Category Archives: Words Words Words

In Which She Admits A Growing Fascination

Merino superwash for the win!

Oh, it is so soft. So lovely and soft. It slips through the fingers and strokes them. It rewards you for knitting with it with pats. It practically purrs. I am serious.

I had a lovely morning and lunch out with Pasley yesterday. We wandered all over Pointe-Claire Village. There was a rogue flake or two in the air, but apart from that the snow was the only thing missing from a perfect Christmas shopping trip. Apart from the not really buying anything, that is. It was more of an appreciative viewing of all the lovely things out there. I did pick up fudge as a treat and a pair of secondhand boots for the boy, and a very inexpensive hand-held milk frother for our hot chocolate, but I was very good indeed and did not buy any of the other stuff I sighed over, including piles of gorgeous ornaments, smoked Cheddar, and Green Mountain coffee.

After dropping Pasley off at home I realised that there was no point in going back home; I’d just have to turn around again to leave for the South Shore, fight through traffic, and collect the boys. So, having recently done a search online for the knitting shop Ceri and Mousme mentioned last time they were over, I knew it was a couple of minutes away from Pasley’s place. I’d stop by, poke around, see if I could find a good yarn to do Mousme’s Hat v2.0. And maybe something soft for my armwarmers, because the Berocco Geode is a bit too loose and I keep splitting my stitches.

I found Tricot Quartier no problem, and it’s just lovely. I’m so glad I put gift certificates from this shop on my wish list! I poked about for half an hour and ended up with the Mission Falls 1824 Wool 100% merino superwash in black for my armwarmers, a pair of size 10 straight needles for them (because I love the size 10 circulars I’ve just finished using with much love, and of course I am working with wooden needles), and I decided on a yarn for the hat. It’s a wool/silk blend, not as fun colour-wise as the acrylic I used for the trial run; more sedate, but still with a touch of whimsy.

And I got to HRH’s office in twelve minutes. Stupid non-existent traffic! Good gods, world, can you not even be consistent in your trafficky habits? Usually there is miles of traffic on the 15 south and around the bridge at that time! Good thing I’d bought yarn and a pair of needles to occupy myself while I sat in the office for an hour, otherwise I’d have gone spare. (No, I wouldn’t have; I’d have gone to the school supply shop and bought myself a notebook, and done some writing instead. Still.)

Anywhats, did several rows of the first armwarmer (v1.5) and realised that my straight needles weren’t creating the lovely stockinette stitch that the circulars had (duh). Which meant I had to teach myself to purl.

May I say right here and right now that I hate purling? Passionately, even. I mangled a length of test acrylic at home while watching television last night by casting on, trying to purl, ripping it out, and repeating the whole process. After ninety minutes of stabbing at it and lassoing needles, I got it. Sometimes I managed to do it. I could do it several times in a row, even. But when I tried to alternate with a knit stitch it all went to hell. Eventually I noticed that the yarn lies in front of the needle while purling, while knit stitches have it coming from behind. I pulled out my how-to-knit book and finally found, long after the how-to-alternate-knit-and-purl-stitches section, a sidebar that said, “Hey, you may have noticed that the yarn lies on opposite sides when you alternate knits and purls! You have to watch for that and move it to where it needs to be for your next stitch.” Gee, thanks. Maybe putting that information before or next to the how-to-alternate section would have been helpful? Instead of twenty pages and a chapter later?

Yes, this is one of the drawbacks to working from a book. Had I been sitting next to an experienced knitter they’d have taken one look at my laborious attempts and said, “Oh, hey, I see your problem: you need to have the yarn lying in front of the RH needle before a purl, and behind it for the knit. Just flip it over.” And a two-foot length of acrylic would have been saved from a horribly mangly torture and eventual death.

So now I know how to purl (go me! though I still don’t like the stitch as much as knit) and can produce rib! I personally like the look of seed stitches, so I suspect that’s what I’ll do the armwarmers in. Or even that may be too ambitious. I should probably do stockinette or 1×1 rib and be thankful that I don’t have to think about what comes next and what stitch starts each row.

This knitting thing is so interesting. It simultaneously engages my brain and lets it relax. And on top of that, it has tangible, visual reinforcement: look, the article I am knitting is getting bigger! This works! I am producing something moderately useful! And I can see how easy it is to start a yarn stash. I spent most of my time wandering around the shop petting the yarn. I want to bring piles of the merino home and cuddle it. I love working with chunky needles and yarns. Although I have absolutely no interest in knitting socks (she says, knowing it will horrify most of her knitting readers — too small! yarn too thin! DPNs of doom!) one of my next projects will be sock-based: I want to make slipper-socks and sew a suede-ish sole over the bottom. Nothing fancy; cables scare me and I want a single colour for them. No stripes or patterns. Just a really nice yarn.

And maybe seed stitch. And ribbing at the top.

In Which She Shares Her Knitting Triumph

Not only did I reach the double-pointed needles part of the project yesterday, I finished the hat. Go team me!

It is lumpy and somewhat misshapen and not quite long enough and the decreases happen in odd places, but I love it. I was so excited about it all working that I didn’t stop and rip out the place where the decreases started to go wrong.

If my excitement seems out of proportion I will tell you only this: I have hated knitting since a Brownie leader handed me a set of needles when I was tiny and told me that to obtain whatever badge it was I’d have to knit a 3 x 3 inch square. She eventually took pity on me and gave me the badge anyway. I’ve tried knitting once or twice since then and have given up. This time? I did it. It worked. And in the space of a day, too. And also? I didn’t work from a pattern. So yes, go team me!

Now that my trial hat is over (it is now officially a Trial Hat because I cannot give it to Mousme; she would heroically try to wear it and I would never do that to her) I know I can Do This. Actually, I started a different project first earlier in the fall. I bought some lovely yarn in shades of grey/silver/black with a touch of brown and started knitting myself armwarmers, but (a) Gryff tore the ball of yarn apart because it has real wool in it and rendered it knotty, and (b) it’s a loosely spun yarn, which means I keep splitting my damn stitches. Fighting with the yarn is not a good way to ease myself back into knitting. So when Mousme had her head shaved to raise money (over two thousand dollars, yay her!) for breast cancer research I asked her if I could knit her a hat to keep her newly bared scalp warm, and she said yes. (Because she is a Good Friend, she also said that didn’t I hate knitting, and was I sure I wanted to do this?)

I need more yarn now. I could rip out the hat but I knotted the end and besides it is my very first knitted thing and I love it with much love. Kind of like those trunk novels that will never ever see the light of day but I can’t bring myself to burn them.

Hello, World: A Rare Weekend Post

I just wanted to share this little fact with you: Life is okay. In fact, it is verging on Downright Good.

The gathering at the Fearsranch was much lower-key that initially advertised. First of all, there were three or four people missing, which made things so very much easier for me. And second, everyone was tired, it being the end of a week and after long amounts of travel on pretty much everyone’s part. The fact that every single individual I met in person for the first time was Made of Good Stuff helped immensely, too. Everyone was Made of Win. I expected this of Bodhifox, my main reason for being there, who felt exactly the same in-person as he does in his journal and over e-mail, but I didn’t have more than a passing familiarity with the others and no expectations whatsoever (beyond “eep people I do not know”). So Made of Win was a good thing. And my flatlining wasn’t as much of a handicap as I’d feared.

There was food. There was drumming. There was cask-strength Macallan. There was a lovely huge bonfire. There was good sleep. There was glorious sun, and breakfast, and discussions about house building (and oven-building and erecting mead halls and rebuilding the front porch), and sad goodbyes said. And there is photographic evidence plus summary and another decent summary the likes of which I don’t have the brainpower to pull off.

Pretty much the only bad thing that happened was I somehow flipped my knitting around and knit three or four rounds before realising it. I pulled the circular needles out and discovered that my swatch had lied to me (with great huge lies! I will never trust yarn again!) and if I had in fact finished the hat the way it was dear Mousme would be wearing it around her shoulders instead of her head. So I pulled the whole thing apart and cast on forty less stitches, and now I have five inches of hat and just made my first ever decrease! Had the Dreadful Thing occurred at home I would have gone ballistic, but the combination of being exhausted and happy and being elsewhere made everything all right.

We’re making pulled barbecue pork for dinner, and feeding a couple of friends whom we called on the off chance they were free (this will never work — you are? yay!). We came home from the Fearsranch with perry (pear cider, with which I am in love), and there is beer now too. I intend to bake Brie. No, I don’t understand it in the least. I’m exhausted. I should be comatose and unable to function. But somehow the night out with excellent people and the subsequent breakfast revived me. HRH and I are considering monthly or bi-monthly Friday night escapes, if they’re this good. And when you get home it’s only early Saturday afternoon, so you still have half a day plus another whole day of weekend.

And now I am going to go knit some more. I wonder if I’ll get to the double-pointed needles part of the project today. At this rate Mousme will certainly have the hat by Yule, and possibly much earlier. (Yes, I was worried about that before. But removing forty stitches from a round makes things progress so much faster.)

The State of Autumn

In brief? Ungood.

Not that anything horrible has happened. In fact, taken individually, the events of the past week have ranged from acceptable to downright excellent. Good rehearsals, fabulous concert, wonderful group cello lesson, awesome guest lecture, kickass edits/rewrites handed in for the forthcoming book, decent handling of freelance assignment, good private cello lesson, phenomenal revelation concerning the non-fic music essay collection and subsequent deluge of wordage, unbelievably good buy of a new winter coat this morning plus the boy had his haircut and charmed folks in the bookstore afterward as usual. Lots and lots of stuff done.

No, it’s all those things piled on top of one another. One or two would have been fine. I’ve worked so much this past week that I’m very close to burnt out, and all the regular stuff was still going on too — groceries, laundry, tidying, meal-preparation, caring for small child when he’s home, and so forth. I ran out of patience and sense of humour three days ago and have been running on empty ever since. I’m irritable and snappish. The constant checking of what time I need to be where, with whom, and carrying what equipment and/or supplies has really gotten to me. I haven’t slept well a couple of nights. Between the cracks of sunlight there is mostly Doomful Gloom outside. I wrenched my back last Friday and it’s not getting better. HRH and I are out of town tonight and tomorrow in order to meet an online friend, and what was originally a cosy little gathering ballooned into a horde of strangers I don’t know, which isn’t helping my dangerously low energy levels and instinctive desire to find a small dark hole and cover my head with a duvet.

It’s odd to realise that the actual holidays are going to be less crammed with stuff than this past week has been. No wonder I’m exhausted.

I will share with you instead the Unbelievably Good Buy of the New Winter Coat this morning. HRH bought me a lovely fluffy periwinkle blue down-filled coat last Christmas and I adore it. But it’s just too much for pre-winter wearing and the warmer winter days. My black wool coat is seven years old and beyond brushing and dry cleaning now; it just never gets to the neat stage, let alone the polished stage. I fell in love with a horrendously expensive red wool coat last year and couldn’t afford it in my wildest dreams. I found something similar this year for a quarter of the price that fit beautifully, but I still didn’t feel that I could afford it at the time. Today it was supposed to be on sale at thirty percent off. When I took it to the cash it ended up being fifty percent off, so I walked away with a new tailored cut, double-breasted, knee-length, red wool coat with an empire waist (and black buttons!) for sixty dollars. I kid you not. Today, life loves me. I wish I loved it back the way it deserves.

I am currently baking the cake part of the Evil Chocolate Tortes for tonight’s feast. I do wish I was looking forward to this gathering more than my energy is allowing me to. I just feel mostly flatline-ish.

So… Close…

All I need to do is proofread this assignment, which means tinkering with it because I always second-guess myself, and then it’s done. So naturally I am dawdling and doing everything except what I ought.

In other news, damn, but “Gaudete” sounds awesome on the cello! It hits all the ringing tones.

ETA @ 16h30: Done, done, done, handed in and gah.

Skiving

I have sneaked away from my laptop to come check out what the Internet’s doing behind my back. So far this assignment is going well. It’s a good product, and unless it jumps the shark in the next forty pages I’ll be able to give it a thumbs up and send it along to the correct department after writing up the evaluation tomorrow.

I must absolutely post this, as the crossover between book-lovers and music-lovers among my Gentle Readers is vast: Bookride Provides a List of Literary Rock Band Names. In other words, bands who have taken their names from books in some way, either title or character of phrase or whatnot. Tons of fun. More provided by commenters below the actual post.

ETA @ 2:45: Finished the rough draft of the review at twoish! Huzzah! And then Jan arrived and there is tea and there are scones and things are very good. So all I need to do is polish it and submit it tomorrow. This leaves me lots of time for writing, because I have goals for the month that I want to meet.