Done!

While I've been blog-absent...

...I've been working on my ripple blanket and playing with fun camera apps.

Ripple blanket

Oddly enough, I was motivated to pull out the long-dormant ripple blanket during the recent heatwave, almost entirely because I could plonk the whole thing on the table and barely touch it while I worked on it. Still liking the looks of it, still convinced it's going to be heavy enough to use as a restraining device when it's done.

Hey, look what still exists!

I've actually been working on the blanket a bit. Remember when I thought I would have it done in time to use it this winter? Or did I never state that publicly because I secretly knew that I would get distracted by something shiny and abandon it for months?

I bought some new plants this week, including that sweet grape hyacinth up there. Spring does that to me, brings all of my latent plant-ownership longings to the surface. In the past, I haven't had tremendous luck with anything flowering nor with herbs, but I couldn't resist. Plus, the greenmarket at Borough Hall is a little sad these days and I didn't have a lot of choices. I really should start looking for recipes that use fresh thyme and oregano before they die or are irrevocably infested with whiteflies.

Since I haven't been doing a whole lot else that's bloggable, I give you today's top five list of Blogs I Love But Do Not Believe I Have Previously Mentioned. Enjoy!

1. One of my favorite relatively recent finds is Peculiar Beauty, on which Bonnie excerpts beauty, fashion and glamour guides of yore (and, seriously, if you're only going to click on one link today, make it that one) and celebrates the wacky, the whimsical and the charming. Just this week, she posted these photos from the December 1970 Playboy.
I would buy a print of the bird in a heartbeat. And that's something I definitely have never said about anything in Playboy before.

2. Scouting New York. A professional location scout posting photos of tiny, overlooked details of New York City buildings and neighborhoods: swoon! Some favorite posts: before and after at the Fulton Fish Market and a look at Hart Island. That photo of all of those shoes at the asylum just slays me every time I look at it.

3. A nice companion to SNY, Patell and Waterman's History of New York cover all sorts of New York history-related topics. They teach a couple of courses at NYU (I think) about literature set in New York and maybe some history stuff too. All-round interesting blog. I'm a fan.

4. Knitkicks, which covers knitwear from a more high-fashion-oriented perspective. And since she's a knitter herself, it's a more interesting perspective than a lot of both mainstream and niche fashion coverage, like this post on Derek Lawlor, where she tries to figure out how he achieved some of his effects.

5. Haute Macabre, which is another fashion site that focuses on "alternative dark fashion with the occasional splash of culture." They post gorgeous stuff like this photo spread and these utterly fantastico eyeglass frames. Plus, their "Knock It Off" category makes the higher-end looks more accessible, which is servicey and fun.

New Year's post the second

So, how'd I do on everything I set out to do this morning? Medium-well, I'd say.

I did manage to get at least a few minutes' work in on each of my current active projects.
The ripple blanket:
A bright green Gretel:
The least blog-friendly knitting project of all time, which is probably why I haven't mentioned it before, a fingertip-length black cardigan done entirely in 1x1 rib:
Amelia, which is about an inch and a half shy of the armhole.
And two spinning projects, some grey Romney/kid mohair from Fantom Farm:
and some merino/alpaca, which is slippery and slow and tedious to spin, but terribly pretty:
I had planned to at least cast on for one of Amelia's sleeves as the new project started, which I still may do, but I'm not going to start anything more ambitious than that.

I ate leftover Christmas cookies for breakfast. These are the famous cookies my aunt makes ever year. She has always refused to give out the recipe, but seems to be cracking a bit under the weight of our pleading — this year she did tell me how to make the filling and confessed that a written recipe exists, but it's in Hungarian and doesn't specify amounts.
I did walk over the bridge, though not all the way over, since it was freezing and in the opposite direction of where I was headed.
The Manhattan skyline, viewed over the shockingly polluted Newtown Creek.
Then I walked over to Alex and Anna's for a little New Year's Day hanging out with a handful of friends. I managed to play with my new camera some on the way. I'm having fun with it so far, but have barely scratched the surface of what it can do.
Anna made hoppin' john and collards for luck, along with cornbread and excellently spicy bloody marys. I'm still stuffed from that, so haven't done any of my own cooking today, but I did make coffee and will count that.
What else? I'll read before I go to sleep, as I always do. I haven't worked on the book today and probably won't, haven't made any phone calls, though I still might. All in all, if this day turns out to be representative of the rest of 2009, I'll be a pretty happy girl.

Essential blanket-making material: scrap paper

My ripple blanket is coming along nicely, currently looking like this:
There's been some behind-the-scenes organizational work on its behalf too, though. Last weekend, in a fit of I-don't-even-know-what, I did this:
In case you can't tell just by looking at it, it's the color progression plan for the entire blanket. Since I'm making it at least partly to use up yarn that isn't allotted for other projects, I don't want to have to buy anything for it, and I was a little worried about using up all of the pretty colors early on and having two thirds of the blanket just be beige and light grey, which are the two I have the most of.

I had already figured out that one two-row stripe of Cascade 220 takes just a smidge under one ounce of yarn. Each stripe is about an inch in height and I'd like the blanket to be 72" long. So I cut out 72 small pieces of scrap paper, weighed each of the yarns I had set aside for the project and assigned that yarn a number of paper pieces up to but not more than its weight in ounces. So, if I had 2 5/8 oz. of aqua, it got two pieces.

Then I took two little snips of the yarn, taped them to those pieces and set them aside, numbering them to correspond to a key I made to indicate which yarns are which. I have three different dark purples in the mix, for instance, and it's not always easy to tell what's what from a 1" snip. When I had weighed and snipped all of the yarn, I arranged the paper pieces so that colors and neutrals and lights and darks were all distributed in a balanced way and then taped them to other pieces of scrap paper that I had numbered to correspond to the rows.

I'm sure it's not going to be perfect — I might find that non-Cascade yarns take more than an ounce to complete a stripe, leaving me with not enough yarn to meet the demands of the little paper pieces assigned to it, or the opposite, that I have extra of some colors to use up or, quite likely, both — but having this framework to check myself against will be very helpful. And with the brain work done, I can just sit back and crochet now.

Who has two thumbs and is still at the office after 5:30 on Thanksgiving Eve?

(We have an honest-to-God time clock, so don't get paid if we leave early.)

At least it gives me a chance to blog about stuff I haven't mentioned since I've been so busy loving on the world for the last few days.

1. Liz and I made a lunchtime trip yesterday to CB I Hate Perfume, which we've been talking about doing for ages. My favorites in the bottle were Burning Leaves and I Am a Dandelion, but I didn't love the way either of them dried down on me. Liz tried Revelation (the figgy one) and one of the violet ones, but wasn't happy with them on her either. The trip over there was worth it just for a look at the industrial-chic shop (complete with friendly mastiff) though.
And I really liked the decorative elements, the branch with scattered eucalyptus leaves in the window and lab glass filled with dried poppies.

Not to mention this great sign we passed on the way:

2. I ripped the ripple blanket back to take out a stripe of tweedy handspun that was totally the wrong gauge and way too big so it was all lumpy and horrible. It was driving me nuts and I knew it wasn't going to get any better.
Before:
and after:
Ahhhhhhh. Much better.

3. I'm excited about Thanksgiving. I'm spending it with a friend from high school I recently reconnected with through Facebook after 14 years of being out of touch. Her mom is cooking everything upstate, packing it up and sending it down with her sister on the train. I think that's hilarious, and totally just like her mom, who used to feed us pretty much constantly from the moment we walked into the house until we left, to the point that she once literally chased me to my car to give me some apples. So, I trust that there will be a ton of food. I'm making a bourbon pumpkin cheesecake with a gingersnap crust and have high hopes for it. The plan is to eat a lot and watch movies.

4. I'm also excited about going to see Milk. I'm thinking Friday afternoon.

5. I've agreed to see Twilight Sunday night, which I'm ambivalent about, since I ended up hating that series with a fiery passion and Wrong-Spelling Meyer is such a diva, but the company will be good and the movie is supposed to be so terrible that it might come around to being good again.

6. I'm in the middle of casting off the blue fan stitch shawl (picot edge) and am either going to just squeak by with the amount of yarn I have or run out very close to the end. If that happens, I'm going to finish it off with some black alpaca and call it a day.

Love.

This blanket is going to be excellent for restless sleepers, since I'm estimating that it's going to end up weighing about 800 pounds. I'll be able to use it as a weapon against intruders: knock 'em over and throw the blanket on top to incapacitate them until the cavalry arrives. But it's soooo pretty.

Business as usual

I'm about 12 rounds away from finishing the knitting on the Pimlico shrug. Granted, those rounds contain 480 sts each, so it's not an inconsiderable amount of knitting, but I haven't been making the kind of progress I really should be. Then I just have to sew the goofy little sleeves in and I'll be able to cross her off the list of projects under construction.
I finished the back last week and blocked it. The stitch pattern is kind of interesting, with almost a smocked appearance pre-blocking. You can see what look like diagonal lines of texture here.
Those vanished after blocking:
I had to block it on a towel on the floor, since the timing worked out that it needed to dry overnight. Usually I block on my bed and pin directly into the mattress, but couldn't do that on the floor, which is why random items that were within reach — votive holders! my piggy bank! a wood box I got in Morocco in 1996 that has swollen and warped to the point where the lid no longer comes off! — are holding the edges down to prevent curling.

It's an odd garment, construction-wise. You knit that gigantic rectangle, then fold it in half lengthwise and seam the sides, leaving room at the fold to sew the sleeves in. Initially, when I was planning this project, I was going to pick up and knit the sleeves down. But for yarn conservation reasons, I wanted to make sure the sleeves were done before I used up all the yarn, save what I had set aside for the ribbing, for the body. Since this is my handspun, there was a fair bit of variation among the skeins. It wasn't too bad, but there were a couple of skeins that fell closer to sportweight than the rest of the batch, which was securely in the worsted-weight camp. The difference between the two was pretty clear; I accidentally started the second sleeve with the finer-gauge stuff and they even looked different.

(Clear as mud? And about as interesting?)

Here's how it looks when I'm working on it:
But this should give a better idea of how this nutty creature is actually shaped:
(I think that's a 60" needle the ribbing is on.)
Obviously, even at 480 stitches, 12 rounds shouldn't take me THAT long. And the reason I haven't been working on it even so though I'm so! close! to! being! done! is that I've been seduced by a new love, an exotic and slightly intimidating one:
It's crochet, for god's sake. I barely crochet. My crochet knowledge is roughly equivalent to Sarah Palin's grasp of geography. (Strike that — I know that I don't know anything.) And it's going to be many, many colors, which is not my particular poison — texture over color! is my rallying cry. AND it's a blanket, which is Not Something I Make, being an adherent to the if-I-can't-wear-it-I-don't-want-to-know-about-it school of making stuff. But here we are. And I love my embryonic ripple blanket with a fierce and unyielding passion.

What I did this weekend

The spinster sweater has two sleeves and some length on her now:
I thought I'd use up all of both batches of these yarns by knitting this, but there's still an awful lot in the bag and there's only so long I can make a sweater if I intend to actually wear it. At this point, it's 10" long from the armhole. I don't want it to be longer than 16-17". Maybe I'll make a scarf to match, but with different widths of stripes. It might be right on the edge between zany and insane, but I think it'll stay on the side of the angels.

I finally got around the putting my bucket hat through a load of laundry and it fits perfectly now.
Before:
And after:
It's not quite felted, but it's denser and tighter and a bit fuzzier. The pattern is here and the yarn was just odds and ends I pulled out of a bag of scraps. It's three strands of sportweight yarn throughout, mostly merino with one strand of cashmere. I love it. I usually can't stand wearing hats with brims; they make me feel oddly claustrophobic. This one doesn't limit my field of vision though, so it works.

In between knitting and laundry and returning library books like the 80-year-old woman that I am, I went to see the Gothic fashion exhibition at the FIT museum. It's really great. They clearly had a ball putting it together. The exhibition design is super fun, with goth club kids styles behind almost-mirrored glass and a circular grouping behind a spiked fence in the center of the room and props like walls and veils to obscure and reveal the revelers. It could easily have crossed into kitsch, but doesn't. I'll have to go back to read the labels and take a closer look at the clothes because it was really crowded when I was there, but there's time; it's up into February. And so, so worth it if you're in the area.