Knitting [& Knit-a-thon!] Update

First, the knit-a-thon update. I got a very nice thank you letter from McConnell Library with the final tally (at least the current final tally) on knit-a-thon goings on:

• 450+ balls of yarn were donated,
• 260+ finished items were donated to the Clothe A Family campaign and half a dozen tiny caps were taken to the premie ward at the hospital,
• over $900 was raised to support the children's lit programs at CBRL,
• hundreds of knitting needles were donated, and many are still waiting to be given to new and aspiring knitters,
• 30 door prizes were donated and then won by very happy knitters,
• and lots of good [donated] food, fun and conversation were had by the many many knitters who participated in both locations.

Isn't that great? Congrats and thank you to everyone who donated and/or participated. And hey, guess what! It's only 11 months until the next knit-a-thon!

I was lucky enough to win a door prize myself and, although there were tons of beautiful kits to choose from with enough yarn for e.g. an afghan, a lace shawl or even an entire sweater, I was a good little girl and picked the one, scrumptious ball of Noro you see above. I just loved the colours and one of my knit-a-thon objectives was to destash, not restash. Well, at least as far as yarn goes. I got heaps of new needles - everything from size 2 dpns up to 25 mm needles which are presumably meant for broomstick lace but won't ever be used for that by me! (At least, not unless someone tells me what broomstick lace actually is...)

I also scored a whole whack of needles for my friend Amy, who knew how to knit in theory but hadn't done it in practice for a long time. She came to the knit-a-thon to lend her support and keep us company but had zero (0) intention of knitting anything, but I bunged a pair of needles in her hands and a ball of yarn in her lap and she was away! She left with left with many balls of yarn and a hat under way and has since started another. I can be very persuasive!



Knitting continues apace on my March socks. I was really hoping to knit some monkeys for March since they're having a March Monkey contest on Sock-A-Month but, alas, I don't think I'll have time so I'm sticking to my original railroad rib socks. I knit the leg of both socks first and then intended to knit the heel flap of one and then the other so that they'd be exactly the same but I really like doing the heels and just couldn't stop! As you can see, they've gotten a bit out of synch so now I have to decide whether to just finish #1 and then go do the heel and foot of #2, or whether to play catch-up so that they're the same length. Tricksy! I must admit I'm not loving the colours quite as much as when I started. The pooling makes them look like camouflage socks - NOT the look I was going for. Oh well!

Another piece of knitting news: you may recall from my Feb 8 spinning pics that Sidney was knitting (yes, that's Sidney. Now You Know.) She had with her that day a really neat little book of Luxury One-Skein Wonders. This little gem was filled with tons of patterns for things you could knit out of a single skein of yarn. Now, this is perfect for me in many ways: 1) I really only get one or two skeins of yarn spun at a time before I get distracted by doing other things, so projects to use up these orphan skeins are much appreciated, 2) I can't knit anything very heavy without the ol' CTS acting up, so lightweight projects that use only a single skein are easy on the wrists, and 3) my attention span lasts about one (1) skein. Granted, my handspun is not anything luxe, but the idea was a good one.


Turns out there are a few different books in the series, so I am now the proud owner of 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders, which you can see behind that yummy Noro above, and I got a copy of One-Skein Wonders: Yarn Shop Favourites from Coast to Coast for Chris for her bday.¹ AND Donna has a copy of one of the One-Skein books - not sure yet if it's a fourth one or one of these three, but at any rate our little spinning/knitting group is well covered by wonders of one-skein or less! So now I need to pick a lovely pattern to use my new yummy Noro on!

Incidentally, I see that Chapters has all three titles on for 34% off right now, and a 20% discount on their irewards memberships. If you buy a lot of books, I heartily recommend it - it's not nearly as good as it used to be but nevertheless Ron and I always keep our membership current and get loads of coupons in the mail.

Only other thing to mention knitting-wise is that I finally finished that blue feathers and fan scarf but I think it's a bit short, so I'm going to take out the casting off and make it longer. I was worried about the length so I never cut the ball off, which means I can take out the CO and then just keep knitting until the ball is consumed. Which it will be before long!


Oh, and I was also given this totally fab vintage knitting bag that I'd been drooling over during the entire knit-a-thon as a thank you for helping to organize and get the word out. It came in as a donation, completely filled with needles which were divided up for door prizes, gifts and general use during the knit-a-thon and on Fibre Fridays. I told Chris that she ought to put the bag out for a door prize itself but she played skeptical - I think maybe she was saving it for a gift all along, the sneaky bugger. Not that I'm complaining: I. Love. This. Bag. It's vintage, it's my favourite colours, it's plenty long enough to fit a pair of straight needles into with knitting still attached, and it even matches my current project of that description. What's not to love? (Those are my new enormous 25mm broomsticks needles and my yummy Noro in there with the fan scarf, by the way.)

Okay, that's it for me for another week or so. I think I'll try to post something worthy at least every weekend since Scarf A Day is taking up my weekday blog-energy. Hopefully by next weekend I'll be able to impress you all with pics of the blankets I'm weaving on Mabes right now. :)


1. I tried to get pics of them all lined up side by side, but just couldn't figure it out. This has caused me grief in the past and will no doubt continue to do so in the future. Any Blogger users out there who can help me out?

Mmm, fiber!

Hey folks! Still having trouble finding the time to post daily to both HFD and Scarfaday, and here it is Saturday with no SAD (an unfortunate acronym, that) post at all - I will be seriously lacking if I don't say something about fiber today, eh wot?

So here you are. This is what "fiber" has meant to me today:


No one had better tell me there's no fiber in peanut butter cookies. Seriously, I don't want to hear about it. There's certainly no "diet" in them, of that I'm well aware, so I've decided that there must be some fiber in them somewhere, perhaps hiding between the chocolate chips that somehow snuck their way into the recipe. And by "recipe" I mean packaged mix.

That's about as close as I've gotten to fiber today because it turns out that today was a photo day! Ron and I set out early to go buy ourselves some snowshoes and head to the park to go on a photo shoot to try out Stella, our new camera.¹ Things did not go quite as planned - do they ever? The reasons for this included things such as "I just want to stop a couple places first," "they're out of showshoes!?" and "it's really really cold!" In the end, our snowshoe through the park turned into a five minute dash down to the lake to take a couple of pics of gulls and ducks and some old buildings across the way and then a mad dash back to the car to warm up.

One of the stops we made en route was at a bookstore to try and find a good book on digital photography; sady we had no luck but since getting home I have spent hours and hours reading various websites on the subject, and have quite fallen in love with Natalie Norton's photography, tutorials, and sensibilities in general. I almost wish I was getting married in Hawaii just so I could hire her to take my pics. I found her via some tutes on DPS, which I heartily recommend to anyone with a hankering to learn more about digital photography - Natalie's in particular but the whole site is GRATE.

Okay, so that's the non-fiber news.

In other, more fibrous news, I finally finished the second sock! What sock, you ask? Can you have forgotten those green/blue/yellow socks I mentioned knitting aaaages ago? This sock, of course! The one on the left, with missing foot:


Sock #2 is finally done, apart from the kitchener on the toe, and no sooner had I finished it than I... (very proud of myself here) frogged the entire toe of sock #1! It simply wasn't big enough because I'd gotten impatient and hadn't knit the foot long enough. I know, I know - it looks ridiculously long in the picture - and in person - so I was confident I'd knit it long enough. And yet, I had not, and so it had to go. This is further evidence that I'm maturing as a knitter, as even though it goes against every fiber (ha!) of my being to frog something once I've knit it, I decided I'd rather spend the time reknitting that toe and be able to wear the sock than to leave it as is. I'm just going to cast on another pair as soon as these are done, after all, so what's the rush to knit one sock versus another?

This sock knitting and frogging happened at yesterday's Fiber Friday, which was by far the best attended FF I've ever been to. It was really fab - we had knitters, spinners, rug hookers, the works. Not to mention a bit of story time going on in the corner where one of the moms with wee ones was reading to her son - who very obligingly turned the pages for her so she could keep knitting while reading, of course! This was, to my mind, a perfect example of why Fiber Friday at the library makes perfect sense.

So that was yesterday. Tomorrow is the Unspun Heroes first spinning meet for ages and I'm really looking forward to it. I gather there will be a fair bit of dyeing going on but I plan to take my wheel and get that purple pencil roving done - I'm anxious to chalk a few things off my unfinished projects list and move on to new ones! I will take my camera with so that tomorrow evening I have something genuinely fibery to share.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got some (high fiber) cookies to eat. Yum!


1. I should maybe fill Ron in on the whole "Stella" thing, hmm? Strangely, he doesn't seem able to hear things shouting out their names as clearly as I can. For me, it's like they come to us wearing little name tags. Is this a form of synethesia, I wonder?²

2.Synethesia has got to be The. Coolest. Thing. Ever. Lucky Ron, he's got it to a limited degree: some numbers have colours for him. I'm so envious!

Never a dull moment

The rosepath is done! Not cut off the loom yet but the weaving is finished. I decided to use a temple after the first yard or so just to speed things up a bit.


I'm not sure why I hesitate to get the temple out so often - I guess I feel like it's going to slow me down so I'd rather avoid it if possible. I must admit, there's also a sense of guilt, like I ought to be able to weave without one and I'm faulty some how for needing one. Where does that come from, I wonder? At any rate, I got out the temple and that sped things up quite a lot, as I didn't have to fuss so much about draw in, just about beating too hard.

Incidentally, in spite of my hang ups about temples, I have a lot of them and really like them all. The one in the pic is a wooden one from Glimakra that I got along with three or four others from Madelyn Van der Hoogt when I took her Weaving II course (including one for the Centre where I teach). It's the kind I use for delicate fabrics or narrow warps. I've also got two heavy metal Toika temples that I got from The Weaving Works to use on blankets and rugs.

Anyhoo, the rosepath. I realized today that I've been referring to it as "the rosepath" even though it's really bits of point twill on a basket weave ground. The treadling, though - that's rosepath. I like this angle because it shows off the stripes down on the cloth beam. Pretty, huh?


Not sure yet what this fabric will become - depends on what happens in the fulling, really. I'm still thinking some kind of cocoon but it might also be hats or pillows or something else entirely. I'm sure it'll let me know what it wants to be eventually.

I also wove a scarf on Joey this morning, so now there's only one or two left on that warp, too. Haven't posted a pic of that warp yet, so here you are:


I wove some scarves in this palette for the show I did last November and it was quite popular with the gents, so I put it on again. I hardly ever repeat warps like that but hey, rules are meant to be broken, eh wot?


I've also neglected to post pics of the socks-in-progress, so here they are as well:


This is my second time using this sock pattern and the first using my new needles with the more flexible cord - definitely an improvement! I've realized lately that I don't like my socks to come very far up my leg, so I made the tops of this pair shorter than the last. I'm afraid they might be just a bit too short, but this is a learning process. Eventually I'll figure out The Perfect Sock and then I can make loads of them!

I'm anxious to get these done so that I can try a new pattern that my mother's friend Peggy sent me. I used her instructions for Kitchener stitch to graft the toes of the blue and brown pair and they worked a treat, so I'm really eager to try out the entire pattern. I think Peggy's considering selling this pattern but she's given me permission to share it with my local fibrous friends as long as each person who gets it donates a pair of handknit socks to a local charity. Isn't that lovely? :D


In other knitting news, now that I've given away the gift, I can show you pics of the silly doggy shrug I made for my friend Marg and her dog Millie for Christmas:


The only explanation I have for this is that it seemed like a really good idea at 3:00 aye em. I hunted around online for a dog coat pattern that I could make pretty quickly and found this really cute one on knitty.com. Of course, with all those cables and bobbles, it wasn't a quickie so I just figured out the basic outline of her 10 lb dog pattern, did a ridiculously small tension swatch and then cast on what seemed like a reasonable number of stitches and knit a rectangle. I got a bit sneaky and used the casting off to sew up the legs and even used a version of the beaded cast off from splityarn for what I thought was going to be the neck. The legs turned out long enough that I didn't pick up any stitches to knit down cuffs and, in fact, turned up the cuffs a bit to shorten them. Even though the shrug is supposedly exactly the same top and bottom, I think the beads will work better at the bottom edge rather than the neck - maybe the cast off stretched the width?

I didn't have a dog handy to try this out on and our cats all objected strenuously, so I have no idea if it's anything even approximately Millie-shaped. I'm really anxious to learn whether or not it fits her and to see pictures if it does! Are you listening, Marg?

So now I have a date with a roast and the enormous new slow cooker that Ron got me for Christmas but then it's back to the looms - want to get Joey naked ASAP so I can dress him up in crackle (ooo, crackle for rocker upholstery - woot!) and I need to make some design decisions about the blanket for Letitia so that I can get that yarn ordered toot sweet. As I say, never a dull moment!

Best laid plans...

So I didn't get to my fibre lunch group today, nor did I get to the flannel fabric place. In fact, I stayed home in my jammies, reading a new (to me) webcomic and eating the cookies I baked to take this afternoon. Ahem. Guess that falls into the "balance of slack" category.

The aforementioned cookies and comics were balanced by weaving off the baby blanket warp just now. I decided to go with the nice, creamy yellow that's in the warp for the last one. Now I just have to deal with the knots that went by whilst winding on the warp and then I can serge my babies apart, wash them up and take them to the store to pick out some lovely flannel to go with. Soon there will be pics!

Oh, and I finished my sock but for the grafting on the toe, which I shall attempt to do neatly tonight.

I want to get the second sock well under way before my new needles arrive, lest my First Sock EVAR¹ remain mateless. I know I'll want to use the new needles immediately and then I may never go back to the rather swear-y ones I'm using now and since the new ones aren't the same size... you get the idea. Oh, and guess what? The sock I finished actually fits.


Scampy, No.2 Cat, likes the new sock, especially the end I left for teh graftings...

Yes, it's a bit loose so it may be relegated to jammy socks but, considering how much time I spend in my jammies (not just while eating cookies and reading webcomics!), this is not a bad life for a sock of mine. It just needs a mate to spend that life with.

1. Okay, so I made a pair of socks about 20 years ago² but they were so saggy and baggy that I only wore them once or twice and even that was enough to put a hole in them thanks to the el cheapo, thick cotton yarn I used, so we just won't mention them, hmm?

2. Omg, omg, how can I possibly be old enough to have done something like knit a pair of socks 20 YEARS AGO!?!??

Gonna Get My Fibre On

Woosh. Okay, so 2008 did not go quite as imagined fibrologically speaking. It ended well, though, and 2009 is looking very rosey indeed!
So here's a sampling of what I'm working on now.

First, some sewing, which is very exciting because I'm finally starting to feel like I'm figuring it out. I got Amy Karol's book, Bend the Rules Sewing, from a friend for Christmas, which is totally cool 'cause I've been reading Amy's blog for ages now unbeknownst to my friend. Anyway, in the book Amy suggests using cotton flannel fabric for interfacings, which got me thinking of cotton flannel in a whole new way, i.e. as more than my favourite sets of sheets. I had a chunk of handwoven fabric that I'd planned to turn into a baby blanket, so I got some flannel am edging it with that. Looks pretty good, if I do say so myself!



I had a few tiny scraps left over from making the edging, and I've been cursing the lack of unpinned real estate in my tomato pincushion, so I whipped up this little guy, too.



Maybe it's just me, but I think it's almost unnecessarily cute. Plus I'm quite taken with the way that the pins coordinate with the fabric, without any planning whatsoever on my part. It is also the first thing I have ever made in a totally spur of the moment, "Huh, I could use one of those, I think I'll make one. Oh, look, it's done and now I've got the thing I wanted and hey, wasn't that easy!?" kind of way and also without any kind of adult supervision. Very exciting! AND it's the first pic I've taken using my latest camera/lighting/backdrop scheme which I am quite pleased with, so what's not to like?

There are some full sized (24") pillows as well, which I may try to take some pics of later but they won't fit in my new photo setup and I'm too lazy to take the camera off the tripod and make the bed and all that.

Lest you think that I'm only sewing with commercial fabrics, here are a couple more recent projects. A stash of new eyepillows for a local yoga teacher...


...and a little drawstring bag that I actually made a few months ago and have been using ever since.



I'm not totally happy with the interfacing in it - used the heaviest iron on stuff I could find, which turned out to be fusible fleece, so the bag is pretty stiff and the cord doesn't pull up as it should. I'll use flannel in the next one and see how that works!

So that's the sewing. I am also knitting, for the first time in years. I am quite enjoying myself and it's lovely to have some little thing to do while e.g. waiting for my honey at the doctor's office. I have also found that I am no longer horrified by the thought of using little needles; used to be that anything smaller than a size 7 was simply Not Worth My Time, but I've just ordered some size 1 needles for socks and am quite anxious for them to arrive. Here are the socks I'm working on now, using needles much too large with coils that simply won't unbend, so there's been a fair amount of swearing involved:



There were also a couple of hats knit for Christmas presents, one for my father in law (the first thing I'd knit by hand in 15!! years!!) which required zero (0) swearing at all, and another for Ron that I've dubbed the muffin-top owing to its rather bizarre design. That one required a small amount of swearing when it became clear that the hat was too big so I had to tear out all the ribbing at the bottom, pick up the stitches and knit it back down. Still, not so bad. Now if he'd just wear the darn thing, I'd be happy.


Oh, and there's a scarf on the go as well. It was the first thing I started (on a lark, at the Unspun Heroes Christmas potluck, 'cause someone had decided we should all knit that evening rather than spin. Hmph.) Of all my projects, this one has required the most swearing because I keep forgetting to pay attention during the lace-making row and wind up with less stitches than when I started. Still, I am persevering and have about 30" done.



I think I'll have to slow down on the knitting front, sadly, as I have definitely noticed a return of the ol' carpal tunnel syndrome which I got in the first place when I added knitting to my signing-all-day and typing-all-night routine back in the early 90's. I'd hoped that it wouldn't bother my wrists now since I'm neither signing nor typing nearly as much but it does still seem to aggravate it. So... I either have to slow down and work at it a little at a time or binge-knit (my usual MO), blow out my wrists and then give it up entirely for another 15 years. That doesn't appeal, so I'm going to try to take it easy. I'm sure there's a new year's resolution in there somewhere.

So that's sewing and knitting. There's been a fair amount of weaving in the past couple months (and the past couple days, for that matter) but I'll save that for my next post. Trying not to binge and fast on the blogging, too!