I’m not sure how my better half is going to amuse himself during this time, but his willingness to go on a mini-honeymoon entirely full of yarn (real honeymoon to happen sometime in 2012) indicates that he will be the best husband in the entire world.

Speaking of classes, last month I took a Fair Isle class at Cricket Cove from Andrea Arbour. Project: the Paris Mittens that she designed.

Don’t let that progress picture scare you. In general, the mittens look better when they are knit by someone who is not me, and that particular mitten would look better when photographed by someone who is not me. I also expect that a photo of the mitten when it is entirely finished and, most importantly, blocked, will look much better even if I am the one who takes it.

I’ve been nearly finished the left one for a while now, but have been having some arguments with the mitten regarding closing the top of it. The garter stitch saddle in two colours makes my head go a little splodey. Once I have shown it who is boss, I plan to get back to work on baby items for various friends and relatives before embarking on the second mitten. I swear this is a result of my spirit of generosity, not second-mitten syndrome. Uh-huh. For reals. I’m willing to pinky swear on it.

I’ve been feeling a bit better lately, and the prevailing theory is something like, Hey, you have bipolar disorder with a seasonal pattern to it — did you really think you could go the entire rest of your life without that affecting you in any way? (Which is not at all the way my doctor phrased it, but I think that’s sort of what she meant.) So I suppose I should feel lucky that this fall/winter my drastic change in energy level was not accompanied by a drastic change in mood. (I do not feel lucky, by the way. If I were a lucky person, it would not have taken me fifteen cups of Tim Hortons coffee to finally win a free coffee, even though the odds for winning a prize in Roll Up the Rim are supposed to be 1 in 6. Also, I made my fiancé buy that last coffee for me in order to trick the cup into thinking that it wasn’t for me. You may scoff, but it worked.)

Anyway! Tomorrow I will go for the regular blood tests I am supposed to get because of my medication, and they will also make sure there is nothing else wrong with me, which there probably isn’t, and then it will be spring and the sun will shine and the birds will sing! And here, to catch you up a little bit, are some photos from 2010. Roughly one from each month, but not exactly. Because some months, either nothing happens, or you don’t take pictures of what does happen, or you do take pictures, but they’re crap.

2010 started like this, in a Cuban restaurant in Manhattan. That’s Mare on the left and me on the right, Yolande is taking the picture, and Yolande’s friend Carla is somewhere out of camera range.

The fiancé, who does not like his photo posted online, and I spent Valentine’s Day at the Homeport Historic B&B/Inn. (This year we went to a Goo Goo Dolls concert on Valentine’s Day.)

The sock acknowledges famous goalie and knitter Jacques Plante at the Bell Centre in Montréal.

Back in New York on April 1, I attended an event sponsored by Scholastic and Women in Children’s Media to celebrate the release of the Baby-sitters Club prequel and the rerelease of the series. Let’s just say that this was my childhood dream. Awesomeness quotient: Meeting Ann M. Martin? Check. Being in a room full of women my age who aren’t afraid to admit that they can still remember the names of all eight Pike siblings way more easily than they can remember useful things like where they put their keys? Check. Meeting people I know online from BSC fandom? Check. Meeting the amazing and funny David Levithan, who is a great YA author himself and has edited so many other novels I love? Swoon. I want to have his babies. It doesn’t matter that he’s gay and I’m engaged. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong with this plan. Um, I mean… Check!

Yes, this is the same sock that was held by Judy Blume and, well, everybody at the 2009 ALA conference. So many famous authors have touched it that I know I am never going to actually wear this pair of socks except to take pictures of how they look on my feet. Which is why I still haven’t finished them — I’m not in any all-fired hurry to finish knitting socks that have become strictly ornamental rather than functional. I’ll get back to them someday, and I’ve knit plenty of other socks in the meantime.

I told you the fiancé didn’t like his photo online.

A dishcloth I knit poses with Our First Dishwasher. Oddly enough, by now the boy and I are already on Our Third Dishwasher, as last fall we moved from the apartment with Our First Dishwasher to the apartment with Our Second Dishwasher, and when Our Second Dishwasher broke in an expensive manner, our landlords decided it would make more sense to replace it with Our Third Dishwasher (okay, so technically none of these are really ours) than to fix it.

I got this in July.

I named my engagement ring Sparkly. BECAUSE HE IS SPARKLY.

The wedding, by the way, will now be a semi-elopement, since we have invited our parents. Which means we say we are having a small wedding, and people say, “Oh, with about fifty guests?” and we say, “NO. SIX.”

I got some more sock photos with Canadian rock stars when I went to a Crash Karma show. Here’s the sock with Mike Turner, formerly of Our Lady Peace.

And here it is with Edwin. Who is really quite good-looking.

That night I did also get a sock photo with Jeff Burrows (formerly of The Tea Party) and The Other Guy in the Band (okay, he has a name; it’s Amir Epstein), and they were also very nice and they look fine in the picture… but I’m in it, too, and I look terrible. So nobody gets to see that one.

David Usher seemed more confused by my sock photo request than the guys from Crash Karma were (and more confused than his keyboard player Kevin Young was that one time), but he posed with it anyway. This is maybe a month after the Crash Karma show, and it’s the beginning of the mate of the previous sock.

Sock is a pirate! We’re on the HMS Bounty. This replica of the original was built for the 1962 movie Mutiny of the Bounty, and it’s been in other movies like Treasure Island and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Sock enjoys hanging out with movie stars.

I made my ballet debut at the age of 30 as a party guest in The Nutcracker. I did not fall down.

And no picture-filled post would be complete without a kitty pic! Here’s me and my girl at Christmastime.

We’ll see if I update more often this year. And I am knitting things that aren’t socks, too, although right now I’m mostly focused on the birth record I’m cross stitching for my new niece. I started it in July, the kid was born in January, and it’d be nice if I finished it before she starts school.

The current interminable knitting project is the Return of the Shawl of Doom. It’s a simple garter stitch triangular shawl in Fleece Artist Goldielocks that I put aside (or possibly hurled violently aside) about two years ago because the yarn was driving me crazy crazier. I am now much more capable of working with this yarn and it is no longer causing me to gnash my teeth every time I pick it up. So this is not yet a story with a happy ending, but at least it is a story with a Happy Bit Somewhere After the Beginning but Not Quite at the Middle Yet.

I also happen to be feeling nauseous today, which is not at all surprising in light of everything sucking. Given my luck lately, it would be more surprising if I were not sick. At the moment, I’m hungry and am trying to figure out what I can eat that won’t make me barf.

Speaking of barfing, Kaytlyn is pregnant,¹ and Mare and I are totally excited, because we know that if we wanted to knit something insane like the Chicken Viking Hat for the baby, Kaytlyn and Addison are much more likely to approve of it than anyone else we know who has kids.

And speaking of Mare, I promised her that someday I would post photos of the beaver statue adorned with her scarf, so I am keeping my promise.

The large stone rodent is ready for his (her?) close-up!

The scarf probably only remained on the beaver for a couple of hours before it was liberated by someone who (presumably) wanted a pretty scarf, but the lamppost cozy is still on the lamppost after two-and-a-half months.

No, the Margaret socks are still not finished, on account of I have a tendency to get distracted by shiny things. My current shiny thing is restarting the pink Orangina (AKA Rosina) tank top I abandoned last year. So far I’ve knit about three inches of tank top.

Oh, well. You gotta start somewhere.

¹By “speaking of barfing,” I was referring to the all-day morning sickness Kaytlyn detailed in her blog. I didn’t mean, “Ew, babies, gross.” Although babies are gross. They leak. Constantly.

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.

What was not awesome: the annoying drunk chick who came up to us during intermission and started talking to my friend. I was knitting and trying to ignore Annoying Drunk Chick, but apparently she was trying to convince us to “lend” her our tickets for some nefarious reason. Then came this exchange, which I swear I am not making up:

Annoying Drunk Chick: Is she knitting or something?
My Friend: Yes, she is knitting.
Annoying Drunk Chick: (to me) Can I say something to you? And don’t take this the wrong way, it’s just because I’m really drunk right now and you probably shouldn’t listen to a word I’m saying. No offense, but—oh, I really shouldn’t say this at all. You should just ignore me.
Me: Now I really want to hear this. It sounds like it’s gonna be good.
Annoying Drunk Chick: Do you have someone special?
Me: What?
Annoying Drunk Chick: Do you have someone special?
Me: Are you going to tell me that I’ll never find a boyfriend if I keep knitting in public?
Annoying Drunk Chick: Something kind of like that, yeah.
Me: Well, if me knitting in public makes somebody not want to go out with me, then they’re not the kind of person I want to go out with, anyway. I’ll do what I want.
My Friend: (to Annoying Drunk Chick) She has a boyfriend. (This is, of course, true, but I saw no need to mention it to Annoying Drunk Chick since it seemed irrelevant to the point I was making.)
Annoying Drunk Chick: Oh, well, that’s good.

Wow. I can’t imagine ever being that rude to a complete stranger. Luckily, she went back to her own seat or wherever and we didn’t see her for the rest of the concert.

After the concert we went to The Old Triangle and after waiting approximately 400 years at the bar for someone to take our drink orders, which they never did, we decided to sit down at our table and wait—that hadn’t worked before, either, but at least we’d get to sit down. Except someone had taken my chair and dragged it over to the next table, and was sitting in my chair, in fact sitting on my coat, even though there were other coatless chairs at the table that they could have borrowed. This someone was none other than… Annoying Drunk Chick!

Yes, the very same. There are 64,128 people in Moncton and exactly one I wanted to avoid, so guess who’s been sitting in my chair. On my coat. Aargh. She seemed very happy to see us. She told the people she was with that she’d borrowed our tickets, although she had not. I guess that’s why she liked us; in her annoying drunken haze, she thought we’d helped her out. Which we hadn’t. Anyway, we weren’t at all happy to see her, so we left. Quickly.

Speaking of someone special, I finished knitting Dashing for my boyfriend (click the picture to make it grow!), and I have gone back to working on a pair of socks that I abandoned and forgot back in the fall.

This is the first armwarmer that I knit. Unfortunately, the cables were a little too tight in this one. I managed to make looser cables in the second armwarmer, but I haven’t taken any pictures of it. Oh, and by the way, my boyfriend really does have fingers, and they aren’t buried in the armwarmer, either. It’s not colossally huge or anything — his fingers are sticking out, but you can’t see them because of the way he’s bending them.

I also made a clock for my boyfriend last month.

It’s a Robert Goulet record, because we are both immensely fond of the SNL skits with Will Ferrell as Robert Goulet. Apparently anything can become a clock if you drill a hole in it and attach a clock mechanism. Obviously, I didn’t have to drill a hole in the record, it being a record, but I did have to embiggen the hole in the middle a little bit with a steak knife.

With this clock, you will always be forewarned of when 3:00 p.m. is coming, when your blood sugar and energy levels are low, and (the ghost of?) Robert Goulet will come and mess with your stuff…

My boyfriend is finally allowing me to knit him a pair of fingerless mitts. Our past conversation on the subject went like this:

Me: You know, I could knit you a pair of fingerless gloves and then you wouldn’t have to wear those cut-up socks on your hands.
Him: (genuinely puzzled) But why would you do that when I have these cut-up socks?
Me: *bangs head against the wall*

I’m knitting Dashing and have completed one mitt so far. Sadly, he has stipulated that they must be made from black acrylic, because he sucks all the joy out of life. I am using Vanna’s Choice. It is adequate. You could be stuck working with much worse.

My back has been bothering me again this week because I was in an accident when a car crashed into the bus I was on, which I have talked about enough lately and therefore don’t want to talk about here. None of us on the bus were seriously injured, just bruised and stuff, and my back isn’t even as sore as it was when I first hurt it. If you want to send condolences to the family of Contable Jason Porter and his two children, Hannah and Jack, who were killed in the accident, there is an online card on the RCMP New Brunswick site.

I’m taking an evening course in blanket weaving at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. That’s the one thing I’ve been doing that’s hard on my back, since I’m trying to give it a bit of a rest. Weaving is currently taking precedence over knitting and blogging (my poor boyfriend and his one lonely mitt!), and Jackie is saving my life. Or attempting to. (When she says, “others are still behind,” she means me. Well, and one other person. And when she says, “We will see how it all turns out,” I’m not sure I want to know what she means.) I don’t know for sure if I’ll finish my blanket, but I do know that I wouldn’t if I didn’t have help from Jackie. And if I didn’t run over to the fibre arts studio every time I have a free moment…

Admittedly, I did buy underwear at the grocery store, which is pretty sad.

I hurt my back last week when I slipped on some ice and fell. So last week was pretty unpleasant, but this week the pain doesn’t hit me until about 4 p.m. every day. Apparently that’s as long as I can remain upright without it hurting, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did last week. It has made knitting challenging, though.

I haven’t actually needed to do a lot of knitting, per se, but I do have lots of sewing up of knitted items to do. That, of course, happens to be my least favourite part. Which is why I’ve left all of it for so long.

Pretty pictures of stash should distract you from lack of any further content, right? Look, Handmaiden yarn in the First Flight colourway from Baadeck Yarns.

And the Celtic Colours colourway…

And now for something completely different:

It took me quite a while to figure out that was supposed to stand for “assorted cupcakes.” Because, I mean, it says ass cupcake.

I did, however, get some photos when my boyfriend and I were at the Magnetic Hill Zoo. Such as this one of me feeding some very gluttonous deer.

I wanted my boyfriend to get a picture of me with the baby goats, purely so I could caption it “Me and the kids,” but there were too many other people around at the time to get a clear shot. I took a lot of other photos, though, one of my favourites being of an alpaca that looks almost exactly like Tina Turner.

See? Does she (admittedly, I’m making an assumption when I say “she”) look like Tina Turner or what?

And although I didn’t take any pics of the fibre-y goodness inside London-Wul, I did pose outside of it.

Guess what. I didn’t buy any yarn at London-Wul at all.

Because I bought a new spindle and several small bags of roving. Yup, I really have to take some stash photos soon so that others may see the prettiness. The roving I bought at Singer the other day was especially pretty. Note to self: also take photos of my soap. I’ve just started melt and pour soap crafting. I’m not interested in trying any soapmaking methods involving lye anytime soon (by “soon” I mean “within the next couple of years”) because I am clumsy and messy. If you’re not into making soap, here’s the 411: melt and pour is soap crafting for morons (such as myself), but you can make really impressive-looking stuff that way. You take plain white or transparent soap base, melt it in the microwave (or in a double boiler on the stove, but really, which method do you think I use?), add fragrance(s), and usually colour(s), and sometimes other additives (i.e., honey, vitamin E, oatmeal, apricot seeds), mix, pour into molds, wait for the soaps to harden, and pop ‘em out.

The current knitting projects include basic socks with Patons Kroy in Tutti Frutti Jacquard — hey, look, the Patons site has pictures of new Kroy colours; must find! — and a baby sweater.

I’m attempting the Heartbreakingly Cute Baby Kimono from Mason-Dixon Knitting in Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran. Too many people I know are spawning lately. My cousin’s wife is having twins; that seems excessive to me. I’m knitting the sweater in stockinette with a seed stitch border instead of garter stitch, and it started out fine because I am not a total moron, despite what I just said when I was talking about soap. The sleeves, however, are not going so well at all, so my plan is to throw myself on someone’s mercy tonight at Heather’s and have them show me what would be a better way to increase for the sleeves than a backward loop cast-on, because that is totally not working out for me.

SHARK CLOTH!

We did a Summer Secret Santa thing at work, and I made the shark dishcloth as one of the gifts for my recipient. Just when you thought it was safe… SHARK CLOTH!

The current knitting isn’t results-based because I’m just practicing some lace swatches, on account of I suck at lace. More about that another time, though. It’s a long weekend, the boyfriend and I are going away (because Moncton is “away,” y’know), and there will be yarn shopping. Starting before we leave, at the 50% off sale at Singer, right about now.