Poetry; is not for me

I've never really been able to get into poetry.  I've got a couple of favourite poems that were studied in school, but for the most part, when you put a poem in front of me, all my brain sees is:

Blah blahbitty blah,
Blahblah blah blahbitty,
Blah blah blah.
O' blah blah blahblahblah,
Blah.

But something happens when you put it to music.  My brain explodes when poetry is put to music.

Case in point:



The poetry of Colin's lyrics is beyond what I can handle.

"A panoply of song"

Seriously?  A PANOPLY?  Wha?

...and "A barony of ivy in the trees, expanding out its empire by degrees"?  A BARONY?  Holy eff.

I just can't handle it.  When I first listened to the album, I thought for sure I had misheard him.  But no, dude actually wrote that.

If you like the Avett Brothers or Iron and Wine or The Fleet Foxes or The Deep Dark Woods or any kind of music, really, you must take a listen to this band.  If you dare.

Fleeting

On the way home from our latest sailing excursion.

More on that yarn delivery later, but first...

... I have to share something with you that I recently discovered and am completely enamoured with:


I know I'm a little late to the Iron and Wine party, but I've been listening to my good friend CBC Radio 2 and they've been playing his new song "Tree by the River" and I'm totally in love (don't tell my husband).

Does this video not make you want to take up flamenco dancing?  These women are positively stunning.

Also.  Get a load of this:



That's Jay Malinowski of Bedouin Soundclash and Beatrice Martin (Coeur de pirate). Swwooooon.

And I've also totally fallen in love with The Decemberists.  I'm starting to sound like a hussy, so I'll stop now.

A New Year, A New Yarn?

 Ok, so I know I haven't called in a while, but I have an excuse.  It's.... um... well ok, I have no really good excuse.  I was working my tail off on some work-work:

 ...and of course busting my hump trying to get some Christmassy work done:

(un-blocked lace knitting looks like a pile of noodles)

 (ahh, much better)

...which didn't get finished in time to send off, but who cares?  It's for my mom and she likes getting things all year-round, so I just sent her a homemade market bag for now.  This will get shipped off this week, if I can remember to go to the post office.  It's exactly how I hoped it would turn out and is the perfect size for her.  I used this pattern (Rav link) and this yarn and found it to be quite easy to follow.  If you decide to try it out, let me know because I have a few little tips.  It's the perfect gateway project into lace knitting.  Good thing?  Bad thing?  It remains to be seen...


Anyway, I finished A LOT more knitting, but I'm not going to unveil it all right now.  I'm going to draw out the pleasure and get more blogging mileage out of it.  Not good for you all to get everything you want right away.  Ha!


Christmas was pretty quiet around here.  We FINALLY got a major project finished (well, truth be told it's only about 90% finished, but I don't care):

You wanna see what the "before" looked like?  Ok, brace yourselves.  Here it is, on the day we moved in, 4 years ago:

Nasty.  Sorry to have done that to you.  Hope you don't have too much trouble sleeping tonight.

It was a major undertaking and will likely prove to have been the most difficult portion of our renovations.  It's a tiny little room and the only bathroom we have, so it drove us a little crazy.  By the end, I was so tired of contemplating it, that I just kind of let it drag on forever.  My husband had to step in and take over, after one of my many frustration-induced meltdowns.  Not my most shining moment.  Although I am proud to say that it is fully functional and I didn't kill anyone.  Win, win.

In terms of Christmas gifts, we had dubbed this "Frugalmas", so it was pretty light.  Mom sent over some little treasures and treats.  The hubbie gave me a box full of wonderful wool socks.  I know that sounds pretty paltry, but you have to understand something about me: I DESPISE having cold feet.  I sleep with socks on, even in the summertime when the rest of me is broiling.  And we just recently discovered that the reason we were freezing in our offices at work was not that the insulation is sub-par, but that the heaters were not working.  Winter has not really hit yet (we got our first "real" snow on Christmas Day - pathetic), so it wasn't unbearable.  I had adapted to it by wearing 3 layers up top (camisole, long-sleeve T, wool sweater) and wool pants below and wool hiking socks in my Docs.  Hence the wool socks for Christmas.  Ironically, my coworkers got fed up over the Holidays and went on a reconnaissance in the boiler room, discovering in the process that there was an air-lock in the system and our heaters were not working.  Took them 15 minutes to get it fixed and now I'm sweating all day long.  Better to peel layers off than have to knock the ice off the toilet bowl every time nature calls like we were going to have to do, I say.  Eventually we'll find a nice balance.  In the meantime, I have multiple pairs of comfy socks - one for every day of the week.


I gave him several pair of handmade pyjama bottoms (I only make him whine for 3 years before I deliver the goods) and I made him a new pair of spring/fall mittens a few weeks ago:

(no pattern, just improvisation with superwash merino)

It's my husband's birthday this week, so he received some additional funds from his parents with which to spoil himself, so he bought some snow shoes.  You know those traditional wooden snow shoes with the teardrop shape and the rawhide laces?  Yeah, modern snowshoes don't look anything like those.  Hi-tech.  What a difference.  As a short-legged girl who grew up waddling around on those massive wooden suckers, I have an aversion to snowshoeing.  I might be tempted to give his a try, though.

As a little treat, he used some of his leftover funds to buy me some new leather mittens:

 

They're dressy-ish but tough and functional and are kind of the mitten equivalent to my favourite shoes.  Plus, they have an added little bonus:

Sweet!  Knitted mittens are all well and good, but there comes a point in the winter where I need something a bit more substantial and have never found a nice pair (I detest gloves) that I can wear with my dressier coat.

I'm still very much enthralled by podcasts and have listened to over 100 of Kelley Petkun's (the owner of KnitPicks) while I've been knitting.  She covers many many many topics that I'm not even going to list out here, but one thing she touches on is audiobooks.  I've listened to them before, but not since I got my iPod.  So, when I received the customary iTunes gift certificate for Christmas, I logged on and bought the trilogy she recommended: "A Novel of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman", which is essentially the story of Pride and Prejudice, told from Darcy's perspective.  Yes, please.  It's awesome.  I can't seem to put it down.  It's making me want to interject "Indeed!" and "Blast!" into conversations and use words like "feigned", "absurd", "ardent", and "reticence".  Not to mention "cravat", "waistcoat", "pelisse" and "frock".  Modern English is so boring.

I also bought the latest album from Justin Rutledge, "The Early Widows".  Wow.  Listen for yourselves.  This one's called "Be a Man" and was co-written with Michael Ondaatje.  You know, the guy who wrote "The English Patient":

"Somewhere there is salt in the air of a season that touches the hem
of an island so northern
Some air is knitting a day for a woman whose eyes are upon the horizon"

Kitchener Stitch, Revisited (a.k.a. The Most Rambling Blog Post in History)

I spent the entire weekend knitting, as I mentioned.  And no, I am not mentioning this in order to make you green with jealousy, although if it has that effect, so much the better (HA!).  No, I mention this so you'll see the following photo and not think I am the Michael Schumacher of knitting.  I think I spent somewhere in the neighbourhood of 18 hours knitting on the cowl.  I am not usually this fast, just ask my as-of-yet-unfinished cardigan, which I started approximately 57 years ago.

I was just really inspired by it.  The yarn was totally dreamy (thanks Wood!) and I got a little carried away.

Ok, really carried away.  Don't freak, but I made several modifications to it:

WHAT!?!?  It was begging for more cables, ok?!  {Ooh, check out my sexy Crocs in that photo - that is just all kinds of awesome.}  I couldn't help myself!  Once I had done a few, I just couldn't seem to stop.

IT'S THE YARN'S FAULT, DAMMIT.  Don't look at me, dude.  I'm not the one steering this boat.

So anyway, as I was saying, I finished it.  As a result, I can now show you how to do the grafting part.  You'll notice in that photo that I removed the provisional cast-on (sorry, I'm stoopid and didn't take any photos of that part...oops) and placed all the stitches (carefully) onto my second needle.  I made sure that the stitches are placed properly and that both needle tips are pointing in the same direction.

Little tangent: It just occurred to me that if you are a beginner, you may not know how your stitches are supposed to be sitting on your needles.  When you place your knitting down flat and look at them dead-on (on either the Right Side of the knitting or the Wrong Side - it doesn't matter), the right-hand leg of your stitch should be sitting in FRONT of the needle and the left-hand leg should be BEHIND.  Here's a funny photo that will demonstrate the concept for you.  You want to make sure that when you take those provisional cast-on stitches back up on your needle, that you keep them sitting properly. End of tangent.

If you still have a lot of yarn left over, you can break it, leaving yourself a 36" tail or so. Thread the yarn tail onto a yarn needle.  Fold the cowl in half, so that the Wrong Sides are facing each other and place the needles in your left hand, with your index finger wedged between them, to give you some space to work:

 Do you like my vintage flannel?  I've had it since I was 14.  Don't you go saying anything disparaging about grunge or you and I are gonna have some harsh words.  I'm listening to Eddie Vedder as I'm writing this.  He's my secret boyfriend. We've been together since 1992.  We don't like to tell too many people about it, what with us both being married to other people and him being a dad and all.  If you are too young to remember grunge, I weep for you.

Ahem.  As I was saying, you hold the needles in your left hand and do the threading with your right hand.  There are a few VERY IMPORTANT things to consider BEFORE you start.  One: this is not the easiest technique.  Please, for the love of all things good and holy, only take this on when you have some quiet alone-time.  Don't start if you know you'll be interrupted or if you don't have any patience.  Two: keep everything VERY LOOSE.  The thing will look like a mess at first.  That's ok.  You'll go back and tighten it up later.

The first two steps are the set-up steps.  Here they are:

Set-up 1:  Slip the yarn through the first loop on the front needle, purl-wise.  Pull the tail through.  Leave the stitch there.

 Set-up 2: Slip the yarn through the first stitch on the back needle, knit-wise.  Pull the tail through.  Leave the stitch there.

Ok, that was easy enough, right?

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the next steps are not as easy and are easily messed up.

But here's a trick I discovered during this last foray in kitchener stitch.  You will be working 2 stitches on the front needle then you will switch to the back needle and work 2 stitches there.  You will alternate back and forth between the two until there are no stitches left to work.  Sound ok, so far?

Right.  Here's the trick: when you work each needle, the first stitch you work will always get pulled off the needle, while the second of the 2 stitches will remain on the needle.  Always.  Got it.  Pull stitch off, leave stitch on.

That leaves you with only one thing to remember: the direction that you are going to thread into each stitch: knit-wise or purl-wise.

Front needle: knit-wise for the first stitch, purl-wise for the second.
Back needle: purl-wise, then knit-wise.

Here's what it looks like:

Front needle: knit-wise (remove the stitch), purl-wise (leave stitch on)

Back needle: purl-wise (remove stitch), knit-wise (leave stitch on)

So you see, if you can remember that you always need to slip the first stitch off the needle and keep the second stitch, all you need to do is chant to yourself:

Front, knit, purl
Back, purl, knit...
and so on, until it becomes rhythmic, your brain shuts down and your hands take over.

When you get to the last few stitches, this is what you need to do:

Front needle: thread the yarn into the first stitch knit-wise and slip it off...

...thread the yarn into the second stitch purl-wise and leave it on

Back needle: thread the yarn into the first stitch purl-wise and slip it off...

...thread the yarn into the second stitch knit-wise and leave it on

Front needle: thread the yarn into the last stitch knit-wise and slip it off

Back needle (ACK! sorry, no photo): thread the yarn into the last stitch purl-wise and slip it off.

NOW, you can go back to the beginning of your grafting and start tightening it up, one stitch at a time.  I stuck my finger in there, just to show you how loose it all was before I started tightening it up:   

The idea is that you want to tighten it up *just* enough to make it blend in with your fabric.

Oh, and what does it look like when you get the steps out of sequence?

They look like purl bumps!  Not the end of the world, surely.  Only, because they were so close to the end of my grafting, I backtracked and fixed them.  Had they been near the beginning, I would have shrugged and said fuhgettaboutit!

You're done.  You just need to weave your ends in and block it.  More on that later.


After all that, don't you think we could use a gratuitous cute puppy shot?



Yeah, I thought so, too.

Also, because you rock, here's a little parting music: