46 hours

is how much time I have at home in between book gigs.

I offer this by way of explanation, for you’re getting a late blog today, but I’m sure you understand that I’d like to spend as much of that 46 hours with Joe, the ladies and Mr. Washie as possible.

From the look of the house, Mr. Washie has missed me as much as I missed him. Poor guy. Luckily for him I own so few “book worthy” outfits that this pitstop has to involve him or I’m going to do book appearances in Chicago and South Bend with this tee-shirt on…

Quizkids

(If you’re not from here, don’t mind us Canadians. It’s an inside joke.) I listen to the radio a lot and It has occurred to me wearing only this tee shirt for weeks until I hear Shelagh again might be appropriate. Sort of a “wear-in” to get my CBC back. As much as I love the BBC World Service…that and the bizarre re-run documentaries are just not working for me anymore.

When last I saw you, my knitwear was leaving Atlantic City and taking a plane to the beautiful Adirondacks…

Adsock

It’s lovely there. I’d been to Lake Placid once before on a climbing trip with Ken and my only memory of the place consisted of a moment when, while I was high on a ledge, clinging to a rock with my fingertips and my will power and I suddenly thought to ask Ken the name of the route we were on. Ken paused (surely pondering the value of honesty) then replied… “Pete’s Farewell”.

I’ll never forget that moment, the trees and lake swirling below me, the rock feeling smaller suddenly under my gripping fingernails…possessed of an urge to check all the ropes attached to my harness and all I could think was

“Holy *&^%$#. What happened to Pete?”

I admit that facing this crowd at Adirondack Yarns was a better moment.

Adyarn

If you ever find yourself anywhere near this shop I’d make time for it. The owner is charming, half the place is a coffeeshop, they have Fleece Artist, and for the first time in a long time (I’ve been working on my resistance) I had a yarn accident. (It involved Dale of Norway. I’ll tell you later when the shock wears off.

I was travelling with three other knitters and they were good company, completely enabling and between the four of us, the trunk was, well….

Knittrunk

full of yarn. It’s so good to be understood. Whenever I travel with non-knitters I always feel like I have to try and explain how one woman could need so much yarn at one time. (I think they sort of get why I would want so much of it….It’s why I need all of it with me all the time that’s hard to understand. Knitters totally get that you need one project for when you are talking and one for when you are watching tv and another one to knit on the plane and then a couple more for if you get bored with those first ones.)

Tuppersign

This is for my Uncle Tupper. (I realize that this will hold little interest for the non-tuppers among you, but I thought he would like it. Humour me.) I took it in the town of “Tupper Lake”. Who knew?

Onwards…laden with yarn and good intentions we arrived at the Brewer Bookstore at St. Lawrence University where much to my delight I spotted this book in the wild.

Knitlit

It’s Knitlit the Third and I thought that the first time I would see it would be at Willow books on the 18th of October for the big party. (By the way? It totally cracks me up that the website advises us that it’s “B.Y.O.Y.”)

Brewer

The friendly knitters….not at all a scary crowd. As a public service announcement I’d like to let you all know that Brewer Bookstore has a knitting book section to be impressed with. Usually big bookstores are sort of a downer in the knitting book section (I can’t be the only knitter infuriated by discovering that in a huge chain bookstore, one with 34 books on worm composting or 52 books on how to organize lumber, that *I* have a better knitting section in my bedroom.) but this one is really good. (Note to bookstores: Quilting is not Knitting. Neither is Crochet or Beading or Plastic Canvas or anything that has “Mile-a-minute” in the title. While these are fine and decent crafts, you should not label a section “knitting” and get us all excited when we see how many books are in there. It angers the knitters when they run over and find this book sitting above the “knitting books” sign. This is also the precise reason that you keep finding this section of your store completely rearranged, but I digress.)

Back home (after a flight in which the lady in the seat behind me prayed loudly during take off and landing “Help me Jesus” and I wished that the heavens would open and shoot her a Xanax.) I discovered my lovely Joe, a cat who is pretending not to know me, a complete hairtie emergency and the cups (naturally) the wrong way up. (I am beginning to find this comforting.)

Most strikingly, upon my return home I discovered a little ray of sunshine in the kitchen. Something that erased all previous memories of stickiness and disaster…something so exquisite that my love for my husband was renewed and multiplied. Joe had bought a mop. A real mop. This impressed me so much that I almost wept in the kitchen. To discover that a spouse who until recently gave no indication that he was aware that floors needed washing has now not only acknowledged that this is a valid task but has also bought tools to enhance his floor washing experience? It’s a fine and touching moment between lovers and one I will treasure forever.

I leave for Chicago in 19 hours where I will wear ironed clothing, embrace the Great Lakes Bookseller Association with the fullness of my being, drink beer with our loverly Rams, meet a Chicago blogger so famous I can’t decide what sweater to wear, read and sign at Arcadia Knitting at 4:00 on the 1st, South Bend knitters on the 2nd at Sit ‘n knit in IN, at a rare morning appearance…10:00am. (I shall be drinking plenty of coffee..glorious brown elixir of life.) The South Bend appearance is a last minute add on….details, as always, are on the tour page.

For now, I have time for my girls, my man….and considering that my stay at home is so brief…

Smallsweater-1

A very small sweater.

Burt, it’s been a slice

Atlantic City and Stitches East were fab beyond belief. I spent the weekend signing books, meeting knitters…greeting bloggers and falling at the feet of designers who inspire me.

(I have to tell you that when they pointed out Beth Brown-Reinsel to me I felt a pang of guilt. I hope she doesn’t know about Joe’s Gansey. I didn’t introduce myself, partly because I was awed by her existence and partly as I was worried that if she *did* know about Joe’s Gansey, things might go badly for me in public. Can you imagine? Being dressed down by a gansey expert in front of hundreds of knitters? Revealing you for the slacker you are? Horrors.)

I had the privilege of sharing a room with my friend Juno, and she made every minute more fun. Together we had a shocking shawl-to-human-ration in the hotel room.

Shawls

That’s eight. Eight shawls to equip two women for two days. (The shocking part is how long it took us to realize how odd that was. Considering how many hand knit shawls are in the average hotel room you have to figure that we were at least a statistical anomaly.)

Walking through the hotel was fun though, Knitters in the halls, knitters in the elevators, knitters only in the restaurants. (Not so many in the casinos. I suspect that many of them felt as Juno and I did, which was that a casino seemed a silly place to take one’s yarn money…being as there is no yarn there…and that we had already gambled a fair bit by purchasing a new sock yarn.)

In the end, Juno and I crowned the current sock Miss America

Burt

(Where else would their be a cast bronze statue of Burt Parkes?)

Praised the charming Miss Knotology on her Koigu triumph

Koiguqueen

and fled into the night.

Two points of business.

1. Tonight I’m at Adirondack yarns in Lake Placid at 7:00. Should be a lovely way to spend a rainy evening. Cozy with my knitting at a really nice yarn shop. (The place is Filthy with Fleece Artist. Filthy.) Come out and play if you are close.

2. The surprise is ready. Call 877- SOS-KNIT (toll free in Canada and the US) and know me for the true and full dork that I am.

5:45am

That’s what time it is as I’m ricocheting out of Boston on my way to Atlantic City to go to Stitches. Since I am not a morning person (if we understand that to mean that if you speak to me before 9am and say anything other than “more coffee honey?” I am going to cry) I will be brief.

-Boston is very beautiful. Very.

-Boston is old. (Very)

-Paul Revere may have been a real guy.

-Boston has a knack for the gentle art of the reflecting pool.

-Some of the nicest knitters live in Massachusetts.

-Bethe is charming company and a fine driver.

-The Boston accent is absolutely impossible to mimic without sounding like Thurston Howell the Third. Don’t try.

-Christina at the Sheep Shack knows how to throw a heck of a knitting party.

-She had 10 balls of trekking sock yarn in stock.

Trekking

-Now she has none.

Madly off…

in all directions. I’m on a wild tear…(really Steph? That sounds so unlike you) for the last couple of days to get out the door for the next leg of the tour, going into the studio to make a surprise…and trying to co-ordinate the children and Joe to withstand a critical mother shortage for a week. (While they are getting much better at it, the thought of a musician/record producer getting up at 7:30 in the morning several days in a row to have the hair-tie/where’s my green pants/she’s taking too long in the bathroom morning scene is pretty much heart-stopping.) I’m packing…though I need a new sock in progress since these…

Bigsocks

these are done. Enormo-socks knit on 2mm needles, in this yarn, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I like the random stripyness of them, and new owner will enjoy the colour (or lack thereof).

I finished them while Joe and I went into the studio to work on the recorded surprise. It was an interesting look at what Joe does all day.

Theman

The man himself, at the helm of his own personal recording empire. The sock noted that there are many, many buttons in the studio.

Buttons

So many buttons in fact, that it boggles the mind that a man who can work all of this still thinks that knitting is tricky…but I digress.

Secretdork

I sat behind the microphone and did my thing (what my “thing” is will be revealed in the fullness of time.) and I felt like a supreme dork. Joe feels that I “breathe” too loudly (how do you not do that?) and commented once or twice that he would really appreciate it if I didn’t swear quite so violently when I made a mistake because it’s really hard to edit out all the cursing and the sighs. (I suppose there’s also the little problem of the frequency of my mistakes, but my self-esteem suffered enough with the problem of my “breathing” so lets not dwell on it.)

I need to find my passport, deal with the end of the surprise, I need to do enough laundry to get me through Holden MA tomorrow, Stitches East on the weekend, New York State on Monday and Tuesday, (details on the tour page) as well as enough laundry that the children aren’t reduced to wearing paper bags to school ten minutes after I leave. I need to buy enough food that nobody here runs out of milk or eggs, tidy up enough that nobody becomes lost in the living room and somehow depart here tomorrow morning with a big smile on my face. This will actually be easier than it sounds, considering that once I get on the plane all of that stuff isn’t my problem anymore and I just get to play with knitters. Until the plane, it’s making me a very cranky mother, indeed. Amanda went to a craft show and came home with this…

Shewasanicegirl

It reads “she was quite a sweet girl, until she started all that knitting.” Makes me wonder if the kids have noticed the crankiness.

With that, I give you a sky for Sandy

Skyforsandy

and a wave.

I’ll write from….wherever there is wireless.

Ahoy Me Hearties!

Look sharply me beauties, It be international “Talk like a pirate day” (With many ‘tanks to Patti, first mate for t’day who made sure I heard about it. ) I be takin’ it fer all that it be worth, for de purposes of me own amusement.

I knitted on the never endin’ bilge-rat bobble bind-off on me desperate Lotus Blossom shawl until I thoughts me mind would wander off, and despite having just about gnawed off me own right arm due out of bordom, I thinks it looks pretty good. (According to the stolen clock in me galley, dis bind-off takes longer than pillaging a Spanish Galleon and stuffin’ the treasure in me stash. Two hours and twenty-five dastardly minutes. Arrr.)

Window-Lb

I call this one “Avast ye scurvy Lassie, Hold this piece of knitting in the window before you go to school, and hold a civil tongue in yer head about the oddness of the Captain.” (This is the only picture with accurate colour. The captains camera is as old as her ship)

Steeringwheel

and this one “There’s not a body here to take a picture of yer accomplishments… so we’ll throw it on the spinning wheel Steering Wheel, while the neighbours calls ye “odder than fish”

Fullsize

This last one we calls “Emma showed up for coffee and took the picture, and even said Arrrrrr while she dids it.”

Tomorrow, why second sock syndrome ain’t a problem for pirates.

Arrrr.

A little Q&A

I’ve got nothing today (Including a finished shawl, so let’s just gloss right over that.) so I’m going to completely cop out of being brilliant or interesting and pillage yesterdays comments for material.

Trickytricot asks:

You do know that the last 9.5 percent are the longest rows, right?

Whatever happened to the highland triangle?

Tricky my pet, my buddy, my pal…I cannot resist. This reminds me of a dinner party where I deliberately choked myself with a large soft dinner bun so that I couldn’t speak to someone who was explaining that they had to carry a 40lb bag of peatmoss…but it wasn’t that bad, because you know…peatmoss is light. The last 9.5% is the last 9.5% whether the rows are longer or not. It’s not like the last 9.5% is a longer 9.5% because the rows are longer. (Although last night I could have sworn that he was making a solid point. The last 9.5% may not be mathematically longer, but man….it feels that way. )

As for the Highland Triangle, it’s still loved and temporarily on hiatus as I need to finish spinning the yarn for it.

Htstop

(Pardon my bad pictures today…it’s raining and dark)

I’ve got three of the five colours spun and plied, but the other two are resisting me. (That’s mostly because I’m trying to spin them with only the power of my mind and not actually sitting at the wheel. slow going, that.) Besides….a prettier yarn waggled it’s label at me and I lost focus. (I just noticed in the picture that apparently I wandered off mid-row a couple of weeks ago. That’s disappointing.) Cast your eyes upwards, read the name of the blog. Know that I still deserve the title.

Stephanie asks:

I hate to burst your bubble because I do so love Lotus Blossom (thanks for the tip on that by the way), but I must mention those most time-consuming bobbles. Did you consider them?



No. (This is directly related to there clearly being No Shawl Today.) The bobble-bindoff is clever, lovely and good looking. It is also a sucking void in the time space continuum. I am timing it.

Jodi asks:

What is Screech?

Screech is a coping tool used throughout Newfoundland. Used in moderation this coping technique makes boring people more interesting, provides backbone and strength, eases emotional pain and aids in recovering from trauma.

Screech

Used in excess, it does the exact opposite.

Micky asks:

What did you do with the corset?



Here’s how it works around here. I pick up projects willy-nilly with no respect at all for continuity, reader interest or consideration for how they are working out. I dump socks for hats, corsets for shawls and ganseys for…well, it turns out that I dump ganseys for just about any reason that comes by. I drop perfectly good projects that I’m having fun with so that I can torture myself with bobble-bindoffs or sock heels that end up crooked. (I don’t think I told you about that.) Above all, and this is really the guiding principle, I never cloud the issue with facts and logic.

Glirastes asks:

Your newest book “Knitting Rules” has the publication date of March 2006 on their computer. Is that correct?



Yes, although admitting it, no…even just typing that causes the world to swirl around the edges creating a vortex of blackness and horror that threatens to strip me from my sanity. (Not that I wasn’t halfway there from the pressure of all the laundry and the fact that I’ve misplaced my keys again.) While it is true that the latest is going to be out in the spring, I’m convinced that putting it up on Amazon was a ploy by the publisher to make sure that I understand they are serious about me turning it in, since the book currently looks like this….

Deathrays

Note the leftover coffee of hours gone by, the largish glass of screech on the table and the obvious and menacing black cloud of Impending Deadline Doom lurking above it with it’s distracting neon lightning, big teeth and bad breath? The way it lies on the papers with it’s filthy, idea sucking, humourless gaping demon-maw – the barbed self-esteem deathrays it shoots at me, even as I type and comply? See how it follows me through my day with it’s psychic mind-control powers invading my waking moment and every sleeping dream screaming “You’ll never make it…Never…NEVER! Give up now! Change your name! Don’t wear socks! Die-writer-Die!”

No? Er…I don’t see that either. Nothing to see here. Move along.

90.5%

That’s it. I’m getting ahold of myself.

This is the Lotus Blossom Shawl that I’m completely in love with.

Lotusblossom90.5

I have six rows left to go. According to the handy dandy shawl calculator found here (look in her sidebar) I have completed 90.5% of this shawl. (Juno was talking about how much she loves this. I concur. The thing is more fun than a 60% off sale on merino. Try it. You’ll spend hours calculating how far you have come, how far you have to go…and if you are like me, timing your speed per inch and working out how much time that means you have left to go on it. Obsessive? I think not. Try it before you judge me.) That means, if my math is correct, (and let’s hope that it is considering what it says about me if I can’t subtract 90.5 from 100 correctly) that I only have 9.5% to go.

9.5%. That’s it. Just under 1/10th. Is that right? I was helping Meg with “rational numbers” last night and the whole thing was making me irrational. When did they make grade nine math so hard? It’s humiliating to be standing there with a little kid and not be able to answer their math questions. She’s asking me all this stuff about “integers” and how positives and negatives work when you are multiplying and dividing them and it was all I could do to find this web page (thank you Lois Terms, whoever you are) and pour myself a little tiny glass of screech. (No ice please. Mummy doesn’t need this diluted.) Screech does not, for the record, make me a better mathematician, but it does take the sting out of telling her that I know that “two wrongs don’t make a right” so logically, two negatives shouldn’t make a positive. (Note: They do. They totally do. Every time. There’s no ethics involved at all.) This whole thing is shaping up like the year that I had to sneak into Amanda’s grade 5 classroom at 4:00 when the kids were gone, quietly close the door behind me and ask the teacher if she could take a minute to teach me long division so I would stop getting my arse kicked by a ten year olds homework. Good times, but I digress…

Even a math whiz like me can knows that shoving a shawl that is 90.5% finished into the back of the knitting basket is…well. Let’s just say that it’s not what a knitter who wants to wear a new shawl to Chicago would do. So I’m going to finish it. I’m not going to do what I did this morning and spend any more of my knitting time for this project calculating how much more of my knitting project remains.

Tonight I will watch the premiere of Survivor (again…do not judge me.) and I will finish this. 9.5%….here I come.

(Note: Yes. This was a diversion tactic to distract you from asking me about the corset. What corset? I don’t see a corset around here.)

PS. Sarah-the-wonder-publicist has given me a time and place for the Chicago stop. I’ll be at Arcadia Knitting, Saturday October 1st at 4pm. Save me a seat (and maybe a little sock yarn.)

Strike one and a half

Gravity: The force that attracts a body to the centre of the earth or other celestial body. (The Oxford Encyclopedic Dictionary)

It is a cruel truth that the female form is an eventual victim of gravity. I have accepted this, and I don’t really mind that my…er…assets…are being drawn ever southward. I still like them and I feel pretty good about the years of devoted service that they gave me and my babies during the milky years. I admit that every so often I look at myself and think fondly of their previous higher location on my body, but I’m ok with it, and besides…I don’t think that they are That Low. I feel (despite gravity and the aforementioned years of service) that their location on my body is still totally within normal limits. Nobody points and stares, I don’t catch people drifting their eyes down my front with an incredulous stare….I’ve never been taken aside an spoken to by a caring friend about the stunning and catastrophic lowness of my breasts.

This is why I was stunned to discover that they are in entirely the wrong place for the Silk Corset. I finished the lace, did the armholes (that’s a provisional cast on sitting there. I had a failure to commit to an armhole/sleeve idea so I weenied out.) and read the next part of the pattern. The pattern instructed me to knit ribbing for a while, and then to do the “Bust Decrease” that’s the part that makes the corset swoop in attractively under your normally located breasts. I knit for the required 2.75 cm and began the chart.

It occurred to me that this did seem sort of high to begin to be “under” the breasts, but Claudia and I have both noted that this top doesn’t have tons of coverage, but still….

I thought about my breasts then, with the corset held up to them and tried to figure out how they could be so far off of where they were supposed to be. Then I got my bra. (Always thinking…that’s me.) I put on my bra, held the corset up to my chest where a corset should go and discovered that even with the help of underwire, elastic and positive thinking, the under the breast shaping of the top, the place where it got smaller was falling right where I got bigger. I can’t put the corset lower because I can’t move the location of my arms…and therefore, the armholes. There was only one possible reason that this corset could not be working.

My breasts are in the wrong spot and I have never noticed.

I gave this a good think. The only way this will work is if my breasts are way higher. Did the corset squeeze your breasts higher? Much higher? Like….UNDER YOUR CHIN?

I looked in the mirror. They seem normal. I turned sideways. Yup. That’s pretty much where I expect them to be. (Pretty much, because I have accepted the gravity issue from above.) I think about the times I’ve gone out in public bra-less. Since I think the restraining force of the brassiere is for special occasions, this isn’t as seldom as you would all hope. (If this upsets you, phone my Mum. She would love to talk over my bra-lessness and lack of lipstick.) I didn’t trip over my breasts on these occasions, or have to lift them up to zip up my pants. When I bend over to pull weeds I don’t hold them back with one hand to see the dandelions and except for one occasion (when I asked for it) I don’t receive mountains of bra’s as gifts in what could be considered an avalanche of suggestion.

Then it hits me. The letters after my name are IBCLC. I have seen more breasts than Hugh Hefner. The chances that I passed this exam but failed to notice that my breasts are freakishly placed on my own body are about the same as the chances that Pierce Brosnan is dropping by this afternoon to do my laundry nude.

(Although Dude? If you’re reading this, we’re almost out of detergent. We use unscented and the store is a block west.)

Sure enough, I rechecked the pattern. 2.75 INCHES, not centimetres. Another tragic error caused by the senseless lack of continutity between the designers country and my own.

The location of my breasts is normal. Thought you’d want to know.

I ripped back the half corset I had knit, added the appropriate amount of ribbing and voila.

Corset12

What I did on my summer Vacation, part 2

(again…feel free to skip this is you don’t care about the minute details of this week of my life. )

The day we left Tupper and Susans we began biking again from our Nations Capitol, Ottawa.

Kenparliament

There’s Ken and the sock with the East Block behind them. The East block is historic on the hill in that its appearance really hasn’t changed much since confederation. The offices of Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald are inside and citizens are welcome to wander around. Sir John A. is the father of Confederation and famous for two other things:

Macdonald was well known for his wit and also for his alcoholism. He is known to have been drunk for many of his debates in parliament. One famous story is that during an election debate Macdonald was so drunk he began vomiting violently on stage while his opponent was speaking. Picking himself up Macdonald told the crowd, “see how my opponent’s ideas disgust me.”

-Nationmaster

(The West block has offices of politicians and such. You can’t go in there – even if you really want to talk to Stephen Harper. ) Doen’t both Ken and the sock look moved? You betcha. Doesn’t Sam look like she thinks Ken might have a few loose stitches? Oh yes.

Usparliament

A picture of the five of us (that’s me in the apparently day-glo orange tank. I had no idea it was so bright.) standing atop Parliament Hill with our trusty steeds. You can get a pretty good idea of how much gear we carry from this shot. Each person has two panniers (those saddlebags hanging over the rear wheels.) One is loaded with their personal stuff and the other holds their contribution to the family load. Sam carries the camping pots, Meg everything to do with light (flashlights, lanterns, candles) etc. Atop each persons panniers are perched their sleeping bag and thermarest. (A thermarest is an extraordinary contribution to civilization. It’s a very small self inflating air mattress. If you are camping on hard rocky ground everywhere you go it is very easy to develop an emotional relationship with it.) All the big stuff, like tents (and beer) are in the trailer behind Ken’s bike.

Parliament

The teenaged girls sitting again, this time with the Peace Tower in the background.

Ggres

This is the Governor General’s Residence, a short ride down Sussex drive. In Canada, the Governor General is also the Commander in Chief and the Queen’s representative. Hence the very Buckingham-esque guard.

Sorrydude

We couldn’t resist. The dude is (just like in England) instructed to ignore anything that goes on that isn’t a threat. I’m still wondering what he thought though. Don’t you think it was killing him not to know what was up with the sock?

For the record, in the interest of public safety and in keeping with Canadian laws and general philosophy, that’s a plastic rifle he’s got there.

24

The number on that post reads “24”. Canadians know where the sock is.

Alongtheriver

From there, we go along the Ottawa/Outaouais River (depending on what side of it you are on.) for ages. The Ottawa River bike path system is awesome.

Birchwood

Still on the bike path, a rare picture of the teenaged girls in motion.

Lechateau

At lunch time (ok. A little later than lunchtime) we took the ferry across the river to Quebec to eat and gawk at the very famous and fabulously cool “Le Chateau Montebello“. (The link has better pictures and info) Even though we were way too sweaty and dirty and poor to be in the joint.

Chateauinside

The sock was impressed. The Chateau Montebello is the worlds second largest log structure. (No, I don’t know what the biggest is) and it’s gorgeous. Even though it broke the bank I’m glad we did it.

Ferrywait

We waited for the ferry back across the river….

Rainynight

and the sock rested. I know it looks rainy here but fear not for the trusty sock. It only rained once on the whole bike trip, and it was at night and we were safe and warm in the tents. Not one drop of rain fell on us on any tour day, and the only victims of the rain that is wandering off in this early morning picture was my right and Ken’s left Birkenstock, somehow left out it the rain. Both of us went “step, squish, step, squish, step, squish” for an entire day. You wouldn’t believe what that does for your mood.

On the road again:

Finally today, news on the tour front. Sarah-the-wonder-publicist has advised me that the fun continues and there are some people out there who are going to be happy. Read ’em and weep you persistent knitters….and never let it be said that Sarah isn’t a good listener.

Thursday September 22nd 7:00 The Sheep Shack in Holden, MA.

(They are asking people to RSVP. You can do so to this email: mailto:clentz@thesheepshack.com )

Friday September 23rd: Stitches East in Atlantic City: Signings at 12:30 at The Yarn Barn of Kansas booth, and at 2:00 at Rosie’s Yarn Cellar Booth

Saturday September 24th: Still at Stitches: a signing at The Mannings booth at 12:30 and a terrifying speech at dinner. (Note to self. Check hair carefully to make sure you rinsed it. Wear pants.)

Sunday September 25th: Still at Stitches, regardless of how humiliating the talk was the night before. Signing at The Mannings booth again at 12:30.

Monday September 26th: Lake Placid NY, 7:00 at Adirondack Yarns.

Tuesday September 27th: Canton NY 6-8:00 pm at Brewer Bookstore, St. Lawrence University.

Saturday October 1st : CHICAGO! (See? I told you Sarah was a good listener) Details of the location and hours to be announced as soon as Sarah gets them to me.

Thursday October 13th: Toronto Ontario. The Creative Sewing and Needlework Festival. I’ll be reporting at 1:00 for a talk and a signing.

Saturday October 15th: Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival

Signing (and buying fiber) at Spirit Trail Fiberworks at 3:00.

Sunday October 16th: Still at Rhinebeck, drunk on yarn and knitting buddies and signing at Spirit Trail again at 11:00

Monday October 17th: Skeneateles (Can someone tell me how to say that?) NY at Creekside Books & Coffee, 7:00pm

Teusday October 18th: Acton, MA: Launch party and multi-author reading for Knitlit The Third: We Spin More Yarns at Willow Books. This promises to be the best knitting party all year. I’ve been promised cake. If you come, you could get some too.

Wednesday October 19th: Toronto, Ontario I’ll be the speaker at the Downtown Knit Collective at the Metro-Central YMCA at 7:30.

Visitors to the DKC are welcome to come.

Yours truly will take to the stage and….well. We’ll just see what happens. This event actually gives me the willies pretty badly. I LIVE in Toronto, so I can’t chant the mantra that gets me through all of my other events. Usually I stand up there, look out at all your smiling faces and know that if I arse it up, faint or swear…the odds are pretty good I’ll never see 90% of you again. That just doesn’t cut it if you are only a few blocks from home.

Phew. I’ll toss all that on the tour page when I’ve adjusted to the idea.

Local Colour

Saturday, the intrepid Knitty-Amy and I carpooled it up to Kitchener for the Kitchener-Waterloo Guild’s Knitters Fair. I’d never been before, so I don’t know what I was expecting, but no matter what I thought I’d find I was unprepared for what I found.

Intrepidamy

(Our intrepid Amy is seen here triumphant and yarn laden..demonstrating the glorious knitterly glow that you get when you score discontinued favourite cotton – on sale. It was either that or the coffee. )

The show isn’t the biggest around, if you’re thinking Rhinebeck or Maryland you’re going to be right put out (first of all…there are no sheep wandering around the Bingeman’s ballroom) and if you’re a spinner…well. I urge you to remember the name “Knitter’s Fair”. There’s precious little in the way of roving and I didn’t see any wheels for sale…but it’s not like they said there would be. Instead, there was yarn. Oodles of yarn. Aisles and aisles of interesting, local awesome stuff. There’s a list of vendors here….and some of them I’d never seen before. My favourite was Rosa Wang (sorry, no website) where I scored some mystery laceweight. This one changes colour over long repeats.

Lace

although this is the least accurate picture of the yarn possible. In reality is is much less… Well, much less every colour except green and the green isn’t that crazy lime green that’s there, more like a loden green. The yellow is more like yellow ochre, a muddy dirty colour …and the red isn’t red, it’s rust. It has no sky blue at all, that’s just some camera trick. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t know why I showed you this picture at all. Imagine that this yarn is actually all the good colours of indian food.

Cashmere

This yarn is the prize. It changes from navy blue to purply blue, is almost iridescent and reminds me of the necks of mallard ducks. (Not that I spend that much time thinking about duck necks, and I know that duck necks are more green than blue…but you know what I mean. The colour thing is not going well today) and my pets….it is cashmere. A huge, honking ball of 100% cashmere laceweight. I feel happy when I hold it. Very happy. (I won’t tell you what I paid because A) discussing how much you paid for stuff is a little bit in poor taste and B) it was so cheap that any of you who know where I live would come here and roll me for it. It would be worth the gas money.)

The cashmere score is almost enough to take the sting out of Saturday’s ritual humiliation. ( You knew there had to be one, didn’t you? When is there not?) I met Cara, Carol, Monica, Renee and hundreds of other people. I talked with the owners of Koigu, and the very nice lady who runs the Canadian Guild of Knitters….oh…you know. Everyone. The whole time that I met everyone I could scarcely think, obsessing and wondering if they had noticed my hair. You see, in my excitement and nervousness about all the people and the books and the driving and the Amy and all of it…..

I forgot to rinse the shampoo out of my hair.

I spent the entire day with most of my hair stuck down to my head in the most stiff and sticky way possible. I say “most” because in places the shampoo must have wiped off on my towel and those parts weren’t stiff, but merely resembled the oiliness of a seals coat. I noticed my head was heavy on the way there, but it wasn’t until I got to the ladies room at the Fair that I realized what was going on in all of it’s horrifying detail. In between meeting and greeting lovely knitters I tried to fluff it up and only succeeded in practically getting my hand stuck in the cemented slick mass while tangling it beyond all recognition. By then end of the attempted fix it was like I had fallen into a vat of bryl cream and then tried to sort it out with a blender. Amy comforted me by saying that at least it wasn’t frizzy. Good point. POINTY OIL CHUNKS aren’t frizzy. If you met me for the first time on Saturday I beg you to forget my appearance and seeming obsession with touching the top of my head. Please give me a second chance. I’m not usually that odd and I swear I’m smart enough to execute both steps of hair washing most days.

Sigh. At least I was wearing pants.

Strike One.

Last night I was reading my email and there were people saying that the corset runs small so “size up”, and people saying that my theory is good, and people saying that the corset was big, so “size down”….this variety of opinions doesn’t shake me up at all. I figure that different experiences with a pattern are normal, since we all knit differently and goodness knows that it doesn’t matter to me what or how people knit, so when two different knitters have two conflicting opinions on a pattern….it’s par for the course. I’ll probably have my own experience and have to live with that too. I kept knitting.

Then I got some emails from a couple of knitters saying that they were right on gauge, that the corset looked fabulous and then it hit water and it was game over. They begged me to wash a swatch before I ended up with an extremely elegant lace and cable elephant corset. (Really, no matter how pro-elephant you are, you don’t want that. Elephants don’t hand wash. No hands.)

This scared me. I knit me a little swatch. (Shown here with the tape measure it only took me 22 minutes to find and photographed here, rather badly and at 1am.)

Small

Looks exactly like I was right. The gauge on the pattern is 22 stitches to 10cm/4″ and these are 22 sitches on a smaller needle, with a smaller yarn I am totally getting a smaller piece of knitting. Good thing too, since I choose the larger size to compensate.

Then I gave the swatch the tiniest little bit of a swish in the kitchen sink, (no soap, no violence) and very gently laid it out on the counter to dry. I did not stretch it or manhandle it in any way.

Bigger

Danger Will Robinson, DANGER. The swatch, expanding faster than my stash in a far flung yarn shop with a sale on laceweight, now measures a staggering and catastrophic 19 stitches to 4 inches. Now there are people who would be better at the math than me (perhaps even enjoy it…though I suspect that Kristen is lying about how much darned fun mathematics is) and that means I’m getting 4.75 stitches to the inch, instead of 5.5 stitches to the inch and that means that the 38.5 inch chest that I thought was going to come out small is actually going to be…wait, ok. so 4.75 X 38.5 = No. Wait, that would give me the number of stitches to cast on…that’s not right. Ok, 38.5 divided by…no. that won’t do it either. Hold on. If 38.5 divided by 5.5 is equal to “X” and in the new equation “X” is 4.75 then the new size of the corset is going to be…. for the love of wool. Screw it. It’s BIGGER. It’s going to be BIGGER. Kerstin or someone else who doesn’t think that all the air on the planet starts to go away whenever X = SOMETHING can figure out by how much. Me? I know it’s going to be BIGGER, and that’s not good. I wanted it SMALLER.

In the interest of getting it smaller, I’ve frogged attempt #1 and cast on the smallest size, on a smaller needle and we’ll see what happens now.

Attempt2

All of this math and frogging would have me upset except I have a new best friend.

Bunny

This wee cabled bunny made it’s trip here from Lee Ann’s house. She’s made of roving I gave Lee Ann, and she’s charming beyond all belief. (Yes. She is wearing underwear. What else? The poor little dear is far from home. Why wouldn’t she be wearing only underwear?) I love her, and she’s sitting by my laptop being admired.

I’m co-opting part two of the bike trip (I know, it’s breaking your heart that you don’t see the Canadian Parliament through the eyes of a manic knitter and her assorted sock projects today) with breaking news. Tomorrow I’ll be signing copies of Bookbookbook 1 at 1:00 at the Gemini Fibres booth at the Knitters Fair in Kitchener Ontario (which is really just a chance to go yarn crawling with Amy). This by itself is exciting, but the news is that Gemini Fibers, with the help of The Canadian Manda Group has managed (through a string of complex cross-Ontario phone calls and with the efforts of a really awesome dude there named “Anthony”, who is a distribution and shipping genius) to procure 32 copies of Bookbookbook 2, hot off the presses and before anybody else has them, which (when I am done staring at them and feeling faint) I’ll sign too.

Last time, Americans had the book a long time before a Canadian (namely my mother, the only Canadian it probably really pissed off…) set their eyes on it. This is often the case with North American book distribution, but for a Canadian author, it’s a little heartbreaking. This time?

Well. To quote Ryan…. “neener neener”.

Who’s coming to gloat say hi?