We went up to Maine yesterday, so no knitting got done.  We were actually out quite a lot later than expected, but that was because the day was so beautiful and neither of us was in any rush to go back home to a warm city apartment.  So we meandered and poked around and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly.

Webhannet Falls

The tiny park that contains the falls is right on Route 1 in Wells.  We’ve been driving by it for years and have seen it gushing like a broken water main as well as frozen solid.  It is the site of the first permanent buildings in Wells - a saw and a grist mill built by Edmund Littlefield around 1640.  As we drove in, there was something small scuttling around on the dirt road in front of us.  I slowed down, assuming whoever it was would get out of the way.  You kind of expect wildlife to be leery of cars but this guy - a chipmunk, as it turned out - didn’t give a hoot.  I came to a stop and he sat there, about 18 inches from the front tires, regarding us with...well, it almost seemed like he was amused.  Of course the minute we opened the car doors, hoping for a photo op, he hied himself off into the brush.

Beach Stones

The next stop was along Route 1A, Shore Road, I think.  This runs right along the coastline from Ogunquit to York and has some really beautiful - and private - beaches.  On the other side of the road is a salt marsh and as I went down to the edge of the marsh, clouds of damsel flies exploded out of the bushes all around me.  But there were also a lot of these guys:

Splash of color

In the greens, yellow-greens and gray-greens of the salt marsh, this guy really stood out.  I chased him (a butterfly chase consists of taking one very, slow, careful step after another, trying to close enough distance to get a good picture) and he kept flitting away just far enough to lead me on.  Who says animals don’t have a sense of humor?  Finally, he flew to the top of this bush and flared his wings before departing entirely.

Salt Marsh

The view on the ocean side of the road was much marred, in my opinion, by the presence of Private Beach - No Trespassing signs.  I do realize that when you have paid as much for these properties as these people have, you want your peace and quiet.  But the view is not theirs to dictate (even if the beach is) and the signs made me feel both mulish and wistful - wistful because I would dearly love to be able to afford to live in such a place with the ocean at my feet; mulish because whenever a complete stranger tries to order me around I am seized with the compulsion to do exactly what they’re telling me not to do.  No, I didn’t go down and wade in their water, much as I would have liked to.

Coast line

This will probably be our last trip up for a while.  The summer season is getting under way and things are getting crowded and busy.  Not, though, at the rate they have in previous years.  We saw many “Vacancy” and “Reduced Rates” signs and for the first time ever, I was able to drive straight through the center of Ogunquit without having to stop because of backed-up traffic and pedestrians.  We’ll return in the fall when things have calmed down again.  Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll even be able to stay for a few days!

I spent most of yesterday knitting, not that you’d know it.  It was one of those days where I got side-tracked.

All right, you can stop snickering now :)

What sidetracked me was Kim Salazar’s post on String or Nothing and the notion of filet knitting.  Filet crochet is simple, consisting only of double crochet stitches and chains (see the gorgeous example in Kim’s post).  Rendering this in knitting is a whole other thing because the two crafts are worked entirely differently.  It’s a fascinating concept and one I pursued all day yesterday with little success except for the pile of abandoned swatches that grew steadily on the table beside me.  Still…

I did finish the crocheted washcloth.

Son of Warshcloth

It started with two circular rounds of half-double crochet which then got squared.  It was interesting to see that the yarn’s short color changes only covered a stitch or so and gave the finished cloth something of a tweedy look.  Rather nice, I think!

Then there came the start of the little stranded bag.

Please don’t stare at my bottom!

I wanted to try the next stranding experiment on a smaller scale.  I have a pattern in mind for this, but I have to work out the number of needles first.  I don’t have a circular short enough to manage this on and I find it very uncomfortable to have the work on four needles.  The current plan is to bite the bullet and work a few rounds as is - until the corners have been smoothed out and then to move the work onto three needles and proceed that way.  This is fingering yarn on size 2 (US) needles.

I also got the slippers started.

Bazic Slipper

The Bazic Wool is really nice to work with - incredibly springy!  The ball band suggests a size 9 needle - which I tried.  That really didn’t work too well so I frogged and tried it again on size 8s.  That was better.  These slippers will be really nice to wear and probably warmer than any slippers I have ever had before.

I also finished this.

Crocheted Bag

This one is small too - about two inches in diameter and about four inches tall.  It’s made with Takhi Cotton Classic that I’d had ageing in the stash for about a year.  What nice yarn this is to work with!  And what gorgeous, saturated colors!  It’s really slick though, and might be better worked with wood than metal.

Filet knitting...Hmmmm....

Weekend Activities

We had a really gorgeous weekend in these parts - beautiful weather and very comfortable temperatures.  Myria and I went on a picture-taking expedition Saturday and we had a lot of fun.  The conditions were so good that even my ancient (as far as digital technology goes; it’s about 8 years old) camera picked up some decent shots.  The sidebar picture was taken in a little conservation area in Dunstable, a tiny town a few miles away from us. Dunstable is really just a wide spot in the road, but it’s out away from the highways and the active areas so it’s also very peaceful and, usually, very quiet.  Of course the day we were there, the church was running a carnival/fair type thing so the town was getting roughly 10 times the amount of traffic that it normally sees.

Knitting, so to speak...

Yesterday I worked again on the Dragon Skin pattern making no further progress than before.  I know I’m missing something simple and stupid.  It’s just a matter of figuring out what it is.

I think I have decided to forgo the stockinette exploration of the slippers for now and just make a garter stitch pair for myself.  I probably won’t be needing them any time soon, but it’ll be nice, come the cold weather, to have them all ready.  I’ll be using this wool for them:

Bazic Wool

I’m not sure how I’ll use the purple and blue, except that those will be the top colors.  The grey will definitely go for the soles :)

I have frogged the Meadow Flowers shawl.  While I was working on it, I kept thinking how lovely it would be in mohair and finally realized that the Primavera cotton blend (much as I like it) wasn’t going to make a shawl I’d be happy with.  I’m looking into other possibilities for that.  Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to afford mohair at the moment, but I’m sure the time will come :) There’s no hurry.

I have also been looking at this:

Weaver’s Wool Mini Shawl

I think I’d make this bigger - add a couple of wedges and make it longer.  Of course, I don’t have enough of anything to make this either, but it’s on my “to play with” list.  I like the semi-circular design of it and the construction.  I don’t like that it’s garter stitch as that could mean considerable length-wise stretching.  Stockinette would narrow the wedges, but I’m not sure that would be a bad thing - especially if I add more wedges :) I did work out a bit of it last night with the aid of some margarine-colored acrylic.  I should try it again in stockinette and see how that works.

Another Stupid Kitchen Trick

We are determined to try and shed some tonnage this summer.  One of our biggest problems is dessert, well, sweets in general.  Over the weekend I tried something that might just help us out in that area (apologies to those who are offended by gelatin products or for whom this is old news).

I had found some sugar-free gelatin boxes hiding in one of the kitchen cupboards and decided to make some up.  Jello isn’t my first choice for dessert, but it can be acceptable in the summer because it’s fast, easy and almost calorie free.  It’s also cold - a nice plus for a summer dessert.  While we were going through this batch, I began to wonder about using low-fat, sugar-free yogurt as the cold “liquid”.  It would add substantial body to the finished product and still not be a significant source of calories.

Well, I tried it.  I made up two packages of sugar-free peach gelatin (using the 2 cups of hot water called for) and then added two 8oz cups of fat-free, sugar-free peach yogurt instead of using 2 cups of cold water.  I had worried that the live bacillus in the yogurt might affect gelling but…

It worked!

...it solidified (semi) just perfectly.  We tried it last night and you know what?  It was pretty, darned good - a lot more like a pudding than a gelatin.  Even with a glop of non-dairy whipped topping, this comes in at less than 100 calories and that’s pretty good for a dessert.  The peach (lovely, lurid color, isn’t it?) has a nice tang to it.  I’ve got strawberry lined up for the next effort and I expect that will work just fine too!

The only problem is I can’t figure out what to call this stuff!  Jellgurt?  Yoglo?

Nahhh....

Happy Monday!

This via Fibre Frenzy -

Copy this list of literature classics and bold face the ones you’ve read.  My notes are in italics.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger (Nausea, No Exit, Caligula)
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss (Silas Marner)
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms (The Old Man and the Sea)
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey Known in my lit class as “The Idiot” and “The Oddity”
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Ulysses)
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird I read this every year or so
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49 (Gravity’s Rainbow)
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg)
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth (Ethan Frome)
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse (A Room of One’s Own)
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Not so hot, eh?  I want to know where C. S.Lewis, Terry Pratchett and Nevada Barr are?

Well, I did manage to sleep last night.  I only woke up once because I was cold, but pulling the blankets up over my head (leaving a breathing hole, of course) seemed to do the trick.  I don’t have that head-wrapped-in-cotton feeling this morning.  Ahhhhh....

And it’s a beautiful morning - bright, sunny, dry and cool.  Niftiness!  Dad and I are off up the Maine coast today which should be very pleasant indeed,

Not a lot to report in terms of knitting.  I did some more on the fancy scarf and started crocheting another washcloth.

I’ve been giving serious thought to frogging the Meadow Flowers Shawl.  While I like the yarn a lot, the shawl fabric doesn’t have any kind of “body” (for lack of a better term).  My thoughts for the yarn go towards something like a one piece T sort of thing but I want to think it over for a couple of days before I do anything.

I’m also thinking about re-trying the slipper in stockinette rather than garter.  I think stockinette would give the body of the thing a little more integrity.  We’ll have to see what happens - couldn’t hurt to try.

I’ve got about three inches of ribbing on the DPNs that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a sock or a fingerless glove.  I pick it up and work a few rounds, hoping it will tell me where it wants to go.  So far, it’s remaining mum.

In other words - I need to get myself !@#$%^&* organized!

Did any of you catch Sci Fi’s 5ive Days to Midnight this week?  Given that the SFN’s production values can often be measured in negative numbers, I was surprised to see that it was pretty good.  The ending was a bit rushed, but otherwise it wasn’t bad at all.  Likewise I haven’t been real impressed with Timothy Hutton since “Ordinary People” but he handled this wonderfully and it was nice to see Dennis Quaid again.  The network is repeating the entire 5 hour mini-series on Sunday.

And there’s this for any of you who might be interested in vector drawing programs.

Microsoft is offering Expression 3 for free.  I had a very early version of this years ago when it was offered by Fractal Design and it’s quite an interesting program.  This appears to be a somewhat stripped down version, but the “cool” factor remains and it’s great fun to play with.  For free, it’s definitely worth a look!

Ray Charles passed away yesterday morning.  I had the privilege of attending a concert many years ago - and it’s probably my favorite live-performance memory.  I know I can still listen to his voice and music on CDs, but the world feels like it’s somehow missing something now.

Georgia, Georgia…
No peace I find.
Just an old, sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind…

Have a great weekend, everyone.

...or the night before (:  Last night it was toss, drift, wake, turn, drift, wake - repeat ad infinitum.  Night before I woke up at 2:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep.  Gack!  I don’t have sleep problems ordinarily, but when I do it’s seriously frustrating.  This impairs my knitting as I’m too tired to have any motivation and even if I could summon the interest I’d make so many stupid mistakes that I’d spend the next two days in the frog pond.

I did, however, manage this:

Cuffed Slipper

As it didn’t seem this was something I could mess up too badly, I fetched out the prototype slipper and picked up the stitches around the opening to work a fold-over cuff.  I wound up with 40 stitches and worked 2x2 ribbing for about 3”.  Then I switched over to stockinette and worked another 3.5 - 4”.  The ribbing lies under the fold-over and is there mainly to keep the cuff snugged up to the ankle.  What shows is the reverse stockinette of the fold-over.  You could show the front side of the stockinette by purling every round instead of knitting, as I did.

I wound up binding off twice :) The first time, I was determined to figure out how to do an I-cord bind-off.  And I did figure it out!  I was thrilled to see this neat rounded edge appearing around the top of the cuff.  Thrilled, that is, until I finished off and tried to put the slipper on.  The bind-off was too tight :( So I ripped it out and did a regular bind off - very loosely.  That worked.

What I’d do in the future would be to increase the number of stitches on the last worked row.  I had 40, so I’d probably increase by one third to one half - because I really liked the I-cord bind-off, but it has to be done tightly in order to look good (doesn’t it?) so you need more stitches in order to actually be able to wear the slipper afterwards.  That’s my working theory anyway :).

Sorry about the trivial post and its lateness.

I really, really hope I can sleep tonight!

I worked on a pattern stitch yesterday.  All day.  I’m trying to adapt it for a particular purpose and not having much luck so far - not that I’m going to give up.  But I got nowhere so fast, so many time yesterday, I’m lucky the knitting police didn’t bestow a handful of speeding tickets on me :)

The pattern stitch is called Dragon Skin and comes from the Barbara Walker treasuries.  It’s one of my favorites and produces a fabric of beautiful, overlapping curved “scales”.  There’s a nice example at Much Ado About Knitting.

I went as far as charting the pattern yesterday because I thought that might help me see how it all falls together.

Dragon Skin

Actually, that did help a bit.  As I get used to charts, I begin to understand how valuable they can be, especially in terms of seeing how the stitches come together to create the pattern.  And a chart is neat and concise whereas a pattern may run to pages of written instructions.

Niks Nogard

Here I just swapped the sections.  A large swatch from either chart would give you pretty much the same result, but the starting point is different in each of them.

What I’m trying to do is to work out a way that the pattern may be worked into a triangular shawl, starting with the point and working up to the shoulders.  If you substituted YOs for the M1s, ("M" in the chart) you’d get a lacier appearance, though I’m not sure the result wouldn’t be more leaf-like than dragon-scalish :) I haven’t succeeded in making it work yet - but I expect I’ll continue to fiddle with it as the idea is very appealing to me.

The “warshcloth” is done but I won’t bore you with another picture of it - it’s just a washcloth.  I like it though, the colors are great and the cotton (Classic Elite Spotlight) is so soft.  I may have enough yarn left to make another one.  Wouldn’t that be something?  I’ll have to change the pattern though.  It wouldn’t do to have two identical items amongst the assortment.  They’d feel self-conscious and the others might pick on them :)

I have a question. I know, so what else is new?  The fancy scarf is coming along very nicely and I’m approaching the end of the first ball of yarn.  This is acrylic microfiber; it’s very slippery and has very little twist.  I’m at something of a loss about how to join the new ball and how to handle working in the ends.  Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas?  Because this is intended to be a dressy piece (and a gift to boot) I want things to be as nearly invisible as possible and I can’t think how to manage it with this slick stuff…