So, I should have explained the title of the last entry: the new (and green) thin is the sweater that I wore today, the old thing was the stack of articles that I wrote, what is in my estimation an entirely predictable paper with. Moving on…

After a day of wearing this sweater (and in fairness it wasn’t quite cool enough, particularly at midday, but it was close) I’ve realized that I want to work on trying to make V-necks work again. It’s a shape that works good on me, and I’m feeling particularly neck sensitive, but I think that sweater needs a little bit of time to wear in and soften up. Because it’s that itchy, mostly, It just doesn’t have the worn in feeling that’s so nice.

Amongst my travels yesterday and today, I’ve been giving some thought to my novel project that I’ve started and taken a short break from to spend some time on other projects. I really only wrote a preliminary 400 words just to see how it felt, so maybe I’m still letting the ideas stew, and my little start was more of a dry run.

The last project I kept pretty much under wraps the whole time because of the nature of the story (I’m sticking to that explanation at any rate.) and because I was more worried that the conceptual issues were too connected to the plot. This time I think I can talk about the conceptual ideas without giving away the plot. It’s still connected, there’s just more of it (it being a longer piece) so I can talk about isolated moments without giving it all away. So I’m going to be blogging about this in the future, I think.

Anyway, this entry has been lingering for more than a day now, so I’m going to let it go, but be well and be warm. It’s finally cold season. Yippie!

Cheers

I’m wearing my most recent new sweater today, it being finally, almost cold enough for sweaters since I finished it.

That’s not strictly true. This summer I worked in a film and media archive doing some cataloging and digitization stuff, and it I damn near froze my ass off. It was 90 outside, and I walked out of the house wearing sweaters sometimes.

Anyway, so I’m wearing one of my sweaters and I quite like it. I’m not sure that it’s one of those perfect sweaters that I’ll live in day in and day out, but I think I do like it a good piece. Shetland is such amazing yarn.

Sorry, no pictures.

In red sweater news, I’ve picked up the stitches around the armhole for the second sleeve (!) and I’m just knitting the very end of the ribbing on the first sleeve. It’s good stuff. It’s also all I want to work on now, and I have emails to read, writing to revise, and a research project with a prof to work on this afternoon. Sigh.

I also wrote a paper last night/this morning that I feel is… not as good as what I could have done, it feels too much like the kind of stuff I was doing a year ago, and while I think it was good for me to get in touch with that again, as it serves as a good foundation for the work I want to do in the future, at the same time… Ugg.

(Note: theBoy is studying microbiology, and a local research institution.)

tycho: I really enjoy being a social scientist, I mean I’m not going to cure plague or anything, but by god, I’ll make sure there’s something worth curing.

So, I’m making this red sweater. I’ve talked about it before.

Ok. I’m nearing the close of the first sleeve and I have not yet used all of the first half of my yarn supply. That’s right. I think there will be some trading at some point of the darker color, which I’m pretty unlikely to use ever again in my life. Probably, who knows.

I’m beginning to think through my next sweater project, which is a long way off, because, including sweaters that need sleeves, I have like four sweaters in progress. Five if you count the interminable fingering weight sweater knit at 12 stitches to the inch.

So maybe it’s more like five sweaters. Sigh. I think I’d like to have the grey sweater plus only one more on sleeves before I start another sweater¹. For the past three years I’ve always started a sweater during thanksgiving week and finished it before christmas, and I’d like to do that again, but I might go for just finishing a couple of sweaters. I might be able to get all of all my sleeves that I want to get done by then, but the other project is too long. Sigh.

In other news, I did some practice GRE work. The computer screwed up, so I don’t have a good sense of my math section score, and because of computer screwing up (it meant my practice today was shorter, and didn’t mimic real test situations enough…) I don’t have a statistically accurate view of the verbal section, but I’m pretty pleased with how I did on this section.

What this tells me is that I can do really damn good on this test, my actual score is/will be an issue of endurance rather than anything intrinsic. Back to practicing.

So I was totally going to post this morning with a list of all the things I had to do: math problems, look for articles on identity in spoken communication, read an ethnography of a nursing home, write emails to professors, beat up some incredibly awkwardly written windows software, and of course writing and knitting. Sort of makes me nervous just thinking about it.

Anyway, so I was going to post that list, and then I was going to say, “sorry, I don’t have anything more… inspiring at the moment, but I have to run, and I don’t know how much time I’m going to get with the internet today…”

And while I still don’t have very much to report to you all. The knitting is going well, I’m glad to have a schedule, even a loose one again, so with luck I’ll be able to get some good writing done. I need to figure out a good way to jump start things. But that’s not why I’m writing this post.

I got an email from someone I went to knit camp with pictures of Meg, my shawl…

I’m a fan. Thanks Stephanie (sorry I don’t have a link. Eek)!

Anyway, I’ll see if something more inspiring comes up.

Cheers!

So I’ve had this kooky idea for a while to set up a sort clearinghouse/repository for GFDL and other open source style knitting patterns. The idea would be that a community of knitters could probably do a pretty good job of maintaining a collection of frameworks that would be really useful for people who want to get in and do design work, teach classes, and so forth. The truth is that most knitting patterns follow only a handful of different models, and there are only so many ways to actually knit a particular shape, so we’re stuck recreating the wheel time and time again, rather than creating new things.

Furthermore, because we’re always working from scratch, we’re more likely to make silly errors. We may know that we always do sleeve decreases on every third row, but if we write on the 4th row, the chances of you or a tech editor catching it is probably pretty slim. Linus Torvalds' (or someone similar) suggest that one of the benefits of open source is that “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” And I think this is also true of knitting patterns. If enough people read through a pattern, the bugs will get sorted out, and the patterns can be of a consistently higher quality. Which is a reputation and a strength that can be transferred to any manner of derivative works.

It seems like a great idea. Even after a number of weeks since I wrote the initial series of TealArt entries on the subject, I still feel like it’s a great idea.

The problem is, I have no idea of how to organize it.

I mean, I think I know how to work with people to have it done, there are organizational and logistical concerns that I don’t have the foggiest idea about how to organize it. My notion is to set up a framework, and seed a collection of publicly liscenced patterns, and then work to build a community around this. The ish is that I haven’t a clue as to the kind of framework and standards to set up in the beginning to make sure that it makes sense.

I fear I’m starting too in the middle for this to make sense. I sketched out some rough ideas on the subject that are still up at the knitting section of TealArt, for starters. The kinds of framework that I’m up in the air about are:

• how do we categorize and sort patterns so that they make sense to both the contributors and to the people who might be using the repository?
• what format do we write patterns in? What kind of stylistic standards do we establish?
• when is a pattern completed, and when is a pattern considered still in progress?

Thankfully there are plenty of really powerful community tools that allow for the right kind of collaboration, and I think that I can--with time--get it together so that it makes sense for people, the issue is more of a data structure problem.

I think that KnitML will answer a lot of these questions at least in terms of the formating and style (which is the hardest issue.) We’re still a ways away on this, but there’s progress and I don’t think I’m much closer than KnitML to getting the project off the ground, so that’s safe. The second group of issues, relating to simply organizing the patterns, I’m thinking less is probably more here, the fewer categories there are the less there is that will make me/us say “wtf” in six months…

Anyway, I’ve blathered long enough, I’m going to go visit theBoy and maybe get some reading done. We’ll see. Here’s to more productivity in the future!

When we first toured this house we loved almost everything about it. The woodwork, windows, and the layout are very arts and crafts-y and so that’s cool. It was, however, carpeted with the most ugly carpets. There was a lot of burnt orange shag, and it was bad. Thankfully we knew that there was hardwood underneath because there were a couple of hallways and what not that had hardwood. But since we had a dog, we figured best to leave it in for a while, figuring that sooner rather than later we’d manage to rip it up

I should point out that we’ve lived in this house for eight years now.

A few years back we Tom Sawyered some friends into helping us rip up the orange, but we elected to leave it in a couple of rooms, mostly because ripping up carpet that was installed in the 70s is a lot of work, and it’s gross.

Today, we ripped up the carpet in the office, got rid of one of the old desks, and it’s very nice. But, you sit on your ass for long enough ripping out tack board and the staples they use to hold the carpet padding down, and you’re bound to feel kind of cranky.

Needless to say, I didn’t get much writing done, nor knitting, though I did get a bit done, but everything looks pretty much the same as it did a few days ago, so no pictures. I’ll try and get pictures of the office once we unpack a few boxes, because what the hell..

Oh yeah, and we had another morris dance gig this morning at one of the county libraries. I think the team has four more gigs, and I think I only have to dance once or twice more. This is a good thing. It’s also a good thing that I’m almost done with these gigs as well, because if there was any particular “performance energy” in this show, it’s long gone. And I find myself more irritated than pleased. Mostly with gravity. sigh

More later…

… of the knitting bag.

Ok, so I don’t have a knitting bag, but it’s better than the random places I stash projects that I’m neglecting. Even if it’s technically more accurate. We’re doing some repair on the house and I was forced to move the sweater I’m about to show you from the shelf I had been stashing it on.

(We have really old carpeting in our office that we should have taken up when we got the house, but we didn’t and it’s just been icky.) Long story short, I pulled out this sweater.

I started knitting it in June so that I’d have a stranded project to work on at Knitting Camp. And when at camp, I got the notion to--without reading the pattern--use a yoke style construction to get set-in sleeves. Which would have been fine, except that I’m very intent upon knitting sleeves from the shoulder down for a number of reasons cheifly:

1. Progress is more apparent near the end rather than the beginning.
2. It’s easier to get sleeves to be the right length and shape when you’re working top down.
3. It’s easier to have a nicer shoulder seem when knitting top down.

While the third point is obviated by the fact that you have to knit down from a provisional cast on (and there is thus a half stitch discrepancy in the pattern). I’ve compensated a bit for this, and it’s working out.

The problem? My usual speed of decreasing developed for drop shouldered sweaters, isn’t quite right. So I’ve had to rip the sleeve out twice. The third time is the charm.

The patterns for this sweater is from the book of Anatolian Stocking Designs. The central motif says something about “Egyptian Motif,” I think, and the other other is something that I tweaked a lot. The little round motif is a modified Fair Isle perrie that I’ve used a couple of times.

Here’s a closeup of the pattern. This is sort of draft two of this pattern. The first, is in the bottom of the box of sweaters that I took to camp with me. I did it in Prime Alpaca Sport Weight. It’s a very nice sweater, but it’s not particularly wearable: too warm and the fabric is kind of limp. Also, I’m used to knitting stranded work pretty tight to keep the wind out, and so this sweater which the rest of the world thinks is sport weight, I treated like jumper weight shetland. I’d like to make another garment out of it at some point, but I’d need to be a little less automatic about the gauge of that.

Here’s a detail of the neck shaping, which uses this slit neck shape that I’m quite fond of. This shape is often the difference between a sweater that’s too warm and a sweater that’s just right. And while I’m not particularly sensitive to wool (like I can wear sweaters over short sleeve shirts, Having the wool on my neck is often too much.)

So there’s that. I should go back to knitting or something.