So many skeins to wind. Quite a fun palette going on here, not the usual.

A little more swatch sharing.

I was at Shoppers Drug Mart today, trying to use up our Shoppers points (Americans, do you have Shoppers Drug Mart?) and so got to treat myself to some magazines. And I spied this: Threads magazine Fitting issue. JACKPOT.

I'm as much a seamstress as a knitter. Or at least I used to be, before it got harder and harder to find really good fabric. I love the logic of making patterns and usually make or customize my own. Any craft that involves special rulers, geometry, and fabric stores is a good fit for my personality. A good fit, get it? erf erf.

The final instalment of my little overdyeing project. I don't have pictures of all the simmering and rinsing. Just too much steam and water for me to think of getting the camera out.

At breakfast, the front page of the paper confronted us with the brutal and horrifying images of the garment factory collapse in Bangladesh. The death-count at the time of the paper's printing was 140. An hour later, on the CBC news, it was over 200. And the count is rising.

The images of workers escaping from the rubble on makeshift ropes made from lengths of fabric tell a chilling story. On the radio, the voices of trapped workers call out to us where we sit, in the comfort of our cars and homes.

Even if you reject ipods and sneakers and sweatshop t-shirts, the spider's web of low-cost manufacturing is intricate and insidious. The thirst for affordable goods drives the manufacturing of those goods to countries where buildings, time, materials, people, cost less. Even if you check every label, grow every vegetable, sew your own clothes, you will be touched at some point by the bizarre inequities created by a world of consumers. 

This is not a political blog. This is not a controversial environment. But there is no way to turn away from stories like this. Our shared history of controversy, dilemma, guilt, inequity, these are all woven in to the things we buy. We are involved. 

Yesterday, I started to talk about my little overdyeing project. Well, it seems little now. But there were some moments when I did question my own lack of forethought: winding 24 balls back into skeins? Is this a Good Idea?

Happy Monday everyone. Ours was the usual, "I don't have any clean socks" and "I need to print out my homework" at 8:34 am. We leave at 8:35 am.

I recently worked with a knitter who finished a sweater in two days. (She attributes her accomplishment to a very long train ride.) But how about a sweater that gets finished in two decades?

It is beautiful out there today! Blue Blue Skies and warm. There may even be a blush of green on the lawn. Horny little gangs of squirrels everywhere. (Squirrels are still a novelty to us, so we think they're cute. But I think that will wear off. I commented on how cute they were to our realtor, and she narrowed her eyes and growled I hate squirrels à la Clint Eastwood.)

Trying out a new shawl pattern that I wrote for sport weight yarn in lace weight yarn, with a few stripes thrown in. The pale dove grey of the Americo Sedoso is a perfect complement to just about any other colour. I'm trying it out with the hand-painted Sweatermaker Yarns Fiona in a cheerful fuschia-violet blend. Sedoso is an amazing lace weight, in 60% royal alpaca 20% cashmere 20% silk. Fiona is 50% merino 50% silk (the yarn I used for the Trifle Shawl).