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Thank you all for bearing with me while I get this new blog straightened out!

I hope you will all forgive me since this isn’t knitting really but I spent most of the weekend finishing this up and am quite pleased with it.  It is a variation of Bron’s Misty Morning Stole (scroll down).

I haven’t crocheted anything for quite a while and this project was great fun and went very quickly!

Rainbows in my living room!

I used the crayon-box colors of Classic Elite Sand and a J (sz 10) hook to make this.  While I’m very pleased with the stole, I can’t say I’d buy Sand again.  It’s bulky cotton and as close to a boucle as cotton is likely to come.  It tends to stick to itself and it breaks relatively easily - both of which make working this yarn out of a center pull ball (I got lots of practice winding center pull balls!) a little tricky.  There were also knots in about a third of the skeins but since these were a mill “special purchase” I don’t really feel I can complain.  However, the fabric is nicely textured and the colors are absolutely glorious and clear.  On the whole, I’d say it was worth what I paid for it - $1.00/skein.

The whole nine yards

Well, it isn’t exactly nine yards long - it’s about 24” wide and 104” long.  In retrospect, I think I might have been able to sacrifice a little length for a bit more width but I had no idea how far this yarn would go.  Next time I may do it differently.

To my surprise, despite the cotton content, this is fairly warm.  It wouldn’t do in sub-zero temperatures, but for a brisk spring or fall day, it will be perfect.  I’m debating about putting tassels in the corners.  I think the stole is whimsical enough to stand multi-colored tassels but I haven’t quite decided yet.

Pattern stitch and color changes

I was surprised by how quickly my fingers remembered the rythym of crochet and how easily they adapted to the hook which was bigger than anything I had used before and I have to warn you that you may be seeing more crochet as we go along.  I’d forgotten how much fun it was to do and how quickly it goes.  I’ll never abandon the knitting - there are too many things crochet isn’t suitable for (in my opinion) but this was a delightful break.

Happy Monday everyone - I hope your weeks all go well and quickly!

I don’t have much to talk about today knitting-wise that I didn’t talk about yesterday.  So I thought I’d share some of the neato sites I’ve run across while I was surfing around this week.

Cuter than a bag of puppies!

As knitters, I suppose we all dream of having our own wool “on the hoof” in one way or another.  I’ve certainly thought about it.  I honestly don’t think I’d get into the whole shearing-washing-carding-spinning-dying thing but who knows?  Perhaps with a small flock of my own, it would become important to me to see the whole process through from beginning to end.  I would probably do it at least once - just to see how it all went together.  In any case, the idea of growing my own wool has a lot of appeal.  I don’t really expect ever to be in a position where it might be possible, but if I ever were, I think these guys are what I’d be looking for:

Miniature Southdown “Baby Doll” Sheep

These guys come from Penn Oak Farm.  This site also has good information about the particulars of the breed and what their wool is like.

The sheep grow to between 18” and 24” at the shoulder and are quite docile.  Wouldn’t a backyard with a small flock of these guys be awesome?  When you didn’t want to knit, you could go out and play with them :)

Time Beguiler

Then, courtesy of Incoming Signals, there was this:

Samorost, opening screen

It’s sort of a mini-MYST style game called Samorost.  The graphics are phenomenal and the gameplay is quite entertaining.  It took me about 45 minutes to get through the whole thing - and I’m not a very good game player.  Samorost isn’t terribly long or complicated, but it’s wonderful to see and one of the best uses of Flash animation ever.

There are no instructions or dialogue - once the opening screen comes up, you’re on your own.  Great fun and beautiful to look at!

Useful Stuff

Finally, just to make this a real assortment, there’s this from Tech Support Alert.  These are freeware utilities and they are some of the best around.  While I haven’t tried all of them, SpywareBlaster and Spybot Search and Destroy I’ve been using for a while and they are very good at what they do - which is keeping your system free of software that tries to ferret out information or hijack your browser.  There’s more that just utilities here though, there’s an entire software suite that’s worth a look just for the games :)

As always, if you do decide to try any of these, make sure you understand what they do (and don’t do) before you install them.  Most items have links to the homepages of their creators which will fill you on the latest updates, etc.  All of these are free for non-commercial use.

I’m hoping to get a fair amount of knitting in this weekend and I hope you all get to do the same :) See you Monday!

This is the debut of the Expression Engine blog, moved over from the Movable Type blog.  You shouldn’t notice a great deal of change, though some things (like comments - which now have smilies for those as likes ‘em and a live preview ) are a bit different. Some image tags were broken during import and I’ll be going through and fixing them as well as updating the How do I do that?!? and Patterns links on the sidebar.  Presumably that will set everything to rights.  If you run into something odd or confusing, please let me know so I can take a look at it?

After completing the second section of seed/stocking blocks, I did decide to try another (different) minute lace pattern for the following section.

Lace pattern II

All together now, just like Don Ho: “Tiny bobbles...”

Ahem…

Some of you may remember this pattern as the one I used in the Zen Garden Stole (see sidebar under “Patterns").  The only difference here is that the bobble is done over only two stitches.  Because the yarn is so slippery, it’s kind of a touchy procedure, but I think it looks pretty good and is worth taking a little care to produce.

Current progress

I’m very happy with how this is turning out.  I’m nearing the end of the first ball of Surf and feel comfortable that I’m going to have enough to make a scarf of decent length.  However, after working on it for a while, I find that my eyes start craving some color!  And my hands want something a little larger to work on that doesn’t require a death grip in order to keep everything civil :)

Warshcloth

This is Spotlight cotton and it’s really soft and very nice to work with.  Since I only had the one ball of it, a washcloth seemed like a good idea.  Pedestrian they may be, and simple, but I’ve found that I like the ones I make a lot better than the ones I used to buy.  And, because I’m apt to make one out of any bright cotton yarn that I only have a bit of, their nature tends to be rather random.  I like that too :)

And there’s this…

Sand dunes?

...about which I will only say (for now) that it’s a rapidly growing pile of Sand :)

I will try to get this new place straightened out within the next week.  I very much hope you will all find it friendly, entertaining and hospitable :)

Another Literary Diversion

I have been reading A Tale of Two Cities.  Aside of Scrooge, which I’ve read many times and Great Expectations which was required in high school, I haven’t read much Dickens and have been pleasantly surprised by how readable the book is.

I knew the story, of course - the opening and closing lines have been quoted and mis-quoted many times. A French doctor is imprisoned in the Bastille for 17 years.  When he is released, he is brought to England to meet a daughter he never knew he had and by her tender offices is restored to health (physical, mental and spiritual).  The daughter falls in love with a self-exiled French tutor and they eventually marry and have a daughter of their own.  He (the husband) is actually a member of the French aristocracy but has abandoned his property and title because of a loathing of the way his family has treated the peasant population and a desire to dissociate himself as much as he can from those horrors.  Unfortunately, as the French Revolution gathers steam, he feels he must return to help an innocent man and he is captured and marked for execution because he is a member of that aristocracy.  It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t been in France for many years and that he has had nothing to do with the atrocities perpetuated upon the general populace.  All that matters is that he is the marquis and so he must die.  An English lawyer, a dissolute but brilliant man and a heavy drinker who bears a striking resemblance to the marquis (and who also has been in love with the marquis’ wife from “afar") arranges to take his place at the guillotine so that the marquis, his wife and child and her father can return to England in safety and so that he may feel that he has accomplished at least one worthwhile thing with his life.

When I’m enjoying a book, I begin to read, but very shortly stop seeing the words on the page.  Instead, I’m seeing the story unfold in my head - something like watching a movie, except in more detail.  I can hear the footsteps on the stairs, hear the voices and see the expressions on the faces of the characters being written about.  When this doesn’t happen, I have no success with the book.  I might finish it, but I won’t remember much and it will never be more than a collection of printed pages.

I’ve had this book for quite a while having purchased it with a reluctant feeling that this is probably something I should read - but I didn’t look forward to it much.  Last week I ran across it again, sitting patiently in the bookcase and decided, without much enthusiasm I’m afraid, that now was the time.

So I was unprepared when the “movie” began.  Despite sometimes labored prose and somewhat sentimental dialogue, the underlying story about these people and their times is rich and compelling.  To my surprise, the horrors of the French Revolution are not glossed over as I had expected them to be.  I could see the guillotine, hear the moans and cries of the people in the carts being taken to their deaths and smell the stench of the streets.

And, of course, there is knitting content :) I think few of us, however, would care to be associated with the wretched Madame DeFarge!

I feel like I’m writing a book report here :) But I was so surprised by how readable this is and how intense the story is that I can’t help it.  Read this!  It is available for free, here, here and here to note only a few places.

It is also available as an inexpensive paperback.  Most bookstores should carry it, or it could be ordered on-line.

Signet and Penguin paperback editions

If you can get a hold of the video tape (it hasn’t been committed to DVD as yet, more’s the pity) the 1935 movie starring Ronald Coleman is very much worth viewing.  There have been many other film versions since, but this is the only one I’m familiar with and it is very good.  Of course, I have a life-long soft spot for Ronald Coleman (sigh) which doesn’t hurt anything either!

Ronald Coleman as Sydney Carton

Dickens was a popular writer in his time and the literary critics felt that since his work was so popular with the masses, it couldn’t be real literature.  Fortunately, modern opinions differ.

I came within 20 pages of finishing the book last night, but decided I couldn’t handle Carton’s sacrifice at 1:30 AM, alone in the dark (except for my reading light).  I will finish it today and have my cry.  And then I’ll probably go in search of more Dickens.