Knit Faster

But please be careful! I just read the fine print on the card inside the Addi Turbo Lace needle package as I was putting my new needles away in my binder. It says, “This needle or item should be used only for the purpose it was designed for: NEEDLE WORK. If used improperly and or by untrained persons this tool may cause bodily harm. Always use caution and store your tools in safe place inaccessible in particular to children.” Isn’t that a hoot? Bad grammar, punctuation and all — I still haven’t stopped laughing! I’m afraid I never realized what lethal weapons circular knitting needles can be in the hands of Untrained Persons or Children. I’d hate to think what a Trained Person could do with them. Now we know why the airlines are so picky about letting folks knit on airplanes. Guess I’ll have to be more careful in future. Maybe a large padlocked safe for my needle collection? Whaddya think?

Whew! Wiping my eyes…Where was I? Oh yeah. In other crafty news, I’m trying to clean up the stuff that I dumped all over my studio/study when I was unpacking. Later today I hope to start hauling stuff out of the north-east attic space. That’s the one that contains really old fabric scraps that I couldn’t throw out, old patterns likewise, wrapping paper, ribbons and other packaging materials. I’m in the mood to purge so I hope I can get rid of some of the junk that’s in there and get what’s left sorted into a better and more useful configuration. I have several cardboard boxes left from my fibres (the ones that are now in Rubbermaid bins instead) so they should come in handy for organizing. But I can’t put fabrics into them unless I put them in plastic storage bags first. I found that some fabrics tend to get yellow-brown stains on them from long contact with cardboard so I need to be more careful if I want things to last until I get around to using them. That could be decades! Oh wait…it already has been decades for some of this stuff. Scraps from the dresses I made my daughter when she was 2 and she’s (gasp!) 34 now? Gotta get a big garbage bag up here. Now.

So. Are ya tired of my holiday photos yet? I’ve been trying to get thumbnail-sized printouts of them pasted into my travel journal. I’m about 1/3 of the way through the 175 photos I kept. (We won’t even mention the 4 that I accidentally deleted. Sniff!) And it’s a bigger job than I thought. Of course I've never completed pasting the several hundred from my last trip in September 2006 yet either so I obviously get bored of the job quite quickly. However, I’m determined to finish before I forget what and where. Interestingly T-Man had his camera with us but he never pulled it out once. Of course he doesn’t have a readership to entertain. Heh.

Tired or not, here’s a few more scenery shots from the trip. Here we have the Columbia River at Blanket Creek just below Revelstoke, looking north:


I took this one through the windshield (which was relatively clean at that point) while heading north on the Icefields Parkway in Banff just before we got snowed and sleeted on higher up in the pass:


Here we have the boardwalk through the marsh at Crimson Lake, AB, somewhat west of the last photo. Those are mostly larch trees (conifers that turn golden in fall and then lose their needles in winter), with some willow and spruce and aspens. Isn’t everything a lovely late spring green? Good thing you can't hear the caterpillars chewing on it.


Also incredibly and surprisingly green and further west still (halfway across Alberta actually), we have the usually desert-like badlands:


And this scene looking south may look cold but it wasn’t too bad at all even though, as you can tell from the whitecaps, the wind was blowing pretty hard as usual at Waterton Lakes:


We would have liked to have spent more time at Waterton than 2 days, but we only had so much time and a long way to go still to get back home. If you’ve never been there, it’s a very interesting and relatively quiet international park right on the Canada/US border. It’s quiet because the road is a long way in and doesn’t go anywhere else! The American side is Glacier National Park. You can’t drive directly from one side to the other, but you can take a boat cruise or a long hike. Even if you’re only reasonably fit or older (like us) there are a number of possible trails with amazing scenery. The campground is right in the tiny town on the main lake, Upper Waterton (the photo was taken at the edge between town and campground), so you can walk to restaurants/cafes or get supplies without having to drive. Ground squirrels infest the campground and the deer are so tame they walk through town nibbling on anything that’s not protected. Even though it’s a relatively small park compared to Banff and Jasper, it’s got a lot of natural diversity and lots to do. Even if you don't like camping or hiking like we do.