It’s Nothing Without Pictures

I finished the Globe Trotter socks back in November, but it took me a while to get some decent pictures and get them uploaded to the computer, so I am a bit late in celebrating the victory of the socks that would not end. The socks weren’t a difficult knit, and they were zipping along quite handily once I got through the first half sock, so the blame for the extremely long time they took to be completed needs to rest squarely where it belongs, on the shoulders of the stupid, stupid sock yarn. Seriously, Paton’s Kroy, I am looking at you. I chose the Paton’s Kroy because it is a nice, everyday yarn at a reasonable price. That price becomes unreasonable when you get finished with the first sock and realize you are going to need a third ball. At six dollars a ball, needing three of ‘em to complete a pair of men’s medium socks means it cost eighteen dollars and I might as well have bought a fancier brand of yarn with better yardage. Then, to add insult to injury, it took me nine months find another ball of plain gray sock yarn.

Gray.

Plain.

Seriously?

Every Micheal’s in town was out of the gray for months. They could still be out of it for all I know – I ended up finding it at a yarn store I don’t often frequent because it is really, seriously off the beaten path. Now I could have ordered it online, but then to add shipping to my six dollar purchase would have seriously irked me, and then I would have had to order more yarn to justify the shipping costs – and I am on a yarn diet. Except for souvenir yarn. And birthday yarn. And Christmas yarn. Everyone knows those don’t count.

So here they are, in all their glory. They have been gifted, they have been photographed and celebrated and there might have even been a little wine drunk in their honour.

They have even been worn.

Life’s Candy and The Sun is a Ball of Butter…

In the past few days I have watched a lot – a lot – of Glee.

A lot.

Thanks to devoted re-watching of the last episode aired before Christmas I pretty much have “Don’t Rain on My Parade” permanently burned into my brain. I am hoping it won’t do any lasting damage.

Glee is seriously, totally, wonderful, it really is. It is like they made this show just for me. First of all, I grew up watching Fame, and was too young to understand any of the very 80’s plot lines, so really only took away from that show the idea that you could stop traffic in the middle of New York City in order to sing and dance on taxi cabs and no one would arrest you. A show like Glee, with singing (lots of singing!) dancing, and off kilter humour? Sign me up! Plus, there is the added bonus that the character of Emma is always costumed like Mary Tyler Moore. I loved Mary Tyler Moore, with her jaunty beret and the absolute certainty that she would make it after all.

I even like the “very special” episodes they keep insist on having every once in a while, where the characters learn a very important life lesson. Can’t we all use a valuable lesson about the humanity of our fellow man, set to the rousing soundtrack of classic Broadway show tunes mashed up with streetwise R&B? Of course we can! If Glee only had killer robots that look just like us and a dark vision of a dystopian future it would be the best television show ever invented.

I find the idea of competitive show choir an intriguingly American concept, like cheerleading competitions on ESPN 2 and things labeled “cheez product”. My high school didn’t have a football team, let alone a glee club. Our cheerleaders had to resign themselves to peppy routines done during monthly assemblies exhorting us to donate more to the canned food drive. They may have cheered on the basketball team, but I don’t know for certain because no one ever went to a basketball game.

I would have liked glee club, I think. Now, I wouldn’t have actually been in glee club, as my singing is – I am trying to come up with a suitable metaphor here, and failing miserably – let’s just say it is bad, really, really bad, and leave it at that. But I would have liked the idea of glee club. Unfortunately, I am pretty sure in real life people don’t spontaneously burst out into well choreographed song and dance numbers for no reason.

It would be totally awesome if they did.

Oh, Martha, You Put a Spell On Me….

Way back in September, when the world wasn’t a frozen ball of ice, my darling child came home with her first (of many) school fundraisers. This one was magazine subscriptions. Being a good and enthusiastic Mom I ordered two subscriptions: Martha Stewart Living and Everyday Food, also a Martha publication. Oh, how I both love and hate that crafty little jailbird, with her hot glue gun and decoupage and her unrelenting insistence on pronouncing everything in the most pretentious (and often just plain bizarre) way possible.

It reminds me of the more annoying of the Top Chef contestants, who season after season have to bicker about the proper way to pronounce ceviche…. who cares, just stop serving it outdoors in Las Vegas when it’s a bazillion degrees outside.

Where was I? Oh yes, Everyday Food. My first issue arrived yesterday, and I am hooked. It’s a little teeny, tiny, crazy brand of kitchen crack. I am lusting after ridiculous cupcake decorating sets from Kuhn Rikon, and wishing I had a mandoline so I could make beet chips (I don’t even like beets). I’ve cursed myself for not getting a microplane rasp from Lee Valley when it was still a woodworking tool and half the price, and planned an entire weeks worth of menus entirely cooked in parchment.

I’ve hidden the magazine behind a potted plant and I think I will make Paul get the mail from now on. I obviously can’t be trusted, and will need strict supervision at the grocery store for the next while, lest I be found gnashing my teeth and pulling on my hair in frozen foods, or picking fights at the seafood counter.

2009 – The Good Bits Version

I’ve been playing around with slide shows this weekend, and came up with this to end the months long silence around here:

Make a Smilebox slideshow

Pumpkins! Pumpkins!

This is the first time I have carved pumpkins since I was kid, and it is awesome. I am already planning next years pumpkins, which will apparently involve electronics and a heavy dose of craziness. I can’t wait! I am really pleased with how the pumpkins turned out, unfortunately I have misplaced my camera so was forced to take these photos with my cell phone. So they kind of suck.  One unforeseen consequence of the pumpkin carving was Miss T’s absolute devastation upon learning that her precious Blues Clues pumpkin will have to be composted soon. She actually drew a picture today depicting a sad Blue pumpkin and a sad little girl bound together in their misery and loss.

I think we need a therapy jar.

Happy Hallowe’en!

We are about to set off trick or treating, so tomorrow will have some pictures of our first adventure in jack o’ lantern carving and other Hallowe’en traditions, and even a creepy tale of spinning gone way, way, way wrong.

For now, I will leave you with a sneak peek of next year’s jack o’ lantern project:

(click on the image for instructions)

Now I just need a soldering iron….

…. Muhahahaaa!

Happy Birthday To Me…

I turned thirty-five today. That number seemed impossibly distant and crazy when I was the age my daughter is now. Now, I just want to know when I get a free pass to start taking naps everyday. I was informed today that I either had to have another baby (which really only trades sleeping during the day for not sleeping ever, never at night) or wait until I was at least another 15 years in before I get a nap time.

That seems very unfair.

Dishcloths!

dishcloths!

I finished three dishcloths, all from the kitchen cotton I dyed last year. I had tied the yellow yarn too tightly when I dyed it and it still had little undyed bits here and there. I am feeling particularly lazy these days and I didn’t feel like dyeing it all over again, but luckily I discovered the magic of a yellow permanent marker and after a little colouring time you can’t even tell. With these small successes under my belt I decided to tackle some of my unfinished projects. First in line is this sock:

poor little injured sock

You may remember earlier this year when the poor sock had a run in with an evil clothes dryer and  wound up with three (three!) holes in it. (Three!) I finally could look at the poor thing without wanting to curse (a lot) so I took out the scissors and hacked away at the toe until I could start unraveling it. Then I carefully picked up the live stitches and got them back onto the needles. The only bright side of this whole situation is that the yarn comes in pretty big skeins, so I actually have enough left in my stash to knit the foot all over again. Lucky me.

(Three!)

ETA: The dishcloth pattern is in Mason Dixon Knitting, and can also be found at the Canadian Living website.

Happy Thanksgiving

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving this weekend, stuffed full of lovely food and our first project from the Hello Cupcake! book we bought a few weeks ago.

We went with the Pumpkin Cupcakes, although they were technically a Hallowe’en project. The Turkey cupcakes seemed a little beyond our abilities for a first project, what with the fan shaped cookies for the tail, the mini cupcake heads and the eighty different candies and sprinkles used to decorate the whole thing. There was a very adorable “cupcake wreath” project as well, but even with my unending enthusiasm for cute baked goods I wasn’t about to collect and wash 100 maple leaves and then paint them with melted chocolate. That sort of thing falls under the category of Just Not Happening. Not until Miss Teagan can be reliably sent out to gather and wash 100 maple leaves, at the very least. I am pretty sure that such inane projects are the reason why children were designed to be easily bribed by the promise of sugar.

The whole thing went really well, considering I decided on this ridiculous project the morning of Thanksgiving, the fact that we had to leave at 1pm to drive for an hour be damned!  Other than a fruitless search for green licorice shoelaces that left me cutting green licorice strips into even tinier green licorice strips it all went off without a hitch. We had a nice assembly line going, with my applying the orange icing, and Sweetpea dipping the cupcakes in the orange sprinkles and adding the licorice stems. And eating sprinkles. And licorice stems.

Saturday morning we hosted a Thanksgiving Brunch at our house for my Mom and my stepfather. We would have done dinner, but our evening was going to be filled with singing and dancing at the Backyardigans concert at the NAC. Singing! Dancing! And even more singing! Did I mention the singing? It was a mad crush at the NAC, filled to the brim with excited children clutching their seizure inducing flashing wands at 10 bucks a pop. Through some fluke of the online ticket buying system we ended up with front row center seats, much to Miss Teagan’s utter delight. I brought a legwarmer to work on during the performance, and the proximity to the performers gave me pause, but I figured since I can knit while looking attentively at the stage and the poor performers were dressed in giant costumes that allowed very little in the way of visibility, I would go for it and happily knitted for an hour and a half of singing. And dancing!

And singing!

Back To Basics

I am in a knitting funk. Everything keeps getting away from me, pretty much literally. If I’m not running out of yarn, then it is unraveling, or getting covered in shampoo, or needles are snapping or sleeves are just plain pissing me off. The last few months has been very disheartening, and finished projects are all but a distant dream.

So I am knitting dishclothes.

I have knit one already, and it was quite a feeling of accomplishment, that little square of finished knitting. I am using the ballband dishcloth pattern from Mason Dixon Knitting and some dishcloth cotton I used in my first dyeing experiment a while back. I am finding these little things surprisingly satisfying.

I always thought knitting dishclothes was a strange waste of time- to knit something that will get dirty and used up, but I found a couple when we moved and they really are fantastic. Once I started knitting my own, I realized that they are really kind of fun – quick and cheerful.