The reason I bring it up is because he inspired me to get organized in my designing endeavours. I’m still working out some of the kinks, but things have been going swimmingly! Of course, I’ve been crazy busy as a result.

And so, this post is an update on my design progress!

Currently, Hope’s Hat is in testing:

In the meantime, I’m working out sizing issues on some other projects… here’s a bit of a preview:

It’s all very exciting!

I have seen this stitch pattern used to look like scales, feathers, leaves, and cartoonish chainmaille. It all comes down to colour, really. You can alter the pattern a little bit to change the sharpness of the scales, too, which is kind of neat.

Here is a little bag that I whipped up:

I did a simple single crochet panel for the back:

If you’re going to make a bag using this stitch, I recommend lining it. As you can see here, the crocodile stitch side is actually quite hole-y:

I made this little bag up as a sample for an upcoming class I’ll be teaching. Look on my teaching page for details of when the next Crocodile Stitch class will be!

Since then I have learned two things: one, I’m going to have to re-create those missing posts, and two, back-ups are a thing. :P

Ok, so I already knew about back-ups, I just didn’t really understand how the Wordpress ones worked. Rest assured, I do now! Hopefully, if this happens again in the future, the fix won’t take as long as it will today.

Please stand by!

And yet, there are a lot of ways one can make their crocheting life easier. And what better way to celebrate NatCroMo, than with some helpful tips? (And tutorials… lots and lots of tutorials. :D)

Today’s helpful tip has to do with a tool you might not associate with crocheting, but one that I have found invaluable!

A kitchen scale:

This scale made my Jacob’s Snakes And Ladders blanket possible. I weighed any questionably small scraps of yarn before using them – if they weighed at least 15g (a number I came to by weighing the project after the first and second rows), I used them to make a row on the blanket. In the past, I have used it to determine an approximate yardage for my finished projects.

For its next trick, I’m going to use it to weigh a ball of yarn while I work with it – I’m going to chain 1/3 of it, and then sc the rest. (This will make more sense should I be successful and can show it off to you all!)

Enjoy NatCroMo (National Crochet Month), everyone! Crochet in public, join a crochet-along, learn a new technique, teach, shout it from the mountain tops! And stay tuned – there are more tips, tricks, and tutorials to come!

From there, we left our rental car behind and carpooled up to Edmonton (don’t look at me like that, it wasn’t my idea! It’s good for the environment! Cheaper on gas! The fact that it gave me more crocheting time is just a side bonus!)

This is how far it is from Ponoka to Edmonton:

On the way back to pick up the rental car, I had intended to crochet, but I was kind of tired, and completely enamoured with the sky:

The sky is amazing to look at in Alberta! Later I’ll show you what I mean!

We’re at the airport, waiting to board our plane.

Of *course* I brought yarn. Whose blog do you think you’re reading here?

(That’s Premier Yarns “Serene”, colour 13, from Mary Maxim)

I hear that Pearson has free wifi now. Though, when I mentioned it to Charles, his only response was to say, “have you never heard of Darren Kitchen?” Point taken. (On an amusing note, when I went to the bathroom before boarding I saw signs on the stalls advertising that the wifi was available… everywhere… in the bathroom!)

We’re off to sunny Alberta to visit family. Charles will be working for part of it, and during that time I’ll be sightseeing buying yarn… and possibly a new suitcase to get said yarn home again.

We didn’t have much of a view on the plane:

So I crocheted (the lack of view was totally the only reason. Totally.)

If you’re wondering how far it is from Toronto to Calgary, here is my Seraphina Shawl:

After landing in Calgary, we rented a car and headed up to Ponoka. I was the one driving, so there was no more progress made on the shawl. So, instead of another shawl picture, I’ll share this one with you:

Just doing our part to combat West Nile Virus!

To celebrate this “nearly shorts weather, really” weather, I decided to stop in at Zellers on my way home from work to pick up a ball of off-white Phentex worsted yarn and maybe some socks.

Success!

Well, ok, sorta… no need to adjust your screen, the yarn is blue. I think it’ll work anyway. I got it for joining 8″ squares together. The squares were made by my fellow guild members and the finished blanket will go to Warming Families. I took a bunch of squares home with me from the last meeting, along with several balls of off-white yarn, but I don’t believe I have enough of that yarn to join the blanket.

ANYway…

I had a bit of an accident while I was at Zellers. I spent so much time hemming and hawing over the Phentex and the lack of off-whiteness that I knocked into a shelf and some extra yarn fell into my cart. I was helpless to resist.

Let’s see… the yellow and pink on the right seems to be Bernat Soft Boucle; the variegated in the middle is Bernat Handicrafter cotton, and the blue stuff on the left might be Astra.

I was quite a hit on the subway with this giant bag of yarn, let me tell you!

(Don’t worry, there were lots of empty seats available; the yarn wouldn’t have gotten a seat otherwise!)

Here’s the bag again, this time sitting on the loveseat:

Why am I showing you this? Well, I want to give you an idea as to the scale of the bag… because the printing on the bag is actually a helpful guide to what you can reuse the bag for.

Personally, I’m going to go with #5:

(I’m assuming #6 there is for your average residential elephant owner…)

My friend Dennis, of Weatherbe Sweets, surprised me with this awesomely detailed (and very yummy!) Settlers of Catan cake:

Complete with all of the pieces needed to play the Cities and Knights expansion.

Of COURSE we played with it!

I played green, and was doing fairly well…

… until Chris (the recipient of my first Catan blanket and He Who Claims Credit For The Idea of the cake) started eating my playing pieces.

A few rolls into the game and the Barbarians attacked and started eating the cake island

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em!

Thank you Dennis and Chris!

Remember this?

It’s bigger now:

(Colours are a lot closer to real life in the first picture.)

And it is officially the First Finished Christmas Gift of the Year. Let’s have a round of applause!

I also made this, which the always lovely Roopurt is modeling for us:

Here is a close up:

I used a single ball of yarn I found in my stash that was unlabeled. I’m pretty sure it’s Astra but they don’t seem to have this colour anymore (even though it looks like this colour is the featured picture… weird).

To make this kind of scarf, you make a base chain approximately as long as you want the scarf to be, then do 2dc in each chain on the first row, and 1dc in each dc for the following rows.

I wanted to see if the “no base chain” foundation row method would work for this… and it did! It’s a bit complicated to write out, so I’ll save a tutorial on this for another post. If you simply can’t wait for that, do a search for it on Youtube. It’s pretty neat!

Truer words have never been spoken.

Sunday, August 30, 2009 started early for us. Up at 5:30am, I headed over to the Always Open convenience store to get some milk and a coffee for Charles. It was moving day, and mostly everything was packed; we didn’t want to have to move an entire kitchen’s worth of food, so the coffee-making supplies were packed and when we ran out of milk on Saturday, we decided to rely on the nearby convenience store, whose name really bears repeating: Always Open.

When I got there, I saw this:

(This is a story of epic proportions with lots of pictures, read on under the cut!)

The door was locked, and most of the lights were off. Normally when this happens there is a sign saying, “back in 10 mins” which, when you think about it, isn’t very helpful unless you know when the sign was posted, but is a lot more helpful than what I saw, which was nothing but a closed store with a “Open 24-7” sign mocking me.

So, off to McDonalds we went. Charles got his coffee, along with some breakfast, and I got two cartons of over-priced milk for my cereal.

After breakfast we packed up our essentials that had to wait until the last minute, and did some cleaning.

We had lots of time before needing to head out, so we loaded the piano into Dad’s car, which we borrowed for the week while my parents are at Disney (we were invited to go with them, alas, we were moving!). Once the piano was in, we filled the nooks and crannies up with mostly soft things – pillows, sheets, towels, and found there was room for our framed pictures behind the driver’s seat.

Moving the base of the piano into the car, I managed to smack it into my leg. The bandage is covering up a half-inch long gash which is surrounded by a nasty-looking bruise:

We still had about an hour to go before we needed to leave for the new place to get the keys, but we decided to leave then anyway, given that there was only one chair left in the old place, and really nothing much left to do. We killed time at Starbucks and our new drug store, then headed over to the new building.

We got our keys, and went through the check-in process, making sure there were no problems with the place before we moved in. I took some pictures while it was still empty:

Then it was time to head back to the old place. On the way, we stopped for lunch, then at the bank to get the money out for the movers. We got there with half an hour to spare, so we set up the folding chairs in the open garage and waited for the movers.

1:30 rolls around, and there’s no sign of the movers, though that’s when they were supposed to be there. Charles called them. It turns out, they’ve been delayed at their morning move and will be “a bit late”. Specifically, he says they’ll be there by 3pm. Well, we had the elevator at the new place booked from 3-5, so that was cutting it awfully close! And given how slowly they were obviously going at the other move, well, I was quite worried by this point.

3:00, and still no sign of them. Charles calls again. And again. And again. Then on my phone, thinking the guy is call screening. He got through that time, so… They’re almost done!

3:30, Charles calls again and gets the voicemail, but the guy calls back and says they’re on their way! Unfortunately for that guy (and his reputation, did I mention this was Innercity Moving and Storage?), he forgot to lock the keys on his cell phone and it auto-redialled Charles’ phone number. We listened for a bit and noticed that what we were hearing were distinctly moving sounds, and very obviously not driving sounds.

That’s right, the movers totally lied to us. They weren’t coming. It was now 4pm and we were officially screwed. Most of our stuff was sitting in boxes in our old landlord’s garage:

with a small handful of larger furniture down in the basement apartment that Charles couldn’t move on his own:

(though, the piano shown in the picture was in the car)

We decided to make the most of the elevator window at the new place and at least unload the car. Once that was done, we’d figure out what to do next.

When we get to the new place we notice a few dozen people leaving, all at once. What is that sound? Ah. The fire alarm. The elevators are locked. People are evacuating.

One of the evacuees, what looked like a young high school student flung open a door on the car next to mine, and it hit my Dad’s car. (I checked later and couldn’t see where it hit, so that was a bit of a blessing, I suppose!)

Completely pissed off at this point, I tear away from the building. There was nothing else to do, really. We couldn’t go inside, and our elevator window would be long closed by the time everything was sorted out.

So, we had a car full of soft things and an expensive, hard to replace digital piano; a new apartment we couldn’t get to; and an old apartment that was completely packed up.

We decided to go out for dinner and figure out what to do. Well, the logical conclusion at the time was to head to my parents’ house. It was the only place I could think of where there were extra beds, and a safe place for the piano to stay until we sorted things out.

(Here I’m surfing Craftster and watching Mythbusters)

The original plan had us moving on Sunday, then off work on Monday to rest and unpack a little. Well, Sunday was completely shot, so Monday ended up being the day to run around and try to figure out what the hell we were going to do.

Monday morning we woke up early again, and I changed into my last set of clean clothing. I only had this clothing because I packed some extras just in case something went wrong. “Be prepared!” and all that. We did some grocery shopping, then headed to our new apartment to unload what we had (sans piano).

Not wanting to go back to Hamilton that night, since we both had to work the next day, we decided to see if we could fit our mattress into the car. It took quite a bit of work, but we managed to fold it in half (no worries, it’s just air pockets and memory foam) and tie it up with some rope we found in the car, then crammed it into the back of the station wagon. We drove it over to the new place, conveniently arriving just as everyone was getting home from work. Most of our new neighbours were quite understanding, so we did manage to get it upstairs, and untied (collapsing on it shortly thereafter).

Our rest was short-lived as I had managed to find a friend who was available to help Charles move the last of the furniture out of the old place. This needed to be done as soon as possible because the new tenant was due, and the landlord wanted to clean and paint before he arrived. We decided to stop by the McDonalds drive-through on the way back to the old place.

I placed our order, paid for it, and got most of our food, but the McNuggets were going to take some extra time, so I was told to pull ahead and they’d run them out to us. We waited. And waited. And waited. Finally, Charles went inside to see what was going on. It turns out that the girl at the window had gone on break and forgotten about us. She gave us two packs of McNuggets instead of one. When we got to the old apartment, naturally all of the food, except for the McNuggets, were cold… and the microwave had already been packed. Swell.

Charles and my friend moved the furniture into the garage while I went and got gas in the car. By the time I got back they were done; my friend had gone home. We grabbed a couple of boxes of things that looked important, then headed back to the new place.

I washed the sheets, and were able to sleep in our own bed in our new place for the first time. Naturally, I didn’t sleep well; not enough noise, if you can believe it!

Tuesday morning came, and since it was Sept. 1st, there was no way we were going to find movers or even book the elevator, so we decided to go to work, as originally planned. Of course, in the original plan I was to have Monday off to rest, and likely ice the living daylights out of my bum knee, but that didn’t happen. So, Tuesday was starting out with a throbbing knee. That morning was also when I discovered that I had no clean clothes. It was too late to do a load of laundry, so I put Monday’s clothes back on. Lovely.

After work on Tuesday I went to the new place, grabbed the car, drove back to the old place; I was on a mission: FIND CLOTHES! I couldn’t find the box I was looking for, but I did find the laundry basket, which was full of the previous week’s dirty clothes. Perfect! Inside was also one of my cereal bowls, which was nice because that morning I had eaten my breakfast out of a large serving bowl. I grabbed a couple of random boxes, figuring the ones that were easiest to get to were most likely our essentials that we packed last. I also did a cursory search for a box that might contain the modem. You see, we didn’t need it at the old place, so it got packed up in a maddeningly unlabeled box several days before, and we couldn’t remember which one it was. (Luckily, we did have it narrowed down to all of the unlabeled boxes. I had labeled the ones I packed, so that cut out about half of the possibilities.)

No luck on the modem, but I did some laundry and I had clean clothes!

Wednesday was another early day. We had booked new movers, S & Sons, which we saw an ad for on the bulletin board in our new mailroom, for 7:30am to meet us up at our storage unit. We weren’t taking any chances with them running late at a previous move, and the only morning elevator window available was from 9-11. These movers arrived early, and were quite professional:

The unit was packed up by 8am, then it was off to the old place. I still had my key, but I wasn’t sure if the new tenant was in yet, and I didn’t want to just barge in. With the key I had, we’d have to go in the basement entrance, then use a key inside to get into the garage. Instead, I went to the front of the house, rang the bell, and waited for my landlord’s parents to answer and then open the garage for us. Naturally there was no answer. Even though I’d told his father just the day before that we’d be there between 8 and 9 the following morning, and it was clear from the open balcony door that someone was home, for whatever reason they weren’t answering the door. I rang the bell again and waited, and still no answer. Crap!

I decided to risk it and try going in the basement door. I knocked first, waited, got no answer, then let myself in. Looking down the stairs I couldn’t see any furniture or boxes, so that was a bit of a relief. Unfortunately, the key to the garage door wasn’t there anymore!

The movers had arrived by this point, and we were paying them by the hour, so I called our old landlord’s cell phone. He confirmed that his parents were indeed home, and said he’d call them to tell them it was me at the door. So, I went back around to ring the bell again, which I feel the need to point out, did absolute wonders for my bum knee.

We get into the garage and the movers start working. Charles has been helping them the whole time because, again, we were paying them by the hour, so we managed to get away just shortly after 9.

The owner of the good moving company had a theory as to what happened with the bad ones. He said that it wasn’t uncommon for some movers to have someone call up and they’d quote them a price, maybe $60/h. Then someone else would call asking about the same day and time and they would quote them maybe $75/h. And on it would go, and when the day came they’d go and move whoever agreed to pay the highest amount and not bother to even call the others to say they weren’t coming.

I wouldn’t have believed such things happened if it weren’t for the fact that that theory fit suspiciously well with what actually happened to us. Again, the bad movers were Innercity Moving and Storage. Remember: they’ll probably screw you in favour of a higher bidder.

We got to the new place, with the movers arriving shortly thereafter, and they started moving us in. They were quite nice and even offered to move the heavier items in first, just in case we ran out of time with the elevator. We did end up running overtime, but whoever had the elevator booked after us hadn’t shown up yet, so we ended up getting everything in just fine. I even found the box the modem was in!

Once everything was settled, Charles got to work getting the internet connection up and running. We’d been relying on our smart phones for days; it would be nice to use our computers for a change!

The modem is plugged in, but the DSL light isn’t on. He checks and finds that there’s nothing at all wrong with the modem or its wireless signal, the problem is that the line is dead. Now, hold on a minute, we had Bell come in the Friday before we moved in so that they could set this up before we got here. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

We called Bell and they said they’d send a technician on Thursday after 5. I got home from work at 4:30. Since the internet wasn’t set up, that meant my VoIP phone wasn’t set up, and it is set to automatically forward all calls to my cell phone whenever it isn’t working (for any reason). The buzzer to get into the building is set to call the VoIP phone, which means it would actually call my cell phone, which means, had the Bell guy arrived before I got home, I would have known about it. We waited until about 8:30pm, then decided to call Bell and see what was up. They said that the service window was from 5-9, so the guy had a bit of time yet and might still show up, and that we were still on his schedule; he hadn’t made any kind of note about not being able to make it, or not being able to get into the building. We weren’t holding our breath that he’d show, and naturally, he didn’t. (I don’t know if you’re sensing a theme here… that’s three services we’d used during this move where someone just didn’t show up, with no notice or anything). More calls to Bell, and they say they’ll send someone on Friday. Right-o!

Friday was a half day for me at work. I went up to Davisville Station after work to change the address my Metropasses are sent to, and found that while they have elevators running from track level to the mezzanine, they have only an up-escalator between the mezzanine and street level, which is where the Metropass office is. Because my knee hasn’t been through enough already this week!

I head home and spend a lovely afternoon sitting out on the balcony, crocheting, and watching the condo construction.

Charles gets home later on, and we wait for the Bell guy. He finally arrives, pokes around looking for access panels, then announces that he needs access to the “telephone room”. I’ve never lived in an apartment building, and had never heard of such a thing. It turns out that it’s in the basement, and you need a key to get at it. And it’s late in the evening on a Friday before a long weekend. I call the building’s after hours number, tell them what is happening, and they paged the Super and told him what we needed.

Clearly, we got our internet sorted out (though, there was a tense moment on Saturday after I accidentally knocked the modem off of the back of the chair and we lost internet briefly. I had a long overdue meltdown over it. I mean, come on, after that week? It could easily have been something even less important that set me off!)

On Saturday we took advantage of still having the car and went and did some more grocery shopping, hoping to get the heavy things we needed that would keep well. By the time we got home, I had just about had it. I was tired, both physically and emotionally, so we decided to just stay home. I crocheted some, read a little bit, and picked up the shattered remains of my abandoned farm on Farmville.

At that point the new place wasn’t really feeling like home quite yet. I felt like I was on vacation, staying at a rich relative’s apartment that they weren’t using. After all, we went from a (very nice) basement apartment, with 1 bedroom, a kitchenette, and only one window, which was north-facing and underground in a window well, to a 2 bedroom apartment, with a real kitchen, room for an actual dining table, and a balcony with a lovely view of the lake, on the 10th floor of a pretty amazing building (there’s a free gym downstairs! And a movie theater room! And a board room! And a spectacular party room! And we can take the garbage out whenever we want to instead of trying to find a place for it to rot under the sink!). Adding to the feeling of just being on vacation was the fact that I only had a fraction of my wardrobe unpacked (about what I’d take with me for a week’s vacation).

I had a gig in Hamilton this morning, so Charles came with me and we stopped by my parents’ house and picked up my piano. We got it moved in this afternoon, and the place already feels more like home. ^_^

All that’s left is to move the yarn back, but I’m trying to hold off on that a bit until we can unpack some more boxes to make room for it.

So, clearly this move was brought to us by Murphy’s Law. A shame, really, as I prefer:

Cole’s Law: thinly sliced cabbage.