Ladybugs & Yarn

… are ladybugs and yarn. I was looking to give the blog a makeover and a name of its own, considering a) the shiny new index page on the main site; and b) that I’ve been formatting my patterns under a similar name. So! Now I have both.

When looking for beads last week, I went into the biggest arts & crafts store I’ve ever seen, and in the process rediscovered, in a sense, all of the crafty pursuits that I’ve let languish since knitting elbowed its way in. I’m not drifting from knitting by any means (as it seems to be the one craft I honestly feel that I’m good at), but I do think I should get the rest of my craft supplies from my parents’ house soon, so I can dabble here and there. I seem to have packed rather randomly (read: extremely quickly) when it came to those things, too. I have my fabric stash, but no sewing machine at the moment as Mom took it home with her the last time she was here. I have my brushes and dabbers and stencils, but no box of paints. I have beads and wire and crimp pliers, but no findings. I have pretty papers, but no paper-slicer or flat glue to collage them onto boxes.

I also have cats on my feet, but this is unrelated.

The first tweed sock is done and I’ve started the second, but photos will have to wait until they’ve been gifted. They’re on Ravelry, for those of you with access–I’m seventykay there. As far as my Juliet sweater, I frogged it. Loved the yarn, loved the pattern, but didn’t love them together. I think I may try again with some medium slate-ish blue Cascade Pastaza.

Happy Canadian Turkey Day!

I found out about the Pay it Forward exchange through Gilraen’s blog, and it was such a lovely idea I had to throw my hat into the ring. Here’s how it works, in the words of the creator of the exchange…

It’s the Pay It Forward Exchange. It’s based on the concept of the movie “Pay it Forward” where acts or deeds of kindness are done without expecting something in return, just passing it on, with hope that the recipients of the acts of kindness are passed on. You all know I’m already a PIF type of person. So here’s how it works. I will make and send a handmade gift to the first 3 people who leave a comment to this post on my blog requesting to join this PIF exchange. I do not know what that gift will be yet, and it won’t be sent this month, probably not next month, but it will be sent (within 6 months) and that’s a promise! What YOU have to do in return, then, is pay it forward by making the same promise on your blog.

So! I am therefore making the same promise to the first three people who comment and request to be a part of this exchange.

In other news… Socktoberfest! A perfect excuse to pair up those lone socks, finish those languishing WIPs, or knit that pair of socks you’ve coveted for months. There’s nothing to sign up for and no imposed deadlines–all you have to do is decide to focus on sock knitting during the month of October. If you want to set goals, go to. Mine are to finish the sekrit socks and get them mailed off, and to knit a pair of tweed socks for my father. If I get those done, then I have a lone crazy-coloured sock in self-striping wool that needs a mate, and if even that gets done, then I’ll work on the pair of barely-started Fire on the Mountain socks that were my new commuter project.

Time to put on a film and get knitting.

The leaves are turning. It always seems to happen so suddenly; you go to sleep on a warm indian-summer night and wake up to a crisp autumn morning. I love this time of year, when the leaves are red-gold, when the air has a refreshing chill in the early hours and a lovely warmth mid-afternoon.

I noticed the trees on my way to Lakeburn this afternoon. The transit buses don’t venture that far outside the city limits, but my mother’s car is here while she’s in Alberta visting her sister. I’ve only had it out twice, once being today’s drive and the other a trip to the zoo on Magnetic Hill (more on that, later).

Lakeburn, of course, is home to London-Wul. I could have just phoned them with my questions about spinning classes, but I chose to visit, instead. The studio has such a wonderful atmosphere; it feels less like a store and more like a cozy workshop. Which, I suppose, it is, since the owner does have her own lines of handspun and handpainted yarns. I took a look through Folk Style, More Sensational Knitted Socks, and a bunch of other books while I was there, and of course had to take the opportunity to squish yarns, eye up the Addi Turbo lace needles, and pet the pearly pink plastic sock DPNs. Even in the presence of all that gorgeousness, I did behave myself–almost. I found a lone skein of hand-dyed fingering-weight pure wool in a bright cherry red, and 500 yards for $8 was too good of a bargain to pass up. It’ll make a fabulous Estonian Garden scarf.

Speaking of red, I took out several yards of red corduroy from the fabric bins this evening. It’s waiting beside the sewing machine now, along with a fall jacket pattern. I think I’ll cut it out tomorrow while the cats are napping–much easier that way. They’re positively angelic where knitting is concerned, but pattern pieces pose too great a temptation for them to resist.

I spent a fantastic afternoon at the zoo on Friday. Look at this beautiful creature:

I loved all of the big cats (and the raccoons and the alpacas and the marmosets and the wolves and the otters and…), but this jaguar and her mate had me captivated. Such powerful animals, yet they roll and stretch and paw at each other like kittens in the sun.

More photos!

Oversized teddy bear.

Young stag.

A capybara, the world’s largest rodent. This one must’ve weighed about 80lbs.

Bison.

Tomar the gorgeous tiger.

Baby llama!

Aww.

Adorable raccoon.

Very curious, too. As soon as he noticed us, he decided to sit and watch us the way we watched him.

Bald eagle! Very impressive birds.

Sleepy otter. <3

Another sleepy otter, obviously protective of his toys.

Pygmy goats, looking for handouts.

Norwegian pony. A cute one, too.

Scarlet macaw, king of tropical birds.

This cockatoo was a total show-off.

Some kind of small South American tree snake.

Alpacas!

A cougar, more interested in his nap than in the humans watching him.

Itsy-bitsy marmosets. These little guys could fit in the palm of my hand.

Something tells me it would be a bad idea to turn your back on this deer.

I have loads more photos, but it’ll take some time to sort through them. Also, I think next time I go to the zoo I’ll go in the morning, as in mid-afternoon most of the animals have taken refuge from the heat.

As promised, I took some photos along Main Street. I’ll put them in another post, though, later this afternoon.

That ecstatic bliss brought on by fabulous life changes has settled down a bit now, of course, fading into a low-level buzz of contentment that hovers at the corners of my mind and occasionally makes me smile at completely random times. The courses are going so well at the moment; my average is a solid A+; we’re constantly being warned that the course is going to get much more difficult, and quickly, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. As long as I keep up the good study habits I have at the moment and don’t allow myself to procrastinate or fall behind, I’ll do well. I’m almost sure of it.

Tomorrow afternoon I’m going to the Magnetic Hill Zoo and plan to take a load of photos. I’m thinking about wandering around town after supper, too, with camera in hand, provided the weather behaves itself. It’s been gorgeous the past three days, though, so I have hope.

… I did promise knitting in the subject line, didn’t I? Yes.

I’ve been steadily knitting away on one of my own designs–a set of two pairs of pretty plum-coloured socks, one mother-sized and one daughter-sized. The pattern’s not for release here, but it’s being sent to somewhere more commercial and with a larger fanbase than this itsy blog of mine. =D I’m very excited about it. If I could knit the pairs on the bus they’d be done, but charts and buses don’t mix. I’ve been doing them, instead, in the moments I can manage at home.

As far as bus knitting goes, I’m 3/4s done a pair of socks knit with the Fleece Artist merino that the LYS’s knitting night girls gave me as a gift when I left for college. Lookie at the awesome rainbow colours:

My other commuter project is a Juliet cardigan knit in this gorgeousness. I’ve made a few simple alterations to have the pattern work with the gauge I’m knitting to, and now it’s fine for bus knitting until I get to the lace.

It’s September. Do we all know what that means? … Holiday knits! Oh, come on, I can’t be the only one to have all of my gifts planned and yarn-stashed already. Granted, it’s a small list, but I had to figure out what yarns I’d need while I still had a steady income, so the plans are all done up. All of the giftees have access to this blog, so I’ll keep the babble to a minimum–all I’ll say is that I have two pairs of socks, two hats, and a wide scarf to knit.

It’s autumn-evening chilly outside (beautiful!) so I think I’ll take a walk to the mailbox–I keep forgetting it exists and haven’t checked it in a week. Good thing it’s locked, yes?

Blueberry pancakes, anyone?

It’s been a couple of weeks now; not long, but I’m settling in quite comfortably. The courses are starting off on the right note, I love my apartment, the cats are happy, and I seem to have landed myself in a quiet part of this lovely city. I’m just a short bus ride from downtown, so I get the best of both worlds.

Based on what I’ve seen and discovered so far, there seems to be much more here that appeals to me and my interests. I’m a bit of an arts-and-culture geek at times and I’m thrilled that there’s a strong presence of both, here. I like being able to walk down Main Street and hear jazz coming from an open-air restaurant near City Hall, then turn the corner and hear maracas when I pass by the entrance of MexiCali Rosa’s. I’m thrilled that Symphony NB has six concerts at the Capitol Theatre (pic is quite large; it’s a gorgeous venue that was built as a vaudeville/opera house in the 1920s) here between October and June, and that the student price to attend is less than that of a cinema ticket. I’m amused (and pleased) that there are angora bunnies and assorted sheep wandering around that beautiful yarn shop just outside of city limits.

I like that when I step onto the curb in front of a crosswalk, the cars stop in both directions, and I like that the girl sitting beside me in class asked me about the knitting I’ve been doing during lunch breaks. I like that although the city’s seven or eight times larger than anywhere I’ve lived before, I no longer have to show my monthly pass or student ID when I board the bus because the driver remembers his regulars. And, of course, I like that there seem to be enough good things that I can ignore the few things (and people) that remind me too much of that town I’ve left behind.

Teal-coloured surgical scrubs and a lab coat just might be a better (and more comfortable!) look for me than a Tim Horton’s uniform. Actually, screw the “might be”. The word is “are”.

I’m rambling. But I’m happy. Can you tell?

I’m sprawled on the living room floor with the laptop at the moment, watching Gargoyles on DVD, waiting for my hardboiled eggs to cool. Egg salad sandwiches for lunch tomorrow, mmm.

There’s going to be lots of photospam over the next couple of weeks, as I have a whole new city to play with. There’s also going to be a shiny new look for this whole domain. Stay tuned.

Tomorrow morning, just after dawn, there’ll be a van stuffed with boxes and furniture zooming along Route 11 South, toward Elmwood. I had a promise made to me that it would all work out, and it was kept.

It’ll be 7-10 days before the internet gets hooked up in the flat, so I shall speak to you all again after Labour Day.

Here we go.

It’s been a panic-stricken few days here at Chez Kay, as things that were supposed to have been approved were not approved and financial arrangements fell through. I though I had run out of options, but my father is bound and determined to get me through this degree and moving on with my life, and I can’t even fathom how I possibly deserve all that he’s given me up to this point, let alone what he’s prepared to do this year so I can finish my education. He tells me not to worry about it and to let him handle it for a few days, because he’s going to figure it out, but of course that’s like telling the rain not to fall.

I’m far from at ease, but I’m continuing to pack and make plans (with some alterations). If things can be accomplished through sheer force of will, this will happen. At the moment, I’m trying to focus on the things that are within my scope of influence–I’m sealing and labelling my boxes, and checking my list to make sure I don’t leave anything vital behind. I’m doing a good job so far of packing things together in some form of organisation… so far.

I’m kind of excited about my kitchen & bathroom (and living room too, really), because things match now so I don’t feel like a straight-out-of-high-school student who’s cobbled together everything that they could find secondhand or pillage from the parents’ house. My first apartment had a white lacquered dining room table, a lot of milk crates as end tables, and a brown-and-orange flowered sofa that my parents bought when they were married in 1972. I didn’t care at the time, and truthfully, I wouldn’t care now if that’s what I was taking with me again, but there is something rather nice about looking at a room that’s your own and having it coordinate and have some form of decor. I’ve been slowly acquiring furniture and other household items since that first place, but most of them have been kept in storage and/or corners of the basement waiting for me, so it didn’t hit me until I started packing that hey, it all goes together.

The apartment decor was a stroke of luck–the kitchen is black & white, and all of my tools/small appliances are red/black/white (very retro), plus, the bathroom is white with gold trim and the bathroom stuff (gifts from my mother–lovely ones, too) is beige with white & gold. My bedroom furniture is a black & mahogany-coloured set I bought a few years ago; parts of it (my computer desk and bookshelves) are going in the living room with the black & mahogany end tables from my parents’ house. The sofa that I’m taking with me, pillaged from the basement here, is black and beige, so even that’ll coordinate. I might have a small streak of interior decorator in me somewhere–I love moving in and unpacking and choosing where things will go.

The cat tree is a violent green and won’t match anything. <3 But the kittens love it, and I’m going to place it near the living room window so they have a comfortable perch.

I went to the work-attire store today to find scrubs and a lab coat, and they had neither that matched the specifications of my course. There’s another store I can check, and I can also order them straight from the college if nothing else works out. I’d be perfectly content to work in scrubs the rest of my career, but it depends on where I work–hospital pharmacies allow scrubs, but most retail pharmacies don’t.

On a knitting-related note, I went to a get-together at the beach last night with the knitting night girls, as it was the LYS’s fourth birthday. There was tons of food, wine, maniacal laughter, and of course knitting. It was such a gorgeous area of the beach, too, at a cottage owned by one of the women on the outer curve of the bay, so that when you look across the water in one direction you can see the faint outline of the Gaspé coast. The other direction is open sea.

To my utter surprise… I got presents! Since I’m leaving. First, there was a lovely little spinning wheel pin. Next, there was a skein of Fleece Artist merino in gorgeous rainbow colours. Last, there was an awesome spiral-bound knitting design journal–it has pages for writing up patterns, little sketch templates to draw designs, and chart paper that’s not square, but is proportioned like knitting stitches are.

Okay, it’s about time for me to be settling in–tomorrow is the start of my last stretch of work. Five days from now, I’ll be done.

On a final note, I have my new address now if anyone wants/needs it.

And today it rained. Mid-morning, it was still sunny and oppressively hot, but the clouds rolled in at noon and there was thunder and lightning and pouring rain that went on for hours and hours. I went outside without a coat, just because. Glorious.

A butterfly joined me at work today. It flew in the open window and settled quietly on the edge of the counter–if it had been flapping in my face I would have been skittish, but it just sat prettily for a long while and opened its wings every so often to give me a good look at its gorgeous markings. Someone told me that butterflies bring good luck if they land and sit beside you, and although I’m not superstitious the sentiment seemed appropriate considering the direction life’s starting to take for me.

It’s still raining, but the storm’s moved on.

I have the theme song from Nintendo’s “Kid Icarus” (a game I haven’t played in at least fifteen years, if not more) on auto-repeat in my head. The memory might be weird, but it’s not entirely random–guess what I cast on for today. In amethyst-coloured Handmaiden Lace Silk.

I’m thinking about looking for a new circ to knit it on, though. I do love my pointy-tipped KP needles for lacework, but the silk is too slippery on the metal, even knitting as tight as I do. I transferred it to a bamboo circ, and the stickiness hit the other extreme, plus this circ in particular is quite dull-tipped. Have any of you tried Addi’s lace circs? I don’t like their Turbos, but I’ve heard the lace ones are very nice and have just the right amount of grip.

So I tried on the first Bordello sock after I finished the gusset decreases, and the blasted thing will absolutely not fit over my heel. I should have known, because a) I have high insteps; b) the stitch pattern is on a bias and is therefore less stretchy than stockinette. Bah. So I frogged it. I’ll choose another pattern, and soon, because the Sea Wool is gorgeous and I want it on my feet. I’m thinking I might knit a pair of Embossed Leaves socks, but I have plenty of patterns to choose from.

Bedtime, now. If I can find room amongst the cats.

I’ve finished the final Harry Potter book and have much to say, but I’ll keep my mouth shut until I can remember how to make a cut-tag so that it’s optional reading for those of you who are still waiting for and/or reading your books (or don’t give a flying fig to begin with!).

The links to my free patterns don’t work at the moment–I’ve just acquired Adobe Designer so I can make better PDFs, and have therefore taken the patterns down while I redo them. I should also mention that I’m re-uploading them under a different name. I’ve renamed my little (empty at the moment) Etsy shop to Ladybug Yarns, and am therefore redoing the patterns to match. It takes a bit more time to do a pattern with Designer, as opposed to doing it in Word and exporting as a PDF, but oh, it makes the files much prettier. Here’s a little preview of what the new pattern template looks like:

Pretty, yes?

I have to go off and flail more about the HP book. Fortunately, I have people online at the moment who are as nerdy as I am.

ETA: I just re-uploaded the new version of the Parasol Socks pattern. It’s much shinier than the old one.

I’m registered for college, have paid a deposit on my tuition to reserve my seat, have been pre-approved for an education grant from the government, shouldn’t have issues getting approved for the bank line of credit to cover what EI can’t, have been on the phone with landlords to set up apartment viewings in the city, am working again, and my moving date is September 1st.

… I can’t even believe it.

And I won’t let myself dwell on the wasted years and the dead ends–all I need to think about now is moving foward, because it looks like it’s happening. Actually, screw “looks like”–it is happening. I’m going to be taking a day trip to Moncton sometime in the next couple of weeks to find an apartment, and I think once I’ve walked into the place I’ll be living and signed whatever I’ll be signing, it might start to feel real.

Thank you all for the comments on my little purse–I haven’t replied to each of them like I usually do, due to zooming around like a nutter these past few days getting things in order. Forgive me, this once?

I’ve been happily knitting away during waiting times in offices, hold times on phones, callback times, etc., and I have to admit it’s been mostly plain, diagonal-knit dishcloths. I’ll need some for my kitchen, and the handicrafter cotton was on sale a few weeks back at under a dollar per ball. Mom suggested I knit them to match the small kitchen appliances and dishes I have, but I chose a rather hodgepodge mix of colours, instead.

I’m going to have the final Harry Potter book in my hands in a few hours. Glee!

Now, I’m off to finish another cloth, and then catch up on blog-reading, because I <3 you all.