My full, full life

Well, it has been a busy few months! I have been a little overwhelmed by some of the hard and just busy things in life this year. My job as a youth leader is fantastic - I love my volunteers and my students, but it is 20 hrs a week, fit in around full time parenting most of the time, with some help from Dave. And I still have Owen home all the time, so the days are busy, busy. Then there was winter - a long, hard, cold, ice filled winter. My boys weren't allowed outside for recess for three weeks straight because the school yard was sheer ice. And then there was this Lent - sometimes I have one idea about what I'm giving up for Lent, and then God has his own plans for winter pruning and winnowing. God's plans are better, but much harder than the ones I have for myself.

In any case, our cold Easter came with snow still on the ground, but bunnies for the younger two kids anyways. I made Owen a hipster / barber shop quartet bunny, which was more fun for me, and he loves him. Emma's is sweeter and more traditional, but still bright and fun.

With the long cold Spring we have been doing LOTS of crafts. I refilled our kids' stamp pad with blue ink from the stationary store - not glamourous, but the clearest ink we've had to work with in a long time. The cigar boxes, which look cool on our open kitchen shelves, are courtesy of Dave's hobby.

And this is one single image that captures why my house is ALWAYS messy. See that bin of stuff I had just picked up off the floor 5 min. ago, all ready to be put away in its proper places? Ha. Owen 537-Mom 0

I have really gotten into knitting lately. This is a fortunately / unfortunately kind of thing. Fortunately, knitting is portable and can be taken to sit on the floor while the toddler plays, of taken to the 30 Hour Famine overnight trip. Unfortunately, I don't have a knitting stash so my fabric all sits, calling out to me, while I ignore it and skrimp and save to buy yarn instead of quilt batting.

These leg warmers were mostly just for the texture - this in Noro yarn from Japan and I loved the subtle colour variations. They are great for cool spring mornings, when you know it will be shorts weather in an hour, but its still too cold to walk to the park right NOW.

These were fun, too (thank you 30 Hr famine and the last season of Dr Who). I have a sweatshirt with 3/4 length sleeves that is the perfect weight for early spring and late fall. So, funky arm warmers. These are one of the few things I actually get comments on in Montreal (most things I make, no matter how funky, are still within the range of normal here, or they could be bought at some cool store on the Plateau).

My next project is a chunky pullover sweater for me. I know, I've only been knitting for 2 years, but I really started knitting because I can never find sweaters I like. So, onto my true knitting scheme -  building myself a great stack of sweaters and cardigans and vests.

I am terrible at keeping track of rows and what abbreviations mean, even on the 40th time doing the same increase, so I always make a ton of notes. You would think I would remember eventually, but I just can't keep those kinds of things in my head - they fall out as soon as a new thought comes along.

You might have seen this quilt before, maybe? Like, for the last three years! My last piece of batting is sandwiched between the finished windmill quilt top and some lovely Anna Maria Horner (plus a favorite Erin McMorris print and something else from long, long ago that was languishing in my stash).

This quilt is kind of like my last few years - I had great ambitions and plans and dreams for it, but right now it is wonky (in some places on purpose, in others by accident), bumpy, most of the corners are cut off and the quilting is a bit of a disaster. But it is done, it is colourful and fun and the backing fabric is beautiful. It is not at all what I planned on it being, but it is good in its own way.

That would have been a lovely way to end, wouldn't it. But wait, there's more! One of my favorite spring ambitions (that rarely ever lasts through the whole summer)  - to have a beautiful-ish back yard. This year we bought lots of colourful flowers and planted them up in the pots we tried growing veggies in last year. Hopefully the toddler will be kind to them and I will remember to water them, and they will bring lots of joy and cheer to our back yard.

Aaron loves doing anything with his hands, and planting flowers is no exception - he took over almost all the baskets and wouldn't let me plant a thing!

I had one of those "real" Montrealer moments yesterday - I picked this great little shelf up off the side of the road. It is perfect to give Owen his own corner for his toys. The poor boy needs his own spot somewhere in the house, after all!

Finally, I am hopeful that I will get at least a quilt top done for Dave before his 40th birthday in June. I'm going to do a simple 4X8 rectangle grid (because NDG = bricks) in colours I know he likes. Fortunately, the colours he likes rolled back into style just in the nick of time. Whew.

So that is a little life and creativity summary. I hope I get more time to blog this summer, but I'm not counting on it. I almost have a working smartphone ( a story for another day when I don't have kids to put to bed), so I might be on Instagram soon.

Okay, off you go to read about all the cool kids who got to go to Quilt Market!

Well, it has clearly been a busy month here, as I haven't blogged at all! I feel like I am just coming up for air around here, as it has taken me a while to figure out how to insert 20 hours of work into my full time parenting role. I have ended up taking a night away from home to work for four or five hours from a coffee shop (my workplace doesn't have an office) which makes it so that I'm not always trying to either work at midnight or work around the corners of family life. There are lots of things you can do in those little pockets of time, and I manage about 3 or 4 hours of stuff during those, but some things take sustained concentration, and I can't do those in tiny intervals.

In any case, around the other corners I have been trying to knit again. I thought a simple cowl would be a good, easy project. This cowl is in seed stitch, but it has an uneven number of stitches per row, so you really don't have to concentrate at all - just check what your last stitch was and do the opposite. I have found that if I leave the yarn at the front, I tend to make extra stitches when I come back to work on it again, but as long as I leave the yarn at the back when I walk away, it is perfectly fine.

This yarn is a chunky yarn - Cascade 128 - and its supposed to make a 15" cowl in about a skien and a little bit of yarn. I guess my knitting is tighter than I thought, because I'm almost finished my first skein and I only have 5 or 6" dones. I don't know if its my fault or the yarn's fault, but I'm definitely NOT buying a third skein of yarn - when I'm done two, I'm going to be done.

Sigh. One day I'll figure out knitting. It just doesn't seem to be as intuitive to me as sewing - maybe I just forget what it used to be like when I started sewing.

In other news, I've been working away on my windmill quilt, too. I have all the rows sewn together. I finally decided to just sew them together and add a border.

The border is going to be mostly rail fence blocks, but I don't quite have enough fabric leftover, so I'm going to add a few squares of other prints. I think its fun to have a border where I mix up the fabrics and explore the colour relationships between them, after having blocks that are all single colour blocks.

I love the crazy colour explosion of this border. I think this is going to be a great winter quilt, when everything is white outside it will provide lots of happy colour inside.

2012 Making in Review

When I was thinking about what I had accomplished this year, I felt like I hadn't made anything at all. Maybe a softie or two, and a doll quilt and maybe something or another for the baby. But then when I went to make a mosaic I realized why I haven't finished anything big. Its because I did a lot of small project sewing - mostly for small people. If I look around my house, I see lots of handmade, but often I can't even remember when it was made. I guess this year I had lots of requests from kids, and lots of practical things that I wanted to sew instead of buy, and not so many friends having babies.

When I look at my mosaic, I'm pretty happy with my year. Considering I was working for half the year and I had a new baby in the house (and 3 other kids for the summer), and we went through the crisis of Latin (twice) which has ultimately led to the untimely demise of the PhD project my husband was attempting, I think I did okay to fit in any sewing time at all.

Here's to a 2013 with less excitement and more sewing.

Knitting Finishes!

My goal to knit a hat for each child is almost finished! I noticed that October was such a frantic month that I did not finish my post about Emma's hat, even though she has been wearing it since (Canadian) Thanksgiving over  a month ago. In fact, it seems to already be lost, though a thorough hunt through the van and under the couch will need to be done to confirm that. In any case, I've really enjoyed knitting all of these hats, and have tackled a different new challenge with each one so far.

 This was actually the second hat I made, and I showed you the start of it back here. My sizing was WAY off, and this hat, which was originally for Owen, fit Aaron. That was okay, because Aaron wanted one too. The yarn is Sweet Georgia Superwash. It is dyed in Canada, which is great, and it is really soft and dreamy to work with. The pattern is called the Bimple, by Wooly Wormhead, and more details about it are on my shiny new-ish ravelry page.

 It is super cute, and I had fun learning to make a stitch in between two stitches to make the increase in this hat. Also the little point is adorable, and it is long enough to be warm in the cold winters we have here. Aaron loves it, but he can never tell which way is up, so I tried to add penguin buttons so he would know the front from the back.

 My button - adding skills need work - they lasted one day. In any case, Owen needed a matching hat. His is not quite finished - it still needs blanket stitching around the edges and ties (in orange, of course). It fits him right now, so I fear it will be cute but short lived. I have a fleece hand me down hat for the deepest darkest days of winter that will do when he grows out of this one.

 As you can see , Owen was happy with his hat, and he loved that it matched his big brother's hat.

 Emma's kitty hat also turned out pretty well. It has a knit-purl-knit-purl and then reverse pattern, which made for tedious knitting and there are some spots near the top where I lost track of which row I was on where there are big strips of ribbing in the middle of the hat. But she likes it, and it still looks cute, so I'm not too worried. And as I said, it may be lost already, so we will be knitting her something else in the near future (I'm thinking a bubblegum pink Bimple to match her brothers?)

 The poitns on this hat were really cute, and I learned how to do alternate cable cast-on and kitchener stitch with this hat, so it was a fun learning experiment - see that bit in the middle of the back that doesn't match the pattern? that's what I was talking about. This yarn was Tanis Fiber Arts Green Label, and it was also really great to work with, and I loved this colour. It is a rather decadent purple for a two year old, but none the less, it was a cute hat.

 I love my daughter's sense of style these days. It just makes me grin whenever I see her.

Today when we were getting ready for church she declared, "I will wear a new dress to church today and I will look BEAUTIFUL."  We didn't have a new dress for her to wear, so she settled for a long sleeve shirt, her favorite summer dress plus a skirt plus striped tights. A girl after my own heart.

A Crafternoon and A Kitty Shirt

I had a lovely crafternoon with my friend Valerie , who is a knitter, yesterday. She gave me a knitting lesson and I gave her some advice on a lovely fall quilt she is putting together.  She taught me how to make a skien of wool into a ball.

This is the lovely, chunky wool I'm using for hats for Aaron and Owen:

Valerie also taught me how to make an i-cord and knit on the front and back of a stitch, so I can knit this little hat .

I'm almost done Emma's little kitty hat. I have about 2 inches left to knit, then I just need to stitch the top together. Emma loves it and she's super excited to get it. I have had some trouble with this hat - it is supposed to have a regular seed-ish type pattern, but I've had trouble keeping track of the rows all the time, so its not quite perfect. I may have also added or lost some stitches here and there. Such is learning to knit with small kids around.

I also discovered that Emma is at that age where I can no longer keep her on my lap while I'm reading blogs without consequences. I was reading wee wonderfuls and Emma saw the kitty shirt Hilary made for her daughter.

Emma immediately wanted a kitty shirt, too. I had just picked up some fabric pastels, so I could actually make her a kitty shirt.

 Its not pink and sparkly, but it is pink - with brown and red spots, as requested by my customer.

Its not perfect, but Emma loves it. You can tell, because it was in the laundry about 2 hours after I finished it. Fun times, these days at home.

Pre-Knitting Issues

I have recently started knitting, and I like it. I like picking wool. I like the meditative process of knitting. I have always loved wearing wooly sweaters, hats and scarves so I am glad to make my own. But there is one part I'm struggling with. How do I get from this:

 

Hat yarn for Owen, Aaron and Andrew

To this:

Leftovers from fingerless gloves I knit my Sister in Law for Christmas

Without this in the middle:

Emma's hat yarn

I have been trying, unsuccessfully I might add, to untangle this 200yd long knot for a full day now, and everytime I almost get it better, it gets another big snag in it. Sigh.