a 'snowed in' day

This time it's really bad (apologies for the blurry pic, it was still dark out. Click on the picture so that you can actually read the numbers).


There's one car stuck on our street and one neighbour got stuck at the bottom of his driveway because he was too lazy to shovel and decided to just go for it. Some people aren't so smart. I'm hanging out at home and cuddling up to my knitting.

Speaking of knitting, I seem to have taken a slight detour from finishing FOs to casting on new projects. While surfing for a duck pattern for the baby blanket, I came across a Pooh washcloth pattern. Ya know I'm a sucker for Pooh bear.


Pattern: Happy Hunny Bear
Yarn: Lily Sugar'n Cream in Robin Egg
Needles: 4.5mm addis

And thanks to P-La, I cast on a felted clog.


Darn you and your cute clogs! These blue ones are for hubby. I've got some purple Lopi for mine.

Many Thanks
I have been remiss about thanking a few folks. Firstly, I'd like to thank Nikki. I won her blog contest last week. I can't wait to see what my prize is!

And Ricky and Phoebe won in the "cutest" category in the Central Park Footie contest hosted by Phyl. They would like to thank Phyl for recognizing their supreme cuteness. Sadly (for them), the prize is for me but maybe I'll give them extra treats today.

And a reminder that there's still time to enter our contest. You have until midnight PST Jan 31st.

Well, I'm off to do a little online shopping. It's Gladys' bday soon and I need to find an appropriate gift. Gladys - got any hints for me?

definitely a snow day

The weather folks have been predicting snow for this weekend but not a lot of snow. When we got up this morning, there was just a light dusting on the ground so we headed out to do our regular food shopping. Imagine our surprise when we got home - 2-3" of snow had fallen in the hour we were gone.



Don't my beauty berries look cold? I called my sister to whine about the snow and she just laughed at me. Apparently, they're getting a severe cold front. Lows will hover around -27C/-17F (-41C/-42F with windchill; cold enough for frostbite) tonite. She told me that their new car doesn't have a block heater so they have to park it in the garage to prevent it from freezing solid. And their low tonite is their high for tomorrow so it's only going to get worse. I don't know how she can stand living there. Since she's stuck indoors, she is consoling herself by shopping for jewellry on eBay. At last count, she bought 2 rings and spent $400.

My fabric shopping trip was semi-successful - I did buy fabric but the construction took a bit more thought that I had anticipated. I found a quilt panel that I liked but it was a little too narrow so I bought some co-ordinating stripes for a border. I chose a backing fabric but there wasn't enough on the bolt for the panel plus borders (there was enough for just the panel). I bought it anyways. I'm good at fudging improvising. When I got it all home, I chopped off the top of the panel to make it a little shorter so that the overall dimensions would fit the size of the backing fabric. I machine quilted it and I just have to sew the opening shut and do a little hand quilting and it'll be ready for the baby. My friend is in labour and we're predicting that she'll deliver today. All of us are joking that since their first child was born during one of the worst snow storms in Boston, their second child will be born during today's snowstorm.


And as Turtle mentioned in yesterday's comments, fabric has a tendency to jump into your shopping cart. A little of this came home with me. I bought it cuz it's pretty (and purple).

Speaking of babies... A fellow knitter is pregnant and we're knitting a baby blanket for her. On Wed, I was given some yellowy yarn and some instructions. I rummaged around Ravelry and found a duckie dishcloth pattern and adapted it for the baby blanket. I whipped this up while watching some ST Enterprise yesterday night.


Too cute! I might make a few of these for wash cloths and give them to the nieces.

And what do you do when it's cold and snowy outside? You make some yummy congee (Chinese version of chicken soup) for lunch.


I cheated a little (don't tell Mom that I used store-bought stock) but I don't care. If you're wondering - the stuff on top of the soup is a combo of seasoned dried pork fluff, sesame seeds, and seaweed. Yum!

Looks like the snow has stopped. Guess I should help hubby shovel.

speed quilting

I haven't knitted a single stitch in almost 48 hours. Last time you heard from me, I needed to make something for an imminent birth. Well, that plan got sidetracked on Thurs. Some signature quilts that we'd been working on were due Friday night and as of Thurs morning, one quilt still needed a bit of work. Yikes! So I spent Thurs afternoon/evening and Friday morning hand quilting the remaining 11 ft. It doesn't sound like much but the quilting design had loops and stars in it. I finally got it done around 1pm, sewed the label to the back, and spritzed the blue pen marks with water to make them disappear. Then I laid the quilt on the bed so that it could dry. All 3 were finally finished - phew!

The party was a blast. The ladies were quite happy to finally have their quilts. All of us ate way too much food. One of the highlights of the evening was our host's dog, Tucker. Pauline was petting him and every time she stopped, he would kinda growl at her and she would start petting him again. He was really enjoying the attention, see:


And still no knitting for me today. I rummaged around in my fabric stash and I don't have any boy-themed fabric. I found a few baby bits but I think they're too girly. So I'm off to the fabric store to find something appropriate.

can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em

(warning - rant ahead)
Hubby can be such a PITA. Yesterday morning, I was woken up by the opening and closing of several doors. Fine, roll over and go back to sleep. And just as I was falling asleep, I hear his noisy bicycle pump - yay, he's riding his bike to work and I'll get another hour of shut-eye before I have to feed the cats. Roll over some more and pull the blankets up. More doors opening/closing and some muffled noises directly under our bedroom - he's leaving, double yay. And then I hear this strange noise like lots of running water and it doesn't seem to stop. Ugh! I squint at the clock and it says 6:20am. Phoebe is crawling all over me and Ricky's meowing for breakfast in his loudest Siamese voice. Hubby's up and making a lot of noise. He hasn't left so the cats expect me to be up. I dragged myself out of bed and stomp downstairs. Hubby set up his bicycle trainer in the room under our bedroom and he's happily riding away. I let him know (using not nice words) that I'm extremely grumpy and will be that way all day and he'd better not wake me up ever again. And if he doesn't come home with a peace offering, he's dead meat. He brought me a box of cherry cordial chocolates from Purdys :)

And to further perk me up, a little package arrived from Gabrielle.


Thanks, Gabrielle! The card is just hilarious and I can't wait to use the hand cream. It's hard to tell from the picture but the legs on the sheep buttons move when you wiggle them.

There was a lot of knitting while I grumped around. The Peapod cardi is almost finished.


I have to be careful where I leave it. After the last photo shoot, I caught Ricky lying on the cardi and using the ball of yarn as a pillow while I was uploading the pictures onto the laptop. Don't worry, I wash all my gift knits before they're handed over.

I cast on a Valentine's present for hubby and I did some work on one of my WIPs - the second sock for Pauline. And my co-blogger just reminded me that there's a baby due soon and I need to make something for him. Yikes! So I should stop blogging and get back to knitting :)

Holy Sheep

This headline was too good not to blog it: "Wharram Percy: The Town the Sheep Devoured".

There's a town in England which was abandoned around the 15th century, and current research is finding that it was because of the sheep: "By the 15th century, sheep farming had become far more profitable than arable farming, so the lord of the manor turned more of his land into pasture land, leaving less for the farming of crops. This in turn led to less work and less food for the villagers of Wharram Percy, so that they were forced to leave the village to find work and food elsewhere."

So unfortunately, the story isn't as good as the headline, but it's still an interesting look into history.

recycling yarn

I was at a thrift store last week hunting for the usual treasures - linen tea towels, old quilts, etc. when I ran my hands across a sweater. OMG - it was so soft. I looked at the tag and it said 100% cashmere, made in Scotland. It is a mens XL and in fabulous shape. The sweater is a green heather colour - a colour I can't wear but I know a few people who would look fabulous in it so it came home with me. I've recycled sweaters (for yarn) before and I was a little worried that I would accidentally cut into the sweater while picking apart the seams. But this sweater was sewn together with sewing thread so ripping it was really easy. I had it apart in no time. I started by winding the yarn on the ball winder but the strands aren't spun very tightly and the yarn kept snapping. I ended up winding it by hand.

I've got about half of the back undone. I'm trying to gauge how much yarn I'll have. Colourmart claims 2300 yds of 2:28NM cashmere per 150g. The sweater weighed around 425g before frogging. I think the sweater yarn is slightly heavier than the Colourmart cashmere so I estimate that I have at least 2300 yds. I'll be skeining up the yarn and washing it to get out the kinks so there'll be an opportunity to calculate yardage.

I'm keeping an eye on all those stole suggestions because I'll be looking for a pattern for this yarn. My current favourite is the Woodland shawl. Mmmm, mossy green leaves...

The Peapod baby sweater didn't get much attention this weekend. I did reach the bottom of the armholes. I've got 3 counters going - one for the leaf chart repeats, a count of the button hole rows, and row count (from the beg of the armhole opening) so that I can match the fronts to the backs. I need more kacha counters!


This is the cutest thing I've ever knit!

random Friday

I have a bunch of little bits that I'm just going to dump into this post.

Since I can't enter my own contest, I thought I'd list the stoles that I think Gladys should make.
1. Print O' the Wave Stole by Eunny Jang - I've got a cone of cobweb wool/silk from Scotland for this project
2. Juno Regina by Miriam Felton - currently, otn so it's easy for me to recommend it
3. Hanami by Melanie Gibbons - I've got some creamy shetland lace from a small farm in Saskatchewan that would be perfect for this stole.

I've had a look at your suggestions and they are all amazing. I can see my Ravelry queue growing...

At this time of year, the malls have their big post-Christmas sales. I'm lucky that I live fairly close to 3 large ones so I've been shopping this week (walking is good for my back) and I've picked up some great bargains.

I'm allergic to all costume jewellry. I can only wear gold, titanium, and usually silver so I don't have a lot of fun jewellry to wear - just serious stuff. Imagine my surprise when I saw a silver ring sale - 6 for $3. How could I resist?


And I've been buying lots of sale books. I even got a knitting one - Luxury Knits by Amanda Griffiths. I think a more accurate title would be "Knits using Luxury Yarns". Would you buy 15 balls of Rowan Kidsilk Haze (or 3435 yds of a similar yarn) to knit a stockinette cardigan? Yep, definitely luxurious. There are some very nice patterns in it. Here are some of my favourites:




We watched the Transformers movie yesterday night and it was hilarious. There was a lot of action, too but some great one-liners as well. Just too funny. I'm going to watch the movie again tonite.

Thanks for the get well wishes. I got the house moderately clean without making my back feel worse. Between the Advil and my heating pad, I think I'm definitely feeling better today. We'll see how it goes after I tackle the mountain of laundry (the next house I buy will have the washer/dryer upstairs).