SP5 Questionnaire

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1. Are you a yarn snob (do you prefer higher quality and/or natural fibers)? Do you avoid Red Heart and Lion Brand? Or is it all the same to you?
I think novelty yarns have their place, but usually that place is not on my needles. I love natural fibers… fibers that breathe… although I’m not terribly fond of 100% cotton, but I’m willing to believe this is because I haven’t met the right kind yet.

2. Do you spin? Crochet?
I’ve been spinning for over a year now and still love it even if I don’t get a lot of time to do it. I know enough crochet to do a provisional cast-on without too much difficulty.

3. Do you have any allergies? (smoke, pets, fibers, perfume, etc.)
I have asthma, so things like smoke and heavy perfumes set me off.

4. How long have you been knitting?
I’ve been knitting for almost 3 years.

5. Do you have an Amazon or other online wish list?
Nope.

6. What’s your favorite scent? (for candles, bath products etc.)
I am fond of herbal scents… lavender, thyme, sage, rosemary, etc.

7. Do you have a sweet tooth?
Yup, but I’ve had to cut back on my intake since I started Weight Watchers in April. I’m not saying don’t send me chocolate (mmmm), but things that are easy to have small pieces of are great. 🙂

8. What other crafts or Do-It-Yourself things do you like to do?
Knitting and spinning are pretty much it these days. I like the idea of being creative, but it doesn’t mean I am… and I’m learning to accept that. 🙂

9. What kind of music do you like? Can your computer/stereo play MP3s? (if your buddy wants to make you a CD)
I have ecceltic tastes… I think the only stuff that turns me off is country and rap.

10. What’s your favorite color? Or–do you have a color family/season/palette you prefer? Any colors you just can’t stand?
I like burgandy, french blue, and purple. I can’t stand orange and bright greens (like grass green)… they make me look ill when I wear them, so I just avoid them if I can.

11. What is your family situation? Do you have any pets?
Just the Husband and me.

12. What are your life dreams? (really stretching it here, I know)
Sorry, I haven’t figured out what I want to be when I grow up, let alone what my life dreams are yet.

13. What is/are your favorite yarn/s to knit with?
I don’t think I have one. There are yarns I like, but none I go out of my way to get, or find myself always knitting with. I can’t even really say anything like “soft yarn” cause I kind of like the way wool is scratchy… it’s a tactile experience.

14. What fibers do you absolutely *not* like?
I find kitchen cottons make my hands ache… and I tend to stay away from artifical yarns (e.g., acrylic) unless I’m knitting for charity where something washable that won’t cause a potential allergic reaction is recommended.

15. What is/are your current knitting obsession/s?
Again, I don’t know that I have any… I knit lace, I knit socks, I knit preemie hats… *shrug* I think socks are the closest thing to an obssesion cause I try to always have a pair of socks going… they’re a great travel project.

16. What is/are your favorite item/s to knit?
See question 15. 🙂

17. What are you knitting right now?
I am currently knitting a pair of socks for the Husband and a shawl for myself while working on a shawl for my mother-in-law on the side.

18. What do you think about ponchos?
Not for me.

19. Do you prefer straight or circular needles?
Depends on the project.

20. Bamboo, aluminum, plastic?
Bamboo, wood, or plastic, but no metal hurts my hands like cotton.

21. Are you a sock knitter?
Yup.

22. How did you learn to knit?
Knitting for Dummies.

23. How old is your oldest UFO?
A year and a half old… I think.

24. What is your favorite animated character or a favorite animal/bird?
Dragons.

25. What is your favorite holiday?
Halloween.

26. Is there anything that you collect?
Yarn, roving, and fleeces. 🙂

27. What knitting magazine subscriptions do you have?
I am currently subscribed to Interweave Knits, Vogue Knitting, and Spin-off.

28. Any books out there you are dying to get your hands on?
Not really…. although I am contemplating getting the 3rd Barbara Walker treasury (I have 1 and 2, and they’re great).

P.S. – If you have any other question I’ll be happy to answer them to the best of my ability. 🙂

Bigger and Better Things to Come

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Many thanks to Deb! I’m going to rip back the few inches of the Beginner’s Triangle Shawl and start on an adventure… my own shawl. 🙂 Not like I’m doing anything fancy. I’m going to look around and see what lace edgings I like and figure out the base number of stitches for the edging of my choice. That will probably affect whether I start with an odd number of stitches or even. Deb told me she just did a garter stitch triangle, then a lace edging. This is the basic construction of the Wool Peddler’s Shawl I just completed, so this should be pretty straightforward. Nifty. 🙂

I’m also thinking of starting a pair of socks for the Husband since he has managed to wear holes right through the bottoms of both socks in the last pair I made him, now they were a little bit over a year old and he wore them a lot whenever it was cold out. I think they ran into the problem of the carpet in our apartment being rougher stuff than the wool they were made out of. I picked up a couple different colors of a washable wool yarn that looks to be sport weight, so it should work nicely.

I’m also hoping to get the drum carder out of the box sometime this weekend. I got it a month ago, and it’s just been sitting in its box the whole time. I had been so busy with school stuff that I had to ignore it to get assignments done. But, the long weekend should afford me some time to play.

Now for some peppermint tea… and some painkillers… for the kink in my neck is giving me a righteous headache.

JavaScript rots your brain

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I don’t know why but this week has been exhausting; thankfully, it’s at least going by fast. I blame it on the JavaScript project I’ve been working on for work. My manager had the brilliant idea that now that I had done a website with JS, I must be an expert, so I could easily complete this page for marketing. *ugh* I’ve been working on it since last Friday. At least I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is glorious since the light was in doubt until moments ago. I have been building the page in parts, and yesterday I added the last important part of the JS code, and it didn’t work. Everything was working beautifully, then I broke it. I have spent a goodly portion of today taking things out and adding things in an attempt to make it work goddammit. My manager came up with a way to make it work that was akin to using a hammer to make a square peg fit in a round hole. I’m rather proud of my coding finesse (I would have gone into programming if it hadn’t been for the required calculus classes). So, I spent today working on it, and now, finally, it is working. The only thing left for this project is to apply a stylesheet to make it conform to the company website. For some reason I have a feeling that’s going to break it again… of course, that would have nothing to do with the fact that the company website was designed by someone who has a limited grasp on how a website should be designed for usability standards. Anyways, the JS is working — properly, no less — and now my brain is goo. I have a couple more hours of work left and all I can do is stare at the wall. Hopefully, if I keep my head upright my gooey brain won’t leak out my ears.

Actual Knitting Content
I haven’t done much… haven’t even considered the dropped stitch in my Beginner’s Triangle Shawl. Might have something to do with me wondering if this is the pattern I want to use this yarn for. I thought it would be good because I only have 1000 yds, and the pattern says knit till the triangle is as long as you want it, you’re bored, or you’re half way through yarn. But, I’m still in love with what Deb did with her Brooks Farm, and I’m slightly unhappy with the fact that the Beginner’s Triangle Shawl will have vertical stripes…. *ugh* Perhaps an email to Deb is in order to find out how much yarn she needed for her shawl….

Catch it now before it goes away

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My professor gave me full credit for my final project. Yea! But she has said that she’ll be cleaning out our files sometime this week, so see it while you can. An important note: my website seems to only work in IE at the moment as FireFox has handling issues with the JavaScript I used. I don’t know if it’ll work in Safari as I haven’t checked it on my home machine, but if someone tries it and it works, let me know.

Edit: My professor has removed all my files from the server, so no more pretty website.

The end at last

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This afternoon I turned in my last major project of the semester. *sigh* Quite a load off my back. And since I’ve decided to take a break and not have a summer class (even though it’ll set me back a little). You all saw the paper I turned in last Monday… well, unless you ignored it, which I wouldn’t blame you for doing. 🙂 I had a final a couple days ago. Then, today’s assignment, which was a website for my Internet Technology Tools class. I’d share the URL, but I want to make sure my professor grades it before I go sending any traffic its way. Unlike the paper, the website is all about fiber, so it should be more interesting than the history of the Mountain View Public Library.

Shawl
Meanwhile, I started a new shawl for myself… the Beginner’s Triangle Shawl from A Gathering of Lace. The Brooks Farm Duet is so nice and soft, and I haven’t had too much trouble with it spliting, which was a worry I had before I started due to the way the yarn is plied. It’s going to interesting to see how the colors play out since the shawl is knit side to side rather than top to bottom or bottom to top.




Unfortunately, I dropped a stitch while I was knitting and studying on Saturday. I haven’t had the chance to try to pick the stitch back up… I didn’t have good lighting or a crochet hook when I made the mistake. I’ve been too busy or tired to take care of it since then. Picking up stitches requires so much more concentration than knitting does… at least for me.

Fun stuff
Tonight was a tasty steak with mushroom sauce and asparagus in celebration of finishing the semester. Very nice Pinot Noir… I even splurged and had an extra glass (since I have the points for it).

Tomorrow is going to be a half day at work because the Husband and I have tickets to the 2 pm showing of Episode III in Mountain View. *Woo hoo*

The Weight Watchers diet is going really well… I’ve lost 12.6 lbs so far, which is amazing… it’s really hard to believe that a simple change in my diet has done this. Of course, now the pants that I bought a couple months ago are really baggy… I was able to pull them down without undoing them this afternoon… it took a small amount of work, they didn’t just fall off, but they fit nicely when I bought them. I’m about half way to my 10% goal. I guess this is really incredible because when I tried Weight Watchers 2 years ago I only lost like 6 lbs in 13 weeks…. I lost that same amount in 2 weeks this time around. Okay… I’m going to stop sharing now and go drink my wine. 🙂

Finally, some pics

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I fianlly got around to downloading pictures off my camera, then uploading then into my online gallery last night. I even found pictures on the camera that I had forgotten I had taken. One is a couple ounces of raoving I dyed with food coloring (I have yet to get around to spinning it up… need to do that).

The other is a couple of scarves I made for my Mom for her birthday. She had told me she wanted “one of those scarves.” Since I wasn’t sure which kind of scarf she was talking about I knit two. The glittery one is knit out of a skein of blended yarn I got at my LYS for $36. The other is made out of Bernat Boa… $10 at JoAnn’s. My Mom prefers the glittery one… the Boa scarf is that one that people identify with (no accounting for taste). My Mom says she’s been taking a great deal of pleasure in telling people it’s a Borchardt Original (*snarf*) whenever someone asks where she bought it.

And finally… the moment you’ve all been waiting for…

The Wool Peddler’s Shawl

72″ wide, 34″ tall… and quite nice, if I do say so myself.

Lace close-up

Haiku Wednesday

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Falling leaf?
Wings beating lightly
Tiger butterfly passes

Regretably, no pictures of the shawl. They are still laying dormant on my camera. But, the shawl is winging its way towards TN.

In lieu of pictures, I present for your reading pleasure (if you’re into that sort of thing) my recently written library history paper: (sorry, taken down)… all 23 pages of it. No, don’t worry, there’s only like 18 pages of actual writing and even 5 of that is appendices.

I will say this, the stuff they put in newspapers 100 years ago is just funny.

Two finished objects

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The Wool Peddler’s Shawl has been blocked and looks great… I even have pictures taken, but I am too lazy at the moment to upload them from my camera. Gotta keep people coming back for more, right?

The second finished object is my Library History paper…. that only took forever to complete. It has now been emailed to the professor and is out of my hands. If you’re into that sort of thing, I’ll try to link to it tomorrow, too.

Must go get something to eat…. I’ve been working on the paper since 9 AM (that’s just today’s work) and didn’t bother to stop and eat. Now I have no excuse.

*ugh* Majorly crashing as adreneline leaves my system…..

The question of use

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I chatted briefly with my sister yesterday, and she told me that her kitten seems to be enjoying the felted kitty bed… although not in the manner in which it was meant to be used. She’s been carrying it around in her mouth. According to me sister, she has yet to lay in it, but has layed on it a couple times. *eah* As long as she like it, I guess.

I have to hit the library after work this afternoon to look up newspaper articles from the turn of the century. Ah, the joys of microfilm… *sigh* I’m trying to keep from flipping out over this paper. The professor says she’s looking for 20 pages. I have no idea how I’m going to get there. Let’s hope she counts cover pages, abstracts, and references towards the page count. *ugh* There are questions she is looking for answers to that I haven’t found any answers to, such as “Who used the library? Do you get a sense of who the founders targeted and who the early patrons were? Was this a white, middle-class oriented institution, or did the early library reflect California’s diverse population?” The closest answer to this I’ve gotten is that the library was open to everyone who lived in town. What the demographics looked like in 1905, I have no idea. I can’t make any assumptions because Mountain View was founded through Spanish/Mexican land grants… the majority of town sits on the site of the main ranchero (which had a name that translates to The Pastures of the Ewe Lambs). But I don’t know if there was still any sort of Hispanic population as the town began to grow and finally incorporate. I might have to see about trying to find what the ethnic proportions were. What’s funny is I think the core of my paper is actually going to focus on the town trying to get a public library up and running instead of the library once it was established.

It’s not a Flaw… it’s a Feature!

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Shawls
I finished the Wool Peddler’s Shawl (officially this time) on Monday night. It took me about 2.5 hours to finish the sewn cast-off, but it looks really nice. Now I just need to wash it and block it. You’ll get pictures when it looks pretty… right now it looks a bit lumpy.

I did a swatch and cast-on for the Beginner’s Triangle last night. This morning I discovered a new design feature that I have added to the pattern. I photocopied the chart because there is no way I was going to cart around a hardcover copy of A Gathering of Lace. Unfortunately, certain things didn’t show up in the copy… those certain things being the purl stitches at the end of each row. They’re there to create a clean edge… the first stitch of each row is slipped as if to knit. Well, I have been knitting the last stitch of each row… opps. Since I was on Row 18 when I discovered this (by looking up something in the book) I decided it looks just fine and to continue as I have been. *shhh* Don’t tell anyone.

Secret Pal
I still haven’t figured out who my Secret Pal was.

But I can happily say that my other Secert Pal (the one I was sending to) is Lisa @ Slip Knot Pixie. Yea!