Kirsten Nelson

Two of my friends are having babies in the next six months, and in both cases they know it’s a boy. I found it difficult to buy non-gender-specific clothing and baby items when my own son was born, and it doesn’t seem to have gotten any easier.

Little Lark has lovely clothing, all organic cotton and environmentally friendly dyes. I love stationery as well, so it appeals to me.
The Polka-Dot Patch is a bit more mainstream, but seems committed to unisex clothing. They do have dresses and other clothes specifically for girls, but their unisex categories are prominently placed and have a good selection.

This reminds me of:
Me to We: Socially Responsible Clothing, although they don’t have any children’s clothes. (Yet!)

I tried to make a watch cap from the pattern given here, which purports to be the original pattern from the International Seamen’s House in Georgia.

I thought I was knitting pretty close to the given guage, but it ended up at 17 stitches to 4 inches on 4.5 mm needles, so that hat is far too big.  I’ve pulled it all out for a new project I’m planning.

I found a UFO (unfinished object) in my boxes of knitting paraphanelia yesterday.  I apparently started a ‘crown’ hat for myself in purple some time ago, probably to go with the purple winter coat I stopped wearing years ago, but only just got around to putting out for pickup in CP’s recent drive in our neighbourhood.  I adapted the pattern many years ago from Debbie Bliss to make a hat for my son; her version comes to a point, which I don’t like, so I made mine with a proper rounded top.

The garter stitch points on the brim were 13 stitches each, and there were six of them.  I count 79 stitches across the brim as I’m pulling out the 14 rows of garter stitch – perhaps I added an extra stitch for sewing it up, since garter stitch can’t be knit in the round.

It appears as though I knit the hat from the brim up in stocking stitch, then picked up stitches for the points on the brim.  After about 22 rows of even knitting, I decreased on the knit rows; with six sections, there were six decreases on each row, with that last one being the final two stitches of each knit row.

The yarn is from Woolly Harvest, from Manitoulin Island where my parents live.  On 4mm needles, I count exactly 16 stitches and 22 rows over 4 inches.  There’s nothing wrong with the hat – it seems to fit, and only needs three points completed to finish it.  I’m pulling it out anyway – purple doesn’t go with either my fall or winter coats, and I want the wool for a sweater I’m in the planning stages of!

Katie Baldwin, my lovely manager at JUMP Math while she was Publications Editor, made me aware of this site:

http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolour

You choose up to 10 colours, and it presents a mosaic of mini-Flickr photos with those colours.  You can create some pretty neat effects.  I haven’t quite figured out a classroom use for it yet, but I had fun playing with it.

I got this fantastic book, the 2008 edition of Milepost, at the World’s Biggest Bookstore. It has more information in it on the remote Stewart-Cassier highway than anywhere else I’ve seen. It will be indispensable in a month’s time.

This book transformed the way I think about our personal finances.

This reminds me of:
The GetRichSlowly blog.

J.D.’s tongue-in-cheek blog offers advice on sensible personal finance – even more so now that the site is earning enough money for him to devote himself full-time to researching and writing. It’s a personal and inspiring account.

I’d like to start maintaining my bike better, and the videos from Alex at the online Bicycle Tutor seem like a good series; easy to follow, starting with simple concepts and working up to more complicated ones, and free.

This reminds me of:
The GetRichSlowly blog, which led me there and espouses doing your own maintenance for the satisfaction of doing so, and also to save money.

This site – www.FreeRice.com – contains a vocabulary quiz, and donates 10 grains of rice for every answer you get right. It automatically adjusts the level of the questions according to the words you answers correctly. I was immediately at level 42 and went up to level 45… it says there are 50 levels, and nobody has gotten above 48… that sounds like a challenge! It started in October 2007, and I hope it’s legitimately donating food…

This reminds me of:
Me to We: Socially Responsible Clothing

We saw Owen Pallett play at the Dawson City Music Festival in 2006. I was thrilled to see a few months later that he had won the 2006 Polaris prize for “best Canadian album”.

The fact that he has named himself after a popular RPG, and doesn’t have much of a web presence, makes him hard to find. I managed to buy several of his CDs for myself and for my parents at Rotate This! in Toronto.

This reminds me of:
The Dawson City Music Festival