I didn't go to the knitter's Frolic today.

It's not because of the transit strike - I would have gotten a ride in with my family anyway - and it wasn't for lack of interest or because of a yarn diet. Instead, for the last two weekends I have been taking a weaving class at Wellington Fibres.

The class is four full days of instruction led by two amazing instructors, named Rosemary and Mary. These ladies rock. In the first two days of class they taught us how to wind a warp, dress the loom, and weave in twill. It was amazing. I can't show you what we wove in that first weekend yet because I need to do some finishing work before I show it off.

Weaving is hard work! I'm not used to working on a project all day long - I can already feel a little soreness in my back from the day's work. Still, I'm really enjoying working on the big looms. Someday when I have lots of space I'll have to invest in one. I'm already envisioning all the amazing things I could make on a loom like the one I'm using.

This weekend, we are working on a six-inch wide scarf. The warp of my scarf is Wellington Fibres mohair yarn in a gorgeous walnut brown, and the weft is my handspun, so obviously this project will be very special once it's finished.

We're having a campfire tonight... It will be a good way to relax after a day of crafting!

I confess to a weakness for deep, dramatic reds and burgundies.

This is a sweater I have been working on for a while, but I've ripped and reknit the yoke a few times because I was having a case of knitter's block.

I wanted to use some sort of textured pattern on the yoke of this sweater, but nothing was working right, so I decided to take a different tack entirely, and this colourwork pattern is what I came up with. In this photo I'm just about to begin working on a Norwegian Snowflake motif.

I never thought coral and burgundy could work together, but these complement each other pretty nicely. There is more contrast between them in real life, but this was the best I could get in the few moments I had with my Powershot today. I like reds, but they can be kind of difficult to photograph.

For some reason I'm really liking hemmed edges on my sweaters lately. I love the way they look, and the way they defy explanation to knitters who have never seen them before... :grins:

It's a snow day at my university today, so I am at home in my pyjamas. It's actually really convenient because I feel like death walking at the moment: I have a TERRIBLE cold which I can't seem to get any relief from. It is kind of sad to waste a snow day on being sick though.

For Christmas this year my mom gifted me with an Ashford Knitter's loom. I love my mom, she's awesome - she even picked out the 20-inch wide one rather than the 12-inch one, so this loom is definitely pretty versatile. I'm having a lot of fun experimenting with it, and using up a little yarn stash to boot.

I started weaving almost instantly after we finished unwrapping gifts on Christmas morning: I wove this little scarflet in a couple hours...

The warp (dark green) is briggs and little, and the weft is some merino navajo-plied handspun, both of which had been sitting around forever. It made me smile to have a whole project finished before I had owned the loom for more than a few hours.

Since then I've been making long panels which I figure I will sew together to make a blankie. The warp in this one is Rowan DK tweed, and the weft is two strands of random coned mohair, one pink and one white.

I brushed the fabric after I took these photos, so now it has a nice halo.

Warping the loom is pretty easy compared to the trials and tribulations of warping other, more complicated looms, but it is still a bit of a tedious process. I do find the actual weaving, it's pretty addictive. The speed with which you can finish a project is definitely appealing. I've already warped the loom with a second panel, using a dark purple warp and the same mohair yarn for the weft. So much fun.

I have a to give a presentation tomorrow on femininity in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, so of course this is the perfect time to be updating my blog. You gotta love procrastination! It's really easy to tell if I have a lot of deadlines coming up: I get a lot of knitting done during those times!

Anyway, this weekend I had the chance to stop in at Lettuceknit, and I couldn't leave without taking home some spinning fiber... there was some beautiful stuff there, but I ended up with this merino/alpaca blend from Fleece Artist:

As you can see, there are no pictures of it in fibre form, because it was just too tempting. I predrafted it the day after we got back from our various Toronto adventures, and spun it up the day after that. It turned out beautifully, a light worsted weight two-ply which wants to be a hat.

Actually, it insists that it shall be a hat, and the knitting shall commence NOW, no waiting, no excuses.

It's very demanding yarn. Who am I to resist such orders? I don't think it will remain in skein-form for very long.

Since we last met, I've come down with a wicked bad case of startitis.

Because of this, I think I'll start my latest and hopefully more successful attempt to blog frequently with a look at my collection of WIPs, because hey, it's January, which is definitely the best time for taking stock and reevaluating all these projects which are cluttering up my craft room, right?

To begin with: This is my version of Jared Flood's Hemlock Ring Blanket:

Yarn: Alpaca With A Twist, a dk weight yarn which was a recent arrival at the Stitch Niche, the yarn store I work at/loiter in.

Needles: Hiya-Hiya 5mm circular needles. I LOVE knitting with these. They are similar in feel to Addi Turbos without the premium price point.

I started this because the photos on Jared's Blog are just too beautiful to resist. I wanted that blanket (and the cup of tea) right this instant, thank you very much. While this project is not exactly instant gratification, it knits up very quickly when I have the time and the available brain power to work on it. Sadly both time and brain power have been in short supply lately... I've been so busy with school and with other even more enticing knitting projects that it only gets sporadic attention right now. I am sure that I will finish it soon, but I think finishing it will require one of those rare episodes of project monogamy.

Next Up: Even More Lace Projects.

The first question most people have been asking me when they run into me lately is this: How is your semester going?

The answer: Today I had a midterm. Yesterday I found out about that midterm at 11.35pm. That's how my semester is going right now.

Actually it's not as bad as that sounds. Really. That happened in one of my lowest-priority classes, and the midterm (which I just finished writing) was actually pretty easy, and didn't require much in the way of last-minute cramming. I'm actually mostly caught up on course readings, I'm even starting to think about essay topics before the deadlines start bearing down upon me, and I'm planning a preparatory reading course for next semester, to be followed by the production of a (hopefully) brilliant and erudite thesis. We'll see how that goes.

This is what I've been doing in my non-existent free time:

This is Eunny Jang's Autumn Rose Pullover. I fell in love with this pattern when I saw it on her blog, and I got a chance to see a finished sample at the K-W knitter's fair.

The only problem? I hate hate HATE the feel of Jamieson's Spindrift. That's just a personal preference, YMMV.

I also wanted to knit a sweater in non-autumnal colours, because my wardrobe tends to get stuck in that rut of reds and browns and golds and such, so I thought I could change things up a little bit with some jewel-tones. And of course find a suitable substitute yarn.

(This photo shows the colours most accurately, in my opinion. I'm really sorry for the lousy photos. There's been a moratorium on natural light here in Canada for the past few weeks. We'll have to wait until that ban is over before getting a decent look at this sweater.

The yarn I went with is Rowan Felted Tweed. Pricey, I know, and made even pricier by a lousy online vendor who shall remain nameless, but who decided that using DHL to ship to Canada was a good idea. The colours I'm using are: Bilberry, Melody, Midnight, Crush (discontinued, substitute Sigh), Wheat, Camel, Cocoa, and Carbon. If you're interested in using a slightly softer, cushier yarn than Jamiesons. I'm really happy with the way this yarn is working up, happier than i would have been with the Jamieson's, I think.

Note to all online vendors: DO NOT use DHL, they will bleed your customers dry with extra shipping and handling charges on top of the fees your customers have already paid you directly. They are EVIL.

But I love my sweater so far.

Sweaters don't progress very quickly when they are relegated to 'Side Project' status.

Lately the Log Cabin Blankie has been taking up most of my knitting energy, so my latest sweater project is moving way too slow for my liking.

This is a heavily modified version of Veronik Avery's "Dollar and a Half cardigan" - an interesting little pattern that kept nagging at me all summer until I finally gave in and cast on. I wanted to have it done for school, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen, because I'm obviously in for a very long stay on Sleeve Island with this sweater. Oh well.

I really quite like the lace sections of this pattern - they're interesting to knit and yet they are not too airy for a winter sweater like this one is meant to be. Here's hoping it fits well when it's finished. Several people have had trouble with a bit of a michelin-man effect because of the different gauges of the lace sections and the stockinette, and I'm hoping to avoid that. We shall see.

This week has been all about getting ready for the upcoming semester, but I've managed to squeeze in some fiber-related activities here and there.

I have some random acts of kindness/good customer service to tell you about.

First, allow me to introduce you to Ely:

A couple days ago I received 8oz of alpaca (from an alpaca named Ely!) in the mail from Ann, who runs Maple Corners Camelids. She had seen a comment I made on Franklin Habit's blog, The Panopticon, expressing my wish that someone would send me drive-by roving, just as Franklin had the good luck to receive some. Bless her, Ann saw the comment and decided to grant my wish!

I literally danced about when I opened the box, so happy did this make me. It's so soft and beautiful, I'm spinning with a fingering-weight 2-ply in mind. I want to do this stuff justice.

That's not the only Random Act I have to report, though. A while ago I put in an order for a pattern from Schoolhouse Press, but it turns out I am not so good with this online shopping thing after all. I think I must have misunderstood the order form, because I ended up ordering the wrong pattern.

The wrong pattern arrived on a Very Bad Day.

Normally, I like to think of myself as a good customer. I don't like to think of myself as one of those customers. But it was a Very Bad Day and I proceeded to have a meltdown and completely throw email ettiquette out the window, partly because of the bad day and partly because I didn't see how this could have been my fault. (I now understand what I did wrong when I ordered.) Anyway, I was definitely way too curt in one email and hit that send button before I had the sense to self-edit.

Let that be a lesson to you. Think it over before you hit send.

There was more emailing back and forth, and I apologised, and wouldn't you know, that despite my bad behaviour, they knocked down the price of a replacement pattern for me, giving me a discount even though I was totally in the wrong. Amazing! I'm pretty sure I'll be ordering from them (carefully this time!) in the future.

Have any of you ever been a bad customer? I was actually quite shocked at myself, I'm not usually like that as far as I know and I don't want to repeat the experience. Must work on controlling my temper in these kinds of situations, I guess =)

Anyhow, I have a sweater project in the works just in time for fall, so my next post will contain some actual knitting content, I promise!

For some reason I haven't managed to find the time to take pictures of knitting for a while... I guess I've been too busy enjoying my vacation now that I'm finished with my summer job. Call it blog amnesia, I guess. I have been doing a lot of knitting, though, so I should have something to show for my work sometime soon.

I've been busy doing plenty of non-knitting stuff, as well:

Yesterday, I made peach crisp to take over to a friends house for dessert. Peaches are just in season here so it turned out beautifully and tasted so good. Here they are before I put the crisp topping on, just sprinkled with some brown sugar and cinnamon:

One of the strange things about me is that I'm allergic to raw peaches but I can eat them cooked, so I always love finding new and interesting ways to prepare them.

I had a bunch of bananas which had gotten overripe a few days ago, so those turned into banana muffins. I've been nibbling on these with my breakfast all week:

And, this whole gardening thing is totally paying off! We've had a constant supply of lettuce since mid-July, along with a near-constant supply of cherry tomatoes. My regular tomatoes, however, have been sluggish. The first crop has only just begun to ripen. I have enough that I'll be able to make a little salsa on Friday, once I exchange some of my cucumbers for some of Protagitron's jalapeno peppers...

I think I may also attempt to oven-dry a few, and make pasta sauce or tomato paste out of some others, and once they begin to really come ripe in large numbers my mom and I will do some canning.... There are too many out there for us to eat them all fresh, that's for sure.

As if that weren't enough, I also think I'm going to make a pot of sweet-potato chili once I get some more zucchini from my two plants... There are a few that are almost big enough to pick, they just need a little more time.

Hopefully I'll find some knitting time in amongst all these projects!

I've had a string of excellent weekends lately. One of my favourites this summer was Hillside weekend! Hillside is a local three-day folk festival which has become a high point of my summers in Guelph. One weekend in July, half of Guelph/surrounding area converges on the island in Guelph lake to watch performers on four stages, attend workshops, demonstrations, and drum circles, eat a diverse assortment of delectable foods, and just have a good time, all while making friends and meeting people. Best of all, it's a knitting-friendly event:

That's me, knitting away on a sock at the Sun Stage. I had such a good time, much better than last year when I got sick halfway through the weekend. So even though it's been a busy summer, I've still been managing to get plenty of knitting time in.

HOWEVER. Immediately after I finished knitting the squares of the log cabin blanket (It still isn't put together...) I came down with an extremely bad case of start-itis. This illness, if you're already aware, is marked by an irresistible need to cast on projects left and right, flitting from one yarn and project to the next like an addled little moth.

Need some evidence?

This is the Myrtle Leaf Lace Shawl, from VLT, knit out of Colinette Parisienne. I haven't picked this up in a week...

...And here we have a large lump of Noro which is a top down vneck cardigan (no pattern, I just improvised....) It's actually a lot further along than this. As in, it's been waiting for buttons and blocking for a week now.

My cousin is adopting a baby in a few months, so I've started knitting an aran pullover for him. The back, front, and half of a sleeve are completed on this, and it's still been a couple days since I've picked this up.

The reason everything seems to have fallen to the wayside this week was that I switched over to some small hat projects for friends this week. I'm still working on one but I've delivered two and they were both very well-received, as far as I could tell. Maybe soon I'll be able to get the start-itis under control.

We just won't talk about the Dollar-and-a-Half cardigan that I cast on for today...