Month: August 2008

There are some decisions…

SusanLeave a comment

…that you should be allowed to go back and re-take. Like my decision to go to I Knit this evening.

Just think, if I hadn’t gone I wouldn’t be appearing in a video clip on national TV tomorrow knitting a beige cardigan to show how hip and cool knitting is these days. Or pouting with rock-chick attitude at the camera while drumming with large knitting needles to the beat of a pop song by a band that I’ve never heard of.

And, no, I’m not telling you where and when this travesty will be airing; I have some pride left (I think).

The good news is that I think my Katarina cardigan is now finished bar the casting off and weaving in of ends so there should be pictures of the finished item over the weekend!

Back in the land of the living

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It’s been a strange week this week. It started last weekend looking like this:

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with me studying for my upcoming exams while working on my Katarina cardigan and eating biscuits.

It was then followed by a bad stomach bug that resulting in me spending 5 days on the sofa watching Buffy DVDs. (6 series in 5 days combined with exam and wedding stress has resulted in some very bizarre dreams about demons that I’d have been able to vanquish easily if only I had finished coding our wedding website.)

There was some good during the week though (other than the Buffy-watching). There was the day that I spent watching a fox sleep in the sunshine on top of our garage roof:

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And just to prove that that really is a fox, here’s a badly-enlarged section of the photo.

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We still don’t know how he gets up and down from there but he’s becoming a regular.

There was also a lot of knitting done although sadly my food-deprived brain wasn’t really up to lace knitting and it somehow didn’t occur to me that I might want to take pictures of knitting projects as well as foxes. I do however have a very nearly complete cardigan with sewn-up seams and everything. My Katarina cardigan just needs the garter stitch shawl collar finished (which will hopefully get done at I Knit on Thursday) and the ends woven in and it will be ready to wear. I’m so pleased with it (and promise to post pictures soon); the sizing is perfect; the yarn is beautiful (although it sheds a lot) and it looks fantastic on. All I need now is for the weather to cool down enough for me to be able to wear it.

I also have almost the whole of the first of the Leyburn socks (again, pictures will follow). I just need to decide how long I want the leg to be. I’m torn because I usually wear my socks fairly short but that will leave me with lots of leftover yarn and since the yarn looks so good in this pattern I’m thinking I might just go ahead and knit them to the full length.

Whole lotta knitting going on

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Unfortunately, not much of it is terribly photogenic right now.

I’m about halfway through the body of the shawl and people are starting to believe that it might get done before the wedding. (I’m not sure I’m one of them but I’ll keep trying!)

My Katarina cardigan is progressing well. The endless stocking stitch is a real relief after the amount of concentration that the shawl needs. I’ve finished the back and one and half pieces of the front, just leaving the sleeves and the knitted on collar to go. Should be ready by the time the weather gets cool enough to actually wear it.

And then there is one project that actually merits a picture (or two).

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These are the Leyburn socks from Pepperknit.

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These were cast on to be a middle ground between the complicated lace and endless stocking stitch. They’re mostly stocking stitch but with a beautifully simple but effective lattice pattern. They are also the first pair of socks that I’ve knitted from the toe up and I’m still amazed at the way that the toe miraculously became 3D without me needing to do anything other than knit backwards and forwards. One day I’ll wrap my head around how that happens!

I’m also really happy with the way that this pattern looks with this yarn. I treated myself to the Cherry Tree Hill yarn at the opening of the new I Knit shop, promptly tangled the skein horribly trying to wind it without a ball-winder and then hated the way it looked in all the sock patterns I tried. I think we have a winner this time though.

Second class citizen

Susan2 Comments

Apparently this fortnight has been about finding things that you can’t do without iTunes. First, there was “download stuff from Audible”, now the list includes “buy an iPhone”.

Well, technically you can buy an iPhone but since the first thing it asks you to do when you switch it on is connect it to iTunes there’s not much point to doing the first bit.

Somehow things didn’t seem so bad when software either ran on Windows or Mac or Linux but rarely ran on more than one of them. Now that there’s software that runs on both Windows and Mac, as a Linux user, I’m starting to feel like I’m on the outside looking in.

And, amazing as it may sound, I’m not one of those Linux users who runs it just so they can feel that way. I don’t run Linux so that I can look down on other people who have never heard of an init.d file or a kernel. I run it because I don’t have to pay for it, it runs on the old and not very powerful hardware that I have and, until recently, it did everything I needed it to do.

Now, it turns out that I have various options if I do want to buy an iPhone. I can use iTunes on Steven’s iMac to do the initial setup, much like I used it to download my Audible purchase, or, I can install and run WINE on my PC long enough for my PC to pretend that it’s running Windows, install iTunes and initialise the phone. Then I can hack the phone so that it can synchronise with an application that will run on Linux.

But, frankly, I just don’t want to. What I want is to buy the phone and use it without having to jump through any hoops (why do you need a computer to use a mobile phone anyway?). So, until I get over this bout of childish petulance, I won’t be buying an iPhone. I’ll just need to live vicariously through Steven’s instead.