A Well-Travelled Toque

The first Bucky toque I knit was meant all along for my long-time friend Linda.

Bucky Toque #1 for Linda

She and I both attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, back in the day. We also graduated with the same major. At the time we attended the University, it had approximately 50,000 students, but the major we selected drew a very small crowd; in fact, Linda and I made up 66.67% of the graduating class that year. I wrote about our friendship here and that friendship was strengthened when we travelled through Ireland and Scotland last summer.

The Eilean Donan Castle in Scotland. This one is for you, Linda!

Our common link is our alma mater so it was an easy decision to craft one of the Bucky toques for Linda. That first toque was completed in early October last year and within a week of completing it I had sent it to Linda, who still lives in Wisconsin. Problem was, though, she had moved within the last year and I had lost my address book. (I know, I am one of those old fuddy-duddies who actually have a hard copy of addresses, that up until last fall I carried in my purse. It came in handy lots of times for phone numbers and street addresses that were needed on the go.) Once I lost that book I began creating another, but not before I wanted to mail Linda her toque. Rather than admit to Linda I lost her address I simply looked it up online and you guessed it, I sent it to her old address.

About a month after I mailed it I contacted Linda to see if she had gotten it and she had not. Now the complicating factor in all this is I mailed the toque from the U.S. using my Canadian address as the return address. That means I paid the U.S. rate and that doesn´t always mean I will get whatever is mailed returned here in Canada. In the past when Xmas cards have been mailed this way they will end up coming back months later; I would receive returned Xmas cards in April and May. So I was not hopeful about seeing that toque any time soon, if at all. In fact we had talked about my making another one. But low and behold, about two days before I returned to Wisconsin before Xmas 2015 the toque was returned. On it was stamped a note saying it had been sent to Bermuda by mistake. This little knit toque had been created in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, been mailed from Bellingham, Washington, taken some sort of cross country tour of the U.S., visited Bermuda and returned back to British Columbia in only two months. I took this well travelled hat to Wisconsin in my suitcase and mailed it to Linda on December 23. She sent me an e-mail on December 24 saying she finally received it. So once I was in the state and used the proper address things worked very quickly.

Linda also sent me this photo of her all decked out in Badger paraphernalia. Sorry about it being posted so late, but my tardiness in no way reflects my lack of excitement to see you f-i-n-a-l-l-y got the toque. Sure it was too late for this year´s football season, but there is always hockey, basketball and of course, next year.

It looks like a pretty good fit to me and look at all that sunshine!

Oh and to show her sense of humour, here´s another photo Linda sent me. Love that it too remained in the holiday season colour mode!

Ode to the Cat

It has been six months since Mike, the cat's, passing. I think of him every day and miss him especially when Paul is away. Mike was a being in the house with me and we were close. Grieving his death has been muddled with my Dad's passing and sometimes I feel guilty about that happening. As time passes the ache becomes less hurtful for both and I am starting to get mostly good memories in its place. Recently I helped celebrate Pablo Neruda's birthday with Jami, my poet and overall very creative friend. Guests were asked to select one poem written by Neruda to read to the small group who gathered for the celebration. I picked this one: Ode To The Cat -- Pablo Neruda There was something wrong with the animals: their tails were too long, and they had unfortunate heads. Then they started coming together, little by little fitting together to make a landscape, developing birthmarks, grace, flight. But the cat, only the cat turned out finished, and

Anatomy of a Sock

I've been knitting socks for a relatively short time. One of the disconcerting things for me as I started following patterns for socks is the pattern designer assumes the knitter (in this case that would be me) knows all the parts of a sock. So I thought I'd devote a post to improve my own knowledge about the anatomy of a sock and maybe some of you will learn something about the humble yet necessary sock as well. Here's the names of the parts of the foot as I know them. #49 ankle, #50 heel, #51, instep, #52 ball, #53 big toe, #54 toe, #55 little toe, #56 toenail. There are some parts more important for this discussion; first the heel of a foot is generally used to refer to the entire C-shape from the ankle to the instep. Speaking of the instep, it refers to that curve near the bottom of the foot. And what seems to be missing in the design above is the sole which generally refers to the bottom of the foot in total or plantar aspect in more technical terms. (BTW

Yarn Barf

It's back to quirkiness and time to step away again from the cuteness for a while. But as you see I'm someone who slips from one to the other without much effort so anticipate this back and forth to be my new normal. A dramatization of me in the midst of my startitist frenzy Yarn barf . I'm willing to bet you hadn't thought of putting those two words together, had you? It just so happens yarn barf can be a reoccurring pain for those of us who use yarns that come in a skein instead of a hank. (No pun intended regarding the current Noro virus, well maybe a little pun.) Skeins of yarn wound by the manufacturer These are hanks which need to be wound into balls If you look closely at the picture on the right you'll see the start on the millet yellow skein at the centre right of the photo. Its start can easily be seen coming from the centre of the skein onto the violet skein to the left. Easy to find, right! Sure but what about the remaining 4

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