Last Saturday, however, was glorious, sunny, and warm, which was serendipitous, since it was World Wide Knit in Public Day, and in Fredericton, we were knitting in public. Outdoors. Specifically, in front of the yarn shop. With considerably less planning than last year. (The lovely event notice I wrote up included the line “Hosted by: We’re sort of developing plans organically on Ravelry.”)

The turnout was quite good, considering how last-minute it was and how many people had other commitments that weekend. I think the most people we had sitting in lawnchairs on the sidewalk and knitting at one time was seven, with others arriving and leaving as their schedules allowed.

I actually have quite a few photos of people KIPping, but since I don’t know how well people I’d never met before would react to me posting pictures of them on the Internet, I’ll stick with a photo of Kathy, Trish, and me.

More people were induced to join Ravelry, more people later found one another on Ravelry, we taught some passers-by about WWKiP Day and were pleasantly surprised to discover that a few passers-by already knew it was WWKiP Day (fellow knitters? people who saw the—ahem!—highly popular WWKiP Day knitting book display at the library?), my awesome boyfriend did my laundry while I spent six hours knitting, a tourist took pictures of us, some guy walking by called us Amish, and a good time was had by all.

There was also some knit graffiti, in the vein of the scarf on the panther statue last year. Sadly, I never got to see that in person.

One of the lampposts on Queen Street now has a lamppost cozy.

It looked great last Saturday, but now it’s all slumped down onto the conical section below the most cylindral part, as it is clearly too big to properly fit on that pole.

One of the dolphins frolicking in Freddy the Nude Dude’s fountain celebrated WWKiP Day by wearing a little scarf around his tail. That only lasted until some point on Monday, when presumably a city employee was ordered to remove it.

My friend Mare just sent me some photos of another Animal Statue With a Scarf, which I’ll include in another post. Mare is a better photographer than I am, although so is everybody.

I’ve been reading about Knitta’s stuff pretty much since they came into existence, but I only recently started reading the Masquerade blog, which I now love. I don’t know why I said “reading,” when it’s almost entirely photographs. And I’m familiar with The Ladies’ Fancywork Society (a crochet street-art crew!) and the awesomeness that is Knitted Landscape and some others, but I’ll have to visit every single link on the Yarn Bombing blogroll to see what nifty things I have been missing out on. How much am I looking forward to this book? Let me count the ways. Oh, and speaking of books, how annoyed am I that the release date for Stitch ‘n Bitch Extreme keeps getting pushed further and further back?

I was working on my first toe-up socks on WWKiP Day. This is how they looked then.

That is also how they look now. They used to have a little bit of foot, too, besides just a toe, but I ripped it out. Then I knit a little bit more foot. Then I ripped it out. Then I knit a little bit more foot. Then I ripped it out.

I don’t want to talk about it right now.

Know what is a very happy thought? Lots of yarn.

The only thing I like more than lots of yarn is lots of books.

Baby-sitters Club books are definitely a happy, comforting thought. (That picture was taken in the Owl’s Nest. While I do own every book in the Baby-sitters Club series, I don’t own multiple copies of all of them.)

Knitting and other fibre-related magazines are also a happy thought.

Why do I need happy thoughts? Mainly because I have had a headache since yesterday afternoon. It was really bad last night, so I spent yesterday evening lying perfectly still with my eyes closed, because that was the only thing that made the pain bearable. Unfortunately, I wasn’t at all tired until my usual bedtime rolled around, so this was really, really boring. I tried taking ibuprofen yesterday, but it had absolutely no effect on my headache whatsoever. It did, however, make me dizzy.

When I woke up this morning, I thought that I felt a lot better. Then I tried standing up, and I realized that 1) I only felt a little better and 2) standing up was a bad idea. I went to work anyway, though, and lasted nearly an entire hour before going home sick. Oh, here is an actual happy thought: I bought the latest issue of Spin•Off on my way home from work.

I’m really bad at napping. Once I’m up, I’m up for the day. I can’t possibly go to sleep during the day unless I’ve been awake for well over twenty-four hours. If I hadn’t gone to work at all, I probably would have been able to sleep in, but since I did get up, there was no way I would be able to fall asleep again. So I’ve been up all day, sick and tired and cranky. The headache did subside enough by this afternoon that I was able to do things such as knit and waste time on Ravelry. I know time spent on Ravelry isn’t usually time wasted, but today I read all 4,811 posts in the most useless thread on Ravelry (it’s about tiny icons, mainly of food, that show up after certain words).

I finished knitting the cuff of the second Tangled Up in Blue sock and I was really happy about that because I do not have the patience to continue in 1×1 ribbing on those tiny needles for very long. I don’t generally find knitting on tiny needles any more difficult than knitting on larger needles (although of course it takes longer), but switching between knit and purl so constantly on those toothpicks (2.25 mm bamboo needles, switching to 2 mm for an inch at the ankle) is a bit much for me.

Then I discovered an inexplicable mistake in the cuff, and I had to rip back half of it and knit it again. Which is such a pain, because I knit ribbing so slowly on small needles, and I knit stockinette at quite a reasonable pace for me. I thought I was actually going to see some progress on the sock today, but nooooo. It was not to be.

I DID NOT ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING TODAY. This drives me crazy. I did not manage to read a book, not even a children’s book. (I did look at the pictures in my new magazine, but I didn’t really read it.) I had to undo the minuscule amount of progress I’d made on my sock, when I could have gotten so much more done if I hadn’t made that freaking mistake. I spent a bazillion hours on Ravelry without accomplishing anything useful there, either, except for adding exactly one yarn to my stash.

This is sock yarn that I won in a prize draw at Singer on World Wide Knit in Public Day. It is Regia Canadian Color 4747 Kilt, and although it looks okay in the skein, it’s so much prettier when knitted up — I found a photo of a sock that someone made with the same yarn. Ooh. Lurvely.

The teeny bit of WWKIP Day that I managed to participate in was fun — running to sit in front of the courthouse during my lunch break, knitting two rounds on a sock, gulping down one samosa, and probably seeming rude and/or strange as I barely had the chance to talk to anyone, except for saying, “Hi, let me see what you’re knitting! Ooh, pretty! Bye!” I hope another year I’ll have more time! It sounds like a good time was had by all, so yay to Trish, canKNITian, & co.

I have convinced Ria to come back over to the dark side, and she is knitting another sock.

I think I might be dumb for only giving the Tangled Up in Blue Socks a one-inch cuff, since they are a cotton blend. They will probably fall down all the time.

I can’t believe that I am worried about my lack of accomplishments on a day I stayed home sick. Quiz: Am I too a) driven? b) self-loathing? c) whiny? or d) all of the above? Oh, well. At least I wrote a blog post.

Well, sixteen including myself. Hey, I count, too, ya know.

This is a guide at the Carleton Martello Tower, who said, “I’ve worked here for five years and no one has ever asked me to hold a sock before.”

I was working on Saturday, so I missed most of the WWKIP Day festivities. I am looking forward to other people posting their scavenger hunt photos, since I didn’t get to see anybody else’s yet. I am dying to see what kind of wacky hijinks the New Brunswick knitters got up to!

Ria and the sock are all about the wacky hijinks. Here they are conspiring in front of a fiddlehead statue.

Ria: “I can’t believe we have a statue of a vegetable in town.”

The moose statue also got into the wacky hijinks.

Admittedly, the best wacky hijinks were committed by a group of Fredericton knitters who, Knitta-style, festooned parking meters, fire hydrants, statues, and the like with knitted items. I want to be them when I grow up.

I wanted to write a longer post, but yesterday I went biking for the first time since 1997. And the bike was too big for me. And now my butt hurts. So I’m going to sit (or possibly lie down) someplace more comfortable than this computer chair. With any luck, I’ll have time to post some more tomorrow. Feel free to check out the Yarns on York Flickr group, some of my scavenger hunt photos on Flickr, and the WWKIP Day 2008 photos on justFRED.ca.

Oh, and don’t forget about Boob Lady, who was happy to meet the sock. But then again, she’s awfully friendly to everybody.

I think other people call her the Hula Girl, but ever since I saw The Simpsons Movie, she’s been Boob Lady to me.

Although we slept in the lodge at night (in sleeping bags on the floor — the cabins had beds, but they didn’t have heat), we spent most of the days outdoors. We snowshoed to German Point, a place where in the summers at church camp, I went swimming. In the summer it was a nice(ish) beach, but in the winter it was about the journey, not the destination, since when you got there, well, there was the river, and everything was covered in snow, nothing to see, so you might as well just turn around and head right back.

We slid down big hills on our Krazy Karpets, and we went skating. There was a hollow that at summer camp we called the “fire pit,” because that was where we went for our campfires. In the winter, though, the basin filled up and froze over until it was exactly like an icy pond.

In the evenings, when it was even colder and dark, we mostly stayed in the lodge. We made the same supper the first night of camp all three years I was there: tacos, blueberry muffins, and fruit salad. There were also blueberries in the fruit salad, and they turned the rest of it — the other fruits, the marshmallows, the yogurt — a completely disgusting shade of purple. It looked absolutely vile, but it tasted like fruit salad. It was very comforting to be mixing muffin batter and know that soon you’d be grating cheddar for the tacos, just like you’d done the year before, and the year before that.

After supper, we did various Girl Guide-y things. One that I remember was performing a bizarre skit about the lives of Robert and Olave Baden-Powell. Singing, of course. Doing crafts. One year we sewed red heart-shaped pillows with lace around the edges, as it was near Valentine’s Day. They turned out really well, but when I tried making one at home, it was all squashed and lumpy and strange. Apparently I sucked at sewing pillows when I was doing it without help.

And every year, we made God’s eyes.

According to Wikipedia, “The Ojo de Dios or Eye of God is a ritual tool, magical object and cultural symbol evoking the weaving motif and its spiritual associations. For the Huichol peoples of northwestern Mexico, The God’s Eye is symbolic of the power of seeing and understanding that which is unknown and unknowable, The Mystery. The four points represent the elemental processes earth, fire, air, and water.”

We made simple, little kid-type God’s eyes out of yarn and Popsicle sticks. I liked using variegated yarn the best and watching the striping patterns emerge. It was meditative and soothing, winding string around sticks, and for a while after camp, I would go into a God’s eye-making frenzy and make them at home, too. I actually liked the way they looked from the back better than the front.

I know these have yarn coming loose, but that’s just because they’re some of my original God’s eyes from Girl Guide camp, so they’re all at least fifteen years old. I swear they weren’t always this messy.

The problem, though, was that I never knew what to do with all these God’s eyes once I’d made them. I loved the process, but wasn’t too crazy about the product. Neither were the parents/grandparents/piano teachers/etc. whom I foisted my Popsicle stick and Red Heart petroleum product creations upon. I didn’t even think they were pretty enough to want to decorate anything with them. (I’m not knocking more complicated God’s eyes, or ones made with better materials, only my own kiddie creations.) I wished I could find a way of translating my obsession with wrapping yarn around sticks to create something that had an actual function, maybe even something beautiful.

Luckily, now I have.

So last Tuesday morning I got up at 5:30 a.m. in order to make sure I could catch the bus at 6:45 a.m. Due to my unexpected negative bank balance, I had to put the bus ticket on my credit card. I slept during almost all of the bus ride, although once I woke up I knitted maybe two rounds on the Thing on DPNs. (Its actual goal is sockhood, but I feel too ambitious when I say that, so for the time being, I prefer to refer to it as the Thing on DPNs.) I decided the day before the trip that I would like to experiment with double-pointed needles, because I wanted to feel like less of a pussy when surrounded by people who are actually good knitters. (It’s okay to be a kitten, but not a pussy.) I just wanted to mess around with the DPNs before I went to play with the big girls, in the hopes that it would improve my self-esteem, which it sort of did. It is actually easier than I thought it would be to knit a tube on DPNs, just like everyone says it is, but I am terrified of things like toes and heels. (On the sock. Not on my feet. My actual heels and toes don’t scare me.) It could wind up as a very small legwarmer.

I got into Halifax around 1:20 p.m. and did a tiny bit of shopping that afternoon. What I actually had to do was run around to all the stores I wanted to check out (The Loop, Woozles, Little Mysteries, Venus Envy, the Jade W, the Bookmark) to see what books and yarn I might want to buy, and then, once the money my parents deposited in my account actually showed up in there, run around all over downtown again so that I could purchase a few items. This is not in any way a complaint, because I realize that I am very lucky that I got to do any shopping at all.

Then around four-ish, I headed to Your Father’s Mustache to meet up with members of the Halifax knitting group Knitting Out Loud. Some of them I had never met before, and others I had met when I went to KOL a grand total of twice during my last semester of grad school (and Steph I’d met a couple more times than that ’cause she works at a yarn shop… ’nuff said), but I asked the day before if I could get together with them anyway ’cause it seemed way less intimidating than showing up at the Lord Nelson all alone. Anyway, they are fun and welcoming.

I met Deb Barnhill in person, which was considerably more relaxing than when I was sending her frantic transportation-related emails. Deb is the designer of the Knitty pattern Babe, she is very nice, and she knits at the speed of light. This photo is actually from later on, because I was too lazy to take any at Your Father’s Mustache.

Rhonda designed an awesome KOL logo and the girls silkscreened matching T-shirts to wear to the event. They had an extra one, so they gave it to me. Squee! So much squee! And serendipitously, it is robin’s egg blue… I have this little obsession with any turquoise-y colour… Oh, and guys, I’m way sorry I didn’t contribute $3 or so at the time to the silkscreening fund. I know details about that were on the KOL blog, but I didn’t read them beforehand as I didn’t expect I would have anything to do with the T-shirts, and I was just getting back from the bathroom when you were chipping in money at the pub and didn’t know what was going on. They made a shirt for the Harlot as well, a green one, of course. You can see a picture of them presenting the T-shirt in Terra’s post The Fibre Dorks Leave Their Houses.

Lesley has great photos of the evening in her post An Evening with the Yarn Harlot, including one of the infamous battering ram. I did not see the battering ram in person; I think I was still at Your Father’s Mustache not eating my potato skins because I was way too excited to eat.

When the rest of us got to the Lord Nelson, Jennifer, Kelly, and Kelly’s husband were there. Yup, Jennifer had made it after all. Yaay! The waiting to be let into the ballroom was agonizing, but knowing that we were confusing hotel staff and guests helped a little bit.

The KOLers grabbed seats in the first two rows and then posed for group photos. This is yoinked from Lesley ’cause there wasn’t enough time to get pictures taken with everybody’s cameras:

If you look at the embiggened picture (it’s a perfectly cromulent word) on Lesley’s blog, you will also be able to tell that the thing that looks like a hole in the crotch of my jeans is actually my watch clipped onto my belt loop, thankyouverymuch.

In this group photo, my eyes are closed, but I don’t care because I usually have my eyes closed in pictures. I am not what you’d call photogenic. Usually in photos, my eyes are closed and there’s a weird look on my face, but in this one, my eyes are closed and I’m actually smiling, which, coupled with my sitting on the floor cross-legged, makes me look kind of serene and meditative. Ommm. For a who’s who of the faces in the photo, check out Steph’s post Harlot Hangover in Halifax.

When Stephanie Pearl-McPhee took the podium, we learned that the Yarn Harlot in person is just like she is on her blog, only more so: interesting, down-to-earth, and very, very funny. I can’t remember ever hearing more people laugh more times at any other speaker I’ve ever heard. She’s also a lot less grainy and faded in real life than she is in this crap photo I took.

I was working on the Irish Hiking Scarf while she was talking, and at the end it was only four rows longer than it had been at the beginning of her talk, because I kept getting distracted. Mainly ’cause I had to laugh so often. Blah, I suck. We heard quite a lot about CHOKE (Cultural Humiliation of Knitters Everywhere), but fear not. CHOKE has no real chance against us… because we are A CREEPY SUBCULTURE!

Afterward, I of course got my books signed. Yep, I brought all four of Stephanie’s books with me to get signed, plus Ria’s copy of Casts Off, since Ria had to work and couldn’t come herself. No, I couldn’t just bring one. Yep, I’m inconsiderate like that. Hey, I once got Tammy Pierce to sign twenty books for me (and a lot of those were hardcover and I had to bring them in a huge duffel bag).

Although I lived in Nova Scotia for twenty-six years and have lived in New Brunswick for less than one, it seemed likely that someone else would knit Stephanie a Nova Scotia washcloth, since it was going to be a bunch of Nova Scotian knitters in Nova Scotia. So I figured I’d knit her a New Brunswick washcloth. While a person can never have too many Nova Scotia washcloths, variety is also the very spice of life, innit? I’d rather have one NS and one NB washcloth than two NS washcloths. This is one of the very few times in my life that something worked out the way I had planned. Someone else did knit her a Nova Scotia washcloth (blue, this pattern) and I represented with my New Brunswick washcloth in a colour very aptly named “Hot Green.” Despite my usual procrastinating ways, it was all finished a couple of days before my trip, unlike the cloth I knit to go with my friends’ wedding present last month, when I was still weaving in ends minutes before I had to leave for the ceremony.

All my wacky washcloth pictures were in my post before this one. Oh, and despite what it says in this Yarn Harlot post, my name isn’t May. That’s a typo. Anyone who ever actually reads my blog knows what my name is, anyway.

That evening I also finally got to meet Henry, who hadn’t been born yet when I went to those two KOL nights. I’d been looking forward to meeting him for quite a while. He is a much more accomplished sock knitter than I am, despite… oh, I don’t know, his LACK OF EYES. And also LACK OF FINGERS. This is humbling.

Yes, again despite what it says on the Yarn Harlot’s site, that is Henry, not Mr. Happy. Mr. Happy is Steph’s husband. Steph is Henry’s mommy, and the Knitting Out Loud logo is on the back of her shirt, ’cause the incomparable Henry is on the front.

Here’s Jennifer buying a book.

I took a picture of Kelly by herself, too, as well as one of blogless Halifax knitter Jen D. and the Hallowig (don’t ask… but if you must, there’s a picture of it on Terra’s blog), but my camera gave them red devil eyes and I am too lazy to bother Photoshopping their eyes into normalcy, so those photos will just stay on my hard drive and off the blog.

I don’t have any photos of Kelly’s husband, “Moose,” but you can see him on Kelly’s blog, of course, as well as in Jennifer’s post I’ve Been to Halifax to Visit the Harlot.

Kelly and I had to leave right after getting our books signed so we could get back home that night, but Jennifer and the KOLers went to the Victory Arms pub with Stephanie and her friend Tim afterward. There are pictures on various people’s blogs, such as Alison’s. It was of course dark during most of our ride home, but when we stopped to get gas, Kelly used those two minutes in electric light to knit, which seemed to freak Moose out slightly.

In short, it was totally worth getting up at 5:30 a.m. and spending large portions of the day travelling. Totally. I knew it would be.

So now I am back in the regular world, where a friend of mine (also named Stephanie, which makes her the third Stephanie in this post) asked me if the Yarn Harlot is related to the String Jezebel or the Crochet Whore. While I would like to roll my eyes at that… honestly, I think it’s pretty damn funny.

He was knitting something pink.

More accurately, the yarn was pink with flecks of white and flecks of grayish-browny.

I almost asked him what he was making, but I didn’t, because sometimes I am inexplicably shy.

There is just something about seeing boys knitting that causes intense happiness. I cannot possibly be the only one who feels this.

Here is a picture of a guy friend of mine knitting, although I have done the whole ridiculous putting-a-black-bar-over-his-eyes thing, since I have not asked his permission to post this anywhere. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, but I’m getting a kick out of the stupid black bar over his eyes so I think I’ll keep it there.

FYI, I’m pretty sure he’s single right now. In case the Mohawk is a selling point for anybody, though, I must regretfully inform you that he has recently gotten rid of it.