Designing

So, it's been awhile. I'm not going to bother updating you on everything that's happened since I last posted since I promised I would do that last time and never got to it.

I am posting here though for a specific reason. I'm in the process of designing a pair of socks. I was driven to do this thanks to the Sock Knitter's Anonymous group on Ravelry. They have a monthly challenge that I've been joining in on for a while and this month's challenge is a man's sock, a holiday stocking, a design by Jeannie Cartmel or Socks for a Cause.

Now I haven't mentioned this here before but I come from a family that's been fairly affected by breast cancer. Both of my grandmothers have had it in the past and one is currently undergoing treatment for a recurrence.

So I thought, what better to knit than a sock that benefits breast cancer, both for the SKA challenge and since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. But I'd already knit a couple of the breast cancer supporting socks out there and the rest don't really appeal to me, so I've dove in and I am currently designing a pair of socks!

That's what I have so far, and I do have the rest of the pattern written out and tested on a mini prototype sock, but I just want to get past the heel flap before I send it out to test knitters.

Thanks to some helpful suggestions on Ravelry I've decided to name them Pink Promise Socks.

As soon as I get the pattern finished and the test knitting done, I'm going to be posting it for sale here and hopefully on Ravelry and all the proceeds from the Pink Promise Socks will be going to support the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, so stay tuned!

Reading Meme

Wow, it's been a long time! Oops!! I'm up to my neck in midterms and out-of-town visitors, so no update right now, but I'll try to update soon.

Today I read this meme on Jung at Heart, one of the blogs I read regularly (I always find her lace very inspiring!), and wondered how many of these books I've read, so I thought I'd post it here and figure it out.

"The Big Read answers a big need. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 report by the National Endowment for the Arts, found that not only is literary reading in America declining rapidly among all groups, but that the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young. The concerned citizen in search of good news about American literary culture would study the pages of this report in vain.

They say the average American has only read 6 of the following:"


Key
1) Bold the books you have already read
2) Italicize the books you intend to read
3) Notes in parentheses next to note-worthy titles.


1) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
3) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
5) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (grade 10 English!)
6) The Bible (parts at least)
7) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8 ) Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
9) His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
10) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
11) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (many times)
12) Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
13) Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
14) Complete Works of Shakespeare (some, mostly for various high school English classes)
15) Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
16) The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
17) Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
18 ) Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
19) The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (I can't count how many times I've read this book anymore, the audiobook of it is also great)
20) Middlemarch by George Eliot
21) Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
22) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23) Bleak House by Charles Dickens
24) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
25) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
26) Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
27) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 ) Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
29) Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
30) The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
31) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
32) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
33) Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
34) Emma by Jane Austen
35) Persuasion by Jane Austen
36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
37) The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (This has been so popular lately I feel like I really should read it)
38 ) Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
39) Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
40) Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
41) Animal Farm by George Orwell
42) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (although I really prefered the prequel, Angels and Demons)
43) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
45) The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
46) Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
47) Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
48 ) The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (I feel as a Canadian I should probably read this at some point)
49) Lord of the Flies by William Golding (grade 11 English)
50) Atonement by Ian McEwan
51) Life of Pi by Yann Martel
52) Dune by Frank Herbert
53) Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
54) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
55) A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
56) The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57) A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
58 ) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
60) Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61) Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (grade 9 English)
62) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
63) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
64) The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
65) Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
66) On The Road by Jack Kerouac
67) Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
68 ) Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
69) Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
70) Moby Dick by Herman Melville
71) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
72) Dracula by Bram Stoker
73) The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
74) Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses by James Joyce
76) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77) Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
78 ) Germinal by Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession by AS Byatt
81) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
82) Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
83) The Color Purple by Alice Walker
84) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
85) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
86) A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
87) Charlotte's Web by EB White
88 ) The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90) The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton
91) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
92) The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93) The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
94) Watership Down by Richard Adams
95) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
97) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 ) Hamlet by William Shakespeare (grade 12 English)
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

So in total 19, although that kind of surprises me because I am a big reader, though I suppose I'm not a huge fan of the classics (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, etc.) and the books that I do read and enjoy I tend to read over and over and over again until I can't stand them anymore.
Well, I suppose I should stop procrastinating and go back to studying, but this was interesting! Hopefully I'll find time/inspiration to come back here soon and make a longer post.

Snow, Snow, Snow!

Well, tis that time of year again when we tend to get a bit buried in snow. We saw our first actual snow on Sunday (only a little bit) and then temperatures dived to -20 C and lower on Monday, the wind was especially brutal. But you know what? It was sunny out and I came to realize I really enjoy winter like that. As long as you're bundled well and you aren't standing around outside, weather like that is nice. The snow on ground is so cold it squeaks when you walk on it and the sun is out, which is quite rare for this time of year when it sets at 4:11 pm, and is most often behind clouds.

Yesterday it warmed up to about -10 C and started snowing in earnest though, and really made me wish I had gone out to buy groceries over the weekend. By last night we had about 10-15cm of snow on the ground and the weather report was predicting it would go up to +7 C and rain today (which can I just say - gross). But that didn't happen, and isn't going to, it warmed up enough over night that we apparently got a lot of freezing rain though the night, and now it's snowing again - I haven't been outside yet, but something tells me it's going to be slippery!
At least the freezing rain made all the trees pretty, with a layer of ice on everything. This is the picture I woke up to this morning


Lots of knitting going on here, mostly stress-related, I've got two exams in the next two days and I just handed in a 10-page paper yesterday. I'll try to get on here again soon and post actual knitting content!
Happy winter all!

We Will Remember Them

November 11th - As you go about your day today, please take a moment to remember, remember those who have given their lives and those whose lives have been affected by conflict. And take a moment to be thankful for the freedom we have now thanks to the people who fought in these conflicts.

Act of Remembrance

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Mittens!

Hello,
I guess it hasn't been that long since my last post, relatively. I don't exactly remember when that was, so I'll catch up with you later, right now I just want to show you these awesome mittens!!

They are the Galileo mittens by Laura Chau (Ravelry link, here they are on her blog). When I first saw them on her blog I immediately wanted to start making them. I don't normally feel like that about too many projects, and especially not mittens, so when the pattern came out on Friday I bought it and headed out the the yarn store on Saturday. I ended up with Cherry Tree Hill Supersock Merino in the Java colourway for the main colour and O-wool 2-ply in a mint green for the contrast.
And now I just want to keep knitting on them! It did take me a while to get gauge, I just started on one mitten and then decided I wanted to try different needles, so I just treated that mitten as a swatch and as practice and when I was happy I ripped it back and started over. I really can't wait to wear these!


*Something I learned while trying to photograph this mitt, it's very awkward trying to take a picture of your own hand...

The winter wear knitting enthusiam could have something to do with the fact that it snowed here for the first time last week and got chilly. But it has warmed up this week, crazy-like, in fact right now it's 16*C out!