For Cate

So, this guy is trying to quantify the way and speed with which ideas travel through blogs for a talk at some conference. And Cate wants to knock his socks off with the power of knitters. But you're saying, no no no! We want to keep our power secret and then ambush the Muggles when they are weak and defenseless. I mean, obviously, if you have a great weapon, you don't want the world to know, do you?

But see, here's the thing. Haven't you suspected for a while now that everything you knit is based on something you saw on a blog? Like there's some massive knitterly groupthink? I don't mean that to sound negative; bees in a hive have groupthink and they're not exactly slackers. Groupthink can be a powerful force indeed. Dudeguy's trying to put hard numbers on it, which is kind of cool.

I think we can agree that fun ideas (like knitting Rogue) spread faster than less-fun ideas (like helping science), but let's all pitch in and help this guy out. Here's how you do it:

1) Write a blog post in which you discuss the experiment.
2) Link to this post in your blog post.
3) Ping Technorati.

What I am afraid he will discover is that there are tons of knitters out there, but only 2 of us are technically proficient (ping Technorati? wha?), but hopefully I got that right.

P.S. At the end of his post there's a list of blogs that linked. Seriously, folks, he needs more knitters.

Walk With Me Wednesday

On Saturday, Kathy and I met at the Blue Hills Reservation to divvy up our fleece (now roving) and get some post-Thanksgiving exercise. Since I am still coughing a bit, we tried to find a more level walk, but failed and ended up climbing a paved road all the way to the top. Here's the view from the Blue Hills weather observatory:
and here's the observatory itself:

I have to admit, I was sucking wind by the time we got up there, but Kathy was nice and didn't drop me. In fact, she was even willing to pose with my dog.
We took a rocky, muddy path back down that wasn't as easy to walk, but had some nice architectural bits along it to make up for it.
(sorry for all the trees).
I wish I had taken a picture of the lovely Trailside Museum but I didn't think. The sad thing about the Reservation is that several of the historic structures within it have been allowed during the recent budget crunch to fall into disrepair. You'll be walking along a trail, stumble across an old building and notice all the windows are boarded up and what's left of the paint is peeling in sheets.

Oh, what's that? You wanted to see the roving? I neglected to take pictures this morning before I left for work, but lucky for me, Kathy's on the ball and has some in her Walk With Me Wednesday post. We dropped a 7 lb fleece off at Friends Folly Farm, and they returned to us 5 lbs of roving, already thoughtfully split into two 2.5 lb bags. It's a gorgeous silvery-grey that should spin up pretty easily.

If you haven't read Kathy's post yet, she suggests that if we always ended exercise with fiber, maybe we'd exercise more. This is an idea we can work with, people! After all, any good exercise program has a reward mechanism built in...

Catching up with old news...

Before I fell under the weather, I attended the K2Tog workshops at the Fuller Craft Museum. The day was sort of a mixed bag--I got the sense that the museum wants to reach out to the fiber community but they haven't targeted their audience yet. The day felt sort of unfocussed, with classes ranging from absolute beginner to experienced. It would have been more successful if they'd narrowed that range a bit.

Two of the sessions I took were real standouts, though: lunch & dyeing. The luncheon speaker was Peter Hagerty of Peace Fleece. He's a fascinating man whose path from Vietnam vet to international yarn entrepreneur was inspirational. He mentioned that on trips to Russia, even though he spoke no Russian & they spoke no English, when he & his wife took out their knitting, they immediately made friends. He told too many stories to recap the talk here, but he was truly mesmerizing. If you get the chance to hear him speak, do go. And buy their yarn, it's for a good cause.

My last workshop for the day was Natural Dyeing. We dyed samples in onion skins, cochineal & indigo. Rhonda, the instructor, had color-dedicated dyepots that she heated on propane-powered hotplates (which she said you could often find at the Ocean State Job Lot for $25--good to know!). She uses non-toxic mordants like cream of tartar. We each dyed a set of samples. Here's mine (top to bottom): indigo, indigo/cochineal, cochineal, indigo/onion skins, cochineal/onion skins, onion skins. The blended colors were dipped first in one, rinsed, then dipped in the other.
I was really pleased with the yellow of the onion skins. It's such a lovely "naples yellow" (any watercolorists out there?) shade, and so easy and inexpensive to achieve.

As we were wrapping up, one of Rhonda's assistants decided to try her hair in the indigo pot.
It took so well, she reports, that when she recently dyed her hair red, that one blue lock rejected the red dye.

All in all, the dyeing workshop showed me that natural dyeing is less fuss and bother than I had thought, and might be something I could manage in the basement with a hotplate (which is exactly how Rhonda recommends you approach it). So maybe someday I'll get off my butt and actually dye something!

ETA: Well, actually, indigo is a fuss and bother, which is why I included the link. Rhonda has a dedicated indigo pot that she keeps going all the time, which doesn't make sense if you're an occasional dyer. But the other colors seem manageable.

Dinah Feigns Concern for her Meal Ticket

To be fair, the poor cat has spent so much time curled up next to me in bed over the past month, she's started to sneeze. She does have moments of non-evil.




You can see the curl at the end of her tail in that picture. Her tail is permanently crimped at the end, and she doesn't like the curl touched. She can wind half of her tail around your arm like a monkey (although she can't hang from it, not that I've tried).

I'm feeling better and did some holiday-giftie knitting over the weekend. I have a lot of posting to catch up with--but first I have to catch up with work!

A Magnum of Whine

After Rhinebeck I decided to step up my posting. I was going to post at least twice a week, I had a schedule of topics in my Palm Pilot (sad, I know), I was cruising on my knitting and had plenty to talk about. Then I caught a cold. Then it turned into tonsillitis. Then my boss caught pneumonia and shared it with me. Then I had an endoscopy for an unrelated condition, and now between the endoscopy, the coughing and the sneezing, my throat muscles are bruised and beat up; it hurts to turn my head, swallow, touch my throat. I am not writing this so you'll all say "get well soon!"--I'm really not that sick, I'm just sick enough that I should be in bed, but not sick enough to tolerate lying in bed--I'm just writing this to explain my absence. You know when you were a kid and you had just recovered from something and felt fine, but your mom still made you stay in bed another day or two and you were like, "But mo-oo-mmm, I want to go outside and play!" That's where I am. And the fact that every single time I think I'm getting better, I suffer some setback, has made me realize that my mom was right, I should be in bed. So anyway, long story short, sorry I haven't posted, don't give up on me! I do have knitterly things to share, eventually. Check back next week. I have high hopes for next week.

I've got nothing but a quiz

I've got to tell you, I thought this quiz was a load of bull, but I have to admit they pretty much nailed it:

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Philadelphia Your accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington. if you've ever journeyed to some far off place where people don't know that Philly has an accent, someone may have thought you talked a little weird even though they didn't have a clue what accent it was they heard.
The Midland
The Northeast
The South
The Inland North
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

I grew up about 2 hours west of Philly.


(Quiz via Maryse...)

More stash reduction!

I knit one of Grumperina's Odessa hats last weekend as a Christmas gift for my friend S.

The yarn is a three-ply fingering weight homespun, from the Friends Folly Farm Cranberry Relish roving (whew, say that five times fast!) I bought at Spa last February. When I saw how pink it spun up, I thought of S -- it's her favorite color -- and decided to make something from it for her.

The pattern calls for DK weight yarn, but I made a swatch and did the math. The stitch pattern takes 11 stitches, so instead of casting on 110, I cast on 132 and changed the ribbing to k2, p2. With this change the swirls do not swoop up from the ribbing as organically as they do the way the pattern is written, but my yarn isn't very springy and I wanted to make sure the hat would be large enough. I used somewhere in the ballpark of 140 yards and about 160 beads.

The beads are also from stash. I bought them a couple of years ago at Michael's after I read Bead Crochet. I crocheted this bracelet from them (well, half them, half gold) at the time.


I got really excited about bead crochet and beading in general, until I did more of it. Turns out I have neither the patience, the eyesight nor the hand-eye coordination for the work. Unfortunately, I had already bought about a billion beads, thinking this would be my Great New Hobby. So I was glad to reduce the bead stash with this hat, too.

I plan to make a matching Odessa, only with gold beads, for S's little daughter. Maybe I'll even make one for myself.

Then I'll only have a million and three-quarters beads left. Maybe I should give bead crochet another try...