last weekend on saturday we had an open day at the k:ita and i displayed some wool and circuitry. thanks to all who passed by, even in the freezing un-heated conditions and despite the window-rattling audio from the installations on either side of my studio. thanks also for those who brought me heat, those who brought me drinks, and those who came to chat and pet some wool and circuitry.
we finally have net again. i hate our “premium-alternative” isp. i spent hours (much to my coworkers’ chagrin) literally yelling on the phone to try to get our case escalated. we pay for business class service and we got the worst customer service i have ever experienced (and that is saying a lot since i used to be an att customer in new york city). anyway, now the bandwidth is back and i can upload to my heart’s content. so pictured here is a scarf i made from my own handspun, from merino dyed by the lovely andrea. i’ve been quite ill (not from lack of internet but it may have been stress-induced from spending an hour a day on hold with incompetent nincompoops) and the only thing i could do was stay in bed and knit plain ol’ stockinette.
yesterday i managed to step out of bed long enough to sort some stash and make a decorative window display. yeah my brain goes on vacation when i am ill, but it can still sort out colors.
dude, schneier, please please don’t write a rant that can so easily be blown out of proportion by other persons in the media. ok, i know we should be paranoid about all pseudo random number generators, but frankly all the media will read out of this piece is: ecc is b0rk3d omg!!11!!!11!
it really irks me that people crap on ecc (elliptical curve cryptography) just because they haven’t taken the time to look into some of the excellent literature on ecc’s use (and abuse, this is security, everything is broken as some point in time). even math kids should be studying up on this because wow is the math behind ecc fun.
that’s all i’ve got today. and it’s quite enough because it is so soft and squishy! i can’t wait until my singles are more even, but the plying went well and the yarn is quite balanced even without a wash yet. the other half of the roving is waiting patiently for me to spin it up! it various from a fingering to sport weight and is superwash merino from vesper rovings in the “scales and tails” colorway. yum.
yep this wheel wins a prize. i was hoping to have some semi-even sock weight singles in a month or two, but day three? holy mackerel i want to give hugs to the entire kromski family. thank you for making a gorgeous spinning wheel even a beginner can have fun on! in case you were wondering, there was another 50 grams or so of that purple alpaca/corriedale i spun up this morning before i attempted to break into the good stuff. my advice to beginning spinners (as i thoroughly AM a beginner, these last singles are in no way perfectly spun), do learn on a drop spindle first because it will make the first weekend with a new wheel so much fun. thank you thank you thank you Elemm for teaching me, and no don’t worry, i won’t send you the bill for the piles of roving i just bought off of etsy, but man, THANK YOU for a lovely obsession. (there is even an etsy indie dyer who at the moment is living in germany for those of you in deutschland, and she has GORGEOUS stuff).
spinning geek details:
– pictured above is a total of 72 grams (half of what i have) of superwash merino in the “scales and tails” colorway from vesper rovings
-spun on the slowest whorl on a kromski minstrel, spun worsted
-in some places i separated out the colors to make longer color runs and didn’t spin straight from the roving as it was dyed
-plied together it will make a fingering weight sock yarn
some prettily turned wood arrived yesterday in pieces and became this:
which led to these:
which last night finished up as this:
yes i love my new kromski minstrel, and i can highly recommend wollinchen as she included all sorts of extras and color cards as well as turned around an order to my doorstep in less than a week. the two skeins in the middle pictured above are navajo plied, the two on the outside are two ply. they aren’t even, but the skein in the right is over 100 grams and today i think i spun another 50 grams of that alpaca/corriedale purple as navajo, and 80 grams as a thin 2-ply. i started with 500 grams of the alpaca/corriedale and i have 200 grams left. that combined with the 100 grams of bfl (red/black/white) means i spun up 400 grams yesterday and today. yes i guess that means my minstrel and i are getting along wonderfully. *smile*
these socks were finished ages ago, back in june. they were never properly documented because of my unplug and various other stuff. many many many requests have come back for the pattern i used, but frankly it’s a kludge of many patterns which i will document for you here. i really liked the lace pattern of hedera, (which is a top-down sock) but i wanted to do toe-up knee highs. when you knit them top-down the lace pattern “arrows” point toward the toe and i wanted that same look. so i redesigned the lace pattern for the sock and with cookie‘s permission i am posting the “almost exact opposite of hedera” stitch pattern here below:
i was inspired by the sodera sock mod of hedera, but i wanted a more traditional looking toe-up gusset. i also am a huge fan of the simplicity and look of the magic cast on for toe-up socks. so the “instructions” go a little like this:
1. cast on with magic cast on 16 x 16 (16 on each side of the magic cast on, total 32 stitches) or fewer on each side if you want a longer, pointier toe. increase every other row as described in the magic cast on technique until you have 60 stitches. i knit using magic loop on a 2.5mm addi turbo circular, but you can use dpn’s or two circulars if you prefer.
2. knit foot as for sodera socks, but substitute the chart above.
3. when you are about 3.5 [<– edited to correct this] inches away from the length of your foot, start the gusset increases as described in baudelaire, following the 60 stitch size (smallest). continue and then follow the heel pattern from baudelaire.
4. for the leg of the pattern and cuff follow sodera but stay with the chart pictured here above.
5. choose a nice colored ribbon (i usually wear one that is bright blue, shocking i know, blue and black, who could have guessed that from me?) and use some flat elastic (sold as underwear elastic) in the cuff as described in sodera.
these are a long project but work wonderfully in dark solid colored yarn. i used an inexpensive black superwash sock yarn that came in 100 gram skeins (mondial ciao), but i really wanted to use regia silk. none of the local yarn stores had more than two 50 gram skeins of black regia silk from the same dye lot. one sock used 62 grams and the other 63, for a total of 125 grams. i wear them quite often as i tend to wear black knee-length skirts almost as often as jeans. the ravelry link for this project is here and all the project photos are here. Viel Spass!
in the last few weeks of socktober, i didn’t manage to finish the socks i was working on, but i did crank out two shedir hats, one blue, one khaki out of the single balls of rowan calmer elisa brought me back from her trip to seattle. i love a pattern that uses single balls of yarn but it’s a bit like candy — an addiction that incites one to knit it up in all the colors you have on hand. i think this is the first time that i have knit the same pattern twice in two weeks (unless of course if you count socks or sleeves which require that you knit the same pattern twice). i also did some swatching from the japanese let’s knit 12 i received, i swatched for pattern 7 (details here and pictured below). it is quite pretty but all those twisted stitches would likely cause my hands to fall off before i completed an entire sweater of the pattern. i will swatch a few more from that book before i move onto what i really wanted to do this month: design a sweater. so we shall see how the heck that shapes up, i really have no idea what to expect.
oh and for all of you out there that think i’m already knutty for knitting, wait until you see what will be arriving from poland (via deutschland) in a week or so. i can give you a few clues, it starts with a “k” and ends with a “romski”. yep i really hankered for something other than a drop spindle. by the way, we made fun of elemm at benediktbeuern because he was spinning dental floss, but dang that is hard to do. major props to him for spinning gorgeous stuff on a spindle, and many thanks to him for the new addiction, i mean hobby. *smile* i can’t wait until i can make my own sock weight yarn. until then i have some gorgeous handspun sock yarn from the fabulous allspunup to tide me over.
finally something that works. i got my nokia e70 to work to share 3g over bluetooth with my macbook. i followed the how-to over here. following the instructions there i grabbed the nokia 3g scripts from Ross Barkman’s page and used the “NOKIA 3G CID1” script. then to make it work with base (my ridiculously cheap flatrate 3g provider), i used:
telephone number: internet.eplus.de
account name: eplus
password: eplus
now i’m off to wander the streets, connectedly of course.
what is luxurious to me may be frivolity to others, but i know what i like. when i was in nyc for the win get-together in 2005 i shared a bottle of Strub wine at a korean restaurant with my co-bloggers. little did i know that i would eventually end up living in the country where the wine was from and be able to order a half case of it for the same price as the whole bottle in new york. this is the second time i’ve ordered Strub and have to say that despite the fact that they use screw tops, the wine is excellent. the box of bottles is sitting in the hallway along with the bajillion other bags and boxes of stuff that will need to eventually be unpacked in our new place. yes we are officially moved in!
the other luxurious items to arrive during the move were these two japanese knitting books and some posh yarn 4ply 100 percent cashmere for socks for myself. i have joined a kal for the “let’s knit” japanese series. i am firstly going to swatch for sweater number 7 in let’s knit 12. the other book is a beginner book for knitting gloves and mittens. i particularly like the step-by-step pictorial instructions (helpful since my japanese is non-existent). the cashmere with its lovely muted blue, violet and green is aptly named “stormy sea” and is, as expected for cashmere, incredibly soft.
lastly on this list of luxury, i present to you, the scotch-filled chocolate. this is yet another reason i need to visit switzerland again soon, to be able to marvel at the incredible chocolate choices. for now i will rejoice in the fact that my local grocery store is temporarily carrying this scotch-filled confection. i hope your weekend is filled with your own luxuries, small or expansive, and that at least you are accorded the biggest luxury of all: some free time.
fabienne.us 