You thought I was kidding?

We really do have a lot of shops that specialize in down products, many of them started by European immigrants to Canada in middle of the 20th century. Some are big chains, but I love finding an independent shop where they really understand their craft.

How do you find such luxuries in Canada? Why, simply visit the website of The Down Association of Canada. That's where I found Daniadown -- the company I bought the twin duvets from earlier this year. I'm not sure where I'll be taking the two-pillow project, but that's what the whole winter is for.

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Meanwhile, it's quiet around the blog and you guys know why. We're on the new server now and, knock wood, all seems to be as promised. Hub is going happynuts with programming things he was unable to on the old server. My happy geek boy.

Speaking of my geek boy, question: I've blindly cast on [after swatching and getting gauge] for a pair of kilt hose. I have 4 balls of Bulky Fixation and I'm wondering if that will be enough for his size-10 feet. Does anyone have any feedback for me?

[He doesn't read the blog. He's very much NOT a blog boy.]

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I'm picking up a special present at the airport today. I'm selfishly excited to have my good friend moving here. I know the next few months will be a challenge for her and Sandra, but I'm hoping I can help a little.

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Okay, head back down!

WWW for November 26, 2008

A little bit of everything this week, starting with the very little!



Neil Gaiman fans, you may know about the upcoming Coraline movie, but did you know about the knitwear therein? Click on the link to go to the movie's website and then enter the key SWEATERXXS to see Althea Crone's indescribably tiny sweaters knit for the characters in the upcoming stop-action movie to wear.

What, you want to see the rest of the site? Here are the rest of the keys, via Mr G himself -- glad to oblige.

stopmotion : the Biggest Smallest movie ever made.
buttoneyes : Meet the cast...
moustachio : Bo Henry, art director of Coraline, shows off his remarkable moustache tricks.
armpithair : Every hair in the film was placed there by hand...
puppetlove : Director Henry Selick explains what it must be like for the puppets in the film.



It's that time again. Rowan's announced the yarns they're discontinuing. Say goodbye to...
Rowan - 4-ply Cotton, Damask and Bamboo Tape.
RYC - Cashcotton 4-ply, Cashcotton DK, Luxury Cotton DK and Silk Cotton.

Colors to be discontinued are listed below:

ROWAN
Calmer - Onyx, Khaki, Tinkerbell, Powder Puff, Carnation, Mandarine
Summer Tweed - Cape, Exotic, Dew, Angel, Sprig, Orient, Blossom, Bronze
Cotton Glace - Hyacinth, Butter, Tickle, Peony, Buttercup
Handknit DK Cotton - Diana, Decadent, Slippery, Nectar, Soap
Kidsilk Haze - Elegance, Nightly, Fondant, Jacob, Violetta, Ice Cream
All Seasons Cotton - Jazz, Soul, Giddy, Citron, Framboise, Cinnamon
Naturally Dyed Organic Cotton - Lipstick Tree, Querbracho bark

RYC
Bamboo Soft - Almond



Thinking about planning a special knitting excursion for 2009? Here are some upcoming options:

- Terri Shea, author of Selbuvotter, leads the Purlaway luxury knitting retreat in Oregon next October.

- our own Tara Jon Manning, author of the Mindful Knitting series of books and much more is looking forward to the next Mindful Knitting Retreat in Vermont next March.



Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers, and happy Thursday eve to the rest of us!

what i picked with my birthday gift certificate

Because it's all about a good night's sleep, I decided it was okay to treat myself to a brand-new uber-stuffed down pillow. I picked the Royal Velvet Majestic Gold 1200-Thread-Count Hungarian White Goose Down Pillow. I leave the full label in there, because there are [not kidding] seven billion different varieties of down pillow from this company and the differences are freaking subtle.

In the end, I went for pure down, Hungarian [because I'm half Hungarian, don'tchaknow], with the largest fill amount [26oz] I could find. I like the gussets on the side.

I've had many down pillows over the years and there are two on my bed that are so squooshed from years of use that they're not so much good any more. I am thinking, when the new pillow arrives, I'll take the two oldies to a down shop [we have several in town!] and have them made into one new pillow. They usually clean/refresh the down when they do that, so I'll have a fabulous backup pillow as a result!

Thus endeth my diatribe on pillowness.


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It's WWW day! Stay tuned!

i moebiused!

Remember this? Well, as promised, I cast on that evening, pulling a skein of craziness from my wall of special yarns. It's [I've just discovered, thanks to the power of Google] "Raggedy Cotton" from Henry's Attic. It's strips of cotton cut on the bias [so it's stretchy!], and dyed with my favorite aqua blue by Laura, who is rather good at the dyeing thing. I bought it at Lettuce Knit ages ago and had no idea what to do with it.

It's odd as yarn goes. It's not the softest yarn, but in the finished piece, it's got a lovely substance and it's the most wearable moebius I've ever knit. [In non-wools, they tend to be pretty floppy and I didn't want floppy.] I haven't washed it yet which may soften it, but I have put it on my head and wrapped it around my neck in multiple ways and it is quite fabulous.

What was most fabulous was that I only had 6" of yarn left after this project. 3" from my cast on, and, after choosing a random place to bind off, JUST ENOUGH to go around both sides of the piece [aka a freaking LOT of yarn], leaving a 3" tail. I believe Cat charmed the project from afar.

A wee winner!

Thanks to Trinity for her suggestion -- her comment was the randomly selected winner of my sort-of little contest.

Trinity, send me your address so I can mail you your wee prize!

You want to know what I've bought, right? NOTHING yet. Nothing. I'm still waffling. Turns out the Kindle doesn't work in Canada [blerg], not that it was in the budget. Current idea: someone suggested an Ice Cream maker. I get bored with the low-fat Chapman's flavors [yummy, but always the same], so this just might be the ticket!

In any case, thank you all for participating! I loved reading all your suggestions and clicking on the links. It's fun to dream.

WWW for November 19, 2008

This week, we're WWWW -- What's What WORLDWIDE Wednesday! Take a look...



Have you seen the new Debbie Bliss magazine? Perhaps not...at my LYS, the copies were gone in a matter of days! The Autumn/Winter issue is full of Debbie's signature cables and simple, elegant British style.



Elsebeth Lavold has some new yarns coming out. Bambool is 80% Bamboo Viscose and 20% Merino Wool. Calm Wool 40% Wool, 30% Camel, 30% Alpaca. To go with, two new pattern books: The Out of the Blue Collection and The Touch of Romance Collection.



More Lavold! knitting exhibit "Knitting Along the Viking Trail" will make an appearance at Seattle's Nordic Heritage Museum, just in time for the second Nordic Knitting Conference, March 13-15, 2009.



New yarns from O-Wool! Legacy DK and Legacy Bulky are made from 100% certified organic merino wool. It is processed in accordance with the Global Organic Textile Standard. No chemical softeners are used during processing, so a rinse soak is recommended as the best way to highlight the natural softness of the merino fiber.



Congratulations to Seasalt, a retailer in the UK, on their successful Go Knit campaign!

Go Knit! is their charity knitting window project. Volunteers hand knit scarves to go into Seasalt shop windows in October. The scarves were sold from the windows to raise money for the Cinnamon Trust, a charity that helps old people and their pets. This year, over 400 homemade scarves were donated by Go Knitters, and in one shop, 52 scarves were sold on the first day!



Brand new from our friends at Interweave -- Stitch Magazine! The premiere issue features 25 clever projects by independent designers — including a patchwork pillow pattern from Lisa Congdon and an assymetrical folds wrap skirt by Martha McQuade of UNIFORM studio, plus articles profiling Natalie Chanin from Alabama Chanin and Katherine Hable Sweeney and Susan Hable Smith, the sister duo from Hable Construction. Projects range from stylish and sophisticated to charming and modern, and always design-conscious. Each project offers clear step-by-step sewing instructions, and included in the magazine are several full size clothing patterns on a pull-out insert. For a preview of Stitch, visit the website, which offers readers two free full-size skirt pattern PDFs from projects featured in the magazine, plus a bonus pattern for a table runner and a tutorial on sewing basics.



We'll have more fiber news next Wednesday!

help me spend my birthday present!

How weird is this? I have a birthday-present Amazon gift certificate from my sister and her sweet hub burning a hole in my e-mail box and I cannot, for the life of me, make a decision about what to spend it on! Wanna tell me what I should buy?

I've got $75 to play with [they spoiled me!] and I can ship to their US address, so it can be anything Amazon sells. Things close to $75 but a little over are also cool. Books, music and DVDs are obvious choices, but too easy. I'm looking for...I don't know what! They don't sell yarn and I already looked for a Lazy Kate [not kidding].

If you're game, fill up my comments with your suggestions! Get creative! I don't promise that I'll pick one, but I just might...

I'll pick one commenter at random this Friday morning and send them something from the Knitty prize cupboard, so it'll be a little birthdayish for the winner, too! Let the coveting begin!

p.s. The cake above? Chocolate raspberry truffle. That's what hub got me to celebrate this birthday. It was UNBELIEVABLY delicious. <3 Dufflet.

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eta: My birthday was a month ago, but thanks for the wishes! Thanks for the DVD recs, but I don't think DVDs this time, either. Sorry I left it out of the original post. It's in now. :-)

Favorite suggestion so far? Kaphine's accordion.
Closest to my own taste: I already have a fuzzy logic rice cooker [bought from Amazon!] and LOVE it huge. Also have 2 OTT-Lites.
Wish I had the budget to top it up for: the Kindle. But I don't. Oh well.

Keep commenting! I love your suggestions! Off to see what vintage they've got! :-)

Knitty secrets revealed!

Okay, so I don't always talk about the business behind the scenes, but this is something you guys need to know about!

You know how, whenever a new issue of Knitty is released, the site gets bogged down and unreliable for about 6-8 hours? And then it's fine again? That's because we're on a shared server with an "unlimited traffic" account that we set up in 2002. It worked very well for quite a while, but as our readership grew [yay!], our server couldn't keep up.

About 2 years ago, we moved to a "better" account with the same webhost that was supposed to alleviate the problems. Those of you with long memories will remember that it was a disaster that shut the site down for hours and hours [not just a slowdown, but a complete stoppage of data] until we returned to our old server. Oy.

So more than a year ago, the hub [aka CTO of Knitty] started seriously pushing for us to upgrade our server situation. It's taken that much time for us to weigh our options, seek out solid solutions and finally, unbelievably, choose a provider. We signed up with the new provider today.

This is a huge deal for us. Moving to the new server should be almost invisible to you, and will likely happen in the next few days. Then we get to play with it, making sure it really does what they said it would. And then we get to implement the new features we put in place in September [the thing that made the server go boom seconds after we went live? that's the thing I'm talking about] and see how we do for the winter issue.

This means that the launch of the winter issue will be a breath-holding few hours for the hub and I. You guys are fabulously determined websurfers and we expect to be pounded with traffic the moment we launch, as usual. This time, we're 99.9% sure the new server can take it and more with no slowdowns! But as a practised skeptic, I'll believe it works when I see it working.

Should we have any trouble on launch day, please know we'll be doing our best to get it sorted out as quickly as possible. But our hope is that you won't notice any difference at all, except that you won't have to post "New Knitty's UP [and I can't get at the site]" on any message board ever again.

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The other thing the new server means is still a secret! We've been working on a sister site to Knitty [nope, not Knittyspin] since 2004. We plan to let the beta version loose as soon as we can. We're really excited about this new site and we hope you will be, too. It's something we believe knitters have wanted for ages, and we're looking forward to telling you all about it. When we can.

if you can watch this without smiling, you're broken

spotted on my sister's LJ.

this kid will be winning the Giller one day. or, more correctly, the French equivalent. undoutably.


Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

if you are similarly smitten, her Vimeo stream has an RSS feed. :-)

What's What Wednesday, premier edition

A new feature begins today @ the knittyBlog: What's What Wednesday! Our intrepid roving reporter, Melissa Gow, is collecting all the stuff a web-loving fiber fanatic could want to know, and you'll find it here on Wednesday's knittyBlog. Let's go!



The UN has declared 2009 to be "The International Year of Natural Fibers".



Weaveolution plans to be a Ravelry-type social networking site for weavers. They hope to go live by spring 2009.



A fraction of an ancient spindle whorl was found in Reykjavík, inscribed with runes. The whorl dates from roughly the 11th century and the runes have been translated roughly as "Thórunn owns me". How flipping cool is that?



Welcome back Spindlicity!



Knitting fiction author Debbie Macomber has recently opened a yarn shop.



The Royal Winter Fair is shaking up their spinning competitions this year. They have dropped the traditional sheep-to-shawl challenge and are holding two new spinning competitions instead. One is for drop spindling and the other is a three-person team with a spinning wheel.



We'll be back with more news next Wednesday! [In the meantime, the usual blogness will continue :-)]

The story in photos

This is Lake Louise, Alberta. It is possibly the most breathtaking place I've ever been to. Even prettier than Emerald Lake, if that's possible.

Lots of pictures for you to peek at, including Banff and -- most importantly -- the reason I was there: the Make 1 Yarns Fall Retreat students, teachers, their knitting and lots of fun. There's also the special Make 1 Retreat colorway on Lorna's Laces Amy-Friendly Yarn [!], in case a little yarn pr0n will help get you through your day. The other instructors at the event were Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, Stefanie Japel, Nancy Bush and Cookie A, and everyone came out of their classes glowing and motivated. It was really exciting to see.

I taught my Plug & Play class, and it was great to see the students grabbing on to the concept and running with it. One of them [Jeneane] even got so far in her shawl that she snapped a picture and uploaded it to Ravelry before the class was over!

It was an absolutely fabulous retreat, super-organized and fun, because of Amy and Sandra, the owners of Make 1 Yarns, organizers of this retreat. They took care of every detail and are most generous hostesses. 92 happy, smiling students can't be wrong.

I hope I get the chance to do it again next year!

i was away.

And you might not even have known it.

Here's where I was:



More soon.

wow.

You guys are great. I loved reading [and cheering for] all your votes and hearing about what it was like at the polls for you. Maybe one day I'll get to vote in person.

Mostly, I'm just so happy about the election, the huge, record voter turnout and the final result. I really feel that whatever happens to the US deeply affects the rest of the world, and Canada especially. I think what happened yesterday means better times ahead for both countries. I also respected McCain for his speech and the sincerity with which he delivered it. Those were good words.

I don't usually discuss politics on this blog, but this is so important to me that I broke my rule. Now I'm done. For another 4 years, if not longer.

if you are a US citizen, you have only one thing to do today.

and it's not knitting*.


It's not just your right to vote, it's your responsibility as a citizen of the United States. Drop me a comment when you're done and I will give you a yay out loud in the Knitty offices!

I voted absentee in September. Now it's just the waiting.

*in case there's a line up at your polling station, you should totally bring your knitting. I would!

in aid of election eve/day harmony, Cat Bordhi stylee

Cat Bordhi sent me a note today that pointed all of us to her online Moebius tutorial [above] as a metaphor for unity. In her e-mail, she wrote, "...I hope that you will be able to send it on to knitting friends as it may bring peace to them during the next few days, regardless of their political viewpoints. And it may help support the world to regain a sense of grace and true humanity."

If you have never done a Cat Bordhi-style moebius, never tried to learn her unique and brilliant [but potentially intimidating until you actually DO it] cast on, you now have no excuse not to give it a shot. The video above will help you get there.

To read her whole message including design and yarn suggestions, click here. For those who like it short and sweet, here's what I think is the pithiest bit:

So - here is why the Moebius is a perfect expression of the best of humanity, and the healing of the fractured country and world that I trust is coming:

1. The Moebius *appears* to have two surfaces and two edges - ie, polarities such as black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, Republican and Democrat - but when you follow the surface around you will run right into your starting point without ever having changed to the other "side." For there isn't one. Everything flows into itself. Polarities are an illusion. What lies beneath the apparent polarities is oneness, beauty, and grace. In a Moebius you can see it, hold it, be awed by it. Once the frenzy dies down, hopefully those with opposing views will slowly rediscover their common humanity.

I love how Cat's brain works. How lucky we are to have her as one of us.

I'll be casting on a new moebius tonight. Who's with us?

so what's different about the blog?

Another blog!

I put the button over there on the sidebar --> about two weeks ago. The one that says Invincible? Yup, that's the brand name plaque from my huge vintage desk, and it seemed a fitting representative for what the new blog is about.

It's about stuff I love. Vintage, handmade, unique, brilliant, awesome stuff. I do read a lot of stuff blogs -- blogs where people feature things they like. But I was finding stuff on my own that never showed up in these blogs, so I took the leap. It's been 2 weeks and I'm having a blast. The posts are short, which means it's all about the stuff [as am I :-)].

The desk shown above is the find that set me off on this new bloggy journey. It's vintage army surplus, unused, and it FOLDS. Take a peek on the Very Small House blog for more about it, and all the other delicious things I keep finding. I update daily during the week.