Frenzy

Apparently, I've been home for a week. Until I moved to southern Ontario for school, I didn't realize how much I love Ottawa, and now I try to make the most of my visits. But really, what have I done? Lots of relaxing, and quite a bit of knitting. Throw in some consumerism, as well, some of the yarny variety. Making the most of it? Not clear, but it's good to have a rest. I'm currently in the throes of packing to jet off on some fun adventures across the Atlantic which I've been looking forward to for months; that part of my holiday won't be particularly restful, methinks.



Anyway, here are the dregs of some lovely Malabrigo Chunky. What's left after I finished my first ever Malabrigo project. (gasp!). I'm probably the last knitter on the planet to make this discovery, but all the rumours are true. It's damn soft. Holy crap. At some point I'll have pictures of the finished product, but once again gift-knitting means it doesn't get an unveiling just yet.

Why I love octopi

Octopus and coconut video

Best thing ever?
Quite possibly.
It's all over facebook now, but it totally made my day.

My octopus obsession is well-documented. I've had Hansi Singh's octopus queued forever, and one day I'll buy this sinister cephalopod shirt.

However, until this point I had never though of octopi as creatures who scuttle.This video changed my mind. Plus, it also proves octopi can be cute, a dubious notion but something I have always maintained. Bahahaha.

Winter Knitty

This snuck up on me!

Things that caught my eye:

Citron: the ubiquitous shawlette, but this one isn't lacy. I can never make up my mind about ruffles/ruching/whatever, but I like this one a lot.

Knotty but Nice: I am a slave to the cable.

Mr. Popper's Penguin: Penguins are awesome. I find myself wondering about the variety of hot water bottle cover patterns out there. Do people actually use hot water bottles? Maybe I should start...

Bitterroot shawl: Oh hello lace! For awhile I thought all these lace shawls looked the same, but I think I'm getting educated and seeing the intricacies more clearly.

Spoke: Neat-looking, but I don't know if I'll ever make it.

Diversion: Wild.

Duet: I like the idea of a convertible hat/neckwarmer.

Things I might actually make in the near future:
Knotty but Nice
Citron

And in the far future:
Bitterroot

oh hello blogosphere

Neglected Keystrokes - this is cracking me up for some reason so I thought I'd share.

Tomorrow: last class of the semester!

back

Another sneak-peek!



That's the blue yarn I finally got wound, even though it was split in a billion pieces. I forgive it, though. It's so beautiful. The subtle colour variations don't really come through in this photograph. Sigh.

After November's obsessive blogging, I need to slow down. I've learned that I'm bad at storing up blog posts - in November, at the end of the day I'd realize I needed a blog post, but I couldn't come up with anything cool to talk about. I need to sit down and blog as soon as an idea strikes me, which isn't every day. Ah well, interesting experiment.

never a lonely knitter

I think whenever I'm lonely I'll sit in a crowded place knitting.

In the last year I've started knitting in public more that I had before: on the bus, on the train, at knit nights / meet-ups, in the park, in the lobby... I've gotten used to most of the weird looks and comments - usually positive, sometimes perplexed. A man on a train a few weeks ago leaned over me to plug in his laptop and said "If you knew there was power, you would have brought your knitting machine, eh?" To which I laughed nervously and didn't explain that's not how it works.

Today I brought Vivian sleeve #2 to university so I could knit a little when I needed a break from the computer lab. Sitting downstairs behind the Tim Hortons, I attracted the attention of one of the Tims ladies who exclaimed she used to knit when her children were small, but she doesn't remember a thing anymore. I don't know why, but it made me smile. I said something dumb about how she could learn again, but she was off.

Anyway. Little moments. Back to work now.

finishing

November is nearly over. No more inane daily blog posting for me? Haha.

I'm excited for December for a number of reasons, in no particular order:

-end of the semester
-4 weeks off before my last semester of grad school!
-going home, where this year there is no bus strike
-winter (maybe even snow)
-going to England for Christmas!

In preparation for the above, I am working hard to finish:
-2 gifts
-2 presentations
-some blog posts
-1 digital library
-1 final paper
-Vivian

So that's where things stand here. In terms of my workload, the worst is over, and although I'm not looking forward to the inevitable scramble before the very end, from this vantage point it all feels so manageable. :)

suburban music

I might have posted this before, but I rediscovered it recently and it's so awesome I thought I'd share.



Six musicians break into an apartment while the owners are out and create a musical masterpiece.

FO: sneak peek

I finished knitting up the Debbie Bliss Fez, and here's an engimatic macro shot to prove it.



Those of you on Ravelry can click on the photo to see the project details, but for now this one's staying in the deep web. A successful improvised project, if I do say so myself: I should try this more often.

Fez is really soft, and it nearly disintegrated when I tinked back a few rows... Not a yarn that frogs particularly well.

thursword

Decuman

adjective 1. large or immense, as a wave.
2. (in ancient Rome) of or pertaining to the tenth cohort of a legion.

3. Also called decuman gate. (in ancient Rome) the main gate of a military camp, facing away from the enemy and near which the tenth cohort of the legion was usually stationed.

~Dictionary.com

Also apparently a Celtic saint from the 7th century

To stash or not to stash

Looking at the growing pile of yarn in my closet and thinking about the odds and ends I left behind that I plan to return to, I fear that I have acquired a stash. How did this happen? I'm careful to buy yarn with a specific project in mind, but my project-related ambitions are greater than the time I have to knit them with. In the time between purchasing yarn and the present, the intended project often shifts and shifts again while the yarn languishes in the closet waiting for me to make a final decision.

So I have a stash. It's not a large one, but it is definitely a stash of some variety. This may not be a bad thing. Plenty of knitters have a stash and enjoy it. That's fair enough. But since I'm mentally gearing up for a huge move in the next 6 months or so, having a stash makes me nervous. I won't be able to take it all with me if it grows any more. I can hope that I'll get around to making all the things I intend to make with all this yarn before June/July 2010, but I don't know if it will happen.

Case study:

(excuse the re-used picture)

I ordered this Sweet Paprika yarn for a gift knit. When I received it I fell in love and after some hemming and hawing decided to use it for an Ishbel for myself. Then I questioned that decision when I found Herbivore by Stephen West. I love the colour of the original scarf/shawl, and my yarn happens to be a similar green (though less variegated and more semi-solid), and hey. Love. Then there's the matter of my 101 in 1001 list: #4 is knit a lace shawl. Ishbel is lace, but Herbivore isn't, so if I end up knitting Herbivore with this yarn, I'll have to get some more to make Ishbel / other lace shawl. I definitely intend to knit Ishbel eventually, like everyone else in the universe,

But until I decide between the two patterns - or find another entirely - the yarn gets to sit all skeined up in a plastic bag in my closet. Stashy stash.

Camel teaser

Trying Fez. I know 15% isn't a lot of camel content, but it's still pretty neat.

skein fail

A skein of beautiful blue yarn. It's not just straight blue: there are hints of purple and green in their too.

It languished in my mom's stash for who knows how long until she gave it to me along with an eggplant purple skein of something similar. The only identifying feature is a torn label that reads "For the purpose of reordering" and lists colour number and dyelot, along with the attributiong "Produced by Cottage Craft Limited. St. Andrews, N.B."

Anyway, I've been excited to start using this yarn, but I'm having a lot of trouble winding it into a ball. First, the knot tying the skein together was felted together, then I found that the yarn is not a continuous strand.



(Please excuse the flashed out bed shot.)

Some strands longer than others, but so far not one that will see me through to the end, or even a significant portion. Boo! I'm hoping I'll find that one long strand soon enough, but for now I've lost the ends entirely and it will have to wait for tomorrow.

FO: Thing I can't show you

Last week was one of my most stressful this semester, and after it was over I just blinked and stared for a few days, wondering if things were really real. I still have work to do, but it all seems really manageable: a nice change from blind panic!

I finished knitting something, but it's a gift so I'm not going to show it around the internet just yet, so no pictures. But I'm so excited about it!

Maybe in a few days I'll have some more cryptic photos of almost-gifts to bandy about, but for now I'm working on my Vivian sweater. I'm nearly done the body up to the underarms, and I've finished one sleeve, so it's coming along! Can I finish it in a month? That's the plan.

winter fruit

It's nearly winter, though the weather has been pretty balmy in these parts. (Which is convenient since there is a bus strike, but you know. I do like real winter.)



Thus, grapefruits! My winter fruit of choice. I wish I could have both cold winters and not have grapefruits shipped from millions of miles away... but alas, the world doesn't work like that. All this to say, I love grapefruit but I feel guilty about the carbon footprint, I guess.



This one was really tasty and dare I say luscious... I wasn't expecting such an early grapefruit to be such a success, but hey. Hooray :)

Dickensian Demons

The Christmas decorations are out at the local mall. This is the first holiday season that I've been here, so I hadn't seen how the mall celebrates Christmas.

There's an array of characters decked out in Victorian garb, include a tree seller with a fistful of American cash, some children laughing at their friend who has fallen on the ice, roasting chestnuts, etc.... It's terrifying. I just had to go out and take pictures and videos of it.

There's a full nativity scene, complete with a stunned looked Joseph, a plush Eeyore-esque donkey, and my favourite: a totally smug camel.


Moving along, there are some Victorian carol-singers making unfortunate faces.


And the best part? All of these figures are robots that move. In slow motion.



I imagine "Christmas on Acid" by the Vestibules playing in the background when I walk past these displays.

When I was taking pictures, a woman came up to me and said something to the effect of, "It's such a nice display. An old-fashioned Christmas!" I laughed nervously. She sounded so proud and satisfied that I felt a little guilty knowing I was taking these pictures in order to ridicule them on the internet. But anyway.

Two words today because I'm tired of talking

pulverulent
dusty-looking; readily crumbling; powdery
~The Phrontistery

excoriate
1. to denounce or berate severely; flay verbally
2. to strip off or remove the skin from
~dictionary.com

It's Thursday! The moment of truth has passed - only time will tell if I also passed. In any case, it's over and there's nothing I can do about it now, so I'll stop excoriating myself. It was more internal than verbal or physical flaying, so I'm sure there's a more appropriate word for it, but that's all I've got for now.

And I've picked up my knitting for the first time since Saturday. Life is good. Tomorrow I'll go to the gym in an attempt to tackle these bad stress habits I've acquired.

Introducing a real post for real : Thoughts on Twist Collective's Winter Issue

Twist Collective's winter issue came out a few days ago and I immediately pored over it. I tend to head straight for the patterns and go back later, sometimes months later, to read the articles, but I do love it.

This time around I find myself most enthused by accessories projects. The sweaters are nice, but nothing is really shouting at me at the moment.

I like Tanit's Jacket by Gudrun Johnston, but I'm not sure I could pull it off without lots of mods - cropped, squarish... What's up with all the cropped jackets out there?

Four Winds by Alasdair Post-Quinn is gorgeous and could spell my first foray into double knitting. Maybe? With his neat tutorial and instruction videos also included in the issue maybe I'll actually get the kick in the pants I need.

The Polar Chullo by Mary Ann Stephens is pretty cute, but I don't know if I'd have the opportunity to make it. Polar bears are great, though!

Moxie by Kristi Schueler looks neat, but I'm a bit bewildered by the colour choice in the sample. The green and teal/turquoise are kind of the same level of intensity. I'd pick something with more contrast, I think, though maybe some people want less of a shock for a bold design.

Frost Tapestry by Robin Melanson is just beautiful. I love the curlicues. I don't know if I'd make the neckwarmer, but I definitely want the hat and mitts.

Basically, it appears as if I'm obsessed with colourwork. Yet, the endpaper mitts are my only real colourwork project so far in my knitting life. Clearly something has to change. I have several colourwork projects in my queue for priority this winter, and hopefully I'll get to them.

Blog post fail!!!

Frustration is vacillating between two choices for months, only to find that once the decision is made, someone else has already done it!! Boo. I am not impressed. Obviously I should have checked Youtube first before throwing myself into it.


Wow, I'm bored of talking about myself. Can it be possible?

labour disputes follow me around?

There's a bus strike in London. When a strike was on last year in Ottawa, I managed to miss most of it by moving to London... But I can't escape this time. On the bright side, I live reasonably close to everywhere I need to go, so I'll be fine. I need to get more exercise anyway.

I'm preparing a seminar presentation for Thursday, and I just read Private Peaceful, by Michael Morpurgo, as part of it. It hit me harder than I thought it would. Simply written, not very long, and even though I'd read dozens of summaries and reviews, the ending shocked me. A look on the author's website shows that he and his wife started Farms for City Children, a charity that lets children from cities stay on the farm and experience farm work for a week at a time. Very inspiring.