Hey look! Some hideously ugly slippers!

They're goofy looking and they need another run or two through the washer, but I haven't been able to get them off of J's feet for long enough to do so, so they must be successful in SOME kind of way. I also was able to use up a bunch of oddballs of yarn in knitting them, so they succeeded there, too. Oh, and they kept me occupied on the car ride from Madison to Ithaca after I finished J's vest.

I finished these the day we got here, and (gasp) *had not brought any other projects with me*. I had a half-ball of the vest yarn left, a yard or two of the components of the slippers, and size 9 dpn's. Dire circumstances when you don't even have furniture to entertain you. Fortunately, there's a yarn shop about 10 minutes' walk from my new place (I swear this isn't the reason I rented here). I picked some plain sock yarn and DPNs, keeping in mind that my stash is bursting at the seams and that socks can fill up hours that would otherwise be spent looking at walls.


Storebought sock tossed aside in favor of the new kid on the sock block.

Is pretty, no?

After we moved in and started sorting our things, J came up to me with his dremel tool, which comes in lots of little pieces. He asked me if I had everything he'd need to make a small drawstring bag.

I had some leftover, moderately tough fabric left over from another project that was just the right size, so I handed him the fabric, a tomato of pins, and some thread.

"Cool! Can you show me how to sew it together?"

I laughed, and my brain broke. I realized I never have seen him sew before--he's even given me pants to hem, but I just figured he wasn't comfortable on the sewing machine. But I never realized that he didn't know how to sew at all. To me it's like someone not knowing how to use a can opener, or peel an orange--you'd assume they knew how, even if you hadn't seen them at it.

It took me a few minutes of thinking to decide how to teach him--I can't even remember *learning* how to sew, so I wasn't sure where to start. (One of my favorite pictures of me is being about three and sitting playing at my mom's old sewing machine. I wasn't sewing for real--I do remember being taught how to use a sewing machine when I was in first or second grade--but I've been looking at sewing-in-progress for my whole life, so it's purely instinctual.)

Explaining all the while, I trimmed the fabric so it was nice and even, drew seam lines with a pencil, and pinned the fabric together. I threaded the needle, doubled the thread and knotted it. I sewed the first few stitches, describing seam allowances and stitch sizes.

Three stitches in, he ended up with a rather spectacular knot, so I explained how best to open up knots (don't pull too hard), how to prevent them from getting too unpleasant in the first place (don't pull too hard), and how best to prevent them in the first place (constant tension on the thread, and DON'T PULL TOO HARD).

After six inches or so, I taught him the rocking-the-needle-back-and-forth thing, which I'm sure has a real name but which I know from osmosis.

When I went to bed, he was still at it, and in the morning, I inspected his work. Pretty good.

So I set up the drawstring part, wrote a little explanatory note, and left for the day.

When I came home there was a completed bag. "I didn't want to go out today, so I just took my time, sewing the bag and watching Mythbusters. It was pretty relaxing!"

Crafting while watching TV, relaxing? You don't say.

Next lesson: Sewing machine.

There's been recent knitting. Completing things! Who would have imagined? I almost forgot what all this yarn was around for.


I think I mentioned that I bought yarn for a vest for J. There's a black sweater I knit for him last year--very basic, ribbed, v-neck. He likes it a lot, but didn't feel that it was quite formal enough to qualify as "business attire"--in particular, the v-neck is wide enough that it doesn't work so well with button-down shirts. So he asked for a vest with a closer neck than the sweater, in a relatively neutral color. I offered cables and other fanciness, and was refused. So, clean and unadorned rule the day.

I didn't see any sweater patterns around that suited my general plan, so as usual I went off on my own, though I looked at a couple of vest patterns in Interweave to get an idea of armhole depth. I think I cut them a little deep--in looking at their directions, I failed to think about the fact that they picked up and knit an inch of ribbing on every side while I just wanted a very plain I-cord edging, for a nice clean finish. Also, that J is broad-shouldered relative to his bitty waist.

There's something about him wearing it that gives us both a... militaristic impression? It looks a bit like chain mail, or a bulletproof vest, or something. I suspect it's the lack of wide ribbing on the edges. Adding a tie completely changes that, though, and turns it very adorably preppy.

J didn't like this picture of him in the vest. "I. Am. Composed. Of. A. Series. Of. Ones. And. Zeros," was his exact response. He demanded that I take another, less severe picture, but he'd already changed and didn't want to re-dress. So here.


In his jammies and slippers (I'll talk about the slippers soon).

That closet, by the way, is the "I don't know what to do with X, hey how about I stick it in this closet?" closet. We're pretty much totally unpacked, but the closet definitely needs some reordering. Even just today, it's a bit better. I could actually close it now!

Through a couple of layered coincidences, I've ended up doing some family genealogy recently. My mom's father's people lived in upstate NY near to Ithaca between at least 1850 and 1940 (coming via Ireland and, er, further upstate NY, and not sure where from there yet). Cornell has a good number of records of the area, so I'm poking at them with sticks to see what falls out. My family is both fertile and uncreative with names; there are multiple generations of Johns and Franks which has gotten me all mixed up now. I found pictures of one of the Franks, which was really neat, but he's obviously too young AND too old to be any of the Frank [lastname]s I knew about. I haven't figured out exactly who he is yet to the Franks I know about--a nephew? A cousin?

But! I've found an address where the family lived for at least 30 years, and where my grandfather probably visited as a child. Google Earth leads me to believe that the site of the house might just be an empty field, or it might be across the street from the empty field. Hard to say. And, I found that there's someone with my great-great-grandmothers' maiden name that still lives in the town where she was born in 1848. The name is common enough that it *could* be a coincidence (it's not "Smith" common, but common enough). But it's still neat.

A while back, when J and I were going to Italy for a trip, I looked up some bits of my dad's side of the family. I rapidly hit a language-barrier dead end at Ellis Island. So it's fun now to have both the language and the geographical proximity to go through microfilm of old newspapers, looking for wedding announcements.

So in the last month I pretty much failed in keeping up the rss feed for the blog, because I barely had time to write. And then I caught up. And now the feed doesn't seem to want to actually DO anything. Nothing's showing up. I made a temporary fake one to test, and very carefully looked at the whole chunk of code. The code is right, and double-checking didn't help. As I barely understand how that thing works anyhow, it's frustrating. I'll play with it again sometime in the near future, but if anyone who was keeping up by rss happens to wander over here, that's what's going on. Argh.



And this scarf, which I showed a picture of but didn't talk about. Honestly, it's all a lost weekend at this point; I only remembered I knit it when I found the thing, still needing ends woven in, in one of the boxes. It's pretty, but I think I'm just burned out on everything even related to the last three months.

I charted out the design for this scarf when I went home for a little break at the end of September, right before the final slog. It's about the only thing I worked on that whole time, save some spinning. It looks kind of complicated, but it's the kind of lace I like to knit (good thing, since I designed it). What's the kind of lace I like to knit? The kind where the pattern can be described by rules rather than charts or stitch patterns.

Oddly, I just tried to explain the rules and realized they don't translate well into words; it's far too much of a kinetic/temporal thing. Nevertheless, I figured out the rules after the first repeat and didn't look at the chart again until it was time to decrease at the end--even reversing the direction of the points mid-scarf was perfectly straightforward. An easy pattern was necessary, since I couldn't hold many non-thesis thoughts in my mind for the last few months.

I'm planning to sell the pattern with a few variations in the near future--basically, once Ravelry gets their patterns-for-pay thing set up. I'd been planning this since very early on, once I knew I liked what was happening with the scarf. Frustratingly this pattern came out just a few weeks after I started knitting the scarf. It's similar in *just* enough ways to make me worry that people are going to think it's derivative (the color, in particular, was the thing that got me). But I'm still going to go out on a limb with it, because hell, *I* like it, and maybe other people will too.

When I first started on the pattern, I mentioned that it was inspired by this hair ornament, which I love, along with the philosophy of its designer about the nature of art and collaboration. I got permission from her to use the title of the hair ornament as the name of the scarf (there's some trading in the works), so the lovely will be called "Proud Suppliers of Angst to Crowned Heads for more than Four Centuries". A mouthful, but a delicious one.

Would anyone out there be willing to be a test-reader (or knitter)? Moderate lace-knitting ability would be awesome, pickiness doubly so. There'd be a free pattern in it for you, at the very least. No *real* timeframe, though I'll probably have it all charted and typed up by the end of the month.

I was taking the city bus home from my brand new, fabulous, well-paying job. The bus needed to stop at one point to let four nervous deer cross the road. As soon as the opposing traffic stopped for them, they shot across the street and into the adjoining park. Then I came home to an apartment full of all of my wonderful, useful things--in boxes, mostly, but there.

It's been a good day.

I'm in a place. I've signed up to rent this place for a while. We have a functioning Internet connection which goes through the phone lines, though we still don't have a dial tone. How does that work? We have a trundle bed, and some food.

We have none of our stuff, yet, except what we brought out in the car. This fact prevents this place from being "home". So it's kind of surreal right now, like we're on a strange vacation that involves filling out lots of paperwork.

While being in this very empty limbo, Robin has tagged me for a book meme:

Pick up the nearest book of 123 pages or more. (No cheating!)
Find Page 123.
Find the first 5 sentences.
Post the next 3 sentences.
Tag 5 people.

I am actually cheating to include books that have been published, because the closest book to me is the annual report for the Center I'm working at. Second choice isn't necessarily more enlightening:

"I'll take one of these."
"That's 700 yen"
(a pause of several wordless panels) "Whoa! there's one that has the president from "Kujibiki Unbalance on it, and the art looks pretty good."

--From Genshiken: The society for the study of modern visual culture, Vol. 1.

That would be an extremely meta-dork manga that I bought the day before last. J and I had watched the anime version and enjoyed it, and right now I'll do anything to avoid the very boring and poorly-written book I brought with me. Genshiken is pretty neat. In no way a good introduction to manga or anime--I can tell what jokes I'm not getting, at least--but I find all the characters amusing and recognizable. These are the geek guys I hung out with in high school, the geek guys I WAS in high school. The geekdom's just different.

I don't like tagging people, but anyone who feels like it can consider themselves tagged. Just leave a comment to that effect.