Amy Thistle

She Won’t Want it Back Now

Dogs. Whatever possessed us to get dogs?

I’m upstairs, sorting the laundry, while Cai and Fergus are bopping around the living room. Growls, grunts, the occasional yip, a few full-out barks, some slurpy licking.

Wait a minute. That slurpy licking sound, what is it?

Oh, right, it’s one of the yarn swatches I’ve made recently. I hand the swatches over to Cuca as cat toys, but the dogs eventually appropriate them as chewies. Most of these ersatz chewies are in the garbage can by now.

Downstairs I waddle, laundry basket on hip, to find Fergus with one of E.g.’s new, hand-made-by-moi, crocheted slippers in his mouth.

“Fergus, that’s NOT a chew toy.” Taking the slipper from him, I’m about to set it and the other slipper in the coat closet when I notice that one of the ankle patches is missing.

And I can’t find it anywhere.

I’ve Got Your Back

Pardon My French

You are getting sleepy…

The good news is, I got four and-a-half inches higher on the back of the sweater I’m crocheting.

The pattern uses an interesting variety of stitches — half-double crochet, treble crochet, single crochet, and chaining — but it’s really quite straightforward. You make a row using two types of stitch on the right side (i.e. the outside) to make the cables, and then a simpler row using the other two types on the wrong side (i.e. the inside) which becomes the row on which to work the next bunch of cables. No counting is necessary, unless you get to the end of a row and things don’t look right.

Today I decided to turn on Radio-Canada, the French-language version of the CBC, and worked away with one ear cocked to the talk shows. Because my French is rusty, I need to listen more carefully than I did fifteen years ago. And because bilingual jobs are more in demand than unilingual ones, I thought it would be smart to use my crocheting time to brush up on my langue seconde.

Stitching went along merrily for a while. Then suddenly, I got to the end of a row. And things didn’t look right.

I counted. There were the right number of stitches on the fresh row, but the lower one seemed short. Okay, whatever, add an extra stitch at the end of this row, chain, turn, do the next cabling row.

About a third of the way along, I noticed that on the previous cabling row, I had missed a stitch. Now with single crochet, which makes puny short stitches, this mistake might be remedied by shoving in an extra stitch without the error being too noticeable. But I had missed a treble crochet, which means that a piece of cable about the length of the road from Toronto to Montreal was missing.

And so, that first third of the most recent cabling row, the entire in-between row, and two-thirds of the previous cabling row were promptly unravelled.

Would you like the punchline now? It’s short, so pay attention. It’s:

wait for it…

Twice.

The bad news, then, is that of the four and-a-half inches of crochet I did today, three of them were pulled out.

Needless to say, the word “multitask” does not appear on my résumé.

First Things First

So, yeah, we went to a wool shop yesterday, and I bought a book or two. Today we went through our stash (technical term: means all the various weights, colours, and compositions of all the skeins, balls, and twizzly bits of yarn in one’s possession), reacquainting ourselves with some interesting stuff we’d forgotten all about.

New experiments will come later, however. I’ve already started a crocheted sweater, my first. My mum gave us some purply acrylic yarn left over from an afghan project, and there was almost enough for this pullover, so I’m doing the hem and cuffs in a shiny bluish yarn.

The purply colour is called “sweet violet”, and the bluish colour is called “sapphire” . In order to show the cabling, we had to manipulate the second photo below fairly drastically. The real-life colour of the sweater-in-progress is somewhere between those of the two photos.

Not a terribly exciting post today, but I figger that putting my project into the blogosphere will help motivate me to finish it.

To be continued!

The photo accompanying the pattern I’d saved from the Autumn 1999 Crochet Digest.

A close-up showing the nifty ridging effected by front-post-treble-crocheting, something easier done than said.

Wordless Yarnsday

Cozy

In a previous life — Before Blog — I occasionally crocheted. I’ve never learned to knit, knitting requiring two needles, which necessitates far more coordination than I’m capable of, but crocheting I can do — a little.

One year, I made three shrugs for Christmas. One was in black wool shot with gold filament, and given to my now-ex-sister-in-law. Below are photos of the other two. A shrug, by the way,  is a shawl with sleevelets.

This is our classmate from theology school, in a variegated-wool shrug of a straightforward pattern. (The slice of manhood belongs to my sonnyboy. )

And here is E.g. in hers, in a more open stitch. The blue-green wool was hand-dyed in Nova Scotia. I was more — umm — experimental with this one, but E.g. does wear it, on chilly evenings at home.

I’ve also crocheted a number of pairs of slippers. These are probably the only plain pair I’ve made; the others have usually resembled running shoes or chubby livestock, or had little attached medallions that look like animal faces.

Last year (I think) , I picked up a ball of this beautiful soft wool, and treble-crocheted it into this lacy little coat scarf for E.g. She wears it just about every day, outside even, in the Spring and Fall. Success!

Keep warm this week, everybody!