San Francisco Again

Hubby had to go to San Francisco for a conference so we rented a car and both headed up there. It was very strange not to have a cat with us.

Successful September

I decided that the titles of my monthly update posts needed more excitement than just the month name. So here I have gone for some alliteration; except when I checked Ravelry for completed projects it wasn't as successful a month as I remembered, so the title is "Successful September With a Couple of Days of October Thrown in".

The month was productive as I finished all those projects that were nearly finished and just needed the intent from me to get 'em done.

First off the needles were the socks that I had technically finished in July but I decided were not quite long enough. All that was needed was to unpick the toe shaping add some rows of pattern and then redo the toe shaping - twice.



The yarn is Fame Trend by Marks & Kattens, the same yarn as these socks and also a Christmas gift from hubby. I decided that I was not going to match the colors on the socks which was a good decision as I came across 5 knots in this ball of yarn. This is totally unacceptable in one ball of yarn but as I was on the road I didn't do anything about it except I had extra ends to sew in.

I also finished the sweater, which just needed ends sewing in and another blocking. I am really pleased with how it fits. No photos yet as it will look better if I am wearing it so I either have to speak nicely to hubby or set up the tripod. It should be just right for Southern California winters.

And then squeezing into October, I finished the easy project that mostly lived in the car. A good number of years ago I bought Teddy Bears when they were on sale with the intention of dressing them in outfits I had knitted and giving them to charity. Well I finally achieved one dressed teddy. Left over yarn was used so that helps in using up yarn left over from other projects.



All I have to do know is knit outfits for the other bears.

So as at the 2 October I had 2 projects on the needles. Both lace shawls so I felt very pleased with my accomplishments. Now for the next projects!

San Diego Honours Members of the Military

San Diego is supportive of members of the military. With a Naval base on Coronado Island and a Marine base just north of where we live it is not surprising. I wonder if it has always been that way here. But that is not a conversation that I will start. And for any non-Americans reading this you have no idea of how members of the military, many of whom were drafted - read no choice - were treated by the press and therefore members of the public during the Vietnam era.

Anyway the purpose of the post is to show a couple of photos I took at sporting events recently. We were lucky to go to the opening home game of the Chargers (football) and the last home game of the Padres (baseball).

Both games honoured members of the military and had fly pasts before the game started. The Padres game was very touching as they honoured Japanese-American veterans from WWII. (Again for non-Americans, some poor decisions were made by those in power during this time affecting Japanese and their American-born children.)

During the singer of the National Anthem at the Chargers game a flag was unfurled. This was the size of the football field (nearly typed pitch there).



You see that it is not smooth. There are people underneath that flag holding it up as the flag is not allowed to touch the ground. And it was a very hot day.

At the Padres game, the team wore their camo uniform. When a baseball game starts the home team runs out on the field and takes their position. Before the start of this last game members of the military stood in the positions which for some reason I thought was pretty cool.

Life At The Beach

Yesterday we walked to the village to hear some live music in a park near the sea. We then went for our usual walk along the beach. Coming back I wanted to capture the sun shining on the sea. These were taken with my phone - not bad.

August

There's even less to say about August than there was July. Nothing was started and nothing was finished.

I didn't do anything to the socks that need to be lengthened and one of the close to completion projects was put in the car for a just in case project. (Which is where it had been residing before our long trip.) The sweater is almost finished. The neckband is attached and the sweater has been blocked - just need to sew in the ends.

I am probably about half way through the beaded shawl. But that is by rows and as it increases in size on every right side row, I am no where near half way through. Part of me wants to make a spreadsheet to work out where I am as a percentage of size and part of me thinks I should just pick up the needles.

That is what I should do - pick up the needles and knit. I haven't opened my knitting bag since we left San Francisco nearly 3 weeks ago. But I have finished a book of over 1000 pages.

What Not To Say When Your Husband Is Driving

Do not start off a statement with an extended arrrrghh just when he has pulled out of the driveway. This will make him pull over wondering where the problem is. Potential accident, disaster, sickness. Whereas really it was an extended excited arrrrgh followed by there's the sea. (You can see the sea from our driveway - it makes me sooo happy.)

Some People Move Houses - We Move Countries

We haven't moved much since we've been married. In fact we've only moved house in the same city once and that was because we started off in a rented apartment (with rented furniture). But when we do move, we have to change the country.

A few days after getting married we moved from the UK to the US; 9 years later we moved from the US to Canada; and 6 1/2 years after that we moved back to the US.

In addition to everything involved with moving house there is all the additional paperwork for moving to another country. For people, belongings and animals. Except as we were driving this time we did not need any paperwork for the cats. Good thing as their vaccination records were not with all the other paperwork I had for crossing the border. (Put in a safe place that I would never have thought of looking if asked.)

As with our other moves, we have moved to a place where neither of us know anyone, although hubby has lived in California before; northern California and now we're in southern California. One big difference about this move is the time of year. The last two moves have been at the beginning of January to places that have winter; a shock to the system but at least you know what you are getting. Having moved here in the summer, I can't imagine that it will not be cold in the winter.

Moving countries presents more challenges than just extra paperwork. Suddenly there is a gap in the records of your life. Credit and employment history shows no activity. To be able to live normally, deposits have to be paid to obtain services and an explanation of every aspect of your life has to be provided to obtain a mortgage. But at last we have a house, internet and cell phones.

Let the good times roll.

A Day In San Francisco

How To Help Your Child Become An Adult

Last month I passed on a parenting tip. But how do you know your parenting skills have worked? After all it is easy to make your child think you are awesome but how does this translate into real life. One sign is when they grow up to be independent human beings making their own way in the world, obtaining information to make decisions secure in the knowledge that they can do this as you have been behind them encouraging and teaching.

And you feel so proud of them when it works out as this example shows.

We are in California and our son is in Calgary. So as I am an awesome mother I sent him a food parcel. The dear child considerately emailed me he had received the notice to pick up the parcel from the post office and he would do so after work. He then asked me what time they close!

One of us needs some work in the growing up to be independent department.

July

I thought I had loads of projects to show you that I had completed in July but I have one to tell you about. Agh, what happened? Well, despite knitting a bunch it still doesn't translate into completed projects. And in July I completed one pair of socks and almost another pair. This pair is technically completed but I want to lengthen the foot so I am not counting them as finished yet.

So here they are, the one finished item. I started the first one on 28 June as the designer - Anne Campbell was a featured designer in the SKA group for June and I had previously queued this pattern. The yarn is Fame Trend by Marks & Kattens and was a Christmas gift from hubby.

After completing the first sock, I decided to make the second sock with the same colour sequence. Except this ball of yarn was dyed in such a way that it was not possible to make two matching socks. Even where I found the same colours, it was plyed with a darker colour.

I mentioned in a previous post that there were two projects close to completion that I could finish. Well that didn't happen and now I have three projects close to completion. We'll be house sitting in a couple of weeks so if my memory holds up that would be a good time to finish projects.

Ignoring those projects I have just one thing on the needles which is a beaded shawl. Because I have all this time to knit. Huh!

Heading Into The 21st Century

I finally did it. I am now on Facebook. Friends had been suggesting/nagging for many a year that if I wanted to see photos I needed to be on Facebook. With the current loooong road trip there seemed to be little excuse to remain faceless. So today I joined the masses.

It wasn't easy; and that has nothing to do with being a Luddite or old but due to the #@!$ browser I was using. I was in Goggle Chrome and it would not open any of the Edit windows which worked fine in Mozilla Firefox and Windows Explorer. As I had no problems with either of those browsers I did not bother to check for weirdness in Goggle Chrome's settings.

With Ravelry, my blog, the odd immigration forum and now Facebook I don't know where I am going to find the time for the rest of my life.

Stella RIP

Charity Blankets

I have mentioned before a group that makes blankets for charity – Western Canadian Oddball Blanket Society. Each blanket is made up of 6 sections of 6 inches each plus an edging. Each section is knitted (or crocheted) by a different person and then passed on to the next crafter. Although the name of the group is Western there are now knitters and crocheters from all over Canada involved. Currently the majority of the blankets are donated to the NICU at Foothills Hospital in Calgary.

Last year I crocheted a complete blanket so at the beginning of this year I decided to crochet a preemie size blanket.(Preemie size blankets are roughly 24 inches square.) Basically it is a large granny square with a shell edging.



In February it was my turn for a strip on a regular blanket. I was the fifth person on this blanket and it was being worked in various shades of blue. I chose a chevron pattern in a silver blue shade.





I have to say this was my favourite blanket to work on as the knitting was wonderful and the colours well chosen.

In May I was the second person on another blanket and chose a heart pattern. I love going through my stitch pattern books and choosing a pattern that I think will be interesting for me to knit as well as suiting the blanket and has more or less the right count of stitches for the blanket. The challenge for this blanket was choosing a colour that was in my stash but would go with the colour started on the blanket.



At the beginning of May the board issued a challenge – fast-track blankets – each board member started a blanket and with bribery and cajoling encouraged others to join. I worked on two of these, even though I did not have much time I wanted to do my part. For one of them, it was decided that each person would work their 6-inch strip and send to the organizer to put together and work a border. The yarn I used was highly variegated so I worked a simple broken rib so that there was some pattern but it does not pull in the way that ordinary rib does.



The other fast track blanket was worked in the normal way, being passed from knitter to knitter, and I was the third person. I was in rather a quandary when I received it as the first two knitters had both worked garter stitch and I really did not want to work garter stitch. Because garter stitch has a high rows per inch gauge, it is not actually as fast a knit as you would expect it to be. As I was the third person on the blanket, I decided that it would be OK not to work garter stitch and would also give following knitters a choice. But it couldn’t be an all-over stocking stitch pattern as there had to be texture to go with the garter stitch. Although I had just worked a ribbed section, a rib pattern of some description seemed the best, so I chose this textured rib pattern.





These are my last blankets until my yarn is out of storage and I find another group closer to where I will be living.

How To Be An Awesome Parent

This post could have had many titles:- I Wish I'd Been There; Parenting is Tough; This Child Will Be In Therapy For Life and I'm sure someone reading this will believe it was child abuse.

A friend messaged me and told me what she had done when her child was being really annoying. I laughed out loud and had to share.

They were in a mall and, apparently, there are laws, I'm sure set up by busy body do gooders, that you are not allowed to leave your children behind when you depart the mall. Bearing this in mind, what choices were left to my friend when oldest child was being annoying?

She ate his Kinder Egg right in front of him!

That is true parental sacrifice - the chocolate is not adult friendly.

Hitchhiker

The problem with buying yarn without a project in mind is that it sits in the stash for quite a while as there is the tendency to purchase yarn for a specific project rather than look in the stash. This is how my stash is mostly sock yarn as there is always enough in 100 grams to knit a pair of socks.

Except, sometimes you don’t want to knit socks or you just have to knit a certain pattern or you “need” a certain item. So the sock yarn still sits in the stash even though it, ostensibly, has a purpose.

And then there is the yarn that you are not sure if you even want to make socks with. Such was the case with this yarn.

I purchased three “skeins” of this yarn at different times and I paid full price for this one.



The second skein I purchased became thesesocks. From knitting those I found that the yarn is more colour block than self-striping, the yarn looks crinkly after being reknitted and the stitches look a bit odd where the colour changes occurred. (At the colour changes a stitch from the original skein is made up of tw0 colours.)

The yarn is a long scarf and you could just use it as a scarf but really that is too easy – why not knit it into another scarf? This would solve three problems. The colour changes might not look so strange, I had an idea of how the striping looked, I could use the whole skein, no adding small amounts to my stash. There was no point in knitting a standard scarf from a scarf so I chose Hitchhiker. A pattern I had had for a while but I felt needed more than a single-toned yarn. Plus it was an easy pattern and I always like to have one of those on the go. Although I have no idea what will be my next easy project.

I was a little unsure of how big (or small) this would turn out. The original pattern uses 150 gram skein of Wollmeise which is 525 metres. My yarn was 100 grams and 420 metres, enough for a scarf plus I could always unravel it if I didn’t like the end result. Needle choice was easy; for this trip I packed a couple of sets of DPNs for socks and my interchangables, so I used size 3.5 mm, the smallest size in the set.

The crinkliness of the yarn shows much more in garter stitch but it looks like it has been worked in a boucle yarn. I could wet block it to see if that makes a difference but as I am currently on the Washington peninsular I am not going to try.

Gifts

We were blessed with finding a superb, caring vet for our spoilt white kitty and a vet technician who looked after both cats when we went away. Both of them had far exceeded my expectations in a vet and cat feeder so I wanted to say a big thank you when we left. I did this by knitting them each a scarf.

This was an ideal time to use the skein of Punta that I had purchased on the yarn crawl. At that time I had not heard of Punta but my friend was a big fan so I purchased and then as it wasn’t sock yarn I couldn’t think what to make with it. I had just enough to make this scarf. I used size 5.5 mm needles but I did not like the result after blocking as the stitches really opened up, so I blocked it again and just patted it into shape and I much preferred the end result.

The other scarf I made used my own hand dyed yarn see this post. I had wanted to make the cross stitch scarf from 101 designer One-Skein Wonders for a long time but couldn’t find the right yarn. My hand dyed was perfect. I changed the pattern slightly by casting on 4 more stitches and working 4 rows of moss stitch at start and finish. It was easy to use up almost all the yarn and the end result was a perfect match of yarn and pattern. The photo is not very good but I didn’t have the time to take photos on different days with different light.

On The Needles

As half the year has gone, I thought I’d do a mini round-up of what is not complete. The oldest lace project will stay that way for quite a while as I packed it up and put it in storage. (We won’t talk about the lace yarn I did bring with me.) The sweater is completed and just needs the neck band sewn on. I haven’t rushed to do that as it will need a good blocking and I am not in the best place for that right now. Physical location that is not mental place.

The small easy project I keep in the car is nearly finished and will be (should be) after the two pairs of socks on the go.

If I really put my mind to it I could complete all these items by the end of the month. Let’s see!

April and May

Well it seems that not only am I knitting slowly but I am updating slowly too. So here is another post with two months worth of completed objects. April was very slow on the knitting front but I finished a pair of socks albeit a pair I started on 1 January and I knitted a dishcloth.

I started the socks on 1 January as part of the Ravelry SKA group animal theme for that month. The pattern is The Gardener by Leslie Comstock and I had favourited it a while ago so I took the chance to knit it. The yarn is Madeline Tosh Sock, colour Grapefruit, which I had bought on my trip to Denver and had saved for this pattern. I have now used all the yarn I bought on that trip.

As I like using knitted/crocheted dishcloths, I am using up all my ends of dishcloth cotton. In April I knitted another Hex. I divided the small amounts of dishcloth cotton into two piles – variegated and solid – and then alternated between the two when I ran out. As this was a dishcloth for my use I knotted the yarns at the changes and didn’t worry about which side the knot fell on. Not too bad a result.

May was more successful. I have shown photos of the mystery sock I started in May; I made three sections for WCOBBS blankets which I will post about separately; a scarf, which will also have its own post; a completed pair of socks started in April and I completely frogged a pair of socks that I started last December.

The designer in the SKA group for April was Rosehiver. Her designs are wonderful and still free which is amazing and really she should start selling them. May’s mystery was her design and she also designed these socks. So it was a no-brainer that I would knit one of her designs when April came around.

The yarn is Kypria from The Sanguine Gryphon before they split into two separate companies. I really like the finished article and they are my new favourites.

Stitch Markers With a Difference

In my last post I mentioned the gift from my friend Clair. She has now opened her ESTY shop Purple gecko Studio so I can go into more detail. Her gift to me was a beaded bracelet she had made herself but the unusual design feature was the stitch markers. Along the bracelet are lobster claw fasteners with beaded stitch markers attached. So if you are out with your knitting and need a stitch marker you have one on you. Or if you never know where to keep your stitch markers now there is no problem. And they are so pretty the knitting uninitiated will just see a bracelet. Clair has also made some necklace/pendants with detachable stitch markers.

So go on order some for gifts and don’t forget to get one for yourself too.

Friends

I really wanted a catchy title for this post so that it would turn up in search engines and the whole world would know what wonderful friends I have and generate some traffic for their blogs or ESTY stores. Instead there is the non-imaginative title but the sentiments of this post will be the same even if it was titled Harry.

I informed the spousal unit that I would be out every Thursday until we move so I could spend time with my knitting friends who I have said are a bunch of fun people brought together by a mutual enjoyment of fibreness. The first Starbucks gathering occurred on 25 September 2008. (I know because I blogged about it.) So that is nearly 4 years of knitting togetherness of people who met on the web. And despite the concerns of one daughter, we have not attacked, maimed or murdered anyone with our pointy sticks. People are still joining our group (yes we are that fun), babies have been born and people have moved away. And now it is my turn - to move, not have a baby. I really hope I find a similar group when I finally move into my new house.

But this past Thursday was amazing. They gave me a basket filled with goodies that were so special for me to remember each of them by. I was totally surprised, grateful and honoured. (In other words gobsmacked.)

As we, mostly, meet in Starbucks I shouldn't have been surprised to receive a couple of mugs, a Calgary one from Lacey who came out on Thursday even though she is very pregnant and an Edmonton one from Sharon who actually popped in for a visit last week, so it was great to see her before I moved. From Shannon the awesome crocheter I received some notecards but not just any old notecards, these were her photos of Alberta.

Becca made some stitch markers and although she is American, one of the markers is Canadian and they are so wonderful my husband knew immediately what they were. My pinky bff (I've started to use that expression because it makes me laugh) Clair made me a bracelet with a difference which I won't reveal here in case she decides to sell them. I'm still waiting for the present from her husband as my leaving will increase their disposable income. Clair is easily overcome by yarn fumes and it is not difficult to encourage her to spend money in a yarn store followed by coffee.

And now a plug for Cara's Esty shop Chasing Fire Ceramics. She made me some maple leaf buttons. Short of them being dipped maple syrup, how much more Canadian you can get? So support a new vendor and buy. And Susan knitted me a dishcloth. I am not going to use the dishcloth. One day Susan will be famous and I can sell the dishcloth for loads of money.

And then there was yarn. The ever talented Vanessa gave me some lovely soft baby alpaca. Vanessa joined our group when she worked in Starbucks and now has her own Esty shop - Mochanut. The other Claire gave me Wollmeise sock yarn. Claire is a Wollmeise fiend. She has nearly 3000 items in her queue and over 6000 items favorited on Ravelry, as well as having two small children she finds time to knit big shawls. Mary, another lace knitting and fibre buyer extraordinaire gave me some Juliespins. This is another dyer the group raves about but I have never used and this yarn has sparkles.

And there's more! I also received some handspun. Heather spun 70% dog and 30% merino. But not just any dog, her big, soppy malemute! And Myrna gave me some of FatCatKnits handspun and wrote that she would think of me every time she used her air conditioning. I wonder why?

I wanted the ethernet world to know what wonderful friends I have and that they will be missed. My husband's comment was all these goodies would need a moving box of their own.