Cross-posting on myself

I reviewed Rebel Knitter's Knittishishms book on my main blog today. The review ended up there instead of here because the main blog includes talking about things literary, and although there are great patterns in it, Knittishisms is more of a book to read than a "pattern" book. It's the sort of book you could hand a non-knitting friend to read while they waited for you to do something (say, darn in some ends), and they would find it enjoyable to read.

Of course, having to decide which blog to review the book on brings up all sorts of Golden Notebook-ish dilemmas (if I may be so pretentious), but it seems a factor in modern geekdom that we only interact where our obsessions intersect.

An unexpected finished item

On the "Apollo 8 anniversary," (we're always creative about what to call 25 December), my mum showed me a hand-knitted beret she had bought recently, and asked me if I could make her another one of a similar size, any appropriate colour or style I wanted. What she liked about it was that it was a bit wider than a standard beret, which suited the way she was wearing it (back of the head instead of to one side).

Rowan Magazine's 30th anniversary issue had a vintage-style beret I wanted to make, and I had three balls of Rowan Kidsilk Haze given to me by the ever-inexplicable J-A. The colour is ashes of roses — pink with a lot of grey in it, almost like cross between burgundy and lavender. I started it on the 27th and had it finished last night, the 28th. That's including the time I took to calculate how to give it a wider circumference without messing up the lace motifs on it, so job well done if I may say so myself.

The pattern called for Rowan Wool Cotton, which also looked very nice in the magazine photos. Fortunately, the Kidsilk Haze knits up to almost exactly the same gauge. Of course, it gives a very different look to the beret — soft and floppy instead of crisp and sculpted.

The colour turns out to be even harder to photograph than it was to describe above (it's colour 600 if you look on a Rowan shade card). When the flash went off, the silk in the yarn reflected the light and made it look like it was made out of cheap wire. With the flash off, I could get a relatively sharp photo, but the yarn came out a scary shade of light pink. I opted for monochrome photos, since in this case the point is to talk about the knitting:


I don't know why, but I really enjoy it when berets are divided into an odd number of sections.

Note that this beret was knitted straight and then seamed (the original pattern is written that way, but die-hard in-the-round knitters could convert it in a jiffy). The seam is at the 5 o'clock position in this photo in case anyone is looking for it. All of the motifs match up, so it's not especially noticeable unless you hold the beret up to the light.

Here's the bottom half (seam at 5 o'clock again, and this time you can see it from the inside a little):
Yes, the band stretches to fit a human head. I tried it on my head, and it was very comfy.

I think the part I enjoy the most is that the entire finished beret only weighs 14g (that's about half an ounce for people on imperial measure). I started with a part-ball of the Kidsilk Haze and expected to need part of a second one, but I didn't even finish the first!

S'mores

I made good on my promise to try out making S'mores from scratch (if you can call making something from three highly processed ingredients "from scratch), and this is how things worked out:

First off, the costs. I went to a somewhat overprice grocery store for the graham crackers and the marshmallows, which cost $3.99 and $1.29 respectively. Ironically, all of the available chocolate bars were too fancy for the purposes of re-creating a campfire dessert invented in the 1920s, so I had to go across the street to the British import candy store and get a genuine Cadbury milk chocolate bar. The shop is stocked right now with all sorts of imported Christmas treats (the Guinness pudding was very tempting but too expensive for me), so I wound up getting one of the big bars that they don't always have. This was the most expensive ingredient, at $5.99 for a 230g bar.

Including tax, that put my total investment at $12.84, which matches the kit, but I got larger amounts of the ingredients. Unless the kit came with pretty amazing North American chocolate (doubtful), I got better quality ingredients as well.

The graham cracker package conveniently had S'mores instructions on it (I just can't bring myself to call it a "recipe"). I followed them and had some ready in well under five minutes. A hint: if the marshmallows keep falling off the piece of chocolate (mine did), split them open a little to expose the sticky insides, then push them onto the chocolate a little. The inner part not covered in powdered sugar sticks like glue.

Now that I've tried them, I don't get what the fuss is all about. Then again, I'm a Rice Krispies squares fan, and I'm sure if I hadn't grown up with those I wouldn't get what that was about either. I suspect that S'mores taste better if you're in the middle of a mosquito-infested national park and have just had hot dogs and beans for dinner after hiking for hours and desperately trying to fill in your "identify local flora and fauna" assignment, even though you haven't seen a single hawk all day and all the plants look the same to you.

Given that wrapping paper is so cheap, I think that if you're going to give S'mores ingredients as a gift, it makes a lot more sense to self-assemble. If the person you're getting it for loves S'mores that much, they probably don't associate it with yuppie-style packaging.

prefab DIY

If you're connected with DIY at all, I'm sure you'll know what I mean by "prefab DIY." It's those all-in-one boxes that you have to do a little bit of assembly on, maybe add one ingredient, sometimes have a few basic tools on hand, and then you're done. Often there is very little scope for creativity — the satisfaction comes from making it look just like the photo on the box. Often, as well, the price of such certainty is reflected in what you pay.

Sometimes these kits are convenient (like when you really don't feel like having vast quantities of the raw materials left over), or they can be subverted easily enough to have fun with them. Last year, for example, the ever-fun Tara had a gingerbread house party, and we decided to make one depressed-area gingerbread house with graffiti and snow yellowed by food colouring, plus a surrealistic Das Candy-Haus of Dr. Caligari. There was lots of giggling and very pleasing results at the end of the afternoon.

And then... there's items like this one:
Someone took about seventy-five cents' worth of marshmallows, a dollar-fifty of chocolate bars, and maybe another dollar's worth of graham crackers, put it in a nifty box with a recipe, and created a S'mores kit that retails in the $10-$15 range (all prices in Canadian dollars).

Now, if the person who came up with this can sell it at that price, more power to them. But surely if you can cook well enough to follow a S'mores recipe, you can cook well enough to buy your own marshmallows, chocolate bars, and graham crackers, find a recipe on the internet if you don't have one already, and eat any leftover ingredients raw if you don't feel like doing anything else with them. (I would humbly suggest, however, that since you're more likely to have graham crackers and marshmallows left over than anything else, you could always break the crackers into pieces, melt the marshmallows, combine, and make a batch of graham cracker macaroons. I'm just saying.)

The thing is, I'm sure whoever decided to package, market, and sell these kits did their homework and worked out a price point that reflected what the market would bear and what consumer demand would deem reasonable. What irks me is what this says about the cooking aptitude of the general population in Canada and like countries.

I'm going to put my money where my mouth is and do a price comparison this weekend. I'll see how I do, and will report back.

the slipper experiment

A few days ago I hauled up the last of the yarn from my locker to my apartment. As I suspected, most of the nice stuff had wound up in the locker (in sealed plastic bags, in a suitcase, thank goodness). Now that it's all in my living space, I'm starting to appreciate what a gargantuan task reducing the stash will be. The idea is to have it all fit in my cedar-lined chest. That means I need to decrease the volume to about 20% of what I have now. That's okay: part of knowing how to solve the problem is knowing the size of it.

I count any unfinished knitting as stash, even though it's really living in that strange twilight-land between stash and knitting. The truth is, I have so many ideas that sometimes things that are on their way to being finished wind up being unraveled and turned into stash again. I hate that silly debate between "process" and "project" knitting (reminds me too much of left-brain vs. right-brain, and all the other stupid binaries we impose on ourselves), but it's true I like to experiment at least as much as I like to get things done.

The past couple of weeks have been good for finishing things and experimenting at the same time. I finally finished the Lana Grossa socks I first blogged about last May, and started the second Noro sock of the pair I was working on at the same time. It had been so long, I had to look up my old blog post to find out what size needles I had used for the Noro, because all I could remember was that it was smaller-than-usual. (I knew there was a reason why I kept this blog!)

I also just finished a new pair of slippers for myself, because my old ones were ruined when I painted my bedroom. My old slippers were Isotoners, but this time I decided to knit my own.

I have a friend who saw a lot of my sweaters before she saw my apartment, and when she finally came over, the first thing she said was, "Where's all the knitted household stuff?" The truth is, I'm not that big on afghans, knitted pillows, tea cosies, or (gack!) wall hangings, much less door-knob cosies, toilet paper roll covers, or other ways people have found over the years to use up leftovers. That includes household slippers. When I was little, my grandmother used to knit my brothers and I slippers. We used their natural slippiness to our advantage, and would "surf" down the cushion-floored hallway after a running start. We would have our new slippers completely worn out in about a week, maybe two if they were made from Phentex instead of the usual leftover Eaton's Lady Fair Sayelle acrylic. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Oma taught me that slipper pattern as soon as I was past the scarf stage.

There's a nice pair of slippers in Melanie Falick's Handknit Holidays, though, and the idea of reducing some stash and replacing my slippers for "free" appealed. Also, this pattern calls for fingering-weight yarn, so I felt confident substituting some sock yarn. It takes me a couple of years to wear out a pair of hand-knit socks.

Here's the finished version:

Besides the yarn substitution, the major changes I made to the original pattern were:

• Altering the size to something that would fit my feet. The pattern instructions are, as is typical for women's socks and slippers patterns, too small for me, even at the largest size. I take a North American size 10 shoe (that's a European 41, or a UK size 8), so I had to do some math to size it up myself. It wasn't that hard once I had compared the instructions to the schematics a few times, but it would be nice if someone remembered that not all women are five feet four with a size six shoe when they're publishing these things. There's a reason why I could design my own sweaters by the time I was sixteen, and it's not because I'm a fashion genius, unfortunately.
  
• Ditching the long laces that were supposed to cross and tie halfway up the calf and replacing them with short laces that hold up the sides but don't require any tying, because they're sewn onto the slipper at both ends. (They can't be eliminated entirely because they're what's keeping the sides of the slipper from curling and falling off the foot.) The laces are still threaded through the centre-foot points to allow for the slipper to stretch and flex correctly as I wear it.
  
• Removing the yarn-overs the pattern called for and replacing them with make-one increases instead. I don't have anything against lace patterns; I just thought this would look better. I also eliminated the yarn-over at the back of the heel since there wasn't going to be any lace to run through it.

I'd like to get some leather partial soles for them (the kind with the separate toe and heel pieces that come with the tough linen thread to sew them on with), but haven't seen these for sale in a long time. If you have a lead, please let me know.

The slippers fit and stay on a lot better than you would be led to believe when you're making them (the uppers curl something awful until they're on your feet), and the minimal upper means that your feet stay warm, but not too warm when you're wearing them. The final effect is that of a dancing slipper — pretty and elegant.

knitting and timing

This month is NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel from scratch, starting 1 November and finishing on or before 30 November. This is my third year participating, and my second year of being a registered participant. Last year I got more than the 50,000 words completed, despite heavy hours at my day job, and this year I am on track to do the same.

Which is a long way of explaining why I was finishing a baby jacket at 2:30 in the morning last Saturday.

The jacket pattern is from Interweave, which seems to be the source of 80% of my pattern knitting these days. It's just a knit-and-purl pattern, sort of a King Charles Brocade, and had to be made in unisex colours because we don't know if the baby is a boy or a girl yet:

(The buttons are little sunshines with smiles on them. The eyes are the buttonholes.)

There were no side seams on the body —the only seams were up the sleeves and to attach the sleeves to the body. Since the fabric pattern was knit-and-purl anyhow, I used a trick my grandmother taught me and knitted the first and last stitch of any seam sides, no matter what was going on in the pattern at the time. Doing a one-stitch garter border like this made it very easy to seam, and I got everything straight on the first go. Given that I did the sewing-up at 7:00 in the morning the day I was to give the gift, the speed was both needed and appreciated.


The garter-stitch seam lies nice and flat (especially important for baby sweaters), but it shows more than a traditional seam. In my humble opinion, it is nice-looking enough to be called "decorative."

The yarn is an "eco-cotton" by Marks & Kattens. It worked well and has a nice soft hand on 3.25mm needles.

The only really nasty part in the whole pattern was doing the seed-stitch collar on 2.75mm needles for 7cm. Highly recommended if you want something more polished than Your Average Baby Sweater but don't want to get bogged down in complicated stitch manoeuvres.

And yes, this took about as long as making an adult sweater.

DIY with paint

If you read both this and my main blog, you know that I moved to a new apartment over the summer. Everything was pretty much the way I wanted it, except for the colour of the bedroom walls. The previous owner had painted the room a very dark blue, which went great with her light-coloured oak furniture, but not so great with my black metal furniture:


I wear black most days, but it's not how I decorate.

There was one big obstacle to getting the painting done: I'd never painted a room before. I talked to lots of people about it, and got responses ranging from "it's easy, just read about it on the net and go for it" to "ugh! what a lot of work! and it always turns out badly! hire someone!".

I almost hired someone, but when I thought of how the logistics of that would work, it seemed that trying to do it myself was a lot better. Either way I was sleeping on the couch (a very comfy sofa bed, but nevertheless a couch) for a couple of days.

So I read about it on the net, used a paint calculator to figure out how much I needed, and went from there (the Benjamin Moore site helped me; I'm sure there's other places). And you know? If you decide that painting is what you're doing that day, and don't plan on doing anything else, it's not that bad. My only regret is that I didn't talk to the ever-practical Brenda beforehand: she recommends painting in your underwear if you're by yourself or comfortable with the people you're painting with, because paint is easy to get off skin, but nigh-impossible to get off clothing. Thanks to Beryl, Cila (sorry if I spelled your name wrong), Howard, Eric, and Andreea for all the hints. Thanks also to the ever-amazing Jan for creating lots of examples of how paint can transform a room.

Saturday: removed furniture, emptied closet, removed closet doors, removed electrical faceplates, taped, tarped, and did 2 coats of primer. The dark blue was still showing through the primer, but I had two cans of paint as opposed to one can of primer, so I was still optimistic.


Sunday: crash. Clifford the big red couch got folded out as a bed and did a great job. The mattress and support frame are almost exactly like my regular bed. Very comfy.

Monday night: Decided that sleeping on the couch for a week, waiting until the following Saturday was not going to cut it, despite Clifford's excellent attributes as a bed. Having my clothing scattered over the rest of the apartment in garbage bags and stacked on other furniture was also a factor. So at 8:00pm I opened one of the cans of paint and started painting. I had two coats finished around midnight (only one coat inside the closet because otherwise I'd run out of paint and have to start the second can) and was amazed. Everything had been covered up.

Tuesday night: Removed tarp & tape, then touched up baseboards, ceiling, and closet shelves with a sample bottle of Debbie's White by Debbie Travis. If you get on your hands and knees you can see the touch-ups, but otherwise not. I also removed excess paint from light switches and electrical plugs (not all mine, the last paint job had left this too) with Q-tips and nail polish remover. Replaced faceplates. Removed antique brass faceplates from living room and bathroom, and discovered they were there to camouflage that the light switches had paint on them. More Q-tips and nail polish remover. Replaced face plates with nice clean-looking white ones. I seem determined to make this place look like it's from 1963, but it's working out well.

Tuesday also saw the furniture get replaced in the bedroom, being careful to avoid the touched-up parts of the baseboard. Slept in the bed.

(this isn't quite the colour, thanks to the camera flash, but you get the idea)

Wednesday night: Closet touch-ups were dry, so the clothes got put away. Interestingly, there is way more room now than there was before. Side benefits!

Verdict: You can definitely tell it's an amateur job, but I was painting over another amateur job, so I don't feel bad. When the day comes to sell, I'll have to paint it off-white or something else boring, but for living in, it is fabulous.

Postscript: there was one faceplate that had no holes in it. When I took it off, I found these wires. The clear red knobby things say "3M" on them. If anyone knows what these are, please let me know!

Annie and ATLAS

This past week the Large Hadron Collider at CERN went on-line, which means it's about time I blogged about that Annie Modesitt jacket I made last winter. Yes, that is a coherent, single-topic sentence. Read on and find out why.

One of the parts of the Large Hadron Collider is ATLAS. And ATLAS has a very interesting shape at each end. Check out this diagram:


See how the ends look like broadly ribbed knit fabric radiating out from the centre? That was the first thing I thought of, anyhow.

I sketched out a few sweater patterns based on the circular broad rib, but kept coming up with stuff that would make the wearer look like they had made a sweater out of a craft-fair pillow from the 1960s. Then I picked up the anniversary copy of Vogue and found my answer in Annie Modesitt's Twisted Float Shrug. The original is designed to make the most of the interesting colour blips that happen from striping garter stitch (as the photos on the link show), but I took the same shape and did the wide ribs of the ATLAS equipment in a single colour. I used a heathery green/black/brown shade of Galway, using garter stitch at the very centre to represent the hole in the middle of the machinery:


(Note: No matter what I do, the yarn always photographs darker and more boring-looking than it is in real life. In real life it changes subtly with the light and shows off the texture of the ribs swimmingly.)

The back/fronts are a single circle that gets knitted from the centre out, much as you would for a beret or a doily. When the width is equal to the width you want for the back, you knit onto waste yarn where the sleeves will be, then knit over the waste yarn. When it's time to knit the sleeves, you pull out the waste yarn and knit down. I kept the texture of the wide ribs going, and decided to make slightly belled sleeves instead of the tapered sleeves called for in the original pattern:


I like how the sleeves maintain the overall pattern even as they leave the geometric plane of the jacket body — it seems appropriate for something inspired by a physics experiment. I also like how easily this pattern adapted itself from being based on colour (okay, and texture) to texture and a monochrome colour. The main caveat is that you have to use a stitch that looks good on both the right and wrong sides of the fabric.*

There seems to be a lot of discussion about this pattern regarding yarn amounts. I used almost every last centimetre of ten balls of Galway, which has excellent yardage. On the other hand, I made outer part of the circle (after the sleeve slits were knitted) extra-generous because I wanted to have a nice length and lots of overlap at the front.

I wore this over a black long-sleeved V-neck all last winter, and it's great — comfy but dressy, perfect for my business-casual office. The big shawl collar keeps the draughts off, which is nice since my cubicle is under a vent. I'm sure it will be a wardrobe staple again this winter.

* So! Who's up for making this work in reversible cables?

Naked Sheep 2.0 Rocks!!!

(I feel like everyone who reads that title needs to do so out loud, preferably using one of those microphones that imitates a large stadium echo.)

Tonight the ever-amazing Lisa hosted the first knitting night at the newly rebooted Naked Sheep, and an excellent time was had by all. If you live anywhere near Toronto, you simply must go and see. Yes, even if you don't knit or crochet.

Lisa and I met at the original opening of the Naked Sheep four years ago, and the first thing she told me after announcing she had bought the shop was that she was going to rearrange the shelves so that there was room to sit and knit in the centre of the shop, and so that things were more spacious.

"Makes sense," I said, but wondered about the narrow shape of the shop and whether it could be made "spacious" and still have a decent stock of yarn and pattern books.

Well, I got to see with my own two eyes tonight, and after I picked up my jaw from off the floor, I couldn't stop saying how much of a difference the new layout makes. Not only is there room to sit and knit, there is room to dance. I know, because we did some dancing towards the end of the night when everyone was packing up their knitting.

"Wow, I can't believe how open it all is," I said to Lisa. "How many shelves did you get rid of?"

"Actually, I bought a new one," she said, and pointed to a six-by-six foot cubbyhole rack on the wall behind her.

I am amazed. More space to move around and knit, and yet more space for yarn.

The energy tonight at the knitting drop-in was incredible. I don't want to moan about all the details, but I had a very busy day at work followed by a stressful drive to Mississauga to return a rental car. I wasn't even sure I was going to make it, but I wanted to see the new shop and check things out, so I went. It's almost 11:00pm as I write this blog, and I still feel buzzed.

Some people who dropped by tonight, like Brenda and Sandra, were people I met at the Sheep during the opening of the original version of the shop. Other people were new to me, and some were even new to the shop, but everyone got welcomed in and invited to pull up a chair. (And I would give them shout-outs too, but I can't remember everyone's name! If you were there, please e-mail me so I can say hi to everyone!) Knitters of all sorts of different skill levels were there, which to me just makes things more fun — some projects even got worked by several sets of hands. Variety is very cool when it comes to DIY.

On the way over, it occurred to me that I should at least give Lisa a card — I mean, that is one of the things you're supposed to do when someone you know takes over a business — so I made a quick dash into my favourite card shop. They had all sorts of cool blank cards, and a couple of "congratulations" cards, but in the end I picked one that had a neat collage on the front: a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman's head from the 1950s, a diagram of an atom picked out in sparkly ink, bright happy shapes. On the inside it was blank; on the outside it said "Inspired".

In a single word, it describes Naked Sheep 2.0 perfectly.

Go see.

Lies knitters tell themselves

It's a funny way to freshen up this blog, but after a month of unpacking, furniture assembling, and general settling-in, this is where my head is at, and this is why:

The ever-cool Lisa has bought The Naked Sheep, just a few minutes' walk from both my old apartment and my new one, and she has graciously invited me to teach some classes for her. This means that I have had to pay more attention to the knitting zeitgeist than I usually do, so as to know what the heck people are talking about when they join my classes.

What I'm finding is that we're still lying to ourselves about some pretty fundamental things:

• The irrational hatred of seams continues with ongoing propaganda attacks and untrue claims that seams "weaken" (if you do them right, they strengthen), "are difficult" (not if you bother to learn how), and are "a pain" (again, not if you bother to learn how). Come 0n, guys. I think Elizabeth Zimmermann is amazing too, but I prefer to look to her as the inspiration for keeping my own knitting wits about me, not for being a "blind follower", as she referred to knitters who followed patterns slavishly and never thought about what was best for them. It's got to the point where Meg Swansen, Elizabeth's daughter and an amazing knitter in her own right, is writing diplomatic, logical magazine articles trying to remind the knitting proles that there is no right way to knit. When Elizabeth came on the scene, knitting in the round was unheard of except for socks and gloves — she had to push to get circular knitting accepted as a general technique. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, with some knitters acting as if they've been asked to trample their fair trade cashmere in manure if someone so much as mentions seams. Is it not better to know how to seam so that you can when it's the best method for the job at hand? Maybe (gasp) you might find you prefer to knit as I usually do, and view seaming as a pleasant end to a knitting job well done. And if you don't, at least you won't be ignorant anymore. I have altered patterns from in the round to flat pieces, and I have also done vice versa. It's whatever it takes to get the job done right, and forget about dogma.


• I am going to be an aunt for the first time sometime around New Year's, and have already picked out what I'm going to knit for the baby shower. I am also knitting for friends of mine who are expecting their first in November. I've looked at a lot of baby patterns in the last week or so, and I noticed something: most of them emphasise how quick they are to do, even when they're also labelled "heirloom." I'm currently working on a cabled pullover for the baby due in November, and I have these empirical measurements to offer: 93 stitches for the front and back, 23.5 cm in length. 93 stitches is about normal for an adult-size sweater — just in thicker yarn than the fingering-weight I'm using for the baby. 23.5 cm is almost halfway to an adult-size length for a sweater. My conclusion is that baby sweaters are not that faster than adult ones. So since I'm making two baby sweaters, one due in October and the other in November, I had better get cracking.


• "Circular needles are superior in every way." Again, if an educated knitter has a personal preference for circs, I won't argue with them (unless they are disdainful of my own personal preference, in which case they better be ready to do a thorough defence). But straight needles, especially those lovely fourteen-inchers that I prefer, came into existence for a reason. The way I knit, I tuck the right-hand needle under my arm and hold it still while my right hand feeds the yarn and my left hand worries about forming the stitches. It works great for me, and is the normal way to knit in the eastern Netherlands (where the grandmother who taught me how is from), and so I'm told, in parts of Scotland. When I first learned how to wield double-pointed sock needles and circulars, I had to completly re-learn how to knit, and it was not fun. I'm now at the point where I'm pretty comfortable with the other method, but I do find that I really enjoy settling down with a pair of nice steel straight needles after finishing a project on circs.

Now, some of this is going to lead to the time-honoured comment of, "Well, that's your opinion, but everyone's free to say what they like, and the truth is that most knitters prefer..." True, this is my own opinion, but I don't buy the part about "most knitters." Most knitters never even get to hear these opinions, because they're drowned out by all the noise coming out from other sources. There are knitters who always knit in the round, always use circulars, and whip off baby sweaters very quickly (like the ever-original Brenda, who is also well on her way to being a wizard of the top-down method), but it seems to me that they need to fight to be heard as much as I do. Maybe it's time we all stopped being such blind followers and took this to the next level.

Moving, DIY style

I haven't blogged in exactly a month, because every spare moment has been spent on packing. I've been 100% dedicated to DIY, though, and here's proof.

• As soon as I got the keys to my new place, I walked over to, let myself in, and walked around, checking everything over. Then I opened the closets and estimated how much would be dedicated to clothing and how much to yarn stash.


• When I went to the laundry room and flicked on the light switch, I noticed that the light bulb didn't have a cover and immediately thought, "Hm, wonder if I could bead something. That could be a good excuse to use up miscellaneous seed beads — or those lampwork beads that don't match anything!"


• As I pack my kitchen and washroom (the two rooms that are being moved tonight, so help me), I am alternating layers of breakable items like drinking glasses with layers of yarn skeins. The yarn is also being used to keep boxes of books from getting too heavy.


• One of my new neighbours helped show me which keys fit where in the parking garage, including my storage locker. He recommended getting a set of storage shelves for the locker, especially if I make preserves. "I do! Thanks for mentioning!" was my immediate reply.


• I'm not quite sure where the couch is going to go, but I know where my work-in-progress baskets will be relative to it.


• I already have the spot for my working chair (writing, blogging, planning out textile and jewelry projects) picked out.


• I took a quick flip through my favourite seasonal cookbook and picked out a blackberry/lime drink to make when my friends come over to help me Saturday.

Okay, back to the boxes... next time I post here will probably be sometime in mid-August. I plan to take advantage of the new place's central air conditioning to get more done at night (but promise to keep the AC at an environmentally-friendly level).

Time of Reckoning

I'm moving in about a month, and all I can think about is: where am I going to put my stash in the new place? It's an issue, because the new place is only about two-thirds the size of the old place (but with a washer/dryer and dishwasher, so very much worth it). This, of course, leads to the usual question of "How do I turn all this stash into useful stuff, like clothes and gifts?"

And that, dear reader, led to a very useful review of What's In the Stash.

Disclaimer: I started my DIY life with virtually no stash. My grandmother gave me just enough of her stash that if I wanted to try out a new stitch pattern (or, in the case of crochet, a whole new craft), I could do it, but not have much more of any given colour than was enough for a few inches of fabric. That was fine — it encouraged me to experiment without going for the grand plunge of a whole new project to work on.

Then I inherited my grandmother's stash, plus the stash of a friend of the family who gave up knitting due to her arthritis. I also started earning a reasonable income. The consequence is that I have a crazy amount of odd balls of yarn, mostly in acrylic, and absolutely no compunction to give them up. When I mention it, people always tell me to give it to charity. They don't get that I don't want to give it to charity. I will buy new yarn and give it to charity, no problem. But this is my inherited stash, and what I'm really interested in is in turning it into cool-looking clothing that doesn't look like I made it from stash.

Not everything is in odd balls. Some yarn I have enough of to make a solid-colour sweater. Other yarn I have enough of to be a main colour with contrast colours either gathered from the stash or bought new to supplement. I love Sally Melville's adage that, "It takes a little cash to use up a whole lot of stash!".

To that end, I'm currently crocheting a wool cardigan from Teva Durham's Loop-d-loop Crochet book (the one I'm making is the one with the Irish crochet medallions on the front). The main colour is stash; I bought the contrasting colours. It's all in Mission Falls wool, so it all goes together nicely. I'll post photos here when enough of it is done.

It's also a good time to recycle ideas I had for things that didn't work out in previous stash-reduction exercises. A couple of years ago I tried making a woven-look tailored jacket out of the Golden Hands/Creative Hands set I have from the early 1970s, and while the fabric looked great, it became rather obvious I was going to run out of yarn. Now I've discovered other yarn, in a different colour and in greater quantity, and I'm thinking it's time to resurrect that idea.

Plus, the opportunity to try the really "grand" projects that would be prohibitively expensive to buy as a single project, like those wonderful knee-length Kaffe Fassett coats. Sure, you're supposed to make them out of luxurious Rowan and other yarns, but even acrylic starts to look nice when you combine enough colours.

As scary as the yarn packing is going to be, this could be a lot of fun. If only I had time to both knit and pack....

still a put-down. but better.

The Guardian recently ran an article about how to DIY yourself into the latest fashions, with everything from turning t-shirts into dresses to making pom-poms (!). Along the way they covered knitting, and for once there wasn't a single ageist remark about it. Instead, journalist Lousia Casson called it "the surprise celebrity fad of the decade."

Right, because no-one could possibly get interested in knitting for any intrinsic value it has in itself. It must be proles with delusions of grandeur copy-catting those crazy knitting celebrities. Although perhaps that the fad has lasted a whole decade (bit longer than that, actually, the latest revival is getting on fifteen years now) would indicate there are other forces at work.

Maybe I'm just touchy about it because the article gave Madonna as an example of a knitting celebrity (what, did Julia Roberts give it up, or is that just old news?). On the plus side, the article acknowledges that a full-blown sweater can be daunting for some newbies, and provides a free music player cozy pattern link, plus a link to knitting clubs around Britain.

Overall, not bad. It's easier to fight classism than the feminist minefield the usual "granny" reference brings up — you know, the one I posted about before, where one winds up being very long-winded and saying something like, "Yes, I knit, and I learnt to knit from my grandmother, but to say knitting is for grandmothers alone is both ageist and ignorant of the actual demographics. Furthermore, while being a grandmother is both a desirable and positive role, limiting knitters to a gender straitjacket like that is unfair to knitters of both sexes who are not grandmothers, and..." anyhow, you know the rest.

Besides, the free sewing pattern links in the article look like they'd be good to check out.

Raccoon in Progress

Queen of quiet irony Jean-Anne keeps saying she's frustrated with my mentions of the raccoon jacket. She has every right to be — after all, I did start the thing last year, and put it down for a long, long time, so long that I had to disentangle it from the work-in-progress graveyard in the corner bounded by a couch, a bookshelf, and the outer wall of my living room.

It's back in regular rotation, though, and I'm desperately trying to get it done (amongst all the other things I'm desperately trying to get done, like my novel's first draft) before the Toronto summer hits us with all its hot and humid disgustingness. I love Toronto for three of its four seasons, about ten of the year's twelve months. I spend every Toronto summer wishing I had the money and means to spend it in New Zealand, though. I don't care if it will be raining — just find me somewhere that's cool, even cold, and serves decent tea where I can knit, write, and do Pilates in peace Then I'm happy as the proverbial clam.

Anyhow, back to the Raccoon Jacket. It's an Annie Modesitt design, and I knew as soon as I saw it that I must make it.

For me, making this jacket is an act of sympathetic magical revenge. When I first moved to my neighourhood, I had a lovely two-bedroom apartment in a four-plex built around 1920. It had a front balcony bigger than the living room. For the winter, the living room had a wood-burning fireplace. Because the street level is much lower than the houses (ie: every building has stairs going up from the street to the front door), I had an amazing view. Oh yeah, there was a smaller but serviceable back balcony too.

The raccoons destroyed it all. They were attracted by the bags of garbage the previous tenant left on the back balcony, and they didn't leave after I cleaned everything up. They used the balconies as latrines, and ripped up the attic so badly my heating bill almost matched my rent. They stank, they attracted insects, and according to my old downstairs neighbours they even made it into parts of building humans were trying to live in. They even left a "calling card" of a squirrel with its chest burst open like some urban residential version of Alien in front of my back door when I shooed them away as I went out one evening.

I now live in an equally lovely but raccoon-free sixplex that was built in the 1950s. I can see the front door of my old apartment from my new apartment.

The "pelts" on the Raccoon Jacket are made from short rows. Even the chevron stripes on the sleeves are made from short rows. I added ten centimetres to the sleeves to make them wrist-length. I have longer-than-average arms and legs, so "cropped" stuff tends to look just shrunken or otherwise wrong on me.


My only complaint so far is with the yarn — see the weird striping and clumping hear the cap shaping for the sleeve? That's because the grey mix yarn (the main colour) lost one of its two strands for several yards. This was the second time this happened, and I was out of spare yarn, so the darker clump to the right of the black triangle is me mixing in a strand of black to keep the furriness somewhat even. You can see the thin lighter strip I knit before I realised what was going on.

Oh well, in real life raccoons don't have ideal pelts either. Believe me, I've seen enough of the evil vermin to know. Don't even get me started on animal rights (which I normally support) or how "cute" they are. Nothing truly cute smells or acts like that.

I have one more sleeve, the collar, and the finishing to go. Instead of the fur coat clasps Modesitt recommends, I think I'm going to make frog closures out of some Butterfly 10 cotton. I also want to get this thing lined — the fabric is both heavy and stretchy, so I think it will need the support. Black or midnight blue satin lining, I think.

Here's hoping I can show the finished thing here soon.

Sock Off

I say this every year, but this year I mean it: this is the Summer of Socks for me. A lot of my existing socks have been around for five or more years now (hand-made socks lasting longer and all), and some of them are worn down to the nylon at the toes. I never seem to wear out hand-knit heels, just the toes. I know I could darn them, but that wouldn't reduce my yarn stash as quickly and the truth is I'm not very good at darning toe points. Under the ball of the foot or elsewhere on the sole, yes, but not right at the end where all the decreases are.

New socks it is, then — about the only wool knitting that's bearable in the summer.

Noro sock yarn:

I'm glad I bought my yarn at The Purple Purl, because the ever-cool-and-helpful Jennifer advised that I should go down a few needle sizes to get the yarn to work — 2.25mm instead of my usual 2.75mm. (Note to those who don't knit fine yarn: at this weight, half a millimetre makes a big difference). Jennifer said she had cast on the same number of stitches as usual, though, so I tried that for mine, and encountered one of those "weird gauge things" that show up from time to time. Apparently the smaller needle size only affected the row gauge, not the stitch gauge — the socks are the same width as the Lana Grossa socks I was making at the same time, but the cuffs and heel are shorter. Just one of those things, I guess.

Anyways, Jennifer's advice was excellent as usual, because the smaller needles make a smooth, firm fabric. The Noro is a loosely-spun single-ply, just like their their thicker wool yarns, so it needs to be shown who's boss. Just like the other yarn, too, the sock yarn can be a bit "breaky" in places, but it also spit-splices well, so it's only a minor annoyance instead of a major setback (so long as you're not squeamish about spit, anyhow). I'm glad they put some nylon in it to make it proper sock yarn, as opposed to "artisan" stuff that is beautiful to knit with but wears out in about a week.



Lana Grossa sock yarn:

This is the finished version of the sock I started during the storytelling festival I blogged about a few posts back. It's just nice, well-behaved, proper sock yarn with good striping and great texture. See how the colours matched up again after I finished the heel shaping? I love it when that happens. I find the European brands that offer self-striping all tend to do that — they must plan out their stripe lengths so that they will work with an average-size adult sock. As a bonus, my stripes ended in the colourway about where they began (100g skein, so two socks per ball), so my second sock will approximately match the first one and I didn't even have to trim away any yarn!



The Noro sock yarn is also a 100g ball, and those socks won't match — the colours will be shifted about one stripe. Since the Noro has long repeats and has that lovely gradual transition between colours, I think that will be a benefit, not a drawback.

I'm looking forward to wearing both these pairs next winter. More immediately, I'm looking forward to getting the mates to each of these done so I can finish the cotton/wool socks I started two summers ago (oops) and try out the ball of Tofutsi I got when Gina was here. The other Lana Grossa and the Austermann moisturised wool yarn should come first, though, to take advantage of this cooler spring weather we're having.

Bigger is better?

I saw these giant-size pomegranates in my local supermarket the other day and couldn't resist buying one (plus a regular-size grapefruit for scale), just for the sheer freak factor and the photo op. It was easily twice the size of the last one I bought.

That was size. What about taste?

You guessed it. I used a quarter of the pomegranate and half the grapefruit to make a pomegranate, grapefruit, and salmon salad for dinner tonight. The pomegranate seeds were the size of corn kernels — and were almost completely tasteless. Fortunately, the grapefruit was a good one, so at least I had some acidity to balance off the salmon and the olive oil.

Once again size and taste turn out to be incompatible. The thing is, how do we manage to tell the supermarkets that?

A Waffle-less Weekend

Last weekend I had the ever-effervescent Gina stay with me for a weekend yarn crawl. Beryl and I picked her up from the airport on Friday night after a brief, unplanned tour of Malton (lesson learned: if you're ever driving to Pearson airport from downtown, get in the right lane on the 427 as soon as you get past the 401). Saturday morning we ate breakfast at The Purple Purl, visited Americo and Romni, then wound up at Lettuce Knit. Gina stayed in the shop to check out yarn while Beryl and I scavenged Kensington Market to get food for the evening's barbequeue.

On Sunday we had brunch at Boom on St. Clair and then yarn shopped at In the Loop.

Gina did well on her stash enhancement. I said the only thing I wanted to buy was some Noro sock yarn. Which I did. I also got some other interesting sock yarns — more about them in future posts as I use them up.

Despite constant mention of them, we never did have any waffles. Come to think of it, I'm not sure anyone really wanted any.

Gina was kind and generous enough to give me these amazing things in the photo at the top, all made by artisans in and around Calgary. That's mercerised 3-ply-weight yarn — the idea is that the green yarn is for socks with the blue as heel and toe yarn, but I'm more inclined to make mittens from it. The soap with the star motif is made with ostrich oil, and the mug is stoneware (and has been much used in the last few days for the drinking of tea).

So you can see why I haven't been doing much writing lately. Expect the next few posts to be about sock-knitting.

DIY for everything!

Sometimes I swear I'd be happier on a commune somewhere in a forest or a desert, with just an excellent internet connection and decent mail service to keep us in touch with the outside world.

Either that, or I'm just too picky for a world where we're encouraged to make the mass market, one-size-fits-all choice.

I recently checked out this Nivea eye cream, more for the part about hiding shadows (which I always have, no matter how much sleep I get) than for the spokesmodel dancing around in her PJs during the TV ad. It's lovely stuff, but I keep thinking, "This little 14g jar cost as much to buy as it does to make 750g of day cream at home." Before this venture back into commercial preparations, I'd been using the home-made day cream under my eyes for over a year, and that part of my face isn't any more wrinkly than when I started.

So, I've been thinking. What if I took my Froosh day cream recipe and added some reflective agents? If it doesn't work, I'll be out $10 of ingredients (with the reflective agents, maybe $12-$15) and 45 minutes. That's not any worse than walking out on a bad movie.

The only really bad part is that 250g of cream used on my entire face lasts over a year, so 750g... eh well, I have great friends who are happy to get free day cream.

knitting and listening

Last Sunday I went to a story-telling festival at Harbourfront (see my main blog for details), and decided there was no way I was going to be able to sit still without some knitting. It's not that I expected the telling to be bad; I had high expectations based on what friends who had been previous years had said, and I wasn't disappointed. But I know me, and I know it was either knit or grind my teeth. For someone who had a reputation as being patient and quiet as a child, I've never been able to sit still well. I think I just learned to cope early on.

I added to my list of things to work on because I couldn't find the pair of socks I already had on the go [sigh]. On the other hand, this was the next pair of socks I was going to work on anyhow, so in a way it's all good (and more stash reduction!). The yarn is some Lana Grossa self-striping stuff my mum got me last time she was back home in Holland.

Mystery solved -- mittens lost

I just became self-employed in the past year. That means that last week I took all my envelopes of receipts, remittances, and government forms to my new accountant (he actually has lots of experience, but he's new to me).

The conundrum was that I needed a bag to put all my envelopes of papers into. It's a tough call -- you don't want to use a bag you're going to need, but you don't want to show up with a bag that looks stupid, either.

I duly dug around in my Box of Bags, and discovered a plain black messenger bag I hadn't looked at in a while. Wow, I thought to myself, this is in good shape. I should start using it again. I remembered that I used to over-fill it and kill my shoulder with the weight, but the bag was in great shape -- just needed some brushing down.


I opened it up to check if I'd left anything inside, and discovered a dark grey pair of hand-made mittens. Perfect! I'm constantly losing/ruining mittens, and the ones I made this year were crap because I was too lazy to dig up the pattern I'd been using since I was twelve years old and I screwed up the thumb shaping (in different ways on each mitten). So I tried the newly-discovered ones on, figuring I could put them away with my other winter things and be ahead of the game for once next winter. It was also nice to find this pair again, because I remembered losing them, and got the satisfaction of that "A-ha!" moment when what was lost becomes found again.

There was only one problem.

Moths had found the left one before I had.