I know at least a couple of you have been wondering where I’ve been – I’m not going to give a blow by blow account of the last year, but I will try to explain my absence jut a little bit.

Mainly, the move and subsequent renovations ended up being much more time consuming than anticipated – in retrospect, selling the old house and finding the new one went fairly quickly (some work was needed to ready the old abode for sale but, painful as living in dust and paint is, it was done in a few weeks). We didn’t have to live through multiple open houses, and that was great.

The renos on the new house were a different story. We began with unfailing optimism – the company we hired had built a new porch for the old place as well as built an addition for Marcel’s sister’s house, so what could go wrong? Well, plenty. The first week seemed ok but everything seemed to slow down afterwards. We foolishly followed the recommendation to pay on an hourly basis, as a fixed estimate entailed a 25% surcharge. It soon became evident that if we didn’t hover constantly, grave mistakes ensued – actually, mistakes happened even if we hovered all day. The alarm system was short circuited, a too small window (by 7″!) was purchased and installed, cement poured through the cracks of the kitchen floor into the basement, the tiles in the kitchen were installed incorrectly twice, wiring stuck out of the wall in odd spots, cabinets were installed then uninstalled because of lack of organization, pieces had to be thrown away because of cutting errors while some that were installed have chips from being cut with the wrong tools. On and on. Later, when we hired someone else to complete plastering and painting the spare bedroom, he asked why we had such a large bulkhead in the room (we believed it was an air return for the forced air heating system) and asked if he could make a hole in order to see inside and perhaps shrink it. We agreed and he did – and found that not only had they not changed the tape on a conduit inside, but had not even connected it and so hot air was being blown into the ceiling. Then, he looked into the aforementioned air return… and saw that it wasn’t connected to anything at all. It had been been boxed in and plastered for no reason at all.

The other disappointing thing that happened of late was my having to cancel my trip to NYC for Vogue Knitting Live, as I don’t have the necessary papers to teach in the united states. It’s unfortunate, but the repercussions could be huge if caught working without the proper visa – it usually entails being barred from entering the country for 5 years. With family and friends across the border, it’s a risk that I cannot afford to take.

All was not so dark, however – the new house is only a couple of blocks away from Marcel’s sister, Monique. She’s one of my favourite persons in the world and now that we live so close to one another, we can work together – she is the new administrative director of St-Denis Yarns. She’s turning into a knitter, too – her first project has been the bear claw blanket, which she is making with some modifications out of nordique. We’ll blog that one of these days. The pullover above is for her, which she’ll model when it’s done. Speaking of models, her sons are also born models – expect more boy patterns in the future.

I’ll leave you with a sneak peek of the next magazine (soon! I promise!) – A photograph of Tanis wearing one of the sweaters:

Ttfn!

I never usually post if I don’t have an image of some sort, but I think I’ll have to make an exception this time around – I’m just much too tired to find an image or to take one, but there’s no catching up to emails under these circumstances so I’m hoping a few of you will see this post and understand.

In short, the renovations are still in full swing. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but there’s so much left to be done that it’s hard to tell when it’ll be over. I know a lot of you are waiting for issue 3 of the magazine and I promise you will love it – my friends have really outdone themselves – but it will have to wait a little while longer. I mean it… only a little while longer.

Thank you for your patience. In the meantime, I’ll take any support I can get – yes, renovations are that hard.

Watched this documentary last night – if you get a chance, make sure to watch it as well. We really enjoyed it.

I thought about beginning this post with a statement to the effect that ‘times flies’  but I quickly came to my senses – no, time definitely does not fly in the midst of renovations or as part of a move, for that matter. More like, time crawls and crawls…

Nothing seems to be easy anymore – I had some orders to fill this week and it must have taken 8 hours to get 6 little boxes prepared. Why so long? Well, one of the renovations projects is the basement. It was a bare unfinished space when we bought the house, and its intended use is for it to be my office and main stock room. In the meantime, all my yarn resides on pallets in the garage. But! The kitchen also needed work – it didn’t have any ventilation for the range and we had to go through the living room to get to the garden – and we figured we’d be better off getting everything done at once. So, not only is the garage filled with yarn and everything that belongs in my office but all the cabinets that are being recycled are also in there. Oh, and the usual garage stuff. Finding a specific bag of yarn in there is an adventure.

I could go on, but I won’t – suffice it to say that there are fun obstacles for every task at hand. It’ll be great once it’s done, I know… when it’s done!

No, I’m not on vacation – I’ve moved and this is my new backyard!

While I’ve been surrounded by a sea of boxes, my dear friend Pam has also been busy: http://www.quinceandco.com/. I promise to post a pic of the shade card to my twitter account later today – it’s one of the cutest I have ever seen.

Ann Budd’s newest recently became available and I couldn’t be more thrilled that one of my designs is part of it. It is the all-(north) American hoodie and it is knit out of my very own St-Denis Nordique.

What makes Nordique ‘green’ is where it comes from – it is indeed all north American, right down to the wool used. Because the majority of wool used today originates from Australia, China and New Zealand, much of what can be purchased on local store shelves has an elevated ‘ecological footprint’. An ecological footprint is calculated in terms of what strains a product, company or individual inflicts on the environment by their demands on resources – naturally, if a product van be purchased locally instead of being imported from overseas, then the demands on the environment are thus lessened. A balance is key, as it is with eating foods grown locally: it doesn’t mean a Canadian household should stop eating bananas entirely, but it doesn’t really make sense for the same household to buy Mexico grown tomatoes in july. Likewise with yarn – why import what we can produce right here?

But enough about Nordique: please sure to visit Ann’s own blog as well the other blogs on the Knitting Green blog tour:

June 11th: Kimberley Hansen

June 12th: Sandi Wiseheart

June 13th: Carmen Hall (guest writing on Ann Budd‘s blog)

June 14th: Katie Himmelberg

Be sure to also visit the previous stops on the tour:

Kristeen Griffin-Grimes

Kristen Tendyke

Mags Kandis

Cecily Glowik MacDonald

Finally, if you plan on being in Columbus this weekend, be sure to visit Classic Elite’s booth!

First things first: I’d like to thank everyone for all the lovely birthday wishes on Tuesday. You all made my day!

As usual, Marcel spoiled me: in addition to the silver pendant shown above, we went out for dinner an a movie. And my daughter gave me the print shown below; love it. I can’t get over the fact that she is almost 14.

Apart from that, my schedule continues to be cah-razy – tnna is next week and there’s some knitting to finish as well as some all-new-yarn to debut. I’ve also decided to get serious about the web site and so have been doing homework for the past 2 weeks. Seriously – I though my head was going to explode from reading a little but too much about php, cms, htlml, ssl, bla, bla, bla. But! I’m a little smarter now and can tell my css from my drupal so there is hope yet. Stay tuned – I think I’ll post some sneak peeks in the coming days…

Quick note: I’ll be in Chicago this weekend for a book signing this friday at Loopy Yarns as well as at Have Ewe Any Wool in Elmhurst on Saturday for another book signing.  I’ll have lots of sample garments with me: all the garments from St-Denis #1 and Knitting 24/7 as well as most of those in St-Denis #2. Please come by! I’d love to meet you.

As you no doubt surmised from my last post, the second issue of St-Denis magazine is now available. I was very fortunate that Pam, Kat, Jared, Laura, Melissa, Jennifer, Robin and Carol agreed to contribute designs to the issue. I uploaded photographs and details on Ravelry a few days ago.

When Jared mailed me the juneberry triangle, he mentioned that he’d like to see it knit up out of my new yarn, the fashionably late Boreale. That sounded like a plan so when a case of startitis hit a couple of  weeks ago, I grabbed some yarn and got started.

The original is 48″ wide and 23″ deep – I wear shawls more like scarves and like to drape them, so decided to make mine larger. As it is knit from the top, the only change I really had to make was to keep knitting until it was about 12″ shorter than my desired depth. I didn’t even change the needle size!

The only thing slightly tricky about enlarging this pattern is that all 8 rows of the second chart must be knit before beginning the 3rd chart, as these are designed to flow from one to the other. As these represent 8 increases per repeat and the 3rd chart contains a 14 -st repeat, I couldn’t follow the pattern exactly as charted with all of these additional stitches. But that is easily remedied – chart 2 is worked over 7 sts and chart 3 and 4 over 14 sts so I only needed to delineate where to begin and end the repeats while working the edge sts in pattern as much as I could. The edge stitches ended up a little wonky and not quite symmetrical, but that doesn’t bother me.

BTW: I’m planning on being In Toronto for Knitter’s Frolic on May 8th – please drop by booth #40! I’ll have lots of magazines and books on hand as well as samples from both issues and from the book.