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:
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.
My apologies if I’ve misled anyone in the last post – it turns out that french canadians don’t know their birds. What we quebecois call an “outarde” is actually a “Bernache du Canada”.
Anyhow… I’m actually blogging today because Alison called on Friday to ask if I had forgotten something. I did – I meant to tell you that information on thumbs would be forthcoming and plum forgot. I’m only going to tell you where to place the thumb openings today – the actual thumbs will follow very, very soon.
The thumbs for these mittens could be worked as after-thought additions, but using waste yarn means that there will be fewer ends to weave in, so let’s go that route. While the charts uploaded the other day indicate thumb placements, these are merely suggestions – you can place these wherever you please.
To demonstrate, I’ve drawn the silhouette of my future mitten. If your gauge is different from mine, measure it at this point in order to determine how big your mitten will be once it’s completed given the number of rows in the pattern. Once done, place your hand on top of the paper pattern about 1/2″ from the top in order to establish where the thumb opening should be.
Voilà – you can now measure the distance between the base of the mitten and the base of the thumb. Multiply this measurement with your row tension to the inch and round out to the nearest row number. Once you reach that row, work to the thumb placement as usual then drop your yarn – add some waste yarn and knit the correct number of stitches in waste yarn. Slip those stitches back to the left hand needle, knit over them once more and you’re done. Later, we’ll remove the waste yarn in order to knit the thumb but that will follow in another post. And I promise to fix the charts, too!
