My Day Off

If I truly want a day off I have to leave home. Fortunately my friend Ada is a willing host and we always have a great time together. Sometimes we go out yarn shopping but mostly it's movies & knitting, cross stitching, beading; comparing, sharing and enabling.
Ada brought me back a scrumptious skein of baby alpaca from her recent trip to Peru. From the way she talked about it, I was expecting a small, bitty skein - certainly not the 150g skein of laceweight that I received!! And it's a natural white so I can dye it before or after I knit it!!

I shared with her all of the work knitting that I'm doing but can't show anyone (she can keep a secret like nobody's business!) and tempted her with the STR & LL that I bought down at Lettuce Knit.
I spent most of the day stitching on the Mystery X cross stitch. It is worked in hand dyed threads, metallics and a generous smattering of beads. It's so exciting seeing the design growing and watching the colours playing off of each other. I still have more to do, but January is young yet.




I came home tired but well rested & ready to be a single mom for 3 weeks. Kerwyn is off on another trip to China tomorrow. It's a long time, but I have quite enough knitting to keep me busy and Amanda has started her home schooling so I'm sure that the time will pass quickly.

Latent Skill

I can spin!! It's in me and look out world! now it's out. It wasn't me, it was the tool; I wasn't meant for a drop spindle, that's all.
I went to see Kathy and we chit-chatted while her Ashford wheel got used to a new presence in the room. I didn't make any overt, startling moves toward it and it didn't make faces at me (yes they can!) or start spinning it's wheel menacingly. Once we had gotten used to the idea of each other, Kathy showed me how it's done. "You sort of loosen up the fleece like this." uh-huh "And just feed it in like this, holding it sort of like so." Yup. Got it.
You know how it is when someone is really good at something and they just sort of do it and tell you how easy it is? I mean, it's like riding a bike. "Hop on and just pedal." But there are like, what, eleventy-hundred and one other things to do & think about & coordinate in order to ride the bike as opposed to just not falling off of it.
It looked very easy and there didn't seem to be any real pitfalls (or maybe Kathy just didn't want to scare me) so there was nothing else but to give it the old college try.
Amanda had to be dragged away from her good times with Elizabeth & Kathryn so her focus is a little off, but you get the idea. I spent hours spinning and plying. I will definitely have to work on consistency & loosening up a bit. (No Kyle, this is not proof that I'm uptight.)
Then Kathy wound the yarn onto a kniddy-knoddy that her husband had made out of plastic pipe. I know, he made it for her - not just thought about it. Apparently the skein is a bit long, but he made her a kniddy-knoddy!! We steamed the skeins to "set the twist". I was totally unprepared for the magic of this - it's like high-speed blocking. When you block a sweater or shawl you see the wrinkled, uneven stitches then after considerable time & effort you have wonderfully even & smooth stitches. As the yarn was passed over the steam, I watched it scrinch up and straighten out!! I giggled out loud - it was amazing!
I used some fleece that I had in my stash - for thrumming & for felting over soap , the coloured one was Fleece Artist.
The yarn is nice; the smaller skein feels nicer as it isn't spun or plied so tightly.
I might just have to get a wheel. Definitely maybe ...

Morrigan

Okay, there are other sweaters in the book, some of which I really loved a lot, but this isn't about them. Amy asked that I keep the sweater a bit secret still - build the suspense just a bit more - so I give you Morrigan a la Photoshop and a small descriptive tease to whet your appetite.


Jenna & I proudly posed with our baby. We didn't cave to the Jen peer pressure to make out.









I did score a couple of NSfY buttons and Amanda caught some yarn in the act of adopting me.
Hey, they're my colours so no one will doubt that they belong in my family.






And speaking of Jen, I told her that I would post a picture of a Chiquita Banana ad from an old Life magazine, so here it is. Yeah, it's rather beat up. I had that thing folded up and carried around from when I was in high school until I had it framed a couple of years ago. I still chuckle when I read it!

Sorry for the 101 seemingly identical entries. I hate it when text goes into a picture and the preview doesn't accurately portray the final layout so I have to (yes, have to) keep editing it. 102nd time's a charm!!!

Let them eat cake

Chocolate cake even!!
Amanda made this on her own - I set up the oven and gave a couple of hints but this is a work of her own hands. (And it's good ... really, I'm even eating it!)

Amy is bringing her one copy of No Sheep For You to Lettuce Knit tonight!! Yes, I'm totally going to be there. Must see my Jenna's cabled sweater... Amanda is coming with me - I had to actually bribe her away from skating. Kerwyn is going to be home not early (not a newsflash or anything) and I didn't want her walking with Kyle to the arena & back in the dark. Normally she would love to go on an outing with me but the child loves her public skating!! No matter, no price is too high tonight. Don't tell her that though!!

Meet some of My People

They're not knitters but they're family so you love them anyway.

Uncle Grant (my mom's brother)

Aunt Pam (his wife)

Daphne (my sister)

Daphne, Uncle Wayne's head (another brother of my mother), my dad & I playing Solo. This is a great game - I don't know anyone outside of my family who plays it so I try not to forget how to play intelligently in between Gatherings.

There's more relations but Amanda was the Photographeur du Jour and this is what we've got. Amanda had a great time with her cousin Chantal; Kyle solved a wood puzzle that my uncle Wayne had made. It seems simple enough but making a square out of those shapes was a lot harder than it looks. Kyle was doggedly persistent and didn't give up - way to go Kyle!





Here we are in the first few minutes of 2007. This is the first year that we've allowed Amanda to stay up & she had Kaylie over. MMM had the Top 50 Guilty Pleasures videos - mostly 80's stuff. Talk about memory lane - it was great!!








This is Linda Gibbons. She is an advocacy consultant and is helping me work through the IPRC & IEP process so that Kyle can have some consistent help at school so that he can be more than just "full of potential". It's an exhausting dance - you have to give a lot to have a meaningful collaboration and it's reassuring to have someone with experience helping me learn the steps.

I got this lovely package today. I have signed up for Chatelaine's Mystery X - a year long cross stitch mystery. I'm hoping that I will be able to keep up each month. Some keeners already have their January piece stitched; I'm going for a more leisurely pace way slower than that. ECC did a really beautiful job of packaging this up - it's almost a shame to have to break it open. They even put in a set of needles!!

I will take some un-informative pictures of my knitting tomorrow!!