mii on the wii

I've been busy playing. Just after Christmas, hubby and I bought ourselves a new toy - a Nintendo Wii (comes with Wii Sports) and the Wii Fitness Plus bundle. I am getting a lot more use out of it than hubby because he prefers to zip around in a warthog. My favourite game is tennis from Wii Sports. This is closely followed by the Snowball Fight game in Fitness Plus. Hubby and I are currently vying for the high score title. Last time, it took him an hour to beat my score by one kill. Don't worry - I'll kick his ass. I need to rest up a few days first.

Speaking of sports... I live right beside the host city for this year's winter Olympic games - Vancouver. There is Olympic fever everywhere as businesses get ready for the flock of athletes, support staff, reporters, and tourists that will be flooding this town. One of my quilting friends has tickets for the figure skating gala performance so she's been working on some Olympic themed quilt items. Yesterday, she brought some fabric to show us and of course, I had to go out and buy some for myself.


Winter Sports by Laurie Godin for Northcott Fabrics

It's very rare to see fabric featuring Canada so I had to add some to my collection. This cotton version is only available in Canada. The flannel version is available to everyone.

If you look closely, you can definitely see Vancouver:


The outline below the mountain is the downtown Vancouver skyline. In fact, Gladys (hey when are you going to blog?) works in the tower that looks like a space ship at the top. I've promised to make Gladys a project bag and I'll have lots leftover for a quilt of some kind.

I have been struggling with my knitting this week. I cast on the Outside In socks using a Fleece Artist/Handmaiden mystery sock yarn which is a little thicker than the sample sock yarn. After reading through the pattern, I wanted to knit it via magic loop but I didn't have any 2.25mm circs (gasp - there is a needle size that I don't have!) so I used 2.5mm instead. Big, big mistake. Oh so fugly fabric. I eventually switched to 2.25mm dpns and got something much better. But those single knit columns still looked really sloppy. I have a hard time keeping a decent tension when I have to switch back and forth between knit & purl sts. So I tried a few rows where I twisted the sts via ptbl (purl through the back loop). Ugh! What a pain in the butt! I ended up frogging the whole thing and spent the rest of the day stewing.

I was determined to knit this sock even if it killed me. The pattern calls for the sock to be knit inside out. When you are done, you flip the sock and voila, you get these lovely knit columns. I thought to myself that I should be able to knit the sock right side out and thus the knit columns can be ktbl (knit through the back loop) to make a nice tight stitch. All I had to do was reverse all the decreases and it should work out, right? It ended up being a bit more fiddly than that and I'm still not totally happy.


So this is where the sock's at. Part of me wants to frog and make a few more changes. Sigh...