Sometimes I do finish things...

A month or so ago, I finally sewed the buttons on the cardigan I had intended to give to my niece for Christmas. A week or 2 later, I mailed it to The Gambler's brother. Luckily she's chubby big rather than long big (note the rolled up pant legs); it fits her nicely. Intentional face cropping on my part - The Gambler's brother has a PhD in something to do with communications, and asking him for permission to post a photo of his progeny on the Internets would likely lead to some pedantic yammering on his part. I'm hoping to have more baby knitting to do in the future - my brother and his wife are registering with an adoption agency. Since he's not bitchy like my sisters the only sibling I get along with a great guy, I'm hoping that things work out for them.

Silicon footprint?

I've been diligently listening (while knitting) to my backlog of CBC podcasts, and much of it has been thought-provoking. A recent episode of Spark raised the issue of energy consumption and technology ; do people buy carbon offsets for ipod usage in addition to air travel? Now I don't feel so bad about the fact that my cell phone is turned off 95% of the time... Some of you who read my blog regularly may have noticed that there was one gift project that didn't make it to the last post: The Christmas Cardi ended up being finished in time for Ukrainian Christmas. There's a bit of a long story behind why I didn't finish it for December 25th - it involved being post call, The Gambler's antisocial brother, and some amaryllis bulbs...but we won't go there. The last seaming was done yesterday. I'm visiting The Purple Purl with Jackie this afternoon, so by the end of the day, the buttons will be sewn on and it will get mailed tomorrow. Together with the birthday shawls for my mom and my aunt. I swear. Really. No, I actually mean it this time... And now that the gift knits are done, it's back to the me knitting: I'm swatching for the Hourglass sweater from Last Minute Knitted Gifts. I am planning on striping these 2 Silk Garden colourways together. I had initially planned on doing 2 rows of each, but now I am thinking that it might work well to do 3 rows dark/2 rows light at the bottom, 2 rows dark/2 rows light in the middle, and 2 rows dark/3 rows light at the top. Or maybe it will look like crap. We'll see.

C minus 7 days...

7 days to finish the Christmas Cardi. Yesterday I picked up 574 million stitches and knitted the contrast band: The contrast is actually supposed to be knit in stockinette with smaller needles, but after looking at a few ravelry projects, it seemed that garter stitch was the way to go. Mental note for when I next knit a cardigan with a button band: Figure out why I got the row of purl bumps at the base of the band and how to avoid it. Now I just need to find those cute little buttons I bought in Switzerland... I realized that there is an error in this pattern - it instructed me to bind off the 30ish stitches for the neck opening on the back, and then when it was time to do the contrast edging, the pattern says "knit the 30 stitches which are on a stitch holder, then continue to pick up stitches" Argh! I could have picked up 30 less stitches!! Really really really have to get into the habit of reading the whole pattern through before starting! Granted, I don't think I would have picked that up (no pun intended). Sunday I made much progress on the first (I'd walk a mile for a) Camel Glove: BTW: Batty - this is camel coloured merino yarn, not camel yarn. Zara yarn to be precise - complete with knot about 10 metres into the projects (argh!) And then realized that the gloves are a bit baggy. But the good news is that they fit The Gambler perfectly, so I now have a template for when I knit gloves for him. I used the Cigar gloves pattern from knitty with some modifications such as having FULL FINGERS(!!!) and offsetting the thumb so that right and left gloves aren't interchangeable. So I have frogged them, and will start to reknit tonight at the Scarberia SnB. Finally, in cat news, Somerset's left sided whiskers are finally growing back: They fell out this summer after she had a superficial infection on her face. So she's looking a little less unbalanced these days.

All work and no play...

...makes pitiful blog fodder. Well, I guess I could tell the story of how we got a kick out of making the fancy pants big city cardiologist wait on hold, and then the radiology tech accidentally hung up on him...but I think you had to be there. Even though I am still on call, as of Friday I have been on Respirology call (otherwise known as "my spa week") , so I have had some time to finish warmfuzzy: I even picked up a gift bag and card today (I cannot wrap worth a damn. I don't know what happened to me in kindergarten; I never learned how to hold a pencil properly or how to fold paper in half. Surprising that I have managed to live a relatively full and productive life) so it is ready to leave under the tree in the staffroom. This morning I finished knitting the pieces of the Christmas Cardi, soaked them in preparation for blocking, and then realized that I do not know where my pins are. So I went to my friendly neighborhood yarn shop.... ...and this Silk Garden followed me home. I had already picked up 3 skeins of the darker colourway at Kniterary this Thursday, not having any specific project in mind...so now I have more! I subsequently realized AFTER getting home that I forgot to pick up the pins, so I walked back(the beauty of living 2 blocks from a yarn shop) and picked up 2 packages of pins. I hadn't done the math of how many of them I would require... ...and ended up having just enough of them to pin the back and fronts. Somerset tried to help me block the sleeves, but Greedo thought it smelled like wet dog. Tonight, I cast on for my gloves!

Oh Christmas Meme...

Sandi recently tagged me for the "7 weird things about you" meme. I've already done that meme before, and I have seen a Christmas meme floating about Blogland, I decided to combine the 2 into: 7 Weird Christmas Things About Me 1) I have always hated tinsel - even before I got cats. I prefer a Christmas tree with minimal decorations. My favorite tree was one I had in my first apartment - it was a real tree, about 4 feet tall, and I decorated it with red velvet bows, star garland, white mini lights and a quilted star that I sewed up using my Mom's machine. It sat in the bay window, underneath some red globe lights, and I loved to sit on my couch in the evening with the room lit only by the tree and the window lights. 2) We don't tend to decorate the house for Christmas, but we usually put up a tree (we have an artificial one). Last year we took it down in February. 3) My favourite Christmas dish is "Kutya"; it is the only traditional Ukrainian food that I have ever prepared. 4) When I lived with/in the same city as my family, on Christmas Eve we would have a traditional Ukrainian meal, which was meatless. When I moved to Ontario, The Gambler and I would go to one of his buddy's parents' house for a traditional Swedish smorgasbord. When that buddy went to South America to teach, I felt like we had to start our own tradition. In the last few years, we have always cooked a roast or some steaks for dinner on the 24th. So our new Christmas Eve tradition is to eat beef. 5) I started knitting myself a Christmas stocking out of black acrylic Red Heart yarn a few weeks ago. It's for the staff room at work. 6) I am not at all religious, but my favourite Christmas music is either traditional Ukrainian carols sung by a choir, or Silent Night. 7) The Cat Carol makes me cry like a baby. So does the end of the cartoon version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I'm not tagging anyone specifically for this one - consider it my Christmas present to you. Speaking of Christmas presents, the Warmfuzzy just needs to have the fringe trimmed and have the ends woven in. The Christmas Cardi is nearing completion - those are the sleeves on the straight needle (back and front panels are curled up on the circ). I was able to knit a grand total of one row on each sleeve this weekend, because I spent most of my waking hours at the hospital from Friday through Sunday. Luckily, I don't think we'll be seeing the recipient until Boxing Day.

A productive weekend

I have been searching through patterns alot of late, and frequently find that the patterns that I am interested are not free. This blog post raised a good point about the price being charged for some pattern downloads. I'm not sure what a fair price is, but they do seem to be creeping upwards - for some small projects like hats and mittens, the pattern cost could end up being similar to the yarn cost. Thank goodness for knitty, which has been the source of patterns for much that I am currently knitting. I have finished the fronts of the Christmas Cardi, And cast on for the back. But the prospect of knitting straight stockinette in a single colour for 7 inches on 3.25mm needles is not particularly enticing. Maybe that's why Ella Freezes Over keeps calling out to me: Knit me! Knit ME!!

Sweet Beautiful Long Weekend!!

For me at least; I am off until Monday! And ironically, I couldn't sleep in today, because my body had no interest in doing so. Oh well - that is what afternoon naps are for. I've given up on the daily blog posts during the whole month, but I'm still working on a November sweater: This is The Christmas Cardi - intended for my niece Ambar. It's the Devan pattern from knitty that used self striping sock yarn. The sock yarns are both cotton/wool blend. The stockinette knits up quite quickly. I have just started the arm/v-neck reductions. It just occured to me yesterday that someone is going to say that it's not appropriate for a girl because of the blue stripes, to which my reply will be "Red is the new pink". Hard to say if I will finish it in the next 2 weeks; at least I've got an extra 25 days after that. Granted, 12 of those extra days will be spent on call for the ICU. (I'm not sure if I've ever explained what my work schedule is like - I do call for 7 days straight 5 weeks out of every 8: 3 weeks of ICU, which is insanely busy, and 2 weeks of Respirology, which is much less busy. I have sometimes overlapped Respirology and ICU call, but I end up having to neglect my Respirology duties, so I am not doing that at all in the winter. Even though it sounds like alot of time off, my ICU weeks are very tiring, and it feels like I don't have any spare time. Unfortunately, for the next little while, I am likely to have to pick up extra time because a fellow who joined our hospital as a 3rd intensivist just after I started decided that it wasn't the right career for him, so now there are just 2 of us, meaning that I do 4 weeks of ICU out of every 8, which further cuts into my knitting time) I did manage to attend a Toronto Knitting Event (everything that happens in Toronto is capitalized; sometimes bolded and italicized too) yesterday evening - the opening of a new yarn shop called 'The Purple Purl' (I personally would have named it 'The Black Purl', but nobody asked for my opinion). I had planned to meet up with some of my knitting friends, but missed them by a bit (I subsequently caught up with them at a restaurant). There were many many people inside the yarn shop - enough to make it somewhat stressfull, because you couldn't walk anywhere without having to tap on someone's shoulder and ask them to move. So I quickly checked out their inventory, grabbed a skein of yarn, and left without even picking up a freebie gift bag. (I did stop to pay for the yarn first, just in case you were worried) This is Indigo Moon yarn, which is dyed on Gabriola Island, just of BC's Sunshine Coast. Ironically, The Gambler and I spent a few days on Gabriola Island, and I planned to check out the Indigo Moon studio, but wasn't able to find it. Now, I freely admit that I need more sock yarn like I need a hole in my head (I've always wondered - could piercings be considered "holes in the head"? How about when people put those big grommets into their earlobes?), but this yarn does solve a minor dilemma: The "Blue Spruce" colourway works well with these other 2 sock yarns, so it will allow me to knit a Kaleidoscope sweater using 3 fingering weight yarns rather than a combo of fingering/sportweight. Of course, I now have to decide if I still want to carryalong the alpaca laceweight that I only have 540 yards of...