I lost my grandmother last week. When she was starting to get dementia, one of her persistent fears was about being forgotten. I don’t know if that’s just the way her brain reacted to the things she was forgetting herself, or if it was from her own experiences working as a nurse in a seniors home, but I feel like I should honour her memory by writing something even though I’m honestly not ready to do this yet. But I’m starting now anyhow.

She grew up in southern Ontario, and her dad was the lighthouse keeper in Long Point, Lake Erie. This left her with a lifelong fondness for lighthouses, so when I started traveling on my own as a young adult I would often find postcards of lighthouses or other nature photography to send her. I used to budget some time in every trip to find and write a postcard to her.

She made lifelong friends in nursing school, lived in France and the US as a military wife before coming back to Canada, and raised my mom and uncle in all those places.

Obviously, I mostly remember her as a grandma. She was a talented crocheter and used to make new hats and scarves and mitts for us grandkids every year to match our snowsuits. I should get you all a picture of the crocheted blanket she made for me, an impressive rainbow unicorn blanket that honestly still fits my aesthetic although my bed’s gotten bigger! The picture above is of a rainbow one she made for herself. She also made me So Many Crocheted Toys. She had a gift for designing things herself and did things like make me a Muffy the Mouse stuffy from Today’s Special when I was obsessed and they didn’t merchandise every single Canadian kids show. She collected dolls, from mint-in-box Barbies to random garage sale finds that sometimes she had to clean up and make clothes for.

When I was close to finishing high school I joined a concert band that met not too far from where my grandparents lived, and thus started a tradition of visiting every week for hot chocolate and cookies and playing with the dog. My grandparents came to nearly every concert, which was a *lot* of them because the band played free concerts in the park every other week all summer and I was part of the band for more than a decade (up until I moved to the US in my 30s). Thankfully park concerts aren’t formal affairs (see photo above) so you can talk and listen. As I got older, our chats after band practice included more adult topics like investments or politics (a favourite of many folk in Ottawa), or what it’s like to have a miscarriage, or the challenges of living in other countries, or the cold war or what it was like to organize a dinner party in the 50s and 60s. (It sounded SO much more stressful than the regular D&D + dinner nights I hosted with my friends!)

She loved kids and was thrilled to meet her two great-grandchildren (my cousin’s kid and my own), and even though we both live far away, I was able to send my mom pictures and videos to take over to show her so she got to see my part of the family grow in between visits.

I’m lucky to have gotten so many years with her, and there’s probably more stories to tell about her rescue dog that only decided I was ok after we shook hands, and her dolls, and that time she called my mom to tell her she’d been lying about her wedding anniversary date for 50 years. But I don’t think I have it in me to tell those or dig through photos today, so we’ll leave those for another time. She’d had declining health for some years so her passing isn’t exactly a surprise, but it’s still fresh and sad and she’ll be very missed.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love advent Calendars but not so much the fact that they happen in December. But by chance I heard about the Made BySarahS MSKAL in time to join in for a nice May mystery (This post was written at the end of May right after I finished, but it’s been queued for a few weeks.)

This mkal was even more fun than I’d hoped, because it turned out I’d also accidentally joined a mostly Rhode Island-area knitting group full of lovely people. My own Saturday knit group has been out of commission since the pandemic, and I don’t even have contact info for most of them to set up an online thing. I hadn’t realized how nice it would be to have a regular group again, even if I was a weird odd one out on the other coast.

The pattern was a simple cuff down sock (look, another check mark on my 2020 fiber bucket list!) with stripes so there was an excuse to have yarn every other day. The socks matched the beautiful succulent/cactus project bag.

The non yarn days had a variety of teas, sweets, stitch markers… the usual small stuff you can fit in a yarn related advent. The Dread Pirate helped me open some packages and shared some sweets and shook a lot of yarn. One big treat for me: the kitchener stitch keychain, which is definitely a useful tool and one I’d coveted but hadn’t bought for myself.

This kit was exactly what I needed as I was starting to get my feet under me again: Cute little packages, a friendly community, and a simple project that I’ll definitely wear. I’m so glad I did it, and glad I managed to go to many of the happy hour calls even though I didn’t know everyone. It was really lovely.

I’m already intrigued by this hint about the next kit. August!

In this year’s fiber goals, I decided I wanted to give brioche another go. So when one of my favourite designers mentioned that she’d be doing a course via Zoom, it seemed like a perfect opportunity. So I signed up for PDXKnitterari’s course on May 2nd as soon as I could make sure my husband was good to be on toddler duty then.

Zoom is an interesting tool for this. I really liked the “debugging” part in this format: normally a teacher will bend over the work with a student to fix things and the rest of the class works on their own pieces, but because we were all sharing video, we could *all* see what the problem looked like and watch as Michele figured it out. This was super helpful to me for later, because there was so much more for my brain to latch onto since I’d watched and tried to guess myself as we did the class. And it’s always fun to watch a master at work.

I really appreciated the bit of advice that it looks like of like a mess for the first few rows. I definitely would have assumed I screwed something up and probably ripped it back a few times without that hint!

This was also a much better experience for me than my previous foray into online fiber learning because I set aside time during the day instead of trying to fit in a video in my toddler-free evening. That’s on me as much as the format, but it’s good to get a sense of how much of a difference it makes.

And, of course, it helps to have a great instructor who’d put a lot of detail into the pattern *and* had videos for us to watch later if we got stuck. I didn’t need them for the brioche for this piece, but I really appreciated the one on the Russian bind off.

Of course, now that I’ve gotten a little taste, I’m already trying to figure out what brioche thing to make next! And maybe what class to take next?

While I was sick over Thanksgiving, I suddenly thought it would be a good idea to knit a toddler sweater. I had a grand idea of doing it in a weekend, which wasn’t very likely, but a fun thing to try. It might have been doable if not for the toddler himself!

Yarn: Bumblebirch worsted in Paprika

The yarn is glorious. Thank you past me for indulging — this was probably bought on yarn crawl with some vague idea of future toddler in mind, but I think it’s maybe the last batch I have prepared so I guess it’s shopping spree time again this year?

Pattern: Antler by Tincanknits

This is the 2-4 year size, and it’s a bit long on him but considering that he keeps saying his “tummy hurts” when his clothes ride up and he gets a cold back, a little length is good. Plus maybe it’ll last to the 4 year mark?

Close up of the Antler cables.

Like all the the Tincanknits patterns, this is well-written and easy to follow. This one is bottom up and seamless (well, if you don’t count the underarms!) I didn’t get it done in the one long weekend, but it only took another couple of days later in the month to finish it up.

The Dread Pirate toddler in question is very pleased with his new sweater, since he likes cardigans. (And his previous ones are all pullovers — even with wide necks he’s suspicious that his head might not fit.)

We haven’t tried to get much of a photo shoot going (too much more fun stuff to do over the holidays!) but here he is in the Ottawa airport trying to reach his favourite airport feature, the courtesy telephone.

The Ravelry queue system seems pretty simple: if you see something you’d like to make, you put it in your queue. Then later, when you’re ready to make a new thing, you look through the queue, choose something, and away you go.

But… how do you decide what goes in? Do you ever take stuff out without making it? How often do you change the order? How do you find things? One of the knitting photo challenges reminded me recently that everyone does it differently.

I joined Ravelry in 2011. When I first joined, I didn’t know how to knit (only crochet) and was doing a lot of amigurumi toys and baby presents, so I used my favourites for stuff I’d made and wanted to make again, and used my queue for everything else. I’d get an idea in my head and queue 15 similar patterns while I decided on one. I’d queue piles of free-this-week patterns in case I saw the perfect yarn. I’d queue stuff for technique ideas. I’d queue stuff because I liked the photography. And I never-hardly-ever triaged the queue.

My crafting has changed a lot since 2011: I learned to knit and I started mostly making stuff for myself to wear and hardly ever repeat a pattern. (It’s not that I have a problem with doing that;’it’s just that there are so many beautiful things and so little time!) My skills have changed, my stash has changed, I’ve changed climates twice… Plus Ravelry has added features and I’ve learned to use more of them, so I have a different toolbox than I started with.

[Picture: climate change. This is what passes for a cold winter here. Hah! ??]

I don’t want to say that I’ve been using my queue incorrectly, I can definitely say that the way I’d been using it wasn’t working well for me anymore. It was time to clean up. But there were probably 600 things in there! It was daunting.

Since I’ve been in “finish all the stuff in progress” mode for months, though, I decided it was time. I could redirect my urge to start new things by instead planning out some stuff for the year, and clean things up before the yarn crawl so I had an idea of what I needed to buy. It’s been weirdly but pleasantlty cathartic.

It’s still a work in progress, but I’ve gone from 600ish down to well under 200, and I’m expecting to make it down under 100. That’s still probably 10 years of knitting at my current rate, so I’ll likely never finish even my shortened queue. But that’s never bothered me; what bothered me was not being able to find things quickly (when I was trying to justify my yarn purchases or figure out if I needed more of something).

You made it this far; have a peek at my new queue:

I’ve got a mix of old and new, but heavy on the new. That’s expected with all those changes in tastes and skills, and the pure excitement of new pattern releases. I haven’t bothered with precise ordering, but stuff on the first page is stuff I’ve been finding yarn for and stuff I could cast on any time.

Funniest find: I queued a hat pattern back in 2015 that gave me a jolt when I found it because I recognised the name… A colleague from work who I only met last year! I’ll have to tell her. I might even still knit it!

Most popular designer in my queue: pdxknitterati has the most patterns on my first page but a lot of tincanknits sweaters survived the cull and are hiding in the later pages because I’m still choosing next winter’s toddler sweater. I probably won’t knit them all, although toddler sweaters *are* addictively fast compare to adult ones.

Here’s the yarn that I’m currently planning for pdxknitterati’s Lucky Star design:

But I also have yarn ordered for her Oregon Sky design in Knitted Wit’s Glow Up collection *and* I have yarn (but not yet beads) for her Garland Shawl. That one actually *wasn’t* in my queue — I thought it had been for years, but apparently I’d queued a pile of her other designs but that one was stored only in my head. I hadn’t even bought the pattern though I could have sworn I had. Weird! It’s in the queue now. Her similarly-shaped Fern Lace Shawelette remains the piece I wear the most out of everything I’ve knit. If you met me at a conference in the past however many years since I knit it, there’s a good chance you’ve seen me in it. It’s even in many of the videos of me speaking, beause it’s *perfect* for holding the mic in the right position for me. I think it’s even in the clip of me in the Google Summer of Code video!

Stash diving win: I’ve had this stunner from Fierce Fibers since last year’s yarn crawl. It’s got yak in it, it’s a beautiful subtle shift and I wanted a pattern that would make it sing. I think I’ve finally got one: the Whakairo Cowl. I’m a bit worried about the (super soft, amazing) halo messing with the stitch definition so I might not make it past the first 20 rows, but I’m hopeful!

Most technical? It might be Toph or Dreamcatcher, both of which use some short row stuff i haven’t done before. But I have a feeling that I haven’t found the most technical one yet in my queue triage, because I haven’t found that time I tried to find the most fancy plant-inspired brioche I could.

Most excited about? Seriously, it’s just about everything on that first page. Spilling into the second. This has been a great diversion from casting on All The Things, but it certainly hasn’t lessened the urge at all!

Biggest lie? I keep saying I’m not casting on right now, but two of those things on the first page have knit a longs starting this week, so I’m probably going to cast *something* on by this weekend and wind yarn for a second. Good thing that just like with my queue, I get to change the rules of what I’m doing when I think it suits me better.

Advent calendars aren’t a big part of my childhood, but I liked the idea of getting little presents all through December, and since I’d intentionally cut back on gift knitting, I had time to do a mystery-a-long, so I bought into Jimmy Beans’ Craftvent.

It’s a nice kit, filled with knitting tools (including needles and everything else in the photo above) and enough yarn for the mystery shawl. Well, MAYBE enough yarn for the shawl; a lot of people ran out of yarn #2.

I didn’t run out, though it was close! Unfortunately, the upset over yarn shortages and the posting of spoilers made the Facebook group they made for the kal super angry and not fun until jbw realized they had a problem and laid out ground rules. I don’t think Facebook is really designed to deal with spoilers, and they should have stuck with Ravelry, which has tools and conventions about spoiler and no spoiler threads that would have really improved the experience.

I liked the pattern ok. There was not much mystery for the middle clues, but since the yarns were also part of the mystery that didn’t bother me as much as it might have. (Picture above in grey to show that there is a subtle difference between yarn 1 and 3)

It’s a lousy time of year for me to have a calendar based thing going, so I started opening boxes early, which made me more chill about spoilers at least.

I didn’t finish before Dec 25th rolled by, but that’s ok.

It was a pretty busy season!

And I did get it done before I left Ottawa and blocked after I got home.

It’s gotten me thinking a lot about designing a similar “Christmas in July” advent out of season, so it hits at a less busy time of year. It’d be a neat way to showcase some yarn from my local yarn store, but i think I’d want a lower price point so it’d have to be a bit lighter on the goodies. Maybe I’ll try to design a simple scarf and see if I could make it work!

As for doing the jbw Craftvent again, I’m not sure. It’s fun and I have no regrets (except maybe for joining the fb group) but I think i might try one that’s all yarn or use the same amount of money to get surprise yarns at a time of year when I can appreciate them more.

Still, it was a fun thing to do this year!