Piggy needs a hug (and some sleeping pills)

It's been one of those weeks. Last week's car accident, coupled with the aftermath at ICBC, has left me more anxious than normal (Piggy is hardly as cool as a cucumber at the best of times). This makes a good night's sleep less likely (Piggy's standard five-to-six hours is looking great right now).

Add to that a brief relocation to the noisy downtown core while catsitting for a friend, and my nervousness about speaking at Northern Voice tomorrow, and you have an under-rested and overly-caffeinated Piggy.

On the upside, there is some movement with the sock. Not a huge amount, I'm afraid; I've been working on a secret project (nothing super-thrilling, so don't get all excited; I will post it next week) for my partner in the Malabrigo swap on Ravelry instead. But still, there is more sockage than before.




I've received measurements of my niece's foot, so now know when to start the decreases. There's obviously no way I'll be getting the pair done in time for her birthday on the 28th, but I'm feeling confident now that they will get done.

And I've received a bit of added incentive: my sister tells me that when my niece was asked what she'd liked for her birthday, she said she wanted a party and...me. Awwwwww....Piggy's got the warm fuzzies.

Piggy needs to read more

Thanks to beentsy, Piggy is feeling somewhat guilty about all the "important" books I've never read. How about you? (Tag, you're it!)

Bold the books you have already read.

Italicize the books you intend to read.

Notes in parentheses next to note-worthy titles.

1. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (Started more than once, but nope.)
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. The Bible (Bits and pieces.)
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
11. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (350-odd pages of unremitting misery.)
13. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller (Ok, I'll admit it. I don't get it.)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Read a lot, but plenty left!)
15. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (And the other two in the trilogy, The Girl at the Lion D'or and Charlotte Gray.)
18. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch by George Eliot (I managed to finish this only because I was going to be tested on it.)
21. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (Zero desire.)
22. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (I've started this one several times, but have never managed to get more than 100 or so pages in. It's one of those books that I feel I must read before I die, though.)
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis (I've read two of them; no huge desire to read the others.)
34. Emma by Jane Austen
35. Persuasion by Jane Austen (Possibly my favourite book.)
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Everyone else and their dog have, so I guess I should.)
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres (Seeing the clips from the Nicolas Cage film recently -- it aired a few days ago -- has turned me off. Unfairly, I'm quite sure.)
39. Memories of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
41. Animal Farm by George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (Truly dreadful.)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving
45. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
47. Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (You'd have to pay me.*)
48. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
50. Atonement by Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
52. Dune by Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons ("Something nasty in the woodshed!")
54. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
58. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
62. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (Beentsy read it twice. In a row. That's intriguing enough to make me want to pick it up.)
65. Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road by Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (400-odd pages of even more unremitting misery than Tess of the D'Urbervilles. NO. MORE. THOMAS. HARDY.)
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
72. Dracula by Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses by James Joyce (Tried. Failed. More than once. Unlike War and Peace, I've given up.)
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (My favourite Plath work is an uncharacteristically fun book for children, The Bed Book, which is, sadly, out of print.)
77. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal by Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession by AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web by EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton (I'm surprised I haven't read these; I think I've read everything else Blyton wrote.)
91. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (Another I've started but never finished. And one I feel guilty about.)
92. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
94. Watership Down by Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (Another one I hated. Clearly Piggy is unsophisticated.)
96. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (Good, but my favourite Dahl is Danny the Champion of the World.)
100. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

* If you have an enemy you'd like to drive to suicide, buy them the collected works of Thomas Hardy.

Piggy's Proposal

Piggy got into the Valentine's Day spirit after all. Well, sort of.

Allow me to explain. I like ice cream. A lot. I don’t think it would be stretching it to say I love ice cream. (Stick with me…all will become clear.) In fact, it would not be inaccurate to say that ice cream is my favourite food. I could happily eat ice cream three times a day, every day of the year.

Thing is, Piggy is trying to give up dairy products. I won’t go into all the reasons for this; suffice it to say that I have never felt (or looked) better than the two years when my diet was free of animal-derived foods, including dairy products.

Now, there are several non-dairy ice “creams” available; a couple of them are even pretty tasty. Well, the chocolate-based ones, anyway. I’ve never been satisfied with vanilla-flavoured ones; the beany flavour of soy seems to overpower flavours less robust than chocolate.

But on Saturday (yes, Valentine’s Day), my relationship with ice cream changed forever.


Piggy hereby proposes marriage to the genius at Turtle Mountain Foods who came up with idea to make non-dairy ice “cream” from coconut milk.

I'm only half-joking.

Happy Paraskavedekatriaphobia Day

Well, Friday the 13th is already more than half over, and nothing horrible has happened to Piggy yet (touch wood). Perhaps the fates mistakenly figured she was in New Zealand yesterday with the whole car accident thingy, and got the timing wrong.

Anyhoo.

I’ve been slaving away at work looking up knitting superstitions on the interwebs this afternoon. Here are a few of the favourites…

It's bad luck to leave a project unfinished. The intended recipient will get bad luck from the unfinished item. If that’s not incentive to break out your WIPs, I don’t know what is. On the other hand…methinks it might be time to cast on a particularly complicated blue sweater for a certain Canadian Prime Minister. Maybe a lacy one, just to be safe.

If you knit one of your own hairs into a garment, it will bind the recipient to you. I suspect some of my friends are now bound to either my late dog Tessa, or my sister's dog Brie, whose hairs are still hanging around my Mum’s place.

Knitting on the doorstep in late winter will prolong the winter. This is one comes from Iceland. Why anyone in Iceland would choose to knit on the doorstep in wintertime is thoroughly beyond me.

It is extremely unlucky for actors to knit in a theatre – either onstage on in the wings. Don't actors have enough of superstitions already, without having to come up with ones about knitting?

Piggy's most-despised "holiday"

And, since this year Friday the 13th is followed by Valentine’s Day, we mustn’t forget the many superstitions linking with romance. The most well-known one must be the sweater curse – if an unmarried woman knits her lover a sweater, the relationship is sure to come to a speedy end.

Edited to add: As VTknitboy points out in the comments, this old superstition needs to be updated -- it ain't just hetero women who should be wary of the sweater curse! :-)

But it’s not just sweaters: socks aren’t safe, either, ladies. Your boyfriend is sure to walk away from you in them.

Neither of these is a problem for Piggy, who is hopelessly single and rather loathes Valentine’s Day. Honestly, I'm a perfect candidate for a convent. Well, except for that whole religious belief thing.

Anyhoo, the point is: don't be expecting a sickeningly sweet, lovey-dovey post featuring knitted hearts or the like tomorrow. Besides, I’d have to cast them on today, and it’s apparently bad luck to start a new project on a Friday – any Friday.

Mind you, I did find one last superstition that could bode well: according to an old Norwegian superstition, knitters should look up quickly when accidentally dropping yarn to catch a brief glimpse of her future husband.

Piggy is rather clumsy. Perhaps she should start looking for more good places to knit in public…

How about you? Do you have any superstitions about your own knitting?

Piggy can't catch a break

So, I was looking for some comfort food this afternoon, because my morning was crap. (Let's just say it involved a call to the car insurance company. More on that another time. Maybe.) But something healthy-ish, because now that I've broken the yarn diet, I've decided to get serious about a diet diet. 

Anyhoo. Applesauce with cinnamon sugar seemed to fit the bill. I knew I had an unopened jar of the stuff in the fridge, so easy-peasy, right?

Wrong.

Epic, epic FAIL.

So, how was your day?

Yarn diet FAIL

Piggy has taken a tumble (well, a running jump is probably more accurate) from the yarn diet wagon. No huge shocker there, really; I (and everyone who knows me) knew from the outset it was only a matter of time before I'd be writing this confessional.

That doesn't lessen the sting, however. I am really rather disgusted with myself, if not for the reason you might suppose. It's got nothing to do with how long it took to cheat on the diet -- I'm actually rather impressed that I managed to go almost a whole month without buying yarn for myself.

It's about how I cheated.

I've always believed that if you're going to do something -- even something bad, like breaking a diet -- you should do it right. Give it a 110%. Go big or go home. In for a penny, in for a pound. You see where I'm going with this, I'm sure.

It is on this point that Piggy's mere fail is elevated to a FAIL.

What do you reckon I bought?

A plus-sized sweater's worth of fingering weight qiviut collected by Inuit muskox hunters?

Nope.

Perhaps a shawl's worth of naturally dyed lace weight cashmere spindle-spun by a women's collective from a decade's worth of harvests of hand-combed fibre from a tiny herd of milk-fed, free-range goats raised in a valley in Kashmir itself?

Sorry, no.

Right, ok, then, yes. Best not be too greedy. And remember, Piggy is pretty poor. So what about a few skeins of delicious Mmmmmalabrigo, then?

I'm afraid not.

Wait for it -- this is what I broke the diet for:




Yes, yes that is what you think it is. Dishcloth cotton and fuzzy acrylic.

Don't ask. Seriously.

Pretty Squooshyness

And it's free! Check out what my yarny pal Siobhan donated to the cause of Piggy's yarn diet-respecting stash enhancement:

Pretty, no? It's homespun Targhee and Piggy loves it. I'm thinking hat...what do you think?

Back on track

I'm sure you've been breathless with anticipation since Thursday's post, in which Piggy whined about the picking up of gusset stitches. Allow me to apologize for leaving you hanging for so long, and to reassure you that things are fine.

We have the makings of a gusset, thanks to an intervention of Wranglers led by beentsy at yesterday's meet-up.

I advise you to breathe slowly, lest the sudden rush of oxygen overwhelm you.

In which Piggy gets her comeuppance

I should have seen it coming. 

After riding a wave of euphoria (read: boasting about it to anyone who would listen) following the successful turning of a heel, I sat down after work to start on the gusset. Worrywort that I am, I was a tad worried that my heel flap was a wee bit long, after receiving some reassurance from a few of my knitting pals on Plurk and Twitter, I dived back into the sock-knitting waters with a most un-Piggy-like optimism.

Queue the inevitable tsunami of whoop-ass, courtesy of the knitting gods.

Gusset FAIL.

I'm still not sure how it all went wrong, but it sure as heck did. And reading through the relevant sections of a recommended book, Teach Yourself Visually Sock Knitting by Laura Chau (aka cosmicpluto) didn't help. 

Chau says I should finish the heel turning so that I start the next row on the right side of the work. I did. Sounds good, right? 

"MWAHAHAHAHAHA!" the knitting gods thundered.

For you see, in Chau's photo for this stage of the game, the yarn is dangling from the left side of the needle, while mine is on the right...how can that be?  I purled across that final Row 2 of the heel flap, then turned the work...so the yarn is on the right-hand end while I'm looking at the right side of the work. What am I missing, here? Probably something obvious.

And then it gets worse for Piggy. Chau says knit all the heel stitches, then pick up stitches along one side of the heel flap (then knit the instep stitches, and, finally, pick up stitches along the other side of the heel flap. But how can I knit the heel stitches on the right side of the work with the yarn coming from the left end of the needle? 

HELP! I know that I'm the one with the problem here, not the fabulous cosmicpluto. But I. Really. Don't. Get. It.

I knew it was too good to be true.

Piggy can haz sock!

Well, a heel, anyway.


A gusset, on the other hand...we'll have to see.

This is my first-ever sock. Actually, that is not strictly true. I have made a half-hearted attempt at  socks before (with this exact yarn -- Koigu PPM -- in fact). But this is the first time I've made it to the magic that is the turning of the heel. 

Yesterday morning, Piggy was a born-again sock virgin. Today...well, today she's not.

Yes, it is small. It is for my niece, who's turning four this month. Yes, Piggy chickened out and went with a mini sock. But that's a heel, baby.

FO: Soar, Brie! Blankie

What's the world coming to? Piggy's got another finished object. And it's crocheted.

Don't mind the gaps!

It ain't the most beautiful blanket in the world, it's true. It's just row on row on row of double crochet, with a border of reverse single crochet (well, except where it was reverse half-double, double or even treble crochet, where it was needed to even out the edges!) of Vanna's Choice acrylic.

But it was made with love for a special friend going on a special journey. (Oh, and for the House Points it received as my Care of Magical Creatures homework, too, of course...)

Brie thinks she might really be a Hufflepuff...

That would be my sister's dog, Brie, who, as I type (late Monday night; gotta love scheduled posting), is -- hopefully -- sleeping soundly in a crate on the lower level of an Air Canada jet soaring above the Arctic en route to London. Pending the approval of a vet at Heathrow, my sister and her family will be taking her home to Portsmouth tomorrow.

It was hard to say goodbye to Brie this afternoon, but I'm glad she has a nice blankie to keep her warm on her trip. Because despite all my crochet goofs (Piggy has the hardest time keeping the same number of stitches on each row!), I'm pretty sure Brie likes it.

Say it with me: awwwwwww!

Happy trails, Brie-bear!