This Old House

We’ve made some good progress on the hallway renovation. K is having a blast working on this area. He says it reminds him of when he was restoring cars, except now he has no pointy-haired boss to torment him. There’s only me and I’m easy to scare off, when I’m not tripping over tools or paint cans.

Here’s the side wall with its 47th layer of white goop, ready to be sanded, again:


Before K starts any work, he covers our coat rack with plastic. It hasn’t helped much:


The ratty old carpet we don’t worry about. It’s so ancient and thread bare, no amount of plastic is going to protect it:


The main wall is almost finished up to the living room entrance way. K put a sheet of plastic across the opening to keep the muck and dust contained in the hallway, but in my dizzy state of mind I managed to walk right through it and pull the sheet and the tape down on me. K decided it’s best to leave it open and deal with the mess rather than untangle me from the clutches of plastic and duct tape.

Bike Month…

THIS was where K was hanging out last Saturday.
When he wasn’t posing his bike on the seawall:


or stopping on the bridge to take photos of our fair city:


On Sunday, he volunteered at our annual Island Bike tour and today, he’s off to Steveston to take his place on the Big Bike event. It’s a busy month for our intrepid cyclist.

I’m having fun using up as much of my yarn as I can. My stash consists mostly of ‘one-ball wonders’, those skeins that jump out at you at the yarn store and say ‘buy me, you have to buy me’. I never could resist the call of the yarn ball.

I also was bequeathed a fair amount of leftovers from my knitter friends. There’s never enough of any one particular yarn to make a complete garment, so I browsed through my selection (which I must say is depleting rapidly) and came up with this colourful scarf:


I'm using 4 separate skeins for this baby, all double knitting weight or less. You only need 15 stitches on 12.75mms (17US) to get a decent width. The pattern is simple – just knit every row until you run out of yarn or fall asleep or your hand goes numb from using those fat needles.

You can see the texture and colours better here:


Here's my favourite model, wearing her new scarf. Each skein held approx. 150 metres (165 yards) and I ended up with a scarf that's 6 inches wide x 56 inches in length. A perfect size. I find if I knit with multiple thin strands, the scarf has more softness and drape than one strand of equal thickness.


Aren't these chubby needles good looking? K turned them on his lathe in the woodshop. I believe the wood is maple. The blue ones are 19mms (35US). I somehow managed to lose one of the needles and since I only use them for scarf knitting, K cut it in half and created points and tips for them. The man is a genius.


Next on the needles…

A friend donated two skeins of railroad yarn to my stash and I’m planning to knit this simple EROS SCARF next.

I’ve never worked with such slippery yarn before so it could be awhile before you see photos. Hopefully it won’t end up a tangled mess on the floor. It’s happened to me on more than one occasion. I usually leave the yarn lying there until it decides to behave, or until I quit sulking.

One more potato chip…scarf, that is, just off the needles:


Once again, I used bits and pieces from my stash. Some were only 3-5 yards long. For the 720 stitches, I guesstimate you’d need approx. 35-45 yards, but don’t take my word for it.

That's all for today.  Enjoy your week and we'll see you next Friday.



"Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are a good person is a little like expecting the bull not to attack you because you are a vegetarian."
~Dennis Wholey