the cat and the carder

I STILL have not gotten around to carding! I know that I should be doing it or I am never going to be able to spin my fleece and make the sweater but life (and tons of other projects) seems to be getting in the way. New socks have been started that are proving hard to put down, called Hypnosis, and spinning of assorted other fibres seems to be taking up a lot of time.

Then there is Daisy. She is a stray cat who has adoped us. She was abandoned at the garden centre where my daughter works and seems to like to sleep beside the carder in the garage. My guess is that she is about six months old and she is in heat as she spends most of her time walking around the house and crying to get out at all hours of the day or night. What ungodly noises a cat in heat can make. When my daughter and I are we are bored we try and make up a game to see what words from the English language her yowling sounds like -- hello, door and argon are some of the words she has said so far -- or maybe we are just going crazy with the constant noise and these are the voices in our heads.

We have an appointment to get her spayed next week.

The dogs are ok with her. Stewie growls as she walks by but I don't think he'd do anything terrible and Penny just rolls over on her back into her favorite submission pose when she walks by. I didn't really want to take on another animal as I think that two dogs are plenty, but my daughter has assured me that when she goes back to university in the fall, Daisy is going with her. I sure hope so...

Oh well, so that is my excuse for not carding for today; cannot disturb Daisy as she is "settling in". She is actually a very nice cat and is quite affectionate and doesn't bite or scratch when she isn't yowling. SIGH!

gather all ye fibre friends

Yesterday was Worldwide Knit in Public Day and it is held the second Saturday of June to encourage all of us fibre addicted people to get together and spread the word.

I was at my Local Yarn Store in Whitby -- Kniterary -- instead of knitting in public I choose to spin. We also brought non-perishable food items and put a square on the tree in the back of the store as a record of our participation. Thanks to Martina and Vicky for a lovely afternoon. Two other people brought their spinning wheels and their were also a number of drop spindles in action. Now that is something I'd like to master but haven't gotten around to yet...

I am currently spinning some lovely falklands wool from The Sweet Sheep called Harrumph. Upon the advice of another spinner, Heidi, I am going to try and make some socks with it.

I don't look happy here but I am ... just concentrating...

of montreal

I haven’t been able to work on my fleece all week but hope to get started on carding it soon. Every time I walk in my laundry room, I see it and I start to feel rather guilty. My lack of work on the fleece was because I went to Montreal this weekend for the Canadian Library Association Conference. It was a quick trip with only two full days there. I wasn’t really a part of the conference but I was asked to introduce a session about the Canadian Federation of Municipalites work in post tsunami Indonesia and Sri Lanka. It was a very interesting session and I am putting a link to the blogs written by Dawna and Katherine who went to Indonesia and Laura who went to Sri Lanka to help re-build two libraries in those countries. Talk about life changing experiences for them.

I did have an opportunity to visit one very nice wool store called À La Tricoteuse . There is a complete list of at least ten wool stores in Montreal found here, but I didn’t have time to visit them all. That is for another trip! I ended up starting out walking to the wool store from my hotel because MapQuest said that it was approximately 2 kilometres but I ended up walking more like 5 which took me a lot longer than I thought.

A light rain was coming down during my walk and I arrived at the store soaking wet at a quarter to five with the store closing in 15 minutes. The store was in a lovely part of Montreal, just north of the Latin Quarter and it was a very unassuming storefront painted in dark tones. I entered the store which was quite light inside even for a rainy day and very simply organized with all of the wool on big cubby holes in the wall. No stray balls of wool floating around here or baskets overflowing with handspun. I did see a madam sewing at a table in the corner of the store and she glaced up at me as I came in but continued on sewing. She had that certain French je ne said quois and was dressed all in black which made her match the formality of the store. I told her that I was looking for some sock yarn and started babbling on about being from Ontario and wanting some souvenirs for my afghan and she smiled and I guess she realized I was a serious customer. She pointed to a large whole section of sock yarn set up in the centre of the store arranged by color. I ended up buying quite a few balls of yarn for my sock yarn afghan as I want to add some bright solid colors in pink, yellow and orange to the rest of the striped sections. I also bought a large ball of blue yarn which has some aloe vera in it for my sore feet. $99 dollars worth of sock yarn. Yee gods!

I also finished my zig zag sock and knitted about 10 more squares for the afghan on the trip. All in all a very productive time with lots of good knitting karma. I like Montreal!