We may not have enough science funding, and our Prime Minister might be a dork, but I love this country and I can’t imagine living anywhere else. Here are some things I love about Canada:
Moose
Blueberries in Sudbury!
Tommy Douglas, who brought us Universal Healthcare and was voted one of the greatest Canadians. Our healthcare system has saved millions of lives (especially the poor ones, which American media folks seem to have forgotten in their haste to bash the fake Canadian system they’ve conjured up from anecdotes about Medicare), including that of my aunt.
Canadian David Suzuki. ‘Nuff said.
Diversity in Toronto
Beach on St. Joseph’s Island
Caribana
Canadian Snow
A deer I ran into (on campus!) who was about 10m away but looks really far because I only had a cellphone camera
Happy Mother’s Day everyone! I hope that all of you, in the true spirit of the day, protested a war or somehow encouraged disarmament.
(I always forget that it’s a protest holiday and get my mom something and make her breakfast anyway, but it’s also important to remember the original intent of Mother’s Day.)
Vegan Yum Yum has a good article on Food Photography for Bloggers, but considering the scale of food (small) and the scale of knitting (wouldn’t you know it’s also small!), there are lots of things us knitters could take from this.
Most of the tips in here are ones I’ve heard before, but it did tip me off to these lovely Lowel Ego lights for shooting at night, otherwise known as any time during the winter in Canada.
There should be a rule on Ravelry that you’re not allowed to discuss religion or politics. Just like at the dinner table at Thanksgiving. There’s always some crazy jerk on the site that has decided that something else on the internet offends them and because they are offended, they are going to get every other Ravel-zealot to jump on the person and pull their metaphoric pants down. The only time when I ever come across something really ridiculous and trollsome, it’s always the religious or conservative/liberal fanatics on the site that have decided between the 50 crazies on a particular forum that they suddenly all hate the same person, just because they used a jokey pattern title referencing socialism or made a comment about how squares are better than triangles.
By the way, guys, I’m really offended by the way [political figure] spoke of [social group] in his or her [long boring speech punctuated by vague promises and references to inexperience of opponents and/or change] and I cannot agree with [policies of political figure]. I welcome the anger from Ravelry!
It seems like there is a new one every week. Whereas the last ones seemed to have at least some soul (like here and here), this new embroidered music video by Architecture in Helsinki doesn’t appear to have very much of anything.
Architecture in Helsinki feels like another one of those bands that sounds like your brother made it on a Casio in his basement in ’85 and someone picked it up and rerecorded it with slightly better production values and sold it to a distributor by saying “Napoleon Dynamite” a lot.
The embroidery itself is very nice, but they took a lot of shortcuts by just CGI-ing the motion so it doesn’t seem like there’s enough effort involved. That shouldn’t be my reaction, I know, but it is. There doesn’t seem to be a real concept here; it feels like it’s just embroidered to take advantage of the DYI aesthetic. The previous videos were real works of art; this video is just a bunch of spinning coconuts.
Les peaux de lièvres by Tricot Machine is populated by 700 frames of knitting. This would be a huge undertaking, even if most of it is duplicate stitch. Looks like it was really fun! The final effect is breathtaking, and the music is beautiful.
I don’t know about you folks, but up here in Canada it’s gettin’ mighty cool. Not cold yet, but fall is certainly making its presence known. Which is the perfect time, in my opinion, to begin thinking about mittens. So here are a few mitten photos I found on Flickr. What’s your favourite mitten pattern?
As you folks might remember, I was gone last week in Northern Ontario. I wanted to post something but didn’t have the time to take photos until now. Here the highlights:
8 days
5 deer
2 adorable baby raccoons (fluffy tails, little masks)
3 snakes (two babies, one momma)
2 porcupines
1 vulture
Harry Potter 5
Harry Potter 6
Chapter 31 of Harry Potter 7 (since finished)
3 camp sites
1 beautiful sandy beach
20 mosquito bites on my right foot alone
Approximately 50 bug bites in total, give or take
3 shots fired
2 holes to the right of the bulls-eye
2 planned dishcloths
0 finished dishcloths
3 shades of grey and 1 shade of red:
That’s my artsy brooklyntweed shot, revealing several shoes and some recycling.
Here’s a breakdown of the week:
The first stripe was started on the Thursday or so, but not seriously worked on except after it got too dark to read my Potter. On the trip back, a light stripe was knitted onto that accidentally and then ripped back. Fortunately, there were twelve hours in which to knit, so it wasn’t a huge loss. I spent an hour working on a paper and then knit knit knit until we got to Kingston. It was pretty grueling. I think 3 of the remaining 11 hours were spent trying to sleep to avoid having to boringly continue on the sweater with nothing else to do but listen to the CBC’s boring diatribes on the history of Simcoe Day. Honest to goodness, it’s referred to as “Civic Holiday” by most of Ontario. That’s its actual name. From this, you can extrapolate how boring it was to listen to their coverage. YAWN.
If you’re looking at this and wondering why there are points at the beginning of the armholes, that’s because my gauge swatch was off from the beginning (despite hours and hours of swatching and re-swatching!) and I didn’t realize how seriously off it was until I’d knit 4 or 5 stripes. Seeing as I didn’t have anything else to do except listen to “John Graves Simcoe was the first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada” for the 15th time, I just kept knitting and hoped it would work out. A few days later I decided to accommodate by knitting a larger back section and have the seams shifted forward or backward a little bit. The seam shifts under the arm, which I’m calling a “design feature.” This may be a huge disaster, but it’s my first sweater, so I wasn’t really expecting it to work out anyway. I’m exploring! It’s an adventure.
