Prolonged Absences

Its funny how time can really fly by sometimes, without your even noticing it.  It took me a little off guard the other day when I realized that we're almost into the last week of February.  Seems like even the extra leap day won't be enough to get me caught up this year!

I've been busy with lots of little things which, when taken altogether, seem almost too overwhelming to deal with.  Unfortunately, that means I tend to shy away from considering everything at once, but all that compartmentalizing of my time and thoughts makes time disappear even faster.  I really must learn a more effective way of time (and attention!) management.

I've hardly been doing any knitting this year either.  Compared to last year's hugely productive knitting regimen (I finished 54 projects and 264 swatches), I'm almost feeling hints of knitting withdrawl these days.  Good thing  this Noro yarn found me last Sunday, and told me that it really needed to become my new scarf.

I did try hard to resist, reminding myself of all the other lovely yarn that's in my stash, but then Mr. Rowan Tweed walked by and broke down all my best defenses.

I am such a sucker for Tweed! 

5 days later, and am more than a third of the way through my scarf... how can you resist colours like that?!

My Book Arrived Today! :)

Its not just my book.  Its a book I share with other people - some very smart other people, several of whom I am happy to call my friends.

Here's my contribution:

It feels like a very long time since I wrote this - sometimes when I read it, I forget that it was really me who wrote it.  I hate that.  :-\

Happy New Year!

Did everyone have a fun New Year's Eve?  I hope you weren't all hungover this morning!

Mike and I opted for a quiet evening at home, most of which was spent with me catching up with my swatch blog, with the various NYE celebration shows (New York, Niagara Falls, Toronto, etc.) on in the background.    (Gotta have Dick Clark there to welcome in the New Year, even if it is shown on a 3-hour delay out here!).  We chose this option because we wanted to head up to Whistler bright and early this morning - we figured that all the hard-core partiers would stay in bed, and we'd end up with a pretty quiet mountain.  And we were right!

 Do you see the early morning (8:30am-ish) huge mass of skis, belonging to all the people in the ticket lines, bathrooms, and/or doing other preparatory things?  No!  That's because it wasn't there!  :)

 This shot was taken near the bottom of The Glades in Symphony Bowl, at exactly 10am.  While I was skiing, I was the only one there - a few others started to pass me as I was taking the photo.  :)

We had a great day skiing - and now that I'm skiing post wrecked (and now repaired!) knee, my desire to avoid falling at all costs is making me pay more attention to my technique.  Good thing Mike is pretty skilled at teaching the finer points of skiing!  (although I will probably try to take a proper lesson soon - that was the plan last year, until we had to cut our ski vacation short).

Given that the holidays are now coming to an end (although we still have tomorrow off - yay!), I thought I should update you on all the holiday things I had wanted to post, but didn't get time to do...

Let's see... I left off after Christmas Tree Day...

On Christmas Eve, we gave Gus his Christmas present.  If you remember, for the last year and a half, Gus has been living in a vase on the desk in our office.  Recently, he'd been looking a little bored and cold, so we decided that it was finally time to upgrade.

This is Gus' new home - a 5.5 gallon tank, complete with a heater, some new decorations, 2 mystery snails, and four little tetra fish friends.  The snails are named Norman and Rockerfeller; our little orange-striped tetra is Napoleon, and the larger, black-striped tetra is called Fletcher.  The two little cardinal tetras are new to the tank, so they don't have names yet.  In rather a sad turn of events, it turns out that Tetra fish are really good jumpers - not that the people at the pet store told us this.  So a tank with no lid, and a rather high water level (due to the heater) unfortunately resulted in two dead little fishies!  But don't worry, we went to a much better pet store and got a lid, so now our fishies are nice and safe!

Since we stayed in Vancouver for the holidays this year (as per our three-year cycle of Mike's Family, My Family, and then No Family), the plan was that we'd have Turkey Dinner at my brother's house.  Ostensibly, this was decided so that my 1.5 year old nephew, Max, could go to sleep in his own bed at his proper bed time, rather than having to keep him up super late (and overexcited) at Grandma and Grandpa's (aka: my parents' house).  But of course it turns out Max is a bit of a night owl, so we probably could've had Christmas at the folks'.  :)

Anyway, my contribution to the dinner was Tourtière, a French-Canadian spiced meat pie.  This year I decided to try a new recipe, since the one I've used in the past was always a little bland (I was given the basic recipe by Mike's mother, but the 'secret sauce' eludes me - my pie did not taste like her pies!).

 Here's the filling, simmering away.

And here's the finished pie, awaiting transport to Maple Ridge.

Dinner was a lot of fun - not least because we had this guy to entertain us.

This is Max's ' Who me? But I'm innocent!' expression.  I think he gets this one from his father!

Here he is tackling a gift from my parents... you'll see what it was in just a bit.

I gave Max this guy...

I thought he was a monster, but Max assures me that he's a "Bo Bot".  :)

For my brother, I "made" this gift...

his very own, do-it-yourself Gingerbread House Kit.  A little late, perhaps, but who says it can't be a New Year's House?!

Here's my Dad, calmly watching all the present shenanigans from afar.

(oh sure, he likes cats now, but what about all those years when I wanted a cat, but the answer was always 'no!'?!)  ;)

After a bath and a change to PJ's, Max decided it was time that his father put together the tricycle that came out of that great big box.

 Keep an eye on Max here... "Yay! Daddy and Granddad are building my bicycle!" (that kid is such a ham)

 Two seconds later...

"Ooo, now that they're distracted, I'm going to go play with this camera that I'm not supposed to touch!"

Good thing that kid's so cute - he gets away with murder!

Max's monster, and his blue counterpart, were the extent of my Christmas knitting this year.  Mike's sweater didn't get finished, because it turned out that my sewn steeks weren't nearly as secure as I thought...  but the kind people from the Dale of Norway Ravelry Group have given me a number of suggestions on how to fix the now partially unravelling armscye/body stitches, so hopefully I should be able to fix that and get on with finishing it.  There was a woman at Whistler wearing a machine-knit version of the same sweater (I'm guessing, given the leather DaleGarn Patch that was sewn on to it), and seeing that definitely made me want to finish this one soon.

In other news, I successfully finished my year of swatching - 257 swatches in total.  You can read my final comments, and get some info on the 'next steps' here.  For now, I'm going to bed!

Christmas Tree Day!

On December 10th, Mike and I decided that it was high time we went out and found ourselves a Christmas Tree.  As you may remember, we generally get our trees from a U-Cut style Tree Farm, since this ensures the freshest possible tree.

This year we went back to the same farm as last year - the weather was just about as grey, but at least this time the ground was mostly frozen, so we didn't have to wade through mud puddles to find the tree.

Here's Mike with our tree right before we hoisted it onto the car.

And here he is all tied up tight, ready for the drive home.

Once we got home, we stood out little friend in the corner, and decorated him with lights and tinsel and ornaments.  Now he's such a happy little tree!

We also have a Charlie Brown-style tree this year - Mike took a fall while hanging our window lights, and unfortunately this branch wasn't quite strong enough to support him.  But now it looks so festive on our mantelpiece!  :)

A few days after the tree went up, I baked the traditional gingerbread cookie ornaments... good thing I didn't actually need them for the tree, because they haven't made it to the decorating stage yet (hence the lack of photos).  They're far too yummy on their own!

Steeks!

Remember Mike's Olympic Sweater?  It has been lounging in my UFO pile for quite a while now... I knit most of the body fairly quickly, but then had to rip it out and re-knit it because my gauge was off, and the piece was too small.  That was finished by March 2010.  I worked on the sleeves (very) sporadically, and finally finished the second one back in October.  Then the whole thing went on hold for one very "simple" reason: steeks.

For the non-knitters out there, steeking is the act of purposefully cutting open your knitting.  It is a process not for the faint of heart - especially because it is almost always done to knit pieces that incorporate a great deal of colourwork.  It's kind of the point really, since the whole point of steeking is that it enables you to knit your sweater in the round, so that you never have to purl a row with multiple colours - apparently, cutting open your carefully-stitched colourwork is supposed to be easier than purling a row with three colours at once.

Anyway, after knitting that sweater body twice, the last thing I wanted to do was ruin it with a few badly placed snips.  So, after reading a few blog about steeking, and a recent article on the subject in Vogue Knitting, I did the only smart thing: knit a practice swatch. 

You will note that this was knit flat, and that there are 3 colours in that centre row.
For the record, purling with multiple colours is not that difficult.

Once the swatch was knit, I hand-sewed a line of long stitches with white thread, to mark the point at which I wanted to make the cut.  The next step is to sew (with a sewing machine) two lines of stitches on either side of where I wanted to make the cut.  These secure the knit stitches, and (supposedly) lock the whole thing into place so it doesn't fall apart after you cut it.

Here's my swatch after sewing and steeking:

Then I was ready to tackle the real thing.  There are two kinds of steeks on this sweater:

 At the neck placket, the pattern required what I can only call a steeking panel - a group of 3 (I did 5!) surplus stitches that span the area to be cut.  You cut the centre stitch, fold back the edges, and then pick up the neckband stitches along your fold line.  This one is less terrifying, because at least you have some wiggle room - if you mess up, there are still a few extra stitches in here in which to correct your mistake!

The sleeve steeks are more terrifying because you have to cut into the actual knit piece - lose a stitch here, and you're probably going to see it in the final product.  In both this pic and the previous one, you can see the red stitches I put in with the sewing machine.  I was trying very hard to sew down one half of the 'V' in each knit stitch.  This sweater was knit in sport-weight yarn, so you'll have to forgive my less than straight seams!

Okay, seams in (about 3 to each side of each steek...), and its time to start cutting!  Here's the neck placket after a few snips:

 And after cutting all the way through:

 And here is one of the sleeves, fully sliced, and folded back to reveal the interior floats.

Now that I'm past this hurdle, I can get moving on the final steps - sewing in the sleeves, hemming the bottom, knitting in the neck placket and collar, and sewing in the neck zipper.  And then (hopefully) Mike can stop telling everyone about his sweater that may never see the light of day!  ;)