I thought I was supposed to have more time after the exams?

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(This post got written weeks ago but I somehow managed to forget to push the button to actually publish it!)

Two weeks have passed since my exams and I find myself wondering what happened to all that time I used to spend studying. Actually, it is not that hard to figure out, studying has been pretty much replaced by wedding planning and worrying about exams has been replaced by worrying about the wedding. Not that there is anything to worry about, everything is well in hand but it seems I can’t help myself.

There has been a reasonable amount of knitting going on though, even if I haven’t managed to do all the things that I promised myself I would do with the free time that I thought I would have. I also haven’t managed to photograph any of the knitting so you’ll need to make do with words for the time being.

My wedding shawl is completely finished and is far and away the most beautiful thing I have ever knitted. In fact, I think it is quite probably the most beautiful thing I will ever knit. It is currently wrapped in tissue paper in a nice box waiting for the wedding but it is very difficult to resist the temptation to take it out and wear it everywhere. In fact, after I had finished blocking it and removed all the pins, I put it on and spent at least 40 minutes dancing round the flat wearing it. Given half a chance, I would never have taken it off. The Knitwitches 100% silk laceweight was absolutely perfect; the colour (undyed) is a good match for my wedding dress; adding some extra width means the size is exactly what I wanted and the (small) mistakes that I made are pretty much invisible, even to me. At the moment, I’m torn between dying it after the wedding to a colour that I’ll be able to wear more often and leaving it as it is to become an heirloom. I think it will be dyed though, since I’m unlikely to use it as a christening shawl and I can’t face the thought of it sitting in a box for a couple of decades just in case a future daughter or grand-daughter would like to wear it at their wedding.

I also finished the first of my Leyburn socks. It looks really good, the pattern is a good match for the yarn and it has absolutely helped confirm that I just don’t like knitting socks. I keep thinking that so many other people like knitting socks that I must be missing something but no matter how many times I try, I just don’t get it. I will knit the second one of the pair (eventually) but next time I suggest that I might try sock knitting again I’d appreciate being reminded of this post!

Jumper knitting however, I love. My Sahara is progressing nicely now that I’ve tried it on and reassured myself that it will fit and will not look like a circus tent and I’ve just cast on for a Vino cardigan.

The end is here!

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The shawl is finally finished! Well, the knitting anyway. I still need to weave in the ends and block it.

Unfortunately, thanks to the exams being only 3 days away now, I don’t have time to take better pictures or do anything else with it. I’m really, really pleased with how well it has worked though so expect lots more details next week.

The end is nigh!

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The end of the work on my wedding shawl that is. I’m now more than half-finished with the border so there really isn’t much left to do. Here it is, not-terribly-artistically draped across the sofa:

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and a close-up of one of the corners with the border attached:

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Not bad for two months’ knitting. I can’t wait it to see it with the pattern properly blocked!

FO: Katarina Cardigan

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I’m studying at home today (2 weeks till my exams!) and since it is a really miserable wet day here in London, I wanted to wear something snuggly. What better than my new Katarina cardigan?

Katarina 1

This brooch doesn’t sit very well with it so I’ll need to get myself a proper shawl pin but it works well enough for taking pictures.

Katarina 3

I’ll probably usually wear it open like in this picture but it is nice to know that it can look a bit dressier.

Katarina 2

Finally, a silly action shot that was supposed to show off the shape of the sleeves better. I’m not sure it does at this size but you can see a larger version by clicking on it.

Some notes:

  • RYC Cashcotton sheds. It is great yarn to work with and knits into a beautiful soft, warm fabric but it’s nearly as bad as having a dog in the house for leaving hair everywhere. This also means that if you have sensitive sinuses, you might find this an uncomfortable yarn to knit or even wear.
  • The shawl collar needs a really stretchy cast-off method in order to sit nicely. I don’t have any recommendations because I think I’m going to go back and re-do mine.
  • If you are going to extend the length of the sleeves, you need to keep doing the increases. Otherwise, they end up with a slightly dented bell-shape.

Learning the hard way

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Apologies to everyone who subscribes to the RSS feed for this blog and was recently spammed with what appeared to be 90-odd new posts only to discover that they were actually old posts. Also, apologies to anyone whose links were broken by the recent disappearance and re-appearance of this blog.

The 10-year old PC running our webserver died last week and, true to my usual nature, I managed to make things a lot worse before I managed to make them better. (Trying to recover files from a dead server should not result in having to re-install the operating system on your desktop PC but somehow I managed it that way.) Also true to form, there were no backups to recover from and it was only after recovering most of the blog via cached versions from internet search engines that I discovered that I probably could get the files off the dead server.

Lessons learned from this experience:

  1. Backups, backups, backups;
  2. Do not attempt complicated technical procedures while off sick from work. If your body isn’t up to being in the office, your brain is probably not at its best either;
  3. Sometimes it is just better to pay people to do this sort of stuff for you.

So, everything is now back up and running, although not quite exactly the way it was so I’m afraid any old links are probably still broken.

Normal posting should resume shortly with lots of knitting project updates to come!

There are some decisions…

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…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

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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.

(In)Audible

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Over the weekend I made my first and, for the foreseeable future, last purchase from Audible.co.uk.

It seemed like such a good idea; I was doing some work for Distributed Proofreaders and needed some background noise; I didn’t fancy listening to music and couldn’t find a film that I fancied either. I decided to purchase one of the Doctor Who audiobooks that had been recommended to me recently and listen to that instead.

I headed over to Audible, which had also been recommended to me, checked that my MP3 device (an iPod) was compatible, checked that I could access the free samples on the website and then selected the book I wanted (The Stone Rose, by Jaqueline Rayner, read by David Tennant). I signed up for an account and paid for the book.

Then the fun started.

It turns out that all Audible downloads are protected by a form of DRM (Digital Rights Management). This means that you need to use software supplied by Audible in order to “unlock” the files. Since they only supply software that will run on either Microsoft Windows or Apple operating systems, I had now purchased a file that I couldn’t even download to my PC since I use Ubuntu, which is a Linux-based system.

A bit of web-searching and hunting through the Audible support forum confirmed that when they said that all iPods were compatible with their audiobooks, what they actually meant was “all iPods whose owners use iTunes” which is not the same thing at all. In fact, the only way I managed to listen to my newly purchased audiobook at all was to download it via iTunes on Steven’s Mac and burn it to a CD. From there, I can now re-rip it and load it on my iPod if I want to listen to it while I’m on the move.

Suffice to say this is less than convenient and I won’t be doing it again.

DRM doesn’t stop piracy; it just pisses off people who want to use items they’ve purchased in they want that they want to use them rather than the way that the seller wants. There’s a further issue with Audible’s DRM in that they won’t publish audiobooks without DRM even when the book’s author and publisher want them to.

There is one silver lining though, while researching all this, I discovered that emusic (a site I’ve used before for non-DRM music downloads) now does audiobooks as well. I’m off to renew my subscription now.