Amazingly enough, I didn't do any holiday knitting this year--none! Not one stitch! This means that the usual post-Christmas share-o-rama isn't happening this year.

Meanwhile, though, I did get to thinking about the projects I've completed this year, and I figured I could regale you all with a big picture-heavy post as repayment for the complete lack of crafty stuff around here lately. Where are they now?

First, the knitting:


It turns out to be a little loosely knit for a hat, but it's perfect as a neck thingy. I get annoyed with scarves because they're always flopping over my shoulder, but this stays put.


I didn't do all the knitting on this (it was a group project), but I supplied the yarn from my stash, arranged and sewed the squares, and added the edging. If a group baby project comes up again in the future I'd definitely steal my own idea and make another one.


The top hat was for me, and I haven't used it much; it's a squitch too short, which is the point, but it falls off too easily.


More stash-busting Dulaan stuff, which kept my hands busy.


Hey look! More brainless donation-bound knitting! (Incidentally, I just recently donated the last 5 or 6 balls of the acrylic pile. Considering I started with a LARGE box full of yarn, I managed to go through a lot.)


I ADORE this hat. Adore, adore, adore. The child I made it for has a smaller-than-average head, so he's not wearing it yet, but the mama mentions to me occasionally that she's been trying it on him in the hopes that he'll fit into it for part of this winter. Keep an eye out for the pattern this year; I'd really like to publish it in some format but still haven't thought through the details.


I wear these a lot. I like that I can wear them in bed without feeling like I have shoes on, yet they're much warmer and sturdier than socks. I might go through another slipper-knitting phase next year--it's one of the best uses of yarn bits.


I almost wore these last night to a party but was worried about getting too warm with so many people around (a valid worry, actually). Successful, though there's not so many occasions at which I can wear them.


A good fall-time hat. It's got me excited to use the rest of that white handspun on a sweater.

And the spinning:


The red merino was finished early this year. The scarf I'm knitting from it is nearing completion. A good project--I'm considering some larger-scale laceweight spinning projects now.


Went into those green-and-brown slippers, above. I'm trying to find excuses to get more of that Jacob fiber. It's a bit scratchy but has a delightful character.


Never got a finished shot of this, partly because I wasn't happy with how the yarn looked. I liked it knit up, though (those green-and-brown felted slippers). Have enough left for some small thing. Maybe hat stripes?


I didn't finish using up all this fiber, and I haven't spun up *quite* enough for a sweater yet, but I spun a lot of this through the year, and I feel like that counts for something. I'm just about ready to start up with it again.


Surprise! I haven't talked about this yet. Actually, I haven't technically finished it yet either; there's about 50 yards of singles left to ply. But both of these things will happen soon.

The totals:

-Over 2500 yards of finished fiber spun--about 10,000 yards of fiber going through my hands as singles or plied yarn.
-16 knitting projects finished.

I didn't finish much with any level of complexity this year--I knit most of a sweater, most of a self-designed lace thing, and one sleeve of that Fair Isle sweater that will never die, but I'm only counting finished things. I'm not at all concerned about this, since school's been taking precidence.

Some things I have planned for next year:
-First, finishing all the straggler projects (green sweater, Fair Isle sweater, lace scarf). Those will happen before anything interesting, but probably not before we move at the end of next month.

-I have the yarn for a vest for J, which he richly deserves for dealing with me. That'll probably be my next on-the-bus project, once I have time to sort out swatches and stitch counts.

-I want to finish spinning that Shetland wool, and start planning the sweater for it. Not sure if I'll get as far as knitting the whole thing this year, but it's in my head right now.

-One of my stepbrothers will become a father this coming summer, and I have a very fun Baby Suprise Jacket in my head. That'll happen after the vest, I think.

-There's a huge, crazy lace shawl being planned. I have the yarn, I've done some swatching. I'm not likely to finish it by the end of the year, but it will probably be this year's big project.

-My fiber stash is starting to overstep its bounds. A lot of what is taking up space consists of mostly-done projects (see two unfinished sweaters), so it shouldn't be difficult to get it back to a more manageable form, but that definitely needs to happen. And once I finish the Fair Isle Sweater, I know I'm going to have a lot of yarn leftovers that will make good fun little projects. So there's those.

-I've got a hot nut for a stranded hat/mitten/maybe scarf set for myself, but I fear that they'll have to wait until next winter.

-Lastly, I really want to get some design stuff sorted. I want to start selling some patterns, but I haven't done any research yet for how I should approach this. If I submit things elsewhere and get them accepted I wouldn't have to worry about a lot of the details of distribution, but if I publish them myself I'd have a lot more control over my own work. Not sure where that's going, but it's something I'm thinking about.

Funny, I've been in town, but not in a remotely writing mood. It's been a pretty quiet holiday season around here. Nice not to travel for a change, as I can't think of a year that I didn't at least spend some of the holiday at my grandmother's or dad's. We had a pleasant holiday, just me, J, and the brainslug:

The tree is tiny, but real, and live--well, it's planted in dirt at the very least. It seems to shed more than full-sized cut trees, and I'm not sure what that's about.

We didn't have much in the way of ornaments, so we put together some odds and ends. The brainslug of course, and I tied up a few dreidels we got from J's parents for Hannukah, and J tied up a few D&D minis, and I cut out some pretty bits of paper I had lying around.

This all was way more fun than a more traditional tree decorating. It may be my new holiday tradition, when we get a tree--spending an evening making that year's ornaments. It's an excuse for me to use decorative odds and ends I save for no reason, it's nice to have a tree that reflects the previous year of interests, it gives me an excuse to play with string, paper, and tape, and it means no fighting with piles of dusty boxes in the basement that take up space the other 11.5 months of the year. How freeing to start with a blank slate each year, and how freeing to not have to pack up all that stuff every January! A bigger tree would be a nice way to display cards, too (as it was with this one, the Aspect of Hextor that J added was barely supported).
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Got a lot of really nice goodies, in particular, a digital camera that I'm still learning about. But it focuses! That alone is way, way worth it. It also has this funny face-recognition process, where it puts a little box around facelike things. So far, it's recognized a stuffed animal and a face I stuck onto a cookie in a bento:

Now that I have the technological capability to take some nice pictures, I need to work on the know-how, clearly.

I also ended up with a great pile of knitting books, a super-cozy bathrobe, and the Dance Dance Revolution game my sisters have, which is more doable and has better music than the other version we have. (I've been playing DDR as an alternative to going outside; 20 minutes when I'm getting cooped-up feeling from looking at a screen all day helps immeasurably. That and streaming classical music have been my thesis-composing godsends.)

Spent today looking for information I thought I had somewhere in my filing cabinet. It's amazing how many people in my field will *talk* about what they think is happening when they're looking at your poster, but how few actually write about it in their journal articles. When you spend a day reading back and forth between a pile of papers from the big hitters in the field, it becomes very obvious, and very annoying, that no one wants to go out on a limb talking about mechanism since they'll probably be wrong. Of course, now I'm not sure how to phrase the counterarguments to things I KNOW reviewers will say, because I can't refer to those arguments in any document that I can find. Grr.

I have been working on the handspun lace scarf off and on while going to job interviews and taking the bus into work--I rarely do work on the bus ride, because I like having a set-aside quiet moment for thinking about my day, and because if I get involved in reading a paper I'm liable to miss my bus stop entirely.



The scarf about 40 inches long now. The reflection line halfway through the scarf is just about where that stray yarn is hanging off on the left hand side--you can kind of make it out, but it's always hard to photograph unblocked lace.

It's a nice little pattern for doing at odd moments, with a level of complexity that allows me to dial up or down how much attention I pay to it, depending on my mood. The lace is very straightforward. I like knitting patterns where you can find the "rules" early on, and so I'm not very surprised that when I made up my own lace stitch* that it would be something you can keep going indefinitely with 5 or 6 general rules to keep the thing in line.

To be honest, I hadn't spread this out to look at it since the last time I took a picture. I hadn't noticed when laying it out on the floor, but when I was editing this picture, I noticed that it looked a lot darker on top just after the yarn change (where that yarn is hanging off the side). Was it just the shadow from my desk light or the angle of the picture?

No, it's my spinning. I just looked at the scarf, and the yarn in that section is a bit thicker than what preceeded it (on the other hand, it was better spun, I didn't have to stop and add twist like I did with the first section). There are also a lot of small thinner and thicker spots in various places, which are hard to see here but which show up when held up to the light. I don't think any of the thickness variation will be obvious when it's being used as a piece of clothing, but it is a reminder that this was my first laceweight yarn. I'm really glad I'm working this yarn up pretty soon after finishing the spinning, though, because it very clearly (to me) shows what areas of my spinning I need to work on. It gives me a chance to fix things the next time I do a large-scale fine spinning project.

*I charted this lace pattern out without any stitch dictionaries etc., and it may actually be unique in its particulars, but in no way am I implying that I'm the first person to make diamonds or long columns of yo's.

My brain is tired of words.

I've actually been a little less stressed the past few days, compared with the past few weeks, even though everything's happening so fast.

Firstly, J is being really awesome at knowing that I'm going to be no fun for a little while, and letting me do whatever I need to do. We did the one Designated Fun thing on Friday night, which was going to a Jonathan Coulton concert. (we were in the balcony, so out of sight in his picture, sadly. My birthday's coming up, but the current plan is to celebrate all holidays in late January. Because by then there should be something to REALLY celebrate. We'll just pretend that I'm 27 until then, yes?

Secondly, I've specifically set my life for the next two weeks up so that I don't stop, ever, even if my brain is fried, so that I don't have time to worry. I typetypetype, and set myself little goals of working for x amount of time, and I'm packing my head full trying to put every paper I've ever read together, at once, which leaves room for little else. And then I take a break by wrapping presents or scrubbing the toilet. Or, if I'm really getting antsy, playing Dance Dance Revolution for 20 minutes. Then, more typetypetype. It works, because all the non-typing activities don't need to get done right this second, so I can just hop in with whatever I feel like at that moment.

Thirdly, I've been getting a lot of writing done. A *lot*. So the actual calculation of "how many pages I need to do per day to get this done" is much less scary than it was, even though there'll be edits and formatting and such, of course. But making progress feels way better than staring at a screen and writing 2 pages of total garbage that I end up deleting the next day, or getting into that state where I'm so nervous about writing that I can't actually do anything about it.

Lastly, something clicked last week and I realized that the amount of stuff will decrease if I just do all the stuff I'm worrying about already. There's still lots to worry about--I'm still scared out of my wits about defending--but right now the only thing I can do is work as much as I can. And I'm doing that. If I work hard and get lucky, then I'll have a whole different set of things to worry about real soon now. And I'm looking forward to something new.

Please stop eating for a moment, I'm going to talk about two gross things.

This is coming from someone that *likes* snow, but snow in the bar district of a city is gross. We have a few inches of solid ice right now that happened on Saturday, and this morning I was walking down State St. seeing all these perfectly preserved piles of bartime vomit, which are clearly displayed against all that white.

This is why I don't understand drinking.
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I was poking through some recipes before we bought groceries on Sunday, looking for ideas for dry beans that I wanted to crockpot (ended up as a slightly oversoupy-but-flavorful chipotle pepper/sweet pepper/corn/bean chili). In the Moosewood Cooks At Home cookbook, they say that thoroughly rinsing the beans after their overnight soak will get rid of some of the carbohydrates which are "the source of beans' ill repute".

So I did a little experiment, despite not being allowed in the lab right now. Soaked the beans Sunday night, rinsed them *really* thoroughly Monday morning, had the chili last night at dinner and today for lunch. Since I needed some sort of double-blind test subject, J got to be an unknowing guinea pig, until I casually asked him today about his gas.

It's a good thing he loves me.

Results: inconclusive. I may have to cook two batches next time, because my curiosity is piqued.

If anyone on here happens to be looking for a 1-br apartment in Madison, or knows someone who is, I'd highly, highly appreciate it if you gave me a little mention. The lease for our place doesn't run out until August, and it's clean and lovely and about as cheap as anything you'll find in the area.

The usual routes--craigslist etc.--are being taken, too.

I know I've discussed this before, but I don't generally talk about work here because I can think of a million ways for even the most innocent stuff to go wrong. So except for the occasional very non-specific "ack!" or "whee!" I keep it really vague. So it's sort of odd to have this rather huge part of my life that basically gets ignored here, except that I think it's pretty clear that I'm nearly done and have been doing a big final push with the writing lately, and going to mysterious locales to interview, and that I can't wait for my work to get published so I feel comfortable talking about my field of study a little without worrying that I'm giving too much away.

Which is a incredibly convoluted way of leading up to saying that I've had a job offer that I've accepted, which is in Ithaca NY and which I'm super, super happy about. The most informative-yet-vague description I can think of is that I'll be a jack-of-all-trades in a very interdisciplinary field, which should allow me to do all the things I enjoy, all at once, which I never thought I'd be able to have at this phase of my career. Having my fingers in all the pies like this, HR-type people kept telling me would involve 10 years toiling in the science mines first.

Other people like toiling in the science mines, but I have no nose for finding ore.

I shouldn't try to make metaphors when it's late.

Anyways, yeah. Two more months, and I'll be in a fresh-yet-familiar place.