Knitting chat

My favourite part of this past weekend was an hour or two I spent listening to really beautiful choral music while knitting more of the cowl I've been making with the yarn Trish gave me.

It's funny - when I was growing up I could. Not. Stand. Choir. Music.  This posed a challenge for me because in whatever free time he could muster my Dad was a singer, having trained as a boy chorister at the cathedral here in Toronto - when not in actual choirs he was in demand as a soloist for every wedding and funeral in our parish.  Not admiring the music my own dad could and did perform was, to say the least, inconvenient.  But I just didn't like it.  By the time I hit my late twenties though, a few years after he died, it all turned around and now I love it.  Sorry Dad.

That story doesn't have a whole lot to do with this cowl beyond the combination of parental resolution, comfy chair, heart-melting voices in harmony, and absolutely the most wonderful yarn/pattern combo you can imagine, all inside on a grey rainy day with the furnace kicking out just the right amount of warm.

Icing on the cake: the stitch marker I threw onto my circular needle after casting on at my desk, when I realized it was that or walking downstairs to find a real one.  This is the bulb-shaped safety pin that attached the price tag to a dress I bought last spring, and something about it - the shape? the colour? the metal? - just spells Ahhhh.  I think it's a style thing.  And this pin with this yarn and those needles and the stitch pattern I threw together - it's just 100% yum.

My only disappointment is that the yarn is DKish and the cowl just knit up so FAST.  And I want more.  I don't have quite enough of the yarn left to do a whole hat, but I think I will need to rig something up between what I do have and something that can make friends with it. 

(by the way, I'm being a bit sneaky with these pictures.  There's a trick to this cowl which I'll show you in a few days.  stay tuned!)

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After my weekend of incredible leisure, I spent today shifting from one transit stop to another for a bunch of different appointments.  I didn't get much knitting done on bus or subway, but while on a break for coffee in at a bench in a mall I did spot a very tiny girl wearing handknit leg warmers in her stroller.  Brilliant, I thought: totally covered that gap between the blankie bunched up in her fists and her very cute baby shoes.

So of course, I got thinking that knitting baby leggings is absolutely the right thing to do for the two couples whose new babies I want to bring a present to.  Because once you're two months late with the gift, it starts to seem logical to take even longer with the gift, if it means more knitting time.

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The other thing I noticed from the very same spot was a number of people walking up to the shop doorway in front of me to take an iPhone picture of something over my shoulder.  At first I thought this was one of those things that people do with iPhones (I don't have one, so what do I know?) but when I got up to leave I glanced over there myself and discovered they had all been taking pictures of the display in the doorway of Victoria's Secret.

Is that a thing now?  Because the underwear in there looked pretty standard-grade Victoria's Secret to me.

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A couple of nights ago I wandered through a thread at Ravelry with pictures of the last few club yarns from Knitterly Things.  This was an error in judgement.

I have SO many socks knit with Knitterly Things' Vesper Sock (see 'Yarns' tab above), because it was the first club I joined, way back before I even knew how to knit socks, and I kept renewing.  It takes me about 2 months to knit a pair of fingering weight socks, and you get 2 skeins of yarn in that time, so it doesn't take a lot of math to figure out I am swimming in Vesper Sock, even though I eventually made myself stop renewing 'until I caught up'.  I was doing okay with that plan until I realized I could buy one-off skeins of Vesper Sock from the online shop, and now I'm back up to about a year's supply.

Le sigh.  Yesterday, I was early at the dentist's, wearing one pair of Vesper socks and knitting another, and Maria admired them both, and I remembered the yarn pictures I'd just seen, and I thought MAN, I really miss those club shipments.  And when I got home I saw the next club is opening up for new memberships (which I guess is me, after all this time) in November.

I wonder how much more Vesper I can work through in two weeks, so I can justify joining?

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Okay: time to get on with the day.  Mine is looking pretty good even though I'm not quite sure where I'll be working the knitting in, and I hope yours is too!