Flagel Knitting Files

Just so you are not misguided into believing my trip home was all gloom and doom, here's a quick photo of a happy hooded baby sweater Mom had in her and Dad's home. Mom's hooded baby sweater With its pleasant mellow yellow colour, its tiny little hood and the pom poms it is almost too cute for words.  The bobble stitch that creates the bodice and picot edging at the bottom, help to lighten up the feel of the sweater.  The copy for the pattern I found stated it was from McCall's Needlework and Crafts , Spring 1979 but it looks current to me as a miniature baby hoodie.  I think this potential outcome has motivated me to see what I can find out there on the web that might look similar and make it up ASAP. By the way, there was plenty of time to knit as Mom and I sat in the hospital with Dad.  We were like the mother/daughter twin set of knitting in his room.  Doctors and nurses commented about how nice it is that we both enjoy the same type of past time.  And as yo

So I've been away for a while and with good reason.  My 84-year-old dad became very sick on Friday, August 17 and by Monday, August 20 the situation was bleak.  So I packed up and flew home to help out.  It is amazing how this one small act could help out everyone else in the family.  And it was really a small thing for me to do.  (It isn't often one can touch so many people you love in such a positive way.) Dad with the help of countless doctors, nurses and others pulled through and continues to recover in a nursing facility near home.  Mom can stay in her own home now and visit him whenever it suits her.  I'm now back in Greater Vancouver all safe and sound, and it was upon my return the overall and thorough smack in the face hit me.   It is all too easy to take life for granted.  One does the day-to-day things that must be done, sometimes doing the should-be-done things and trying to make time to enjoy the process.  But it is so easy to become sloppy and lose priorit

Vancouverites tend to whine about the weather a lot.  We whine when it is too rainy and cool as it was through most of May, June, July and part of August, 2012.  If it is below 15C or about 62F we think it is not warm enough. This last week the temperatures soared to 30C or about 90F each day and we whined that it was too hot.  Now I can hear all of you who have lived through one of the hottest summers in North American sighing and thinking:  You had ONE week of hot weather, are you kidding.  No, I'm not.  We don't have much air conditioning in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia because generally we don't need it for more than one week per year.  But this was the week.  (Paul and I installed AC in our home years ago because we like to be comfortable.  So my only discomfort this last week was at work, not home.)  I lived in Fresno, California for years where the temperature can get to 40C or about 115F during the summer.  You'd think I could handle the current heat

There are so many perils in knitting, the needles are sharp and can tenderize your fingertips, you have to match the right yarn and pattern, you need to know how to sew things together properly after you finish knitting and then there is knitting with dark coloured yarns.  Its peril is it is so very hard to see your output.  Stitches too easily get lost in some very dark hole making it a challenge to determine if you are actually getting the results you should.  Some knitters avoid darkly coloured yarns because of this challenge and yet others have found ways to work around it. It helps to knit with dark yarn during daylight hours.  Great idea during the summer when the sun stays up well past 9 pm, but not so good during the winters when it doesn't gets up before 8 am (as or before most of us leave the house to go to work) and sets about 4 pm (while most of us are still at work.)  So in the winter I tend to work on brightly coloured projects for the spring and summer, and during

I have already written about how knitters can spend, fill, lose and manage time around knitting.  I personally spent/filled an entire 6 hours of flying (from Bellingham, Washington to Honolulu, Hawaii) happily knitting.  These hours just fly by without my noticing, except perhaps for a sore bum. But sometime ago much closer to 9/11, my needles were not allowed on a flight; they were confiscated as potential weapons.  My protestations that any ballpoint pen or sharpened pencil would be equally dangerous fell on deaf ears and perhaps I was lucky that I stopped arguing when I did. I was able to make the flight, but it was so sad to have yarn and not be able to knit for lack of needles.  That flight from Seattle to Milwaukee was one of the longest 5 hours in my life.  So it is during those hours I go into knitting withdrawal, trying to figure out what else to do with myself for hours on a plane.  I have to say I can suffer a version of this same affliction even in my own home.  I suffer

Karen, a friend of mine who lives in North Carolina, and I seem to have started a tradition for ourselves.  When the Winter Olympics were held in Vancouver in February 2010 we phoned one another and managed to talk our way through the entire Opening Ceremonies.  We enjoyed it well enough to continue the tradition for the Opening Ceremonies of the London Summer Olympics. This is how it works, we both try to watch the same U.S. based broadcast so we're seeing the same imagines at the same time.  I remember in 2010 my broadcast was about 5 seconds ahead of hers, which created some fun for me as I could announce the upcoming event to her.  We can talk our way through the spectacular programs, the 200 or so different countries who march in the ceremonies, where certain countries are actually located in the world, what the athletes are wearing, why so and so was invited to be a part of the ceremony etc.  This time we speculated what it was those kids were carrying (it was part of the O

All controversy about Ravelympics and using the term Olympics aside, I have to admit the Olympics are great for knitting at home.  They have long periods of inactivity and then times one should look up.  In my home Paul and Mike understand my obsession and accept my sometimes distracted attention span. There are plenty of activities where public knitting either doesn't work or is just inappropriate:  1) when driving, 2) at work, 3) in darkened theatres, 4) at a funeral,  5) watching a movie or TV program with subtitles, 6) during a lectures (sometimes it is OK, depends), you get the idea.  Then there are times just made for knitting in public, all generally requiring waiting:  1) at the doctor's office, 2) riding buses, 3) when flying across the country, 4) working your way through a government bureaucracy, 5) riding along in a vehicle with someone else driving on a long road trip and so on. Reenactment of me knitting in public I am quite happy to knit in public to fil

Sourcing the right yarn to get the impact you want for that special project can be tricky.  Inevitably the yarn used to make up the pattern you just bought is either 1) not available in your LYS, 2) far too expensive for your budget or 3) no longer manufactured.  It is at this point the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth begins because any knitter worth their knitting needles knows the yarn is what makes the pattern special.  So a search begins. Yarns comes in several different weights from lace  (very tiny) to bulky/ roving  (quite thick).   The differences between these includes the width of the yarn or put another way how many strands are twisted together to form the yarn.  The proper weight of yarn is essential to getting the proper results.  Making an adult-sized sweater with sock yarn instead of medium weight yarn may mean you end up with a child's sweater instead.  Here's the kind of chart a knitter uses to be sure the proper yarn is purchased.  It can be rather

I realized last week there are far too many projects sitting alone in bags in my storage area with the needle work incomplete.  These projects migrate from my work area in the family room up into my storage room.  Unfortunately once there, it is pretty easy for them to become lost. I got one of these lost projects done over the weekend.  (This sentence is accentuated with a cheer of Yes!!)   Remember U900 that included Rabbit U and Bear 900 ?  Remember I am making these two characters without a pattern.  In my case that means a fair amount of hit and miss, trial and error in getting them to look like the guys in the videos. The crocheting for Rabbit U was complete in January, but he had trouble standing.  Lucky for me Her Majesty helped me find a solution, mini bamboo skewers.   Rabbit U's ears also needed some propping up because even after much fiddling around they simply drooped too easily.  By using some very fine floral wire, woven  in and out of his ears, that problem wa

It is another long weekend here in British Columbia.  Today's BC Day which seems to commemorate two things:  1) recognizing the pioneers of British Columbia and 2) the passing of an Act by the Parliament of the UK which changed British Columbia from a colony.  I think people just use it as one last fling of summer and get outside by camping, hiking and spending time next to water.  (Does it seem like we have a lot of three-day weekends in BC in the summer?  Yes, it does for me too.) So with this extra day I worked on completing the flapped Blossom Sweater.  Here it is all done up (sans blocking). As you can see I've dressed it up a bit.  The red buttons are mimicked by the spider webs I learned to make last weekend.  Random placement of the red, yellow and blue circles help to keep this sweater whimsical, or at least that's what I'm trying to achieve by adding them.  The piece de resistance is the red edging.  This is my own contribution to the pattern and in

I met up with a girlfriend, Jami, this last week to attend one of the grand firework shows Vancouver puts on in early August every year.  A mere 250,000 to 400,000 of us head to English Bay to watch a stunning 15-minute show.  It is quite an event that probably deserves it own post, but not now. My friend told me a story that  raised goosebumps on my arms. There was something going on in California for me, I had so many wonderful interactions and this is a tale about another of them. I flew into LAX on Friday, July 6 just before my professional conference began.  My flight was a very early one so I thought I should find something to do since I had several hours of free time.   The play, War Horse , was touring in downtown Los Angeles.  Somehow Vancouver is in the backwater when it comes to getting award-winning plays.  I saw  Lion King ,  Wicked  and  Avenue Q  long after they had been hits and seen what seemed like everywhere else.  So I had no clue when  War Horse  might show

Knitting can be a very solitary activity because it does require a certain amount of concentration even if one is making something simple.  And it can be a wonderful way to find, use or justify time spent doing less useful activities like watching television or waiting at the doctor's office.  So if you are more of a loner, knitting can be a great companion. However, not all of us are loners and people like myself enjoy the company of others, even when we're knitting.  Most LYS have their own variety of an evening when they open up the shop or a room in the shop for knitters to bring in projects to knit together.  There is usually someone there who can answer questions, people you might know drop in and out, and of course the shop will sell whatever knitting supplies might be needed.  The problem is you really should be knitting with yarn from the shop and preferably on a pattern you purchased from them as well. Many knitters, myself included, prefer to find spaces other t