Domestically Challenged

Fastest Knit Ever

Tomorrow is Elaine’s Birthday. Happy Birthday, Elaine!

She doesn’t get a birthday very often, due to that leap year thing, so I’m going to Montreal to celebrate it with her tomorrow night. I’ve also made her this:

This was seriously the fastest knit ever. I think that the hat may have even been faster than the Magic Slippers. I cast on and finished it during My Best Friend’s Wedding which was on TV Tuesday night. I used some Rowan Little Big Wool that I picked up at Romni last weekend and a really long 15 mm circular needle. I really wished I had 15 mm dpns but suffered through an improvised magic loop method. I really hope that this hat looks as cute as Elaine as it does on me. I may have to make one for myself (especially if it stays this cold).

February is for Finishing

This is the second year in a row I've joined February is for Finishing. I'm not sure I actually finished anything last year, but this year I'm on fire. Well, relatively speaking. Not only did I get Twinkletoes out of my knitting basket but I finally attached the hood to this cabled baby cardigan and sewed on the buttons. This had been at the bottom of my knitting basket since August!

Now there is much more space in there for new things. To celebrate, I cast on these tiny baby slippers. What a fast knit! If you need instant gratification, I highly recommend this pattern.

Now I just need to finish my Best Friend Cardigan before the end of winter.

More Stitch n' Bitch

We are becoming less and less domestically challenged at the apartment. I blame this on B who knows how to do things like strip and wax a floor. Hopefully some of these skills will rub off on me. When we heard that we may get a little baby-sized visitor at our sn'b last week, B and I scoured the house in preparation.

C brought her baby for the first hour and she was so fascinating that we were all enamoured with her. I pretty much spent the entire time ignoring my knitting and staring at her. I also couldn't find the yarn I needed to finish the baby sweater I was making, which further hindered my progress. I looked in the big stash, but it wasn't there. Then I dumped out my knitting basket and found a big knot of crap that shocked and horrified B (who is anal about organization).

Surprisingly, the missing ball of yarn wasn't in there either. I did discover a pair of forgotten toddler-size Twinkletoes slippers, though. All that was left to do was weave in the ends and find a baby to wear them. Hmm...where could I find a baby? I promptly gifted them to C who was kind enough to send me some pics of her little daughter modeling them. They are definitely cuter than I thought they would be.

Some Squirrels Are Bigger Than Others

One of the first things I did last Sunday was finish and block my Squirrelly Swedish Mitts.

This is only my second stranded colour work project and I am so happy with how the mitts turned out.  Not only do they fit but they aren't that wonky where I put in the third colour. I just hope that I can let this go:

This project was the first time I tried to use a third colour. I must have been being so anal when I knit the first set of squirrels (left), holding the yarn tighter than normal with paranoia that I would screw it all up. By the second mitt (right), I must have been more confident, more relaxed, and held my yarn closer to my usual tension. It could have also had something to do with that bottle of German beer I was drinking at the time. After all, my gauge is two whole stitches taller than it should be! Maybe I'll just tell people that one mitt has the mother squirrels and the other has the babies ones...

I'm also thankful that I had all of that practice with duplicate stitch on the arrgyle arrmwarmers:

Devil squirrel?? I must have been very, very relaxed.

Wrap Up

So many things happened while I was in Italy that I wanted to blog about but, in the interest of time, I’ll just give you the Coles Notes version. The first weekend of my trip I had free time to do whatever I wanted. Seeing as I missed her wedding, I thought I should fly to Belgrade to visit with my dear friend, A, and meet her new husband. It was so nice to catch up and see what her life is like in Eastern Europe. Some parts of Belgrade were beautiful.

Other parts were Orwellian.

And some parts were ridiculous and heartbreaking.

As usual, my visit with A was too short.

My last night in Italy, my hostess and I went to Varese where we shopped (but didn’t buy anything) and went out for dinner with a few other people from the office. I had my first (but not my last) prosecco and some of the most delicious gnocchi I’ve ever tasted. I actually don’t usually like gnocchi, but three of us were splitting three dishes, one of which was shrimp and spinach gnocchi. The brie and asparagus risotto was also amazing. It almost made me want to learn how to cook.

Then suddenly, my trip was over. The flight from Milan to Frankfurt was uneventful but I did revel in the beauty that is the Frankfurt airport. Well, that is until I realized that the Frankfurt airport is some sort of time warp. Even though I kept walking straight ahead I kept passing the same stores. I must have walked for half an hour until I got to where I needed to be for my connecting flight and the whole way the stores repeated themselves. I even passed a lost couple who were arguing about whether they had passed that particular Relay kiosk across from the pretzel stand. I knew everything would be ok though when I entered the waiting area for my flight and saw a familiar face.

(yes, Hagrid was made entirely out of lego)

On the flight to Toronto, I had an aisle seat in the middle section, the worst section, of the plane. I was grateful to be on the aisle though. Being wedged in the middle of the middle section would have been an absolute nightmare. Once I had settled in, a woman approached me and asked if I would mind trading aisle seats with her so that she could sit with her sister. I often ask people to trade seats so that I can sit with my husband, so I was more than happy to do this, despite my most recent experience trading seats before take-off. My new seat mate was a very slight and proper German man in his early 20s, who was probably offend that I visibly wasn’t wearing a bra and that my knee would sometime brush against his. Who’s the pervert now?

I originally thought that the flight would be around 6 hours, but it was in fact 8. This allowed me plenty of time to finish the second Squirrelly Mitt. While I was knitting them, I could hear a knitter diagonally behind me giving her seat mate a play-by-play of what I was doing. Other people on the flight were curious about the mitts and the finished one did a tour of the older women who were on their way back from Cairo. All of their nice compliments were an enormous ego boost. This extra energy was necessary, too, because when we landed in Toronto, I realized that since the flight had been 8 hours instead of 6 that I had less than an hour to board my connecting flight. In theory, this should have been made easier by the fact that I didn't have to change terminals, but still, I had to clear customs, get my luggage, drop off my luggage and go through security; all things that could take an enormous amount of time if there was a charter flight to Cuba. Luckily, I was wearing my running shoes. I ran at least a kilometre from the gate to customs. No line. I ran to the luggage carousel and called B to get the 411 while I waited. 10 minutes later I had a bag. On my way to the connecting flights luggage conveyor belt, my boarding pass was examined and it was questioned whether my luggage would actually get on the plane. I finally got the green light and ran up to the departures level, 4 stories up. This is where I was a bit confused. My boarding pass did not have a gate number because it had been issued in Milan and I couldn’t find the monitors with the gates, only the ones with the check-in desk information. I decided just wait in the line up at security and figure it out on the other side. No line. I made it to the gate with enough time to sit and call my sweet husband. If all of my Canadian money hadn’t been in my checked luggage, I would have had a beer to celebrate.

Squirrel Love

This past week I have been staying with one of the big bosses of the organization where I am working this week. She has a beautiful home with a view of the mountains and the lake that she shares with two cats. I am fortunate enough to have my own bedroom that has a view of the lake and my own bathroom. Talk about spoiled.

My hostess is incredibly generous and has even taken measures to incorporate me into her nightly activities. The first activity was "pilates". It was taught by an 70-year old Dutch lady who used to be a ballerina; something that was evident in how she carried herself around the room, swan neck extended and expression lit up as though she were on stage. Her excited demeanor was mirrored in her outfit - fluorescent green T-shirt clashing wildly with her hot pink lipstick. At least her pants were a neutral gray. She was very nice, which helped when she spontaneously started to grab my body in intimate places in order to mold me into different positions. I'm pretty sure we weren't actually doing pilates until the ab work at the end. I did feel stretched out afterward though I am still trying to figure out the rationale behind the jettes at the barre. Last night, I was going to borrow one of my hostess’ swimsuits and accompany her to the pool. I was having a bit of anxiety about this because I was in desperate need of a bikini wax and I was really reluctant to shave (razor burn and such). My husband laughed at me when I confessed that everyday I tried to make a dent with the tweezers. He reasoned that because I'm in Europe, many people would be displaying body hair in various places. So instead of dreading it, I decided to own it. I would be “that woman”, not caring about anyone’s reaction, if only for blog content. I was even looking forward to it. Around 8 pm, though I was exhausted from a long day of meetings and I could feel my enthusiasm to display my untended bikini line in public waning. Instead of getting cold and wet, I had a very strong desire to curl up on the warm couch with a cold German beer and work on my Squirrelly Mitts.

The first time I saw the Squirrelly Mitts on my friend’s activity page on Ravelry, I was completely obsessed with them. I haven’t day dreamed about casting on a project in ages and wasn’t the least surprised when I ignored my yarn diet and bought fresh yarn for the project at Wool Tyme. I cast on a few nights before I left for Italy because I wanted to add a Latvian braid at the cast-on edge (a popular modification) and I wanted to make sure I had internet resources available (something that is lacking on the plane). Fortunately casting on at home also gave me access to B who was able to decipher the tutorial on Savannahchik’s blog.

Apparently, I have some sort of difficulty with simple instructions. (Thanks, B!). I didn’t knit much on the plane though because I really needed to prepare for the workshop and because I really wanted to avoid any conversations with the pervert. I did knit in the evenings after the workshop to decompress and managed to finish the first mitt before going to Belgrade for the weekend even though I again ran into trouble with simple instructions. Instead of paying attention to the instruction that read, “knit the 14 stitches that appear above the thumb placement line, and then move these stitches to waste yarn”, I put all of the stitches above the lines for both thumbs (29 stitches total) and knit on happily for a very large number of rows. Ripping that back almost reduced me to tears. Tonight, I am trying to finish the little squirrels on the second mit. I just think that they are so cute, especially their perky little tails.

(Like my manicure? It almost made me late for my flight to Toronto!!)

Arona: Wine Not?

After the conference ended on Thursday, the North American contingent took a ferry across Lago Maggiore to Arona. I was under the impression that we were just going to wander around the town and maybe find some place to have dinner. I later discovered L's secret agenda - a hike up a steep hill to see the statue of San Carlos. L, the fearless American, had seen the statue from our side of the lake on the first day he arrived and was determined to see it close up.  K and I were game when he assured us that it was close by; after all, we were wearing high-heeled boots. We should have been wary when we saw that L was wearing his hiking boots. We started along the road in the direction of the statue along a nice paved sidewalk. I was thankful for the guardrails on one side of us because the traffic was whizzing by quite quickly, despite the hairpin turns in the road. Then, the sidewalk ended and we had to cross to the other side. This was made more difficult by the fact that we could not see what was coming over a bend in the road. Luckily it was getting dark and we could anticipate the oncoming traffic by the headlights. I never played chicken as a child, but it think this came close. Once safely across, we started up a steep stone staircase through the woods. If I was out of breath and I’m a long distance runner, I can only imagine how K felt. I paused with her a few times where we reflected that vertical climbs were good for the metabolism and that we should certainly have my favourite carb-rich energy drink (beer) once we reached the top. I wasn’t too phased when we reached the top of the stairs and the statue was nowhere in sight. After all, my father would often tell me that our destination was just around the next corner on our many biking excursions and L held a similar attitude. K and I continued on behind L reasoning that we had come this far despite the approaching nightfall, the lack of a sidewalk and the hot white pain we felt with each high-heeled step. After beginning to doubt its existence, we finally found San Carlo,  silhouetted against the dark sky. He was just across the street from a church and adjacent bar (!), which K spotted before any of us. After a refreshment, we made our way back to the town even though it was almost completely dark. I was only half joking when I suggested we call a cab. Our dinner back in Angera was well deserved. After almost an entire year of abstinence, I indulged in a shellfish zuppa. It was almost worth being subjected to L's death march.