I didn’t do much this week, other than knit my little butt off on some swatches. I’m still unsure about Court, but Plunger is coming along swimmingly. I keep meaning to take some vague photograph that doesn’t show anything, but haven’t yet. Maybe soon.

Last night I stopped in at Jackie & Kevin’s to see Jackie and Bradley. He’s so cute! He just started crawling, and has got two adorable little teeth poking in on the bottom. I swear if I wasn’t already engaged… ;P

Then Yannick and I met Julie and Rich at Scores for some dinner. Funny moment: the waitress was slow. I mean you can get ketchup out of a bottle faster. We sat around for at least 40 minutes after eating waiting for her to come back to bring us refills, gd forbid she bring the check.* 15 minutes AFTER that when we got the bill, she presented it to us, saying, “Here you go. Take your time in paying, I’m in no rush.” REALLY? YOU THINK SO? We managed to wait a split second after she’d left the table before all 4 of us burst out laughing.

Tonight I’m going out for dinner with Robyn and some of her friends for her birthday dinner, then going home after to knit all night. The submission deadline is ACK! Monday and I need to have everything photographed by tomorrow night.

Oh- speaking of Robyn…her blog is now open to the world! So please go and visit my cousin over at
http://www.knitpurlknitpearl.blogspot.com and say hi!

In case I don’t get to blog tomorrow, here’s the plan:
-go for my first wedding dress fitting! ACK
-wish my brother Mike a happy birthday! (ok, maybe this will go first)
-go to my parents’ house for Father’s Day dinner
-go for coffee with Steph and Steph
-go through all the swatches and photograph and prepare and send out my SnB submissions

*I have nothing against service staff, I was a waitress and barista and bartender myself. But in an almost-empty restaurant at 10pm there’s no excuse to bring us our meals and then disappear for over an hour.

A big bunch of birthday wishes to my cousin Robyn, the mommy-to-be!

Knitting World Cup related:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2043964,00.html

I’m very excited right now. I should be knitting, but I’m popping over just to blab because Yannick’s not home.

There are 2 designs I want to submit to the next Stitch ‘n Bitch book by Monday. One design is being worked through, but is taking some time as it’s…well…unique. Did I ever give this one a nickname? I think so but can’t find it in my archives. Assuming I never named it, I’ll call it Court from now on.

The other design is the one I called Plunger, the one that was delayed by the Superwash wool fiasco. By dipping into my stash to have a temporary solution, not only did I end up with a working pattern, but I managed to solve some things that were bugging me about the original design! Yes, I changed it a bit, so it’s not the first thing I had pictured in my head, but so what? I’m beginning to understand that designing is not only about creating the vision, but at times requires adaptation for what is actually possible. And I’m totally ok with this design being adapted, as I am very proud of the finished result. Go Plunger!

Ok, back to knitting!

Knitting World Cup related:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2043964,00.html

Knitting World Cup related:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2043964,00.html

The Shower
Today was my bridal shower!

I got up at 9 to shower and put up my hair so it would be full later. As much as I love really long hair, it goes flat fast. I put it up in large rollers too keep it up until I was ready to leave. (Yannick asked me “Why are you curling your hair?” I said, “I’m not.” He said, “But you have rollers in…” I said, “It’s for volume baby!”

I got to my aunt Fran’s by 12:30- the shower was being hosted by my 3 aunts (Fran, Miriam and Carol) and was called for 1pm. I have no photos ‘cus I forgot my camera, but since there was a flash or 8 going off every minute, I’m sure I’ll be emailed photos and video within the next few days. People kept coming in and coming in…and coming in… and by around 2pm we started with the food (oy there was so much food!) and the games. First I judged a toilet-paper wedding dress contest (and almost started crying with my mom when we saw my 18 year old sister “made up” as a bride, all pristine in her white toilet paper) then we played some other games while opening gifts, like guessing the amounts of candies and almonds in jars, matching off traditional anniversary gifts with the years, and so on. I also had to answer questions about how well I know Yannick. I don’t know how many were asked, but I got only 2 wrong.*

If anyone who was at my shower reads this, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for the beautiful gifts. Everyone was really sweet and I hope they had a good time, I know I did!

The men (Yannick, my dad, my brothers, his dad, an uncle and one of his nephews) came by around 4:30 to help eat all the food. It actually took until 6:30pm until everything was done and we started saying most of the goodbyes!

Now it’s 9:30, I just got home and changed into some comfy clothes. Yannick has a party to attend, so I’m going to flop on the couch and watch Aeon Flux on DVD, along with some World Cup Knitting.

The Explanation

The “X-Treme Lace Knitting” post has been generating some comments. First off, a big thanks to everyone who has left me a comment laughing about it. I tried hard to come up with a truly x-treme knitting situation, and when we saw how the photos came out (especially the one with Sam) it was easy to write up the scenario. For those who are totally confused: I’m part of the Amazing Lace knitting group. Every two weeks there will be challenges, and we post our responses on our blogs. This week’s challenge was to show an example of x-treme knitting, so my post was my contribution towards that. I didn’t realize until afterwards that I’d forgotten to leave an explanation in that post, and I will try to do so in future ones.

To Amanda Cathleen: Yes, I have the spreadsheet. I’d love to email it to you, but I don’t have your email address! You can email me directly if you want (link in the sidebar) and I’ll send it to you!

*The first one I got wrong was what he noticed first about me, way back when we first met. It was multiple choice, and I guessed c) my beautiful blue eyes. The answer was b) my cute and sweet personality (note: their words, not mine). I swear I was going to say B but last night he commented on my eyes so I thought that was what he’d said to them. Turns out it was B after all. The other one was what food would he never eat. I took it literal and said either “gefilte fish or cats” since one he hates, and the other he loves too much to try. He’s tried almost everything else. His answer was “shepherd’s pie”. He’s eaten shepherd’s pie, he just doesn’t like it very much. Turns out he answered “what food do you dislike most” instead of how I took it, as “what food would you not eat- even if bribed, or under death penalty or whatever”. If he’d known how I was going to hear the question, it would have been the gefilte fish, so I would have ended up with a perfect score. 🙂

So the Knitting World Cup kickoff was on the 9th at whatever time the whistle blew. I didn’t worry about starting on time because I knew I had a time delay, which I calculated as follows:
Time it took to knit 1 base row: 1 min 46 sec – we’ll round that up to 2 min.
# of rows in the base knit so far: 50

Time it took to knit 1 body row: 6 min 58 sec – we’ll round that up to 7 min.
# of rows already knit in the body: 36

My calculations told me a delay of 6-ish hours was needed. I played it safe and only started working on it today at the Montreal Knitting Guild’s year-end meeting, the Garden Party (held indoors due to rain). Robyn came with me, and we had a pretty good time. Afterwards we went to Wal-Mart, then she came over and knit for a bit after helping me choose what to wear to my bridal shower tomorrow.

Tonight Yannick and I had some dinner and watched X-Men 2 and a DVD I will only refer to by its initials: P.O.T.P. Thanks Robyn! *groan*

KWC day # 1 update: I started today on row 37. I am now at row 54. Of a really big, really boring knit. In all black. This is going to take forever.

*pant pant wheeze*

Ok, lemme catch my breath. That was a close one!

I don’t know what happened…there we were, the Kid and I, cruising along our merry little way. We were following all the signs, narrowly avoiding pitfalls to both our confident knitter’s esteem and our delicate lacy ego…when all of a sudden WHAM! There we were- stuck in a trap!

I really can’t explain it…we had followed the clue exactly as written! Instead of arriving at the next pit stop, we were ambushed from behind…then everything went dark as I felt a black mask being slipped over my eyes. The next thing I knew, padded hands were pinning my wrists together behind my back, securing them with a long, animal print scarf. There must have been two of them, an evil genius and lowly henchman, perhaps, because one of them held me to the chair while the other bound me with a 75% wool/25% acrylic blend. The cads! Knowing that there was no way I could force the acrylic to break with my will alone!

I felt the Kid shudder but didn’t know the full extent of the horrors until much, much later. I must have blacked out, because when I came to there were the signs of a struggle, and three sets of footprints leading away. Hmm…three? One must belong to whomever rescued us!

I scoured the internet all evening, trying to find any clue about those who held us captive, or our mysterious savior. Finally I came across some video footage of our ordeal. I did a screen capture to show you the worst of it.
It was worse than I’d thought! Not only was I being forced to knit while captive, tied to a chair and blindfolded, but look at the poor Kid! Threatened by a scissor-wielding tiger! One false move on my part…one accidental tug on his fragile body…and it would be all over for the Kid. It was truly the stuff nightmares are made of!

Closer examination of our Amazing Lace clue revealed that it was not in fact a clue, but rather a very clever fake. Someone had gone to the trouble of duplicating a clue, down to the destinctive gold and maroon colors, all for the sake of leading the Kid and I into his nefarious plan. Who was this evil-doer? Who would go to such lengths as to put our lives in danger? I’m not sure, but if I know my evil villains, (and I know my evil villains), then something tells me that he must have stuck around to watch his plans unfold…much like the ruthless cads in those James Bond movies. Maybe if I freeze frame again, and watch that video footage frame-by-frame, I might catch him. Maybe…

Maybe……there.

I have to blame it on the germs. Otherwise, why would an ordinarily sane knitter go through her knitting bag to find a wip that wasn’t too taxing on the brain, choose the Clapotis that was for her her HER, knit on it for about 3 total hours through the day (when she wasn’t sneezing, napping or coughing), then, right before going to sleep, decide to take all her progress, all of this:and turn it into this?
It took a lot out of me to frog it, let me tell you. But the more I worked on it, the more I kept coming to the same realization. I love the pattern. I wanted to knit a scarf. A nice, squoushy winter scarf. Following the pattern as written I ended up with something about 20″ wide, not counting the stitches that were still to be dropped. Normally I wouldn’t mind having another shawl, but the colors of this yarn are so similar to the Noro I used for my Tasha Tudor shawl, that I don’t see the need to have 2 shawls the same color. I really want this Clapotis to be a scarf. The only way to fix that? Rip it out, start over, this time stopping after 4 repeats of the increase section (for a total of 5 dropped sts, a scarf of about 10″ wide-ish). Plus now I’ll have enough for a really, really long scarf, the kind you can wrap twice around your neck and still have long enough to tuck into your coat or have trailing behind you in the wind. I’m going to love this scarf.

Once I have enough strength to cast on and start over.