my fascinating yarning

I haven't touched knitting or crochet outside of stitch and bitching for a month or so, I don't know why.  But all the great tank top patterns are pulling me back in.  I love this one in the upcoming issue of Crochet Today.  I won't really know until I've got the pattern in front of me if there's sufficient shaping to make it flattering, but as a casual thing to throw over a bathing suit?  I fucking love it.  Although I'd probably leave off the fringe.  It'd make me feel like I was wearing a throw blanket. 

I love Crochet Today.  They blow all the other oddly named crochet magazines out of the water.  Every issue has AT LEAST one design I love, and even when their designs get dorky, they present them with a sense of humor and appreciation for the craft.

I HAVE stopped believing.

I was sorting through in my head a post examining Glee and its rank unexamined privilege that's been an explicit theme throughout the season, specifically whether having the female and minority characters rewarding the entitled ones just for occasionally thinking of them as human beings were the farty imaginary conversations its white producers/creators/bullshit peddlers wished they could have with members of the oppressed class, or was intentionally half baked and adolescent, like we all were in high school. 

But last night's finale was such a steaming turd.  I'm not going to make the same mistake I did with Heroes, and continue trying to find meaning and sense out of a show that's just trying to fill the time between commercials with another product for me to buy.  Maybe I'll get around to it someday, but I fucking doubt it.

The post where I pretend I'm one of those perfect fucking people who eats delicious looking plates of food every day

Just another humdrum day at the It's A Wonderful Life Factory!

Oh look, an almost abandoned blog.

I've been trying to get used to working two jobs, which, yuck. I'd rather get used to hanging around in the pool with a shiny bathing suit on, fanning myself with stacks of 100 dollar bills. But, whatever.

I did see an excellent Lady Gaga makeup tutorial. The backing track is pokerface without the vocal tracks, and I like it SO MUCH better.

The Post Where I Anger the Knitting Gods.

I've played around with the addi clicks and found them unimpressive, especially for 150 bucks.

Did lightning strike me down yet? No, ok, I'll continue. I even have a few shitty pictures as evidence!


One of my new favorite yarn stores In the Loop had a set of the addi clicks in when I was there a few weeks (possibly a month? I've been sitting on my hands about this for a while) ago. I, of course, took advantage of the chance to pull them out and play with them for about half an hour. It took the five or six people there maybe three minutes to get the twisty connection thing down, and it was awesome and strong. So I pulled a ball of yarn from this project out, cast on and started swatching a bit. The cables were wonderful. The needles feel solid and sturdy in your hand, and the tip is just the right amount of pointy. So that was pretty wonderful, but pretty much all true of the standard addis.

But that join sucks. I've read other reviews that talk about how the join is no big deal, and the yarn slides right over it, which I found to be true, most of the time. Which means sometimes the stitches got stuck. 50% of those stuck stitches I was able to tug the work until the yarn slid over, but the rest I had to stop knitting to push the stitch over the join. I mentioned it to one of the (awesome) owners, and when she knit a few rows, she found it happened to her even more often. I'm generally a loose knitter, and she's generally a tight one. I knit several more rows and as long as I keep my tension fairly loose, the sticky join is noticible, but not a huge problem.

So, the needles are accaptable when I was knitting at 5.5 stitches to an inch. Any tighter than that and the stitched start to get stuck at that join again. Considering the Kells Sport merino says it knits up with a gauge of 5.75-6.5 st/in, that's a bit troublesome for me.

I love my addi turbos. But if I had 150 dollars to spend on needles, I'd rather order the 40 inch addis in size 0 to 8. Even when I already own most of them, and have two pair of some (zeros, I'm looking at you) they're incredibly useful, I can use them to magic loop anything, and they work great at any gauge.

just to throw some knitting in here...

I've been working on the Austrian Socks from Interweave's Favorite Socks, one of my favorite pattern books ever. I'm slowly working my way through all the patterns. I think this makes 5 out of 25, so I've still got plenty to look forward to.


Since I got the book, I've grown much more comfortable modifying sock patterns if I decide something sounds fussy, but I've kept pretty close to pattern with these guys. The i-cord cuff originally called for you to do a provisional cast on and kitchnet them together, but even me, kitchner's biggest fan, couldn't do that without it coming out looking like the shittiest thing ever, so I cast on again normally, and seamed it together. The only problem:

see that wonky seam? That's on the front of my sock, because I started picking up the stitches wherever I damn well pleased. Ah well, the next sock has that sucker on the center back where he belongs.

I am so in love with this yarn. It's Three Irish Girls Kells Sport Merino in Roisin, and it's difficult to photograph. It looks purple, right? Wrong. It's cranberry. A warm delicious looking cranberry that has just the right amount of subtle variation.



Love!

This is the very crappy version of something my brother and I came up with that made us giggle. So now it's in my pile of good idea projects to finish up. Oh Great, because that wasn't long enough.