Thursday, April 30, 2009

Ribbit

In honour of my mother, who is currently attending her monthly Knitting Night, I thought I would blog about all the knitting I did while I was in Toronto. You see, while the past several years have proven that I am incapable of blogging from Toronto there is one thing I do there without fail. Lest any of you gutter-minded types think you know the answer allow me to remind you that I was staying with my parents! Nope, whenever I visit my childhood home my mother and I hit our local yarn shop – Mary’s Yarns – and I pick up my needles and get to knitting.

The impressively large stash I keep in the corner of our guest room might suggest that I do little more than knit all year round, but the truth of the matter is that once I finish a project I tend to put my needles and notions aside and mange, somehow, to forget just how much I love the craft of knitting. (I won’t even mention how I have considered this a useful skill in case I am thrown back in time or find myself transported to a post-apocalyptic world and need to clothe myself.)

But get me to Toronto and the memories come flooding back. Mary’s in Unionville is the haven where my mother and I feed our rampant need for massive amounts of yarn. Lest you think I am gushing for no reason, I even met a fellow Mary Worshiper on my flight to New York! How’s that for random?

The first project I started was a stuffed animal later gifted to my friend Adelpha who was busy stuffed animal sitting for me back in Cairo. After a few days of flipping through my mother’s pattern books I found an adorable frog in Puddle Jumper by Elite Classic Yarns. After studying the pattern for a few minutes, I realized that the design was so basic that even a flat knitting freak like myself could knit this up fairly quickly.

Ribbit, as I dubbed him, knitted up in less than a week. The knitting and sewing up took exactly two balls of Royal Tweed – I literally had to go through the trash to find a one-inch sample of yarn to include in my finished projects book.

The scarf is not included in the original pattern but I decided to include it since Ribbit seemed rather naked. The scarf was knitted “wrong ways” and cast on 100 stitches allowing me to knit only 10 rows. I had so much fun with the scarf that I bought extra balls of these two yarns so I can knit myself a full sized-scarf later.

My latest project/obsession is a log cabin blanket that I am knitting in Cascade 220. This is another one of those projects that seems to grow a little bit every time I pick it up. I thought about doing a classic log cabin since I didn’t like the “Moderne” but eventually decided to find a happy medium simply do my round of five colours until I run out of yarn. My plan is to eventually finish the blanket with a black border but knowing me I’m still ages and ages from that stage. In the mean time, I am greatly enjoying taking a break from the computer to pick up my needle and get my knit on.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

The Long Way Around

I know I keep apologizing for my long silences and many of you are probably ready to give up on me, write me off, stop reading, or worse - stop commenting. I have no grounds to ask this of you but I will attempt to appeal to you none-the-less: Please give me another chance! Again.

Moreover, I beg your indulgence for my two month long Canadian silence. I wasn’t buried in snow banks, or even kept prisoner in my childhood room with its thirty-year-old baby wallpaper. But to say I was hibernating would not be inaccurate. In addition to temporarily silencing this blog, I was also unconscionably silent to good friends in Toronto who sought me out – and those whom I should have sought out on my own. I stayed hidden within the comforting cocoon of my family and used the time to try to pull myself together.

And that, my Devoted Readers and Friends, is closer to the truth than I gave even those closest to me. Not that I lied to anyone about the reasons for my disappearance from the Cairo scene – everything I said was true – just different shades of the truth.

It is my fervent hope that I am now back for good. (Well, other than brief trip to Oslo, Norway next weekend.) The upside of all this is that I now have oodles of tales to tell. From shopping and knitting, to Mario Batali and Wicked; I’ve had a busy spring and I can’t wait to tell you all about it!