A Doubtful Guest

So this thing showed up on my porch chair. I invited it in.

It seemed harmless enough...

But then,
it just made itself right at home.

Really at home. It has no manners at all.

 NONE.

 

 

 

 Its a nosy parker,

fancies itself a literary critic,

and is a total couch hog.

David gave it a comeuppance.

 




 But they have since made up their differences.




Which is good, because it looks as if it means to stay for quite a while.

More about knitting

 

  
I'm not a serious knitter, by which I mean that I haven't been knitting since I was a wee sprat, and I spend less time making actual things than just dinking around. I've only been doing it regularly for about 5 years, or less. This means that I am still discovering things about knitting that are interesting.

For instance, I don't think about knitting the way people who design knitting patterns do- 'make 1 increase every 3 rows for 6 inches, then bind off 6 stitches using smaller needles...' I usually think something like 'well, I think I just gradually make it bigger starting here, and when it's long enough, I'll stop.' That kind of thing works fine for making simple shapes without any fancy textures, but for something more complex I'm still in the woods.

Therefore, swatches. I got the Barbara Walker stitch dictionary about the same time as I found a bag of mini skeins at goodwill. They're the perfect size for swatches: they're small enough that by the time I decide the yarn is too prickly, or the pattern is just stupid, I'm done anyway. I've learned some things about the nature of knitting this way:

Merino yarn really is a amazing as everyone says it is. It's lightweight, cushy, springy but not to springy, holds its shape well, and and looks a little glossy when worked up.

Fancy textures just look like crap when knitted in variegated yarn. No matter how beautiful that striped yarn looks with its 5 different colors in a ball, it will knit up a splotchy, uneven, formless mess. And you will not be able to see that fancy stitch clearly. Just don't even bother.

The most interesting thing that I've realized is that knitting has syntax. That is, patterns cannot be knitted backwards. In one sense, well duh. But it's why they don't reverse that is cool. Think of it this way- since knitting is basically just rows of loops going through other loops, it ought to work just as well if you go from the top to the bottom as from the bottom up, right? Not really. It works for plain knitting, because every row has exactly the same number of loops, and each loop stays in the same relationship to the other loops for the whole way. But if you knit a pattern, you change the relationship of each loop not only to the loops next to it, but in relation to the row before and the row after it! I'm sure experienced knitters would roll their eyes at me here. Whatever. The idea was a new one to me.

I tried to reverse the order of a particularly complex and beautiful pattern because I wanted a sweater knitted from the top down rather than bottom up. Did not go well. I never did manage to approximate anything like the original pattern, because I couldn't figure out the increases and decreases. On the other hand I gained an appreciation if swatching. Those are my swatches up there. I have a whole bag of them and they look like quilt pieces so maybe someday I'll make a very strange and off-putting cushion cover out of them.

Pachydermoids

I made some little elephants. The pattern is by Ysolda Teague, and the directions are just delightful to use. I used smaller yarn than called for, and smaller needles, but other than that I pretty much followed the directions exactly for the first elephant, and only made the ears different for the second, smaller one.

The bigger one looks pretty much like an elephant, so I added a tail, which the directions don't call for. I also didn't have enough yarn to make a whole elephant in gray, so I switched to red for the body so he looks like he's wearing a little onesie. I added a butt flap to complete the impression. He's stuffed with Poly fill. This makes him quite lightweight, and very squishy, which is nice, but his arms and legs are a bit stiff or something.

I made the next one on even smaller needles, but with the same yarn, resulting in a much denser knitted fabric. Partly I just thought the miniaturization would be cute, and partly I wanted to fill it with beans and thus needed to make sure the knitting was tight enough that the beans wouldn't work their way out. That aspect was perfectly successful: the beans gave it a nice weight and the arms and legs are appealingly floppy, and slightly poseable. On the other hand, the ears turned out a little unexpectedly. I think they look more elfin than elephantine. I like the construction of the alternate ears; they are flatter at the edges than the originals, but the proportions are a bit whimsical. I now have a strange little house gnome rather than an elephant. I think it needs a tail, but I'm not sure what kind, I'll have to think about it.

Here are more pictures.

Wow, it works!

  

  
I made a Rube Goldberg Machine, and it actually works! I've been knitting a lot lately, and given that decent yarn is terribly expensive, I took a notion to recycle the yarn out of sweaters from Goodwill. Which is all well and good, but it takes forever using a drop spindle.

Back when I did my initial experimentation, I had tried to figure out a method for using my treadle machine base to spin yarn, but my engineering was for crap and I abandoned the idea for several months. I was even seriously considering buying an actual spinning wheel to speed up plying the yarn I got out of secondhand sweaters, until I came across plans for building your own.

That's when I learned about scotch tension. See, when you spin yarn, 2 things need to happen. First, it has to get twisted. Second, the twisted yarn has to get wound up onto a spool or something. With the most basic type of spinning mechanisms, you spend a couple seconds twisting, than stop twisting while you wind up the string you just made. Scotch tension is a method for getting these 2 things to happen simultaneously!

As you can see, the gadget above has a spool (bobbin, in the parlance) mounted between 2 arms. The thing with the arms is the flyer. The flyer has a little wheel stuck on it, and the belt from the treadle table goes over the wheel and turns the flyer. This is what twists the yarn.

Well,  if the bobbin is sitting on the flyer, that means the bobbin is turning at the same speed as the flyer, and if all the flyer does is twist the yarn, how do you get the yarn wound up?

It is ridiculously easy: all you do is loop a little piece of string over the end of the bobbin, causing a teensy bit of drag. The bobbin will then turn just a little slower than the flyer, so that not only does the flyer twist the yarn, it rotates around the bobbin, thus winding and twisting at the same time.

The first time I read about how that works I thought well dang, that is just brilliant. I'd been looking at plans for spinning wheels that work using complex arrangements of drive belts and wheels with multiple grooves in different diameters calculated to cause various ratios of twist and take up, and it was all just too daunting. Scotch tension is so perfectly low-tech it's foolproof. Want your yarn less twisty? Tighten the string. Want your yarn to be more twisty? Loosen it. Want to make yarn faster? Pedal faster, silly!

Edit! Featured Instructable! Squeeee!!!!

Merry %$#@#ing Blah Blah!

&%$#$!

I am bah humbug, but David really wanted a hermit crab. I will name it Hubert.

Seriously?!?!

Hubert expresses my mood, which, while not exactly disagreeable, is not at all festive.

Well this is just humiliating.

 I do not like this kind of sillyness, but I am willing to acknowledge that other people do enjoy such things.

C'mere an say that t'ma face, son!

I don't wish anybody ill of the season, I just want you to know that I find most of the usual ceremonial observances terribly off-putting.

Does this butt make my shell look big?

I offer to encourage you in your particular enjoyment, in exchange for being allowed to go on much as I do any other day of the year. With more sleep. And more cookies, probably more cookies.

this message approved by the admiral.

Happy Christmakwanzaakha.

Epic Sock Project

It took me a year and a half to knit these socks. Mostly, I am just really glad to be done with them.

The technical stuff:

They are made of wool that I unraveled from a sweater that was really well made but terribly unflattering. Gauge, about 9 stitches/inch. Needles are a 000 40" circular, which I chose because I knitted them 2 at a time toe-up.
























They are far from perfect, because I fall much closer to the "project knitter" side of things than the "process knitter" side.

Things I like about them:

The ribbing at the top looks nice. I learned a new bind-off technique that allows the top edge to stretch very easily.
The fit at the ankle is nice and snug. No wrinkles or sags.
They're toasty warm- 100% merino!



Things I don't like:

That lace pattern isn't very stretchy. The ankles stay snug, but the knees don't.
And I really could have thought out the calf increases better. They're a little clunky looking.



Naturally, even though I swore the whole time that I would never do such a thing again, I started thinking about how to make the next pair better the minute I got these off the needle.We'll just have to wait  and see if that really happens.

the heck is that mess

 

 
That's my first and probably only attempt to spin my own yarn. I've been curious about spinning forever and thought I'd try it out. So I grabbed a little 1 ounce baggie of prepared wool when I was at the store the other day and spent some time trying out various home made contraptions for turning it into string. Some things I discovered are:

1. It takes more coordination than anything else. It isn't physically arduous, or complicated, but it reminded me of learning to pat my head and rub my tummy at the same time. Or rotate my arms in opposite directions.
2. There are some weird old men who like to do historical re-enactments having to do with spinning flax on youtube.
3. A drop spindle is about the most low tech thing you can get, but there are better ways to make them and worse ways. I found that a bent coathanger jammed into a rollerblade wheel was more effective than a thing made out of a CD and a chopstick. The important thing is weight. The rubber wheel had enough mass to keep the whole mess turning for a good while, whereas the CD was too flimsy and just stopped rotating.
4. Between the two iterations of drop spindle, I had the rollerblade wheel jammed under a belt that I operated with the treadle of one of my sewing machines. That was much faster, but was like learning to pat my head, rub my tummy, and rotate my arms in opposite directions all three at once.
5. One ounce of wool will not make enough yarn to make anything out of, at least not if you're a beginning spinner. I would knit a bunch of little aliens out of it, but it's so unevenly made that it would make some very misshapen creatures.

how it looks stretched out, before washing

At any rate, my curiosity is satisfied. I now know that making string is about as interesting as you'd expect it to be for about 2 hours, and then I'm pretty much done.

Success! Muahahaha!

 I made a yarn winder. It's ugly. Boy howdy is it ugly. But it works! Now all I need is a swift. 

Hey look, it's a pineapple!

 

 
This is a dinky version of the Big Damn Pineapple found on Knitty. I didn't have the commitment to make the whole version, so I cast on only half as many stitches as called for in the directions and ignored the stitch counts indicated in the rows. Instead of figuring out how many beads I was going to need, I just pulled up the loop of each stitch requiring a bead and slipped one on as I went along. It worked because I was using very fine crochet cotton that would fit through the beads when doubled. Needles were 00000 size.

I showed it to David. I said "Look at my knitting", and he said "Cool! it looks like a virus!" and I said "It's supposed  be a pineapple", and he said "Oh, right on, like Victorian clothing and stuff."

*sigh.*

He makes me so mushy.

Manly Mittens

 

 
I got a great big sack of yarn at goodwill. David needed some new mittens. He always pokes the fingers out of those cheap gloves he uses anyway, so I didn't put any fingers on his mitts. This used up one whole ball of very thick yarn, and a little bit of something else.

The blue yarn worked up to about 4 st/inch, the gray, about 5 st/inch. Fiber content unknown. They look like dryer lint. After my epic scarf project, I needed some instant gratification, these took only a few days of knitting on the bus during my commute.

I was really trying to not acquire even more stuff, but it's so rare to see any yarn at goodwill that isn't 100% acrylic Vanna's Choice or Red Heart or novelty Fun Fur yarn that no adult would want to wear that I snatched it up. There are a bunch of nice wools and a pair of lovely balls of lace weight yarn that might be alpaca. And about 8 balls of Fun Fur, but I'm going to knit Jej a vest out of those. She will never wear it, but her kids might.

David said something like "I want you to knit me a pair of underwear out of dryer lint" and I said really? and he said "No, I meant gloves." So there you have it.

Rush job

  

  
Lately, dinner has been an un-photogenic, ad hoc sort of affair. There have been a lot of nachos. There was a pretty tasty chicken and chick pea pottage, but pottage does not look as good as it tastes. Lots of fried tofu. One time we ate grilled cheese and carrot sticks. It was delicious.

But! I did make a noodle salad the other night which I got a photo of before we ate it.

1 lb tofu
1 T dark soy sauce
1 T fish sauce
dash of sesame oil

1/2 cup peanut butter
1/3 cup light soy sauce
1/3 cup rice vinegar
1T sesame oil
1T sesame paste
dash of cayenne

chinese noodles
2 cups broccoli florets
salt

sesame seeds
cilantro
yellow bell pepper slices

Cut the tofu into 1" cubes and press it firmly to squeeze as much water out as possible.  Toss the tofu in a bowl with the next 3 ingredients and let it sit.

Combine the next 6 ingredients. This is the dressing. Mix well.

Boil the noodles in salted water. When they are about 30 seconds from being done, toss the broccoli florets into the pot with them to blanch. When the water comes back to a boil, drain the noodles and broccoli together. Run cold water over them to stop the cooking and remove extra starch from the noodles.

Toss the nooles, broccoli and tofu together with the dressing, then decorate each serving with sesame seeds, pepper slices, and cilantro if you like it. I like it a lot.

"It works perfectly!" he said.

So, what the heck have I been doing all this time? I made a scarf. An epic scarf. 2 months and 55,000 stitches of knitted scarf for my brother's 40th birthday. After I dropped it off, I thought maybe I should have gotten a picture of it, but I was basically sick of looking at it.

He sent me this picture of himself modeling it. Pete's One Scarf rules them All.

The Yarnlings

Most of these were made last year, but this week I made several changes to the formula which is the mini alien pattern found here. If  you click over to my flickr photostream, you can see individual pictures of all of them, I think they're quite appealing. I gave them all names according to their personalities.

This really is a very excellent pattern, and all but the last two I made followed it exactly. I knitted them in the round on size 2 double pointed needles for the most part. Peeve and Bigfoot are the only ones I made on different needles, Peeve was made of sock yarn and requires a set of size 1's, and Bigfoot was made with a rather different beginning that required a circular #3.

This is Six

Six was my first attempt to alter the construction. I followed the instructions for the circular cast-on exactly, up to the point where you make bobble arms. After the first set of bobbles are made, knit 4 rows plain, then repeat the bobble row, and finish as directed in the pattern.

After Six, the notion I  had of making an alien with more pronounced lower limbs took hold of me, and I made Bigfoot. Bigfoot requires a circular needle, because I used my favorite start-in-the-middle cast on, found in this handy video. 

Bigfoot.

To make your own bigfoot, cast on 20 stitches according to the video. That's 10 on the top needle, and 10 on the bottom. On round 1, start by making a bobble, knit 8, make a bobble, knit 10. Knit rounds 2-7 according to pattern. Knit an extra round, maybe two, depending on how squatty you want the body to be ( I think I knitted 2 extra, because I wanted him taller). Continue following instructions from round 8 to the end of the pattern. Run a long tail of yarn through the remaining 6 stitches, and stuff the alien through the hole on the top. Pull the yarn tight,tie off, and decorate as you like.

None of these guys is very big. Bigfoot and Six are only about 3 inches tall, and Peeve barely tops an inch. Maybe that's why he's so irritable.

It's a Sweater

  

  
With a long floppy cowl neck. I started knitting again last month, and it has sort of taken over my life. I have become a Chick Who Knits On The Bus. People including a very old lady coming from the airport, a lady who spoke very little english, and a buffed up dude with a bunch of neck tattoos ask to see what I'm doing. They were all quite polite. I just don't know how I feel about suddenly having become a person who looks like they could be approached by strangers. Maybe if I knit in smaller gauges, the effort will make me scowl more. But maybe not. I tend to stare off into a middle distance while I knit.

In any case, I think I'll just resign myself. I spend up to an hour and a half on public transit per day, and whereas before, this was all wasted time, suddenly the bus ride is bonus crafty time. I now have a very nice sweater, and a pair of experimental knee socks that are too itchy to wear.

More socks are forthcoming. I'm sure the popularity of sock knitting has a lot to do with the fact that even the most ambitious sock project stays at a convenient size for schlepping around. As a side note, the yarn for the last two projects came from goodwill. The stuff for the sweater is very high quality, and was a joy to work with. It's all squishy and bouncy, and has a satiny kind of finish. I shudder to think what it would have cost if I'd bought it new. The socks are another story. The yarn seemed like it was all right to begin with, but once it was made up, it was just terribly uncomfortable.

The lesson is that high quality yarn is the only way to go if you actually want to use the things you make. It is particularly annoying to spend all that time and effort making something and then have it turn out to be intolerable once you put it on. Maybe some children of my acquaintance will want a pair of christmas stockings.

Wheeeeee Vacation!

But I want to show you some things I made recently before I go kiting off.

Item: octopus shaped dress.

Items: a gaggle of tiny aliens.

First day of vacation breakfast: Fried-egg salads & baguettes for 2.

There are more pictures of these gadgets on my flickr stream.

Later today: Beer Festival!