Six is Not Enough

No pictures today.  Most of yesterday was sewing and not the inspiring kind.  There is a bit more to do of that sort today, but then,..

I have a few other errands to do as well as go through some material for some classes I am taking and then, before i know it, it will be time for The practise sessions at the Grand Prix in Mexico.  The day will be full and busy and interesting.  

And there will be knitting.  i have a blanket to work on that I have been forgetting for far too long and it would be great to get that out of my way.  

Sock Monkey Cabin Blanket, you are calling my name.  Six is really not enough.

Any Day Now

After being energised by the ghost costume, I sat down and did a bunch of household sewing yesterday.  There is more to do.  there is always more, but still, it filled a need and I am happy to have that done.  There is a bit more on that pile for today, but after that, sewing will get interesting again for me, if not for you.

When the sewing was completed, I wanted something simple but interesting to knit.  The lovely striped sweaters were not it.  I wanted socks.  I really could use them too.  This is always the time of year when socks die and the sock drawer assumes I have some new socks waiting in the wings.  Usually I do, but not right now.  Right now, I have nine different sock events on the go, but only one has a single sock complete.  

I dug through the depths of the sock project bags, but couldn't find the one I was thinking to work on.  I settled for this one, which was ready for a heel.

Unfortunately for this sock, I was looking for a second end from the sock ball so I could double strand the heel and before you know it, half the ball was out on the floor.

I thought I was working with the inner end, but no, contrary to common practise, the ball had both inner and outer ends coming from the center, all mashed up together.  The ball had obviously been looked at somewhere along the way to me, and it took half the day to sort it out.  I ended up cutting the  sock off the ball with a good long tail, and rewinding a good socks worth.  Then with two ends coming from places I understood, I started the heel.  

It will be fine, better than.  I just need to get some socks done.  Winter will be here any day now.

In Defense of Old Books

I know what to knit next, and yes, it is the things for Carter and Marcus.  But I have to wait for a budgetary opening to be able to get the material required.  sigh.  Life happens and sometimes the knitting does indeed have to wait.

In the meantime, it isn't like there isn't plenty to knit.

I pulled out this pretty thing and worked on that most of the afternoon.  It is now over nine inches long so I am just over halfway on the body.  This is thrilling because with the very lacey mohair, its a slower knit than most.  Still, it is a gift and I can't wait to see Luda wear it.  Christmas maybe?

I am also thinking hard about the next thing I really want to work on, and surprisingly, it may very well be one that is already in the stream of WIPS.  

It is the Scandinavian Star Vest from Chryl Oberle's Folk Vests.  This was one of the first books I bought when I started knitting.  It was a bit 'old' even then, but it is filled with timeless things.  My fingers are looking forward!

Do take a look  at these older project books.  There are some really wonderful pieces in them and I hate the thought of them going missing for a generation till the knitter's of the future find them on some dusty shelf in an abandoned library.  Find them now.  Enjoy them now.  Get the word out.  

Today's idea

One of the very few things I can do for mom and dad , living far away as I do is to try to keep up their spirits with the weirdness and silliness of the world.  So every time I think of something they might enjoy, I am off, writing a letter to my dad.  I have been doing this for a while now, so if the blog is spare and odd, that is why.  They are getting the best stuff (if I have best stuff that is).

But writing letters takes time.  I am surprised at how much time.  When you watch characters in Jane Austen write to their loved ones, it seems there is always stuff to write and it is done on an elegant afternoon, in front of a sunny window with a good view and ones hair curling effortlessly over ones shoulder, dressed to the nines in a simple but stylish garment.  If you read any decent biographies of people of the day, you will find letters often took days and it was something that was done quite carefully.  Austen has several samples of such things in her books as well as in her letters as collected.

I tend to write once a week, though sometimes, subject matter fails me.  Keith is a not too bad source of things, but the kids, the kids are a treasure trove of good stuff to write about.

There is always some one doing something goofy or weird.  Or worse!  But finding the subject matter is something I try to do with great care.  

This next week and a bit is going to be a treasure with Halloween coming up so soon.  And fast as ever things follow along, Christmas.  So much to tell before those days.

Sadly, this does leave the blog with not a lot to write about.  Take today, for instance.  Zip.  Nada.  I haven't knit in three days nor done anything else remotely craftlike.  What I have done is cut some fabric for an around the house project and sewn the sides of some old white curtains for a ghost costume.  

What I can tell you today is that this tiny venture into the sewing room is making me hunger to do some more work in there.  As ever pants!  T-shirts!  Sleepwear! More dresses!!! I still have a long list on my list of things I could really use to dress properly.  

Still I will save that for tomorrow.  If I wrote about that today, I would have little to say then and I wouldn't have gotten anything done today but writing.  

Not that that is a bad idea.  It just isn't today's idea.

Better but is it Done?

And done.

It's such a small difference and yet, it is so much better.  

Now the question is Do I make it longer?  It is cropped, and looks good but it still needs to be a sweater and keep me warm..I'm not a hundred percent sure if it does that.  

I will wear it today and then I will decide.

Cutting!!!!

Yesterday's chores involved taking a scissors to the knitting and cutting.  Harsh, but necessary to make this a really wearable sweater for me.  

It's my version of Threipmuir and no matter how much I loved it, I wasn't wearing it and you can see on this photo why.  It bunched up at my neck and no amount of blocking kept it out,.  It is probably knit a little to tightly at the start leaving me feeling choked.  It is a bit short, I think too, though honestly, I am not sure I wore it long enough to really know for sure.  Still more length wouldn't hurt and I do have the yarn.

The firs brave snips took a whole section right off.  

After that it was a matter of getting one leg of each good stitch on the needle and pulling off the excess partial rows above.  

The yarn here is Briggs and Little Sport, on of the best stickiest yarns on the planet.  It wasn't going anywhere...not even when I wanted it to.  There were bits and pieces of the cut row to pull out and two rows of knitting to get me right where I wanted to be to start knitting a new neck ribbing.  It took all afternoon.

In the end, the job is done and I am kind of looking forward to making this one be even better than the first go round.

My next up trick is going to be getting the ghost costume started.  Yup.  A ghost factory is what we are.

Winter green.

There is nothing like wearing a sweater you have just finished, particularly when it is a warm an cozy garment.  It's perfect from the deep but not wide v neckline, to the flash of rust at the hand pocket, to the rolled hem wihch is the perfect longer in the back than on the front.  Sigh.  Perfect and it is mine.

You still can't really tell the rich deep green from this picture.  It's just not a colour that works well in photography indoors.  Now outdoors is a whole other thing.  

Normally, this is where I would be pounding off to start Marcus sweater , but it seems I got that wrong.  He wanted a red mitt and a blue mitt and a yellow sweater.  Which means I am going to have to ask Carter what he wanted, because he was talking about some weird stuff earlier that same day.  I shall consult with the boys and then I guess go shopping for yarn.  I do not have any yarn in yellow for boys sweaters.  

A whole week of blogging too!

No pictures today.  The sleeve still awaits.  I had several things I had to do yesterday. You can only put some things off so long.  Those things are done, but it didn't lead to more knitting.  I have been sitting up routinely this summer till at least 9 before heading off to my room, but now, as fall comes in, I feel the urge to crawl into bed once it is dark.  So seven p.m. was my crawling into bed time last night.  And I did sleep.  Long and peacefully.

So today I face the sleeve and once that is done, the v neckline finish and then, the sweater is done.  I am looking forward to it.  I needed another good workday sweeater.  My good things like my Hun were starting to be used that way, and i Love that too much to waste it on dishes and chores.  There might be another workday sweater for me before Christmas too.  You never know.

But first Marcus' sweater.  I am really looking forward to getting going on that.  I love that he loves his sweaters.

The green and the next thing.

Sleeve two is a go.  I got a decent way along it, though not as far as I dreamed I might.  My dream was unrealistic, if I am honest, particularly with the state of me and napping these days.  Napping has become my superpower and one of these days, I do indeed hope to resolve it so I can get more of the things I dream of done.

But as you can see, sleeve two is well underway.  I am just about to switch over to dpns and that is when knitting goes really fast.  

I usually keep the sleeve on my short circular tips till I get to the point where I don't have to turn the entire sweater to work around.  Once the sleeve is long enough to turn back and forth to work on and I don't have to worry about all the points and possible stitches slipping off,  I move to the dpns.  I don't know if I knit faster on them, but it seems to be faster and I really do enjoy it more.  

And that is what it is about, isn't it?  

Now for the next big thing, Marcus has asked me for a red sweater.  I want to give him a red sweater but I really don't want to have to buy more yarn.  But it needs to be superwash.  Really superwash.  I have a couple of lovely reds but not superwash.  I have one possibility but it is a four ply, in other words, fingering weight.  It's all cotton and would wash up like a jeans yarn and should be a great choice but fingering?  I may have to see what it looks like doubled.    

I will also need to make it a growing sweater and it is going to need some size.  My little boysand girls are all growing fast.  And so it goes.

Little mysteries.

By the end of the afternoon, I was deep into the swing of knitting.  I really felt like I could do more than a round at a time again, and that I could make visible progress and just sit back and go along for knitting's lovely madcap ride.

I finished sleeve one and sleeve two will be a go today.  I have nothing much else to do for a change and though I could join my online community today to knit I am just going to sit and watch a some old movies and maybe a Poirot or two for my general mental health and knit.  

Yes, once again, the Poirot thing is working.  It's a mystery to me.  Bahahahaha

I am not sure about the bottom edging with the rust on my sweater.   As you can see in the picture I completed the sleeve with ribbing.  I have a feeling I will redo it and change it out to ribbing too.  It has to do with the neckline.  

I wanted a nice deep neck and the v is nothing if not impressive.  But I have a really strong feeling that I am going to like the neck finish to be ribbing in plain green.  It's just a more classic workmanlike finish, simpler, plainer.  And this is a sweater I will wear through all the days tasks even if it has the very cool inside pocket colour detail (A little flash is a wonderful thing).You don't have to be plain to work.  

Anyway, the sweater will soon be done and then there is something special in the wind.

Yes. I still write this blog.  In my head I write it every day.  It's only when I wake in the morning, that I realize I had written nothing.  

It's a bit like that with knitting. 

It comes out and onto a pile and sits like this most of the day.  Occasionally, as I walk by, I knit a row or two.  I have advanced by a few decreasees but it doesn't look like much.  

And yet it should.  It's five inches long, my little sleeve, and when the total desired length before the bottom hemmy bit is ten inches, that's pretty good.  I need to look at this as much as a measure of my success as much as I look at the total length of my sleeve. 

Small knitting and invisible change.  This can be success as much as anything else. 

This is the sum total of my knitting this week.  

I had so hoped to be done.

My mom and dad are doing fine. A few med changes additions and subtraction, and starting to feel a bit more comfortable with the new way of eating and they are doing better.  Personally,  there was a doctoring  day, and a few struggles thereby, and then company for a couple nights while getting some things for mom ABC dad to make life easier, and today some housekeeping so I am ready for Thanksgiving company.

I miss knitting.

I miss it a lot.

Jane and Hercule

I thought I was past it.  I really did, but time and emotions and the way the world works can mess up the best of plans and the best of intentions.

It has been many months now since I had my man, Hercule Poirot in my bedroom all tidy in his boxed set.  For a long time, a movie or show on TV was rare.  I was reading a lot and when that was not enough, listening to my audio books.  I slept better than I had in years and lately, with the change in my medications, even better.  A full nights sleep?  It happened. I know.  What was up with that.  But since mid summer, everything was changing.  I was kind of glad when my little boys went back to school so I wouldn't have to pretend I was brave and could sleep without TV and sleep without a light on in my room.

In the past month, it has gotten so much worse.  I use the timer on the TV.  I know I sleep better without the extra light on, but each and every time it clicks off and the room gets dark, I wake and it has to go back on.  I thought it was just the sound of voices and did try books, but the same with audio books.  As soon as the screen went dark, I woke.  

I am exhausted during the day and  struggle to find the will to knit, even though it is what I most want to do.  But all i seem to be able to do is sleep.  It's light then and I don't need to worry about the dark apparently so it is a good sleep but I feel like an infant with their days and night all switched around.

I have written about it before, that when Brian got sick, I found comfort in the undemanding mysteries of Agatha Christie and how the series of Miss Marple and Mr. Poirot became very dear friends in an odd sort of way.  They helped me sleep.  They helped me not to think.  I am asking the same of them now.  I need to not think.  I need to pop on on and go to sleep comforted in the knowledge that they are there if I need them again.  I have a wee night light filched from the kids room to take care of the dark problem.  

I am going to need this for a while.  My struggles are connected to my mom and dad.  They have always been strong and generally healthy and other than the occasional big thing have not needed support or help from their kids.  But they are aging rapidly and my dad is getting very frail.  My dad, in particular has last the ability to swallow easily.  Everyone says he is so thin and frail and they all worry that his time with us is not long. \He is very anxious and I think he is feeling very alone and scared. I don't want him to feel that way but I worry too.  That is yet another piece of my framework that I may be losing soon and sweet heavens, as much as he fears going, I fear him leaving me to.  I am not ready for it.  

So I am bringing out the big guns to help restore a bit of something, be it the resolutions that Ms Christie always provides, or some other mystery. Poirot carried me through it before.  Maybe he will again.

I will knit tomorrow.  I will start a sleeve on the green sweater.  I will get that one thing done.  And I will have Jane and Hercule for company.

No matter how many sweaters I knit, when I near the end of the body, I am always a wee bit surprised.  It's such a big piece of work completed.

I am onto the last part of the rolled edging I wanted to do.  I made one tiny mistake.  I should have knit one stockinette row in green so the when I switched to the reverse stockinette portion, I would have had green bumps.  The way it is, the sneaky bit of colour is less hidden than I hoped.  Oh well. It isn't enough to bug me to reknit the row.  I will remember that detail for the rest of the rolled edges.  

There still are sleeves to knit, 3/4 sleeves mind you.  Each sleeve should be a day of work, but I will be wearing this very soon.

Forward for some and back for others

I am a tiny bit sluggish this morning.  I had an early a.m. meeting and it totally discombobulated my day.  However, I am thrilled to show you this.  

I am down to about 10 rows before I join the bottom of the pocket.  At some point I need to measure for length and do some short rows on the back side to make the whole back longer.  It won't be anything dramatically longer, just a nice long slope and an extra bit to cover off the ever present chill.  

Among the questions and revelations that I have come across the last while, there is also this.  Last fall and winter the ever present chill was not so ever present.  It seemed to have lessened somewhat and I thought bravo, my medication was working.  This summer and particularly this  fall,  the chill is back.  I am constantly chilly.  So back to the drawing board and maybe a change in meds.  Sigh. 

Pink

I got a giant parcel the other day from the fabric store.  It was large because I ordered a proper cushion for my chair and some other reupholstery supplies.  While I was getting the things I needed for that work, I decided to take a look at the fabrics I had been avoiding that.  I really have enough of that already but...well...there is always that thing you do not have.

This is the time of year when the buy 1 get 2 free wall can be a bit bare, so I was looking at a filter they called shirting.  It is everything that will make perfect shirts right down to a men's dress shirt.  It isn't only for guys, as the little bees kids fabric attested to and this time I found some more buffalo plaids.

I love plaids,  I always have but Brian wasn't a plaid person, or a print person and somewhere, subconsciously, I tended to avoid what he did not like.  Silly me.  They had some plaids there with a really great price on them, so I got one of my personal favourites, red and black.  

I bought it thinking of shirts but you know what?  Maybe a dress.  Wouldn't this be the most wonderful plain dress?  I think so and as I folded the fabric after giving it a wash, just fell in love with the idea.  Warmth and the ultimate comfort and ease.  

Then I changed the filter to filter for colour and looked only for pink fabrics.  I found a really lovely piece of  double gauze in a nice quiet but very pastel pink.

 If Cassie isn't game for it, then I guess I will be going pastel for at least one shirt.  Or maybe, just maybe, heaven willing, something for a baby coming in January.

And then I spotted it.  in pink.  So not my usual but it was exactly what I had been looking for for months.  Jess from Muna and Broad talked about a favourite pair of pants made in a pink fine wale courduroy and that took me into thinking about corduroy in general.  I know people make fun of it but a fine whale is lovely and warm and I am all about the warm.  The pink is a bit of a departure, but Cassie might like this pink for a dress/jumper/pinafore she liked. For me, this says shirt that lives it's life as a jacket.

 

I put the pink double gauze alongside so you could see its proper colour, a lovely warm rose rather than a pink.  I ordered a lot so no matter what Cassie wants to make and what I want to make there is lots of fabric to do it.  All in a bundle, it must weigh ten pounds.  It is heavy and warm and I think I am really going to enjoy whatever it becomes.  

I am trying to not go the the fabric store.  Looking online might be more dangerous than live shopping ever was because live, you are a bit limited by what you can carry to the cutting table while still leaving room for the cutting person to cut.  I don't have to carry it here, not even from the post office.  I have a saint for a roommate. 

I ought to be ready for sewing again next week.  There has been some other new to do stuff going on around here and I needed to get that established before I did anything else.  But summer is done and fall is here and warm things are on my mind. 

And specially for anyone who needs and wants to learn about stepping out of our comfort zone, I present Pink, who is layers and layers and layers, but no matter what layer you listen to, it is something special.

Step outside your boundaries,  Go coduroy.  

Merry Middles

The merry middle.  

That old children's story, Piggy in the Puddle has been running through my head for the last few days.  Everything I am knitting is in the middle.  And I do mean everything. Looking at my Ravelry projects page, it isn't absolutely true.  There are quite a few things that are just started, and one thing that is almost done, but most of the things are in the middle.  Even my socks, all 9 pairs of them are middle, some on the first sock, some on the second but in a middle.  

It could get me down but I don't really mind middles.  Middles are where the cool things really start to show.  Middles are where a project starts displaying itself in its glory.  Like this.

The inside of the pocket is just long enough to show the flash of colour that I was hoping for.  

Today, middles are pretty great.  Today middles are inspiring.  Today middles are very satisfying.  

This is a very merry middle indeed.

Psst, if you need a really great kids book for your little ones, here is a link. Piggy in the Puddle by Charlotte-Pomerantz 

Magic

I changed the sheets on my bed yesterday.  It's a completely insignificant thing in the big scheme of things but I am writing about it today because yesterday was the day I put on the full winter bedding.

My full winter bedding goes like this:  sheet, wool blanket, cotton quilt, wool filled comforter and it was the blanket that I added to the mix yesterday.  Putting on that last bit of bedding helps to sort out stuff with no place to go in my room, ie, the wool blanket in it's storage bag is no longer just taking up a corner, it is actively doing its job.  One less disaster corner. 

But the best part is a secret only known to those of us who use a wool blanket on their beds. A blanket provides a whole different level of warm.  

Comforters are great, do not get me wrong on that.  I made mine a few years ago and made a second one for my guest room and I love them and I am gradually changing over everyone else's mind about heavy thick wool comforters, one child at a time.  A comforter lays over you, capturing all your body warmth and holding it like a coccoon around you, protecting you from the chill of the night.  The air space it holds around you it its superpower.

But a blanket is different.  A wool blanket is flexible and its magic is that it drapes close to you, tucking right alongside you, connecting you directly to warmth and coziness.  It's a direct pathway to ultra warm.  Perhaps its superpower is that a soft woollen blanket, tucked close is the underwear of the blanket world..  

And just like the long johns of my childhood, having this last layer on my bed means I am ready for what comes.  

As I lay there, not hot, just incredibly cozy and cradled, I thought of mom and dad and winters in the house before dad fixed the central heating, and how my nose would stick out just above my layers of blankets, and it would breath in the chilly air, but everything below my nose was quite contentedly warm.   I felt surrounded by safety and comfort, just as if mom and dad were just next door and would save me no matter what  was in my dreams.

It was very hard getting out of bed this morning.  Incredibly hard.  And if I am honest, I am looking forward to getting back into it tonite.

My blanket was one of my presents to myself from the PEI portion Epic adventure.  It was supposed to be for on the guest bed but I need it more.  Blankets are still available for an extremely reasonable price from that same source, MacAusland's Woolen Mill and in this time of people looking for ways to cut costs, turn down your heating just a bit and turn up your wool power.

Get a blanket. 

It's laughing at me.

It.  Never.  Ends.

I have been knitting sections with this small bit of yarn for three days last week, and over the whole weekend.  There is abundant progress on the length of the sweater, but this ball of yarn is not shrinking.  At least half of the sweater is complete and that bit?  That bit is still the first ball.

There is also a problem with the mohair. 

The mohair isn't shrinking either.  It's just sitting there, sticking to itself enough that you have to give it a really good yank when you pull some out to work with. There is only one ball of this.

I know how it goes though.  One minute, I have tons of yarn.  I have acres and could almost make a second sweater.  Snd then, blammo.  I will look up ten feet from the last bit of bound off edging and \I will end up short.

Lots of yarn?  Sure.  I know how this goes.  It's laughing at me.

Light Knitting and Grief

This morning I feel as if I need some relief.  I think I know what it is from but that is for later in thinking time and thinking time is just another word for knitting time.

I pulled this out yesterday afternoon.  

I wish you could see the true colour.  It is just so incredibly lovely.  It is also hard to knit.  There are only four rows of mohair in a set but each stitch needs taking care of so that i can be sure to catch it.  It is not a speed knit.  

There are times though, when this slow knitting feels absolutely right.  

I am finding the passing of the queen much more of a personal loss than I ever imagined it could be.  She is so far away and other than a figure head, she played little in the day to day world I live in.  And yet, I feel such loss.  I find I have to stay away from news because so much of the "news" is an individual who is no more connected to her than I am, opining on some small imagined slight by someone or other to someone or other.  There are body language so called 'experts' who make pronunciations on things that were decided years ago. It angers me.  Leave these people alone.  They just suffered a huge personal loss and they deserve better from us.  She gave us her all, her everything, and maybe just maybe in the interest of human decency, we should allow them to grieve.  No family is without division, no family is without strains and stresses and no one wants the whole world looking in and commenting on it.  So leave them alone to grieve.

What will happen can happen down the road.  Will that family heal their wounds?  Maybe?  Will we love King Charles as we loved his mum?  Maybe. Will we let the little ones of the family be children?  I sure hope so. But for now, let them grieve.