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freeing up the needles

On Sunday Yannick and I finally did something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.  Jakob is already 16.5 months old and will have a little sibling soon, and we still hadn’t taken a child/infant CPR course.  I’d registered us for one when Jakob was about 3 months old, but each weekend it was scheduled, something came up that we couldn’t avoid, and we had to keep putting it off.  I’m so glad we finally took care of it, we both learned a lot, and it was especially gratifiying for me to see that some of the stuff Yannick would pass off as fact isn’t actually the case (or at least, to his credit, has been changed since his last CSST course 8+ years ago). *

The course was from 9-5 at a local hospital, and I had the feeling there would be knitting time around all the hands-on, practical stuff.  I debated bringing my current work in progress- socks for Robyn’s Robyn’s Nest’s November club kit…but figured it might be rude if I started spreading out my pattern in front of me.  I know I work, listen and retain information better when my hands are busy, but it might appear rude.  I mentally wracked my stash for some unfinished object I could bring with that had an easy repeat, or miles of stockinette stitch.  I was at the point of finding a new project to cast on when I remembered my Silk Rumple shawl.  Perfect!  A simple 2 row repeat made it mindless enough to allow me to look up and not have anyone think I wasn’t paying attention.  I brought it with and by the end of the class I was about 28 repeats short of a completed shawl.  I didn’t have the heart to put it back into the depths of my stash when it was so close to being finished, so yesterday, between Jakob’s nap time and a night to myself on the couch, I kept at it.  Now not only do I have another finished project, but I also have the weight of a long-lingering “ufo” crossed off my list.  (And Maaike can get her needles back, since those of you who remember this shawl might remember I had to borrow her 6mm Options needles, as they were the only needles sharp enough to get into the k2togs with the bouclé-y silk yarn).

This detail shows the simple k2tog/yo pattern.  The colors were accurate on my computer at home, but these photos seem a little dark here at my work computer.  Hopefully your monitor settings are better than mine!

The shawl turned out longer than I’d thought, which is a relief.  When Yannick brought me the yarn, what had appeared to be a single skein was actually 2 smaller skeins held together.  I knew that the tail ends of where the two skeins met would be the approximate center of the shawl, and was worried that it wouldn’t be wide enough for me.  In the end it makes a slightly skimpy shawl or a perfect scarf.  I am slightly tempted to pin the edges together and try it on as a shrug, but I don’t think I have quite the body for a shrug.  Luckily that is something I can do at any time, and in the meantime I have a very pretty silk shawl I can wear easily.

It feels so good to have another project completed!

Details:

Yarn: Silk Rumple by Fleece Artist’s Hand Maiden.

Needles: 6mm KnitPicks Options circulars

Pattern: Bias Shawl pattern from the yarn’s ball band

Timeline: February 1 to October 6 2008

All the info and more details/photos on Ravelry.  (Project link)

*p.s. to Julie, Jackie, or Debbie…you’ll be glad to know that the whole eye+spoon or mouth thing?  Balony.  Put a paper cup over the eye to keep dirt away and call an ambulance, no funky Mcgyver techniques allowed!


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speed demon

I think I’ve just knit the fastest shawl of my life. 

About 2/3 weeks ago, one of my first cousins was diagnosed with stage-2 breast cancer.  (First cousin as in proximity…not as in that I expect to have second, third or more cousins diagnosed with cancers).  As soon as I finished the deadline knitting I had at the time, I knew I wanted to make something special for her, both to let her know she was in my thoughts, and also to (hopefully) be useful.  I ruled out a chemo cap because it will be a few weeks before she starts chemo/radiation, and I don’t know how sensitive her head will be once she loses her hair.  Instead, I decided to knit her a shawl to help keep her warm during the chemo treatments, or just to make her feel pretty and special.

After investigating my stash and doing some browsing on Ravelry, I decided to go with the Summer Lace Shawlette, a free pattern from Interweave Knits and Knitting Daily.  My cousin’s favorite color is red, and while I didn’t have any appropriate red yarn on hand, I did have some deep pink yarn in the appropriate gauge.  The yarn is Tannis Fiber Arts’ sock yarn from one of Robyn’s Robyn’s Nest sock club kits, and the colorway is called E=MC2.  I feel like the pink color works perfectly for a breast cancer shawl (and it’s October too…does that qualify as ironic?)

I cast on Monday, September 29th when I got home from the first night of Rosh Hashana dinners with my family.  (Happy New Year to any Jewish readers, by the way!).  This photo (above) shows the colorway pretty accurately, as well as my total progress by bedtime that night.

And the next photo? 

This is the completed, finished, done shawl, blocking on FRIDAY night.  Friday.  Monday to Friday.  5 days to go from sock yarn to shawl.  I’m stunned.

It was an (obviously) fast knit, easily memorized.  I extended the body section by 8 rows because I had enough yarn and wanted a longer shawl. 

Note: if you decide to make this, and to make it longer than called for, you have to pay attention to how many rows you add.  The final border is worked on a certain number of sts for the lace repeat, and by adding 8 rows (and thus 4 extra stitches on each side) I didn’t have enough to extend the lace section.  That meant that when ready to knit the 8 lace rows along the bottom edge (right before the bottom seed st border), I had to work the border as usual, then knit 4 plain sts in stockinette stitch before starting my lace pattern.  Had I just started the lace at the beginning of the row (after the border) and decided to “wing it”, the lace never would have matched up along the center lace panel that has already been established.  Ask me how I found this out!  As you can see from the photos, it doesn’t look so bad having a little stockinette stitch gap on either end of the lace border.  If it really bothers you, just make sure to add enough rows (1 stitch added at each end on every rs row) to be able to work an extra lace repeat before it would normally start.

Same shawl, same lighting.  I just threw in a light bulb for scale.  I’ll take some better photos when it is good and dry and I can unpin it.


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:( rss

It has come to my attention that Bloglines isn’t picking up my site feed.  I don’t know why, since it is set up correctly through WordPress, I have sent Bloglines an email asking for some help.  Sorry about that!

 

(Of course, if you follow my blog through Bloglines, you won’t read this message until the problem is fixed).


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I’ve been tagged!

 

I’ve been tagged by Amy for this meme, which I think means I need to list 7 wild and crazy things about myself.  I think I’ve done this before, so let’s hope I don’t repeat myself too much…

1. I miss the “good old days”.  For as much as I know my friends and I weren’t exactly innocent in high school, the stuff going on these days scares the hell out of me.  I was so relieved when my siblings moved on to cegep and university, and I am afraid for my cousin’s generation who just started high school this year or last year.  Sex parties, drug parties, lipstick parties, “candy” parties, orgies…I can only hope that by the time my kids end up in high school, that society will have reverted somewhat to a different value (and entertaiment) system.

2. Along the same lines, there is a small part of me that has great fondness for, and misses, old TV programming.  I remember when “must see TV” wasn’t the Friends lineup on Thursday nights, but Friday nights sitting around the TV with the family, watching Full House, Family Matters, Step by Step and whatever the last 30 min show was.  (Perfect StrangersJust the 10 of Us? That show with Jason Priestly having a crush on their nun/nanny?)  Yes, almost every episode had a moral, but look how we all turned out.  Today’s shows show that the moral is “get on TV and milk your 15 minutes for all it is worth”, and look at (many of) today’s kids.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Lauren Conrad or Tila Tequila as my kids’ role models!  Give me Blossom and Six any day!  Whoa!  Hell, I’ll even take Jem- and she was truly truly truly outrageous.

3. Now I’m on a reminiscing kick.  I loved the old days sitting on the floor in my brothers’ bedroom, playing with our Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the originals, not the remakes), our Justice League figurines, our Thundercat figures (with the cool light-up eyes), my She-Ra and Princess of Power figurines (who were smaller than the He-Man figures, for some reason, although She-Ra still was able to ride BattleCat), and our Voltron figures.  Go figure I was only allowed to play with the one driven (ridden?) by the girl.

4. Oh, and speaking of TV programming, remember when Saturday mornings weren’t all about pushing the latest Japanimation merchandise?  Remember Kid Video?  The Game Master?  Galaxy High?  Dungeons & Dragons?  Ahh…the days of eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch or whatever that Chocolate Chip cereal was and watching cartoons while dressing my youngest brother up as Orko so we could play He-Man.  (I was Sorceress…she was much cooler than Teela, and those were the only two women on the show).

5. I tend to ramble.  Have you noticed I tend to ramble?  You should hear me in real life where I don’t have to worry about spelling or my spacebar that has decided to only work intermittently.  (Which is funny, because my windshield wipers have decided to STOP working intermittently.  I should get them to hook up…I might have something that works well).

6. I tend to find things funny that no one else does.  (See above keyboard/wipers hookup “joke”).

7. I really, really enjoy paperwork.

I’m not tagging anyone but if you want to play along, consider yourself tagged.  Imagine I just stood in front of you with a can of spray paint and tagged you from head to toe.  (This would be another one of those “jokes”, people).


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Welcome!

Hi!

Welcome to the new blog!  I hope you’ll like it here.  As you can see there are some new features, the main ones being those tabs up at the top there.  Most of the stuff that used to be in my sidebars can now be found neatly organized into those tabs, so feel free to explore the pages and look around!

WordPress’ Blogger import feature is having issues, so any of my Blogger posts between September 5th and September 29th are missing from this new site.  They hope to have it working soon, and I will upload those posts as soon as I can.  In the meantime, all my new posts (including some finished objects to show off!) will be here, along with more free and sale patterns (as I can find the time to knit them up).

Thanks for following me over to this new setup!

Jennifer.


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mmmmmmmmmmmmm food

I swiped this from Laura ‘cus it looked like fun:

Bold the one’s you’ve eaten.
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (I ate alligator)
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O -Shots
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Now I’m hungry!


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Hanukah Dreidel Pillow, part 6

The finished pillow! Yay!

After finishing the front, I cast on for the back. The back was worked in 2 overlapping sections so that the pillow could come out easily for laundering/changing of the cover. My original intent was to leave it as is, but once seamed, the center of the back kept gaping, so I added a row of buttons. Had I had more time, and a proper plan in place, I might have sewn down a strip of Velcro instead.
When it came time to join the front to the back I had been planning on working icord but since speed was still a factor (I had to mail it to Mary Maxim before the contest deadline) I chose the easiest and fastest way for me- single crochet. For fun I decided to use white around the blue areas, and blue around the white areas.
And there you have it. One completed Hanukah Dreidel Pillow. Not a contest winner, but makes me proud enough to see it come out of my head and land on my couch.


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hey look- some of that stuff I’ve been knitting (and a special day too)

I finally got around to taking some progress photos last night. It was really late so forgive the flash…but feel free to admire my new couches as the background! 🙂

This is the progress on the BullsEye Pinwheel Baby Blanket I’ve been carrying around as my “work anywhere” knitting. It doesn’t look like much right now, but will hopefully look good once the bind off frees it from the confines of the circ I’m working on.

I’m at row 38 and have calculated that I want to be at row 47 and either bind off, or work an edging, so the end is in sight!

Also, this weekend Maaike and I started knitting(along) Baby Surprise Jackets. Here’s the progress on mine as I went to bed last night.

I am at row 76 of the 114 row pattern.
Here is how it will look when properly folded and seamed. I’ve decided that I will make the buttonholes on both sides as per the pattern, and will wait until our baby is born to choose buttons. The blue and green is pretty unisex in my opinion, but if we have a girl I think I’d like to put little flowers or something to push it over the girly edge.

I couldn’t end today’s post without mentioning 2 special things.

2 years ago, today, Yannick and I got married. Happy 2nd anniversary, my love!

And perhaps even more special than that, today also happens to be Yannick’s birthday.
(Yes, chosen so he wouldn’t forget the date).

Happy birthday sweetheart!


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book meme

I swiped this from Dianne’s site, mostly because I want to see how many of these “top 100” books I’ve actually read.

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.
*Look at the list and bold those you have read.
*Italicize those you we intend to read.
*Underline the books you LOVE.
Share this list in your blog, too, if you like.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read most, so I’m counting it)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot (rings a bell, but I’m not 100% sure)
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (half, then I got bored)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So I’ve read 30 out of 100. Hmm…I guess the hundreds of other books I’ve read don’t count? 😉


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dumb as a…

I wish I could say I’d overheard this comment. But nope- this is all me.

I went out for dinner with the moms from Jakob’s playgroup. We’re trying to do an adults-only thing once a month. Anyways, many of us have wedding anniversaries coming up in September, which led to the topic of how long we’ve been married/with our significant others.

I mentioned that next week will be both Yannick’s birthday and our 2nd wedding anniversary (same day). What did I say next?

“In December it will be ten years we’ve been together. I know. Ten years! But it feels like a decade!”

Ahem.

Clearly we all know what I’d MEANT to say? I was going for the joke- intending on “…but it feels like a century!”. But nope- baby brain kicks in and I’m lucky I can string together a few coherent words without too much drooling.

And I thought I got dumb when pregnant with Jakob! Today I’m 20 weeks pregnant. It can’t get worse, right?