Randomly on a Wednesday:

1. I took the morning off today to watch the swearing in ceremony for our new Prime Minister. I don’t regret it at all. The best moment for me was seeing that he had made good on his promise to achieve gender parity in the Cabinet. Half men, half women, for the first time in Canadian history.

2. Best moment of the whole thing? When a reporter asked him why gender parity was important to him, and he said “Because it’s 2015.” Just like that.

3. I leave in the morning for 14 days.

4. I have no idea how to pack for that. I really don’t own that many pairs of acceptable underpants. Or shirts. Or pants.

5. Fourteen days is a long time to pack knitting for. I know I’ll be in woolly places, so I don’t need to fear running out, but I do think I should leave with some sort of a knitting plan.

6. I should make one soon.

7. I opened the Christmas spreadsheet to help make me a plan.

8. I wish I hadn’t done that.

9. Maybe I’ll just take socks.

10. Or not.

A few months ago… or maybe a little longer than that, I had dinner with my mum, sister, mother-in-law and sisters-in-law. We took a few pictures, and they all looked great, and I looked… less great. I’ve never been good at that whole scene – outfits, hair, makeup. I do okay in the shoe department, thanks to a tiny little fetish for well made, totally comfortable shoes that look as good as they feel, but when it comes to the rest of it, I tend to be the lady wearing old jeans, a tee-shirt with a hole in it and mismatched (but very well made) knitted stuff.

I mentioned it to Joe, who usually looks similarly scruffy, and we decided somehow that we were going to take it up a notch. Joe bought three new shirts, and a jacket that doesn’t look like he got it at a thrift shop (but he did) and I started to think over how I could dress a little better. I’m a textile artist. That’s how I think of myself (and most of you) rather than simply a knitter. I’m interested in the fabrics I make, the shapes I construct with knitting… The more I thought it over, the more I thought that I should look like that – like a textile artist and writer, rather than like someone who rolled out of bed, grabbed enough clothing to stay warm and covered, and launched a day- Which is totally what I do, and I don’t see that changing, so the answer was to have better stuff to grab.  I’ve been working on it, little by little. Every time I need a new shirt, I spend a little more time choosing it, give a little more thought into how it all could eventually pull together into a wardrobe, instead of just a collection of stuff.

It turns out that the onset of winter is a really, really good time to start thinking about all of this, because mostly the “outfits” that I wear for the next six or seven months will all involve a coat. Pulling together a wardrobe that looks ok in public is a lot easier, if you only need to worry about coats. They delightfully cover the rest of what I’m wearing, so I have lots of time to think it over. I own three (almost four – I’m about to buy a new one) coats. This is a pretty low number for a Canadian, I think, considering that you’ll wear one every day for about 200 days a year. I have a light, waterproof coat, a warmish dress coat, and a warmer parka. (I’m saving up to buy a super-warm coat. I’ve been missing one for a year.) They are respectively lime green, autumn orange, and brown. (I’m thinking about black for the new one, but know that my mum disapproves of black on me, on account of my fair skin. She says it makes me look dead. I’m almost 50. I’m thinking about letting her opinion go a little. Sorry mum. I’ll wear a scarf- put a little colour by my face like you keep saying.) So last week when I realized that I had no mittens for this year and decided to do something about that, I did something radical. Instead of choosing yarn that I love and making mittens, I chose yarn that I loved that went with all my coats, and made mittens.

Behold! A pair of Cloisonee that match all my things. (Except possibly the hypothetical black coat. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.)

I love them on their own, but I love them with my coats even more.

See that? One step closer to sort of well-dressed.  Then I needed a new cowl. (That is a total and absolute lie. I have about nine scarves and cowls. I am in no danger of freezing to death anytime soon, but only… um… all of them totally match my coats, so I needed a new one.) I wanted a specific colour, and while I was at Rhinebeck I went on a hunt, and came up with Watershed in Eastview. (God, I love those Harrisville Yarns.) Then I found a pattern I loved – Winterlong, and started knitting.

The thing took almost no time at all, and I love the result. I wanted something a great colour, sculptural… interesting to knit, but would reliably lie flat. A big cozy thing to wrap round my neck and keep out the wind and snow, and this project was perfect.

The thing knit up in a flash. It seems to me that it took longer to dry after it’s bath than it did to work it.

I’m totally in love. It matches all of my coats perfectly, and about 3/4 of my wardrobe (if you can call tee-shirts and jeans a wardrobe, which I am)

and the best part? It matches the mittens.

I’m one step closer to being someone in an outfit – not just clothes. As long as I have a coat on, I’m good.

On Thursday of last week, two things happened. First, Joe left for a conference in NYC, and I woke up feeling awful. I’m leaving soon for a two week trip out of town, working two gigs (the Columbia Gorge Fiber Festival then a few days off, then the November Strung Along Retreat – at last count, by the way, we had a tiny few spots left. Email if you’re in) and I can’t afford to be sick right now, so I did something drastic and amazing.

I took the weekend off.  I know – lots of people take the weekends off, but what’s that joke about owning your own business? It’s awesome because of the flexibility. You can work any 14 hours a day you like.  Both Joe and I have recently lapsed (out of necessity, mostly) into a wild schedule where we work all the time, and Thursday I woke up feeling it, and I promptly cancelled all but two of my weekend plans. One was a bike rally meeting with my Co-Lead – Cameron, you’ll meet him soon enough – if you’re on instagram you might have seen him go by already, and the other was a plea from a friend who desperately wanted to learn to knit. Turns out he’s recently learned he’ll be an uncle, and wants to knit a blanket.

He came over, I drew him a picture, gave him needles and yarn, taught him the premise of knitting (pull loop through loop using stick) the knit stitch, the purl, increasing, decreasing, placing markers, casting on and casting off, and he left three hours later with a top down baby sweater on the needles.  (I’m very good with beginners.)

Other than that, I slept, knit, and tidied. The whole thing was very restorative, and there’s an amazing amount of knitting to show you, but it’s all blocking right now. Tomorrow we’ll have a festival of finished things. Today though, let me show you a little sneak I do to make sure my socks match exactly – or rather, that it’s possible for my socks to match exactly.  (Sort of.)

I’m knitting a pair of socks headed for the Long Range Planning Box (although Christmas is so shockingly soon I don’t know if we can call it long range) using Opal #8610 that I snagged at the Knit East marketplace from Cricket Cove. It’s supposed to look like a watermelon, and I suppose it does, if you have a wide way of thinking about watermelon. (All that yellow, doesn’t seem right.) I knit the first sock, and I rigged the colourway so it worked out the way I liked.  I knit to the end of the heel, then ripped out a chunk of the colourway so that the pattern would progress undisturbed along the top of the foot. I rip out parts of colourways all the time to get what I want… and usually things work out just fine, but before I do the second sock, I always double check that it’s going to work.

I knit that first sock, and then before I start the second one, I break out the ball winder. I lay the finished sock nearby, and I start winding. I wind to the place where the first sock began, and then I start following along. As I wind, I count off sections of the first sock – a section of pink on the ball, a section of pink on the sock, now yellow, now green…. I wind and watch, making sure that subtracting a section of yarn from the first sock didn’t leave me with a wrong order for the second.

In this case, I have more than enough – and enough in the right order.

(I always weigh the remaining yarn after the first sock, and compare it to the weight of the sock to make sure I have enough- but with long repeats, that’s not always enough to get you a match.) Especially when I plunder a colourway while making a sock for a big man. If it turns out that I don’t have enough, I’ll choose to use the gutted bit from the first sock to start the second, because I think that mostly, the legs of socks are covered by pants, and it’s the feet we really look at. In any contest between matching legs or matching feet, I’ll take feet every time. It’s what you see when they’re poking out the bottom, or propped up on the coffee table. Feet over legs. That’s how I do it.

Today is a rainy day. Not the kind of rainy day that I hate least, where it mists, then rains, then clears, then rains, but a dismal, constant, cold, heavy rain that’s demoralizing and eventually leaks into the basement.  The remains of Hurricane Patricia are passing though, and it’s been raining steadily since the wee hours, with no apparent intention of letting up.

Have I mentioned that I hate rain? I do. I like water under me, like in swimming and baths, and so today I’ve spent the day in, cursing the grey, dark skies, and drinking pot after pot of tea. It’s been a long, slow day – spent mostly at my desk, catching up on email and paperwork – and that at least feels productive and has been a decent rest, which is brilliant, because as spectacular as the weekend at KnitEast was (and it was spectacular, with lovely teachers and clever students and lovely scenery) I came home so completely knackered Monday night, that yesterday I had several involuntary naps.

(That’s the tide going in and out on Passamaquoddy Bay. It’s off the Bay of Fundy, home of the worlds highest tides – I think this one was 28ft.)

I got up this morning (early, for something that turned out to be cancelled) and sat at my desk, and realized that I was cold. My new sweater was on the back of my chair, and I shrugged that on, and then thought about how cold my hands had been over the weekend. I’d forgotten to pack mittens. Then I thought about why I hadn’t packed mittens, realized I’d never made good on my promise to myself to make a pair of mittens over the summer, and that I was at serious risk of spending another winter wearing a leftover pair from someone else’s kit. That’s a crappy place for a knitter to be, so I hunted up a few oddments that match my coat(s) and today, as I’ve worked at my desk, I’ve managed a row here, and a row there…

And with any luck, by tomorrow I’ll have a pair of Cloisonee for myself, I’d forgotten how ridiculously fast they are- and if that doesn’t stop the rain and make it warm up – I don’t know what will.

*PS: If anyone fancies it, we have a few spots open for the Strung Along Retreat in November. We were totally full, with a waitlist, and then forces conspired. (Judith’s doing wheel maintenance and mechanics, amongst other things, and it should be more than worth it just for that.) If you fancy a bit of a treat and a rest before the rush of the season starts – have a peek and see if it’s for you. You can send an email to strungalongATyarnharlotDOTca if you want to talk about it.

*PPS. Yes. I did finish a pair of socks and a bit over the weekend. Two all done pairs (one was started when I left) are drying after a nice bath, as I type this. I’ll show you tomorrow.

I was going to tell you just now, as I unpack and repack my suitcase to head out the door for St Andrews-By-the-Sea, that I was feeling a little tired today. So I sat at the computer, typed all that in, and then glanced up at the screen to check for typos, and realized that my keyboard hadn’t been plugged in. Yeah. So maybe more than a little tired. I’ll go to bed early tonight and be chipper as all get out tomorrow. (Well. If you know me, I’m seldom outwardly chipper, but I’ll be chipper on the inside.) I’ve spent the day trying to pull together the disaster that is our house and lives – Joe and I have both been travelling and working a lot, and things are getting a little dodgy around here – If by dodgy, you understand that I mean that there are dust bison roaming the floors, the only food in the fridge is condiments, and neither of us have a pair of clean socks.  More than that (since my priorities are still – well, mine… I’m not currently really knitting anything. The knitting situation is a mess.

Now, don’t take that wrong, I don’t mean I’m not knitting, I’m totally always knitting, but since finishing that last sweater, I’ve just sort of filled in a few gaps – I have a pair of socks for someone almost done, and while I was at Rhinebeck I worked out that the yarn I’d brought to make the thing I wanted to wouldn’t work – so there was a Harrisville purchase – and a cowl started.

That’s Harrisville Watershed (what a great yarn) in “Eastview” and the cowl is Bristol Ivy’s Winterlong – a beautiful, sculptural piece that’s knitting up really quickly. Those are both snacks though, just little bits of knitting to tide me over the disorganized gap.  They don’t count. Especially the socks. I need a knitting plan, the next big thing.

That’s what I was thinking about today as I tried to pull everything together, and decided to focus on the way Joe and I both had no clean socks, so I got a load of laundry together, looked out the window at the weather (we’ve had our first snow here – although it was air snow, not stay on the ground snow) and decided it was time to make the switch to warm, handknit wool socks for both of us.  In they all went to the wash, and as I washed them all, I realized that my handknit sock drawer is in crisis.  Joe’s in pretty good shape, he could use another pair or two but (gasp) Christmas is coming. Me? I’ve got just a few serviceable pairs, and that’s after a festival of darning. So, knitting dilemma solved. I’m going to bang out a pair or two of socks for myself over the weekend, make a mental note to stop giving them all away,  and make a new plan on Tuesday morning.  Two birds, one stone.

Thursday, I left for Rhinebeck, and got on a plane, and then another one, and landed squarely in the arms of magic. There’s no way for me to explain to you what Rhinebeck is, or… more properly, what it is to me, because on the surface it’s all easy.  On the surface, Rhinebeck is a sheep and wool festival, and there are sheep and yarn and wool and thousands of knitters, and I guess really, considering how much I like all of those things, it’s a set up that I would love it, but Rhinebeck has become something else over the years. I could show you the sheep… Oh, wait. I will.

I could show you the grounds, the yarn, the stuff… Oh, fine. I will too.

Mostly though, I want to show you what I really go for.  It’s the people….

and more specifically, these people.

Way back, in the beginning of knit-blogging, when all of this was fresh, and we were all discovering the virtues and wonder of far flung friends connected by a love of yarn and a bunch of websites, a bunch of us started going to Rhinebeck together. We’ve continued that, and this weekend I had the privilege and joy of spending this time with a group of women that I’ve been proud to call my friends for a decade.  We spent the weekend enjoying wool, talking knitting, talking everything, knitting, catching up, and cementing what brings us back, over and over.

I love us.

(Photo credits to Caro, who always gets the best us on film, this time thanks to a recycling bin, and a timer.)

And I wore a new sweater. Rhinebeck.  There’s nothing like it.

Well. I’m at the airport -and I have an unfinished sweater with me. I know. I was hoping it would be done too, and I’m still hoping that it won’t turn into a real squeaker, but I fell behind last night because it turns out that I could barely knit during that baseball game. (We won, but the city very nearly exploded.)

See that? Sorry for the crappy picture. Airport photography is harder than you think. That sleeve is about 20 minutes from done, it just needs about 5cm of ribbing, and then there’s just the other one, and I totally did not run out of yarn, and I’m not going to.  All I have to knit is one little sleeve, and I have a wild fantasy where I manage to knit it between here and Boston, which is probably nuts, but it’s Rhinebeck. It’s totally the season for nuts. I can knit the sleeve today, then I can can weave in the ends and block it when I’m at my friends place tonight,  and it can dry in the back window of the car all the way there. It will even have tomorrow night to dry, and that makes the whole thing sound doable. (See the way I made it sound like the big deal is the drying, and not the fact that I think I’m knitting a sleeve in a few hours? Rhinebeck crazy.)

I’m going to pour on the burn.  I’ll post to instagram as I go.

Progress on the Rhinebeck sweater – real progress.

The body is done, and the both buttonbands knit, although only one of them is sewn on, but still, that will be short work. The next few days, I’ll be headed to sleeve island. I’ve got a full skein remaining, and about a third of one more, so as soon as I’m done here, I’m going to weigh both of those, split them in half, and start. I’m still a little worried about having enough yarn to finish – though I shouldn’t be. It feels like enough, but I figure that if I split the yarn in two, and run out, at least I could adjust the sleeve length to suit what I’ve got. A sweater with two matching 3/4 length sleeves is entirely wearable (at least by me) but a sweater with 1.5 sleeves is a look I don’t think I can rock. I’m off to meetings for the rest of the day, but I’m cool with being the crazy knitting lady in meetings, so with any luck at all, I’m actually going to have a finished sweater by the time I get to New York.

Is it my imagination, or does this seem to be going a little too well?

Knit knit knit. That was the plan for the next few days until Rhinebeck. Knit that sweater and damn the torpedos on everything else, and then this morning I took a realistic look at my life and wondered how I managed to get that delusion going for even the few hours I thought it would be true.  This weekend is Thanksgiving here in the Great White North, and the party starts tomorrow evening, and after three big family celebrations (one each on Friday, Saturday and Sunday- though I only have full cooking responsibility for one of them) and the minute that’s over, there’s Bike Rally meetings on Monday and Tuesday, and then Wednesday I pack, and Thursday I leave. I’m not entirely sure where in there I thought I was going to have this private knitting party, but clearly the wool fumes got to me.  (Again.)

The sweater is a little farther along than it was, noticeably so, I think, although maybe just to me.  I’m also rather reassuringly still on the second ball of yarn, which means I’m starting to feel good about the chances that I won’t be wearing a Rhinebeck Vest. (3/4 length sleeves are still a possibility.) Today’s the last day for a few that I can reasonably have a big long knit, so pardon me. My wool and I are going to kick back, make some tea, and watch a little baseball.  (Go Jays Go. Sorry. It had to be said. This blog will return to its previously sport free nature after they win the World Series.)

Home, home, I am home – and there’s not a single person alive who could be enjoying it more. I had a fantastic time at Knit City in Vancouver. If you have to travel for work, I highly recommend the way I did it this last weekend, which was in my own country (so nice not to need my passport, or to have to negotiate US customs. They seem nice enough, but their all armed, and it makes me nervous) and with friends, in a city I adore, and with absolutely un-Vancouver-like sunny warm weather.  In 3 days I:

-Knit the daylights out of my Rhinebeck sweater. I’m feeling good about the progress I’ve made. I’ve finished the top part, and divided for the body and sleeves, and made it a few inches past the armholes. It’s not a sweater yet, but I’m seeing how it could be. I have 8 days. I think all things are possible right this minute.

-I taught a ton of classes while I was there, including one fun one where at the end, knitter took pictures of their swatches. I think that means they were pleased.

-I ate my way across Vancouver with Clara Parkes and Kate Atherley.  The three of us were on East Coast time, so aside from waking up every morning at 4am and wondering why Vancouver wasn’t ready to rock and roll, we were ready for dinner at 4pm. In case you’re wondering, this means you have no trouble going into any restaurant you like. We ate at Tamam, Tacofino’s and The Acorn, and made at least one new bartender friend.

(That’s not easy to do in such a short time, and with only one Margherita, but we’re really charming.)

-Took Clara on the bus. While we were on there, a guy who smelled exactly like a bottle of cheap gin poured on a mensroom floor in a cheap gas station told me I had a nice shirt, then minutes later, asked what it would take to get a phone number. The answer? “So much more than is possible on this bus, sir.”  I think Clara enjoyed the cultural moment.

– Saw a marketplace so chock full of CanCon (that’s Canadian Content, for those of you outside our lovely country) that it staggered the soul. Fabulous marketplace.

-Fantasized about what it would be like to sleep in my own bed 10 nights in a row. So far, it’s all I’d dreamed of.

-Reminded myself that if you’re on a 2 week sweater thing, that you’d better plan ahead for buttons – but didn’t buy buttons.  I’m on it.