As the weather cools off, so do construction projects around campus. And the guys in hardhats commemorate this by laying down fresh sod over the spots that got torn up. All around campus, in the spaces between the sidewalk and the street, there are signs reading "NEW SOD, PLEASE KEEP OFF." I keep smiling to myself, imagining the ink and paper that would have been saved by condensing the message to "SOD OFF".
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I went to the yarn store yesterday five minutes before closing time and found a single skein of the black yarn I'm using for J's sweater, hidden behind the rest of the cotton, which, being off-season, now sits on a shelf in the back of the store at ground level, behind a potted plant. I almost missed the cotton and the black skein. Luck and Good Timing!

I also picked up some yarn that'll go into presents. It'll get combined with some stuff that I already have, reducing the overall stash. Wisdom and Forethought!

Then I walked home, which was further than I realized (a shade under 4 miles according to Mapquest)--I've biked it many times on nice Saturdays, but walking it on a Tuesday after work and before dinner is much different. Healthiness and Season Enjoying!

I'd missed the farmer's market, so on the way home, I stopped at the grocery store and bought lots of tasty stuff. Hunger and Impulse Purchases!

Well, the extra skeins weren't in the other bag, although I did find the receipt, and I definitely bought 14 skeins, so I suspect I just knit through more than I thought (there were a few sub-skeins due to knots, I may have counted too many of those as a single skein).

Things.... are close. Close enough that I'm concerned about the neck ribbing, though I'm pretty sure I have enough for the sleeve that's left. But buying a skein in a different dyelot for the neck (or maybe a different color entirely, as in the original pattern doesn't bother me nearly as much as doing so for the upper half of a sleeve.

In the meantime I need to convince my hands that yarn does not run out the same way time does, and knitting faster doesn't mean I'll go through less yarn.

I've been almost exclusively working on J's sweater for the last two weeks, and as a result it's been coming along very quickly. I've got the back and one sleeve all done, and the second sleeve and front about 40% of the way there (the sleeves are my "carry around" project, which works surprisingly well).

The night before last, I was rummaging through my knitting bag for more yarn and found two more skeins in the pockets.

Uh-oh.

I added up what I've used and what I have, and I came up with 12 skeins. I swear, SWEAR I bought 14, which would be more than enough. 12 *might* be enough, but it's sure not more than enough.

So tonight I'll be pulling everything out of the yarn box, the knitting bag, my backpack, the other knitting bag.... OH, the other knitting bag. That I bring to knitting nights filled with brainless things like SKEINS THAT NEED TO BE WOUND, that sits in the closet the rest of the time. The one I always find odd things in because it has so many pockets that I forget where they all are.

*crosses fingers, squeezes eyes shut*

Otherwise I'll probably be playing Dyelot Bingo.

(This started as some comments left in a locked message board that I thought deserved a wider audience, just in case it looks familiar to you):

I think a fair number of people get into knitting because they think they'll end up with things they like more inexpensively than they would if they bought it at a store. As a result, they don't think of knitting as a hobby, but as a cost-saving measure. Money they'd be willing to spend on a movie every week, or rock climbing, or whatever other non-thing-producing interest they have, they're not willing to spend on the entertainment factor of string, because they think the final product is the point of doing it in the first place.

But unless your tastes run to haute couture or items handknit in first-world countries, this isn't the case. Machine-knitting is cheap, the labor required to put knits together is cheaper than it should be. The raw fiber materials are comparitively expensive, and most of the money goes into shipping/marketing/retail markup (though some cursory searching isn't bringing me any exact numbers).

By the time all is said and done, I usually spend 50-70$ on a sweater's-worth of yarn, retail. The wool I bought for a sweater last week cost about 50$. Yarn for shawl projects has been 30-60$. Socks are usually less expensive, but the Lorna's Laces Shepherd sock I used for the bumblebee socks is usually over 10$ per skein, one skein per sock.

These are roughly in the range of what I'd spend on a nice piece of clothing in a store, maybe even a bit more.*

So folks who knit thinking of economy will be disappointed. But knitting today is not a necessity, it is a *hobby*. Like all hobbies, it requires some beginning investment, and more money to replace what gets used up over time.

How much do common hobbies/methods of entertainment cost per unit of time? (note: there might be cheaper hobbies, I'm just listing things I've had experience with that many people spend lots more time doing.)

-Reading a new hardcover book: 1-3$/Hr, if you don't re-read much.
-Reading comics: 3-5$/hr, if you don't re-read much
-Rock climbing: 3-5$/hr indoors (including rentals), greater initial investment required if you go outside though it might be cheaper if you go all the time and live near some rocks.
-Going to the movies: 2.50-8$/ hour of entertainment
-Going out dancing: 3-5$/hr, more if you're drinking.
-Going out to play pool at a bar with friends 3-5$/hr (assuming you ARE drinking)
-Skiing: maybe 5$ an hour if you go all day? Not including rentals and time going up the hill.
-Going out to eat: 10-20$/ hour, half or less if you're cooking (assuming you enjoy cooking.)
-Woodworking: maybe 10$ an hour if you use MDF and hand tools. Probably more, and the investment in tools can get really high really fast, if you want a full shop.
-Dance/capoiera/yoga/music lessons: 5-30$/hr.

Meanwhile:

-Spinning: .30-3.00/hr (and then I get to knit it, which takes twice as long as spinning it. So slash those numbers by 1/3.)
-Big gray lace shawl: .25-.50 /hr, not including leftovers that went into another shawl.
-the Fair Isle I'll be picking back up soon: .50-.75/hr
-The cotton sweater I'm working on right now: . 80-1.00/hr of entertainment

There are cheaper hobbies, and ways of making hobbies cheaper (libraries, watching the same DVDs over and over I'm looking at you husband, borrowing equipment, EBay), but in terms of initial "investment" (5$ for needles and another 5-10$ worth of yarn that will probably just be used for practice), and in terms of long-term amusement per hour, knitting is positively cheap. It's just not a cheap way of obtaining socks.

*I'm not counting Knitpicks or elann.com for yarn, because I'm also not counting going to St. Vinnie's or overstock.com for clothing. Apples and apples.

Dear spiders:

When you are three inches across, with a fingerprint-sized body, sitting in a web two feet across, in the middle of the country, you don't need to worry, city kids picking raspberries will avoid you at all costs. So why go the extra mile with that scary zig-zaggy yellow striping? It's just overkill, really.

I don't consider myself especially arachnophobic, but seeing 3 of those things right next to me, along with a spider with a super round body (as if saying "I'm full of bugs right now, but you still look delicious"), made me EXCEPTIONALLY careful with where I was going. And considering I was in the middle of a raspberry thicket at the time, it took me about 15 minutes to pick my way out to the mowed area, where I finally allowed myself a nice soothing freakout.

Since I'm a dork, I had to figure out what I saw. (Warning, large creepy spider pictures are present in the links below.)

The fat one, I'm pretty sure was a orb-weaving spider. It seems to have the right fat body-to-leg ratio, though it looks like they can be skinny too.

The black and yellow one was definitely a Black and yellow garden spider. Just look at that thing and tell me you wouldn't jump at the realization that you were standing within two feet of three or four of them. I'm particularly sure after seeing some pictures of stabilimenta, which these guys had, which I hadn't seen before, and which had me particularly convinced they were up to no good. It did make them easy to spot, though.

We also saw tons of grasshoppers--little black ones that got trapped in our big stainless steel bowl of berries, and large green ones that liked my light blue pants and used J's head as a nice jumping-off point. There were plenty of caterpillars and light yellow butterflies I assume were their mature form. Bumblebees, ants, and inchworms, of course--how could they stay away from a bounty that humans were mostly letting go to waste? And a lot of ant-sized black bugs with tiny red dots on their back. There were a bunch still in the pile when I picked through the raspberries last night, and there were plenty of berries I left alone when I saw one waist-deep, presumably drunk on its good fortune.

There might have been some fieldmice; I heard some noises I didn't think came from J. But my friends had recently mowed the field the raspberries were in, so save our little patch, there wasn't much cover.

Generalization time!

If I'm sitting on the bus, spinning yarn, minding my own business:

-White people will stare at me slack-jawed for an entire ride but won't ask me what I'm doing, even if I pause to make friendly "you can talk to me if you want to" eye contact. They *will* ask their friends what I'm doing. I think this is supposed to get me involved, but I can barely hear on the bus because of my bad ear so I usually only realize what's going on when they start pointing to me. If I look at them and smile, they freeze with the realization that I'm not a self-contained living history exhibit, and continue the conversation with their heads together so I REALLY can't hear them.

-Black people will ask what I'm doing as soon as they see me doing something unusual, watch for a minute or two, then get back to whatever they were doing before with a "it takes all kinds" shrug.

-Teenagers of all colors look at me like I have seven heads, then studiously ignore me save "subtle" glances that are terribly obvious when you have more than 16 years of life experience. (note: It might be that teenagers look at everyone like they have seven heads. It's the second part that's more unusual).

-All small children will ask their caretaker what I'm doing (they're usually loud enough that I CAN hear them). Their caretaker always tells them to ask me directly. I'm not sure if this is the caretaker not knowing and saving face, or the kids not wanting to talk to strangers, or both. Kids like touching the wool. If I have plenty with me I give them a tuft.

-Occasional exceptions to the white person generalization are women who have spun or knitters who have done some research. And friendly older gentlemen who vaguely recognize spinning are are interested in the mechanics.

-All bets are off when one person has asked a question within hearing range of a few other people. I guess then the shyer people know I'm not scary or Amish.
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Yeah, I'm still using my spindles. I particularly like sampling and doing small skeins on them, and I'm still working on the cranberry laceweight merino.

Right now I'm playing with some small dyed bits of yarn the person that sent me my wheel included in the box. There's some bright yellow/green/aqua, some pink/red/purple, some navy/aqua/purple. Very soft, and so bright and fun. There's just enough of each for an accent color; I'm totally in love with Sugar On Snow from the latest issue of Knitty, and am thinking of using the green for a leafy cord on a hat for me, and the others for cords with other doodles on the ends for friends and family. I've got 20-25 yards of the green, and the pattern says she can get 4 tassels out of a single 100-yard skein, so I should *just* have enough. If not, maybe I can only do one leaf and connect both I-cords to it.

For the main body of the hat for myself, I'll probably use some charcoal-colored alpaca roving I've had all summer. I'd bought it thinking of mid-winter wear, and I might try spinning a fat single from it.

A preppy vest for myself:

Wool-Ease on size 8US needles, my own pattern--I'll put it up here with tips for up- and down-sizing it sometime in the future. For some reason the sweater came out very, very light in this picture--it's a dark, tweedy green.

I like how the pattern came out, although it seems to have this mysterious property of being the exact dimensions of store-bought vests I have that fit well, and turning into something looser than my store-bought vests when I put it on. It did, however, knit up exactly to my *intended* size. I might block it a bit longer, to narrow it some.

This was my first time designing something more complex than a hat or non-gauge-critical shawl. The designing process started with me wanting cables that split and went up the sides of a v-neck, and worrying that I didn't have enough yarn for a full sweater. I drew a lot of pictures, measured a lot of things I already own, played around with a lot of different types of cables. Originally I wanted thinner cables with twisted stiches that were in "Knitting the Old Way" (I think it was called "Austrian Jacket"), but the gauge and color just wouldn't let me get the level of detail I wanted. I did twist the stitches in the ribbing, though, which is a nice little effect up close.

It all worked out as planned, in the end, and it was a pretty quick knit (except for picking up stitches around the neck and arms, which took 3 weeks of me sitting there looking at the sweater balefully, then 4 nights of giving up and actually dealing with the thing.)

Mmm. Work-appropriate handknits.

I went all the way to Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Fest, and all I got was these two enormous bags of roving:

2 pounds of Shetland roving is HUGE!. The colors are slightly different--one's a very light tan (off-off white?) and the other one has some darker hairs running through it. It's nice to deal with small-time farmers (this was from Sheepy Hollow). The sheets of paper you can see show a picture of the sheep the fleece came from, and the name of the sheep, which I love, especially because I've fallen for Shetland sheep. They're pretty small, the size of a medium-small dog, and they're curious and sassy and have spotted fleeces. I just want to carry one around in my pocket.

I went to the festival with Madam. It was the first time I'd spent a lot of in-person time with someone I'd met online, though I'd met her and a few other online acquaintances before, just not in a "hang out all day" kind of way. I was sort of wondering how that'd work beforehand, being the social klutz I am, but it was fine and I had a really good time looking at things with someone else that likes talking about string.

I'd planned on getting a few ounces of dyed roving or yarn, but nothing leapt out at me. I suppose I'm too much of a natural-color person. So I stuck with the Shetland and some circular knitting needles for J's sweater.

I haven't started on the roving yet, but I bought it for a sweater. Since the colors are close but not identical, I'm either going to spin it into a 2-ply yarn (one ply each) or a 3 ply yarn (one ply each, and one half-and-half). They're close enough in color that the effect shouldn't be too barber-poley, but far enough that I couldn't just have alternating stripes of one and the other. I've also got an ounce of medium gray Shetland from my Halcyon Yarn purchases, and I'm thinking of throwing a lump of that in here and there to liven things up, since an ounce spun up on it's own isn't enough to do much with. Maybe I'll just put the slubs into one ply. We'll see. I'm sure there'll be lots of sampling and swatching.

There was a handspun competition I was considering entering, but last week I got kind of nervous about the requirements and being pretty new to spinning, so I held off. I did watch some of the judging, though, and at the end felt like my yarn would've been unashamed to be seen there. The weight/skein size requirements weren't as stringent as I thought, and some of the skeins were pretty over or under-twisted. It's not that mine would have blown them all out of the water or anything--there was this merino/cashmere laceweight that was *fantastic*. But I felt a lot better about my spinning after that.

So, a good day. The rain even held off.

Dribs and drabs:
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I am cautiously optimistic about my research right now. This is so much better than the way I've been feeling about it for the last few months that, ironically, cautious optimism is making me dance like a monkey.

And of course, the thing I tried was the LAST shot-in-the-dark thing I was going to try before some serious project reconsideration. We'll see if I can make the same thing happen next week. If I can, then I really should be stepping up the job search stuff, while never leaving the lab. We'll see.
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I realized this week that I hate the part of knitting where you're picking up stitches for little edges, like neck and armholes. Other finishing I don't mind because you start with all these bits, and then after an hour--hey look! A sweater! But picking up stitches seems to take forever. My vest has suffered as a result. I finished it last night, but it took me 3 weeks to knit the body and another 3 weeks to get around to knitting the very narrow edges.
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I made a bento-themed dinner on Sunday, something I'd been meaning to do for a long time. I didn't go full out with the crazy designs, but I did make pretty food. There were these onigiri (plus a few more with pickled fillings I'd set to one side so I could remember which was which), some fresh veggies, potstickers, and some fried tofu. I'll definitely do that again, almost everything wasn't time-dependent, so it's the sort of thing that would be very easy to do some of the night before, and then just heat the tofu and bring the rice to room temp right before you eat.
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Last week in my capoeira class we learned a song that might just have the most typical capoiera message ever.

The first thing you need to know is that the songs are call-and-response things, where the singer starts a song with the response so everyone knows what to sing, then sings various verses (usually only 2-4 measures, short little things that say "I like Capoeira Angola!" "Isn't this music great?" and "My clothes are dirty because I don't have soap.", but in Portuguese, so they sound poetic.)

And the other thing you need to know is that a lot of capoeira is mind games; convincing someone that you're going to kick them and then feinting or vice versa, pretending to be hurt so they let down their guard, that sort of thing. Which can be a lot of fun when everyone comes into it in the same friendly this-is-only-a-game headspace.

So there's a song you can see here called "cai cai cai cai", which means "fall fall fall fall". The chorus is "fall fall fall fall", and then the solo singer sings about how REAL capoeira players never fall, even if they wobble. Which totally reminds me of kids' songs like Lucy Had a Steamboat, where the message is "Oh, did you think I was saying something mean? I wasn't, I was just innocently singing this song, lalala."

It's just a total head game to be chanting at someone to fall, but within the context of the song so they *shouldn't* be getting mad/distracted. Lots of fun.

Also for my own reference (yours too if you're interested), this site has a lot of capoeira songs with (fairly bad) translations. It has a lot of info, though, and a couple of songs I've heard recently that I could only figure out two words of.

I haven't been finishing much lately, though there are a bunch of things very close to completion. In the meantime, here's something I didn't make.

It's a lazy Kate which J made for me with some spare fiberboard. I used it last night, and then he understood what it was actually for, because apparently I didn't really explain it very well (if you need more information you can read the minimal Wikipedia entry or look at many commercially available styles, with a little more explanation).

It works as advertised. I'm thinking through ways of tensioning it, but I didn't have any trouble plying with it last night so I don't think it will be too critical--I suspect sticking some cotton balls underneath the bobbins would be sufficient. I also may paint it at some point. We shall see.