and the wraps continue

Blaise was delighted by my needle wrap. so much so that he wanted one for his wrenches. hey why not?

bigger, made of tougher material, but hey off we go. even left him some room to grow and a spare spot for the missing size he hasn't purchased yet.

I got my sewing machine fixed

I finally got the sewing machine fixed. The good news is the man who fixed it said i was better than most people who brought him dismantled machines or people who didn't use a transformer.

So what to do...the 2nd dress seemed to big a project to restart with.

I was knitting and my little double pointed needles were everywhere. i had found a lovely lady on Trademe who sold a whole set of DPs, 5 of each from size from teeny tiny UK 14 up to UK 000 for $25 for the lot. then i remembered that the knitting book i had borrowed from Rachel had a pattern for a needle holder. Well it was very successful! the slowest thing was the pockets themselves.

Squid Hat!

brace yourself, its not baby-sized. it's me sized. and no this is not my squid hat, its the original squid hat link.

i broke a rib. yes it hurts very much and while i don't do a lot at the moment i do enjoy knitting, i like the soothing feeling i get doing it. so i opened the folder of hat patterns. so many choices...which one should i go with. it ended up coming down to me missing scuba diving. A lot. all that weight and bulk, not going to work with a busted rib.

well if i couldn't scuba dive i needed something to make me feel ocean-y. lucky for me the creator of squid hat had resized it on request and posted adult sized instructions. stay tuned.

all done!

Tomato hat is done. After finally working my way through the SSK I have to admit its got an organic natural look to it. No tomato leaf I've seen was flat, they all have texture and attitude.

Its for a 6-12 month old baby so i'll have to wander over to Adele and see if it fits baby L.


With a close up of the SSK decrease

SSK - sucks, sucks, kill me

I officially dislike this stitch. It seemed so easy in all the books, slip one stitch to the working needles, then another, then put the left needle through the front of both and knit them together.

BAH!!

finally in frustration i did what any good geek grrrl of my generation would do, i hit the internet for a video. Watched it 7 times. I understood what they were doing; i even could explain in my own words what was going on but replicating it in my work while holding DP needles...well those 7 rounds took almost 2 hours. Blaise (smart man) removed himself from the couch (aka Ground Zero) after the first couple of rounds with the the comment "You really don't like that stitch."

What can i say about SSK: i know what it is, i know how to do, i have practiced it for 2 hours, i still passionately despise it.

darn you tomato hat

Trying another hat, this time its a little tomato hat

The first part was easy, just knit in the round for 29 rows adding green as you get near the top. That was the easy bit, then its into SSK which i know means slip 2 then put the left needle through the front and knit.

I did that, was supposed to end up with 63 stitches and ended up with 64 ... nuts... ok so i moved an extra one over...then it just got worse....ok try again. i worked it out on paper and it worked there. i've obviously screwed up so i'll go back to row 29 and start again.

i'll make this hat!!

How the hat should be worn

While my cat makes an excellent model (though she may disagree) she doesn't do my work justice.


However, young baby W., he wears it like a pro.

The apple hat part 2

thankfully the decreasing was simple, it was k2tog which i have come know means "knit two together". very simple really. so following my pattern i decreased as required. the DPs seemed ridiculous when dealing with less than 12 stitches but then i finally got to the brown stem. that was pretty easy as well thankfully.

the catch was making those little green leaves, i had no idea how to make the increases they were talking about. thankfully Rachel had the book Stitch 'n Bitch which i borrowed and it had good clear instructions on increasing. still had to do the leaves 3 times before i had one that i liked but with that little wool being used each time i could afford to be picky.

the end result was quite good.


look ma my first hat!

The apple hat part 1

What i'm trying to make is this cute little hat here.
Apple Hat

cast on - check
knit in the round -check


transfer to double-pointed needles and start to decrease.... i need to learn to do that

shopping spree

i hate spending money but sometimes you just have to splash out.

getting ready to make a hat was one of those moments, needed Double-pointed needles, new wool, a set of rounds in the right size. see i learned from my binary scarf experience, you need a set of rounds that is small enough to work without struggling. ^^bb

oh and i bought a needle measuring tool just for good measure.

so many things to knit

Back in January i was browsing knitting websites. lots of patterns, hats, toys, leg warmers, random things to knit. so many projects :)

but had made Blaise a promise not to start something new until the scarf was finished.

learning a technique wouldn't count as making something new so i decided to learn how to use double-pointed needles (DP).

so 4 needles, 3 containing stitches and one working needles. in my reading i had discovered that the most common newbie frustration was that you get a ladder or a loosening of stitches when you switch from one needle to the next. so borrowed a set of DPs from Rachel, grabbed a ball of wool and gave it a go.

i'm either totally lucky or i have a natural talent for DP needle work, not a gap or ladder to be seen.

Binary Scarf

in December 2006 Blaise approached me with a request to knit him a scarf. not any scarf, a scarf knitted with a binary pattern. he had found it off one of his sites and it came from a knitting website known affectionately as Knitty.

there was 2 new skills to learn: knitting in the round and using 2 colours.

the two colours was pretty easy to figure out, you just picked up the colour strand you needed as it comes up in the pattern.
-as an aside, learning binary was fun, making the message was even more fun ^^

the knitting in the round sounded simple enough, all you needed to do was knit and the round needles turned it into a stockinette tube. seemed hard though, i struggled to make 6 rows (which was one set of numbers). progress was slow, birthday 2007 came and went, as did christmas 2007, then 2008 passed.

it became the family joke, "what am i getting for Christmas?" he'd ask with a big grin, "A scarf would be awesome."

skip forward to 2010 and to New Zealand. the scarf came with us, still not a lot of work being done. then one day i went Knitworld where a lovely lady finally pointed out my round needle was TOO FREAKING LONG!! all the struggling to knit and slow progress because i was uing the wrong tools.

a shorter set of rounds and suddenly we were making progress.
finally in July of 2010 it was finished.

The binary scarf December 19, 2006 - July 5, 2010 - HUZZAH!

the on again and off again love of knitting.

I learned to knit at a young age, i was 5 or 6 and mom and grandma taught me how to knit. to this day in the family photo album is pictures of me sitting staring with great intensity at the knitting needles and my work.

i made grandma a tea cosey. it wasn't fancy, it was a varigated white/yellow/green wool, i had two green metal knitting needles and i knitted 2 sides which mom helped me sew together with holes for the spout and handle.

i still have the green needles. they have traveled with me forever. knitting fell off my radar for a long time. on occasion in high school i picked up the needles and knitted squares. eventually i put together a blanket for my grandpapa and that took a couple of years. never anything fancy just a knit stitch.

i suppose the next big push came when we hit New Zealand in 2005. at the Agrodome in Rotorua Blaise and I were blown away by the hand-dyed wool. we each bought a set of wooden needles and a ball of wool. i knitted up a scarf, still a simple knit stitch but with a neat twist where you wrap wool around the needle and then drop the loops off next row.

back in Canada i made a couple more scarves in this pattern. then in December 2006 Binary Scarf reared its head.

Success i grew a tomato

ok its tiny, very tiny. but hey its the first one and i have yellow flowers like no ones business at the moment. hopefully i shall soon have so many tomatoes that i will give them away to neighbours and make new friends.


incidentally while watering tomatoes this morning i looked down to see a man of asian descent looking up at my plants. he pointed to the plants and gave me a thumbs up. i said hello and was talking about the plants when he smiled and said "no engrish". ah well at least he liked my garden.

"cookies taste better in shapes"

in the grand tradition, and because i wanted cookies, i made a batch of my no chill sugar cookies. turns out i had forgotten all my cookie cutters; blaise is still confused on how that one happened.

so i purchased a rather functional but scalloped circle set, simple yet efficient. i was making lots of cookies when my official taster walked out of the office to perform his role.

he munched quietly on the still warm sugar cookie and said "its good but cookies just taste better in shapes". well i was off school, had a morning to kill and a desire to make blaise happy. with a paring knife and a toothpick and a laptop for visuals i made "shaped" cookies.

baby steps to bento

so bento in simplest terms is a japanese box lunch made up of a variety of foods, usually involving a base of rice and some veggies, pickles and meat. they can be simple like an everyday lunch or they can be over the top in design and complexity.

well i have to start somewhere so i figured Onigiri and one-day pickles might be a good start.

Onigiri are the rice ball, made hot out of the rice cooker, shaped with salted hands and having (usually) a filling. Things i learned from this first onigiri: rice out of rice cooker extremely freaking hot, when doing filling for onigiri it is not necessary to prep an entire can of tuna. they do look the right shape though, i even got the seaweed hand holder on there.

The pickles were also an experiment, i took the recipe from here http://www.justhungry.com/sweet-and-sour-cucumber-and-wakame-pickles
i didn't have one of the types of seaweed and i used chili powder in place of a whole chili pepper.
i left them over night in the fridge and ... they're really good!! they only last a week, two tops but they won't be around that long.

so bento baby steps was a success.

yummy salads

The plants...they won't stop growing. i expected growth, the climate alone would support that. and the lettuce i expected quite a lot of lettuce. i was right on that count; we've had 2 delicious salads so far and the lettuce keep growing. i'm just harvesting the outer parts and letting the middles keep growing.

The herbs are doing great too, lots of leaves. but man the tomatoes...
ok so back home before we moved i had planted a dozen heritage tomatoe plants but we had a really wet summer and they never grew well. we had lots of green tomatoes by the time we left but nothing ripened (i'm sure the new owner of our house is quite pleased though). i forgot how fast tomatoe plants grow given the right conditions. take a look at my plants. we are at 4 weeks for some of them and 3 weeks for the others. i'm a little worried about lack of bees being on a balcony, i think i'll have to look up how to hand pollinate the yellow flowers that are showing up.




look at my corriander

i love the climate

so let me say this. i was worried about the amount of sun we might get. when i started planting i was convinced that growth would be really really slow. turns out we must be on a good angle for the sun.

the tomatoes are obviously getting bigger. i can look at them at the end of each day and see new growth. the lettuce is expanding monstrously and the herbs are doing great too. everything is growing like mad.

check out my garden. ^^bb

planting round 2

so after a rather awesome day relieving i came home in such a good mood that i was determined to finish up my planting.

i had more juice containers for the last of the coriander and more lettuce (for lettuce you need a 1.5L pot per plant so the 3L juice containers here are amazing). i wanted to move those roma tomatoes to the 18L containers and i wanted to get as many of the remaining tomatoes into containers.

so back to the drainage holes, washing rocks, filling pots with dirt. did all my transfers, planted new ones, watered everything, etc. now i'm really packed full on containers onto the balcony. i'm going to see if i can't find a cheap table for our office that is the height of the window. i think i'd like to put a lot of the herbs on the table so that i can give the tomatoes more access to the sun. right now i have to organize by height (shortest near front) but that means my tomatoes in the back get less sun because of the way the sun moves around here. but they're all growing so it seems to be good so far.

what do the bus drivers think of Canadians?

so i ran out of dirt. and i was annoyed because i had just made the score of my gardening career. we were walking downtown a few days ago and we passed a rather large organic store. out front in a cart were a pile of large containers, 18.9L containers, that had once held chickpeas but were now empty.

i said to blaise "i wonder if we can take those" and when i ran in and asked the answer was a resounding "yes". they were putting out their empty containers for people like me who wanted containers for growing tomatoes. i scored 4 of them and they were sitting at home (with a fresh batch of rocks from Lyall bay) empty. my other plants were starting to get droopy, they needed to be planted soon and i wanted to transfer the two romas out of the smaller pots and put them into these larger ones.
but i was missing something critical...dirt.

so today while blaise was working i got up and got myself a bus day pass and headed back to the nursery to get more dirt. now last time blaise and i did this we ended up taking a cab back because we didn't know how to get home by bus. this time i had checked my route. i would take the 44 to get there but it only came by once an hour. but down the street i could pick up the 2 which would get me to Kilbirnie shops which i could transfer to a 3 which would take me home.

so i bought my first 40L bag and headed to the bus stop. for a distance of 2 blocks it was surprising on how heavy and freaking awkward the thing was. but i got my bus, hopped on, got a strange look from the driver and headed home. thankfully it was early and blaise had another hour of work so i figured i'd go get a 2nd load.

well first off i hit the same driver on the 44 who looked at me funny but didn't say anything. got another 40L bag of dirt and headed down to the 2. however by this point in the day there was a lot more people out and about. i walked onto the bus carrying my bag in a sort of "carrying a sleeping toddler" hold and there was giggles from all over the bus. the driver had the biggest grin on and said "well thats a new one"

hey i have no car!

kilbirnie transfer was just as bad, i swear they had radioed ahead "crazy lady carrying dirt". the driver there just kept snickering as i shifted my bag around on my lap trying to prevent my legs from falling asleep. but got the 2nd bag home. 80L of dirt...that outta do me.