My oven mitts finally felted up. It only took about 8 runs through the washer and dryer. Yeesh.

I'd had these two beautiful undyed sheepy-smelling balls of yarn for a while, trying to decide what to do with them because they were so pretty. I've got potholders at home, but I'm clumsy and burn myself with potholders half the time because I'm not mindful of where my fingers are. I figured oven mitts would work well for a couple of reasons: 1, I need oven mitts, and 2, this means the yarn will be on display all the time in the kitchen, which means I can spend just as much time looking at the yarn as I did before.

I made up the pattern as I went along, essentially making a heel-less toe-up sock with a slit in one side, then picking up the stitches around the slit to make the thumb. The shaping is a little bit off--both thumbs are kind of long, and I stupidly made two right hands (not the first time I've mirror-imaged something twice by accident). I wanted them to be very densely felted so I don't burn my hands any more, but that took quite a few trips through the wash.

They work great, and I love that they still have some of that raw sheepy personality. I've had a pattern in my head for the past few weeks--something I wanted to make as a Christmas gift, but which seemed like it'd need one unit more tweaking than I was in the mood to do on my own. I had a particular stitch pattern in mind, though, and a specific construction method. It was just a matter of getting up the energy to bother.

And then during my usual blogreadings, miracle! Someone else has done all the work for me, and posted it as a free pattern, no less. Makes me wonder if I'd seen the pattern before and filed it away deeply enough to not remember.
---------------------
I undid the most offensive stitches on the cross-stitch--I don't mind when there's a couple stitches of slightly-different green where they shouldn't be, but I'd hit a point where the errors were getting additive. If you look at this picture of the project I'm working on that I showed yesterday, I have just about everything between the upper bird and the hollyberries just below him done--it's just a lot of foliage. I started on the hollyberries last night.

My favorite thing about embroidery and cross-stitch is the negative space. Seeing spaces where a color is supposed to go, then filling it in, it just always seems like magic. Like this beautiful work-in-progress. (Yeah, I found the cross-stitching bloggers.) I love the way half-done embroidery looks. Maybe that's from being the child of a press operator, seeing the red, yellow, cyan, and black layers separately, and how they'd come together in the end.

With knitting, I enjoy the actual process of wrapping the yarn around the needle more. I don't spend a lot of time looking at what I'm making until it's done.

I've started a cross-stitch project, just a Christmas stocking that has cardinals sitting on treebranches. I haven't done a cross stitch project since maybe high school, and I was enjoying it a lot until I noticed that one whole huge section was about 5 stitches off. I know what I have to rip out, but while I put that aside to let it cool off, I've completely finished 4 knitting projects (you can see two of them soon). I feel useful.

I also finished dissolving this sweater I never liked into neat, uncurly hanks of yarn. I believe I'll bring the yarn with me and start the new sweater over the holidays.

I'm hedging my bets on this one. I bought about 300 yards of coordinating yarn--it's a different brand, but nearly identical composition, gauge, and yarn construction. I'll be knitting this sweater at a significantly tighter gauge than I did before, and though the sweater will be more fitted, I'm not convinced that two inches in width is going to give me the extra yarn the tighter gauge will eat.

I'm using a top-down seamless raglan pattern, so my plan to maximize the yarn I have is to knit the thing as if it were a super-cropped sweater with 3/4 sleeves, and add to that as availability warrants. When the original yarn runs out, I'll finish off by ribbing in the newer yarn until everything's long enough. If things go well the ribbing at the wrists and waist will be about the same length.

I haven't decided what I'm going to do with the stripes yet. I might make them even like they were last time, I might do some crazy random thing. I might look at some sweater patterns in my knitting books before I make up my mind, or it might depend on my mood when I cast on in the airport. I'm slightly leaning towards one-row stripes at this point, which I could do easily since it'll be constructed in the round. But we'll see.

When you were a kid, did you ever make one of those soap-powered boats?

The principle works with any floating thing, some liquid that dissolves in water (which temporarily messes with the surface tension), and some size container of water. Like this morning, when I was taking a bunch of little squares that'd been sitting in alcohol, rinsing them not-too-throroughly in water, and tossing them into a water solution in a small container. The squares are denser than water, but they're also hydrophobic (aka water beads up on them, like it would on a piece of Teflon), and they're small enough that the surface tension can keep them up. So when I hit it just right, they'd float, spinning erratically for a few seconds as the remaining alcohol floated on the surface for an instant before dissolving in the water. Once they stopped dancing I'd give them a poke with my tweezers, and they'd stay submerged.

Whee!

Hey, you get your kicks where you can in the lab at 7:45am.



I hadn't thoroughly mixed the last container of natural peanut butter I bought, which meant the stuff on the bottom more closely resembled peanut fossil. Bleah. I tried putting in some sesame oil to loosen it up, but it just wasn't the same. So I dumped out the last crumbly lump--about the size of an unshelled almond--onto the lid of the peanut butter jar, and left the lid and jar, which still had some crumbs, on the patio.

And then I laughed and laughed and took pictures. I've never seen a squirrel so intense. I could've come up behind him and picked him up, but so long as I didn't take the monstrous lump of All That Is Right and Nut-filled With The World away, he wouldn't have noticed. When what he had had been eaten down to about half its original size, he set it aside, covered it up with some leaves, and came back to the porch to see what else he could find.

Merry Christmas, squirrel.

Somehow, Madison just doesn't feel right if I can walk around without my ears stinging from the cold. So in a way, the long nightmare of beautiful weather and snowless streets is over.



I finished Cornwall a few weeks back.

The pattern is Cornwall, from Alice Starmore's Fisherman's Sweaters. I used Cascade 220, and needed to go down a needle size to hit gauge. It fits J great in a heavy-duty winter sweater way. J loves having a completely non-scratchy wool sweater, and was impressed with how wind-resistant it is after walking around in 40 mph gusts on Sunday with just a polartech vest on over the sweater (those fishermen knew what worked).

Pattern modifications:

-The green stripe is a pretty minor change, but a nice one. It made the armhole gussets (the diamond shape that J's displaying) tricky, though, because the sleeves were picked up and knit in the round towards the cuff, so I needed to figure out how to do intarsia, and in the round, as I went. I like that the gusset is all one color, though--it's the type of detail one would never see on a storebought sweater.
-Another detail one would never get on a storebought sweater: personalization. J's initials are knitted into the gussets (The "C" he's displaying is pretty clear on my monitor, so you might be able to see it). It's kind of silly, yeah, but I like being able to put a little secret into something handmade. Otherwise, why not just go to KMart?

Things I learned/liked/didn't like:

-I like knitting fisherman's rib better than brioche stitch. I knit a little brioche hat soon before getting to the sweater yoke, and I'm fairly certain that the yarn does the same thing in both patterns. I thought that all the knitting into the stitch below would annoy me, but I got the rhythm of it pretty quickly.

-I just don't get along with Starmore necklines. I had trouble with St Brigid (about 1/2 way down that page), and I'm not thrilled with this one, either. You're supposed to pick up stitches at the yoke, knit the chevron pattern, then knit a short length of stockinette and stitch the active stitches to the pick-up row, forming a hem. It might yet block into something normal, but it just seems a little stiff and wrong. I offered to change it if it bothers J, but he's fine with it for now.

A good time, all in all. Not too tricky, not too boring, and since I though I'd be making a heavily-cabled sweater when I bought the yarn, and because I ALWAYS overbuy, now I have almost 4 balls (800 yards!) left over.

There are days when working in a cutting-edge lab at a Research I university is indistinguishable from a first grade arts and crafts class.

Those are good days.

I just finished a lot of minor site updating. My Finished Objects section was about 4 months out of date, but that's been fixed.

I've also started writing up a couple of patterns and tutorials I've been meaning to do for a while. They're not live yet, but I only need a couple of evenings at home to write up all the charts.



This is the hat I made for my friend's son. It's almost identical to the one I made a few weeks ago, but in blue, and with a tassel instead of that flowery bauble I put on the other one. The original plan was for it to be topped with a pompom, but several scraggly pathetic pompoms later I decided to go with what I know.

I quite enjoyed doing the same thing over again, actually. Because there are several sections (The one-color rolled brim, the Fair Isle bit, the stripes, and the decreases) I didn't have time to get bored with one piece before the next thing to do came up. At the same time, each section is very easy, so I didn't have to change gears from a completely mindless part to a brainpower-requiring part, which sometimes makes me set something aside for a day or two.

Even though it's pretty easy, I have decided to put the pattern up, partly to give an example of what can be done with the basic hat recipe. Hopefully it'll end up as a sort of "here's how to not be afraid of making something up as you go along" tutorial.

This morning on the news, they were interviewing 50 Cent about something or other, and you know how reporters finish up a piece by saying their name and where they are? Well the reporter finished the report by saying she was in Farmington, CT. And I fell over laughing, because I'd completely forgotten that 50 Cent bought the white elephant of a mansion that's a 10-minute walk from where I lived in high school.

The Mansion has been part of the local folklore since the early 90's, when its original owner, a guy involved in a huge savings and loan scandal in Connecticut, needed to get rid of it to pay for legal fees, or something. (Hey, local folklore--it doesn't have to be accurate.)

In eighth grade, a teacher was driving me home from the Geography Bee and took a brief detour to look at the gates, see if we could see any of the house from the street (we couldn't). And she told me how the house had about 20 bedrooms (actually eighteen), and that no one would ever buy it, partly because it was too big and expensive to be in the middle of nowhere, and partly because anyone in Connecticut rich enough to own it had been bamboozled by its current owner, and they wouldn't want to do him any favors.

Mike Tyson bought the mansion in my senior year of high school. Many jokes were made about the local hoity-toity grocery store now carrying ears for its elite clientele.

But Mike never showed up--at least, no one I knew ever saw him. I don't think he stayed there for any length of time. And a few years ago, when mom and I were at the hoity-toity grocery store, she mentioned that the house was being sold again.

Last year, as we were driving through Farmington, she mentioned the new owner. This time, though, people have actually seen him around here and there. And if newspeople are interviewing him there, it must be one of the main places that he stays.

I suppose this is the sort of thing that every region has--the little myths that crop up, the sort-of-famous people that have lived nearby, the "Hey, they just mentioned a place I've heard of on TV!".

What are your hometown myths?



This flower showed up a few days after the first frost--you can see that a lot of the leaves in the background are pretty rough looking. The seeds it was grown from came in a "butterfly attracting" flower mix that J got for free somewhere, so I'm not sure what it is. It seems a little confused, though, waking up just as everything else is going to sleep.

It's a nice ending for the garden. Oh, man--just as I was finishing writing the entry below, I got a call from one of my co-workers, and Big Huge Enormous Money is very likely to be coming into the lab. If government science spending is similar to what it was last yearn, Big Huge Enormous Money means our lab will have the funds to double in size next year.

We just hit the big time. People are finally starting to believe in our work. It's good timing for me--two of the grants that just got good scores have a big chunk of data from my work in them, which means that all eyes will be on the 3 or so papers I'll have out in the next year.
---------------
Someone looking at my projects in progress would notice that most of what I'm working on between now and Jan. 1st is secretive and therefore poor knitblogging fodder. (The project labeled Sooper Sekrit will be a Christmas present too, just because I'll finish it around that time, even though the recipient's caretaker knows all about it).

It's times like this that it makes perfect sense for me to not be on a knitting-related web ring. I have some finished things I need to take pictures of and download off the digital camera already, so we won't be totally without knit content for the next two months, but it will be slim pickings. Then there'll be a huge glut in January. You can look through January of last year if you need proof. Just think of it as your gift for the post-holiday doldrums.

I'll make up for the knitting content with more terrifying links, though. This is a totally frightening idea for a Christmas present, to me--not acutally scary, just scary sociologically. It's a reminder that there are people in the world who can spend more money on a toy car for a child that won't leave the backyard than we did on a real car that brings us places inaccessable by city bus.

Why don't they just shell our a little more and get the kid a Mini? That toy runs on DIESEL. And is available in SENATOR SILVER. That's just a world I'll never belong to--I don't really want to, granted, but I couldn't even if I wanted to.

This car, on the other hand, is wicked cute, run by foot power, and costs 10% of that other one. It's still completely nuts to buy for a child, but at least it makes me smile. Ari has an entry today encouraging people to enjoy a meat-free holiday. And I've been thinking for a while if/how I can incorporate my vegetarianism more into the site here (I mean, if you're not someone who knows me in the real world, did you even *know* I don't eat meat?)

The thing is, I'm really bad at convincing anyone to do anything. J and I were talking about this entry of his recently, in which he said "..there is precious little point in "dialogue" when first principles are in dispute..... We all believe what we believe and no one is ever going to agree with anyone else beyond a fairly limited circle."

My response boiled down to "It took you 26 years and two months to figure this out?" This was something clear as day for me in childhood, holding simultaneously in my head my dad's essentially Hindu spirituality, my Catholic school teachers' anti-... well, anti-everything stance, my mom's agnosticism, my grandfather's deep commitment to his Methodist church, along with the knowledge that I love all these people and that they're all good, kind, and generous. They're all living correctly, for themselves.

So I'm not going to try to change your mind about anything.

On the other hand, it's possible to be a resource for people who want to eat healthier and cause less environmental damage in their habits. It's also possible to show people who will never become vegetarian and so haven't sought out information that it is possible to be healthy, to eat delicious food, to not be focused on what you *don't* eat, but what you *do*, which I find is the most common hang-up with people unfamiliar with vegetarianism.

I forget about some of these things, sometimes--we live in an incredibly veg-friendly neighborhood, with a lot of variety at our local grocery stores, fantastic produce at the farmer's markets, and ability to be totally lazy using our CSA. I haven't eaten meat in over 9 years, and my dad was veg through most of my childhood, so meal-planning doesn't seem at all complicated.

Anyways, yeah. Expect a few more recipes, a little bit more about grocery shopping, that sort of thing.