It's coming

I don't mean to alarm you, but... have you noticed anything particular in the past few weeks?  Something's in the air, something is AFOOT, people.  Something BIG.

At first it was subtle and - come to think of it - rather charming.  Quaint, even.  Something in the light, a welcome change of colours after an entire season of cheap fabrics and bright neons.

Then it was more... insistent.  Whatever it was, it wasn't going away, and I had to actually, you know... DO stuff.  Like, for instance, get next year's garlic planted.

And THEN.  Then, well... even at the grocery store, the truth was staring me in the face, and I couldn't deny it any longer.  There was no espace.

Christmas is coming, my fellow knitters.  It's only 50 days away.  For realz.


Luckily, I've been a good knitter and have been squirreling away gifts all year long.  Victory will be MINE!  Booyah!

Happy Knitting, Everyone.

Journey

I just got back from Rhinebeck, and I want to tell you about how awesome it was.  I mean, of course it was awesome because - duh - it's the freakin' New York Sheep and Wool Festival, but I think that the fact that it has inspired me to decloak and actually write something really says something about what a fabulous time I had this year, don't you think?

I mean... first of all, there was the weather.  The sun was shining, the trees were decked out in their finest colours... What can I say?  It was absolutely magnificent. 

Then there was the excellent company.  Sadly, my fabulous peep Kate the Enabler wasn't able to attend this year, but my good friend Marie-Michele graciously stepped in and - it has to be said - as a Rhibeneck newbie she did amazingly well.  It probably had something to do with my finely tuned mentoring skills (hah!).  The fact that she got stopped approximately every 11 minutes by someone who wanted to ogle her Color Affection probably didn't hurt either.  Sheesh.

Of course, it is the SHEEP and wool festival, so one musn't forget the animals.

 (I don't think this gent was enjoying his haircut too much!)

Especially when they make such yummy fiber.

This was the first time I went to the fleece sale.  Not to buy a fleece of course, since I'm pretty sure turning fiber into yarn is easier when one knows how to spin.  But just to have a look at the different breeds and see/feel what different fibers they produce was pretty cool.

The rarest breed of all, of course, is the elusive knitwear designer.  They're a famously shy breed, but with the right mix of patience and audacity, one can usually manage a sighting. 

(Yours truly and the fabulously stylish, friendly and gracious Stephen West.)

And then, well... I can't quite explain this one.  Let's just say it involved a scarf, a Robert Frost Poem, and a pretty kickass blogger.  Um... you had to be there?

Of course there was yarn, lots and lots of yarn.  Some of it even came home with me.  But ultimately, Rhibeneck wasn't really about the yarn for me at all.  This year, it was all about the journey.

Happy Knitting, Everyone!

Something completely different

The last week of summer break, before the beginning of the new year and the craziness that ensues, I took a day off from work and had a girls' day with Émilie.  Truth be told, I was a bit worried about what we were actually going to DO together.  Around here, Dad is the "fun guy", and Mum is the one who buys the kids new shoes and takes them to get hair cuts.  All well and good when your toes are feeling pinched and your hair is in your eyes, but not exactly fun city, you know?  So what were we going to do for fun?  Sure, there were things on the To Do list that we could tackle, but that really wasn't what I wanted our day to be about.

I made a few suggestions (movie?  pedicure?  crafts?), but nothing seemed to spark her interest.  Finally I just asked her: what would you like to do today, Émilie?  "I want to go to Céramic Café, Maman."

For those of you not in the Montreal area, Céramic Café is a café where you can paint your own ceramics, and they'll take care of the glazing, drying and (baking?  cooking? whatever.  They take your piece and make it all shiny and nice).  Well alright-y then!

Émilie chose a frog figurine (I swear, the house is full of frogs and unicorns!), and I walked in fully expecting to paint a mug or a bowl or something, but... well... that was before I knew they had garden gnomes. 

GNOMES!!!  OhMyGah.  Simply Had. To. Have. One.  Honestly, is he not the cutest gnome EVER?  So cheery and happy-looking.  And puh-lease.  Who could resist that face?

 

So yeah... I had a great day with my daughter, got to get my craft on, and got a gnome too.  I wonder if Maxime would like to join us next time?  After all, Gnomeo here needs a girlfriend :)

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Wondering about this week's muffins?  Here they are!

Peach Butter Muffins, from the Messy Baker.  Absolutely delicious, very light and fluffy, and a good way to use up my homemade vanilla peach butter, which nobody in my family seems to particularly enjoy but me. 

Oh yeah... that's the stuff right there.

Happy Knitting, Everyone!

Going Random

This past Saturday night, I had one of those Bizarro World knitting moments where the knitting was just going super fast and I finished everything.  OK, technically I only had 2 projects in active rotation, but STILL.  These are projects I'd had on the needles for weeks.  Evening after evening, I'd plunge into a thankless knitting abyss and nothing would get done, and then Saturday, *poof!*  Both projects were finished.  On Sunday, just as we were heading out to apple country for the day, Phil suggested I bring something to knit and I had nothing I could bring with me. Chew on that, my friends.

The first thing off the needles was the second of the Eyelet and Flame Chevron socks.  I finished these on September 1st, so technically I was a day late and a dollar short for the Solid Socks KAL, but that doesn't make these babies any less awesome.

Knit with Madelinetosh Tosh Sock in the Candlewick colourway.  The stitch pattern is the Eyelet and Flame Chevron, on page 68 of Vogue Knitting's Ultimate Sock Book, and I sort of fudged the cuff, heel and toe to make a sock, heh.

I mentioned last post that I'd talk about how I came to settle upon this particular pattern for my next sock.  WELL, here's the thing.

It recently came to my attention that I have... drumroll please... 446 sock patterns in my Ravelry library.  That's FOUR HUNDRED FOURTY SIX, sock patterns that I've either bought (paper of electronic) or downloaded since I first joined Ravelry.

I've got 2 words for that: In. Sane.  And the killer is that, when I want to knit a sock, more often than not I'll just download a new pattern rather than try to choose one from my books/PDF library, because honestly... How am I supposed to decide when I've got so many options?  How do I choose?

There's just no way.  The only solution was to bust out the random integer generator.  And that's exactly what I did, and what I'll continue to do for the next little while.  I've allowed myself a few outs (I don't have to knit it if I don't like the pattern; I have to use stash yarn), but this was the first one Mister Random Number Generator selected for me, and it's none too shabby, if I do say so myself.

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In closing, lest you think I wussed out on my weekly muffin commitment, here are the muffins for week 2!

Strawberry Balsamic Jam muffins.  Not as "healthy" as last week's (who are we kidding at this point?), but really, truly delicious.  Ask me how I know.

Happy Knitting, Everyone!

Twofer

It's Back to School time  chez Dear (or First Day of School Ever time, if you're Maxime), so the days are long and the evenings are... yeah.  What evenings?  *Sigh*

How about we look at some knitting?

These are the latest socks in progress, knit out of Madelinetosh Tosh Sock in the Candlewick colourway (I may have mentioned previously that I have a thing for yellow).  The stitch pattern is the Eyelet and Flame Chevron from Vogue Knitting : The Ultimate Sock book, and I'm sort of fudging the rest of the sock as I go along.  I'll get into the process by which I came to select this particular pattern in another post, but for now the important thing to know is that I'm... totally fracking obsessed quite motivated to have these finished by August 31st, in order to qualify for the August Solid Socks KAL.  The fact that it's *cough* highly unlikely that I'll achieve the goal is totally irrelevant.  I am knitting like the WIND, people. 

Yup, absolutely nothing gets me going like a potentially unrealistic objective.  I find them extremely compelling.  What can I say?  I'm a complex woman.

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This past weekend, I made muffins for the kids' school snacks.  They eat hot lunches at the cafeteria, but we still have to pack about a zillion snacks for them every day.  Needless to say, there can be no ding-dongs, ho hos or twinkies in their lunches (ho hos... *snicker*).  But I still want to give them a little touch of sweetness.  Hence, muffins. 

As I took them out of the oven, I thought to myself "I know!  I'll make them muffins every week!  Not only that, but I'll try a different recipe every week and share it on the blog!  Brilliant!!!"

So!  Here are this week's muffins.  Blueberry Bran Muffins, the recipe is (how embarrasing) from Kellogg's.  One week down!  39 to go.

What was I saying earlier about potentially realistic objectives?

Happy Knitting, Everyone!

Put a lid on it

Let me begin by saying that this isn't the post I meant to write tonight.  I had planned to show you the new sock in progress, and possibly to come clean share some recent stash enhancement, but well... this feels more relevant for now.

We are right in the thick of canning season chez Dear.  As you may know if you've been reading for a while, over the past year, I've tried to put more thought into what our family eats, pay attention to where it comes from, and figure out what our relationship to food actually is.  Eating local, enjoying the best of what's produced in our own backyards (literally or figuratively) is something I feel very strongly about.  So in the spirit of "getting it while the getting is good", come August, I spend most of my weekends trying to freeze, can or otherwise process some of the local goodness that is in such abundant supply this time of year.

The "Eat Local" movement is by no means new, and most people in my area either do a bit of canning themselves or know someone who does.  Even so, every so often, when the "what did you do this weekend?" topic comes up and I proudly answer that I processed 50 pounds of tomatoes and canned 12 quarts of dill pickles, I'll get a pause, a smirk and a "Oh, well, I certainly don't have time to do anything like that" remark.

And tonight I asked myself: how many times have knitters heard that kind of comment, right on the heels of a "My grandmother used to knit" remark, from Muggles?  How many times has someone looked at what we're doing and passed a tiny wee perhaps-not-meant-to-be-condescending-even-though-it-kind-of-is judgment on how we spend our time?

Hey, this just in - everything we do takes time.  Every time we choose to do one thing, that's time we're not spending doing any of a million other things. That's just the way it is.

Is canning (or knitting) time consuming?  Absolutely.  Are you allowed to feel like knitting or canning aren't your cup of tea and you'd prefer to spend your time doing something else?  You're darn tootin'.  But where I get off is when that assessment is followed by a judgment on the value of how I choose to spend my time.  When it translates into "I wouldn't do what you're doing, because I have far more important things to do".

Yes, it takes time.  But I know that for every hour on my feet, every neck spasm, and every dramatic complaint from the kids about how "it stinks in here!!!", there will be excitement and authoritative pronouncements that Mum's sauce is the Best Sauce Ever this Winter.  And - to me - that makes the hours I spend canning well spent indeed.

Next time I get that kind of remark, I think I'm going to take a feather from my dear Grandma's cap and tell whomever that they can put a lid on it.  I've got more important things to do.

Happy Knitting, Everyone!

The Only Solution

This may come as a shock to many of you, but, well…. I can be a bit of a smart ass (I swear, I can actually HEAR my father laughing out loud right now).  Yes, it's true.  I have been known, at times, to display a fair bit of the smug.  Really.  You’d be surprised at how often I suppress the urge to let out a loud and heartfelt  “Well, DUH!”.

HAVING SAID THAT.

As you may or may not recall (see how I did that?  Just completely glossed over the fact that I haven’t blogged in just shy of a month.  Ahem.), a few weeks ago, I joined Stephen West’s Mystery KAL.  I have plenty of sock yarn, and I do so love his designs, I figured this would be great fun.  I didn’t bother  to knit a gauge swatch thought because, duh.  It’s a shawl, people.  I’m pretty sure it’s going to fit your basic human shaped person, right?  Nor did I concern myself too much with the fact that the yarn I had selected fell slightly short of the recommended yarns in the pattern because, duh-huuuuh.  Everyone knows projects rarely require ALL the yardage that’s stated in the pattern.  That’s just the designers’ way of messing with you covering their bases.

[The astute reader will at this point have noticed that, despite FULL knowledge of established Knitter Wisdom, this knitter flew RIGHT IN THE FACE of tested and true traditions and cast on without a care in the world.]

Everything was going swimmingly.  I was enjoying myself, and for ONCE, was actually up to date with the clues as they were coming out.  The first 3 clues were charming, and I was really looking forward to the final clue coming out and having a completed project to share with my awesome and loyal blog readers (see what I did again?)

The final clue has you knitting the edges of the shawl, decreasing from 83 stitches down to 9 at a rate of 2 stitches every 8 rows.  Yeah, I know it's a bit technical.  Anyway, the point is that there I was, happily knitting away, when it occurred to me that this last clue was somewhat knit heavy, and that my 2 balls of yarn were feeling, shall we say.... a little less than full?  I started to think that I might maybe perhaps run out of yarn.

Total and utter shock, people.  No idea how it could have happened.

This is hand dyed yarn, there's no way I can get any more.  What to do?  At first, I did what we all tend to do when we suspect we're going to run out of yarn: I knit faster.  When that proved ineffective (as it often does), I decided there was nothing for it but to rip back to the beginning of the final clue and increase the rate of the decreases (from 2 stitches per repeat to 4.  That would definitely work, but after about 5 pattern repeats, I started to feel like the edges of my shawl were looking a little too stumpy, and that maybe I should go back to the original decrease rate of 2 stitches every 8 rows.

Now I'm about to finish the first edge, and the balls of yarn that were disappearing faster than a teenager asked to empty the dishwasher appear to have as much yardage in them as they did when I first cast on.  I think they may even have MORE yarn in them than when I ripped back.  Which is making me wonder if I would have had enough yarn after all, and maybe I should rip back AGAIN and knit it the way Stephen West intended.

You know what this means, right?  I mean... there's really only one option at this point.

I'm going to have to cast on a pair of socks.

Happy Knitting, Everyone!