Now, Where Was I?

These are a few sketches completed before I regretfully dropped out of Laura's tree study during the month of March. I did continue to draw when time permitted, but the regularity wasn't there, so not much progress took place. The big pines with the spreading branches make me want to do a bigger picture of them. More sketches needed there.

Meanwhile Laura, as always, produced some truly inspiring work as the month went on. http://laurelines.typepad.com. And did you see her recent drawing of the female cardinal on its nest? Absolutely stunning. I can't wait to see what she brings back from France.

After a couple of weeks of very good weather, our trees are starting to pop - much more inspiring than they were a month ago. So I'm still studying trees, but hope to show other things as I get back into a more serious working mode. I also want to get more familiar with Blogger and learn how to make it work for me, arrange my photos the way I want them, have lists of books and my favourite sites, and all those other things I enjoy so much on other people's blogs.

I'm Back

Everybody's out of the hospital, still alive, and back to normal, or as normal as we get in my family, so I'm hoping to be a more faithful blogger from now on. Thanks to everyone who left kind notes, and I'm sorry I didn't answer them at the time. I didn't really see them until it was a bit too late to send a prompt reply, but I did appreciate them very much.

I thought I would kick off my comeback tour by participating in List Friday, hosted by Mrs. Pom over at Pomegranates and Paper. She asked for a list of ten things we love (or at least like) about where we live, and somewhat to my own surprise I came up with ten right away. So here they are.

1. The bicycle path, which winds for miles along the river's edge, past water lilies and weeping willows, tall reeds and old apple trees. The great blue heron fishes in the shallow water. Sometimes you might see a fox, a rabbit, or a deer. There are otters in the neighbourhood, but we only saw one once, crossing the highway right in town, against the light.

2. We are located on a major flyway for migratory birds, and our local bird sanctuary is a northern breeding ground for Canada geese. After a skimpy beginning back in March, enormous flocks began to arrive, and continue, night and day. When I open the door at night to let the cat out, I can hear them honking up there in the dark, passing overhead like clouds. Soon we'll see them swimming beside the bike path with all the little goslings in tow.

3. There's a beach I can walk to. It's a manmade beach, not very large but not very crowded, mostly patronized by the campers who have permanent sites in the local park. A lot of people around here refuse to swim in the river because of pollution, but I love to swim in natural water, and have never had any infections or illness because of it. I prefer it to an overcrowded pool on a hot day, for sure. There's nothing like a beach to cleanse you inside and out.

4. In June and July, the wildflowers are spectacular. Mostly pretty common varieties, nothing rare or wonderful in themselves, but so abundant, and the days so long, and the weather so perfect, that the effect is intoxicating.

5. It's a short walk to the post office, the grocery store, and the bank, and I'm known by name at all three. When I lived in Ottawa, I had the same bank account at the same branch for fifteen years and nobody ever recognized me.

6. My back yard is big enough for a really large vegetable garden. (And one of these years I'm going to plant one.)

7. There's hardly any traffic here. People routinely walk down the middle of the street even when there are sidewalks on both sides. It's also very quiet, which is nice if you want to have your coffee on the deck on a fine spring day.

8. There's a bridge between here and Cornwall called Hoople Creek Bridge, which strongly resembles the Lingan Bridge of my childhood, so I feel good whenever I cross it.

9. There's a dramatic story attached to this village. It was created in the 1950's to house the people whose homes were flooded when the St. Lawrence Seaway was built. Many of the older residents of Ingleside remember homes, farms, churches, and family graves they will never see again although they lie only a few hundred yards away, under the water. This was a planned flood, of course, not a sudden tragedy like Hurricane Katrina, but it left deep emotional wounds, and affects life even today. I don't mean to say that I'm happy this happened, but it gives a context to the rather bland, suburban appearance of the place. Ingleside is not what it appears to be, and I like that.

10. Should the pleasures of village life start to pale, we are just one hour from Ottawa, an hour and a half from Montreal, the same from Kingston, four hours from Toronto, and eight hours from New York. Really, folks. This is the centre of it all.

It's Been a While

Just to let you know that I haven't given up blogging. I've got two family members in the hospital, and posting had to take a back seat for a while. I'm bringing my sketchbook on my travels, and I'll be back.

A "Duh" Moment

While drawing the kitchen-window tree today, I noticed that one of the limbs has practically no bark left on it.

Of course, I have seen this every single time I drew it, and each time I would think, "What an interesting contrast in texture", and that's as far as my thinking went.

Today, for the first time, it occurred to me to wonder why the limb is losing its bark. It's too high to be rabbits or deer, and there's no bird that could do that. Squirrels don't eat bark.

Is the tree dying? Does it need to be trimmed? Is it a late symptom of the stress from the big ice storm eight years ago? Or is this just part of its life cycle? Will the bark grow back? Can the tree survive without bark?

I'm also wondering why it took me so long to make this connection. I think it's because the mental effort of drawing usually doesn't allow any "outside" thought at all. That's one reason it can be a very nice rest from life's usual run of problems. It's all you can do to handle the problems of getting the tree, or some part of it, on the page, and anything else has to be blotted out of your mind. But I've done this tree so many times lately that my mind felt able to let that one little thought in while dealing with the drawing.

Today I studied the bark, particularly the places where branches split off to become new ones. I tried different ways of using the pencils to see if the texture changed. (it did.) I tried a paper stomp, which I don't usually use, to see if it improved the smoothness of the barkless branch or the roughness of the barked. I think it contributed a bit to the round shape of the tree when used sparingly at the edges, but I don't think it helped the smooth trunk at all.

I'm realizing that I have never once done a sustained drawing of this tree or any other. I sometimes manage a graceful gesture, occasionally capture the idea of a massive trunk, but I always quit too soon to get any more than that. After that little bit of drawing, if the tree still attracted me, I would usually move on to paint or pastel. I'm not a detail painter and don't want to become one. My paintings go for big blocks and major movements.

But studying the subject in detail with different media, over and over, helps to develop a knowledge of the tree, an understanding that will strengthen the final product. Who knew?

That's why I call this a "Duh" moment.

Yikes, What Happened to Last Week?

Sorry for being a no-show all week. Life got busy, and I was never able to get the pictures taken before dark. My camera doesn't do so well by artificial light.

Anyway, here are two of the week's trees. The coloured one was done in pastel pencil in my sketchbook. It's not really that bright out there, yet, but I seized upon any hint of non-gray and exaggerated it. Blogger is not being very cooperative today, so it looks as if two is all I can post.

Drunk on Spring

Forget spring fever. This is a drunk, people, an event when common sense is forgotten, you imagine yourself twenty years younger and much more beautiful than you ever were, you fall insanely in love with every puddle and twig. In short, if there was a lampshade out there, I would have been wearing it.

Sunshine, blue sky, a fresh if chilly wind, puddles everywhere. I still love puddles just as much as I did when I was four. I still like splashing in them if I'm wearing the right boots and there are no witnesses. (Being a grown-up is a drag that way.) I could still stare into them for hours. I can still remember specific puddles from different times in my life. Now, during the spring melt, they're everywhere. Yippee!

Every year I look forward to seeing the pools that form at the bases of the trees along the driveway into the park. I guess the standing water is really bad for the trees, but I love to see the repeated reflections going off into the distance. From close up, you can look down through the sparkling water and ice to last year's grass underneath, with the sky floating on top of it all.

I always want to paint it, but there's not a single good spot to work from. The only reasonable place to stand is in the road, which isn't busy but does have some traffic. There's no place to put anything down. My sketchbag, balanced on a handy log, kept threatening to topple into the water.

So the sketches are really quick and crude, in my little book, with the colour added from an already-fading memory after I got home.

The last sketch is of the open water near the faraway shore of the river. Everybody knows that when there's open water, the geese start to come back, and sure enough I saw a little flock - so little that I thought they might have overwintered, but after that I saw two larger flocks. The geese are back! And local farmers say winter's over when you can hear the crows. I didn't just hear them, I saw them flapping around everywhere.

More Trees

An overcast day with freezing rain edging the branches with ice and reflecting the sky, while the rest of the tree is dark, wet, and broody. I attempted to capture it in the big sketchbook, but I'm not happy with the result.

These trees all look alike to me. The trouble is that they have too many "arms". I mean the real trees, of course, not the drawings, which have too few, because I haven't got the time or patience to put them all in.

Advisers on tree-drawing usually say to just draw the primary, secondary, and tertiary branches (biggest, second-biggest, and third-biggest, to me). After that, they say, you can put in a tone to represent the groups of tiny branches. I've seen this done successfully by other artists, and I always start out with good intentions, but I get seduced first by one branch, then by another, and before I know it I've lost my place. Then it's impossible to give the lines a graceful flow when I'm inching along and following every by-path.

Clearly, there needs to be more science in my method. Tomorrow I'm going to try doing all the primaries in one session, then leaving it and coming back later to do the secondaries, etc.

Sunday and Monday

On Sunday I worked from the bedroom window, little pencil sketches of our back yard trees, and some distant ones behind the neighbours' houses. There were great patterns of intense blue shadow cast across the snow, but I never got to paint them because my husband lost a lens out of his glasses. He can't see without them, so he needed me to put them back together. I dropped the little screw, couldn't find it, and then had to go look for some wire and pliers. So the shadows were gone when I got back to it.

Today was much milder than it has been, allowing me to go outdoors for a while to draw the big pine tree. Had to quit when my hands got cold. This is a huge tree, probably 50 feet high, and it surprised me how dumpy it looks in my drawing. Needs more study. I loved using the charcoal, though. It's always been my favourite for sketching, if I can use a big enough surface. The paper is some kind of manilla that I found in my stash, a nice yellowish colour.

A Few Trees

Laura of http://laurelines.typepad.com chooses a different subject to study every month, resulting in beautiful and fascinating sketches that show impressive skill development as the weeks go by. And her drawing skills weren't too shabby to begin with, not by a long shot.

This month she's inviting us all to join in on her study of trees. I'm a little late getting started, but here are my first attempts. The idea is to make as many sketches as there are days in the month (or more, of course, if it suits you), so by the end of March I need to have 31 drawings of trees.

It happened to be freaking cold here yesterday. I did go outdoors, but then wussed out and came right back in again. It's not much better today, so all these were done from the house windows. You may have gathered from previous posts that we have lots of trees around us. I figure I can do a dozen different trees before having to to venture out again. Surely the weather will have improved by that time?

The last two pencil drawings look as if it's the same tree continued upwards, but that's not the case. One is an ash tree from an upstairs window, and the other is a softwood maple from the kitchen. Maybe by the end of the month the difference in the trees will be apparent in the drawings.

Actually, these are just sections of the trees. A whole one is too big to do all at once -- at least from this short distance -- and my sketchbook is also too small. For the bigger drawings I borrowed an old book of my daughter's which wasn't full. I don't like the paper, though. It's only 60 lb and buckled badly under the tiniest bit of watercolour.

Robert Bateman sketchbooks have been my standard brand for the past few years. They have 110 lb paper, thick enough to take light washes without buckling, although the pages will curl at the edges. I also like being able to use both sides of a page, getting 100 sketches into a 50-page book. I just wish they would make them with more than 50 pages. Recently I've been finding this landscape format in stores, and I love it, but I don't see them online at Curry's, only the old standard sizes. Dick Blick doesn't carry Robert Bateman books at all. I'll have to try to hit an art supply store next time I go to Ottawa, which won't be until March 15, and meanwhile root through my stash of supplies for some big drawing paper.

Tacky Crafts I Have Done

This is for the Friday List on Pomegranates and Paper. You asked for it, Loretta.

1. Those woolly men made out of yarn and pinned on your lapel. You looped the yarn around a piece of card about twenty times, made a second one just like the first, then pushed one through the other to form a cross. Then came the artistic part. You cut short lengths of yarn and tied them to form a head with a topknot, a belly, legs with topknot feet, and arms with topknot hands. I loved those. For years they satisfied my wool-craft craving when I couldn't learn to knit.
2. Silver pillows made from cigarette wrappers twisted up and looped somehow. To be honest, I never made any of these, but I wanted to. It was de rigeur to have two of them in the back window of your car and we didn't have any in ours. I could never get enough wrappers together to try it. Besides, I think you had to "send away" to the cigarette company for directions.
3. Wineglasses and pipes made from cigarette wrappers. These only took one wrapper each so I used them to while away many a quarter of an hour.
4. Paper drinking cups made from a folded piece of notebook paper, the only thing I learned to make in Brownies. We had the pretty Brown Owl who didn't know how to make anything, let alone keep twenty-five eight year old girls under control while she taught us. We had a lot of singalongs and poetry recitals. The other pack had the smart, capable Brown Owl (a school teacher in real life) who taught them all kinds of things, and when our Brown Owl was out for a sick day, she took the two packs together and I learned how to make a paper cup. I still make these sometimes, when I'm bored. You have to drink fast. It doesn't leak, but it will dissolve.
5. Speaking of folded paper, what about those Fortune-Telling things? Eh?
6. Eyeglass cases made from a square of felt sewed up with a blanket stitch.
7. Place mats made from two pieces of waxed paper ironed together, with pictures of food cut from magazines sandwiched between. I learned to make these in Grade Four Health Class and was very taken with the process. You could make a pretty scalloped edge with scissors.
8. Every Christmas, my sister and I got an Embroidery Kit. It contained four napkins, a cross stitch pattern, embroidery floss, a hoop, a needle, and a thimble. I don't think I ever completed a set, but I liked cross-stitch. It was a better gift than the stupid model airplane my brother got.
9. Once I got a ceramic kit. There was a plaster statue of a "colonial boy", paint to colour him with, a brush, and some kind of glaze that you didn't have to bake. It turned out terrible. The glaze didn't go on exactly right. I liked that kit, though. But I never got another one.
10. Potato prints. Yuck.
11. My goodness, I could go on an on. I'm going to stop here with Kleenex Flowers. What can I say? It was a rite of passage to womanhood. You couldn't feel like a grown-up until you had made a bushel of these for someone's wedding. Also, a teacher once had us make a lot of artificial flowers but you had to get special florist's wire which was not generally available, so I never made any more, although I still remember the basic how-to.
12. Oh, and one more, to make a dozen. In Grade Three I learned how to make folded paper baskets to hold Easter candy.
13. All right, a baker's dozen. In my kindegarten class I saw a sample of a little mat woven from strips of coloured paper. I waited all year to get taught how to do that but the teacher never came through, wasting our time on reading, writing, and counting, so I just figured it out for myself at home. Of course I didn't have the nice construction paper to work with. You couldn't get that stuff just anywhere, and at school they conserved it as if it was silk peau de soie. When my daughter was small, I bought her stacks of construction paper and she liked making those mats, too.

Going Back in Time

These sketches are the beginning of an attempt to recreate a past that is very long gone.

At a recent family wedding, my cousin Patti asked me to paint a picture of our old home. Normally I'm uncomfortable with commissions. Trying to fulfill a client's request makes me nervous and has a depressing effect on my creativity. But this was different. I had actually been turning the idea over in my own mind for a while before Patti mentioned it.

This was our grandparents' house, where I lived from the age of two until I moved to Ontario at age 25. Patti spent a few weeks there every summer and lived there year round for a time. So, of course, we both have very clear memories of this house. I don't even have to close my eyes to bring it all back, detail upon detail. The wallpaper in the front room when I was four. The curtains lifting in a breeze at an open window on a summer day. A vase of lilacs in the center of the lace cloth on the dining room table. Well, you know. You probably have similar intense recollections of your own childhood home. I could probably create dozens of these little vignettes from memory.

But to draw the whole house, a portrait, from the outside, turns out to be surprisingly difficult. What view to work from? We were back-door people, but the front garden was nice, and Patti would like to see the snowball bush, but also the roses that grew in the back yard.

The worst thing, though, is that the house doesn't exist anymore, at least not in its original form. Long ago the second story was removed and it was remodelled into a bungalow. The wood shingles have been replaced with aluminum siding, and the original 4-paned windows with a plate glass picture window and sliders.

So I can't go back and look at it, or ask someone local to photograph it for me. There are very few photos of it, and those not very helpful. It only got into a picture by accident, a window ledge here, a doorframe there, a background against which some family member stood, squinting into the sun. It never occurred to anybody that we would ever need a picture of the house itself.

I can't remember ever wanting to draw or paint it, because my idea of subject matter was a New England salt box with green shutters and tall, shading elm trees, or a Victorian mansion with bay windows and wraparound verrandahs. Our house was basically a big box, with an almost-flat roof, 2 chimneys, and rectangular windows evenly spaced. Neat and tidy, no frills. Although it was never a company house, it was exactly like hundreds of other houses flung up by the coal company in 1913. Not a single building in town predated that year. There were a few built in the Victorian style,, and some attractive craftsman-style bungalows, and there was a handsome brick post office with a clock on top, but it was a raw place, exposed to the four winds, waiting for trees to grow, for sidewalks to be laid, for time to cast a mellow patina over it all.

It was our home, and we were sometimes moved by affection and pride to think it better than it was, and at other times were unable to see anything but its all-too-familiar shortcomings. But, honestly, it wasn't a pretty house. If I had tried to paint it then, I would have had trouble making a composition out of its uncompromising bulk. I still don't know how to do it. And now I can't even see it.

How I would love to be able to walk back in time and see all these things again. My sister disapproves of this desire, but she thinks I'm trying to relive the past. I don't want to re-live it, I just want to see it. Check my memories against the facts, study proportions, make notes. Be able to say to my daughter, "See, this is how it was". Obviously that's not going to happen. I'm thinking this is going to be harder than building a new house from scratch.

Yes, I finshed in Time

Here's the Knitting Olympics project, completed on the night of Thursday the 16th and blocked by Friday morning, but the weekend was very busy and I neglected to post about it. What's that you say? "A likely story!" No, I really did! I just didn't have time to post before now. I have earned the gold medal. Isn't it cute?

This has been quite a learning experience for me. The first few days were so rocky, with constant mistakes and frogging, that I would probably have quit (or, as I would have preferred to say, "set it aside for now") if I hadn't committed to keep trying for the two week period. Even after I was well into it, there would be a day of good progress when I would think, "I've got the hang of it now", followed by a day when nothing went right. There was no time when I felt really in control. At first I had a hard time following the pattern, simple as it was, but then after it was memorized, it was still necessary stay constantly alert. In other words, this never settled down into a comfortable knit, and I was never certain of finishing at all, let alone before the deadline. Yet, at the end of all that struggling, I finished early, and lo there is lace!

Before blocking, it looked just like a textured rib, and I feared that it would stay that way, but once wet it spread out beautifully and really looks like lace. I give credit to the Filatura di Crosa, which I considered very pricey, but it's proven to be a truly superior yarn. No thick or thin spots, soft yet strong, it never threatened to break when the wet threads were stretched, and not a hint of dye came out in the wash. I would definitely buy it again for a special project.

There was a dispute with a cat as to property rights on the scarf while it was blocking. My first idea was to use my daughter's bed for this job, since there's a door I can close to keep the cats out, but the scarf was too long for the bed, so I had to take a chance on the dining room table with extensions added. I'm pleased to say I defended my handiwork against all comers, with the help of a spray-bottle of water. At least until I went to bed. Then the feline claim was reasserted, but only a few of the pins in the center came out, so not much harm was done.

Remember how I agonized over length and width? I kept asking my husband, "Is it too narrow? What do you think? Is it long enough? Maybe too long?" and he would just stare at me like Norman Bates's mother. Well, it really is too narrow for my original idea, but my daughter likes it the way it is, so it will not be reknit. It's eight feet long and works well in one of those pashmina-type knots, where you first fold the scarf in half, put it over your neck, and slip the ends through the loop. It could also pass as a stole as long as you don't expect it to actually cover anything. Oh, and it only took two balls of yarn. For future reference, I think four would be more than enough to make the wider stole.

How did everybody else do? I'd love to hear.

The cool wine colour of the yarn doesn't quite match the warmer wine of the dress, but in candlelight after a couple of drinks, will anyone care? I'm just going to sit and admire my gold medal.

KO Update and Some Sketches

Here are a few more sketches, just to show that I'm not knitting all day long. In fact, I'm confining work on the stole to lunchtime and evenings so precious daytime hours are reserved for art. These repeated sketches of my neighbours' gable are paying off. Yesterday I moved from the sketchbook to the easel, and I'm quite pleased with the underpainting. I'm hoping to do a series of at least four, including a night painting.

The stole is almost done. As I mentioned in the comments yesterday, I don't know how much to expect it to stretch lengthwise during blocking, so it's a wild guess where to stop. It's sideways stretch that's needed most; it really looks too narrow right now. Remember how I worried in the beginning about running out of wool? I haven't touched the third ball of yarn yet, so it could have been a lot wider.

I hope to have it blocked by Thursday, because my daughter will be home for Reading Week and can try it on with the dress. Also, I need her bed to do the blocking! If the colour isn't right, it can still be used with other outfits, and it could even function as a snowy-day scarf if wound a few times around the neck. So it will be used. The question is, will it be used for its intended function, as a wrap for the wine-coloured spaghetti strap dress?

Knitting Olympics Day 10

The stole measures 51 inches, but, hey, it would be about twelve feet if all the pulled-out rows were included. There ought to be a way to include that in the official final stats. Something like, "One thousand rows completed, six hundred completed with no errors, total sixteen hundred rows, ten points for the good ones, five points for the rejects, total fifteen points".

Also, because I'm sure you're all wondering, I've compiled a list of all the different ways I can make a mistake in a six-stitch repeat pattern that I've done successfully hundreds of times:

1. knit a stitch instead of doing a yarnover
2. forget to do a yarnover at all
3. slip a stitch instead of doing a yarnover
4. knit a stitch instead of slipping it
5. slip a stitch instead of knitting it
6. count stitches before I get to them, as in "4-5-6-7" when I'm only on 4.
7. forget to pass-slipped-stitch- over
8. knit the border stitch on the right hand side as if it's a pattern stitch.
9. drop the border stitch off the left end of the needle and knit two rows before noticing.

I could go on, but you can see how it goes. All these errors are caused by wandering attention, which happens constantly now that the pattern is memorized. A couple of times I even zoned out while just counting the stitches on the needle, from one to thirty-nine. What was spooky was that the count was accurate. Like, one-two-three (zone out - zone back in) twenty-seven - what? How do I know I'm on 27? Count again, 27 it is.

This would be great if it could be repeated reliably, but of course it can't. I've always been fascinated by what human beings can do unconsciously, ever since I learned to touch-type. To this day I don't know where the letters are on the keys but my fingers do. Most of the time, anyway. And why do they sometimes forget? And those days when you find yourself at the bus stop with your purse and your lunch and the last thing you remember is watching the toast pop up? What's with that?

Being number-challenged as I am is a handicap in knitting, which is a math-based craft. I often wonder how early knitters, most of whom were illiterate, coped with that. I assume that most of European peasantry could count to a hundred and could work with groups of ten. You see that all the time in the Bible. "Divide them up into groups of fifty," etc. But what did they do if their gauge didn't come out even? Did they have some way of doing fractions and decimals? I suppose they worked in the same gauge pretty well all the time, using their own handspun yarn, and if something was the wrong size they just pulled it out and re-knit. Fitting tended to be general rather than specific in those old patterns. But what about all those cable and lace patterns? I suppose it was the people with a natural gift for math who developed those, and others just struggled to learn from them.

One good thing about being number challenged is that I'm not the least bit fazed by the Knitting Olympics time clock. I don't have one on this site anyway because I don't know how to put it on, but lots of K-Olympians have it and are freaked out by it. For me, it would be a problem if it was a pie chart. I understand pie. But numbers I always view as through a veil of gauze. So I'm fine with the clock.

Rooflines and Trees

More rough sketches. This is the view from my kitchen window. This is where I usually see the moon early in the evening, or a glimpse of the sunrise in the morning. Such a familiar subject should be easy to draw, but I find that each sketch is different, and none are accurate, yet they're starting to tell me what I need to know. I had to do a study of the tree branch by itself, even though I've drawn it numerous times before. The coil binding of the sketchbook interrupts the flow, but then there's a divider in the window, too, cutting the branch in half.

I'm pondering a series with this motif and different skies and weather. Last year I saw a sunset at the National Gallery that was just a dormer window and roofline silhouetted against a yellow sky. I couldn't get it out of my head for weeks. The painter was Lemieux. (Jean-Paul? Jean-Luc? I forget!) He had a lot of wonderful landscapes and city scapes with very minimal subject matter, pared right down to the bone but eloquent. He was from Montreal, and much of the landscape he dealt with was similar to what's around here.

Drawing houses exposes my weakness in straight lines and perspective. I need to get a ruler and protractor and take measurements before I tackle the next one.

Window Views

We just replaced a window in the bathroom, and I'm suddenly fascinated by the view, although we've lived here for fifteen years. I'm trying to work it into my February resolution to do some local scenes. Here's the first, pretty rough sketch. Please note: I'm not a watercolour painter; this is a working sketch only.

Knitting Olympics Day 8

It measures 18 inches, and I've only used half the first ball of yarn, so maybe there will be enough after all. It's not really as narrow as it looks here. It's curling under at the sides. I hope that will block out. Otherwise I may have to consider some kind of edging?

The weather got a lot milder overnight. I was surprised to see how much snow has melted. I'll have to look for a new background for these pictures.

More Gestures

Two posts in one day. Blogging is going to my head, right? I'm just experimenting.

Knitting Olympics Day 4

This may look pretty much like what I showed on Saturday, but there's a difference. No, I don't mean the powdering of snow. Those circular needles just don't want to let anything lie flat.

No, the difference is, this has no mistakes. Ta-da! I'm starting to get the rhythm of this pattern, and this afternoon I was thinking that it would go faster now and allow me to make up for lost time.
Wrong. Even while the thought was forming, I ran into some unexplained flying-fickle-finger-of-fate type of experience and had to rip back to the next purl row. It's all right now, though. Touch wood.

For variety I'm going to try posting some gesture drawings from my sketchbook. It's mainly to see if I can put two pictures in one post. These were done on a freezing cold day with sun so bright I could only really see silhouettes. They were done in the park where people took their small children to play on the ice with hockey sticks.


Well, I didn't really intend for that to turn up 'way up there with the knitting. Needs work.

What's This?

Yes, it's back to row 1. Yesterday I was gaining and losing stitches with alarming frequency, but didn't think the mistakes would be all that obvious after it's blocked, so I continued knitting.

Well, in the harsh light of morning it's impossible to keep deluding myself. So I ripped it all out even before I had the first sip of coffee. It was only agonizingly painful for a minute.

I'm glad to have this chance to start again (glad, I tell you!) because the first version was looking a little too wide. I don't know what the final width will be, but it doesn't need to be more than six inches, and shouldn't exceed eight or nine. Keeping it narrow will make the yarn go further, too.