eleven hundred days

Eleven hundred days. That's how long it took for me to get from this

to this.



There were two moves, a pregnancy, work-related nonsense, birth-related goodness (seriously: neither of my sister's children were even born when I cast on this thing!) and three entire years in between. That is madness! That is inexcusable. But it was worth the wait. Totally, absolutely, worth the wait.


The details ('cause once upon a time this was actually a knitting blog)

Pattern: The Katharine Hepburn Cardigan from IK's Lace Style
Yarn: Louet Gems, which happens to be the yarn suggested
Needles: cheapo Aero circulars in 3.5 and 3.75, the suggested sizes
Adaptations: not a one
Findings: mother-of-pearl buttons


Now let's have some more badly framed selfies, shall we?











It's perfect. Ok, it's almost too short. Almost. I might be able to block it out a little bit longer and eke out another half inch in the body, but I'm not complaining. No-sirree-bob. What became the running joke in the home-stretch of knitting this cardi was whether it would even fit. "Are you even the same size you were when you started? Hyuk hyuk hyuk!" I knew that I am, but still I started to worry that the negative ease I opted for when I chose the size I did would prove a little too negative. But it was not to worry: the size is just right.

I finished this two weeks ago, and since then it has been almost non-stop 25C+ days. Not precisely wool cardi weather. Today is grey and rainy and cool. I'm a very happy knitter, cuddled in my lovely acid yellow sweater. This cardigan is made of spring. Spring and unicorn hair and awesomeness.

mmmmmmuffins!

Pancakes. Those buckwheat pancakes. As good as they are, making them for breakfast every morning for the past - I am not exaggerating - nine months got to be a little...old. This week I declared that I could not stand it for another week. And so, gluten-free muffins.

I adapted a recipe from Michael McCamley's Gluten Free Baking, and I'm really happy with how they turned out. Adding liquid glycerin to the mixture? Yeah, no thanks. And we were out of rolled oats, and I'm very allergic to almonds, so the recipe became more inspiration that outright direction.

For the all-purpose gluten-free flour:

1 1/2 cups sorghum flour

1 3/4 cups arrowroot starch or tapioca flour

1/2 cup quinoa flour

1 tsp xanthan gum

Makes enough for two full batches of muffins with a little left over.

For the muffins

1/2 cup butter, soft

1/2 cup scant sugar

1/4 cup orange juice

1 egg

1 2/3 cup all-purpose gluten-free flour

1/2 tsp xanthan gum

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp allspice

1 cup scant blueberries

raw sugar to sprinkle

1. In a food processor, combine first four ingredients until well mixed.

2. Add dry ingredients and process until just combined.

3. Transfer mixture to a bowl and add blueberries, stirring with a spoon.

4. Spoon into 12 muffin cups and top with a sprinkling of sugar.

5. Bake at 350F for 20-30 minutes or until tops are browned and crunchy and a knife inserted comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack for several minutes before serving.

I have no idea how these would store: we keep eating them all up at one meal!

blinded by the light

One of the reasons we chose needed to live in this apartment was all the natural light. Every room has at least one window: the dining room and kitchen have extra-wide windows, and the master bedroom and living room even have two and three windows respectively, and south and west facing to boot. After two years in a north-east facing apartment surrounded by highrises, it is amazing to have light pour through our windows, even on dark and dreary days. Glorious.

The living room was outfitted with a rather redundant combination of roller and venetian blinds, as well as some sheers that hung to the sills. Within a couple of weeks the sheers were taken down (we wanted to let the light in, not keep any of it out!) as were the roller blinds. We put the curtains from the old place up on the rods that had originally held the sheers, but they started pulling out of the drywall, and the nature of the room prevents the rods from extending far enough past the window frames to allow the curtains to keep from obstructing the windows. Grr...

After much discussion, we opted to make roman shades. You know, the royal "we". One family trip to Fabricland, one truly fabulous post-Christmas sale, and we had acquired more than enough fabric to make 3 roman shades for the living room. Then began the procrastination. I wasn't terribly excited to start measuring and marking and checking and cutting and pressing and sewing more than 14 metres of straight, boring seams. The prospect was not attractive at all. But now that they are done, I am so, so happy with them.

The upholstery fabric was $3/m. $3!! I lined them with ticking, and mounted them using hook-and-loop tape stapled to 1x3s cut to length and screwed into the lintel of each window. I was fortunate to find this website that gives not only instructions on constructing roman blinds, but actually features a calculator to help with determining supplies and draw-ring placement. I made relaxed shades, which, despite needing to be dressed every time we raise them, I'm really happy about. The drape makes them both a little more and a little less formal than a standard, rigid roman shade.



Now that we have the blinds installed, and we have our new library happening, we can decide what painting needs to happen in the living room. I'd love to get to the point where I can sit down on the couch, look around and say, "Yup: we're done."

living in a library

I've always wanted to have a library.

Ever so rarely - and I do mean rarely - I will take the dog out for her short morning walk. Usually it's Jon who takes her, but last Thursday things were running a little late and I was up and dressed so he asked me to run her outside. As Wembley and I were strolling down the street, I noticed that someone further down the block had put a set of wooden Ikea shelves out on the sidewalk. I grabbed 'em.

We've had four printer-paper boxes packed with books in the storage room since we moved last summer. We've had the top shelf of the built-in unit stuffed with books to the point that nothing was remotely accessible: two and three deep and stacked three and four high, and shoved in at all angles. Ugh.

I was going to build some shelves to run the length of the wall at the end of the room, next to the couch. I even had my inspiration photos on Pinterest. I had measurements. What I didn't have was a drawn out plan for assembly, the time, the space or yet the motivation to actually, you know, build them. The books languished in their boxes. But finding these shelves on the street was a fabulous tipping point: I may not have the motivation to dive into constructing shelves right now, but drive out to Ikea and pick up a couple more pieces to extend the scavenged set? Sure thing.

I love them. I don't care if they are rudimentary - actually, I quite like the simplistic look of them - I just so enjoy having access to every single one of my books again. We did a major purge of our library before the move (I'm regretting a few of our omissions now, though) so we don't have so many books that I feel overwhelmed by them. I threw them onto the shelves haphazardly yesterday, so today I got to organize them.

And yes, it really was terribly fun. Who's got two thumbs and is a total nerd? This momma.

I grouped them by topic. Originally, they were, from left to right, starting on the top shelf: poetry, lecture notes and personal writing; Waldorf, parenting and birth resources, feminist literature and a hodge-podge with Dante thrown in without reason; Classics (plays and epics) philosophy - arranged more or less chronologically, political science - again, more or less chronologically including our copy of The British North America Act (what, you don't have it?), with a photo book of babies and a photography reference manual to add an air of randomness; 

middle shelf: novels, arranged by author and title; a shelf of all religious texts: general religious theory (Otto, Eliade, Paden, etc.), Christian theology, both medieval (Augustine, Aquinas) and modern (Niebuhr, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Frye), devotional materials (Chambers, Claiborne, Nederhood), bibles and concordances, followed by more practical commentary and history (Nishioka, Rutherford, Migliore, etc.) and then what texts I have from or relating to other faiths (Epic of Gilgamesh, The Bhagavad-Gita, Siddhartha, Darsan), and an old hymnal; 

bottom shelf: (hidden beside the couch) the printer; knitting books and magazines and a random assortment of books, including some children's lit; photo albums, large picture books, old school notes, church reference materials (Book of Forms, woot-woot!) dictionaries and a Fowler's, a bunch of Nortons and our collective yearbooks.

But then I took a step back and decided that it didn't make as much sense as I would like. You see, I may anthropomorphize my books a wee bit. I group my feminist lit next to my birth resources because I like to imagine that Hannah Arendt and Ina May Gaskin are enjoying a cup of tea and a chat by sharing a shelf; I have Alberto Manguel alongside Thoreau because I think a dinner party featuring the two of them would be rather awesome. So when I looked at the shelves, it seemed odd to me that my religious texts weren't next to my philosophical texts. So I switched 'em, the top shelf for the middle one, and stuck Dante's Comedia where it belongs, with all the other religious and philosophical texts (I put it there because, while it's poetry, my motivation for reading it isn't merely poetical, but theological in nature. It's a toss up, but it has to go somewhere, and Dante seems more at home alongside Diana Eck and Thomas Aquinas than Ezra Pound or Walt Whitman). 

It's such a joyful sight, all these books. Having purged so many over the past eighteen months, I can honestly say we have chosen to have all these books and have made the conscious decision to keep them in our home. When I look at our library, I don't have that self-satisfied materialistic feeling of pride in my possessions, but rather such enormous potential. There are so many things to read, and so many thoughts that could result from that reading. As a result of unearthing all our books, I've picked up a classic, Orwell's 1984, which I've somehow never read before. And we're all reading just a little bit more than we were last week: it's hard not to feel inspired to read when surrounded by books.

screen-free

This past week, I have made a simple but surprisingly effective change to our day. The laptop's shut, the television off, and I have kept myself off the couch except to nurse Bubby.

It has made all the difference. Our days fall into rhythm almost easily, almost without trying at all. The girls play calmly. My patience has increased many-fold.

Dishes are washed. Laundry is hung. Songs get sung. Stories get told. Tidying happens. I'm poring over Waldorf resources, taking notes, making plans. I spend the morning washing up and sitting at the dining room table reading while the girls play alone in the living room. It all just works.

It's putting a crimp in composing posts, to be sure, but it's worth it. So very worth it.

The Seed Babies

Sweet baby seed, so small and so round

Hide down deep under the ground

Under the earth you safely hide

Stay there, now: don't peek outside!

I've dug you a hole and I've put you to sleep

Your leaves will come up and your roots will go deep

This is a favourite verse of ours. The girls will often take turns playing the seed, or sometimes be seeds together, curling up on the floor under a blanket while I recite the verse until I say the words "Your leaves will come up..." when they throw the blanket off their back and spring up onto their feet, arms stretched overhead to be their leaves. 

In the past week I've been seeing a popular meme on Facebook, pointing out that the ancient celebration of the goddess Ishtar (pronounced "easter") was a fertility festival in which eggs and rabbits were common images. "So there, Christians: your holy days aren't so Christian now, are they?" is the general impression I've gotten from the meme. And the point is a valid one: the celebration of the resurrection of the Lord isn't as simple as it may seem. But I, for one, believe in a god big enough and interesting enough that She might choose for the whole resurrection story to play out at a time of year where the pathetic fallacy of the season of new life and rebirth can work alongside those same themes within these holy days. So as we have approached Easter, I have been struck by the desire to have any little gifts we might give the girls this Easter morning represent those same themes, effectively bringing our Waldorf living and our holy observances together.

 

I not only brought them together, I stitched them together in felt.

I saw this image on Pinterest and felt an unrelenting need to stitch up similar little Seed Baby dolls for my girls. They're just so cute! I'm so glad that I did, too. The girls love them and I had a lot of fun constructing them.

It's a lot of handstitching. I was able to serge the back seam of the inner and outer face layers, and to stitch the two halves of the body together, but that was all. Every other stitch was made - sometimes painstakingly - by hand. I may have been up until 2am sewing these things. But it was totally worth it.

The way a Waldorf doll face is constructed is quite ingenious. There is something so satisfying about the alchemy of turning a ball into a face just by running a few lengths of thread around it and giving it a stout yank. I foresee a lot of little dolls in our future. Summer flower children, Mother Nature, possibly an entire Nativity scene...

I had also found (again, via Pinterest) this post about felt blanket-stitched chicks, so I made two of them, as well. They're simple and sweet, and a great little project to whip up sitting on the couch or driving in the car. I've developed a new love of blanket stitch as a result, too: seeing all those little stitches lined up neatly in a row is very gratifying.

I'm thinking of putting together a tutorial on the seed babies, particularly since I deviated from the inspiration post and tutorial in several ways, but the tutorial linked really is great, though it is originally in Dutch and the internet translator does make some, let's call them inventive, choices with language. Still, the photos and translated text are quite clear so if you are hoping to make your own Seed Babies, you should have no trouble getting the gist of what to do. The inspiration post for the chicks had a link to the tutorial the blog writer had written, supposedly including a printable pattern, but sadly the document link is broken. Boo. I created my own pattern and I'm very happy with it, so I plan to scan it and post it, as well. For now, though, Easter chocolate and sleep. I think I've earned it!

*****

See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?
I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.
Isaiah 43:19

He is Risen, indeed!

Glynis's "Pl'mpy" Toque

"Ooh!" she exclaimed, "It's very nice. I like the pl'mps."

A "pl'mp", you must understand, is a bobble or a nupp, and this hat is fairly covered in them. They're rather ridiculous, but I thought they might help to highlight and even exaggerate the thick-and-thin nature of this beautiful handspun we were gifted two years ago. One of my Knittyboard confederates, feeling particularly badly for us that we were displaced from our condo for several weeks during advent while we were expecting Bubby, sent us some Christmas baking as well as a skein of the gorgeous yarn she spins. Soft and fluffy and springy, and variegated in shades of yellow, orange and fuchsia, it waited in my stash until the proper inspiration struck.

And struck it did. Over a period of a few days, taking best advantage of Bubby's naps, I knit up this little number for her and she adores it. It's a slightly ludicrous hat, with its gnomish shape and bobbles from ribbing to tip, but I'm still absolutely thrilled with it. Cute and silly, just like the girl it sits atop.

The Overalls of Excessive Cuteness

You may notice a recurring theme in my Christmas gift garment posts.

And that theme is corduroy.

I'm not sure exactly what it is about corduroy that I love so much. Maybe, as one online friend of mine noted, it reminds me of my early-80's childhood clothes. Maybe it's because it's a less-commonly used fabric for children's clothes these days, and I do enjoy an unexpected fabric application. Or perhaps it is simply that corduroy is visually appealing and interesting without being fussy or specifically girly or overly juvenile. Plus it wears well, being both warm and durable, as well as needing no special laundry care. All good things. And it's versatile, too! Yesterday I showed you off a bubble dress for Peanut in fine-wale cord. Today, a garment for Bubby, also of cord, but used in an entirely different way.

I give you: The Overalls of Excessive Cuteness

Lots of credit - and I do mean a lot of credit - goes to Shannon at googiemomma for these overalls. Back in December she posted about overalls she made for her own toddler baby. I had been trying to figure out exactly what I was going to make for Bubby for Christmas but inspiration had not struck. I took one look at her post and a voice in my head fairly screamed, "THAT!" I dug around in my stash and found the most luscious, soft, darkly teal wide-wale cord I had. And that, as they say, is that.

Just as Shannon noted her struggle to get clear, well-framed photos of her daughter wearing her overalls, I similarly struggled. This kid will just not. stay. still. Or cooperate. But at least she's cute.

The overalls came together really well, and I'm pleased with how they turned out. She loves them, which is of course of greatest importance, and they fit nicely. Per Shannon's helpful emails, I used a gusset at the crotch to create the three dimensional space necessary to accommodate not only a human shape but a cloth diaper in addition to the demands of toddler baby-play. The overalls are partially lined - because I had a limited supply of the lining fabric - with a quilting cotton print and fastened with two fabric-covered buttons in the lining fabric. They have a turn-up cuff because a) it gives them a little extra longevity and b) they are frickin' adorable.

They do, of course, have a pocket. Because overalls are not overalls without a pocket, and because where else is a busy girl to stash her Playmobil unicorns and goats if not a bib pocket?

It's hard to beat the sartorial versatility of corduroy overalls. Even little fairies like to wear them.

a bubble dress for Christmas

It's been reeeeeaaaally cold for the past few days.

Last week it was warm. And any Ottawan can tell you, warm weather is not sunny weather. It's usually grey. Warm = grey. Sometimes rainy, usually snowy, but not bright. No, if you want bright sunny weather you have to wait for the cold. And not that sissy, wamby-pamby cold, either, but the deep, down, freeze-you-to-the-marrow cold. You know, the quality Canadian cold. Yesterday we had it and I wanted it. But we also had an entirely trashed living room and a sleep-deprived, under-caffeinated mommy with the temper of a newly-awoken bear in the spring. This morning brought -26C temperatures (that's -15F for you 'Murikans), a bright, unobstructed golden sun, and a well-rested, far-better-caffeinated mommy. Bad for anyone with plans to take leisurely walks outside, but good for me. Kidlets ate breakfast and I hurriedly made the living room presentable. Because I really wanted to show you a bit of what kept me at my sewing desk day after day, night after night back before Christmas.

I can not even begin to tell you how proud I am of this dress. I mean, we're talking way beyond that healthy, "ya done good" sort of normal pride. No, I'm into full-on, first-cornice-of-Dante's-purgatory, sinful pride. I want her to wear this dress everywhere we go and then faux-modestly quip, "Oh, her dress? Oh yeah, I threw that together one night before Christmas. No big," while inwardly yelling "Booya! 'Spect!" Because I'm  all street like that, you know.

The dress is printed fine-wale corduroy, fully lined with a brown and turquoise-dot cotton print (previously seen here and here) with white fine-wale corduroy piping at the waist and a single-button closure at the back.   I used this tutorial to get the general idea, but drafted my own pieces based on Peanut's measurements. I had drafted a paper pattern back in October for Peanut's fairy costume (which I've only just realized I neglected to feature in a post) and used that as the basis for the bodice of the dress. The skirt? Well, to be quite honest I couldn't even begin to tell you the proportions of the skirt. It was late and I was highly caffeinated when I started working on this. I can't remember anything about the math I used to arrive at the drafted pieces I did, and I drafted directly onto the yard goods I used (risky, I know, but I couldn't very well try a muslin on my 4yo and expect to keep it a surprise, could I? And therein lies the terror of sewing surprise garments for older children: what if she loves it but it doesn't remotely fit??) so I can't so much as give you a hint in that regard. Check out the tutorial I linked above: that woman did a way better job of being helpful than I am going to be, I'm afraid. 

But do ogle the dress some more. Oh yes. do ogle this dress.

It's a perfect fit. Perfect. If I had made a dozen muslins and tried it on her countless times before I cut into the cord I could not have made a better fit. I have no idea how I managed it. It was sheer dumb luck (and do read that with Maggie Smith's Prof. McGonagall-voice: it's how I hear it in my head and it's awesome).

Pride aside, though, the very best moment with this dress happened before she ever tried it on. She opened it Christmas morning, snatched it up out of the paper and held it at arm's length and exclaimed, "I love it!! Thank you, Mommy!!" and threw herself into my arms, hugging me. The dress coming together exactly as I wanted it to is good. But making my little girl rapturously happy with something I made with my own two hands? Way better. Way, way better.