Needles & hooks

Adventures in Harlotry…

…or “I saw that on the Internet!!”

Last night The Giant Glove and I went on a little excursion to meet The Yarn Harlot. In the middle of the afternoon, I exchanged vehicles with my friend because The Hand won’t fit in my Honda Civic. We loaded it into the back seat of her extended cab pickup and I climbed up into the largest vehicle I have ever driven for the 90-mile trek to Webs.

Because there were 600 people registered for the event, it was held a little distance away from the store at a theater. I got there around 5:15 and took a seat near the back. My goodie bag contained a ball of red Cashmerino Aran and pair of Boye straight needles. I pulled out a smaller glove to knit on and settled in. At 6pm, Stephanie took the stage and entertained us for about an hour. She took questions for another half hour. At the first bit of final applause, I was up and out the door so I could drive The Hand to the store and get in line.

When I got to the store, the employees were all thrilled to see The Glove. And as luck would have it, we (The Glove and I) were first in line for the signing. I sat down and waited. I fielded a number of questions and The Glove received a lot of attention.

Around 7:45, the signing began. A few people had been placed in a priority line for various reasons and they were allowed to go first. I held back and shielded the Glove so their Harlot time was not hijacked. Then it was my turn. I handed her my book to sign and said “Hi Stephanie, about 2 weeks ago you caused my blog traffic to explode when you posted a link to this…” and I pulled The Glove into her view. She was speechless for a minute and looked like this:

Then she finally said “I guess it wasn’t Photoshopped!”

She climbed over boxes and came around the table to take a photo of me sitting in the chair holding her Sock (I’ll link to her photo when she posts it). And then I got a picture of her sitting in it:

She signed my book and I moved The Glove off to the side, in front of a display of weaving shuttles, while I got down to the more serious business of shopping. On occasion, I came back near it to see people taking photos in or with it, and I overheard lots of “I saw this on the Internet!” I talked with people from time to time about it and was implored to take it on the road to places like Rhinebeck and MS&W. I suppose if I’ll be in town for the Boston Knit-Out this year, I’ll have to borrow the Truck again.

Around 9pm, I had paid for my purchases (that in a later post) and picked up The Hand. It gave a wave to the sales staff and I loaded it back into the Truck and drove home.

Already I’ve heard from one person who had a Glove Encounter last night. If you took pictures or wrote about it, I’d love to know! Send me an e-mail or leave me a comment and I’ll link you below.

Close Encounters of The Glove Kind
Robyn: Make sure to check out her baby boy cupped in the palm of The Hand.

Comments: 8 — Posted under: Absurd, yarn safari

And the answer is “no”

I started toe-up 2-at-a time, just to see if I could actually make a pair. I ran out just about where I needed to turn the heels. So, not enough yarn. I think I’ll take this with me to Webs tomorrow night and see if I can find something suitable for a solid color. Then maybe do feet solid and cuffs fun, or stripe it.

Comments: 2 — Posted under: Knitting

Yarn Intrigue

Is there enough of this yarn:

To make a pair of baby socks to match the Baby Surplice Jacket and Hat I posted yesterday? There’s 10 grams. It’s anyone’s guess.

Comments: 2 — Posted under: Knitting, Absurd

Mini Tour

Tomorrow night I’m heading out to Webs to see The Yarn Harlot speak. I’ll be bringing the giant glove with me. Don’t worry, I plan to spend plenty of time shopping after her talk, so there will lots of time to shake hands with the glove.

If you see me, give me a wave!

Comments: 1 — Posted under: Uncategorized

It’s the small things

I spent the last 2 days running errands and doing chores so that I could spend all of today “ass-sitting”. A pleasant pastime involving me, a couch, my Tivo, and knitting. It was foiled around 8am when our listing service called to tell me that they wanted to show my house at 11:30am. So the first few hours of my day were spent making the house presentable and then making myself scarce. But come 12:30, after a little lunch, ass it was.

Now, it’s not as ambitious as when I did the 24 Hours of Knitting, but I’m still hoping to knock a few things out.

First up, the cardigan set for my niece. I think last time we saw it, there were a lot of ends and the hat still needed pom-poms. Well, it’s all done now. It’s been done for a while, really. All that I needed to do today was take photos to show you:

The sleeves are a little poofy because I could have set them in better. But I don’t care.

And the hat:

The next thing I finished is the Baby Surplice Jacket I’ve been working on. I showed you that before. But it was missing a hat and buttons. Here’s the finished set:

What’s been holding this one up? This:

I needed to pick buttons. And not just any buttons. There’s a band of button holes around the bottom edge that allow it to be fastened at any size. So I didn’t want to sew the buttons on anywhere, I wanted cufflink-style buttons. But the best buttons I found weren’t shank-style, so I had to get creative to join two together. Some quality time with some 6-strand embroidery floss gave me this:

What did I do? I cut off a length of floss, about 18 inches, and threaded it through the holes on the button so that I had equal lengths of floss coming out the back side of the button. I separated each side into 3 sets of 2 strands each, and then matched each pair with one from the other side. That gave me 3 sets of 4 strands each. I braided these for about 1/2 inch. Then I separated them back and threaded each back through opposite holes on the back of the 2nd button. Each went around the front and back out the other hole. Back on the back side, I tied all the ends together in a knot, making sure everything was tight.

The next step was to give the braid some strength and to make sure that the knot doesn’t unravel. To do this, I tied the two ends together repeatedly, switching sides of the braid each time I tied them. I slowly climbed the knots up the length of the braid, back to the first button. This created a solid rope-like connection between the two buttons.

At this end, I could probably have cut off the strands and all would be fine. But for some added security, I separated the strands back out into sets of two and then ran each one back through the “rope” several times before snipping it off.

(p.s. for some reason, WordPress overwrote my theme with the default. I’m not sure why. It’s fixed now. But I am a little worried. Maybe that’s karma’s way of telling me I need to upgrade it!)

Comments: 5 — Posted under: Knitting

You know it’s trendy when…

Yesterday and today have been devoted to a variety of chores and errands. One of the chores is to go through my pile of mail and pay bills and recycle things. In the pile is a recent Ikea flyer advertising their textiles. Even though I’m in the midst of selling a house and not a place where I can actually decorate, I still like to look at Ikea catalogs and get ideas for the future.

One of the things Ikea is pushing right now is their fabric by the yard. Get it and make stuff with it. And the caption on one of the pages… “You’re so crafty. Oh, you’re not? Well, there’s so much you can do with fabric, even if you don’t sew (but you know, maybe sewing will catch on again, like knitting!).” (italics mine)

Comments: 2 — Posted under: Almost Random

Excel is my Master

Announcing the availability of another Hanne Falkenberg spreadsheet. This time for LaStrada, in the medium size. I didn’t create this one, I’m just distributing it, since I have the infrastructure in place. Anyway, if you’d like a copy, the instructions are always the same: e-mail me and I’ll send you a challenge question to verify that you own the pattern.

Comments: 0 — Posted under: Knitting

Short rows? Short rows! (an update)

Old post:
Okay, I’m having a senior moment. And I’m not even that old.

Anyway, in the last week or so, one of the blogs I follow pointed to another one that had a neat short-row technique. It might have been a way to do toes on a sock? All I can remember is that the punchline was “just try it”. Anyway, that pink and white thing I’m experimenting with uses short rows at the color change and I’m trying to figure out a way to make those gaps more manageable. I got it in my head that I should try that method, but now that I look for it, I can’t remember what I did with the link. And googling isn’t helping. So, if you have any clue what I’m talking about, if this rings a bell for you, please leave me a comment.

thanks!

Update:

The internet does it again. Vaguely describe something enough and someone will recognize what you are talking about. In this case, Donna pointed me to the post I was looking for. I should have been a little more clear, I do know how to do short rows with the wrap or gap techniques. What I was looking for was a non-hole, non-wrap technique I’d come across recently. And it was this post, about the Sherman toe with “encroachments”.

But thanks also to Patsy and Marianne for suggesting a few things. I’m off to go play with some scrap yarn.

Comments: 5 — Posted under: Knitting, Almost Random

We’ll just take our toys and go…

So, on a non-knitting mailing list I belong to (I know, hard to believe), someone asked about yarn charities and aside from rattling off the easy ones (Afghans, Dulaan), I got into a discussion with someone about Warm Up America and my frustration with them (I have a pile of squares sitting in a box because they want you to donate locally but don’t give you easy ways to find local recipients, and don’t get me started on their partnership with Michael’s Crafts).

Anyway.

I did a little Google research thinking that I really should send off my box of squares somewhere and I encountered what I’ve always found frustrating about yarn charities: there aren’t really good collections of them anywhere. Too many of them have limited lists of charities, too many links are broken because the charity no longer has a website, too many of them have changed their needs, etc. And the frustrating thing is, I know what needs to be fixed, but I can’t do it, because it’s not my page.

Now, I don’t want to start my own page that will fall victim to all of those same complaints. Hell, I can’t even always keep up with my Hanne spreadsheet requests (I’m caught up right now, I swear!). But if I’m going to the trouble of looking for specific sites and finding out what is current or not, well, I want to do something with it.

So I immediately thought of the best online evolving knowledge base out there - Wikipedia. And a quick look showed me that there were exactly two yarn charities listed: Project Linus and Knit A River. So I spent a little time setting up an account and creating a yarn charities page and making entries for Afghans and Dulaan and the Red Scarf Project. And just as I was about to go look for more to add, I got an ominous message — these entries were not “notable”. What?! (grr, stupid non-knitting geeks.) I tried to pump up my entries by making reference to the ones that were already there and by listing the famous knitters that support these projects and all the press that they have received. Didn’t matter, they were deleted anyway (as were the two that existed when I first started!). So I decided that rather than fight the battle with the muggles, I’d go off to find a better venue.

I couldn’t remember if there was a knitting wiki out there, and I had the means to make my own if not. Well, turns out there’s a fine one. It’s just a baby (started 2/2007) and it needs your love and support:

What’s a Wiki you ask? It’s a collaborative website, a big database of knowledge. Some are general, some are specific. Anyone who reads it can also add or edit content. So the best part is, if you read a page and think “Hey, they spelled that word wrong” or “How can anyone talk about Mosaic Knitting without mentioning Barbara Walker?!”, you can fix it! You don’t have to know HTML or how to make webpages to participate, but there is a bit of Wiki code that you might have to manipulate. There are plenty of help resources out there, and KnitWiki uses the same code as Wikipedia. And there’s a help mailing list at Yahoo for the Wiki as well.

I added the few yarn charity entries that I’d made for Wikipedia. I’m hoping to take over the Yarn Store Listings project, because big long lists of stores just aren’t manageable (so if you are inclined to add your favorite store, please wait a bit until the format gets worked out). And I’ve started writing small articles about whatever knit topic I come across most recently (today I created some pages about Yarn Forwards and Yarn Overs, and it grew from there).

Post a button on your blog (there are a bunch of choices). Talk about it. Go make an account. And go make it better! If everyone who reads this posts just one article, we could make it explode with knowledge! See this list of wanted pages, surely you know some of that!

Comments: 6 — Posted under: KnitWiki

What to do after a big FO?

Seriously? You want a giant glove pattern?!

I was half thinking about putting something together. Even sketched something out. But then I’d have to knit a prototype to test the pattern. And really, I don’t have that in me. And where would it end? Because a giant glove would need a giant hat. And a giant sock. And a giant scarf. And while “Knitting for Giants” is probably a new niche for knitting books, I think I’ll leave the giant pattern writing to others.

Instead, I started thinking about what to do next. I still have a pile of FOs that need attention. Some much less than others. But I figured that after finishing something so big, I really deserved to start something new. And while my realtor was having my first open house, I found myself returning things near a Fabric Place. So I wandered in and looked around at the yarn. And some ideas I’ve had for a pattern to support my Breast Cancer 3-Day Walk started percolating. And I bought some swatching yarn.

I went over to a friend’s house to pick up my cat, who was banished for the weekend, and sat and watched a movie with her. And hand-wound the new yarn. And started swatching:

But that’s all you get.

Comments: 3 — Posted under: Knitting