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

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...

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.)

More faux-content

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

So I don't bore other people...

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.