Topic: Posts

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.

Hey Folks!

Andy and I joked this morning that we were running out of the internet. It’s true, I seem to be getting though it with some speed these days. I had been using an open source news (rss) reader for some weeks, because it was open source and because it handled feeds from live journal a little better than what I had been using. I switched back to a newer version of the program that I had been using, NetNewsWire, and I must say that it’s way better. While it still won’t do friends-locked live-journal feeds, I can somehow read things faster. I also did some culling of dead blogs, and things that I’m no longer reading. This means that I’m down to 83 feeds, from a high of about 500 when I moved from Wisconsin. This is progress, and at this point it means that I can budget some time to read more sci-fi and cool knitting related blogs.

I’ve been knitting a little bit here and there and I’ve made some significant progress on my Morocco sweater.

It’s probably about three inches longer now. If you omit the large bottom border (ie, that entire picture,) I’m almost 1/7th or so of the way to the beginning of the saddle shoulders. Which is convoluted. While the resulting jacket will look much like Joyce Willams’ (it’s her design after all,) I’m going about it in a completely different way. Because I’m perverse like that. But it’s a great deal of fun.

I’m going to go caffinate and see what comes of it. I think I need to give up on my old favorite color of fountain pen ink, so we’ll call me mister blue hands. It’s not drying fast enough, anymore, or maybe it never did, but maybe I’m using thinner, less absorbent papers.

See, when I say I’m scatter brained, I mean it.

Cheers!

First a poll. A somewhat low tech one, just leave a comment. If you read, say a science fiction book, where the name of the ships all had dutch names, but the characters all had english names what would you think?

Moving on…

I knit a square last night.

A friend is opening a yarn store in, less than two weeks (wow), and I’ve been drafted somewhat, consensually, into knitting swatches for the store. I must admit that where my mother has knit like 20 of them, I’ve knit… almost 2.

The thing is, mostly that I really really hate knitting squares. Once upon a time I disliked knitting things that weren’t in the round, because I didn’t like purling. Now, I don’t knit things back and forth because I hate turning the work. It’s not the movement of turning, it’s the way that this action breaks the rhythm of knitting.

I called--and I suppose still do call--the knitting section of TealArt “the knitting savants” and I think this is completely appropriate, because while I know a thing or two about the craft, I’m really picky about the kind of work that I do, and only tend to knit vary specific things, and if I have to knit something that isn’t one of these things for very long, I tend to get irritable and bored. So I’m thinking of naming the collection of essays and knitting writings that I’ve been casually working on for a while “the knitting savant,” because I think it would be cool.

Later, assuming that life doesn’t come crashing in I’ll post pictures of my current knitting, though it’s grown about 2 inches since I took the pictures. I finished the border of the sweater and it’s been flying since then.

With the recent uptick in membership in ravelry, I’ve been getting a lot of feedback on my stuff from the site, so I’d like to thank you all. I’ve spent too long doing this whole blogging thing sort of in isolation, it feels good to have a community again. And I really love ravelry, it’s great stuff and the community seems to really be “working.” So huzzah!

I’ll be in touch. I have a lot to ramble about, but I don’t want this post to get too unfocused, so I’ll see you all right here real soon!

Though I heartily accept and cherish “science fiction” as a genre that can describe and support the kind of fiction that I’m interested in writing, and I’ve often really enjoyed very fantastic science fiction--stuff with magic, stuff with aliens--it’s not something that has really occurred to me to write. Well that’s not true, I’ve thought about it, but have never really thought of a way to do it without coming off as cliche.

Let me interrupt this reflection with a theory:

I think there are two major kinds of science fiction, the first kind that answers major “what if questions,” like “what if there is time travel,” or “what if aliens come to visit earth from a far away planet,” or “what if a galactic empire collapses and a group of academics does what it can to save civilization,” or “what if an alien probe has been watching over human development for the last 3000 years,” or “what if corporations and the government wage a war on the internet to control the citizens of cyberspace.” The second kind science fiction elaborates on the kinds of questions above, and says “what if modern technology was based on gears and brass rather than transistors and silicon” (steampunk), “what if such and such happened to the collapsing galactic empire,” or “what happens if the government is able to crush cyberculture” (post-cyberpunk). Now lets be clear, I don’t think that this second class of science fiction is bad, quite the contrary, it’s often the best stuff; but I think it contributes to the genre discourse in a very different way. Ok. Done.

There are tropes in science fiction, like aliens, like magic, that are more about fitting in with the discourse of the genre, than about the direct questions that the trope asks. So, often, I think telling a story with aliens is more about responding to and thinking about all of the science fiction that deals with aliens, from Star Trek, to Stranger in a Strange Land, to War of the Worlds. and less about what aliens means in a bigger picture sort of way. I think the same thing goes for magic, the examples are different but the discursive structures are pretty much the same.

So for whatever reason I’ve kept things pretty realistic in my writing. While I haven’t been ultra vigilant about keeping track of the speeds that my spaceships are flying at, and I do muse on the possibility of telepathy a fair pice, other than that… I feel like it’s pretty straight up. Humans are from Earth, the speed of light hasn’t been broken, the current date system are used, and I occasionally have oblique references to present-day events.

I’m thinking, though, that, my previous aversion to aliens might be misplaced, and I’m actually thinking that aliens might be just what I sort of need in this short story I’ve been playing with for a while… Anyone have thoughts on the subject or am I just being weird?

The piece I’m knitting is probably about 8.5 inches long now, and I have about 5 more rows to knit, except that I have made an error in two of those five rows, and have to do some un-knitting. Sigh.

It’s mostly that I got carried away and forgot to read the chart. After the 5 rows, I have the body of the sweater to knit, which I do hope will fly by really quick on up to the underarms at which point it gets interesting again… in the good way. It’s going to be a long coat/jacket type thing. I’ll take a picture of it soon I hope.

There’s also sleeve knitting that I very much need to spend some time on.

Back to writing.

If I have to do step back once more I might punch someone, just saying.

And a fieldtown-ish version of the lolipop man by a women’s team that’s kinda cool:

And of Course:

So here’s another little post about my writing project and process. It’s what’s on my mind, and insofar as tychoish.com is a reflection of that, it’s what I’m writing about.

But first, I do so apologize for not being in closer touch with you all these last few days. I’ve been morris dancing a lot, and unfortunately that doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing of various sorts. But I’m in a good place with all of my various commitments and feeling pretty grounded at the moment. Here’s hoping this sticks.

I’m trying to get this story laid out to the point where I feel like I can safely write it without having the big super-structural frameworks shift on me when I’m half way up there. I’m sure some writers are better with making those kinds of adjustments, but I know I’m really bad about that, so getting things worked out ahead of time makes the writing easier.

Once upon a time I outlined projects like this by taking a spiral notebook, and on each 2 page spread I’d outline the content of 4-5 scenes which I thought made up a chapter pretty well. I’d include snippets of conversation, and really it was a kind of free writing. The beauty was that I was able to take these ramblings and pull out the critical information “where do the characters need to get by the end of this, and what do they need to have seen on their way.”

What this massive longhand aspect of the project did was force me to sit around with the plot and the characters for a long time, so that by the time I got to the actual writing, I had it pretty down pat.

The novella that I’m beginning to edit now was easier, because I was able to sketch it out a number of times on a single sheet of paper, and then transfer those notes to the computer. It also helped that I wrote a synopsis as part of an earlier project years earlier, so the characters had been in my mind for many years, and though the process wasn’t as formal, it was similar in terms of all the important parts.

For the current project I’ve done a couple of series of notes in my day to day notebook (the book I cary around and use for everything from writing and writing, to to do lists, to phone numbers and driving directions), but nothing formal like I used to. I then started a digital notebook in plain text file. It’s about 2,600 words at the moment, and the core 1,600 words or so is a first draft of the outline broken down by chapters.

I’ve been contemplating the next step, because the outline that I have so far is a bit rough. Because there are more characters in this, there are huge chunks of the outline that don’t have characters, or details, or even a more specific scene division broken down.

So what I’m doing now is creating a stack of index cards--the paper kind, of course--where each story chunk is on a card. This way I can play with discreet story elements and I can insert points on the outline as I need to. This is hard to pull off on the computer, because I like to outline on paper, and I often feel that notebooks have a very linear structure in the way that I tend to use them. I do know about scrivener, and even a wiki type program might work, but I like the way this is working and the way that I’ve changed my writing as a result.

We have this rather large, and by this point, somewhat middle aged cat. He’s incredibly shy around people he doesn’t know, and there are only a very select few who aren’t us that have seen him (maybe a dozen? not more than two dozen) in the 7-8 years we’ve had him. The neighbor who cleans up after them when we’re gone refers to it as “cleaning up after our invisible cats” because she’s not seen them. (We’ll, she’s seen the one, at a distance, I think).

Anyway, so we were talking about the feline hierarchy in the house, in particular how Nash (the large, shy one) would theoretically respond to a new feline member of the household. I said:

Think about how he treats us--the herding, the mewing, and so forth--ok, now he’s a big cat, but we’re bigger than he is. Another cat wouldn’t be. Think about how he’d cope with someone smaller than him… I’m just saying, it could be a problem.