When it came time to name these, my mind dived right into World of Warcraft (which I play) where performance enhancing pieces of armor and weaponry are often quite fancifully named: 

Resplendent Belt of the Eagle
Hauberk of Totemic Rage
Dreghood Gloves of Nature Protection
Siphoning Dagger of the Whale

Ahem…

You know how it is when you learn something new?  It becomes almost an addiction for a while in the same way that a small child with a flashlight finds that everything in the world requires added illumination :) At least that’s often how it works for me.  Having learned how to bead knitting with the assistance of a crochet hook, I wanted to employ the technique.  And it happened that I had this pretty blue-green yarn and I also had the right sized beads in an assorment of arctic ocean colors.  The color is quite cool and the beads enhance that appearance though, being wool, the gaunlets are quite comfortably warm :) Appearances can be deceiving - and sometimes that’s a good thing :)

Of course you can and should make these with any color yarn/beads that tickles your fancy - a black pair with red beads for the gothically inclined, ot white silk with pearls for a bride.  Even the fellows could get in on the act with a charcoal or leather colored yarn and silver or bronze beads!

Glacial Gauntlets of the Wolf

Materials

100 grams of fingering weight yarn
Set of (4) size 2 US (2.75 mm) needles
1 size 12 crochet hook
180 size 6 glass beads or “E” beads (a 28 gram tube is way more than enough)
Tapestry needle for weaving in ends

Terms

K - knit
P - purl
B - place bead
M1 - Make a stitch by casting on a backwards loop.

There is an excellent tutorial for the beading technique by Sivia Harding/Knitty Spring ‘06.  Scroll down to the section entitled “Hooking beads as you go”.

Okay - ready?  Comfy?  Got your coffee-tea-soft drink-gin and tonic?

Cast on 63 stitches, 21 stitches on each of three needles, and join.  Be careful not to twist.

Knit 2 rounds of K5, P2 ribbing.
Next round: *K2, B, K2, P2* - repeat around.
Knit 2 rounds of K5, P2 ribbing.
Next round: *K2, B, K2, P2* - repeat around.
Knit 16 rounds of K5, P2 ribbing.
Next round: *K2, B, K2, P2* - repeat around.
Knit 1 round of K5, P2 ribbing.
Next round: *K1, B, K1, B, K1, P2* - repeat around.
Knit 1 round of K5, P2 ribbing.
Next round: *K2, B, K2, P2* - repeat around.
Knit 16 rounds of K5, P2 ribbing.
Next round: *K2, B, K2, P2* - repeat around.
Knit 2 rounds of K5, P2 ribbing.
Next round: *K2, B, K2, P2* - repeat around.
Knit 2 rounds of K5, P2 ribbing.

Thumb Gusset

Round 1:  K5, P2, K2, M1, K1, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 2:  K5, P2, K3, B, K3, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 3:  K5, P2, K2, M1, K3, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 4:  K5, P2, K3, B, K1, B, K3, P2; (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 5:  K5, P2, K2, M1, K5, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 6:  K5, P2, K5, B, K5, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 7:  K5, P2, K11, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 8:  K5, P2, K2, M1, K7, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 9:  K5, P2, K13, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 10: K5, P2, K13, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 11: K5, P2, K2, M1, K9, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 12: K5, P2, K15, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 13: K5, P2, K15, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 14: K5, P2, K2, M1, K11, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 15: K5, P2, K17, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 16: K5, P2, K17, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 17: K5, P2, K2, M1, K13, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 18: K5, P2, K19, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 19: K5, P2, K19, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 20: K5, P2, K2, M1, K15, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 21: K5, P2, K21, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 22: K5, P2, K21, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 23: K5, P2, K2, M1, K17, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 24: K5, P2, K23, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 25: K5, P2, K23, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 25: K5, P2, K2, M1, K1, (B, K1) 9 times, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 26: K5, P2, K25, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 27: K5, P2, K2, Bind off next 21 stitches, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 28: K5, P2, K4 (joining one side of the gusset to the other), P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.
Round 29: K5, P2, K2, M1, K2, P2, (K5, P2) 7 times.

Knit one round of K5, P2 ribbing.
Next round:  (K2, B, K2, P2) 9 times.
Knit three rounds K5, P2 ribbing.

Bind off gently and weave in the ends.

These are light duty gloves and not, obviously, intended for very cold temps.  But they are fun and attractive and really easy to knit.  And if you’re a WOW player, you now have a unique piece of gear, though I cannot promise that it will improve your game playing :)

Come on in, the water’s fine!

I’m out most of the day today so this won’t be much of a post :)

Which is just as well because there hasn’t much in the way of knitting either!  I hope this fug goes away soon because it’s really starting to get on my nerves!

Chatters is on for tomorrow night :) See you then!

I watched the weirdest pair of movies over the last few days.  They aren’t intended to be viewed together, it’s just that…

I had read about Colma: The Musical and it sounded interesting enough to have a look.  It’s an indie film about teenaged angst written by H. P. Mendoza who also portrays one of the three main characters.

It is indeed a musical, but it’s a whole different slant on things.  While there are some comic moments, this isn’t a funny film as the kids wander around doing the things teenagers do like buying drinks on fake IDs, figuring out sexuality - both in terms of activity and orientation and using the hard core four-letter words as basic vocabulary whenever there isn’t a teacher or parent around.  Mostly they’re worrying about what they’re going to do when highschool is over (college doesn’t seem to be an option) and they have no more safety net.

The movie isn’t great and is probably only worth seeing once - but it does have its good points. The story is straight-forward; there are no guessing games here.  The music is adequate, if not spectacular and the acting is reasonably good.  But most of all, these kids actually sound like teenagers and I’m not sure the film isn’t worth watching just for that.  This is not Frankie and Annette on the beach :)

After that, for some demented reason, I felt I had to see High School Musical which seems to be well thought of.  I guess maybe in the recesses of my little mind, I thought it would be amusing to do a compare and contrast with Colma - both musicals and both dealing with what it is to be a teenager.

Trust me - there isn’t anything here that you haven’t seen before.  Teen boy and teen girl hook up under improbable and unlikely circumstances and despite spiteful antagonists and selfish “friends” manage to shine through, together, to the end.

This one is Frankie and Annette, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney - all the cute little teenage movies that have rolled down through the decades.  It’s just set in a highschool instead of on the beach or out in Judge Hardy’s garage.  Inoffensive is about the best you can say for it.  The production values are decent - this is Disney, after all.  However, the story is so trite and the music and acting so pedestrian that nice sets hardy matter.

This is a family film in the classic, if not the best sense.  There’s nothing there that’s going to offend anybody.  There also isn’t anything there that would interest or excite anyone - or even keep them awake :)

Colma is most definitely not a family film - but even if it’s not very good, it’s better and truer than High School Musical.  Mendoza is going to be someone to watch, I think.

We had a power outage here Saturday morning.  When we have power issues, usually it’s only a flicker where the power’s out just long enough to make you have to reset your clocks.  This time the power was out for 8 hours or so.  I know that’s nothing to folks in some parts of the country for whom power is a sometime thing during the summer (I’m thinking windstorms, thunderstorms and tornadoes), but it was a little prolonged for us.

Even so, I wasn’t terribly concerned.  I have a gas stove so cooking wouldn’t be a problem and I have a French Press so coffee shouldn’t be an issue, thank goodness!

Oh wait...how am I going to grind the beans?  Maybe I should look at a hand grinder…

I’ve been putting time in on the entrelac shawl, hoping to get it finished before the weather turns seriously cold.  But you know, that seems like more of a joke every day.  It’s the 22nd of October and we have yet to have a hard frost.  Today the temperature is going to be in the high 70s and it’s the right time for Indian summer - except for that lacking the hard frost thing… The way it looks now, we’ll be heading into a mild winter.  I’m dreaming of a green Christmas?

Anyway, the shawl is coming along and the end is approaching rapidly.  Since you cast on for the width at the top, the piece just gets narrower as you work your way down.  Those last few rows of blocks really don’t take any time at all.  I pretty much expect to be finished with the body of the shawl by the end of the week and puzzling over possible borders on the weekend.  I really can’t wait to wear this :) The way things have been this year though (it’s going to be 79-82 this afternoon), I have to wonder!

After Chatters Saturday evening, I was finally sufficiently motivated to cast on for the second Endless Knot sock.  See, I had been thinking about doing the second by reversing the colors of the first.  It had occurred to me that, on top of the symbolism already inherent in the sock, reversing the colors would lend a bit of a Yin-Yang feel as well.  I was a little concerned though, that it would look clownish.  The Chat crew, however, urged me to go for it - even echoing some of my own reasons for wanting to do it this way.





So I did :)

Yesterday, I went to a concert with my dad.  We drove up to Rochester, NH to see “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band.  You can’t imagine how good these kids were!  Well, they’re not kids I guess, since they’re old enough to be Marines - but they were all younger than me probably including the colonel who was conducting :) I realize that for many, band music is an acquired taste but this band is so good and the musical selections are so well chosen, that you’ll never miss the strings - I promise :) The band is small enough so that you can see the performers and instrumentalists (assuming reasonable seating) and actually watch them creating this incredible sound; seldom do you get to hear such clarity, articulation and precision.  This is not a crude piling of one note on top of another.  This is the building of breath-taking architecture constructed with sound and air.  The program included Makris, Holtz, and Copeland along with a medley of Harold Arlen pieces and a few marches, one of which was (of course) Semper Fidelis.  If you get the opportunity to hear these people play, jump at it - this band is so worth it.

So, how was your weekend?

Been in a bit of a knitting fug this week.  I have lots of projects to work on, but nothing was tripping my trigger.  And I didn’t really even have startitis although the possibility of starting some new and wonderful project is, of course, always there.

This is especially embarrassing because I started the Secret of the Stole project with the idea of learning something and acquiring some self-discipline and now - well at least, at the moment - every time I look at it, I think...eh… That will almost certainly change in time, but right now I feel like I’ve bitten off - not more than I can - but more than I want to chew.

I keep leafing through stitch patterns, looking for something (or even a couple of somethings!) to attract my attention.  God knows there’s plenty of material but so far, nothing has presented itself as an absolute must-do.

I’ve been scouring knitting and crochet sites on the web.  Have you seen the Flying Bats Scarf?  Very cute and funky.  I think I’m going to write that bit of lace into a chart and then think about how it might be used.  I saw the pattern over a week ago and it’s been hovering in my consciousness ever since.  And you all know how I feel about bats :)

Myotis: The Shawl?  Heheh…

I saw a movie last night that I liked enough to recommend - a British film called The Riddle.  It tells a parallel tale of murder both in the present day and in the past.  These murders are connected by a heretofore unknown manuscript of Charles Dickens.  Derek Jacobi is always worth watching and here he plays a dual role to very good effect.  The surprise (to me) was Vinnie Jones who plays the journalist who is caught up by these murders, both past and present, and who has to figure out what exactly is going on.  Jones was wonderful and inhabited the character of Mike Sullivan fully and believably.

While the movie is a bit slow in spots (it runs 116 minutes) it generally moves along pretty well and I found the ending quite satisfying and fitting.  On the other hand, the reviews of it that I could find (and there are surprisingly few of them) were all along the lines of “...the only riddle is how this ever got made”.  All I can tell you is that I liked it.

Chatters is on for tomorrow night - same time, same channel :) Holy knitting needles, Batman!

Have a great weekend :)

I’ve worked more on the entrelac shawl than on the SotS this weekend - something in me wanted the soothing ease of stockinette and really didn’t feel up to lace.  Lace, to the lazy part of me, feels too much like work :) And since I know I need to have all my wits about me to do it even reasonably well, I decided to leave it alone for a couple of days :)

On the other hand, the shawl is progressing nicely and before too much longer, I’m going to have to start thinking about what to do for an edging or border.  (Aside: Are edgings and borders synonymous terms or are they two different things?) I believe I’m going to have enough of the lavender heather to manage it with though I think a single line of the orange and the red might be nice as well.

I also did a little dyeing - much more in the nature of an experiment than because I was after a particular color.  Well, I guess I was after a color…

See, I’ve been chasing a true blue.  You all know my parameters - food safe colors only.  Most of what I play with consists of Easter egg dye tablets and Kool-aid :) In the tablets, the blue color has a fair amount of green in it.  It’s a nice color - but it’s not pure blue.  I want a blue I can mix with red and not get muddy tones because there’s some green in there that the red doesn’t like.  So when we were shopping last week and I saw this:

... I thought I might as well give it a try :)

And I tried one other thing while I was at it.  Reading the ingredients on the Kool-aid package showed me that there was a considerable amount of citric acid in the content.  So I crossed my fingers and didn’t bother adding vinegar.  You know that there has to be acid in the dye solution for the wool to take up the color.  Here, I was figuring that there would be enough citric acid in the Kool-aid to do the trick.  And there was!

It’s a pretty color, for sure - but it’s not blue.  Medium aqua maybe…

Friday I went out in search of a little retail therapy to cure what had started out as a rather depressing day.  In between downpours, I dashed to the mill shop and made a nuisance of myself for an hour or so pawing through displays, checking out new merchandise but just not hitting on anything that floated my boat.  Finally I wound up in the front of the shop looking through the knitting book selection.  I had Evelyn Clark’s book Knitting Lace Triangles in mind when I started looking - until I spotted a copy of Barbara Walker’s second treasury of stitch patterns.  It was an old edition but in reasonably good shape and I have wanted this book forever.

I have hardly put it down since I brought it home :)

Have a great week all - I probably won’t be posting Wednesday because I’m going to be out all day :)