How the heck did it get to be mid-April??  It really only seems like days since the last blog, but it has been weeks.  I know it's been a while because my blog posting toolbar has completely changed since I last used it.  There's now a sigma up there on the tool bar -- I wonder what that is.  Um, hold on a second, I have to go and click on it to see what it does......Oh.  Ok.  That button "inserts a symbol" -- I wonder how they picked sigma to represent every other symbol available.  Huh?

So what has been up here....

There was a trip to Toronto to take in King Tut at the Ontario Art Museum.   (Did you catch the alliteration in that last sentence? What fun!) 



It was an amazing exhibit and one I had wanted to see ever since it first came through North America when I was 10.  It just blew my mind that we were looking at objects that were made 5000 years ago.  I think with all of our modern technology we're tempted to look on people who lived so long ago as "primitive" but clearly they were skilled  and sophitocated artisans that contemplated many of the big questions that every generation asks:  Where did we come from?  What is our purpose here?  And, of course.  How do I make the guy who is paying for this happy?  (There was a scultpture of a pharaoh showning him as a realistic human and others showing him as his god-persona, religious, cultural  and political leader of a united Egypt.  As there were far more sculptures of the latter, there's not a big leap to guess which was preferred.)

Unfortunately, you're not allowed to take pictures inside the museum so here we all are climbing on a Henry Moore scupture outside.


Thank you to the kind passerby who offered to take our picture.  It's nice to have proof that we were all actually there together. Although, you know there's always just a moment when I hand my camera to a stranger that I wonder if his next move is going to be say "OK, on 'three' smile.  One. Two." and then he sprints in the opposite direction with it.

There was a large collection of my favorite Candian artists, the Group of Seven andEmily Carr ,  Canadian landscape painters from the 1920s.
            
DD#1's interpretation                                                                        Emily Carr:  Red Cedar


Toronto is a great city to visit and I feel very lucky that we live with in a few hours of a world class city.  Here's a shot out our hotel window.


Can you see how many construction cranes fill the horizon?! 



Here's my prefunctory Artsy Urban Shot.


   

And although it was chilly, it was plenty warm enough to walk around some of the neighborhoods.  One of my very favorite is the Kennsington Market neighborhood.  And two of my favorite places in that neighborhood are the Market Bakery (I fall down very hard for pastry.) and Cheese Magic (What's not to like about cheese?).

So after a brief week home, we turned around again and made for Auntie Colleen's and Uncle Rob's house for Easter because as  DD#2 says, "It's a tradition".  Or rather "It's a TRADITION." with capital letters as in something you do not mess with. 


There were lots of Easter traditions, with a lower case "t", to be had.   The official posed Easter picture.  (Yes, we took about 15 posed pictures and  this was the only one that turned out without someone having a odd expression on their face.)


 The ever popular Easter egg hunt.


Dyeing eggs.  I particulartly like DD#2 spotted egg.


And though this has nothing to do with a Easter tradition, the similarity in hair styles between DearSon and the stuffed dog makes me laugh.

And, of course there has been knitting and spinning.

I (finally) finished this Lopi sweater.  I've been working on this one on and off for a year and finally decided during the cold snap in February that I would actually finish it.

 

Pattern: Britt a woman's traditional Icelandic Lopi sweater
Yarn: Reynolds Lopi
Mods:  I made the arms 5 inches longer than stated in the pattern!  What the?!  Do Icelandic people have particularly short arms?  Or should  I just come to the conclusion that mine are freakishly long?

There were socks for my DH:


Pattern:  Basic sock recipe
Yarn:  Yarn that I spun from roving I bought from a shepherd in our Handspinning Guild.  Lovely soft, lofty chain-plied heavy worsted weight.

And from my own "I'm a nerdy knitter" files:


Pattern:  Star Trek Insignia washcloths
The difference in sizes is due to the fact that I knit the green one continental and the purple one English style.  Adding to the nerdiness of these, I was doing an experiement to see what gauge differences would result from a different knitting techniques.