We found some wonderful fabric at a quilting store (My Sewing Room, Calgary AB) that is perfectly drawn prints of….. FRUIT! We bought fabric for each type of jam, so we don’t need to actually put the flavour on the label.

Mum’s jams on the left, mine on the right.

We are going to use the fabric to cut out circles to elastic or tie to the top of the jam jars. Today, I decided to find out what diameter of circle we will actually need to use. I got out my:

• pinking shears
• scrap fabric
• jam jars!
• a few round dishes
• an orange Sharpie

The orange sharpie was the only thing near to hand that I thought would be easy to see on my scrap fabric. It was that or a charcoal pencil, which I dismissed as being too messy.

First, I tried one of our smaller dinner plates, because that’s what mum and I talked about in the store.

That’s that big mound of fabric in the front. There is a jam jar under there I swear! Then I traced a cereal bowl onto the fabric with orange sharpie and cut it out with pinking shears. Too big still. Little glass bowl was too little, but $0.50 garage sale metal food storage dish was perfect! Here’s a photo with the measurements.

5.75″ it is! I now have just one question… how does one get orange Sharpie off white bowls and glass plates?

Oh yeah, and I entered it in the Calgary Stampede Western Showcase and won second place in the whole knitting section! Here’s me when I discovered it:

I have now officially earned (well, won) money for knitting! Second place gets you $125 and a pretty blue ribbon. The big teal shawl on the right in the photo got first. It was great to see everything so well displayed – every time David goes to the Easter Show on Sticks and String, there are horror stories of how badly displayed the knitting is. Well done, Stampede.

I’m probably going to knit myself a wedding shawl (this one took under 2 months, I’ve got 11 until the wedding!) and mum asked if I’d still be able to submit it to the Stampede. The answer is a very large “maybe?” Knitting take-in was June 30th this year, and we’ve chose June 25 for the wedding, so if stuff stays the same, yes, I will be able to enter my wedding shawl into the Stampede. Or I might make a different one for the Stampede. After all, I have set a precedent!

Or this:

But we looked like this:

Because of this!!

Who needs sunshine, when you have a sparkly ring?!

‘Had’ is the operative word in that last sentence. On Tuesday, I looked at the little tally on my pattern print out (I make a mark each time I complete row 20) and I thought ‘ that can’t be right!’. But it could: I only have 7 repeats left to go! That is this much:

I can now actually see the beginning (and end) as I’m knitting.

So with only 7 repeats to go, and more than 2 weeks until the deadline, what is a knitter to do? Cast on something else, of course.

That is the Eunice pattern from Cookie A’s book Sock Innovation. I recently started watching Round the Twist, a video podcast by Carin, and she has decided to knit every sock out of said book. I caught up on all 40+ episodes over a few weeks, so I’m joining in after she has already completed a different set of socks. I also need to do this to start using up some of that Sock Summit stash. The yarn I’m using is Wool Candy BFL in the colour ‘Robin’s Egg’.

I’ve been having a bit too much fun with this sock – I need to put it down and finish up that last little bit of Evenstar, and then block it. That’s why tonight I’m going to watch The Two Towers and knit, and tomorrow will be Return of the King. Those two movies should be just the right amount of time to finish 7 beaded points.

That’s right, I’m on the beaded border now! I started the border on May 25th, and I have do have a deadline for the shawl to be done – June 30th. In between now and then I have a week’s trip to San Francisco (not planning on bringing the shawl, I’ll be too busy seeing things!), a couple weeks of unemployment, and some work. Let’s call it 24 days, because I also have to block this baby. The edging is made up of a a 20-row pattern repeated 56 times around the edge of the shawl. That means I need to do 2.33 repeats per day. So far, I’m ahead of schedule, but I have spent the past few days hanging around the house and knitting.

I am cautiously confident though. I feel like I’m getting a rhythm going with the beading. I pick up 3 beads on the crochet hook at once, which saves a little time, and the actually knitting is pretty easy.

I did have to make up my own way to start this border though. It is a knitted-on border that knits 1 stitch of the border together with 1 stitch of the main shawl every other row. This attaches it and means that there isn’t actually a bind off in the whole project, keeping it nice and stretchy. You start the border with a provisional cast-on so you can graft the start and the end together. The pattern had instructions on how to do this without cutting the yarn. I couldn’t wrap my head around that part, no matter how hard I tried, so I just cut the yarn and moved on. It will look just the same, I’ll just have 2 extra ends to weave it. I think it is worth it for the lack of headache.

The pale pink line you can see in the photos is a lifeline – I ran embroidery floss through the live stitches of the body of the shawl before I started this edging, in case I messed up.

The beads are slightly darker than the yarn, and are a nice matte, frosted finish.

I’ve been doing most of my knitting at work. I work in the dark. This hadn’t been a problem, and for some silly reason, I felt myself too good for lifelines. I regarded them as training wheels – I don’t need those any more, I can do this! Well, now I think they are more like PFDs: something that might feel cumbersome, but is definitely needed because you never know when your boat might flip over.

There have been mistakes. These mistakes have all been on the last repeat. Maybe I get excited about the new row that is coming, and mess up the last few stitches, or who knows what.

I saw a mistake about 4 rows down from where I was one day. Remember that this shawl is at about 600 stitches around. I was not going to rip back that many stitches! I dropped the stitches in question, and fixed the mistake (I missed a YO, which left a blip in a YO border in the pattern).

A few days later, I noticed a bigger mistake. I couldn’t tell if it was further down than the first mistake (because I’d knitted on it for a few days) or in the same spot. So I dropped those stitches down, and tried to fix. It was big and scary, I was dropping 7 rows in a complicated lace pattern, but I persevered. When I had finished, the mistake was gone, but I’d messed up the stuff beside it pretty badly. The ’stuff beside’ is the main motif of the Evenstar shawl, the stitches that look like Arwen’s pendant from the movies.

I dropped again, this time dropping and re-knitting the Evenstar bit. I was not looking forward to it, I put off starting by knitting a whole row of the shawl, till I got around to that part again. The Evenstar motif has a wacky little increase/decrease where you end up making 7 stitches in one group. It was that part that I didn’t want to do without the end of the yarn being free.

But… I managed! I showed my knitting who was boss!

No photos of the scary process, because I didn’t want to pick it up and put it down and disturb it by getting the camera. All is well – I’m hoping blocking will even it out a bit where tension changed (I tended to re-knit with smaller needles than I’m using on the whole thing, because it made maneuvering easier) and if I need to, I may employ some judicious duplicate stitch.

It was stressful, but I was very proud of myself for not crying, not sticking it in the back of a drawer, or martyring myself by ripping back to the easiest place to pick up stitches, the stockingette band 71 rows below.

The other night, I decided I needed to colour a bit, so I made a few cards with the kit.

I just have to say that Robin Hood is one of my very favourite historical and/or fictional characters, and probably the first book character I ever had a crush on, so this stamp made me extremely happy.

Just some simple cards to get back in to the swing of things. This doesn’t mean I’m not still working crazily on the shawl… there is a deadline that I’ve set myself for that to be finished, and that’ll come up quickly.

Not too bad! The first part went very quickly, and I got very excited, but the thing to remember about this shawl is that the stitch count will double every so often, so it makes a flat, circular object when finished. I have to keep explaining to people that I am not knitting a hat, or a bag, but a flat thing. It’s just got too many stitches on a short circular, so it is scrunched up. Currently, my rows have 280 stitches in them. Tomorrow I am expecting to finish clue #3 – that’s when it doubles again.

When it changed from 144 to 280, it took some time to adjust to the new longer rows, but I eventually felt like I was knitting at a respectable speed again. I’m scared for 560.

You might ask, why would one go through all this knitting without knowing what the finished project will look like? Some designers just know how to play on the strengths of people’s obsessions:

Yes, that would be the Evenstar Shawl and all the yarn (Yarn Chef Creme Brulee, colour ‘Dusk in Provence’) on my Tolkien shelf. The little grey edition of The Hobbit is the one that dad read to me at age 4, which I then read by myself at age 5, and is the book that started it all. The pages are brown, one falls completely out (the one with the ‘attercop attercop’ song), and there’s obvious tea stains, but I love it. I love all those books up there. The yarn is sitting in front of LotR, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales. There’s also a whole bunch of other related stuff behind all those books.

Obsession? Moi?

My linen shopping bag is done, a year and two weeks after I started it! (Ravelry Link)

I originally started this project with the idea of finishing it and taking it to Sock Summit to hold my purchases. I got partway through, and abandoned it for some socks that I also didn’t finish for Sock Summit. I think it turned out for the best, because I don’t think the haul I got at Sock Summit would have fit in the bag, stretchy as it is.

The yarn makes me happy – I traded with someone on Ravelry for it, so it was essentially free, which is always good. This is also the project that I told myself I had to finish before I started on my Evenstar Shawl, and I’m ecstatic about being able to start that tonight. I’m about to get out the ballwinder and swift – I couldn’t even wind the yarn before finishing this, it would have been too tempting.

I did make a modification to the pattern, based on some comments other people had made about the project on Ravelry: when making the handle, I only cast on 70 stitches, instead of the 145 recommended, which I think made the handle just the right length. I am pretty short, after all.

This year, I had a task: to make a birthday cake for myself and my friend K, as our birthdays are 4 days apart. The deal was that she’d make dinner, and I’d make the cake.

My birthday was Good Friday this year, and cake day actually ended up being Easter Monday, so I decided against anything with chocolate in – we’d all be chocolated-out. I looked through my favourite cake book, Sky High, and picked out a couple choices. After consulting with K, we decided on the Marbled Lemon-Blueberry cake.

The first step of the recipe is to make jam for the filling. I love that ‘make jam’ was the first step, it made my day. And then I made jam! It was also a good thing I had to blender-ize the blueberries, there’s been a rash of food tampering at supermarkets around here, pins and tacks and the like. People are scary. I made the jam on the Saturday, when cake day was Monday.

I find it is so helpful to divide up recipes like this into multiple days. Sunday was cake-baking day:

You use some of the jam to make some batter purple, and swirl that in to the cake pans.

Monday was the part I’m always least confident in: icing the cake. This recipe had you make a buttercream icing, which I’ve never done before, and I’m not exactly sure what sort of texture buttercream should even be. When time eventually came to eat the cake, I scraped all my icing off, because it just tasted (and felt) like eating butter. Everyone else seemed to like it though, and I generally scrape the icing off store bought cakes too.

As you can see, I had a bit of a structural integrity problem here. You’re suppose to trim off any domed bits from your cakes, so you have perfectly flat surfaces. If I’d done that, all the marbling would have been cut off! So, I decided to glue it together with jam and icing, which mostly worked. I found the icing ended up looking pretty sweaty in the end, even after being in the fridge. I feel like the lemon juice didn’t like mixing with the butter.

I’m not sure how the cake in the book has swirls so dark, and icing so white. My swirls were much paler, and I followed the instructions for how much jam to add to the batter. I also don’t know how you get white icing out of yellow butter, and eggs with yellow yolks.

Some cell phone photos of the cake at the party, after slicing off everyone’s pieces. Yes, I made a cake that is labeled ’serves 16-20′ for a party of 8. It was delicious!