Madeline and I at Niagara Falls in July 09

Me, Madeline, Ava, Alex and Luke

We spent Alex’s 10th birthday in July at Great Wolf Lodge in Niagara Falls and had a great time with WannaBaa – her kids and mine.  It was chaos – but a good kind of chaos!  What a great place to bring kids!  Highly recommended but definitely on the expensive side.

Stay tuned for a book review this week…

Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians today – I hope your day is full of turkey and family (for some) and sleep and rest (for the others). I personally spent last night sleeping at the hospital wired up to within an inch of my life for a sleep study to see if I’ve inherited the family apnea. So I slept terribly, was home by 6:30 a.m. and crashed for another three hours in my own (delightfully comfortable I will never complain about my mattress again promise) bed. After I got most of the cement out of my hair.

I shouldn’t complain though – I’ve had two great dinners – one here at home with my parents, kids and niece and the other at a friends who is a gourmet cook…more on this in a moment…

First – I owe you a bit of old stuff promised earlier, starting with my trip to Toronto at the end of August.

I went down to visit Wanna-Baa of the comments, but stopped on the way to visit a farm in Port Hope – probably one of the few, if only, shepherds locally with Blue-Faced Leicesters. I have no pictures for you, but the farm was just amazing – there were turkeys wandering around my car in all different colours, a guard goat and the ugliest duck I have ever seen who thinks he is a person and insisted on following us to visit the sheep. Sara had brought out bags of fleece from her spring shearing and I ended up with two BFL fleeces – one is a first year and the other is a third year.

Both fleeces were relatively clean and so far the processing has been dirty but not horrifyingly so…

…than the very adorable alpaca…

There was also a baby donkey and the most amazing dogs – Lori raises Leonbergers – enormous but incredibly gentle. It was a whole lotta dog let me tell you.

Luke, his grammy and a REALLY BIG DOG.

So that’s it for the history although I should shout out a huge thank you to Chriss and Elizabeth for helping me skirt the fleeces and for their advice on how to get them clean.

And while I’m on the topic of fibre…

I seem to have acquired some more…

I participated in a fiber swap on Ravelry. Basically we were split into groups of four and each member of the group sent fiber to another member each month. This month I got a lovely 4 oz present from Lapoli…isn’t it nice???

I’ve also made an early 2009 resolution – I think this will be the year I knit for me. I have been considering simplifying my wardrobe pretty significantly and would love to focus on having most blacks and neutral bases that I can cover with my own knitted sweaters, cardigans, shawls and jackets…

I was so taken with this idea that I promptly cast on some things a bit early…

February Lady Sweater in Mirasol Tupa.

And work on the Susie Hoodie from More Big Girl Knits also continues. I am just about done with the bust increases and will be onto the arms soon which I am really looking forward too…shorter rounds!

Getting organimized…

Something had to be done. I couldn’t pull out a project without having fourteen others fall out of the cupboard. So – big canvas bins for fiber – the white has fiber to be dyed and the blue contains fiber that is up on etsy right now…

And some nice wicker baskets for yarn from current and upcoming projects to show off themselves…

Is it a bad sign when your house and stash start to look more and more like a yarn store?

(Oh and just to revisit an earlier post…all this clean up meant that I took some stuff off the needles…which means I managed to find all those needles I was lamenting about losing…

…not that this stopped me from putting in a knitpicks order…no siree!)

Now last of all…

Wild encounters OR how I pissed off a mother cat and paid the piper for it

Warning – includes photos of my legs that do not include handknit socks.

So I’m at my friend’s place for Thanksgiving and she has a formerly feral cat that arrived on her doorstep looking for handouts, got adopted and turned out to have gotten herself knocked up before they had a chance to spay her.

The kittens were born about 5 weeks ago – four adorable little ones – two black and two tabbies. Like all kittens they have sweet faces and short stubby tails and when they run it seems like their back ends go faster than their fronts.

I am helpless in the face of kittens.

So I am walking towards the kitchen behind a kitten and reach down to pick it up but clearly she doesn’t want interference and takes off ahead of me. I keep going into the kitchen but as I hit the doorway I hear this horrible hissing and feel pain in my leg. I look down and its like a scene from Wild Kingdom. You know the one where the pride of lions is taking down a full sized elephant by coming up behind and attaching itself to its back, claws fully embedded in the skin?

And that’s just one side and the picture is a lot prettier than my leg which is also pretty bruised and there is more on the other side. I WAS wearing pants by the way…

So a few bandaids and some peroxide later I go down to get some dessert. I walk towards the kitchen again and as I hit the door Phoebe attacks the OTHER leg (no kittens were around by the way). Talk about determined overprotective mother!

Those would be puncture marks from her teeth! For the rest of the evening she kept a close eye on me and everytime I moved my hosts had to step in to move her out of the room.

I am certainly none the worse for wear but certainly learned my lesson when it comes to mother cats!

Have a terrific week everyone – I am off for a workshop with Brandon Mably and an evening lecture by Kaffe Fassett at WoolNthings…I should pack my camera NOW so I don’t forget it!!

Hey all – long time no write! Summer sucked me in and spit me back out again – I can’t believe September is already here – packing lunches and homework again. Neither of these two activities rates high on my list of favourties due to the amount of knitting time lost during a year!

The boy has entered Grade 4, and the girl Grade 6 (eek! that is kind of officially pre-teen country isn’t it?). Two days in and neither is particularly impressed with the experience.

What I’m knitting

On the knitting front there has been progress. The Swallowtail Shawl in my handspun is done and I couldn’t be more pleased. The colour changes are gorgeous and the repeats were long enough that I got several rows out of each colour even towards the long end of the knitting.

Pattern: Evelyn Clark’s Swallowtail Shawl from Interweave Knits, Fall 2006
Yarn: Handspun from 100g of Blue Faced Leicester from Fleece Artist
Needles: KP Options in 3.5 mm

I am still plugging away on the Print O the Wave from Eunny Jang in Handmaiden Sea Silk…no sideways pics of this though. I am more than halfway through the repeats on the main body and will have to contemplate the border – somehow I am NOT keen on picking up 8 gazillion stitches around the edge.

Lastly – I am making some progress on my Susie Hoodie from More Big Girl Knits…granted that it doesn’t look like much but the Berroco Ultra Alpaca is terrific to knit…

Colour is darker and more heathery than it looks here…love love love…cross fingers it will fit.

In my mailbox

I participated in the Hush Hush Handspun Hootenany this summer and received this awesome package from my downstream pal…whose email I am looking for right now – I will credit with an actual name and link but my brain has big holes in it!

Anyway – here is the package of goodness:

That’s a huge 8oz bit of spinning fiber from Crown Mountain Farms – the blue yarn on the left is my pal’s own handspun – pretty pretty blues and greens and very very soft. The sock yarn on the right is her own handdyed (damn I wish I had a link for you to her etsy shop…next time!). There were also two bars of soap (lavender and almond – yum!!!), some lindt chocolates (not shown…um possibly devoured at this point) and a cute little notepad that says “Homespun” on the top.

My own upstream pal was in England, moving to Australia next week so my fingers are crossed she’ll get her parcel in time!

Spinning…span…spun!

More Fleece Artist – this is wool-silk in lovely browns, copper and burgundy/pink. I am spinnign thin again and now that I figured out what was going wrong the last time I tried to ply with thread, I’m going to try again.

Dye party

I spent Sunday dyeing my little heart out. A pound and a half of silk and a pound of merino-tencel blend. I am hoping to update the shop in the next few days and then I will be going on hiatus for about three months as I start French language training half days in the hopes of meeting the language requirements for my new position before Christmas. I suspect that blog updates will also be scarce and while I’ll be reading other blogs I probably won’t be commenting much (not a big change from the summer!) I am hoping to show you the Rambouillet that Chris and I are processing and to confess I had little stumble and am the proud owner of two unbelieveably gorgeous BFL fleeces that need to get cleaned and put away while the weather is still nice.

Here’s a little taste of what I dyed up…

These are 3 of the merino-tencel rovings…shininess due to the flash on the first two.

Take care!

Right!

The news

I started my new-ish job today. And so far, I haven’t done anything new! This is probably because it is a) Monday and b) Monday before a statutory holiday. Downtown Ottawa is a wasteland (no, moi in Vancouver, I did NOT write cultural wasteland…stop that!) today. Tomorrow it will be dangerous to walk around here unless you have a Canadian flag tattooed on your face! I have no idea who that guy is, but he sure looks happy doesn’t he?

Yesterday we celebrated Alex’s ninth birthday. We went to the ballpark to watch a Can-Am League game – less talent that Triple A, slightly more than Little League. We had a suite overlooking home plate – it was absolutely amazing and since my kids are used to running around the stadium, we only saw kids at important moments – like when they were hungry.

I can’t believe my baby is nine. I also can’t believe I am old enough to have a nine year old. As a result of my disbelief I did my best to behave as childishly as possible without endangering anyone and had two big pieces of birthday cake. So there upcoming 39th birthday!

Stuff I am dyeing

I think I lost two whole days of my life trying to untangle this holy mess:

That’s a pound of merino-seacell pencil roving. It was like untangling yarn, but yarn that would just drift apart if I tugged too hard. It was totally worth it though…it is so soft!!

The first step in dyeing is to soak the wool – with this stuff I couldn’t wind it up into a ball like a I do with thicker rovings because the water would not penetrate to the middle. So out came the swift and some very gentle skein winding happened. Worked like a charm! This bit got dyed strong blues, reds and greens. I really need to dye up some for me and spin it.

Stuff in the mail

Supplies! Can you believe the number of postage stamps on this? Mail ordered from Copper Moose in the US – there is a pound each of BFL and Merino, and half a pound each of Merino-silk and merino-tencel. Lookie here! Bags’o’wool!

Stuff I’m knitting

Susie Hoodie continues – it looks the same as last time so no boring pictures of blue stockinette for you! Don’t bother to complain about that either as I am not wasting valuable computer space on a picture.

Susie Hoodie might have been chucked aside for some warm weather knitting. Having firmly committed to copying a couple of people who are smarter than I am, I am knitting up the Print’o’the Wave in Handmaiden SeaSilk. Frogged once in favour of smaller needles but so far so good. Isn’t it pretty? This one is definitely for me!

And I guess today is Handmaiden day – because I cast on a sock in Casbah. The yardage on the skein is a bit short (around 325 yards) so I decided to bite the bullet and learn how to do a toe up sock. Now I am sold!!! I did Judy Becker’s Magic Cast-on with the help of Cat Bordhi’s YouTube video (thanks for telling me about it Nancy! Hint: click the link and check out the divine sea silk stole Nancy just finished – awesome!). I am using a rib-whose-name-I-have-forgotten out of one of the Vogue Stitchionaries and last night I did my firstest ever short row heel with instructions out of an Interweave Knits from last year. As I am knitting on 3.75s these are going very quickly!

Places I’ve been

I mentioned ages ago that I would tell you about Kniterary – just about the cutest little yarn shop in Whitby – and I think the ONLY yarn shop in Whitby. That’s beside the point.

The very first time I went there the woman who owned the shop had just bought it from the previous owner that week. Sales stock was…well…unimaginative and more than a little acrylic-y. I don’t go there everytime I go to Toronto but I do try to drop in occasionally to see what’s new.

Huge improvement! A super comfortable couch. Lovely woman who totally left me alone and talked to Alex who was nicely tolerating the yarn store visit (he actually likes knitting but doesn’t have the attention span to do it for long). They had some really lovely sock yarn from The Sweet Sheep and Celestial Merino (yummy). Decent selection of Berroco, Fleece Artist and lots of Mission Falls.

I didn’t buy much as I had just spent a fortune for three hellish hours at Canada’s Wonderland the day before. I did pick up Cat Bordhi’s new sock book – it is pretty cool although beyond the cast on and looking at the pretty pictures and marvelling at Cat Bordhi’s brain (I’m surprised her head isn’t three times bigger than it is), I haven’t tried any of the sockitectures…

That’s it!

Happy Canada Day to everyone!

Damn it…I’m going back to bed.

Well, my blog was pissing me off. It NEVER changed – oh stop laughing back there! I DO realize that for blogs to change one should probably post something on them every now and then.

Time for a spring cleaning. I wanted some of my own fibre in the picture at the top…new colours! A fresh spring feeling. Let me know what you think…I’m not sold on the light green yet but its growing on me.

The other thing I think I need to do is find a direction for the blog and it occurred to me that, given the…um…strong support I have been showing to my local LYSes, bookstore and pretty much any place willing to sell me something to do with sticks and string, the least I could do would be to turn my financial loss into blog gain. So I am going to start subjecting you to my opinion – little reviews – patterns, books (knitting and not), cat breeds, coffee, podcasts, yarn…whatever strikes my fancy.

Knit that: pattern review

Today I give you: the Burridge Lake Aran Afghan by Anna Dalvi.

This pattern originally appeared on the sadly defunct Magknits but has been put up for free download through Ravelry or Anna’s site. Anna Dalvi who lives here in Ottawa and was the mind behind the Mystic Waters Shawl (which I started and frogged – beautiful pattern but I was having fidelity issues because I still hadn’t finished the Swan Lake stole).

I think this is going to be my grand opus. If I can finish this, I can do ANYTHING – climb Everest, do the side splits again, eat only sugar and fat and never gain weight, become patient, perfect and loved by all. I may be a bit optimistic, but its good to have goals. (OOH! lightening outside!)

The picture is less than a 1/4 of the first of three panels that will make up the afghan. It is absolutely to fascinating to knit. For one thing, the Trinity Stitch (the columns on either side of the big Saxon Braid) is made on the wrong side so purling rows are as interesting as cabling rows on the right side. Also, every one of the three patterns has a different number of rows – remind me to take a picture of my chart where I keep track of all this for you.

The pattern is absolutely perfect. Its fun to knit. If you like BIG projects, cabling (learn to cable without a needle for this one – there is a LOT of cabling going on) and knowing that you are making a family heirloom that you may be knitting for years to come (if you are like me), I recommend it.

The yarn is Patons Classic Merino – I couldn’t afford the full 20 balls but I think a basic grey should be safe. (more lightening!)

Pictures from my stash

In the newly purchased department – Cascade 220 Wool Heathers and purse handles for a medium Noni Carpet Bag. Wool purchased at Yarn Forward in Kanata.

Spinning and spun

Right now I have some copper superwash merino I purchased at The Black Lamb when I got my wheel last year. I had spun up the first 50 g right away and it has been sitting on the bobbin for over a year. I am finally spinning up the rest – I am not a fan of spinning superwash because I find it way too slippery but I admit that the singles are really pretty and shiny and will be lovely when I ply it up.

Off the bobbin is an absolutely gorgeous 2-ply silk/merino blend from Fleece Artist. A larger skein has gone to its forever home - and this smaller skein is going to follow it there whenever I see Leanne next (Yes, hon…there’s more…I’ll trade you for a gallstone!)

Non-knitting news

Alex competed in his very first baseball tournament on Saturday and his team (the Yankees) came in second place in a very close final playoff game! This is his first year doing any kind of organized sport and he got off to a bit of a rocky start. But on Saturday one of the parents did some one-on-one with him to help him get his batting technique down and in the final game he got a run batted in, a triple and eventually got to home plate for his first point! I am so proud of him and really glad he had some success – he was getting very discouraged and nothing we could say was going to be as good as just hitting the ball.

Here he is at bat – just before his very first hit. Sorry for the fuzzies but it was really sunny – I couldn’t actually see what I was photographing so I just shot the picture on faith.

Alex is super strong – and built like a 1920’s slugger – if he can connect I think he’s going to hit them out of the park.

Stuff I’m looking forward to

I have a 1 pm meeting tomorrow with our Director General to “talk about my future”. This could be anything from a fun project to a minor career change and no one wants to tell me what its about but everyone seems to think I’m the one for it (whatever it is). Curious huh?

Test drives – my lease is up in mid-July so its time for dreaded car shopping. I’m going to pretend I am looking forward to this the way I look forward to checking out a new yarn shop. I am hoping the power of positive thinking will find me a decent price on a lovely heathered 4-door with cashmere-alpaca-quiviut seat covers and plenty of room for my wheel and knitting friends. Oh and an Ipod docking thingie would be nice too so I can listen to podcasts while driving to yarn shops. Oh, and it should probably have an engine and other car stuff in it. And somewhere to park kids and groceries. Are you thinking that maybe my car salesperson is going to be as confused by me as I am by him/her?

Have a great week – kids are back from dad’s for the next three days and I’ll line up my next review for the weekend. Let me know what you think of the new look and format!

Yeah…there’s no denying Handmaiden Fine Yarn

That’s Casbah - a gateway yarn if I ever felt one. It is so soft that it has been living on my computer desk for regulary snuggling.

And this might be some Sea Silk - destined to be one of these (and its all Leanne and Nancy’s faults). Plus mine for needing to join everyone on the bandwagon.

There’s more – I updated my Ravelry stash if you have access and want all the gory details – I’m too embarrassed to roll it all out here at once. But I went to Knitter’s Frolic…and it was an excellent way to part with some of my tax return.

In the done-with-that Department, we have Icarus.

Icarus from Interweave Knits from Summer 2006 – which I knit in about 6 weeks – breaking my all time knitting record.

Last weekend I ended up – through a series of coincidences – do a spinning demonstration at the Canada Agriculture Museum (click for cute cows). In about 6 hours I spun up just under 100 grams of some South African Fine I had dyed last year. I chose really bright colours because I knew there would be tons of little kids. The funnest part was watching the kids get completely mesmerized by the wheel. They would walk in and literally sink to the floor. Had I known the wheel had so much power over toddlers I would have bought one a LONG time ago!!!

And lastly – Madeline and I went to Toronto a few weeks ago (conveniently when Knitter’s Frolic was happening) and delivered the Tomten Jacket to its rightful owner.

Miss Ava – 9 months and the best model a knitter could ask for…

With Icarus done I’ve turned my sights on the Susie Hoodie from More Big Girl Knits. This will be the first sweater I have ever made for myself. I am nervous about my gauge (.25 of a stitch less than the 17 called for) but I think when the waist decreases are done I’ll take it off the needles and make sure it isn’t too big.

And if it is…I guess I’ll have to eat more.

Edited to add: Wanna-Baa reminded me of these great pics…amazing what 9 months can do for a baby (scroll way down)

Righto – the bent needle on the right is a cable needle. The obsessive types who prefer to make their own sweaters instead of doing the sane thing and buying them from the store use needles like this…

…to make these (photo blatantly stolen from here and they use a different style cable needle in this drawing but you get the pciture):

Okay – short tutorial is now over.

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Now personally, I am not a big fan of the cable needle. It takes no small amount of dexterity to manage it, the cable needle flops around in front or in back of your knitting…etc. etc. Plus I like the idea of extreme cable knitting - letting those stitches hang out in space for a few moments and risking it all.

Seriously though. The universe, it appears, has something different in mind. The universe seems to think I need a cable needle.

On Saturdays the kids have music lessons. Unfortunately, the place where they have lessons does not have a waiting room. Also, the kids do not have lessons at the same time. This means I get to hang out in the car with whichever child is not in a lesson for that half hour. I had just come back to the car after sending Alex off. It seems Madeline generously put my bag with my knitting and my book on the front seat so I would have them.

In my bag were four of these – beloved sock needles (el cheapo Aero 2.75mm for the detail-oriented)