Month: April 2011

My Life According to Chip Taylor

This one came from Vicki, AKA Knitorious. If you want to play, you have to pick a different artist, one artist, and choose one of their song titles that best fits each question, preferably not repeating song titles. This actually was pretty fun. I saw these two perform together in Seattle a few years ago. Chip wrote “Angel of the Morning” years ago, one of the highlights of the evening was when Merrilee Rush, who performed it and made it famous, came up unexpectedly on stage to sing it with him.

MY LIFE ACCORDING TO Chip Taylor/Carrie Rodriguez (they sometimes play together, sometimes not)

Are you a male or female:
“Magic Girl”

Describe yourself:
“Sweet Dream Girl”

How do you feel:
“Angel Of The Morning”

Angel Of The Morning*

Describe where you currently live:
“Midnight On The Water”

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
“Oh Ireland”

Your favorite form of transportation:
“Same Damn Car”

Your best friend is:
“Hey Jonny” (john, of course!)

You and your best friends are:
“We Come Up Shining”

What’s the weather like:
“All The Rain”

Favorite time of day:
“Big Moon Shining”

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
“The Trouble With Humans”

What is life to you:
“Do Your Part”

Your relationship:
“I Can’t Help It If I’m Still In Love With You”

Your fear:
“Something About Losing It All”

What is the best advice you have to give:
“We Just Roll On”

Thought for the Day:
“What Would Townes Say About That” (Townes Van Zandt)

How you would like to die:
“Dance With Jesus”

Your soul’s present condition:
“Unglorious Hallelujah”

Your motto:
“Must Be The Whiskey”

I couldn’t find a video of this, but here’s a link to an NPR story about the two of them, click on the “listen” button, this is the first track they perform, and is about 2 minutes in on the audio.

Drop me a note if you decide to play along, I’d love to see what you all come up with.

*I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get that fracking video to embed here. You’ll need to go on over to fracking u-tube to watch. Some days I hate html with a blind fury fueled even hotter by menopause.

World Grits Day, 2011

Well OK, it was Thursday, not today, but we did have grits, and I took a photo to commemorate the event. Kris tuned me in to this several years ago with her Grits & Sticks contest, so I included knitting in the photo.

That’s a nice plate of shrimp grits, with the first rosé wine of the spring, and my True Blood Faery sweater. You will notice that the wine matches the sweater.

I’m clearly not going to reach my April goal on this project, which was to finish the bodice and start a sleeve. The whole thing is knit in one piece up to where it divides at the armholes. I was pretty sure I had gotten to that point already, but I keep knitting and knitting cable rows, then measuring and getting the exact same number. I still have about an inch to knit on the bodice before it splits, but I appear to be in limbo at this point.

Last but not least, the spammers have gotten more clever lately with the comments. My spam filter is pretty good, it rarely misses a spam comment, and even more rarely dumps a real comment in the trash. I do glance through them before I permanently delete them, mostly just for laughs. Here are a couple of the recent ones that make me laugh. I’m excluding all of the comments written in Russian, since I would have no idea what I was posting.

Can I simply say what a reduction to find somebody who truly is aware of what theyre talking about on the internet. You positively know tips on how to convey an issue to light and make it important. Extra folks have to learn this and understand this aspect of the story. I cant imagine youre not more popular since you positively have the gift.

Well, thanks!

Hello there, Are you going to be publishing a follow up piece? My husband and me have squandered some time browsing over your web page and surprisingly enough you touched on some thing we had been discussing only the other week with our accountant. We often notice ourselves quarrelling over the smallest of issues, isn’t it childish? At any rate we wish you greatest wishes from the Usa.

Sorry, no marriage counseling here.

This looks to be a very active website. How do you manage to keep up with filtering out all the comments?

Good question, good question.

I’m off to get some stuff done, have a great weekend!

Saved From The Fires Of Mount Doom

Or,

Finished Project!

Project Details:

Yarn: Sanguine Gryphon Little Traveler sock yarn, color is Penny Pot, NJ. Go check out her yarn, her colors and fiber bases are wonderful. This is superwash merino.

Pattern: What do YOU think? Same old pattern, 72 stitches around, top down, this one with a ribbed cuff. I put Wooly Nylon in the heels and toes.

Needles: 2.00mm Blackthorn needles. I like these, and the tips are absolutely the sharpest double points I’ve ever seen. I was worried that these would hurt my hands, since my one go-around with the Signature needles did (enough that I sold them), but these are fine.

Started: July 2010. I’m not kidding, even though it’s a bit embarrassing to say so.

Finished: Today!

For: Me!

What I Learned: Medical conferences are really good for finishing sock knitting! Lookie here at what else I did today:

In the spirit of full disclosure, I didn’t do all of that today. This was my Wintergrass sock, and I was about half done with the cuff before I picked it back up today. I ran into two other knitters today, one of them did her best to try to convince me that I should buy a loom. She also said that I shouldn’t Mickey Mouse around with a small table loom, I should go right to a huge floor loom, and I wouldn’t regret it if I did. Who knew that a medical conference could be that dangerous of a place?

Here are a couple of photos that show we’re still having fun. I have been going to all the meetings, since in fact that’s what I’m being paid to do, but we did have a great couple of days before the meeting started. We’ve also been finding some wonderful restaurants in the evenings.

More meetings tomorrow, then back home to rain and cold (I am assuming, I haven’t bothered to check the weather yet).

Sunshine!

No rain, no clouds, it’s actually warm here. I can already tell that we will love San Diego and want to come back. We got here late yesterday, then had a nice dinner last night at an Iranian restaurant in the Gaslamp district.

Here I am at the airport.

No, that’s not that blasted unfinished brown sock. It’s on my Blackthorn needles, which I’m not sure I’d try to get on an airplane. I did put this away after we got here though, I’m going to seriously try to finish the brown pair this week.

Today we paid for one of those city trolley tour things. It was a relatively cheap way to get transportation all over the city for a day. We rode all the way around the city tour, but spent most of the day at Balboa Park. You could spend a whole vacation just there. There are great trails, nice gardens, and lots of cool museums. We ended up doing the space and flight museum, which was fun. I met a fellow knitter there.

That’s Amelia Earhart, with her airplane. I didn’t know that they had found her.

What, you didn’t know she was a knitter?? Look closely at her left hand. Click to make it bigger….

A sock knitter, no less. Funny, she’s knitting socks in the same yarn that I am.

We also saw one of the Blackbird Stealth jets at the museum.

It amuses me to no end that the jet is made out of the same stuff as my knitting needles.

Here’s proof that there are sunshine and flowers in southern California.

And some pretty scenery.

Tomorrow we have tickets for a Padres game. They won their home opener today, so hopefully it will be a good game tomorrow. We have the morning to goof off, but haven’t quite decided what we’ll do yet. My conference starts the following day, so we’re going to try to pack in as much tomorrow as we can!

More Knitting Time!

No photos today, since I’m supposed to leave for the airport in 2 hours and have neither showered nor packed (what? Plan ahead? I’m supposed to do that??). We’re heading to sunny San Diego for the week. The American College of Physicians has their annual internal medicine meeting there this year, and since I haven’t been to one in a while, I decided to go. It’s usually a really good medical conference, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s in a sunny spot in early April. It IS turning to spring here in Washington, but that still means rain, rain, clouds, 40 degrees, and more rain. And wind, let’s not forget that. So it will be nice to be somewhere warmer. And sun. Please, God, just a little sunshine.

I am planning to just take sock projects with me. I have two socks on the needles, one of which is in danger of immolation if it’s not finished by the end of the month, and the sweater is just too damned bulky to fit in a suitcase at this point. I haven’t researched yarn stores in SD yet, but I’m sure there are some. We’ll be staying in the Gaslight district, anybody have any suggestions for fibery things near there?*

OK, I’m off to pack. I’m taking Ernie** with me, so there might be blog posts if I have anything of note to report. Have a great week!

*Shhhhh…John thinks I just wander into these places by accident. Don’t spill that I research the yarn stuff before we go on vacation.

**Ernie is the Mac Air, he’s a great travel computer.

March Wrap-Up

It’s a new month, which only means one thing. A Wrap-Up! No joke!

So how did I do? Here were my March goals:

I’m getting back to that True Blood Faery sweater. My goal is to get at least half of the cabled bodice done in March.

I am going to finish that lilac fiber, and ply it too. So there.

I now have two pairs of socks on the needles, so I need to finish one of them. The brown Sanguine Gryphon socks need to be done. I have one sock done and the cuff of the second done.

I have some fiber from Spunky Eclectic on the wheel that I’d like to finish, but that might be a bit ambitious since there’s a pound of it.

Read more, blog more, again.

And how did I do? Some good, some not so…

Here’s where I am on that Faery thing.

I am at least half way done with the bodice, by my calculations. The body of this blasted thing is knit in one piece, and it’s getting a little unwieldy, let me tell you. I’m to the point of the armhole shaping. The Faery thing will get finished, at some point in my lifetime. This is a win, though, since I got done what I wanted to get done.

Finishing the sock? Not so much. I’m not even showing a photo. It wasn’t helped by the fact that I knit the whole sock heel then realized that I’d forgotten to add the Wooly Nylon that I added to the heel of the first sock. It was noticeable, so I ripped. There was a lot of swearing involved getting the stitches back on the needles. I am not speaking to it at the moment.

Spinning? Now there’s a BIG win. Here you go:

This is a Finished Project!

Project Details:

Fiber: merino-silk blend, I think it’s from Ashland. I bought this when I first started spinning 2 years ago. The color is imaginatively named “Lilac”. I think it looks like Winter Solstice, so that’s what I’m calling it. It’s 70% merino, 30% silk.

Spindle or wheel: spindle, I spun this on my Cascade Mt. St. Helen’s spindle, plied on the wheel, since I was thoroughly sick and tired of it and needed to get it done.

Technical Details: This started as 8 ounces of fiber. It ended up as 2 skeins, totalling 220.5 grams, 0r .49 pounds. Yardage is 834 yards total, giving me a yards per pound ratio of 1702. This is mostly fingering weight.

What I’ll do with it: this will be a shawl. I might even start it tonight.*

The other March goal? The Spunky Eclectic fiber? I have a bunch of it, I got only 4 ounces spun up. What can I say, I have to go to work sometime.

I managed to get in 11 blog posts in March. I did get some reading done. Check out my Goodreads (in the sidebar) for details.

What are my April goals??

I have some Corgi Hill  True Blood Red fiber that I started last summer, spindle spun. I’m going to get half of it spun up.

The wheel project is that Spunky Eclectic fiber. It’s Targhee wool, the color is called Flannel. I’ll show you a photo next time, it’s gotten dark here and photos just aren’t working tonight. I want to FINISH that!

Get the bodice done on the Faery sweater, and start a sleeve.

Really, those damned brown socks that I’ve been knitting forever need to be done. I promise that if I don’t finish them by the end of April, that I will burn them in the backyard in a spectacular sacrifice to the goddess of knitting. Really. I’ll take pictures.

I’m off to eat dinner. I work this weekend, then we have a little vacation planned. Stay tuned to see where we’re going!

*Not really. I already have 2 shawl-like things on the needles, I’m not starting a third. That way lies madness.