OMG. Rocky Horror Muppet Show.

I love geeks.

The facts: I had a lovely weekend in NYC with J and friends. My mom and I have been doing genealogical research about a family tragedy in the 1870's. There's been some financial mixups recently, none in our favor (we are not in debt or otherwise poorly financially, but it's about time for the unpleasant surprises that are no fault of ours to stop). My aunt died this weekend, and I found out yesterday.

I want to talk about these things, some in more detail than others, but somehow talking about any one of them sounds self-absorbed and mean in the context of the others. Ignoring the lot and sharing a bento picture, which I've done before at such moments, seems worse.

Life is being intense right now. That much is both true and not insulting to anything that's going on in my life. I had a thing going until just before I heard my aunt was doing poorly where I was making a point of doing a blog entry every day, to get back into the habit of remembering the little bits of my life that show up here. I don't think I'll be able to do that for a while. I'm not closing up the blog, or anything. I just need to acknowledge all those facts in one place, together, and let them sit there for a bit. I think.

I had a 12-hour fast last night and this morning for a blood test--just a first-time patient at a new place typical checkup stuff, nothing bad. I hadn't ever had to do that before (even my "diets" consist of me saying to myself "maybe you should only have one piece of cake at a time since bike riding has seemed extra-hard lately").

Twenty minutes into the 12 hours I was STARVING, despite having had a large protein-heavy dinner and a few cookies and dates just before it started. I think there's something in humanity's brains that insist upon food when you're saying there's none to be had. Makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that you should go looking for some more berries when the nearby trees are empty, even if you've just eaten. On the other hand, this is why diets are so totally useless. So get off that silly diet right this instant. Go ahead and increase the amount of veggies and whole grains you eat and think of non-cake alternatives for a snack, but humans just aren't designed to starve themselves.

Pattern-selling update: The Crowned Heads scarf is being beta-test-knit AS WE SPEAK (well, she might be eating breakfast or something AS WE SPEAK). The beta-knitting is apparently a good thing because there were several small-but-propagating errors in the charts. I'm going to retest one bit of it myself, but the pattern will probably be out soon. Right now I'm spending some time looking up similar patterns to see what the right price is. (Probably 4-7$)

I've also been working on the fish hat, which will go up for sale eventually too. This one is a lot less complicated than the scarf, but I'm adding in a goodly chunk of information about personalizing clothing in secret ways, so though it's relatively small it will probably end up as a more useful pattern than the scarf. This one may actually end up going out first, depending on my whimsical nature.

You all will be the first to know when they actually are ready to purchase.

Meanwhile, I've ALSO been working on putting the free patterns together in a nice downloadable pdf format and posting those too (still free, just more convenient if you like pdf's or like the Ravelry library setup). The only one that's up so far is the Pi Hat, but I'm poking away at the others, too--all the patterns will be getting a bit of a facelift; some new pictures, some added info, some clarifications based on feedback I've seen on Ravelry and elsewhere.

You'll notice that this means there's 3 or 4 patterns that I'm working on at once. I'm finding that I get a lot more done this way than when I was just plugging away on the lace scarf pattern. Sometimes I wouldn't be in the mood to work on the part of the lace scarf pattern that needed doing, so I'd do something else entirely. Now, with several different patterns at different levels of finished-ness, I'm more likely to be in the mood to work on one of them.

Another thing that helps is that I'm knitting and graphing another pattern, which is a doozy, but which I'm really excited about. It'll probably be a year before it's done if my rate of ripping and reknitting has anything to say in the matter, but it's a creative kick-in-the-pants that is maintaining the momentum of these other currently-less-interesting projects. And all the mistakes in the scarf pattern have taught me a lesson: Write Out Everything You Do, Stupid.

Another thing about the Fair Isle sweater:

My original plan was to do a button band with ribbing on the sides that would be set up the same way as the ribbing I put on the bottom, top, and wrists. But when I cut the steek and it folded back on itself, I tried the sweater on and liked the way it looked just plain. So I’m seriously considering putting in a zipper instead.

Any thoughts? Do you think a zippered Fair Isle sweater looks unfinished, or a button-banded one looks too busy? Have you put a zipper into a sweater and found it to be a royal pain in the tuchus?

I've got PLENTY of yarn left, enough to be planning a shawl with the leftovers, so that part's not a problem. There's also plenty of ease in the sweater whether I add an extra inch of fabric or not. Mostly I just want to decide so I can finish it and be done, and I'm trying not to let the "zipper will be faster" factor to weigh too heavily.

Holey Camoley, this sweater has two sleeves.

(this is the back of the cardigan, which is why it looks so much nicer than the pictures of the front, with the big old steek running down the middle.)

One comment I've gotten from some real-life knitting friends is that the colors of the sweater look a lot subtler (read: "nicer") in person. I should probably get some natural-light shots one of these days, but the pic above is considerably closer, though still a little more contrasty. If you look at all the pics together, you can really see what a terrible photographer I am. I've gotten a new digital camera since the older batch of pictures, so I can't even blame this truer-to-color image to any improvement on my part.

Ah, well, at least the pictures are all in focus.

The sleeves are constructed in an interesting way. Partway up the torso, some stitches on each side are set onto holders, to be picked up again when picking up stitches for the sleeve. You can see on the picture above that the sleeves are slightly set in. No other shaping is involved, but this method gives a sleeve that's partway between a pure drop-shoulder (easiest to knit, especially with complex color patterns) and a fully-fashioned set-in sleeve (looks best on a human body, but a pain to get designs to line up just so). It's an interesting construction detail.

Another advantage to that method is that if you have a nice pattern going up each side of the body, it can continue, uninterrupted, down the sleeve:

The downside here is that a pattern which is right-side-up at the waist is up-side-down at the wrist unless you're holding your arms up in the air at all times. I was clever enough to carefully line up my waist pattern so it would continue in a nice even way, but I wasn't clever enough to think of the pattern-directionality problem when I wrote my initials into the spot. I could have flipped the initials when I started the sleeve (when I first noticed this), but it would have messed with that lovely stripe of pattern you see there, and the continuity pleased me more than my initials being correctly oriented on my arm.

I have been making occasional bentos lately, but I haven't been taking pictures or posting them very often. I think this is because I haven't been making many for J while he works outside the confines of a typical 9-to-5 job. When I make one for myself, I'm just making lunch, but when I make two lunches, it's more of a thing that feels deserving of pictures.

About a month ago, J went on a sushi-making spree. I think we had sushi three times in two days. THAT kind of spree. We had some avocado left at the end of it, and incredibly we weren't sick to death of rice-based foods. So I mixed the avocado up with some soy sauce and garlic, and used it as a onigiri filling.

I don't know if I'm making filled onigiri wrong, or if you can really only put a tiny dab of flavoring in each one, but we still had tons of avocado left after this, and even then most of the onigiri had a pretty presentable side and a slimy green side with two grains of rice stuck into the goo. The nori belts hid the worst of the goo, though.

The top set of nori has some edamame with sesame seeds and black pepper. The bottom set has little sesame spinach balls, which I saw in a bento community one time but forgot the name of.

In the lower red container, there is chopped up apples with cinnamon and cranberries, pickled ginger, carrot cake, and yogurt. Since making this lunch, I've used cake as a plug to prevent liquidy ingredients from migrating all over the place a few more times. If you don't like wet squishy cake it wouldn't work. But I'm someone who scoops ice cream onto a cake, waits for it to melt, and mooshes it, so to me it's actually a good thing.

The extra black container has carrot cake, apples, and cucumbers, but was controversial among the husbands in the household. I was going for apple bunnies with cranberry tails, and then threw some poorly-organized cucumber in to fill in the remaining space without paying too much attention to what it looked like. J, who doesn't lurk about on bento communities and so had never seen an apple bunny, thought that the general shape was, er, "suggestive", particularly when it was sitting next to the cucumber.

Lessons for the future, I suppose. Everything tasted great, I just have to keep working on the presentation.

Family visit was lovely. Pictures as soon as I get back into town. Mostly right now, though, all I can think about is The Twitchy Eye Of Death, Which Has Been Twitching All Day When I've Needed To Do Important Grownup Work Things, And Which Prevents Me From Having A Normal Conversation.

Because of all the twitching, you see.

What's up, twitchy eye of death? Am I tired? Stressed? Dehydrated? Hungry? I've tried addressing each thing in turn, but no use. Twitchy Eye Of Death considers itself above such foolishness.

I have a tendency to "catch" things like this. I won't have a twitchy eye for years, then for two days it gets in the way of my favorite activities, like sleeping and looking at stuff. I'll get the hiccups every time I laugh for a week. That sort of thing. I always wonder why that is--it doesn't seem to correlate to any obvious factor.

*twitch*

But who cares about retirement fund stupidity? I GET TO SEE MY MOMMY TONIGHT. *yay*

Oh! I forgot to set up the stuffed animal diorama in the guest room. I'll have to call J and get him to take care of it for me.

You can keep your thousand-year traditions, walking in on my childhood bear with his nose stuck in Gender Outlaw or askew on the floor next to an empty wine glass is the Way Of My People.

Retirement fund related stuff? Most. Frustrating. Thing. Ever.

It's a "I don't have any record of you on file even though you called the number on your statement,"
"We put your account number here in this entirely blank space, of course it's there don't be silly,"
"you can't talk to representative without the account number that you DON'T HAVE"
-level frustrating.

This would be a petty upper-class problem, except that I'm getting totally enraged about barely 200$, which no sane upper-class person would do.

Hmmph. I'm going to go on Ravelry and look at pretty shawls. (Non-knitters will substitute looking at catalogs or photography books.)

The design problem I posted about just below here percolated for a few days, as I thought about hydrangeas and bluebells, until I walked home through the rain on Saturday night and it hit me. Rain! The blues are of a slightly grayish cloudy sort, and the yarn's not delicate enough for teensy little flowers. An appropriate and practical Upstate New York-themed shawl, for keeping warm on gray days.

There are surprisingly few patterns based on watery themes, especially when compared to patterns that deal with other natural phenomenon, like trees and leaves and flowers and cats. Perhaps the idea of snuggling with a rainstorm doesn't appeal to most.

And this is a cool thing about Ravelry. I can just go over there and type in "clouds" or whatever. Out of over 100,000 knitters, many with hundreds of finished projects posted, there's always someone who's done something neat. It'll be interesting to see how a really focused social site like that will inspire creativity over the long run.

1) Today is the First of May. Too bad that it's chilly today, and I'm headed out of town for a work thing.

2) I'm making good progress on the second sleeve of the Fair Isle sweater that's been wandering around here off and on for over two years:

(Last picture, one-sleeved.)

The second sleeve is over half done, and then it's just the button bands on the front. But now that I'm getting close to finished with it, I've been thinking about what to do with the leftover yarn, because it looks like there's going to be *tons*. My original plan was to do a vest in some kind of inverted colorway, but at this point I'm so tired of stranded projects that I'm ready to scream. But at the same time, the colors blend so beautifully together, so what to do?

So now I'm thinking about doing a big lace shawl with color shifts in it. There's another lace project that I've been using as a carrot to get me to finish the sweater, but using up these colors would be very satisfying, and the knitting would go way faster than for the carrot-project.

There was an article in the most recent issue of Spin-Off about traditional Danish shawls, which are tied around the back and make a sort of v-necked thing in the front (I'd link, but they don't have a good overall shot on the website). I think a light-to-dark top-to-bottom slow progression of color would be pretty and interesting.

Now, to figure out lace patterns. Something to go with varying shades of blue, something that won't be overly obscured by color changes, something that won't get all strange and boobular by going reasonably tightly across my front if I tie the shawl in the traditional way, something that'll work with the increases as written in the shawl (6 every other row, versus the typical triangular 4). At this point, I'm leaning away from leafy patterns, away from larger stitch patterns, and away from getting too involved with designing a lace pattern, but a quick jaunt through a pattern book last night didn't set off any ideas.

Anything pop into mind?