Spitting Distance

Oh, I am almost there!!!!!

The trees at top left, a bit of snow lines, some backstitching on the central figures...and Charlotte's stocking will be done and dusted. A mere six years in the making, this has to be one of the more complex cross-stitch pieces I've done. I like it, but it's definitely time for this to move on, and out into the world. BEGONE.

Lots of other things going on around here, needlewise, but the Christmas gag order is firmly in place. Later!

Making the Best of It

The other day I mentioned that I had found a couple of small holes in my quilt after I repaired the edge. I sat down in the sunshine today with a couple of needles and a helpful book, and spent a half hour or so doing some fancy darning...my first try at this sort of work. Here's a pictorial record.



The Hole, roughly mended to keep the raw edges from unravelling during repair.


The Book. Full of useful knowledge and pretty ideas. I must keep an eye out for this one, for my own library.


The Patch. Stitched in DMC 223, 224 and 3347. Made up as I went along, trying to follow the instructions for "Spiderweb Stitch" and failing miserably, but still coming up with a pretty flower, so all's well that ends well.

And here's a progress shot of Charlotte's stocking.


Have a good weekend - I'm off to Fun Knits tomorrow with my knitting posse. We'll be stuffing ourselves with incredible food at the Lovin' Oven and spending the grocery money on laceweight. Fun!

Ticking Over

_____________________________
"I hate it when I'm boring."
"Yeah, I know what you mean. So do I. I've been so boring lately."
- my friend and me, today.





I thought I'd show you what I'm working on lately, since I am philosophically exhausted today and find myself unable to competently review a book.

Charlotte's Christmas stocking continues. It was borne in upon me that there isn't much time left if I want this done by 25 December, and with the entire family (my side, that is) here for the day, it would be a shame if Charlotte's was the only sock left uncrossed. Even Emily has one - not as big and fancy as the others, nor personalised, but at least hers would blend in.



As you can see, I've made some progress on the toboggan - compare it to this picture from June 18 which was the last time I had anything new to show.



I have cast on a new sweater. Between the purple yarn and the pattern, I've decided to call this "Grape Jaali".

My first attempt at the back of this sweater didn't go so well. I knit the cabled strip for the hem, then turned it and picked up along the long edge to begin the body of the sweater. You're meant to fold the knitted strip in half lengthwise, and pick up through both layers at once. The instructions call for you to pick up almost 1:1 - that is, for every row, you pick up a stitch. Stitches are wider than rows are high, though, and by the time I had a bit (read, ten inches) knitted I could tell this was going nowhere. The stitches were packed in so tightly that they were almost gathered - and with the hem doubled, there wasn't enough stretch to block it out effectively. Also, it seemed like it was going to be too big for me.


Ugly gathers.


I ripped, and began anew. This is the second try, and it's going much better. In case you're curious, I kept the cabled hem the same size, but picked up for the next size down - 126 stitches instead of 136 stitches. I also left the hem undoubled, and will whip-stitch it into place when I have blocked the piece to satisfaction.


Much neater.

And I have resurrected a five-year-old project, my very first attempt at quilting, with plans to finish this and hang it on my daughters' wall. It's not big enough for a bed and I don't have the wherewithal to make another umpteen blocks to MAKE it big enough. A wall hanging it shall be.



My favourite part of quilting is definitely the pressing, with the neat 1/4" seam allowances coming in a very, very close second.

I love miters.

I hope to buy the batting and backing, quilt this (hand-quilted, of course, with an electric needle) and finish it by the beginning of October. Doable, I think.

On the horizon is another sweater for Ruby, who this time will receive a nice thick pullover jumper in time for Christmas. Once I price the yarn, I can start that.

I'd also like to get some Latvian mittens knit this fall, but there are only so many hours in a day and I've got that pesky Ministry of Education insisting Charlotte gets educated...tchuh. Don't they know I've got STASH to deal with?

Up-Freaking-Date

Somebody does WIP it Wednesday....maybe Jo? Anyway, here are some WIPs (WIP = Work in Progress).

The centre of the Cap Shawl is almost complete. The rounds are now 738 stitches long so one round takes a fair bit of time, especially now that I've got these six purl rows to do. Purling doesn't feel any slower to me, but when I look at the clock I can tell it is. It takes me almost half an hour to do a round on this, at the moment.



Lace in progress is pretty boring stuff to look at, which is why I've spared you too many progress shots. There you have it, though: round 170 of 172. Feels like these next 2.5 rounds will take for-freaking-ever. (Aside: thank you Megan for formally introducing me, all those years ago, to the concept of the expletive infixation. It has validated all kinds of linguistic outrage for me. By the way if you have the time, do read that entire article - it's hilarious.)

And as promised I am showing you a picture of Charlotte's stocking. It was kind of a knit-centric week (trying oh, so hard, to get that stupid Cap Shawl done) so I didn't do much......if it sounds like an excuse, it is.

Last week:




This week:




Is it enough, O most enlightened reader? Or does the sun appear dark in your eyes because of my slack-freaking-assedness? I know which one I'd choose.

I'll do better next week, I promise.

Here's the peony, in full blowsy bloom. This is one decadent plant: between its scent, its glorious plumage, its syrupy buds, and its almost instant progress from bloom to decay, it is the Roman Dinner Party of the perennial world.



And that's all we have time for today. Catch you on the flip side, my fan-f*cking-tastic darlings.

Sting, Stang, Stung

More on this fuzzy fellow later. Click to embiggen.

My sister has been asking what Piper looks like now, at the age of four months. He's gotten a lot taller:

but mostly he has become kind of a handful. You know how puppies chew, right? Well, Piper doesn't chew so much as he eats. The other day he was lying beside me in the living room when i heard a funny swallowing sound. Sticking out of his muzzle were 2 inches of a 12 inch collar. I had taken it off him earlier and put it in my cardy pocket, and he pulled it out and swallowed most of it before I caught him.

Dealing with that was disgusting, really (kind of foamy-slimy), but the larger issue is that we have to be awfully vigilant about this dog. Stupid animal has a death wish.

Our house has also become home to another kind of pet: honeybees have set up a hive in our crawl space, between the floor and the insulation. I first noticed them coming and going out their front door, a gap in one of the wall vents to the outside...

We have called the local beekeepers' association, and they gave us the names of five beekeepers who would probably love to come and collect the hive. I don't know how long it will take but the bees are not bothering us - I quite like having them there actually.

However, on Saturday Emily fell down into a patch of clover in the front yard (our lawn is about 70% clover now) directly on top of a bee. She got a bad sting in her leg, which got red and hot very quickly. Within a few minutes she had an alarming network of welts all over her calf.

My mother is anaphylactic and carries an Epi Pen for bee stings, and I was a bit concerned about it as Emily has never been stung before. I had homeopathic Apis in the house, so I gave her three of them within ten minutes of the sting. The welts disappeared completely, and by the next morning all that was left was a tiny little stinger hole.

So I'm definitely keeping that remedy in the house. It's part of my growing Family Kit. So far I keep Arnica (for trauma, bruising), Apis (for stings and bites), Aconite (for panic), Influenzinum (flu), Hepar Sulph (for earaches, congestion and infections) and Ignatia (for worry and stress).

The last thing I wanted to show you is Charlotte's Christmas stocking. Remember this?

I have picked it up again, realising uneasily that it is halfway to Christmas and I've barely touched it. I really need to get it done this year, but at this rate I might not make it. I'll have to sacrifice some knitting to the cause, eventually, but I'd like to finish the Cap Shawl first.

Maybe I'll show you guys a picture of this thing every week, and if there isn't enough progress you can set up a hue and cry in the comments to get me going.

Now I'm off to clean up that coffee table...it's moved to the top of my priority list because I want to knit for a while and I need a place to set my teacup.

Coronation of the one-eyed man.

Sab·o·tage. Pronunciation: \ˈsa-bə-ˌtäzh\ Etymology: French, from 'saboter' to clatter with sabots. 3 a: an act or process tending to hamper or hurt b: deliberate subversion

I've been troubled with headaches lately. This morning I was pressing my hands against my eyes to relieve the ache a bit, but sadly I had put my glasses down on the duvet, whence they slipped to the floor without my noticing. I squinted down at the carpet myopically, then took a step back without thinking.

Crunch.

Now my entire day is going to be wasted, first searching feeling around the catastrophically messy laundry room for my old glasses, then going to the local very-crappy-optometrist's to either get contacts or get the broken ones fixed.

But I am not only here to bore you with trivia about my day, but to bore you with updates on my crafting.

Last night I made some progress on the Cap Shawl. That is, I knitted ten rounds and tinked six after discovering two inexplicable increase errors in what should have been blissfully easy knitting.

Since that wasn't going so well, I put it down and picked up Charlotte's Christmas stocking. After a couple of hours spent on that, I realized there was a chart error and I had done about 30 minutes' worth of work in the wrong colour. So I pulled it out and did it again.

With another wrong colour.

So then I went to bed. And what I'm here to ask you is this. Is there a malevolent fairy casting her powdered glass over whatever I set my hand to? Or, to lay the blame where it most probably belongs, do you believe that your state of mind can directly affect events in your life? Do you believe that a persistent nagging suspicion of your own incompetence can, in fact, undermine your competence?

I need Tony Robbins.

This One's FO You, Gwen

Serenade Angel
Designed By: Rebecca Waldrop for MarBek Designs
Begun: in the time before time, when the earth was young and the butts of Scotsmen were still faintly blue.
Finished: thirty minutes ago (August 19, 2007)
Stitch count: approximately 175 by 300
18-count aida fabric, in "Victorian Christmas Red"
Mods: none, you Philistines. Modifications are for the free and carefree life of knitters. I slavishly followed every subtle nuance and infinitessimal colour change in this chart.

I should tell you that it's very hard to photograph cross-stitch. None of these pictures remotely do this piece justice, nor even accurately depict the colours.

The approach of Christmas (and the "brr" months, as my brother calls the four months leading up to Yule) always spurs me to a renewed interest in cross-stitching. In my circles lately there has been a fair bit of excited chat about cross-stitch: it seems a lot of those who knit were at one time stitchers too. All this talk of charts, DMC, Balger, hoops and tapestry needles induced me to dig around in the stash and pull out some albatrosses that have haunted my sleepless nights for years.

This is the first of three angel patterns I bought in the early 1990's. The other two, "Herald Angel" and "Canticle Angel" (by the same designer and similar in style) haven't been started yet but will, in time, complete the series.

So this is an enormous relief - a rather weighty WIP (work in progress) that has been waiting for at least three years for 12 background crosses and a bit of gold ribbon around the edge of the halo. It's difficult to explain why it took me so long to finish - it's a complicated and boring story about my inability to use a hoop because of fear of crushing the multitude of fussy metallic threads, and the size and weight of the frame on which it was therefore mounted. (See? even the précis is complicated and boring.)

I can't tell you how glad I am to have this sucker finished. Cross-stitch is a wonderful and absorbing hobby, but you can't really take a piece of this size with you on your travels. As a result, you are limited to the amount of time you can find to sit absolutely still with a strong light over your left shoulder, chart clearly visible and very close by. It's extremely time-consuming.

A bit of a closeup for your delectation.

This is the first of four large and outstanding works-in-progress which I pledge to have finished by the end of this next year. At the earliest. The other three are, in order of importance:
1- Charlotte's Christmas stocking. Ideally I would like this one to be done by this Christmas. The chart is still lost and I have ordered another one. When it arrives, I will be stitching before you can say "Yes, Virginia".
2- The Beatrix Potter Storybook Sampler that I started while pregnant with my first child, serenely expecting many days ahead when I could sit in a rocking chair with a cherubic infant sleeping in a cot beside me, stitching fondly on a beautiful addition to her lovely nursery. (Go ahead: amuse yourself by playing "spot the fallacies" on that last sentence.) I have finished 5 of 8 motifs on this. There are 75 different symbols in this chart (so around 65 different colours). It is on 18-stitches-per-inch fabric.
3- The "Enchanted Alphabet", started circa 1994, a lovely little nursery-themed thing which I am 60% done. (It was midway through this piece that I started the ill-fated "Serenade Angel".)

It feels good to be doing this again, but I admit I have gotten a bit older and it seems I need a stronger light now. I think I may be forced to invest in an Ott-Lite if I plan to finish these projects with my eyesight still intact.

Some Traditions are Just Crap.

My love of all things stitchy began when I was 20 years old, and my sister went to Austria to be an au pair for a year. I pined - oh, how I pined without her. It was the autumn of 1994, and I was wandering in a craft store with my mother when I saw it. A pattern for a cross-stitched Christmas stocking. I was Paul on the Road to Damascus. Smitten, blinded, utterly compelled to obedience. I grabbed the leaflet, marched over to the DMC rack and, slavishly following the list given, pulled out 30 colours. I plunked them down on the counter, paid for them, then said to the shop assistant, "How d'you do this, anyway?"


I still don't know how I managed to complete this whole Christmas stocking in time for mid-November, when it was sewn, stuffed, and air-mailed to Austria in time for Christmas Eve. I marvel at the sheer bloodymindedness, the pig-headed stubbornness that enabled me to see the pattern, decide to make it, and throw myself at the process with a tenacity only seen in certain terrier breeds, or particularly implacable mules.


Typically, I decided that, No, it was not enough to make one of these for Gwen. I also had to make one for Clumsy, Mum, Dad, Mr Man, The Goddaughter, and all The Nieces. It was a case of "everybody I love is going to have one of these, come hell or high water, or imminent commitment to an asylum for the artistically exhausted." Luckily for me, my mother and sister were just as deeply devoted to the cause as I was, and helped me out a lot by stitching quite a few of the required stockings themselves.*


We were doing great. Stockings were had by almost all. I had a baby, then another. I chose the patterns for them, planning to soldier on to the end, which was now tantalizingly in sight. However, two years ago some terrible things happened.


1) I got finished everyone's stockings except two: my own daughters'. I seem to feel I've got all the time in the world to do theirs. This is bad.


2) My poor longsuffering mother has developed a repetitive strain injury called "seamstress' thumb" (sorry 'bout that, Mum) and my sister has developed something called "crushing boredom and lack of motivation", coupled with "two young children, a full-time job, and a persistently social church group".


3) I learned to knit.


Now that I know about knitting, it just about kills me to sit there staring at a colour-by-numbers chart, painstakingly threading needles and making 18 little Xs per inch, when I could be flying along at 22 sts and 30 rows to 4", needles clicking, chatting to my friends or watching movies. Do you know, cross stitching anything takes like a bazillion times longer than the same amount of knitting?


Anyhow, here is what I have done so far on Charlotte's stocking. In four years.


I just KNOW I can finish this by Christmas. Right? I can, right? Right. Thanks. That's just the encouragement I needed.

* I don't have pictures of these stockings, sadly: this was in the years before I even had a regular camera, never mind a digital one.