socks, unless I just plow on, neglecting everything else, and there are other things I want to knit, too!
  
• Okay, I'll end this bullet list, now, and show you a picture.

I could have taken this picture on any recent sunny day, but now it is grey and damp out. I even had to put a plastic bag down under the yarn on the table.

(I'm not complaining really, as it is warm, and the ice is slowly slowly melting, and I have seen green things, in other people's gardens.)

Whatever... The pink I got from Haley, and will become socks for Elaine one day. The others I got in a swap from Heather, and I really want to knit up the rocking multicolour one at the top.

This was meant to be the year of socks for me, but I have, you know, other things to do as well. For example, the Felted Tweed is now in a big laundry basket in the living room, staring at me whenever I pass by.

Me and moss

I've always liked moss, you know...

Here's some moss and grass from the West Coast of BC.

Here's some from Mull, off the west coast of Scotland.

Wouldn't you love a shawl that looked like that!?

And here's some of my mossy wool!

For more on moss, you can check out today's London Daily Nature Photo, for moss on a lovely rock with pinky orangey purply black and white bits...