Tag: québec

visiting a cabane à sucre

DiannaLeave a comment

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Last year around this time of year I never managed to get around to having a very typical Québecois experience – going to visit a cabane à sucre, or a sugar shack. Quebec is not the only place that has them, of course, but it was here that I first learned of them and the concept is very tied to Quebec in my own mind. So this year, when a somewhat last-minute invite came from a friend to join a group going to a farm about 45 minutes outside of Montreal, I didn’t hesitate to say yes. So last weekend, we piled into a car and drove out to Rigaud, where we visited Sucrerie de la Montagne.

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I’m not going to lie – the whole experience is a *little* campy (the photo above is the horse-drawn cart that took us from the parking lot to the dining hall, a hilariously short distance), but it was also very, very fun. Even though it was a miserably cold and grey day with freezing rain coming down, everyone around us (ourselves included) was so very cheerful. I think some of that has to do with the sugar, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that going to visit a sugar shack is a very tangible sign of spring on the horizon in a part of the world where the long, harsh winter means we won’t be seeing flowers pop up for another month or two.

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Cold nights and warm, sunny days encourage sugar maples to produce sap, so it’s this time of year that the tree taps start flowing. Sucrerie de la Montagne still maintains a lot of the more traditional ways of production, so the maple trees around their grounds have all got metal buckets attached to the taps.

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A visit to a sugar shack involves a big meal – ours was in a large wooden dining hall, full of communal tables, with live folk music and a fire. And let’s just say that the meal isn’t very vegetarian friendly (but then, in my experience, most of the traditional Québecois foods aren’t). But the last course involved pancakes and sugar pie, and those were predictably very good. After the meal we all headed outside for tire d’érable, or maple taffy.

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Troughs of fresh snow are laid out and maple syrup is poured over the top. Once the syrup has sunk in a little bit, you take a popsicle stick and roll it through the syrup for a little sticky maple popsicle. It is, as you would guess, very sweet! But if you just have a small one it’s not so bad.

I’m happy to have finally crossed this experience off the to-do list. And I’m very happy that it’s finally feeling like spring is just on the horizon. This winter hasn’t been as hard as the previous was, but it’s nice to have reminders like this that this one, too, is coming to an end.

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looking back at 2018

DiannaLeave a comment

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I’ve been taking some time to look back, as one is wont to do at this time of year. Yesterday was the winter solstice, which means this year has almost drawn to a close. 2018 has been quite a year. I released a lot of patterns this year. I knew I had done more work than usual, and kicking it up a notch in the first full calendar year after finishing my master’s degree was the plan, but still, when I sat down to count out how many new designs I actually released, I was stunned to realize there were twenty-four of them. 24 new patterns in 2018! Fifteen of those came in the form of three collections. I am absolutely astonished at my own productivity. Of course, there are some things that helped make this achievable – working with third parties always makes the work less for me, and tied to that is the fact that the work for some of this year’s releases was actually done in 2017 (or in the case of Fog & Frost, even earlier). Sample knitters also knit a few of these samples. These are all things I’m grateful for as someone designing and writing knitting patterns. But here’s a look at my 24 patterns of 2018 (a list with links will follow in case something piques your interest):

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From left to right –
Row 1: Frost Flowers, Lyngen, Alice Mittens
Row 2: Mountain Hum, Polar Night, North Wind
Row 3: West Wind, Cloud Pine, Adrian
Row 4: Opal, Dorthea, Turlough
Row 5: Drumlin, Weekend Walking Mitts, Caithness
Row 6: Tremblant Toque, Le Massif Scarf, Sutton Slippers
Row 7: Stoneham Poncho, Bromont Mitts, Brave at Heart
Row 8: Just and Loyal, Wit Beyond Measure, Great Ambition

The collections are definitely all highlights – Fog & Frost, the Chalet Collection for Espace Tricot, and Lion, Badger, Eagle, Snake. The reception for the latter two in particular has been incredible, and I don’t know how to say thank you in a way that actually conveys my gratitude. But thank you.

A few of these patterns were published in books, and it is always exciting to see my name and my work in print. Opal and Dorthea were published in the Norwegian book Ruter og Lus: Retrostrikk fra Salhus Trikotagefabrikk (which I wrote about here) and I still can’t quite believe the museum wanted me of all people to be involved with that project. And then Caithness was published in Kate Davies’s new compilation of hat patterns, Milarrochy Heids, and it means a great deal to me to be included in those pages and to call Kate a colleague and a friend.

I also returned to teaching this year, giving a few classes at Espace Tricot and teaching a full weekend of workshops at Twist Festival in Saint-André-Avellin, Québec. I spent eight months of this year working at Espace Tricot as well, getting to know local knitters and making friends and generally becoming a part of the wonderful fiber community in and around Montréal and Québec, so being invited to teach at Twist was a highlight. All the classes I gave were colorwork related, and it brings me so much joy to share my love and knowledge of colorwork with other knitters.

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From top to bottom: teaching my Traditional Mittens workshop, being interviewed by Transistor Media (you can listen here), and hanging out with buds in the Knitting It Up Yarns booth (first two photos by Sébastien Lavallée for Twist Festival, third photo courtesy of Annie of Knitting It Up)

While I’ve been invited to teach at a few retreats and events in 2019, I’m not anticipating very much teaching in the coming year, I’m sorry to say. The reason for that is that I’m likely looking at another big move next summer (which can make event planning difficult-to-impossible), but more on that at a later date.

Plenty of other things have happened this year – I read 30 books, I learned a new craft, I traveled to some new and exciting places as well as some old and familiar ones. I feel I have so much to be grateful for right now. Given the year I’ve had, I’m taking it easy for the last few weeks of the year, and I’m looking forward to spending the Christmas holiday with family and friends. I am especially grateful to you, my readers, followers, customers. You all are a massive part of the wonderful year 2018 has been on a professional level, and I can’t say thank you enough. My birthday falls on the first of the new year, and some of you may remember I held a birthday sale on patterns last year – keep an eye out, because I plan to do the same this coming year. It’s such a nice way to say thank you for the year just gone by.

Whatever the end of 2018 holds for you – travel, festive celebrations, time for quiet reflection – I hope you enjoy it. And I’ll see you in the new year.

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a wintry walk

DiannaLeave a comment

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When we lived in Tromsø I was pretty good about getting out for walks on a regular basis. The goal was always a daily walk, and even if I sometimes fell short of that, it wasn’t hard to find the motivation to get out for a walk when I was surrounded by so much natural beauty. Since moving to Montreal I have gone on fewer walks, especially since winter has set in. Given that in December we went through the longest continuous stretch of days that never made it above -17°C (about 1.5°F) in Montreal’s recorded history, I suppose that’s not a surprise. Lately, though, it’s been much warmer (about -5°C / 23°F or so) and we’ve had a lot of snow, and I realized that I hadn’t actually walked over to Parc La Fontaine since the snow first came.

I visited this park for the first time over the summer, when we were in Montreal looking for apartments before the move, and I fell in love with it immediately. It’s a huge park to be in the middle of the city, full of trees and playing fields and with a pair of ponds (or one pond divided in two, depending on how you look at it) feauturing, as its name suggests, a big fountain. In summer, it feels like an oasis. The trees provide a leafy green canopy when you want a break from the sun and the heat, people picnic and laze in the grass, and take leisurely strolls on the paths through the park and around the ponds. It’s one of those magical communal spaces that I’m so grateful exists.

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In winter, the experience is very different, unsurprisingly. I expected that there wouldn’t be too many people in the park in the middle of a weekday, though there are a few, walking dogs or babies or simply going from point A to point B. The green grass is covered in a thick blanket of snow and the trees are bare. The main thoroughfares appeared to have been plowed, at least a little bit, but the park was also full of tracks from people taking shortcuts between the paths.

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The ponds freeze over in winter and one of them is kept clear for skating. I’d heard about this before so I was pleased to see people on the ice. Having grown up in North Carolina, frozen ponds are the things of picture books to me (even after living in Norway), and it was fun to see that come to life before my eyes.

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One of the things that consistently catches me off guard about Montreal is how much the vegetation reminds me of the vegetation where I grew up. The tall deciduous trees are deeply familiar to me in a way that feels surprising in an otherwise pretty unfamiliar place. I moved to the west coast of the US after graduating from college, and grew to love the flora of the Pacific Northwest. Northern Norway presented a new set of trees, flowers, weeds, and herbs to become familiar with. But the vegetation here doesn’t feel new or different the way that it did in those places. It’s always so interesting to me which pieces of our childhood come back to the front of our minds when we least expect it.

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One thing I hadn’t anticipated about the experience of being in Parc La Fontaine in the winter is how much more aware I was of the city surrounding me. You’re still aware of being in the middle of the city in the summertime, but in winter when all the tree branches are bare you can’t avoid it. It’s easier to see downtown on the horizon when you look south/west, and all the buildings and the streets on the perimeter of the park are much easier to see and hear. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it did make me want to head for Mount Royal next time I want to go for a long walk in the snow to get away from the feeling of the city.

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I wore my Brackett hat on what might have been its inaugural journey outside the house. This is a pattern of Whitney Hayward’s for issue 3 of Laine Magazine, and I knit mine in the Harrisville Designs  Color Lab 2 yarn I brought back from Rhinebeck. There are so many different colors in this Harrisville yarn that it feels impossible to photograph correctly, but I think this photo gives you a little bit of an idea. (P.S. Have you seen the Bellows cardigan that Karen is knitting with it?)

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Today’s walk was a lovely reminder that it’s always a good idea to get out of the house for a walk, especially when the weather is good. I’ll have to make sure to do it more often.

a new chapter

DiannaLeave a comment

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In my last post I mentioned that my husband and I were preparing for packing up and leaving Norway, but I didn’t say where we were headed. After a couple of weeks of travel, we landed in our new home of Montreal (!) a week and a half ago, and already I don’t know where that time has gone. Moving is so full of seemingly unending lists of practical/tedious/annoying/difficult tasks that need to be accomplished, and we’ve been working away at as much of that as we can. But so far, September has been on the whole a good month. And we are very happy to be in Montreal.

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We left Tromsø the last day of August and woke up on the first of this month in Helsinki, a city that neither of us had ever visited before. We were positively charmed and I definitely want to make it back to Finland someday to spend more time there.

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After three nights in Helsinki, we were off to Crete for what was essentially the first of two “work trips” (I was presenting at a couple academic conferences). Crete was hot and sunny, but after the northern Norwegian summer, we were both pretty happy to be able to enjoy some proper summer weather. Three nights on Crete was followed by three nights on Mallorca for the second conference.

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And then, finally, Montreal. We are setting up a new home in a light-filled space in the city, and very soon we will begin finding our new routines and our new favorite places. Already I’ve enjoyed simply walking the streets of my new neighborhood, choosing different routes to and from various errands in order to explore as much new ground as I can. I’m looking forward to meeting new people and going new places and getting to know this incredibly unique city better. Soon we’ll have internet up and running at home and I hope then I’ll be blogging again more regularly! Until then, you can find me going for long walks as I explore my new city.