Can these socks be saved

Hello again from from the knitting fail corner of Hugs! Looking over past posts, I see I started these socks as a Christmas present to myself in October 2021 (or more likely, the year before that, and hoped to knuckle down and have them ready for December 24, to tuck into my stocking.)

 

The good news is, they all but finished now. The second sock, currently filling a cute tinyhappy knitting bag, is also ready to graft at the toe. But I haven't done any grafting, because when I got this far and tried them on, I realized.... (cue the dramatic music)

THEY ARE SNUG AT THE ANKLE.

Okay I am pretty sure I know how this happened. The yarn is practically all alpaca and it's a heavier weight than I normally use, so I had to improvise the number of stitches I cast on and trust in the stretchability of the fiber, which was asking too much of it because alpaca isn't known for its elasticity. I knew this at the time. I have no excuse for this error in judgement.

Alternatively, I may have gained weight. I mean we all know our ankles is the first place those extra cookies go, right? 

 

Apparently I've been considering this problem for nearly a year without coming to a decision, so perhaps it's time to go over the two options I've identified. 

I can finish them and never wear them, which isn't a much different outcome than the ideal because hello: white alpaca DK socks? I can only ever wear these on a chaise for reading while not even thinking about getting up to make more tea, or in bed for sleeping for the first twenty minutes before I wake up in a sweat and claw them off my feet. 

Or, I can rip them out and reknit them with more stitches, and hope I have enough yarn to get to the toe because my vision was so very much a monotone foot. This approach will probably involve ripping, skeining, Soaking, drying, and ball-winding because who wants to knit with seriously kinked yarn?

I guess these two options are really:

I can finish them and never wear them or

I can just not finish them. 

Let's leave this horrible thought for your subconscious to ponder, or not, and do what I've been doing all this time which is looking at something pretty.

Two people I like have birthdays coming up - well, more than two people, but two I'm actually thinking about making my own cards for - so naturally I got out my watercolour paints to make some rectangular backgrounds on heavy paper.

This paint - small specialty sets from Kuretake Gamsai Tambi - has a ton of glitter in it and, by some chemical miracle, none of it rubs off once it's dry. I'll tell you though, the water you use to clean your brush is like a glitter whirlpool when you shine light through it. 

 

 

Even with two layered together, the colours seemed a little depressing for a milestone birthday in particular, so I also painted some backgrounds in regular watercolour. After it all dried and I cleaned away the brushes, I got out a Micron pen and started doodling. 

I don't think any of these are ready for their Hallmark Card debut, but I am at peace with that. Well, mostly. After panicking just a tiny bit I decided to work with the depressing glittery ones.

At this angle you can really see the glitter, which kind of compensates for the meh colours, don't you think? And also, in the case of the middle doodle especially, the illusion of birthday snakes emerging from a basket to surround you.

 

Next up: the paper cutter and some double-sided mounting tape. Naturally, I have no idea where my art card stock with matching envelopes have gone, so I will be doing a flat panel and slipping it into a gift bag. Invention, meet your mom Necessity.

Hope you have a lovely week not grieving over the agonizing choice I am putting off for my beautiful, unwearable socks! Let's get together again next Saturday.

(oh, I just realized there's a third option. I can finish the socks and give them to somebody with very slim ankles and a chaise reading habit. sadly neither of my birthdaying friends qualify, but maybe if I wait long enough I'll know somebody else who does...)

Happy Creative New Year

... and I hope it is a happy and productive one for us all!

I have been swept up in so many projects the last few months, thankfully none of them in any way related to being sick. There has been some rearranging of mantelpiece decor, as above (see the sock blockers in the corner there? compliments of Trish, who spotted them years ago at a rummage sale I had just left, and missed seeing - they have walked around to different display areas here ever since.)

Lots of watercolour planning and painting, none of it very impressive but always enjoyable. Though, for the record, this snowman looks much more polished in his actual size of Tiny.

SO MUCH FICTION WRITING. In 2021 I wrote and edited a novel, revised another, started a new one, and wrote a short story and started two others, despite all the other pressing crises including my beloved older relative's broken hip and subsequent move, which Pete and I coordinated. (She is doing great!)

A little knitting, not as much as I would like... Omigosh though, I was late to the party discovering that Emily Foden (Viola yarns) has written a knitting book. Naturally, I hesitated zero seconds before purchasing a copy. It arrived in a mailer with one of her quirky/adorable drawings on the back, and inside that was a brown paper wrapper with another drawing by her which I am not throwing out ever, 

and inside THAT was the book. Which is amazing. Emily is one of the most creatively talented people I have ever met and I highly recommend Knits About Winter for the patterns, the photography, the words, and the general feeling of potential while holding it in your hands.

 

(also, this vest.)

Actually a lot of what I'm doing now is about getting at a feeling of calm and possibility, go figure. But Januaries are always like that, aren't they? Even when we're not in a plague year. 

Some of that is coming from shopping, which I'm trying to resist or at least restrict to work-related purchases like pens. Have I mentioned Wonder Pens here? Their website is so welcoming and their photographs so alluring, it's a real delight to spend time with. I usually take my time thinking about what I would most enjoy having and sometimes that means missing out on something very cool. Not always though, heh.

For Christmas I received a Pilot Kakuno fountain pen and it is rarely leaving my hand. 

 

I've already had to order new ink cartridges... plus a second pen with a fine point because I like both fine and medium points, and take notes upstairs and down, so two pens is perfectly logical. Even practical. Ahem.

The Kakuno is a starter fountain pen intended for children (which I still basically am) and has a smiley face on the nib, but adults like it because it is inexpensive and safe to throw into the bottom of a bag and maybe even lose, unlike a $1200 fountain pen because apparently that is a thing that exists. I, however, would cry if I lost mine. It is ergonomically ideal and glides across the paper I'm writing on. 

 

The paper is another Yay... I was reading a review of 'best annual planners' and was reminded of Filofax, a mini version of which I carried for quite a long time pre-cell phones and stumbled across again recently while tidying a bookshelf. Being a diehard shopper I went to their Canadian website and looked at what they're doing these days, then immediately bought myself an A5 size notebook. 

LIFE CHANGING.

The paper is like glass, it's so smooth. But also not like glass because even my beloved new fountain pen doesn't really show through on the other side. And the pages are repositionable, which is perfect for planning a novel and making notes generally. I bought the hole punch too, thinking I would mix and match papers, but I really only want to write on Filofax paper now.

 

My cousin sent me a very enjoyable mystery to read on Boxing Day, aka Mary's Annual Holiday, and I enjoyed it very much alongside my tiny snowman bookmark and tea in a mug I bought myself. Anthropologie has the funnest monogram mugs! But I especially love anything with illustrations by Nathalie Lété. (please note: no watercolour painting took place on my day off, though a Q-tip and my brush cleaner did manage to stay in view at my painting perch.)

 The book, The Secrets of Wishtide by Kate Saunders, was perfect for a lush day off... very well-written and perfectly paced to keep the pages turning. It's always a treat to come across someone delightful you hadn't read before, isn't it. I followed that up between Christmas and New Year's with The Darkest Evening by Ann Cleeves, and enjoyed that enormously too. An excellent reading vacation all around.

Now I am back to cooking every day, which means weekly pizza using a recipe I adapted from this one on the BBC's food site, because the bags of double 0 flour I can buy divide neatly into 500g portions and it calls for 650g. I supplement with 150g of semolina flour and all is well. Also I cheat and use a sheet pan and nobody here cares they're not getting a slice from a circle, but the last time I made it I was struck by the texture on the parchment paper I use for ease of removal and thought I'd share. it's like one of those high school geography class elevation maps, don't you think?

Or maybe I just imagined that. 

 

Here's something more useful to you, perhaps: a project I did for some small Christmas presents and didn't get to share in time. It would work equally well for Valentine's Day or Easter or any other day you wanted to tie a bookmark onto a bar of organic chocolate. Especially if you have an excessive amount of art supplies.

First, I scribbled with a Derwent Inktense pencilcrayon onto a gritty board (you can use a plastic cutting board but I have the Caran D'ache Palette) and wet the marks to get a nice smooth inky paint, then brushed it over a big sheet of watercolour colour. Inktense doesn't reactivate once it's been wet and dried, so this gave me a nice streaky background colour to work with. 

Gosh, even after parking the dried sheet under some very heavy books overnight, the paper still curled a bit... but never mind, it all works out in the end.

 

Then I painted a lot of circles over the sheet, in a very limited watercolour palette of red, turquoise, and a deep shiny purple from Daniel Smith. I outlined some of them, and I left others plain. To liven things up I did a few circles in sparkly white from the Kuretake Gansai Tambi Starry Set. The great thing about those paints: they glisten, but don't rub off as sparkles all over everything you touch.

When all that was dry, I sliced up the sheet with my cheapie Fiskars paper trimmer and voila! 

Pretty bookmarks to slip under the ribbons I used to tie tags onto the chocolate bars. With a gift card or an actual volume, it's an instant book-reading vacation.

There, that bookmark thing alone was supposed to be a whole post of its own back in November. I need to be less busy, I guess.

As it stands, though, that's quite enough from me for today. I will try - I always do try - to check back in more regularly but if you don't hear from me, rest assured I'm still writing away at something you might see at some point. And I will hope all is well with you, too. As a sendoff, let's revisit some more snowmen I did after watching an excellent tutorial from Harriet de Winton on Youtube:

See you soon, hopefully before these two melt away into springtime :^)

A paper garden

Hello again, and welcome to my garden! Since it's on paper, it's easy to share here at Hugs. I will begin with some flowers that look like flowers and are in fact made with watercolour...

pencils. I still canNOT master the hand movement you need for flowers painted with a brush. Something else to work toward I suppose, and in the meantime I have a huge collection of watercolour pencils I might as well be using. I used three different brands to make the pots and cut flowers for that sketch, and three different techniques, though my favourite was just dipping the pencil into water and drawing with it. No intermediaries.

And here we have a plant drawn using a waterproof Micron pen over a dried wash of leftover watercolour paint. Simple to do if a bit daunting when I first put pen to paper, and every time I get such a lift looking at the results.

I've been trying to keep up with twice-monthly Hugs, but I got knocked off my feet by some sad news and couldn't bring myself to post last weekend. I am guessing you're all too familiar with that experience, especially lately. 

 

Hugs has brought a lot of good things and people into my life, but two friends in particular - Lynn and Julia - found me here early on and kindly reached out by e-mail, which I have appreciated enormously over the years. I have learned so much from them both and been able to talk to them about very specific things that don't especially interest other friends, and don't we all need people like that in our lives? I know I do, and I never take it for granted.

Julia sent me a farewell message a few weeks ago, having been diagnosed unexpectedly with a very late-stage, untreatable cancer. She was very accepting of what was coming and I am grateful for her sake that she did not last even as long as the short time her doctor estimated, but also conscious of how young she was, and how bright, and how much she still hoped to do. 

 

I am sure that practically all of us have lost someone important over this last year and that we all have a giant sack of feelings about it. The dominant one for me at this moment is, Life is short and it's best not to wait around to pursue the many interesting things it offers because you just don't know what's coming. It's too easy for me to struggle with indecision over what to do next and get tangled up with doing nothing at all. I'm going to try not to do that going forward.

Not unlike Lynn, Julia had such an appreciation for animals and plants that I couldn't help noticing more about the ones near me than I did before we met, and appreciating them, and cultivating them. She was really good at easy, practical, healthy cooking, which added a valuable dimension to my kitchen time. She was also incredibly resilient and resourceful and strong, no matter what life threw at her. I seem to have gathered many friends with those qualities over the years, but she was exceptional. Witnessing the way she approached things has given me courage to deal with my own obstacles many times, and will go on doing so, I know.

 

So: instead of posting pictures of some doodle flowers and riffing on the random silly things that made up my week as I'd planned to do for this post, I'm planting a little memorial garden for Julia. That's another piece of inspiration she gave me, and one I can see now is a great comfort for the people left behind after a loss. I would be very glad to share it with you: there is space here for anybody you would like to honour, even if you only do that in your mind while reading this.

 

When I was uploading photos for this post, I clicked the wrong menu option and was offered this photo, taken shortly before Julia first contacted me, and embellished I suppose by Google with the .gif of falling snow. I decided to accept the serendipity and close today's Hug with it: a cosy spot close to home and a warm cup of tea, with a pair of handwarmers I knit for a friend. If you've been reading Hugs for any length of time you know what a selfish knitter I am, but one very bad winter when Julia's feet were always cold I knit her a pair of socks with my most special, hand-dyed, very heavy mohair yarn. It felt good to do that for her at the time, but now, I am so glad I took the trouble.

I hope you have a lovely couple of weeks filled with fond thoughts of the good people in your life, past or present. Take care and stay well, and I will see you again soon!

Procrastination by Organization

Hello again! I have dropped in to share my adventures with paint storage, and since that sounds dull even to me, I think it's best if we start with a photo of successful knitting. Plus a box of sort-of matchy pins.

These are socks I've knit and toe-grafted and run in the ends on, but somehow forgot to wash so I could get to wearing them. Mostly they sit in this attractive bowl which was a present from the last friend I got to see in person for lunch before the pandemic. Sandy found it in a dollar store and used it as a vehicle for (amazing) chocolate brownies, but I've appreciated this dish so much and admire it every day, not just for the socks that are in it now. It's like half of a cracked egg: it suggests possibilities. And not just the possibility of a mess on the counter, either.

I've been organizing my art and office supplies for the past few days. Which is much more interesting than, say, paperwork, if only because it's colourful. Just be grateful I'm not here to tell you about all masks I stitched up before treating myself to the organization project because that really was dull and also, hard on my back.

Let's start with a mostly respectable picture of my paint problem, shall we?

Even though I still can't paint a proper, recognizable watercolour flower, I did upgrade to better brushes, and treated myself to a good set of Daniel Smith paints in a tin. That set came with a second, empty tin and it seemed like a wonderful storage solution for my many extra paints, some of which were still in their original tiny sets with no mixing wells or other conveniences. It was such a choppy setup I wasn't using them, and that made me feel even more guilty about having bought so much more than was sensible.

*

Wait a minnit. Isn't this basically everyone's experience with knitting? Whereby one must buy Every. Pretty. Yarn, even before one can knit with even tension? And then it gets worse from there because you decide to learn to spin, too, and have to buy a spindle and some roving and then a wheel? Plus, naturally, a swift. And maybe a bag of undyed roving straight from the sheep, and dyes, and...

*

In any case: one thing I finally decided to do was squeeze out a bit of all the paint I bought in tubes, after spotting discounted sets from Schminke and QoR, and never use because it turns out I'm more comfortable with dried up paint in a pan. I had an inexpensive plastic palette, discovered long ago on an Urban Hike with my friend Jan, and it turns out it has just right number of wells on one side for the Schminke paint, and on the other, for the QoR. Yay! 

(except for the cut I got on one hand trying to unscrew a particularly stubborn cap. that was Ow.)

Then it was time to test-swatch all the colours and decide what I want in primary rotation. This job required meticulously cutting up little 1x3" cards and drawing a line on them, precision work I will definitely do again next time I'm stressed and need to calm down:

Incidentally, the whole time I was working on this speckly board I was missing shopping in HomeSense. I bought this and a smaller matching cutting board there and I use the two of them together when painting, to protect my desk. Now I think, Why didn't I buy a second big one?? Seriously, when I think of the first thing I'd like to do once the pandemic is over, it's taking a walk to the nearest HomeSense so look at different dishes than I already own. Three great pleasures in one outing. 

I really need to aim higher.

Completing all of the cards was a satisfying project even though it forced me to acknowledge just how much I have overbought and duplicated my watercolour stash.

Thankfully, this stuff is not going to go bad. I might have reached the point of having more than I can use up in my lifetime (see: yarn references above) but it will definitely last my lifetime.

A sidebar about my idea to use the empty Daniel Smith box to store all my additional paint: 

Even though it has the same dimensions as my brilliant Winsor & Newton metal box, the clips are too close together to allow anything more than a brush to sit between the two primary rows of paint. This is where online shopping is a sad substitute, because I would have noticed that issue in person. And honestly, why waste space like that in the design process? To say nothing of the fact that the second flap full of mixing wells doesn't open sufficiently far enough to be useful. 

However! by filling the middle channel of my Winsor & Newton box, then removing the insert and setting it over the mixing well of the first Daniel Smith box (see photo above), I was able to get a lot more paint out into one compact area. I figure if I can see it, I'll use it. 

Because let me tell you, this mess is not enticing me to paint.

 

Another project I took on just yesterday was putting together my very first Dot Journal. Holly, who went with me to a pen show a few months before the pandemic started, tipped me off about these things. Almost apologetically, because she assumed I must already be keeping several given my ridiculous stash of coloured pens and markers and notebooks. But she was so wrong! I was using journals with dots in them all the time and hadn't even considered linking up the dots to make personalized charts and planners. It's the perfect hobby for me, in that it gave me an excuse to watch for sales on even more coloured pens and markers and notebooks.

Again... I seem to have overdone it even by my standards.

 

 

It's not like I'm tops at decision-making to begin with, and there I was, faced with all these colour options for keeping the journal. I finally decided to do a small palette, like I would for a painting if I ever learn to do a real one, and doubled up a colour or two with a different brush tip.

 

I was very proud of this achievement and got all the way around the house to show it off before I realized that I wanted to use the yellow book to plan out a novel I'm researching.  I'd picked a green book for the meal planner I wanted to work on first, so I would be prepared, rather than paralysed, at 3pm on days when I'm supposed to make dinner. And I'd already bonded with the healthy-looking green for this purpose. GAH.

I considered using the same pen palette and just getting on with it already, but I know myself too well, and coordinated a new palette with the new cover. It's not like I was running short on pens or anything.

 All of this pen selection nonsense boiled down to me being afraid to put a mark in the book. I'm always wary of 'ruining' a notebook like this, which is why I generally use books with tear-out pages. But I was determined to use all this gear I've been accumulating, and - whoa.

The paper in an Oasis Light notebook is smooth like glass. I already knew I loved writing with LePen markers because I've been using a pair of them over the last few years, but LePen on Oasis paper is amazing.

I even recognized the advantages of having set up a 6-pen palette. It's really nice to have those decisions already made and neatly grouped with the notebook.

Because there are so many pages, I've been able to note down a lot of nutritional information to make grocery planning easier as well. I will regret the hours I've already spent on this after my three-month planner period is done and I have to start a second book for the next three months. But maybe after the first book is through, I can do this job with my eyes closed?

A girl can dream. But first: she's gotta paint the map for the new paint boxes!

Hope you're having a lovely March so far. Stay safe and I'll see you again soon... maybe even with a plausible watercolour flower at the top of the Hug.