I made a hat.

I was curious about Brioche stitch, because Interweave Knits has had a few patterns in brioche lately, and because the yoke of the sweater I'm knitting for J is done in fisherman's rib, which is in the same family of very squishy fabrics (and acutally, now I've started on the yoke, I think that brioche and fisherman's rib, while worked very differently, are just two means to the same end--the yoke looks identical to the hat).

The pattern is the "Brioche Helmet Hat" from the most recent issue of IK. I made the larger size without any modifications except using one strand of worsted weight throughout. The instructions were clear and easy to follow, though not necessarily intuitive, since I needed to look down every other row or so while working the earflaps. The larger size is labeled as a 2-4 year old size, but it wouldn't need to be made much larger to be appropriate for an adult, since I could technically squeeze it onto my big old noggin.

I might make one for myself. I don't think changing the pattern would be too tricky now that I know how it works. My ears get cold easily, and they hurt like a mofo when they thaw, so I start wearing my ridiculously arctic earflap hat pretty early in the winter. This hat might be a good way to transition into the cold weather without looking so totally goofy.

Not sure what I'll do with this hat, in the meantime. For the moment it's begun a new "Eventually someone will be visiting and get cold, or I'll find a good cause to send it to" pile.

If a person with a hammer tries to turn every problem into a nail, I try to turn every thought process into a lab notebook.

I say the phrase "lab notebook", and most people will think of a high school or early-in-college science class, where for some reason they needed to write out exactly what was already written on a Xeroxed handout. That always made me crazy, writing down observations identical to a few dozen people in my class, which were again identical to student observations for decades.

It's very rare that an incredible discovery is made in a first-year science lab. So what's the use? Half the time people end up writing out half a semester's worth of entries on the day the notebooks are due.

Once you're not following someone else's instructions, though, lab notebooks are wonderful. I love mine like a pet, especially when I've managed to remember to put in a detail that seemed unimportant at the time but becomes critical two months later when I can't figure out why something has decided to stop working.

It's okay to put failures into lab notebooks--not just okay, but necessary. It's very freeing, somehow, to write three careful pages of protocol, and at the very end, say "Looked at it. It's crap. Go slower next time."

My knitting notebook is structured exactly like a lab notebook, though I don't usually enter the date. I even put the table of contents up front, and if it's interesting, write up the results. It's nothing like other people's descriptions of knitting notebooks--I don't put in swatches, for instance, because it seems as silly as tying stoppered bottles of chemicals to my lab notebook. It tells me where I can find materials if I need them, but mostly it tells me what I did, or plan to do, and why. It's a reference, not a show-and-tell.

This weekend I realized how useful a cooking notebook would be. There was a wild rice salad I made over a year ago which was delicious, but which I never made again because I had no idea what went into it (it tasted bad, at first--too much vinegar--and I panicked and threw half the spice cupboard into it). I tried it again this weekend, and it came out very well, though different. How handy it would have been to have a non-spiral bound notebook the first time around, so I could at least have been in the ballpark.

I never liked those little index cards, anyhow.

For the record, here's the salad. Values are vague, because I don't have a cooking lab notebook yet. :

Rice Salad

--1 cup uncooked mixed rice (there's a blend in the bulk section of the Co-op that I use, but I've seen similar things at the grocery store--it contains, among other things, wild rice, plain white and brown rice, and some very short grains (Arborio?)).
--However much water/stock is needed to cook the rice according to the directions.
--3 or 4 cardamom pods (Cardamom! It's a flavor I knew I was missing for the last 5 years of cooking. But now it's mine.)
--about 1 tsp. cumin
--about 1 tsp. cinnamon
--a clove of garlic or some garlic powder
--1 overflowing cup of mixed dried cranberries, chopped dried apricots, and chopped walnuts, very roughly 1:1 fruit:nuts.
--a very hefty blob of rice wine vinegar--maybe a scant 1/4 cup?
--some vegetable oil, about as much as the vinegar.
--probably some salt and pepper.

Cook the rice in the water/stock, a little oil, and the spices. Be amazed by cardamom.

While that's cooking, chop the apricots and walnuts, if needed, and put them in a pretty bowl. Eh, put the vinegar and some more oil in the bowl too, while you're at it.

When the rice is cooked, fish out the cardamom if you can find it, put the rice in the bowl with the fruit and nuts, and mix it all up.

Put it in the fridge for a while, then taste and adjust the spices. Put more vinegar in if it's going to be sitting overnight, because it mellows out a lot.

So, I watch the Today Show when I eat breakfast, which I feel like I have to apologize for, because I know it's dopey and because J mutes it or turns the tv off on his way through half the time. But I learn things, like what computer modeling predicts the weather will be that day, and that there's a country song called "She's in Love With A Boy" in heavy rotation with the exact same melody as a ska song from the 90's called "She's Got a Girlfriend Now".

I didn't say I learn important things. Five minutes after I wake up is too early to learn important things.

Anyways, my favorite part is when they have these alarmist stories about "new trends" that were happening ten years ago when I was in high school. Kids are worried about getting into good colleges! People swear! And they write about their feelings online where anyone can read them! Sometimes I get too embarrassed for Al and flip to Sesame Street for a few minutes, but most of the time it makes me happy that there are people in the world that don't realize there are pictures of boobies online.

They had one of these non-stories yesterday, and they created a term that I instantly, simultaneously, recognized and groaned at.

"Girl Crush". Meaning, that very early portion of a friendship where a person seems incredibly interesting, and you want to spend lots of time with them and ask them lots of questions. If the story is to believed, this is a female-only phenomenon.

I do know exactly what they mean. A lot of the symptoms are comparable to a romantic crush--you think about the person a lot, are so happy to see them, lose track of time during a heady conversation. (this is what I mean in my links section, where I call John my "first blogging crush". Man, I think I spent about a week reading nothing but his archives sometime early in grad school. Also, note this entry on the joys of a good scientific conversation. I'm just pointing out that I said it first. So there.) I've gone through that phase of friendship with a lot of people, and of course most of the time it's like a romantic crush, where the non-fantasy person has annoying habits, or is too busy for new friends, or the interest just fades, but plenty of times things work out, and there's a lovely friendship to be had. It's not like friendships intense enough to require romantic language are anything new, as a quick glance through Victorian-era letters will attest. (I know, I know, some of those letters were probably written by women with real romantic feelings, but without a socially acceptable way of acting on them. But they're not all written by those women.)

Nevertheless, the phrase still bothers me, for a reason that Matt Lauer made abundantly clear by asking three different times, "Are you sure you don't mean some kind of sexual thing here?" The phrase "girl crush" sounds like something right out of a straight guy's lesbian fantasies. And frankly, there is already a real thing that could be called a "girl crush", real romantic feelings between young women, which shouldn't be diluted by some term that'll have 15 minutes of fame. For although some of the symptoms might be similar, it's not the same thing, not at all, and it insults the reality of either experience to make it sound that way. The silence in here has been deafening--I've been working on what will probably be a Christmas gift, and don't want to give the game away. And I've been spending a lot of time at work.

I accidentally bit into a piece of pepper today so spicy, the top of my head may actually have popped off and floated around the room. (There were bits of pepper in my stirfry, about the size and spiciness of the red pepper flakes you get at pizza places. I could deal with that, but this was a back-of-a-teaspoon sized piece that hadn't been shredded properly). I can't even remember a good portion of the meal. I do remember asking the waitress for a glass of milk, and she looked at me quizzically.

"Half and half?"

"No, milk."

"We have half and half. You want coffee?"

God, no.

So anyways, even though I spit it out and drank a few large glasses of ice water, and milk after I left, I can still feel it. My body spent a half hour or so deciding which direction that thing-that-couldn't-possibly-be-food would take, and while I'm glad the answer was "downwards", that doesn't make the one painful bite's path any more torturous.

Look familiar? I made an almost identical pair for my stepmom for Christmas. In March, I got an email from her that said she'd loved them so much that she wore them completely out, and could I make another pair? It took a while to get around to it, but I finally did. The felting came out more evenly than before--the first time I made them I had two very small balls of white yarn, and used one for one slipper and the other for the other. A lesson in uneven felting rates. This time it's the same yarn the whole way through.

The small band of white around the ankle was done using a technique I read about in Folk Knitting in Estonia, that makes a little braid in the middle of a piece of knitting. It's pretty neat--you bind off in the usual way, by lifting one stitch over another, and combine this with yarnovers. The end result is what looks like a bound off edge (a braid) in the middle of the outside of your work. I think the technique would look better if that row was worked with needles a size or two smaller than the rest of the piece--I found the braid was neat enough, but so loose that even felted the white shows through the next row of red.

Since my stepmom wore through her first pair in less than 3 months, I made sure these were as solidly felted as they could be, and then added slipper bottoms. It makes them look extra-sturdy, almost professional. If I can actually remember to send them soon, she should have them in time for chilly weather.

It was Jeremy's birthday yesterday, and he got these socks. Toe-up, knit on 0's, and he picked out the colors, so getting them wasn't too much of a surprise although he didn't know about my deadline for them. The bright heels and toes were made with the last bit of yarn from the Unreasonably Bright Socks. The reason that only about 1/4 of the toe is knit in the bright color is that I just barely had enough yarn to squeak by. This worked very well with the figure-8 toe, because it starts at the very bottom of the toe. It would have been a big mess with the shortrow toe, my usual technique, which starts at the closest-to-the-heel end of the toe shaping.

Here's what I do when I have maybe-enough yarn to do some toes (or anything I need 2 of, really), and I want to minimize yarn waste without making things uneven looking. I take the one ball of yarn I have and wind a much smaller ball from it. Without cutting the yarn, I weigh the new and old ball in my hands until they feel about the same weight. Then, again without cutting the yarn, and being careful to wind with about the same tension as with the first, I wind the second ball.

They're never the same size the first time around, which is why I don't cut the yarn.

Depending on how far off the first pass was, and how big the ball of yarn is, I'll either start winding completely from the beginning, adding or subtracting as needed, or else I'll just pull a few yards from one ball or the other and drape it over whichever half is lacking.

If I had a scale, I might triple-check by weighing each ball, but I don't, and I haven't had much trouble using this method. Things usually stay within a row or two. If you're particularly unconfident, you can leave the yarn uncut, work until the first ball is gone, put that work on a holder, and work the second piece with the other end of the yarn (in other words, do the knitting equivalent of that scene from Lady and the Tramp). That way the worst that will happen is a few rows from piece #1 need to be unknit to match #2. This wouldn't work with a yarn with a strong directional texture like a chenille, but for things like socks it'd be all right. Two quotes:

1: This is from an email from an almost violently liberal friend of mine, which made me laugh:

This dimwitted, superstitious horde [intelligent design proponents] are growing in power so fast that it would make cancer sit back in wonder.

2: New words to an old song, with a mental image that made me laugh. Blame J.

"Why do nerds
Suddenly appear
Every time
You are near?

Just like me, they long to be
Close to you." I really shouldn't look at the listing of houses for sale in our neighborhood. First, I'll find my favorite house in the world is for sale. (Hard to tell from the pictures, but it looks like a gingerbread house, and has a bright blue roof, so tiny and cheerfully quirky. I probably wouldn't REALLY want to live there, but still, it's the principle of the thing.)

Also, we really, really, really can't afford a house. Especially in our neighborhood. Even the tiny gingerbread house is well out of reach. It's ironic that the part of town known for it's granola-crunchiness is by far the most expensive place to live.

So why do I look, when I know I'll only feel like the Little Match Girl with her face pressed against the window? Partly, for the comfort of knowing that I'm working towards being able to afford a real, doesn't-even-have-to-be-so-modest house. Sometimes graduating seems purely theoretical. But looking at a whole building, and the dirt underneath it, and thinking how I could paint the bathroom fluorescent pink and fill the backyard with morning glories if we wanted to, that seems like a real thing I can work towards.

First, the Boston housing market needs to collapse. *crosses fingers*
The blooming of morning glories started out slowly at first, just one every few days, but now there's at least two every day. Two of the vines haven't flowered yet, but both have buds, so they should be joining the fray soon. The vines themselves are going everywhere, trained up, across the rope I'd originally strung up for the bird feeder, and down to the cucumber plant, which doesn't have nearly the same reach but makes up for it with its rich foliage.

The cucumber plant flowers like crazy, and has put out a couple of pinky nail-sized fruit that dry and shrivel within a day or two, but it hasn't produced anything worthwhile yet, even after I tried cross-pollinating the flowers by hand. A second pot of cucumbers is doing really terribly--I used a different soil in that pot, ironically it was the stuff labeled "organic", but had a stong chemical smell and appears to have burned the cukes and beans completely. I've started watering the pot to within an inch of its life lately, hoping to leach some of the chemicals out before I reuse the soil next year.

The Peppers That Claim To Be Sweet But Look Like Pale Poblanos are doing well, red streaks shooting through the yellow. I'm thinking of making some kind of Spanish rice with them this weekend--a nice way to display them, whether they're hot or sweet. The regular sweet peppers I started from seed are thriving, but they're so far behind the times I'm not sure we'll get fruit out of them before the weather cools. We've gotten a pint or two of grape tomatoes, but I think that plant's starting to wind down production. I planted another batch of sweet peas this week--if the squirrels don't eat the seeds we'll have a nice fall-weather crop.

The squirrels love our porch. When they're not busy stuffing nuts between the wheel and frame of our bikes, they're digging around in the wonderfully diggable soil that our plants live in. Although I'd seen the aftermath, dirt flung every which way, I hadn't caught one at it until this morning. I pulled back the curtain and saw one laying in the blackberry pot exactly as if it were a sauna, tail curled around the inner circumference. He ran away, but not before giving me a dirty look for disturbing his relaxation time by gaping.

This sweater is the first finished object from my most recent knitting phase, which started about 2 1/2 years ago--the first serious knitting phase, the one that makes people in my knitting group call me an expert.

I'm going to be unravelling it soon.

It's my inlaws that restarted me knitting. After my two-dozen rows of a garter-stitch scarf as a kid, a "learning the mysteries of gauge" lap blanket in which the first block was 1/3rd smaller than the last, and a comfortable but slightly short sweater I made in college, I wandered away from knitting. It was fun, but I don't usually stay with any one type of craft for very long. After the first sweater, I made a big crochet blanket, then started working on a quilt.

The quilt was still in fairly small pieces when I got yarn three Christmases ago. Really nice stuff--merino, in three shades of green. So soft and light. I couldn't NOT make something with it, really. (You'll note that the quilt is still in pieces, albeit slightly larger ones.)

So I pulled a sweater pattern out of Knitter's Stash, which I also got as a present that year. I changed a lot of things along the way. I changed the cardigan to a pullover, made it into a v-neck, adjusted the ribbing so it didn't interfere with the striping. A lot of the abilities I pride myself in now--the lack of pattern-fear, a willingness to rip out a bad idea, enjoying a small amount of math-gymnastics to make my ideas fit the reality--all that shows in the sweater.

But I also look at it now and see lots things that would vastly improve its wearability. The sweater is too short and wide--more of a problem than blocking alone can fix. The gauge of the sweater is consistent with what's listed on the ball band, but I disagree with the ball band. the fabric feels too gappy. On a windy day it's as if I'm not wearing a sweater at all.

There are also problems that don't directly impact the wearability, but which make me cringe nonetheless. I was too cheap to buy smaller needles for the ribbing, thinking it would look okay. It doesn't. I only conquered my terrible stich-picking-up technique last summer. (The main trick to picking up stitches is a point-of-view one--you don't need to pick up the stitch closest to the edge if it's ugly.) The way I got around this on the green sweater was by crocheting the neckband. It lies flat, but it looks wrong.

I'm not even going to start talking about the seams. I'd be typing all day.

I wouldn't mind so much if this was made with some cheapy wool or leftover Red Heart, but I love this yarn. Not only is it beautiful to knit with and wear, but it's more expensive than I'm usually willing to spend on a piece of clothing.

It deserves better.

So right now it's on top of my "to be fixed" pile, next to the khaki pants with the button that won't stay put and the skirt that will get finished as soon as it's cool enough to iron its seams properly.

It probably needs more yarn. Fortunately Elann is putting up some very similar-looking, similar-gauge merino next week. I'll use it in the ribbing and at the neck, which I think I'll change to a loose turtleneck. If I'm very close, I can rip yarn out of a kerchief-y thing I made from some of the leftover yarn.

In a further experiment, I'm going to use the Incredible, Custom Fit Raglan Pattern. I think a top-down raglan will help the stripes to match up better than in the original, and if the yarn situation is looking dire, I can make the ribbing a bit wider. I haven't made a top-down sweater before, but I appreciate the approach of the pattern above. It seems like it'll be easy to wing the parts I want to wing.

It will be an interesting way of coming full-circle with my knitting skills, I think. It's not the first time I've unravelled a whole sweater I've made, but it's the first time I'm doing so without bitterness.

I can't wait to see my new sweater. Dear Brain:

I know you enjoy reminding me about things I don't like to think about in the middle of the night. But this is overkill. I get it, I GET IT--I'm physically capable of reproduction, as are most of my friends.

So you can stop it with the baby-dreams now.

3 in one night. Ridiculous. I've started a sweater for J, called Cornwall, from Alice Starmore's Fisherman's Sweaters. I can't find a picture of it online, so MS Paint to the rescue! I'm enjoying working on it--it feels real and substantial after lots of lace, socks on 0's, and a somewhat fine-gauge sweater for myself with The Sleeves That Will Not Die.

Being a gansey, it's worked in the round, which is new sweater-construction territory for me. I like it so far--it's easier to picture it as a completed garment and see that it's about the right size. And since there's about 10 inches of stockinette between the ribbing and the first chevron band, it's a particularly easy to work on while reading a magazine or following movie subtitles. It makes the stockinette go faster, at least. So I'm working on a paper, and it's at the point where to get much farther with it I have to decide on a journal to submit it to (or maybe I'm just procrastinating, I really can't even tell anymore). So I call up the most recent issues from a couple of candidates, to look at the format--number of pages and figures in a typical article, what they seem to think is interesting right now, that sort of thing.

Partway down the index of one of the journals, I see an interesting title and think, "Hey, that sounds like work that other people in the group are doing! I hope they didn't get scooped or anything." It's only after I skim over the figures, determine that yes, this group is doing the same thing and oh man does their data look good, after imagining how disappointed my office mate will be, because I have to tell them that someone else came up with their great idea too--only then do I happen to check the authors.

It's my officemate's paper.

Reading. It's important.