love handles

so i made my first pair of grown-up gloves..with actual whole fingers and thumbs and everything! i never realized how very hard it is to photograph the colour red:

these gloves are made on two needles. before christmas i searched and searched for a glove pattern that i could understand, be it on two needles, circulars, dpns, whatever, and i really couldn't find anything that worked...i tried and frogged quite a few different versions until i happened upon a book called 'knitted accessories' from the knitter's bible, which has some really cute projects in it, including this one, which is called 'love heart gloves'...i know, the picture leaves a lot to be desired but they have a little heart pattern on the back of the hand, you can sort of make it out here:

i rather liked making these gloves, they make up fairly quickly but they are a bit fiddly i have to say, and i made the mistake of not measuring the fingers the first time around so it was a lot of trying on and mucking around on both gloves to get the fingers just right...as it is the thumbs are still a little big, but you can't have everything i guess. i may also try my hand at making some convertible mittens as well.

oh, and in case you were waiting with baited breath (yeah, right), here's this week's snowfall contribution:

blizzard

the forecast calls for........SNOW.......i suppose i might as well type it now, since we have a crap load of it....well at least two inches on the ground anyway, with an official 'snow day' called on monday, i think we can safely say that winter has arrived in this neck of the woods, not a bad run for the mild weather though, i'm not complaining.

ground hog day is only a couple weeks away, and can glorious spring be too far behind it?

these are my latest flakes, the patterns for all but two can be found in the book '99 snowflakes'.

seven years

i like to keep things light around here so i won't get too maudlin, at least i'll try. it was seven years ago today that we lost my dad. it seems like yesterday to me, especially on this day, or other days--special occasions like his birthday, father's day, christmas...the list goes on. my life changed forever that day. in the blink of an eye your entire world can turn completely upside down, while everyone and everything around you just keeps on as normal...i will never forget that sick, freaky, almost nightmarish feeling i had driving home from the hospital--watching people go about their normal daily routines, traffic on the road, people rushing into grocery stores, hurrying on their commute home from work, busy doing nothing and everything, normal wednesday afternoon activities, all the while my family's lives were coming apart at the seams and we struggled to come to the realization that dad was gone, we would never see him again, never hear his voice, never hear his laugh, never. it broke my heart to see the dog sit by the door day in and day out for weeks waiting for dad to walk through it and come home, not understanding where he was. grief is such a personal thing. you hear things like 'it will get better with time'...i don't know about better, but for me it's become less...painful i guess is the only word that fits...for me it's a wound that won't ever quite heal. i was wrong about not seeing him again, i see him all the time in my dreams. it's not the same though, i miss my dad.

flakey friday

well this week we finally got some of that white stuff...sn*w...happily though it's already melted. and you know, for the whole 48 or so hours it was on the ground, people around here were actually complaining about it, too! the nerve. all gone now, but there are promises of more to come this weekend, just in time for someone's (who shall not be named) birth anniversary...of course, the weather always turns crappy on that day, probably to go with the mood of the person who's turning a year older, although this person--let's just call her 'k' for want of a better name--refuses to acknowledge said day and will definitely not acknowledge getting older, in fact will only admit to turning 29 for the umpteenth time.

in any case, i digress...here are some more of my woman-made sn*wflakes, which i have decided i will showcase on fridays...at least for this week:

i got the patterns for these in multiple places, a lot are free online at the cpc site, and a few were from books that i had, one in particular called '99 sn*wflakes' and the other was the 'tis the season for crochet' book that had the cute penguins in it.

if you were wondering (you probably weren't but i'll tell you anyway) the 'background' is a hand towel i had in close proximity and thought it would bring out the detailing of the flakes a bit...i know, i'm no annie leibovitz.

some of these are pretty small, so i put a loonie ($1 coin) up for comparison...they are a little bigger than a quarter i guess and can get lost easily...this happened with the one on the left...after i stiffened & blocked it and the others i was taking the pins out and somehow it just went missing...which made me think i was driving myself bonkers (it's a short enough trip), because it pretty much disappeared right before my eyes...cee was my hero as usual though and he found the pesky little thing hiding under a table hat (it's the curse of the table hat!), so i quickly put in the box with the others.

clusterrific

i finished another doily....wait.....did i say doily? because i meant to say table hat...cee said i shouldn't make any more doilies, because we have no where to put them, so it wasn't logical...and when he saw me working on this he said "what is that?" so i said, "it's a hat"--because i'm so quick thinking and witty...and he said, "i better see you wearing it"--because he knows b.s. when he hears it-- so then i said "it's a table hat"--again with the quick thinking...so that's what it is...a table hat....that's my story and i'm sticking to it.

this is called the 'cluster stitch' doi--em..table hat--and it took me an insanely long time to make and an excrutiatingly long time to block...and was very very involved, i actually put off blocking it for about a week just because i knew what a pain in the rump it would be. i think it should be called the "cluster (insert f-word expletive here) doil--table hat" there are a bajillion cluster stitches, both double and treble, and a gazillion picots, but i was happy with the end result. i would have taken a few close ups but the camera (a poor worker blames their tools) just is not up to snuff...i couldn't get a decent shot of it.

if you would like to make this table hat, you can find the pattern for it here

no visible flakes

funny i should name my first post of the year after a line i heard in a dandruff commercial, but in this case it really suits. i joined a thread sn*wflake crochet along on the 'ville and here are my first efforts:


these really are the only sn*wflakes you will see around here--right now, anyway--i admit i would much rather see these flakes than the real variety. i think shovelling a pile of these would be a snap.

i say the title fits, because for the first year in all of my 30..er..something...years there is absolutely no sn*w outside...oh we had years when it would melt early (chinooks are quite common and very welcome from where i originally hail) and then fall again, but this is different....this is...scary...creepy even. here it is january 3 and we have had not even one day of sn*w yet this winter...oh sure we had that half-hearted flurry in the beginning of october, but since then...nothing...around here we are all waiting for the other shoe to drop...people aren't really even saying the word "sn*w"--see, i'm even afraid to type it--lest a gigantic pile of it fall from the sky onto their heads. now, of course, one person's delight is often someone else's dread, or however the saying goes...this does put a hurt onto some of the businesses around here...you know, wintery-type activities like ice fishing, sn*wboarding, skiing--although what they call 'ski hills' out here leaves much to the imagination--could be i'm biased though, growing up with a view of the rockies out our kitchen window...but here in canada we are nothing if not creative, and for the times when mother nature doesn't cooperate, as long as it's cold enough, we have a little thing we like to call a sn*wmaking machine...which i suppose i have become for myself. if these are the only flakes we see this winter i don't guess it would be too horrible...just a little spooky.