Knitting Experiences - 5 years later!

I was reading back through the blog today trying to find a reference to something that I apparently didn't ever blog about (big surprise right? ;) ).  But I did come across this, posted almost 5 years ago just as I was getting more serious about knitting and thought I'd post it again and see how much has changed in my knitting.

Mark with bold the things you have ever knit, with italics the ones you plan to do sometime, and leave the rest.

Afghan
I-cord
Garter stitch
Knitting with metal wire
Shawl
Stockinette stitch
Socks: top-down
Socks: toe-up
Knitting with camel yarn
Mittens: Cuff-up
Mittens: Tip-down
Hat
Knitting with silk
Moebius band knitting
Participating in a KAL
Sweater
Drop stitch patterns
Knitting with recycled/secondhand yarn
Slip stitch patterns
Knitting with banana fiber yarn
Domino knitting (=modular knitting)
Twisted stitch patterns
Knitting with bamboo yarn
Two end knitting
Charity knitting
Knitting with soy yarn
Cardigan
Toy/doll clothing
Knitting with circular needles
Baby items
Knitting with your own handspun yarn
Slippers
Graffiti knitting (knitting items on, or to be left on the street)
Continental knitting
Designing knitted garments
Cable stitch patterns (incl. Aran)
Lace patterns
Publishing a knitting book
Scarf
Teaching a child to knit (haven't taught a child but have taught other people)
American/English knitting (as opposed to continental)
Knitting to make money
Button holes
Knitting with alpaca
Fair Isle knitting
Norwegian knitting
Dying with plant colours
Knitting items for a wedding (currently knitting a shawl to wear for a wedding, not one I'm in though!)
Household items (dishcloths, washcloths, tea cosies...)
Knitting socks (or other small tubular items)on two circulars
Olympic knitting
Knitting with someone eles's handspun yarn
Knitting with dpns
Holiday related knitting
Teaching a male how to knit
Bobbles
Knitting for a living
Knitting with cotton
Knitting smocking
Dying yarn
Steeks
Knitting art
Knitting two socks on two circulars simultaneously
Fulling/felting
Knitting with wool
Textured knitting
Kitchener BO
Purses/bags
Knitting with beads
Swatching
Long Tail CO
Entrelac
Knitting and purling backwards
Machine knitting
Knitting with self patterning/self striping/variegating yarn
Stuffed toys
Baby items
Knitting with cashmere
Darning
Jewelry
Knitting with synthetic yarn
Writing a pattern
Gloves
Intrasia
Knitting with linen
Knitting for preemies
Tubular CO
Freeform knitting
Short rows
Cuffs/fingerless mits/armwarmers
Pillows
Knitting a pattern from an online knitting magazine
Rug
Knitting on a loom
Thrummed knitting
Knitting a gift
Knitting for pets
Shrug/bolero/poncho
Knitting with dog/cat hair
Hair accessories
Knitting in public

So, encouraging to see how many of the items on this list turned from italics into bold, things I wanted to try that I have.  Also surprising to see a few items I didn't think I'd want to try have turned into things I've done. A few new things added to the list of what I'd like to try, nice to see I still have some new things to try in knitting, not something I think I'll ever run out of :)

Weekend at Sick Kids Celebrity Bonspiel

Don't have time to do a full blog post about this weekend right now, so will instead post the letter I just sent to all my awesome sponsors (surpassed my fundraising goal & will have a higher one for next year!) and some pictures from the weekend! (picture of the skips by Anil Mungal, remainder mine)  Huge thanks also go out to the organizing committee, Jeff, Pete & Kevin, and the corporate sponsors who made this event possible, especially Capital One for this event & all you do for curling!

Hi all!

I wanted to send you all huge thanks for being my sponsors in the Celebrity Bonspiel for Sick Kids this weekend. It was an amazing time and such a great event. The overall event ended up raising more than $100,000 (before the silent auction started which also did well) which is $25,000 more than they raised last year so thank you all for your generous donations!

Our Celebrity Skips for the weekend - from Canada and across the globe!

(Photo by Anil Mungal)

I was placed on a team with Heather Smith-Dacey (the skip from the Nova Scotia team which has been at the Scottie’s for the last 2 years) and got to play against Silvana Tirinzoni (skip of the Swiss National team), Crystal Webster (skip of Team Alberta at 2011 Scotties and beat out in Alberta semi-finals by team Nedohin this year) and Teri Lake (lead for Smith-Dacey’s team). Our team had a great time playing and missed out on the playoffs by less than 2 points.

Ryan Fry watching Sara Carlsson's game vs Rachel Homan

Throughout the weekend it was a lot of fun to sit and chat with all the curlers, the amateurs and the “celebrities”, all sitting around having conversations you would find at any curling club after a game. It was also really interesting to watch the celebrity skips on the other draws and get to see them play up close.

Glenn Howard vs Alison Kreviazuk

The Brier Tankard also made an appearance

  Saturday night was a banquet and dance and a chance to find out just how hard the celebrity curlers can party (just as well as they can curl!) & I had a great time partying and dancing with Alison Kreviazuk (who knew me from Twitter), Rachel Homan, Kaitlyn Lawes, Tracey Horgan, Eve Muirhead, Heath McCormick and a host of other young curlers.

Me & my skip for the weekend, Heather Smith-Dacey

So thank you again so much for the support, it means a lot to be able to give back to such a great cause!!

Cheryl 

NaKniSweMo

Many of you may have heard of NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, but may not have heard of NaKniSweMo. During NaNoWriMo writers across the globe endeavor to complete a 50,000 word novel. As NaNoWriMo's knitting counterpart, during NaKniSweMo knitters across the globe try to complete a sweater with 50,000 stitches in one month. (For comparison your average pair on fingering weight handknit socks have around 15,000-20,000 stitches)

I haven't participated previously, but having competed in the Knitting Olympics in February and Ravelwealth Games (which ran alongside the Commonwealth Games) this year as well as having a number of friends who are attempting NaNoWriMo I thought it would be a fun time to join in!

So joining I am. I'm going to try and knit Elizabeth Zimmermann's Green Sweater, whose very interesting tale is told in this article in Twist Collective and can be seen on Ravelry here.

I've swatched, I've wound my yarn and today I start!

What You're (Probably Not) Missing at Home, Volume 1

This week's What You're (Probably Not) Missing at Home is seasonal, as it's that time of year that we have to get the calves ready for sale and fill Grandma's basement with wood for the winter.

For those of you who don't know, we have a beef farm, about 2 hours away from our house at my grandmother's, and operate a cow-calf operation, which means the cows are bred over the summer, have their calves in March-April-ish and then we sell the calves at a calf sale in November. In order to sell them, they have to get 2 rounds of vaccine over the month or so before the sale. Dad & I headed up to the farm to do the first round last week.

The first step in doing this is always to get the cows into the barn, of which they're very suspicious! This is what they look like as they run away from where you're trying to herd them!

Then you wander out further in the field to try and bring them back...

Once you do get them closer to the barn, they're usually not too bad to get into the barn, although there was one fun steer that I had to chase around the corral a few times, he's an excited one!

Once we had them in the barn, we let all the cows out because we were only vaccinating the calves, this makes it less crowded in the barn and easier to sort calves, but a lot louder in the barnyard as the mama cows aren't impressed at being separated from their babies. This clip is actually a lot quieter than it was at times!

The heifers we kept over last year and bred this summer got magnets since we're keeping them. (Magnets go in their stomachs so that if they accidentally eat any nails or stray pieces of fencing or other metal it sticks to the magnet & doesn't pierce their stomach lining.)

Then we waited for the vet to show so that we could run the rest of the calves through. We had one cow with horns that needed to be dehorned, and a male calf who was still a bit bull-ish even after our attempt to steer him that needed to be fully castrated. I was in the barn with Grandma sending calves out the chute to the head gate. And let me tell you, some of these calves are going to be fun to get back in the barn after the experience they had this time!

Getting the calves through the vaccination process didn't actually take too long, but you never go to the farm just to do one thing! Always tons of odd jobs to be done!

Among the other things we did:

Fixed the windows in the old chicken coop:

Cleaned out the outdoor water trough at the creek:

Trimmed a tree away from the hydro line (shh, don't tell Mom!):

Bedded the barn down with straw (flake straw off the bale, toss it down the hole in the barn loft floor, spread around so it's nice & comfy for the cows):

And various other things, including stone picking, fence fixing, fence checking and more!

And of course we did wood. Grandma has a wood stove in her house that she uses extensively for heat in the winter, so every fall we fill her basement up with wood.

This starts by heading up to the woodlot on the tractors, one with a trailer to fill & one with the wood spliter on the back.

This also means you get to wear such sexy outfits as this:

Once at the wood pile by the woods, Dad gets out the chainsaw, cuts the logs up into ~2 ft chunks & I run the spliter (the blue thing) and then chuck the split pieces into the trailer.

When the trailer is full, we drive that tractor down to the house, back it up to an open basement window and start pitching until the trailer is empty and the basement is full.

And repeat!

And of course going anywhere with the tractors means stopping at every fence and gate, getting out, opening /lowering the gate/fence, getting back on, driving through/over, getting out, closing/putting back up said gate/fence. It is easier though when there are two of you!

Fun times! And of course, we'll get to repeat for the booster of the vaccine sometime this week :)

Up next in the What You're (Probably Not) Missing at Home: What we've done to your room since you're not in it!

New Name, New Blog Series!

Some of you may have noticed that I've updated the title of this blog. I didn't think what I was posting really fit the old name as I was doing more random ramblings that didn't necessarily include knitting and baking and have more of that planned. Don't worry I'll still ramble on about knitting (Especially this month potentially! NaKniSweMo starts today & I'm casting on!) and baking, it will just me more interspersed with posts about other things.

Which brings me to my new series. My brother is on a high school exchange with Rotary right now. So for a year he's living in The Netherlands, going to school there and attempting to learn Dutch. Over the past few months he's been gone there are a few things I know he's either missing being here for or completely glad he's not here to be involved. So with that in mind I'm going to start writing about "What You're Missing at Home This Week" and/or "What You're (Probably Not) Missing at Home This Week". May not be weekly or timely, but you've probably come to expect that, given my history of very sporadic updating!

First Day at Shelter Valley

Going to make this brief because it's almost midnight & I have to be back out at the festival site tomorrow morning before 9am!

Today was the first day of the Shelter Valley Folk Festival and this year my Mom & I are volunteering and attending this local festival.

My role as a festival volunteer is parking, directing people where to park and helping them back to their cars after dark. It went well today although it was stinking humid and very hot out in the sun in the middle of the parking lot for my 1-5pm shift today.

I have to say though, Shelter Valley knows how to treat their volunteers! Upon registration you get a t-shirt, a meal ticket for all meals over the weekend and if you choose to, a camping spot on site. And the food is amazing!! Today's meals were pasta salad and pizza for lunch and chili, cornbread and assorted salads for dinner, so very tasty!

My view for much of my 4 hrs parking looked like this:

After parking I headed over to dinner and then up to the main stage where the show had already started.

Layah Jane started us off with a great voice & an amazing guitarist (I think his name was Oliver Robertson?)

Donne Roberts was up next with his band (drummer was a lot of fun! Whole drum set was hand drums, no drum sticks!) and some music inspired by the folk music of his native Madagascar. During this set we started to get some rain, you could tell by the way the whole audience collectively reached for their tarps/umbrellas/raincoats/ponchos/etc!

Then there was a lovely introduction for the guitar maker, guitarist and singer Grit Laskin, but just as he was about to start, the artistic director of the festival came on stage and warned us all that there was an intense, but small, thunderstorm cell headed our way and advised us that they were shutting down the main stage for a bit and that we should all head to our cars. We were lucky and for the most part the storm passed to the south of us and we were in the clear, but we did have about a half hour delay. Grit boasted when he got back on stage that when he took the stage the whole audience stood up and left! The humour was appreciated by those of us who had waited out the storm!

Grit went on to play a wonderful set, with a few guests, playing the guitar, mandolin and squeeze box. His fingers seemed to fly over the strings of his guitar!

Oh Susanna was on next, she was one of the acts of the night I was really looking forward too. I wasn't hugely impressed by her set, but I'll be searching her out in workshops tomorrow, sometimes I prefer the artists in the smaller stage settings than headlining the main stage. Her comment about this festival was that she seems to have been type-cast, singing in workshops with names such as 'Love Does Not Conquer All' and 'Death Becomes Her', so she was "going to play to type tonight & proceeded to sing us a song about heartbreak and death, rock on!"

I knew Mom's shift was over in the middle of Oh Susanna's set and so went out to find her after. Note for the future: set a meeting place if you're going to be trying to find someone in a large crowd of people in the dark! I did find her and went on to watch Karen Savoca & Pete Heitzman with her, neither of us were super impressed with them, but they seemed to be a crowd favourite.

Next on stage was Royal Wood, who I have seen last year at Home County Folk Festival and really enjoyed. His set was really good & I'm excited to see him again tomorrow.

Headlining the night was Ron Hynes, who is amazing. We decided though that since the show was running late and we have to be there bright and early tomorrow morning and we would be stuck in the parking lot if we stayed to the end, to call it a night before Ron Hynes finished, which is too bad, but we're exhausted and it's only day one!

Did I mention bright & early tomorrow morning? Yes, I'm booked in to work parking 9am-1pm and then again(!) from 9pm-midnight so tomorrow will be a long day! Also planning on heading over early because there is breakfast for the volunteers & apparently the scones are to die for... we'll see :)

People I'm very much looking forward to seeing tomorrow are Chic Gamine & Luke Doucet, I've been told I also must make a point to catch Eliza Gilkyson, who I haven't heard of but now I'm intrigued!

Probably no post tomorrow night (because of above shifts!) but hopefully one to wrap up the weekend!

Stitch & Pitch at the Blue Jays!!

Earlier this summer my brother had been complaining that he had never been to see a Jays game, my response? "I'll go with you but we have to go to the Stitch n Pitch game" (expecting really to be going by myself or with Mom who I've been able to drag along before), imagine my surprise when not only did he say sure, but my Dad piped up and said get 4 tickets, we'll all go. So Wednesday night found us working our way downtown Toronto to the Skydome (bite me Rogers, it will always be the Skydome!) to sit in the only sold out sections of the stadium, the Stitch n Pitch sections!!




Brother at the baseball game

Stitch n Pitch is an event organized by TNNA (The National Needlearts Association) with major and minor league baseball teams across the United States - and the Blue Jays!! (Find one near you!)



They stick the knitters up in the 200 level in the outfield where we can sit and knit (or crochet) without fear of being hit in the head with a ball. There were over 500 of us there! Even Ace (the mascot) came up to visit us, wearing a scarf knit by one of the knitters and presented to him on the field at the beginning of the game.



The game was great, they were playing the Seattle Mariners and we were sitting right behind Ichiro, who having lived in Japan for a year I think is really neat!! The Jays got 3 home runs and beat the Mariners 11-6.
Despite being brutally hot outside, once sitting in the dome in the shade with the roof open there was a lovely breeze and it was great to sit there, enjoy the baseball game and knit!


The sock at the game

One of the best parts of going to Stitch n Pitch are the goody bags & taking 3 non-knitters with me, I ended up with 4 of them!



They all had the same yarn, so now I have enough purple/white yarn to make someone a sweater :)



We also got samples of Eucalan wool wash and coupons to use at the stores that had sponsored the game.



Not only did they do goody bags this year, but there were prizes on various seats throughout our section & I scored 2 of them! This lovely BFL yarn from Two Sisters Stringworks and a copy of the Yarn Harlots book 'At Knit's End' which I have been meaning to buy, so bonus!




At the end of the day though, the game was awesome and I am totally looking forward to next year's Stitch n Pitch!!



And for the record, this is how much sock you can knit during a baseball game:

SNOW!!

Hey,

So I haven't been here for awhile, blame pneumonia, work, school, final exams and pneumonia again!

I'm DONE university!!! I wrote my last exam yesterday morning and am so thrilled to be finished, but am now packing up like mad since I'm moving home tomorrow....

But, this just had to be blogged about. Yesterday it was sunny, warm, 17*C outside. I went out to lunch with friends and we sat on the patio, I was worried about getting sun burnt and I even put on sunscreen. At 9:30 at night I walked home with just a sweater, no jacket, and I was fine!

Today however, today is a different story. This is the view out my window this morning:

... yeah... It's hovering around 0, and nothing's staying on the ground, but it has been steadily snowing for more than 6 hours now, on April 26th, after being 17*C out yesterday... Wow.

Drive-by blogging

- Sweater finished, Olympics finish line crossed, details/pics hopefully to follow next week

- no new projects yet, still working on ill-fated sock design, again... new sweater idea percolating

- midterm this afternoon in Financial Statement Analysis, probably not going to go all that well

- catching a train home tomorrow morning for Dad's retirement do on Friday then back to Montreal Friday night for Special Olympic Curling Provincials Sat-Sun

- so far behind on homework it's not funny

- wish I'd done some reading during reading week instead of just watching the Olympics, but man, weren't they awesome?!

Ok, off for last minute cramming and procrastination :)

Halfway...

Or not so much...

I was going to have a great post here tonight about how my sweater has been going pretty good (besides a misplaced set of side decreases we won't mention), however...

instead I tried on my sweater and came up with this:

Yep, for a sweater supposed to have 0 ease, it's looking pretty big, too big.

I remeasured gauge and my gauge is spot on which sucks, because in my swatch it was smaller, so I did the math and cast on a size bigger, now I need to readjust to about 2 sizes smaller. I was checking my gauge throughout and always got the same as I had when swatching so maybe I need to check my tape measure.

But AAUGGHHHHHH!?!?!? what a set back to have. I'm going to sit down with it tonight and see what I can fudge. I'm not going to rip out the hem (drama with that I don't want to talk about either, let's just say Olympics is not spelt Oylmpics...) because I can't bring myself to, and also the hips fit fairly well, but hopefully play around with the decreases to get a different size from the waist up. Going to take a glass of wine or two to bring myself to rip it out though...

But tomorrow I get on a train and am going home for reading week, so no classes, no work to interfere with knitting (just a midterm the week after I need to study for), so who knows? Maybe I can still pull this off!

Getting Close...

...to the Ravelympics / Knitting Olympics cast-on!! I'm so excited to start working on my Freyja sweater!!

I'm getting excited, also antsy, because I finished my latest big project on Saturday (more about that below) and bought enough yarn for a new sweater project at Ariadne Knits' knit night last Thursday, so I'm really itching to cast on!

I have been swatching though - enough to know that my gauge is off my 1/2 a st (drat, drat, drat) and I don't know anymore exactly what my colour combination is going to be. Here's a picture of my different combinations, I'm leaning towards the one on the right for now, the light blue just seems to pop too much for me I think.

Also I’ve been trying to decide whether to add a hem to the bottom with the interfacing in another colour (the darker green in this picture) or to stick with the seed stitch border which I like the look of… I don’t know what to do, but I’ll have to figure it out by Friday since this sweater starts at the bottom!

So you may not know, but last week was the Scotties' Tournament of Hearts in Canada, the women's national curling championship, and I spent a lot of time watching over the week, either over curlcast's live feed (which was new & awesome, thanks curlcast! It sometimes also had sound which made it even more fun!) and over TSN's video on demand which was posted after each draw had been over, so I usually knew how the game would go, but still worth watching. And most of the time I was watching I knit (when not doing homework or eating) and at the end of the week I cast off, making this my Scotties' project!

It's the Fern Fitted Shell, and though it had a few false starts (one all the way up to the underbust!) I did finish it and I'm very happy with it! It looks great as a tank or over top of a collared shirt so I could wear it in more business-y contexts, which is great. The only thing I'm slightly regretting is the yarn I made it with. I used Coolspun Cotton, which made this a really cheap project, but it's a dishcloth cotton and I foresee it getting really worn fairly quickly so I'm delaying blocking it but I should just dive in.

Anyways, I should head off to get ahead on homework so I'll be able to focus on the Ravelympics starting Friday!

Finally January!

So after being around plus 10*C for the earlier part of the week and being under a heavy rainfall warning, yesterday it snowed and today it is -17*C, -30*C with the wind chill, and it finally feels like January!

Kindly Sheep Mittens!

A project I finished awhile ago but haven't posted about yet, mostly because I haven't gotten any photos of them yet today, but it is snowing big, fat, fluffy snow today, so walking home through it I decided it was a good day to finally get some pictures of these mittens.

A view from my balcony this afternoon (really only 1/2 the snow shows up in this picture...):

So the mittens.

These are from a great pattern from Knitty (Fall 2009) that was written for a dk weight handspun, but the yarn I fell in love with for them is Fresco by Classic Elite, it's a fingering weight wool, alpaca, angora blend that is so soft!

The pattern is for wrist warmers and a cropped mitten that then hooks onto the wrist warmers and both have the same cable pattern.

I modified them a bit, adding a repeat to the cable motif on both the mittens and the wrist warmers to make them longer because of gauge issues.

I love them so much, the double layering means that your hands stay really warm, although there's still just a single layer at the top so I've been scheming about how to make that better.

Also I'm having some problems with the hooks, especially on the back of the hand staying hooked, I'm contemplating whether to move them further down the cuff (and out of line with the ones on the palm side) or tighten the hooks up with pliers. Leaning towards the pliers at this point because it requires less effort...

I also wish that I had picked a slightly lighter colour for the mitt part because in the dark yarn the cable pattern gets mostly lost, it's there, but the effect is very subtle, whereas on the wrist warmers the cable pattern stands out and is really pretty.

I apologize for the blurry pictures, but the camera refused to focus too well very quickly and the longer I continued trying the same shot the more the pictures became like this:

Something wrong with the camera? I think so!

Anyways, since I finished those not much knitting going on here, been busy with the back to school, new job, messy apartment things.

I've tried a couple socks, one cobbled together from leftovers and the 'More Sensational Socks' book and another that I'm trying to design, but all efforts so far have been failures which kind of makes trying again less appealing.

But I do have a sweater picked out for the Knitting Olympics, so I'm just waiting to get started on that! (should swatch first, maybe I'll go do that!)

Now Available for Sale!!

The Pink Promise Socks are now available for sale on Ravelry, I am so excited!!

If you want to knit a cute pair of socks and support a great cause you can get your very own copy of the pattern by clicking on this button right here: