Monday, August 29, 2005

Hi! It's me! Remember Me?!

Hi all.

This is just a quick post to say that I do totally still exsist.

I've been working at my new job, which is at a public library, so lots of knitting book reviews coming soon! I'm just still getting used to life here in Maryland and unpacking ALL THAT YARN. (I just spent a few hours unpacking knitting related stuff. Oh my.)

Also, I just want to give public props to my secret pal! She was awesome. I feel bad, because her secret pal was not so awesome. Her last package rocked and I will take a picture soon! But lots of yummy yarn and cool soap and marinara seasoning and a recipie for tomato sauce! How awesome is that?!

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Ai yai yai

Well, I've enjoyed my time with my secret pal so much that I've already signed up for Secret Pal 6! You should too. You know, if you knit and blog...





In more knitting news, I am a chocolate decadence IDIOT. So, I'm increading up to the bust and am thinking to myself, I need to get up to 106 stitches, then knit for an inch straight, and then start the sleeve decreases. And then I count my stitches and #$&(*&#@ I have 108.

Gah.

So, I rip out to the last increase, including the increase row and then knit an inch straight and then I look at my pattern notes to see how the sleeve decreases go... GAH!

I was really supposed to increase to 108 after all. I haven't ripped out the inch yet. GAH!

@#$! %^&%^$ @#!@# ^&*&^* @!#!@#


In other news, here is our book pile. We went to IKEA to get some bookshelves for the pile, but DUDE! IKEA's a little overwhelming. We finally just took a catalog so we could think about it some more...



Also, I want to say to anyone thinking of reading the Thursday Next books by Jasper Fforde, you really should. I finished Something Rotten before moving out to DC, and the whole series was AWESOME!

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Manly Scarf



Look! I'm back on the high speed internet! Woo! Check out the manly scarf! Pattern's up here!

(Also, check out Dan's arty photography!)

But I'm here in DC, trying to unpack stuff. Man, Dan was right when he said I have too much yarn... I'm still trying to figure out where to put it all.


OH! Check out what my secret pal got me!

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Book Meme

No knitting content at all. I stole this from Kim

Bold if you've read it.
Italicize if you've read part of it.
Underline if you want to read it.
Add a book, if you like


#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius, (in classical Chinese, even!)
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Kapital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh T.S. Eliot.
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Emile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Emile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
#111 The Odyssey by Homer
#112 Harry Potter: The Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling
#113 The Pelican Brief by John Grisham
#114 Sphere by Michael Crichton
#115 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
#116 Tales of the Otori by Lian Hearn
#117 The Bacchae by Eurpides
#118 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
#119 Starseeker by Tim Bowler
#120 The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
#121 Sabriel by Garth Nix
#122 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
#123 The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#124 The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
#125 Macbeth by William Shakespeare
#126 Othello by William Shakespeare
#127 Why I Am Not a Christian : And Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell
#128 The Metamorphoses of Ovid
#129 Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
#130 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
#131 A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
#132 Empire Falls by Richard Russo
#133 Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
#134 The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
#135 Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
#136 Emma by Jane Austen
#137 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Potter!

So, this is only knitting related in that way that we were all talking about this last night at my very last knit-in.

I'm happy with my result, excpet, for a really long time I was in ENTP. I can't help feel kinda sad that I've successfully killed the poet in me to let the anal-judgemental cataloging freak take over... gah. Oh well. I could be Kim!

Pirate Monkey's Harry Potter Personality Quiz
Harry Potter Personality Quiz
by Pirate Monkeys Inc.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Off Pops Jack!

I tried to teach a group of 8 year olds how to knit at a birthday party on Saturday. I don't know how successful I was but it was a lot of fun AND managed by shut-up my ovaries since two close friends of mine announced their impending mother-dom last week.

On the other hand, watch this space for more bonnets! Or not. One of the mothers was in on the last slew of bonnets. But damn, those things are fun to knit...

In my other knitting news, I'm almost done with the front for Chocolate Decadance. I've done the neckline and have picked up and knit a few rows of the top hem. I think I'll have to sew the hems before I start the back though, or at least the top one, as I don't know what to do with the stitches and I want to sew them live, not bound off, and I don't think I have enough stitch holders...

Tonight's my last A2 Knit In! :( So you should all come, because on Sunday? I'm outta here.

Beth-- I understand what you mean about swatching. A sleeve can also be a really good swatch. Just not when you're the designer, because you have no place to start.

Also... I completed my class on Creating Web Pages. It was a good class. I fully and highly recomend it for anyone who wants to learn some HTML. Anyway, I want to put my skills to use, so I've been thinking of adding to this site some lessons on how to do cool things, like a German Twisted Cast-On and cables, etc etc. Are there any things you want to learn? Let me know!!!

And here's a little knitting rhyme...

Into the hole
Around the back
Through the loop
AND OFF POPS JACK!

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Commento Respondo

So........................

I thought I'd respond to some comments, because I've been meaning to and keep forgeting and then am too lazy to go back and do it.

Plus, I've hit that mid-afternoon slump at work, so yeah. Watch me goof off.

Anyway...

Ellie-- I understand that your post office knows who you are, but say there was a box that was addressed to an unknown person at your address and they new it wasn't the person next door to you. Would they automatically send it back? Or would they at least attempt to deliver it first?

Beth-- (do you blog Beth?) About making the gament the gauge swatch. I do do this with things that don't have to fit. But I had to do several swatches for the Chocolate Decadence sweater to see at what gauge I liked the fabric drape. So I could see how silk knits up (as I don't get the change to knit with a lot of 100% silk) but also, as this is my own design, I needed to get some semblence of how many stitches per inch I was getting so I even knew where to start with how many stitches to cast on. I'm also being overly anal with this sweater as the yarn was a very special yarn splurge, and this sweater WILL be perfect, in order to justify the yarn and the decay on my bank account.

And thanks to everyone on the job congratulations!

ALSO Knit In is tonight! At the Sweetwaters on the corner of Washington and Ashley. Lots of fun! (And I get to have a slumber part with Emily tonight. Very exciting)

Sirius Black is my Whore-Crux

Blah blah...

What a week, at least knitting wise.

On Saturday, I discovered that, as per usual, my gauge changed when going from swatch to garment... blargh. I think I really just need to start knitting bigger swatches. Yarn Store Boss Lady told me that all the designers are now doing 8x8 instead of the old standard of 4x4. I think I need to do 12x12. Grrrrr. Swatching=oh so useful=oh so sucky.

So, I had to rip out that Chocolate Decadence sweater. Rippity rip rip.

But I was at the yarn store, so I found a new and exciting way to rippity rip rip. And this worked because I was at the end of the ball... I just slid out the needle, put the yarn end on the ball winder, and wound my sweater into ball. Lovely.

And! I've now actually knit up to exactly the point where I ripped on Saturday, this time with 10 more stitches on the needle.

My gauge only changed by 1/2 st/inch. But, oh! The difference it made.

In other news, Saturday was the yarn store sale. I think I did very well, considering. I only walked away with things that were 50% off. Which means I now have a lot of Calmer. Dan's freaking out that we don't have enough space at our new place for all my yarn, so I best get to knitting it up!