Happy late blogiversary to me!

Yesterday was my very first blogiversary...and I totally missed it! To celebrate, I thought I'd republish my very first post about how I learned to knit. Enjoy ;0)

{Hello World, October 3rd, 2005}

My mother was one of 24 chidren. Yup! No really! My grand-parents were farmers in rural Quebec and being good Catholics in the 1930s and '40s had a child every year they could. My grand-father passed away when I was 3, but my grand-mother lived to be 84 years old.

She spent the long Quebec winters in Rimouski with one of my uncles and his wife but in the summer she would pack her bags, her knitting needles and her yarn and travel down the St-Lawrence River to Montreal where she would visit with all her children and grand-children and great-grand-children. She would spend about a week at each of her childrens' homes and knit mittens and socks and slippers for everyone in that family and then moved on.

During one of those visits, she taught me to "tricoter a l'endroit" (knit) and "tricoter a l'envers" (purl) with some scrap yarns. (Did I mention she was french? In fact my whole family is...I'm the anomaly. More on that later, but now back to my knitting debut. ) My grandma would watch me knit and every once in a while, she would have to put down her mittens in progress and try to figure out where I went wrong. Somehow, I always ended up with too many stitches (which is weird because now I always seem to be loosing stitches!). Anyway, I would make a little square, get bored and go draw or play house instead.

My grandmother passed when I was a teen and it wasn't until my early twenties that I got the knitting bug from a Martha Stewart Baby magazine. I got myself some needles and cotton yarn and knit the garter stitch baby sweater. It was pretty much a bunch of rectangles seamed together into a buttonless cardigan but it looked pretty good. I made one for my nephew and put the needles away for another couple of years. I was working full-time and finishing my bachelor's degree on a full-time basis as well and just didn't have time for knitting. Textbooks occupied my commuting time.

I got married last year and moved to a new house in the suburbs. One of the implications was a 1h30 minute train ride each way to and from work and since I graduated and don't have any more required reading...I picked up one of Debbie Bliss' learn to knit books and the rest is history. The addiction began. I was encouraged by all the knitting blogs out there and now that I am at home on maternity leave with my 3 month old son, I have both the time to knit and a growing model for all those very cute and very quick knit baby sweaters and booties.

So expect to see a lot of baby knits 'cause he's always growing out of something...

Cheers!

{The continuation}

Of course Julian is now 15 months old and history is about to repeat itself as I am expecting my second child...so expect to see more baby knits in the future too ;0)

One of the things that really solidified my knitting career was that the week after our wedding, Stephen's job took him to Indiannapolis Mondays through Thursdays for 6 months! Here I was in a new house on an undeveloped street (basically, the woods!) far, far away from anything without cable or satellite which left me incredibly bored in the evenings!

Knitting really helped me get through this time. It was fun. It busied my commute and my evenings. And I keep such a good memory of that time even though I was seperated from my newlywed. All those nights spent bundled up on Stephen's side of the bed, wearing his woolies, listening to AM talk radio on our clock radio and trying to figure out different knitting techniques while I waited for our nightly call.

That's when knitting became more than a past-time for me. It became a part of who I am. So I'll always be a little grateful for those long lonely months ;0)

Why I hate to love Noro...

So after my mitten success, I decided to do something with my Noro stash. I bought these 4 balls of Noro silverthaw in a great orangy-pink-green-purplish colourway (it was a really late night guilty pleasure from the Cucumber Patch). Now this is some of the most expensive yarn I have ever bought. I mean, $10 a ball and shipping from England? That's a far stretch from my usual Elann fare. But I totally fell in love with the colourway. It reminds me of a rich Gustav Klimt painting. Really. Love at first sight.

I bought 4 balls not knowing what I would knit with it and then spent months trying to find a project that woud do it justice. Then I found this and made a plan! I wrote out the pattern line by line (don't you hate it when patterns just refer you other lines in the pattern...just write it out people!?!!), found some Addi's and off I went. So for the first like 10 inches I was loving the Noro. Loving it! The colours. The way they speckle into each other at the transitions. Ah!


And then it happened. That kooky Noro thing I have read about many many times before happened... TO ME! The colour sequencing went all wonky. Purple, pink, orange, green, teal and purple. What a marvelous colour combo. Take a breather to admire the deliciousness of it all, grab a drink and a snack, squeeze the hubby and the baby, pat the growing belly and continue. Ah! Purple, pink, GREEN?! What happened to the orange? It's okay. It's going to be okay. It's probably coming up next. What? Teal? Purple? Okay, this is all wrong. Stupid Noro!

I don't think Noro is made for uptight people like me! Seriously. I can't love this scarf now. I want to. I really do. But everytime I look at it, I think "THAT'S SUPPOSED TO BE ORANGE!!!" So I guess it's destined for the gift pile. I'll have to give it to a less tense person than I ;0)

In Jujube news, OMG there's like 10 zillion new things a day! But today, he took 5 steps towards his mommy. And yes, my heart totally melted. How I love that child ;0) Also new this week lots of singing, most notably "row, row, row" and "melly, melly, melly" from that boat song! But also "Pat-a-cake" complete with the clapping and key actions! Then there was "Plea" as in "Mo plea" when he wants more apple Bear Paw cookies. Grandpa also taught him to say "va-va-va-voom"! I'm not sure what the context of that one was but I'm really curious about what's going on over the during the day. LOL! Okay, that's enough gushing about baby for one post. I'll save the photos for next week. Now for the baby belly. Everything is going really well except that I am still super tired. What is up with that? Ugh! At least I have the best, most understanding and helpful husband in the world ;0)

Oh, and I can knit again!!!

ps - I will be moderating comments for the next little while due to comment spam I received in my last post. You can leave comments as usual and I'll approve them before they appear on the site. That way I can filter out Viagra pitches :0)

Actual knitting!

Yesterday was the day! I took out some yarn and needles and actually knit something for the first time in over 2 months...and it felt great!


I made it easy on myself though and picked an interesting but small project and was amazed at how quickly it came together. Here are my Target Wave Mittens from Norah Gaughan's Knitting Nature.

The pattern is sized for children but I was able to make toddler mitts by simply using thinner yarn and smaller needles. I used stash Peruvian Alpaca from elann and knit them up using size 3 needles (3.25mm) instead of the recommended size 8 (5mm) needles. I also altered the number of 'rings' around the thumb so that they would fit Julian better (that's two fewer colour changes for the thumb). Other than that, I didn't have to modify the pattern at all to resize these for toddlers!

Here they are being modelld by my sleepy Jubilee (isn't napping in a sunbeam the best?). They still need a serious blocking but I'm really happy with how they turned out - never mind that I was able to finish them in the time it took to watch Transamerica and Kinky Boots! If you want to give the pattern a go, but don't want to spend the big bucks for the book, pick up a copy of the current Interweave Knits magazine. This pattern is included as a 'preview' ;0)

Have a good week everybody!

PS - thanks for all your kind wishes about my big baby news last week. I had a Doctor's appointment on Friday and all is well. We even got to hear the little one's heat beat. Oh, how I love that sound ;0)

Extra! Extra!

Mama's got really big news! We're talking little itty baby news! A few weeks after my big return to work at the beginning of July, Stephen and I were thrilled to discover that we are expecting our second child!



Turns out we got pregnant right around our Jubilee Bubilee's first birthday, a few days before I went back to work. Talk about an exit strategy! I've been keeping the secret from you all this time because some of my colleagues read this blog and I wasn't ready to tell them yet. But everyone knows now...I can't hide that belly anymore! Already!

I'm 13 weeks in and am starting to feel that wonderful, miraculous 2nd trimester energy boost. Well, I'm wishfully thinking anyway ;0) I've been sooooo tired this time around. I've been going straight to bed as soon as I come home from work in the evenings and frankly haven't seen August go by. Actually, I'm shocked that it's already September. Aren't you?

I haven't been blogging because I've mostly been sleeping! And truth be told I haven't knit a single stitch since my last post way back in July. Knitting is one of the very few things this time around that give me nausea. I haven't even flipped through recent knit zine subscriptions because for some inexplicable reason, doing so makes me dizzy. I hope to be back at it really soon though. Like I said, anyday now, I should be full of energy and back to my old past-times.

Oh, how I hope!