Vancouver Island or Bust!

After 15 months of planning the final hour has arrived and I'm on the train to Toronto for the shortest leg of my ultimate trip to the West Coast.

From what I can tell from the Via Rail website, this jaunt from Kingston to Toronto is likely to be the least comfortable of the trek as we (the other travelers who are heading west and I) will be boarding the "Continental" just a bit before midnight tonight, which should arrive sometime on Saturday morning in Vancouver. From there, I'll make my way by bus and ferry to Victoria where I'll be meeting my brothers for a week of visits, yarn shop searching and a day at the Cowichan centre to try and connect with some of the Native knitters there.

At left is a picture of Victoria in full bloom a few weeks ago. Not all that different from what I'm leaving here.

This is what we have to travel through on the way across Canada: what Albertans are hoping to be the last of the spring storms. Very pretty but I had been hoping to see SPRING on the prairies. A lot can happen before I get there.

I have packed a whole suitcase of knitting, rug hooking, books, note books, this laptop, my MP3 player and a whole lot of snacks. I was assuming that I'd have a chance to blog a fair bit while on the train but have discovered that it's only on this leg of the journey that internet access is available on the train. It appears that I'll have to wait until I can get off in train stations for a bit of a break, once or twice a day in order to connect to the station's access. All that to say, I'll be keeping some notes and pictures along the way but it might only get posted every second day.

Be back with you soon.

Anne

The Ultimate Knit and Chat Weekend on Amherst Island

is incredibly excited to offer

THE ULTIMATE KNIT AND CHAT WEEKEND on Amherst Island.

Isn't this the lodge where you would love to spend 2 nights, enjoying 6 gourmet meals,and a series of knitting workshops, a yoga class for knitters and all the Knitting and Chatting that you can handle.

Save the dates on your calendar now:

Friday. Sept 24th (for supper) to Sunday Sept. 26th (after lunch) all for just $350*.

Or if you can only spare a day, take the ferry and join us on the Saturday from 10:00am to 4pm for workshops, a delicious lunch, lots of fun for $50.

The goal of this weekend retreat is to relax and get away to this lovely island setting and enjoying the company of new and old friends, while picking up some great knitting tips.

The knitting theme of the weekend will be "Going Around In Circles".

-Friday evening we will have a pot luck snack fest while having the opportunity to try out a wide range of circular knitting needles. Bamboo, nickel plated, lace tips, 9" sock needles, "Clicks" (interchangeable ends).

You name it, we'll have it there for you to try and compare.

-Saturday after breakfast we'll welcome our daytime participants and have the first of 2 workshop sessions that you can choose to attend. Likely themes for these sessions will be:

-Converting a regular pattern so it can be knit in the round: the pros/cons, and how tos.

-How to use circular needles on smaller projects: magic loop, 2 circulars, small circulars.

-Moebius knitting a la Cat Bordhi: lots of ways to use this interesting technique.

Needless to say the exact schedule and content isn't firmed up just yet, but we'll keep it posted here as things solidify.

-Saturday afternoon will have another workshop and/or free time to walk the shoreline or sit on the beach.

-Saturday evening will be movie night/ chat night/ "P.J. party with knitting" night...whatever.

-Sunday morning we'll have Jackie from Yoga to Go come and visit us to share some gentle yoga techniques, specifically helpful for knitters. Then you can catch up on the knitting class that you didn't get to participate in by chatting with the teacher.

We'll finish off with a great Sunday luncheon and a last walk on the beach and head to the ferry in time to be home for the lovely dinner that your family will have prepared for you...

Some of the nitty gritty details:

Registration: To save your spot for this exquisite fall getaway just call WOOL-TYME Kingston at 613-384-3951 and we will be glad to save your spot (for the full weekend of the day.)

A $150 deposit is required at registration ($100 refundable until Aug 31st.) for the weekend and a $25 deposit is required for the day registration.

The rest of the payment is due by Aug. 31st. Cancellations after this date can only be made if we are able to find someone to take your place.

Where: The Lodge on Amherst Island is just a 2 minute drive/5 minute walk from the ferry terminal. As parking is at a premium, (and who wants to pay for the ferry anyway?) we can meet in Millhaven and car pool from the ferry dock.

*Note The price quoted above is based on double occupancy (2 beds per room), consequently if you prefer not to share your accommodation, the fee for the weekend is $450.

Other details will appear here and in email posts to you as specific plans gel together.

Don't delay. Registration is on a first come, first served basis.

Anne

Be kind to wounded knitters out there.

I was just watching a DVD series where actor, Ewan McGregor, and his real life buddy are riding their motorcycles from London to NYC, called "The Long Way Around", that is to say through Europe, Russia, flying across the Beiring Strait and down through Alaska, Canada and across the USA.

While visiting a children's shelter run by Unicef, Ewan asked the kids if they had learned to knit. They replied that they did knit, and did it quite well. Ewan then related the very sad story of his 9 year-old self knitting a scarf for a beloved uncle, emphasizing the time and patience that it took. When he presented the gift, his uncle laughed..."And I never knit again," were Ewan's final words on the subject. But you could tell that it was with some very real regret that he put the needles away.

Let me tell you, I hear more than my share of stories of people who have had such experiences. They find the courage to come to the store and shyly ask about taking lessons, feeling that their previous experiences with frustrated teachers and/or inapproriate tools mean that they are, as they've been told in the past, "not very good" at knitting.

Coming up in June is an opportunity for all knitters to go out and find some wounded knitters and extend the hand of friendship and encouragement to them. June 12th to 20th is World Wide Knit in Public Week.

One great way of celebrating this fact is to get together with friends at a local cafe and knit, but I'm planning on doing something a bit different this year.

It will be an exercise in building up knitting karma: I plan on spending 1/2 hour each day, knitting by myself at some different location in the city. The idea is that I'm hoping that people will come up and ask about what I'm doing, or will share a bit about their knitting history or memories. It should be fun...and who among us would not want to have a reason for sitting down to knit for 1/2hour each day, no matter where or what the circumstances?

I plan on keeping a record with pictures and will keep you up to date about the results. Do you have any plans? Let me know and we can share them with each other.

Yarn Theory...science meets craft yarn.

Last week I heard on CBC Radio that the winner of Britain's Diagram Prize for the most unusual book title of 2009 is: Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes by Daina Taimina. Daina was a mathematics professor at the University of Latvia for 20 years and has now been at Cornell University for the past 10 years. She also crochets objects to illustrate hyperbolic space and makes truly appealing books about them. Follow this link to see more examples of her technical/beautiful work.
http://www.math.cornell.edu/~dtaimina/hypplanes.htm




So, living as we do in a world where every piece of information is about 2 minutes away with the help of GOOGLE, I wondered what other math and science minds had turned their techno brains to yarn crafts and WOW, what a treasure chest is out there.

The Yarn Theory Project was an art exhibition in 2009 which explored the relationship between knitting, crochet, mathematics and science. It operated out of an old public school, turned into a community art gallery, bringing art to the city and the city into the studio.

In areas of Britain, breast feeding clinics had found themselves short of expensive models of breasts for demonstrations. They issued a plea to knitters and patterns were made available for breasts of varying shapes and sizes from the Lactation Consultants Association of Great Britain. This is a picture of Audrey Horncastle who at 84 has found a whole new way to make her crafts valuable to the community by knitting "boobs" for the group.
Where there's a will, the knitters have a way of solving any dilemma. Link here for the pattern.

Follow the link below for more examples of the collisions between craft and science, such as a knitted brain, a view of the nature of the chaotic system with 25 500 stitches, a womb, the digestive system.
http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/science_blog/090127.html

And most beautiful of all, is the Crocheted Coral Reef Project, which will be exhibited at the Science Gallery in Dublin until June 2010.

From the Crocheted Coral Reef site here is a description of the project:

"One of the acknowledged wonders of the natural world, the Great Barrier Reef stretches along the coast of Queensland like a psychadelic serpent, a riotous profusion of color and form unparalleled on our planet. But global warming and pollutants so threaten this fragile monster that scientists now believe the reef will be devastated in coming years. As a homage to the Great One, IFF directors Margaret and Christine Wertheim instigated a project to crochet a woolen reef. The sisters, who grew up in Queensand, have been spearheading the project since 2005, quiety watching as it has morphed into an unexpected and far-reaching wordwide movement. "

Check it out. It's almost worth the trip to Dublin just to witness how our lovely yarns can be made to emulate nature.

I thought that it was supposed to be a LION and a lamb that lay down.

So this afternoon I was going through my email and had received notice of a new book being published in Britain on the social history of knitting in the past decade or so. Interesting as that could be, the subject matter paled in comparison to the picture that they featured as part of their book. It showed an adult elephant wearing a knitted (or perhaps crocheted) coat, similar to a dog's coat.


Now, as I am committed in this blog to find and share things from the knitting world that I find of interest, I couldn't let the elephant coat go. So I started searching Google for the original picture for some background from where it might have come. Well, I guess I'll have to buy the book as I wasn't able to come up with anything...but look what I found: Themba, the elephant and Albert, the sheep. Follow this link to read about their strange friendship and to see more pictures. http://geniusbeauty.com/cute/baby-elephant-adopted-sheep/cute/baby-elephant-adopted-sheep/



Also, while looking up "knitted elephant coat" I came up with this dishcloth pattern, which can be purchased for $2. at http://digknittydesigns.blogspot.com/2009/07/elephant-knit-dishcloth-pattern.html

And although I didn't find the actual picture of the elephant wearing the coat, perhaps we have a clue in this cartoon as to who the crafty lady was who produced it? Papa elephant doesn't look to happy about waiting for his new knitted garment.
http://www.agoodyarn.net/KnitImages2.htm


Enough about elephants: Google being what it is, I could spend the rest of this year telling you about 212,000 pictures that I found in .11 seconds that referred to "elephant knitting."
This is the other activity that has been keeping me occupied for the past few weeks. This is a picture of a basket of "Goodie Bags" that we've prepared to bring to the spring conference of Ontario Hook Craft Guild members, taking place at the end of April in Cobourg. We made up 300 hundred of these bags, each containing 5 strands of fun yarn that can be incorporated in a rug hooking project.
The idea is to let the rug hookers of Eastern Ontario know how much fun it can be to have a world of spun fibres at your fingertips, ready to be worked in to their latest creations and also that WOOL-TYME Kingston is now offering a whole array of rug hooking supplies.

So for those of you who think that the life of the staff at a knitting store is the essence of creative bliss, consider the 12.5 person/hours required to cut and assemble 1500 of these skeins, the sheer blind confusion of trying to sort them into groups each containing 5 coordinating colours, and the extra 10 hours to bag and tie them and get them ready for transport to Cobourg next week. But I'll let you in on a little secret: I love this kind of mindless drudgery...Reminds me of the years when we (my kids and I) would fold, address and mail over 1 000 copies of the paper newsletter at least 3 times a year.
According to an article in the March issue of O(prah) Magazine, a Harvard affiliated study found that "repetitive motion and focus of needlework can elicit what's known as the relaxation response, a calming meditationlike state." Perhaps it refers to the repetitive motion of putting little skeins in bags too.

Interesting knitting blogs

It has taken me a while but I finally got around to reviewing the links to other blogs that I have on this site and was thrilled to discover and rediscover some fun things.

First, the discovery: Lynn One, Purl Two is a great
little site written by Lynn Cullen who, with her Mom, runs Mary's Yarns in Unionville, just north of Scarborough, ON.

Lynn represents what so many of our younger custoners would love to have: a good excuse to spend the majority of her day in a yarn store, knitting, designing, blogging and all the other fun things that this job offers.

Above is a picture of Lynn's thumb holding up a book from Japan that a friend brought her, showing a cozy sweater knit for together couples. Check out the blog, it really is fun.

The redicsovered blogsite is a lovely story. In January 2007, The knitnotwar 1,0o0 project announced its intention to mount an art display of 1000 knitted, felted origami cranes by late 2007 in Portland, Oregon.

Their latest post dated Feb. 19th, 2010, announces that they are just 60 cranes away from the 1000 target. This says so much to me about commitment: achieving a goal 3 years after the anticipated deadline to my way of thinking would require much more tenacity than achieving the original goal on time.

And besides that, they also announced that the Peace Promotion Division of The City of Hiroshima will be hanging the final project in one of the booths (for displaying folded cranes) surrounding the Children's Peace Monument after it has been shown in Portland. What an honour for them.
I do believe that linking here will get you to the pattern if you'd like to try it. Aren't the cranes lovely in this picture? I'm sure the group would be thrilled to have any of you join them in their last efforts.

And finally, just in case any of you think that the only interesting knitting stuff comes to us through cyberspace, this is a picture of a real fellow in Jamaica selling his wares and knitting caps from his table, not on etsy. It's a picture taken by the sister of one our customers who actually met the real live guy and didn't even need to go to a website to get his picture.

What a great city Montreal is, yet not one where people usually choose to spend a spring break. But it's close and Mother Nature was ridiculously kind to us with magnificent sunshine all last week, and there is always lots of great food and beautiful things to see.

You will all be glad to hear that the concept of knitting is alive and well in the city. Witness one of the "knitted" toques which adorned many of the bus stops. Actually it isn't really knitted (are you surprised?) but an extremely clever design of black stitching on a padded fabric that looked a lot like stitches. Notice they even took pains to shape the ribbing around the bottom, although the stitches didn't change to represent the knits and purls which we know produce this indented effect in real knitting. But they get major points for trying.

Actually the whole toque-on-the-bus-shelter thing was part of an ad campaign for milk and a comforting evening of entertainment coming up soon. The poster pictured here, which is in fact a picture of an actual knitted piece, is really impressive for the quality of the reproduction and the persistence they show in getting their message out there: The ad campaign is EVERYWHERE throughout the city. But the most impressive version of the poster that I saw was an entire subway car covered with a reproduction of the knitted fabric. It made me wonder how long a real knitted "metro car cozy" would last at those speeds.

We also got to go to the Museum of Fine Arts which was featuring a presentation of the stained glass work of Louis C. Tiffany, son of the great Mr Tiffany from Tiffany and Co. of NYC and consequently "Breakfast at Tiffany's" fame.

I saw this beautiful piece that I've pictured here, and it was my one little glimpse of real spring flowers in these magnolias. What surprised me most when examining these pieces of stained glass up close is that the individual pieces of glass are not flat. Some can be up to an inch thicker in some sections than the piece next to it, or even from one part of the same piece to another part of it. I guess it's part of what makes the amazing textures and colours jump out at us.

Well, back to the store today. It's nice to have work that one is glad to get back to after a holiday.