"My country is not a country, it's winter"

These are the first words of a song written by one of our poets. And boy, this week, was he right.
The past week has been cold. Like, very cold. Like, feels-like -38-Celsius-because-of-windchill cold. Getting out of the house at  7:15 am and walking for 12 minutes to the bus stop have been a little bit of a challenge. It felt like the cold air went straight to my brain through my nose, and that my thighs would fall of. But at the same time, there is a great feeling of being strong about being able to just carry on with our life in that kind of conditions. And it makes -25 feels like spring.

In that past week, I managed to finish something (Hurray!) and wear it at work (double hurray!)
It's the skirt that I very, very slowly sewed together.

Picture sucks, but it is because I am home alone, and I'm too comfortable with my  warm clothes and do not want to expose my legs to the cold air, so I am not wearing it and taking a picture of myself. 

I took this picture in a hurry, because I have to bring it to my sewing class this afternoon to show my teacher.

In other news, despite being very happy to have finished one sleeve of my folded, I am very sad to announce that I still hate DPNs. I still keep loosing them, or they get in the knitted part and pull on the yarn, or they fall off and I have to fix several stitches, or they get stuck in the sleeves of the sweater I'm wearing. Moreover, the knitting doesn't look good and regular. I'm hoping that a good blocking will fix it (or part of it). I'm starting the second sleeve today, and I hope to finish it soon so I can go back to my circular needles. Now, I know that you will say that I could have done it all on circular needles, and then you would not have to read all my complaints. But the problem is that I am a very stubborn person, and I wanted to learn how to knit with DPNs.  So I did. Next step is to learn to enjoy it. I see a lot of socks coming up in the next months to teach me that.
Meanwhile, I've been telling myself regularly that I would not need to sew anything, at least. So it's not too bad. I'm trying not to think how much easier, faster and prettier this would have been on my circular needles...

The other craft I'm thinking about a lot right now is weaving. I'm obsessed  about fixing my small Meco loom, and warping my 60" Clement again. I'm planning to take some time off from work to shop and warp. I'm thinking baby blankets overshot. I've been pinning in my weaving board like a maniac, and now need to find time to go explore all these sites. But I am stubborn, and these blankets will get woven. I'm just not sure when.

Have a great weekend, I'm off to my sewing class!

2013 miracles

Although this first week back to work was incredibly hectic, this year's first miracles managed to happen:

I have been knitting since April 2010. I've been trying to start socks since probably May 2010, but I just can't get the 4 DPN thing. I've cast on about 15 times, but I keep dropping stitches in between the needles, getting my yarn totally tangled, adding stitches in between the needles, or loosing needles at the bottom of my bag and finding the 2 first rows I had so much trouble getting done totally frogged.

So, this is the first miracle: 

It's a sleeve, not a sock...

I'm the first one to be surprised to have made it that far. And since I have been able to knit sleeves with DPN before (provided that I didn't need to cast on), I'm very hopeful that I will manage to finish it. I think that the secret might be the bamboo needles; they are not as slippery as the metal ones, and that might be why my stitches are staying in place. The plan now is to start a pair of socks, once again, with these needles to see if I'll be successful.

2nd miracle of the year (although it looks more like a major disaster on the picture...) : We finally started putting the mouldings on, which means we were able to place our shelves in their final location, and we can now empty our boxes of books. (That's today's project, although I think the shelves will need a little emptying before I can fill them again).

3rd miracle: I think my man is really fed up of mouldings, so he started to plan for the "walk-in closet room". I've been wanting the Ikea's Pax system for ever. I managed to convince my man that that was the only system we could use. We were ready to go to Ikea...and then we realised that they wouldn't fit, because our ceilings are too low. I didn't have a plan B, until my man looked on the Canadian Tire's site, and found these in super special. The day after, they were bought and installed, which liberated a tons of room that can now be organised otherwise. And for a third of the prize of the Pax, and me not having any second thought about it.

In the other crafts news, well, I was able to start my Folded sleeve because I was done with the body of the sweater:

I hope I finish it soon, because I'm looking forward to wear a pair of earrings I bought in Hungary to fit with it!

How cute? 

Last news of the week, I bought a used weaving bobbin rack on the internet, like this one (# 6362-1000), which means I will not need to borrow one when I want to warp my looms anymore. It also means that I have no more excuse not to weave...

Got to go, I have a lot of house cleaning and organising to do.
Have a great weekend!!