O.R.K...

Spud

2011-11-06T09:14:00.003-08:00

On Thursday 20th October, my friend Katy snapped a few posterity maternity shots for me.

On Friday 21st October, I posted my last update about IVF and then the Fella and I departed for the hospital. I had been booked in for a 40 Week induction by my OB, due to my age (here they have concerns about the speed of placenta breakdown and the increased risk of still births in women over 40).

After 2.5 days of prostaglandin treatment as an outpatient (returning to the hopital every 6-12 hours for reassessment and spending 2-5 hours there at each visit), my induction was written off as a failure. On Sunday afternoon, I was scheduled into the OR for an unplanned c-section, which - as a procedure and an experience - terrified the living daylights out of me.

The only good thing about it?

Spud: born 23rd October, 7lb 90z, 53cm long. Intact and healthy. Snapped just after being wheeled up to the post partum ward from Rocovery.

Spud - 27th October, waiting to be discharged from hospital.

Spud - 30th October, 1 week old.

Spud - 5th November, 2 weeks old.

Wearing his first ever hand knitted gift (thank you Auntie Arianwen)!

Part 3: Reflection on the Birds and the Bees (ICSI IVF Style)

2011-10-21T07:25:00.002-07:00

There was a point during our cycle of IVF when I joked to someone that if we were lucky enough to have a child, that I would really look forward to telling my child all about the birds and the bees. Well, you see, darling, it all starts with needles...

...lots of them. Now some people breeze through this part of IVF without a backward glance but if you happen to a bit needle phobic, like me, then you are in for a bumpier ride. Just to put all of those needles into context, IVF breaks down into the following basic stages for a woman:

- egg production (in my case this took approximately 27-28 injections, 8 blood tests and 8-9 vaginal ultrasounds);
- egg retrieval (IV plus the whopping needle used to hoover out my eggs);
- egg fertilisation (well that involved a needle but thankfully it was not stuck in me); and
- embryo transfer (I think that this was needle free, but it was certainly not catheter free).

I should say at this point that I have a tendency to faint when people brandish a needle at me so I have to tell you that I am very proud of myself for surviving all of the above without passing out and bruising my forehead on a piece of hospital furniture. That, in itself, was a miracle.

I should also say at this point that having read up on IVF, the processes, procedures, choices and paperwork before we started our cycle of IVF, it was my ideal scenario to go through the above process, produce a bumper crop of eggs (of course) and have at least 4 of them fertilise. This would give me the option to use two embryos in this IVF cycle and freeze down the other two for a second 'go' later. Either if the first cycle failed or if we were successful and decided to try for a second child later. Really. Ok, you can stop laughing at my naivety now.

I really should say that this is a very long blog post. Sorry about that. It's just the way that it turned out.

Egg Production

Once I was a couple of days into the process (only 1 injection per day for the first two days, which the nurses handled in order to demonstrate how and where the drugs should be injected), I was supposed to inject my tummy or upper thighs with two drugs per day to stimulate egg production and manage my cycle - FSH and Buserelin.

Being a logical person, I decided to use one side of me for one type of drug and the other side of me for the other. As you do. What did tickle me (this is from my very unscientific packet reading and internet research) was that the two IVF drugs - well, one was made from hormones extracted from the urine of post menopausal women and the other's primary use is in the pallative care of men with prostate cancer. Isn't that quite the party?

The only problem was that I was supposed to inject myself with these drugs and I just couldn't do it. I tried and I failed. The Fella tried and he failed. Neither of us could do it. I sat at our dining table, drugs and syringes laid out in front of me like some kind of serious drug addict and I could not overcome 40 years of needle phobia and neither of us could overcome our conditioning not to hurt ourselves (or anyone else) on sharp, pointy objects. Either we would think that we were pushing the needle in but it turned out that we were not (as it wouldn't go in, just created a dent in the skin) or it would just pierce the skin with a sensation that felt (both to me and the Fella) like a ballpoint pen being pushed dully through a piece of clingfilm. Whereapon we'd either recoil in panic (dropping the syringe on the floor, contaminating it and wasting our drugs) or not be able to push the rest of the needle in.

I phoned the hospital and explained our problem. Luckily, the nurses have come across people like us before. So I had to go into the hospital every afternoon for the remainder of our IVF cycle to get a nurse to do my jabs for me. Pathetic but true.  Personally, I found that the drugs stang after they were injected. By the time I reached the egg harvesting stage, my abdomen sported a whole constellation of scattered injection bruises, my hormonal balance had been so upset I was a raging basket case and my ovaries felt like they were trying to bulge rudely (and uncomfortably) out of my pelvis.

On top of the injections, from Day 3 of the IVF cycle onwards, I had to be at the hospital at 8am every other morning for a blood test and a vaginal ultrasound. The Fella nicknamed this 'The Breakfast Club'. I didn't really speak to any of the other women that I met in the Breakfast Club blood test corridor or ultrasound waiting room. Other than the odd smile and nod of recognition, we were all very quiet. Towards the end of the cycle, this became a daily appointment. The blood tests were just more needle misery that I pretended to be stoic about and the ultrasound became affectionately known in our household as the 'light sabre treatment'. I have to be honest, it was silent, but somehow it really helped me to imagine the light sabre noise in my head as I could feel the ultrasound probe swinging first to the left and then to the right in order to scan my ovaries so that the specialist could count how many egg follicles they were producing. By helping, I mean that it distracted me from the fact that I was reclining on a chair, knickers off, socks on, covered in a modesty sheet, being probed by a piece of hospital ultrasound equipment.

After every blood test, I had to ring the hospital at noon to find out my blood test results and whether my drug dosage was being altered. After which, I would go hang around the pharmacy to buy more drugs and take them into the hospital for a nurse to do the jabbing honours. Rinse, repeat for 14 days (in my case).

This was quite a stressful, emotional time for us as a couple. Apart from the fact that my hormones were completely messed up, I did not respond to the drugs either as quickly or well as the hospital expected. I didn't realise there was a problem until about halfway through the IVF cycle when a doctor I had not met before did my ultrasound and commented, effectively, that my body needed to buck up its ideas and try harder because only 5 egg follicles were starting to look viable (I started with 9 or 10 but they did not all develop). As a result, I was starting to look borderline in terms of whether there was any point moving onto the egg retrieval process (the hospital will not go to egg retrieval for anything less than 4 follicles). They ramped up my FSH drug. I fussed very badly because there was absolutely nothing that I could do to 'buck up my body' or control how my body responded to the drugs they had instructed me to take. They ramped up my FSH drug some more, the IVF cycle dragged on but no more egg follicles matured.  I felt very despondent. We reached the crunch point where we really needed to either proceed to egg retrieval or cancel the cycle.

You see, despite the drugs you take to control your cycle, the IVF egg production process does have a clock ticking. It gets to the point in an IVF cycle where you have to act, retrieve the eggs, fertilise them and get embryos back in before the uterus lining starts to prepare itself to shed. There is an optimum window for embryos 'to stick' and if you miss it, the IVF cycle is very likely to fail.

We had a difficult conversation with one of the specialists about whether we should or should not proceed to egg retrieval. She was honest but very careful to tell us that this had to be our decision - our case was not optimal, I did not have many egg follicles and we were really pushing my cycle, so the odds of us being successful were diminishing fast. She estimated that the chances of us becoming pregnant had dropped to around 20% from 30-35% so we were very likely to need another cycle of IVF if we wanted to become pregnant.

However, she also warned us that we needed to be aware that this might be just as good as it ever gets - what would we do if there were fewer eggs next time? She'd had cases where there were lots of egg follicles but the eggs turned out to be very poor quality. She'd had cases where there were very few egg follicles but the eggs were all very good quality. With us, she pointed out that there was no case history established for us that identified whether the number of follicles in this cycle was typical and no data on whether my eggs were any good. If it was a question of finances, then we could cancel and try again in another 2-3 months time and hope for a better outcome. However, the way that she said it, left us both with the impression that we should consider continuing. She had to leave in order to do a procedure for another couple.

We sat with one of the IVF nurses and hashed the problem backwards and forwards, looking at the pros and the cons of going to egg retrieval. I would be lying if I said that finances were not a big part of that discussion. By that point, we were at least $5,000 into the procedure (hospital treatment and drugs). If we continued, the remainder of the cycle would cost a further $5,000. So really, the question was whether to proceed so that the hospital could build up a full cycle case history on us or bail and put the $5,000 we saved towards another, potentially better cycle with better odds. It was a very miserable and upsetting discussion.

In the end, we decided to continue. We made this decision on the basis that it would give the hospital a full case history on us, which might improve our chances in the future.  We also made it on the basis that having two full attempts at IVF for $20,000 had to be better than one and a half attempts for $15,000. After all, if we were successful, even if our odds were very low, we wouldn't need the second cycle. Also, I have to acknowledge that there was a part of me that did not want to have gone through such an expensive, exhausting experience and walk away, mid process.

Also, notice how we were committing ourselves mentally to another round of IVF if this one failed? After starting this whole process by saying that we would give it one single go and if it didn't work out, that we would get on with our childless lives and not get sucked into further cycles of treatment? I think that this is how it happens, how people are drawn in and how doggedly determined they can become about having a baby at any cost - the hope extended by IVF can be a cruel, expensive thing.

Egg Retrieval

This took place at about 10:30am on Sunday 30th January 2011. We showed up at the hospital, I donned a hospital gown, gave my music to the nurse to play during the procedure (Amplified Heart by Everything But The Girl), sat in a chair and freaked out quietly about the IV needle in my hand. I made them put tape over it so that I couldn't see the needle poked into my skin. The Fella had to vanish into a little room to well, you know, do his part! Once he returned, they took me through to the procedure room where I climbed onto the bed and put my feet into the handy holders (in my trademark black ankle socks), lay back, tried not to dwell too much on what was about to happen and held the Fella's hand like it was my anchor to the earth. At that point, they started some kind of happy, relaxant drug in my IV and once that kicked in, I didn't care at all about what was about to happen.

A new specialist that I had not met before did the procedure and he was both quick and efficient. After injecting something to numb the area, he used a whopping great needle to stab through the walls of my vagina into each egg follicle on my ovaries. He proceded to suck out each egg. How do I know this? Well, he had positioned a screen so that I could see what was going on via the ultrasound image. It might sound biazarre but it really helped to see what I could feel going on 'down below'. It wasn't painful, I could just feel the jiggling around. The lab staff came into the procedure room, took my eggs away and confirmed an egg count.  Six eggs - one more than we expected! I was so relieved (as sometimes, they cannot reach all of the eggs) that I burst into tears.  Once the procedure was over, I had to spend an hour in recovery, then go home and take things easy.

Egg Fertilisation

The lab fertilises your eggs on the same day that they remove them. They prepare the eggs and sperm and in the case of ICSI IVF, they inject individual sperm into each egg. They leave them and wait to see if any embryos develop.  Depending on what IVF process you are following, embryos are implanted back into your uterus either on Day 3 or Day 5. In our case, we were due to be implanted with our embryos on Day 3. We had to wait for a phonecall from the lab on Day 2 to tell us if any of our eggs had fertilised and how many embryos we had suitable for implantation.

As I am 40, the hospital would have agreed to implant up to three embryos, to give me the best possible chance of conceiving. Under 40, they tend to implant a maximum of two embryos. If you recall, we had already decided that we would only implant two embryos and save any others for later.

This all turned out to be a very moot point. When the phonecall came through, it turned out that only three of my six eggs had been mature. The lab cannot inject immature eggs, so in a matter of seconds during this phonecall report, our six egg count halved. Sadly, of my three mature eggs, only one had fertilised. So we only had one embryo.  A single, lonely, only embryo. Bang went my secret hope for twins and bang went my hope of having a second 'go' from one round of egg production. I made polite noises to the nurse and hung up the phone.

Then I realised. Don't be stupid. Just think how close you just came to having been through all of that and ending up with no embryo to implant at all. I rang my dad in the UK, gave him a progress update and with his usual good humour, he immediately named our lonely little embryo, 'Bob Hope'. If you are British, you will probably get the joke, 'You've got two hopes...and one of them is Bob Hope!' (The other is no hope.)

Embryo Transfer

This was very straightforward as well. It happened for us at about 10:30am on 2nd February, 2011. We were scheduled to have our embryo implanted after another couple had had their eggs out. I only mention this because their music was left on in the procedure toom during our embryo implantation. Again, I donned a hospital gown. This time, no IV was needed. The same specialist who had removed my eggs did the embryo transfer. He inserted a catheter into my uterus, measured it and told us that he aimed to pop our embryo into my uterus, not quite at the back, so that it wouldn't float back up into a fallopian tube. He used ultrasound while he worked out what was what but then advised us that the procedure itself is done blind as ultrasound waves are not good for an embryo. A lab tech strolled in and advised us that our little Bob Hope was a grade 3, 10 cell embryo.  We must have looked a bit worried as it was very hastily explained that the hospital had had successful pregnancies from grade 5 embryos.

There was a short delay and the lab technicans walked in with what looked like a clear plastic tube.   I held the Fella's hand and stared at the ceiling while there was some jiggling around at my lower end. The previous couple's music was still playing and it was some kind of light music being played on what sounded to me like traditional Chinese orchestral instruments. As little Bob Hope was transferred I realised that I was listening to an instrumental cover of 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' by Procol Harum. It's odd what you notice at times like this. With great ceremony, the lab technicans took away the plastic tube, checked it and announced that the embryo was no longer in the tube. Pretty much, that was it. I looked over at the Fella and said, "I love you darling but you really need to work on your foreplay."

After the procedure, I was wheeled out to recovery and told to rest for an hour. After that, advice conflicted slightly. The hospital paperwork suggested bed rest for two days but the specialist told us that this wasn't really necessary. I hedged my bets, took things easy for a couple of days and lounged about on our bed reading a lot. I have no idea whether my fear was in any way rational but I was just terrified that the embryo would simply fall out. After all, what was there to keep it in?!

After IVF

Once you've completed IVF, you wait. You have to eat, drink and behave like a pregnant woman (both during and after the cycle) but you do not know if you are pregnant. You have to wait 14 days and then go for a hCG pregnancy blood test to see if the embryo has 'stuck'. If the results are either positive or ambiguous, you have to go for another blood test at 21 days to either confirm the results and/or verify that your hormone levels are rising in a way that suggests a viable pregnancy.

It was a very long two weeks. We waited, continued to eat and drink according to all of the pregnancy rules, told Bob Hope that it was well worth sticking around for the family grub and tried very hard not to fall in love too much with the idea that we might be pregnant while behaving exactly as though we were pregnant in case we were not pregnant. It's actually a lot harder to do than it sounds.

On the day of the blood test, I was at the lab early. The hospital told me that they would phone through the results at about 2:30pm. I waited in for their call but it didn't come. I phoned them. The lab results were not yet in. In BC, there is an online service that enables you to get your test results as soon as the lab publish them. Although I had wanted the hospital to tell me the test results, in case I interpreted them wrongly, I went online and spent about two hours constantly hitting the refresh button on the blood test report. Finally it came through. I opened it....and I wasn't sure what it meant.

It sort of looked like it might be positive news but I was terrified that I was interpreting it wrongly. I phoned the Fella at work and explained the problem. Together, we looked online for what different hCG levels meant but neither of us were certain and neither of us wanted to get our hopes up artifically. I hung up the phone and it rang immediately. It was the hospital. The nurse said, "Well, it seems that I have nothing but good news for you today. Congratulations, you are pregnant! You have to go for another blood test in 7 days time to verify that the pregnancy is viable."

That folks, is how we found out that we were expecting our baby. We were lucky enough to learn that our pregnancy was viable at the next bloodtest. Then, once we'd seen our tiny embryo at our 6 (8) week scan, our little only, lonely Bob Hope officially became Spud. We waited a long time to announce our pregnancy because we were terrified about the prospect of a miscarriage and once that danger was past, we had to have a series of tests to make sure that the baby was low risk for chromosomal problems (due to our ages).

We know that we were extremely lucky with our IVF treatment as our chances of getting pregnant in that cycle were so low. I have since met a couple who have just had their first baby after 8 years of failed IVF treatment. I just cannot begin to imagine the heartbreak, misery and disappointment that those eight years brought them and what strength and determination it must have taken for them to continue their quest for children.

So now - I am almost 40 weeks. Spud is due.  In fact, because of my age, viewed as being overdue. If the baby doesn't trigger a spontaneous exit very soon, the hospital will want to induce me (due to fears about how quickly the placenta can deteriorate in women over 40 after Week 40).

On one hand, it's been a very long haul with lots of anxiety about the pregnancy and lots of worry about whether Spud is okay. I suspect that a bit of extra worry is natural for people who have been through the mill of IVF. I sort of feel like I have been pregnant and worrying about this baby forever.

Quite needlessly, probably. We seem to have had a very straightforward pregnancy. We've been exceptionally lucky with our prenatal care as our OB has given us an ultrasound every month, so we've been able to 'have a visit' with our baby, see how it is developing and see what it is doing when it bumps around inside me. This has been fantastically reassuring for us.

On the other hand, it feels like this year has whizzed past and I can hardly believe that this wriggly creature inside me is due to come out.  I really want to meet Spud - I really want to see, hold and pat my baby's wriggly bottom.

So come on Spud, we're waiting - whenever you are ready, love.

Part 2: Reflection on the Birds and the Bees (ICSI IVF Style)

2011-10-19T14:13:00.003-07:00

I have reflected a bit on my previous post and it falls short of the post that I thought that I would write about our fertility journey over the past 2-3 years. Every time I thought about writing something down during this time, I saw witty comments and cartoon drawings of the most ridiculous moments - so far, not so good. However, I feel that if I don't write this stuff down before our baby arrives, the moment will be gone. So please bear with me. I am writing this all down as much for me as anyone else. I am writing each post as I go, so they may not be as tightly written as they should be.

I do not know for certain but I suspect that people tend not to talk about treatments and procedures because either they are trying to forget them, normalise them or are trying not put off other people who might have to experience them. The truth is though, that some procedures, especially fertility related ones, are fairly extraordinary. It's been 9-10 months and I still haven't been able to normalise them. In some respects, I think that they should stand out as something quite odd (or amazing, whichever way you wish to look at it). I hope that my personal experience of them doesn't put anyone off. If you are having difficulties with fertility, asking for help, receiving treatment and having a successful outcome more than compensates for any of the procedures that you have to go through.

Our first appointment at the hospital was a bit of a non event, a quick meet and greet, a review of our file and a dispatch for more tests. The Fella was sent for more tests and told to review the medications he'd been prescribed to stabilise his blood pressure with his usual doctor as the side effects of some of them were known to cause fertility problems. I was dispatched for a Hysterosalpingogram (HSG) test (wiki link). The fertility specialist told me that this test was both 'diagnostic and therapeutic'. Basically, it's an x-ray of the uterus and fallopian tubes. The way our consultant put it almost made it sound like a relaxing spa treatment - it sounds fairly benign, right?

Well, trust me, it felt a lot less benign when I was stripped from the waist down (apart from my M&S black ankle socks), lying under a skimpy paper towel and x-ray machine on a cold metal slab, in a dimmed room, waiting for the x-ray to happen.  The nurse had explained the procedure to me but I still felt like I'd entered another dimension of the bizarre when the x-ray guru entered the room with a miner's lamp strapped to his forehead.

You see, they have to squirt dye up inside you in order for the x-ray machine to see any of your reproductive organs.  So the x-ray guru has to insert a catheter up into your uterus and squirt in the dye. Are you squirming uncomfortably yet?! I was - even before he'd switched on his lamp. This is also where I learnt first hand, for the first time, that when a medical person says, "You might feel some cramping," what they really mean is, "This is really going to flipping hurt - brace yourself." I was expecting a bit of cramping, I wasn't expecting the kind of 'cramping' that shot me halfway up the metal slab and almost had the x-ray guru's eye out on the toe of one of my black socks!

Luckily, it didn't last long and the x-ray guru left the room before I could regain my composure sufficiently to fling myself off the slab and ping his forehead forcefully with his miner's lamp. I commented lamely to the nurse that it hurt a bit more than 'cramping' and she commented helpfully, "Well, it hurts a lot less than childbirth."

That's right, I thought, just the thing to say to a potentially infertile woman, who's sitting on a metal slab with her knickers off and trying to come to terms with the fact that she's just had her insides invaded by dye and a man wearing a miner's lamp.

So why was this test both diagnostic and therapeutic? Well, the x-ray enables them to check your vital reproductive bits. Squirting the dye through your reproductive system, flushes it out. So it is possible that if you had something blocking a fallopian tube, it would be removed and voila! Your fertility problem would be solved.

At our next appointment, the specialist confirmed that all my bits were present, correct and free of any blockages. He looked over the Fella's test results and advised that things had not improved, despite the changes implemented around multi-vitamins, lifestyle and blood pressure medication. In fact, his results were slightly worse.  Mind you, it is important to remember that it takes about 3 months for any changes to be processed through a man's body completely, so it is possible that some of the changes the Fella had made were just not reflected in his results at that point in time.

The specialist advised us that there were avenues that he could pursue that might or might not help to improve our fertility situation but that it would take over a year for us to begin to see any beneficial results, if there even were any. Due to the uncertainty of success and our ages, he felt that we should consider some form of assisted reproductive treatment instead. Based on our specific situation, he recommended ICSI IVF. This is the type of IVF where individual sperm are injected into each egg.

As we were in December and approaching Christmas, he suggested that we start our IVF cycle in January - so that is what we did.

Part 1: Reflection on the Birds & the Bees (ICSI IVF Style)

2011-10-13T10:45:00.000-07:00

I thought that I knew all about the birds and the bees. Living on a small holding for a few years in West Wales back when I was in single digits quickly put paid to any notion of the cabbage patch or the stork. Even if I had wanted to ignore what the animals were all up to out in the fields, it was hard to ignore the facts of life when we popped Harriet, my goat, into the back of my parent's Morris Minor Traveller (complete with interesting fungi growing on the wood inside the boot) and took her off to a local, rather smelly, billy goat 'to be serviced'.  A quick wag of her tail (well, she was in season), on hopped the smelly Billy and, 150 or so days later, out popped her beautiful little kid - simple really.

Then later when I was an adult and in relationships - I was suitably careful. After all, the bird and the bees rules are very simple - take one girl and one boy.  Mix thoroughly and 9 months later, baby very likely to pop out - or so I thought. Who knew that the whole topic of the birds and the bees could get so blooming tricky and involved?! Certainly not me.

Ignorantly, when I married the Fella, I thought that the biggest task we faced would be discussing the whole topic of changing our lives radically by starting a family, becoming parents and incorporating a child into our lives - making the enormous decision to start 'trying for a baby' officially. It might sound strange, but after almost 20 years of dating and being a 'Sink'ie (Single Income, No Kids) before I met my husband (who already had a teenage son and likely thought that his parenting days were coming to an end), it's quite the topic to discuss and decision to make.

As it turned out, the decision was not that hard. We both wanted children together. So, really, I could not have been more wrong about the real task that we actually faced.

To begin with, we were completely laid back about the whole thing. 'If it happens, great - if it doesn't, no problem at all - that's also fine.' There was a sort of excitement mixed with trepidation at the uncertainty of it all every month - would it happen, would it be this month?! No...no...no.

After a number of months, a little alarm bell of concern started to ring at the back of my head so I bought some of those ovulation kits. When I found myself staring at a shelf in a supermarket, debating the merits of one brand of stick over another brand of stick in my head, I realised that I was crossing some kind of invisible line from casually trying for a baby to actually trying for a baby.

For a while there, I applied myself enthusiastically. However, all that resulted from my purchases were a number of months where I logged my cycles, peed on ovulation sticks and tried to romance the Fella at the appropriate times. Naturally enough, my romantic timing always stank. 'The right time' always seemed to conflict with when we are both too exhausted or busy to do anything about it. One way or another, the whole thing was an unmitigated disaster. So I abandoned it before it started to have a serious impact on our relationship.

We went back to our, 'If it happens, great - if it doesn't, that's also fine,' approach but I have to be honest, there was no excitement or trepidation for me each month. By this time, it had been over a year and I pretty much knew by this point that no month would ever be 'the month'.  I felt very flat about it. I worried about my age. I started to read online about how much harder it was for women over 35 to conceive and maintain a pregnancy. I assumed, as the Fella had his son from his first marriage, that our inability to get pregnant was my fault in some way and I felt wretched about it. I also worried about the Fella's age - not because of his health but because the longer it took us to get pregnant, the more worried about being 'too old to be a dad' he would start to feel. I have to admit that I was worried that we might reach a point where he would want to stop trying for a baby before I was ready to give up on the idea of us having children together - I just didn't know what impact that would have on us as a couple.

It was about this time that I handed myself into a doctor.  I discovered, as an aside, that I had an autoimmune thyroid problem. I have blogged about my struggles on this front already.  I might not have been so determined in my pursuit of treatment if I had not found out that thyroid problems can have a serious impact on fertility and unborn babies. It took some time but I did eventually get treatment which eventually brought my thyroid hormone levels into the correct range to both conceive and sustain a pregnancy successfully. At this point, I felt quite hopeful again. However, nothing happened and so my doctor agreed to refer us, as a couple, to a fertility clinic for assessment.

This meant that the Fella had to have some standard tests before our hospital appointment materialised - just so that there was a full case information on us both. To our mutual surprise, the results of his test were not that great. He was referred to a urologist who advised him to make some simple lifestyle changes and to start taking vitamins. He duly made the changes and started to take the vitamins. We waited for our hospital referral to come through.

In the end, it took about three months for us to receive our first hospital appointment. By this point, it had been about 20 months since we had started to try for a baby and I think that both of us were mentally trying to reconcile ourselves to the fact that children just might not ever happen for us. I felt quite sad about it.

This said, before we went to our first hospital appointment, we talked at length together about the prospect of being offered some kind of assisted reproductive treatment and how comfortable we felt about it. We discussed couples that we either knew or had heard about through others whose relationships had been destroyed by endless rounds of fruitless, expensive treatment. We decided that if IVF was suggested, then we would give it 'a go' but that we would not get sucked into rounds and rounds of it. We just did not think that we could afford it - either emotionally or financially (IVF treatment has no public funding in British Columbia). We agreed that trying for a child was important to us but also that we were important to us too - so, if we were offered IVF and it failed, we needed to be prepared to pick ourselves up and plan a future together without children.

Our view was, "We should do this and have one proper go at it. If we don't, then we could end up looking back in 10 years time and really regret it. We'll be sad and wonder why we never did it - there will always be a 'What if...? and 'I wonder what our child would have been like?' hanging over us.  If we have a go and it doesn't work, then at least we will know that we tried, gave it a good, proper go but it was just not meant to be. At that point, we can move on."

We felt very sensible about the whole thing and thus prepared, we went to our first hospital appointment.

The Calm before the Storm

2011-10-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

I am almost 38 weeks. Although pregnancies are usually 40 weeks, they warn you to expect your new arrival anytime between Week 38 and Week 42 (although they may not want me to go much past my due date due to my age). So our baby could make an appearance anytime over the next 2-3 weeks. This said, Spud is not showing any signs of wanting to exit any time soon - the baby has not dropped and there are no early warning signs that labour might be imminent.

At my OB appointment this week, I had a growth scan and Spud is now estimated to be about 7lbs and 11 ounces.  The longer that Spud stays put, of course, the bigger Spud will get (an additional 0.5lb a week) so I am really hoping that this very wriggly creature that lives inside me will start saying goodbye to my innards and start scrunching up into a nice pelvis-dynamic shape ready for delivery very soon - I live in hope!

In the meantime, we have packed for the hospital, stocked up on shelf safe groceries, cooked up some meals and frozen them down for our return from hospital and I think that we are about as ready as we can get at home, without having a test baby to check whether we have things right or wrong.  The baby may have an opinion too, so there are a few things that we are hanging back on until after Spud arrives.

Out of necessity (which happens to work out perfectly with Health Canada's latest recommendations on infant sleeping arrangements), Spud will be sharing a bedroom with us for the first 6 months - 1 year.  So I don't have any pretty nursery pictures to show you - we have simply set up a Spud Zone in our bedroom:

I realise that this all looks a bit sterile, spartan and tidy but I don't expect it to stay like this once the baby arrives! Like the title of this blog post, this point in time really does feel like the calm before the storm. I expect this area to look like a hurricane has blown through it about 2-3 days after we are home from the hospital!

You can see our mini-crib reflected in the mirror - it just about fits alongside our bed. As we don't have a dedicated nursery, we got a cot (crib) system that we can wheel about the house (in case we need to park it in different rooms around the house) and that will size up as Spud grows. The only drawback is that it is oval - great for getting through doorways and around corners but a bit tricky when it comes to bedding. The proprietary bedding is both expensive and not readily available off-the-shelf here. So I bought one mattress protector and one sheet to use as a template and I've been working away in the background on my sewing machine to create some extras of my own. Not worth photographing but still, it's amazing what you can achieve, cost effectively, with some breathable nappy (diaper) wrap and some white cotton flannel! I am hoping to whip up some more bedding and and mattress protectors for the full sized version of the cot (crib) before Spud outgrows the mini-crib next year.

The other things that I have whipped up recently for Spud are some baby blankets because I couldn't bear to spend money on inferior ones when I knew that I could make better ones for myself (for the same or less money):

I know - seven blankets is probably excessive but once I started making them, I found it hard to stop! They are all double sided (mostly cotton flannel on both sides but a couple are cotton flannel on one side only) and made to my usual recipe (which I finally get to test for myself).

The green tortoise/turtles blanket is slightly different from the others. I included a layer of the breathable nappy (diaper) wrap inside it. The idea behind this is to either use it for walks on drizzly days next Spring or use it for baby bottom airing time. Any accidents and it can be dropped straight into the wash. I've only made one as I want to see how useful it is.

Although I've been busy on my sewing machine, I haven't made all that much for this baby other than the blankets and the bedding. Most of the things that we needed have been purchased: 0-3 month starter pack wardrobe as well as sundries like towels, washclothes and 12 white cotton flannel diaper squares to use as burp cloths.

I haven't done any knitting at all for Spud - for some reason, I am having a block about making things that I know will take me forever to do and only have a very short life span if Spud grows quickly. I know, I know, I should just make a bunch of baby projects in Big Wool, like this Rowan one. But...like I said, it's a block.

I do have two other sewing projects in progress for Spud - a quilt and a play mat, a bit like the one that I made recently for my niece, Lorna. I'm stalled on the quilt (haven't touched it since my MIL died in June and there's no way that I can finish it in time now) and I cannot show the play mat yet because I'm still a very long way from finishing it.

The quilt is in the same kind of colours as the change mat in the blankets photograph: teals, blues and lime greens. I am not sure why these colours happened. But they did. Interestingly, I've set up a guest room in our basement (as the reno is delayed and so that my parents can stay with us when they visit in November and December) and the colours downstairs seem to be white, navy blue and dark red - I am hoping to reuse some of the guest room things in Spud's nursery after the renovation is complete. So not sure how I'm going to integrate teal, blues and lime with the navy and dark red. Mind you, does anything in a child's life ever really match? I doubt it.

In terms of the play mat, the scope of the project seems to have exploded from a completely plain (and easy) denim pad (i.e. a few hours work) to something much more complicated (i.e. I've spent a whole week on it so far and it's nowhere near finished) because the Fella was worried that he wouldn't know which side of the mat should go 'up' and which side should go 'down' in terms of avoiding contaminating the baby and/or its baby blanket with the gruesome quantities of floor grot that invades our house every single day. It's okay, I have 2 weeks or so go. I feel confident that I'll finish it in time...maybe?!

The very last thing that you may have noticed in our Spud Zone is this pile of baby name books:

We bought 3 books, exhausted them without success and then bought 3 more, going for the bulk 60,001+ and 100,001+ titles. We still do not have a shortlist of names for our baby and now we dread opening any of the books at all as the task has become too overwhelming!

At this rate, we suspect that we'll be taking the books to the hospital and playing a blindfold game of 'Pin a Tail on the Donkey' to pick something out while distracting me during labour.

In the meantime, Spud is, well, still Spud!

It's not been all doom and gloom this Summer...

2011-10-03T14:02:00.003-07:00

...although you could be forgiven for thinking so from my blog. There has been the occasional ray of sunshine that has made it through the branches of the cedars and shone through the windows of our little house in Vancouver. One of those rays of sunshine was the news that my incredibly talented and inspirational quilt teacher's article on machine beading had been published in the September 2011 edition of the American Quilter. I did the photographs to support her article.

My teacher's blog is here: http://asthespoolturns.blogspot.com/ and a link to the magazine that her article appeared in is here: http://www.americanquilter.com/books_supplies/item_detail.php?id=2533. Just in case that link doesn't remain robust, it is this issue of the magazine:

Sadly, the magazine required me to sign away the rights to all of my images so I don't think that I can show you my actual, personal favourite images from the photography shoots on my blog, even though they did not use them in the magazine article. However, if you enjoy working with fabric and beads, I can recommend both my teacher's technique and her article in this magazine. I've used this technique in a number of different projects - it works and the end results look fantastic.

In terms of my contribution to this article, I did this piece of work sometime back in May or June 2010 and it was a really good, interesting experience. I was offered payment for my work but I turned it down on the basis that the learning opportunity was more valuable to me than the amount being offered by the magazine for my photographs.

The first thing that I learned was that I loved working with clients in my studio. In this case, my quilt teacher and her husband - it was a huge amount of fun. It also led me to acquire a photography reflector holder so that any future clients do not have to spend the day holding a reflector - just so - for each photograph. My quilt teacher's husband earnt his stripes that day.

The second thing that I learned was how much work goes into step-by-step photography. The magazine required approximately 100, magazine ready, supporting images for the article. I suspect that I thinned the final cut down to about 150 finished images? Trust me, I took a lot more photographs than that during the course of the project. In the end, the magazine used 13 of my images.

The project took three, one day studio shoots plus a further half day at my house to create some contextual, lifestyle type images. For each step in the tutorial, I took a series of different images in both landscape and portrait format (to give the magazine layout options). Once I'd thinned them down to a logical series of possible images, I had to colour correct them all, pretty much individually. My camera wouldn't read one of the project's fabric colours correctly (a green, which it stubbornly turned different shades of yellow) and at that point, I did not have any specialist colour correction tools and software.

This was another very big learning point for me. Do not attempt any kind of product photography work without proper colour correction tools. Particularly when you are doing work in a world where colour is really important (fabric and yarn). I own one of these tools now and I use it religiously in the studio and during post-production work. It was one of the first things that I bought after I'd spent hours at the computer painstakingly trying to correct my 150 final images by eye. In the end, I had to aim to green up the yellows and get them as consistent as possible with each other. So, if you spot any colour inconsistencies in the magazine images - I apologise, but trust me - I really tried very hard to get them all the same shade.

Otherwise, the final thing that I learned is that it's very odd seeing work that you have done in print, so long after it was completed. It was over a year between doing the work and seeing it in print. It was very exciting to receive the news about the article being published, race out, buy copies of the magazine and see my first ever work in print. At the same time, I've learnt so much about product photography since doing this project last year (I enjoyed this project so much that I took a formal course in product photography) that it's difficult for me to look back at my work without being very critical about my images. I still worry whether or not my quilt teacher was okay with my work and I hope very much that she felt that my images supported her article adequately.

I am not sure how many opportunities like this will come along in future. I hope that more do - simply because I enjoyed working on this project so much. It is possible that my quilt teacher will write some more sewing and quilting articles (as a sewer, I really hope so) but from reading her blog and seeing how well she captures work in progress with her own camera these days, I expect that she will be able to take care of her own photography in future!

P.s. 37 Weeks - so technically, I have 3 weeks until Spud arrives. All I can tell you is that I have a very wriggly tummy!

The End of the Present of Doom!

2011-09-13T11:59:00.002-07:00

As you may recall, my niece was born w-a-a-a-y back in March. Now my sister lives in India. In a a bubbly froth of enthusiasm, I bought some yarn and fabric with the idea of whisking up a few semi-cordinated items to celebrate her arrival...

...and I almost made them all. I know, astonishing, isn't it?! I wrote off the knitted cardigan idea as being too impractical for a baby that spends most of its days in the sweltering heat of Bangalore but I did whip up a little newborn cotton knitted hat (because it was fun) and I made a decently sized, cotton flannel receiving blanket with some very cool fabric that I picked up at a local quilt show. Job done, I thought. Time to send it off to India and paste pictures of my work all over my blog to prove that I haven't, in fact, had my crafting hands cut off at the wrist.

I spoke to my parents in London to check that I had her address right. They warned me that over 50% of the gifts that people had mailed to her in India had 'vanished' en route. Very, very sensibly, they suggested that I post my gift to them in London for my sister to pick up on her next trip to the UK...in August.

I glanced at my gift in dismay and did a quick calculation in my head...April, May, June, July, August. Um, that meant that my niece would be 4-5 months old. This rather took the shine off my nice, bright, cheerful, handmade newborn gift. At the very least, I'd need to make a bigger hat.

I stared at my remaining yarn but truth be told, I just couldn't bring myself to make a replica hat in a bigger size. So, I decided to make something else. Something that would loosely co-ordinate with the receiving blanket that I had already made but would be appropriate for a 6-12 month old baby.
It took me some time to work out what I wanted to make. A part of my gift was prompted by a discussion that I observed between a group of quilters at the show where I bought the fabric for my niece's receiving blanket. Also, my gift took much longer to complete than I expected - well, all of my craft projects came to an abrupt halt when my MIL died in June and I've spent a lot of time this summer helping to sort out and clear out her house (I only finished up work at her house on the Labour Day weekend). However, I did manage to finish my gifts and get them to the UK in August, in time for my sister to pick it up and take it home with her to India.

My final package (snapped just before I bundled it into the post) contained:

a padded, cotton floor mat (1.5 metres x 1.5 metres);
the original, cotton flannel receiving blanket (1 metre x 1 metre); and
two pairs of bloomers (nappy/diaper covers).

The padded floor mat came about due to the conversation between quilters that I observed at the quilt show. The quilters, who had all lovingly made quilts for new family members, were absolutely horrified to find their quilts on the floor when they went to visit. I heard comments like, 'I hand embroidered it and it was being used as a rug!' and 'That happened to mine too - all that work and they were walking on it! I am never making anything for them ever again.'

Dwell Studio Fabric (sort of but not really, quilted.
I stitched around the border and vertically through every other brown circle. I hope it's enough!)

Now I do understand - an enormous amount of effort goes into quilts - but why make something for a new baby that you do not expect to end up on the floor and/or smeared with some form of baby effluent or goop? After all, their world, is mainly at floor level for the first few years of their lives and they are not all that cordinated. The main thing on parent's minds is going to be how to protect them from the floor while they are having tummy time or learning how to crawl. So the first thing that they are going to reach for is the one thing in the house that is big, soft, clean, safe and washable i.e. the quilt lovingly made by the grandparent (gifted as an heirloom but doomed to a much more finite destiny).

I don't have any unfolded views of the mat
- it is square with the feature fabric in the centre and a deep denim border..

So with this in mind, I made a cotton, padded floor mat. It is backed and bordered with denim. Intended for the floor, easy to wash and can be used as an underpad if my sister has any more precious quilts or handmade blankets that she wishes to protect - at least from the floor!
The second item (or the first, depending on how you look at it) is the receiving blanket:

It's cotton flannel on both sides. The feature fabric is Michael Miller's Bite Me Apples in Lime, which just happened to go nicely with the spotty green flannel that I picked up at a local quilt shop.

On the reverse side of the blanket, I stitched together a half of two different apples and hand appliqued the composite apple into one of the blanket corners. I ~~stitched crudely but as neatly as I was able~~ (cough) embroidered up the centre of the apple core to cover the join.

The third part of my present is the two pairs of bloomers (diaper/nappy covers). I used the bloomer pattern in Lotta Jansdotter's Simple Sewing for Baby book. I used some plain cotton (not flannel) that I picked up on ebay that matches the reverse of the receiving blanket.

I really like the way that they turned out. This is the first pattern that I've made from this book and I came across a couple of problems that I had to solve. Firstly, I made this in the 6-12 month size and I am not certain that the measurements given in the book for the leg bias binding strips are correct?

I cut mine to the length stated in the book, checked and checked again, but they simply were not long enough to attach in the way described in the book. I wonder if the measurement in the book is for the 0-6 month size and the 6-12 month length was omitted in error? I got around the problem by putting the instructions in the book to one side. I edge stitched the two ends of the bias strip together and eased the circular piece of bias binding into each leg in the way that I might do if I was stitching a sleeve into handknitted jumper. I just about made it.

Secondly, the book assumes that you have the baby underfoot. The idea is that you custom cut the elastic that you need for your baby's waist and legs - a bit tricky to achieve when I am in Vancouver and the baby is in Bangalore! So, I changed the the top to have a 3/4 - 1 inch waistband and used button elastic instead of the elastic stated in the pattern. I left 1.5" of the waistband open (over a side seam) and securely sewed a button in underneath. This way, my sister can adjust the waistband to whatever my niece requires. I completed the leg elastic as per the pattern but left them intentionally loose. I hand stitched the last 1.5" of the leg seams closed in a contrasting green thread and sent instructions with the bloomers on how to unpick the green part of the seam and shorten the leg elastic if she needs to. I have to be honest though. My sister doesn't sew - at all. So I am guessing that my niece will just have to put up with baggy leg apertures!

Voila! My loosely cordinated set of floor mat, blanket and bloomers! You'll have to wait to see the knitted hat that my niece didn't get...I might just have popped it into a drawer for Spud!

Who is due in 6 weeks - good grief, where has this year gone?!

A Sad Event

2011-08-24T10:58:00.006-07:00

On Monday, the world lost one of its very talented human beings - John Howard Davies.

To the outside world, he was a child actor, comedy producer and director. In my world, he happened to be a friend and one of my most favourite people. I feel very lucky to have known him.

I knew him through my sport (where it never really seems to matter what people do in the outside world). We competed for the same team. He was a skilled competitor, a great team member and an excellent coach. He was endlessly kind, incredibly bright, extremely funny, full of stories and a lot of fun. To boot, he was charming and a real gentleman (with just the right hint of scoundrel about him).

His passing leaves a massive gap and I will miss him enormously. My heart goes out to his wife Linda, his children as well as the rest of his family and his friends.

Links

BBC news report

Short BBC video round up of JHD's work

Mirror news report (includes two video clips)

Does anything ever pan out as planned?

2011-08-08T10:03:00.004-07:00

When I started writing posts for my blog again this year, I envisaged that I would:

say a little bit about IVF before I forget it all;
completely bore the pants off you all about my experience of being pregnant;
share my attempts at making clothes for the first time in my life using a bunch of maternity patterns that I picked up at my local Fabric Hell; and
fill my blog with nice pictures of the things that I am making for my niece and for Spud. Or at least, trying to make.

I am not doing very well, am I?!

The truth is that we have been run off our feet with Everything Else and I've barely got to my studio, let alone sat down at my PC to write blog posts or sat down at my sewing machine to sew.

The maternity patterns are sitting with a length of fabric in an untouched pile at my studio. Time issue aside, I emailed Roo recently and confessed that my bust and my tummy expanded faster than I could overcome my fear of opening the pattern packets. Now, with only 2.5 months left of my pregnancy, I do not really see any point in making clothes that I will probably never get to wear again. So if anyone would like a set of this year's maternity sewing patterns, let me know and I'll pass them along!

My knitting bag containing a couple of baby projects is languishing next to the sofa and my baby sewing projects are strewn across my studio. Their progress frozen in time to the day that my MIL died. Today, I am supposed to be at the studio working on completing a present for my neice as I need to get it into the post to the UK while my sister is there (visiting from India) but I am taking time out to do this blog post. You know how it is - steal time from one activity to do another?

Instead, I have:

attended to my MIL's funeral arrangements to save the Fella and his brother the upset of doing it;
assisted a lot with the sort out, clean up and necessary cataloguing (of her house and its contents) identifying what things to keep, go to auctioneers or off to charity. Including taking proper photographs of all significant pieces (general view, artistic detail and any maker's marks).

At this point, I should tell you that each and every room in her house is/was clogged, waist deep or higher, in belongings. So it hasn't been a small task and it is nowhere near complete yet.

My MIL was not a hoarder in the current, reality tv sense, she had just worked in the collectibles business for the past 30 years. She collected things as stock and laid them down like wine in her house to accummulate in value. The problem is that she collected an awful lot of different things, individually none of the items were of any significant value and she had no coherent storage system. So it's been a shell game of moving things from one room to another, putting the same category of things together and then trying to work out what on earth to do with them all.

This spate of activity at her house over the past month or two has led me to review my own belongings quite carefully. I recommend that you do too.

Ask yourselves, is there anything that you own that you really would not feel comfortable with someone else going through after you die? Please consider that this person might be someone you love. Or else, it might be someone that you are not all that close to at all. I am not sure which would be worse?

Since my MIL died, the Fella and I have each thrown out about 5 bin liners of clothes. In particular, I have been through my underwear and sock drawer and thrown out every last pair of old faithfuls in anything less than 100% perfect condition;
liaised with the designer and the builder who were supposed to be renovating the basement of our house this summer to create two new bedrooms and a bathroom - one for us and one for Spud - allowing us to turn our existing bedroom into a home office on the main floor of our house;
bitten down my deep disappointment when it became clear that Canadian builders are of a different yet similiar ilk to builders in the UK.

Although we started this project back in March, were reassured that the basement part of the project could be done (just) in time for the arrival of our baby and threw out or put into storage all of the things in the basement in April so that the builder could start whenever the designer was ready, we still do not yet have the city permits that we need to start work. (Courtesy of the designer taking 6 months to come up with a new basement floorplan and a new garage floorplan, most of which I did myself in the end because his design was unusable...would you put a baby-toddler bedroom on the opposite side of the house from its parents and make sure that its route to the bathroom was a night time trauma creating assault course down a long hallway, around a corner and through a laundry room? No? Me either.)

On top of this, the builder has confessed that he now has no time or resources to start our basement project properly until May/June 2012. So there will be no renovation this year, meaning no bedroom for the 1st year or so of Spud's life. I realise that Spud will be in our room for the first 6 months or so anyway. But still, it's disappointing.

In the meantime, the builder does have time and resources to work on our new garage. So we might have that done by.....Christmas? The only good that has come out of this delay is that the emptied home office in the basement can become a temporary guest room over the winter for members of my family who may want to come over to visit Spud. So we plan to paint it white and put a sofabed, bed, garment rail and a chest of drawers (dresser) in there before the baby is born. Next summer the furniture will be dumped, the room will be demolished and stripped back to the studs. It's an idiotic situation but there it is.
ordering some essential baby things - stroller (buggy), car seat and a crib (cot) that will work in a house with no nursery. We have the stroller but the car seat and crib are both pending. The ETA is 8-10 weeks, which is might be cutting it a bit fine. If the worse comes to the worst, I can bring Spud home in a taxi (no car seat needed for that I don't think) and the stroller has a basinette for Spud to sleep in at the start. Ikea seems to have run out of the Gulliver baby changing table that we like - it doesn't seem to be in stock anywhere on the West Coast of Canada and our local store have no idea when they will get it back in. So I am stalking their website weekly to see if we will be in luck. After all, I have 2.5 months and I can always change the baby on the dining room table if I have to.

I think that this just about summarises where I am?

Once I have my niece's present out of the way, I am hoping to settle down and work on some projects for Spud. So I hope to have some baby projects to show and tell in the near future.

I picked up a couple of baby clothes and accessory sewing books that look quite promising and might be a gentler route into working with patterns than maternity wear? Just on the basis that if things I make fall off my baby through my complete ineptitude, it might be less embarrassing than if they fall off me in the supermarket?!

This said, I'm not sure exactly how to achieve my list of things that I want to make before Spud is born. I need some kind of support or positive motivation to help me ring fence the time without interference from others. At the moment, it seems that it is too easy for me to be ambushed by those who do not think that my things are as important or urgent as the things that they want me to do for them.

It's very hard for me to say no when their activities are tied to something that is so emotional and upsetting for them. It makes me feel unsupportive, churlish and selfish to want to do my things rather than their things. I feel particularly guilty when I consider that part of my desire to do my things is that I get to do things sitting down, in clean, peace and quiet. Doing their things means that I have to spend my time standing, bending, kneeling and working in 30 years of dust, wearing a mask and plastic gloves in 25-30 degree summer heat.

The problem that I have is that I am more or less 3 weeks into month 7 and pregnancy is really only 9 months +/- 2 weeks either way. It takes time to make things properly. I don't want to end up not finishing the things that I want to make or making errors because I'm working in haste and feeling like I'm going to drop the baby at any minute.

But now I am starting to moan. So I am going to stop writing. Things just are the way they are. Onwards and upwards - off to do my niece's present I go!

Blindsided on an Idle Thursday

2011-06-22T14:29:00.008-07:00

I think that most, if not all, of the extraordinary days I have experienced have started out as very ordinary days. Last Thursday was one of those days.

What was it that Baz Luhrmann said in that song to the graduating class of 1999?

“The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.”

Thursday was just one of those ordinary, idle days - all the way through, pretty much. We were tired because Spud is keeping me up at night, so we oven roasted some ribs, ate, set aside half a rack for the Fella to take over to his mother (she’s 80 and she lives close by so we often make extra when we are cooking to drop off to her) and by 10:15pm we were in bed, lights out, congratulating ourselves on getting to bed early for a good night’s sleep.

At 10:30pm, on the dot, came the blindsiding. The phone rang. The Fella answered and I could hear his mother’s panicked voice, “I don’t feel well. Can you come?” My husband was already rolling out of bed and reaching for his trousers, “I’ll leave right now.” I stayed in bed to keep out of his way while he grabbed the rest of his clothes and he headed out the door, saying, “It’s probably nothing, you try to get some sleep and I’ll be back in a little while”.

I lay there in the dark wondering whether or not I should really stay put or get dressed. As I lay there in the dark, I heard 1...then 2...then 3 sirens. It was about 10:42pm. My heart sank like a stone – it could have been coincidence but we live in a quiet part of Vancouver and the Fella’s mother only lives about 2 blocks up and 1 block over.

The phone rang. It was the Fella. He was in tears, “It’s bad - about as bad as it gets. The paramedics are here, working on my mother. I cannot get through to my brother on his cell phone. Can you find another number and ring him?” I said, “Ok. Stay with your mother and I will come find you - either at her house or at the hospital.” He said, “I am not sure if they’ll be taking her to a hospital.”

By sheer luck, I had stuck my BIL’s (Brother in Law) house phone number to the fridge recently. So I got up, phoned and luckily, he was in. I explained. He said, “I’ll leave now.” Then added, sounding a bit perplexed, “But I spent all afternoon with her. I left her at 6pm and she was fine.”

It was 10:50pm. I drove over to my MIL’s (Mother in Law’s) house. I wasn’t sure whether anyone would still be there but as I turned into her street I could see a fire truck and two ambulances parked outside her house. The Fella was standing on the lawn talking to one of the ambulance crew and my MIL was on a gurney, being wheeled across her front lawn towards an ambulance. Her face and shoulders were so pale that they almost appeared to glow in the dark.

The ambulance left with my MIL for the hospital and we waited to lock up her house while the crew from the other ambulance cleared away all of their equipment and discarded medical supplies from her hallway. While this was happening, the Fella explained that when he got there, he found that his mother had left the front door open for him. She was waiting for him, sitting in a chair in her hallway - coat and shoes on, handbag over her shoulder and her house keys in her hand – ready to go. He thinks that she tried to say something as he walked in through the door but then her eyes rolled upwards, she lost consciousness and was struggling to breathe. He dialled 9-1-1 straight away. The time on his cell phone was 10:40pm. He said that the firemen arrived first and helped his mother until the paramedics arrived.

When the crew had tidied up, I drove us to the ER where we completed his mother’s registration at the front desk and were shown to a Family Room by a social worker who told us that my MIL’s heart had stopped twice on the way to the hospital but that they had got it going again and were working on her now to stabilise her. It was about 11:20pm.

The family room was a blue-grey carpeted box with two sofas, two coffee tables, a spare hospital bed and a very small, lonely looking box of tissues. The social worker bought us both a plastic cup of water and we waited. The Fella was in pieces – in shock at finding his mother, the trauma of seeing the emergency crews work on her at her house and knowing that the situation was pretty bad. My BIL phoned us twice to update us on his ETA and we explained where he would find us.

Just before he arrived, two ER doctors came in to see us looking very glum. They explained very carefully that the situation was very serious and that they were trying to stabilise my MIL but they were not certain what was causing the problem. They warned that she seemed decided to go, rather than to stay and they said that without the assistance of the paramedics, she would not have made it this far. In a little while they said that they would take us in to see her. They left. My BIL arrived. We waited some more.

Eventually, the social worker came back, warned us that my MIL was hooked up to a breathing machine and then we were ushered through the ER to see her. We walked into a brightly lit, busy area with 4 work areas, separated by dividers. It was just like walking into a hospital television drama set. I looked at the floor as there were other people being worked on when we walked in. The medical staff looking after my MIL had stepped back to allow us through to see her. She was almost unrecognisable - chalky white, naked (partially covered up by some kind of blue rubber pad), surrounded by machinery, intubated and her chest was heaving up and down mechanically with the rasping of the breathing machine.

I stood back to give the Fella and my BIL some space but they appeared as bewildered and disorientated as I felt. It didn’t look possible to get close enough to touch her through all of the machinery, so all they could do was stand and look at her from about 6ft away. The medical team ushered us back out to the Family Room so that they could continue working. The social worker said that they were preparing her to go up to the Cath Lab. We waited.

Two new people came to see us in the Family Room. One of them, a man, introduced himself as the Cardiologist. He asked who had found my MIL and asked the Fella some very specific questions,
‘Was she breathing when you arrived at her house?’

‘She was trying to.’

‘Was she breathing – yes or no?’

‘She was trying to, yes.’

‘What time did she ring you at your house?’

’10:30.’

‘What time did you call the paramedics?’

’10:40.’

‘What was her health like before today?’

‘She was on high blood pressure medication but she was very able and independent. She lived alone, still drove a car and ran her own business, working at weekends.’

The cardiologist outlined two options, saying that the Fella and my BIL needed to decide how to proceed.

The first option was to intervene further. It was thought that my MIL had a clot, a blockage, in her heart. They could take her up to the Cath Lab right away, prepare her for surgery and perform an angioplasty. The surgery would take about 15 minutes and the hoped outcome would be that her blood pressure would stabilise. However, he warned that her condition was considered critical, that there was a high risk that she could die on the operating table and it was not 100% guaranteed it would resolve the problem.

The second option was not to intervene further. He would instruct the ER team to step back and adopt a palliative care strategy. They would make my MIL comfortable and we could spend her remaining time with her. He confirmed that without surgery, there was no possibility of recovery at all.

As you can imagine, there was a lot of discussion at this point. I kept quiet except to ask clarification questions and follow up questions to elicit more information from the doctor. The penny dropped for the Fella and my BIL that the reason the cardiologist was asking all those pointed questions about breathing, timings and previous state of health was that he was trying to rule in or out whether she might have sustained some kind of brain trauma from lack of oxygen and whether she would be fit enough to recover from the surgery/the entire experience.

When they asked about this, the cardiologist could not offer any guarantees. My BIL asked whether they could check brain function before surgery, he said that they could but that would delay the heart surgery by a further 30 plus minutes. If they decided to proceed, then they needed to do the procedure straight away. He did say that he thought it was a positive sign that she’d been coherent on the phone to the Fella at 10:30pm, that the emergency services had got there very shortly after 10:40pm and that she had fought the intubation in the ER. Apparently, you have to be pretty much a vegetable if you choke that down without any resistance. Although, I think that the phrase the doctor was much more politically correct. He said something like, ‘they worry about whether someone has sustained neurological damage if they don’t fight the intubation.’

At the end of this part of the discussion, it was not clear that proceeding with surgery was the right thing to do or not. It might/might not help to stabilise her, she might/might not survive the procedure and she might/might not be okay afterwards.

So, the discussion turned to what my MIL would want if she was there and able to speak for herself. I can vouch for the fact that she’s a fiercely independent woman with a very strong set of views and a very particular outlook on life. As it happens, she had retired from working at this hospital some 20 years earlier as a Social Worker. According to her two sons, she wasn’t very fond of sick or infirm people and she certainly wouldn’t want to be one herself.

I think that the big worry for the Fella and my BIL (not for them but for her) was that she would survive surgery only to face a long recovery, be physically or mentally disabled in some way, be unable to live her life on her own terms and have the rest of her life overshadowed by the fear of having to go through something awful like this again. Very upset, they concluded that if she had been there in the room to speak for herself, she would not have wanted the surgery.

So they opted for palliative care. The cardiologist left to speak to the ER team. The social worker came by and said that she would take us through to see my MIL again before they took her off the breathing machine. This time, I opted not to go – I thought that her sons should be have some time with her on her own and I did not need to see her in the way that I had seen her before. When they came back, the social worker said that after they had taken her off the breathing machine, they would move her to a private room and we could spend as much time with her as we wanted. We waited again. What was the time at this point? I knew but I have forgotten already.

You know, in my naiveté and from watching too much ER, I thought that when they switched off her breathing machine, that would be it. I guess that I was preparing myself to spend time in a room with a dead body for us all to say goodbye to my MIL after she had died.

So it was with some surprise that I walked into the ER ward cubicle and found that my MIL was still alive - unconscious, intubated and hooked up to two drips and oxygen but still very much alive. She looked like she was having a rough night’s sleep but it certainly didn’t look like she was about to gasp her last.

The nurse explained that she was breathing on her own and was medicated so that she wasn’t in any pain. He said that we could stay with her for as long as we wanted. If she was still with us at the 7am shift change, that they would probably move her to a Family Practice Palliative Care bed. I cannot remember what the time was at that point but when the nurse said 7am, I remember feeling - courtesy of my regular bouts of insomnia – that it was a time on the clock above the hospital bed that felt like it was half a lifetime away from the current time on the clock.

So we sat, we watched her breathe, we chatted and, effectively, I suppose that we waited for her to die. We were not sure what else we should do - where else would we be?

It was a long night and after the initial drama, the rest of the night was quite peaceful. We sat around her bed and, at one point, we thought her colour had improved greatly. She was breathing so well, we wondered if she might pull through. We asked the nurse about her condition when he came in to suction her breathing tube but instead he confirmed that the way her breathing had started to change was a clear indication of her body starting to fail.

At about 4:30am or so, her breathing became more shallow. A doctor came in and told us that he was going to remove her breathing tube to make her more comfortable. The nurse who removed it was ever so gentle. She spoke to my MIL as though she was awake and conscious, speaking to her by name, telling her exactly what she was doing, what she needed to do and how she might feel the need to cough. After she removed the tube, my MIL breathing was more laboured, so the nurse raised the head of the bed so that my MIL could breathe more easily. Once the bed was raised up, a lot of her colour drained away again and it was clear that she was not doing well at all.

At some point after that, I went outside for some fresh air. While I was outside, I phoned my father to tell him what had happened. I must have been on the phone for longer than I realised as when I got back, it was 6:10am, my MIL had died and the social worker was there to hand us some information leaflets.

I think that the last time I saw a dead body was when when I saw my grandmother in her coffin at her wake. It took me a long time to get over that as she didn’t look at all like the grandmother I knew and loved. This time though, it didn’t feel odd or strange to be in the same place as my MIL’s dead body. It felt like a natural progression from the rest of the night. She had been breathing and now she had stopped. She was sitting up in the bed, looking distinctly grey with her eyes closed and her mouth ajar. I felt a bit relieved for her that her ordeal was over. I do not feel badly that I was not there at the very end. In some respects, I thought that it was right that it was just her together with her sons.

The social worker told us that we could continue to stay with my MIL for as long as we wanted. However, the Fella felt that he’d said his goodbye and now that she had gone, he felt that we should go as well. So I said goodbye to her and as we left, the Fella did something that he often does to me if he is up and I am still in bed - he affectionately wiggled his mother’s foot through her bedcovers and said, ‘Goodbye Polly’.*

‘Polly’, Fella's Family Matriach: 1930 – 2011.

Notes

*A pet name that he and his mother used to call each other. They used to have a parrot.

Written with many thanks to everyone from our local emergency services and hospital who worked on my MIL - your efforts gave us the extra time we needed to say goodbye properly.

We're all okay - the Fella is grieving and we are gently taking each day at a time.

Little Lady Receiving Blanket & Burping Cloths

2011-06-15T15:47:00.004-07:00

Posted and en route to a baby girl in Italy:

The colours are much brighter than this in real life and the pattern is in focus. The blanket is about 100cm x 100cm and the cloths are large enough to grab and sling over your shoulder for protection while burping. I made the pattern up for both items and they are both made from 100% cotton and cotton thread. So they should survive a good hot wash and tumble.

Recently, I've spotted a pattern for burping cloths at a local fabric store that are shaped a little. I think that they could be made up very easily in either dishcloth cotton yarn or fabric, so I might need to have a go at making some for Spud.

Apologies that the photos are so crappy but I seem to have lost the knack of taking decent photos with my little point and click Samsung - honestly, I couldn't make it do anything that I wanted it to do. The good news is that we've now come to an agreement with our insurance company so I am looking forward to replacing some of my stolen photography equipment soon - it will be such a relief to have a real camera again!

On the subject of Spud...

2011-06-14T12:22:00.006-07:00

Thank you for your congratulations!

I think that I should probably start writing some stuff down before I forget it all completely. I find that when I am in the middle of something, I get so caught up in what I am doing – or the problem that I am solving - that it exists to the exclusion of everything else. I certainly couldn’t write about what was going on, on the Spud front, at the time which may help to explain why my blog has been so quiet over the past year.

I thought about trying to draw a series of cartoons to illustrate some of the ‘stand out’ moments from the past year (I can even see them in my head) but I am not sure that I’d be able to realise them in the way that I see them and that would be a bit disappointing. I have also thought about not saying anything at all – simply focusing on the future and what lies ahead.

Yet that didn’t feel fair or right to Spud, the team of doctors and nurses at our local hospital and all of the other women out there who are going through, or considering, some kind of assisted reproductive treatment. In the end, this decided me:

Pregnant women are smug - please enjoy, it is a funny song! It also happens to be so far out of touch with the reality that a lot of women experience that it is really quite hilarious!

As it turns out, an awful lot of us find that getting, and remaining, pregnant is a lot harder than indulging in a whole lot of ‘ho'ing’. I mean - who knew?! It makes me laugh out loud when I look back on all those years of contraceptive pill taking and the panic that would set in if I forgot to take one. After two unsuccessful years of following all of the usual conception advice and a number of comedic scenes reminiscent of those from the 1999 Ben Elton novel (film) Inconceivable (Maybe Baby), the Fella and I handed ourselves in to the local medical profession.

After a series of tests last year, we were referred to the Reproductive Health Unit at our local hospital in November and we had our first cycle of IVF between January and February. I may choose to tell you a bit more about the process another time (so that I don’t forget it) but the long and short of it is that we were successful and Spud is an ICSI-IVF baby. The two links that explain what these are will take you to Wikipedia.

The women that I have run into on the road to Spud have not been at all smug. Mind you, none of us were pregnant either (although I really hope that everyone is now). Depending on whether it was a first or subsequent cycle and whether a previous cycle had been successful, I observed that we were a mixed bag of the quietly anxious, unsure, hopeful, afraid, optimistic and/or resigned – women who were doggedly working their way through a process that they had been through before.

What I will never forget is the day that we went into the Reproductive Health Unit for our 8 week ultrasound and the doctors found Spud’s heartbeat (after a very anxious minute or so when they couldn’t locate Spud at all). As we were leaving the hospital (feeling relieved but a bit like we’d been run over by a bus) another couple walked out in front of us and got into the car that was parked next to ours. We got into our car and glanced across to see whether it was safe for us to back out of our parking space. The couple in the other car was hugging. They were both in floods of tears. We quietly backed out and left them to their grief. This really brought it home to us that for every couple who leave the hospital with good news, many others go home absolutely heartbroken.

I am pregnant. I don’t feel smug - I just feel very lucky that Spud stuck. You see, we were told that our chances of success were rated as being less than 20%. The doctors were talking to us about the likely need for a second cycle of IVF before we’d even been through the egg retrieval process.

This is likely to be the only time that I will ever be pregnant and I fully intend to enjoy it - as much as anyone can who is pregnant, only just getting over their nausea at 21 weeks, has acid reflux and now suspects that that there is a litter of very active, squirmy puppies lodged in their abdomen rather than a single, small, prospective human being!

No, it does not matter to us whether Spud is a boy or a girl and we cannot tell you about names because we haven’t chosen any yet (also, it feels odd to discuss names with others before the baby has arrived safely). In fact, we have asked not to know what sex Spud is so that we have a surprise to look forward to in October - we just want Spud to be healthy, whole, intact and bright enough not bounce off the furniture too much.

I give no apologies at all for being an irritating cliché!

Introducing Spud...

2011-05-21T18:50:00.000-07:00

It-is-so-frustrating-not-having-a-camera!

I would love to show you the completed, fabric part of the presents that I have made for my new niece Lorna and another new arrival in Italy (Bianca, who arrived about a week after Lorna). I would also love to show you the WIP images of the knitted part of Lorna's presents.

However, I am stumped by the lack of a camera - my Samsung is still in hiding and I refuse to resort to a crappy camera-phone image for a finished object. Basement - yes, textiles - no.

So, how about I share these images of a different, but no less special, WIP with you instead?

This is Spud at 12 weeks. I am now 18 weeks, so our little potato will be fully baked by the end of October. I would have said something sooner but I could not say anything because we were waiting for the results of some chromosome tests.

P.s. Does this explain how I managed to persuade the Fella to tackle the basement clear out?!

P.p.s. This is why I was out while our house was being burgled on the 13th April. I got home after this scan to find the house had been broken into - it was both a very good day and a very bad day.

It took some persuasion...

2011-05-03T12:10:00.009-07:00

...but over the Easter Bank Holiday weekend, it did happen. A four day, basement clear out.

I understand why you might question a blog post on this topic but trust me, the occasion merits it. It's taken me since October 2008 to persuade the Fella to do it and the job did take a full four days to complete.

Why did it take so long? Well, my husband has lived in this house for more than 20 years. During that time, he's managed to accumulate and stack so many things in his basement that it resembled something out of a particularly grim episode of 'Hoarders'. The basement had become such a huge problem that the very idea of trying to tackle it froze the Fella to the spot. I offered to help with it constantly but I could not deal with it on my own as I did not know what was important to keep or what to throw away.

Why now? We have been talking about the need to renovate the basement for some time as we need more usable living space. It is ridiculous that most of my belongings are in a rental studio 12 blocks away when we are sitting on top of about 1000 square feet of under-utilised space. Mind you, this said, nothing had happened downstairs despite the fact that we've been talking to a builder and have had some 'As-Built' floor plans drawn up recently. So then we had the break and enter.

This proved to be the final motivation that the Fella needed to tackle his basement. You see, he needed some receipts from the basement to prove that he owned some of the things that were taken. He knew that they were in the basement...somewhere. So he hired a 30 cubic yard skip (bin) which was about 19ft (long) x 8ft (wide) x 6ft (high) and we set to work.

Please excuse the crappy mobile (cell) phone images but my camera was stolen in the burglary and my little Samsung point and click camera was AWOL.

The Fella and the garage in progress:

The garage and skip (bin) after the Day 1 clear out:

The shelves at the bottom of the stairs, the scullery cupboards and the laundry/darkroom:

The shelves were emptied and placed in the skip. The things on them and in the scullery cupboards were either binned or given away. We spent quite a bit of this day recycling the things that could not be put into the skip. E.g. a broken freezer, a truck load (literally) of paint (some of which predated the Fella's purchase of the house), a truck load of obsolete electronics (including 30 ancient walkie talkie radios that he'd picked up at some government surplus auction and never fixed plus the 60 rechargeable batteries that went with the 30 radios).

As a result, the skip (bin) did not look much different at the end of Day Two:

The biggest task of the weekend was the home office. Here is the Fella hard at work:

Here's the home office at the end of Day 3 (we found the receipts that the Fella was looking for) and the skip after the end of Day 4 when we'd dragged some old metal lockers out of the Fella's storage room:

From this angle, it doesn't look very full, but trust me, it was rammed full behind those lockers!

The next step is to hire a storage container to pack everything that is left so that the basement is completely empty and ready for the builder to start work. I think that this task is planned for this weekend. Otherwise, we had the asbestos/hazardous materials survey early this morning and at the moment, there is a door fitter downstairs replacing the two doors that were damaged during the break in.

This time, the doors will be steel rather than wood and I am doing my best at trying not to feel like a prisoner behind them.

A Small Setback...

2011-04-19T10:30:00.004-07:00

...in my back to blogging effort.

Our house was burgled last Wednesday. We left the house at 7:45am and I got home at 2:10pm (with an antique spinning wheel restoration project in the boot of my car) to find that the house had been broken into. They were determined to get in too - they smashed two doors and damaged a window in their efforts to get in. It was a bit of a shock. Luckily, whoever broke in was long gone.

That is - long gone with a surprising amount of our possessions including our PCs, all of our camera equipment (except my little point and click Samsung), my entire jewellery box and our spare car keys. As they went through, and in many cases emptied, just about every cupboard, closet and drawer in the house, they left quite a mess behind them.

So the past week has been rather overtaken by this event, its consequences and the administration necessary to deal with it (clean up, police, insurance, garages to arrange for car keys to be reprogrammed / replaced etc.). Suffice it to say that I have not done any knitting and my new wheel project is sitting quietly by itself in our living room.

Yes, I have lost some things of value (including some things of great sentimental value as they were my last link to my grandparents and my great aunt). However, I have no plans to fall into the same kind of upset vortex that I fell into last April when someone tried to steal my car from outside our house. It's not productive and I've long learned to expect no better treatment from Vancouver.

Today, everything that was stolen is simply a long list of things that I have inserted into an Excel spreadsheet in order to email to the insurance company.

A Good Reason to Knit

2011-04-05T12:26:00.009-07:00

My new niece, Lorna, arrived safe and sound on the 29th March 2011 in India.

So I have bought supplies:

100% Organic worsted & multi Cotton.

The colours are very off on the left - think fresh, neon 'Shrek' and you will be much closer!

All I need to do is find my ball winder and knitting needles.

One aborted attempt at a pair of socks aside, it's been a very long time since I last used them.

I wonder if I can even remember how to knit properly?

Is it really 2011?

2011-03-30T13:16:00.002-07:00

If I get knocked down...

2010-04-13T16:49:00.015-07:00

...I just get back up again.

I have had a couple of occasions in recent months where I have felt a bit misunderstood. Or perhaps it is more that I have spotted, despite my best efforts to prevent it, that a conversation is spiralling out of control in a negative direction.

The first time it happened was during the Winter Olympics - I was pulled over by local law enforcement after leaving Iona Beach (the public park where I was taking my landscape photographs). Nothing disastrous happened and I did not get a ticket. However, when I spoke to the officer who pulled me over - I just felt like I was trying to communicate with someone in a foreign language. Even though we were both native English speakers. It was a really peculiar experience that left me feeling really uncomfortable. As a result, I am not in any special hurry to encounter another officer from that particular organisation again.

The second time that it happened was during a hospital appointment just over a week ago. I knew in advance that the hospital was going to confirm that I have thyroiditis because I'd been given the tip off by my family doctor. Naturally enough, I had poked around on the internet, spoke to one of my sisters to compare notes (she is being treated for the same thing) and felt quite relieved as thyroiditis would help to explain a number of different symptoms that I have been experiencing over the past year or so.

As my hospital appointment was with a surgeon (long, boring, unnecessary story), I assumed that they would tell me that I was no longer a surgical case, confirm my diagnosis and refer me onto an Endocrinologist for advice and monitoring or treatment.

Not so - it seems that while I do have thyroiditis and I will need treatment in the future, I do not need treatment yet. Apparently, it could be another 6-8 months before I will need treatment. Now, please don't get me wrong, this is excellent news - after all, who wants to be on medication?

However, if I am not to receive treatment yet and I believe that I have been experiencing symptoms consistent with thyroiditis for some time, what do I do to manage them? Will my symptoms stay as they are or will they get worse as my thyroid packs up? How do I go about being monitored, so that I receive treatment when I need it?

When I asked these questions, my consultation started to come off the rails a bit.

I was told to monitor via my family doctor - ok. I received some advice to diet and exercise - Atkins or Weight Watchers and Curves as 'group activities tend to increase the chances of success'.

Although obvious, the advice presumes that I have not been trying to manage my weight. While the lack of exercise is a fair cop, I started to take steps to curb my weight gain before last summer (under strict instructions from my husband not to crash diet or starve myself). There is the occasional slip but we have cut right back on carbs, fats, sugars, dairy and reduced portion sizes. We even banished alcohol to the weekends (only) after Christmas.

To my chagrin (and creating no small amount of panic in my head), my weight has simply continued to increase. In fact, I have gained about 48lbs since I came to Canada. I tried to explain this but it was as though an invisible, inpenetrable 'fat barrier' had sprung up between me and the surgeon in the consultation room - I got that look that suggested that if I had been trying for so hard and for so long? Then why was I sitting there bulging out of my oversized jeans?

After that, things took a further, strange turn for the worse. Contrary to what I had read and heard, the surgeon asserted that some of my symptoms were not indicative of a thyroid problem but instead, were indicative of depression and tried to give me a prescription for anti-depressants.

Frankly, I was a bit gob smacked - I rejected their assertion that I am depressed and I refused the prescription. I pointed out that there is absolutely no history of depression in my medical history.

Yes, I might be fed up about being so tired and forgetful. I might be concerned about my weight gain. I might be missing the UK (friends and family). I might not find life particularly fufilling without a job. I might not enjoy the endless grey and rain (Autumn - Spring). I might not be enjoying the experience of living in Canada 100% but to the point where I am actually, truly depressed about it?

No, I do not think so. There are lots of things here that buoy me up when these other things start to get me down. Amongst them - the Fella, my stepson, photography, the sporadic textile things that I do and the friends that I am starting to make here.

So, things here have been interesting. I sort of felt that I got knocked over by my hospital appointment and I have spent the last week starting to dust myself off and get back up again.

I went to see my family doctor yesterday to find out what monitoring might involve. I outlined what happened at the hospital and I have been referred to an Endocrinologist. At the very least, I hope to understand more about what is happening to me and obtain some answers to my questions. The extremely good news is that there was no mention of depression in the report that my family doctor received back from the hospital. So, if nothing else, the surgeon listened to me on that point.

I am not going to hang my hat entirely on the referral though.

The lack of exercise is a fair point. So I am now walking 2-4km per day and I am waiting for a call back from a fitness trainer to confirm when they can fit me into their schedule at the local community centre (now confirmed for next Monday). As I have a medical condition that is very likely to be slowing down my metabolic rate, then I guess that exercise has to be an important part of trying to keep it going. I am hoping that the discipline of having a trainer for a while will help me get back into the exercise habit. I am also hoping that it will help me slow the scales down.

I am in the process of reviewing meal plans with the Fella to see if we can manage to go completely gluten and dairy free on top of the changes that we have already made. From what I have read and heard, this can help combat fatigue and tiredness. So, if anyone has any good information resources on this topic and/or any gluten-dairy free recipes that won't make the Fella feel that his culinary life has ended, then please let me know!

This is what it looks like...

2010-04-07T10:21:00.006-07:00

...when someone tries to steal your car from outside your house during the night.

It's not very impressive looking, but then, it is not a very impressive or interesting crime. My car was parked about 12 metres from our bedroom, we did not hear a sound and the car alarm did not go off. I found the damage when I popped outside to grab my raincoat from the car's boot the next morning. I found the car unlocked, with the above damage and all its windows stuck partially open. I assume that the car was saved by its immobiliser or its electronic coded key system. We duly reported the incident to the police over the phone and our insurers towed the car away last night to be fixed.

While we were putting polythene over the open car windows, a police woman happened to pass by (canvassing the neighbourhood about an unrelated incident) and stopped to speak to us,

'Yeah', she said, 'my car has been broken into 3 times so far - once while it was parked in the car park at the police station. I have stopped changing the car door lock because it has cost me over $1000 in repairs so far. If I decide to sell the car, I'll deal with the lock.

I see that all of your windows are stuck part-way down. They take advantage of a programmed feature on this make of car that means that when they punch out the door lock, it causes the windows to go down and the alarm (or its motion sensor?) to become disabled. Then it's low risk for them to get into the car and try to drive it away...

...at least it didn't rain too much last night.

These people don't usually have cars of their own. It the Easter weekend and lots of people are away. They probably intended to take your car, use it for a couple of days to commit crime - like some break-ins nearby or something - and then dump it.

I would recommend a wheel lock as a visual deterrent and possibly an after-market alarm with a different coloured light to the factory fitted alarm - just something to make them hesitate and move on without damaging your car.'

This matter-of-fact information imparted, she said goodbye and continued on her way.

Inside my head, the good news - to me - was that the thief only seemed to be interested in the car (and a pair of sunglasses that I had left inside the arm rest). Nothing else was taken (although the glove box was rifled through) and the economy of effort/damage needed to get into the car and try to start it was quite impressive. Naively, I assumed this was because they wanted the car intact to sell on or strip down.

As I watched the police officer walk away, I realised that she was probably right. Their only interest in having my car in one piece was probably just so that it remained unremarkable and retained its ability to blend in. Oh, I guess that its decent load capacity and engine size probably made it attractive too.

For some reason, this made me realise how fond I have become of my faceless, comfortable, capacious car and how lucky I was that they did not manage to steal it. I am also happy that something of mine was not used in any sort of crime and then dumped. Or worse.

Apart from the obvious damage, which will be fixed, the only other indicator that some nasty, grimy stranger sat in my car and tried to steal it..?

Lots of cigarette ash scattered around the front seat areas, like this bit left on the passenger seat. I do not smoke. For some reason, this upsets me more than the door lock and ignition damage.

When the car comes back from the garage, perhaps I should install two signs on it, 'Don't bother - this car is fitted with a very effective immobiliser.' and 'Please refrain from smoking when attempting to steal this vehicle.'

People, Light, Fabric and Texture

2010-03-31T16:24:00.004-07:00

I have completed my Advanced Studio Lighting class and I am delighted to say that I did well in my final critique. In the last two studio sessions, I found myself exploring the theme of people and fabric. (You can take the woman out of Textiles but you cannot take textiles out of the woman?!)

The first of these two sessions was a Figurative Nude class.

Ahem. For the general consumption purposes of my blog and Flickr, this image is probably the only one that is safe for me to share. It is a bit dark but it does illustrate the theme that I was starting to explore i.e. the way that fabric changes light, form and adds texture to what you see.

My second studio sesssion was with Erica. Now, I did warn Erica in advance that I planned to wrap her in fabric - just because I was a bit nervous that she might think me a complete weirdo. To my utter relief, she just burst out laughing and said, 'Toga Party!'

So, without further ado, here are some of my Erica 'Toga Party' portraits:

For fun, I converted the top image into a negative image. I love how this appears to changes the very soft image into something hard and alien - almost like a x-ray of chiffon thrown over a marble statue:

So, once we had conquered Rome, I did my best to move us forwards through time to 17th Century Holland:

I think that this might be my favourite image. The effect of the lighting and the fabric in this picture reminds me a little bit of Johannes Vemeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring'. The above picture is sort of intended to go with this next picture:

The narrative idea behind these two pictures is a kind of 'before' and 'after'. Through a fabric screen: unaware of being observed and aware of being observed.

The next three images are a continuation of this theme but concentrating a little more on texture and form through fabric. Amongst a number of other things, Erica is a talented florist. So I included flowers in a few of her portraits as a reference to her skills:

Please click here for the full slide show of Erica's photoshoot. I really enjoyed creating these pictures and I would love to explore this theme further. So I am hoping that this session did not creep Erica out too much and that she will agree to model for me again soon!

On Entitlement, Health and Luck

2010-03-26T14:17:00.006-07:00

Although I am fairly well known for blethering on about the small stuff and using humour to dismantle the bigger things that are bothering me, I can become quite quiet and I can retreat into myself when something is genuinely not going well.

I am not sure why this is - I am not sure whether it is because on some level that I think that if I make myself quieter and smaller in some way, the unhappy or bad thing will roar past me without noticing that I am there.

Usually, it does too! After it has gone, I emerge from cover, dust myself off and carry on. After all - many things are just not as bad as they first appear. With time and thought, it is usually possible to navigate quietly around them or break them down into manageable chunks to chew, swallow or spit aside.

My circumstances over the past year or so have meant that there have been some stuff bothering me here that I have not been able to address because I have had no status in Canada. One of these things has been lack of access to health care.

Although I had a travel insurance policy followed by an expatriate medical insurance policy that was supposed to cover me until my Canadian health care benefits kicked in, they both turned out to be fairly useless for day-to-day matters or things that the insurance company was determined to argue might fall into the category of a pre-existing condition (which is pretty much everything, as I discovered when I phoned them). So, during my visits home, I visited my GP but I was not ever in the UK long enough to be referred for follow up treatment.

So, basically, I have just had to go without and put up with things not being quite right. All fairly minor stuff but it has still got me down a bit. As I am from the UK, I am just used to healthcare...well...just being there, as and when you need it.

The good news is that this situation changed for me on the 1st March - I now have entitlement to Canadian health care. As a result, I have been working on getting a number of things sorted out. I feel quite lucky to have found a family doctor that I like, who has accepted me as a patient and who, unexpectedly, set me off on a referral path that might help to explain some of the symptoms that I have been experiencing over the past year or so e.g. insomnia, tiredness, weight gain, feeling down, 'fuzzy headed' and being very forgetful. Fingers crossed, at least.

In addition, the cherry on the cake piece of good luck (which I think completes my immediate list of Canada 'settling in' tasks) is that I passed my driver's knowledge test* last Friday and I passed the road test* this morning. So I now have a Canadian Driving Licence!

*Notes: you can only drive on your foreign licence in BC for 90 days after you become a Permanent Resident. After that you have to cease driving until you have obtained your Canadian driving licence. As BC has no reciprocal agreement in place with the UK to do a straight swap of driving licences, I had to pass a knowledge test and a road test in order to obtain my Canadian driving licence. Today was my 90th day in BC...which was cutting it all a bit fine.

This was not entirely my fault as you cannot apply for a Canadian driving licence, do the knowledge test or do the road test until you have your Permanent Resident card. My PR card only arrived in the post recently, which made everything all very, very last minute.

Things have been a bit stressful here so I am really looking forwards to a relaxed weekend!

Portrait Lighting and Model Shoot

2010-03-04T14:01:00.005-08:00

Two posts in one day, whatever next?! Well, I am sort of stuck at home on 'Fella Watch' today as he isn't well. He's been ill since Monday - thankfully, he seems a bit better today (his temperature has come down) and I am delighted that he is asleep on the sofa at the moment and not, um - how to put this gently - shut in the bathroom, making noises like a dying animal.

Was that too much information? Okay, well to distract you from the mental image of my husband dealing manfully with the explosive output from his gastric system, here is my output from the portrait lighting demo that we did in class recently:

This is just a very quick guide to some basic studio portrait lighting - Broad, Glamour, Rembrandt, Split and Narrow.

The next images are from the high and low key photo shoot that we did to explore the above lighting for ourselves. We also got to play with some other portrait light set-ups as well.

The brief that we were given for our shoot was to come up with an overall, emotionally evocative triptych plus provide a small selection of other portraits. Just to demonstrate that we had explored a range of different lighting set-ups during the session. In addition, we were asked to convert all of our images to black and white so that we could review the three-dimensional rendering of our subjects with the lighting that we set up.

This is my emotionally evocative tripdych - my theme and brief to my model was 'Dreamy on a Weekend Morning'.

These are two of my other high key lighting examples. I do not particularly like either of them but I truly dislike the one on the right. I took it to crit on purpose - the pose reminds me of a school photo and I did not get the effect that I was looking for with the ring flash - yuck!

These are my low key examples. The image on the right is a narrow - rim lighting shot simply to fulfil the exercise brief. The other two are closer to what I had in mind for the shoot. I was told beforehand that my model is both an actor and in a band. So for the left and centre images, I researched actor publicity shots, theatre lighting and pulled together some classic gestures/poses from some Shakespeare plays to come up with some ideas for my shoot. I was feeling quite smug and prepared when I got to the studio...

...unfortunately, when I met my model, it turned out that he actually does tv comedy type things, rather than classic theatre type things! Opps - poor chap. At one point I asked him to pose with a melon so that he could emulate some of those classic poses from Hamlet. Later, I had him posing with flowers.

He dealt with both props valiantly though and was cheerful throughout (even if I did catch him knocking on the melon to see if anyone was there and putting it up to his ear to hear if it was talking back to him) - happy to share the outtakes if you would like to see them!

Life Update & Advanced Studio Lighting

2010-03-04T11:10:00.009-08:00

I realise that I have been a bit quiet lately. Oddly enough (for a person out of work) I have been quite busy recently. In addition to the Landscape Photography course, I have been doing an Advanced Studio Lighting course, taking some pictures for a friend plus trying to sort out all sorts of new Landed Immigrant (Permanent Resident) admin. E.g.

In UK:

Inland Revenue/Tax

In Canada:

Customs;
Medical Cover;
Social Insurance Number;
Permanent Resident Card;
Driving Licence;
liaising with the company importing my belongings for me and trying to get the house/my studio space ready for everything to arrive;
tarting up my CV, trying to find out which local recruiters deal with the sort of jobs that I do, worrying about job hunting in a new country and fretting about the fact that I have got so fat that none of my old work/interview outfits fit me; and
shoving my head into the sand about looking for a job, even though my savings are just about dwindled to nothing, and attempting to diet (note: attempting but apparently not succeeding) my way back into some of my clothes so that I don't have to go to interviews looking like an over-bloated blimp.

On that cheerful note, I will leave you with the still life images from my Advanced Studio Lighting Course that I presented during our image critique recently. The inspiration for these was sort of afternoon teatime treats with associated lighting:

Above Exercise: lighting comparision between strobe and constant hot lights

Above: the two still life images that I preferred (both strobe lighting).

Now that I have uploaded these images to Flickr and linked to them from my blog, I am interested to note that all of the colours in these images look a bit grungy and washed out. How odd. I wonder if this is because I have changed a Photoshop image profile from sRGB (web) to RGB (print) recently?

In terms of composition and lighting, my idea and the shots are not quite there yet. However, I have the lights and props at my studio and I'm hoping to have another go at setting this up and getting the images that I want!

1st Wedding Anniversary

2010-03-02T09:55:00.003-08:00

Happy Anniversary, Lovely.

I can hardly believe that it has been a year already. It's been a big year (or so) of change and adjustment for us both. Do you know what? I think that we are doing okay. I guess that it helps that you happen to be one of the kindest, most lovely men on earth. Yep, you:

I am really looking forwards to the next year with you.

Gx

Ps, posted a day late because our anniversary weekend included a quick trip over to Salt Spring Island. We arrived home late last night. I am delighted to say that Salt Spring Island delivered my first ever viewing of a sheep on Canadian soil:

I spotted quite a few Suffolk sheep (with new lambs - hurray!) on the island, plus this breed. I am not sure which it is. I am sorting of hoping that it is a White faced Welsh Mountain sheep.

Landscape Final Project – Iona Island

2010-02-24T18:27:00.008-08:00

Background

The first time that I visited Iona Island was last June. The Fella thought that I might enjoy a romantic evening stroll by the ocean - I did not realise, until I got to the island, that this stroll was a 9km hike along a sewage pipe, next to a treatment plant, underneath the jumbo aeroplanes landing at Vancouver's International Airport. At that point, I wrote the island off as any kind of serious destination!

View Larger Map

However, on the 21^st January this year, we had mixed sunshine and clouds. I was driving home and I could see this big, beautiful sky but no way to photograph it without the interference of the surrounding urban landscape. At that point, I remembered Iona Island. I raced over there to get shots of the clouds in the sky. Also, while I was there, I spent some time watching people come and go, walking their dogs and exercising along the sewage pipe. Human sewage aside, it was really refreshing to be outside with lots of unfettered sky to enjoy. In fact, although it is very close to Vancouver and the airport, Iona Island still feels like quite a wild place - I even saw a short eared owl out hunting for prey.

I started to see why people enjoy visiting the park, even though I confess that I am still struggling with the sewage aspect of it. My final landscape project was the result of a number of different trips that I took to Iona Island in order to photograph the sky, the log booms, the beach and the people who visit the park.

Project Objectives

These are the objectives that I set myself:

Capture a series of images of a single place, at the same time of day but in different weather conditions;
Capture images of people interacting with the landscape/park;
Capture images of human interference with nature/the landscape;
Shoot lots of sky (my view of it is a bit restricted at home by the urban landscape);
Practice simplicity in my landscape compositions; and
Utilise some of the creative techniques discussed in class:
- Creative filters (neutral density; graduated; polariser);
- Long and short exposures;
- HDR.

Project Results

My images were taken on different days. However, I timed my trips to the park so that they took place at approximately the same time, each visit. I did this to keep light consistent (so my images would work as a set) and also to see how weather affects the colour and mood of the landscape on different days.

Log Booms, Iona Island

The log booms are an impressive sight, even though they are simply evidence of the local logging industry.

I like the fact that at Iona Island, it is possible to look North and it appears that there is nothing much in that direction, except trees, until the mountains. It is as though the city of Vancouver does not exist.

I was also happy to capture images that illustrates the magic trick that the weather plays on us regularly here in Vancouver. Sometimes, the mountains dominate the horizon. Then, when it rains, they vanish completely behind clouds!

Iona Beach – Logging Industry

These two images further indicate the presence of the logging industry in and around the park:

Sawn driftwood and escaped logs along the tide line of the beach

A discarded pile of wood shards

When we got married in Tofino last year, I was astonished at the quantity of escapee logs (whole tree trunks) that were washed up on the shores of the beaches. It seemed like such a waste of natural resources that otherwise might still be standing in a forest somewhere. The problem is not as pronounced at Iona Beach but it still bothers me a bit. I was pleased to bump into a small group of people who were beachcombing for sound wood to use in an arts project.

Iona Beach – Sewage Pipe Strolling

The last set of sky and silhouette images are of people exercising along the sewage pipe. These are my favourite images - I love the way that the sky changes the mood of the place and I love the outlines of the people, all doing different things. You will need to click and enlarge the images to see but...

...there are people striding, cycling, carrying skateboards, chatting and pointing, peering at the view and even someone taking a photograph!

I also love the fact - do not ask me why - that all of these people are doing all of these things on top of a very large sewage pipe! Which, of course, is another example of our impact on the local landscape and environment.

On that note, I think that I will leave you to enjoy them!

Bit of a delay blogging about these even though the pictures have been on Flickr for ages...something about being up to my armpits in some photography projects, my UK tax return (it might appear to be late but it is not!) and trying to organise my BC Driver's Licence before my 90 days are up!

The Last Landscape Fieldtrip...

2010-02-12T13:01:00.002-08:00

...was a straightforward trip to Steveston, which is just south of Vancouver. Here are my top 3 picks that I presented for critque in class on Wednesday night:

I have decided to call this picture, 'The Emanating Menace of Beige Food'. Yes, it is perfectly innocent seaside concession stand and yes, I agree that it looks perfectly harmless at first glance. However, as your eyes tune in and you realise that it sells fish and chips, you start to sense the thigh-bulging evil of deep fried beige food emanating from its fat-saturated core!

Mind you, if it gets its supplies from here:

The fish and chips that they sell will be very fresh indeed. This is the Public Fish Wharf. Yes, I know that I was overdoing the creative effects at the moment but hey, I was practising and having fun!

To round off, here is a straighforward image of a tug boat at work towing two barges of sand or something - just another Saturday by the edge of the Fraser river.

Landscape Creative Techniques

2010-02-04T09:40:00.004-08:00

Last week we did not have a Landscape field trip class. We had a Wednesday evening lecture on 'creative landscape techniques' and after our class, we were released into the wild with an assignment to practice some of them over the weekend.

Now, the Fella and I had booked a road trip to visit the Seattle Boat Show. We headed off last Friday and returned on Sunday. We sort of assumed that we would meander back to Vancouver via the coast to have a look around and complete our assignment en route home.

In retrospect, the problem with this plan was that the Fella decided that he would drive. While this made complete sense at the time (he knows the roads), it's been so long since we've been on a road trip together that I had completely forgotten that he doesn't have a switch for gentle 'touring' driving speed.

Y'know, the kind of driving speed that allows you to pull over easily if you see something that might be worth a closer look or photographing (and perhaps, even posting on this blog). E.g. the first cattle, sheep, goats, llamas and alpacas that I have seen out at pasture since I arrived in North America (all in the course of about 5 miles, on a single stretch of road somewhere NW of Seattle).

Just as an aside: yes, you did read that correctly, I have not knowingly clapped eyes on any farm livestock (other than the occasional horse, do they count?) since I arrived here in October 2008. Yes, I have ventured out into a number of different rural areas around Vancouver but I have not ever seen a single farm animal. This really threw me last year when I did not see any Spring lambs anywhere. As that always used to be one of the uplifting signs of Spring for me!

The Fella appears to be of the firm opinion that all routes should be travelled at the maximum allowable speed, so as not to inconvenience any vehicles that might happen to be travelling behind us. As a result (my camera being safely stowed in the boot), I have no NW US landscape pictures to show you at all - just a frustrating memory of a nice drive with a great landscape and my continuous requests for us to stop, or at least slow down, being ignored. Bah Humbug.

In the end, I insisted that we stop in White Rock (in Canada, just over the border) to scrape together some shots for last night's class.

Here are my results. I am not sure that I like them but at least I have tried them and I know what effect they produce now:

Creative Tools/Techniques: Graduated Neutral Density Filter, Polariser & Long Exposure. What does this do? It helps to balance sky/foreground, remove glare from the surface of the ocean and blurs the people. I am not sure that I have the hang of this yet as the foreground looks a bit too overexposed and I really don't like the odd pink-brown colour that the two filters seems to have stained the sky.

Creative Tools/Techniques: polariser and a graduated neutral density filter. Reduced water glare and helped to enhance sky detail. I converted this image to black and white afterwards in order to combat the pinky-brown stain problem in the sky area.

Creative Tools/Techniques: filters as before and zooming lens during a long exposure to create feeling of movement. Well it sort of does, I guess - I don't like this effect at all!

Creative Tools/Techniques: polariser to manage water glare and multiple exposure to capture water movement at 3 different times during the same wave.

The other 'in camera' creative techniques suggested in our class were:

panning the camera to capture a moving object and blur the background. We did try to pan on some birds but they were too far away for our pictures to be effective!
taking pictures with a very high ISO set on the camera to create pictures that are deliberately 'noisy'. I forgot to take any pictures like this!
spinning the camera during a long exposure. I don't have a safe way to do this without risking my camera. I did try flipping it from horizontal to vertical but um, the images were shockingly bad so I gave them the boot!

Can anyone else think of any other 'in camera' techniques that give unusual results?

Is it wrong...

2010-02-02T17:33:00.003-08:00

...to like some of your own pictures sometimes?!

South Pacific, 5th Avenue, Seattle

I realise that I have some ghosting in the bottom of the picture (passing car headlights) but I love how the number 5 appears to spin at the top of the brightly lit theatre sign - it looks like it is spinning like something out of that film The Exorcist!

The Beautiful City & Its Homeless Community

2010-01-28T09:39:00.006-08:00

Now that I have seen this, I am not sure that I should attempt to take another landscape image within the downtown Vancouver area! This art project is a very cool time lapse photography video of Vancouver set to even cooler music:

Personally, I think that this is a beautiful piece of work. I find it a good representation of the glossy parts of downtown Vancouver. I suspect that videos/images like this will go a long way to perpetuate the idea that Vancouver is one of the best cities to live in on the planet?

I tend to think of downtown Vancouver as being a bit like the City of London on a smaller scale. It is a blend of smart high rise office and residential developments. It has shopping streets plus the usual entertainment, restaurant and bar type places.

For me, in style and location, it appears to sit a bit separate to the rest of the city (in the way that the City of London feels like a distinct but sort of separate part of London to me). It is a dense mix of metal, glass, brick and concrete. It has a big park and it is surrounded on 3 sides by water. Downtown is reached from both North and South Vancouver by bridge.

The remainder of the city and the Greater Vancouver area is a bit less 'glamourous city' in its look and feel. It has quite a different sort of character and feel. Many residential homes are timber-framed. The commercial and retail areas tend to have a lower profile too (storey-wise).

In order to balance the content and mood of the above time-lapse video, I think that it is also fair to say that there are certain areas of the city that have serious, ongoing problems with poverty, homelessness, prostitution and drug use e.g. Downtown East Side (DTES). In addition, there are other areas within Greater Vancouver that have a real problem with gang violence - it seems that the recession last year did not just hit legitimate businesses hard.

So it's not all pretty scenery backdrop, buildings and lights here in Vancouver.

I am not suggesting that we do not have these problems in the UK. We do. However, I am still shocked by the numbers of homeless people that I see wandering the streets here.

I snapped this image as part of a class photography assignment during a fieldtrip downtown last Autumn. Even though I consider it to be a picture of two people helping each other out, I still felt uncomfortable about taking it. I read a book about the DTES called, 'Hope in Shadows,' which helped me to pinpoint exactly why I wasn't happy. As a result, I have not taken another image like this since and I am only posting it now for awareness raising purposes.

People pushing supermarket trolleys stacked high with bags is not a sight that is confined to the DTES either. There are many more people living rough in parks and out in the suburbs. The homeless people where I live congregate in the local supermarket and off-licence car park - they sit outside, beg or busk for money and they trawl the local alleys for bottles to recycle*.

The city opened over 160 new winter shelter beds in the past month but they will close them again in April. While I am delighted that some more homeless people now have a safe roof over their heads, I confess that I am suspicious about the timing.

These shelter beds opened in the month before the Olympics and they are due to shut in the month after the Olympics end. The bad weather here kicks off in September/October. Where were those beds when temperatures went down to -7 degrees celcius and it hosepiped down with rain last year?

This topic feels like it is a boil that is just too big and complex for me to lance properly on this blog. I do not feel well-enough informed to do it justice. (It is why I have not blogged about it before. Actually, I did not set out to when I started to write this post today.)

So if the topic of homelessness in Vancouver interests you, here are links to:

Operation Pheonix, which is the campaign that was run by a local newspaper here over the past year. If nothing else, it gives a snapshot view of kinds of problems that exist in the DTES;
Hope in Shadows which is a annual community photography project for DTES residents. It is a really positive project that I support. Their book is an illuminating, if extremely depressing, read; and
Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society which is a non-profit organization that provides food and related assistance across Greater Vancouver.

Don't get me wrong, Vancouver is a nice enough place - I have just never been able to reconcile these two very different aspects of the city in my head.

With thanks to Katy, I have added these links which relate to the Vancouver Winter Olympics and relocation of Whistler's and the city's homeless for the duration of the games:

I do understand the issues around security for the Olympic venues. Yet there is still something extremely grotesque to me about shuffling homeless people out of the way for the expensive frills, pomp and ceremony of the Games. Heaven forbid that the world should see anything other than partying tourists, Olympic officials, athletes and Official Game Sponsors advertising** behind the heads of presenters during tv broadcasts during February and March.

Notes:
* Here you still pay a bottle and can deposit (in the way that I remember that we used to in the UK when I was little). You get your money back if you return your empties to the store. However, many people simply put their bottles and cans out in their recyling box where they become a potential source of income for people living on the street. I hesitate to say, as a result but, I notice that many stores have a limit on the number of bottles and cans that a single person can return at any one time/on any day.

**Apparently VANOC spent $40million on procuring all commercial advertising space across the city during the Games for Official Sponsors (so that the city is suitably badged behind tv presenters' heads). The local media have been having a bit of fun with the fact that VANOC officials are (apparently) driving around town, reporting incidents of ambush marketing and making people take down unauthorised Olympic symbols etc. So we are now a city advertising a lot of Macdonalds and Coca Cola?

Family Affair / Ok, it's like this...

2010-01-27T22:22:00.007-08:00

...I do not seem to be making anything at the moment. I am not knitting, not spinning, not quilting or making anything else out of fabric. (This is a slight issue as I have a quilt class tomorrow evening and no, I have not made any of the squares set in the class that I attended back in November. Hmm.)

However, I have been taking lots of photographs and I am really loving it. I also want to find ways to combine my photography with my making - I have lots (and lots) of ideas but they seem to be trapped in my head waiting for me to discover the correct technique to make them real and not look completely crap!

So at the moment, I am biding my time, collecting images that I like. With this in mind, I am doing two photography classes at the moment - Advanced Studio Lighting and a Landscape Photography workshop.

The Advanced Studio Lighting course has really only just started. We've had an intro and a kit orientation but we do not go into the studio to start our practical work until next Wednesday. The Landscape Photography course is being taken by the tutor I studied Macro Photography with last term.

However, this time, I am not taking her class alone. I am taking it with the Fella - so this class has become a family affair! The Fella has dragged out his 35mm SLR camera and this class seems to becoming a battle of technologies between us (digital vs. film)!

That said, I am being helpful. I mucked out, hoovered, dusted and scrubbed the Fella's darkroom area of the basement on Monday night (untouched since about 1996). On Tuesday I picked him up some fresh developing chemicals and last night? He made some B&W prints.

I even shot a roll of black and white film with his camera last week and I cannot wait to get down there (now that it is up and running) in order to do some printing of my own. - I am SOOOOO excited about it (oddly, for someone who should be burying herself in Photoshop post production techniques for her digital camera).

For fun, here are the photos that we took to our first two critique sessions. Now, we know that these are not perfect. The idea is that you take images to class that you sort of like but that are not quite right i.e. you need feedback from the class on what you can do really nail the shot that you want.

Also, because we are teaming up (as a couple) on our field trips, we are consciously trying to take in pictures that are different - even though we are taking pictures in the same place.

Field Trip One: Stanley Park
Please click to enlarge images

Fella's 35mm Film Images

Lighthouse, Stanley Park

Olympic Barge & Lost Lagoon, Stanley Park

My Digital Images

Lost Lagoon, Stanley Park

Two Images from Trails around Beaver Lake, Stanley Park

Field Trip Two: UBC Area
Please click to enlarge images

Fella's 35mm Photos

View From Old Marine Drive (UBC)

Log Detail - Wreck Beach

Log Leading Line - Wreck Beach

My Digital Images

Reeds - Wreck Beach

Sky above Iona Beach

Stream Detail - Wreck Beach

We have another two classes and one more field trip left before the end of this workshop. Plus we have to come up with a final project for our last class and we are feeling a bit stumped for ideas...do we collaborate (okay with our tutor) or do we attempt completely separate projects?!

I favour collaboration because the Fella works full time (I have only just started to look for work) so I have more time on my hands (e.g. I helped him to digitise and crop his prints). However, I get the sneaking feeling that the Fella is starting to get a bit competitive and may wish to complete a project on his own?!

Handmade November– January Gifts

2010-01-19T11:15:00.005-08:00

Now that Yogic Knitter has opened her birthday present (Happy 40th Mel!), I can show off my November – December making efforts! My apologies in advance but this is a very heavy picture heavy show-and-tell post. My images are a bit uneven as I took the majority of them a big rush (in the hour before we left for the airport to catch a plane to the UK)!

With one exception, my November-January birthday and Christmas gifts were sewn rather than knitted. The inspiration for all of my sewn gifts came from the fantastic Bernina Sewing Club that I attended in 2009. In two cases, I gifted the original items that I made in class as they were perfect fit for two people on my gift list. Otherwise, I made duplicates or tweaked and rescaled the original project patterns to create things that I hoped my gift recipients would like.

Just as an aside, the good news is that the lovely people who own Bernina Corner are developing a website for their business. Shortly, you will be able to find out more about them, the services and classes that they offer at this link!

1) Beaded Notebooks

I gave beaded notebooks to my sister-in-law (lilac, green and pink), mother-in-law (blue and red) and my stepmother (red and gold). Here are two close ups of my sister-in-law's gift:

Here is a group shot showing all three notebooks together:

Truth be told, it was a bit difficult to tell whether my mother-in-law liked her notebook but my sister-in-law and my stepmother both loved theirs - so two out of three isn't bad?! I plan to make another one of these, probably in blues, for my sister who lives in Bangalore.

2) Small Embellished Bags

I made this little brown bag in class. I filled it with 3 walnut whips (for fun) and gifted it to my brother's very long term girlfriend for Christmas:

Please click to enlarge!

Here it is again together with a little pink bag that I made for Mel's daughter, E. The pink bag is based on the same design:

However, I gave E's bag a robust snap to help the contents of her bag safe and sound from prying eyes.

The great thing is that both bags were well received which is lovely to know!

3) Project Pods, Stitch Marker Holder and Camera Pouch

Back in September, I made a little drawstring bag. I modified the pattern for this little bag to create a number of different things.

First up was a DSLR camera pouch that I made for my friend K. who blogs here and is 365 photoblogging here. K. is a fabulous photographer who also happens to knit and sew:

Please click to enlarge!

The true colour of this bag is a bit more teal than it shows on my screen (it looks quite blue) but despite playing with these images in Photoshop, I cannot quite get the colour right. So I have opted to leave them just as they fell out of my camera.

The reason that I made this for K. is that there are times when I do not want to lug a purpuse built camera bag around. I simply want to pop my camera into my handbag. Yet I need to keep it clean, as dust-lint free as possible and protected. As K. has as at least as many hobbies as me, I thought that there might be times when she would value having something like this on hand for her camera! Actually, I got a little note from K. recently to say that her camera pouch was proving to be useful - I love it when things work out and are used!

Next up are two knitting project pods I made as joint Christmas/Birthday presents for my mother and one of my sisters who lives in the UK:

This blue bag containing two skeins of yarn (complementary dyed merino and kidsilk style mohair in greeny-teal) went to my mother. Now I realise that my mother likes green. However, I have also noticed that she loves indigo dyeing and did a lot of fabric work in blue before she started her plant dyeing again. So I compromised: blue bag and greeny-teal yarn.

So this black, white and pink bag containing a mad selection of bright pink yarns in different weights went to my sister. I chose her bag colours to match her vibrant personality and gave her some bright pink yarns of differing weights in order to present her with a 2010 knitting project challenge. My sister has a fabulous and quite individual fashion sense (which is just as well as she teaches fashion-textiles!) so I will be interested to see what she does with her package (nudge, nudge sis').

Last, but certainly not least, of my sewn gifts is a fibre bag and stitch marker pouch that I made for Mel's birthday:

I know that Mel likes pink and when I saw this wool-silk fibre, I thought of her instantly:

I chose her fabrics to coordinate with her fibre. Now I hope that the bag is useful as I find (when I am spinning with pre-prepared fibre) that I want a bag that will sit on the floor at my feet.

This is my first attempt at a bag that is big enough to hold fibre, robust enough not to flop over all the time yet small enough not to be in the way - just to keep Mel's fibre handy, clean and contained. I hope that it works out.

I made the stitch marker pouch in purple cotton fabric and gave it a lilac silk lining. The outside fabric has the same print as the fibre bag. However, it is purple to go with the spinning wheel stitch markers that I made for Mel:

You see, I am hoping that Mel will knit her yarn into something cool once she has spun her fibre and I wanted her stitch markers to show up against her yarn. So I used some amethyst beads (which are the same as the ones that I used in my Semi-Precious Scarf project). I found the little sterling silver spinning wheel charms when I was green bead hunting for Kelli in a shop in Covent Garden. I had the feeling that they might come in handy one day!

So here's the family group shot of my project pods all together (the camera pouch had gone to its new home by the time that I took this picture):

Well, this just leaves me to tell you about the knitted gift. Hmm. Well, I made a 'Turn the Square' hat (Designer: Jared Flood) for my brother-in-law's birthday:

The pattern is great and the yarn I used was lovely (Dream in Colour Classy - Black Parade and Cocoa Bean) – lots of bounce. However, as you can see below, the gauge fairies are still not on my side:

I added just over an inch to the length of this hat because the Fella's family have enormous heads. Really - they are huge, we measured them all last Christmas for a laugh. I even tested this hat on the Kid while it was in progress and it looked like it would be perfect.

Nope - it was massive on its gift recipient:

As a result, I doubt that my brother-in-law will ever wear it. Although he was very kind about and said that he thought that it might be good to play football in. I will report back if I ever spot it on his head!

Phew, I think that catches up my recent making efforts - I hope that all of your making went well over the holiday season and that your gifts were all well received too!

A Right Olympic Argy Bargy?

2010-01-18T19:15:00.013-08:00

There was a gap in the rain on Saturday, which was very lucky as it coincided with a photography class field trip to Stanley Park. Although we were there to ~~take snaps of~~ (cough) shoot the landscape surrounding the seawall, I could not resist taking a picture of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics barge:

I realise that the barge doesn't actually look at its best or particularly interesting during the day or from this angle. But then, to be honest, this could be said to sum up my individual lack of excitement regarding the forthcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

I have not commented before because it really did not feel like it was my place to do so. Vancouver does not really feel like it is my city yet and the Games were announced long before I arrived. So I am a tail end Charlie. However, I am mindful that the Summer Olympics are coming to London in 2012, so I have been watching events unfold here with some interest - is this how it will be for Londoners too?

From personal, informal observation (gathered from people I know, reading the media etc.) local residents of Vancouver appear to be split into three main camps:

gung-ho for the Games;
ambivalent about the Games; and
extremely vocal in a negative way about the Games.

I need to admit that I am not sure that I have actually met anyone who is in the first category but I do hear that they exist. Perhaps they are just keeping their excitement well hidden (in the way that a football fan might do if their team scores but they are seated at the wrong end of the pitch)?

It is possible that when the Games start, these people will stream into the streets, ~~cars~~ bicycles (as these people will be compliant with VANOC's transport recommendations) bedecked with Canadian flags and ~~toot their horns~~ ring their bells in triumph at a Canadian medal winning performance.

I do know a number of people in the second category. They appear to be doing what they can to make the best of the fact that the Games are coming to Vancouver and they plan to get on with their lives, as best they can, around the event. However, they do not sound that excited about it. They sound a bit well...resigned? The impression they give is that they are steeling themselves for the arrival of the Games rather than looking forwards to it.

Based only on what people have said to me in discussion and from reading local media, it seems that many people fall into the third category. Despite a lot of positive PR (which includes endless ads on tv "Do You Believe?"...ack, cheesy... and a big poster campaign around the city etc.), the discussion tends to focus on:

the expense of the Games, the projects that money has been spent on, the disruption to the city-businesses-people that these projects caused while they were in progress and the long term value of those investments versus what people feel the city should have spent money on (longer term relevance and value);
the fact that the Games are very over budget and residents perceive that they are going to be paying for the honour of being a host city for many years to come;
wondering what positive legacy will be left in place for the city and its residents after the Games are over;
the feeling that Vancouver did not really need the publicity associated with being a host city. Whistler is a well known ski resort and the city of Vancouver is a popular tourist destination (courtesy of having the reputation of being one of the best cities in the world to live in);
the disruption that the event has brought in the run up to the Games (which is going to worsen while it is on) and the impact that this is having on communities, commutes, livelihoods and families.

To give you an idea - there will be road closures, parking and stopping suspensions. There will be area security closures around key Olympic venues. This may sound obvious but as a result...

...some schools and businesses plan to close. This might sound great but is likely to impact some residents personally (extra child care requirements / adverse impact on income).

Some employers are following official guidance and are requiring that their employees change their regular work hours from 9am-5pm, 7am-2pm during the games (to alleviate anticipated Olympic congestion downtown).

Others seem to be implementing a 'regular hours' contract with staff - someone who landed a job recently was required to sign an employee contract that committed them to regular work hour attendance during the Games. If they are absent or late? It will be grounds for dismissal.

Not to mention the 200 or so homeless people who were relocated to Squamish from Whistler for the period of the Games very recently (for security reasons, apparently).

More about what the city recommends to local residents and businesses can be found at this link. You may need to read between the lines to assess the impact of this advice on a busy city.

Now VANOC consulted with an official from a former Games host city and as a result, distributed a leaflet to local businesses advising the fact that while they expect hotels and restaurants to benefit from the Games, they do not expect very much in other areas of retail sales. In fact, they might drop. From the evidence collected from former host cities, people who travel to Vancouver to be a part of the Olympic experience may buy things that they have forgotten to pack or did not realise that they needed (e.g. wellies, raincoats and umbrellas) and they may buy memorabilia. However, that is pretty much thought to be it. Consistent with this, many watering holes/restaurants popular with local residents have warned that they are booked throughout the Games as they have been adopted by competing nations as hospitality venues. This means that they will be pretty much closed to the general public.

So, despite the fact that this should be, a memorable, 'once in a lifetime experience' for the city and its residents, many people are voicing that they do not feel that there is anything in it for them. In fact, they plan to avoid the city and the Games altogether.

Some are taking holidays (abroad in some cases - yes, leaving the country to avoid the Games), some plan to work from home in order to avoid coming into Vancouver and the rest appear to be gritting their teeth, or grinding them, about the prospect of their commute and the disruption to their usual routine.

So, in summary, I feel that I am living in a city that appears to be bracing itself for the Winter Olympics, rather than embracing the forthcoming experience of being the host city.

Personally, I hope that the angst and worry is misplaced. I hope that the whole event goes well - particularly for local residents. After all, if local residents will be paying for this event for years to come, they may as well get as much as they can out of the experience while it is here.

As for us? We will stay out of the way. I did meet a few people early last year who obtained event tickets through the residents' ticket lotteries (not met any since though). I was not eligible to participate in the lotteries at the time and the Games were too distant for them to prickle the Fella's interest at all. By the time he was interested, the lotteries were over and he's looked since but there do not seem to be any tickets available (certainly none that are affordable) for the sorts of things that we are interested in.

So despite the fact that we live here, we will watch the events on tv, just like everyone else around the globe. Yes, there is every chance that we will fight over the remote (convertor). The Fella wants to watch the ice hockey and I want to watch the figure skating!

December Download

2010-01-15T12:21:00.003-08:00

December was a slightly weird month, split neatly in half (almost) between being here (Canada) and there (UK). I am not sure that I recall a great deal of the run up to our departure as it sped past in a frenzy of making. In fact, I was making gifts up until 1 hour before we left for the airport and snapping quick documentary shots of everything that I had made until 15 minutes before we left for the airport (more of that later).

The second half of the month whipped past in a series of short visits with as many family and friends as we could shoehorn into our short trip to the UK. I remarked to the Fella that it was peculiar, only having time to see some of my friends. Also, only seeing those friends once, when I was used to seeing or speaking to them every 2-3 days ordinarily - I felt very sad about it, actually.

We did get caught up in the bad weather during our trip. We had to pull off the road during our return trip to London from Hereford. It was the night that snow hit Reading, Newbury and Basingstoke and as we were in a rental car with summer tyres (effectively), we decided to bail and stay overnight in Swindon. I worked on a big project in Swindon for about 6 years once, commuting 150 miles (round trip) by car almost daily from my home in London. It was a fantastic project to work on with brilliant colleagues but I am not sure that I would want that commute now. It was strange and slightly nostalgic to wander around the shopping precinct in the snow, seeing what had and hadn't changed. Yes, I made sure that we entered and left Swindon via the Magic Roundabout (mostly to terrify the Fella)!

The day after, we whizzed down a quiet M4, remarking on all of the cars abandoned on the hard shoulder, and cut across Bracknell to Farnborough where we went to visit my Removal Company's warehouse. There, we tackled the belongings that I have had in storage since October 2008. We have probably spent more on storage costs over the past year than any of my things are actually worth. We went through my things, knowing that we needed to reduce it all by 50% in order to make the shipping costs to Vancouver viable.

Frankly, my hat is off to them - I think that removal men must possess the same sort of skill and tact as undertakers. We stood in their freezing cold warehouse with my two opened storage containers and they very quietly, tactfully, efficiently and good humouredly helped us to separate my things into three piles: to ship, to give away, to throw away. I thought that it would take all day. Nope. It took 1 hour and 30 minutes to unpack, sort and repack all of my worldly possessions (which looked extremely pathetic on the concrete floor of their warehouse).

I am sure that people will tell me that it was good for me but it was really hard to give and throw so many of my things away. Particularly the ones that I remember saving for and appreciating very much when I could finally afford to buy them. Of stuff kept, some went to my father's family house and some went to my youngest brother who has just moved into a flat. My father's family put us up while we were in the UK and it was really strange to see some of 'my' belongings dotted around their house. In truth, it was quite hard not to snatch some of them back and hide them in my suitcase. Even though I knew that we had no room or use for them here. Mind you, I think that there might be more bed linen here in Canada than we originally planned to bring back in my suitcase!

So as I type, 250 sq ft of household goods (reduced from 500 sq ft) are on their way towards Vancouver. They were shipped on the 12^th January and we have been told that they are expected to arrive here on the 31^st January. It's quicker than I expected.

I am glad that my stuff is on its way. I realise that it is a silly thing but it has been very strange living with the Fella in Canada without any of my belongings around me. I have felt a bit naked and uncomfortable about it. It is not that any of my things are nicer or smarter than the Fella's - in some cases, quite the opposite. However, it will be good to have some familiar items here e.g. to have a tea or coffee out of one of my own mugs (assuming that they survive the journey) and to have my own, familiar bath towel in the bathroom.

Sometimes I think that the Fella doesn't notice but it turns out that he does.

One of the things that upset me the most to throw away was my old bed frame with its really comfy mattress. It was not worth the cost or hassle to bring into Canada. Besides, the Fella prefers to sleep in a larger bed. However, his bed has to be one of the most uncomfortable beds that I have ever tried to sleep on. I cannot begin to count how many wretched, sleepless nights I have had since my arrival in Vancouver in October 2008. It has been thoroughly miserable – I have either paced the house, sat at the PC or lain in the dark, listening to the Fella breathe while watching the clock tell me how slowly the night is passing. It is so very hard to survive the next day when you have had very little or no sleep. I have been like a zombie - I cannot tell you how many classes I have almost fallen asleep in or had to apologise because I am yawning constantly and felt horrible.

So watching my lifeline to a good night's sleep being moved over to the disposal pile was quite tough. Made worse by the fact that the beds that we slept on during our trip were either completely trashed (hotel in Hereford) or extremely small and hard (parent's house in London) where the two of us were kipping on a ¾ size bed.

So I may have mentioned my heartache at letting my bed go - perhaps I mentioned it more than once, if I am honest.

When we got back to Canada, out of the blue, the Fella confessed how old his bed was. Put it this way – my stepson (almost 16) was likely conceived on it. He then marched me out to his truck, took me to a stretch of road with bed shops and refused to come home until we had picked out a new one.

It was delivered last Saturday and I made it up with some of the freshly laundered bed linen that I had brought back in my suitcase. Our new bed is so comfortable that I didn't get out of bed, all day on Sunday. I propped myself up, surrounded by my lovely, old, familiar bed linen (just some old IKEA stuff) and I read 'Kafka on the Shore' (at last). I have even had a couple nights since then when I have slept all the way through the night. In fact, the Fella tried to wake me with a cuddle this morning and he got told very firmly where he could stuff it for waking me up!

I think that the Fella is worried that he has unleashed a beast - that I am going to, 'take to my bed' for days at a time, as ladies used to do in the olden days.

I don't care. It is very selfish but I like how I feel after I have had a full night's sleep.

Tick Tock...

2010-01-14T16:32:00.004-08:00

Well, we might be married now but surely I can still expect a little bit of romance on Valentine's Day...?!

Erratated

2010-01-14T16:13:00.003-08:00

I realise that is not actually a word but it is how I felt when I showed my Quick Cabled Cowl pattern to someone when I got home to the UK (just before Christmas).

Just imagine my chagrin when I spotted that I had managed to upload the wrong version of the PDF to Ravelry and that I was in the UK without access to the files I needed to correct the error. Particularly when I nipped into my store and saw (with some horror) that about 360 people had downloaded the pattern.

If you know me, you will know how carefully I checked that file. You will also know how much it pains me to confess that I made such a stupid error. Yet somehow, in spite of checking thoroughly, I managed to rename and upload a slightly older version of the pattern with a cut and paste error right in the middle of it.

Luckily the error was not fatal i.e. if you followed the instructions as they were written, you might wonder why the pattern referred to you lines 5 & 6 in Section A, when you should really have been referred to lines 1 and 2 in Section B. However, as the instructions on lines 5 & 6 in Section A were the same as the instructions on lines 1 and 2 in Section B? The cowl would turn out the same.

I corrected this problem as soon as I got back to Vancouver, so there is a new version of the PDF to download. I took this edit opportunity to tidy up (simplify) one of the main row instructions and I altered the two buttonhole row descriptions to try to make them easier to follow as well. I hope that the new edits are easy to use and beneficial.

I made a note of the update on the pattern page to alert people to the new version and I did try to do the 'notify users of an update' thingie but I am not sure that it worked because the pattern is a free download. So I will have to hope that people read this post or cruise the pattern page to ensure that they have the latest version of the pattern PDF.

In the meantime, as you were (mumble, mumble – need glasses – mumble, mumble)!

A Befuddled Start to a New Decade

2010-01-14T14:36:00.002-08:00

Happy New Year! I promise that I am alive, even if I am sheltering from the usual West Coast deluge and not doing brilliantly well at fighting off the crippling lethargy that seems to afflict me when the gloom closes in and the rain falls incessantly.

I have written, if you can believe it, two reviews of 2009 - one in words and another in pictures. Yet I have not posted either of them. I think that it is because I found 2009 quite a downbeat, difficult year - despite the fact that 2009 is the year that I got married. When I reviewed them, I found that neither of my posts made very entertaining reading or viewing.

So to spare you the agony, I think that last year can be summed up very simply as:

- I made some stuff (less knitting/spinning than I expected; more sewing/quilting than I expected);

- I learned some new skills (well, put it this way, I have a back up drive stuffed full of image files);

- I did my best to adjust to the change of being in a new country , a long way from my family and friends (I am not sure that I am doing that well on this front so let's move on);

- I put on an extraordinary amount of weight (see bullet point above); and oh yes, I almost forgot

- I got married in a plastic dress. Twice – effectively.

Phew, I am glad that's done. Let's move on shall we?!

Good News!

2009-12-10T14:02:00.004-08:00

1. I received an A+ in my Macro Photography project (concept, images and presentation) plus some good technical feedback on my images to help me improve - very happy.

2. Just in case anyone is interested, I have just uploaded two patterns to Ravelry to make them available as free PDF downloads:

Quick Cabled Cowl*
download now

Semi Precious Scarf
download now

3. In a week's time, my feet will be back on UK soil as I am headed home for a brief visit to sort out the contents of my house (to ship/give away/throw away) and see my family for Christmas. Other than going out to my photography classes, I have been a bit of a recluse this autumn so I am really looking forwards to seeing my family and UK friends again.

4. I have received my visa to enter Canada as a Landed Immigrant. I will do this when I return to Vancouver after Christmas. This means that I can apply for a BC Driver's License (yes, I will need to take a driving test) and I can start looking for work in the New Year! Double hurray!

5. My baby bolero and cuddle wrap arrived safe and sound in Marseille (do not prick my happy bubble by asking exactly how much it cost to ship - suffice it to say that it was about double the cost of the materials that were needed to make the gifts in the first place) and I have received a photo of my gift recipient with her wrap and in her bolero - it fits and they like it = gift success!

Okay, relax. As you were. I really need to get back to my Christmas gift making...

...which is why it has been so bloomin' quiet on this blog recently.

I know, I know: Bad blogger - no biscuit.

UBC Botanical Garden & Macro Photography - Part 1

2009-11-30T14:35:00.008-08:00

In an attempt to remain active this autumn, the Fella and I have been looking for ways to combine a bit of exercise with the things that we enjoy (photography) and that I have needed to do on a weekly basis (photography homework projects).

So a little while ago, we headed over to the University of British Columbia with our cameras and tripods to see if we could snap a few images of autumn while exploring their botanical garden.

Just as background, the UBC Botantical Garden is a lovely mix of West Coast forest and lawned areas. It even has a little physic garden, a kitchen garden and a forest canopy walk (if you have a head for heights)! It is well worth a visit if you live in, or are visiting, Vancouver.

We really enjoyed our afternoon out in the gardens. It helped that we were really lucky with the weather. For me though, one of the best things about our walk was the idea it sparked for my macro photography class final project.

I cannot show you my whole project yet. I did not have time to photograph it before I handed it in. However, I can share the images that I submitted. To amuse you while you look at them, I have included a bit of chat between me and the Fella while we were taking the photographs.

As you may be able to tell from our banter, we are not botanical experts! However, the walk did generate a lot of discussion between us which led me to the idea for my final project. So it is sort of relevant!

Me: Oooh Fella, come look at the inside of the flowers on this shrub - it is sort of looks like king scallops complete with roe or brains or something! I wonder what this shrub is, I cannot see a label for it.
Fella: Me either, we'll have to ask someone or look it up when we get home?

Fella: How many pictures of a water droplet on a berry do you really need to take?
Me: About just as many as you need to take of that extremely small brown bird in that very large, dead bush?!
Fella: Hey! I like birds. You are right though, this is one dead-looking bush - I wonder why it's here?
Me: Perhaps it does something really interesting in the Spring or the Summer?

Fella: I do not like hydrangeas.
Me: I do. I find the one in our garden really difficult to photograph so I thought that I would give it a go here.

Fella: I wonder who gets to eat these cabbages?
Me: (spots a sign) All of the produce goes to a local charity who distribute it.

Fella: These seed heads are amazing - I wonder what this plant looks like when it is flowering?
Me: Do you know? I am not sure. I wonder if we would recognise this plant at another time of year?

Me: I like how there is still a lot of water around in the shade of the trees even though it is a sunny day.
Fella: Rainforest by name - rainforest by nature!

Me: Crumbs look at this! Talk about determined, the rest of this Verbascum has died back but it is still trying to send up one final shoot - even though it is nearly November!
Fella: What's a Verbascum?

Fella: Look at these metallic blue berries.
Me: Ooh, I love them.

(However, I did not love the composition of this image, so I went back to the garden two weeks later to reshoot it - only to find the tree devoid of any leaves or berries. They were all on the ground, in the mud underneath the tree. I had missed them!)

Fella: (reading a sign) Dead Man's Fingers.
(looks up and sounds disappointed) I cannot see anything?
Me: Here! Look, here's one! It's split open and you can see its 'seeds in a thick viscous, edible pulp!
Fella: Urgh, that's horrible - I wouldn't eat that!
Me: (laughing) Just think, if you had not been here today, you might not have ever seen one and known what it was like!

Fella: I don't like hydrangeas. Why are you photographing another one?
Me: Just to annoy you.
Fella: Really?!
Me: No, of course not but if you complain again, I'm going to look for a third one to photograph!

At this point, your two not-so-intrepid botanists from Vancouver retired gracefullyfrom the gardens in search of a warm place serving hot coffee!

Bits and Bobs

2009-11-12T11:56:00.004-08:00

As I am focused on getting a final project together for one of my photography classes (more about this another time) and we seem to have spent the best part of the past three weeks succumbing to, enduring and getting over a persistent sort of cold (not flu), there has not been much crafting or blogging over the past few weeks. Just about the only things (of very minor note) that have taken place recently are my birthday and Halloween (not on the same day).

My birthday was very quiet. I received some greeting cards, an Amazon voucher, some photography related presents from the Fella and two very fabulous bunches of flowers:

They have really made a lovely splash of colour at home and brightened my sprits while it has been pouring down with rain outside over the past two weeks. The flowers on the left are from some of my younger siblings and the flowers on the right are from my in-laws.

Just as an aside, I'd like to highlight the little tablecloth under the vase. Click if you would like to see bigger images. This was a wedding present from my Italian host family's Albanian foster daughter (which is a connection that is far too complicated for me to explain). It was handmade for us by her grandmother in Albania. I do not think that I have never been given anything handmade like this before, so it is really special - I love how well it goes with the cherry dining table that the Fella made last year.

Not that I can see myself risking this gift being on our table during meals - in fact it was time for a family meal with the Kid shortly after I took these pictures, so I plucked it away to safety:

Oops! In a flash, I was taken back to my childhood and visits to my grandmother's house. I am sure that I remember things like this draped over armrests plus the back of her sofa and armchairs. Ngg.

Here are my photography presents from the Fella in action:

As a hint, these pictures of my September sewing club output (isn't it sweet?) were taken in my North facing studio with the lights switched off! Yup, photography lights - very useful for Vancouver's dark, damp, grey winters.

As the Kid was here for the Hallow'een weekend, we held our annual pumpkin carving contest:

However, no winner could be announced as we were all far too biased towards our own pumpkins!

See what I mean? Mind you, I guess that it is just as well that that no prize was awarded as our pumpkins were just not scary enough to keep away the Trick or Treaters. We had an endless stream of children at our front door between 5pm - 9pm. Last year, I think that we were still eating the left-over Halloween candy at Christmas. This year we almost ran out of sweets to give away. We were down to doling it out, one fun sized bar at a time.

It was a bit nerve racking. The children all looked to be very sweet in their Halloween outfits but who knows what tricks they might have had up their costumed sleeves!

Baby Bolero and Cuddle Wrap

2009-10-27T10:55:00.004-07:00

These days, it's not often that I manage to drum up a Finished Object to show and tell! However, in between my 'kitchen make-over' tasks this month, I did put together a little knit and sew present for a little girl who arrived safe and sound in September.

Here is a little bit of information about the two projects that compile this gift.

Baby Bolero

Pattern: Baby Bolero – One Skein - Leigh Radford
Yarn: Dyed Cotton – Blue Sky Alpacas - 100% Organic Cotton (purchased from Urban Yarns)
Yarn Comments: I used the recommended yarn and I found the Blue Sky Alpacas cotton really lovely and soft to work with. Forgetting how knitted cotton goes when it is wet, I gave the bolero pieces a good 'Soak' before I seamed them together. Although it was all fine when it dried, I did have an alarming moment when I felt that I was trying to pin out a droopy, loopy dishcloth. If I need to block anything made of this yarn again, I must remember to use the spray bottle, damp-block approach!

Pattern Comments: I did not modify the pattern but I did stray very slightly from the finishing instructions. I blocked the pieces before I put them together. Then I used a coordinating cotton sewing thread to seam the bolero as the garment is really small and yarn is comparatively bulky. I seamed the sleeves before I stitched them into the armholes (it just seemed to make more sense to do it that way). Also, I could only find 34 stitches, not 38, to pick up where instructed for the ribbed edging. This did not have any visible impact on the edge of the finished garment.

Now I have made this bolero before. I make it again because I remembered that it was a quick and easy knit. The instructions are clear and easy to follow and you can make it out of a single skein of Blue Sky Alpacas Dyed Cotton. This is how much yarn I had left over afterwards:

The only thing that I would bear in mind about this pattern, if you are considering making this bolero, is that the yarn weight is ever-so-slightly on the bulky side for such a small garment.

I found this when I made my first bolero. However, I put it down to my yarn substitution. Yet I struggled this time too. Although seaming with sewing thread did help, the seams were still a bit bulky. I think that this contributes to the garment pulling out of shape a little around the armholes. If you click here, I am hoping that the link take you to the Ravelry Bolero Projects page where, if you flick through a few pages, you will start to see the problem I mention in a number of project photographs.

Cuddle Wrap

Pattern: Improvised but based on a flannel cotton kit that I saw at The Cloth Shop
Materials: 1 metre of white cotton flannel; 1 metre of a quilting cotton in a fun print (purchased from The Cloth Shop); sewing and embroidery cottons
Techniques Employed: rotary cutting; piecing; top stitching; hand appliqué and embroidery

Comments: although this project was very simple, it is the first gift that I have made on my own without any input. It is not perfect by any means, but it still feels like a milestone. I do not think that I would have had the confidence to attempt this project without the input I have received this year from the sewing club and quilting class I have attended. Even if I had plucked up the courage to work on it without this input, I do not think that it would have turned out nearly so well.

Honestly - if you are thinking of getting to grips with your sewing machine but are not sure where to start then I do recommend that you see if there is some kind of a club or class in your area. Even if you are familiar with your sewing machine, it will mean that you tackle a small project once a month - if there is one thing that I have learned from my knitting it is that the more you do, the more you learn and the easier it becomes to get a good result. (Mostly!)

The second thing that I would like to mention is that the shape of this wrap was totally inspired by Knitter Bunny's Baby Chalice Blanket which did not receive a prize in her State Fair this year.

You see, the judges commented that her blanket was an odd size/shape for a baby blanket. Well, it was rectangular. Now, as the overall shape of most babies that I have met has been fairly cuboid (or rectangular parallelepiped, if you prefer), it seems to me that their general shape lends itself quite neatly to a rectangular shaped blanket. So I have made a rectangular one too!*

*Notes: of course, if the parents of my gift recipient complain about the shape of my gift, I will amend my ways and make square or round cuddle wraps in future!

Although both of these pieces are really simple, I am pleased with the way that they sort of complement each other and combine to make a complete gift. I like this idea and I think that I will look for more opportunities to do it again.

In the meantime, I hope that my gift recipient and her parents will enjoy their present. I have requested a photograph for my project files but, as I have still not received one yet for the pink cardigan that I dispatched earlier this year, I am not going to hold my breath!

The View From The Rear

2009-10-26T11:33:00.009-07:00

Yesterday, the alarm went off at a most unwelcome hour for a Sunday. I noticed that the Fella ignored it. Instead, he buried his head in his pillow and snuggled deeper into the duvet. If I am honest, he threw an arm around me and promptly went back to sleep.

I lay there for a bit and listened to a CBC radio programme (over the Fella breathing in my ear) - I heard one presenter commenting on how lovely the sunrise was and listened when the follow-up weather report forecast 10-15mm of rain, due shortly after sunrise.

I groaned and poked the Fella awake again, "We've got to get up. Rain is forecast - we'll need to take some wet weather gear."

His face was a picture of misery at the prospect of losing both his Sunday lie-in and going outside when it was due to tip down with rain - simply because I was determined to fulfil a promise to my sister. Now she lives in India at the moment and has probably forgotten what rain and 9 degrees Celsius (without wind chill factor) feels like.

Ok, my promise to my sister? To get off my backside and do some more exercise. My sister decided - in her infinite wisdom and after some googling - that participating in a 9.5km run around the Stanley Park Seawall would be the perfect way to kick-start my exercise programme.

In horror, I told her that I have never been able to run anything in my whole, wide life. She laughed (somewhat gleefully, I feel) and told me not to be so ridiculous. In the end, we compromised on me entering the 'walk' category...this year, at least. Plus I got a promise from her in return. If I do my walk; she has to fulfil a promise to me in India.

Now the problem for the Fella is that he tends to get roped into the things that I do. So if I am going to walk 9.5km on a Sunday morning in Stanley Park... then so is he. Hence the wretched expression on his face.

"Okay, tell you what," I said, "you make coffee; I'll make bacon sandwiches."

His face brightened and he rolled out of bed. I called out after him, "Although, in view of the occasion, I realise that I should probably give you a healthy bowl of cereal or a bowl of oatmeal."

He said something that I didn't catch but from the indignant tone, I think that it might have been something rude.

* * *

A short while later, the Fella sat at the dining table, one hand clamped around a hot mug of black coffee and the other gripping a substantial bacon sandwich. I was similarly equipped (albeit with a smaller portion).

Over our carefully considered pre-race breakfast, we discussed the improbable fact that we were up, dressed and about to take part in a 9.5km run (okay 9.5km walk). The improbability is probably summed up well by the fact that the Fella does not even own a pair of trainers, we have not done any practice walking and the fact that we are have this conversation while munching on bacon.

I can just tell that the Fella was really and truly trying to look on the bright side of being dragged outside on a cold, grey Sunday morning when he said, "Well....at least we aren't doing this for erectile dysfunction.*"

I reassured him that it is really only 9.5km; hardly a marathon. The expression on his face suggested that 9.5km may as well be 26 miles, as far as he was concerned.

*Notes: Film: Run Fat Boy Run

* * *

Now if you are any kind of serious runner, you will know that it is essential that you skip the bacon sandwiches and get yourself to a race venue early - at the sparrow's fart, preferably. Not just to avoid the intake of bad calories and do your pre-race warm up but also in order to park close to the race Start/Finish line. Otherwise you are just going to end up parking with the rest of us amateurs, quite some distance away and sad in the knowledge that you are likely to regret your tardy arrival later.

We were oblivious to this, of course. We simply rounded the last corner from our gentle 0.8km warm up walk from the car, saw the race registration tent and focused on the realisation that we had just arrived in a very strange land.

We were in the Land of the Enthusiastically Fit and Lithe. The land where lycra is your flattering friend and the toned body may run free. People were happy and excited; some were even in fancy dress. They were not hunched up against the cold, swaddled in raincoats like we were.

They had that happy glow of people who are familiar with, and happy to be, up early and about to do something that they love. There was even a DJ pumping out high energy versions of tracks like, "It Hurts So Good" while some competitors improvised warm-up routines that other runners were joining in with.

Now please excuse the expression but I cannot bring to mind a different one that would sum it up as well - we felt about as out of place and uncomfortable as a packet of sliced ham delivered wrongly to a bagel shop. Here is the picture that I snapped of the Fella, just after the majority of runners had left the Registration area to go to the Start Line:

When you look at this picture, you need to know that "The Eye of the Tiger" track was playing very loudly in the background. At this point, I think that I am just lucky that the Fella has not turned on his heel and headed back to the truck! As for me, I just started to giggle nervously.

Now this is the view ahead of us in the race line up, just before the start:

This is pretty much the same view, just after the start:

I would like to point out that this was about the last time that we saw the majority of these runners. Not only were we the last two people over the start line, we were walking. The only other participants visible in the distance ahead of us was a family group with young children.

As we left the start line and walked up the road, we became aware that we were being tailed by a woman on a bicycle (apologies that the picture is blurred). She peddled up to us and introduced herself as the race sweeper official:

The Fella voiced discomfort in my ear and asked why we hadn't just walked the Seawall on our own. To make matters worse, the cyclist was joined by a Transport Authority patrol vehicle (which looked like a police squad car, complete with emergency lights going) who wanted to reopen the roads.

After a bit, the patrol vehicle caught up with us and the official started to make small talk with us out of his passenger side window. First of all, observing our speed, he jokingly suggested that we cheat by taking a shortcut via the totem poles.

When we rejected that suggestion, impressed by our determination, he suggested that we seek to improve our efforts by joining his running group. It meets every Sunday morning at 08:30. This group, apparently, includes a lady of 76, who doesn't run when conditions are slippery.

We nodded like there was a cat's chance in hell of us taking him up on his offer and walked on, studiously trying to ignore him as he announced to other passer-bys and drivers that he had to escort us, the very last people in the race, safely off the roadway before he could open them back up to the general public. The Fella increased his speed, expressing discomfort and embarassment (through gritted teeth) at being followed by someone he kept referring to as 'the police'.

Plus under all this close scrutiny? It meant that he felt that he couldn't have a cigarette. Now if you know the Fella, you will realise that this is a serious, deal-breaking issue. It simply had not occurred to him that he might have to endure a 9.5km walk without a single cigarette. Luckily, we moved onto the Seawall footpath and lost the patrol car before he had a complete snit.

However, to his chagrin, we could not shake the woman on the bicycle. The poor love was doomed to spend the whole race peddling as slowly as she could behind us. In the end, she realised that she just could not peddle slowly enough without falling off her bike, so she tailed us the rest of the way on foot:

The Fella's mood worsened - her prescence eliminated any kind of cigarette stop. I noticed that his walk became very purposeful. To the point where I was almost jogging along beside him to keep up. After about 4km, I asked if he might consider slowing down a little.

He glanced over and said, "We cannot slow down. We are gaining on the kid."

There was a short silence while I digested this news. Then, "What kid?!" I asked, scanning the horizon.

"That one. The one with the fairy wings. We are gaining on them. I am not going to be beaten by a kid in a pair of fairy wings!"

Yup, one of the children in that little group ahead of us. After 4km, we had gained a few feet on the family group who had been ahead of us at the very start. Only a few feet, mind you. It seemed that in order to ignore his cigarette craving, the Fella had decided to focus on overtaking a child aged under 10 years old and adorned with fairy wings.

I thought that this might not be the best time to tell him that he was being ridiculous.

By this point the child had handed its wings over to a parent to carry. The race wore on and each time we crept a little bit closer to the family group ahead of us, I caught a glimpse of this little smile on the Fella's face:

In the end though, to his credit, the pace that he set us did mean that we eventually caught up with them. Mind you, it took us about 8km to do it.

Actually, I have to be honest and tell you that the real reason we overtook them is that they actually stopped in order to take photographs of each other at some rocks by the path:

However, the smile on the Fella's face was still like this after we passed them:

Hmm, not a man who can hide triumphant joy very easily - I must remind him never to play poker!

The family group had been joined by two male runners somewhere between the 5 and 6km markers (one of them is the tall person wearing black and a bright red wig). Basically, they had run the race, finished it and run back to find their families trailing behind them - just in order to accompany them back to the Finish line. At one point, the guy in the red wig even ran back to us and offered us some kind of 'Power Energy Bar' that they were giving out to runners at the end of the race.

We refused them on the basis that we were only doing the race in order to shed a few pounds. In truth, I think that we were more worried that if we consumed any runner chow that originated from the 'Land of the Enthusiastically Fit and Lithe', that might be it! There might not be no return to the 'Land of the Sofa Bound Slobs' that we know so well.

At long last, the Finish line came into view and I was not at all surprised when the male runners plus the children, picked up their pace to pound past us down the home stretch - after all, the Fella might not have wanted to be beaten by a kid in a pair of fairy wings but can you imagine how the kid might have felt about being beaten by some old guy who doesn't even own a pair of trainers?!

Our official race time? The timer above the Finish line said something like 1:54 as we crossed it. I promised my sister that I would try to complete the race in under 2 hours and we just about managed it. Here is a shot of the Finish line that I took after we had passed through and handed in our ChampionChip timers:

Our actual, personal times were 1:53 something. We came 946 and 947 out of 949 runners!

Ho hum. Well, race done, we stood there and looked at each other. The prize giving had long been held and most of the real runners had pushed off home. It was all a bit forlorn. It was probably at that point we realised that we still had to limp another 0.8km to the truck along Lost Lagoon.

It felt like a very long way. Mind you, it did provide the Fella with an opportunity to chain smoke a good number of cigarettes. The final part of our walk it was very peaceful - no race officials and no patrol cars. We came across a whole family of racoons and we made it back to the car just before it really started to pound down with rain.

When we got to the truck, I suggested a light lunch at Cardero's in honour of the race's Rear Guard Couple and I was rewarded with this tired but grateful smile:

Fella: I love you for being just so bloomin' supportive. Last night and this morning, we even discussed working a good long walk into our weekend routine, rain or shine. Yes please.

PS, Little sis'? I did mine - now it's your turn. I believe that we agreed on something that might be a stretch for you? Now, wasn't it something like a 10 mile/half marathon run?!

Autumn Colour & Positivity

2009-10-23T12:06:00.005-07:00

The rain seems to be settling in for its usual Autumn - Spring sojourn here in Vancouver but I have been nipping out between the raindrops to snap a few shots of Autumn colour before the rain strips the leaves from the trees and the plants all fade away for Winter.

While I enjoy all of the seasons, I have to admit that Spring and Autumn are my favourites. For me Autumn is all about colour, smells, rustle of leaves underfoot and the fact that it means that my birthday is on its way!

I have no idea whether it is apparent in my photographs but I have started two new classes this term: Design & Composition plus Macro Photography. This is part of an effort to keep my brain occupied and help me to stave off the rainy, low light induced dooms and glooms that swamped me out of nowhere last year. Also, I am also starting a new quilt class in North Vancouver next week and I am really looking forwards to it!

The other good news is that the Canadian High Commission in London is ready to issue my visa. So I am hoping that within another 6-8 weeks I will obtain Landed Immigrant status. Once I have that, I can start to look for work here. Not being allowed to work is the thing that has been really doing my head in over the past year. So I am looking forward to this situation changing. I just hope that I will be able to find something relevant and interesting to do.

The coffee-shop incident at the start of this month really did knock me for six. Sorry about that. Suffice it to say that I have not returned to the cafe. Although it is a shame (I was sort of settling into a knitting routine there), I do not think that I need any more well meant advice for the time being.

I am hoping that I will be able to share pictures of our kitchen project soon - we are just not quite there yet. If I turn my head to the right, I can see finishing panel clamped to unfinished cabinets. The reason for the delay is that the Fella (who is doing this bit) morphed into a Giant Human Biohazard this week and, having decided that he must have The Flu, spent the best part of two days on the sofa chugging back Ginger Ale, gummy bears and chocolate.

Luckily, 72 hours, some Contact 200 and a few boxes of tissues later, we have worked out that he's just had a cold (that he is pretty much over) so I have pushed him back out of the door to work! He did not take much urging, as he's realised that there is a very good reason that I do not ever bother to switch the TV on during the day!

Just when you were trying to convince yourself that you are okay...

2009-10-05T17:37:00.007-07:00

...some well-meaning stranger happens by and pricks your bubble with a very sharp pin.

I was sitting in a coffee shop today. Minding my own business, sipping a black coffee and working on a little time-out project. I was relaxed as the kitchen is ready for the plumber to come tomorrow morning to reconnect our water supply, the sun was shining and my little project was almost finished.

I dunno. I was sitting there amidst the other Monday afternoon locals, quietly reflecting that it has been a year since I arrived in Canada. I was thinking over the past year, all of the changes in my life (the good things; the not-so-good things; the indifferent things) and wondering whether I should put together an anniversary post about it.

An older lady, who spotted me knitting over my coffee on Friday, comes into the cafe and ambles over to me. She is friendly and, in her very limited English, she enquires after my project progress. We exchange a few words, she goes over to another table, sits down and drinks her coffee. I knit on.

As she is leaving, she comes over to me again. I think that she is going to say goodbye, so I look up. She has not come over to say goodbye, she has come over to impart some kindly, well-meant advice.

She stands over me in the middle of the cafe - in front of all its staff and customers - and she starts to gesticulate. She tugs at the front of her top and she tugs at my side, pulling on my jean belt loops.

She is speaking quite loudly in very bad English. To start with, I cannot make out her words. So she repeats them, in a louder and in a more agitated tone. "Looser, " I make out from her words. "Look better, y'know?"

She smiles and leaves. The other customers are looking at me. I can feel the embarrassment flaming on my cheeks.

Well, I already felt awkward and uncomfortable about my weight gain in Canada. I know that hardly any of my clothes fit. It is just that I have been trying to address it through a revised diet plan so that I shrink back into my clothes, rather than giving in and buying new ones.

Clearly, it is not working and I am pouring out of my clothes in such an unseemly way, that complete strangers feel compelled to let me know that I am making a public spectable of myself by wearing clothes that are clearly too small.

Happy arrival in Canada anniversary to me.

The Not-So-Domestic Way to Deal with Apples

2009-10-01T10:54:00.004-07:00

Take one mystery, dwarf apple tree laden with apples:

Then:

Have a cook-off competition with the Fella to see who can make the best apple pie. Notice that this opens a debate on the best kind of pie crust. Discover that you have opposing views. In his view, it should be riddled with lard. In your view, it should not. Neither of you win the competition as your respective pie crusts are virtually inedible. (But at least yours does not have lard in it.)
Ask around for tried and tested pie crust recipes and find out that people either use frozen pastry from the supermarket or follow the recipe on the back of their trusty packet of branded lard. Realise that the easiest way to close the debate and keep lard out of your diet, is to avoid the production of any more apple pies
As apple pie appears to be off the menu and half of your kitchen is sitting in your back yard due to the kitchen reno - try to give the apples away. Note very happily that about 5 big carrier bags of apples leave in this way. Review the situation and realise that the removal of these apples does not appear to have put much of a dent in the abundance of fruit still hanging from the tree. Permit yourself a sigh
Try to ignore the tree
When this fails, make 5 family sized cinnamon apple crumbles (apple crisps). Eat one, freeze one and give the rest away to family and friends
Notice that the apples have started to drop and are killing the grass as they rot away. Feel a twinge of guilt at the waste. Find yourself racing outside each morning to rescue the windfalls from the slugs
Start to pile the apples on the front doorstep as you have no more room inside the house. Try to analyse why you are doing this and give up - it is irrational as you have no time or room to process the fruit during the kitchen reno
Observe to yourself that the pile of windfalls outside your front door looks quite 'harvesty' and hope that people will knock on your door to ask if they might take some away to make pie. Funnily enough, no one knocks

Compulsively, you continue to collect and stockpile the apples each morning. At least this is saving the grass under the tree. However, the pile of apples outside your door starts to get out of hand. If you were going to be honest with yourself, you would need to admit that it looks very much like a trip hazard and a serious apple disposal problem
Continue piling the apples and notice that you have started to grade them as follows:
- Top step: Apple Pie/Crumble Filling;
- Middle Step: Apple Chutney;
- Bottom Step: Apple Sauce; and
- Ground: Ones you would rather not use, like these:
Bizarrely enough, succumb to the mental pressure of the apples piled on your doorstep. When the Fella vanishes into his workshop to saw bits off some vital part of the kitchen, rush outside and bring in armfuls of apples. Peel a sink full of apples and make 6 lemon apple crumbles as you listen to the sound of enthusiastic sawing and drilling coming from the bottom of the garden. Freeze 3 down and give 3 away. Peel another sink full of apples and make a batch of cinnamon apple sauce for pancakes. Freeze it down too. Wonder, with a certain amount of concern, if you have started to turn into a Stepford Wife
Lost in your obsession, peel another sink load of apples when the Fella goes out to work the next day. Dig out a large pot and make chutney from this very easy to follow Apple Chutney recipe that you find on the internet
During this process, pop outside and review apples left on doorstep. In fact, take pictures of them from different angles and feel slightly weird about your apple mania
Phone your mum 8 time zones away to check how she sterilises jars and makes her chutney jars airtight. Realise that you do not have any greaseproof or parchment paper - so proceed without it, hoping for the best

Feel ridiculously proud of your efforts and take photos because the stuff inside your 12 x 250ml jars, actually does look like chutney!
Don't stop there though. While you are on a roll, peel a few more apples and use this Caramel Apple Upside Down Cake recipe to make two apple pan cakes which turn out to be delicious either hot or cold. (One eaten, the other given away.)
At this point, the Fella gets home. Recluctantly, allow him to prise the apple peeler out of your hand, lead you out of the kitchen and hand you a glass of wine. Express worry about the apples still sitting on the front doorstep. Allow him to tell you that it does not matter, that you have done enough and let him reassure you that he will have the tree professionally pruned this year, so it will not fruit next year. Spend the evening pretending that the apples left on the doorstep are not drilling a hole in your brain
The next day, when no one is looking, swoop every apple that you can find into the garden waste bin. Feel the apple burden lift and heave an enormous sigh of relief!

The End.

The Uplifting Power of the Cosmos

2009-09-26T18:48:00.010-07:00

This year the garden and I have played a waiting game.

I have waited for plants to make an appearance so that I could see what is planted where (front and back gardens). While the garden has waited for me to give up hope and leave it to its own devices so that it can continue its quiet return to the wilderness.

Bind weed, dendelions, brambles and the rain forest are all battling me very earnestly for custody of our outdoor space. The wilderness wants the garden back. It feels to me that for every weed I have beaten back, pulled, chopped, plucked or dug out, another five have grown in their place. We even have our very own, very nicely established (thank-you-very-much) cedar nurse log, right up against the house.

I guess that it did not help that I vanished off to the UK for about 6 weeks. When I got back I found that all of the beds I had diligently cleared, dug over and removed root systems from in May and June (I meant to put down weed suppressor membrane but I ran out of time) were green again. All choked with bindweed, brambles and something that the Fella tells me is 4 Leaf but has puny flowers that look oddly like Cows Parsley to me.

The only truly uplifting evidence that my efforts were not entirely in vain were two things that I planted from seed this year: grass and three packets of cosmos seeds that I bought when I went to explore a Garden Centre with Dotty.

They both grew - I feel very proud. (Can you tell?!)

So in the middle of all the chaos created by a legion of very hardy and very determined weeds, is a small oasis of colour created by the Cosmos and a patch of green that doesn't have our neighbours frothing at their lips in despair and hacking at our property borders to keep the ruin of weeds contained on our plot.

I am not complacent though, I realise that I have a long struggle ahead.

However, I am hoping that my efforts this year have given some of the garden's longer term, but struggling to survive, inhabitants a little bit of hope.

I have a very long garden To-Do list over the Autumn and Winter. So just hold on, my lovelies, hold on - next year I promise you that you will have more room to breathe and a little less competition for sunlight!

(Although I doubt that our garden will ever be in the running for Vancouver Garden of the Year, nor will our grass ever have the astro turf appearance of our neighbours' lawns!)

Aw (please feel free to insert your own rude word here)

2009-09-25T16:12:00.008-07:00

Do you ever get the feeling that some projects are just a little bit jinxed? I am beginning to wonder if I should re-title the 'Argyle Lace Hat' referred to in this post to the 'Ill Fated Hat'?

Although I realise that I should not write in this way about this gift because I believe that the recipient is very sensitive about this type of thing and takes it very seriously. If she ever caught wind of the fact that I feel this way about her long overdue present? It is very unlikely to grace her head when it is finished.

Mind you, when you consider that her head is about two inches smaller in diameter than mine and right now, it looks like this on me:

I cannot ever see her wearing it anyway.

Bother, bother, botheration.

Right now, I should be 3 rows away from the cast off. This blooming thing should almost be ready for me to jab a fork triumphantly into its well-cooked rump. I was feeling quite good about finishing it as I have not enjoyed working this hat very much (not the pattern's fault).

So, as far as I was concerned, the end was in sight, the project was almost over and my promise to make a hat was almost fulfilled. I even pulled some different yarn from a shelf earlier thinking through something that I want to make for someone quite special - except, I cannot do that yet now. I feel thwarted.

For, as you can see for yourselves in the picture above, I have clearly made a mistake.

It is one of those big-fat-obvious-clanging-right-there-in-front-of-your-face mistakes that I managed not to see. For an entire 18 rounds (despite reading and following the same flipping sentence 9 times). Yep.

It seems that an '*' just in front of a SSK instruction on the crown was in my blind spot. As a result, I have about 78 stitches on my needles when I should have about 28. Plus the overall size of the hat is closer to a potato sack than a hat.

Nope, there is no excuse for my error. Yes, I did wonder why I was running high on stitches and dangerously low on yarn when I sat down today to make a concerted effort to finish this fluffy pink marshmallow and get it off my conscience. Grump - talk about more haste, less speed.

Okay, I need to take back about this much:

It's taken me 16th August - date to do this crown. Slow, I know. It is at times like this that I wish that I put in a few lifelines. Such a simple thing to do. However, I did not and I am not confident that I could thread one accurately now.

I dare not rip without one, so I guess that I will have to tink - it is going to be a slow process. I hate undoing work as it feels like I am also undoing all those little bits of life that I set aside to work on my knitting in the first place.

Oh Bah Humbug. Okay, hat vent off my chest - I am off to unknit painfully on circular needles.

PS: in other news: apple tree fruit either dispersed or processed and kitchen reno is ongoing (pictures of both to follow when I can catch a proper breather).

On Sunday we switch off the water supply to the kitchen and tackle 'the other side'. The water will be switched back on (assuming no hiccups and that we work to plan) when the plumber comes back to finish off on Tuesday 6th October.

Yes, that is 10 days without running water, sink or much work top in the kitchen.
Yes, Tuesday 6th October is the Tuesday before Canadian Thanksgiving.

So yes, if the project slips we will be without a kitchen over the Thanksgiving weekend. Hmm, do you think that the Fella's family will mind prepackaged picnic finger food on disposable plates?!

Summer Knitting – Quick Cowl/Gaiter/Neck Warmer

2009-09-16T13:42:00.007-07:00

It probably will not have escaped you that my interest in knitting seems to have faltered a bit during my sojourn in Canada. I have noticed it too. Pondering this, I was curious to find out whether my inclination to knit might reappear upon my return to the UK. So, I packed two travel knitting projects to take with me to the UK and, strangely enough, my interest in knitting did return while I was there.

Actually, it started on the plane somewhere over the Atlantic. In the last hours of my flight, I found myself reaching for my knitting and my i-Pod. I started to work on the back of a small toddler vest, which I will share when the project is finished and dispatched to its gift recipient in the UK.

However, it really started when I was back in London and over my jetlag. I found myself waiting to catch a train. I boarded, sat down and before I had realised what I was doing, my project bag was out, neatly clipped to the seat in front of me and I was thumbing over an error that I had made on a halted sport-weight hat project in Vancouver. I continued to work on it whenever I was travelling and during my return flight to Vancouver. Again, I will share this project when it is finished as I still have the crown to complete.

Then, during a visit to my mother in Hereford, I helped out at her gallery during a 3 day yarn sale. As it happened, there were some lonely looking balls in a box that looked like they were being overlooked. As two balls had lost their labels, I asked my mother if I could use them to whip up a little something to give people a project idea for the yarn. This was the result:

A little cowl, gaiter or neck warmer (as you prefer) that was inspired by the Knit.1 Gaiters that I made a year or so ago.

Project Statistics

Yarn: 2 Balls of Adriafil Charme
Duration to Knit: 3 hours or so (by a medium-slow knitter)
Worked: The Small Gallery, Hereford
Pattern: My own but inspired by a 2007 Knit.1 Cabled Cowl (Gaiter)

A very efficient knit as this was all the yarn that I had left over at the end:

It is quite a funky little number. Although the yarn does not stand out when you walk into my mother's gallery (it is tricky for it to compete with all the lovely hand-dyes that she stocks), it was perfect for this project. It gave the cable good definition plus it was soft and extremely cosy. In fact, I could wear it against my skin – a small miracle!

I was almost sad to leave it on display in my mother's gallery window. Although I did write up the pattern for my mother so I guess that I could make another one! Except...

...I am home again now and my interest seems to be leaching quietly away again. I am a bit worried about it as I enjoyed my knitting over the summer. I have even been avoiding my local knit night over the last few weeks. I am trying to hold onto my interest long enough to finish the hat and the toddler vest but at this rate? I think that it is going to be a stretch.

My observation is that public transport and progress on my projects seem to be very strongly linked. You know how there are results knitters (knit to obtain the finished object) and process knitters (knit for the love of doing it)? Well, I think that I might be a 'situational knitter'.

Without a commute, my knitting rarely makes it out of its project bag. My head doesn't seem to be able to conscience sitting and knitting as a standalone activity in its own right. Not at home and not at the studio either (interestingly enough). While I can just about spin, I have never been able to knit and watch TV successfully. I cannot do it in just the same way that I cannot iron clothes and watch TV at the same time either.

As a result, unless I can find a way to overcome this problem (open to ideas that do not involve me setting up camp on the new Canada Line train carriage for two hours each day), it might be the case that knitting may only make an occasional appearance on this blog until I have obtained residency status and I am allowed to work in Canada.

Assuming no problems, I am hoping that this will only take another 3-5 months and that I will be able to find a job here. Clearly, from a knitting perspective, I have my fingers crossed that I will be able to find a role in a location that gives me a logical Public Transport commute!

Moving on from the Quilting Quandary

2009-09-15T15:56:00.004-07:00

Thank you for your comments on my previous post - they are good reinforcement on why it is good to seek out other opinions and points of view. Actually, I am looking forwards to getting this piece of work finished now. I would like to start something else that I feel a bit fresher about. With this in mind, this post is to outline what I have been working on to move my quilt along.

The basic premise for my design/headspace idea is this:

Air & Flying Birds Portion of Quilt

Headspace: I have thought long and hard about it. On the proviso that I work in some kind of positive counter-balance, I think that it is okay for my birds to be swooping off and up into the air towards the UK. After all, that is where my family and many of my friends are.

Design: I would like to try to keep the obvious, visual movement going from left to right as well as up and away in my quilt. From a techniques perspective, I would still like to include appliqué in my project. To achieve this, I have been toying with extending my triangular flying birds out into the border as appliqué shapes. A bit like they are an extension of the flock formations within the centre, like so:

I played with a number of different layouts. This positioning won the day as it leaves the bottom left corner empty. In effect, I can place my land anchor and design counter-balance here. Either an appliqué shape or a stitched-in quilt motif.

In terms of quilting the rest of the top and right hand 'Air' borders, I am not certain what pattern would best link the appliqué triangles together. My thoughts so far are that I either:

echo the flying bird theme along the top and right borders so that the appliqué triangles are linked by a set of quilted triangles, or

try to see if I can find a softer quilt pattern motif, perhaps something more random and airy to link them together?

What do you think? I have looked but not found anything on the web - is there some kind of symbol or hieroglyph for air that I could develop into a stitch pattern? Does anyone have any suggestions on where to look?

Land Portion of Quilt

Design: I think that the quilt needs some kind of anchor in the bottom left hand corner to counter-balance the top right movement of the flying birds. For a while, I toyed with the idea of placing something figurative in the bottom left corner, for example:

However, adding something this figurative into the mix didn't work for me. Also, I worried that my little bird might appear a little wistful, watching the migratory birds flying away. He has been consigned to my studio wall to wait for a different opportunity to come into his own. So I went back to my overall concept and thought about the headspace aspect of my quilt.

Headspace: right now, what feels like it is missing from my quilt is my positive reason for being in Canada. Without any question, this is 100% the Fella and the Kid. Awww! Okay, it is a bit obvious but I have done some research, thumbed through some quilt pattern books and this motif caught my eye:

It is a True Lover's Knot quilt motif and it is sometimes found in traditional wedding quilts. As my relationship is my anchor to Canada, I think this might be a good motif to use in my quilt, perhaps positioned something like this:

My challenge is deciding what to place with it along the left and bottom borders. I am looking for something that that relates to land or sea that I can transition over to the top and right 'Air' borders. Maybe if there is some kind of hieroglyph for air, maybe there is one for earth or sea that I could use too?

Nothing like a challenge*, eh?!

Notes

*Especially a challenge where you are concurrently performing a small kitchen reno and have half a 1950s vintage (not in a good way) kitchen sitting in the back yard waiting to go to the dump and a bunch of unfinished Ikea kitchen cabinets half screwed into your kitchen.

Next step: we have to tackle the kitchen sink. Now drainpipes are usually (always?) on the outside of houses in the UK. I am told that this is not the case in Canadian houses. This may explain my horrified shock (and the Fella's corresponding lack of shock) at finding a dirty great 4" iron drainpipe running down the wall in the corner of our kitchen.

Nice. Just what one needs in a very small kitchen, eh?!

Quilting Quandary – Part 2

2009-09-01T15:43:00.004-07:00

Design Problem

As I mentioned briefly in my last post, my appliqué design is comprised of a ¼" vine that snakes around the border of my quilt. The vine is decorated with 85 curvy flower and leaf shapes. It's a very lovely border design, by the way - I just do not think that it is working in the specific case of my quilt.

The best way for me to explain why I do not think that the border works in the case of my quilt is to show you the pictures that I took while I was working on pinning the vine:

Yup, I pinned that fabric vine very carefully and very badly to my quilt top at least 5 times. I did not take a photograph of my first effort; it was just too embarassing bad. It took me hours and hours, over the course of about three days to do all that pinning. Each time, I would spend ages staring dubiously at the result before sighing and taking the vine off again.

After my 5^th attempt or so (just in case I was suffering from a temporary bout of snaking vine sickness) I left the vine pinned to the quilt top for two days without the blue masking tape guides, while I worked on something else. Y'know, just to see if that improved how I felt about it:

In the end though, I just had to fall on my sword and admit that the vine was not working for me. I took it off and tried not to wince about all of those hours of fruitless pinning. Why wasn't it working for me? Well, I just felt that:

the border was fighting for attention with the centre of the quilt - my eye was not sure whether to look at the centre of the quilt or at the border; and
the curves of the snaking vine were at odds with the strong geometry of the quilt centre. For me, they were interrupting the very strong left to right and bottom to top movement of my flying birds. I quite like that movement.

Now, these problems are not apparent at all in the original design of the quilt. In fact, I am willing to bet that when I get to class on the 18th September, I will see other people's snaking vines on their quilt tops, they will be utterly gorgeous and I will feel as sick as a parrot for not perservering with my own!

I am wondering if they are troubling me on my quilt because I have strong colour contrasts in my blocks and quite strong colours in my appliqué shapes?

Perhaps if I had chosen a more subtle colour combination, I would not have tripped over this problem?

Perhaps the geometric centre would have faded a little more into the background and allowed the curvaceous border skip happily around the edges?

Headspace Problem

When I started work on this quilt I was feeling very homesick. I know that I have worked this into my quilt.

Pretty much from the outset, I knew that I wanted to hang this quilt on the North facing wall of my studio, between my two studio windows. So I added three blocks to the bottom of my quilt to extend it from being a 9 block quilt to a 12 block quilt. This means that the centre of my quilt has the same number of blocks as the panes of glass in my studio windows.

When I put my blocks together, I oriented them so that my flying birds would point North East. This happens to be the aeroplane flight path from Western Canada back to the UK.

When I was working on my quilt before I went home for the summer, I did not see this as being negative. I was really looking forwards to seeing all of my friends and family. I really wanted to get on a plane and follow my bird blocks North East. However, now that I am back, I keep looking at my quilt and I see the homesickness that I stitched into the centre of it.

This is bothering me a bit. Rather than frame and prettify my statement of homesickness with a lovely, curvy, flowery, hand stitched vine, I would like to work on my quilt so that it makes a more positive and balanced statement.

Do you know? I think that without the headspace problem, I might have battled on with the original border design. However, the fact that I am struggling with it from this perspective as well has lent a bit of weight to abandoning it and attempting something else.

With this in mind, I have been playing with some ideas that I'd like to share. I think that the opportunity to address the above lies in adjusting my border design and selecting appropriate patterns to stitch together the layers of my quilt.

Also, in view of the fact that it is now the 1st September, I am hoping that my alternative appliqué border idea will be a little less daunting and a bit more possible for a ham fisted hand sewer to achieve - at least I hope so!

Quilting Quandary - Part 1

2009-08-31T11:03:00.005-07:00

Since my return to Canada, I have been battling a small quilting quandary.

Remember my Flying Birds quilt?

My next class is on the 18^th September and in preparation for this session, I am supposed to appliqué the 5" borders around my quilt with a snaking vine, leaf and flower design (using the hand or machine technique of my choice).

First of all, here's a quick word about me and appliqué:

1) I have not attempted to do this before, so I am not feeling very confident (even though I attended a 3 hour class that showed me how to do it)

2) I am extremely unskilled and slow at hand sewing. In fact, I suspect that my skills only rate marginally higher than the hand sewing ability of an animal without opposable thumbs.

The second point becomes a more concrete problem when you consider that my overall quilt top is 37.5" x 48" and you take into account the fact that I preferred our tutor's hand sewn sample over the machine stitched ones produced during our last class.

To start with (in June), I was a bit worried that I might be trying to bite off more than I could chew. So, in order to give myself the best chance of success, I took my fabric and sewing notions with me to the UK in June. I hoped to get a head start and baste all of my appliqué shapes while I was away.

Did I manage it? Nope. True to form (and every previous summer break when I have packed several knitting projects and not ever picked up my needles), I returned to Canada without even unfolding the fabric. Yet as soon as I stepped back through our Canadian front door in mid August, the 18^th September deadline started to prick my conscience.

So I duly took off to my studio and, to help me decide whether to blunder on with the hand sewing idea or give in and resort to using my machine, I produced my own appliqué test:

Even though my hand sewing was not great, I was still drawn to the hand sewn blind hem stitch. Okay, so far so good. I had my design, I had done a test and selected a hand sewn stitch. I just needed to get on with it.

So I did. Or at least, I tried. Honestly, I did. However, I came unstuck. I think that I must have suffered a quilting epiphany. It poleaxed me, it did - right at the time, that I needed to be hand sewing a snaking vine and 85 curvy leaf and vine shapes to my blooming quilt (at about the speed of light).

What was my epiphany? Well, it seems that making a quilt is much more of a journey (both in terms of design and head space) than it is a straightforward 'make as instructed' project.

Yep, really. As a result, I have got bogged down and progress has ground to a halt while I try to work out how to move forwards. Not good when you consider that my September class gets closer with every passing hour!

In short, this is what I have come up against:

Design - I was not comfortable with the way that the border design worked visually with the centre of my quilt, after I pinned on the snaking vine
Headspace - my head is in a different and more positive place than when it was when I started working on this quilt. I would like to incorporate something that balances the meaning I managed to sew into this quilt before I went away on holiday.

Bear with me, I do realise that this may take some explaining.

Addressing the Silence

2009-08-31T10:32:00.002-07:00

Despite the fact that I am now home (i.e. reconnected to electricity and the internet), I realise that I have been holding myself back from blogging because I have not 'done' the blessing post. I like to present things here as logically and sequentially as possible. As a result, it sort of feels wrong to blog anything else until that has been done - does anyone else suffer from this self-imposed problem?!

However, I realise that I need to get over myself. As I have things to blog that cannot wait for me to sift through and sort out the 2000 or so pictures (4000 image files) that I took while I was in the UK.

Actually, if I am honest, all I have managed to do since my return home is back up my files to an external hard drive - that's it.

Mind you, I do not have very many photos from the 4^th July (a bit tricky to wield a DSLR when you are trying to avoid being smothered by a mountain of non-breathable, white plastic fabric). As a result, I put a call out for photos to all our guests after the blessing so that I could fill the gaps in my image set. Although some have arrived (thank you!), others are still promised. So additionally, I sort of feel that I need to wait to see what photos I receive from our guests, so that I can put a complete blog post together?

In the meantime? Onwards with something else - I think I need some input on a project that I am working on (and am struggling with a bit)!

Life in the Basic Lane

2009-08-06T02:21:00.002-07:00

I have spent the last six weeks or so staying in a place that does not have any running water, electricity and is about 100 yards from the nearest Ablution Block. I am not complaining by the way, it is waterproof, it does have gas and it does have a few battery powered garden lights. However, when I am staying here? My life becomes quite basic.

Suddenly, the need for power to use a laptop or finding somewhere that has access to the internet is a lot lower down my list of must-haves than a hot steaming cup or tea or coffee!

Instead of planning blog posts, I simply harbour the occasional aspiration to sleep through the night without needing to get up and visit the Ablution Block. This is not the best trek in the middle of the night, particularly if it is pouring down with rain. The Ablution Block is not the most salubrious midnight destination either, it has grimy cement floors, aging curtains, bright neon strip lighting plus a full complement of local moths and biting insects.

So mainly, the most pressing thing on my mind everyday (after working out how to obtain a hot beverage and spend the minimum amount of time in the Ablution Block) is where to find some electricity to charge my mobile phone so that I can sort of stay in contact with the outside world.

Like I said, it is a fairly basic life! So please bear with me - I think that I am due to travel back to Canada next week (I really should check my ticket).

Once I am back, I will go through some of the photos from my trip to see what I can put together about our wedding blessing and the rest of my trip to the UK!

Home!

2009-06-30T14:10:00.004-07:00

I'm home, I'm extraordinarily happy to be here...

...other than the discovery that I left the UK a Size 12 and returned nine months later a whopping Size 18. I am about 2.5 stones heavier - who knew that the body could expand at such a rate? (Back on the Diet Dust.)

As a result (I look like a sack of potatoes in everything that Monsoon, Coast and Phase 8 have to offer), I will be standing in front of 120 or so people in four days time in the white plastic dress of nastiness.

As soon as the blessing is over, I will whip off my very own sea of white polyster and slip into a dress that has been cast off by my younger sister as she's worn it to about 3 other weddings in the past year. It even has a cigarette burn on the skirt that I need to put a stitch in. Classy to the end, eh?!

As soon as I am not drowning in place cards, playlists and all sorts of other admin, I will surface with pictures.

In the meantime - wish us both luck?!

Sewing Mojo - 1; Knitting Mojo - 0

2009-06-19T14:09:00.007-07:00

Instead of packing this morning, I found myself on a bus headed towards W10th Avenue.

Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that I was headed to Urban Yarns. Y'know, a last minute run for something I need for one of my travel or summer holiday projects. Well...

...it was a last minute run but I was headed to The Cloth Shop (almost next door to Urban Yarns) as I needed some last minute sewing supplies for my Flying Birds quilt project:

Now I know where I stand with knitting needles on aeroplanes but where on earth do I stand on a few fine sewing needles, thread and one of those Clover pendant style thread cutters, which I was thinking of attaching to my keyring? Does anyone know? Or should I forget the thread cutter and use my teeth?!

By the end of my quilt class last night, I realised that if there is any chance of having my applique done by the time we have our next class in mid September (when we will learn how to baste and machine quilt), then I need to take my fabrics and freezer paper on holiday with me - I need to baste 85 pieces of fabric, ready to sew onto my quilt top when I get back.

I discovered during our class that the iron-on, freezer paper method does not work as well as traditional basting. It also became obvious that the neatest result is hand applique, rather than machine applique.

Now, that is all very well but the thing is - I am awful at hand sewing. Oh and did I mention very slow at it?! The idea of hand stitching a 1/4" vine stem around the edge of my quilt and adorning it with 85 fabric flower pieces is extremely daunting - I do not mind giving it a go but I am worried that I am biting off more than I can chew!

If it is apparent that my hand stitching quality and speed is not up to it, I will have to switch over to machine applique. Mind you, machine applique looked like it takes some skill to get right too.

Now, if you are wondering why the fabric in the image above bears no resemblance to the fabric that I showed you for my applique a little while ago...

...well, when I got to W10th, I found that The Cloth Shop was having its annual Longest Days of the Year sale. I decided to ignore discounts being offered on regular fabric as I already have two big projects on the go. Instead, I opted to rummage through two tables of fabric scraps that were being sold by weight. The above is 2lbs of fabric scraps in co-ordinating warm creams and browns that I got for CAD$10. The scraps are all different shapes and sizes.

I am hoping that there is enough here for some kind of small holiday foundation or paper piecing project that I was thinking I might pack to take with me. Just in order to practice some hand sewing while I am away. Just in preparation for the huge hand sewing applique task that awaits me when I get back.

Yeah, I know:

Knitting Mojo - 0; Sewing Mojo - 1!

Right, off to pack!

P.S. I might pack a couple of knitting projects as a back up. Just in case I get to the UK and find that I am swallowed alive with the urge to knit as soon as I place a toe back on British soil.

P.P.S. I have been so homesick it is untrue. I am very grateful to all the lovely people I have met in Vancouver who have extended me their friendship and been keeping me sane over the past nine months. I hope that they do not think me ungrateful as I will miss them over the summer but I am just very excited about the idea of going home for a bit to see my family and friends in the UK.

P.P.P.S. I plan to have a cup of tea, eat a proper bacon sandwich and go for a brain-balancing stroll around a familiar supermarket before I go see my diet dust counsellor in order to get my weight back under control. So if you catch up with me in London, the chances are that it will be for a coffee or a fizzy water!

P.P.P.P.S. I plan to collect all my sports kit together and start practising for the GB Open. I have not been able to do any training in Canada at all so I am very conscious how far behind I must be. My peers have been competing in earnest since February/March and many of them travelled abroad to a Championship in South Africa at Easter. In fact, I had to step out of my home nation's Commonwealth Games Trials earlier this year as I am not in the UK to participate in them. That hurt a lot.

P.P.P.P.P.S. I plan to talk to people without hestitating in case I say something that might be considered a faux pas or in case it sparks a reaction (not a reaction to what I have said, a reaction to the way in which I have expressed myself) i.e. used a British colloqualism, pronounced a word differently or just because my accent is odd (to them).

Please don't mind me when I write this - I am just homesick. In general, I am glad that people are interested enough plus feel comfortable enough with me to highlight and discuss language, pronounciation and accent differences.

It is just that I have had nine months of being the odd person out. The novelty does wear off. I just want to get on a plane, go home and be exactly the same as everyone else around me.

In particular, I want to be able to hear a London or a British accent in a shop without having to quell a serious urge to hunt the speaker down - just so that I can speak to them. Just because they have the same accent as me. Ridiculous but true!

Intermediate Photography Slideshows

2009-06-17T16:45:00.007-07:00

I have been flat out over the past 2-3 weeks, trying to get assignments in for both my Intermediate Photography course and my Introduction to Photoshop course.

It's been a period of time where my enjoyment of photography has been stretched very thinly and the Fella winces every time I point my camera lens in his direction - poor thing.

This course was far more technical than my first course and as a result, my output is a whole load drier. While we did have two field trips, we spent the majority of the time being shown different lighting techniques in the studio.

Now, if you are having an extremely slow day at work or you just wish to really punish yourself for something, please click here as I have just the slideshow for you:

Intermediate Photography - Full Slideshow - this slideshow contains selected output from all of my class assignments - still life, quality of light exercises etc. If you click this, please note that I accept no responsibility for any damage that may occur when your brain decides to lose the will to live and your body makes sudden, unexpected contact with any kind of object!

If you are shorter on time or you wish to remain conscious, then you might prefer one or both of these slideshows:

People Slideshow - this contains a selection of studio portraits from my class assignments. The people in the pictures are all models provided by the school. I think that it is easy to see from my images which models I gelled with most easily. So, if this is something that I would like to do more of in the future, then that is something that I will need to overcome. That said, I learned such a lot on this course and I do think that my images show progression.

Field Trips Slideshow - this contains my top picks from our two field trips. The first one was a walk around Chinatown and the Strathcona neighbourhood in Vancouver. The second was a walk around the Granville Island area at night.

In addition, I did a final term project. I took portraits of three volunteers in a studio and outside, in natural light. However, I do not want to post any images from this piece of work until I have shared it with my models first. I need to check that they would be alright with me letting other people see their images. This might not be until I am back from the UK later this summer.

Lantern Lighting Invitations

2009-06-17T11:35:00.004-07:00

Last night, we started to send out invitations to the friends that we are inviting to our blessing and a lantern lighting, later in the evening. They are not all out yet but I do feel a bit happier today (I was starting to feel a bit panicky).

What is this all about? Well, in order to help resolve the problem of who to invite to our wedding blessing celebration, we decided to split our event into three discrete sections:

blessing
meal
lantern lighting.

As our venue is quite small and can only seat 70 for a meal, despite having lots of outdoors space, we decided to draw a circle around family and the friends who fall into an exception category for one reason or another. We have invited these people to the full event. The invitations (with one goof on my part that I have uncovered so far and addressed with a friend who got placed into the wrong pile) went out a little while ago.

We introduced the lantern lighting to give us a focal point for later in the evening. We are thinking of using the sort of lanterns available from this website (although we might not order them from there).

The idea is that we hold the blessing with all of our guests. Then we have dinner with the guests who are coming to the meal and once this is cleared away, we break up the tables in readiness for the remainder of our guests to arrive. We are breaking up the tables in the hope that it will be easier for everyone to mingle and our new arrivals will not be greeted by people sat amongst their dinner debris.

When all of our guests have arrived, we plan to have a quick toast, light some lanterns and socialise with everyone!

The friends that we are inviting to the blessing and the lantern lighting are those we know through our sport. We have so many sporting friends that it would be impossible to invite them all to our meal. (In fact, we still cannot invite everyone otherwise we will overload our venue.)

We are relying on the fact that our sporting friends, who know the place that we are having our blessing, will understand our capacity predicament, are very capable of looking after themselves and will be happy to socialise with us afterwards when they arrive for the lantern lighting.

It is not a perfect solution but we are doing our best to include as many people as we can without it becoming a complete circus. Fingers crossed.

Knitting, Spinning & Flying Birds Quilt Update 3

2009-06-04T08:25:00.005-07:00

Blogging is a bit sporadic at the moment as I am doing admin for our Wedding celebration event, I am in countdown mode for our trip to the UK and I am coming to the end of two of courses: Intermediate Photography and Introduction to Photoshop. I have assignments and projects due very shortly and no, I am not ready to hand them all in!

That said, I am trying to make a little time, now and then, for other things. For example, on my needles is some of my Autumn in Spring handspun twinned with some Cascade Superwash:

This is destined to become a little tank top for a little boy who will be in the 9 - 12 months bracket this autumn. Mind you, at the rate that I am knitting (albeit that this yarn is aran weight) it might take me that long to knit this up as I am still only on the swatch!

Also, on my wheel is some merino fibre from the Yarn Sprout:

The merino is much more tricksy to spin than the fibre I was working with before. It is very soft, it has a much shorter staple, seems to need quite a bit of twist and it doesn't seem to 'grab' as much. So when it breaks, it is not all that easy to join new fibre back in. I have made more progress since this shot was taken and I think that I am about halfway through now?

Being fed through my sewing machine is my Flying Birds quilt:

I think that it is going to be there for some time yet! We started to put borders onto our quilts last Thursday but we did not get any further. (Actually, it took me another whole afternoon to finish putting my borders on!) As a result, our class homework is to create all of the appliqué shapes that we need in time for our next class. Here is a close up of the fabrics:

Okay - onwards, upwards and all that. No time to rest. As...

...just because it seems that the last thing I need right now is any other sort of task, project, WIP or UFO, I have found myself signed up for a two day quilt workshop.

Apparently, I will cut, piece, baste, quilt and finish an entire quilt in two days (Friday and Saturday). If I were to point out to you that it took me an entire day to iron all of the fabrics for this project (some 32 or so fat quarters worth of fabric), how likely do you think it is that I will actually manage this feat?!

Nope, me either.

Flying Birds Quilt Update – Part Two

2009-05-27T13:33:00.004-07:00

Just for my own learning record, I would like to pick out a few of the key learning points for me so far from my quilt classes. Just as a memory trigger. They all concern how to do the following in an accurate manner:

prepare fabric and check that its grain is sitting naturally/ straight before it is cut

cut fabric using a rotary cutter and mat (plus when best to cut the fabrics that you need)

piece fabric (individual and groups of blocks)

do and don'ts of handling fabrics during piecing

folding seams during piecing to prevent clunky seam overlaps underneath the quilt top.

While seam folding is an integral part of piecing, I have separated it out because I'd like to focus on it for a minute. This is one of the learning points that I really do not want to lose (in terms of working out how to approach seams on completely different blocks in the future). While I expected there to be a whole lot to learn on this course, I had no idea how important something as simple as seam folding would be.

I know. You will just have to humour me here. This quilting thing? It is seriously bringing out the ~~neat freak~~ attention to detail in me.

Thinking back, I remember admiring the back of the sample quilt top before I started this class. There was just something about how all of the seams seemed to dovetail together and the how flat the quilt top was that I really liked.

At the time, I did not think for a moment that the back of my quilt top would look anything like the sample. To be honest, I just hoped that the front of my quilt top would look okay. I had no idea that I could ever produce something that looks (almost) as neat and tidy on the back as it does on the front:

The reason for showing you my quilt back is to show you what I mean about how the seams are folded - as an future aide memoire to myself, really. Here is a close up of one of my blocks, marked up with arrows:

Key
Small arrows - half triangle square seam direction
Larger arrows – block building seams
Red – Row 1
Blue – Row 2
Yellow – Seams between rows
Green – Upper to lower triangle seam

Why show you this? Well, in the top triangle there are a whole load of seams that could overlap in the centre of the flying birds (the little dark triangles). If you consider in advance which way to fold your seams when you build your block, you can minimise the number of seams that clash at crucial points, like so:

The arrows show what directions the seams on the smaller parts of the block were pressed (opposite ways). If you do this, it keeps seam overlaps to a minimum. This helps to keep the pieced fabric remain flat and makes quilting a little bit easier later on (apparently).

Just how cool is that?! This would never have occurred to me and eve if I had read it in a book, I would never have got my head around it - my head is just not wired that way.

So my 4^th class is this Thursday. We are adding the border to the quilt centre and we are learning how to do some appliqué. I think that the appliqué part is a vine that runs up the left hand side of the quilt. So I have picked out these fabrics as candidates for the vine stem and its leaves:

Just looking at these fabrics makes me realise that I am really looking forwards to Thursday and spending another evening in class. Not only am I learning a lot, I like everyone who is going to be there. Yep, quilting so far? It jigs, jives and rock 'n' rolls...albeit neatly, of course!

Flying Birds Quilt Update – Part One

2009-05-26T10:39:00.004-07:00

Just before sewing club this month, I attended my third Flying Bird Quilt class over in North Vancouver.

Now, I did worry that I might appear to be a bit of a class swot when I showed up with 12 completed quilt blocks, rather than the 9 that we had been asked to complete. However by the mid-point of the class, I knew that I could relax. I realised (as I sat there with temporary basting glue in one hand, pins between my teeth and glaring at seams that refused to align) that I was quietly slipping into my usual place at the back of the class while the people around me romped ahead with their projects!

The objective of our third class was to piece all of our quilt blocks together. Three of the five people in my class finished their piecing and headed home early. The other person started the evening at a slight disadvantage because she had not had time to create all of her blocks before the class. However, she managed to finish all of her blocks AND complete the same amount of piecing as me during our class.

At this point, I would like to show you some of our work in progress:

Exhibit A: hard at work on sand and greeny teal quilt blocks

Exhibit B: quilt blocks in calm, coordinating greens

Exhibit C: quilt blocks in complementary, vivid blues with acid green splashes

Exhibit D: finished quilt centre & block detail in moss and a lemony cream

For some reason, I do not have a snap of the blocks that our tutor is working on. I must remedy that at our next class! As you can see from the above, while we are all working on the same design, our choices of fabric mean that our quilts are all turning out with quite different moods and character. About the only thing that they have in common really that they are all turning out very well and I like them all!

Okay, I know - where's mine? Well, after three hours of class, all I managed to put together was three separate rows of blocks.

(So it seems that the Rare Knits concept may apply equally to my other crafting pursuits - Gabrielle Rare Knits, Rare Sews, Rare Spins, Rare Photographs?!)

This meant that I had quite a bit of catching up to do after class. In fact, it took me a whole afternoon to put my quilt top centre together:

Exhibit E: completed quilt centre

When it was done, I was just so pleased and amazed that it worked out (with a little seam ripping and swearing, here and there) that I had to tell someone.

Straight away. At a run. You know me.

So I raced down the entire length of the corridor in my building (where my craft space is) to tell the people at the other end (who run a business making stained glass). I burst merrily through their doorway, gabbled excitedly for a moment, noticed that they were looking a little bit bemused and then I noticed that they were working on a church commission that was really beautiful plus far more complicated than my quilt top.

I stumbled to an embarrassed halt. After all - piecing fabric and piecing glass? I see a connection (kind of) and these guys are pros, running a business, they are not just noodling about with fabric and fibre like me!

So I jerked my thumb over my shoulder and said rather lamely, "Y'know, my stuff. I just finished an important bit. Learning how to quilt, never done that before. It turned out okay. Kinda pleased. Hope that I didn't disturb anything crucial. Sorry. Going now."

Luckily, all of the people that I have met in my building so far have turned out to be quite cool. Much to my relief, they laughed and even better still, my sudden and excited entrance did not cause any of the professionals to hammer anything sharp into a glass saint.

Can anyone say, "Phew?!"

Sewing Accessories Case

2009-05-22T13:30:00.007-07:00

Now my sewing club meets on the 2^nd Friday of every month and I have been sitting on this update because I prohibited myself from posting until our wedding blessing invitations were out. Mind you, this delay has been very useful. It has given me time to use my project and consider how I feel about it.

Now if I were to look over my piece of work with a critical eye, I would say that it really shows that this is the first ever time that I have attempted a bit of free motion quilting. However, in the overall scheme of things, I do not think that this matters because, I have come to realise that each time I see this project?

It makes me feel so happy!

Not only do I like what we made, I love the fabric that we made it in and I am finding it extremely useful. Before this month's project, I toted my sewing accessories around in these two, rather charming freezer bags:

As a result, I have often felt anxious about my sharp objects (scissors, snips, needles and rotary cutter), slicing their way out and damaging someone or something.

Now I feel a lot less worried because I can carry my sharp tools around - nice, safe and securely - in this stylish little number:

I am not quite sure what I love most about it:

The flowery fabric
The scissors fabric
The fact that I made it

The fact that it turned out alright
The fact that it resembles the kind of pencil case that I used to have at school
The fact that I have a new stylish sewing accessories case
The fact that I can now leave the house trailing less plastic behind me!

Now I was lucky enough to receive another set of the materials for this project. So, unless you want to persuade me otherwise, I can quietly nurse a vision of having - not one but - two stylish accessory cases and reassign both of my freezer bags to other clutter containment duties!

However, I have not decided whether to make my next case:

an exact replica of the first case, which might lead to confusion when reaching for tools; or

switch the fabrics over so that I have the gorgeous scissors fabric on the outside and have a secret flower garden on the inside; and/or

fold the fabric the opposite way in order to make a deeper but narrower case for different sized accessories.

What do you suggest?

In the meantime, I am going to sit here and daydream about future sewing club projects.

If they continue in the same vein as the past three projects then I think that I might have every chance of achieving a more organised sewing space by the end of this year - oooh, what can I tell you?

There is just nothing like a little bit of stylish organisation to make this person a very happy woman indeed - hurray, hurray, hurray!

Wedding Blessing Celebration Invitations

2009-05-22T12:40:00.004-07:00

I am not sure whether it is quite safe for me to post yet. I am about halfway through our wedding blessing celebration invitations. Do not yell at me. This has not been a very easy process – how on earth is a person supposed to pick sensibly between the people that they know and love, just in terms of who to invite and who not to invite?

Our key criteria for our blessing were very straightforward. We thought it would be lovely to:

celebrate somewhere that is meaningful to us both
hold it on the first weekend in July (which is the third anniversary of when we met)
receive our blessing in the same spot that we met
have an event that is laid back and enjoyable – both for us and our guests.

Luckily, we have been able to make arrangements to make the first three bullets a reality. We are holding our wedding blessing in the same place that we met three years ago and our blessing is going to be performed by someone we both know and respect. We are still working on the final bullet.

The good news is that our venue has plenty of outside space and lots of room for children to play and people to camp. However, our venue has a limited seating capacity for the meal after the blessing. While this supports the idea of a having a relaxed event of a manageable size, it has also presented us with a problem. We do not have the capacity to invite everyone we know. My extended families are quite large. In fact, trying to work out how to solve this problem is the primary reason that our invitations are so late going out.

In the end, we decided to make our event a simple blend of our immediate families and the friends who know us both, have been an active part of our lives over the past 3 years and have been a part of our journey together (so far). It's not a perfect solution and I am sure that there will be some hiccups to iron out – we just have our fingers crossed in hope that there will not be too many.

~~~

PS, as I am sure that you are all wondering, I have no idea whether or not I am going to wear the plastic fantastic, white wedding dress. Far from losing weight since I last wore it - I seem to have gained more? So even if I could strap the horrible thing on, I suspect that setting free my bingo wings, even in my cream shrug, is a bad idea. I might turn suddenly and knock someone out? No, I have no idea what to wear instead – a bin liner, perhaps? A darker shade of cardigan over my dress, that goes somewhat with my shoes? I think that I might hold off and make a dash to Monsoon or something when I get back to the UK. Ho hum.

100 Lines...

2009-05-11T15:28:00.006-07:00

Dear Fella, family & friends,

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.
I promise that I will not post again until our July Wedding Celebration invitations are sent out.

Sometimes...

2009-05-03T16:57:00.006-07:00

...a weed is simply a flower in the wrong place:

Here, I think that they are the perfect flower in the perfect place - I love how that yellow sizzles against that blue!

Having snapped these dandelions zinging happily against that wall, I am not immune to the irony of coming home afterwards and using one of these devices to pluck them mechanically out of the lawn, one by one. So now, instead of being a happy sea of yellow and green, our lawn is now a sea of green and little brown potholes - it serves me right!

I have not written about gardening at all so far this year - I feel very conscious that this is my first season in an unknown garden, in a different country.

It feels a bit like being right back to where I was over 10 years ago when I first bought my house in London. I spent the first growing season, watching to see what might emerge from the mud and rubble left by my builders. I thought that I should build on and complement what was already there - as it turned out, nothing emerged at all and I was able to plant up my garden completely from scratch.

I feel that I need to take the same approach here this year: wait to see what is already planted and do my research on what might flourish in any gaps. (I am now well equipped with B.C. specific plant books as a result of a lovely gift from Dotty plus some advice on what other books to purchase!)

In the meantime, I will enjoy the nice surprises from the garden and do my best to battle back 12 years or so of gardening neglect i.e. tackle the weeds, prune the shrubs, nurse the lawns back to life (limed last weekend, now need fertiliser) and plant a few annuals to tide me over until next year.

On the other hand, of course - I could just relax and upset the neighbours (who have spotless, astro-turf looking lawns) by letting the dandelions return and take over...?!

Ps, I have not spotted any sheep in or around Vancouver so I have not seen any Spring lambs this year. So instead, here I present some hard Canadian evidence that Spring has finally reached Vancouver!

Mystery of the Missing Knitter & an Unattended WIP!

2009-05-03T09:56:00.009-07:00

Unattended WIP, as spotted in a Vancouver alleyway, behind some shops at 14th & Granville.

I am stumped. I cannot think of a single crafter I know who would be separated willingly from their WIP. So is this a case of:

- Accidental loss? In which case, if you recognise this WIP and know the knitter, please can you get them to hurry on down to 14th and Granville as it might still be sitting there! The Fella would not let me bring it home in case its owner attempted to retrace their steps in order to find it - I sort of suspect that his relectance for me to remove it had more to do with the fact that it looked like it had been run over several times?!

- Foul Play? In which case, should I call the police to report a missing knitter?!

- WIP Cruelty and Abandonment? In which case, should I phone the World Society for the Protection of Knitting, then see if it is possible to track down the missing knitter in order to have them banned from the ownership of a WIP for the next 5 years?!

Oh what to do, what to do...?!

Sew, a needle pulling thread

2009-05-01T16:59:00.008-07:00

A long time ago (back in the days before I took up knitting again), I used to head off to quilt shops, festivals and craft fairs with my mother (my family's true textile artist) and pick up the odd fat quarter (or ten) of fabric.

I had quite grand ideas about making myself a quilt for my bedroom and over time, I built up quite a bit of fabric. However, the flaw in my master plan was that I really had no idea how to sew, piece or quilt - at all.

So, other than toying with my fabric a bit, making a few quilt blocks (not all shown) and some Christmas presents, I did not manage to achieve very much:

When I came to Canada, I decided to pack my fabric stash as well as my yarn stash. Just on the basis that if there was ever going to be a time that I might get to grips with the 'whole fabric thing', then surely it would be while I was here?!

So in between study and DIY duties last autumn, I did my best to hunt down a reasonably priced sewing machine. I was stumped - the selection of machines, features and prices were so mind boggling that I stalled completely on the whole sewing idea - I simply could not afford or justify the purchase of the machine that I really wanted.

Then, as you know, the Fella and I got engaged! After a short discussion on the topic of engagement rings, I am delighted to say that mine arrived in the format of a large, heavy brown cardboard box containing a sewing machine! This might be considered a little unconventional but as someone who rarely wears jewellry (or remembers to put on her wedding band each morning), what on earth would I do with a diamond ring except lose it?!

Thus equipped, I joined the sewing club run by the people who sold us my sewing machine. Once a month we tackle a small project that takes us through a range of different sewing techniques. I have been going for three months now and this is our output so far:

Month 1 - Test Stitching

Month 2 - Travel Pincushion with Pockets

Month 3 - Thread Catcher

While extremely informative and fun, the focus of these workshops is firmly on how to use your machine effectively rather than on how to approach a bigger project from end to end. The fabrics are precut for us and the workshop time streaks past like someone running naked across the cricket pitch at Lords!

So, after speaking to the sewing club tutor (who has excellent patience and teaching skills), I signed up for her 'Flying Birds' beginner's quilt class. I have attended two classes so far (2 more are scheduled this month) and it's been brilliant!

In the first session, we learned how to cut our fabrics precisely. In the second, we learned how to put together our first quilt block. Here is our tutor showing us how to piece our blocks together (you can see the quilt top that we are aiming for in the background):

Here is the block that I produced (I need to produce another 8 of these before our next class, next week):

Here is one of my classmates holding up a half completed quilt block:

Now, please do not panic mum but, I am really hoping that I can convince this lady to let me adopt her 'in loco parentis' before end of this course! She happens to be one of the most kindly, lovely people that I have met here. If you flip through this slideshow of our second class (which seems to be running in reverse order)? You will see the really cute baby quilt that she has made for her grandchild and bought to class to show us all. Very cool.

So, in summary, although things have been a bit quiet on the knitting front of late (I am having trouble finding my stitching mojo), I am working away in the background on new skills: sewing, spinning, photography and Photoshop.

So far? It's all a very big but enjoyable learning curve!

Rockpool Candy - Dark Forest - Handspun

2009-04-29T16:52:00.004-07:00

Last December my mother sent me an early Christmas treat in the post - a Dark Forest Rockpool Candy batt.

Naturally enough - being me and being terrified of ruining it - I squirrelled it away in my budding fibre stash with the intention that I would pull it back out when my spinning skills were good enough to tackle it.

Following a brief discussion on Ravelry with the Doyenne of UK Fibre Activists and Sculptresses herself, on how to dampen the libido of domestic mice and keep them from 'getting jiggy' with mice from the wrong side of the floorboards, I confessed that I had one of her batts tucked away.

When I ~~let slip~~ mentioned that I was keeping it until my skills were a bit better, I got just the encouragement that I needed to pluck it back out of my stash and have a go - so I did!

Here is my bobbin showing 50g of fibre spun as a single:

As the batt was made up of a mix of different fibre types with silk fabric 'sprinkles', it made it really interesting to work with - just in terms of how it felt and behaved while being spun. I tried to spin the yarn fairly thinly and as evenly as I could, going with the flow as slubs and fabric sprinkles popped up - I have no idea whether this was the right approach or not!

I am really pleased with the result and here is the final skein, washed and dried to set its twist:

I think that this colour is truer to the yarn than the colour on the bobbins above. It is a two ply yarn with nice, subtle variations in colour and texture. I think, but I am not sure, that the skein is approximately 65m of something akin to aran or a light chunky weight? As you can tell, I am not quite there on the whole precise science yardage and weight part of spinning quite yet!

PS, I finished the Autumn in Spring batch of handspun too and I think that I have about 340m (371 yards) of yarn across 3 skeins. Two of the three skeins seem quite close in weight, I think that they are about 38-39m per oz but the third is about 48m per oz. So I think that I need to split them across two different projects!