walkabout knitting

Ducks, not always in a row Quax edition

2012-01-23T12:06:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-19T16:22:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-14T16:22:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-12T07:45:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-08T15:46:00.000-08:00

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. . .

2011-11-27T22:31:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-22T09:35:00.000-08:00

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.

Knitted stem socks or silly wine stuff

2011-11-04T00:40:00.000-07:00

The didn't make it in time for Halloween 2011 projects include a partially completed knitted black cat, knitted witch and a spider web.

Two of the three projects are sitting in project bags with needles and instruction notes waiting for me to revisit them. The spiderweb project is sitting near the front door taunting me to test my crochet meets kynar wire skills so we'll see which project queues up first.

If I were a lady who boo bags her friends those projects would be done not waiting to be done but I'm a bag (project) lady not a boo bag lady so cat and witch are on hold until I can cycle back around to them when the "oh I need those needles so I'd better make progress on those projects" situation arises.

But in the proof that I am not so far removed from boo bag ladies, I was in a must knit something mode, I picked up needles, some scrap yarn and found that the same modified recipe for the knitted pumpkins created a kinda kewl stem sock coaster for stemmed glassware.

Unlike the pumpkins, in sewing up you just cinch up the bottom and seam 1/2 way up the side seam leaving a slit for the glassware to slide into.

My neighbour has the defacto wine bar of the court yard so I thought I'd gen some of these up using left over sock weight yarn and combine them with a corkscrew and a couple bottles of wine for holiday cheer.

Wool is a better wicking fabric for this silly hostess gift so digging about for suitable wool/wool blends with an eye for my neighbour's taste/preferences is a bit of a challenge for my mostly warm weather doesn't knit socks stash of yarn but I think I can crank out enough to keep the local wine glasses clothed and classy.

If this sounds like a too much time on my hands thing, please bear in mind that back even before my brief not working except to volunteer and/or support spouse's career days I had a bad habit of cutting out the caterer by doing my own events with full menus so knocking out a few silly stemware socks in my spare time is a no brainer that keeps my hands busy while I'm thinking about other projects/problems.

Pumpkins, or let the gourds begin

2011-10-15T01:33:00.000-07:00

Halloween or All Hallow's Eve aka Celtic New Year's Eve has oddly inspired me this year so I guess it makes sense that I should revive the blog at this time of year.

Little side line about the gap in blog postings, I've written drafts, I've saved them, edited them, and consciously decided not to delete them but also not to publish them.

In the age of cult of personality and over share, I'm still in the don't drop the veil mode which will, undoubtedly confuse the Hades out of those who see me as a total extrovert -- buzz, sorry, wrong answer, thank you for playing, please try again, we have these lovely parting gifts. . .

Short-form is wrist/hand has improved since last report but not as much as promised. I'm still dealing with challenges from the fracture that I'd rather not but I'm coping.

Onto the pumpkins.

Recently I knit some knitted balls and blocks for a friend's grandchild.

The balls were done using short row wedges in garter stitch. They are really just one of many variations of a Knitlist pattern exchange recipe -- double pie wedge short rows that form a ball.

Since my walkabout knitting was still sort of in the training wheels stage of its comeback, I had some trouble keeping track of how many wedges I'd worked. To remedy the situation, I decided to finish each segment with a plain knit/purl row to give me a reference/sanity check. Once stuffed they had a ribbed sort of look that, had they been orange rather than yellow, looked a bit like pumpkins.

This got me in the decorating mode so a big ball of orange cotton jumped into my cart at the local JoAnn's and it was suddenly a let the gourds begin moment.

A big challenge was finding the yarn for the stem. In a good/bad news moment, I'd not actually managed to unload some nasty Xmas green acrylic so it got pressed into service.

The first one I did got "filled" with an inflated 15" helium quality balloon.

The rest were stuffed it with a mix of crumpled junque mail and plastic shopping bags. I didn't sew up either end (stem or bottom base) of the pumpkins so that I can remove/recycle the stuffing and store the pumpkins flat when they aren't seasonal.

So what's the recipe? The basic recipe, as mentioned, is from a gift to the Knitlist from 1995 which, sadly, no longer exists on the web except perhaps on the wayback machine. The nearest version I've seen is from Tia Judy's page which is more pattern than recipe but I'm providing the link to help 'splain how the short row pie wedges work.

My versions are 48, 36, 30 & 24 stitch cast ons @ about 5 spi (stitches per inch) but any evenly divisible by 3 which results in an even # of stitches will work without too much thought/effort. Twelve wedges for a nice full pumpkin.

Short form recipe = cast on 48 (36, 30, 24) . Knit 32 (24, 20, 16) wrap & turn "orphaning" 16, (12, 10, 8) stitches. Knit 30 (22, 18, 14) wrap & turn "orphaning" 2 sticthes. Continue last two rows until you've reversed which side the stitches are orphaned. Complete the wedge in the next row, and this is this is the key to the ridges for the pumpkins, by purling 48 (36, 30, 24). Eleven more wedges, cast off & sew cast on & cast off stitches together.

Stem -- with green pick up about 24 (or any multiple x3) stitches. Arrange on dps -- join. Knit one round. Knit 2, Purl 1 all round for 2 rounds. Next round K2tog, Purl 1 all round. Knit 1, Purl 1 round for 2 rounds. Bind off.

Cut yarn, weave in ends blah, blah, blah. Stuff with tissue paper, crumpled junque mail or plastic bags

July forward looking inward

2010-09-10T01:09:00.000-07:00

So for everyone who has an issue with white on black -- byte me. I'm only a little kidding about this.

I recently went to a professional meeting where the suggestion was that only people without design and layout experience did light text on dark background web and blog layouts.

Byte me seems right. There are many reasons for light text on dark background as a legit design not the least of which is making it harder for someone to print your text and call it their own.

Oh yeah, anyone and everyone can view the source content however they prefer (say black on white) and defeat that intellectual property hurdle but if anyone and everyone can do that then who the Hades cares if I publish in something (white on black) that you have a problem with since you have the power to see it regardless.

I'd respect your complaints a bit more if you reserved them for the must have insert name of browser add on/plug in especially of a specific version to view content.

Okay, it is an ongoing issue for me. Also ongoing is this little insight into my life.

Early in July I drove a friend to her doc's appointment to check out the hairline fracture in her foot.

Since the appointment was supposedly going to be a short one and we had other graphics issues things to discuss it wasn't a drop off favour.

I parked the vehicle in the pay garage, sent pal up with the get validation chit and said the catch you later at the elevator before rambling off to fave local thrift to do a bit of shopping.

As I walked back 'round toward 5th Avenue Books to pick up a used copy of an HTML/CSS book, I tripped and fell on a small up tick on the sidewalk by University & 5th.

I can't even begin to count how many times I've almost fallen/tripped at that same seemingly safe stretch of sidewalk but this time I flew and landed on outstretched palm.

Some lovely people helped me up, collected my things and convinced me that this was not a walk it off, never mind moment. It seems so subtle to you and me but this is a lovely close up of a broken ulna & radius near the wrist joint . As a true inside shot, you don't get the fun of seeing the lovely jut out, distortion, "dang gal that's effed up" vision of nasty my little let's talk shock adrenaline rush brain was coping with.

I thanked my helpers, collected my stuff, isolated and imobilised my arm and walked the two blocks to the nearest emergency room/trauma centre.

This is pretty much the story of July on for 2010. I'm not brilliant at reading x-rays and this is not a Rocky & Bullwinkle over the top obvious x-ray but apparently it was a pretty nasty break.

Being me, I refused pain meds, embraced ice packs and minimised my time in hospital as best I could. I am, after all, a woman who did a breast cancer biopsy as an outpatient procedure in 1974 because I refused to stay overnight.

I couldn't quite manage that in-n-out bit on this one but I was gone baby gone with pins & plates in place ASAP.

Bones heal quickly. Soft tissue slower. I can write, I can type, I can code. I can sort of kind of knit. I can't make a fist (never was a big left uppercut gal), don't ask me to long tail cast on and we are just not going to speak of my plait my hair skills

So what happened to January, February, most of March & now April?

2010-04-30T23:50:00.000-07:00

Well, if I manage to write and post this in the next 10 minutes I will at least have one blog posting in April 2010.

I'm guessing that "stuff" isn't quite going to cut it and playing another smoke and mirrors bringing on the backlog and backdating entries is just a recipe for getting myself back into the same sorry state down stream.

So what did happen?

Job front -- more resumes out, a mixed bag of interviews but no close the deal job happy ending so far. So the resume roll out continues. Some good networking connections but the market is still pretty soft and reqs are still being cut/canceled so it is what it is.

I'm playing with XHTML, CSS and other tools to keep and expand my skill set. I may finally roll out some CSS on my web page or more likely one or more of the web pages I handle for others.

The big push after job seeking has been designing and swatching and there's not a happy ending there yet either.

But I do have some nice designs that need to find a publisher (could be me if the graphic artist ever gets bum in gear or I finally cut him out of the deal) and more in the works as I have been soothing my soul and fingers with the healing power of deeply saturate dyed ultra fine alpaca.

Pictures from camera, computer & phone along with mundune musings will appear here soon nad hopefully more often than once a quarter.

Topping the Topiaries a San Diego Safari Part 2

2010-01-17T20:26:00.000-08:00

Going Ape

Me? I should be doing the whole walkabout to the Whistlestop this weekend or being local social at a potluck but I've been fighting with my swatches for a geometric half octagon and multiple conflicting social obligations as per usual mean go to neither.

My first real world swatch had some bad bias problems.

The second version (triangle not 1/2 octagon) suggested that I'd imagined the bias.

The third version validated the first so frog, frog, rethink, rechart and reknit. It was all going so well when I took knitting and only hand done chart of the reworked patterning went off on a 10 mile walkabout yesterday and only the knitting and I came home. . . to all here's an all too familiar -- pish.

Extreme short rows -- a tea time classic

2010-01-12T18:07:00.000-08:00

Or sometimes lazy lace isn't all that lazy.

Some years back I went off on an exploration of making the holes that appear when you do short rows without wrapping work as a design element rather than a problem.

I designed a couple of great scarves, jackets, hats, bags etc. using the technique. All of the designs were tested, proven and crazy popular with everyone who saw them.

Well, everyone except the magazines I submitted the designs to -- pish. So I banked the design work and moved on to other design areas.

At the time I thought I had taken the design options as far as possible but when putting together a class proposal I realised that I'd overlooked the simplest version and since the class proposal was geared toward what I call the "if you can count and knit you can do this" crowd, I settled on the simplified version as the class project.

During the class I plan to discuss other more subdivided versions of the technique and show examples but not make the more challenging versions a class project. I have the original lazy lace pieces as well as some other examples to show/inspire but I think the simpler version is challenging enough for a class.

I was working on a practice safe jewelry pouch for a friend when it struck me that I could probably do a knitted tea cup for my guild's tea party challenge using the technique since the eight segment piece I was working on was already cupping nicely.

Being me, I thought I'd take it to the extreme and do the 10 subdivided sections in each panel version.

I'd love to report that it went swimmingly and that it was an easy knit, but I tend not to lie. Small needles, small thread, stitch markers and trying to knit each section in the same order each time so I wouldn't get lost too often. I got lost a lot. Often enough that when I decided to knit a companion saucer, I decided that the saucer would almost match. On the saucer front, I still have two failed efforts on needles to show just how much fun this can be to work.

While I am nuts, I am not nuts enough to knit the 10 subdivided sections 20 times or more to get a full, mostly flat circle to form the saucer. That one got a simpler treatment.

There are certain things that happen using this technique that cannot be done when knitting centre out or perimeter in. Whether that's worth the effort can be debated.

I was considering entering the pieces into a local small image show but I wasn't sure whether it would have juried in and I wasn't too keen on setting a price that would adequately reflect the time involved.

I'd like to put it and a few other pieces into a more textile and/or sculpture friendly exhibit that doesn't require a sale at the other end but so far I haven't found one.

I find it very odd that I walked away from art during college but I keep doing art and mostly sculpture which was never my strength.

Knowing that one of the keys to keeping my hand healthy and not giving myself a repetitive stress injury is to change up needle and yarn sizes, I resisted the impulse to immediately cast on and knit a pine paper person -- toe up, of course and with short rows.

The liquid gold leaf is left over from the shoe project and the starching (diluted white glue this time) was not quite as crazy as the pine paper shoe process. But it did require a hunt for china and I only managed to find one tea cup and none of the matching saucers. I'm not 100% happy with how the handle distorted the molding process but I also wasn't about to break my tea cup.

With perfect hindsight, it struck me that I could use tin foil to get a shape to mold over. My experience with the shoes tells me that eventually even the diluted glue will not hold the shape so I'd like to explore some other options/combinations.

I really like the idea of using some form of resin to create forms that could drop into something like this to retain the shape and not detract from the lace.

I'd like to explore this a bit more and do "normal" lace rather than this technique so the time and effort is reduced. Yes, that's right, a centre out lace medallion is easier than this so called "lazy lace."

We all scream for ice cream

2010-01-02T17:37:00.000-08:00

I was thinking about the guild's tea party challenge when I went digging in the stash room for nasty acrylic suitable for knitted food.

Originally the idea was revisiting my cup cake technique to either knit a half dozen or so as part of the challenge and also to surprise a very dear local knitter and fellow guild member on her birthday.

I'd also been considering working that technique or some other variant on a larger scale to create a multi-tiered cake purse/bag using a rescued cardboard container.

The container, resembling a cut down heavy duty ice cream carton had previously been forced into a life of ugly by some country-quaint obsessed crafter who I'm sure meant well when she gave it to me many years ago covered in very busy fabric and quilt batting.

No, there will be no picture of the fabric but keep reading to see if a cake purse takes form at some point.

Somewhere along the knitting thought process, the ice cream side took over and this is what happens when you combine acrylic yarn, diluted white glue, an empty yarn cone, and some short rows.

I was thinking of lining the cone with a cone but I don't have very many of them and those that I have aren't quite the right size as it turns out.

I settled on the glue story because I ended up wanting this to be functional or capable of being functional. So the scoops got the glue treatment lightly. Next they got blocked over a plastic ball and filled with poly-fil. I then cut and sewed a circle of reinforced felt to the bottom of the scoop.

Scoop and cone were stitched together in one small segment next to a crocheted chain loop.

You can actually fit knitting needles (dps) or other knitting notions into the cone and the scoop functions quite nicely as a pin cushion.

It was fun, the short rows to form the way more regular than a real scoop of ice cream really added to the pieces. But the best part was being able to delight with knitting a fellow knitter who is a great delight in my life.

Half Octagons again

2009-12-29T18:46:00.000-08:00

No, no, really, it will make it to Montana at some point before the Spring. But I just wasn't happy with the swirl factor of the front and so there was another pass at blocking.

Truth? It didn't make that much difference once I took the blocking wires out.

Still, I did get a nice shot of the almost finished item. All that's left is a crochet chain and button or buttons.

I have some options but I'm not in love with any of them. More precisely, I'm not committed to any of them. Some great buttons from The Spirit of the Cloth, an idea about doing a Dorset button out of either the Curious Creek or some embroidery floss or some other option.

I really want to work with both Kristine's yarn and also with the half polygons in the geometric progressions with a bit of luck both of those will come together but playing with Colonnade has reignited my interest in partial polygons and what does and doesn't work when combining lace and hand/boutique dyed yarn.

I'm also very much loving how the JoAnn's bargain 72" wide felt is working out as a photo backdrop.

Hope Christmas is just duckie

2009-12-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

Circa 1956 short rows, 9spi & strange diagrams

2009-12-08T11:11:00.000-08:00

Around this time back in 1956 I was busy plotting an early entry into the world.

Sometime earlier that year, my mother was trying to get her knit on in anticipation of my arrival. My mother, like her sister aka MATB, was not a knitter.

Unlike her sister, my mother had no real illusions about her lack of knitting skills and yet, interestingly, she somehow managed to teach some of her WW II era Girl Scout charges how to knit even though she hadn't a clue of her own. Must have been some really good tech writing 'splaining how to knit and/or how to teach knitting.

Mother's knitting so sucked that MATN (yet another aunt acronym) was said to have pulled the woeful WIP out of mum's hands to frog and finish since as Luisa declared, Mein Gott im Himmel the child will freeze.

I can't be sure but it may well be that Luisa was the knitter behind the long lost and treasured matinee set that I treasured as a kid. Sadly, that particular bit of my knitwear history isn't in the bit of knitting history that is the subject of today's posting or I'd be able to recreate it for a new generation.

If Wikipedia is to believed, Woman's Day magazine (the US version) has been in publication since 1931 when it began as a free publication designed to boost sales at A&P stores. Free didn't last but it was still an A&P exclusive until 1958 when it was sold to Fawcett Publications.

In 1956 it was still an A & P publication and, as you can see, it wasn't a big glossy exercise but apparently, at least in 1956 (and likely long before) they put out an annual Woman's Day Big Book of Knitting with designs for the experienced knitter and instructions for the less experienced wanna be knitter.

Interestingly, English needle sizes were also given and circular needles were also popular enough to be specified in some designs. The models are a scream, especially the male ones -- think Mad Men for crazy camp.

Half a century later, the average American knitter of today might run screaming off into the night (or onto the internet for HELP!) over patterns with no schematics, very little hand holding on the designs and many, many being knit at 9 spi on size 1 US.

While the specifics (gauge and lack of diagrams) might send today's average knitter off the edge, some of the designs are pretty timeless and would definitely appeal to today's knitters with a few tweaks.

Having knit a few of the smaller designs in the past, I can attest to the fact that then, just as now, there are mistakes lurking in these patterns and the errata is long gone from memory and print as near as I can tell.

The largest size given on any of these designs is a size 18 which, back in the day, was a 36" chest. I'd have to swatch to be sure, but I'm guessing that simply upsizing needles and yarn might yield a gauge and garment to fit today's larger sizes and knitting styles.

I was particularly interested in three of the designs three pictured here.

The fourth design is for the footie crowd and while no, they didn't suggest making your own felt for the felted thongs, tabis were mainstream in 1956. BTW, not a picot bind off, a picot hem.

The little white ribbed number appeals to my interest in shaping and the effective use of diagonal ribbing to contour fabric.

The yoke treatment on the pullover combined with the waist shaping is wonderful on its own but has me wondering about combining a hand pain with a solid for an updated look that would provide a pop of colour and be an affordable way to explore some of the great boutique dyers that have abounded in recent years.

The gal doing a great impersonation of the classic Superman stance/pose got my attention not only for the pose. The cardigan has a great fitted shape and, at first glance seems to have some miter treatment forming the yoke.

A glance at the instructions gave me even more interest because my beloved short rows are a big part of the design.

Even though this is the only design in the book with a diagram, initially I couldn't wrap my head around how the diagram related to the design.

Here's the diagram, does it communicate any better to you blog readers than it did to me?

The diagram should look oddly familiar to some of you who have seen my short rowed Kathryn's Kimonos and other odd experiments in strip knitting via short rows.

Believe it or not, all that short rowing is to form the button bands, neckline and bottom edge of the cardigan.

And, after all that effort, the thing is sewn onto the rest of the garment instead of picking up and knitting and/or grafting. So I guess they were forward looking in 1956 but they still had a few things to learn.

Portrait of the knitter as a young girl

2009-12-01T20:16:00.000-08:00

Or back when my mother and I both really liked my profile, my mother had this silhouette piece done of me.

I think I remember the hat -- a modified cloche with a wide velvet ribbon that was my Easter bonnet in maybe 1961 or thereabouts.

I remember a long lost hazy photo or two of me and my brother from that time line.

In a perfect world, I'd be able to pair this shot with a photo of the silhouette I had done at Disneyland about 20 years later.

That bit of my history is in the I'm sure it is here somewhere but I've no clue where column, so maybe next December it will debut.

No knitting content today although there's plenty in the queue -- old knitting magazines with quirks and forward looking designs, updates on Santorini Sand and more.

Collared or Prudence Part 2

2009-11-28T21:03:00.000-08:00

Although in the knitting early days my fingers/brain seemed intent on not learning the rhythm of the pattern, the Brilla Prudence lace collar knit up quickly once it really hit the front of the knitting queue.

I cast on on the 10th of October and finished on the 22nd of November.

I'm quite clear that October was more tinking, frogging and taking the back seat to Carol's colour splash shawl project.

Prudence ended up taking 31 lace points to get what I think is a reasonable length to fit 'round neck/shoulders.

I added a small short row tab with a single YO/2tog button hole to accommodate the faux pearl button closure.

The photos don't quite do justice to how lovely the Brilla worked up. The sheen of the rayon almost makes it look beaded.

While it has some heft to it (it took 75g to complete), the overall impression is substantial but not heavy and feminine but not delicate. For my purposes and my vision, it fits/works on all levels and the 31 points are something of an inside serendipitous joke.

I'm more than a bit curious to see how this and other collar patterns would work up using hand paints and way bigger needles and yes, I am thinking chill chaser more than garment collar but garment collar would also be interesting to explore.

This construction would also be interesting for a skirt or an off shoulder frill/flounce treatment.

It has just a few more public appearances to make here in San Diego before it ships off to its new home/owner.

I'm wishing I had another full hank of white Brilla so I could crank out another collar before the end of the year.

Just a bit of bloom

2009-11-26T21:19:00.000-08:00

I'm not much for the holiday itself but I'm pretty good at being thankful or at least I try.

Today's posting is one of those life's simple pleasures to be thankful for in this case, a sunny day, Southern California and a rose in bloom in November.

A couple weeks ago, I spent the day getting my neighbour comfortable with his first digital camera.

Our route took us through Balboa Park and, of course, included the rose and cactus gardens on Park Boulevard where I took this shot to show the value of the macro feature.

The goal on the day was to get him comfortable using some of the basic features like zoom and macro to get some shots in the camera and uploaded to his computer.

Not every feature, not every option, not information overload, not terribly technical, just getting feet wet and shooting.

It was a taming technology session and it reaffirmed to me that even though I may be much more technically inclined than a student, I can still listen and communicate at an appropriate level. He's been complimenting and singing the praises of my teaching ever since -- warm fuzzies abound.

I like the praise but I am even more thankful for the underlying skill that makes that praise possible.

Organising or index cards & envelopes

2009-11-25T16:16:00.000-08:00

In either a tweet or a FB status update, I noted that one of the problems with creating databases is changing sort strategies.

It isn't a big deal when the sort is purely theoretical and/or bits and bytes but if you change the sort strategy of tangible items things are more complicated.

Actually, it is only more complicated if you're the one who actually has to find the items, see if the sort still makes sense or just find shelf space.

Several years ago I embarked on a stash sorting exercise that pretty much divided yarn by fibre content and colour.

I didn't go into great detail defining what was in each bin and although I tried to get as many like things with like things I wasn't too concerned when not every hank of yarn X found its way into the bin containing the other hanks of yarn X.

Over time yarn came and went from the bins. Some bins became sparsely populated, others saw little change and still others saw overcrowding and wait lists. More bins were added to the original collection but that only delayed, and in some cases exacerbated the underlying problem.

The pure amount of yarn I had grew and my handle on the inventory was much too LIFO with the first in stuff becoming the lost, forgotten or can't find. My FILO was First In LOst and my FIFO was First In FOrgotten and that just wasn't working for me.

The studio still has a certain amount of constant chaos and the "go back bins" will always be with me as I find that I didn't catch all hanks of X when I put the other hanks away or as I pull a hank or two of X for a project and then need/want to put it back with the rest of its kind but don't feel inspired to move other bins around to put a single hank away.

Add the active and not so active WIPs, things blocking, swatches "seasoning" and things waiting to be photographed. . . I'm just trying to not let it get too out of hand before restoring some order.

Originally in this year's October re-org, I was excited about repurposing some diskette labels to better document the contents of each yarn bin.

For some bins containing lots of hanks of a just a few sorts of yarns this idea had great promise but as I got into bins where there were more types of yarns with fewer hanks each and/or finer gauge stuff, that scheme was not working.

Enter old school index cards, a little new school Ravelry and alcohol.

Up first, old school index cards. One of the big failings I saw in my previous stash sorting scheme was that sometimes, especially as yarn got used up, it made more sense to combine the contents of bins with a little less attention to fibre content, colour etc. but labeling and relabeling as things changed was a pain and not enough of a priority to keep current.

So I started thinking old school and physical cards for physical items. The idea is a simple one with each bin having an envelope and each envelope containing an index card for each type of yarn contained in the bin.

That way, if I decide to shuffle yarn from bin to bin, I can shuffle the cards too. In addition, even if I can't see all the yarns in the bin, I can pull the cards and see detailed info (yarn name, mfg, weight, yardage per hank, # hanks, dye lot & colour) on the contents.

The original frugal plan was for me to make the envelopes and use old business cards but it wasn't quite coming together. Enter Warwick's. I was just wandering through on the outside chance that I'd hit the shop when a friend was working and when she wasn't I wandered into the stationery section for inspiration.

Half 3 x 5 inch index cards and gift insert envelopes are the perfect old school answer. A 3 x 5 card is too big/wasteful for the info I need and a business card too small. The gift insert envelope will hold the half 3 x 5 cards nicely. For day to day functioning, I leave the cards sticking out but in the event of a move, the envelopes can be closed to keep the cards secure.

Each bin has another old school marker or two. The lids of bins I own are clear, blue and green so each bin has a C, B or G yard sale sticker and then a number. There's no hidden coding in the lid cover, the number or the colour of the index cards this information is purely for navigation and physical retrieval.

On the database side of the house, I relied to some degree on the kindness (and compulsiveness) of others and went with the Ravelry new school option.

When I joined Ravelry, I had little or no interest in doing an inventory of my stash using their tools. I didn't see the value but once I started doing the reshuffle this year, it all came into focus.

Because of the work of others, the Ravelry database, contains essential information about a lot of commercially available (and previously available) yarn. This means that if a yarn is in the Ravelry database, I can tap into that information to create my own database of my yarn inventory.

With my yarn inventoried, I can more readily figure out if I have enough of a particular yarn to knit a specific project. A good example of this was when I was trying to decide what I was going to use to knit my version of Santorini.

Classic Elite Sand was in the database so all I needed to do was list how many skeins in what colour/dye lot and automagically, the 22 skeins showed me that I had 1694 yards -- more than enough.

The stash database includes a field for location so all my inventoried yarn is coded with the bin labels. This makes reuniting orphaned skeins & hanks much easier.

I can also download the table/spreadsheet of my inventoried yarn and sort/manipulate it to meet my needs in ways that are not yet coded into Ravelry.

And the alcohol? A long time ago, I discovered the value of using the divided boxes that wine and liquor comes for storing stemware and other fragile items. They work just as well and are a much cheaper option than buying storage boxes.

Those same boxes are also great for storing yarn that come not in hanks or skeins but wrapped around a rigid cardboard tube -- think Rowan Linen Drape, Lang Opal, DMC Cebelia, etc.

I haven't gone inventory mad on those quite like I have with the bins but eventually the plan is to have each box have a key with what yarn is contained in each section. For now, it is easy enough to know what yarn's where just by glance.

No a half octagon is not a square or more on Carol's Splash of Colour

2009-11-24T16:19:00.000-08:00

I finished knitting my version of Colonnade on the 11th and did a first pass on the blocking shortly after.

Even before it was off the needles, I did some checking into my notes on polygons and confirmed that the curving my fellow guild member saw in the final product was not her issue but the nature of the design.

It uses the increase ratio for a swirl rather than a geometric octagon and that's going to create a skew/swirl even though we're talking about a flat knit half octagon rather than a centre out knit in the round.

The swirl/curve does not become obvious until fairly far along in the knitting and it can be blocked into straight line submission but the swirl is the natural result.

That swirl actually gives a nice little "flounce" at the centre increase line. The swirl/flounce is less apparent at the next set of flanking segments and presents most strongly at the "fronts."

More than a few knitters and designers figure that you can just string a series of knitted triangles created with the same increase ratio together and produce a nice neat shape that lies flat and conforms. It doesn't work that way because math (in this case geometry) really does matter.

I've been toying with this for ages and whether it is decreases, increases, short row pie wedges or any other construction method it all comes back to the math and internal angles.

The first shows the centre back flounce and skew/swirl. The second shows the curl and swirl/curve of the front/sides.

While I may do another block of this before sending it off to Montana, I'm fairly happy with the end product. All in all, the centre back drop is about 17 or 18 inches making it just the Victorian chill chaser I'd in mind.

The picot point cast off produces a bit of ruffling that gives a nice feminine touch. I am still pawing through the bead stash to see if I've cached anything that would suit my vision of a few beads that can also function as buttons for an optional closure.

Having knit this, I will, without a doubt, get back to my own notes on ideas for half octagons and half hexs to bring those ideas to life. I was way too crazy tempted to tear back and do some of the "ooh that would be an interesting design twist" ideas that came to me while I was knitting to not pursue them.

When I decided to do this project, I thought I would pair the Curious Creek with some Louet Merino I'd purchased for a project for another friend. That other friend may still get a Louet Merino gift because, although the colour was dead on, the gauge was way off.

That gauge issue set off a stash and shops search for more Curious Creek and a compatible coordinating yarn that would suit both my eye and the colour comfort level of the intended recipient.

Curious Creek is Kristine Brooks and they are San Diego local (and seriously local to me) and when none of the local stockists had any of the yarn on hand, I broke down and phoned her to see if she had any leads on sources.

Her insight was that Woolgirl had exactly the stuff I was after in stock and since I couldn't find it locally and Kristine was headed out of town I placed the order and was impressed with the result. The final photo shows the lovely packaging and attention to detail a knitter can expect when ordering from this retailer -- kudos.

Set in stone, er, um concrete

2009-11-22T16:19:00.000-08:00

If you know me at all you may have noticed that I tend to notice things that other people gloss over. This can be considered amusing, charming or annoying -- whatever your perspective it is one of my quirks.

I have a particular fondness for odd signs along the way and sidewalk stamps gone wrong.

Today's posting then is about long wrong stamped in concrete "where am I again" mistakes set in concrete.

There's a small/short street called Blaine that runs from Cleveland to Centre (or Center depending on who you ask) but on one particular corner, Blaine has its own identity crisis as shown by these unedited images.

Diagonal ribbing and 44 sweater update

2009-11-21T16:19:00.000-08:00

Careful readers and folks on Ravelry will know that my pal Stacy (aka Artmama) got a wild hair to do a service project called 44 sweaters in honour of the 44th Prez of the United States of America.

For the not politically aware that's the current one (Barak Obama).

Anyhow, I was one of Stacy's fellow knitters and crocheters who helped her reach her goal of 44 sweaters for kids all donated to the Vista Hill Foundation.

I contributed three of the 44 sweaters.

The first one was adapted pattern from Tater's Cotton Cardigan knit, in my case, from Comfort left over from the still-in-process Fish Afghan/Blanket documented here back in March/April.

In that particular case the adapting pretty much means I used her cast on and increase ratio/shaping/sizing and changed pretty much everything else. If you look closely it is the bright yellow cardigan on the long line of sweaters in the backdrop of some of the images on Stacy's blog and also on the Vista Hill Foundation's press release photos about this project.

The second one, the quick knit baby sweater, was adapted from Baby Yeti from Berroco to fit the amount of yarn I had (read short row garter stitch shawl collar) from a "what was I thinking?" yarn exchange at the Whistlestop some years back.

I was either showing or delivering one of the sweaters to Stacy at Knit @ Nite when we got to talking about how few sweaters there were for bigger kids and/or boys when I decided to start a third sweater for that under served demographic.

The diagonal sweater is the result. It is shown here and Stacy's blog (check the link) shows it in action on its beautiful recipient.

The yarn is a beautiful soft acrylic in a lovely taupe brown.

I bought the yarn more than a decade ago at Cold Spring Mill in Yorkshire and I still have plenty on hand.

This one fully my own design -- basic gansey featuring a diagonal rib with rolled neck and rolled cuffs.

Knit from bottom to top with also bottom up sleeves joined to body at the armholes before raglan shaping up to the rolled neck.

The sizing is generous with about a 32" chest. These projects have really brought home the charm of designing for children's sizing and no, I still haven't sized the sweater up for adults but it is on the long and winding to do list.

Scooting right along

2009-11-18T16:19:00.000-08:00

Today's posting is yet another one of those stuff seen around the hood shots.

One of the now you see it now you don't shops that have been part of the business turn over here in Hillcrest is a Vespa shop.

Even though the shop's gone the scooter remains popular hereabouts.

No, these two are not twins, or if they are they are fraternal rather than identical.

Vintage, retro and a change of pace from my usual car shots.

In terms of photo composition, I could live without the ashtray at the top of the stairs and I would have liked more of the landscaping to show but that would have required me to wait for some parked cars to move or be edited out.

Fabric finds -- nursery numbers

2009-11-14T16:15:00.000-08:00

This started as a posting about older embroidery projects but drifted. Sometimes things work that way.

Okay, so things work that way more often than not -- bite me. The bite me is an homage to pal Karen the linguist. She and Stephanie will get/enjoy the reference.

Long ago and far away I found these in a thrift store. I loved the whimsy of the fabric with its Beatrix Potter vibe.

I could never quite figure out if these were supposed to be place mats or ill considered (read no opening) pillow covers or what but I liked the fabric/vibe and the price was right.

I may have had a project in mind or I may have had a friend in mind when I bought them but eventually they were lost in the stash/clutter maelstrom.

Fast forward, the undefined project never appeared and while the fabric still appeals, I'm not the believes in fairies woo-woo widow who decorates in this genre (and probably never will be) that would decorate a home with this stuff.

I'm thinking that, unless I cut them up for sachets or some small gift giving sewing project that suddenly hits the front of my queue, they need to go live elsewhere.

In my world, known friends I know get first dibs and/or first refusal.

My front of the queue known friend in this case is Stephanie who just happens to have a penchant for sewing and a perfect for Beatrix Potter vibe kidling or two.

Unlikely to manage a hand off before the end of the year but they can be bundled up and find a temporary home in the pending delivery basket.

Sometimes good gauge is bad scale

2009-11-05T15:02:00.000-08:00

You know the theory that says only skinny gals look good in stuff knit from/in bulky yarn?

Doesn't always work that way.

I finally got 'round to clicking over to the Fall Knitty and fell for the clever combo of solid to hand-dye of Stephen West's Colonnade.

Ultimately, after much back story (not included here), I ended up working my version (different # of stitches et cetera) up on 3.75mm needles, Rowan Merino/Silk blend and some gorgeous Curious Creek mohair/wool blend.

I was happily working away on it at Knit @ Nite and delighted to be able to show Suzanne of Knitting In La Jolla (seasonally able to come and just be another knitter) how very well my 11th hour colour substitution was working out. I did not share it in the 'round table show & share.

Enter a fellow guild member, a lovely woman, prolific knitter, and a tad petite. She knit Colonnade in Manos.

She got moose lace. In addition, the styling shown in Knitty, was not working on her small frame.

She also saw some issues with the way the "fronts" which is to say that they curve.

Not being shy sorts, I, and other Knit @ Nite people, had ideas and suggestions.

My sense was that it would work on her better as a shawl/caplet and that she was right about the scale being over powering. So much for the bulky is only for little people.

The curving had me a bit concerned for my own project but the task at hand was to make fellow guild member figure out a way to be happy with her work product.

Images here are from progress on my version as of the 1st.

Creative storage or October's organising overflow I

2009-11-02T17:24:00.000-08:00

My blocking solution over the years has been the use of fibreglass foam insulation panels. I have four of them.

Even though they are the best solution for some one with limited floor/wall space, they present their own storage problems.

Years ago when I reworked the studio closets with shelves to hold yarn and fabric, I had this great idea that I would just slide the panels horizontally into the closets.

Well, not quite. Even with the closet doors wide open, the opening is two inches (read two doors) too narrow to accommodate that storage solution.

Doors off? Well, without getting into the whole painted over the hinges issue (why do people paint hardware???), I'm using the open doors to support a room width shelf that I really need and probably couldn't otherwise find stud support for -- aaarggghhh.

Cut the panels? Not a pretty or very precise choice at least not for me. The beauty of the panels is that the do have a defined size and can be butted against each other to form the size needed for different projects.

Three of the four panels are still in a transient existence but one has found an interesting over the door storage solution.

I recycled a USPS priority mail shipping box with box cutters and duct tape (as needed) to form four corner units.

I punched holes into those corners and threaded twine through them. Hung the whole bit from the gap between a thumb tack and the top of the door.

This particular door is the one I see from my computer "control centre" so it often houses things to photograph, working/thinking projects, go back items and more. I like to think of it as my "need to deal with" panel.

No, it isn't pretty but it works and takes wasted space and makes it work.

The box I used might accommodate a 2nd blank panel piggybacked but right now all of my other panels have projects pinned out on them.

Dear Prudence Part 1

2009-10-31T19:05:00.000-07:00

Remember Brilla? Yarn who was rejected for pin cushion purposes?

Well, those two white skeins recently hit my radar and seemed the perfect fit for a knitted lace collar.

A knitted lace collar? Well, yes.

No, not for me. People who know me IRL know its back story and future.

I can't remember whether the idea came before or after another project that had me thumbing through my stitch treasuries for lace borders, edgings and/or panels.

When that project found me gnashing my teeth, muttering about Barbara Walker Treasuries and doing more charting (and recharting) than knitting, a look see into the Guild's library offerings ended up with me rediscovering a book I'd dismissed for my personal library years ago.

The book, Knit One, Make One In Classic Knitted Cotton was written by Furze Hewitt who also authored Classic Cotton Edgings (in my library) and Traditional Lace Knitting (not in my library).

Years ago, I found Knit One, Make One in a local used book store but rejected it because its balance of projects to stitch patterns for design inclusion wasn't working for my needs. It still has a lot of projects I'll never knit but some of those projects have stitch patterns that I can adapt and even the projects have adaptation possibilities.

Brilla is not classic knitted cotton but rather a cotton/rayon mix and even though I am working this up on 2.5mm needles it is sort of chunky. It isn't moose lace but it also isn't a delicate flower block into an ethereal experience. Feminine but very strong statement and definition.

I don't have any strong plans to block, or, as suggested for pure cotton, iron/press the welting textures out of the piece. I'm also thinking button hole(s) and a few small pearl buttons rather than a ribbon.

Carrying water -- bottles that is

2009-10-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

While I was fighting with nylon cord that wasn't working up as expected back in July, I went to one of my Knitting Nights and, for some reason or another, the positively painful pink nylon twine on the needles got a bit of attention.

I'm not sure exactly how the idea came about, but since the original water bottle carrier was for a friend doing the Breast Cancer 3 Day, and one of the people taking note of the work is part of the Team In Training group, it just fell into place that I could support the effort with a design and a practical item to make the walk easier.

At one of the Spring/Summer knitting night get togethers, I went from a sort of vague water bottle size, a general notion of how it would fit onto the hydration belt to a sketch and a few notes based on the actual belt and bottle.

She trained, I worked on other projects but finally got project on needles. After some very real false starts with my brain/fingers refusing to remember the knitted mock filet crochet variation I'd become enamoured with some years back , I finally got it on the needles and finished.

We did a couple of tweaks to the end product mostly for her specific ergonomic preferences and perhaps next year we'll do the pattern or a pattern & knit as a fund raiser. I would, as ever, change a few things on the design so it could work for more people's preferences -- slightly different design and it fits on a bike rather than a belt, can fit on either or can convert to a different carry method (for this size a wrist strap).

Team in Training's colours are white, green & purple -- the white was easy but matching the other colours in nylon twine was not happening. I went for the only vivid green available and had to go coned fine gauge cotton for the purple icord element. More materials research might be in order.

As seen along the way -- a mountain of cloud

2009-10-19T19:19:00.000-07:00

Since last post was long on words and short on images, today's seen while walkabout is very visual.

Surprisingly, no much colour balance dithering was involved with this image.

Just a random in the hood walkabout shot from some months back.

I know that I was looking North & East across Balboa Park from 5th or 6th at some undefined point South of Upas. My memory says near Nutmeg/Maple but I can't be sure.

The vision of a mountain of cloud, light fluffy, white and inviting was too wonderful not to shoot & crop.

It could easily be confused (okay, might need some photo tweaks) with a snow covered mountain top in the distance from a semi-tropical scene.

More elusive than that, it is a big fluffy cloud impersonating a mountain or mountain of candyfloss/cotton candy.

Talking Torsos

2009-10-18T23:51:00.000-07:00

I can choose to phrase this as either I'm short waisted or as I have crazy long legs. Crazy long legs may be the sexier and ego boosting side of the house but it doesn't quite get to why this is a knit related issue.

So what's up with that? I've been knitting Lisa love-her-to-death Limber's Santorini from Knitting In the Sun and I'm doing it in long discontinued Classic Elite's Sand in what I consider an Aegean Blue.

It is a drop shoulder design and while I don't hate that design quite as much as many others do, there are some problems.

First, and this might just be me (aka a total quibble) but, gauge as given, is as blocked so it doesn't give me an idea of pre-block gauge. This matters to me in part because I am such a loose (to the point of sluttishness) knitter that I really need to have a good pre and post block vision even when working with the suggested yarn.

Sand is an Aran weight yarn that is supposed to knit up on 5mm needles at 4 spi. Euroflax is a sport weight whose native gauge is 6 spi on 3-3.25mm needles and lace gauge of 3.5-4 spi on 4-5mm needles.

The design specifies 4.5mm needles and a blocked gauge of 4.5 spi -- for me at least, that does not compute.

The Sand is not working up as a must block aggressively to get gauge fibre and it also doesn't seem to have the bloom factor that the Euroflax does. It is pretty much on target as an unblocked gauge as given with nice fabric and unless it scrunches down on laundering (and there seems to be enough air 'tween the stitches to make that unlikely).

Resulting fabric will have a bit more heft than the Euroflax but the gauge is quite close to the blocked version of the as written project.

Again on the loose knitter front, if I were knitting Euroflax on the needles suggested I would have fabric nearer fishnet or cheese cloth even before blocking. So maybe, just maybe I'm knitting truer/closer to the yarn's suggested gauge -- that's a big change for me.

Note to self -- Louet's ball band info for gauge is closer to my knitting reality than most manufacturers' info.

Cut to the chase, if I knit the thing as written and at perfect/dead on gauge it still wouldn't really work for me.

I did, in my own obscure way (bottom up, in the round rather than pick up and bottom down flat), knit the sleeves using the fundamental increase/decrease formula before I admitted that my nagging inner voice was right about the sleeve just being very wrong for me.

Did I mention that I'm short waisted? On a footnote of the crazy long legs, I am 62.75 inches tall or thereabouts. From ground to low shoulder I'm about 53 inches with 31 inches of that devoted to legs and my natural waist is about 41 to 42 inches from the ground.

In theory, those crazy long legs suggest that I should be about 5' 10" and that was always the expectation when I was growing up -- well, up until I just stopped growing and everyone else (including some of the serious shrimps with short legs & long torsos) zoomed past me when I was about 12.

But I've digressed, do the math, my total torso is about 23 inches (yes that's 7 inches shorter than my inseam) and a low shoulder to waist measurement for me is maybe 11 inches.

The smallest size of the pattern specifies an armhole depth of 10.5 inches -- on me that's a dolman sleeve and I don't generally do dolmans. My comfort zone for arm hole depth is about 8 to 9 inches and I should always keep that in mind when working any pattern.

Fortunately, this is a drop sleeve design so changing the arm hole depth does not require a full rework of the sweater body. Since I hadn't worked the body in one piece from bottom to armhole, all I really needed to do to correct for the change was to take out the crochet chain that joined fronts to back.

So what's the take away?

Even the best designs that you so love may need a sanity check to match the design's finished size to your body.

If you're walking around in a fog thinking that you are a perfect size Insert variable here then, unless you are really lucky or totally delusional, you're wrong.

You're also probably wrong/delusional about your ready to wear and the only major difference here is that when you wake up from your fog with ready to wear you'll pay someone money to make the ready to wear actually fit you.

When it comes to the knitting (and days gone by home sewing) you'll need to take ownership of your project and make the corrections yourself. Man/woman up folks, only dish clothes and the like don't need adjustments to fit.

Just like fashion designers design for an ideal fit model that very few of us ever match, knitting designers do the same and your best success is going to come from figuring out your body, the design, your knitting and how to make the three come together for a triumphant trifecta.

I've long since figured out that my truncated torso means that all instructions that tell me how may inches to knit from either bottom to armhole or armhole to bottom will need some tweaks but some how I still fall into the "oh it will fit" viper pit.

I reknit the sleeves based on my reality and I am much happier with the result.

The whole project is on hold (oh like that never happens with me) as other projects (knitting and not) jumped priority queue. To date, the still to be done involves picking up stitches for the neckband and deciding how I will join body sides & sleeves to body -- minor stuff.

No photos this go 'round but if you're on Ravelry, you can see the WIP on my project page. If you actually know me IRL, you've also probably seen it or at least seen the bag I've been lugging it about in.

Bag BTW, (and yes, as we know I am a bag hag) is the Tiger tote from the Buddha's Barnyard series of Chinese brush work by the late Nancy Rupp.

October is for organising one in a series

2009-10-16T12:44:00.000-07:00

The room that is my yarn studio, like most of the rooms in this apartment, has a less than ideal layout -- limited wall space (lots of doors/windows and door swing stuff).

It was far from perfect at move in and, despite repeated efforts to reinvent it, arguably has only become more dysfunctional since then. Okay, adding more yarn, needles, patterns, projects and fabric may have had something to do with that. . .

Now that I am in the midst of the current incarnation of the Autumnal archaeological dig, I'm taking the extra time to really put like things with like things and not just stash the stash. I've been guilty of the stash the stash story but another part of this go 'round has been to rethink my prior sorting strategy both as new yarn comes into the picture and old yarn exits to a new makes more sense sort order happen.

With a bit of luck, this like things with like things and really taking stock, will mean that I will either finally start working on some of these projects (especially the sewing ones) or admit my lack of interest and pass them along (donation rotation) to someone who's more motivated/interested.

I've been at this for a few (eek) weeks now and although things are still in flux (or crazy chaotic mode depending upon your perspective) I'm now at the fine points decision mode.

For example, is it better to keep the small file cabinet with design/pattern notes/submissions in the studio or in the office/computer room? And does it really make sense to try to keep all not in use knitting needles in one location.

So the powder room off the studio which had literally been a marginally functional crafting library can now function as a powder room but is still mostly about books and knitting needles.

The crowd them out knitting magazines have moved from there to a new set of shelves in the studio. I'm still not happy about the magazine storage but it is a way better for now improvement.

Sadly, the sewing machine, having had its table shifted into computer duty in the office months ago, no longer has a working home in the studio. The best I can do right now is non-functional storage and even that's a where's the shelf/floor space issue.

Photos not shown include the cone zone, fabric stash round 1, do I really own that much fine gauge should be tatting thread and my deeply shallow mannequin (she's an IKEA wireform), the Goko perch and more.

There's still a lot of stuff hanging off of other things as some crazy mix of visual stimulation/overload.

Some of it is just borderline clutter and some is about baskets holding things waiting to join up with others of their ilk (the go back bins) and some is keep it in sight so I can keep it in mind for design purposes but that's part of how a studio works for me -- a complex mix of everything in its place (and that place can evolve over time) and bits and pieces out to visually stimulate/flirt with my creative juices.

And no, not all yarn, wire, needles, fabric, projects (in process or otherwise) are confined to the studio space. Some of that is inspiration and some is just not having space that works. Still, trying (from time to time) to enforce my version of the guest worker programme (you can come out and play but then you have to go back to the selection pool.

I'm also trying to figure out how to move photography into the studio so I don't have a semi-permanent installation on the dining room table. There never has been a good answer in the studio space unless I completely eliminate any guest room/seating/sleeping from the room.

Eh, she used to embroider too

2009-10-15T18:56:00.001-07:00

When my original knitting instructor (Mrs Maclaren) took me on as knitting student when I was a mere kidling, she had high hopes for me.

Those hopes were based in part because, although I was well under the age of 10, I'd already proved myself to be a very talented hand seamstress, quilter and embroiderer. While I wasn't born with a needle in hand it was a near thing.

I did not live up my instructor's expectations and she pronounced me hopeless as a knitter. My other talents stayed and expanded but knitting. . . let's just say that while the knitting seed was planted but it was in hibernation.

One of the embroidery types I really loved was known as Swedish or Huck Weaving.

Swedish friends assured me that there was nothing ethnically Swedish about it and the Huck came from the fact that at one point in its popularity it was worked in Huckaback fabric that, like Monk's cloth, features raised vertical fabric floats that perle cotton, embroidery floss or other embellishing thread cab be threaded/woven through to form a design.

The technique was very popular in the 30s and has had a number of different resurgences over the years.

I began designing in the technique about 40 years ago and last did serious design work about 30 years ago when it retreated as a well adopted needle arts form.

At one point, I worked up designs/finished linens while studying and sold them on a consignment basis with boutiques and a few dear friends also ended up with custom designed and worked pieces.

Since I no longer actively design in this area and my design portfolio (like my modeling portfolio and library of programming subroutines) didn't make the trip to California or stay safely in storage back East (sigh) I hold out but limited hope that some of my friends will figure out digital cameras and such well enough to send photos of the still come out for special occasions linens I designed and stitched for them over the years.

Some of the fabric stored in the studio is hunted down Huck. Some of it high end nice stuff and some of it that is not a lot better than the old style public restroom towelling of days gone by.

I've also either found or replaced some of the original Mildred Kreig pattern booklets but I'd dearly love to see my own original designs. Crazy girl that I am, I have thought about trying to work floats in knit designs to introduce Huck surface weaving into knit designs.

7 Reasons why you should buy yarn at Sears

2009-09-28T21:49:00.000-07:00

My late aunt (often know as MATB) apparently wasn't a really great knitter. Okay, it could have been age, eyesight and pride, but when she died I ended up with some of her unfinished stuff and it was oddly gratifying to see that someone who had always held herself as way better than anyone else at everything was not so much.

Most of the UFOs and such have long since exited my life but while I was rolling through the Autumnal archaeological clear out, I found the one auntie UFO that intrigued me.

At some point or another she was working on a cardigan using Sears Afghan and Sweater Yarn in the colour Rose (50) and the dye lot 4199.

She had the back, one side and part of both sleeves done or in progress. On the front, she had dutifully marked her button/button hole placement. No idea what the pattern was and I've no real desire to own or knit a rose coloured wool garment so the yarn is probably going into some donation rotation but not before the gotta blog moment.

I have six full 2 oz hanks of this lovely 2 ply 100% Virgin All American Wool. The suggested laundering for this stuff is hand wash with Sears Cold water wash and I'm guessing that while the moth proofed yarn may have survived the test of time any vintage Cold water wash would be little more than water at this point.

Meanwhile the 7 reasons why you should buy yarn at Sears are:

Each yarn goes through 18 different inspections to give uniformity of weight, color, strength and quality.
Sears yarn is pull-skeined for instant knitting
Each dyelot is numbered to give the most perfect color match.
Sears Interchangeable Yarn Chart helps eliminate guesswork in pattern and yarn selection.
Sears will teach you how to knit. Ask about our schools for Beginners or Advanced knitters.
Sears knitting teachers are available for consultation after class or in the department.
"Satisfaction Guaranteed Or Your Money Back."

August absentia

2009-09-25T19:46:00.000-07:00

No, no, really there were drafts in the queue (even some that had been in the queue for quite some time) but at the very near end of the month, it only seemed right to note that blog entries were pretty much absent in August.

Okay, and in all honesty, July wasn't much better. September is shaky at best.

So what was I up to? Job hunting, working with a career development group (mixed bag reviews there), knitting, designing, frogging, a little tech editing, and more. Some of the more involved "transition assistance" classes/sessions at least got me the H out of the house and dressed like an adult.

There were far too many slugfest/hermit days that could/should have instead been training, slimming and other good things.

Best case scenario would be that all that radio silence would mean that I've emerged out the other side with a temp or perm full time gig or a part time gig that makes the degree thing work out.

Best case scenario so no happening but it all isn't for lack of trying. I'm now coming up on the 6 month story with no happy ending or "landing" in sight -- so for the record, in case you haven't figured this one out, I need a job.

The go back to school full time solution has met with its own set of mostly economic issues that I am still trying to gut/get through. Even going back part time has some concerns.

Some of those concerns are the same semantics that I ran into when I was first laid of. If, having started a degree programme before becoming unemployed and pursuing it while working full time, does continuing that programme in a new semester constitute "beginning" training/school that might disqualify one for UI? From here it looks like the interp is far from clear/consistent.

The point is moot at the moment since I need to finish the work to clear my incompletes -- anyone want to mentor me in writing APA style term papers in exchange for knitting instruction and/or some other and I can't really afford to continue school until I find a job or take on a crazy big amount of debt I'm not keen on.

These are tough times. Unlike some of my friends and colleagues, I've been through and caught in tough times before. I graduated into a recession and with limited resources/support managed to get through and at least take a detour or two and while I'm certainly not at the place I expected to be so very long ago, I am still here, still sucking air and don't plan to stop doing that any time soon.

But you know, sucking air with a job sucks a lot less -- I'm just saying.

Just a little jewelry in July

2009-07-14T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit of a bead whore and jewelry junkie and I'm also very big on repurposing things. My parents were frugal folk and it did not skip a generation.

Based on my projects at Teradata/NCR, it had to have been at least 5 or 6 years ago when the hardware guys I was working with did a redesign/rethink of a honking huge circuit board and, as a result, scrapped a whole slew of heat sinks.

On the day the heat sinks were about to hit the dumpster, I was in the lab talking with the engineers who were gathering up the doomed. I immediately saw potential in these little hotties for either jewelry, sculpture or some other art project so I adopted a few.

As is the usual case, the adoptees went into the project room to rub elbows with some of the other oddments and wait for their turn at the front of the inspiration & project queue.

One thing and another, lay off, connecting with colleagues, chats with local artists (dangers of living near Spanish Village), some $ store and Industrial Liquidators finds and front of the queue they came.

So what do you get when you mix heat sinks, liquid gold leaf, cheap $ store nail varnish, a bit of Industrial Liquidators' brass wire, niobium ear wires and my creative vision?

Earrings that are getting me major compliments.

These are actually second generation as the first ones I painted out with a great green that just would not/could not work with normal ear wires and put me back on the niobium track.

Most of the heat sinks are base black but some are metallic. I'm trying to work for now with the black and saving the metallics for different wire wrap treatments.

For jewelry, the black poses a bit of a problem if you're trying to get good surface colour coverage and not have a jarring ticky-tacky (trash to treasure never really comes off as more than trashy IMO).

They have a nice channel that lets you hide the wire you're using to create the loop that will connect up to the ear wire or other finding. That channel also allows for the interesting interlocking quality that first drew me to them and thought they might do well as sculpture in one form or another.

I've wired up and worn the original vision green ones and I have a number of other variations either in process or planned. Some for me, some so not.

Grrr gauge or when is #18 not #18

2009-07-06T08:26:00.000-07:00

One of the perils of knitting with non-standard materials is that the materials don't always have to meet any sort of knitting QA standards.

I mean, come on, the world will not end and the job will not stop on a job/construction site if the #18 Mason twine from one package to another is not quite the same weight as the last batch.

That's my current excuse for not getting gauge or, more precisely, not seeing much difference between several different runs at the same project with different stitch counts on the same size needles.

I'm not unfamiliar with the idea that sometimes that's not the issue but rather that the thread/yarn whatever will only bend/morph change so much within the range of needles that it can be worked with -- or to put it another way, it doesn't effin matter what you do your spi isn't going to get tighter no matter how much pain you put yourself through.

So I'm still on the deconstruct and reconstruct side of the fish afghan. I'm thinking that the story of the fish afghan blanket will be right up there with the how Theo came to be born (aka the delivery saga) and I'm hoping that when blankie finally meets baby for more than a casual nod in a bar that they will bond.

And you know what? Even if that doesn't happen Jen, Tony & Theo are so special and such good people, the finished product is working up to be so wonderful, and the journey has been worth it.

Helping hats or the 1000 fab hats project

2009-07-05T20:08:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid I loved hats and I wore them well.

Later on my little pin head and lots of hair combo made hats a more problematic issue but I was still not above stealing Panamas, Cookie Cutters, and other dashing haberdashery items from male friends on the unprincipled principle that they looked better on me.

Come to think of it, I had something of the same MO when it came to the hats of my youth.

I know for a fact that one of my favourites was a cream coloured felt number with a jaunty tilt that I'm pretty sure I stole from my mother.

Wish I still had that hat as I am now coming back around again to being now old enough (rather than young enough) to pull off the eccentric vintage thing.

But enough about me and even about my hats, this post is about a hat project called 1000 Fabulous Knitted Hats and I still need to do some photography to get my projects in for consideration.

This is a project put together between Annie Modesitt and Rockport Publishing (aka Quarry Books) and the original deadline for the photographs was 1 July but it has been extended to 15 July.

So:

Click on the links to get the information & forms
Get out your digital cameras and set them to take PRINT rather than WEB quality photos -- yeah, I know, you may have to actually read the instruction manual & clear some space on your memory card -- and shoot some of those masterpieces.
Or, if you happen to have a lovely cache of digital photos of great hats, go through the files and pick a winner.

I know I'd love to see the Mary Lee Herrick Chicken hat that got away from me during the DAE 2002 Knitter's Auction and not for want of bidding btw turn up in the pages of this project.

In case you're wondering, the panda hat shown is, as far as I know, still in the possession of the person I knit it for and also occasionally getting linked to by Myspace people without my approval as documented in this 2007 blog posting. With the extended deadline, I may try to get the hat back for a photo shoot even if I wouldn't really relish revisiting that design.

The other for consideration hats hit another snag today when fave bartender was not on Whistlestop patrol at our knitting Sunday. Still, I'll work it out and clear that memory card to make room.

Big Fish Story or why you can never have too many needles

2009-07-03T14:29:00.000-07:00

The last update on the fish blanket/afghan was that the # of stitches picked up along the edge of one panel was way off from the live stitch count of the other panel it was to be grafted to.

Live stitches were living on a 32" circular and I was guess-timating that the final panel was at least close to the same length as the others.

Two things that changed my world view on this one.

I finally pulled the picked up stitches out of the final panel. In the process I discovered that one of the segments of the panel had had some stitch failures along the selvedge edge.

So, I decided to frog it and take the grafting out so I could reknit and regraft.

Since I was already going to undertake this effort, I decided that it probably would be a good idea for me get a real sanity check about why the stitch counts on the two sides were so off.

To that end, I carefully transferred the live stitches onto a length of heavy gauge fishing line (great stuff for blocking btw) and, sure enough, the final panel with the problematic picked up stitches is at least four inches longer than the other panel. That pretty much explains the problem.

So, while I may be picking up stitches soon and grafting the last panel into place, first there's a bit of frogging and reknitting that has to happen first.

Rainbow icord for the season

2009-07-02T17:29:00.001-07:00

So what do you get if you knit five stitch icord using rainbow nylon twine on 3.25mm needles?

If you're me, you get a perfect rainbow cord suitable for Pride season. Or for someone who likes rainbows.

The prototype icord key chain that I've created with this bit of frivolous knitting needs a rethink when it comes to attaching to the keyring, I don't dislike the end product enough to keep it from making a trip to the Pacific Northwest as a gift.

Colour me clueless

2009-06-26T00:41:00.000-07:00

The launch party for KITS was at Knitting In La Jolla on the 16th of the missing May.

I was really fun to see the other designs, the other designers, the book and knitters.

In true show of maybe I'm not as full of myself as some people think I am, I was shocked to discover that people wanted me to sign my design in the book.

I was also clueless as to the fact that it, like several other designs, my design had a photo in the book other than the ones directly associated with the pattern pages. So colour me clueless.

So those of you with a strange scribble that might vaguely look like a signature on my pattern page -- you have a collector's item but only if you also snagged autographs of other designers on site in addition to Kristi's.

I hope to be somewhat more polished at this weekend's signing and meet and greet at Bonita Knit & Sew.

Santorini swatching

2009-06-22T21:19:00.000-07:00

I was so charmed by Lisa Limber's jacket in Knitting In the Sun that, even though I have said that I don't want to knit anything for the size I am now, I decided to make an exception.

I looked with some lust at the elann samples for May and June and even swatched a couple but budget and practicality prevailed.

So I turned to stash and after a couple of that could work -- oops not quite enough outings, I actually started to inventory my stash and capture the information on Ravelry.

Thus began the process of stash swatching for suitable yarns.

Quite a few hit the not quite enough yardage wall and others, like the cone of recycled yarn in a nice neutral failed the even remotely correct gauge test.

Not shockingly, even the suggested yarn failed the gauge test.

Although I was leaning toward neutrals or at least something on the subtle side with perhaps a bit of a green or yellow tone, that's not what has hit the needles at least for this go 'round. Think Aegean blue

I may or may not written about this before but most edgings are very directional and while that works pretty well for pullovers and for shawls that are round or rectangular it can present a bit of a problem for cardigans and triangular shawls.

The edging on this cardigan/jacket is lovely wave lace pattern that, by the nature of the location of increases and decreases creates a flat side and a "jut out" side.

If you look at the picture of the cardigan on page 109 of the book (great picture BTW), you can see how that plays out in the front of the garment.

So pretty much, the right side of the bottom bit of the pink swatch is the right front side of the cardigan and the left side of that same swatch would be the bottom bit of of the left side.

To be more clear -- | meets <> meets < ? Right now I'm leaning toward > meets <. But that creates another set of problems.

Junkyard from Jersey & a subtle shift on the corner

2009-06-16T22:05:00.000-07:00

One of the "new in the hood changes" I've seen recently is a funky vintage boots, vinyl and some such shop in the ever changing small kine space next to The Flame.

The new shopkeepers are originally from the Jersey shore (think Red Bank, Colts Neck and such) and they have been putting it together a bit at a time.

The official opening is slated for the end of June.

Another change just down the way is that the car repair shop on the corner is not, at least for now, going to go away and become yet another condo project. The change in this case is a more ethnic change with the Asian owners out and Hispanics in.

A subtle shift and I'm told they do very good work by a fairly reliable source.

Construction again or I love the scent of diesel in the office

2009-06-12T16:16:00.000-07:00

On the 8th, an all too familiar scent wafted through the window of the office -- diesel fuel.

With all the construction that's surrounded me in the last few years I'd be shocked if my lungs aren't an environmental disaster area.

Condo conversion directly across the street, two major construction projects a block away and a third one block over.

Throw in a couple of tear downs and townhouse projects within a three block area and you get the idea of just how much fun it has been 'round here.

Later that day when I went out on walkabout I discovered that single family homes are again taking a hit in Hillcrest.

Three plus this time on Centre Street.

The plus is because a couple of them were two on a lot before the diesel powered North American Bobcat and its associated construction buddies took up residence.

Rumour has it that the final outcome will be an all too rare apartment complex but I have my doubts. The smart money is usually to start as a condo so you can preserve the option to revert to condo when the market shifts.

Regardless it is another round of demolition and construction fun.

They start work around 7am and don't stop until around 6pm so there's a constant back up beep punctuating most week days round here.

Urban art -- toasters

2009-06-06T20:53:00.000-07:00

The date on the edited image is mid-May so I probably snapped them earlier still.

I love the toaster but I wish it had wings -- flying toasters appeal to me and flying toasters on a sidewalk appeal even more.

Am I showing a secret (or not so secret) Mac past?

Could well be.

Big backlog of other photos kicking around.

I just have to find time to get them linked up with words and up to the blog.

On shelves now

2009-06-03T01:26:00.003-07:00

This photo is from my first tangible sighting of Knitting In the Sun.

After a day of take the meetings job interview swing, I popped into BookStar in Point Loma/Loma Portal and found KITS positioned between EZ's Knitting Without Tears and Maggie Radcliffe's Color Knitting Techniques --- nice company

I couldn't resist a leaf through and I sorta kinda gotta gush.

As a print media person and die hard photographer, I found it to be a visual delight. I totally love what Stephen did with the photo of Haleakala and would dearly love to own a poster sized print of the shot with the sand bucket.

I was sort of impressed with the chair but even more impressed with his staging, treatment/styling and even the best of my bark orders on photo shoots days could not have improved on that shot -- wonderful.

I did my pimp the book duty as I was heading out to mention to the staff that the book has local interest with author, designers, models, photographer & location.

Oy vey, what happened to May?

2009-06-02T19:30:00.000-07:00

Last year's blog calendar omissions were A months.

This year, although April had a short run -- drop off after the 22nd -- mostly we're having other issues.

So what up with May?

Short answer is that it got away.

Yes, it rhymes and that totally sucks but, as my cell phone voice mail used to say, WHAT-ever or What-EVER where's my fave linguist when I need her?

So confession, I had to admit that I'm not enough of a super steel woman to hunker down and, with a highly limited to less than zero support network, ace my master's degree term papers 30+ years after I wrote my last term paper, using a previously unknown to me style (APA) while coping with the whole lay off story.

I just betcha that's a total run on sentence and I'm so very sure that I don't much care. It is what it is.

Honestly, I'm proud of myself to have confronted the can't get there from here before it was all slam into the wall and no way to recoup/regroup. I'm doing my best to stop with the self-flagellation of not living up to my internal insane standard of achievement.

So May got away and we will so not discuss the fish afghan (or my own personal fish tale).

Okay, so maybe we will, I still need to rip out and pick up stitches to graft the last panel to the others.

Previously in process loose ends in the category knitting that are still loose:

Need to be woven in ends for the diagonal rib sweater for the 44 sweaters project
A crocheted loop (or two) and button closure for the something sunny for Stacy (also 44 sweaters)
Aforementioned fish afghan
Way more projects that we hope gentle readers will have either forgotten about or will be nice enough not to remind me about

I'm just going to delete the 27, yes 27, place holder entries and write forward a bit to cover the stuff I thought interesting enough to note, photograph but not find time to blog about.

So for today's eye candy we have another in a series of the walkabout vehicle, babe are you sure you're not a dude, vehicle images.

Old Fords and a natural stone are nothing compared to old Fords with lace stencils -- sorry Willie

Pickup and pish

2009-04-22T08:33:00.001-07:00

Theoretical goal on fishies was to:

Finish up sewing the front to back fishies
Undo the two knitted together panels with the live stitches
Graft those panels by connecting live to picked up stitches

And get all of that and more done by the 19th so -- stretch goal -- I could have it written up, finished and ready to hand off to Tony, Jen and Theo.

I actually got the sewing bit done, one of the panels all happily grafted and was well chuffed with my progress in picking up stitches for the other grafting job until it became crazy clear that the pick up ratio I'd used was not even close to the number of live stitches I needed to graft them to.

Hrumph. I could not bribe anyone into taking them up and picking up the required number of stitches -- pish.

Psychic, a little late, or just forget something?

2009-04-17T10:28:00.001-07:00

Note the dates the road will be closed. Here's the problem, I took the photo on the 11th of April.
Some possible explanations that come to mind are that:

This is a super early heads up for 2109
(psychic city planning)
They are little late getting the sign up for 2009
They forgot to pick the sign up

Foil bunnies, files, acetone, eff and Fkeys

2009-04-16T00:31:00.000-07:00

If my mastery of my new phone with its camera capability was better, or if I'd get off my bum and go buy a new battery for the digital camera (can you say not holding the charge it should?), a slightly different version of this image would have graced the blog on Easter Sunday (okay, so Easter Monday at the latest).

Readers of the blog and/or people who know me understand that I like the unexpected and I just notice stuff. I especially notice the unexpected.

I was walking through one of the alleys 'round here the other day when I looked down and saw a little sign of Easter in the form of two small foil wrapped presumably chocolate bunnies. I pulled out my trusty digital camera to discover that the battery was pau. Tried the cell phone's camera but wasn't terribly successful.

I was surprised that they were still there when I snapped this shot. Oddly, the bunnies were not in the same position as when I first saw them but they were still there. Okay, well, either that or someone is just randomly putting foil wrapped choco bunnies out and replenishing the supply when people take the bunny bait.

I do not recommend having acetone anywhere near today's computer keyboards. The relatively thin plastic (light weight is good but has consequences) key caps melt rather quickly. Quick action, turn upside down and blot, blot, blot mostly worked out but for some reason the X key did not want to behave properly in its home position but is perfectly happy and functional as a function key 12 and function key 12 is happy to play X and we are so not talking about why the lower right "what the hell is that silly flaggy" key literally took a flyer and has not been seen nor missed other than for me to wonder WTF it was supposed to do on the Linux box.

It's all about the Bobmas

2009-04-11T15:16:00.000-07:00

Since last year I didn't have an April, well, not on the blog at least, I'm making up for it this year and I knit a zero carb cupcake that I prefer to think of as a cuppy cake.

For an idea of size, the bottom covers a Crystal Light container and is knit from yarn from an elann.com sample skein.

The whole thing measures less than 3.5 inches tall by 2.5 inches wide.

I've not yet decided whether to sew top and bottom together and fill/stuff it or if I want to keep it as container. If container, my idea is to glue bottom to Crystal Light little tub, add a base to the top and fill it for plush/pin cushion factor.

It was a silly quick knit when I needed a bit of distraction.

Also in the spirit of Bobmas and all things revelling in Ravelry is this slightly edited photo from fairly recent walkabout sidewalk snaps.

Random Query on a day -- professional status

2009-04-08T18:45:00.001-07:00

What makes a building professional and have you ever seen an unprofessional one?

Ravelry is so educational

2009-04-07T20:54:00.000-07:00

One of the things I like most about Ravelry, and actually the winning argument for why I finally joined, is seeing response to things I've designed.

I haven't seen a lot of this design is junque on Ravelry and given some of the doozy support questions I've fielded on my "public" email, I've taken to suggesting to the seemingly seriously not getting it folks that they hele on over to Ravelry and see how other people have managed to muddle through.

It shouldn't come as a huge shock that knitters who find the good, the gilded, and the goth something worth knitting, queuing or favouriting covers a broad range of people. That fact is part of what I enjoy the most about clicking over onto user activity and getting to know fellow Ravelers.

Recently, I stumbled upon a few of those silly blogthing quizzes and couldn't quite resist.

Clearly the quizzes are just of fun and lack the ability to parse input or the what's your preppy name would note that I already have one and simply feed it back to me.

However, the total boy brain may help explain why it its that classic cars have a habit of popping up on this blog.

Speaking of which, in days gone by late spouse and I would have shouted "parts" upon seeing the little turquoise number in this posting. We had a similar Bronco at one point. Ours was yellow, lift kit, with a rather impressive (read menacing) looking root catcher. Anyone who had or has one, understand the parts issue. I miss it, just not the constant tinkering and search for parts. I still have a 4x even though it doesn't go off road very often.

Your Brain is 27% Female, 73% Male

You have a total boy brain
Logical and detailed, you tend to look at the facts
And while your emotions do sway you sometimes...
You never like to get feelings too involved

What Gender Is Your Brain?

Your Brain is Complex

Your mind is a multi dimensional wonderland, with many layers.
You're the type that always has multiple streams of thoughts.
And you can keep these thoughts going at any time.
You're very likely to be engaged in deep thought - and deep conversation.

What Pattern Is Your Brain?

You Are Disturbingly Profound

You're contemplative, thoughtful, and very intense.
Taking time to figure out the meaning of life is a priority for you.
Because you're so introspective, you often react in ways that surprise people.
No one can really understand how you are on the inside... and that disturbs them.

Are You Disturbingly Profound or Profoundly Disturbing?

A day or so's diagonal

2009-04-06T19:16:00.000-07:00

During Knit@Nite, Stacy and I talked a bit about wanting to have more larger sized sweaters and more sweaters that are clearly geared for boys.

Easy enough to make a baby sweater and fun to make something cute for a girl but kids come in all sizes and boys need sweaters too.

I had actually been thinking about doing another medium sized girl's sweater out of the stash of pink that became irrelevant once a certain young lady in Ohio got too old for too much pink but boys need sweaters too and in larger sizes.

I know I have more Woolease and/or the seemingly endless supply of navy Anna Belle City (that I thought I had used up) hiding somewhere but what I could find was four hanks of the City and two each of two colours of Woolease.

Since the City doesn't knit up to the same gauge and the two blue colours of Woolease need something else to make them not butt ugly, I spent a little more time digging around a bit in the stash room for more use it up possibilities.

That's when I remembered the stash of nice acrylic I bought at ColdSpring Mills forever ago. I pulled out a couple of hanks of a taupe/brown acrylic and I'm estimating that my gauge is going to yield a 32 to 34 inch chest pullover for some kiddo.

I got going with a bottom up diagonal rib over 150 stitches.

At 12.5 inches or so I'll be dividing for front and back.

I think that I'm going to go with a raglan sleeve and was considering having the bottom of the sleeves spiral like the bottom of the sweater.

I'm still trying to decide whether to keep the spiral going all the way up to the divide for front and back or whether to do "stripes" of diagonal rib and plain stocking stitch.

This was yesterday's progress and the four inches or so after the rolled bottom reflects about a day or so's knitting.

Needle size is my way too often US 5 (3.75mm) and while I should be able to knock it out in about a week, I may well need to shift gears and work small.

I'm not making huge progress with the Ravelry store. I need to do some print quality (as opposed to web quality) photos of things like the daffs, the shell scarves, the elephant hat, baseball, etc. Since I gave away the Senso daffodil to Carmen of Bergere de France at TNNA, I need to knit another one or two for photos. Might not be a bad idea to shift gears that way so I can photograph the knitted daff with the more organic ones.

Wonderous Whistlestop and some skully stuff

2009-04-05T20:12:00.001-07:00

I finished sewing fishies onto the afghan the other day.

On the same day I took out one of the two knitted together but still live stitches connections, picked up stitches and completed the grafting.

Barreling right along, I started to do the same with the last panel but the pick up ratio was just way too off to fudge so I put it aside and

The plan for Whistlestop was to revisit the picking up of stitches to do the last graft instead of bind off, but when I finally got there, Jen was visiting with baby Theo.

So we went for catch up time and show the blanket in progress and the not yet delivered to Stacy sweater instead of picking up stitches and grafting.

Theo is the most adorable baby. Seriously, all the work and effort with the blanket totally, totally worth it.

Skull is sidewalk art from the other day's ramble.

Hello April

2009-04-01T21:31:00.000-07:00

If you look closely you can spot the two cavorting tree lizards that distracted me while the icord made a break for it.

Today's news on the shorted circuit or the tale of the missing tome was that, indeed, the book had gone missing somewhere in the San Diego County library system. Good news? Not my responsibility but the bad news is that I still don't have it in hand.

The other piece of good news is that supposedly, there's another copy on the shelves at one of the participating schools and I have a request in for that copy. It would be nice if it arrived in time for me to spend this weekend the way I planned to spend the last but I'm not holding my breath.

Two post RIF tasks that got my attention today. The first one was phoning to figure out what was up with the pension payout/rollover money.

Thought we'd filed all the right paperwork almost three weeks ago, but apparently we missed a couple of highly non-intuitive pages. So the guy on the other end walked me through how I needed to navigate the paperwork and I had it ready to hit the post before I needed to head out for the other post-RIF task.

The benefit is a job coach/development whatever service (San Diego office is in inland Encinitas -- eek) but I figured I'd get that going and combine it with Knit@Nite and sweater delivery.

I don't honestly know if I can do the programme while I'm juggling school and all the other fun life's been throwing at me of late. It may make more sense to delay the benefit until I'm finished with this semester and just doing the single Summer session I plan to take. But at least now I know it can be delayed and not yet another someone else's timeline story.

It wasn't a bad run up the way and being on that stretch of El Camino Real is a real blast to the past when life revolved around teenagers and movies at the AMC Theatres on El Camino Real.

I managed to find some cute buttons at the nearby Michael's and drop the pension paperwork into the post before rolling South to La Jolla and Knit @ Nite.

I was running fairly early and got a little turned around and ended up in Cardiff so I swung North to see if Karen & co had any better button options (they didn't although we tried).

Note to self, you have to swing Northeast from the Manchester/El Camino Real merger to Rancho Santa Fe and a few variants to get back onto a stretch of El Camino Real on the other side of the lagoon.

By the time I left Black Sheep, it was late enough that I was not inclined to jump on the 5 and play merge games so I took the coast road to Via De La Valle and then inland to my old miss the merge trick which, fortunately, I remembered better than the whole Manchester to El Camino Real route.

The miss the merge trick worked even better than it used to since my Knit@Nite destination meant that I only needed to go one exit on the 805 and that was one exit before things were getting seriously ugly.

The other suitably foolish photo on the day I shot on the Friday. Clearly some kid's balloon sculpture decided to make a break for it and found this plant irresistible.

Twos -- icord, frogs, step counters and sweaters for the 44

2009-03-29T23:46:00.001-07:00

On Friday, I got the leaves into the mail and then went walkabout through Balboa Park and the hood.

I was knitting icord. The idea was to create lovely green icord frogs for the all but done Something Sunny for Stacy sweater.

About a third of the way along, I got one strip of about the right size done, tucked up into the outer pocket of my bag, and started on a second.

When the second was reaching maybe the right size, I dug into that outer pocket only to discover that the icord had escaped. Okay, it is just icord and only an hour or so's knitting but aargh never the less.

So I found myself wondering what someone would make of about 14 inches of icord on the ground.

My best guess was that it had hooked itself to the camera strap and flipped itself free when I stopped to take a shot of some tree lizards cavorting over by the police stables but since I was outside TJ's when I discovered it missing, I wasn't going to track back.

I did roll through the same area yesterday and, believe it or not, the icord was where I thought it would be with just a bit of dirt to show for its time on the ground.

Both icord bits got a hand wash but I'm not loving the frog closure idea because even 3 stitch icord seems a bit too big for a kid's sweater. One big flower would work for me but two frogs are a big not so much. So I'm back to digging for buttons and "auditioning" stash yarn for possible floral options.

While digging about, I found two hanks of Paton's Melody in a pale pink. It's an uber-bulky acrylic just right for a fast kid knit and a good change it up to prevent injury for my knitting health. Cast on today with Yeti from Berrocco as my general guideline.

I'm not getting gauge but I am getting fabric I like and because I'm not getting gauge I'm also getting more at the three month size instead of newborn which is a good thing. I won't have enough to make it a hoodie but I'll adjust.

Friday's walkabout was mostly to make myself move after an unintentionally sluggish day on Thursday courtesy of that little cell phone network problem and to figure out how many miles I put in on Wednesday when the pedometer reset itself.

I'd forgotten that the cell phone has a pedometer feature. This puts me back into the two sources of information that don't agree situation.

San Diego Circuit -- shorted

2009-03-27T15:20:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got all excited because I got an email telling me that one of the books I want/need for one of my term papers was available for pick up.

Great timing since this week they are at the county annex -- Kearny Mesa. Hmm, easy enough noon to 2pm simple run and I can be all HIB (Human Information Behaviour) all weekend.

So around noon, I head out and, as I did, it struck me that I hadn't driven the truck in about 10 days so it was sort of strange to be behind the wheel.

Although I used to know that area fairly well, it has been awhile, so I went the Mapquest route. As it turns out, Mapquest is not quite mesa savvy with directions.

But I got there. Found the bookmobile. Found a parking space. Got my library card out and we're all good right? Not quite, ooops, my book's not there. And there's not a way to check on where it might be -- pish.

With a bit of luck and a network fix from AT&T cellular, I should get a call later today about whether it is sitting in Vista seriously MIA and/or how we we want to go from here. No news on the inter-library loan on the other title.

Eight out of 20 fish now attached to the fish afghan. Lots of ends of blue Comfort being carefully concealed inside the now double sided fish other ends/strands of blue Comfort will still need to be woven into the blue background but the number is shrinking so the task is less daunting.

And yes, still ignoring the grafting gorilla question.

Bit of bad news in that the nice little yellow fish I knit the other day are just a wee bit smaller than their fellow fish so I may be doing more still.

Meanwhile, as soon as the camera battery charges up, I'm off to the post office with the eight leaves bound for Huntsville as in Jennifer Marsh's International Fiber Collaborative Tree Project. Seven out of the eight are knit in Comfort so that's Seven Southern Comfort leaves.

The Bs double Ds and AT &Ts

2009-03-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

Not sure what's up with the blogger thing. Email to walkabout knitter account informs me that I need to ask for a review to avert the dreaded blog deletion.

I think I already asked for and even perhaps got a review/reprieve already since I'm able to publish new posts but I've nothing to confirm that fer shur so I'm wondering if I shouldn't back up and archive three years of postings as a JIC like I did when I opted to mirror my positively polygonal virtual seminar class for the old KBTH's Way Beyond The Hebrides Fall 2004 Virtual Conference.

Perfectly good SIM card sacrificed only to discover that the reason I was having intermittent can't reach me issues with the cell phone was, in fact, an AT&T network outage -- gnashing of teeth and not happy noises.

'Specially not happy since now I'm locked into two more years of the sort of cock-up that put me here.

Oh well, any one with an old and also useless SIM card, get in touch, I think they'd make great earrings/jewelry and I currently only have one useless one. . . mutter, mutter.

Found all this TMI about AT&T while trying to track down and contact another San Diego local knitting group that seems to be otherwise disconnected from the larger corpus of knitting groups.

The B is Barbie who is buried in run up to 1L finals. The double Ds -- Dana and Deidre who couldn't come out and knit at Urban Grind tonight. All Ravelers.

Urban Grind, I was late since I was in endless and not terribly useful on the phone with the wonderful folks at AT&T. Nothing really against the folks I spoke with but lots against the escalation and public communication model they are working with.

So late and solo but it was good. I tore through a couple of chapters of the bodice ripper/page turner that is Chowdhury's Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval (several references btw to yesterday's Ada Lovelace Medalist btw including one to a paper I've been reading recently).

I did manage to get another three fish sewn onto the back of the fish afghan that's 5 out of 20. Minor accomplishment but I'm okay with that.

I'll take crazy people in the alley for 200 please Alex

2009-03-25T20:19:00.000-07:00

The pedometer reset itself while I was on walkabout.

On the pedometer reset I'll just have to take another long way round Balboa Park circuit tomorrow and see what the rest of the step count was because I'm pretty sure that I walked a little more than 2291 steps today.

Some of those steps were empathy steps as a fellow Knit@Nite knitter was having a key crisis in the Uptown Shopping Centre parking lot. Since I've been through the same thing with the cell phone recently I can so relate.

With nothing but school work in my evening, I opted to play the second go through the bags, retrace steps commiserate, talk about something else, calm and comb the space.

There were two walkabout and skateboard tie-ins today. The first was a young boarder ('bout 9 or 10) hanging by the organ pavilion who was just blown away by my walking and knitting.

He was waiting for his family and very interested in knitting. He didn't really believe I was knitting a fish shape until he saw one of the finished ones I was carting about as a template for knitting new fish.

I really hope he follows through with his grandmother and or with Kid's Knitting which I strongly suggested as a resource.

The other boarder moment was one of my fave TJ's dudes who caught grief from me and everyone else about a boarding wipe out that wall over his face -- scab city on forehead and nose and I know how much that had to bleed.

He's a good guy and I still haven't really done enough to design a kewl hair containment headband solution. Since I'm 'tween projects right now maybe I should noodle about with that. Fixation and/or illusion knitting were early days impressions and I think that's still a good vision.

Rambled home around 8pm and although it was too early and way too Wednesday for it, within minutes of turning the key in the lock, I got an anonymous soap opera high drama of people who were either crazy or crazy drunk arguing and crying and otherwise carrying on outside my windows.

Blogger's you might be SPAM so your blog is locked has kicked itself into an erroneous false positive for this here blog so if and when this is going to get published is anyone's guess.

If I were more poetically inclined I'm write an ode to an annoying algorithm.

It may have tagged me that way because I publish, check the layout, adjust and republish in relatively short order sometimes.

I would happily stop doing that if the cute little code monkeys could you possibly work on kicking in coding that will give me a true preview of the blog post based on template changes I've made. You know, something difficult like reading the blog's column width settings and showing that rather than some erroneous default as a preview. Read and apply -- probably not a tough task.

I've asked for that little feature at least once or twice and I don't think it is unreasonable since you allow me to make those template changes so why not honour them in a preview?

What can I say? I care about layout and always have. Whether doing newsletters, newspapers, ads, brochures, books, magazines, menus or web pages -- layout matters.

Computing is too important to be left to men

2009-03-24T23:34:00.000-07:00

In a blast to the past, I'm looking at a job that does tech support for legal software. Shades of Legalsystems and schlepping systems to law firms to install and overcome staff resistance to technology.

It has a been awhile since I did tech support for money rather than just for stuff I know and can't really resist just being helpful. It isn't exactly my niche or my career goal but it could fit nicely into what I've done, what I know and where I'm going.

And in another could be good experience for career path, having finally heard from them, I'm trying to decide whether the California Ballet Internship is something I really want to apply for or not.

On the one hand, I am a former (modern) dancer and ex ballet mom so that background and reference point will help a lot with the cataloguing part of the long term goal but the task looks to be very long term indeed and I'm not sure about their expectations.

I don't currently necessarily have the online/web database experience they specify as required but if that database is a goal, I can obtain that skill set while slogging through the task of assessing, indexing and cataloguing the materials and the further assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the current database.

Database design is sort of in my blood going back to when I used to develop them for people in the early 80s and if they take a long haul picture of the task/goal then I could probably acquire the web database current skill set during Summer session.

Speaking of databases and cataloguing, my homage to Ada Lovelace day comes in the form of a nod to Karen Spärck Jones (1935-2007) whose slogan is the title of today's posting.

She also said "I think women bring a different perspective to computing; they are more thoughtful and less inclined to go straight for technical fixes. My belief is that, intellectually, computer science is fascinating - you're trying to make things that don't exist."

Spärck Jones is so far the only female winner of the Ada Lovelace Medal. Initially she read history at Cambridge. When she was recruited to the Cambridge Language Research Unit supposedly her only qualification was that she had read philosophy. She later pointed out that reading philosophy was, in fact a good qualification for studying information processing and language.

Spärck Jones had one year reading Philosophy, but she is the woman you should thank every day that Google and other search engines and retrieval systems return relevant results by using specially defined thesauri, natural language processing and inverse document frequency (IDF) weighting.

I think that one of the barriers we've established in recent years to women in technology has come about by specialisation. In the last twenty years or so, increasingly, there's been a narrowing of the path to careers in technology that has created a narrow focus funnel.

I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to push back a little and start embracing systems understanding or a more holistic vision of tech that often comes from someone with aptitude but not necessarily the credential. Some one with aptitude can get a credential but the inverse is not always true.

Some indicators are that women in tech peaked in the 80s but based on my experience that peak included women who had not necessarily come into tech through the now established funnel and some talented individuals may have been essentially forced out or under utilised because of assimilation process that is part of that funnel.

Think about it, someone (another female pioneer, Margaret Masterman, saw her potential) and brought her into the research. Google would not be your friend but for Karen Spärck Jones.

Meanwhile, back at the me side of the house, I got some of the personal web page bits updated and will need to tackle the pdfs for both events and shops.

The Sunny Something for Stacy's 44 sweaters is drying and I'm still undecided on the closure treatment.

Right now I'm leaning toward a three stitch icord frog but I haven't really raided the button supply to see if maybe icord tabs 'round buttons would be a better choice.

While listening to some lectures and working away on a couple of school projects, I also started down the applique the fish onto the other fish and weaving of endless ends on the fish afghan front.

That is an amazingly tedious process -- 20 fish and way more ends. So far I've only two fish done and I'm trying to decide whether I want to do a direct one to one (like fish to like fish) treatment. If I do I'll need to knit another yellow fish.

In other got things done, I finally managed to get the EDD web page not to just seize on me in mid application process. What a remarkably annoying interface.

California taxes are the next fun with state stuff on my plate although that's really only because I'm putting of a day at the DMV as long as humanly possible.

DMV and laundry, some of my favourite things -- NOT.

2009-03-23T21:01:00.001-07:00

File the sunny sweater for Stacy under almost done. That seques nicely into today's exercise in trying to get stuff done.

Turns out that the county library card I got means that I can borrow books from local Universities using the San Diego Circuit with my county card. These are books that I would only be able to get with my city library card through inter-library loan or from the universities themselves by paying for borrowing privileges.

That's handy considering that trying to get some resources when you are a distance learner is way harder than it needs to be.

After much fuss, one of the books I want/need for a project is heading my way via San Diego Circuit and the other is hopefully coming via inter-library loan.

Getting this all sorted involved lots of clicking and cursing about on a variety of highly unhelpful web page and also a number of lovely conversations with librarians and library workers at a number of organisations. The conversations were lovely, the web pages not so much.

It was the late open day at my nearest branch library so I took the nearing completion sweater on a little walkabout to pick up California tax forms and do the inter-library loan thing.found

Just to get some mileage in, I continued on into University Heights for a bit of a ramble and the semi-inevitable slightly lost search for the bridge that crosses Washington.

Why I can never seem to remember that it is Maryland to Lincoln to Vermont is a mystery. But that just means I get to walk around an awfully nice neighbourhood.

Finally found my way with a little help from a local dog walker and checked out a cute little house for rent (not for me, for some searching friends) before crossing the bridge back into Hillcrest.

A stop in at Trader Joe's and I wandered home just as I was finishing the last of the yellow part of the sweater.

Next up, knitting/purling in the green and picking up stitches to create a and for this little gem. While I had the sleeves curl forward, I'm thinking this edging will roll back.

Still haven't decided how I'm going to work the closure on this. I'm pretty sure that I am not doing ties but that's about the only decision I've made so far.

Photos on the day are manly men who can be seen in and around Park Boulevard near El Cajon Boulevard.

So you wanna see a sweater?

2009-03-21T19:50:00.000-07:00

No shock to hear that my faithfully following a pattern went out the window.

I like the sunny yellow but I couldn't see it as a sunny yellow and lace so I pulled the bright yellow/green comfort into the mix.

When I polished off the first sleeve I did the four rows of purling that the pattern called for. I let it sit until I finished the second sleeve. On that sleeve I knit four rows.

The difference between the two methods is that the purled sleeve rolls back and under and the knit sleeve rolls up and over.

I'm definitely in the rolls up sleeve camp so I frogged the first one back and am on my way to making my next decision about the rest of the sweater.

Not sure whether I'm going to add more colour to the body or just leave it plain yellow and only use the green for the trim. I'm leaning toward the latter but could be seduced by some stitch pattern or another and yes, that does mean I've been browsing them.

The sleeve looks a bit puckery but it doesn't really pull in much at all. The tension is pretty even so I think it will flatten out with a wash.

Although I think it would be great to have it done by Monday I'm not going to push it too much and risk a knit related injury.

When I was on walkabout with it today I could feel the weight of it in my shoulders.

I suspect that the shoulder thing is probably less weight than about knitting on 4.25mm needles and not mixing it much in the last few weeks.

The fun just never stops

2009-03-20T21:11:00.000-07:00

About four years ago I was taking classes in programming and Linux administration with an eye toward changing the career path back to writing code rather than writing about code.

The programming side of things was to sharpen old skills and the latter more to get the course credit than the skill set. Although I was prepping with community college courses, I'd already received a go ahead from UCSD to waive some of the prerequisites on the C classes I wanted to take based on my ancient assembler programming experience

That whole effort derailed when I had to go 'cross country to clear out my mother's apartment as her health was fading. The rest of that year was an emotional roller coaster not very conducive to success in school and that's without even touching on the less that helpful info about my work/life balance options.

'Round about the same time. There was noise about condo conversion. Back then it freaked me out because I couldn't really deal with the prospect of having to move on my own and all the disruption. Add to that the fact that at my income level I could neither afford to buy nor was I going to be seeing any help from the City.

Fast forward, I'm doing my master's (doing well so far btw thanks for asking), I've been laid off and the condo conversion is back on the horizon. Pish.

The fun news here just doesn't know when to quit. My initial reaction was uncharacteristically emotional and yeah, I'm thinking that that's a context thing and the fact that I've been in crazy hunker down mode for the last couple of days.

I've calmed down a bit. It isn't a must move now notice but it is another reminder that I need to manage the time and options before it all becomes crisis mode.

Finally reached sleeve division on the Something Sunny for Stacy front, and my faithfulness to the pattern has, as expected, already fallen by the wayside.

Interesting stuff or hmmm

2009-03-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

I need to make some changes on my personal and the guild's web pages.

On the personal page side of the house that's usually code for Liz at Needlecraft Cottage changed shop hours again. I usually wait a tick or six to see what else Liz is going to change.

Because of Ravelry I know that there are a few more group knitting events/groups going that I don't have up on my listing so it needs an update.
Even though I know that I'm never going to have a completely accurate list, it is worth taking an effort from time to time.

On the guild side of things we had some great ideas to invite the LYS to connect up a bit more with us and use some of the resources on our site to cross connect (or co-citation). I missed a couple of those (didn't make the queue) and others are not exactly the special events announcements I think we were trying for.

In other LYS interesting moments, there's a strange mis-perception among some people (well, some people on Ravelry) that somehow Whistlestop Knitting is associated with The Grove.

The only way that's true is that they are within spitting distance of each other and the knitting connection is a secondary part of the underlying business model of both places but that's about it.

The Grove was, at one point, somewhat affiliated with the charity knitting group that meets on Sundays at Rebecca's (aka the coffee shop on the corner of Fern & Juniper).

What's really weird, is that apparently, The Grove has recently discontinued (yet again) their Thursday night knitting salons (original controversy was that they wanted to charge for the event) and moved them to Sunday afternoons and more specifically the first and third Sundays which just "happen" to be the same Sundays that Whistlestop knitting happens.

Is this a coincidence or crazy under cutting of other -- seriously within eye sight -- local group knitting events?

Yes, I know that The Grove has ardent fans that will pimp it/pump it up as the bomb of a knitting shop (all San Diego LYS have a core fan-actic base) but if those people are honest they will acknowledge that the shelf stock has been steadily dwindling and that lately, it barely has any yarn to speak of.

Some of us, self included, barely think of it as LYS anymore.

If you're a die hard The Grove lover -- make your case.

Convince me that they really are a LYS and committed to growing San Diego knitting beyond their bottom line. Heck, convince me that they are actually a LYS and with stock/inventory.

With this latest cut into someone else's gig, I just don't get it. Why wouldn't you outreach instead of compete? The obvious answer on that actually is that you think that your branding can trump the competition and lure that market segment into your realm.

Somehow I'm thinking that it isn't that well defined but it might be a blunder in dumb marketing moment that still might have an end result of hurting and subverting local knitting groups.

Then again, I'm not really getting the whole de-centralisation of San Diego knitting that's been happening over the last decade or so and maybe this is just part of that trend.

Photos on the day, a sweet little house from last Saturday's walkabout and another under the nose change. The 17 January blog entry showed a picture of someone's abandoned glass on a newspaper vending machine -- that vending machine is now gone. I honestly couldn't tell you when and seriously it is just under my nose.

Something Sunny for Stacy

2009-03-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of gloom, doom, strum und on this here blog of late and it is long since time to get with the knitting and get back to my generally sunny personality.

To that end, this will be a light and fluffy blog entry.

First up, my new cell phone.

Other than the cost of the upgrade it's a zero cost item for me. Isn't it pretty? Nice photo, maybe Sony Ericsson should pay me for the image -- okay, maybe not, the phone's a discontinued model -- still nice snap eh?

Given the fact that I had my lost at TNNA phone for the better part of four years, I expect that this one and I will be together for a long time.

While I would normally recycle my old phone to battered women or other worthy projects I'm hesitant with the currently being retired phone since the reason it is being ditched is its unreliability, I'm having a not so much moment with that plan.

Current idea is that maybe I'll just hang onto it and the SIM that came with the new phone as a JIC (just in case) personal back up should the new phone walkaway from me unexpectedly.

I'm still not crazy about the whole icon interface and some of the functions are not going to be used since they will use services/charges that I'm not interested in paying for at this time.

I do plan to use the MP3 playing functions and the step counter and I'll learn to like or at least tolerate the icon interface eventually. For now it is just slog through getting contact numbers into the phone.

So if you know me and you think I have your number -- think again. Plenty of minutes on my plan so phone it in and help me get reconnected.

Moving onto the title of the posting there's this nice little snap of the Sunny Yellow Comfort Cardi for Stacy's 44 Sweaters effort. It is based on the Tater's Cotton Cardi from Marie Grace Designs but, as I said before, whether I will stay true to the design is anyone's guess.

Still, if you're thinking about doing a sweater for a kidling and especially a charity sweater for a kidling, free patterns are the bomb and this one is working up nicely.

Yes, there could be diagrams, there could be stitch counts, there could be place marker (PM) explicit instructions and I probably would have knit rather than purled the central seam stitch YO to make it an even more obvious marker (oy how she edits) but it is a free pattern and it works.

At 6" from cast on and on its way to 7.5", it is in semi-perpetual not growing, not growing, not growing mode as I work my way toward dividing and working the sleeves.

As any knitter will tell you this also means that it will also likely magically get too long and need to be frogged/ripped mode.

Go Ko a go go and something about the date

2009-03-17T23:34:00.001-07:00

I understand the need to be frugal in these tough economic times but I'm trying to figure out whether this sign indicates a less than effective reuse of a flyer from 2007, a reuse of 2007 calendar or if there's some other date problem at play.

Whatever the case it gave me a chuckle when I saw it posted on the footbridge that crosses Washington Street behind Trader Joe's.

Other photo on the day is just another oddity seen along the way home from the bank on Saturday the 14th of March.

I've had my Goko for two years now and the honeymoon isn't over yet. The Goko may have found some new admirers after tonight's road trip.

I am involved with an informal knitting and crochet group that meets in the homes of the members in the North County Inland area of San Diego County. A number of the members are also former co-workers of mine.

One of the newer members of the group is a software engineer and crochet enthusiast who came home from a Oz/New Zealand trip with several hanks of 2-ply wool and no ball winder/swift to make them crochet ready.

The hostess of tonight's knitting night is a ball winder and swift owner, so Jess was in luck with that whole winding thing.

When I decided that I would, in fact, make the trip North to attend, I took the Goko with me to show it off and put it into service.

There was a nice spread of Saint Patrick's day appropriate nosh and background music on the day and that went well with the arrival of my new green cell phone.

Once the crochet Walrus project ran into another bump along the creation process, the winding was on.

We actually made pretty good use of it and I was doing pretty well hand winding a hank of Knit Once Crochet too Second Time Cotton until I dropped the hank off my shoulder and it snagged the chance to snarl.

Detangling was on order for the rest of the evening with one to four participants and lots of head shaking in the mix. Once Vicki was involved, well then we had a project manager and lots of laughs to boot.

The link is to the Goko product page at Village Spinning and Spinning and Weaving in Solvang but I actually bought mine from the marvelous Morgaine of Carolina Homespun. Not that I'm a fibre pusher or anything, or okay, so maybe I am.

Grafty fishes, trees and sweaters

2009-03-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

Nice close up shot of the completed graft that joins the two main panels of the fish afghan.

Pinned out it is about 41" by 35" so picking stitches to knit a unifying border treatment is still going to be an important part of the project.

Weaving ends is also still on the near horizon.

I'm reconsidering the double sided idea as possibly too ambitious and maybe also too heavy.

An old idea is coming back round to consideration and that is to deal with the problem of the individual fish ends (original inspiration for the double-sided solution) by sewing the other fishies on to them making only the fishies double sided. It's a cheat, but it is a good cheat.

In fact, had I gone down that path in the original construction, there would have been no fish ends to deal with as I would have done a joined two fish module, folded them and picked up stitches through both fishies.

I think that's how I will write the final design of this project.

How I will treat this prototype is still undecided. If I decide to abandon the double sided choice, then I have some live stitches on the back that I'll need to either bind off or frog back and graft.

Grafting, of course would be the better reversible and texture friendly choice but that would be 744 stitches to graft.

Somehow weaving in ends doesn't seem as tedious a task.

I am staying amused rather than annoyed that at every twist and turn with this I've circled back round to an earlier design solution.

The last of the leaves for the Tree Project are drying and waiting for a few ends to be woven before they are shipped off to Alabama.

The project got a little bit of a time extension so a few more leaves will be leaving from this little corner of California as a result.

The noise from the start up of the Saint Patrick's day parade carried across the canyon as I wandered home from doing the pension and 401K rollover paperwork on Saturday. I snapped the tree gate photo along the way.

Procrastinating on the picking up of stitches and end weaving part of the fish afghan, and not wanting to knit yet another leaf, I started looking round for the next project.

Needing something portable on the needles, I turned to the 44 sweaters project and cast on for a top down raglan in bright yellow Comfort. I'm actually knitting someone else's design for a change. How faithful I will be to the design remains to be seen.

Fish Ides

2009-03-15T20:34:00.000-07:00

As opposed to fish heads, rolly polly fish heads. Actually more about fish panels -- grafted. Started before the trek to Whistlestop and finished after the walk home -- all 372 ever loving stitches.

Almost didn't walk over because I got a text from the beautiful Barbie with regrets due to law school and I can relate because I was still struggling with a few assignments of my own but I needed the break and I thought that if the crowd was light I'd be able to spread the afghan out and gut through it.

It was a light crowd but I was delightfully surprised with an unexpected and very welcome North County visitor who also got to see yet another leaf in progress, a photo of the drying ones and the fish afghan in all its glory.

The ides, after are all one of my days -- the always emotional, never know quite how I'll feel day couple of days.

2009-03-13T02:13:00.001-07:00

State of California, I'm terribly sorry that your offices are overwhelmed but your citizens are even more overwhelmed -- 'effing fix it.

Close of biz today I'm officially a statistic and I might be a basket case before too long.

In case you haven't heard, the very broke state of California and the Employment Development Department have made a complete cock up of the process for the 10% of the population now unemployed. Nice huh?

I've already tried once this week to contact/figure out the nuances of filing for unemployment.

I was so stressed out on Wednesday that I forgot to ask for a copy of the paperwork before I left my former office.

Suddenly that matters because I'm supposed to know (and gods know I need to know) when the severance pay is supposed to kick in.

The online form has "help" for things that are pretty obvious and no help for things that are more confusing. I have several degrees, proficiency in English and I can't figure out the damned thing and worse still, the form informs me that if I get it wrong they may deny my claim -- terrific.

Maybe I'm over thinking but how am I supposed to know if you are asking how much a made full tilt over the last 18 months or how much per week or what. There's no explanation for this field. Then there's the severance thing total lump amount? Weekly amount? My I don't know what date it starts issue. Sigh.

The toll free number is overwhelmed so all you get is a recording that cuts out and drops you off.

Oh, and BTW, tax dollars paying literally a nickel every time that recording plays and directs you elsewhere.

The ever so helpful web page's Find an EDD Office link takes you to a Google map of Sacramento -- so helpful if you happen to be living in San Diego.

You can get it to give you San Diego but even then the EDD office types you can actually locate are for Employers doing the payroll tax issue, Disability Insurance Offices and One Stop Career Centers -- none of which, as far as I can tell, can offer any how do I fill this out help.

If you click around you can find a list of "EDD Workforce Services Offices" but those locations don't track to the map office locations and none of them are sensibly convenient.

Apparently, they closed most if not all local offices back in 1995 so now it is all telephone hell and bad web applications that may well lead you right back to telephone hell.

It's all getting reported but no local idiot news team or other bodies are taking the initiative to sort it and act as ombudsman. Based on the reporting I've seen it may be a big YMMV story of whether going to a local office, if you can find one, will make it better or worse.

Remember how I said I liked the IRS? Perfect case in point, you can find an answer to a federal question. State of California? Not so much.

Photos on the day are other signs of things not working, broken or otherwise lost along the way.

BTW, remember the tree that fell in the rain back in January and then got a reprieve? It's gone.

Didn't think it could survive, hope my roots are stronger than its and I can survive and maybe even thrive from this latest knock down.

Not a nest egg

2009-03-12T22:06:00.001-07:00

For fun and excitement today, I went off to my dentist appointment and came to a place of peace about the way forward with that little unexpected financial fun news.

And no, it wasn't even nitrous oxide induced peace, just a decision.

Not hearing from the DOE people, yesterday I had another special conversation with my friends at the IRS about whether using an early distribution of the pension and or 401K to settle the little unexpected debt would be considered a legitimate education expense that would not trigger the additional 10% penalty. That got a no based on an interpretation that the debt is not a current education cost.

So I have to go a different way with it.

BTW, I really do like the IRS. I know that sound crazy to people but they are actually remarkably reasonable and fairly transparent compared to many other agencies. I even have an application in with them.

It may well be that there's an accounting error on the DOE end and that I will be making a duplicate payment but I can't prove it and I can't spend the energy when other things need my attention and when everything else is just so raw.

It feels a lot like being sucked back into a very dark time and it is crazy making because I had no clue.

On top of it all, I've been hiding in plain sight and at any point, certainly within the last four years since I buried my mother, there have been many, many opportunities for them to have contacted me, done offsets or even seized assets and we would have been done and I could have long since absorbed the hit.

Coming in as this lovely surprise, it is very different situation but I need to make it go away even if that cuts hugely into what little I have to work with.

So another call to DOE, a different body on the other end and a settlement number.

Rest of the day studying, resumes, and sorting out the phone story.

Photos on the day from walkabout earlier this month. The continuing theme of utility box art and changes of note in the hood.

The shop window snap has quite the story.

In very recent years this storefront has been a vitamin/supplements shop, Amonite Beads, a real estate office, and now it is a boutique that looks to mix new and vintage/resale.

If memory serves, at one point this shop may also have been a retail shop sort of connected with the nearby Corvette Diner.

Other shop changes along 5th come in the form of what used to be The Irish Shop. In its newest in incarnation there's a tattoo parlor. Not entirely sure what Tommy Nolan would make of that.

And no, I still haven't woven in ends or grafted the fish panels and we will not be talking about swatching in Comfort Chunky.

Return to RB -- loose ends and last looks

2009-03-11T15:50:00.001-07:00

Today was the drop of equipment and paperwork to get through the process.

More importantly it was also deliver duck & blanket day. That part at least went well and Lucy looks great.

Like everything else since this all came down, my time line was not the factor because being sans badge, I had to escorted and the whole we'll put a lunch together just sort of went sideways. Oh well.

Running LAU and already on the road when I realised I'd forgotten some library books I had from the company library -- aaargh.

Raced back, and of course, I was sure I knew where they were, they weren't where I thought they were.

Actually more correctly, they were but I was so frazzled that I kept looking right next to where they were not where they were.

Finally snagged them and hit the road.

I can assure you that I haven't missed the drive. Just getting past the post office most days is a real experience.

And then the phone's getting worse. I was pulling off the freeway and thinking that I should phone to give an ETA even though in theory there was a 2 hour block of time reserved for the exercise and -- pish -- I'm off grid yet again.

So I had to twiddle my thumbs a bit waiting for my escort to return to desk and come fetch me.

Visitor badge not really working with the wardrobe choice for the day and all things considered bit of a blur or hugs and hellos and some not hellos -- odd that.

But a lay-off is a lot like death and divorce.

People just aren't comfortable so they react oddly. If they are in the same stressful environment you've been laid-off from the strangeness is all the more.

I don't know if the etiquette elephant could help with this but it was too good of a tie in not to include this photo of a sticker I saw on walkabout earlier this month.

It's remarkable how many people had no clue that I'm gone. Oh well, I had cards, I had resumes. I didn't an opportunity to get them to everyone or even chance to talk to everyone before it was time to roll South.

I stopped at the TJs in Carmel Mountain and started obsessing about getting the sticker off my truck windshield. Dunno why but it was fighting with me and it's still only half on and half off but for some reason I just want it gone.

Then I rolled over to the Post Office to send off the silly little "duck-aid" tins to my group project team members.

Those are photos on the day. Well, that's the first photo. I painted out some Mintz tins with chrome metallic paint. Add a devil duckie pirate pencil topper and a couple of devil duckie adhesive bandages and you've got silly bit of whimsy.

The other duck photo is of the 50 cents each super mini devil duckies from the bins at Babette Schwartz. I used a push pin to pierce them and when I can find my stash of head pins they will become devil duckie earrings.

Leave-ing it at that and more sidewalks

2009-03-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

Weekend wrap up.

Still not sleeping well.

The draft got done.

The assignment got turned in.

The term paper topic was proposed and blessed (mixed feelings on that one),

I got a couple more reasonable walks in.

I picked up supplies for the silly group project gift for my team members.

Sounds great right? Actually not too bad.

Although I didn't go to a party that might have cheered me up because I was feeling a lot like little miss rain cloud considering how the week is going, I'm seeing the weekend as a good one.

One of the orange leaves is somewhat over the size suggested so it may get replaced before the lot get shipped off to Alabama.

I did discover that I truly detest Microsoft Word 2007. My current how to cope with it is to save stuff out as XML so I can do the real edits in Open Office and pull it back into Word only at the end point.

I've had to use Microsoft Office for years now and every new version is an exercise in productivity hit since whatever you were used to, whatever you were proficient at, has probably been moved, changed, abandoned.

Long live open source, long live Open Office.

Most of of my Monday was about waiting, still waiting on a point of clarification I had about the RIF plan and release form. The call finally came in very close to COB so it was a more or less wasted day on the walkabout side of things.

I did, however, breathe a lot of paint fumes while painting out tins to house the group silly stuff.

Tuesday's highlight was hearing from one of my dearest friends but the low light was pretty amazing.

Started out with a roll out the door and try to connect with my money guy to discuss the pension and 401K choices. I thought was going to be at one branch but no joy there so I rambled down to the other and managed to miss him. Phone dropping out of network really starting to get crazy making through this.

But we did talk and discuss some numbers, some choices, some general catching up since obviously things have changed from December to today and set an appointment up to work a strategy based on my school focus etc.

In while I'm not doing school stuff, I've been number crunching and trying to figure out what has to get cut now, what's on the table for next and generally trying to figure out how I can keep afloat and stay on the path with school and all not go through what I went through back in the early 80s when I originally wanted this degree.

When I embarked on this degree programme during such shaky economic times I noted that, well, if I lost my job I would at least be able to get some financial aid that I would not have been able to receive before. So I dutifully went along and started the online form to get that going.

Little unexpected gotcha. I am confident that my mother was sure that she had, in fact, fulfilled her promise to me and paid off my student loans. I had no reason to doubt her and frankly, when I buried her four years ago, finding paperwork to document that was not even on my to-do list since it was common knowledge that she had.

Well, turns out, not quite and I found this out today. Could the timing be worse? Not much.

Does this feel like a total sucker punch? Well, yes, yes it does. Am I having an extreme emotional response? Well, yes, yes, I am.

Political Signs and Sidewalks

2009-03-09T00:30:00.001-07:00

On Friday, I was trying to work on some additional guidelines and rules for data entry for the group project as I think that's an area where we sort of relied on terse comments and an expectation that we'd be working with a "reasonable" cataloger who would have some knowledge of the collection.

I found myself falling down a bit of a rabbit hole as I tried to hack out rules for every decision point so when I went walkabout and really pushed myself to get in some mileage.

I had yet another leaf in progress and I was making some changes to the ad hoc pattern that would help increase for the border icord when the piece got to the size when it was time to split the sections.

It was mostly working until I realised that I needed a different positioning of the increases for the sides and the centre -- duh, frog central.

For some reason or another all the sidewalk signs in the last couple of days seemed to be have a lot of political stuff going on.

I'm sure I must have walked by this Dick Cheney stencil many times without triggering on it or maybe I just always walked by when the whole stop and take a picture would not have been a clever move.

Then there was the clear buy local theme of the tractor stencil.

I've actually seen one or more of those stencils around and have even tried to get a decent shot before.

I've often found it amusing how close this stencil is to the Tractor Room. I'm not suggesting that the country boy had anything to do with the art but I like the positioning.

Not sure whether the wake up call on the utility box was related to the strange little creatures on the nearby sidewalk and wall and I'm not sure what they are all about but I like them.

They look familiar but I'm not sure whether that's because I've "seen" them but not really noticed them before or if they are a from some other reference point that my brain is refusing to serve up right now.

It's been that way lately.

My good intentions of just knuckling down and concentrating on school could only last so long before the sheer reality of all the up in the air questions and bubbled up and had to be confronted.

It isn't that not I'm taking steps and taking stock, I am but the racing thoughts and pure stress of it are had to surface at some point.

Now that the relief over the other stresses associated with just how toxic things were feeling at work the last couple month is fading, the stress of not having that job are slamming into me.

In today's other annoyance, is the fact that the replacement cell phone is behaving less and less reliably. It seems to always be fine when I'm home but other places less so.

While I was rambling over into Mission Hills, I kept getting the dreaded "no network coverage" which is pretty much an off the grid status and the turn it off and on and other work around not happening.

This is very not good when the number is the number out there for job opportunities and such.

And I need my exercise not just for the see less of me more often factor but also for mental health so the phone has to keep me connected.

I had noticed this occasional trend up in the wilds of RB previously but it is now getting worrisome.

On Saturday, I started the day with a empty the truck run to Old Town Recycling where I gave some of my stuff away and got some stuff from other fellow recyclers then I ran an errand over in the Morena area.

Along the way, I caught sight of this little bit of commentary right in the middle of Old Town and had to flip back around to catch the shot.

In another my that's interesting, how did I miss that Old Town moment, I noticed that there have been some changes at the Mormon Battalion building. Looks like a major renovation is in progress.

Labels aren't everything but I like these

2009-03-05T15:15:00.001-08:00

A few years back, my day job went on a big Introvert/extrovert define Myers Briggs types kick and, while I found it interesting, I also found it terribly flawed on several levels.

What I recall most is that, while it was supposed to be team building and instead you had those who defined themselves as introverts expressing a bit of aggression at those they defined as extroverts for tiring and/or wearing them out.

I found the whole experience to be a bit disturbing and this whole us versus them business to be a serious facilitator failure.

Perhaps because I've always been a serious borderline personality on such intro/extro silly scales, I just don't get all wrapped up in types and labels -- too much like shorthand that keeps you from actually paying attention to the person in the moment.

Sometimes I get energy from people and sometimes they drain me. Some people drain me more than others.

And for those of you just convinced I'm such an extrovert, how come I can literally go for days without uttering a single word to another living soul and be okay with that? The answer is that I'm not that much of an extrovert but I'm also not that much of an introvert either

So mostly I don't think that labels make much sense and they should never be relied upon as predictive of behaviour.

I can pretty confident that I've always had some if not all of the behaviours that earned me the need and geek labels but I also know that very few people would have believed I had any of those inclinations or labeled me as such when I was in my t-decades.

On Ravelry, one of the few groups I belong to is the GeekCraft group and that's where the series of silly tests came into my life.

I may be a total computer freak but I am more nerd than geek and I'm not much of a dork.

Here's the first test result:

78% nerd, 35% geek and 9% dork.

On a peer to peer basis, I was:

88% more nerdish
46% more geekish
03% more dorkish

So does this mean that most women my age are more dorky than I am? I feel so socially adept.

Second round:

And the latest:

Gotta Love the Guild

2009-03-04T23:22:00.000-08:00

After outsmarting a UPS Express Box, freeing the Microsoft Office Home & Student 2007 CD from the "made in Puerto Rico" packaging, and making sure that pesky dpn that tried to escape Grace last month at guild was, in fact, in my possession, I rolled out to the UTC area tonight for Knit@Nite which is the subgroup that keeps me in my knitting guild.

I was a little concerned about the route since I usually -- duh -- go there from the 15 South cross the mesa route coming from day job. I've gone from home a few times too and those experiences have been very hit and miss especially if I try to put it together with another right 'round there trip.

But tonight's drive was good and the only gotcha was the JCC parking lot and even then it was more me than lot.

We were in a different room so that might account for our chatter-y delay getting going but it was good and could just the the nature of this group. Well, that and the fact that there was a baby surprise crisis in process.

Once again, we had a new member who found us -- shock, amazement on the internet. I'm sorry, I forgot name but not gorgeous red hair and sweet projects.

The huge shock for the night was that Suzanne of Knitting In La Jolla finally managed to break away from the shop on Kristi's class night at the shop and come knit with us! She had totally kewl WIP and show and share.

She got schooled a bit in how K@Nite rolls but I think she liked us and I do hope she loved being there as much as we enjoyed having her and that she can manage to make it not just a one-off.

My opinion? She's perfect for this group and it was wonderful to have her there as just another knitter. That's one of the things I like most about Knit@Nite. I'm not the knitting guru there but I'm also not the most out there knitter.

Leaving the floundering fish afghan at home, I was all about the International Fiber Collaborative Tree project and my leaves in progress for show and tell. Somehow, twit that I am, I left the hard copy info for that at home. Could have been worse, could have been the dpn

As webmaster, I was excited to hear about not only people working on stuff for the jacket/coat guild focus but also the eco-challenge and compare notes about thrift shops and to discuss some additional outreach we can do to shops, Ravelers and such.

I've already green lighted inviting shops to submit their info to the web page and I've done some outreach to shop owners to consider making the Guild's events something of a mutual marketing tool.

Perhaps because Grace just updated her web page, the discussion in our little corner of the table for a bit from archiving newsletters and outreach to shop owners to into exploring shifting from a sitebuilder for pay story to a free blog or similar service.

It is not going to happen over night. The subtle changes I've been making have been slowly developing and clearly this is not priority #1 on my plate.

Speaking of blogs, Stacy Smith suddenly has one and she's, in no big shock to those who know her, using it for the benefit of others check out her 44sweaters project.

Leaves. branches and keeping RSS not crazy

2009-03-03T13:11:00.001-08:00

The best thing about group projects is also the worst -- even the fresh sets of eyes and don't catch everything.

The virtual experience means that everyone can get their stuff in in a sort of rolling thunder continuous review cycle.

The whole thing is a bit like a single author/editor compressed cycle because not everyone is "resting" at the same time so it just rolls on and on for the designated scribe/contributor.

I'm sure some people would suggest that there's a big down side in that not everyone can be in the same room at the same time be we've worked in email and text chats that we've carefully saved to refer back to and capture meaning in ways that he said, she said auditory memory just can't.

By the time my "I hope I caught everything" edit/synthesis/draft hit the digital drop box in a timely fashion, tired as we all were, we were curious about what's next and looking forward to just being (facebook) friends and a support network and not the intensity of recent weeks.

And yeah, if we get a crappy grade we may all be pointing fingers and taking out the short knives but I doubt it. We learned a lot about team work, team building co-operation and working 100% long distance and virtual in addition to information retrieval, database design and the software.

The peer review came in on the evening of the 2nd and our email cycle has started. No long or short knives, I seem to be the only one who really honed in a hmm, I can see that as a different approach to take given the assignment and if that was your read, perhaps that would be the review.

So far this week in the special work through the process, I've had "fun with Fidelity" which is all about finding out if what I remembered about rules of the road for pensions, IRAs, 401k and other financial instruments was the case. It is but there are some accounting issues I'd not considered about co-mingling of funds from from pre-and post tax financial instruments.

Today is phone HR to ask about those two clauses in the documents that appear to me to be in conflict and other nuances of dealing with disaster in a calm and collected fashion.

And a glorious Saint David's day it was

2009-03-01T23:10:00.000-08:00

What is with the weather? It was like 80 degrees Fahrenheit today here in all_but_downtown San Diego.

Got another must tweak draft of the group project up to the group round about 10 this morning, caught some additional real time chat edits and let it sit for review or rip apart from the rest of the group.

Finally got to write about something other than databases, information retrieval and layoffs (mine) as I cleared up more of the blog draft queue.

I also got some knitting done but not a lot. Four leaves and we just won't talk about the fish afghan right?

Mindful of the iffy instep from yesterday's out and about, I opted for the "European Comfort Sole" stylings of the last Seibel Priscilla pair that hasn't blown out on me for the roll onto to Whistlestop knitting.

That comfort sole was an improvement over the flip flops but feet still weren't very comfortable after a second day of real walking after such a drought.

On the walk over I noticed some changes of the huh, wonder when that happened variety in the form of two new shops. One, sweven, just up the street and the other, mythology nearer Juniper/30th/Fern -- both worth a poke around at some point before one or both disappear.

Exercise, knitting, Guinness, face time and the "pimp the book" factor -- yes, I'm a KITS guerrilla marketing tool -- have been long overdue.

No daffs on the day, but as I was walking along Pershing, I caught a whiff of something that smelled remarkably like lilacs.

Now, I grew up with lilacs that were already quite mature so I have no real experience with baby lilacs, so I couldn't say if these are what we used to call French lilacs or not but they seemed to be in serious bloom overload.

Number of knitters was down a bit, my guess is that people were taking advantage of the great weather to hit the beach rather than hang at Whistlestop. I don't know if the Tony & Jen on new parent patrol has also had an impact on attendance or if the proliferation of alternate groups is also at play.

Anyhow, fewer knitters meant that there was actual space for the victorious Los Monos baseball team to celebrate their victory over The Pirates.

It was a pretty backed bar in my little corner where I knit leaves and enjoyed the page turning bodice ripper that is Rubin (Kent State almost went there 2x -- who knew?) Foundations of Library and Information Science to try to get through the readings for Libr 200.

Fortunately, some of this week's reading overlaps with things I've already read for Libr 202, so I got through quite a bit.

Home in time to catch the last of the edits from team, and drop it all in the digital drop box and call it a day.

Scattered sidewalk hearts, small images & sore insteps

2009-02-28T20:16:00.000-08:00

I'd been meaning to get to the Small Image show at Studio 21 in Spanish Village when it was actually open for the better part of February.

Well, for the better part of February after I stopped kicking myself for not managing to get my ducks in a row and enter either the wedding cake or the chair pin cushion into the show even though I had been specifically invited to enter them during last year's show.

Stupid me, I didn't sign up then, or at any point during the year, to actually get the prospectus.

Anyhow, today they were packing up the show as I was walking through and since it was the same woman (whose name escapes me) and she remembered me and the invitation/work there was some some squirming and such on my part.

But also because she remembered me, I got to look at the exhibits even though technically the studio was closed. I didn't get a huge great look but it was better than nothing.

Today didn't go exactly as planned on the project side of the house as our Eastern correspondent ended up not being able to log on from work so that kind of pushed things out a bit.

Still, people caught some much needed break time and progress was made.

I'm not a big hearts and flowers kind of person but I big on strange sidewalk public art. I actually took this picture on Valentine's day over on 5th shortly after narrowly avoiding a collision with a cyclist.

I saw another one over on 6th tonight on the way home but my camera was not interested in in cutting me any slack on the low light photography front. I may have to put finding where more scattered hearts into my stuff to look for when navigating the 'hood.

All in all I managed a five mile or so walk to and through the park.

It was very clear to me that it had been far too long since I took that trek in my beloved havaianas. Although they aren't full in the blister warning zone yet, my left instep felt pretty tender by the time I got home.

Today I wrote and wrote and wrote

2009-02-27T20:18:00.000-08:00

I've always written. When I was a kid I used to put letters together and bug the adults in my life to tell me if I'd made a real "word" and if I had what it was and what it meant.

I rolled out at 8am and between fielding phone calls, emails and such, I wrote and wrote and wrote for the better part of nearly 12 hours.

I took a good solid draft and pushed and poked and prodded it around until it felt ordered cohesive and whole. I did not do this alone, make no mistake, I had partners and that made it even better. Unlike the little yellow devil ducky in the photo, I was not the odd duck out.

For this reason alone, this has been a very, very good day. Well, if you add finding out that a certain resident of NYC (also a writer) is coming to visit this Autumn for the first time in far too long, it is a totally awesome day.

It know it needs more work. I know it needs an edit (or six) and fresh eyes -- something none of us really have right now.

The word for today is RIF, not riff

2009-02-26T20:24:00.000-08:00

Not a fun day.

Came home, threw myself into the group project. When work is the problem, other work is the solution.

That's my story and my style.

So I'm writing about databases and comparing notes and observations and drafts in serious chat mode with my Canadian colleague.

I'll collapse when I have time -- next lifetime maybe.

Leaves and teams and ducks

2009-02-22T15:07:00.000-08:00

So where have I been, what have I been knitting and what have I been writing?

Answered in no particular order, I've been spending time on Facebook, Ravelry, Twitter, Angel Learning at SLIS/SJSU, SLISLife, Second Life, and well, you know, IRL -- work.

Knitting? Lots and lots of not terribly successful swatches for the back of the fish afghan but more recently, I've branched out to leaves. I know, bad.

But seriously, somewhere on the web, I got clued into the International Fiber Collaborative Tree Project at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and was inspired to play with some experiments.

I ended frogging back most of the first one I did and I'm not entirely certain how many I will end up sending but it has been fun and seriously more portable than the floundering fish afghan with its mocking ends and other issues.

Most of my writing has been skewl, school, skool, and more of the same.

I finished LIBR203 early although not as early as I'd planned.

I had a tough time with some of the assignments mostly because I wanted to write about things that interested me but I also needed to seriously self edit and not pick areas that trip my trigger but are too complex to cover adequately in the time I have available to devote to school.

I can see that this is going to be a continuing trend through this process.

For example, sick and twisted that I am, I really wanted to dig into stuff about metadata and discovery or privacy rights, discovery and web 2.0/social networking but just like when I fall down the rabbit hole of stats and all things numbers it just sucks me in too much.

Seriously, I still read court opinions for "fun" and I think that Marchionini on Information Seeking in Electronic Environments is a great read.

I'm pretty well resigned at this point to having no life to speak of, not like that's anything new, but at least now the main point of the sacrifice (school) has some promise of getting me where I will be in a position to have not only a life but a life that suits me a little better for this phase of my life.

The team/group exercise has been exhausting so far but I really, really like my team and when push comes to shove we just plain rock.

When I took a break from our marathon session last weekend, I got everyone some silly bonding stuff from the little slice of crazy that is Babette Schwartz. Had budget not been such an issue any one of these other highly relevant items might have also hit the shopping cart for me or for the team members.

Late yesterday we got the packet with the "other" group's project write up/design and my initial sense is that I'm even prouder of our team did and that all the work was worth it to have a pretty cohesive voice and view point.

It is also very clear that my field of knowledge/understanding when it comes to things like database design and how that tracks back round to metadata and such is not as widely shared in places other than my geeky techno work world.

The other team included their database (we did too) so there's a lot of good opportunity to keep trying to figure out the software we're working with.

So far, I'm not a huge fan and I can see why a non-traditional collection poses such a challenge with this tool. We struggled hugely because we (maybe I) wanted to build a relational tree and the software does not seem to make that an easy thing to do.

It was pretty late in the process when I triggered on a work around to effectively (I hope) store the multiple search categories any given record might fall into and though would have been in my original vision, a branch or link.

Just an observation

2009-02-05T00:16:00.001-08:00

Vehicles named Colorado have no business being any other colour than red -- seriously.

Random Question on the day

2009-01-30T08:10:00.000-08:00

If my truck needs unleaded gas to run and I need leaded (strong, dark & caffeinated) coffee to run does that mean my truck's a wimp?

Emperical evidence or not, I think TNNA was on an eco-trend

2009-01-28T08:29:00.001-08:00

There were 155 yarns from 32 different yarn companies featured in the Wall O Yarn. One company, Shibui Knits, had all seven of their sample yarns in shades of pink. I found that to be very effective way to distinguish their products and their company from the other yarn vendors.

I started to do a break down of the yarns in my Wall O Yarn book sample to see if it supported my view that there was a lot of alternate fibre and eco-friendly happening at the show but when I went through my Wall O Yarn book it didn't reflect what I saw on the floor of the show.

End of the day, my Wall O Yarn does not provide empirical evidence for my sense that there was a lot of eco-friendly happening in the biz and in the products at this show.

This doesn't necessarily mean that my impression that eco-friendly was a major theme of the show and the yarns on offer, just that the Wall O Yarn samples were perhaps too small of a sample of what I saw on the actual show floor. Just a quick glance of the Knitting and Crochet listing of exhibitors shows me that some major players did not participate in the Wall O Yarn.

Pedestrian perils & mixed signals in San Diego

2009-01-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

The photo illustrates classic San Diego walkabout weirdness and how even the most pedestrian "friendly" parts of the city present the average pedestrian with serious mixed signals in signage.

The sign at the bottom of the image advises the pedestrian that they should use the crosswalk to the right but the crosswalk signal is still in place.

In all the years I have walked this route, I have never obeyed this sign. To so I'd need to make three street crossings to continue on my way.

In my head, and in my San Diego as pedestrian experience, additional crossings are way more dangerous than just crossing the street there are disobeying the don't cross mixed message.

More fun than phone

2009-01-20T21:13:00.000-08:00

So what were my TNNA takeaways?

Like a lot of people I was interested/confused by the Knit Knit gadget. If you just took the business card and not the bigger product card, I don't know how you'd remember that this is the sort of big gizmo thing that yea, does sort of remind me of a birth control pill dispenser, but I'm pretty sure that the pill dispensers were smaller.

Pink and white and kinda somewhere between clunky and compact. And for all the "everything you need" aspect, why point protectors but no tapestry needle?

The TSA approved is a possible big selling point if proven.

I was not the only one drawn to PolarKnit with its yarn made from Polartec, Polar Fleece. Easy care, cool in the hand and warm on the body, I like this stuff and can see big fun especially for kids. They had some really cute semi-sculptural hats in the booth all copyright free (read sell my yarn please). Vancouver as I recall, I hope they can thrive and look forward to them growing the product.

Bijou Basin Ranch -- who knew yak could be so beautiful and yak plus Cormo? I had to 'splain Cormo to a couple of people at the show but Cormo is a nice bouncy/springy yarn that works and plays well with the yak.

I had the hots for the yak + bamboo blend but I wasn't immune to the lace weight pure yak and even made some noises at LYS owners.

I love the Bison Gold but the price point is an issue and the yak makes a little more sense and if they can find a way to drive the price further down and retain quality (perhaps by people buying more for economies of scale) I'd be thrilled.

Where Bijou lets the yak be what it is in colouring, Himalaya Yarns mixes yak with Bamboo but does some additional processing to yield a different range of colours. Buttery yellow and a sage green are the cornerstones of the colour palette and I was far from the only one paying attention to the well priced yarn.

BTW, this is also the can buy hair sticks place but you wouldn't know it from their web page. So Google's right to lead you to Yarn Market rather than Himalaya if you do a search that includes hair sticks. Yes, those are some of the same hair sticks I've demo'd over and over again when asked how I get my hair to look like that.

I was also really taken by the fine gauge cotton at Bergere de France -- gorgeous stuff. Shame that they have all their design work done in France, because I would love to use it in combination with some had dyed.

But then, after a couple of nice chats with the folks at Skacel (where fellow guild member Cia was wearing a gorgeous sweater of her own design in their can't remember durn it yarn) I think I could easily transfer my cotton love to Algarve from Austermann and Aslan Trend's Pima Cotton for heavier gauge.

I was taken by the silk at Jumbuk Fibres and quite curious about the company as they are practically local up in Dana Point. No web page yet, she's working on it, but go figure I bought some of her silk from Liz at Needlecraft Cottage a couple of years back so I can dig it out and play at some point.

On another oh, I have some of that happened at Ecobutterfly Organics where I found Pakucho Certified Organic Cotton. Stephanie and Steve of Ecobutterfly are now distributing the Pakucho so that's another shop the stash to swatch story.

More on yarns and such another day. The big news for any Ravelry sort was a Jess & Casey encounter. Yup, I got Bob.

Other images are from Saturday's walk to the convention centre with plenty o urban art goodness, Some of it official, some of it just so not.

Phoning it in

2009-01-19T22:04:00.001-08:00

When I started out to walk down to TNNA on Saturday, I had to circle back because I forgot my phone.

Hard to connect up with others when your phone is sitting at home on your desk. That's true whether the desk is three or a thousand miles away.

I had a plan for the Wall O Yarn, left the booklet at home and printed out just the pages I'd missed on Friday night. Good plan, although that's when I discovered that the printer's ink cartridges had all gone pink (code word in this case for gone well past their use by date).

As is often the case, it took me longer than usual to get started and the detour back for the phone didn't help.

I did manage to pick up stitches on the side of the fish afghan -- eight fewer than I needed but I picked them up never the less.

At the show, I finished Wall O Yarn, connected with lots of folks, finally caught up with Maggie and got about half way through the show floor before close of day.

Libby and the Stitch N Pitch folks would love to take the beach chair on a baseball road trip to be photographed at ball parks across the country but they'll have to work that out with Kristi and her promotional tour plans for KITS.

I took a circuitous route up to the bus stop by Horton Plaza in the hopes that the Office Depot down by the tracks was still open and I could score ink cartridges. It wasn't -- bummer but the bigger bummer on the day was the phone. Having just missed one bus, I dug around in my bag for the "watch" read phone and found it not.

Phone has a nasty way of hiding so, while annoyed, I was feeling pretty sure that it was just hiding in the bag and that when I got home I'd find it.

Didn't happen. Phoned phone, no reply -- bugger. I'm still fine, thinking the keypad's locked, it's probably in someone's booth and I'll find it on Sunday. We'll do a Marco Polo thing and it will turn up.

Tried that one Sunday and no joy. When I got home from the show, I contacted my provider and sometime late Saturday night, someone started using the phone. We shut that party down but no phone, contacts, all the headaches, none of the fun.

It took most of the day today just to get the phone story somewhat sorted and I almost missed the Elluminate session. Good thing there wasn't a video component to it or I would have terrified folks.

More happier stuff about TNNA and the weekend soon. Including a Jess & Casey encounter.

Grrls got back -- TNNA edition

2009-01-17T23:41:00.000-08:00

A week or so before TNNA there was a tweet from Shannon with a link to her (then) most recent pattern offering called Rivulet. My initial thought was baby's got back and it's a sweet little design.

Got to see it and more indy knit/crochet designer goodness at the Stitch Cooperative booth at TNNA including the electronic galleys for KITS.

My project's photos are gorgeous and if you've a promo post card from Wiley in your possession, look at the over all background image of the side of the card with Kristi's photo for a peek at how well the beach chair (whose project name is a special one) photo came out. No folks, that's not just a kewl beach chair, that's a knitting pattern.

I don't recall whether I mentioned it or not, but just a couple of days before I schlepped the chair up to Kristi's I took some of my own photos at the lawn by the Natural History Museum (by the big fig) at Balboa Park. I had a couple of people try to buy the chair from me on the spot so I think I hit my goal.

I got down to TNNA on Friday to renew and register 'round about 5pm on Friday. I would have been earlier but there was a glitch/gotcha with the PIN number/access for the library resource and with a holiday weekend and the possibility of losing valuable time, I chose to get school sorted.

I ran into Kristi right 'round the trolley crossing. Rolled on into register, present my credentials and took a look at Barry & volunteers' Wall O Yarn and the new product display with other browsers/attendees before they closed the area.

As the Galleria and Fashion Show crowd began to assemble, I said some heys and then rolled home to another exciting night of school work.

As I was heading back down to TNNA on Saturday, I noticed this little reminder that I live near a a couple of bars. There have been worse reminders.

All school and work

2009-01-14T09:12:00.001-08:00

doesn't make me dull. I'm dull anyhow.

There are ten lessons in the mandatory one unit course. I've made pretty good progress so far but it really is tough to juggle everything.

At day job, while one pub is out for review, I'm cycling back around to another one, this is usually how the knitting works in progress go too.

So it isn't a huge shock that one of the work projects is getting a re-think while the draft based on the version of the project is out in review.

Have my engineers become contaminated by my fish afghan design and redesign?

TNNA is coming up this weekend and I've been a slug about renewing my membership.

It's year three prove I'm professional mode and although I verified that even though Knitting In the Sun doesn't come out until 2009, the work was done in 2008 so it quals as credit, I just didn't get the paperwork in so suddenly I need to do that.

I'm not sure the designer model for TNNA really works. The notion that you're only professional designer if you get designs published/purchased by a yarn company or magazine is a bit troubling when the magazines and yarn companies are certainly under no obligation to work with professional designers.

For me, I have a lot of designs that, because they've been up on my web page or otherwise in the public eye. will get a total pass from yarn companies and magazines. It doesn't make the designs any less valid or even marketable but it limits my options.

Is a designer any less a professional if selling through Ravelry or their outlet? Or, by selling in that manner does a designer cease to be a designer and become a publisher or retailer? It seems to me that the designations aren't as clear cut as they could be.

Consequences of procrastination? I couldn't renew on line, and couldn't do it over the phone with Zanesville and be assured that I'd be able to attend. So now I need to renew at the registration desk at the convention centre this weekend.

I'm not going to be in the member roster -- paper or online. Oh bother, oh well.

So, I'm taking Friday and Monday off so I can do the show and hopefully do a bunch of school work too.

Today's photos are from earlier this month and part of the continuing art on utility box project.

2009-01-10T22:30:00.000-08:00

Ahh, networking and more networking.

Knitting is a remarkably social thing. Seriously, a crazy number of people I know I know because of knitting and if I were to try to diagram the connections, I would not be shocked to see how many of them come back around to a certain choreographer in NYC.

And through said choreographer, I know the lady who knows the dude (Hey Dave) who helped me get my network up and running today.

Yup, all the piece parts are in place and there's a solid interim solution (hardware firewall) that affords me the security and functionality to work toward the goal of a total transition from old software firewall to new software firewall.

When I bought the lap top, I also picked up a flat screen and the thinking was that I'd use the flat screen with the lap top.

Then I got the brilliant idea that I'd plug the flat screen into the the new Linux box and crib the Xconfig info so I could use the flat screen in place of the dying honking huge CRT connected to the old Linux box.

I hadn't implemented that "brilliant" plan but Dave and I decided to try it today as part of the "hmm, this isn't as simple" punt plan.

If you ever find yourself getting that great idea, it may still be one but if you connect it while another monitor's attached, it just clones the info and doesn't yield anything terribly helpful.

Still, we pressed on and connected flat screen to old Linux box -- no way, no how, not happening. Old X-windows (FVM) not having anything to do with this new-fangled monitor and monitor equally not loving the Linux box.

Enter the CRT. Some years back when the monitor attached to the Windows box died, flat screens were still too pricey for me to justify the cost, so I sprung for a Viewsonic CRT. Little did I know just how good a decision that would turn out to be. Old Linux X-configurator tool speaks CRT. It isn't perfect, in part because the old CRT really was top of the line for its time, but it works well enough for now.

Ditto on the I found the router story. Since the router only has four ports and I have way more devices than that, I ended up connecting the switch to one of the router ports. The net result is that I have three open ports and some unused NICs.just

Biggest adjustment for me is that I have to stop thinking of the old Linux box as the IP associated with my domain because that IP/domain name now refers to the router. Within the network that's just a minor, "oh yeah" moment.

Outside the network it's a "oh, can't check email remotely" until and/or unless I open up some other ports on the router and redirect to the appropriate internal IP.

After Dave (thanks again Dave) left, I manhandled the huge monitor off the desk and onto the floor by the door as step one in getting into the hands of the electronic recycler.

It is an interim solution and the transition will be a slow one rolling out in phases.

All of it takes a back seat to having the network upgraded and functional so I can start classes next week.

I'm guessing that tackling Samba to make communication between the boxes inside the internal network a bit easier will be one of the first major projects.

For now, I'm just ecstatic that I'm not coping with the old switch's bandwidth limitations and the dying monitor with iterative blind root logins to:

/sbin/ifconfig eth1 down
/sbin/ifconfig eth1 up
log out

And then there's the luxury of being able to answer my email without having to fight with Cygwin or a dying monitor.

Web 2.0 the book, the twit the -- oh shiny

2009-01-09T23:50:00.000-08:00

While in latest iteration of stable muck out mode, I unearthed a bit of life archival material in the form of a some such (25 maybe?) of a didn't go and didn't much miss reunion.

Don't get me wrong, I liked my college. I totally enjoyed the whole experience of being able to figure out who I was, what I believed and, in the case of my school, doing it pretty much in the middle of bloody no where. Not as bad a thing as you might think.

I liked my friends, I loved lots and lots of things about the whole thing but there were a few years between graduation and California when it was more bedda for me to just be outside the orbit.

The material was a 8.5x 11 stapled listing of the class of insert year here. Since I was looking for a distraction and I insist on trying to find patterns, trends, number crunching in almost any likely sampling, I did the basics.

First up the traditional reunion stuff -- who's farthest away, who's nearest-- you know, the basics.

Without having data on the where they came from, given a small Midwestern liberal arts school that, at the time drew students largely from about a 500 mile radius, the obvious question was how many still lived within that general area 25 years on whether from bloom where you're planted or settle near school as new home.

Not shockingly, the bulk of my graduating class were still living in the same state as the school. Equally unshocking is that the next largest concentration was a nearby state where, AIR, lots of people called home before matriculating.

The hmm, factor came from the fact that California and Illinois were next on the where they're at list -- California? I think I actually knew that there were at least three of us but seven? Interesting.

Occasionally I've tripped over other alum on the web or in person.

For some reason or another, my IRL encounters with others from my old school seem to take place at REI and, more often than not, during a sale.

Enter facebook, and a how did he end up there? Guess I'll have to join facebook to see. Hmm, me? Facebook? I'll think about it.

Well, a couple three emails later from already on facebook friends and suddenly, I'm at least there even if I'm not terribly active.

Twitter too although I'm still not phone plugged in.

We can knit, we can cook, we are the Knit@Nite group

2009-01-08T01:42:00.000-08:00

So good to be at Knit@Nite tonight.

Two dozen of the "it makes how many?" cookies consumed, good community sharing and just good stuff.

I"m good with solo but at some point I need knit buds and Knit@Nite is a good mix of both skills and formality (or lack of both) to work for me.

A little louder than usual. I swear I'm going to get/make Barbara an embellished gavel to bring order to our disorderly meeting.

'Course to be fair, I'll also have to make a carrying case for it and a suitable subgroup one for Linda.

It actually fun to watch Barbara (new Prez) rather than Linda call the group to what we like to jokingly refer to as order.

Pretty much full house -- hey there was food and the dessert to entree/salad ratio worked out.

For show and share, I followed the always remarkable Ruby who had previously privately shared that the much beloved Evil-lynn was not there as she was under the weather with a currently undefined (and hopefully not serious) malady.

Since said Evil-lynn had both admired and had her own (got love our friends) issues with the non-equal entelac blanket. my show and share included an explanation of her MIA as well as her issues with the blanket.

Said blanket and duck got both the oohs and aaahs over the cute factor and agreement over my not loving the laundered end fabric so here's hoping that a bit of Scripps Ranch private laundering TLC will do the trick.

Evil-lynn's absence also got lots of much deserved attention. Clearly the group quite rightfully missed her more than her potluck promised salad (not to cast aspersions on the salad).

Fish afghan in progress also got attention and reminded me that I should have thrown the spare fishies into the WIP bag to show/share.

Anyhow photo of fish welt panel progress and the deviously delightful duck and companion entrelac blanket snaps grace this posting.

Total twit that I am, somewhere along the evening I chimed in with my strong sod that view of the idea of purling wrong.

Again, IMO/E more often than not it is the Purling Police rather than the Knit Knazis that put people off the craft in my experience but the twit bit is in suggesting that Norwegian Purl is the total bomb if you're a picker not a thrower suddenly I was it for the Norwegian Purl go-to-gal.

This is not a good thing since mostly I'm still a happy thrower who mostly picks only to demo/teach the basics to hookers (crocheters) who don't speak knit.

When I need to shift gears and knit continental (pick) that takes some brain power and when I have to also purl that's another gear shift and my tranny is old, tired and used to its usual channels.

So suddenly, I'm in Big Mouth Strikes Again mode and everyone wants me to do a Norwegian Purl demo at the end of the meeting. Yeah, like we're going to finish up early or even timely and like my hasn't even knitted in days fingers/brain are going to shift from not quite native throw (insert footnote on knitting history and techniques) to still way not nature Norwegian purl mode.

End result? Find the great online resources and on Norwegian purl and put them on blog and maybe, just maybe on guild web page -- hey, I know the webmaster.

Hey, I may know/be her but I'm still on learning curve and google is not currently my friend as the link I liked most is not coming up first in my current search string -- down side of not keeping a what did I ask when history trail.

Burn baby or skin seared but not the cookies

2009-01-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

Sometimes (maybe often) I am so not the sharpest tool in the shed. I am quite willing to admit what an idiot I am capable of being which is either also a really stupid thing or a kinda good thing about me.

Anyhoo, my high tolerance for pain and my act first think after (often as in, oh I bet that will leave a mark) recently showed itself when I did something of a human branding moment.

'Round about the 14th of December, while cooking dinner, very shortly after firing up the electric oven, I dropped something into the well of the oven.

Like the total moron that I am really quite capable of being, I reached for it and, in the process, touched the heating element. This is arguably as bad as the drop canvas bag with glass bottles, hear the glass break and still put hand into bag and pull back a hand/paw that needs stitches and has blood spewing every freaking where. That was also the time the blood overwhelmed the butterfly I finally bought and it all got reinforced with self-applied SuperGlue.

Actually, I think the broken glass was worse since with the heating element there was a chance that it wasn't heated enough to do the damage it did. No, no really, I didn't touch palm to a glowing red heating element.

There was an "oh that hurts" moment before pulling my hand back revealed a 1" long branding burn in the middle of the base of my right palm.

Looking back, it may have been a 2nd or 3rd degree burn that might have suggested physician intervention but given the method of burn, I didn't see the point.

Seeing a doctor might mean that I would have less scarring later but it's the palm of my hand which is a fairly thick bit of skin to begin with, it doesn't have a of nerve issues ad I just missed involving any underlying veins so cosmetically scarring's not a huge issue.

One of the life gifts one gets from growing up with parents who either didn't handle injuries well (mother) or had pretty much a walk it off attitude (father & grandmother) is the ability to self treat, self assess and treat your own injuries.

I've been watching the seared scar ever since wondering how much healing/scarring is going to happen. Yes, I know that sort of lack of emotional involvement with injured body parts is not exactly normal but it isn't like it hurt or otherwise had any real impact on my life until recently.

It started out looking a bit like a paramecium shaped bit of seared skin. Within a day or so, some of the skin at the less impacted upper bit was already healed and happy with the rest just being sort of weird looking.

The next phase was a fair bit of itching (good sign) and shedding that I thought was the end of it.

I was really thinking that I'd be sporting a palm paramecium to mark the duh moment.

Then one morning, just before Christmas, the paramecium came a bit undone with a thick shedding that didn't really match up with the surrounding skin growth.

That last bit is shorthand for "oh, now this hurts at the perimeter where it's bleeding a bit".

And that perimeter was dry, really dry, so not keeping it moist and bandaged/protected was no longer really an option. Still, it's a a remarkably inconvenient body part to protect and the itching from the healing did not make things easier.

Suddenly I'm sporting a bandage and apparently some people have noted the placement and suggested that I was an inept suicide -- yeah, I'm right handed and it's my right hand. It's my palm, not my wrist. Others are absolutely shocked that I didn't see a doctor and that is looks remarkably healthy considering.

The bandaging only lasted a couple of days but it mostly did the trick and kept the perimeter of the burn from drying, splitting and bleeding.

It looked a lot uglier when the thicker layers of skin pulled away.

Right now as the underlying burned tissue goes about the business of repairing itself it looks a tad obscene but not as scary as it did.

So what's with the cookies? Baking, baking, baking. No skin was seared in the making of these cookies.

Yesterday afternoon, I roused self out to the shops with my must have list for the great baking experiment. I actually hadn't made these cookies in all the years I've lived in this apartment so I wasn't hugely shocked when they didn't quite come out as they should.

I sacrificed my don't eat sugar credo just to make sure they tasted right even if they didn't rise quite as much as I'd like.

Probably a result of not double/triple sifting the flour but then again, it could be an evil oven.

I've cause to rethink my comment about being easier to schlep a couple dozen cookies than alternatives since the recipe makes about five dozen cookies.

Since my breaking the no sugar rule gave me a wave of childhood nostalgia goodness, clearly these babies all have to find new homes and taste buds to tempt but the transport is a bit of a bother.

A shout out to the lovely Linda got me a "oh please don't bring them all to Knit@Nite" which will make the folks at work happier and heavier as a result so I've divided them up into two lots. Now I just have to make sure I don't eat any of the temptations in residence between now and delivery.

In other delivery news, the FedEx fairy has come and gone leaving me textbooks and other need for school stuff. UPS is still somewhere in San Diego with another recommended but not required text.

Found my router today, just not the CD that came with it, Since the CD is for Windows, I 'spect that its MIA status isn't a big deal if throwing a router into the network ends up being a good way to get from point A to point where I want to be.

Concrete Blonde cranked up and while Blogger was complaining the UPS dude came and went leaving me the other text book -- so it's time to turn into a people and think about making for the JCC.

Twaddle on a Tuesday

2009-01-06T21:25:00.000-08:00

Another day of less than ideal health but knitting has been happening and photos have been taken.

Two closeups of the knitting as things were yesterday when I rambled off into dither mode and the out of focus image of the panels pinned out that made me decide not to go down the different colour path.

It is just a happy quirk that the start of that particular 11 stitch repeat aligned with that particular fish tail.

The yarn in the fish tail was a prime candidate for the now fer shur not happening welt.

Although the focus is lousy in the fish panel picture, the colours are truer than in the other two. The natural sunlight streaming through the window made for way over exposed and/or washed out images that I still don't quite get.

Textbooks and other need for school items are due to be delivered via Fed-Ex tomorrow and tomorrow is also the day I can, in theory, start work on LIBR203.

That's a theory because if Fed-Ex/Amazon don't come through with the mike/headset combo the whole eluminate experience is going to have to wait because my test drive of the built-in mike and speaker mix on the laptop is just not going to cut it.

The other flaw in the theory is, that with luck (or sheer force of will), I will be well enough to make the La Jolla trek and maybe even the RB to La Jolla and home trek tomorrow.

Since I haven't been getting much knitting (group or otherwise) in of late I'm really looking forward to it even if potlucks are so not me. 'Sides, I'ze an real life guild officer now so I should make an effort even if big guild days are still not something that my schedule accommodates.

New server's sendmail has not been configured, port miscommunication between the two Linux boxes has not figured out, and options for meatless dish or dessert for Knit@Nite tomorrow are narrowing.

Old standby of Welsh bread not likely since it really needs fruit in tea and sugar bath at least overnight before mixing it up with the dry ingredients. Right now I'm leaning toward the family recipe cookies that didn't make the cookie exchange due to that little must share recipe in addition to cookies glitch.

It's a family recipe. A closely guarded family recipe and I'm the guardian of same. Since technically the end of the line, I guess that also means I get to decide whose family gets it next. A couple dozen cookies are a lot easier to schlep around than any of the other alternatives.