Aiglet Knits Sometimes

Outraged Letters of Varying Importance

2009-06-14T09:39:00.000-07:00

Today is clearly "outraged letters" day.

For the important things, I have written to President Obama regarding his office's contemptible views on DOMA. I know it probably won't help, but I just had to express my shock and betrayal that someone who was so assiduously courting the gay and ally vote during the election would issue this kind of statement.

In the silly things...

I wrote to Columbia Tri-Star Marketing about why I won't be seeing District 9 in theaters. This letter was more sarcastic than outraged -- I sent them a thank-you note for saving me from spending $11 on their movie. And not just my $11, but that of everyone I know and can reach. If they think we're not their demographic, fine. I'll spend the money on something or someone else. It's not like they're trying to turn a profit here or anything.

I also wrote to Fox about the ten hours of intro stuff to the current season of So You Think You Can Dance. I like the show -- it requires a certain amount of actual talent and skill to get onto the show, and it's focussed on performance rather than on internal psychodrama. But sitting through five pre-show shows to get to the selection of the final contestants is beyond the pale. So I wrote them to tell them so.

It feels good to be writing indignant letters again. I don't expect them to accomplish much, really, but I have said something about the things in the world that are upsetting me. (Yeah, okay, the SYTYCD one isn't really that big of a deal, but it was incredibly annoying, and as long as I'm writing letters...)

Later today, we're going to go to a BBQ at a friend's house, where I will work on my travel project and smoke too many cigarettes and eat home-made pulled pork. Perhaps this will soothe my outrage.

REVIEW: Dance Flick

2009-06-08T10:06:00.000-07:00

This movie was dreadful. "I almost walked out" levels of bad.

Look, I love a good dance movie, but they do really all have the same plot -- upper-middle-class white girl wants to dance but can't for some reason, meets non-white/poor (or both) boy who teaches her how to express herself through dancing different from anything she's ever learned, she accomplishes something she never thought she could using these new skills, and then leaves. Boy will not appear in the sequel in any way.

This is a set-up ripe for lampooning, and given that DF was made by the same people who did "Scary Movie," which was apparently a treat for horror fans, I had high hopes of them bringing the funny.

If the writers had watched any dance movie other than "Save the Last Dance," they'd have had better luck. The movie was entirely a remake of STLD, with bits of other things thrown in (almost all of which were much funnier than the main plot-line/satire). Pieces of it were *very* funny, but there wasn't really a whole lot of dancing (although what little existed was fun to watch). Unfortunately, a great deal of the humor is in race jokes, some of which are funny (mostly because they ring of truth) but a large number of which just made me uncomfortable, and all of which became boring after they'd been beaten into the ground, resurrected, re-flogged to death, and then presented as warmed-over leftovers five minutes later.

I'm having a hard time unpacking the bits that made me unhappy because they weren't funny, because they were racial humor (and I have privilege I need to examine there), because they weren't true to the style of the movies they were parodying, or just because they presented the kids in the movie as shiftless, futureless losers who chase "respect" at the cost of anything that might make their lives better. (Which is so not the message of any of the original movies, and isn't really even suggested by them, as far as I can tell, so it's not even like it's a funny reversal of a "dance can get you anywhere, stay in school, don't do drugs" message.)

So yeah... Not enough dancing, too much uncomfortable and overblown humor. Save your money and go see Star Trek instead.

Edited to add later: I see I left out my rant about the terrible ten minute "your mom is dead and it's all your fault" "ballet" sequence. That's probably just as well. It was every bit as bad as you think it was.

RANT: Fault vs. Responsibility

2009-05-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school, my dad forbade me to use the phrase "it's not my fault." I always thought this was deeply unfair, because, really, sometimes it's not my fault -- it's the weather, or traffic, or the fridge shutting down in the middle of the night.

Eventually I figured out that when I said "it's not my fault," my dad was hearing (with justice at least some of the time) "it's not my responsibility." Sadly, these are two different, and in some ways equally useful, concepts.

In any given problem, there are two things to consider: why did it happen, and what are you going to do about it? "It's not my fault" covers the "why," at least in part; "it's not my reponsibility" is an answer to the question of handling things. Often, they have nothing to do with each other. People often cause problems they aren't responsible for fixing (e.g., I broke a tech set-up at BayCon this last weekend, which was totally my fault, but we needed someone else to fix it), and slightly less often fix problems they aren't responsible for.

I think the problem is that people often use "it's not my fault" for "I'm not going to do anything about this," and there's a loss of meaning there. People ought to own up to the things they've done, even if they can't or won't deal with the results, if for no other reason than so that other people know what's going on -- if you caused the problem, you probably know more about it than anyone else!

Taking responsibility for things you didn't cause can be very hard -- there's an assumption that if you're fixing it, you broke it -- but I think it's a mark of maturity to be able to just pick up the pieces and keep going, even if you didn't screw it up in the first place. If we only ever took responsibility for fixing things we had personally broken, then there wouldn't be any response to natural disasters, or tech screwups, or any number of other things. People who are trying to avoid blame wind up sounding like they're trying to avoid work, and some things wind up being no one's problem because they're too big to assume blame for.

I find this very frustrating.

WIP: Sleepy Monkey Blanket

2009-05-19T11:41:00.001-07:00

My boyfriend's mother loves monkeys. I like to knit. The Sleepy Monkey Blanket is clearly the natural confluence of these things.

I've only knit about a third of the front half, using Knitpicks' Wool of the Andes instead of the recommended Valley Yarns colors, because I'm new to colorwork and didn't want to shell out a whole lot of money on yarn for a project I might or might not ever want to finish, especially since a lot of them are in colors or amounts that I can't really use for anything else.

OMG, it works. So freakin' cool -- you knit away, following the pattern, and poof! Monkeys!

Boyfriend and I had a very funny conversation about this, though -- he kept trying to figure out what his mother would do with it, and I didn't really have a great answer. Finally, he says "well, I suppose the dogs could sleep on it?" I couldn't even really get mad -- he so clearly didn't understand how much work this was going to be, not just in terms of the knitting but in terms of learning new skills (colorwork! steeking! sewing bits together! adding borders! eek!). I do wonder how I'm going to impress upon his mother that this is not a dog blanket.

On the other hand... I am making it for her, it is made of scratchy wool -- maybe it'd be a lovely dog blanket, and it is, after all, her right to do whatever she likes with a gift. I'm just not sure how I'd react to the idea of something I put that much work into getting muddy and things. (Also? So not superwash. It'll felt the first time the dogs get really wet.)

The pattern is great, though -- the charts are really clear, even on my black-and-white printer, and the author's enthusiasm for steeking has convinced me that maybe I should give it a try and it won't be the End of All Knitting(tm). I've always liked the idea of the Twist Collective, but I've been so spoiled by the free pattern search on Ravelry that it really takes a lot to make me actually want to pay for a pattern, much less actually do so. This was totally worth it, and I'd recommend it for anyone who's willing to put in the work and can figure out what to do with it. (If you do, please let me know!)

Book Review: _In the Forest of Hands and Teeth_ by Carrie Ryan

2009-05-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

I borrowed this book from Seanan, who handed it to me with a comment that it was more my sort of thing than hers. This was a rather curious comment, since it's a zombie novel and I'm not a horror kind of girl, but I think she was probably right.

Please don't get me wrong, I liked this book. It's just... a bit problematic in ways that make me want to poke at the holes to see if I can make a pattern out of them.

Forthwith, the cover text. After that, all is spoilers.

In Mary's world there are simple truths. The Sisterhood always knows best. The Guardians will protect and serve. The Unconsecrated will never relent. And you must always mind the fence that surrounds the village—the fence that protects the village from the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

But, slowly, Mary’s truths are failing her. She’s learning things she never wanted to know about the Sisterhood and its secrets, and the Guardians and their power, and about the Unconsecrated and their relentlessness.

When the fence is breached and her world is thrown into chaos, she must choose between her village and her future—between the one she loves and the one who loves her. And she must face the truth about the Forest of Hands and Teeth. Could there be life outside a world surrounded in so much death?

SPOILERS AHOY (This is a newish book, which is why I'm making a Thing about it.)

This is such a promising concept, and very YA-genre appropriate -- our Young Heroine discovers that what she's been taught is perhaps not quite the truth, plus zombies. The writing is marvelously atmospheric, with our Village of (possibly) lone survivors, surrounded at all times by a seething mass of zombies, protected only by chain-link fences and platforms in the trees they can retreat to if the fences are breached.

The book opens with Mary's mother succumbing to madness after losing her husband and going too close to the fences, where she is bitten by an Unconsecrated (zombie). (Please don't ask how you can bite someone through a chain-link fence, we're just not going to go there.) It turns out that the Village has an odd custom where if you are infected, you can choose to be put out into the Forest of Hands and Teeth instead of being decapitated after you die. The Village even has a set-up to deal with this eventuality -- a pen they let you die and Return in, with a gate that can be lifted from outside by a rope. Mary's mother chooses this, and Mary spends some time trying to find her mother in the mass of zombies around the village.

I liked this part of the book -- the poignancy of knowing that her mother chose death and zombiehood on the slim hope of hanging on to enough of her identity to find Mary's father and reunite with him resonates well.

Her brother, blaming her for not being there to keep her mother away from the fence (and then for letting her choose to become Unconsecrated rather than be killed), turns her away, at which point she is taken in by the Sisterhood, the religious order that runs the Village. This is where the real problems with the book start. There's very little background given about how or why the Sisterhood came to run the Village, complete with iron-bound ritual and secret tunnels. This makes the world feel a little hollow, especially when they're shown to be fanatics who will turn people over to the Unconsecrated (or at least threaten to) rather than allow questioning of their doctrine. The Cathedral where the Sisterhood lives is described in fairly close detail, and little tid-bits of the rites and rituals are nicely inserted into the ongoing conversations and events.

The real problem is that there's no background -- somehow this structure feels precarious (perhaps because of the rigidity with which it's enforced), but we're also meant to feel a great weight of ages to all of this. I know it's a first-person narrative, and those always tend to have unreliable narrators and big chunks in the available knowledge, but I think the focus isn't quite tight enough, in some odd way, to justify the complete information vacuum. Even when we're given scraps and pieces of information, it's only ever just enough to tantalize rather than really inform.

It's not really the "around the corner" problem (where it feels like if you went around the corner from the main character, there would only be an unformed void), but it's a similar kind of thing, I think.

The book continues through the inevitable steps of the Hero's Journey -- the destruction of "home," the need to set out on a voyage, the currently en-vogue love triangle (although no sex or anything even close to sex, really), und so weiter. It's all very nicely done, the characters feel more-or-less fully realized, the atmosphere stays tense (even if the story does lag at points). The book is very dark, though. I'm not sure I would give it to a younger teenager -- it's pretty bloody, violent in places (as zombie novels tend to be), and has themes of parental death, miscarriage, and some really nasty politics. It didn't quite give me nightmares, but I could see it doing so for someone with less experience with creepiness.

Really, my big problem with this book is the timing of the whole thing -- inside the Village, it feels like things have been the way they are for generation upon generation. Mary's mother tells her stories about the semi-mythical ocean, and proves its existence with a picture of her many-times-great-grandmother at the seaside. The books Mary finds hidden in the Cathedral that reveal that the Sisterhood are experimenting on the relationship between people and Unconsecrated are crumbling and old.

And yet, when Mary and the remnants of her Village (conveniently made up of the person she's been betrothed to, his brother who she's in love with, her best friend who's betrothed to the brother but loves Mary's intended instead, and Mary's brother and his wife, who turns out to be infected and has to be beheaded a few days into their journey) find another Village at the end of a series of paths made of chain link and gates, there are photos and newspapers that can still be read and carried around without crumbling away into dust. Newspaper simply doesn't last that long, and there are other clues that could be put together to imply a Return with Mary's parents' lifetimes (or even within Mary's, really -- that oh-so-convenient unspecified event that wiped out much of her generation in infancy could have been the Return, especially with the ongoing presence of Unconsecrated infants that feels sort of Thematically Important).

Other things that could really use explanation are how all of this elaborate anti-zombie infrastructure got built, if the virus (and it's explicitly stated to be a virus) swept over the entire world that quickly? It's not just one big stone building, but the Village and its anti-zombie platforms, the chain-link fence that encircles the whole thing (and how do they repair it after breaches??), and a network of paths that lead from one outpost Village to another (or at least, it's strongly implied that there are more than just the two that we see on-screen).

The book also ends rather abruptly. The object of the quest is reached, and it turns out that if the people who lived by the seaside had only had as much faith in their myths as Mary did in hers, everyone left would have survived, instead of being left on the endless chain-link paths that have dead-ends all over the place. (And why do those dead ends exist? Were there structures there once? If you were building a huge anti-zombie set of paths through your all-encompassing forest, would you put dead ends in it?)

All of that being said, I'm not sorry I read it. Mary's voice is strong and consistent, and the world is very interesting (if it were less so, I'd be less frustrated at the lack of information!). This book could easily have been half-again as long without really doing it any damage, unless you want to make the argument that the ignorance is part of the atmosphere. It's a supportable argument, really, but I just wound up feeling like I'd been left with bookus interruptus.

I borrowed this, and will probably not be hunting a copy for myself, although I would buy a second-hand one if it were priced reasonably. I recommend this book for people who enjoy atmosphere and character interaction and don't find it necessary to poke at the whys and wherefores of a world too much.

Tons of Knitting, but no Talking

2008-08-31T08:30:00.001-07:00

I've been hibernating from, well, most of my life recently. I've been doing plenty of knitting, but I haven't been talking about it much. Some of it didn't even make it into Ravelry before I gave it away.

I finished the big Alpaca scarf, but the person I was going to send it do died. I had made her a very large alpaca Kiri (I think it was a Kiri, it was definitely some kind of leaf lace) and she loved it so much that I thought she might like something smaller to wear all the time. I didn't manage to finish it in time. (Although I suppose that's unfair to me, given how unexpected it was.) I was thinking of sending it to her daughter, but it blocked out a *lot* shorter than I thought it would, so I'm not sure it's a useable size for a full-size person.

I've also been doing some baby knitting -- my boss is pregnant, and doesn't apparently have anyone to knit for her, so I've been trying to make things. Unfortunately, I'm not so good at cranking out things to order and it's been slow going. I guess I'm just not cut out to knit to order, even when it's my *own* order. I've got about half a baby hat, but since the main body of it is knit in reverse stockinette on size 1 DPNs, it may be a while. It's a good thing I don't believe in giving baby presents before the baby is born!

To soothe my soul, I finally started my red Frost Flowers and Leaves, but I have no photo of that. It's gotten off the DPNs to the Magic Loop stage, but it still looks like a crumpled red ball of ramen. The color is gorgeous, though. I'm really pleased.

Since Seanan has to go to San Jose today and Himself is out of town, I restarted Shedir to have something relatively portable to take with me. It's currently on size 2 needles, so we'll see if that makes it small enough. I sort of refuse to put Calmer on size one needles, that's just... silly. Besides, my size one DPNs are in the baby hat. I suppose I could get a small diameter size one circ from KnitPicks and use that if I really have to, but since I'm staring down the face of some really expensive dental work, I'm not sure it's worth spending the money when I can just wait for the DPNs to be available.

So that's pretty much the state of my knitting. I'm sorry I've been so quiet recently. I shall try to be less neglectful.

12 Steps of Lace Knitting

2008-04-21T16:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote this for a Yahoo group I'm on (the fabulous MMarioKnits), and I thought I'd share, since the people over there seemed to like it so much. Real knitting content coming, oh, sometime soon. I'm stuck in "finishing a Kinzel shawl" hell, as you can probably tell by some of the below.

1. Find pattern.
2. Sigh over yarn.
3. Pick yarn.
(Note that in steps 1 - 3, yarn and pattern are interchangeable, and that these steps can be performed in any order.)
4. Locate a needle that looks like it might be right.
5. Start project, in a fit of confidence, declaring that the gauge swatch didn't *specify* stockinette, so you might as well just start.
5a. Rip it out and find a different needle. Repeat 5 and 5a as necessary. (Note that step 5a is optional, but if performed, must be followed by another step 5.)
6. Knit like a fiend.
7. Try not to swear too loudly at whatever it is about the pattern that makes you want to -- this tends to distract you from counting and scare the locals.
8. Remember that neither alcohol nor chocolate can save you from the background pattern.
9. Get close enough to the end to start looking at other projects and thinking they'd be more fun, as they don't take hours to finish one row.
10. Add an edging. Alternatively, don't add an edging and bind off.
11. Block like mad.
12. Feel terribly proud of yourself... And then try to figure out what to do with the thing!

Radio Silence

2008-03-23T07:48:00.000-07:00

Wow, it really has been a while, hasn't it?

Part of this is that I've been depressed, but another part is that I've been busier knitting than I have writing about it. You see, I got involved in a design project, and it ate my entire knitting life for a while. (I suspect it will again when I get back to it.)

I'm attempting to design a traditional (i.e., bottom-up) Faroese shawl in sea-and-land motifs. Unfortunately, this means that the first line is "cast on 427" and every time I mess up, I have to rip the entire thing and start over. The good thing is that I bought a cone of green laceweight from Webs a while ago and I've got so much of it that when I really mess up I just throw the entire thing in the garbage and start fresh, without feeling too guilty about it. (Actually, being in Berkeley, I put it in the "organics recycling" trash, which reduces the guilt even further.)

No photos, because right now it just kind of looks like, well, a blob of green cotton that might or might not have a "Print O' the Wave" pattern forming. (It's the decreasing that's getting to me -- I picked out the patterns and all of them work but this one, assuming I've gotten my shaping decreases right.)

Other knitting... Well, my older (step)brother had a baby around Christmas, and I'm going to her naming ceremony next weekend. (It's like a christening, except they're Jewish. Same idea, though -- welcome to the community, meet everyone, get presents, etc.) So I've been knocking out baby things like there's no tomorrow -- I made a Mason-Dixon baby kimono out of some white acrylic I had lying around (amazingly cute), and a set of bibs out of the kitchen cotton I've been making my washcloths out of. (Handwash only does not sound like a good choice for the mother of a newborn!) I'm also making a set of matching burp clothes, just 'cause, and I've been spending hours and hours on Ravelry looking at patterns and trying to figure out what I can do with the yarn I already have. I don't know his wife very well, so I can't tell what her reaction would be to a nursing shawl or anything like that, although I still feel that I should make something for her as well as for the baby.

Everything else is pretty much stalled. I did some knitting on the alpaca North Star scarf (which is rapidly turning into the alpaca North Star stole, give how enormous it is), and I've been rather grimly knitting away on the Kinzel Daffodil thing. I need to remember that endless acres of "k/p into next stitch; k2tog" while very pretty is really fussy and boring. Sigh.

I keep going into Lacis, which isn't very good for either my determined yarn diet or my straightened wallet -- I've thusfar managed to resist *both* the $60 lace book full of beautiful patterns that I don't like very much in the book (although I love the ones other people have made) and the Yarn Place Grace laceweight, even if it does come in a really gorgeous saturated purple. Stash knitting is good for you, right? (Maybe things I buy for the baby don't count? I've already had to buy buttons and ribbon...)

I'm debating giving the baby the Baby Surprise Jacket. Yes, yes, it's a Baby Surprise Jacket after all, but it's also made of Cascade 220, which is gonna be a pain to wash. I'll have to ponder (and in my pondering, put on the buttons I bought a while ago, which are ridiculously cute). It's not like coats need all that much washing anyway, is it? Of course, I've only got a week to think about it and to figure out which side of things the buttons go on for girls. I think the buttons go on the right and the buttonholes on the left.

So yes. Baby knitting and ridiculous design projects. How are you?

Flickr

2008-01-06T12:50:00.001-08:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

It really is that ugly.

2008-01-06T12:44:00.000-08:00

I was actually kind of planning to pretend that this sweater didn't exist, but I foolishly mentioned it in my last entry, so I figure I should probably post pictures so you can see it and I can get some sympathy from people who will understand that I tried to save it, I really really did. (My non-knitting friends just look at it and say things like "WTF is that?")

Here's the backstory. I made a Hemlock Ring (a very pretty, very normal-looking Hemlock Ring, except for the dropped stitch I found while I was blocking it, and that's more than fixable). When I was done, I had, oh, a skein and a half of Eco left over, in a pretty sort of medium green. This picture is almost color true, and that stitch marker is the dropped stitch that I haven't fixed yet.

What's a girl to do with all this leftover yarn? I'd always said I was going to make a sweater, and it was cold and rainy, being the beginning of that season in the Bay Area, and my copy of Knitting from the Top Down was sitting there taunting me. I figured "okay, I know a bulky sweater is not going to be the most flattering thing ever, but at least it'll be a nice fast knit, and then I can say that I've made a sweater and not feel bad about never doing it again." Bad plan.

I looked at all the sweaters I enjoy wearing, and realized that they all have V-necks. Okay, there are instructions for V-neck raglans, I can do that. Great. Cast on, knit, knit, knit, knit, hey, arms! Look, it works! Get it to about three inches past the armholes, try it on. Er... I know I have big shoulders, but I'm not that big! Go consult TB, who rather reasonably suggests that I should put in some ribbing on the sides to draw it in. Don't wanna rip back that far, so I grimly dropped a whole bunch of stitches and picked them back up as purl stitches. Actually, this was kind of exciting, since it was the first time I had managed to do the whole "drop something all the way back to the beginning and start over" trick.

Continue on. Hrm, let's knit some arms now. So I knit the arms to roughly 3/4 length, Since I tend to wear that length sleeve anyway, and I was afraid of running short of yarn. Back to the body, pretending I can't see that weirdness on the front center from joining in the round after figuring out the armholes (I'm still not quite sure how, following her raglan directions, you don't wind up with an extra half-row somewhere). Knit, knit, knit, try on, add some more ribbing, knit, knit, okay, I'm running out of yarn. Try on. Oh, dear -- I've managed to knit myself a nice, warm, pleasantly green... belly shirt. Panic. What am I going to do to add length that doesn't require me to go find another skein of Eco?

So I dug out some of the black Paton's merino I had bought myself when I first said I was going to make myself a sweater, back when I was a newbie knitter. (That one never got made because the sweater I picked, Mariah, was and is a bit too hard for me, since I haven't quite figured out how seaming works yet.) Hrm, I've been knitting all these shawls with knitted-on edgings, why wouldn't it work for a sweater? So I carefully found two different but complimentary diamond-type patterns (one for the sleeves and one for the bottom edge, in an effort to pull the thing together). Find some size 10.5 DPNs, knit on the edgings on the sleeves. "Huh. Have I found the one color in the world that doesn't go with black? I must be hallucinating." Start knitting the edging on the bottom. Wow, this takes a really really long time! Knit, knit, knit, knit, knit. Finally finished! Yay!

It wasn't until I'd finished it, and put it on, that I remembered that wool stretches. A lot. From the length that the green is now, I probably could have just bound it off and blocked it to the length I was going for. I'm considering pulling off the black and just binding off and pretending this never happened. Alternatively, I could just block it for another six inches of length so it'll cover my rear end, and wear it out with tights and pretend I'm trendy. So there it is, the ugly sweater in all it's (admittedly warm and comfy) glory. If nothing else, I'll make S. wear it when she comes over in the middle of the winter in a cotton t-shirt and complains that she's cold -- maybe that'll teach her to wear proper clothing!

Bad, bad blogger.

2007-12-30T15:10:00.000-08:00

After being utterly miserably ill during and after Thanksgiving, and then depressed and crazy for most of December, I have finally returned to the land of the living, just in time to say goodbye to the old year and hello to the new one.

Lest you think that I haven't been knitting, rest assured that I have, I just haven't gotten around to documenting any of it. :)

I finished my green Hemlock Ring (only to discover a dropped stitch while I was blocking it, which I have carefully stuck a stitch marker into and will rescue when I go on my next finishing kick). It's a lot smaller than I was expecting, even after looking at the finished dimensions in the pattern and thinking "gee, that's kind of little." Of course, that may be because I'm comparing it to my log cabin, which after two washings (and therefore two dryings, one hung over my shower curtain rod and one properly blocking in an attempt to make it square again instead of oval) has grown to about 6x7 feet. Not that I'd really know, since my friend S. is usually under it -- she still maintains that it's her favorite thing in the house, including the residents, the cat, and our cable, which has what she refers to as the "porn channel" (aka Chiller, the all-bad-80's-horror channel).

After finishing the blanket, I had all this Eco left over. I wasn't really sure that it was enough for another one (despite having about 1.5 skeins of my 3 skeins left over -- I really think I finished HM when I did because I was tired of knitting feather-and-fan). In my insanity, I cast on for what has become known as "the world's ugliest sweater." Using Barbara Walker's instructions in Knitting From the Top, I carefully made a seamless V-neck raglan. I even put a crochet finish around the neckline to keep it from getting wonky. Unfortunately, when I ran out of yarn, I had, oh, 70% of a sweater. It hit on my high hip and had about 3/4 length sleeves. Well, what's a shawl knitter to do when she needs to add length to things? That's right, knit on a border! Keep in mind here that I don't actually own any of the "how to knit borders" books, I just own a whole bunch of lace knitting books. So... I dug out Victorian Lace Today (well, okay, I looked through all my pattern books and decided to use VLT), picked out two relatively similar borders (a smaller one for the sleeves and a bigger one for the bottom), and knitted on three borders. They're perfectly well knitted, they're beautifully attached, and I swear to you that if the sweater weren't made of the only color on the face of this earth that doesn't go with the black Paton's Merino I knitted them in, it would probably look okay. On a black sweater, it might even be cute.

Okay. I have accepted that my sweater is kind of ugly. That's okay, it'll just be a house sweater. Then I put it on. The sleeves are way too long -- fortunately, folding them in half fixes that problem perfectly and doesn't look too terrible, since the lace edging is scalloped at the bottom. Unfortunately... The weight of the bottom border has tugged the body of the sweater down so far that the new bottom of the sweater is pretty much at my knees. I'm really incredibly tempted to block it down just a bit further and then wear it out of the house, claiming that it's that incredibly trendy "short ugly dress over jeans" thing. (I only have to block it down because it doesn't quite cover my rear in the back, which ruins the effect. Plus, well, lace requires blocking and I can't suppress the habit.) I shall have to poll my gentle readers when I get some photos of this thing. (But hey! My first sweater! And it fits in all the places that it should fit! Well, the armscyes might be a bit on the small side, but not unwearably so.)

What else? The mini-cable scarf is dead, long live the mini-cable scarf. I remembered how short the first one was and decided that it was sort of silly to make another scarf I knew I was going to think was funny looking. So I ripped it out and have started a Toddle with it instead. My oldest stepbrother, AAJr. and his wife AALady (yes, seriously), just had their first baby, a girl (who fortunately was named something starting with a letter *other* than A!), so I'm going to send them the BSJ (more on this in a minute) now and the Toddle for next year's holidays (is that pre-planning or what). Fortunately for little EA, they're Jewish, so hopefully she won't run into the "birthday at Christmas" problem quite so badly.

The BSJ is done, all except for the buttons. Unfortunately, I'm having some problems getting buttons. The nearest button store to me is only open Fridays and Saturdays, 11 - 4, but I shall persevere and hopefully remember this week that I have to go during that time. Meanwhile, the 3-mile round trip is probably good for me, and I do get to go by the comic book store while I'm at it, even if I can't buy anything.

Shedir has been abandoned for the moment, as has the North Star. Instead, I'm spending all my "fussy knitting" time on a Daffodil tea cloth/shawl from Marianne Kinzel's Second Book of Modern Lace Knitting. I'm using the same grey weaving wool as I did for the grey Pi, since I've got enough of it to do anything. The disastrous start I made on Mystic Waters was been ripped to be retried at a later date. I suspect I may need bamboo size 4s to knit it with the Alpaca Cloud, since what killed it was a stitch I dropped in row 70 or so that I just couldn't get back up. I'll have to try it again sometime when I'm less stressy.

And that's about it for knitting. (Oh, and the Noro cartridge rib scarf I'm making to use up the last of the Silk Garden 8 while I wait for TB to make up his mind about which colors he wants on his stripey scarf, but that hardly counts. I mostly started it because I was having the kind of day where it takes you four tries to type something like "and," and I was looking for a project that was too simple to mess up.) Other than that... Nothing much changes. I'm still unemployed and therefore on a yarn diet. My parents bought us a new microwave for Christmas, so I'm on a big "let's gather up all the old electronics for the recycling center" kick. Houseguests and parties and cleaning, oh my!

I hope you're having a nice end-of-the-year, with appropriate holiday wishes all around.

Catastrophe.

2007-11-18T09:13:00.000-08:00

So there I am, knitting blithely along on my Mystic Waters, la di da, this is nice easy knitting, as long as I can figure out how to keep my pattern propped up...

At row 123, I felt something weird a bit down in my knitting. Oh, it's a dropped stitch. No... It's... one, two, three, four dropped stitches. But... I have the right stitch count here. I must have dropped them out of decreases further down.

Having blithely told people over and over that all you have to do is drop down the offending section and reknit it, I decided to do this thing myself. Apparently I'm better at giving advice than at actually knitting (those who can't do, teach?), and I just can't seem to fix it at all. Perhaps it's because it's way over on an edge, so I'm not just dropping stitches, but I'm also creating them as I pick it back up.

I'm about this close to just ripping the entire thing out and starting over -- I can't even find a proper non-patterned row somewhere further down to put a lifeline in, so I'd have to rip the entire thing all at once.

This, of course, is what I get for the hubris of alpaca laceweight on Addi Turbos, and chobbling off all my fingernails so I can't use them to pull my stitches into proper decreases. I think I'm going to give this one more try (I'll probably have to rip back the entire corner and then try to rebuild the whole thing), and then just rip the entire business and start over again after the holiday.

Try, try again?

2007-11-11T18:35:00.001-08:00

So there I am, cheerfully knitting away at the blue Shedir, and about half-way through the third set of cables, I realize that there's no way this is going to be a one skein project. I turned it upside down, and also realized that not only could I get my entire head into it without stretching it, I was probably going to be able to stuff one of the cats in there too if I kept going the way I was.

I ripped the entire thing. The Calmer is now sitting in a ball on my knitting table mocking me, and waiting its chance on the size 2 needles. I'd started with the recommended size 3s, but since it was coming out too big, I've decided to drop an entire size and see how much that helps before I start throwing the yarn ball at my computer and yelling at the designer for claiming that this project could be done in one skein on 3s. The yarn is really stretchy and I was making a point of not stretching it out too much when I was knitting it, so that might also be making a pretty big difference. I have a photo essay of the poor thing's death throes that I'll post as soon as I can find a camera cable.

My quest for a "quick" project continued. I'd always meant to make a Baby Surprise Jacket, and finishing off the Log Cabin O'Doom means that I had about three full balls of Cascade 220 (split among the 5 colors, of course, but that's still quite a bit of yarn). Ding! I cast it on yesterday afternoon sometime, and just now finished weaving in all the ends. It's not actually finished, because I want to throw it at TG and see if he can correctly origami it into its proper shape. I think it's actually fairly easy, because the way I set up the stripes was to change color any time I found an instruction. (So the first 8 rows are one color, and then you run out of actually written row-by-row directions, so I changed color. I changed again two rows later because she's got you doing special increases, etc.) I know what the various instructions were for, so I know where the pieces go.

The BSJ was pretty easy -- I did use the "notes" sheet that's floating around online, but I only needed it in one place, right at the beginning, and I flat out ignored it in several places afterwards because her interpretation of the directions didn't match mine. I'm mostly pleased with it, although in one place I wound up having to change colors on the wrong row, so there's one place where the stripes aren't seamless. I have some varigated Lorna's Laces Shepherd Worsted allocated for another BSJ, and I think that'll be lovely because every row will have the color-change dashes, so you won't be able to tell where things happen at all.

Photos of that either her or on Ravelry tomorrow, when I've got actual light to work on. Actually, maybe Tuesday -- I'm going to a law school forum thing tomorrow, and I may be too fried in the morning to take photos, depending on how neurotic I decide to get about the whole thing.

I don't think I actually did anything non-knitting related this weekend, really. TG has a loaner parachute for the next couple of weeks (he's looking at changing sizes, so he's borrowing possibilities from the manufacturers to see how he likes them), so he's been off at the drop zone skydiving all weekend. Yesterday my friend N. came up from school, and we walked to the knitting stores around here and then came home and wound up her yarn before I sent her off to do her homework. (No serious yarn porn from me, sadly -- all I got was three skeins of Misti Alpaca laceweight, which she bought for me as a late birthday present.) We also had our friends R. and L. over for dinner, when I discovered that as easy as the BSJ is, it's not great company knitting because of all the counting. Today, I did mostly nothing but knitting, although I must now go get my laundry out of the machine and pay attention to it.

Oh, and I bought a spinning wheel last week. It's not in very good shape, but I think with some TLC, it'll be very nice. I'll post all about that later, though, since the laundry is calling and this entry is already quite long. Hope you had a nice weekend too!

Phew...

2007-11-09T15:24:00.000-08:00

The log cabin is almost finished. It's off the needles, but it still needs to have its ends woven in. It's already been claimed by S. and Grace the cat as their new mutual favorite thing in the house (including both me and TG). Fortunately, I was smart enough to weave in most of the ends as I went, so I've only got four or so, and I'll do that as soon as I get around to being in a finishing kind of mood (or I get tired of seeing something not-quite-finished being dragged around the house by various friends and pets).

Instead of casting on for Mystic Waters, though, I decided I needed something quick and rewarding to work on as a present for having finished two of my three big projects, so I now have a Shedir on the needles for my friend A. TG bought me some Calmer when we went and looked at the Eco+ for the Hemlock Ring blanket, so I'll have a couple of projects coming up in non-substituted yarn.

I'm not loving the Calmer -- it's splitty beyond belief, and I still have my doubts about the stitch definition. I mean, I've seen the original in the Knitty special issue, but mine doesn't seem to be doing that. Perhaps my gauge is off. But really, I'm hating trying to cable this stuff -- I don't use cable needles, so between the splitty and the slippery, it's kind of a pain. Fortunately, I'm pretty sure A. will love it, and since I have two balls, perhaps I'll make another one and be used to it by then. (And no, I never did actually learn to properly cable with a real needle -- I find it fiddly and actually more difficult than just figuring out how to not drop the stitches in the first place.)

It does feel good to have something I can make visible progress on in less than an hour, though!

Turtles and photos and blog clients, oh, my...

2007-11-06T11:04:00.001-08:00

Someone pinged me on Ravelry to ask if they could use my Barbara Walker Turtle scarf as the "official" Turtle Pattern photo. Somehow, this terrifies me. Out in the big wide world, people are going to see my acrylic knitting as the ur-Turtle. Now, I know that people don't really expect the photos of stitch patterns to be anything like as good as the photos of actual patterns, but still, somehow I'm worried that I'm going to get hordes of Barbara Walker fangirls pinging me and asking how I could possibly think that my Caron Simply Soft play-knitting was good enough to be used as The Photo for this pattern. (See what I worry about when I'm not busy enough?)

In actual knitting news, the grey Pi is done. Finished. Well, almost over with, really. It's off the needles, at least, which means it can go marinate in my "to be blocked" pile until I can stand the sight of it. No new photos, but since I haven't put one here before, here's the old photo of it (several dozen rows before it was finished, but looking about the same, except this photo's got needles in - not that you can see them here, but if you could, they'd be size 4 Addi Turbos):

Although I was desperately tempted to go ahead and cast on for the Mystic Waters mystery shawl that I've got clues for and am way behind on, I decided to virtuously try to finish at least one more project before I did. Not that I was sensible and picked the cabled scarf I've got half a ball of yarn left on, oh, no. I picked the Log Cabin of DOOOOM, although I must admit that it's because the LCoD has gotten too big to be anything other than messy sitting around in the living room, and I think it's starting to bother TG. (I realized reading over the first few entries last night that I have been inconsistent in my acronyms,and I shall have to fix that).

My camera's screen is broken and I can't afford to have it fixed, so this is going to continue to be a photo-light blog, at least in terms of new projects. I am solemnly assured by my own experience and other knitbloggers that there must be a picture in every entry, though, so I think I'm going to start blogging the old projects, so that we can memorialize my "oooooh, knitting" phase (before I got to the "oooooh, knitting with things that aren't made from dead dinosaurs" phase I'm in now, you see). Hopefully that'll encourage me to post more often, too, because I'm starting to feel guilty about neglecting the poor little blog. I downloaded a whole new web browser; just so I could have a blog client, so we'll see. (ETA: And it looks like that client screws up the HTML so badly that I'm not really sure that it's any good either. Feh.)

When you forget to read your knitting...

2007-10-27T14:28:00.000-07:00

But first, a quick meta note: I foolishly upgraded my computer to the beta version of Leopard (Apple's new OS) about a week ago, and have had incredibly flaky internet access since, which is why I haven't been around. They have now released the final version, so I should be upgrading to something a bit more stable soonish.

Meanwhile, in knitting news...

The grey Pi continues, sort of. I got through to the last 20 rows (thank goodness), but I screwed something up. You know, when you get to rows of almost 1000 stitches, it behooves you to pay lots of attention to what you're doing. Sigh. I got about halfway through row 98 (um, that's patterned rows, so it's actually row... 196?), cheerfully knitting away, only to discover that I'd gotten off my count and was putting my patterns in the wrong place. 400 stitches of tinking, here I come. I must admit that I'm tired of this project and kind of want to just pull it off my needles and put it in the trash and pretend it never happened, but I'm so close to the end that I can't quite bring myself to. Besides, I know that's only because the Mystic Waters KAL has started and I really want to knit the first clue on these needles.

Must not abandon almost finished project for new project just because I'm tired of it, right?

Okay, so I'm sure all you pi shawl knitters are looking at this entry a bit sideways and thinking "what kind of insane person gets to past the 6th increase row and still isn't done?" Okay, fair. I think it's that I like my shawls really long in the front, and when I stretch out the plain garter bit, it's only just going from shoulder to waist. Somehow I suspect the blocking gods are laughing at me, though, and when I finally finish, it's either still not going to be long enough, or it'll be enormous and I'll have to give it to A., who's a giant.

It would be a fair revenge on A., though, since I called her about a week ago to find out how big her head is and she still hasn't returned my call. I want to make her a Shedir hat out of the same grey Drops alpaca I'm using for the North Star scarf, but I know she's got a big head and I want to make sure it'll fit before I cast on. Huge grey Pi would be a suitable revenge, I think.

The North Star scarf proceeds apace. It's become my KIP project, much to the amusement of the Wednesday Stash ladies. I don't think I'm going to go to that knit night anymore, though. I rather like some of the people, but the group is really huge, and I think I talk too much for them (or perhaps it's just that I'm overly foul-mouthed). I had a lovely time until everyone showed up, though, so maybe I'll go for the pre-knit-night agglomeration and leave at 6:15... I'm trying to snaffle the people I really like for the Mondays At Starbucks, so we'll see. It was just sort of funny to see everyone saying "oh, you can't knit that in public!" Of course, since they said that, I managed to have to tink one row about five times (before figuring out that, like a good little idiot I'd managed to knit the wrong row), but I did finally get another four rows or so done.

Next week's Monday should be good, though, since I think the person who came last week (R.) and the person who came the week before (J.) will get along famously, and we'll have to see if anyone else shows up. Amusingly, R. and J. are both knitting projects out of the exact same yarn (well, it's the same brand and it looks like the same color), so I'll get to be envious of all the Smooshy Sock I've ever encountered all at once! Alpaca revenge shall be mine, though.

Anyway, now that I've gotten the Endless Bloody Pi rant out of my system, I shall go back to my tinking and watching "educational" TV while waiting for my weekend houseguest to show up. (Well, she's TG's houseguest, really, but since he's not here, being at the airport collecting her, I shall claim her for the moment.)

No new knitting...

2007-10-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

Really, I spent most of the last two days drooling over my cones of Zephyr - and the color card that came with them.

I suppose I did make almost 10 rows of progress on the grey Pi, which is something of an accomplishment when each row is getting up around 400 stitches. Those of you who've made Pi shawls can gasp in horror now -- I'm in the 48 ridges section, merrily heading towards the 96 ridges section. I expect to quit somewhere in the middle of that section, less because I'm happy at how big the thing's gotten and more because, well, I've been knitting it for something like three months and I'm just tired of it.

I'm using what is technically a weaving yarn, so it's very very fine. This may explain why I've had to knit so insanely many rows to get it to do what I want. It may also explain why the yarn smells funny. I think I'm going to have to wash it, although the alpaca I blocked at the same time as the last project I blocked in this yarn also smelled funny, so I didn't realize at the time there was anything I could do about it. The notion of dumping my wool into hot, soapy water and then swishing it around (which really reads like a recipe for felting) makes me very nervous, but we shall see.

As soon as I've knit another 8-bazillion rows, that is. My next increase row reads k95, yo, k1, yo, k95, inc center 271 st. to 573, k95, yo, k1, yo, k95. Sounds like ever so much fun, doesn't it?

Must not cast on.

2007-10-17T13:52:00.000-07:00

Must be good. Must resist the siren call of brand new yarn, much nicer than most of what I'm currently knitting with...

My order of Zephyr laceweight came from Sarah's Yarns. Just now -- just long enough ago for me to have sniffed it and fondled it and thought "oh, that wasn't the color I thought I was ordering, but since it's prettier than the one I thought I was getting, I'm not going to complain."

I'm going to shut up and go knit now, in the hopes of clearing off the needles I need to actually knit something with this prettiness.

Grey is not my friend.

2007-10-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

I'm sure it seemed like a good idea, lo these many months ago when my last bout of startitis took over my brain, to start two grey projects at once.

I have these huge cones of grey wool I ordered from WEBS, you see, and I felt bad that I hadn't done anything with them, so I started knitting things from them. (Lots of things, actually -- I managed to finish two lace shawls before running into my current problem.)

I live in California, where there are two seasons -- the green season and the brown season. I started all these projects in the brown season, when it was beautiful and sunny almost every day, and the grey was just a soothing color that didn't require a lot of thought to knit with. Now, it is the green season, where the skies match my yarn and all the light is that weird cloud-light that leaves you wondering if it would be totally environmentally irresponsible to turn the lights on. It's kind of depressing to be knitting on grey things right now, when I want bright, beautiful colors to keep me cheered up. But I must persevere, in the name of cleaning up my knitting area(s).

My grey Pi shawl is nearing completion -- I've got one more repeat of my current pattern to go, and then I think I'm going to have to do at least a couple of repeats of the next one to balance it out. The top of the shawl has smaller, daintier patterns, so I'd feel weird just ending it with the big bold pattern I put in for the third patterned section. Also, I tend to like my shawls big, and I can't tell how big this one is yet. I think it's not quite big enough, though -- if I hold it up to my shoulders and try to stretch out the front (since it's a Pi-square rather than a proper Pi), it doesn't quite come down to my waist. I know that's not the same as a real wet blocking, but it gives me some idea, at least. Of course, since each row gets longer and longer, "nearing completion" feels more like the sort of pretty lie you tell yourself to finish a workout than it does an actual quality of the knitting. I'd put it down and let it hibernate, but since I'm knitting directly off the cone, I think that would get messy. Besides, I want my size 4 Addis back to use on something else.

My grey Miss Lambert's Veil from Victorian Lace Today, however, has been languishing by the comfy chair for the last four weeks, patiently waiting for me to get back to it. Much like the Pi, it's being knitted off a cone, so I can't just put it away somewhere, and I don't want to rip. I think when I'm done with the Pi, I'm going to have to move the Veil over by my TV-watching station, and try to figure something out for reading the pattern out of the book. Maybe I'll make a copy so I can put it on my clipboard like I've been doing with the Pi.

Oh, well. At least it's finally getting chilly enough that I won't feel silly working on my Log Cabin. Knitting Cascade 220 in the middle of the summer was a bit odd-feeling, although I know that if I want my huge Log Cabin to keep me warm when the real rains come, I have to knit during the dry season to have any reasonable hope of finishing it. I suspect that BC will steal it every time she comes over, though -- she feels the cold more than I do, and the Log Cabin is wonderfully squishy and warm. It's brought me a new respect for the humble garter stitch.

If I can finish the Pi and the Veil and the Log Cabin and the Wavy scarf, I can cast on for another non-travelling project. Despite what it may look like, I much prefer project monogamy (well, for values of monogamy that mean "one for at home and one for out-and-about, but given my preference for lace, I don't think that's unreasonable). I still have two travelling projects, but given how much KIP I've been doing recently, I'm not going to stress about it -- although I might stress about not having anything portable queued up to replace them.

Anyway, less chattering, and more going to take a shower and get ready for my day.

Confessional

2007-10-16T10:58:00.000-07:00

I watch way too much TV, often during the day after it's been aired, so I can fast forward through all the boring commercials (although I have been known to stop and watch one if it's got something interesting going on).

One of the new shows I've picked up this season is Pushing Daisies. Sadly, it's got all the hallmarks of a show that's not going to make it. PD is the show that made me realize I needed a knitting blog, when they showed Chi McBride (who plays one of the main characters) knitting as a stress reliever. They even said that he was knitting in stockinette because he found it soothing, and made a point of saying he was on a purl row later when he had to put his knitting down. It even looked like he was *actually* purling at the time -- they showed him making more than one stitch.

At the end of the show, they show him in a knitted vest and two knitted handgun covers (he's a private detective), and I thought, "gee, I really want to squee about how knitting's gotten so popular that they can put it on new TV and expect everyone to take this for granted, guess I'd better get a knit-blog..."

In actual knitting content, last night was the inaugural meeting of the Berkeley North Starbucks knitting thing. It was just me and one other person, which I actually kind of liked -- we got to sit and chatter away and get to know each other without trying to connect to lots of people all at once. She can't make it next week, but the person who I was originally organizing it with (who couldn't come this week) can, so maybe I'll get to meet another nifty person solo.

Sadly, even though I knew J. (the person who came this week) couldn't make it before 6:30 due to Monkey-care issues, I went at 5 anyway just in case anyone else wanted to come. They didn't. On the other hand, I got 20 rows of my Arctic Lace project (the North Star scarf) knitted, so I suppose it was a net win. Once J. showed up, I switched over to the mini-scarf I've got going as a travelling project, since complicated charted lace doesn't exactly lend itself to conversation.

It might be worth pointing out that perhaps splitty alpaca yarn (Garnstudio Drops Alpaca) combined with slippery metal needles (the size 4s from my Boye Interchangeables kit) isn't the best idea ever. I managed to not drop any stitches, but I'm going to consider that a gift from the knitting gods. The yarn's not really that bad, but since I had to rip out my cast-on three times before giving up and doing a knitted cast-on, I got a bit frustrated with it. (I kept under- or over-estimating the amount of yarn I needed for my long-tail cast-on, because despite knowing all kinds of tricks for estimating it, I always forget them in the heat of the moment.) The pattern is showing up beautifully, though, so I'm quite pleased. I suspect that my scarf is going to be a lot wider than the 10" the book says you should be getting with quiviut on size 3s, but that's okay -- I like nice wide scarves.

The mini-cable is going well, just like it did last time. The seed-stitch edges are doing this neat thing where the stitches pull apart from each other, leaving a sort of lattice effect. (I know it's not supposed to do that, but since it's never done it in any other yarn/needle combo, I'm not too worried about my ability to do non-weird seed stitch, and it is neat looking.) I was thinking of giving it to TG's father for Christmas, but TG pointed out reasonably that his father is something of a giant, and that perhaps a scarf that I refer to as "mini" isn't the best choice, even if I do try to pass it off as a cravat. He was properly impressed by my cabling without a cable needle, though -- I don't think he's ever seen me cable before. I must admit that one of the things I like about cables is that they're almost as good as lace for acheiving the "how'd you do that" effect.

No pictures of anything at this point, because I haven't gotten around to digging out the camera -- even though I'm deeply enamoured of the whole "putting pictures on Ravelry" thing, using the camera with the broken screen in the back is just an unbelievable pain, especially since the break is spreading. I shall have to scrape up the money to get it fixed.

More faux-content

2007-10-13T22:13:00.001-07:00

I promise I'll put some real knitting content up here soon, but for now, you can find it on Ravelry under username aiglet.

Linkety

2007-10-13T22:07:00.000-07:00

I have added links to the crafting blogs I read every day. Maybe I'll add the rest of the blogs I read at some point, but I wanted to start with the ones that were... thematically appropriate. Please let me know if I've done something horribly rude by adding links without asking first!

I felt bad for all the people who have blogs whose names appear late in the alphabet, so I've got them sorted reverse alphabetically. My last name begins with 'S' and I always hated having to be near the end of the line all the time.

No, I don't read psychotically fast, I just have a good RSS reader and most people don't post every day. That means that all of the people linked will allow you to get the full content of their posts through RSS or Atom or some other feed-type mechanism -- I got frustrated with all the people who only give you previews. If I wanted to visit a thousand webpages every morning, I wouldn't bother having an RSS reader in the first place, now would I?

So I don't bore other people...

2007-10-13T20:08:00.000-07:00

I knit. I think about politics. I need to say things that involve knitting and television and other things.

So... here I am, creating a pseudo-knitting blog so I can rant about my projects and random knitting sightings.

Hopefully, it'll only ever be read by people who won't be bored by that sort of thing.