How to use up stash.

1. Knit some experimental shapes with wool.

2. Felt them in the washing machine.

3. Pull them out and realize the ideas didn't work.

4. Throw away.

Et voila. Two balls of yarn used up.

Whining and tidings of great joy.

Hunt me down like a rabid dog and put me out of my misery. 'Cause I've got the baby's germs and wanna roll up and die anyway.

That's enough whining, but this is one of those AWFUL colds that makes your throat itch. I'm about to get the bottle brush and stick it down my own throat and scrub it around. That might work. (Sinus infections, no biggie. Pneumonia? Who cares. Sore throat and it's whine whine whine.)


Anyway. We - sort of - have major, just-breaking fiberish news at House O' Samurai.

Well, first a whole lot of back story.

Every year the husbeast and I both take a chunk of 'mad money' out of the tax return and spend it on anything we want. The rest usually goes to bills or, lately, the baby's college fund, but the mad money remains in effect, if a little reduced from our wild pre-baby days. This year I'd been planning on buying myself a laptop (so I can roam around the house after the baby and remain Hooked In) and hoping I could squeak out enough left over for a spinning wheel.

At some point I must have mentioned this buy-a-laptop plan to my father-in-law, because he called last night to tell us he'd gotten one for me for free. (It's my mother-in-law's old one he'd had overhauled.) The trade he demanded for the laptop was us going to Florida on vacation with them, so the in-laws could spend time with us and the baby. They're so mean. (You begin to see why they get handknit sweaters every Christmas.)

So with no laptop to be purchased out of the mad money, that leaves a great whack of cash to spend on anything ELSE my little heart desires, IN ADDITION to the wheel. Like... like.. a loom. Or a dressmaker's dummy. Or a boat load of fiber. Or... or.. ALL OF IT.

The only drawback now is that I don't know if I've got room in my office for everything. I'm to the point of emptying out the baby's closet and using it (she's got two in her room) or if I totally lose my mind, switching rooms with her.

Hmmmm.

One neat turn deserves another.

Remember my post about the Blue Moon Fiber Arts problem with their bank, and how January One tried to help them out by giving away their yarn, so as to create new sock-knitters? Blue Moon has responded.

January One now has her own color scheme.

And THAT is community. And what makes on-line knitters so cool.

Reviews.

I've been meaning to mention various books and TV shows lately, and keep forgetting. So I'm gonna jumble it all together here.


BOOKS:


"Knitting Out of Africa" by Marianne Isager. I want to emphasize first off that I like the book. There are some things I didn't like about it, but overall you are getting what you paid for; African-inspired sweaters. The sizes available vary by sweater but most lurk in the 40-50 inch range. Some go down to 34 (at least, one does), some go up to 52, but that's about it. The sizes would be easy to tweak by knitting at a larger or smaller gauge, though. And speaking of gauge, it's 25 stitches per 4 inches/10cm. For Every. Damn. Sweater. A variety of techniques are used - garter stitch, entrelac, meiters, log-cabin, stranded color, you name it. In that respect the book is very impressive.

Now, the drawbacks. The yarn used is an alpaca/wool blend I've never heard of, for every sweater. Two strands held double. While that can give you great options for color blending, you have to buy twice as much yarn, and it's kind of a pain to work. Plus the alpaca makes all these sweaters really hot. She chooses muted colors reflecting the original textiles that I assume were dyed with assorted vegetable dyes (and mud, in the case of mud cloth), which may be historically valid but some of these sweaters would look fantastic in bright colors - she could have at least included some small swatches to give ideas and examples of the possibilities.

My one big complaint is, there's no INFORMATION in the book. It's supposedly inspired by African textiles, and there are photos of each textile at the start of each pattern, but other than that and the general area the textile came from, that's it. No info on the textiles themselves or the people who produced them. I suppose since it's a knitting book I shouldn't complain, but darn it, part of the reason for buying books about cultures not my own is so I can learn about the culture.

At any rate, all the sweaters are wearable and flattering to an average size and shape figure. The inevitable animal prints (giraffe and zebra) were dealt with with more originality than I'd expected.




"Bags - A Knitter's Dozen" from XRX books. (I'd post a cover photo here, but yet again, Blogger is fucking up.) Twenty-one bags to knit. There's a decent amount of variety here (not on the level of 'Folk Bags', but then I don't think anyone will ever top that one for diversity); felted, non-felted, beaded, traditional wools to ribbon yarns, you name it. The patterns are laid out in classic XRX style, which I like, but they're pretty stingy with schematics. I don't care if it's a damn square, I want to see a square with measurements written on it. And they don't deliver in that respect. They do the usual song-and-dance with techniques, with a bit on needle felting the only unusual thing. The drawback, as always in XRX books, is the photography. I can't see the damn bags. Sure the models look great. I don't CARE. I want to see enough of the bag that I can tell what I'm looking at. In many cases here, you can't. (There's one drawstring-bag type deal I think I want to knit, but there's no schematic and the picture sucks, so I'm still not 100% sure how it's constructed.)

It has occurred to me that bag knitting would use up some of these odd balls too. Heh. Hello, Christmas presents.



"Freeform Knitting and Crochet" by Jenny Dowde. I think I paid $18 USD for this book. The section in the front on color and design was worth the entire cost of the book. Which is good, because the rest of it is kind of eh. Many of the projects look like grandma using up extra scraps, which isn't what I'm shooting for when doing off-road no-pattern projects. And they don't make me go "Holy SHIT, how did she do that??!!?" like "Unexpected Knitting" still does after dozens of readings. (By golly, if I'm going to color outside the lines, I want it to look FANTASTIC. This is a failing of mine that dates back to childhood. At least I've quit crying when my experiments don't turn out just like I wanted them to.)

Still, I always enjoy learning how other people work, what they do for creative inspiration, and how they express it. So no, I don't feel ripped off by the book. But it's not something I would buy for patterns. Think of it more as an art book than a knitting book, and choose accordingly.




TELEVISION:
It's always a challenge around here to find something we agree on to watch. I lean toward general history and science, the husbeast prefers military history and dumb movies, and The Baby always wants cartoons. Add in that I don't like The Baby to see violence on TV (I've given up on profanity, with the way we speak), and the few TV shows we can find, we end up devoted to. Here are a couple we've really enjoyed lately. You may find them boring or uninteresting, but they should be completely inoffensive.

"How it's Made" is a Canadian show (yay, Canukistan!) that essentially does factory tours and shows how, duh, things are made. From hockey gloves to baby chickens to aluminum foil to gummy bears, if it's manufactured, they've either done a segment on it or are planning to. It's usually on in the early evenings when we're all running around doing dinner, playing with the baby, and otherwise doing "Husbeast just got home" stuff. Dinner preparation has been known to halt while I watch how they make plate glass. Or buttons. Or cotton yarn. Or...

"Good Eats" is a cooking show by Alton Brown on the Food Network. Imagine the biggest science geek you know, being trained as a chef, and doing his own TV show. And don't forget to add in the really goofy sense of humor. The guy won a James Beard Award for his book - the one that contained recipes for corn dogs and home-made pop tarts. The man is mad. I love him. Plus you can get all his recipes at foodtv.com. I suggest the Chocolate Lava Muffins.



And lastly, BLOGS:
I normally don't comment on other blogs here because we all kind of know each other from the comments or mentions in other knitting blogs, etc. But these are two that aren't knitting blogs.

Opera Chic is the ongoing tale of an American woman living in Milan who is an opera and classical music fan. I mainly read it for the dish, which is hilarious even if you have no idea who half the people are. She's also got some nice commentaries on classical music if you enjoy that (I do). But it's all about the dish. The latest scandal is a production of Salome in Rome that features the heroine running about naked or scantily clad (g-string) for much of the performance. Click here for one of the most hilariously censored photos I've yet to see on the 'net.

And lastly, a photography blog, Strobist. Or rather, a lighting-for-photography blog. I skim it most days, but he offers a lot of very good advice for anyone whose knitting photos never turn out right (like me?) I've just begun reading, but I forsee a great improvement, soon.

Get the oxygen.

I just figured out that this undyed yarn shipment this morning contains three miles of sock yarn.

THREE.

MILES.

I DON'T EVEN KNIT SOCKS.

I'm now going to go breathe into a paper bag.

Fiber content.

I tried to take the weekend off knitting, because my hand was bothering me, and met with iffy success on the project. To feel like I was doing SOMETHING, I felted all the containers I'd knit recently:

From left to right; "Pueblo Pot" from the 2007 knitting pattern calendar, knit with two strands of Brown Sheep Sport. The Cookie Monster Bowl, from the Second Treasury of Magical Knitting by Cat Bordhi, blue yarn one strand Elann Uros Aran (half llama, half wool) and the pink two strands of Brown Sheep Sport held together. And the former flower pot cosy, now felted down to be a soda can cosy, from the 2007 knitting pattern calendar and also done with two strands of Brown Sheep Sport. (I've got a whole lot of leftover BSS from various projects. I plan to keep knitting containers until it's gone and then haul them all to Ohio next Christmas and give them away.)

By the way, if you ever felt Uros Aran, it sheds like CRAZY. Like little drifts of blue fuzz all over the floor crazy. If you're using a washing machine, stop the cycle before it pumps the water out and swish your arm through and pull out any clumps of fiber you can feel. (Some people use a hand-held kitchen strainer to do this, but it's more trouble than it's worth to me.) Loose fibers can clog the pump and kill your washer. That's bad. If you do a rinse cycle, stop it and do another fiber grab for any more that came loose. But I can't think of a better yarn for felted children's toys, it comes out almost like fur.

If you're doing something like this, same yarn, different containers and patterns and with the final intention of making up some of your own (I've got an experimental on the needles right now), you can do this on the first one:

Those little yellow bits are cotton yarn I tied there BEFORE felting, ten stitches wide and ten rows high. That way I have a fairly accurate gauge idea for anything new I want to knit. However, everything felts a little differently, even the same yarn knit with a different pattern or into a different shape. But at least this way you have a ballpark guess.



Yesterday I also dyed yarn. This was experimental stuff to try some new techniques before I dug into the sock yarn I ordered. The skein of autumn colors turned out fairly nice, but the purple one was a disaster. (I'm calling the color scheme "Purple Train Wreck" and have no intention of repeating it.) I'll take photos of them once they're dry and I've skeined them up properly.

I've identified the problem with purple food coloring. (If you read blogs or articles where people dye with food coloring, there are often comments about purple acting strangely, and it is usually blamed on the vinegar. It's not the vinegar.) The blue and red chemicals that make up the purple food coloring 'take up' (stick to the yarn) at dramatically different speeds, so what really happens is your yarn turns pink and the blue runs off. Yesterday I tried several things, including adding more blue. I'll call it a mixed success. I got a couple shades of purple that don't make me gag, including a nice dark grape shade, but all of them will be hard to repeat on purpose. For the next experiment I'm going to try a two-part process with actual pink and blue and see how THAT works.

Then, this morning, I got twelve skeins of sock yarn and four skeins of laceweight in the mail. I'm heavily drugged and I'm wondering if I can skein the stuff without screwing it all up. But at any rate, the laceweight is 100% merino and REALLY nice. I'm thinking of keeping some of it. (We knew this would happen, didn't we?)

Oh, and just so you know, if the baby falls into the bathtub, don't laugh at her while you pick her up. It pisses her off. Even if she DID look like Chevy Chase doing a Gerald Ford imitation. (There was no water in it and I was right there. She was WAY more angry and surprised, than hurt.)

Baby + cold medicine =

Bamboo vs. Wood.

Ecologically speaking, bamboo grows way faster than trees, so the obvious choice for renewable lumber is bamboo. But on the other hand, trees are better for the soil (generally speaking) and do amazingly good things for the water cycle, plus put off more oxygen than grasses (again, generally speaking). So to grow trees for lumber is actually a good thing for the environment. In this case I'd say it's six of one and half-dozen of the other, in terms of which is better.

But that's not what I was thinking when I said there were botanical reasons bamboo is better than wood for knitting needles. Take a gander at our lovely illustration.
It's too small to read the details, but really, all I wanted to show was how plant and animal cells are different. See how the plant cell has walls? It's square-ish? Plants build walls between each cell, which gives everything structure, like a wall of bricks. Animal cells, on the other hand, have no walls and are watery blobs that need skeletons or else they ooze around like octopuses. (Octopii? Squids. Like squids.) Cell photo from here.

All rightie. So plants have a skeleton, so to speak, at the cellular level. For some plants, like grasses, that's the only structure they have. Other plants, like trees, produce what science types call "secondary growth" or "woody growth" which is, yes, wood and acts as a skeleton for honkin' big trees. (To some degree, that is where tree rings come from.) Grasses rely entirely on their little cell walls for structure, wood has cell walls and woody growth.

This means, to a knitter, that the material bamboo knitting needles are made out of is much finer, smoother, and more flexible than wooden needles. I guess it's really a matter of opinion which one of them is better, depending on what you're looking for in your needles. I think bamboo is better due to the slight flex, but then that's just my opinion.

But at any rate, that's what makes wood and bamboo needles different. I have left out a bunch of stuff involving primary, secondary, and apical meristems, and have totally left out the intercalary meristems which have no relevance but which I think are cool. Hope it wasn't too painful.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a small war to fight with some purple food coloring.

ALL RIGHT!

Who came into my house and took my fifth Brittany Birch size five double-point? I KNOW it was one of you. Who was it?

Some photos.

Since the last couple posts were really text-heavy, here are some photos to balance things out.


First, this is my mother-in-law in her 2005 Christmas sweater. I worked on it while I was in the hospital having The Baby, and unlike the last sweater I discussed, this one has only good memories attatched to it. It's an E. Lavold pattern from one of her first couple books.

This is one of those "I really should knit a copy for me" kinds of sweaters.



And a baby photo, just because. She was reaching for the dangly hang-on strap of the camera.




And last, so you may all envy me, a shot of the husbeast fixing his work coveralls this morning.

Yup, that's right, HE DOES HIS OWN SEWING. He claims that since it's a machine, he's able to do it. I don't care how he does it, I'm just glad he does.

Get the ink blots.

This kind of has to do with knitting, in that it was a knitting issue that started it and knitting blogs that are making me boggle.

Specifically, it's about the Blue Moon Fiber Arts mess they had with their bank (if you heaven't heard yet, click and read, it's been all over the 'net and I'm not doing another recitation). And for a bit of background, I was a bookkeeper for many, many years before I busted up my hand and couldn't hold a pencil for forty hours a week any longer. So I know a good bit about small-business banking and related crap. Plus I'm related to an accountant if I need advice.

Long story short, their bank totally fucked up. I suspect their behavior was legal, strictly speaking, but it was horribly bad business practice. The Blue Moon ladies dealt with it calmly and professionally and to my knowledge are up and running again with a new bank less than a week later. What's interesting, though, is how other knitters are responding to the situation.

First, of course, were the calls for retribution. I was thinking 'give us their e-mail address and let us crash their mainframe' - computer geek that I am, but most of it was a desire to know the bank's name so that complaint letters could be issued. That's a fairly average response, I would say. Someone suggested that everyone should knit a sock and mail it to the bank, which was rather inspired; peaceful and to the point. Ultimately cooler heads prevailed, pointing out that nothing would help the deeds already done, and it was all moot anyway, what with Blue Moon keeping their council. (I don't blame them for not wanting to be responsible for a flood of hate mail, deserved or not. That's just more bad business practice, and right now they're golden, best to keep it that way.)

Then there were the other comments. Somehow the commenter's views got tied to the issue. (Isn't that always the way?) A lot was said about how women in business get treated like shit and this was just another example of it. It got expanded, at least in one case I will not link to, into a huge riff on how this is further trampling on the rights of women, and yadda yadda yadda. How did this get to be women's rights? It's not about women. It's about dumbasses at a bank who can't be bothered to investigate before they make (stupid) policy. I'm sure psychologists would have some term for this, but I call it "Oh, geez, get a grip." (Having done small business accounting stuff in three states, I'm here to tell you, ALL small businesses get treated like shit. Gender doesn't enter in, except in the eye of the beholder.)

THEN, in one case that I know of, there was the "Let's get a laugh out of this" response. January One decided that the best way to help Blue Moon was to get more people addicted to their sock yarn. (Sort of like drug pushers creating addicts, but different.) So she put out a call for "Socks that Rock virgins" on her blog, promising to do a drawing and give away ten hanks of the stuff from her own stash, thereby - according to her - creating ten more customers for Blue Moon. Soon the comments filled up with almost EIGHT HUNDRED often hilarious stories of why people were sock knitting virgins and why they needed that yarn. Blue Moon got wind, read the comments, and had such a laugh that they donated more yarn to give away, and, long story short, THIRTY hanks of Socks That Rock were given away on her blog. Even if she doesn't create thirty sock-knitting addicts, giving the Blue Moon ladies a good laugh was the best possible thing to have done in this situation.

It is fascinating, to me, how different people deal with the same issue.

Community.

That was my primary goal when I started this blog, to meet people on line and develop some kind of friendship with people. Specifically, knitters. I'd joined the local Stitch and Bitch (Summerville chapter) when we moved here, and had an extremely bad experience with them (they meet at private homes and un-invited me after I skipped a couple meets due to being eight months pregnant - among other things they kicked me off their PUBLIC Yahoo e-mail loop). My experiences with Knitty had been almost entirely positive, and so I figured the on-line knitting community HAD to be friendlier. I was right. (I got one or two snarly e-mails after the history of knitting article, that was about it. And even then, they stuck to the subject and didn't make it a personal attack.)

I kept telling myself that I needed to get out and meet people here in Charleston, but that voice in the back of my head (you know the one) kept saying, we're only going to live here four years, so what's the damn point? (Yes, I'm aware that's a really unhealthy attitude. Like you've never had one?) So, I started up the blog, and between occasional Knitty articles and blog searches and the like, I now know more knitters in Australia than I do in my home town. I am goofy enough to think this is cool. Regardless of where I move to, if I've got an internet connection, I'm in touch with my community. No more losing my entire life when I move, like happened when we left Hawaii.

Now, the idea of moving still pisses me off, but it doesn't fill me with dread like it did. What's particularly nice is, the people I've met IN Charleston, I've met through the internet, so I know that even if I move, odds are good we'll stay in touch. There is a point.


So, anyway. Blogging and community. The way knit-bloggers interact seems to be completely different than any other blog type; I do read a few other blogs (mostly cooking blogs) and generally, the dynamic isn't the same. No swapping, no hooking up in real life, no meeting at festivals or whatever, no private e-mail conversations, just a blog and some friendly (usually) comments. Which is FINE, but in comparison knit-blogging is amazing.

I've always thought that when you expect good of people, they usually rise to the occasion. The on-line knitting community is a shining example of that. I do not envy the Yarn Harlot her blog (300+ comments per day? Does she have time to DO anything else?? She can't possibly keep all her regular commenters straight in her head), but I am impressed by how she manages it and what she uses it for - mostly networking, education, and of course charity fund-raising. A quarter of a million dollars for Doctors Without Borders. That is unreal. Particularly when you consider that the majority of that was probably raised in donations of $100 or less at a time.

I've seen a little of that here, too, the determination to be positive and kind. While I refuse to discuss religion and politics as a nod to community spirit (I'm a moderate in both areas, and somehow manage to offend BOTH sides of every issue), I've still produced some major rants and of course the language is not what you'd call polite. And yet everybody is cool. I've never had a negative comment. Disagreeing opinions are expressed politely and reasonably, and can be discussed. When you consider I've posted about once a day for an entire year, blasting it out to anyone with an internet connection, that's quite a record.


I think I've rambled on long enough. At any rate, I'm going to start adding links to blogs I read regularly over in the side bar. (If you've ever left a comment here that I could track back to your blog, I put you in my regular read folder. Community, dudes.) Give me about a week to get the whole thing together. If, after that, you're a regular reader with a blog and I don't have you linked, drop me a line and I'll put you up.

Hats off to all of us, and yay for community.

Good. Gods.

Um, llama wool yarn? Like "Uros Aran" from Elann.com? It felts. A lot. And it gets fuzzy.

This bowl looks like I hunted down the Cookie Monster, shot him, skinned him, and made a bowl of his pelt.

Pictures coming when it's dry.

Hey, lookit.

The Baby finally wore out an article of clothing!

See the holes in the knees? I'm so proud. (They're 12 month size. If I had quit squeezing her into them after they were too short, they wouldn't have worn out, but screw it, we finally have worn out clothing.)

Of course, the reason the knees are worn out is because the little shit still won't walk:

We call it 'knee walking' and obviously it's not worth a whole lot outside the house, so she still gets carried or put in a stroller everywhere. She's got a little rocker in the living room, and the other day I noticed she would sit in the rocker, then STAND UP, balanced perfectly, and do a little booty shake, and then sit down again. Like a game. BUT SHE STILL WON'T WALK. She crawls over to the kitchen counter or the dining room table or my desk, stands up, gets up on her TIP TOES to drag stuff off, but she still won't walk. Argh.




Oh, and an opinion poll. (I keep asking questions and demanding answers... this isn't a deliberate attempt to get comments out of you guys, honest. Though it's not breaking my heart or anything.)

Do the projects you knit wind up kind of intertwined with whatever events were going on in your life, when you knit it? "Oh, that's the sweater I was working on when ---" ? Because I've realized one of the reasons I'm so indifferent to the blue and black Ganser when I should be thrilled is, I started it the last months in Hawaii, worked on it as we were moving around between houses, literally was knitting on it on our last flight out of the islands... It's all tangled up with all that and so I look at it and kind of go "feh". Anybody else have that kind of thing going on?

And if you do get that kind of thing going on, here's the million dollar question: how do I get rid of it? Because I don't want to be indifferent to a sweater I've spent, geez, like a hundred hours knitting.




At any rate, I did about five rounds of the sleeve last night while watching a movie, and today want to finish the moebius bowl and felt it and another pot I knit last week. I'm going to have to cut back on my knitting for a couple days because my hand is bothering me. Damned hand.

Gulp.

I hope you guys are serious about wanting Samurai Dyer yarns (oh, like I could name it anything else). Because if not, I'm now stuck with a dozen balls of sock yarn and 3200 yards of laceweight merino.

I'm trying to figure out how to do a special for regular readers. Any ideas on that?

And while I'm asking questions... Lace weight yarn. Nobody seems to be dyeing it in bright colors. Is that because no one will KNIT bright-colored lace, or because the dyers THINK that? I wasn't thinking neon yellow, particularly, but some dip-dyes of aqua, bright leaf green, maybe peach/orange or pink/rose/PINK.

Anyone?

Anyone?

Bueller?

Vigo, babysweetiehoneydarling

Joy!

I found it on a Norwegian (I think) web site, here. Check out the patch on the cuff of the sweater. That baby is Dale of Norway. I could probably look up the pattern if I were so inclined, but I'm not.

Just a little something to inspire our Norwegian knitting.

Excuse me while I wipe the drool off the keyboard.

Musings.

I just spent fifteen minutes trying to do a screen capture of Vigo Mortensen in a Dale of Norway jacket. I don't know if it's some anti-piracy BS or my own ineptitude, but I can't get the damn thing to paste to Paint properly. At any rate, the image can be found in "The Passing of an Age" on disc four of the director's cut of Return of the King. It's in with all the discussion of the different world wide premieres of the movie; the one he wore the sweater for was the Oslo premiere, of course.

Stupid programmers.

Anyway.

I'm thinking anything remotely Scandinavian for a Strikke-Along in the fall. "Norse Strikkedesign" is of course the obvious go-to place for patterns. "Poetry in Stitches" is also nice. "Traditional Scandinavian Knitting" by Sheila McGregor contains enough information to design your own norgi. "Knitting in the Nordic Tradition" by Vibke Lind is also great, if you can find it (I think it's out of print, but I first saw it in a library, so you never know). "Two-Ended Knitting" by Anne-Maj Ling contains all the info you need to knit a two-ended sweater, a technique that might be Swedish, but I'm sure it's Scandinavian of some kind.

"Knitting in the Old Way" by Gibson-Roberts and Robson contains the information you need to knit any traditional sweater, from anywhere, to any gauge, with any yarn, if you are so inclined. It uses the EPS (Elizabeth's Percentage System, developed by Elizabeth Zimmerman, which we are using on the steeked jackets), and breaks it down into, I think, fourteen different styles (eighteen?) including yoked sweaters, raglans, drop-shoulders, and five or six other sleeve/shoulder treatments. This book, and the EPS in general, is my starting place for any design I develop myself. So if you're of a mind to make your own norgi, it's for you.

We'll start it up sometime in September or October and give us all a long time to find a book, find a pattern, budget in the yarn, and otherwise pull ourselves together.

How's that for a whole post with no real details in it? Hah.

Just had another go at screen-capturing Vigo. No joy. But I'm sure that's a Dale sweater - the tag is on the sleeve.

Dude, this is MESSED. UP.

I lost my head a little.

The Cat Bordhi book was just sitting there, with the yarn and the Denise set, and when I finished the Steeked Jacket body it was kind of crying out, and, well...

That's a moebius band (with three twists) in the middle of an applied I-cord bindoff. I meant to take photos of the cast-on and the knitting process, but I was too busy going "Dude. This is just so messed up." The cast-on is related to the figure-eight seamless cast-on for toe-up socks, if you've ever done that. You coil the circular needle around twice and knit from the center of the band, outward toward the edges:

The cast-on was where the stockinette an the reverse-stockinette bits meet. (Apparently I was supposed to knit and purl alternately on the rounds, and I just knit. Too busy going "Dude..." to read the directions.)

The husbeast took a look at it and asked 'When was the last time you knit a plain old square?' and I've been thinking about it, and, honestly, I can't remember.

Here's what I've got as of today:

Next, I pick up around the outside edge, keeping the three folds intact, and knit a bowl. The one in the book is VERY cool, I'm hoping this prototype will lead to some neat-looking yarn-user-uppers that I can unload as gifts next Christmas. (It's never too soon to think about Christmas.)

The Baby has begun a career in modern art.

She calls this installation "Alone" and explained to me it is supposed to echo with the primal one-ness of the juice cup, all alone in the midst of the shoes. I'm thinking maybe she needs more time with her Play-Doh. (If only she'd quit eating it.)



I am brooding over the Strikke-along idea and I think we should allow anything remotely Scandinavian (Dale of Norway, anyone? Latvian mittens?), not just sweaters from "Norsk Strikkedesign". (Considering this current Ganser is knit with American wool using Scottish steeks and modern hems, I am in no position to sneer about validity of tradition.) We could do it in the fall. I'll brood over it some more and maybe offer up a suggested reading list one of these days soon.

Bugs.

We've had bugs of all kinds around here at House O' Samurai. The Baby's at that stage of life where she catches every germ imaginable while her immune system figures out what to do with them. Half the time I catch them from her, and her runny nose and sniffle turns into a full-on chest cold for me - you know how it goes.

Computer bugs and sleeping off germ bugs have thus far kept me from posting the baby video over on You Tube, but I'll get to it soon, I swear.

Then there are the knitting bugs:

I had hoped to have the body of the steeked jacket done today, but I discovered a HUGE mistake in the pattern (committed while knitting and reading again - you'd think I would learn) and ripped back two rows and put it all back on the needles. I've got four rows to go and it's done - maybe tonight during Mythbusters.

I was also plotting how to do some crazy Cat Bordhi felted moebius-cast-on bowl thingie (it's all about felted containers at the moment), and had picked the yarn out of the odd balls in the stash: two balls of llama yarn leftover from the watery llama scarf, and one ball of purple/pink left over from the chainmail sweater (from "Knitter's Almanac" by EZ) that I knit in, uh, like 1999 or something.

And I realized, as usual, I was arranging it so that everything I worked on was the same color. Again. Bugger that. So I'm hitting my fallback plan.


I think it's about time "Innsvinget Ganser" had a second sleeve, don't you?

EDITED TO ADD: "Innsvinget Ganser", aka Princess-line Gansey, is from the book "Norsk Strikkedesign" from Unicorn Books, page 50. I've considered, for 2008, declaring it the year of this book and knitting my way from cover to cover, since I want 90% of the sweaters shown in the book. If anyone else has a copy or is interested, perhaps we could do a single-sweater "Strikke-along" one of these days and we could all knit something, knitters choice. Maybe in the fall?