February 2008

We had our fortnightly Ravelry get-together this afternoon, which was fun. Since DH is out of town, I took the toddler in the stroller, in the hopes that she would get her afternoon nap that way. She’s starting to get too big for the stroller and, not surprisingly, only slept for about an hour. I did get some knitting in on a sweater for DS, it’s reasonably mindless. Marina made a comment about my knitting a real project, rather than swatches. Right now I just don’t have the mental energy to work on those TKGA swatches, it’s easier to knit on something where I don’t have to think.

After a while DD woke up and I amused her and the rest of the knitters (though probably not the other people in the cafe) by reading Derek the Dinosaur, a story about a knitting dinosaur who’s the hero of the day when the ice age arrives. The link there is to an Australian bookstore; all the US and UK ones I tried only had books that were inordinately expensive or no longer available. And that’s the version I’ve got anyway, so it seemed appropriate. The pictures of dinosaurs wrapped up in woolly hats and sweaters are awfully cute. In some countries the title is “Derek the Knitting Dinosaur”; that’s what it’s listed under in the Vancouver Public Library, for example.

We talked about this and that, including the problems you find when you renovate an old house (discovering live electrical wires in the walls and support posts that aren’t themselves supported by anything seem to be common issues). Some of the others are going to the Fibre Fest March 7-8, but I got enough of a fix at Madrona (not to mention spending enough money).

And then it was time to go, back out into the sunshine, one of those rare, warm, February days.

Today was just Not My Day. It started with the toddler spilling my orange juice at breakfast, then my mother is stuck in a house in Saskatchewan with a blizzard blowing. Not even my knitting went well, since I had to frog the second version of the TKGA level 1 hat twice. I had almost finished the first version when I noticed I had the colours round the wrong way, and given that part of the test is whether you can read a pattern correctly, I couldn’t send in that version. On the second version I forgot the increases in the last ribbing row and had already cut the yarn. On to the next try, where I found I’d twisted the join after knitting two rounds, this after casting on a number of times to get the long-tail cast-on in pattern to work out right. Sigh. At least it was the Ravelry get-together today, so I could knit and drink coffee while making my mistakes on the second version of the hat, and it was sunny this afternoon, contrary to the weather forecast. The weather forecast for Saskatchewan for the rest of the week is better, so my parents should be able to get out of the house tomorrow. Maybe my knitting brain will do better tomorrow as well.