Category Archives: Crafts


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trache-whaa?

This is what I’ve knit today.  During my wait for my doctor’s appointment, I was able to cast on and complete the short-row toe for my 2nd Celery sock.  I was also able to work a few rows of the sock foot, before getting restless and lightheaded from coughing, and switching to a magazine.  I then had time to read 3(!) magazines.  Why?  Because my doctor was running THREE(!!!) hours late.  My appointment was at 11am, and I was finally out of there about 2:30.  Ugh.

He says I have tracheitis, kinda like bronchitis but in the windpipe.  I remember having this a ton when I was at my old job about 8-9 years ago, I’d get coughing fits that wouldn’t ever end…but I don’t remember feeling “sick” with it too.  In any case, unlike the bad bacterial kinds I read about online, he says mine is viral.  There’s not much else to do other than wait it out, but I can take hycodan syrup for the cough, and use a bronchohaler (sp?) inhaler to help me breathe, ‘cus the problem I’m having now is that when I start coughing I can’t stop for a few minutes, and in between coughs I can’t catch my breath to breathe in to give me the air to try and cough out to stop coughing.  (Does that make sense?)  The hycodan makes me very loopy, so I’m only going to take it before bed because during the day I need to be able to drive to pick up the kids from daycare.  The inhaler makes me feel like I just had 10 strong coffees all at once, I feel so jittery and amped that it’s like my arms are shaking and I can’t calm down to knit.  So because of that I didn’t get any knitting done once I got home, ‘cus I took the inhaler right away and it messed me up for the rest of the night.  Then I took the syrup and was both hyper and hazy…lalala wooo


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missed meeting :(

There was an open house today for the local weaving guild and crocheters’ guild.  I had been planning all week to go, even though I would be going alone.  I was going to bring my loom, folded and tucked into my loom bag, and I was going to meet new people and maybe learn something.

That didn’t happen.  I spent all day on the couch.  Yannick took the boys to swimming so I didn’t have to get up and go, and I just vegged.  I felt so sick and knocked out.

I did get a bit of weaving done in the afternoon.  The boys napped and Yannick and I watched some tv, and I wove (weaved?)  Didn’t get much done, but at least it was something.

I’m now at 21″, and have finished my original 2 shuttles and started my new light and dark colors.  The “light” is an orangey-coral color, and the “dark” has some browns and creams.


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k.o.’d

Anyone catch the license plate of the truck that ran me over?  Oh my did I ever catch Henri’s cold.  I can’t quite decide if it’s strep, or bronchitis, or a sinus infection…all I know is that half of the day my ears tickle and throat hurts and I’ve got crazy headache/pressure, and the other half of the day is spent coughing my lungs out.  I haven’t coughed out the hernia(s) yet, but that can’t be far off.

Last night, no joke, I was in bed as soon as the boys were.  I’d already heated up a frozen onion soup (the ones from Costco are awesome) and as soon as the boys’ doors were closed I came to the kitchen, ate my soup, made a NeoCitran, drank it and climbed into bed.

I tried playing on my phone but couldn’t concentrate and was asleep sometime shortly before 8pm.  I know I woke at midnight when Yannick got home, and then was wide-awake and alert at 2am.  Coughing non-stop for 5 minutes will do that.  I finally had to get up and go get my big “armrest”-style pillow, put my pillow in front of it, and then put a neck roll pillow on top of that so I could sleep sitting up, because lying down was killing me.  I just couldn’t stop coughing.  Finally around 3:30 I fell asleep again.

This morning my headache is insane but the cough isn’t as bad because I’m upright.  I’m tired but don’t want to sleep any more and be up all night.  The boys just got into bed so my plan is to sit on the couch with this:

Hopefully I can finish one of these things before I finish the two others.

This pic is for Maaike, who’d asked me for a less “yellow from night time iPhone pic” photo of the weaving-in-progress.  I took this with the iPhone, but in natural sunlight.  Any better at seeing the colors?  You can see the 2 balls I’m currently striping on the edge of the photo in Wednesday’s post.


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pick ups

UPS is coming today!  UPS is coming today!  Yay yay yay!  UPS is coming today!

Don’t mind the happy dance over here…I’m just excited that this box will be leaving today to go to it’s destination.  It’s sad to see a project leave but I’m thrilled to know where it’s going and the physical act of it leaving my presence means I can move on to other projects completely guilt-free.


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turned heel

While I did take down my loom, intending on weaving some more tonight, instead I remembered that my Jan/Feb socks…still pathetically on the first sock…were almost at the point to turn the heel.  Like only 8 or so rows away.  I decided to finish the foot and turn the heel so that I could put them back into my purse at the simple stockinette stitch part.  I can knit without looking and/or in the dark, but I’d rather not have to work a short row heel in the dark or in stops/starts.


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can’t let an empty loom go to waste

Tonight I had one goal in mind- start another weaving project!

I have had some sparkly yarn in my stash for a while.  If you look in my Rav stash, it’s the “Unknown” stuff that has 10 balls, 1 ea of 10 different colorways.  I’d received the yarn eons ago at a Montreal Knits meetup when Veronik and Mona were still working together and were destashing some leftovers.  I got this bag of 9 full wound cakes and 1 half ball, and it’s been marinating ever since.  Each of the full balls has between 113 and 124 yards, and the partial ball has about 49 yards.  The total yardage could have made a vest or scarf/hat set or something, but each ball is a different color and I’ve been stuck at what to do with it.  The colors all kind of go together, but they’re all different.  One ball has red/blue/gray, another has white/gray/brown, maybe another is coral/brown/gold…but because they all had the same thick/thin, glittery base, they all seemed similar.  They didn’t have any labels, and I”d emailed Mona with a photo but she wasn’t able to remember what it was, so Ravelry wasn’t any help.

It was only after getting my loom that I realized I could weave with the stuff.  I really love the look of rag rugs where you have a thin yarn for the warp and a thicker yarn/fabric for the weft, and I decided to use the yarn to weave panels that I’d seam and make a throw for our bedroom or den.  Luckily Yannick has been indulging my love of glitter via nail polish and had no problems with having a glittery throw in the house.

It took me a while of playing around in Excel to figure out how wide/long I could make the panels and be able to have equal lengths using up as much yarn as possible without wasting any.  I had the yardages from when I’d added the stuff into my Rav stash, and a quick wind around a ruler gave me an estimated 8 wraps/inch, so armed with that info and a handy-dandy spreadsheet from Maaike I kept playing around until ending up with somewhat  disappointing results.  With the amount of yarn I had I could only end up with a throw of 40″ by 60″.  My hubby is 6’2″, so this wouldn’t be a “snuggle under while watching tv” throw, but oh well, it would at least be pretty.

A positive that came out of the calculations was the freedom of realizing that I wouldn’t have to continue trying to figure out which ball to pair with which.  Because I had only 9 full balls, I couldn’t pair them up by 2s and have 5 panels.  I spent way too long figuring out the calculations with 4 panels, each having a matching border made up of the remaining 1.5 balls.  It was a headache because the blanket was getting longer and not any wider.  By deciding to make it 5 panels I let myself have the luxury of not needing to figure out which balls to pair up, and having exactly matching panels.  I’d just keep 2 shuttles going at all times, always having one wound from a darker ball, and one from a lighter, and stripe them in 1×1 rows.  I’d start with all the balls in one bag, grab a light and a dark to start, and after winding the shuttles, would put them in another bag.  I’d keep going as I ran out of yarn until the first bag was out of balls, then start over, always winding from random light and dark balls.

For the warp I used a cone of pure wool, roughly fingering weight, that I got at Collette’s when I bought the loom.  I made the warp 88″ to include a short (4″ each side) untwisted fringe, no swatching waste, and a little loom waste.  I was planning to weave 60″ on this, but as you’ll see in a minute, I got a bit of luck and think I’ll be able to weave 70″ on them and still have enough yarn.

At 10:09 I’d finished warping and sat down to weave.  This was after spending over an hour on the pre-calculations, putting the boys to bed, back to bed, back to bed and then getting them back into bed again.

At 11:07 I stopped to come up to bed.  I don’t have a lot of weaving done for an hour’s worth, but the reason for that is that I quickly noticed I wasn’t getting 8 picks/inch…I was getting 7.  That meant the same amount of yarn I had would get me further than I’d thought.

I left the loom to come back to the computer and ended up doing some rough calculations and deciding that I’d be able to have enough yarn to weave up to 70″ on each panel, plus make 2 of the 5 panels slightly wider.  (Instead of 72 warp strands there will be 76 or 78).  This would let me have the blanket come out wider and longer without having to undo and rewarp this panel.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that even though I’m weaving single rows in a lighter and darker colorway, looking at the loom itself you really can’t see/tell that it’s not all from the same ball of yarn.  This leaves me even more encouraged that the 5 different panels will blend well together in the end.

To join them I think I’m going to seam them in much the same way you seam garter stitch- mattress stitch going from bump to bump, but in this case going through even loops on each side.  I’m going to keep track of my rows so that each panel has the same number of rows so seaming will be easier and look better.


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good neighbors

They say that fences make good neighbors…but in my case I really lucked out in the neighbor category.  Not only does Maaike live around the corner, but there are lots of awesome people on my street, especially C who helped me out not once, not twice, but three (!!) times today, even though we initially had to cancel our plans because she’s sick.

Her huge amount of (last minute) help meant that my secret project was able to be finished, as in all end woven in, finishing touches applied, and ready to be mailed.  I just need to finalize the written pattern first to make sure there are no measurements/etc to be taken, and it will be done!

The resulting unexpected free time (I’d only scheduled to be finished later in the week)  meant that I could finally finish up the project that has been on my loom since January.

It’s going to be a surprise present for my aunt, but I think it’s ok to talk about here ‘cus I’m pretty sure she doesn’t read/know about my blog.  I wove until it ws 60″ long.  There are only 59″ showing in the photo, but the point of the photo was to show the lack of too much loom waste.  My mom’s scarf was cut off the loom at the proper length, but I’d overestimated how much warp I’d need.  Here you can see that my warp is completely unwound with just the loops remaining on the back beam.  (Technical term?  Not sure).

A quick hemstitch was the only finishing done to the edges.  My aunt had commented on liking the “infinity”-style scarves she’d been seeing everywhere, the ones you can wear long as a scarf or wrapped twice around your neck as a cowl.  My plan had always been to join the two short ends after twisting the scarf once, but I hadn’t really thought through how the join would work.

I debated tying knots to join the two sides and having a short fringe running down, but quickly decided that would look kinda awful.  I consulted with Maaike and had decided to hem the two edges by hand and then join them, but at the last minute called up C and asked if she could sew them together for me with her machine (that was the 3rd help of the day) and she graciously obliged.

I’ll show the resulting seam after I soak and dry it later tonight.  For now I leave you with my easy answer on how to straighten the beginner weaver’s problem of uneven selvedges- single crochet!  Because the scarf had a twist in it, it effectively became a moebius….a word my spell check doesn’t seem to believe exists.  Anyhoo, that let me start at one point, single crochet in every 2nd hole at the edge, and end up exactly right back where I started from.  The sc edge done in the working yarn gave a cute rainbow look around the scarf, and ensured that no matter which end/edge is up, the edges will always look “finished”.

Now I’m going to let it soak in a Eucalan bath for an hour or so, towel out most of the water then pop it in the dryer to really soften & full the fabric.


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*yawn*

Had another sleepless night ‘cus of Henri’s coughing.  Spent Valentine’s Day home cuddling with my baby, then went to guild and was the featured speaker, doing a talk on intarsia.  Eeek!  I think it went over well, no one seemed too lost by what I was saying, so hopefully I got some information out there.  During the rest of the meeting I wasn’t able to work on my main project because of having to pay attention, but I did get some mindless knitting done on my January/February sock.  I need about 30 more rows and then I can work the heel.


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self-portrait and sparkles

Was home with the kids today and luckily they were super-well behaved.  They were pretending to be superheroes today, and I caught this cute pic:

Later in the afternoon my sister came by and needed me to draw for her for a school assignment (she’s become an art teacher).  First I had to draw a self portrait:

I copied my current favorite photo, though looking back on it now I made the hair too poofy on the right, and my cheek isn’t big enough on the left (of the picture).  My left eye really isn’t that wonky in person, but I’d erased it too many times and wore out the paper a bit.

Then I had to draw anything I wanted.

I drew a fairy and colored it in with some glitter nail polish 🙂

Once she left and the kids were in bed I go to work binding off part of my project using a bind off I think I created.  But I messed up and realized once I’d done the whole thing that I had to rip it back.  I have no patience to do that now, so I’m going to bed instead.


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feeling tranquil

I got some knitting done in the doctor’s waiting room this morning.  He didn’t find anything unusual in the my belly so I still don’t know why it hurt so bad yesterday.  Because of the stress and worry of it, though, my heart rate and blood pressure was up so now I’m on tranquilizers until things calm down a bit.  It’s hard not to panic, I’m still scared that the hernia will pop out again…but it’s a relief to know there seems to be no immediate danger with anything.

For my commission knitting I got quite a lot done today because I stayed home the rest of the day, so I’m at the point today where I should only be on Sunday.  So that’s good.