Life's a Stitch

You’ve dropped a stitch. Panic or calm? Depends upon the behaviour of your yarn. I used to panic immediately, but now I know there are some yarns whose stitches will patiently wait for you to get back to them for picking up. Brown Sheep’s Lambs Pride worsted is a pleasure in that regard. Also Briggs and Little, as one of my knitting instructors said referring to B&L, “those stitches will stand at attention and wait for you to pick them up.” I’ve just started a Caryn’s Kerchief (from Foxyknits), made from Koigu KPPM. It’s my first Koigu experience and now I know what the fuss is all about. It is so well behaved, and good-looking, too:

Then there are those yarns that jump off the needles and run all the way home before you can even catch your breath. Some of those drapy, liquidy synthetics. Take one of those stitches off the needle and it melts before your very eyes. The combination of those with slippery Addi needles equals two steps forward and one step back.

I cannot get that song out of my head. It is an earworm par excellence. The clock made it home in one piece. It was actually taken apart and arrived in 20 boxes. It’s ticking and chiming at home in its third country in 147 years. Amazing. Even our resident Swiss miss commented that it seems a new family member ” ‘as arreeved.”

Progress on Mari’s poncho; it looks like a grey blob. A comfy grey blob:

Knit night was last night. While I was plugging away on Mari’s poncho something glimmery caught my eye. It was the GGH Fee I had seen in WA last year and have regretted not buying. It was the exact ice blue with silver that I’ve lusted for, four feet away from me. And now it lives in my house, happily ever after. Do I get too much pleasure from this? Of course the comment from my unenlightened resident boys was “It looks like it has dried blobs of glue in it.”

Oh well, I have a bored complainy boy here. My favourite saying is “Children who know how to read can never be bored.” What a mommy comment. Truthfully, he needs to go out, just like the dog, and get some exercise, so off we go…

I am home alone. This does not happen often. I’ve taken a day off here and there to rest up and try to get this heart beating to the sound of a recognizable drummer.

Bryant and Chuck are off to the States to accept delivery of a very special object. When Chuck was a small boy he accompanied his father to the train station, hours away, to pick up an antique grandfather clock. In his youth his father did chores for two elderly sisters in Denmark who eventually left him the clock. His dad told Chuck that the clock would be his someday. Today is the day. Chuck is taking Bryant to the truck depot to repeat history. This bit of family history is important because we live so far apart from anybody remotely related. This will be quite an adventure with the customs stuff at the border.

Making the decision to live far away from home has come with many consequences. We never had family members to help out with babysitting, the kids grew up without the company of cousins, we don’t run into classmates and childhood friends, all the objects of our youth were left behind… This has made me a terrible hoarder, especially when it comes to my children’s keepsakes. Home alone, nobody to attend to, I should be clearing through my piles of stuff. I can live with task oriented clutter but my closet is ridiculous. So instead I have accomplished some serious knitting, working on three UFO’s. I just put in a load of laundry to ease the guilt.

The continuation of Mari’s poncho:

That’s not the right picture – I deleted it by mistake – it has a few more inches on it.

Today’s rant – cell phone contracts. I am halfway through a three year cell phone contract. My phone has died. I didn’t buy an extended warranty because, except for cars, I don’t believe they are worth it. I accept the fact that I must pay for a new phone but I’m having a hard time accepting paying the charge for switching the account to the new phone. They get you coming and going. Our phone company is Telus. So, I went to buy the new phone with the $199 price tag and was told it would cost $249 because of the service charge. I explained that Telus told me I could transfer the account on-line for $10. He refused to sell me the phone at the advertised rate because I refused to pay $49 extra to have them set it up. He told me that I could buy the same Telus phone at a different store for $199, but that if he sold it to me his boss would deduct $149 from his pay cheque. He actually followed me back to my office (in the same building) trying to convince me to buy that phone. Bizarro customer service. Someone get me my knitting. Here is Bryant’s version (easier to read if you click on it):

Mari’s poncho to date:

Yes, that is anotoher “Very Harlot Poncho” from Yarn Harlot. I love that pattern.

Finally the autumn view from our deck – that’s the mist rising from the Capilano River:

Sometime a quickie knit is just so darn satisfying. An entire shawl in weekend, a poncho in five evenings… That’s exactly the case with my Trendsetter Dune shawl. I knit it twice in a satisfying amount of time. Truthfully it was almost three times – it was originally the Bias stole pattern that came with my Fiesta LaBoheme. That’s the one I stopped at scarf size because I thought it was looking baby blanketish. The second effort was the same pattern with Estelle Watercolors held together with Eros. The colour was still too pastel and one of my co-workers bought it from me. Third time’s a charm – here it is, the original bias stole shawl pattern completed in Trendsetter Dune. Complete in a week of evening knitting:

Second daughter was home for the long weekend. I was so pleased when she asked me to knit her a poncho. At first, her choice in yarn didn’t thrill me, but it’s knitting up nicely. I thought it looked reminiscent of my childhood dog, a schnauzer. Who can complain about $16.99 Cdn for a poncho that will be practically indestructo. Washability is important in dorm life.

My son asked if the opposite of masterpiece was disasterpiece. I liked that. I’ve knit a few of those. I have a chenille sweater I almost finished a few years back when I first started back in knitting. I was just about done when Ms.Gracee May chewed up the top of the back. I stuffed it into a bag and recently took a look at it. It’s fixable but that Chenille is so UGLY. I tried frogging it but the chenille comes out as a naked string.

How can you stay mad at a face like this:

I’m in the midst of re-knitting my lengthwise scarf disasterpiece. And I’m liking it a whole lot better.

The product of my weekend efforts, a finished Rippling Waters scarf:

I have been demoted to the shortest person in my family. I used to be second tallest and now I am last. Trying to think positively here – when I make a sweater for myself it will the most reasonable one in the family since I don’t need as much yarn. My scarves can be the shortest, too.

Right now we have another family member, who also happens to be taller than me. She is a French-speaking student from Switzerland who will be with us until Christmas. We have hosted more than 50 students and I consider myself a good communicator, so how come it took three weeks to figure out that her mother works in a knit shop? Marielle, herself, is very creative, having studied jewellery design. She wears a beautiful sweater, done in the tiniest of cables that she knitted – one of her first efforts. Such talent.

We learn a lot from the experience of hosting students. Last night at the dinner table my son trapped a spider underneath an overturned glass. She said at home, they do this with a bee when they eat outside. The bee sends vibes (she pronounced it “veebs”) to the others indicating danger and the others stay away. Have to try it with the wolf spiders here in BC. If you know about spiders in the Pacific NW, they are huge, hairy and scary looking. They are not particularly dangerous and more people get hurt running away from them than from the spider itself.

It’s Canadian Thanksgiving. We are lucky, we celebrate Thanksgiving twice. I buy an extra large turkey and save half the breast for US Thanksgiving, which is invariably on a work day for us. I remember when we moved to Canada twenty years ago and we couldn’t afford a turkey at the then very expensive Cdn prices. I bought hamburger and a turkey cookie cutter and we had “turkey” burgers. There were a few tears shed that night. We were really homesick.

Every year we go around the table and announce one thing for which we are thankful. For year I was thankful for my job in an area with high unemployment. My eldest daughter used to say “I’m thankful for our nice wum (warm) house.” This year, besides the many obvious things I could mention, I am thankful for our jetted bath tub. It was a stretch at the time, and is not very fancy, but now, in middle age I am so appreciative.

Look, what else did I do today? I smell possum blocking:

Gracee had a taste for knitting as well:

It’s Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. I had a difficult time in the beginning celebrating Thanksgiving before Halloween, but now I’m used to it. Canadian Thanksgiving is officially on a Monday, but people generally pick one day of the long weekend for the turkey dinner. You could actually manage three days of feasting if you juggled invitations.

We’ve established a tradition involving a visit from our friends from Seattle. Marsha and I hit the yarn shops and Talbots, a treat for her in Canadian dollars. Dave and Chuck work on a project, this time preparing for the new Allan Brick retaining wall. I can picture those guys stacking those bricks like giant fifty pound Legos. Marsha and Dave own Riley the Airedale. Another cutie with a big nose, he looks just like a stuffed animal:

Ok, I confess. When I see a cute dog on my screen, I’ve been known to pat its head with my cursor.

I spent the entire day in emergency. It was a heck of a way to get a day or two off. If you’ve read my “About Me” you know I have an annoying arrhythmia. It’s been under control for six years with a drug called Rhythmol. Clever name. Yesterday, I had an episode of tachycardia for 40 minutes. I drove to a clinic and was reamed out by the dr for not having gone directly to emerg. Despite all the complaints about socialized medicine, I rec’d super treatment. Looks like another type of rhythm problem, not life threatening if controlled. The most frustrating part – the oxygen monitor on my finger kept me from knitting. As soon as they took it off I had needles in hand and was very productive. The dr commented that I was the second patient he saw knitting that day. I made it to knit night, too. I couldn’t think of anything less stressful.

So, we’re talking at knit night about unique yarns. I was knitting with my Cherry Tree Hill Possum yarn, others talked about scarves they had seen made from sheared beaver and the woman they had seen at a fibre arts festival who had something she made with hair from her dog. Now I love my dog, but not enough to wear her. Besides in this climate, with all the rain, wet dog smells like something even a mother couldn’t love. So we talk about how they get the hair from the animals. Something I remember reading said that possum is a politically correct fur. So what do they do? Comb the possums? We imagined crossing the border into the States, being asked our profession, and stating it as possum comber. We decided, however, it sounds better than beaver shearer.

I never thought about when I block my possum. I wonder what it will smell like? “Like dead, wet roadkill,” says the son. Congratulations, Mrs. Boesen, it’s a boy!

Stash enhancement – Trendsetter Dune in the everglades colour. The name of the colour appealed to me. When it arrived I realized how much other yarn I have in the same colouway – greeny, purplish, bluey combinations. Mail order gets expensive when you start the exchange/return habit. So it’s here to stay, seven skeins of everglades: