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.