As I said in my last post, one of my plans for retirement was to make many more Christmas gifts than I was able to do when I was working. And that’s the way it panned out this year, my first retired Christmas.
Unfortunately, however, I didn’t think to photograph many of these items before wrapping them up because I was pretty sure I’d be with the recipients when they opened the parcels, and then when I went to my sister’s home for a few days of post-Christmas family time, I forgot to take my camera with me. So some things you’re not going to be able to see. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
I started back in the summer, with book socks for my sister. She and I and my younger niece were in Chapters one afternoon back in May and I happened to notice a display of what were labelled “book socks,” essentially cozy, thick socks meant for lounging around in rather than wearing inside a shoe or boot. “Aha,” I thought, “There’s a good idea.” So I knitted my sister a pair for Christmas, using two strands of entirely different space-dyed yarn (different brands, different colours, different repeat lengths). I always give her books for Christmas, so book socks seemed like a natural companion gift.
I loved them so much I made another pair, just for me.
Second, my mother had for months been plaintively mentioning that she desperately needed more knitted cotton dishcloths. You know the kind, the ones that everyone knows how to make, that increase with a yarn over and decrease with a k2tog. The glitch in my plan to provide her with a replacement set was that her kitchen decor requires that her dishcloths be red. Really, really red. I don’t know whether you’ve recently gone looking for red cotton dishcloth yarn, but it’s tough to find. Finally, again in my sister’s company (we aren’t able to get together very often so I remember these things), I found half a dozen balls at Michael’s and snatched them up. I started knitting in September. Two months later, I had a stack of ten dishcloths. Of which I never took a photo, probably because I can’t imagine that anyone would care to see them. Now I’m sorry. But my mum is not. The very afternoon I got to my sister’s home for our much-belated Christmas, my mum was sadly mentioning, again, that she needs those dishcloths. “Christmas isn’t over yet, Mum,” we said. But she still looked surprised when she opened the package that evening. And of all the things she received that day, it was the pile of dishcloths she stroked most often.
Third, I have, over the years, made my mum a number of aprons, very simple, from quilting fabric. Always some shade of red. She had been saying that she needed more, which isn’t surprising: she’s an avid cook, and wearing an apron is a way of announcing that one is resigned to the fact that kitchen messes do happen. Aprons take a beating. So I made her two more, reversible, in two different red cotton prints, with D-ring adjustable ties at the neck. Mum is thrilled. I’m thrilled that I have gained a nice clutch of red scraps for my scrap quilts by virtuously, selflessly making her aprons.
Fourth, I am the family shortbread producer. I usually make my mum a sizeable tin of shortbread, painstakingly wrapped in wax paper to guard against breakage and to allow me to fit the maximum number of cookies into the tin. She doles it out sparingly to company and to family and if she’s feeling she’s well-supplied, she’ll allow herself one for dessert after lunch and/or dinner. In other years, I’ve made my niece her own tin as well, but this year I was right out of small tins so she had to take her chances with the family supply I provided in two larger tins instead. I forgot to take a picture of the shortbread.
Fifth, I have a small great-nephew, who spends a lot of time in Kamloops, where it’s usually freezing cold in the winter. The rest of his time he spends in New Westminster, where it’s damp. So I knitted him a hat, then a pair of mittens to match. And then it occurred to me that while the hat should fit him for years (I used measurements that Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka the Yarn Harlot, says will fit a child two to five years old), the mitts won’t. I’d made him a pair to fit him this winter. I made him another pair for good measure, a pair that should last him nearly as long as the hat. These I did manage to photograph.
I used sock yarn leftover from earlier projects, riffing on the theme of combining two different yarns to produce something entirely new. I also had a premonition that I was going to run out of one of the yarns, so I finished the crown of the hat in a strand of one of the original two yarns and a strand of something else. I made the mittens the same way. Doesn’t it look as if I’d planned it all out beforehand? I feel a bit badly that you’re getting to see the end result before the child or his parents, but we didn’t overlap at Christmas so I have to get these woolly numbers into the mail before the winter is over.
Sixth, I had promised to bring my ancient Scrabble board and tiles with me to Kamloops since my sister’s has gone awol after her recent move. Now, the tile bag from this particular set went missing years ago. In fact, I don’t think there was a bag in the box when I bought it at a yard sale. My dear husband and I used to spend a lot of time laboriously turning all the tiles face down in the box before we began each game, but some of the tiles were so old and well-used that they were recognizable from the back. Two of the “i”s, for instance, had a slight purple stain on the back. So we graduated to using an empty yogourt container. But I felt that that solution wasn’t really acceptable for the rest of the family, so I decided to make a new tile bag. I found a couple of batik scraps that had been in my “favourite scraps” bin for years, and pressed them into service.
The ties are pieces of Rowan twill tape that once graced a couple of stacks of Kaffe Fassett (Rowan is the company he designs for) fabric dh gave me many Christmases ago. It’s kind of a stylish object, this bag, don’t you think? I’m proud of it.
Seventh (are you tired yet? I was), I wrote a poem.
I have written a poem for my dh every year since 2003. It all began with the socks tradition, established in the year 2000 when we were camped out through the fall and early winter on Kootenay Lake, at a provincial campsite north of Riondel. It was the first time in six years that I wasn’t teaching the fall term at UBC, the result of my decision to commit to this important relationship and to move my life, gradually, from Vancouver to Greenwood so that dh and I could make a life together. I was fine for the first couple of months, but as the days grew colder and shorter, I needed more diversion than books and long walks with our dearly-loved, long-passed red bone hound Lacey could provide. On one of my weekly trips across the lake to Nelson for groceries and other camp supplies, I went to the yarn shop and got some sock yarn. Very laboriously, I made dh a pair of socks from two strands of space-dyed yarn, one stitch of one yarn, then one stitch of the other, all the way through the sock. They took forever, but they are handsome, thick and warm, and still in service: they’re mine now, and I wear them over another pair for extra cosiness. The next year, I made him another pair from the leftover yarn and another I used with it, then another, giving them to dh each year for Christmas. In 2003, I managed to finish only sock before Christmas, so I wrote a short explanatory piece of doggerel on a piece of cardstock and stuck it into the sock. Something similar happened in 2004, so I wrote another poem, slightly longer, and wrote it out on another, slightly larger, piece of cardstock.
And so it went. The poems always had something to do with his hand knit socks, and as time went on I invented more and more elaborate narratives involving how these socks were useful in various scenarios starring dh. One was a pack trip (that was a good one, that poem), another a fishing trip, yet another a painting trip. Last year’s involved an art theft caper and yes, his hand knit socks were crucial to the unfolding of the story. That poem took me about five weeks to write, and nearly as long for him to read. It’s more than seventy stanzas long, set to the same rhythm and rhyme scheme as “Twas the night before Christmas."
This year, I scaled back.
Back in the fall, dh mentioned that he really doesn’t need any more hand knit socks. And indeed his sock drawer is stuffed: it’s hard to push clean socks into the drawer after a laundry because of all the woolly goodness already packed in there. But the poem, he said, was a non-negotiable tradition of Christmas. So I wrote him a poem about how he has enough socks. You wouldn’t think, would you, that after fourteen years of writing poems about socks I’d have anything left to say? Turns out I did. Whether the well will run dry on that topic next or not remains to be seen. Regardless, I make him laugh, and that’s one of the best moments of Christmas for me.
Finally, here are the photos of my sister's new quilt that I took with her phone when I was with her a few weeks ago. She, clever thing, resized them so they’d work here on the blog and sent them to me again. You’ve seen the quilt-making process shots; here are the beauty shots. This is the cream leather sofa that I considered to be the base and the foil for the whole colour scheme. It wasn’t until the quilt was lying on the sofa that I saw how beautifully it picks up the rich red oxide paint on the pantry door behind it.
This one shows the backing fabric, a vaguely ethnic print in charcoal and light grey. Plus here you can see the medium grey solid I used for the binding.
And look at the red chair over by the hearth. Did I nail that colour or what? And see how the greys in the quilt echo the medium greys in the stone of the hearth?
I’d like to draw your attention to the quilting, too. Miriam March, of Whispering Pines Quilt Studio, used a pantograph design that I’ve had her apply to a couple of other quilts and I just love how the swirling circles contrast with the stark geometrics of the piecing.
I have to say I’m thrilled with everything about this quilt. The colours and values please me and work perfectly in their new setting. The quilting adds a whole new layer of design gorgeousness and I couldn’t be happier with it. Best of all, I was with my sister long enough to see this quilt get used a lot. The nieces plunked themselves down on it, my sister draped it over her knees while she watched movies on her iPad, it’s part of the household, I think. So satisfying.
But between getting that quilt done (the binding alone took many hours of tiny hand-stitches to finish) and the other Christmas gift projects, I haven’t had much time for blog posts. At least now you know what I’ve been doing instead. Or at least some of what I’ve been doing. As to the rest of it, you’ll have to wait for another post.
One last shot, an out-take from the photo session in my studio. Soop so keenly enjoys being part of the process.
Happy New Year.
Darn! I was hoping that we'd get to read that poem. I did turn the computer on it's side and read the first page. I have had the opportunity to enjoy a few of your DH pennings.
Posted by: Mahina Rose | 01/22/2018 at 04:51 PM
Oh Mahina, what a great visual, your turning the computer to try to read page one of my Christmas poem for dh. I laugh whenever I picture you doing it. I'm leaving it up to him to decide whether I can share the poem with the world. It's really not meant for anyone but him and it's certainly not great literature, so it's tough to decide. I hear that he reduced many of the Caravan folks to tears with his tribute to horses this year: I certainly welled up when I read it. I have to get busy and transcribe his piece so it can be published on the Caravan website: Estelle has asked for it. Caravan is a wonderful incubator for creativity, and I'm really sorry I didn't get there this winter. Oh well. Another year, perhaps.
Posted by: Anne at Shintangle Studio | 01/22/2018 at 08:25 PM
Your sisters' quilt in her great room looks like a picture from a home interior magazine. The quilt and the room enhance each other. What a beauty.
Posted by: Jaynie Himsl | 01/31/2018 at 05:40 PM
Thanks, Jaynie! I was just thinking about you today, as I raced to make the deadline for CQA NJS submissions. Your gorgeous landscape with the corded texture is one of the standout quilts I remember from the only two CQA shows I've got the catalogues for (and I've only been able to attend one in person). I don't know how my submissions will fare, but I certainly seem to have earned a "judge's choice" award with my sister, which is incredibly satisfying. Your appreciation makes me very happy too.
Posted by: Anne at Shintangle Studio | 01/31/2018 at 06:39 PM