argh

well, it is official - it was the dreaded norwalk virus (which now goes by the name norovirus) that knocked us all out last week. i still have stomach cramps. yuck.

in other news, the pace of my super-secret father's day gift project creeps on at an incredibly slow rate (there are pics on ravelry for anyone who wants to see - members only so the father in question won't accidentally stumble upon it). thank goodness i gave myself lots of time for this one! remind me never to do colourwork again. ever.

ugh

nothing like sickness to get caught up on crafting. the wee one and i are both down with "an enteric illness" (so described by the notice announcing the outbreak) and i'm finding embroidery is comparatively easy to do while semi-reclining or shuffling after a restless baby. i've picked up his roy rogers shirt, and have made a fair amount of progress (with a few pauses to fix the mistakes born of a feeble mind).

here are a few shots of the basted together yoke & body, with curved slash pockets. i'm at a point now though where what's left to do (topstitching, armscye and side seams, attaching collar, front button band and snaps) needs a machine, and i just can't sit at a desk. just typing this is stupefyingly arduous.

ugh.

all hail george s parker

maybe i should be embarrassed to admit this, but ever since i saw the royal tenenbaums, i wanted that games closet. fortunately regular visits to small town thrift-stores has rendered this almost a possibility - i don't have the closet space to devote to it, but i do have some games.

today we pulled out careers by parker brothers which is, being from 1955, alarmingly sexist. career choices include farming, politics, hollywood, going to sea, uranium prospecting, and a mission to the moon. i was winning when sadly nic had to leave.

seeing stars

the days are getting longer, next week is the return of daylight savings, and both of these factors add up to brightness at bedtime for baby. and the curtain on his window is the one that was there when we moved in - a filthy piece of floral peach nylon. yuck. so today i made a new curtain one that is opaque enough (interlined with quilt batt!) to keep out more light, but a little more fanciful as well - to give him his own bit of night sky to dream about.


i also installed a proper curtain rod - the previous tenants had one made out of cardboard (!!! ? !) but now he's got solid wood.

boo and yay

i finally went to the wychwood barns farmers' market today, and... well they are purists about only having local products, and i wanted veg, and it's february in ontario, so all they had were a few potatoes and cabbages. less than exciting.

they did however have non-food items, such as this:



the stall also had lovely yarn as well - and according to their website (still very much a work-in-progress), there is more to come!

filmy

ok in addition to seeing more knitting in the movies lately, it seems there is more knitting behind the scenes as well... in an interview with meryl streep on jonathan ross's film 2009 she discusses how she, amy adams, and other actors conducted an on-set knitting circle while filming doubt; and in her excellent book knit 2 together, tracey ullman discusses how she rediscovered the joys of knitting on the set of a dirty shame. it's not surprising really considering how much time on set is spent waiting, waiting, waiting!

ooh, it's been awhile

have been far to busy this past month - the xmas thing, dinner for six, out-of-town guests, horribly sick, more guests (we've had five sleep over in the last month), a birthday party for baby to which we invited more people than we realised, helping a friend move, hosting refugees of the great blackout, helping a friend with immigration issues, having family over, and again horribly sick. i have managed to make a few little things along the way though - a hat for cousin oliver, a scarf and vest for harry, and thankfully i got a boatload of cooking done last week before being felled by "something viral," so we won't starve. but not a lot of time to do much.

i did however finally get around to seeing lars and the real girl, which i cried through like a baby (i grew up in a small town like that, but there wasn't any rallying-around-the-lonely-nutter that i recall - quite the opposite), and which made me feel a little crafty - lars wears a knitted baby blanket throughout, and church ladies come over and knit and embroider. and in typical synchronistic form, just as i was thinking again about knitting and movies, i stumbled across this list of knitting references in movies. brilliant.