My Birthday Weekend

Another year, another birthday! I turned 25 again (for the millionth time! haha!).

On my actual birthday Jimmy took me out for a nice dinner on Main St. Markham (not to be confused with Main St. Unionville!) and I spent the remainder of my evening watching the Leafs loose on tv and knitting :)

Yesterday I celebrated my birthday with friends :) Ed came over for our 3rd ever E&K Knitting Club meeting. Yes, we formed a knitting club, and yes we're the only members. But more members are more than welcome to join us! Our meets always goes as follows:

First 30 minutes - talk and catch up on what's been going on in our lives. This is usually when I start boiling some water for tea
Next 30 minutes - knit and drink tea
Next hour - head over to Tonia's for some all-day-breakfast brunch

LoL so half our meetings usually consists of eating :D

So when Ed came over yesterday she presented me with my birthday gift: a hand knit cowl scarf. I love it!!



The colours and cowl are absolutely stunning! Funny thing is, the last time I was over at her place, she was showing me her new additions to her yarn stash, and when she showed me the yarn she used to knit the cowl, I told her how much I loved it. Little did I know it was for me! Thanks Ed! <3

This weekend I finally got around to knitting all the colour offerings for my wrist warmers. Finally! I just finished knitting the "teal" ones (still gotta finish them off). I'm putting teal in quotes because it's actually more teal than green. Hm.. I'm going to have to think of a new name for those ones! Here's a photo of just some of the colours my wrist warmers come in - It's missing the coal black, silver gray and the "teal" ones :D

I *Heart* Autumn!

Actually I should specify and say I *heart* October :D And no, it's not because it's my birthday month (because I tell ya, after I turning 25, I started dreading turning a year older every year!). Autumn here in Toronto is the season I love the most - and I love it for several reasons:

1) You can start wearing your knitted goods without sweating up a storm
2) The air is crisp and clear
3) Perfect hiking weather - not too hot and no bugs!!
4) Oktoberfest (reminders of my days @ U.Waterloo)
5) The beauty of the leaves changing to all sorts of lovely reds, oranges and yellows - makes driving anywhere so much more enjoyable!

These past two weekends I've gone out hiking with my family to take in all this wonderful fall weather/scenery. I have to admit yesterday was quite brutal - my fam and I were at Hockely Valley and we hiked for 5 hours :S My legs are sore today! LoL

I thought I would share just some of my autumn photos I've taken over the past week. Photos were taken at Rouge Valley Conservation Center and Hockley Valley (on the Bruce Trail).


Beautiful fall orange/yellow - Rouge Valley CC


Hiking at Rouge Valley CC.


Abandoned vintage car engine - Hockely Valley - Bruce Trail


Tin cup - Hockely Valley - Bruce Trail


Side trails - Hockley Valley - Bruce Trail

My First Etsy Sale! (+socks!)

I've been on Cloud 9 over the past few days - I finally made a sale in my Etsy store! I made my first sale last Thursday, and I was super excited. I sold a pair of wrist warmers :)

So every morning when I wake up the first thing I check is the status of my Etsy store - it's a bit of an obsession really! But it's become my morning ritual. Thank goodness for Windows 7 starting up so fast! When I checked on Thursday morning, I noticed one of my items were missing. And my first thought was "oh dumb-dumb Kare! You were probably editing the details for that item and forgot to "accept" the changes, so it's not showing up in your store!" But then I looked closely and realized that I made a sale! Yipee!!

And since then I've sold another pair of wrist warmers, and I have a custom order lined up. I'm so excited!

And I have been busily knitting wrist warmers since then!

But what I really want to do is get back to knitting socks. Since it has been getting colder, I finally had the opportunity to wear the socks I made earlier this year. Wearing them made me miss knitting socks. I thought I would post pics of my fancy-shmacy socks, which I knit using the magic loop method. Actually, the yellow pair is the first one I made using the magic loop method. See - I told you I like making things challenging for myself! I took the hardest pattern from Wendy Johnson's book "Socks From The Toe Up".. or what I thought was the hardest pattern to knit. The yellow ones knit up quite well :)





These red ones however, where for some reason, challenging. They were a basic lace sock, but I kept screwing up. At one point, and this was after I knit the heel and everything, I screwed up on one sock and I just couldn't fix it. I got so frustrated so I ended up taking apart the entire sock.

A word of advice: when you get frustrated, don't just go taking things apart. In quoting the movie Anchorman, right after Ron Burgundy jumped into the bear pit he said "I immediately regret this decision". That was exactly what I said (and then I thought of the movie... and I had a laugh! haha). It's better to try to fix your mistake. Taking it apart when you're almost done should be the absolute last resort. Anyway, I made it through knitting this pair and they're my second fav pair (after my lovely yellow ones)

Tale of Two Hats (Paris, France)

The plan after making my first ever pair of wrist warmers was to make a matching slouchy beret. I found a pattern on Ravelry.com that had a bit of a cable knit to it. Because my yarn gauge did not match the one on the pattern (it was a lower gauge yarn than what was recommended in the pattern), I again, attempted to readjust the pattern by casting on more stitches and adjusting the cable pattern and where to increase the stitches. I felt like after adjusting the wrist warmer pattern, I was a pro.

Boy does being overconfident backfire sometimes!

What I had failed to do is to adjust the number of increase stitches - I kept that the same for the pattern. Needless to say, this slouchy beret turned out not so slouchy. Ok... it wasn't slouchy AT ALL :s It was tight, and the top was loose. I looked like Toad from Mario Bros! LoL Oops! Lesson learned indeed!

Before I went on my trip to Paris in Feb, I had looked up some yarn stores that, if Ed and I had time, we would go check out. Based on my research, the yarn stores in Paris are phenomenal, and it was definitely a pity we didn't get to check out any of them. I was slightly disappointed about not going because after buying yarn in San Antonio, I thought it would be fun to buy yarn from places I travel to. And this is where fate comes to play. For some reason unknown (possibly because we were freezing our buns off outside and needed to warm up!), we found ourselves in Printemps, a department store in Paris. We were just about to leave when I spotted my loot - yarn!! And it was so cheap!! I picked up two balls of gray merino wool yarn to make a replacement hat.

I just had enough to finish my hat :D And this one fits much better, and it slouches... sorta! :D



The one on the left is the first one I knit - can you tell it's too small? LoL