Category Archives: Photographs

In Which She Rejoices And Admits A Puzzling Oversight

I just found 1.2 oz of yarn I’d spun for Devon’s wrap at the bottom of a box, all wound into a cake. I must have split the bigger of my two skeins into two balls, for a total of three balls, and when I got near the end of the second ball I must have remembered that I’d spun two skeins, so I thought I’d used up all my yarn.

I feel a wee bit like an idiot, but I’m so thrilled to have it that I’m not engaging in as much self-flagellation as I otherwise might.

I have yaaaaarn! I can finish the wrap!

(Yes, yes, I know I am ignoring the silk scarf, which ought to be finished first. Ssh. I will probably be responsible and finish the silk scarf anyway before powering through the final third of the wrap. Perhaps this will give me the added incentive to finish knitting it up. That is, if I stop making mistakes that requires frogging multiple inches at a time. *insert expression of irritation here*)

Weekend Roundup: Sunday, Solstice Edition

Sunday morning we had the upstairs neighbours over for our now-annual Yule waffle brunch and small gift exchange. Blade and I were still in fine form from the party the night before and snarked all morning, amusing ourselves terribly. The boy got a Lego tow truck kit from them and decided that I should be the one to assemble it. I don’t work with Lego very often because I simply don’t think in three-dimensional block form very well, but give me a kit with instructions and I’m fine. They gave me a lovely Celtic knot print in my favourite autumnal earthy colours, and a sampling of Saxon chocolates, including my favourite sea salt caramels!

The local grandparents arrived just past ten-thirty for our early Christmas celebration. The boy was very patient for all of ten minutes, so we settled down and started opening presents. He’s at the age where he can actually appreciate each gift he opens again, instead of just enthusiastically opening things left, right, and centre. There weren’t as many gifts as there usually are, for which was very thankful. Part of this is due to the fact that we didn’t have both sets of our parents here, so the floor around the tree wasn’t as crowded as usual, but part of it was that we were all pretty restrained this year. We gave HRH’s dad a movie, and his mom a hand-knitted scarf, and Liam got a camera of his very own, which he began using right away, taking some very respectable pictures of his favourite ornaments on the tree.

The big hit, though, and the present we saved for last, was the early gift that Santa brought him: the racetrack he’d asked for when he saw Santa at the mall. (I knew HRH’s parents had bought him something from the Cars line of toys, so I pinged his mom to see if that’s what they’d gotten, and it was, so we were all covered. Bless them.) A very close second was Anakin’s Clone Wars starfighter, which went to bed with him for both nap and overnight.

HRH and I both got wallets (with money inside, hurrah!) and socks (it amuses me that when you get socks as a kid you’re let down, but as an adult you’re thrilled because it’s one less necessity you have to buy). I got a lovely plum-coloured knitted wrap that’s just gorgeous and so very soft.

My best gift, hands-down, though, was this:

It’s HRH’s newest painting in his Celtic Totems series. My office smells like oil paint, as it was still a wee bit tacky when HRH brought it up for me. (Kudos to Blade, who improvised a nice cover the other day when I was downstairs in the basement office and said, “Hey, it smells like varnish or something down here.” “Oh, I accidentally hit the button on one of my spray paints,” he said. Apparently when I’d left HRH looked at him and said, “Smooth. Thanks.”)

While everyone else played with the toys and nibbled on the various seafood and other hors d’ouevres that HRH’s parents had brought, I started getting food going. I’d brined the turkey the night before, and had realised while falling asleep that I didn’t have enough bread with which to make stuffing. I made a batch in the breadmaker as soon as I got up, a whole wheat/herb quick bread that I shredded and toasted in the oven when it was ready. In retrospect I shouldn’t have toasted it into croutons, because the whole wheat bread was already drier than white. I mixed up the stuffing and put half in the bird, and half in a baking dish, then put the turkey in the oven. Then I mixed up pie dough, because I was short a pie shell thanks to the previous day’s disaster, and had the worst time trying to get it to stick together. I kept adding ice water and it just wouldn’t cling. Eventually I squeezed it together and put it in the freezer to cool off a bit before rolling it out and mixing up the pecan pie filling. And then I discovered that unlike the little aluminium plates that prepared pie shells come in, my metal pie tin doesn’t fit in the oven next to the roasting tray, so I had to take the turkey out to blind-bake the shell for twenty minutes. I couldn’t afford the next half-hour it would take to bake the pie entirely, though, so a quick phone call confirmed that the neighbours were fine with us borrowing their oven, and HRH went upstairs with it. I set our timer to remind us to go get it when it was ready. The bird went back in the oven, was ready around quarter past four, and HRH carved it for me while I made the gravy. I heated up my mother in law’s excellent special mashed potatoes in the oven as well as baking the other half of the stuffing (which turned out to be unneeded on the table), and parboiled carrots before frying them in butter and doing a quick maple syrup glaze. And then we all feasted, feasted, feasted! The pecan pie was lovely, even though some of the filling managed to work its way through the shell and caramelize on the bottom. A soft dollop of whipped cream balanced it nicely.

Somehow, I completely forgot to make rolls to go with dinner. Didn’t even think about them in the overall meal plan.

After his grandparents left, there was a bath for the boy, the second chapter of Prince Caspian, and then bed. He woke up for no particular reason around ten while I was in the bath, although I didn’t find out till I checked on him between bath and bed. I cuddled him back to sleep, and fell asleep myself. A very full day, and forgetting to eat properly in the middle of it was not a good thing. Apart from that, though, it was wonderful. We are so blessed to have close friends and family with whom to celebrate the season. And the celebrating has only just begun!

Scylla And Charybdis

I’ve had an occasional dry cough over the past week. It got rather annoying last night, and today has developed into one of those when-you-cough-your-head-feels-like-it’s-about-to-explode kind of things. Then about an hour ago I developed chills, which led me to take my temperature, and hey, fever. Joy. And I have somewhere to be tonight, an event I swore up and down that I’d be attend come what may.

Rock and hard place: Go to the event, drain what energy I have, possibly pass this cold along to others right when the holiday season is about to get busy; or stay home, rest and focus on getting better, and conserve what energy is left for the recital this weekend?

So my plans for the evening are officially cancelled, which makes me extremely irritated because of the aforementioned promise to attend. Plus I feel, you know, sick. I will go to the mall with the family to be there for the boy’s Santa visit, but then it’s home and bed for me after sitting on the chesterfield watching HRH and the boy do the first round of decorating the tree. The most important thing this weekend is the recital. It’s not like my solo can just be skipped if I can’t attend; I’m duetting, so if I can’t be there, my partner loses out on her show piece as well. I am hereby declaring all my other non-essential social stuff this weekend cancelled as well.

I should have known the day was a write-off when I made two pans of Rice Krispie squares for the party tonight and came into the kitchen to find Cricket standing in one pan, licking the squares in the other. What a waste of food.

In other news, for those keeping score at home, the package originally delivered by UPS that they demanded $58 is processing fees for, which was then returned to sender, sat in a warehouse for a while, finally released to her after she called to find out where it was (total time: five weeks) and re-sent to me via USPS? Got here yesterday afternoon. Seven days, cheaper shipping fee, no delay or bureaucratic mess or extra costs. Take that, UPS. The lazy kate extender and two extra bobbins all work beautifully and I’m thrilled. The sender wrapped it all in ten ounces of three different kinds of roving to protect it; that’s almost a pound of spinnable fibre. I am absolute floored at the effort and energy she put into this at every step.

We got the tree yesterday. We paid more for it than I wanted to, but it’s truly a lovely tree and in very good condition. We’ll decorate it in stages over the weekend.

Finished spinning Jan’s yarn, plied it, and set the twist this morning. 188 yards of home-dyed heavy fingering weight mohair/merino with which she will knit a lightweight scarf:

I was supposed to give it to her tonight at the party; I’ll have to find some other way of getting it to her.

Otherwise today I ate, napped, practiced, and tried to read; this cold is killing my focus.

Fifty-Four Months Old!

According to the doctor’s measurements this week, he is 39 pounds and one meter and 106 centimeters tall. That’s two pounds heavier and just about two inches taller than he was six months ago. He got to stay the afternoon with his old caregiver after the appointment and loved it.

The biggest news this month, bar none, is the reading. With no prompting, of his own initiative, he spelled out “trains”, “steam”, and “boxcar” from one of his train collector books, and then sounded them out himself. I’m ecstatic.

It’s been a big month for movies! He saw the second half of The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi, The Castle in the Sky, and the latest The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But the biggest hit has been The Nightmare Before Christmas. He went to bed singing “Something’s up with Jack, something’s up with Jack” over and over. Also, I was patiently asked “Mama, would you please not sing?” so many times during the film that I lost count. I made a copy of the soundtrack to play in the car and I think HRH is sick of it already. But he sings bits of the songs all the time, including ‘Kidnap the Sandy Claws,’ which would make both t!’s and Tal’s hearts burst if they heard him. We had no worries about bad dreams if he watched it. He’s very imaginative and sensitive, but not the kind of sensitive that leaves him vulnerable to being scared at night. We can show him pretty much anything and he takes the fun away from it instead of the fear. I’m thankful for that, because he’s a voracious film watcher.

They’re going to officially begin eliminating the nap at preschool in the new year. This makes me sad, sadder than the reminders of how much he’s growing in the form of too-short pants and sleeves on shirts, shoes outgrown before they’re worn out, increasing dexterity with pencils and markers and other growing-up indicators. At school he’s down to a half hour at the most, although at home he’ll still sleep a solid hour and a half, and when he wakes up they move him to the library room where he sits for another hour quietly on his own, looking at books. “He just loves books,” his educators say, and we kind of smile and shrug a bit. When you’re surrounded by them, how can you not love them? Books have been an integral part of his life since the moment he was born. He’s never not known books, something for which I am deeply grateful. My parents gave me plaque that says, ‘Richer than I you can never be, I had a mother who read to me’ and it’s a truth. We are currently reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe one chapter before bed each night, and he’s staying quiet for it even though there are no pictures other than the chapter heading in the hardcover copy I’m reading from. I am so thrilled that we’ve reached this point.

He used to sleep on his side, but recently he’s begun sleeping like I do, on his back with his arms above his head. (I have no idea how I get that way; I fall asleep curled up on my side.) But sometimes an arm gets trapped underneath him, and twice now he’s woken up crying in the morning because he can’t feel an arm or hand, because they’ve fallen asleep. And then he cried because the pins and needles sting as the blood gets back into the affected area. A couple of weeks ago we were in the basement one evening and we heard a fitful cry over the baby monitor, a cry unlike anything we’d heard from him since he was a very tiny baby. Now, he never wakes up crying; no nightmares, nothing. So we hurried upstairs and he was still half-asleep, unable to move either of his hands and forearms because he’s somehow gotten them both trapped underneath him. I rubbed them till the pins and needles went away, and cuddled him back to sleep.

Apart from the Santa visit, the big thing this month has, of course, been SNOW! Again this year his educators are shaking their heads and saying they’ve never seen a child so in love with the snow. He rolls in it as soon as it starts falling, which of course leads to much washing of a muddy snowsuit. In the middle of the big storm we had this week he turned to his teacher and said, “Now? Now is it winter?” and she gave up on explaining the whole solstice thing and just said, “Yes, now it’s winter.” “Yay!” he said. “I love winter!” And when HRH got him out of bed the other day, he asked excitedly, “Dada, is it snowing again today?” HRH answered in the affirmative. “The snow likes me!” the boy sad happily. “No,” HRH said, somewhat wearily, “The snow loves you.”

Hoth Reenactment

I kid you not. The shovel is the boy’s defensive artillery.

(Yes, it’s dark at four PM, and there wasn’t a heck of a lot of sun today anyway on account of that little snowstorm we’re having. I love how the camera flash picks up the snowflakes between the camera and the boy.)

Accidentally boiled the fibre in the oven. Good thing it’s mostly mohair and doesn’t felt. In spite of this, the colours look fantabulous. Good call on overdyeing, self.

Mohair Dyeing Experiment Spun Up

Here you are, gentle readers, the dyed mohair spun up as a single:

It’s a thick and thin single that averages about worsted weight (which let me tell you, is really thick for me; I had to consciously tell my foot to treadle extremely s-l-o-w-l-y) and now I want to knit it up into something, despite the fact that it’s only 1 oz and about twenty yards long and very, erm, energized. I’m soaking it to set the twist right now. I spun it yesterday after I got up from my two-hour nap. (I then proceeded to fall asleep right after the boy went to bed at 7:30 and not wake up till 6:30 this morning, so evidently the nap didn’t negatively impact my night, for which I am deeply grateful.)

Someone asked me what I was going to do with all these tiny skeins, and the answer is: nothing. I’m going to keep them in a box with labels tied to them identifying the fibre, the speeds used to spin and ply, the weight and yardage, and the date. They’re samples. They’re not big enough to do much of anything with, but I didn’t spin them with a project in mind, or to stash them against a future project, or for any goal other than having the experience of trying something to see what happens. I’m playing with new fibres, or new speeds, or dye jobs, or new grists. It’s a way of experimenting without committing a bunch of time and money to something that might ultimately fail. And with these smallish experiments under my belt, I’ll be able to apply the skills I’m learning (mohair, long-draw, silk, bamboo, semi-worsted) to larger projects in the future without losing investment.

What I want to know is if the basic Louet line is all about bulky to medium weight yarns and I’m pulling off fingering to laceweight as my default, what the heck would I manage to do with the high-speed flyer or the faster wheels? Spin fingering to laceweight a lot faster is the answer, I suspect, but my point is basically that these supposedly slow wheels are capable of a lot more than those who don’t use them give them credit for. (Also, maybe if I spin with the brake band all the way on I’ll get thicker yarns. I had the brake band on about one-third of the way for this single so that the yarn would actually draw onto the bobbin and I wouldn’t put as much twist into it.)

Mohair Dyeing Experiment #2

One ounce of 70% mohair/30% merino:

ETA: (Hmm. In daylight the colours aren’t that vivid. The above is kind of what I was going for; the actual colours are a lot more neutral and less saturated, like this:)

All the dyes need more brown in them. Yellows and reds take up so much faster than greens; I’m going to have to weaken the rust and gold solutions and intensify the green dye. Also, next time I try this colourway, I’m going to put green between the rust and gold sections as well, so a bright orange doesn’t result from the gold and rust blending. (A not unpleasant effect, but not what I was going for.) As much fun as I’m having with the Wilton’s gel colours, I’m looking forward to being able to measure out dye powder and blend it with a set amount of water to get a reliable solution.

I also got a repeat of my goddaughter’s wrap done last night, and yesterday I did a light edit on eighty pages of my Poppy book (which, to my astonishment, I do not hate; although I suspect I will fall less in love with it as I get closer to the end of what’s there and realise that I have to decide how to finish it properly, after six years). I got an assignment last night, though, so I know what I’m doing for the rest of the week: it’s a 180K-word general fiction title to evaluate. I’m hoping it’s above average for a quick report…