Various shtuff

Brace yourself. It's long and rambling today. And no pictures. Sorry!

Comments correspondence

1) Gillian said (in response to my experience with a rude dude on the train), "What a misreable person. Even I've never experienced that level of rudeness from a see-how-much-room-I-can-take-up type. It saddens me that we might have to get used to this general increase in rudeness. But I'm glad you got to see the lovely Kelly! Well, now that I've found you (or you've found me), expect frequent hauntings. :)"

(Explanation: reconnecting with my old friend Kelly last Wednesday also led to doing the same with Gillian, who was not only a fellow Girl Guide, but also went to school with me in grade two and all through high school and was responsible for reducing me to hysterical laughter on a regular basis.)

Gill, I saw a bumper sticker once that simply said:

MEAN PEOPLE SUCK.
I really liked it, and I think it's quite appropriate in this instance. Oh, and haunting would be cool. :)

2) Mel said, "You should have passive-aggressively pokd that guy with your needles! Unless you were using circs...then your only recourse would be to throttle him! Will we see you next week at Lettuceknit?"

Yes, I was using circs, although I didn't think of the throttling trick (even though I'm sure I could've found a way to use them pokingly). Interesting. Oh, well. Hopefully there will not be a 'next time', but if there is, perhaps I'll be more ballsy.

Unfortunately, it's not really practical for me to come to Lettuce every week. :( It is something of a production to prepare the household for an evening of my absence (leaving DH to take up much of the slack). It means committing to a big hike home (in BF Nowhere, Richmond Hill) by myself late at night. It means spending extra money (which we don't have much of to spare) on additional transportation costs. And, well, it also involves missing out on a few hours with my girlie, which kind of sucks for both her and me. However, I always have so much fun at the SnBs that I really have to start going more frequently than once every two or three months. Believe me, you'll see me soon. The idea of spending a fall/winter evening chatting with like-minded knitters in a cosy, warm room surrounded by yarn, patterns and notions is extremely irresistible. :)

3) Kelly said, "Ooh knitting around corners with short rows? Where did you come across that technique? Sounds nifty!"

It is nifty. It is, in fact, very freakin' cool. Especially when you take into account the fact that I will be knitting around corners whilst simultaneously doing cables. The technique comes from Elsebeth Lavold's Viking Patterns for Knitting book. I can't swear to it that the knitting around corners is achieved with short rows because I only skimmed through the instructions once and I may be remembering it very wrong. But I think that's how it's done - I seem to recall, for instance, a bit where Lavold explains that the usual holes you get with short-rowing are hidden by the cable crosses, thus making the whole thing look pretty seamless. I'm hoping to get started on the edging of my blanket project tonight, so I'll soon be able to explain the process more thoroughly. Stay tuned.

How my mother narrowly escaped a horrible death

Back in the summer, I finished off a very sweet little hooded jacket for a cousin of mine who is expecting his second child. The baby isn't due until this month, but since I knew November would be Crunch Time for Christmas knitting, I was smart (imagine that) and knitted the gift ahead of time. I also (or so I thought) gave the jacket to my mom so that when she had bought/made her gift for the baby, she could send them both together and thus save us each some postage costs.

Flash forward to a few days ago. I had recently reminded her that the baby would be due soon and she'd have to send off the gifts, so naturally she went looking for the jacket.

She. Could. Not. Find. It.

She looked everywhere. She apparently tore apart her closet (where she keeps presents and all her crochet supplies)...no luck. Finally on the weekend she called me and suggested that perhaps I had never actually given the jacket to her and it was still at my house?

My tone got pretty frosty. (I didn't really mean for it to, I was trying to be understanding, honest, but the frostiness just kind of...happened.) I told her it was not possible and that she had it and that she was going to Find. It.

I hung up. I checked my blog entries and discovered (to my horror) that although the blog contained the news that the jacket had been finished (complete with pictures of the finished item), I had never written about handing it off to my mom. I started to think that maybe I was going mad and that my vivid memory of having left it at her house was merely a hallucination. I searched my house. It was not anyplace that I store knitting projects or supplies, it was not where I store presents. Before tearing apart our (very scary) basement, I decided to wait until yesterday evening, when we were scheduled to have dinner at my parents' place. Maybe I could snoop around their place and find the jacket.

No such luck.

And then, this morning I got an email from my mom, with the subject of: "Bingo! sweater found". She wrote: "I had wrapped it carefully in turquoise tissue paper, and tucked in at the back of the shelf above my lower hanging rack so it wouldn't get crushed (or found!)." Colour me relieved! Life has returned to normal (or what passes for normal in my universe).

(Mel, if you're reading this, you probably now think my mother is this horrible woman whose goal in life is to make knitting disappear. :) But I swear, she's a lovely woman. Honest.)

Anti-social knitters?

Yesterday I got on the subway - very crowded, not an empty seat in sight. So instead I aimed for what seemed like a pretty good spot to stand. As luck would have it, it was right in front of another knitter. She was occupied in de-tangling her yarn (it was kind of mohair-y and looked a bit stuck to itself - I suspect that this quality was synthetically achieved, but you never know, it could've been the real thing), but I could see the needles peeking out of her bag. I too began to de-tangle my own yarn (the poor people around us were probably given the impression that knitters spend more time struggling with knotted yarn than doing any actual crafting) and tried to catch her eye in the hopes of exchanging, at the very least, a smile. Nope. At one point she bent down and picked up a skein that I hadn't noticed falling onto the floor. I thanked her very much and smiled, and she looked back at me, nodded, and...looked away. No smile.

I didn't quite understand. Don't all knitters share a kind of kinship? Was she having a bad day? Did I offend her? Did I...intimidate her?

This last thought is so laughable that I can't really keep a straight face while thinking it. Other people intimidate me, not the other way around. However, she was knitting a garter stitch scarf, and my knitting looks sufficiently complicated that maybe? I freaked her out? I just don't know - maybe I'm just giving myself airs by supposing that. But since I don't like to think of the possibility that maybe she's just plain old unfriendly...perhaps she was shy.

Anyway, I found it odd.

Cape Cod sweater for MIL

No pictures today. Although I'm making excellent progress, the front still hasn't reached a point where you'd really notice the difference visually from the last picture. But at the rate I'm going, it won't be long.

Persian Tiles shawl for Grandma

Got an email this morning from the vendor - the yarn has been shipped! I expect it sometime in the next two weeks. Ohboyohboyohboy, a package is coming, a package is coming!