I had to take the quiz too!

Like Not An Artist, I don't have a lot to say in the way of knitting progress right now. Work and the DKC have me running in circles! But I also saw the quiz on Sandi's blog so I thought, "What the heck?! All the cool knitting kids are doing it."

What Kind of Knitter Are You?

You appear to be a Knitting Purist. You are an accomplished knitter producing beautiful pieces with a classic feel. You sometimes lament losing half of your local yarn shop to garish novelty yarns. Perhaps you consider fun fur scarves the bane of knitting society and prefer to steer new knitters towards the wool and cotton blends. Some might call you a bit of an elitist but you know that you've been doing this craft long enough to respect the history behind it and honor it with beautiful piece that can last a lifetime. http://marniemaclean.com Take this quiz! Quizilla Join | Make A Quiz | More Quizzes | Grab Code

I wouldn't say that I'm that big of a yarn snob. Or THAT accomplished. It was fun to take nonetheless.

Yesterday a surprise in the mail

My work visa arrived yesterday. And Immigration Canada wrote me saying that I meet the eligibility to apply for permanent residency.

OMGsqueeeee!

a slight pity party

Do you ever have that feeling that no matter what you touch turns to gold? Every new task you take to hand ends up like something you've done a thousand and one times? Like you wanna hold a master's class on how awesome you really are?

Right now I having the opposite feeling.

Everything I touch needs to be ripped, frogged, redone and thrown back in the basket with a big ol' "mea culpa" flying from my lips.

- I'm dropping stitches as if the pattern actually calls for them.
- I'm decreasing in new and imaginative (read: incorrect and lumpy) ways.
- And most importantly, I'm not getting any satisfaction out of the items I'm knitting.

Is Jupiter in retrograde, or what?!!! There has got to be some explanation other than I am not awesome. I hope.

Sunday High Tea...

Silly me! I was soooo tired last night when I made my weekend post that I completely forgot to mentioning High Tea at The Knit Cafe on Sunday. The funny thing is that I was *sure* I wrote something about it, but alas I didn't.

I met up with Sophie, Sandi and Mel for a late afternoon treat of delectable delights catered by Vanilla & Salt caterers. There were no finger sandwiches or quiches but what we did get was mouth-watering good. I can't remember the actual names of the treats but we had curried pumpkin wrapped in philo and mini cheesecakes with apricot(?) compote goat cheese and spinach and carmalized onions tarts and pear, apple and pistachio tarts. All washed down with the zingiest, perkiest lemony rooibos tea I've ever had. And we got to knit the afternoon away. Not only that, we got to meet Sully! Sully doesn't knit from a pattern. She doesn't need to. She showed off her beautiful hats and scraves and two sweaters -- all in original designs. And people, she knitted them without using a pattern. I'm telling you this is serious. Seriously beautiful stuff! Sophia was there as well and it was so nice to see her as she's forsaken our s'n'b for others closer to her place. Hopefully we sufficiently guilted her into coming back at least once in a while.

It was great fun and I highly recommend it! The Knit Cafe hold High Tea at 1:00pm and 3:00pm on the first Sunday of the month. Call them to make reservations.

What a weekend...

I haven't had email since early, early, early morning Saturday. Now I'm starting to feel disconnected from the world. Sigh!

I had a weekend full of yarny goodness. On Thursday (it's close enough to Friday, so it counts towards the weekend) I meet up with Amy to get The Socks. Amy also gave me the cutest mitten kit that she received from Moorehouse Merino. Love it! How did she know I needed mittens? (Other than she can't actually knit with wool and the ones I've been wearing are .99¢ special from Shoppers?) Thanks, Amy! You totally rock! So I started the socks on Friday night and then proceeded to riiiipppp them out. I found that I may be a good knitter but I am a lousy stitch counter. But I got back on that horse and casted on again Saturday morning.

Sunday, Sophie and I headed to a Secret Location where I was able to add to my growing collection of yarn 20 balls of Jo Sharp Silkroad DK Tweed in "Night" (#409) to make Ubernatural and 5 skeins of Estelle's Wolly Bully in "Sunset" (#350) to make some sort of kooky top-down or bottom-up raglan sweater.

Ok, so now my stash basket runneth over. OMG! I mean, look at it. Loooook!


I know for some this would be just a mole hill not a mountain, a grain of sand on the beach, a drop of water in the ocean! But for me this is out of control. I'm not complaining, but this means no new yarn for me until I actually complete a project or two (or five). Which isn't the worst thing in the world because I have great projects in the queue.

More pictures to follow later when I have a bit more time and I can find the D70. (Blown out picture above brought to you by the tired, borken A60.)

Keep your fingers crossed that I can continue to count until I am finished with the first sock. Off to bed. Zzzzzzzz!

TTC Knit-a-Long...Ghoulishly Late Post

Of course I braved the soggy, cold Saturday so I could lead a group of knitters into yarn nirvana. Who wouldn't right? Katherine and I co-captaining the East Team was a lot of fun, and dare I say, I'd do it again! Mostly because the East Team totally rawked the house. I'm not kidding!

9:00am was the meeting time, and Pam's Coffee & Tea was the meeting place. I tend to ALWAYS be late to things, since I haven't had to go to a workplace in say... ummmm... a year, so I planned to leave my house twenty minutes earlier than I really needed. I've very glad I did because with all the flopping around I did before I left I ended up at Pam's at 8:57am. Christina and Rochelle were already talking up a storm about knitting related things and I was happy that I didn't have to sit at the café by myself. (Note: I normally like to sit in cafés by myself. That day I was chomping at the bit to s-h-o-p.) With the weather I was a wee bit concerned of no-shows, but luckily people's love of yarn was stronger than their hate of the weather, and we only were short 4 peeps when we walked the few doors down to The Naked Sheep. What a sight it was to see my team in TNS:

Okaaay, so I'm apologizing now for the absolute craptitude of my photography during this KAL. I'm mea culpa-ing now! I *knowingly* brought a old, tired and broken Canon A60 digital camera because I was too stingy with space to carry my Nikon D70. People, I wanted that space for yaaaaaarn. But now I'm sad because I have few pictures. At The Naked Sheep I bought 8 balls of Noro Silk Garden in colourway #245 for the Tithe sweater designed by Jane Ellison.

After the The Naked Sheep, we took the longest part of our commute which required us to take a bus then subway then streetcar to Romni Wools. Surprisingly we didn't get any weird looks or scare folks away. I guess that's kinda comforting. Although I am remembering a few blank stares on the subway, but we were riding the subway and I think if you ride the subway it is required that you perfect a blank stare otherwise no monthy pass for you. I think it's stated in the TTC Ride Guide. Here we are waiting for the bus:

Meet my team (from left to right):Cristina, Rochelle, Nadia, Mary Pat, Michelle, Christina and Melinda. Katherine, Lisa and I were huddling under the bus shelter to keep dry. Since it was the Saturday before Halloween we were "encouraged" to wear costumes, however the weather encouraged most not to wear a costume. Lisa, who by the way came allllll the way from Vancouver AND bought the most yarn out of all participants AND won a beautiful African mud dyed backpack to carry her haul in, ended up winning the "best costume" four our team.

No joke! She was the most dressed up! Her sign says "Will work for alpaca."

Romni was as always wonderful and overwhelming at the same time. We had two peeps join our team there, Carla and Tara. Even just adding two people made the team seem larger. Especially when we hit the Second Cup for a quick breather. We took over, yo! Thanks for joining our team Carla and Tara! Sorry I don't have any pictures of you because I basically stopped taking photos before we walked into Romni because my camera was broken and I was sad. To see some of the photos that didn't turn out too blurry or too broken, check out my flickr. At Romni I bought 14 balls of Noro Silk Garden in colourway #47 for the Fitzgerald sweater (also designed by Jane Ellison) for my Sweetie Pie.

Once everyone had a chance to take a deeeep breath, we all realized we were hungry. Nadia suggested The Queenshead Pub we dove in as fast as possible. What a great suggestion! The barkeep was awesome and didn't get all pissy when she saw our large group, although she did warn us she had only one cook so it would take some time. It did take LOTS of time, but the food was great (at least on our part of the table, forgot to check in with the other side). Since it took so long to get our food, we did get lots of knitting done but we ended up having to skip the bead store and a new yarn/luxury pillow (wuh?!) store and had to run to Lettuce Knit as both the North and West Teams were already done and were waiting for us at the Red Room. Ack!

So off we ran (Ok, we didn't run. We took a short streetcar ride. You get my drift.), feeling a little tired from the combo of food coma and yarn overdose. However, that feeling didn't stop me from buying two balls of Mission Falls 1824 Wool in Curry to make da' bear in Last-Minute Knitted Gifts and a skein of Misti Alpaca Worsted in a funky green/gold colourway to make arm warmers for my Sweetie Pie (not to mention the scarf for the bear) from the same book. Thanks for the alpaca recommendation, Nadia!

All three teams converged at the Red Room for yarn fondling, prizes and bevvies. Sophie once again amazed we with her yarn purchases and Sandi blew my mind her amazing KNITTED Elvis wig.

My haul (a recap): 22(!) balls of Noro Silk Garden, 2 balls of Mission Falls 1824 Wool and 1 skein of Misti Alpaca Worsted. Whew!

And of course, a knit-a-long wouldn't be complete without a knitted item to knit a long. This is what I was working on:

A simple garter stitch wrap for a friend who's having a baby and lives in Huntington Beach (not LA), California. Surprisingly enough, the yarn is 90% acrylic. Perfect to throw in the wash after your baby spits up on you. The bear is for her baby which is due in February and will be able to be thrown in the wash too. And my friend Keri, who couldn't make the KAL, created this little yarn cozy that you see in the pic to test out. I was able to avoid the same knitting disaster I had last year.

Hey East Team Rawkers! If you have a blog and you want me to link to it just leave me a comment and I will update the post. Also if anyone knows how to photoshare with flickr to blogger, please let me know. I'm tired of uploading my pics to my ftp site.

The End.