Two videos.

Need entertainment? You might be able to derive some from this disco video, if you can set aside all standards of good taste for four and a half minutes (seen on Making Light). It's bad--it features casual racism and sexism, incomplete choreography, a lack of directorial input, and inappropriately bushy facial hair.

And yet, I keep watching it. It's so EARNEST. It's clear that everyone is enjoying themselves, even the Kevin Smith looking guy whose bongos don't make a noise remotely related to the music.

Equally captivating, but a bit more serious, is this call for equality by an autistic woman(link via Hyper-Textual Ontology), who shares her language, and then translates for those of us who have shut down other ways of understanding.

She also has a blog, where she talks about activism, the video and people's response to it, and going to an autism conference where she was suddenly average, and lots of other stuff. Lots of good stuff, lots of good thinking for me to do about the power of socialization to dehumanize.

I'll mention this now, as I won't have much time for thoughtful posting for a while.

It's handy that Fillyjonk started her blog about a week before I did, because she mentions her anniversaries and it reminds me that mine is coming up too:

The first entries, 5 years ago.

For a couple of months before February 1st, 2002, this web address only had some silly stuff about me loving J.

He was finishing his senior year of college, and I was out here, so every once in a while I'd send him a big manila envelope filled with smaller envelopes, to be opened at odd moments when he missed me. The smaller envelopes had all kinds of things in them--pictures from when I was a kid, doodles made during lectures, jotted-down thoughts that weren't time-sensitive. One simply said "go to this URL", and had some goofy crap in it.

Once he'd looked at it and laughed, I realized that I had a whole empty site that I could fill with things. Somewhere, in the bowels of the Internet, circa 1997, there's a homepage that my friend Dan and I put up together. It had been fun, and I still remembered a fair amount of the coding required to put such a thing together, so I started the blog.

That time of my life was... well, it was really really bad. I was having a terrible time with my graduate-level classes, was questioning the whole graduate thing. I was 1000 miles away from my love, my dearest friends, and my family. Around the 15th of that month my mom got sick (note the multi-week absence mid-month--I'd stopped spending 6 hours a day in the computer labs and instead spend it calling my mom, jabbering while she was too tired to respond, and laying on my bed staring at the wall thinking of made-up funny anecdotes to tell her the next day). I lived in a crummy apartment. I had no friends. It was February in Wisconsin. I was planning a wedding from 1000 miles away.

And I had a website.

Fillyjonk did a nice series of posts about what's changed in the blogging world since then. One of the things I remember was that the word "blog" was *just* entering conversations. Around that time a bunch of random family members asked me what a blog was--I wasn't calling this a blog then, it wasn't as general a term as it is now. I was just writing bits of things on my website.

What's changed since then? Well, for starters, my life is way better, though it's still February in Wisconsin. I wasn't talking about crafty stuff at all then, and now that's most of my shtick. I wrote a lot more daily general observation stuff, I think I do less of that because I don't have to spend nearly as much time in my own head as I was at that point. That can be good and bad, I suppose. My mental audience at that time was J and a few friends, now it's mostly crafty people.

I'm more aware of Googleability. I did a sweep after about a year where I cleared away any searchable references to my first or last name, address, and some other identifying details--my sister's names, I think. It's possible to figure out who and where I am from here, but much more difficult to find this knowing my name. There isn't anyone I'm hiding from; my grandmother reads the site (Hi gram and pepe!), some people I work with know it exists although I don't think any of them think I'm interesting enough to check it out on their own. I just prefer to keep that level of privacy. It allows me to keep a level of truthfulness about my own self that's bigger than my name and address. Although I still mostly don't talk about other people, good or bad--I prefer to mention a conversation in a very general way and use it as a jumping-off point to more detailed thoughts(example).

I didn't think I'd still be doing this after 5 years, when I started it was just another way to pass days. I didn't think I'd make friends. Although my posting density is likely to be pretty low until the summer, I can't really imagine giving it up--how would I give up all my electron-friends?

So, yeah, happy 5th birthday, website. May you always be filled with random thoughts, and fiber, and comments.



Going through a phase right now which might last until I graduate, which is: every second I don't at least have work in visual range, I feel like I'm wasting time. Next week was going to be about as stressful as humanly possible, except one part of an experiment went wrong and needs to be postponed. This is good and bad--on one hand, I want it done, I want to see data, I want to write it up and not think about it anymore, because this is a Big Dang Experiment. On the other hand, this means that I'll have time to eat and/or sleep next week (having time for both is still to be seen).

One extension of this is that the only craft-related stuff that's gotten done recently has been the most brainless of brainless things--endless stockinette in the round, using Wool-Ease left over from the green vest I knit this summer. I just can't hold anything more complex in my mind right now--all available neurons are firing about other, more important things. I turned a heel of a sock last night on self-appointed "break time", but even that was a stretch. Sadly, there's no way the Fair Isle is getting touched for a while. Maybe next winter.

I started this current project without a good idea of what it would be--just cast on 120 stitches and started spiraling. It seems to be turning into a yoked kids' sweater, though, despite the fact that the only thought I've given to it was 5 minutes of looking up numbers in The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns at Madam's a few nights ago and deciding that my guesstimates were about right. The body of it's almost done, I should have plenty of yarn for the sleeves, but not so much after that for a complete object. Depending on its size and stylishness, I'll either give it to one of my procreating friends or the Dulaan project. Also, so far, I'm finding it to be an excellent thing to do while reading papers.

I think I'll do both sleeves at once, knit flat, looking up and increasing once every inch or so. That'll be the easiest thing. I'm fine with then putting the pieces in a corner and finishing them when I'm up for it.

What projects are so-brainless-it's-soothing for you? For me, stockinette in the round is the easiest thing, so I'm thinking about other types of minimally-shaped tubes I can make from the stash--neck gaiters, very basic baby sweaters, or double-thickness scarves out of the Big Box O' Acrylic my grandma found at a tag sale, maybe another Feather and Fan shawl of the type I've knit before--after the fun center, you only do something mildly interesting every 3 rows, so when you get to 600 or 800-stitch rows, that's a lot of knitting to fit in between. I'm thinking of buying a big cone of Zephyr for that purpose, and just going until I run out, or graduate, or lose my mind.

Brainless Baby Sweater

Looks like it'll fit a 3 year old, going on memories of how large young family members were--I don't have a convenient kid around to measure.
You'll need:
-Worsted weight yarn--I think 500 yards will do it.
-Size 7, 16 inch circulars.
A lack of desire for interesting knitting.

Directions:

Cast on about 120 stitches.

Knit one row, then put some bobbles around the edge. Mine have six stitches between them.

Knit two rows, purl two or three rows. (I'm not sure yet if this will be enough to prevent curling. To be more careful, knit two rows and purl two rows again.

Knit while reading papers, thinking up "action words" for a resume, and to keep oneself awake on the bus, until you've knit 8 or 9 inches.

Cast off 5 stitches, knit 55 stitches around, cast off 5 more stitches, continue until you reach the first cast off bit. Cast on 35 stitches here, knit across to the second cast-off bit, and cast on another 35 stitches.

Knit straight for the length of a pinky joint and a half (a little over 1.5 inches for me), while spending a comparitively calm hour with a friend and looking over job listings.

For one round, *knit 2, k2tog*, repeat * to * all the way around. Don't fuss with the numbers working out perfectly.

Knit another 1.5 joints while waiting for your resume to be reviewed.

*knit 2, k2tog* again.

Another 1.5, done while answering questions from a gentleman about what you're knitting, how you can knit without looking, and then while enjoying his spirited argument with a friend on the topic: "Chicago or Detroit: Which is Better?".

*k1, k2 tog*.

Another 1.5, finishing an overdue library book.

Count the remaining stitches, and figure out about how much you need to decrease to get to about 50. For me I needed to *knit 3 or 4, k2tog* for a row.

Knit until you like the neck length. Add some bobbles. Cast off loosely.

To be continued...

Something I never would have thought of otherwise:

The sciences are very international. My office and the office next door (8 people all together) share a phone, and at one time you could get the correct person just by knowing the gender and ethnicity. Eight people, 5 different countries.

Since a lot of companies will more heavily scrutinize applicants with student visas--they need to go through all that paperwork so the person better be worth it, and some companies that work in sensitive areas aren't allowed to hire people from certain countries. So if you have an "international-sounding name", as it was described to me, you should put your citizenship status somewhere on your resume so they won't assume you're on an F-1 and skip past.

I'm a 3rd or 4th generation American (I'm not sure if you count the first generation as the first generation *born* here, or the first generation to *live* here), but I have an Italian first and last name, which has led to confusion at conferences when someone sees my name tag and begins a long string of Italian that, from their facial expression, I guess roughly translates as "Ah, a fellow countryman! How lovely to see a familiar and friendly face!"

To which I reply, in Italian, something that translates to "Full of sorry, I talking small Italian".

So I suppose I'll be putting my citizenship status on my resume. An odd little point.

Ari just wrote something about the links between living inexpensively and living in an environmentally conscious manner.

The too-lazy-to-click-over quote:

"There is absolutely nothing uncool or insulting about beans and rice and other simple, healthful, vegan foods. There is nothing embarassing about taking care of yourself and your family, and doing it in a way that minimizes resource use, whether it's for your financial well-being or for the environment. In fact, this is just what poorer folk all over the world have been doing for millenia."

This is something I've been thinking about lately, because within the next 6 months or so both J and I will be in a new place, making a lot more money, not being in school anymore and not in any way living the life we are right now.

Not that this is a bad life. It's just not the one that will be happening soon.

With so much changing, there's a lot of food for thought. Among what I've been thinking about is how near-future life will blend in with the values I've developed so far. With approximately unlimited opportunity, how do I balance making my life easier, making my life *better*, and making society better?

I've also been thinking a lot about the class system in this country (you might have noticed when I talked about buying a house, recently). I grew up pretty solidly in the working class. The most concise way I've come up with describing it is "living life on a narrow margin of error"--not a hand-to-mouth existence, but always being aware that very little can go wrong and wreck your whole plan. My mom likes to say that through every step of my life, the next step has come *just* as she was able to afford it, and I've always been very aware of that.

That sort of thing.

The inverse, growing up with money, is to live with a wide margin of error. Passable students get entry into elite schools because their parents went there, middle-class parents can afford extracurricular lessons, field trips, and unlimited books. The children of the rich can mess up over and over again and STILL be elected President.

I'll avoid getting political.

Classism, anti-poverty, is so prevalent in the US but never gets talked about. Why else would a diet of rice and beans or picking up useful things on the side of the road be considered so shameful?

I'm reading "Lies My Teacher Told Me" right now, about important events or themes in US history that don't get included in high school history textbooks, and it's fascinating. One of the things missing in most high school history texts is a discussion of how social structures work to keep power and riches for the already-powerful and rich. There is a single president--one! (though now I'm forgetting if it's Andrew Jackson or Andrew Johnson) that was truly raised in poverty. So I'm aware that moving up as much as I have is unusual, and doesn't reflect well on myself any more than dropping out of school when I couldn't afford it and working as an after-school daycare helper would have reflected poorly, had it happened. That's life with narrow margins.

When I took a course on the Sociology of the Working Class, my professor talked about the prevalence of working-class guilt among people who did well for themselves in life. At the time, I hadn't felt that, but I understand more of it now. Someone who has moved up the class system A: Has unique talents, but not necessarily more than anyone they grew up with, B: Is lucky, and C: Will probably have had to shed some of their class markers to be taken seriously. There's an arbitrariness there that can hurt the confidence-making parts of your heart. People who grew up with a cushion never have to wonder what more-qualified person could have taken their place.

So what will I do? Will I still shop at St. Vinnie's when I afford all-new work clothes? Will I bring lunch from home? Will I speak comfortably dropping t's and g's from words? Will I save plastic bags and rinse out deli containers for growing plants?

If I do all of those things, will it prevent me from getting a job that could do real good in the world?

If I do none of those things, will I maybe get the job anyways because I'm just that wonderful? And would looking in the mirror be easier than if I took the other road?

I don't really have any answers here, I'm just processing.
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Oh, Cosmic Timing: I just got a call at work from a head-hunting agency that saw the resume I posted on monster.com over the weekend.

Wow, lots of onion tips! J happened to be watching a cooking show over the weekend that said to pre-freeze the onions and try it that way. I've tried the stainless steel bar--or, at least, I've tried stainless steel, as the bars don't claim they have anything else inside. No luck.

I suspect, as Fillyjonk mentioned, that it's some crazy biochemical thing. A good friend of my parents played the flute professionally, but he oozed something that turned his beautiful silver flute black. (As a chemistry student, I saw silver sulfide form and instantly thought of Ed.) It makes me wonder what other things people have floating around in their bodies, making them unique without their even realizing it.

So, gloves. When I remember to buy some.



Here's what I made with some of the onions I cut--just a simple dish of gnocchi, with sauteed onions, mushrooms, and wilted spinach (I pulled the pan off the heat, put the spinach in, and let the whole thing sit for a minute while I drained the pasta).

The gnocchi was storebought--I make my own sometimes, but it's not a Thursday night project.

The vegetable mixture had some baslamic vinegar and a bit of nutmeg added. I'm embarrassed that I saw the nutmeg thing on one of Rachel Ray's shows during our Christmas Cable Consume-aganza at J's parent's house. It wasn't *bad*, exactly, but my brain kept shorting out trying to identify the strange flavor, so I might not do that again. Home cooking shouldn't be confusing. The vinegar was nice though.

What is it about a bowl of carbohydrates with some nice fresh plant-stuff on top? Oatmeal with strawberries, pasta with mushrooms, rice with stirfry or beans--they just feel nice. They're hearty and filling in the winter, they adapt to whatever looked nice at the farmer's market and don't use the oven in the summer. They always look tasty. They photograph well, considering whatever food I take pictures of usually ends up looking pre-digested.

Mmm.

Recently, I saw in two places a tip that said if you burn a candle next to where you're cutting onions, the lachrymal sulfur compounds will burn off, leaving you tear-free.

So I tried it last night. I think it improved things--I only had to take one break--but I still had to wash my salty face afterwards.

My own personal onion-using tip is: get all the tears out of the way at once by cutting a bunch and freezing it. I usually do two or three large onions in one go, doing a baggie-full of sliced, a baggie-full of small dice, and a baggie-full of a larger dice. This might not work if you eat a lot of onions, or if you like having fresh onion on salads or what have you, but the frozen works just fine when the onions are getting cooked. And I find that a little goes a long way--I don't think I ever use more than a quarter of a big onion for everyday dishes.

The tears don't give me pause, but you know what does? My hands smelling like onions for several days afterwards.

Yes, I've washed them. Gross.

I've tried rubbing them with various solvents (since I have a chem lab at my disposal, I have lots of solvents I can try), but I can't even sleep with my hands near my face for a few days after a big onion-chopping day. J claims he can't smell it, so maybe I'm particularly sensitive to the smell. I should really remember to get some sterile gloves for chopping.

Our bank was having a free first-time homebuyers' seminar last night, so J and I went. I'm graduating soon enough, and have enough options, that we could literally be living anywhere in a 1000-mile diameter area, and making an amount of money that we can only guess at within a factor of about 3. So we were really just there to get an idea of what's involved with the whole house-buying process, who we need to talk to, and *maybe* get an idea of what we could afford based on what other people at the seminar had going. So, a very "hang-back-and-see-what-gets-talked-about" kind of approach.

But as we were the only ones there, that approach didn't work so well.

We actually felt a bit guilty talking to the presenters--we admitted right away that wherever we buy a house, it definitely won't be here, so, you know, there's no money in us for them. They were really nice about that though, and gave us some good general tips about what types of houses are good buys, things that look good and bad on our credit reports, different things to ask real estate agents, that sort of thing.

The only thing that bothered me ties into something that J posted about recently (see topmost entry). In the parts of the packet they gave us that broke down home ownership vs. renting down into actual numerical values, the assumption was that an average house would go up in value by about 30% in a SINGLE YEAR. Now, I know that house prices have been doing some crazy inflation lately, but it seems dangerous to me to buy a house, depending upon out-of-control real estate price inflation to keep you in the black.

It's this situation that is pricing normal people out of home ownership. I mean, J and I really have it all--post-graduate degrees, Ivy League stuff on resumes, being young and childfree and without any non-education-based debt (and not much of that--we paid off J's student loan from grad school in one shot). Soon, we'll be making more money than I've ever even seen in one place before, more than anyone in my family makes.

Even considering that, and considering that we've saved a fair amount of money, the woman at the bank responded to our guesstimated salaries by saying "well, you won't be able to afford much, that's for sure."

I mean, gosh, if our theoretical combined income within the next five yars is in the top 15 percentile in the US and we can barely afford a house, what are the other 85% supposed to do?

I must figure out some appropriate spinning-in-progress pictures--the trick is, how do you keep them interesting if they all look the same? All I've been doing is spinning and finishing a gifty thing I can't show.
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A coworker showed some of us a magic trick today while we were waiting for our group meeting to start. I was about 80% sure of what happened the first time he did it, and was positive when he did the exact same casual movements twice. Since the other smart people in the room didn't catch it, I got to thinking about what someone needs to do to figure out someone else's magic trick, and came up with a couple of things (note: I'm talking about the kinds of tricks that average people can do with household objects. No mirrors, no cloth-covered Statues of Liberty.):

Watch BOTH of their hands and their eyes at all times. If one hand is waving around a lot, pay even more careful attention to the other.

Can't see something? Assume it's not there. Think about where else it could be. Can't see *part* of something? Assume that's not there either. (This is why card tricks are so popular and so evil--as soon as the back of the card is facing you, it may as well be gone.)

Assume all casual movements have a purpose.

If the person is behind a table, assume they chose to be there.

If you've known this person for a while and they've never mentioned or demonstrated their skill at sleight of hand, assume that the trick is an easy one an uncle taught them when they were bored one afternoon in 3rd grade. The only part of the trick that will have improved since then is their acting.

Whoops, I forgot one last holiday gift picture:

This is the Faux Russian Lace Stole from the book A Gathering of Lace-- no, I'm still not sick of that book yet. My mother in law liked the small triangular shawl I knit her last year and asked if she could get a sage green, rectangular one.

I bought yarn (Baby Cashmere from Elann.com) without thinking too deeply about the pattern. I've got enough books with nice stich patterns, I could have put something together. I think I gave this pattern half a look, but the pictures didn't grab me.

About the time I was thinking about this, there was a great FO post of this shawl over on Livejournal, which really turned the lightbulb on. I really love the way those diamonds in the middle extend over the edges of the unit squares--it makes the whole thing much more cohesive than what you get by looking at the charts (or the picture in the book, for that matter).

I did a half-repeat or so around Thanksgiving to make sure I liked the pattern, and then set it aside until I'd done the rest of the holiday knitting, thinking that since this was going to take the longest I may as well do the faster stuff first, and if I completely failed at finishing this, it could be a birthday present in February.

I followed the pattern, except for some very minor mods--really just cutting out a few plain stitches on the sides, and one repeat of the lace because I ran out of yarn. This means the two ends of the shawl are different, but that only bothers me a little. Plus the blocked measurements are within an inch or two of the book's, so I didn't feel like it was too short.

I tried not to do a huge crazy rush job on this--we were at J's family's house for a few days after Christmas, so I knew that I could show it on the needles and then finish it after. But it turned out that I did manage to finish it on the morning of Christmas Eve. It was *just* dry on Christmas morning, which was the only time I did any running around as I did a last-minute wrapping job.

You can see in the blocking picture above that I threaded some yarn (actually leftovers from the shawl) through all the points. This method requires a bit of futzing to get just right, but it also requires a lot LESS futzing to get right, compared to directly pinning out each point (and I only had about 20 blocking pins so I had to make each one count).

A fine knit, very straightforward. When blocking it I noticed a few minor mistakes, but they were really very minor, and internally consistent enough that you'd need to know the pattern to notice them.

A whole sleeve!


Er, still only one arm though.

I plowed through about a third of this sleeve in the past two days (if you can see the orange stitch marker, that's where I was on Sunday).

I don't have a lot of technical notes on the sleeves, partly because I was terrifically sloppy with the decreases. This isn't particularly unusual for me--I get into the groove of sleeves that are to be decreased every 5 rows, and 12 rows later I come back into myself, and need to do a double decrease to catch up.

However, either I'm less sloppy than I think, or knitting is exceptionally forgiving, because my sleeves almost always miraculously come out okay. There's a bit of discussion of this in Knitting In The Old Way--the author shows a couple of sleeves that are on the road to ruin (increasing or decreasing too fast or slow, depending on which direction they're being worked in). She basically says, "notice your sleeves are going to be tragic if you keep doing what you're doing? Do something different!" She does talk about how things might fit a little differently, but it seems difficult to really wreck a sleeve.

Looking at the picture, I'm a little worried that this sweater will wear me rather than the other way around, but at the same time I know that this sweater keeps photographing with more contrast than is actually there in real life. I know this because several people who've seen the sweater online then saw in it real life and said "Oh! NOW I like it!"

I'm also starting to think about what to do with the leftovers. Blackberry Ridge puts up their yarn in 4-ounce skeins, and for some of the background colors I'm going to have as much as 3/4 of the skein left over. It might be interesting to maximize the remaining yarn by doing an inverted colorway, white and light blue over the darker colors. I'm also thinking about expanding the polymer motif on the sweater into more nerd knitting.

First I should actually finish that second sleeve.

Life in our house: No container is safe.
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I showed some alpaca yarn that I spun up a while ago, and mentioned that I'd be using it for Sugar On Snow.

Well, here she be:

Not a Christmas present. All for me.

Despite the fact that J calls it "the tea cozy hat", I'm really happy with how it came out. I particularly like the shaded effect at the bottom--the yarn is a 3-ply throughout, but at the bottom, two plies are a slightly lighter gray Shetland wool, to keep the brim a bit more springy than alpaca can manage on its own. Then it goes to one ply of the Shetland, two plies of the alpaca, and then the rest of the hat is 3 plies of alpaca.

The only trick now is that I have about 2/3 of the alpaca I spun left over. Not that having beautiful silky-soft handspun in my storage box is any tragedy, but it doesn't seem right for me to not be wearing it all the time. Maybe some fingerless gloves?

I've done one other small project with my handspun (a small hat that falls off all the time--I should really fix it, I have plenty of that yarn left over), but this was the first one I've done since I've really come into my own as a spinner, being able to choose the kind of yarn I want to make and then just going and making it. It was really a pleasure to knit this yarn, to feel the occasional little slub and remember the level of control I had over this project. It's a rush--I suspect as time goes on I'll be using less and less commercial yarn, maybe just for fast little projects.

There's also thing I put on Livejournal here about the hat and the spinning, if you're interested in some the yarn design discussion.

More holiday knitting:

Gloves for my sister-in-law. (They really are the same size, I just took the picture at an angle.)

A while back, she'd mentioned that some winter accessories would be good. When I wrote back for more information, she sent a picture of the hat and scarf she already has, and an outline of her hand (with a 1-inch scale bar, which was both helpful and incredibly architecture-dorky.) The hat and scarf were both gray, machine-knit, and the hat had some white and yellow Norwegian star-like motifs going around the brim.

I charted out a star I liked that would fit with the right number of stitches and bought some gray Dale Baby Ull (I had the white and yellow in the stash already). I wasn't too concerned with things exactly matching the hat, knowing that so long as they were similar, they'd clearly be a set.

The bit at the wrist has a wide hemmed section which runs the whole width of the colorwork, so the occasional long yarn float wouldn't get in the way.

Since I had plenty of colors of that yarn in my stash, and a wide, boring, inside hem, I decided to make that part more interesting by knitting her name into it. I've talked about personalization of stuff before, so that shouldn't be much of a surprise.

I looked at a few glove patterns to get the idea of what I should do, but mostly I just held the glove up to the hand outline she'd sent me, setting it up so that the outline of the knitting was about 1/4 inch larger all around than the outline, to account for 3-dimensionality and ease. One trick that I found very helpful when knitting the second glove was that I actually wrote on the outline of the hand how many stitches I'd used in each section--each finger used a different number of stitches and decreased slightly differently, and I never would have kept track of all of it properly without a very clear visual diagram.

I think they were the most successful gift, and the project I had the most fun with. I really enjoy working on something where almost all the variables are set, but where there's just enough space for inspiration and play.

This was also an example of sane stashing. I really enjoy working with the Baby Ull--the yardage, quality, and colors are all great, it's soft and washable, and not too expensive. It's the perfect gauge for colorwork, and so it's great to have 5 or 6 oddballs in coordinating colors that I can reach for when I'm in the mood to try something. It's one of the few things I can see the value in maintaining a stash of, along with a few skeins of worsted weight wool for quickie hats.

Today I'd rather talk about what I'm going to make, rather than what I already have. Despite this happening at the beginning of the year, this isn't a list of things I want to knit within the next year; it's just a list.

Near Future:

-Birch Socks from A Gathering Of Lace(example. They're part done, I just want to finish them.

-Vertical-patterned Fair Isle: Ditto. Rebekkah set an end-of-knitalong date of Feb. 15th, and I'd like to be very close to done by then, if not completely there. That's probably doable, if I actually work on it.

-Finishing group project for a friend.

-Keep spinning up the red silk, the purplish-red merino, and the Shetland, which I've finally started. I could finish the silk soon if I keep liking it--I'm about halfway through the fiber.

-Some brainless hats and earwarmers.

Less-Near Future (Will probably get started as the above projects wrap up. Subject to change but not too much).

-Bright-and-black socks: either combining bright green varigated sock yarn with black Dale Baby Ull, both of which I have, or just using a green-and-black self-striping sock yarn, which I also have. Or maybe both!

-Continued Shetland spinning, and playing with design ideas--I'm fairly certain on some parts, but on other things like the pullover vs. cardigan question, I have no idea.

-Threepenny Pullover, from the... er... fall or winter 2004 Interweave. There's a chance I'll mess with it, but the cabled edging is really lovely. I'll be using some dark blue Cascade 220 I already have, though I'm considering showing the cables at the edge off more by using a different color. First, swatching.

-More babies coming into the world, more baby things to be knit. My Dale Baby Ull stash calls to me, as this fetus will require something special once it joins the outside world (they're not family but I've already screeched "Auntie T loves you!" at the Mama's belly, which should give you an idea of how I feel about this one.)

Distant Future (subject to change, but ideas I'm into right now)

-A couple of patterns I need to write up and submit places.

-Several lace scarf, shawl, doily, and bookmark ideas, all of which were inspired by my spinning (though the patterns themselves won't require handspun). At the Elizabeth Zimmermann exhibition that was here a few months ago, someone mentioned that Schoolhouse Press is bringing out a book on designing lace motifs soon. I may start on this project before it comes out, but I'm really looking forward to seeing that--what I've got in my head is far away from any traditional lace motifs.

Strongly linked to this project would be a little knitting pattern book, probably self-published through lulu.com because I'm not a Book Deal kind of person.

-Aran Christmas Stocking: I've got the yarn (my first big lot of wheelspun), I just have to think about motif placement and stuff. Might be fun to do in the summer. I was amused when I saw that Spin Off had a similar thing in the most recent issue.

-Improving my sewing skills. There are lots of tricks that I don't know. I specifically want to take some seamstressing-type classes so that I can make or professionally alter buttondown shirts, bane of my existence.

-Knitting the sweater I'm spinning for, and along with this, a greater and greater percentage of my knitting being done with handspun.

Christmas post part 1: Year Of the Sock




My two sisters and one of my cousins that lives with my dad all requested socks. I used Elann.com Esprit on all of them, which had the advantages of A: washability (these are three teenaged girls, not so into the handwashing or laundry sorting), B: heavier than usual sock weight so I could finish them faster, and C: crazy bright colors, as all three made similar requests with the colors.

The yarn worked really well. It's worsted weight but I worked it on size 4US needles which seemed to make them dense but still stretchy. Compared to my usual 80 stitches around on size 0 needles, these zoomed along like great zoomy things.

I knit them all toe-up (starting with a figure-8 caston) with short row heels, which I can very nearly do in my sleep.

The first socks were very simply striped, 5 rows of purple and blue with a single row of pink between, knit until they were just shy of knee-length (as requested by the recipient).

The second pair had a pattern of polka dots in yellow. I was looking through a stitch pattern library I have, trying to get ideas, and saw these big polka dots, purled on a knit background. I just used the texture chart as a color chart. I also added some increases up the back of the leg, though fewer than I would have if the socks had been for me and not a skinny 14 year old. I really loved these socks. I would definitely do similar ones for myself in different colors.

The third pair has a little zig-zagging lace pattern to make them more interesting. Someone asked me if they were Jaywalkers. They're not--for some reason I'd always registered the Jaywalkers as being entrelac in my mind--but they do pretty much the same thing.

These were pretty fun fast knits, although I was getting tired of them towards the end. I knit two pairs in just under a week. At that rate I think most people get sick of projects.

I don't usually do New Year's resolutions, but the time seemed right to make this particular one, so here I go.

I will make progress with my thesis every day until I finish it.

I'm sick of the limbo of grad school. I'm so ready for the real world.

In good grad school news, I got an author's copy of a journal in the mailbox today. I'm second author on it. My CV just doubled in size!
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A year of knitting:

(I haven't written entries on a few of these things because they were Christmas presents. Then there's one I've finished since, but I want to do the Christmas ones first. Soon. Really.)

7 hats
3 scarves/shawls
5 pairs of socks
1 pair of gloves
4 sweaters (total--includes several partial sweaters added up as partials)
1 vest
2 baby blankets
3 headbands
1 brain slug
1 doily
And a few oddments I'm sure I'm forgetting.

A year of spinning:

About 1350 finished, usable yards, all told.

For some reason I was feeling unproductive this year, but looking at this stuff, I have no idea why. Cripes I did a lot.
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I was going to try to list my favorite, or least favorite, or use other superlatives for some of these projects, but looking through them I'm mostly just pleased with everything. 18 out of 28 knitting projects were ones in which I made major modifications to a pattern, made something up entirely, or otherwise figured out something really interesting. The remainder were well-executed, and I don't love any of them any less.

The spinning got consistently better and more interesting. I'm thinking a lot about yarn design right now, in the same way I think about knitting design--how can I make something which is beautiful, well-made, and subtle, while at the same time clearly not being storebought? Not every project made that standard this year, but the ones that did are so far and away better than those that didn't that it seems like a good goal to have.

I already mentioned my only resolution for the new year, which isn't craft related, but I do want to keep doing interesting things. I don't expect to get much done in the next year because I'll be writing a thesis, graduating, moving, starting a new job, looking at houses, and doing the million annoying little things that accompany each of those Big Life Things. I expect I'll do a lot of spinning, a lot of knitting with my handspun, a small amount of buying new stuff. I hope it will stay interesting.