Registrations are now issuing under Canada's new Trademarks Regime

 

Registrations are now issuing under Canada's new Trademarks Regime

Anybody who has filed an application in Canada in the last few years knows that examination is routinely taking over two and half years at best.

So, imagine my surprise to discover an Approval Notice issued (one week after the search was recorded) before even a year had passed, advertisement took place just 10 days later and a large envelope arrived in the mail from the Canadian Intellectual Property Office within 3 weeks of the opposition period expiring containing the Registration Certificate.

Yes, you read that right. CIPO is mailing out Registration Certificates. We used to pay extra to get a hard copy.

It is truly a unicorn file. 

 

 

The Winter of my Knit Content (365 Days of Gratitude)

365 Days of Gratitude

2020 was such an awful year globally that on January 1, 2021 I embarked on expressing gratitude for the life I am privileged to live. I decided to do it on Instagram as that would require only a picture and a short explanation. I soon realized that this was not as easy as it seemed. It's not that I'm not grateful for EVERYTHING but coming up with a specific thing and a related picture EVERY day is harder than I expected; and yes, I get the irony (boo hoo, first world problems). But that's what makes it worthwhile -- a daily remembrance that life really is good to me and I am blessed.

Now, I decided to flush out some of my little Instagram glimpses. Number 2

The Winter of my Knit Content

 

Until this winter I had never knitted anything much more than blankets. But I came into a banana box (you know, the ones you get at Costco checkout) full of an assortment of, mostly baby, yarn and felt obligated to use it. It's leftover yarn from many, many projects so it's tricky. Really only good for small projects but there was a really big ball of multicoloured self striping yarn in baby pinks, yellow, green, blue and white which looked like enough for a small blanket so I did that. The blanket has a repeating star pattern. Free pattern at  Start Knitting Once that was done there was still a good bit of the yarn so I made mitts and a hat to match. Free pattern at  Knitting on the Net

 

My First Sweater

 In my search for star patterns Baby Yoda sweaters and hats came up. After reviewing a bunch of different versions I finally settled on Cari Luna's free pattern at Ravelry.com   Knitting up the parts was straightforward. But putting it all together took some mad skills. In the process of getting internet help I read that this is the knitter's nightmare. Ugh. It wasn't a nightmare but it took the better part of a saturday. Free yoda hat pattern from Shinah Chang also at Ravelry.com

 

 

 Stuffies

Next up, for Valentine's Day I knitted little stuffed hearts in red and white for my granddaughter to play tic tac toe with. I used a really cool pattern available for free at Ravelry.com from Amanda Berry aka fluff and fuzz

 

Well, the hearts were so easy and fun I decided to make stuffed stars for the new baby's nursery. Once again I looked to Amanda Berry and found a free pattern at Ravelry https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/starfish-24 I ended up making 6 stars all different sizes with different yarns -- experimenting with needles sizes and number of stitches depending on the yarn type. Super easy pattern. I marveled at how adding a stitch at one end of the row and taking a stitch away at the other end could change a rectangle into a diamond. Weird.

 

 

My last project for this winter was dinosaurs because somewhere along the way the new baby's parents went from a star themed nursery to everything dinosaurs. I used a free pattern from Canadian Living magazine to make a T-Rex. In a couple of places the pattern is incorrect but it was quite obvious and easy to correct. Got help from Marinda Hekel on how to “embroider” the eyes, nose and mouth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwu-ZoJtRkg

Expressing gratitude for the life I am privileged to live.

365 Days of Gratitude

2020 was such an awful year globally that on January 1, 2021 I embarked on expressing gratitude for the life I am privileged to live. I decided to do it on Instagram as that would require only a picture and a short explanation. I soon realized that this was not as easy as it seemed. It's not that I'm not grateful for EVERYTHING but coming up with a specific thing and a related picture EVERY day is harder than I expected; and yes, I get the irony (boo hoo, first world problems). But that's what makes it worthwhile -- a daily remembrance that life really is good to me and I am blessed.

It's been two and half months (74 posts – I counted) and I've decided that it might be entertaining to flush out some of my little Instagram glimpses. I'll start at the beginning.

 

 

To ring in the new year, we went down to the river; we thought that maybe folks on the other side might be setting off fireworks that we could watch. We settled ourselves into two red chairs (*more on that later) and looked out over the river hopefully. There were a few pops and bangs across the river but nothing spectacular. And then some folks showed up right beside us at the dock and proceeded to pop off a bunch of fireworks. It was a great display and we encouraged them and thanked them from (a socially distanced) afar with much clapping and ohs and awes. It was delightful. That kindness and sharing had to bode well for a good new year. 

 

 

 

 

 #SHARETHECHAIR

*The red chairs are a thing in Canada, the parts operated by the Federal Government anyway. Back in 2015 gearing up to our 150^th anniversary of Confederation, the National Parks put on social media  #sharethechair . They built and scattered throughout the country's (many) National Parks red Muskoka  (aka Adirondack) chairs.When you found one you took a selfie and posted it to social media. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That summer we took a rather spectacular road trip and we found some of those chairs way off the beaten track in Red Bay, Labrador and at Snug Harbour, Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland.

The following winter we found the chairs at Winterlude here in Ottawa.

And a couple of years later we found them at the top of Sulfur Mountain in Banff National Park.

Fast forward to summer of 2020 when the National Capital Commission put a bunch of these chairs along the Ottawa River pathway. It seemed a bit of an odd thing to do in the covid summer where sitting around on park benches was frowned on but, that's government for you, I guess. They have weathered the winter well and no doubt hosted hundreds of picnic lunches.