This summer we are fortunate to be spending a couple of months in the Northern Ontario, on Manitoulin Island, the pretty little land where from Justin was birthed. We took the train again, and wow is Canada ever beautiful during the summer!
On the train we met a formidable gentleman from the US who suffered a horendous mountain bike crash on his bike in Whistler.
He took some pictures of me spinning yarn on the train (there is nothing more romantic than spinning yarn on a train across Canada, people!)
Overall, the trip was pretty uneventful (a good thing for all): the engines worked, the staff was great, the beds were comfy. In fact, I had even more fun than I have had in the past because of the simultaneous occurrence of week three of The Artist’s Way - Reading Deprivation. Who would have thought a reading deprivation could be so interesting and informative? I spent a lot of time chatting, knitting, spinning, playing with tarot cards, playing chess and cuddling with JT. As a result, I found my dreams to be more vivid, my creativity through the roof and my will to be stronger…. maybe The Artist’s Way is onto something?
We will post some photos soon of Manitoulin Island! Bye for now.
Well. Here it is, the back of the sweater…
Remember how I said that I was going to take the sides of the sweater in, and do real tapering for the waist on the front of the sweater? Well, I had my brother come by for a fitting (I know, a luxury we don’t all have for christmas presents) and realized that the sweater was 36 STITCHES too big at the waist. 18! That would be a lot of bulk to have dangling off of the inside of your sweater. That would be a visible representation of my laziness that would be forever glaring me in the face - not laziness in making my own yarn, or knitting my own fabric, but laziness of pretending that after all that work, 36 stitches of fabric dongling around inside of a sweater is no big deal. Then deciding that no one would notice, even myself. Its not even a complicated pattern for crying in the mud.
So, last night, I frogged it. Justin’s opinion “You can’t hide that much fabric, you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself!” pushed me over the edge. So, I frogged not just the back, but the little bit of front too, because I had already gone past the point of tapering. Frogging the whole thing took about 10 minutes. That is roughly 1/10th of the time it took to knit it. Remarkable. Read the complete Post.
Wow. I love knitting my own handspun yarn. If you don’t have a wheel, and you are a knitter, I highly recommend learning so that you can knit with something you made! First off, it is so fulfilling to see yarn hanging and drying that is becoming plump and soft. Then, when you touch it, and roll it between your fingers, it is neat to say “I made this”, then when you knit the whole back of a sweater and hold it up poking your finger at the centre of it to check and see that it really is a solid piece of fabric, it is a little like giving birth (minus the pain). You say “I can’t believe you came from me!”
So the sweater. Retrofit is really simple, being stockinette stitch. It has given me a chance to listen to some great audiobooks, and speed up my knitting and thus has moved along quite quickly.
A couple of other recommendations: Read the complete Post.