I've slacked off with the Parade of Slippers. But my digital camera is back from my mom's house, so new pictures will be on the way soon.


I made these for my sister-in-law. I made a stupid, stupid obvious mistake. Worse, I'd put them through one washing cycle before I'd noticed, so they were half-felted when I noticed.

How stupid?

There was one whole extra pattern on the first one I made that wasn't on the second one. A whole repeat! What can I say? Knitting on the bus to work isn't necessarily the most mindful experience.

So I had one slipper an inch longer than the other, with a big obviously-not-matching pattern. What to do?

Be bold and do some slipper surgery. The somewhat felted fabric meant there was a bit more fudging required. I started by cutting through the first and last pattern row (the early stages of this process are seen above). Then, as best as I could manage through the felted stitches, I slid circular needles through the row next to the row I'd just cut:

The fluffy bits of leftover cut stitches, I snipped and pulled out. Removing the felty bits was enough of a pain that I'm glad I didn't try to snip one stitch and unravel it neatly. Bleah.

Since my Kitchener Kung Fu is eminently defeatable, you can see the seam on the fixed slipper. But it's still an improvement. And, with a bit more felting, good enough for presents.

Part of what makes J so charming is his mostly-clueless wandering through pop cultural minefields. The morning news shows often trip him up, since A: He's a bit sleepy to begin with, and B: They get SO into their celebrity stuff. In his world most celebrities of the same gender, hair color, and race are essentially interchangable. This makes him seem slightly foreign, from a country where they listen to NPR, live in real houses, and eat cheese that isn't individually wrapped by the slice.

Example: This morning he confused Lionel Richie with Little Richard.

Glaring errors like this are small comfort to me, though. While I know the difference between the singers of "Tooty-Fruity" and "Dancing on the Ceiling", he knows lots of big words, and could just as easily write an entry about my never having heard of Rosicrucians before yesterday (they're mentioned offhandedly in a book on Paganism I'm reading, and I asked him if he knew who they were because he's smart like that).

Having a partner with large holes in cultural knowledge (either real culture or stupid culture) has its advantages when watching The Simpson or MST3K, though. I can describe Abe Vigoda, he can tell me about Opus Dei. It all evens out.

Someday, we're going to play Trivial Persuit as a team, and we're going to be DEADLY.

Not quite at the level of my "Crazy Things Scientists Do" series, but pretty fun looking:

Want to make your rodent friend earn his keep? Build an alternator and attach a hamster wheel to it. When they decide to run on the wheel, it powers a little LED light. (No, it doesn't hurt the hamster, it's just incredibly cute.)

If I'd had a hamster as a kid, this is just the type of thing my grandfather and I would have built one summer.

The rest of their site is pretty neat too--DIY ways of harnessing alternative energy sources.
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A few more babbling sentences on tickling, and giving permission:
Ari hit the nail on the head in the comments, saying: "It's interesting, because tickling is this thing where "no" is assumed to mean "yes," which is always rather dangerous."

Which led me to start thinking about the idea of permission in general, and the situations in which permission is assumed, or else waved aside.

I'm a vegetarian. I don't like fizzy drinks. I've never cared for wine. (I wish I DID like wine, actually. It looks like fun. But my mouth always registers it as vomit-like, non-consumable. You may as well pee in my glass.)

The response to any of these, too often, is "But.."
"But can't you pick out the meat?"
"But it's a special occasion!"
"But you don't understand. This is really, really GOOD!"
"But you won't try even a little bit?"

And really, that's pretty aggressive behavior, isn't it? Disagreement on political issues that affect many aspects of life happens. But how does my selection of orange juice hurt a Pepsi drinker? What is it in someone that personally offends them about a difference in taste?

What's the deal with tickling? Not to sound like Seinfeld or anything, but there it is.

For the record, I hate being tickled. It HURTS. It's not funny. I lose all control of my actions, as a variety of bruised people can testify. As a kid it made me afraid and withdrawn. The thought of it makes me want to cry. I have dreams of trying to save kids being held down by grownups, being blocked by crowds of smiling people that JUST DON'T GET IT.

My family, thankfully, figured this out pretty quickly and kept the physical contact to hugs. The couple of times as a kid that I really got tickled terribly, to the point of gagging and begging and crying, I didn't have the words or experience to say how bad this was. "I hate tickling" fell on most people's ears the way "I hate ice cream" might--a slightly odd response to something perfectly innocent.

But now I do have the words, and the ability to look semi-logically at my responses, and I can say that for me tickling isn't cute or funny, it's abusive. Not a word that should be used lightly, and I don't. But a behavior that makes a child terrified of an adult*, that makes them cry, that gives them nightmares--it's abusive.

I know there are kids and adults that like it. So just ask first, fer chrissakes.

*Side note: Worst tickling moments? Almost entirely other kids with boundary issues. There was one adult, on one occasion--a neighborhood dad with a hearty Santa laugh that was never in his eyes, who cornered me on stairs at a Halloween party in a way that limited my options to "freeze" and "fall down the stairs". People saw it, but no one really caught on to my level of terror. The head on the serving platter and the bowl of cold noodle ("brains") were nothing compared to it. After that even being in the same room as him turned my stomach. The clarity and horror of this memory and others like it are what make me stick with the "abuse" label.

I've always worried about his daughter.

What I'm giggling uncontrollably at this morning.

Irate Ship.

The parade of slippers is nearly over, I promise:

For my mother-in-law. Making toe stripes line up with their counterparts on the other side was kind of a pain, but these were pretty straightforward.
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The bus stop I wait at in the morning has a shoulder-height stone wall running along the sidewalk, covered in icy snow flung by a snowblower. Then there was a cold rainy day, and about a week and a half of wicked dry and cold weather that makes one wonder why humans live in this part of the world.

This combination of weather left delicate arched sheets of lacy ice crystals flowing from rock to rock. The night before last we had gusts of wind with blowing snow, and this morning the icy walls had collapsed, an accidental Andy Goldsworthy at the bus stop.

My mom's been in the hospital this week (no surgery though, and she's home now), and I've been kind of all over the place. Quantity should be back to normal, but I make no promises for the quality.
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More slippers:

For my littler sister. These ones were more like regular slippers than very short thick socks like the rest of them. I did that by not doing a double short rowing--in other words, doing half of the usual instructions for a shortrowed heel.

The edging was some fun and VERY bright novelty yarn I picked up at one of my knitting group's yarn swaps. I had just enough for the pair, crocheting haphazardly around the edges.
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For future reference: If traveling long distances on a train (espcially if some of that travel will be done at night), Sherlock Holmes stories are the BEST. I hadn't actually read any Doyle before, just picked it up at a shop in Buffalo because I'd finished with Mauve but was still in a late-1800's mood. The scary bits aren't so disturbing unless you're actually Victorian (Coal-Tar Derivitives! Irishmen! Ladies that don't tell their husbands things!), but they're very entertaining, and read well to clickety-clack rhythm.
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In re: the second part of this, because I feel like linking to my husband's site:

I didn't feel too strongly one way or the other about the story, although if the whole theater starts laughing at the dramatic climax a director may safely assume they've missed a key ingredient. I didn't mind the story thinness though, since my eyes were kept busy with lush radiant beauty every single second. And now I want to go to a bamboo forest before I die (how could you not want to see this?).

A movie that changes your life plans can't be too bad.

Much updating and redoing in the Crafty section. An entirely new taxonomy has taken hold.

It's nice to have a mental backlog of things to talk about.

Recognize that doodle on the toes? It's the Trylon and Perisphere from the 1939 World's Fair--at least, in theory. It's also my first intarsia that didn't get ripped out instantly. My father-in-law wrote his thesis on the World's Fair, and turned that into a book, so I thought he'd get a kick out of it (he did).

Since knit stitches are wider than they are long, and felting increases that difference even more, I graphed it in as elongated a way as I could manage. The sphere came out about right, but the Trylon's a little chunky. Ah well.
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The Scientists Must Be Crazy: Chimeras

(This is the first installment of what is likely to become an occasional series. The introduction is located here.

Developmental Biology. Nature itself does things so wildly. No wonder the scientists in this field do so much freaky stuff.

Consider: you started off as NOTHING. Or something very close to nothing. And along the way there were tens of trillions of ways for that close-to-nothing to mess up. But it didn't. Your toes are on the ends of your feet, and on the opposite end is your head, for the most part there's hair where you might need warmth or protection, and all your veins and arteries are connected to your heart, which is conveniently located on the inside. The world's dumbest people were able to do this before they could even think.

People who don't study it call it a miracle.

People who do study it call it an EFFIN' miracle.

Science isn't some magic trick, where finding the mechanism behind what you see makes the whole thing less interesting. The questions get better the farther you go.

So what are the questions? The main one always is: how do we get from that single cell to a creature that can look after its own survival? An observational approach gives us a lot, and beautiful work’s been done in that area. But once you’ve looked at pretty pictures, you start to wonder what would happen if… and at that point you get into the experimental side of things.

And that’s when things like chimeras come in.

Most of what I’ve found has to do with chick/quail chimeras. Chickens seem to be the ideal starting point for most developmental biologists--it's easy to get an embryo (or a dozen), they're reasonably complex without needing to worry about mom-complications like with mammals, big enough to keep track of.

The chimeras are made at the small-lump-of-cells stage. What you do is take a few cells from one region—say, the head-ish area—of one species, and pop that into the head-ish region of the second species. And sit back to see what happens.

You know you want to see pictures.

My goal in writing this stuff up was not only to expose non-scientists to the wonderfully weird place we live in, but also to show that this kind of thing doesn't come out of nowhere. To put a human spin on it, the researcher who did this crazy thing has a very nice green jacket in her closet, started her career teaching high school science, and sounds totally normal when describing the route to this experiment. But a chicken with quail wings! You don’t get this kind of thing on the morning news.

(Side ramble: not that this should be on the morning news--the work's over 30 years old. I happened upon it while reading the first chapter of a developmental biology textbook. But it qualified as "strange enough for me to google it to death", which is the only criterion I'll use in this and future installments.)


A continuation of the Parade of Slippers:


These are my dad's. Not a whole lot to say about them, except that 4-color stripes get real tangly real fast. I did a similar bindoff as the ones I showed yesterday, but I only one plain I-cord row for every 4 or 5 I-cord bindoff rows. This ratio came out much less ruffly.



This was the first pair I made. I based all of the slippers on Wendy's Toe-Up Sock Pattern, my usual sock pattern. I'd originally meant for this to be a foray into top-down experimental sockmaking, but as I ran out of time and got into a groove, I ended up making them all in the usual way. As it was, I ended up playing some Kitchener Stich reindeer games (a future installment).

Since felting reduces length more than width, I made them with somewhat pointier toes than usual, shortrowing about 3/4 of the stitches instead of my usual 1/2.

I'm a lazy swatcher and didn't test-felt every single yarn I used. Since most of the yarns were scraps, doing a swatch from a 2-inch ball seemed kind of silly. So I did a swatch with one worsted weight wool I had tons of and am angry with (it's betrayed me twice now, causing much ripping and gnashing of teeth). From that I got a pretty good idea of gauge that worked well enough for all the pairs I made.

I was particularly worried about the bindoff on these guys, since a tight bindoff, felted down, would be totally impossible. For this initial run I did a modified I-cord bindoff, doing plain I-cord every other row. In other words:

(for a 3-stitch I-cord)
Row 1: K2, knit stitch together with the next stitch to be bound off, move all stitches to the other end of the needle.
Row 2: k3, move all stitches to the other end of the needle.

The result, as you can see, was a little ruffly. This pair was for my fairly ruffly sister, so it worked all right.
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Meanwhile, in that other part of my brain:

Scientists do some crazy-ass shit: An Ongoing Series

A little while back I talked about folks working on the directed evolution of viruses, and its implications for turning us all into blobs of screaming terrified death. After writing that, I realized something: on the Today show every morning, they talk about some new thing that science has discovered. Eggs have lots of cholesterol, or people with cancer should take a certain vitamin supplement. There are blurry star-like things really, really, really far away.

BBOORRRRR-ING. The science that non-scientists get to see is BORING. No wonder American kids hate this stuff. If Katie Couric can't keep awake through it, how is the rest of the world supposed to?

Thing is, very few people work on that boring stuff--or if they do, that pays the grants while the batshit pet project moves more slowly, without getting news coverage.

Scientists are crazy. There are only so many normal ways of testing the world, and most of them have been used up already. So we do things that sound absolutely bonkers. But no one hears about it, so they all think we're boring.

Meanwhile, a real live human being--someone that drives to work, has a family, and picks the cashews out of bowls of mixed nuts--decides one day to see what would happen if he puts baby monkeys in a cage with a vaguely monkeyish wire mesh.

Anyway, as part of an occasional series, I'm going to talk about some of the wierd-ass stuff I see as I come upon it. Hopefully I'll be able to explain it, too. We'll see.

Tomorrow: Part 1, Chimeras.

The bulk of the handmade Christmas gifts:

Many, many, felted slippers. I'll go through most of them individually in the next few days, since I tried a lot of oddball things, most of which worked eventually.

One holiday present:

Socks for my mom, done toe-up on 1's or so, using one of Elann's in-house sock yarns. The patterning, which in this picture looks like a few holes here and there, is Old Shale as translated when you read how to do it once and make it up on the bus. It's about right, I think.

They fit mom well. Phew.

How was the vacation? Fine. I'm still a little sleepy from the 20 hour New York-to-Madison transit, so babbling will wait until I remember what I'm supposed to be doing here.