quick trip to southern Ontario

I had to hit Welland for a wedding, so made sure to find some diversions there before I left. Farmer's market of course, because I have a one track mind and that's supposed to be Foodland Ontario:

I met a knitter from Welland on Ravelry and he gave me the lo-down. You should check out his podcast! He told me about a vegetarian vendor at the farmer's market, but it wasn't there this week. He also told me about knitting and crafty places all over the area, I wish I could've made it to all those little towns! I did get to Broadway Textiles, and the main LYS in Welland though:


Nancy the Librarian Action Figure liked the Welland Zine Library best:

Hit a yard sale and scored some Coronation Street loot, what great luck! Oh how I wish Spider would come back to the show with a good storyline. I wasn't watching it when he was a regular, so I only know him from when he came back to nurse Emily back to health after Richard Hillman twacked her over the head with a crowbar. He runs a juice bar in London and made her beet juice to replenish her.

Just for fun we went to Casino Niagara. I spent $5 and won $12!

Then we went to look at Niagara Falls, they're pretty.

And Magnolia climbed a tree:

Back home now, just in time to do some laundry and get to the Camera Obscura show tonight, yowza!!

take me to the riot

New Stars video for Take Me to the Riot. I bought the digital pre-release of their new album, thinking I'd be satisfied with that. It's great! But now they're saying the physical album will come with a DVD in September, so I guess I'll "have" to buy it again so I can watch the DVD. This quest to cut down on consuming plastic is really hard!

Did you hear that Propagandhi's record label went packaging-free!? Clever and daring vegan anarchists!



Speaking of riots, I actually spent a week at that resort in Montebello for a family reunion in the 1990s. There was no sense of politics there then.

Vegan Pal 2 - questionnaire

I thought I was waiting until partners get assigned to post this, but I just got a reminder to post. It was already done anyhow, so here goes.

I've been taking a break from swaps because I was late on the last few, but I couldn't resist signing up for Vegan Pal 2. One of the organizers is the fabulous Ellie, she was who I sent a package to last time. She's awesome: a vegan crafty librarian who likes cats. No wonder I like her so much, we have so much in common. The other organizer for this round is Cass, and she might have the best funniest blog name ever: Shut Up I'm Counting. The counting thing is the only drawback of SnB, it's hard to count stitches while you're shooting the breeze with friends.

So here's my Questionnaire:

1. What is/are your craft(s), & how long have you been doing it/them?

Knitting, cooking, sewing, whatever. I've been doing them all for a long while, but I'm still at the beginner-intermediate level.

2. Are you a vegan, vegetarian, veg-curious, veg-friendly or other?

Vegan

3. Is this your first swap, or have you done previous swaps before? What makes a swap enjoyable for you?

I’ve done loads of swaps, just because it’s fun to get a package together. Nice to get something surprising back and see what other people made or got.

4. What is/are your favorite color(s)? Do you particularly dislike any color(s)?

Pink, purple, black are my favourites. Don’t really dislike any colours, but I don't really like "camouflage" print.

5. Do you have any allergies (such as pets, foods, fibers or cigarette smoke)?

No allergies, no pets, non-smoker.

6. Do you have any companion animals? If so, name(s) and type(s)?*

No animals, but I have a Blythe doll called Magnolia!

7. Do you collect anything?

Zines, music, tiny little things for Blythe dolls.

8. Do you have a favorite vegan food, snack or dish? If no fav that's vegan (for those who aren't vegan), what's your favorite food? (Hopefully your pal can find a vegan version!)

Any vegan chocolate or candy would be nice. Wha Guru Chews, Green & Black chocolate bar with the soft mint centres, whatever.

9. What are some of your favorite/least favorite tastes/flavors? (e.g. sweet, salty, chocolate, crunchy, smooth, tart, sour, spicy, thai, whatever - Help your pal get a feel for what kind of recipes you might like and/or never ever make.)

All of the above! Not overly picky, as long as it’s vegan of course. I like rice bowls, pad thai, easy fruity recipes.

10. What tools/supplies/accessories for your craft(s) are you wishing you had but don't? Also, what do you have TOO many of? (basically a wish and anti-wish list)

I could use more 4.5 mm needles, because I have so many worsted weight UFOs!

11. Are you on Ravelry? What's your handle?

Got in last week! I'm "pinkvegan."

12. Is there anything else you would like your pal to know about you?

I'm an archivist / media librarian, big fan of Coronation Street, I like hearts (the cutesy kind and the anatomical kind)

13. What scents do you like/dislike?

I like the smells of coconut, vanilla and basil.


14. Do you prefer fall or Halloween or some other Autumn theme?

Halloween, but whatever!

15. Just for fun - tell your favorite Halloween or Autumn related memory.

No real memory, I just love going for walks on crisp fall days and having hot chocolate after that.

almost FO: painted ceramics

One of my crafty groups had an outing to a paint-your-own-ceramics studio. The pieces are already made, and are blank white. I chose a rice bowl with a hole for chop sticks. I painted the base in splotches of pink and purple:

Let that dry, then put green over top:


Before the green dried, I etched. The pink and purple were hardened enough that they stayed when I scratched the designs into the green:




Magnolia supervised:


Then I painted a little plate for her, with the same idea:

The studio is glazing and firing them, I'll pick them up next weekend and see the actual FOs. The colours always change with the finishing. In the mean time, let me know a nice rice bowl recipe!

FO: a trilogy of boleros

I'm still waiting to get let in to Ravelry. I signed up on June 16 and at this point there are 1592 people ahead of me, and 13,665 are behind me. If you signed up and want to see where you are, check the antsy page.

So I can get some knitting done before I start spending my knitting time there. Melinda got me these awesome stitch markers (and lots more great birthday loot). They were made by Robyn, who I met at the last TTC Knitalong.


I went to a wedding in July and decided to knit boleros for the bride, the matron of honour and myself. Boleros are quick and easy to knit, the only hard part is deciding the size. I guess boleros are supposed to look a bit small. The wedding had summery fire colours, so the bride got reddish orange Blue Sky cotton, the colour is called Ladybug. For myself, Mediterranean, also Blue Sky cotton. Yes, I missed a yarn over on mine:


The matron of honour, who introduced me to the bride, loves green so I knit hers with a nice green organic cotton dyed by the people at Lettuce Knit. I finished knitting it on the bus to Kingston, at last moment. here it is on my knee, with my fancy GoKnit Pouch hanging on the back of the seat:


I knit in the ceremony and at the reception!! When the minister said she had to ask the congregation to stop taking photos, I thought she was going to say "put your knitting away and pay attention" but she didn't!

Simcoe Day!

It's Simcoe Day! And I didn't get to Lollapalooza. Ah well. John Graves Simcoe was the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada (now called Ontario), and he did good things like abolishing slavery here and building Yonge Street.

I document my life in so many places: here, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, a bunch of online forums. But I don't give away much. It's strangely good, and a little bit odd.

So many things I've meant to blog about this summer, but didn't get to them. I was sooo excited for The Simpsons Movie to open. I'm a serious fan and also it was opening on my birthday! I went with friends both human and Blythe:

Check out this list of . One of my favourites:



I also meant to do an Ode to Manic Panic for their 30th anniversary, it was in July. I've been using it off and on for about 13 years, and these days I've got some Manic Panic streaks in Ultra Violet. Check out the song "if you suffer from a case of hum drum hair..." Not exactly a long-lasting dye, but it comes in good colours, it's vegan and it's tradition.

The bleaching was done by my friend Tyne over faux fish, while listening to The Go Gos. Not as shockingly purple as I'd hoped:


What else? Can't remember now. But here's something fun to click around: http://www.cbc.ca/artspots/craft/

who died?

Been a long time since I blogged...and this one's a quickie. I don't have Harry Potter Fever myself, but I just love how much buzz there is about it. I went to see J.K. Rowling reading at the Skydome several years ago, and it was so great that so many kids were reading along with her, out loud! Books!!!

I'm on a mad dash to get out of town and little things are going wrong like running out of yarn and going to 3 yarns stores to find more, without success, the glass on the fancy beads I bought being spilled in so I couldn't thread it, but the lovely Sarah at The Rage had a marvelous sense of humour about my near meltdown and had a great time-saving idea...you should go buy something from her!

UPDATE: it wasn't really too terrible, fixed the yarn, bead and cookie conundrums. It was so neat to see so many young people out and about on Friday in Harry Potter costumes and I've been seeing adults solemnly reading the huge book in coffee shops and public transit all weekend. Plenty of ongoing media attention about it, but so far I've managed to avoid finding out who died! I don't want to know, in case I decide to read the series.

World Wide Knitting in Public Day 2007 and TTC Knitalong

World Wide KIP Day was on Saturday, and a knitterly good time was had by all at the TTC Knitalong!

Thanks, Melinda, for paying my food bill when I had to backtrack quickly to retrieve my un-lost wallet. Too much yarn on the brain! And thanks to Fibre Floozie for vegan cookies!

NXN Ears ringing

Did all your NXNE-dreams come true? I feel like I soaked a lot of live music out of my wrist band, even though I only saw 10 bands and a play. But I saw one of the bands play 3 times, so it was 12 separate shows, which is alright for three nights.


I didn't take many pictures, musicians move around too fast for my shutter finger. See:


Hey look, it's Mattias B's pick, placed directly into my hand by him. (See Kelly, I'm a fangrrl, too!) He's the one who goes all out with the Pete Townsend riffs and moves. There was an equipment problem at one of the shows, and he was actually polite and friendly with the guitar tech, I love that! I always wonder why most of them don't show the guitar techs a little more love.

"your kisses are wasted on me"

Were you at The Pipettes' show on Friday? It was sooo great. They were so cute in polka dots, of course, and their backup band was a gang of guys in yellow knitted vests.



Monster Bobby was good too. He played solo, but he was also one of the dudes in a yellow vest later.

The other support was Smoosh, which is a duo, and sometimes trio, of teenaged grrlz. Check them out, they're pretty good. I did sort of worry about their safety, though, and hope they have strong, sensible adults around them while they're on tour.

p.s.
Officially the most unusual and unexpected search that someone came to my blog through:
"how long does it take to go into labor after your 50 percent effaced?"

knitsters storm mega bookstore

Hi blogsters! MJM and I went to the Yarn Harlot book signing Friday night at a certain mega bookstore. Huge crowd assembled, and most of us were knitting while we waited:

Pierre Pettigrew wandered in, probably just to book browse. He was talking with a clerk and did knitting gestures and had that look on his face lots of non-knitters do when they recall with fondness watching their mother/grandmother/aunt knitting back in the day.

Here she is! She presented a solid hour of stand up comedy about knitters and knitting and CHOKE (cultural humiliation of knitters everywhere):

p.s.

meme: randomness times 7

I got tagged by MJM to type 7 random things:

1 - I'm almost never happy with the endings of books or movies.

2 - Speaking of endings, I appreciate that some radio stations play the entire song, without overlapping the opening or ending with talk or another song.

3 -I just got Do You Trust Your Friends? yesterday. It's a Stars tribute CD, a bunch of musicians who are friends with Stars 'renovated' the songs from Set Yourself On Fire. Every track is re-done, and placed in order on the CD. The cover looks a lot like the original. Sweet liner notes. I was slightly shocked by the familiarity meeting the changes, in almost every song, but then I was all smiles after a few bars. Go get it!!

4 - My Mom grew up on a farm and my Dad grew up in a fishing area, but somehow I ended up vegan.

5 - My unread email is in the 4 digits. Too much information is not informative, so I'm starting to unsubscribe from lists and alerts.

6 - I love steamed cauliflower with a bit of Earth Balance melted into it.

7 - My friend Benny is a Liverpool FC fan. Two years ago they played an important game against Milan, and they won, after Benny and I had lunch at the Korean Grill House. So he insisted we do it again today before the Liverpool-Milan game, for good luck. But unfortunately Liverpool lost this time.

Going with the theme of 7, I'm supposed to tag 7 of you, I started out doing that but then I wimped out because some of y'all are so busy! So grab it if you like, I'd love to read your list!

there's a bug in my earball

I spent part of the long weekend at my parents' cottage, my niece covered up to keep the bibites away, and said "there's a bug in my earball!"

Magnolia didn't mind the bugs:


I never thought of Lake Ontario as "mmm...so good," but someone's selling ice cubes with that promise:

In Ottawa, I kept seeing red, black and white flags on cars and thought, 'wow I didn't know there was so many people here from T+T.' But the flags are actually for the Senators hockey team:


Could've been the White Stripes, too, they're all about red, black and white. Speaking of, someone dressed up her Blythe doll like the gorgeous Meg White, exquisite!

Who watches Coronation Street? Charlie Stubbs is off his head! Quelle rat!