Ducks, not always in a row Quax edition

It shouldn't come as a huge shock to anyone who knows me that I have a bit of a thing about ducks.

But a quick search of the blog shows that it has been entirely too long since the last duck content posting.

First up, a never to be eaten sweet little snack. I gather from internet searches that the sweet is mostly in the appearance and not in the taste.

Never fear duck lovers, there is a backlog of paddlers just waiting to be posted about. I'm going to pace myself in posting about all this good duck love.

Errata -- get it while you can

And if you can't experience helps.

In October 2009, I knit a lace collar called Prudence from the book Knit One, Make One In Classic Knitted Cotton by Furze Hewitt.

The book has been mostly shelved ever since for the same reason that had me pass it up purchasing it the first time I encountered it -- too many projects and not enough reference.

But recently I found myself on a lace designing binge so any and every book loaded with lace came off the shelf and into the office for research/inspiration.

One of the projects I was poking at had me trying to figure out how to create period appropriate lace knitting (other than shawls) that might appeal to a modern knitter. Setting aside the shelf edgings, preserve covers and the like, I zeroed in on a sachet project called Lavender Showers.

Pretty much it is a doily that is stuffed with dried lavender before being cinched up and pimped up to look like a parasol/brolly/umbrella. The big draw for me in working the pattern was not just the increase method but also the atypical increase ratio.

It works, and it works well but it forms a circle by using what seems to be a variation on the radiant method with 16 increases per round, this pattern skips the 54 stitch round for an ten round interlude that alternates between 48 & 64 stitches before moving on to 80 stitches. That interlude shows some promise for incorporating a stitch pattern with more rows into a circular or half-circular shawl.

Somewhere around round 11 where the pattern instructs one to k1, p1 into the previous round's YO, I began to fall in love with a "duh" why didn't I think of that increase choice. Round 11 is also where the increase ratio interlude starts and, to my surprise, really does work without ruffle or scrunching.

By round 21, the k1, p1, k1 increase sealed the deal for me and I was seeing this pattern's growth as the start of something more ambitious (and way bigger). Then it all went sideways.

Sideways in that the published instructions just won't/don't work.

My first thought was that I'd knit it wrong, read it wrong or somehow just effed it up. After a few count. tink, reknit and rethink moments it was clear that it wasn't me. 28 rounds in with 96 stitches on the needle, a set of instructions that require seven stitches to complete is just not going to work evenly.

The book was published in 1990 in Australia and if there ever were corrections published they are nowhere to be found on the web today.

With no errata to guide me it comes down to the experience, analysis and how can I make this work?

The previous row was a six stitch repeat with increases flanking a left single decrease, single knit and a right single decrease.

The not working round also has increases flanking decreases and and knit stitch but this one leads with a right single decrease and a left double decrease -- and therein lies the problem.

So what to do? Some would go with the "oh you just need another increase to even things out and keep the stitch count even" well, um, er, no. An extra increase would balance the decreases but the instructions still require seven stitches to execute and 96 is not evenly divisible by seven.

Reading ahead the pattern's next row has left single decreases and increases in one row and increases and single right decreases in the next. So my best guess is that the double decrease in the problematic round is a typo. A single decrease brings the stitch count down to six and 16 repeats.

The moral of the story is that even without errata/corrections, sometimes a little experience and a bit of pattern analysis will put things to right.

Things hit a snag or oops

A not so funny thing happened. . .

It's a small alpaca shawl that I designed and knit before the fall.

It has been sitting in cold storage for some time waiting for the right publishing opportunity.

Recently a good possibility turned up.

In a best foot forward moment, I thought I'd give it a bath and block before sending it off.

While the alpaca got a nice long soak in the sink, I cleared a blocking board, covered it with the "I don't care if the dye bleeds" towel and dug out blocking wires and T pins (never enough T pins for some reason).

I managed to thread the blocking wires through half of the still sort of sopping shawl, pinned it out and was about to thread the second half when I saw this little surprise.

Initially I thought the break was in one of the lace motifs. Further examination told me that if that was the case I'd made a glaring knitting error and somehow managed to overlook it through repeated blockings -- unlikely but possible.

Once it was completely dry, I discovered that it was in a solid knitted part of the piece and not in a bit of lace. Further, I found another very short end hiding just next to the lace motif in the upper left part of the picture.

Two broken snippets that might measure 3/8 of an inch in length and an orphaned loop to work with in effecting a repair. Is it any wonder I let it sit a bit before dealing with it?

It doesn't look like critters and since it was in a solid area it probably wasn't a victim of aggressive blocking although alpaca is weaker when wet.

My current theory is that it snagged on something at some point and that weakened that particular bit of yarn just enough to snap -- sigh.

Extra sigh because I have no yarn to spare to repair it unless I want to unravel a "gosh gauge really does matter" test piece.

It got an inelegant but effective repair, another soak (eau de Eucalan) and is again on the blocking board with a combo of 300# fishing line (love that stuff), blocking wires and T-pins (seriously, never enough of these).

Thankfully I was just being paranoid/delusional/just seeing things when I thought I saw another unintentional hole in the piece. It really was just a previously woven in end that had worked its way loose.

Ornamental owls

I'm not a big one for following knitting trends or the must knit project of the week/month. I'm not oblivious to the trends but unless they interest me for some other reason other than being the latest thing, I'm not likely to be putting them on the needles.

So a large number of the everyone's knitting one projects have come and gone before I gave more than an " oh that's the latest thing I'm not doing" notice of them.

One of those many must knit projects in recent years is the Owls sweater. Which is a lovely design with a clever use of cables in a yoke sweater.

But is is a yoke sweater and even if I was tempted, I'd have to find some one worthy of my knitting love because I still have the memory of my broad shoulders and the Fair Isle yoke sweaters of uber preppy period burned in my brain -- eek.

Still, I like the cable and how I could truly see an owl in it.

This year, owls played a role in my life. As things turned out, not as much the role I would have liked but still they played a role.

So while casting about with various designs and projects I spent an afternoon or two fiddling about with my take on an owls ornament.

The first try involved a cone of fine gauge cotton (origins unknown) and 3mm needles. The initial goal was a globe.

On the 1st pass I tried the plush fibre fill mode but I wasn't getting a controlled shape.

On the 2nd pass I tried the balloon and starch/stiffener route but I couldn't get the balloon to stay inflated enough to form a non-baggy bottom.

So I soaked the hades out of it to soften up the stiffener, undid the top, removed the balloon and regrouped.

In the 3rd pass I turned the still saggy/baggy bottom up into the piece forming a bell shape and allowed it to dry over a rubber ball to get the sag out. It took a couple, three coatings of the stiffener to get a fairly solid base but having done that it seems to give a structurally sound foundation.

I experimented with two sizes of google eyes before deciding on the 7mm.

I've come to the conclusion using this construction that I'm only going to get a good globe shape if I'm willing to stop, stiffen the bottom and resume knitting. That probably is the best option but it is incompatible with the snack food nature of these sorts of projects.

As I type this a second ornament is drying.

Again, fine gauge cotton and relatively small needles but I formed a pentagon bell rather than a generic globe/egg shape.

I also worked it as an open ended bell shape rather than a globe. It was easier to force into a bell shape because it is open ended but the bottom edge is a bit ruffled.

Overall the piece may not have good long term structural integrity without the inverted base. I'm considering experimenting with a thin mix of plaster instead of stiffener/starch and some wire forms to produce a sturdier ornament that can hold up over time and not require restiffening.

A blog uncommented or a commentary on comments

Once upon a time Blogger didn't support comments in a reasonable fashion if at all. So third party add-ons and tips to install them were part of the blogsphere. Most people weren't making money off of their blogs so free was the way to go and free abounded as coders cut their teeth and worked out bugs in a new market.

Things progressed and profit motive came into play -- I know you're shocked.

Popular bloggers got book deals, people looking for book deals got blogs, those programmers who were coding for free got noticed and/or developed an application they could charge for and so the blog garden of Eden developed into a commercial zone.

I, like a lot of people, used Haloscan. Haloscan was free, integrated pretty well with Blogger and things were, with the odd glitch here and there, pretty smooth sailing.

Haloscan got purchased and the transition wasn't very smooth but the alternatives were no comments or for pay at a price point that only made sense if your blog was a commercial venture. The take over kids offered the option of exporting your comments as XML but but neither they nor blogger offered any sort of good path to reincorporate the exported comments.

For legacy Haloscan users, the take over kids initially offered a one year reasonably priced subscription. I took it and forgot about it.

In all the upheaval of my life the comments and the blog were not high on my list of things to worry so it was a bit of a "say what" when I tried to log on and found that my account was pau. I had no nag emails about renewing for a few or lot of dollars more, nothing and I had been getting comments after the account went inactive -- hhmmm.

Oh well, the latest subscription price point is very much aligned with the corporate/commercial blog world , I have no reason to believe the bugs and less than stellar communication pattern have improved so why pay when Blogger's support for comments is way more developed than it once was?

Okay, so choice shaped up this way, let sleeping dogs lie and have the "already there" comments stay there but not be able to manage any new comments or switch things up and go with Blogger or some other 3rd party comment manager and most likely lose the comments that had been posted over the prior four years.

I went with Blogger for free and four years of comments disappearing. Although I'm pretty sure I exported my comments as an XML file at some point I've no clue when, what file name, or which of my networked computers I would have the downloaded the file to so even if I was inclined to try to match them up.

Killing the old code and getting the Blogger comments to work ended up being a bit more than the promised simple template upgrade and re-entering my tweaks. After quite a few grumbles, commenting out some template coding, saving, reloading, cache clearing and holding my mouth just right after reading epic bad instructions but it works.

In the spirit of things that were once visible (and arguably stuff that got followed the money) the photos on the day are urban art pieces by Shepard Fairey. The mural was completed during the Summer of 2010 and ironically got tagged about a month after the installation.

A worse fate has befallen it since. When it was installed it was quite visable as the wall faced lots with couple of small buildings and an equally small parking lot. Now it abuts a building housing a restaurant called Snooze.

And yes, since I can't resist, that means that say if you Snooze you lose sight of art that is.

If I only cleared my desk. . .

A number of people in my life have subscribed to the theory that my abodes do not actually have black holes that things disappear into for a period of time.

The standard refrain of these folk is that if I just kept a clear desk, sewing table, work space etc. that things would not go missing. Well, these people also probably don't believe in quantum theory or alternate universes.

Still, occasionally the desk/work space reaches a point where I can't even find the stuff I know is piled up and the clearing and sorting begins.

That clearing and sorting almost always comes with me thinking that I'd love to be proven wrong and that the items I've come to accept are long languishing in the black hole will have been under those stacks of stuff all along. I've yet to be proven wrong.

Still, it is worthwhile to tackle the stacks, put like things with like things and, if I'm honest (and I am) make room for the next round of stacks of stuff.

And so it was that over this holiday, I tackled the right hand side of my desk.

Sure enough, the stuff in the stacks got sorted, filed, recycled and trotted off to where they belong and not only did the residents of the black hole not reappear, two "I just had them a day ago" stitch treasuries decided to take a field trip to the alternate universe beyond the black hole.

I have a relatively clean desk but the missing stitch treasuries seem a high price to pay. And no, my go-to needle gauge was not hiding in the stacks.

This holiday breather also inspired me to, if not clean, at least shake things up a bit by swapping curtains from bedroom to living room and otherwise making some decisions about rearranging things.

I am not going for the heavy lifting tweak the muscles and bring on the bruises campaign this go round but a more subtle stuff shuffle.

Fortunately, my drill is not in the black hole and alothough my clamps are -- how I do not know -- my neighbour came through and the old oak table's leaf is now repaired until the next time the wood glue bond gives out.

Although I am not a big t-day fan, it was productive. Things that should have been mailed long ago got mailed, laundry got done, designs proposals got submitted on time and even the library gods smiled on me and two books on my want to read list appeared on the new non-fiction shelves just as my reading mode shifted from frivolous fiction.

I will not be posting pictures of the office/desk anytime soon but I can't let a blog entry go out unadorned. So the shots here are snippets of design inspiration from local architecture.

Slippahs the pocket book edition

Stemware gets socks, people feet get slippahs and @ this time of the year not rubbah ones.

Some years back I went into knitted fingerless mitts mode. Although my original pair was bound for a hothouse flower friend in Ohio and therefore made climate/weather sense to me, the majority of the seven pairs knit that year (everyone seemed to have cold hands that year) ended up living with San Diegans.

Suddenly there's a lot of hinting about shoe sizes in my little corner of the world.

This slippery slope to slippah knitting began with an oops.

A couple of neighbours share a late September birthday and so we all got together for a pot luck to celebrate. Gift for neighbour dude was a no-brainer but neighbour gal was more of a challenge.

Being more rich in yarn than cash, I solved my "oops I don't have a gift for the birthday girl" with the offer of a pair of knitted slippers. I picked the pocket book slippers and knit a (somewhat modified) test pair for her to try.

As luck would have it, the yarn I chose to test the pattern just happened to be her favourite colour and fit both my size 6½ and her really rather larger feet.

Her pair got a button hole and button, another just in case pair got icord that can either be knotted into a button of sorts or looped and snapped to secure depending upon who actually ends up with them.

It looks like this year's slippah surge is going down the same path with lots of cold feet being in line for a little footie love courtesy of my needles, stash, and need to keep hands busy.

More pocket book slippers are in progress. There's a yellow pair that will either have one get frogged, become two pair or go to someone with very fraternal twin feet. Important safety tip, do not sew one slippah up before knitting the second -- folded measurements lie like lumpy rugs.

The yellow ones were originally slated to test the feet eater slippahs from Knitting Mochimochi but the pattern, yarn, needles and I could not come to agreement.

I got gauge but the soles seemed too long and too wide for my feet (the test case) and versions seen on ravelry look overly loose even when that's not included in the comments/notes.

After double checking for corrections (none for the size I was making) and re-verifying gauge, I frogged, regrouped, knit soles to match my rubbah slippahs and will be knitting my own version using a makes more sense to me construction method at some point in the not too.

Another pair in progress is a vision in Wendy/Peter Pan purple/pink and I have plans for some silk with reversible cables just because.

Other than the "do pay attention with measuring" gotcha noted above these are really easy, fit a good range of feet and are fabulous to tuck away for travel.

More on the what I've learned about slippahs from the Mochimochi experiment at another time because I think the slippah surge is just starting since mostly mindless knitting is always welcome for the betwixt and between times and general walkabout.