You are currently browsing the monthly archive for November 2011.
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“Wisdom, Happiness, and Courage are not waiting somewhere out beyond sight at the end of a straight line; they’re part of a continuous cycle that begins right here. They’re not only the ending, but the beginning as well.”
Benjamin Hoff
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In a culture determined to frame the world as a linear race, how do you remind yourself of the cycle? of the center?
Rawr. Grrr. Yummm, muffins.
Presenting a heavily modified version of Presley Cash and the mama and baby duo of Daphne and Delilah. If you want to add a bit of grrrr to your day, check out the patterns at DangerCrafts.
Our days were thrown into unpredictability by a sudden trip out east to lay my grandfather to rest. It was a sad time, but without the sting of regret. He had lived a long, full life and his death brought an end to a period of suffering. Gramma asked that the grandkids and great-grandkids serve as pallbearers. It was one of the most profound things I have ever done; we carried him on his last journey.
It was also a week of dozens of beautiful faces – relatives we haven’t seen for too long. Cousins with babies, the silliness of toddlers, uncles with booming voices, and women bearing trays of dainties.
Busy, full, travelling here and there, voices and stories. A week that has left us with very full minds.
Some days when I’m sick, the DVD player is our substitute teacher. Other days I manage to set us on a better course*. The kids did their reading and their math this morning, and then we all settled into a variety of Good Things. Sandra did some knitting and drawing. Tias played outside and read Calvin and Hobbes.
This afternoon kicked it into high gear, with Sandra working on sewing the scalloped edge of a baby blanket, Tias painting his room**, while I was working on a sock made of leftover yarns.
* unlike most Canadians, I don’t have a choice about not infecting my coworkers
**with Rainer’s help. The strike drags on.
scrappy but not crappy
ate = reasonable
eight = insane
Who wrote this language? Sandra’s not impressed.
Spelling continues to be a challenge, but today triumphant exultation burst forth: “In your face, eight!”
Sandra correcting her dictation from “I Capture the Castle”
Right now I’m loving: Goodreads. You can find me there.
You can use it to make book lists and to get recommendations. I’ve known about it for a while and have been a member since 2009, but have pretty much ignored it until lately. Lately, as I’ve been frustrated with the rigid nature of the Amazon wishlist structure and all the 14 lists I was running for books I wanted to read, could get from the library, wanted to consider for the teen book club, thought Tias might like, etc.
You can list books in three main categories: ‘to read’ or ‘currently reading’ or ‘read’. That’s great, but it’s when you make your own ‘shelves’ that it becomes really cool. You choose what to call the shelves, and you can mark something as both one of the three main categories and multiple shelves of your own labeling.
Why is that cool? Well, I’ve got things marked ‘to read’ + ‘self-education’, or ‘homeschooling’, or ‘teen book club’ + ‘history’. I’ve also got Sandra using it and that’s how we’re going to manage her books list for high school. Books she reads for school go on a ‘homeschooling’ shelf as well as on ‘Gr 9′ as well as ‘science’. The labeling can be as detailed as you want. Since you can export your book list into Excel, it becomes a very flexible tool for making and searching records.
The automatically generated recommendations are the best I’ve seen online. It suggests books based on your shelves, so if you’re looking for more ‘middle grade readers’ or ‘sci fi’ or whatever, it’s got good ideas for you.
There is also a social component, with the ability to see what friends are reading and their reviews. I’m following several librarians who specialize in Young Adult services, and they give me a lot of ideas for the teen book club. There are also community lists and groups, so you can see that the book you just rated highly is on a list, follow that link, and get lost in a blizzard of similar awesomeness.
Seeing my books ‘to read’ and being able to rearrange the list in order of preference is really motivating me to get cracking with my reading. My book list may be longer thanks to Goodreads, but it’s not as querulous as it was a few weeks ago. There’s a real sense of movement. Right now, I’m reading, well, you’d know if you went and looked…
What are you you loving about books right now?
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“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
Albert Camus
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How do you keep summer in your heart?
Winter lobbed a beginning volley this weekend.
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Winter and I are not on good terms this year. Every thought of it feels like a sucker punch. The dark. The cold. The snow. The aching, frost-bite sensitive toes.
I’m trying to work on my mindfulness. I’m trying to accept what I have no control over. I’m trying to be the writer of a more positive mental narrative.
Sometimes button eyes or even safety eyes aren’t safe enough. For example, toys for babies should be as safe as you can make them. And sometimes you just don’t have anything but some embroidery floss on hand. Here’s my approach to putting eyes on knitted toys.
You’ll need 6 strand embroidery floss, a needle (mine is a tapestry needle but that isn’t essential), and something to mark the halfway point (I used a dpn).
I like to do my embroidery when I have the most access to the face area. So here I’m doing it before doing the three-needle bind off at the top of the head. That way I can come in from the top and have lots of room for my hands.
Step one: find and mark the halfway point on your face. Decide how many stitches to either side you want the eyes. You can use buttons or pennies to try different locations.
Step two: you’ll go from the bottom of the eye up, so secure the floss at the bottom of the area you want the eye. Here I’ve run the thread through the yarn (not under it) and tied a simple knot. Leave that end with at least 5cm (2″) for later.
Step three: bring the thread to the front of the work, then work satin stitch centered on where your thread came through. I wanted an oval shape to my eyes, so I’m planning to start with the stitch covering half of each stitch centered on where the yarn came through, and then increasing to at least a full stitch on either side, and then tapering again back to half a stitch.
Step four: satin stitch is always worked as horizontally as possible. So where you place the needle on the right should be as nearly horizontal as possible across from where you bring it up on the left. You can see here that I’m starting to widen my stitch at this point. Sometimes you’ll want to pierce the yarn, as I’ve done here. If you limit yourself to only using the natural holes on either side of the yarn, your eye is going to look pixelated.
Also note that satin stitch is worked almost entirely on the front of the work. You can keep your hands at the front of the face and don’t need to spend much time behind the fabric of the face. This is really convenient for working with toys knitted in the round.
Step five: here’s what it looks like after one pass of stitches. It’s a bit jagged and lacks the smoothly rounded edges that characterize most non-zombie eyes. So a second pass of satin stitch is needed, this time from the top-down (since that’s where the thread is waiting for us).
Step six: here you can see how I’m coming up in a location where the thread forms more of a corner than a curve.
Keep your stitches horizontal, and cover the whole eye a second time so that the surface is smooth.
Step seven: Using the end from your knot at the very beginning, tie another knot to secure both ends. Then clip the threads, leaving about a 1cm tail.
Result: a nice plump eye.
Not perfect, but perfection is terribly boring. Besides, perfect toys are a play-room tragedy. You know the drill: the perfect doll with fabulous eyelashes lords it over the other toys at night, only to discover that children are children and within a few days she’s got scuff marks and they’ve cut her golden curls into a fashionable flapper bob. The rest of the toys relish her downfall. It’s all a passive-aggressive mess and the narrator of the story is sure to point out a Valuable Moral.
There’s more Satin Stitch information here if my explanation is leaving you a bit in the dark.
A few things off the needles lately amidst the flurry of activities. (We haven’t seen any snow flurries yet, happily.) Thank goodness my favourite pastime goes so well with life, because otherwise I think I’d be a bit nutty. (Or a bit more nutty.)
Going sideways into autumn.
A hat knit sideways, round about the head. Marina. The Knit Picks Chroma (New England) is kitten soft and the colours are fun to watch as you knit.
getting bored of plain squares
Don’t the cute kids in Africa deserve a little somethin’ fancy?
Simpler than it looks, though. Just a few stripes and then 5 minutes of embroidering french knots and chain stitch.
a gift
Yarn: tosh vintage, Dahlia colour
After feeling the socks I knit for Dad this last Christmas, Tias went into tactile overload and turned his best puppy dog eyes on me.
Sport-weight yarn and his preference for short socks added up to a really speedy pair.
Pair 10 of 12 this year
