I’ve been knitting away on two projects recently. I’ve found a system that I can only implement here, in my parents’ big house. My newest project (cast on as soon as the Annetrelacs were done) are my Druid mittens, and they are my basement project. The long-neglected $1.50 cardigan is my upstairs project.

The mittens get worked on when I go down to the basement to watch TV after dinner. The having cable thing is great; I get to watch Iron Chef, and Mythbusters (I would love to work with Jamie and Adam)! On a side note, these Discovery Channel ads doesn’t get old.

The cardigan gets worked on when I curl up in the chair in my bedroom and listen to podcasts, or watch things on  my computer (like…. all of Heroes Season 2).

The mittens are fairly slow going, what with all the cabling. I’m using 2mm needles, and the fabric is quite tight, but that’s good in mittens because it will keep the wind out.

What I’m finding interesting is that I seem to have a different row gauge on the back of the mitten than I do on the palm. The back of the hand is all cable-y, and the palm is a slip-stitch pattern, and somehow I am much tighter doing the palm pattern. It is actually causing the mitten to want to curve over. Luckily, that’s the shape hands naturally are, so hopefully it won’t affect the finished product too much.

I took these photos on the ferry. I had to get away from the house for a day or two, so I went to Vancouver and visited some friends. Waiting for the ferry, and being on the ferry gave me lots of knitting and reading time.

I’ve been baking a lot in the past few months, and I have been thinking about blogging here about it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to mix up the crafting and the cooking, but it is all creation, so I think it does go together.

Just as I was thinking of starting my foodie posts here, a friend of mine (my boyfriend’s best friend) asked me if I wanted to be a part of his food blog! So far there’s only the two of us (and, might I add, I am the only one to have posted a recipe so far!) but I think he wants to invite lots of people. His theme was that all the posters must be part of the theatre community.

I think it’ll be interesting, I’m not really sure what I think about a blog with so many possible authors, or a main theme that isn’t a food or technique, but a community. I like to keep things uniform, and there’s been no talk of a format for posts or anything. But as I said: it’s only us two so far, and I posted the first recipe. We’ll see where it goes!

You can find us at Theatre Cooking. All my posts for the next while will involve apples because I am drowning in them!

These are apples from my parent’s apple trees (and cinnamon for the recipe I posted at Theatre Cooking. Yum!). I’ve only used 3, but harvested 8 since I’ve been here; not to mention the large bag of them mum and dad had already picked. For some reason, on Thursday I felt like I didn’t have enough fruit in the house, so I donned the traditional fruit-picking hat:

And went in search of blackberries!

And this was a great time to contrast the two places I grew up. We moved to the city when I was 14; before that we lived in a very rural, isolated area. The main difference between blackberry hunting there, and blackberry hunting here? The MUCH lower chance of finding a bear here. I remember mum, dad, and I out picking blackberries (the first place we lived had an entire blackberry festival) and I was picking along, moving along the bushes, just turning the corner and bam! A bear was also working its way along the bush, also eating berries.

That bucket is 4 litres of blackberries! Five apples from our tree, and dad’s worn out Panama hat. I realised that it was very sunny, and I brought no hats with me. I could’ve taken one of mum’s sun hats, but she has a small head, while mine is quite large, so dad’s fit better.

The sad thing is that I’m feeling so overwhelmed by fruit right now, I think that bucket is just going to go straight into the freezer.

I finished another something! It’s amazing what being between contracts will do for your knitting time. Euphemism for unemployed? I suppose you could say that, but I really am between contracts, and taking some well-deserved me time. Theatre works me hard. Very hard. So when breaks come up like this, I seize them. I curtail spending, I’m responsible, I still pay my share of the bills and everyone (all two of us) still gets fed. I love taking this time to work on my own stuff, like knitting, sewing (one day), baking, and cooking. And don’t let me forget organzing! And yes, sleeping in. So I don’t feel guilty. Right now I’m house-sitting, so I feel even more productive, because I have to water the garden every few days…

Anyway, socks!

Pattern: Annetrelac Socks from the very popular Holiday 2007 Interweave Knits
Size: 9.5″ long for my size 8 feets.
Yarn: I bought this yarn about a year and a half ago (Feb 07!) from Yarn Ahoy on Etsy. It is superwash Merino/nylon in the colourway ‘Festooned’. The fun thing was that it came in two skeins, and the skeins shade from pale to dark from beginning to end. I had a little debate over whether I wanted dark on the foot or the cuff. I decided on foot, because I thought dark cuff/light foot would look top-heavy.
Needles: 2mm (US size 0) Addi Turbos
Pattern Notes: I made no changes, despite having less yarn than the pattern called for. As you can see, I made it. I even have leftovers!

I had fun learning to do entrelac. I started out a bit worried, because I don’t really like picking up stitches. After these socks, I think I can say that I’m now a stitch picker-upper pro, and I enjoy it now! It was fun to have suck little bits to work on, it made it seem like the knitting just flew by. Having an entire plain foot was nice too.

I found the pooling on the feet interesting, rather than being bothered by it. What was very cool (I thought) was how the pooling spiraled in the opposite direction on the second sock!

As you may remember, yesterday I left you hanging with this tantalizing picture:

You got to see that end of the box, because the other end has a nice little label-holder with a neatly lettered label. This box contains:

Holes! Well, socks that contain holes, as well as all my extra sock yarn bits, and my Weavette hand loom. I’m planning on darning those socks so I can have warm feet this winter, and then making a few more rectangles for my handwoven sock yarn blankie. I’m going to be working on that blanket for a long time.

Now, to darn socks you need a tool usually called a darning egg, or darning mushroom (someone told me once just to use a lightbulb, but that only works if you don’t have CFLs. For one thing, those things don’t die, and for another, if your heels are shaped like my CFLs, I don’t know how you walk!). I didn’t have one of these tools, so the socks sat languishing. See the languish?

Luckily, there was a solution to this problem. Email mum, and ask her if she has granny’s (HER granny’s!) darning mushroom still. And the answer was….YES.

That is my great-granny’s darning mushroom. I do have a vague memory of her showing me what it was for, when I was about 4 or so.

Mmmmm, patina. It says Czecko-Slovakia [sic] on the underside. I’m really looking forward to using this.

Well, I’ve arrived at my home for the next 3 weeks, and I think airport security guy would tell you I’ve brought more than enough to do. I had a 50lb limit on my luggage. My suitcase weighed 50lbs on the nose when WestJet dude weighed it. I seem to have a knack… the last time I few my two cases (yes, still allowed two!) were 49.5lbs and 49lbs. Just call it my superhero power.

I packed some things just as I keep them at home: in pretty boxes. Boxes make me feel organized. They’re almost as good as lists. This is box #1:

What excitements await us in here?

Oooh, behind door #1 we have knitting! We’ve got the maroony-pink for the Druid Mittens (and the yellow Vogue to go with it), the Classic Elite Classic Silk for the $1.50 cardi (and the IK to prove it), and the orange tencel/merino for the Swallowtail shawl. And yes, I did get that book from the library for this trip, so I haven’t reneged on my ‘no pattern buying in 2008′ deal yet.

Let’s have a yarn close-up, shall we?

Yum! Oh, and don’t worry about the bare Denise ends; I did bring the whole kit with me. Actually, when I first opened this box, and the kit wasn’t in there, I had a little freakout. Then, I went on to photograph box #2, and found I’d put the kit in there because there was more space.

Speaking of box #2….

…that’s post for tomorrow!

The first Annetrelac sock is now done, but the pictures are a day or two old. It’s grey and gross today, and not good for photos. I just wanted to showcase the crazy pooling that is going on:

Crazy, spiraling stripes. I like how each stripe is shaded as well, light in the middle and dark on the outside. Hopefully the other sock is at least similar.

At this point, I was worried about having enough yarn for the whole sock.

But I can tell you that sock #1 is completely done, with a little yarn leftover to boot! Sock #2 is up to the first row of triangles.

I’m going to be housesitting for 3 weeks soon, in another city, so I’m taking a lot of knitting. I’m going to take the Annetrelacs if they’re not done by then (I’m hoping they will be though), and my other projects will be…. well, let’s list them, shall we?

• The Dollar and a Half cardi. I started this more than a year ago, and abandoned it about a year ago. I am taking it with me with the goal of FINISHING it. I have 3 weeks to sit and watch the Food Network and knit. I can do this. If I remember right I only have a sleeve and one front left to do.
• The Druid mittens. Those lovely cabled goodies that are on the cover of the Fall Vogue. Yum. Doing these will use up some of my sock yarn stash (I discovered I have enough for 11 pairs!), I’ll be using yarn I got from the Zen Yarn Garden semi-solid sock yarn club in a pinky/maroony colour.
• a small triangular shawl, still unchosed as of yet. More sock yarn, more ZYG, this time in an orangey tencel blend. I think orange will give the lace shawl a nice punch.

I’m not certain yet if I’m going to take another project. I could bring all my ZYG, I want to make the Bacchus socks from the Fall IK with some blue bamboo blend I have, or I could tackle one of the worst offenders on my yarn-in-kilometres spreadsheet and do something with my skein of Helen’s Lace (it’s more than 1 km long! dude!)

I had a boring temp job this past week, and while there I downloaded a spreadsheet of all my stash from Ravelry, deleted all columns but Brand, Yarn, Colourway, Weight, and Total Metres, and added one blank column. I then went through that and wrote down what I want to do with each yarn in the blank column. I don’t have a project for everything, but it was a great exercise, and really helped me figure out what I want to do with which sock yarn. I also found I’d forgotten to add a few things to my Ravelry stash, so I did that and re-printed.

I highlighted yarn that was currently part of WIP in green, and highlighted sock yarn in pink, because that’s what I really wanted to sort out. Maybe I’ll scan it, and we can oogle.