I took hundreds of pictures

The Honest Ed's farewell party was amazing. They even called part of it aMAZEment. Truly a blast. Here are just a bunch of pictures of the building and the art.

I am stunned at how clever and witty and resourceful these artists and organizers are. Just wonderful. I'm glad I saw most of it on Friday because there was room to move. I looked in at the Marketplace today and it was jam-packed. There is still time to volunteer Sunday as it closes down for good, but I don't think I'll manage that. I'm so glad I was involved -- even a wee bit -- though.

Eye candy Friday

I've mentioned the Honest Ed's store before, I think. It has closed and is going to be demolished soon, to be replaced with residential towers and a bit of retail.

This weekend a big party is happening there in the empty building. I am doing a bit of volunteering, mainly because I wanted to see how it all works out! I have done a shift of smashing tables and carrying nail-filled plywood, to make the space usable for party-goers; I scrubbed gunk off mirrors and swept floors; and I'm doing some community activities today and tomorrow. I'll report in when it's all done.

They've got the lights back on! Of course, burned out bulbs have not been replaced in some time.

These balls were just lying there, being pretty, in one of the Honest Ed's spaces. I took this while things were still being set up; perhaps it is part of some larger art piece, or perhaps they are just gewgaws. Bonus artist's reflection in the shiny ones!

And a frame outside. Painted over several times. Just a bit odd. I like it.

Movieland

Your Think Write Thursday prompt for February 23, 2017 is to write about the movie you can quote from the most. ... What's that movie, the one that once you start quoting from (probably with your friends) and you just can't stop? 

Well.

I see lots of movies, but mostly documentaries these days. We have been TV-less since 1981 (except for a few months around when the Berlin Wall came down) so we don't watch the Grinch every Christmas or any other late-night movie reruns.

Stephen and I have watched lots of movies together in the past, but there isn't a special movie we quote to each other. Maybe African Queen? "Well, do so, Mr Allnut." Yes, that must be the family movie quote.

Die Hard has some familiar moments, but there are no conversations I can repeat.

Sound of Music is certainly one that I know all the words to!

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."

To see what other people quote, look here.

Eye candy

Just some nice oranges for you today.

Think Write Thursday

What are you procrastinating about? And why? And, finally, how are you going to address it?

There are the obvious things we deal with on this blog: how many half-knitted sweaters are lying around the house? Gazillions. The oldest work-in-progress project on Ravelry is from 2011... six years ago!

I have a few half-knit sweaters around. And how many sweaters do I wear regularly, out of all the sweaters I have knit over the years? Zero. They come out once in a while, especially in the spring and fall, when I wear them outside, but really, I do not need another sweater. (This can't be the only reason I don't finish them. It's unlikely I need any more shawls, either, and I can churn them out!)

One day, I will address this. I will get my bags and ziplocs and plastic bins and look at what's in them and do something. I can think of some frogging I might do.

But, you know, I'm busy these days! So things like making decisions about my handiwork get pushed aside.

Sometime in March?

You can read about other procrastinators over at Carole's blog.

February's vintage accessory

Voilà, a tea cosy! It is a bit large for the pot. 

It has a pompom, which I made with my neighbour's fancy-pants pompom-maker. It does keep the strands from going all over the place in the all-important "tie together" step of the process, so that is good. The fact that the pompom is a bit small and sparse is my fault; next time I will use more yarn! 

Nice texture! Squishy and thick. I'd be happier if it was closer to the right size, but I do like it a lot.

Eye Candy Friday

These chairs are in a top secret location. I think I am actually breaking the rules by showing them to you. I spent Thursday afternoon moving them into position, as well as carrying splintery wood, plywood with nails sticking out, plants that need watering, lost umbrellas and much more. All for the sake of art, I think.

Another Thursday

This week's Think, Write, Thursday theme is "a love letter." That's a bit personal, isn't it?

Of course, it can be "to a person, an idea, a project, a dream, a wish, a relative, a famous person, an ancestor or anything (or anyone) else you can think of."

Silly or serious? Alan Rickman or my kids? 

***

I wrote that earlier this week while pondering the theme. 
And got no further.
And now I am pressed for time and, what am I to do? 

Quick, a photo:

We had some freezing rain the other day, which made for a treacherous walk and some nice icicles off every overhang. This is the Little Library up the street. I was thinking at the time of writing a love letter to my neighbourhood. 

Okay, and now I'm off... but don't think I don't love you all!

Hello, February

Another Think, Write, Thursday This week's topic is Hello, February.

February is starting off with a bang. Today I had to shovel snow!

Knitting-wise, I am making a tea cosy for my vintage KAL. It is a very simple thing, but it's in what might be called "half-brioche" or some sort of fake brioche stitch. It's not quite this Fisherman's Rib. It's not quite the same as this variation of brioche, according to Woolly Wormhead. You knit one row, and on the second row you purl one, knit one in the row below. And that is it for the whole tea cosy! I had to rip out about an inch and a half because no size is given in the pattern and the cosy would have swamped my poor pot, so I started again with about 10 fewer stitches.

Other than knitting, well...

1. It is the beginning of birthday season around here. We do all four family birthdays between the middle of February and the end of April, and by some strange luck we go in order from youngest to oldest!
2. On Sunday I am going to the opera, something I have not done before. It is five hours long, and that's about all I know about it. 
3. At the end of the month, there is a big celebration in the empty Honest Ed's store. Honest Ed Mirvish was Toronto's big showman/ salesman/ rags-to-riches guy. He built up his business till he owned a whole block, covered his store in light bulbs and silly signs, had door-crasher specials and Christmas turkey give-aways. People have lots of stories about their immigrant families buying stuff at Honest Ed's, about buying things when they first set up house, as students, as newcomers to Toronto... I am volunteering at the final party, and even though it's only about 3 weeks away, I really have no idea how it's all going to work, but I'll keep you posted. And in a few years, that block will be covered in 20-storey towers and a whole new park. 
4. Stephen is going away for a week and Arthur is coming here for a week. 
5. I'm going to the first meeting to talk about volunteering at Hot Docs 2017. Whoo-hoo!
6. I'm training to volunteer at the Textile Museum.
7. I have a potluck dinner planned with my pals.
8. I plan to write to my MPP about road tolls in the city and my MP about election reform. I think that telling my elected officials how to do their job might be my Canada150 project! A letter a month, two in February to make up for a lack in January. 

I'm exhausted even thinking about it. 

A real Honest Ed's sign, on the way to the exit. 

A few pictures from Monday

Yesterday I had a lunch date downtown. I made my way down there past the US consulate, where a rally was organized. Actually, not really organized, but happening anyways. I think the first notice went up on Facebook Sunday morning. They seemed to make it up as they went along, and that worked just fine.

There were a few hundred people, some of them wearing their pussyhats. I love this sign, Make America vote again!

"It's -15 and I'm from Iran. That's how much I hate Trump!" (Really, only -11!)

Having enjoyed the vibe, admired the signs and taken a few pictures, I carried on to lunch. Nothing special, though I did have a cocktail involving gin, grapefruit juice and ginger beer, which was quite tasty. I really meant to take pictures of the food, because another friend said she would try to recreate the meal at home, but I completely forgot, because taking pictures of your food is crazy... isn't it?

We were near City Hall and I popped in (washrooms in the basement...). This is very hard to photograph, because it is a giant wall of nails.

See, all different sizes of nails. A very 60s work of art. I love how some of the nails are shiny because people rub them!

As I was leaving I met these two. Lego Batman and Robin. I suspect there is more to this story. Oh, yes. 

We have the Toronto sign, and now it has a Canada150 maple leaf added. I guess that's fine, but it's like mixing wool and acrylic to have municipal and federal things together like that. Canada will be 150 years old this summer; a friend of mine is drinking only Canadian wines this year to celebrate. I don't have a project yet...

I like it this way best!

Finally, I was walking up through a park on my way home and came across this sad scene. Or maybe it is a happy scene; the person managed to walk away without their stick.

And I walked home from my big day of decadent lunching and rallies and even a return visit to the Textile Museum, bought some groceries and made supper. The end.

A new hat for someone

A week ago my neighbour and I walked up the hill to Knitomatic for a yarn swap. It's good for us to puff our way up the hill, and I had to donate some old magazines to the swap, and who knows what one might find?

I picked up some dishcloth cotton and a couple of small balls of laceweight yarn. No idea what I'll do with those, but they go in the lace bag and some Stephen West shawl will surely incorporate them in the future.

I also just had to have this single ball of Mille Colori, a wool/acrylic blend in my favourite colours. I grabbed it on the way out to an appointment, but knit most of it at a meeting yesterday about some upcoming fun and games I will tell you about soon! Mostly I just knit around and around, because I got tired of those purl rows pretty quickly.

A great hat in great colours, but I have enough hats for now and so it will go back to Knitomatic to be collected by Streetknit for charity.

Eye Candy Friday

I wonder if any of you follow 70s Dinner Party on Twitter. So many ill-conceived salads... But I do love that sort of nonsense.

I came across this book in a little free library nearby. The cover is so tantalizing, isn't it? The inside, however, was all small black and white pictures, and heaven knows I have enough recipes for everything! So I left it for some other appetizer lover to take, but had to snap a photo so I can always remember...

What my mirror would say

I've been reading some blogs that have this thing on Thursdays. Think Write Thursday, it's called. So, looking for some routine and community and so on, I signed up.

This week's subject is, What would your mirror say if it could talk?

What my mirror says every day

I'm 56, I take a lot of pictures of myself wearing knitted things and post them here and on Ravelry. I sort of know what I look like and I'm not going to agonize about the colour of my hair or the shape of my nose. The mirror by the front door is mainly meant to stop me going out with a milk moustache.

Of course, some people spend time in front of a full-length mirror. I rarely do, not from any philosophical objection, but just because of the way my bedroom is set up -- looking in the full-length mirror is a tad awkward and only for special occasions... of which there are few!

Sometimes catching a glimpse of myself in a reflective window is a bit alarming! Sometimes a mirror in a shop tells you to buy something you shouldn't, and then your mirror at home sets you straight. Sometimes your mirror tells you you are too fat to go to the beach in a bathing suit, but of course, you go anyways, and then are envious of the other "too fat" people who look great, and vow to buy a better bathing suit. Who knows what they think about me!

I don't think any of us in this house are great mirror-lookers. We are vain enough to think we are fine just the way we are.

Gossamer light lacy bed wrap

This is my first vintage accessory of 2017. The plan is to make one thing a month from my extensive collection of old booklets. 

So here you have the "Gossamer-light lacy bed-wrap knitted all-in-one."

You can perhaps see that the gently shifting rainbow colours flow from the orange cuff to maybe three-quarters of the way along. Then I was fudging and finding bits from other balls to finish! Some rainbows are soft and some are just RED, PURPLE, BLUE.

The blue cuff, knit at a slightly looser tension than the orange cuff! How annoying. 

The pattern is not symmetrical top-to-bottom, and I know some modern designers would have you knit up from each cuff and graft in the middle or some such onerous thing. I think this is pretty and it really doesn't matter if your lace points up on one sleeve and down on the other. Another thing our old-timey pattern-writer did was make all the decreases k2togs instead of pairing a k2tog with an SSK. As you can see, this, too, works just fine. The laciness of the lacy bed-wrap:

Full wingspan:

From the back:

Acting "natural":

Trying to look like the model in the book: 

Now for a week of knitting on my "real" project, before tackling another vintage accessory, perhaps a toilet roll cover or a tea cosy. 

Of course I marched

We got to Queen's Park at noon on Saturday, expecting, perhaps, a bit of rah-rah speaking and then a march. We got an hour of garbled, squawky, hard to catch words... "this is what diversity looks like," and "domestic violence," and "minimum wage." We had Idle No More and Black Lives Matter and the NDP, but a PA system in an open park, with excited chattering people all around, was insufficient. I'm sure those people had fun giving their rousing speeches, but next time, I'm going half an hour late, at least!

We did have plenty of time to observe those around us. This woman, for example, was quickly knitting up a pussyhat.

A very Canadian way to hold up your sign: a hockey stick and duct tape.

When we finally got on our way, we admired this woman's Lady Eleanor shawl and asked her about it. She knit it herself, but she said she hardly wore it. But now, she said, she would wear it everywhere! Knitter's pride!

The walk was not very long, about two kilometres. I'm pretty sure that when the first people got to the end point, Nathan Phillips Square, there were still people back at the park; they say there were about 50,000 people! 

I'm sure you have seen a gazillion pictures from all around the world, but here's one of my favourites. I didn't take it myself, but nicked it from Facebook. Here we have Adrienne Clarkson, among other things a former Governor-General of Canada, and Margaret Atwood, great Canadian novelist, both in their late 70s, still marching...

Eye candy Friday

Eye Candy Friday is a thing we used to do in the golden olden days of blogging, and I think it's a fun thing to do. I'll try more regularly to put up a nice picture of something on a Friday, just to brighten us all up.

This past week I went to my favourite little museum, the Textile Museum of Canada. These bits of eye candy are from an exhibition of works by Sheila Hicks. Ammmmaaaaaazing.

These are little bundles all up on the wall. Things wrapped in fabric, in threads, in string.

These below are gigantic. Too bad it was in a museum and I couldn't get someone to go stand there for scale; each of these things could be a floor pillow for sitting on. More wrapping, some sparkles.

Mainly, Sheila Hicks is a weaver, and has made many of these small weavings, often including things like sticks or shells or corn husks. This image also includes the reflection of the photographer!

For some reason, on my way home, I was compelled to take a picture of some tied-up recycling...