Life's a Stitch

Look at the difference between this year and last:

I’ve been out of town this week, no time to post, so I’ll leave you with my scarf at the halfway mark. You can get a good idea of the drapiness in the first and the colour in the second.

When all the world is a hopeless jumble,
and the raindrops tumble all around,
heaven opens a magic lane…

(Over the rainbow, Arlen-Harburg, 1939)

Our house this year, with the 17 year old, has been a struggle. Academics have not been his strong suit and his highlight in the school play was over shadowed by an act of poor judgment. Each day begins with a battle to get him out of bed and often times ends with a pointless discussion prompted by a letter, sent in the mail by a teacher, paradoxically called a progress note. So we grab our successes when we can.

If you have five minutes watch this. Please forgive my bragging, I do try to avoid such behaviour outside of knitting of course. Here’s the boy, in his team’s prize winning 72 hour film festival entry, Capeless. Their requirements were that they use film noir as their genre, use a paintbrush as a prop, and begin or end the film with the line "I’m going to need to borrow your car." Bryant wrote the screenplay, wrote and performed the score and was the primary actor. He won the prize for best composer of an original score and his teammate won for best cinematographer. It proves to us how successful he can be when something catches his interest. We just have to get this guy through traditional high school and on to other things.

PS: If you can’t get the video to run, go to Youtube and search for Capeless. It’s about the second one down.

In BC we call it budging, elsewhere it’s cutting in or jumping the queue. It bugs me. I can’t figure it out – is it a laid back West Coast thing or a Canadian trait, but here, people are generally good about taking turns. Lining up to cross the Lion’s Gate Bridge, where three lanes merge into one, people take turns. At MacDonald’s, people dutifully form one line behind an imaginary point and funnel in succession as clerks become available.

I say generally, because there is always an exception and it always happens to be when I’m in line. For instance, waiting for a chance to wash my car at the self serve car wash. There are three stalls and I’m sitting there waiting for the next one to become available. In comes a car that zooms around me to wait for stall #1. I get brave and approach the guy (no generalizations here, but today at the bank with a neatly formed queue, awaiting for the door to open, an employee comments on how orderly we look. Two of us observed that it must have something to do with gender).

Back to the car wash "Excuse me," says I, "I’ve been waiting."

"That’s not the way you do it," says the driver.

"That’s the way I do it at the bank and at MacDonald’s,"  I tell him.

That’s not what you do here." he says in an exasperated tone, "so which one do you want, make up your mind.

Very politely I say, "I want the one that you’re in." I take secret pleasure watching him back up and move to stall #2.

I’m sure he was thrilled, however, to see that he beat me into his stall by 30 seconds.

On the way home I witness another form of budging, the person who sneaks through a stop sign on the heels of the car in front of her, not waiting for for her turn. She proves that it has nothing to do with gender. All I could think of is "You’d better be in labour, honey."

As long as I’m witchin’ about stuff, let me turn on myself and my inability to visualize what a seemingly beautiful handpainted yarn will look like when knit up. Many times I’m disappointed. This time,however, I lucked out:

That’s Lorna’s Laces Shepherd’s sock yarn in Gold Bar and a faux version of the Montego Bay scarf pattern from Interweave Knits. I found similar stitch pattern in a book and, as they also say in Canada, Bob’s your uncle.

Extra, Extra – Did you see that the current Vogue has an Alice Starmore pattern? What a treat. An A-S pattern without the hundreds of dollar expense of a kit!

Now for the C word.Yes, I’ve crossed the line into the world of crochet. In my college years someone taught me to repeat one stitch, thousands of times, until it became an afghan. Many years later, not having touched a hook, I saw this pattern and vowed to learn how to crochet properly. It’s from a Leisure Arts booklet called Color Bright Creatures. It also has patterns for afghans made up of lions, puppies, frogs, birds, turtles and adorable pink piggies.

So I found myself in a three session class at my LYS, where hopefully, I’ve learned everything I need to know to make that afghan. In the meantime, I finished this scarf, quick and easy pattern with icky chenille (no wonder it’s been discontinued) Fiesta Chinchilla silk yarn. Pretty colours but rough wormy chenille. The pattern is Float Away from the Interweave website. I added picots to the wavy points and omitted the fruit loops-esque fringe. It photographs better than it feels.

Finally, I was tagged by Nina, of Two Sicilian Chicks, with a meme. I like this one as it is short, sweet and interesting. You go to page 161 of the book you are currently reading and share sentence #5. My sentence is "I worked next to my mother-in-law, squeezing together the balls," (are you getting nervous?) "using this rice to protect more rice, that most precious of daily foods." Sentences can be funny our of context. It’s from Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See. I had no idea that one in ten girls died from having their feet bound. I’m going to cop out on tagging anyone, but so many of you are readers and talk about books on your blogs, so if you’re interested, I invite you to take part in this itty-bitty meme.

WARNING: may be offfensive to vegetarians and knitters who don’t eat lamb.

Yes! A lamb dinner:

On a Tuesday night? To what do we owe this great pleasure?

That would be what happens when *someone* takes laundry out of the dryer, and instead of folding it into a basket, piles it onto the plug from the downstairs spare fridge. It brought back memories of the time when our freezer experienced an unexpected thaw, which gave me the opportunity to cook duck, turkey and beef all in one day. Thank goodness I was on maternity leave and had the time and need for excessive caloric intake.

One more thing – I still can’t comment on Typepad blogs. Seems I only had a brief reprieve last week.

Why does Gracee look so anxious?

Because Mari is clipping her nails:

Mari has to wrestle the beast into compliance:

But that’s OK, they’re still friends:

Saturday sky for Sandy:

Knitting yarn content – completed homework for tomorrow’s crochet class:

I was one of those bright eyed young feminists of the the 70’s. I was going to raise my sons and daughters equally, because you know, there’s no difference between the two. Life has taught me differently. If you’ve spent time with me you are familiar with my saying that I’ve had two girls and a shock. A shock, not because he was a surprise – he was very well planned – but because he was so different from the girls.

When the driveway was 30% done, Blogless Marsha very generously left her husband behind, leaving me to live in a house of men. Throughout the day I was gently reminded that there are indeed differences. Yes, that would be a duct taped cereal bag. I might have approached that situation differently. Or have I been brainwashed by the Tupperware parties of my past?

The men have displayed tremendous fortitude, continuing their bricking in gale force winds and torrential rain. It gave them opportunity to incorporate a hundred feet of "big O" drainage pipe into the plans. Yes, it’s called "big O," probably named by a man. I have a different interpretation of the term "big O."

Pictures from the weekend include a gift from Marsha (one of my favourite scarf kits in fall colours), the driveway at 60%, a whimsical addition to our Thanksgiving table, and the mascots – Riley checking around the corner in hopes the coast is clear of alpha female Gracee, and Grace with serious bedbeard:

It’s Canadian Thanksgiving weekend and you know what that means? Yes, turkey, yes, cranberries, yes a major home improvement project. It’s starting to become a tradition – Blogless Marsha, family, along with Airedale dog Riley, will be joining in on the fun. At the risk of sounding uncharacteristically ultra-traditional, the women will be cooking and knitting while the men work their do-it-yourself magic outside. We know we can’t turn this sow’s ear of a house into a silk purse, but at least we can dress ‘er up. Here are the before pictures:

I had no clue that a good sized driveway could be removed and taken away in four hour’s time. And yes that’s an overwhelming amount 16 pallets of taupe coloured brick, but I have faith in these guys. They were the same ones who installed the 92 foot, two level Allen block wall a couple of years back. And how about the project mascots? Keep your fingers crossed – no more rain, OK?

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving weekend! 

When I was a little girl, and would find a Canadian penny on a New York street, my father told me "Hold onto that, it’s worth more than a penny." I’ve lived in Canada for the past 23 years, and not once, until Friday, was a Canadian penny worth more than a US one. You can’t imagine how that past discrepancy in dollars has affected our daily life.

We moved here with an existing US mortgage. Just five years ago that $600 monthly payment cost as much as $960 CDN. Now that we are finally rid of that payment, it would currently cost us $596.40. You have to believe that it all evens out in the end, or you’ll drive yourself crazy. Like in the case of buying a $15US skein of Touch Me back then for $24CDN. Now it would be $14.90. Not that that tempts me. Really.

A Sevillian sleeve update: picked up stitches from the cabled trim and modified the pattern to work in the round. My opinion on picking up stitches follows. When pattern instructions call for a number of stitches to be picked up, sometimes that number makes sense, and at others it doesn’t. The number to be picked up is too far off from the number of edge stitches. For example, this particular pattern told me to pick up 54 stitches from an edge of 72. If I picked up that number it would leave regularly spaced noticeable gaps around the cuff. Instead I picked up what felt natural – 72 stitches – and made the correction in the next row. I did the math, knit a few stitches and then knit two together, and repeated this, ending up with the requisite 54 stitches with no apparent holes. This is the second project on which I worked this past week, where this method has made sense.

I know it’s officially Fall in BC when I look out the window and see mist rising off the Capilano River. Another symptom? Spectacular sunsets.

But soon the rains will set in. In my past, before I accepted my current position in the non-profit world, I was contemplating opening a practice in Seasonal Affective Disorder. I had done my research, bought a light and was set to go, when this opportunity intervened. I was talking about it with some of my co-workers and they’ve asked me to bring in the light, so they can check it out. I’ve decided to go one better, purchase a light and have it available for employees’ use during the day. Maybe I should have Gracee try it out first:

Poor girl looks at the end of her dreary weather rope. I promise, promise, promise that I will learn how to get rid of that "peteye." New buttonholes were all that I could manage this week. Is the knitting content in the photo enough to make this qualify as a knitting blog?