Trying to Feel the Love!

Ah, February. The longest short month imaginable, right? I have always found this time of year to be the absolute worst as a teacher--typically it's a long stretch without any holidays, lots of lousy weather, and kids who seem to have made no progress since the school year started in September. During my first year of teaching, February was the month I walked off the job in frustration. That event never repeated itself, but this is traditionally the time of year I most want to jump ship for another career. This year it actually got off to an above-average start, so I may have deluded myself into thinking the February blues weren't coming. :-)

I don't have any one specific complaint. No horrible tragedy has befallen me, so for that I should feel grateful, I'm sure. My students' work habits are slipping, I'm feeling overwhelmed by various responsibilities, and the typical adolescent complaining is getting annoying, but that's to be expected at this time of year, right?

As I sit here with my nice glass of red wine, I guess I can console myself with the fact that there are only 3 more days left in this dreaded month, right? And then after that there's only one more week of school until March Break, and after that things always look up.

Now, in addition to trying to feel the love for my students and my job, I'm also trying to feel the love for sock knitting! This is my February Sockamania sock:

It's actually a lovely pattern ("Simply Love"), and when I sat down to work on the foot on the weekend I flew through it and right up the heel. I just haven't touched it again since, and am feeling drawn to other projects. This means that I once again won't finish the pattern by the end of the month, but who am I kidding--it wasn't going to happen anyway!

To end on a cheery note....one project has drawn my attention and love this week. This project is destined to end up the hands of a lovely friend and reader here, so I don't want to give too much away. Hopefully this picture gives you a tiny taste of the object in question (excuse the awful photo, the light is terrible because it's FEBRUARY! And it's SNOWING!):


I have one more small addition to this gift to complete, and then it will be in the mail to its recipient, and I will be able to tell you all more. Now, off to enjoy my wine and chase up something for supper.

Hemlock Ring Blanket

My latest FO:


Pattern: Hemlock Ring Blanket by Jared Flood
Yarn: Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted in Chino, 3 skeins
Needles: KP Options US 8, with 40 inch cable. If I had a bigger cable, I definitely could have used it--this was a squish at the end!
Modifications: None, really--unless you count knitting an extra 2 repeats of the pattern. This was necessary given my smaller needle size, though!

This blanket is destined for my school's silent charity auction to benefit an orphanage in Honduras (where our grade 11 students go on their annual service trip). Jared was kind enough to give me permission to knit his lovely pattern for sale for this good cause! For those in the London (Ontario) area, the auction is Friday night (Feb. 29). Let me know if you're interested in more details!

And in case anyone needs another lesson in the wonders of blocking....this was probably the most striking change I've seen in any project. I think this was due to the way the blanket was scrunched up on my needles for so long, basically in a bag shape. After casting off I had this:

It's no wonder the students who saw my knitting this were incredibly skeptical that it would become a blanket!

Pinned out for blocking (a royal pain, as it was just a hair too wide for the bed I block on, and of course the round shape and scalloped edging was really fun to block!), it stretched to just over 4 feet in diameter:


I'm trying to be a more focused blogger, so my goal was to JUST blog about the Hemlock, but I had a question in my comments last time from Kat about my PomPom socks. I realized that I never blogged about them, so here they are quickly:

Pattern: Ridgeline master pattern from New Pathways. Garter toe, plain heel, and the cuff from the Home and Hearth pattern.
Yarn: Regia PomPon, 2 skeins
Needles: KP Fixed Circular, 2.5 mm

These socks are great fun! THe little pompom bits are soft and squishy, so they are comfortable to wear. This was the first pair of socks I cast on from New Pathways, and they made me an almost instant convert to Cat Bordhi's ideas. They fit my foot perfectly! I wore them to school on Valentine's Day and insisted on taking off my shoes and showing my socks to all my students. They keep telling me they want to knit socks, but so far no one has followed through. I had a few girls start baby socks last year, but they never finished them. We shall see if I can convert any new sock knitters before June!

Now....less than 2 weeks until March Break, but they will be a crazy 2 weeks. I would love to promise some small posts about various little things in the meantime, but no guarantees....I'll see you when I next surface for air!

Winter Blahs

Sheesh, it's been a while....January just kind of ran away from me, and February is beginning to do the same. Winter makes it tough to get motivated, I find....and we've been having a lot of winter lately. I'm sure if I didn't have to shovel the driveway on an almost daily basis, I would have more time to get things done, right? But I'm trying to get caught up a bit on life this weekend, and that includes blogging.

So, to begin with--knitting. There hasn't been that much of it this month, mainly because of time constraints, but also because I've been doing a bit more spinning. But here are photos of what I have to show you:


Those are the January Sockamania "New Year" socks. I once again failed to finished by the end of the month, which means I will be starting the February pattern late and probably won't finish that on time, either. :-) My hope is that with 2 weeks off in March I can get back on track with the sock-a-month thing! :-) I just drew the yarn for my February socks out of my sock yarn bin and pulled this one:

That was my last installment of the Middle Earth sock club yarn, an alpaca/merino blend called "Balrog." I think the colours will work well with Anni's February Valentine pattern. I had a lot of pink/red/coral/purple colours in the sock bin, so I figured I'd just reach in and pull one, which also means I'm complying with my commitment to the Socks from Stash Club.

My other current WIP is the Hemlock Ring Blanket.

I bought the yarn (Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted in Chino) in late Novemeber in Michigan, and cast on right after Christmas. It was going really well, but then I set it aside for portable sock knitting for the few moments I've had time to knit this month. I came back to it this weekend and it's still going well. I'm now at the point where the rounds are quite large, so they're taking a lot longer to knit, though! I have emailed the designer to see if it would be possible for me to sell this in the school's charity auction in a few weeks. I would like to contribute something, but am not sure I have time to design a project of my own and get it made in 2-3 weeks! I had been playing with some handspun silk to see if I could do a lacy scarf, but wasn't thrilled with the results, so have put that on hold.

On the handspun note, here are my recent spinning creations:

From left to right, that's mystery fibre in a single (my aunt, who gave it to me, said she thought it was merino but it clearly isn't. Maybe a blend of merino and mohair? Something more coarse and fuzzy than merino is in there, for sure!), Tussah silk 2-ply in about a laceweight, and merino 3-ply. The merino was my first serious try at Navajo plying, and I'm REALLY pleased with how even it turned out. There's not a ton of any one of them, but lacy scarves, mittens, etc., are probably in store. I think my next project is the merino-bamboo roving I got for Christmas:

I believe there are 8 ounces of it, which will be my largest quantity of fibre so far, and it's really lovely stuff. I've been holding off on starting until I know what I want to make with it, and until I'm confident in my ability to do it well. Any ideas?

Oh, one picture this week from my students' work. There is another huge stack of scarves in my classroom, but I've also been encouraging kids to knit squares for a baby blanket. Most of them have done better at making real squares this year (I haven't received a single trapezoid, although I'm still get some rectangles!). Here is a photo of the work so far laid out on my rug (not the greatest backdrop, I now realize--can you see past the square pattern on my rug?):

A few more squares and it will be time to sew this together. Fun, fun! :-)

Outside of the knitting world, life has been pretty uneventful. We hope to do some more recruitment visits (returning to a few cities) in March, and maybe be able to make a decision by April. I am actually still enjoying my job this year (even in February! That's unheard of for me in 7 years of teaching!), so I'm starting to push the move-into-London option a bit. But the practice options for Stephen aren't that great there, so we need to do some research into that to see if we can make it work. I'll let you know when I decide.

Whew, that was a lot! And I didn't even write everything....I was thinking about rambling on about politics and the really difficult decision I had to make this week (I voted in the Democrats Abroad online presidential primary! Exciting!). I'll spare you that, though. :-) I guess I should I have blogged more regularly instead of dumping everything into one post. Oops.