Life's a Stitch

It's done and I'm happy with it. It's different making a comfort/prayer blanket for someone you don't know, as it was a request from a special acquaintance. I did know this – it was made for a young man who experienced similar losses to my own at similar ages. So I did the best I could, knitting into it reflections on loss, resilience and good hopes for his future.

Soon it will join the Free and Easy Pie Wedge Shawl that I made for his sister.

The details:

Pattern: the Bob Blankie by Mags Kandis

Yarn: James C. Brett Marble Chunky two skeins each of two colourways.

Finished size: 45×58 excluding the fringe.

If I were to make one again I'd do the braids as I go. I didn't do that in the first half and encountered some unravelled frustration. I reflected on that, too 😉

Still on the needles – the Bob Blankie for Craig:

In the same colourway – Riley, Blogless Marsha's Airedale:

Isn't he sweet?

That's how I spent my weekend.

I've written a lot about the differences between now and then. How the way we do things has changed, much if it at a much higher cost. Take veterinary care. Old Dr. Burt just retired. At Gracee's last annual check, which was performed for the cost of the shots, he discovered a little cyst on her eyelid. He had Chuck hold her while he snipped it off. She didn't even flinch.

New school vet, annual check-up, wants to do bloodwork and a urine test as part of the routine, She sees another little cyst and informs us it will cost $1000 to remove including the additional bloodwork and the general anesthesia. And by the way, if she's not comfortable with her skills once in progress, she may refer us to a doggie eye specialist. We've found another pet hospital where they were confident it could be accomplished for less than half the price.

Really, I'm not a bad dog mom, but I'm suffering from sticker shock. You see, this past weekend, poor Gracee got really sick. Her digestive tract shut down and she went in for some emergency IV rehydration and a series of barium x-rays. Silly dog is now fully recovered from her licking up potting soil on the deck escapade. $875 bill. We are fortunate in the fact that we still have a small canine health insurance policy that I had been considering cancelling.Who would've thought it would come to this? Much like human health care I have a feeling that hard decisions are made that are difficult to afford.

So here's Gracee, hiding amongst the furniture legs so I can't catch her, not thrilled with having 3cc's of chalky white stuff being squirted down her throat three times a day. She doesn't look too bad from the front end, but the other end didn't fare so well. Does anyone know how to get barium out of dog hair?

I took out my stress in heavy duty knitting. Too heavy, as a matter of fact. The last time I had knitting tendinitis like this was when C was in the hospital for his heart attack.

You know how kids slip stuff into the shopping cart when you're not looking? They never outgrow it. I took three 18 yr olds down to WA with me a few weeks back. We always stop at the local Fred Meyer for the weekend's groceries. You DON'T want to get caught at the border with anything uncooked, but that's a story for another time.

At the checkout I discover I've paid for Fruity Pebbles, a six pack of Pabst and frozen White Castle hamburgers. Yesterday B saw these:

Grapples, that would be grape flavoured apples. Grape flavoured apples at a buck a piece. I had heard about interesting fruit crosses and this one intrigued me so I gave in. I should have read the label. They are nothing more than mere apples infused with artificial flavouring. They weren't too bad, like eating apples and washing them down with grape drink.

Much older and presumably wiser, C slipped this in today at our local Italian grocery store. Ah, Bosa Foods, but that, too, is another story:

His weakness. Not a battle I'm choosing to fight this time. It was only 35 grams of bad.

I slipped something into my cart this week, too. My e-bay cart. A bag of Noro Silk Garden in one of the lighter colourways, perfect for a springy Lady Eleanor the Second. I'll show you a picture when it gets here. We all need to cheat with a treat now and then.

Thank for all the B-Day wishes. It was a perfect weekend starting with:

A welcome surprise from Mandy's (refer to my last post about hiding her identity) son, who true to form, graciously vacated his downtown Seattle view apartment so his mom and I could have a girl's weekend. OK, you 20 something knitters, this man is available.You know what they say about men? Watch how he treats his mother and that's how he'll treat you. This guy is super sweet:

Then our mystery woman took me to the Elsebeth Lavold exhibit at the Nordic Heritage Museum, Knitting Along the Viking Trail. Spectacular! Only disappointment was that the pieces were displayed as art, which they fully deserved, but without mention of the yarn used as well as the pattern sources.

The weekend ended with the often maligned, but wonderful, Mr. Manilow. Uttering his name, I've found, elicits extreme emotion. Read the comments from my last post. You either love him or hate him. It doesn't matter, this 65 year old performer's concert where everyone sings along, waving (albeit free) glow sticks, deserves some credit. The techno version of Could It Be Magic was hard to take at first, but it was OK. Really. His acapella encore of One Voice, dedicated to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, was the real magic. Even our reluctant Mandy enjoyed it.

During the weekend we hit four Seattle yarn shops and all I spent was
$2.50, adding to my Scottie button collection. The Canadian customs inspector  questioned me. "What," she said incredulously, "you went all the
way down there to see Barry Manilow and you didn't bring home any concert
souvenirs?" Here's my big purchase:

So, Mandy (did I mention she's blogless?) told me she fessed up at work that she was going with me to  see Barry Manilow. Thank you Blogless Marsha for a wonderful birthday weekend.

It was one of those morning dreams. Do you get those? When you awaken too early, fall back asleep to inexplicably bizarre dreams? In this one my LYS, but not my real my LYS, was going out of business. I hadn't made it to the final sale so I ran down at 4:45 in time for their 5:00pm final closing. The owner told me I had a $58 credit and she gave it to me in cash. I said "Good, now I can buy some yarn."

As if that wasn't good enough, an employee pulled me aside and asked if I'd be interested in accompanying her to France for a yarn tour, also marked down. I was surprised because I didn't picture us as friend material. I was pleased she asked me and off we went. And you know what happened then? I woke up. 

I'm going to live out my travelling dreams this weekend for my birthday, not quite so far. C offered to take me to see Barry Manilow in Washington for my birthday before he realized he had to work this weekend. That's his story and he's sticking to it. So instead, I'm taking the train to meet a friend who has sworn me to secrecy lest her friends find out she's seeing Barry Manilow. Don't worry, Mandy (her code name), your secret is safe with me 😉

It seems half the birthdays of my life are in springtime and half in winter. This one's looking like winter:

How much yarn will your vacuum eat from the time it take its first bite until you flick the off switch?

Oh about four and a half grams, enough for a third of a wedge of the Free and Easy Pie Shaped Shawl. Luckily it sucked down yarn from the skein end, just like an endless piece of spaghetti, not touching the already knitted portion.

About this, the second F&EPSS I'm making with the same yarn, but in stockinette rather than garter stitch, I think the colour definition is better in the second, but it suffers from stockinette roll:

Since this time I elected to start with a provisional cast on, maybe I can add some weight to that end with some sort of sawtooth edge to mirror the bottom. Hopefully that will encourage it to straighten out.

Next time? I think I'll stick to the garter stitch version. What do you think?

We have gotten two kids through college with the agreement that we
pay for three years, they pay for the fourth. The third child, AKA the
shock (not because he was a surprise, he was very well planned, but
that he was a boy after two girls), is finishing year one. It's a good
thing economically. We spent a long time saving for those educations
and with the current downturn, I don't know how much more we could
afford. Right, you say, what's with all the yarn expenditures?
Oh well, we all have our weakness, but true to our purchasing habits, hardly anything is bought at full price.

I was reviewing this month's credit
card bill and it was apparent Mr. C fed the economy hobbywise. In a stange way it was
comforting to see that the worm had turned. That's a woodworking pun. Going
down the list there was Home Depot, Canadian Tire (tool dept), Rona
Home Centre, Dick's Lumber, Summit Tools, House of Tools and Busy Bee
Tools. What about Home Hardware, I asked? Oh, I paid cash there, he
replied. That's a guy bill if I ever saw one, said our friend, Doug.
Having no room to talk, I agree. We all need a spree now and then and
hopefully his will have some payback. I'm going to spend (poor choice
of words) some time in the near future setting up his ETSY shop for
shawl pins and related items – Woodenknit. Good name, eh? Thanks to
Doug for coming up with that one. 

I smell another expense. If you find any missing "r's" from this
post it's because my computer has, in the middle of this post, suffered
a freak accident leaving its "r's" with a partial disability. It was a
near miss computer drop. I managed to catch it by the "r" key, bending
it out of shape. Arrrgh. I had to press hard to type that.

Pattern: Free and Easy Pie Wedge Shawl – from the 2005 Knitting Pattern a Day calendar and on the ball band of Helen's Lace yarn.

Yarn: Fleece Artist Baby Curls (discontinued).

Needles: Size 9 US

Impressions: Three weeks of stress free knitting from start to finish. That is until I stretched the too tight cast on edge and heard a pop:

Technical stuff: Thinking I had taken every precaution, casting on loosely over two needles, it was still too tight. I took a deep breath and treated the edge as a provisional cast on using E. Zimmerman's fool proof sewn bind off and voila, a perfect edge, matching the sewn bind off on the other side. It worked out so well that I've used a provisional cast on for the second one.

The rest of the story: This was made in response to a prayer shawl request. It's a perfect pattern, given to me by a mom who had made one for her daughter. The recipient will be a daughter who has lost both her mom and dad, as well as her good friend. It's light as angel wings with the colour of the rainbow.

You know when the household garbage starts piling up in the waste basket? When one person puts one more thing on top instead of taking the garbage out? I heard the perfect term for this condition which afflicts my kitchen and one particular bathroom on a regular basis. It's called Garbage Jenga, after the tower stacking game. One false move and it all comes tumbling down.

Gracee loves Garbage Jenga. Especially in that bathroom, she likes the Q-Tips, which require the precise positioning of her front teeth for the pull. She's also an expert Jenga tissue puller, that dog. She considers Kleenex a treat. Could be worse. Here's the guilty party, after a hard day of Garbage Jenga, using a felted bag as a pillow:

There, that satisfies the knitting content requirement.