Author Archives: zardra

Military Brats

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I have noticed that there are more than a few military brats out there in the knitting blog world. So, I have added a few interesting brat links to my side bar.

Today, I found out about Brats: Our Journey Home… a documentary that is currently in production. It addresses the idea of brats as a lost American tribe… a subculture of people who grew up on military bases around the world and who feel different from the people around them.

I know my sense of normal is skewed compared to the majority of people I call friends. I also know that I have have experiences that they will probably never have…. I have been to places they will probably never go. I have trouble unpacking boxes. I don’t remember events by the year they happened, but by where I lived at the time.

For the curious…

The About the Film section is really interesting… it also has links to pages about things like Moving or Life on Base if you scroll down. There’s also information on the filmmakers, the people they interviewed, and how to make a donation to help them get through post-production and get the film into film festivals.

Tulips!

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My tulips seem to have weathered the rainy winter much better than the iris bulbs I planted. My crocus bulbs seem to have been hit or miss. I’m afraid that for several of the bulbs the rain just made them rot. My bearded irises are starting to shoot up, too. Yeah, for spring flowers. I had to drive up to San Bruno to see my chiropractor this afternoon and the dandilions are blooming along the Palo Alto section of 280. Very pretty.

Meanwhile, there was yarn…

This is about 140 yards of a 60% silk/40% wool yarn. I haven’t measured the wpi, so I don’t know if it classifies as lace weight, or if it’s fingering weight. The silk is multi-colored: pink, yellow, green, blue… I got it from The Silk Worker. The blue ply is a 80% wool/20% silk that I got off eBay.

Okay, I’m going to go have soup now… soup is good.

It’s coming… I can feel it

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I think I’m coming down with something. My husband’s been sick since Sunday, and now my throat has that scratchy, warm feeling. *ick* Thankfully, my manager let me work from home today cause my husband was running a 103.6 fever this morning and I wanted to keep an eye on him. It’s coming down slowly, but it is coming down. I just hope I don’t have something like that to look forward to… I’m a big baby when I have a fever (that is anything over 99.8).

On a happier note, I have pictures for sharing…

Here’s the stuff I dyed at my sort-of dyeing class. I carded it, mixing the colors slightly and started spinning it up. I used it to practice a long draw… lesson: works very nicely with rolags, doesn’t work with combed top, which is what I usually sping with. The singles are nice and fuzzy looking; quite different from the yarn I get normally with my short draw technique.
 

I got a package from my secret pal on Saturday. Pretty roving from Deep Color in Berkeley and a couple skeins from the Himalayan Yarn Co. They’re 60% wool and 40% recycled silk. They’re soft… softer then I would have expected. I had heard rumors that recylced silk could be unpleasant, but I think that’s really when you’ve got the skeins that are nothing but the silk. The wool is a nice match for the rainbow of colors in the silk. I have no idea what I’m going to do with it yet… maybe something felty.

States

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bold the states you’ve been to, underline the states you’ve lived in and italicize the state you’re in now…

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.

Doesn’t quite show the bouncing back and forth across the country that my family did… Places I’ve lived goes something like this: New York -> Georgia -> Alabama -> New York -> Arizona -> Alabama -> California -> New Jersey -> California (inside of which I’ve been bouncing around for the last 12.5 years). The only move we didn’t drive for was New Jersey to California because it was Oct and we had to get there for school. Every other cross-country move involved loading up the car(s) and going… usually so we could see the sites and see relatives who lived in the middle part of the country (we only really ever saw them during these moving trips). The funniest one in my mind is when we were moving from Georgia to Alabama, which should have been a few hours in the car total… but we had to go see my grandparents who lived in Iowa, so it wins the longest trip to move the shortest distance award.

Non-Knitting Content

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I think I’m still reeling from my paper that was turned in on Monday. For 2 nights after I keep dreaming about manuscripts and ink and pens…. really trippy. It was actually a rather fun project. I had to examine an manuscript from earlier than 1500 AD and write a paper on it. I drove over to Stanford since they’re right down the street from where I live and got my hands on a collection in their Special Collections… Medieval manuscript fragments, ca. 850-1499 (a.k.a. the Philip Bliss collection). Now, I’ll have you know that this was no mean feat… it was like trying to visit someone in prison (not that I’d know what that’s like, but that’s what it made me feel like I was doing). First, I had to find the main entrance… visitors are only allowed to enter through the main entrance. The, I had to fill out a form on a computer that printed out a sheet with my information, which I then had to show to the lady guarding the turnstile, who compared it to my driver’s license before buzzing me through. Once at the Special Collections reading room, I again had to fill out a form on a computer. Then, I had to turn over my driver’s license in exchange for a key to a locker out in the hall where I could place my belongings because you are only allowed to have a pencil and loose leaf paper when consulting the collections. After stowing my stuff, the nice lady gave me the archive box of the collection and a pair of white gloves.

The manuscript I chose for my paper was titled “About the Proper Conduct on Monks” according to the finding aid. You can see it at http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/medieval/gif/m389-5.gif, there should be an enlarging click-y thing in the lower right corner for a closer look. I chose this manuscript because of all the nifty little drawings in the margins that appear to have been done at a later date, as if someone were studying it. Pointy hands, a couple of faces, some scrawled notes…. very nifty. Unfortunately, the Stanford the page with links to the manuscripts they have in digital form had this one labeled incorrectly… as coming from folder 5, rather than folder 15, and it has the description for the item from folder 5. I think I’m going to try to notify them of the mistake. At least I hope it’s a mistake, cause the other option is I completely messed up. *Gah* Now, I’m going to sit around worrying that I got the folders messed up, and I was looking at 5 not 15…. *groan* Maybe I could try to get a look at the collection again to see if I’m a complete idiot.

Well, if you want to see the paper, mistake or not, I’ve put it up at (sorry, taken down).

My head hurts now…

Remember this?

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I’d be amazed if you do… I started it in Oct. Here’s a sort of updated picture…


All but one side and arm stitched up. Well, it’s been finished since I took this picture a couple days ago, but I haven’t been able to get a picture of the finished product yet. Since Le Bete Noir has been finished, I casted on this…

The Wool Peddler’s Shawl


My Stitches West adventure

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Oy! The humanity! The Stitches West market was insane when I went on Saturday. People everywhere, most of them not paying attention to what was going on around them and stopping right in the middle of a busy walkway. The worst part was the people with the stupid pull-along suitcases. The place was so packed there was no hope of seeing the floor… or the stupid suitcases being pulled along behind someone… perfect for tripping over. Geez. Amazingly enough I did the circuit in about 2 hours. How did I manage that? I avoid all the stores that are within driving distance of my apt (it’s not like I was going to get a discount buying from them at Stitches), and I avoid places like Webs and the Yarn Barn (both of which have websites). I went around and made notes of the things I liked… I only decided what I was buying for sure after I’d seen everything. (I went to a few conventions before I developed this strategy only to find something near the end I really wanted and have no money for it.) If something seems to be going quickly I might get it when I first see it, but usually my motto at these things tends to be “If it’s not there when I go back, I wasn’t meant to buy it.” The only place with a long line that I contemplated buying something from was Carolina Homespun cause their winter hours suck, I don’t drive up to SF all that often, and I’m not fond of the navigation of their website…. and they had glow-in-the-dark yarn. But, I had a budget.

So, I present “The Haul”:


Doesn’t look like much does it? But that represents all $100 of the budget I set for myself. The nifty item I picked up for my secret pal (not shown, obviously) went on the plastic card so that I could utilize all $100 for myself. *grin* So, what is it you’re looking at? On the left is 2 ounces of cashmere fiber…. mmmmmmm. On the right is 2 skeins of Brooks Farm Duet (55% mohair/45% wool) that is currently destined to be a shawl pour moi. (I think it is highly evil of Brooks Farm to have opened a website… because now I want more… so soft. Unfortunately, a quick perusal of their new website does not have that particular color of 100% mohair I was drooling over but was $5 short of being able to get. *sigh*)

Hmm… I need a title…

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It would appear that I am not the only one around here in desperate need of a vacation. Many people I pass in the hallways of my work place have a look on their faces that screams “What the fuck am I doing here?!” along with an air of being plain worn out. For all I know it’s the precursor to some illness ravaging our dept’s ranks… which makes me all the more thankful for my new cube out on the edges surrounded by empty cubes. I’m taking tomorrow off though as a mental health day… there will probably be knitting and getting back on track with my classes (I’ve fallen a tad behind on the reading).

I pulled $100 out of my savings account today as that is the budget I have set for myself for visiting the Stitches Market on Saturday. (I’m so glad Stitches isn’t in Oakland this year… and having it in Santa Clara puts it 10 minutes down the highway from me.) As I was getting my budget out of the new mini ATM my credit union has installed in the cafeteria building on my work’s campus I noticed a sign saying that as a promotion they had randomly put fifties. Unfortunately, there were no fifties amongst my twenties. *pout* An extra $30 to spend on yarn would have been sweet.

It doesn’t look like we have anything planned for Sunday, which is good cause this weekend is jam-packed otherwise. Friday night, we’re driving down to Monterey to go to a wine tasting/silent auction with my parents. Saturday, I’m hitting Stitches. Saturday night, there’s a wake for the little girl who died last week. Sunday will probably be for recovery…. and fondling my Saturday purchases, I’m sure.

Let there be pictures

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Here you can see the baby alpaca and silk I spun up awhile ago. The dark bit is the alpaca, and the light bit is the silk. What was kind of weird about this one is the silk is more than just one color, but because the alpaca is so dark in comparison, the color changes don’t stand out. I only think this is funny cause I had spun up a different alpaca/silk set of rovings from the same person and the silk looked bland by itself, but once I plied it the color variations jumped right out.

Next, we have the roving a dyed at the dyeing class that wasn’t a few weeks ago. I know the picture looks a bit off but the camera was yelling at me about the battery being low, and using the flash made it look radioactive… probably shouldn’t have put it on a dark background either. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet… I’m thinking I might card each into rolags, throw them all in a bag, stir it up, and spin them in the order it comes out… or I might blend them together.

Norma was going on today about jinxed yarn and how she’s crap. But I’m inclined to say it’s not her… everything lately seems crappy. I’m sure Stephanie’s unmentionable problem is also part of the ensuing crapage. Things I have seen recently that support this theory are 1) I got paid last Monday, and they shorted me 16 hours, 2) A friend of a friend lost his daughter in a car accident on Jan 30th (thankfully, they have the alleged drunk driver in custody last I heard). So, see spectacular crap all around.