So I have a new friend.

We’ve been spending so much time together I haven’t done much knitting lately.

We made some singles.

Then some two-ply.

And now we’re comfortable with each other, we’re on to the fun, colourful stuff.

One of my favourite knitting blogs to read is the Yarn Harlot’s. While she is a fellow Canadian, she lives approximately 3400km from where I do. Why then, do we seem to have the same squirrel problems?

Today was a nice, sunny day. I decided to open our balcony door to get some air. This door doesn’t stay open by itself, it needs to be propped. The big box that holds it all the way open wasn’t handy, so I stuck a small box it it, so it wouldn’t shut. Normally this door gets propped wide open when it is nice out. The rectractable screen door was open when I opened the door, because I’d been going in and out the past few days with plants. But for whatever reason, I decided to close the screen today.

A little later, I’m sitting on the couch reading, and I hear a noise from outside. Then I notice a SQUIRREL seemingly HOVERING in my doorway.

It must have been the wool fumes. I bought yarn today for the first time in a year and a half. Squirrels like yarn. Who knew?

I used to think squirrels were cute. Now I see them for what they really are: rats with hairy tails that just want to steal our yarn.

Luckily my iPhone was on the coffee table next to me so I could get pictures. I closed the inner door and then knocked on it to scare it away. What would have happened if I hadn’t closed the screen? My boyfriend says I would’ve had to put on my big girl pants and chased it out. I think I might have been more likely to lock myself in the bathroom.

Something else that has been taking a bit of time from my knitting recently is gardening. Now, living in a north-facing condo, I don’t have much to take care of, but I like to make the balcony look pretty for the summer.

Succulents tend to do well outside in the summer, once the last threat of snow is gone (June), so I pick a few up every year. We don’t have much luck keeping them inside over the winter.

This year I added thrifting to the list of things to do for the garden. I was tired of boring old plant pots. So I went to a few thrift store, and a couple antiques malls, and came up with a funny little collection that makes me smile.

They’re still inside right now, but all on a cardboard tray that gets put outside on nice days when I’m home to monitor/run and bring them in.

Somehow most of the containers I found were house-shaped teapots and creamers. I even have a matching teapot and creamer that I found in two different stores!

They’re calling for snow on Monday, so these little guys won’t get to go outside full-time for a week or two yet, but I think they’ll enjoy it.

My herb garden is already outside, in regular pots. Hopefully they won’t mind a quick snow in a couple days!

This is the bag I’m knitting to take to the Sock Summit to fill with all sorts of wonderful sock yarn. It is actually starting to look like a bag now, not just a square.

And I’ve started on the second colour! My Revolutionary Stitch Markers are really coming in handy: as you go up the sides, you leave one stitch of each square live, to pick up when you start the next tier. The markers are perfect mini stitch holders. I’ve also threaded one through the fabric so I know which square was first of this tier:

It’s so great to see it take shape, and I can just imagine all the great stuff I’m going to buy and put in it! I was just coming off a yarn diet when the Summit was announced, so I just kept on not buying yarn in order to save it all up until I can fondle everything in person.

I really like doing mitred squares. Have such little units of work still gives me a huge feeling of accomplishment when I finish one. And I’m getting really good at picking up stitches!

I’m one of those people who is always starting new craft projects. I have supplies for all sorts of crafts in our storage room. I’ve found a new love, but don’t worry, it won’t stop me knitting. My new ‘thing’? Canning.

I bought this book: The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving: Over 300 Recipes to Use Year-Round and I absolutely love it. Mum made all our jams & marmalades when I was growing up. We had a lot of fruit on our property, way more than 3 people could eat in one summer. It is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I moved out, but I didn’t want to end up with 10 jars of jam. Buying that much fruit would be expensive, and we don’t eat that much jam. Small-batch preserving is just right! You get a couple jars of jam, which is just right.

Soon after I bought the book, but before I’d thought seriously about what to make, I went grocery shopping and found a flat of 12 mangoes for $6. So I bought mangoes.

I cut up mangoes.

And I made just about every mango recipe in the book. The thing with small-batch is that while you don’t end up with a lot of product (good) it doesn’t use a lot of fruit (sometimes good). Most recipes call for 2 mangoes. I still have 6 left sitting in the box.

From left to right we have: Mango Chutney, Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam (no mangoes, but I couldn’t help myself), Mango-Lemon Marmalade, Light Mango Spread (I had more than 1 jar of this, but they’ve already gone to new homes!).

P’s stepdad is a recently-diagnosed diabetic, so the light mango stuff was for him. No added sugar, just Splenda, and a special no-sugar pectin.

It gets the plastic lid, because you need to keep it in the fridge or freezer. No sitting on the shelf for 3 months for this one, eat it fast!

I’ve been looking at canning books for ages, trying to find one that meshed with what I knew about canning. Mum never used pectin in anything, saying that it just diluted the fruit. Look at a pectin recipe vs. a no-pectin one and even if you start with the same amount of fruit, you get much more product from the pectin-using one. Thus, diluted fruit flavour. This book doesn’t use it too much, which is nice.

Mum also never boiled the jars once the jam was in. Just put boiling hot jam into hot jars. She boiled the flat part of the lids, to soften the seal, but that was it. Once the lids were on, I’d hang around the kitchen counting the ‘ping!’ noises the lids made as they snapped down to seal. And, no one has ever died or even gotten sick from eating mum’s jam. Some canning books went so overboard on the warnings it just seemed like fear-mongering to me. Small-Batch has you boil the full jars, and I did for these, but I still don’t think it really necessary.

Most of these have been done for about a week, and the only thing I’ve tasted (apart from licking the spoon) is the Mango Chutney. I sometimes will finish knitting a sweater or socks or something, and immediately put it away nice and neat where it belongs. I won’t try it on for a while. After I’ve spent so much time on something, I want to enjoy it being completed without realising that it’s too big/forgot a button/too small/etc. I think I’m doing the same thing with this jam. What if it is too runny? Tastes bad? To stiff? I’m just enjoying the pretty jars right now, and telling myself I haven’t had any yet because you need muffins or scones to truly enjoy jam, and I haven’t made any yet.

I think I’m going to go make some cornmeal muffins now, and while those are in the oven, I may even sew buttons on the finished $1.50 cardi that’s been folded on the shelf for 2 months now.

I’ve booked my tickets for Portland for the Sock Summit!

The marketplace shopping bag is starting to look 3D, like it should, no more flat bottom panel.

But, work is wacky and huge right now, so not much time for blogging

I am officially attending the Sock Summit 2009! I’ve been thinking about it since it was announced, but I officially have a roommate, and hotel room, so it is all real!

I just need to wait until it isn’t Easter weekend so I can book my flights.

In anticipation of Sock Summit, even before I had a place to stay, I started some projects. The obnoxious socks in the last post are one, and this is another (and probably more practical that wool socks in summer).

I traded for this yarn, which means it was essentially free, which means more money for the Summit Marketplace. It is Louet 100% linen, and I’m using it to make the market bag from the Spring 2009 IK.

As I have three colours, I decided to start with the darkest for the base, then the next lightest, then the very lightest. I’m hoping to do the first 28 squares in dark purple. There are 72 squares total, but the 28 would give it a nice symmetry I think.

I actually took these photos a while ago, I’m on square 13 now, and was on square 7 in the photo.

As you can see, I’ve been using my Revolutionary Stitch Markers. That gold one is dual purpose; it is on the right side of the work, and it is marking square #1. I’ve since moved on to a slightly more advanced system, marking the first square of each set of four (the base is worked in sets of 4). I’ve been using these markers as alphabet markers, number markers, you name it. I was one of those kids whose pencil crayons were always in rainbow order, so I know that with these markers pink is #1 or A (it’s the closest to red), orange is #2/B, gold/yellow is #3 etc.

My work now has a pink, an orange, and a gold on it. I’m working on the square that should have a green, but I don’t think I’ll need to actually put it on the work.

In but 4 months, this bag will be full of yarny goodness at SS09. I can’t wait.

With some of the money I made destashing knitting books last month, I bought myself another knitting book! I bought Cat Bordhi’s New Pathways for Sock Knitters.

I had also been thinking about the best way to attack my stash strategically. Ages ago, I’d made an Excel inventory of my yarn, and I set it up to calculate the total length of the yarn in my stash in kilometres. I then set myself the goal of only having 10km of yarn in the stash at one time. Back in March I was so very, VERY close to 10km, but I’d destashed all I was willing to part with. I had large amounts of yarns left, and I wanted to use some of those up. One of these things was a skein of 800-odd yards of sock yarn that I’d bought to make knee socks. I didn’t feel like making knee socks any more, so I tried making it into a cardigan. It was obnoxious. The yarn is quite bright, so I decided it had to become socks.

Then the lightbulb went on. I had this new, exciting sock book, with all sorts of socks to knit. I had a lot of sock yarn. I could combat second sock syndrome by knitting one of each sock in the book! I’ll end up with a set of socks that are related by colour and innovation, but not by construction.

I figured I might as well start at the beginning, so I made one of the socks in the Sky Architecture chapter.

It’s funny: two of the books I sold were Cat Bordhi’s other knitting books, A Treasury of Magical Knitting, and Another Treasury of Magical Knitting. This book is still the same chatty style (which takes getting used to) but I guess I’m just a sock person, because there is no way you’ll pry this book out of my clutches.

Now I just have to decide which one I want to knit next!

If my socks are going to be obnoxiously bright anyway, who cares if they’re a perfect pair?

I love spring cleaning. I love clearing out stuff, making a giveaway pile, a recycling pile, and a garbage pile, and putting everything where it should be.

My boyfriend and I spent today emptying out our storage room. Our apartment-condo has a storage room actually in our house, and a separate storage unit too. Today we tackled the in-house one. I’m always amazed at the junk I think I need to keep. If I didn’t keep all that crap, I wouldn’t need to have clear-outs!

I’ve also been attacking the stash, and my UFOs. I sold 3 skeins of Mountain Colors Bearfoot to a lady in town, and 4 knitting books to her too. I still have a few skeins left up on Ravelry. I’m also doing a trade with another Raveler, we’re trading some yarn. It works out so well, because I get yarn I want, so does she, and we both get rid of stuff we’re tired of!

The thing I’m most proud of though, is dusting off my $1.50 cardigan again, and actually commiting to finish it.

I started this back when the magazine came out, so Spring 2007. I got most bits done, then stopped. I dusted it off September 2008, and had finished all the bits by November 2008. Then it sat in the box again, until yesterday! I got out the bits, seamed the fronts to the back, and even picked up the button band!

It was also a great chance to test other functions of my Stitch Marker Revolution markers. I had a hunch they’d be more useful than regular stitch markers, and I was right. They open and close, so it was easy to slip them on the needle at the right points once I’d figured out where the buttons needed to go (the teal ones in the pic above). I also changed the button holes from what the pattern says. Pattern says to do a yarn over, but because I have big buttons, I did a 4-stitch one-row buttonhole instead.

They were also very useful for dividing up the fronts into quarters so I could pick up stitches evenly for the button band (Lavender in that pic). I usually use safety pins for that, but these are more fun. I found it easiest to stick the connector part through a stitch or between stitches.

I even used them instead of safety pins to baste the pieces together. No pictures of that, I’ll take some when I do the sleeves. But you just poke the connector through the edge of one piece, then the other, click it closed, and there you are!

These are the small size, and they worked very well. I think the big ones would be too loose to baste edges together.

So, have we all heard about the Sock Summit?

If you haven’t, I can wait while you check it out.

Are you jumping up and down now? I thought so.

I really, REALLY want to go. I think I may actually make it happen. Sure, recession blah blah blah, but doesn’t that just mean that hotels will be slashing prices to attract tourists? All sorts of airline seat sales?

Actually, there is a group of Edmonton knitters (3 hours north of me) thinking about chartering a bus to drive down to Portland. We just need 47 other people to make it work. I think the whole roadtrip idea would be fun, but I also think I might need to arrive in Portland a few days early to have enough time to properly check out Powell’s Books.

The Sock Summit is going to have a good effect on my stash, I think. Right now I see all that yarn, and I just see money tied up in it. I did do a clear out last year, but after another year, and looking at what is STILL left, there’s more that can go. I probably will buy a lot at the marketplace at SS09, but then it will be new and shiny yarn that has me jazzed up to knit with it.

I’m going to put some of my stash as ‘for sale or trade’ on Ravelry in the next few days, so watch out! I’m so close to being under my 10km goal. I thought that silk scarf would put me there, but not quite. I just need to knit like crazy, and start a pair of socks soon. I’m so excited about socks now too!