How many not-yet-healed papercuts can one person have at one time?

The number appears to be equal to or greater than 6. Yowch.
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Family requesting holiday/birthday wish lists: I have one on Amazon, under my real-world name. Look at the notes, too, because a number of the things on my wish list are of the "feel free to get a different version of this in the real world" variety. They tend to have mostly top-of-the-line things there, and I KNOW there are cheaper bathrobes in the world.

If you need a reminder, here are a list of some general types of things I enjoy, if you're waiting for something to strike your eye:

-crafty stuff. The more old-school the better: a book containing the words "traditional", "Heirloom", "Comprehensive", or the name of a geographic region (Shetland, Andean, Orenberg, Fair Isle) will interest me. Books containing the words "hip", "not your grandma's", "weekend", probably not so much. I really don't have that many knitting books, so this is a perfectly reasonable route to take. Natural fibers before petrochemical ones. Gift certificates to places like Susan's or Halcyon or WEBS will be rapidly used.

-books. Soon I'll have time to read again, I hope. I like science books, history of science books, history of odd little things like salt. I like quirky memoirs (think Bill Bryson and David Sedaris, only don't because I've read their books already). Fiction is more of a crapshoot. I'd like to learn more about archeology, that's probably the next thing I'm going to spend a lot of time reading about, and I'm on the lookout for a good smart introduction to the field.

-Food. I like eating food, and making it, and being vegetarian. "Cheap presents" should now be dancing in your head, as I'm perfectly content to get cookies. I'd like to learn more about baking bread, in a "here are the principles now make up your own thing" way. I lust in my heart for one of those big clunky Kitchen-Aid mixers in bright sugary colors, but I don't have the space right now and don't know enough of the future to say that I will have enough space soon.

-Handmade things. Of any type, really: they all make me happy.

(sorry, non-family members. Needed to get some materialism out there.)

I've been working on the self-designed green sweater again.

I think last time I talked about it, I mentioned that I knit each sleeve cap differently, then basted them quickly into the armscye so I could decide which I like better. Well, I've stood in front of my bathroom mirror with a variety of shirts on underneath, but I just can't decide. I *think* the narrower one looks better, but I also did a crummier job of basting in the wider one and I can't figure out if that's the problem, and I haven't gotten around to re-basting just yet.

For the moment, I decided that the best thing to do was to finish the neck. I'm hoping against hope that this will make everything look more "real", particularly if I re-set the wider sleeve.

The neck went pretty quick. It's hemmed, and there are some short rows involved, so it's a bit unusual, but I like how it looks so far. I'm just starting to sew it down. I might manage to finish the sweater by this weekend, which would be nice; it's the perfect weight for this time of year.

Apropos of nothing: PG Wodehouse writes in a style that is very easy to imitate VERY badly. Urgh.

(Jeeves/Wooster. I'm not even a slashy person, usually; I just had to see.)

I talked about this soy silk a few weeks ago. I finally finished the undyed stuff this week. The original purpose of the undyed fiber was: 1) to give me a chance to play with the fiber and learn its quirks before moving on to the expensive stuff, and 2) after spinning one ounce of undyed, to give me a good guesstimate on how much yardage I'd get out of the dyed stuff.

#1? A resounding success. I still find it a little, er, quirky, but it just takes longer to spin than the Shetland roving I've been using lately.

#2? Total failure. Somehow I managed to put way too much of the fiber on the first bobbin, and we just won't talk about what happened when I tried to Andean ply the significant remaining yardage. So I have 2/3 to 3/4 of the original fiber in yarn form now, and frankly what's there isn't even well-spun or well-plied. But I did at least find a few strands I liked to use as my comparison sample with the dyed batch.

As a reminder, I have two 2-ounce baggies of space-dyed soy silk top. There's no order to the colors, and my approach is to spin from the full width of the top on one bobbin, break the fiber into 4 or 5 even strips and spin from each of those in turn for the other bobbin. The end result (I hope) should be variable, but a bit more unified than it would be if I split the top for both plies.

I'm starting with the half of the project that won't involve splitting the fiber. It's a challenge to feed the entire width in evenly, so I'm just breaking off 1-1.5 color-units at a time and spinning from that, to make my life easier. It's working to make things reasonably even for long stretches of color, which was my goal. Lookee:

Some of the finished, undyed yarn on the left, dyed singles-in-progress on the right. I actually haven't done any non-uniformly-colored spinning on the wheel before; I like how the older color peeks out from behind the newer one. Colors are more vibrant in reality, I'll get a picture in good light when I'm home at a reasonable hour.

Another thing I like about the dye job is that it gives me a good idea of my progress. There are about 25 color-sections on each 2-ounce chunk of fiber, so I've got a pretty good sense of how far along I am. I'm about 1/8 done with this bobbin, which was two shortish evenings of spinning.

This is my first time working on a spinning project that's destined for another person. The yarn is ultimately going to go to live with Madam as part of a fiber and video game trade, where it will have lots of other lightweight blue/green yarns to play with.

It's a bit different than giving away a knitted thing--there, you've given something that's complete. I gave my mom a doily last year, and when I went home for a visit, there it was under a table lamp. I'd forgotten about it completely, but it looked just like it had when I finished it.

But in this case, I'm giving away a slightly-processed raw material. Since I've been thinking about the nature of collaborations lately, it's a nice little case study. These people dyed some fiber (apparently this colorway is "Woodstock", who knew? The label on it just said "greens"). I'm taking that fiber and doing some very specific things to it so as to make a yarn my friend will like. And then I'm really, really looking forward to seeing what she turns it into. That'll be a little bit of a present in return.

Thanks for the good wishes. Things went okay, I think--I didn't *feel* particularly nervous, though it was hard to suppress my usual mild-nerve-dealing-with method of bouncing around like a complete spaz. For the first couple of slides, I could totally hear a wibble in my voice, but it was the sort of thing where it might've just been noticable to me because it was my voice. No one mentioned it later.

I never know how to read these things, really. I know that I was pretty comfortable with the level of questions, and there's nothing (except the voice wibble) that makes me cringe looking back on it. I guess I'll just find out when I find out.

And this weekend, I'm relaxing a bit after my whirlwind adventure (seriously, I was in town for less than 18 hours!). For "relax", read "Ravelry". One thing I've noticed that I like is that a lot of my semi-secretive online friends have some or all of their face on their userpic. I know what you people look like now! I like that!

At this point, I think I've posted all the interesting FO's--of course, you can also see them here, so you're not missing out on much on that front, if you're not there yet.

Around noontime EST tomorrow, if you could waft some good feelings in the general direction of Boston I'd appreciate it. I'll be giving a seminar as part of a job interview.

Besides that, life, y'know? Busy.

I am, as usual, TChemGrrl on Ravelry.

So far I'm mostly enjoying looking at other versions of my patterns. Girs everywhere, in a rainbow of colors.

So, I've got a basic RSS thing cobbled together. I *think*. If you're someone who like using Bloglines or whatever other aggregator, you can type the URL here into your thingy, and it should be functional.

If you try it and have some comments, definitely let me know--I did plug this into Bloglines just to make sure it works, but I'm not a regular user so I'm not sure how what I have compares to a "normal" setup.

People of the 80's: Be Amazed.

I played this while J was sitting on the bed facing away from the screen, and he identified it within the first 15 seconds, after probably not having heard it in 15 years.

What is it about those very early video games, and how their music got etched in our heads? Was it our age; our young squishy brains gladly accepting any kind of input? Was it the repetition, the 1 minute tune going over and over again for hours as we button-mashed? Are they just that damn catchy? It's amazing, really, that those very simple sine-wave notes, no variation in timbre or volume, just pure chords floating out of speakers, embedded themselves into the collective consciousness of a whole generation of kids. Cripes, I didn't even *have* a Nintendo, and *I* recognize the music.

Here's another. Those first 6 notes, man. I swear they'll make any American person my age sit up a little straighter. "Get ready! Even if you're only 6 years old, you're about to be given a chance to prove yourself!" I mean, give me a tape of those first 6 notes when I walk into my thesis defense. It'd get me in the right mindset, though hopefully I'll do better than I ever did at playing Mario. Those circley, flamey things underground, man, they always got me.

(Sega, as the second-gen device, didn't ever get the level of universiality to get a million cool videos on YouTube, but this speed run is pretty cool, and I remember that music is just as familiar. Though I think the classic bit from that system comes before any game play at all: "SAYYYY-GAAAAA!")

The lace thing I was planning in this entry is starting to happen. I worked at it when I was home for a bit, and have been getting a few rows in here and there. On Saturday, J and I rode our bikes to a cafe near the zoo, ate lunch, and then hung out for an hour or two--me knitting, him reading about critters that live in the guts of termites. It was a kind of relaxing I don't do enough of, week at home notwithstanding.



It's hard to get a good picture of unblocked lace.

It's been mistaken for the No-Longer-A Mystery-Stole; not entirely crazy since I did borrow a friend's copy to compare beginnings.

I think maybe it'd look better with another stitch or two of space between the motifs, but at the same time that would make the angled-square thing less prominent, and that's my favorite part.

When I hold it up to the light I can see inconsistencies in the yarn which makes for thinner and thicker areas of knitting. I didn't think my spinning was so bad (the WI Sheep and Wool people didn't think it was so bad), but I'm worried that it'll be even more obvious when I block it. I hope that won't take too much away from the pattern.

On the other hand, I love the color of the fabric. The fiber I used is this one, a mix of dark red, bright red, blue, black and white. It's not obvious from far away but up close there's tiny bits of color variation that please me.

Anyone have a link to a solid tutorial on RSS that'd be understandable to someone with basic HTML and CSS skills? Or even better, an explanation with a sample code I could just plug in?

Syndecating the blog is one of those things which comes up from time to time, but when I poke around I end up in really complicated places. All the code on the site is homegrown or judiciously stolen, so sometimes I end up out of my depth in situations where someone on Blogger or Typepad could just push a button. And honestly I've never spent a ton of time trying to figure it out, because aggregators just don't do it for me. In the meantime, I forget that that's how half the world keeps up.

Thanks.

Mostly wordless lately. Not sure why.

I went home for a few days, which was much-needed. My youngest sister is a weensy bit taller than me now. This blows my mind (and the mind of the middle sister, who's still a bit shorter than me).

In the next week-and-a-day, I've got two phone interviews, one in-person interview, a talk to give (I gave another one already this week), and a local industry-meets-academia thingy to present at. And I've got to track down my thesis committee. Just thinking about it all makes me sleepy.

I started working on the bead-inspired (not beaded) lace scarf/stole when I was home. There's a bit more than a foot done now, and I'm about 1/6 through the handspun I have, so I think the size will work out well. The lace is all designed myself, although it's simple enough that it might have been invented before. I like it, so far; I think it'll be a nice dressy thing to wear when I'm not in the mood to go all out with one of the shawls.