After a week or so of trying to connect to other people’s wireless networks and fiddling with dialup (heaven save us!) while here at Mom’s, I got Mom signed up for cable internet service, and set up a wireless router.

WHEW! What a difference. And I’m very pleased with the speed, and how strong the signal is. Some time ago I tried to set up an 802.11b network in my apartment, but I couldn’t get it to work at a usable speed. 802.11g is a whole other story.

So when I get home, I think I’m gonna get an access point (don’t need a router, my main computer acts as a router; or I could just get a router and reconfigure my network) and a wireless card for my bedroom computer, and get rid of the ethernet cables snaking all around the apartment!

Mom doesn’t have a computer of her own, but she’ll be getting one soon. Or more precisely, my brother will be getting it and I’ll be setting it up. She has a fax which is actually a multi-function, so we’ll get a wireless print server for that, too, because she wants to put the computer in a room that doesn’t have a phone line, so the fax/printer can’t be directly connected to the computer. That’s not issue for me, with my laptop; I can just bring the laptop into the room with the fax/printer and plug in the USB cable.

Only knitted a couple of rows today, not worth photographing. More soon. Gotta get this shawl done soon and get started on the whatever-it-is with the pretty ribbon yarn.

My brother kept me hoppin’ this past week. It’s going to get busier still. I worked until 7 or 7:30 all last week. Granted, I didn’t come in until about 10:30, but that’s going to change. I’m staying at my Mom’s, and until Friday, so was my sister. She left Friday, and my Mom’s leaving Tuesday, for a month. Without all the morning chitchat, I’ll get out of the house a lot earlier. But I doubt I’ll be leaving the office much earlier!

Did get some knitting done, though. After “duh”-ing out on Tuesday, I thought to bring it with me to knit on the bus the rest of the week. It’s a short ride, but hey, a row here, a row there, it adds up. Then I did a lot this weekend. Here’s two shots of the blue shawl in progress, first about noon today:

And about 8:30 this evening:

It will definitely need borders, but probably not more than about 8 or 9 inches deep.
Yesterday I went to a nearby yarn store to get fixins for whatever it is I’m going to make to donate for the auction at The Fabulous Fiber Fest in August. I assume I need to donate something; I did last year, as did all the participants. I’ll be there this year as the knitting consultant. Anyway, here’s the yarn, with the bag it came in:

Here’s the beginning of a swatch:

The ribbon yarn is called “India” by Lana Grossa, color 12, and the nubby, glitzy stuff is Trendsetter Swing, color 1843, “fruit salad.” They coordinate perfectly. I hope you can see the colors. I think I’ll concoct some sort of purse with this. Not sure yet. Need to play with it some more. It better be fabulous, for what I spent on this stuff! (Well, I needed needles, too. Killed me to buy a size 9 circular when I have half a dozen of them at home, but whaddaya gonna do.)

Mom’s arthritis is acting up, because there’s been this mondo rain storm threatening but never quite coming. My own hands even felt a little achy; I’d forgotten that I used to get that when I lived here! This humidity is for the birds. It’s great for the singing voice, nice for the skin, but it’s hard to breathe, fer cryin’ out loud! I was never nuts about it, but now I’m really unused to it. (Sigh) Guess I better get used to it again.

Okay, started work at my brother’s office. Yep, he needs organization help alright. I can’t believe I didn’t think to bring knitting on the bus! Last time that’ll happen. Made a little progress on the blue shawl:

Yeah, that’s a second ball you see there on the right: had to frog a couple of inches. Made a mess of it on the plane, tried to fix it and it only looked worse, so I ripped and am reknitting.

I brought my Joy spinning wheel along, and some superwash merino I want to make some headway with, once this shawl is done. But I brought it out this evening to show my Mom, who got a kick out of it.

Although my Mom has never spun and hardly ever knitted, she used to sew a lot and crochet a little, and I definitely get my fiber affinity from her. She had me ironing at 5, sewing buttons on at 6 or 7, making clothes in my teens. Until a couple of years ago when I met the spinnies in my guild, she was the only one I could talk to about what I was making, what problems I was running into, what I was thinking about doing to solve them, and so on. Other people liked the things I made, but their eyes would glaze over if I started discussing the process. She’s always enjoyed hearing about whatever project my mind was buzzing with.

K.

Uneventful flight, now I’m here in my Mom’s apartment. It’s after 2am and everyone’s asleep, so I can’t be farting around with taking pictures and card readers and whatnot, and anyway there’s not much to show since I had to rip out some of what I knitted on the plane. More tomorrow, probably not until evening.
K.

Packing up now. 4pm flight. Gee, better call a cab. More when I get to the Big Apple!
K.

Here’s the pattern for the blanket. I debated whether I should hang onto it and try to sell it, but considering the size, I’d hate to have to re-knit it in commercial yarns not of my choosing on a tight deadline, and since I’m not even giving actual yarn names used, I figured, well, this one’s not quite fit to be commercial so it’s free. I dare anyone to knit this sucker! If you do, please send me pix!

vals_big_afghan_knitting_pattern.pdf, 5 pages (including 2 photos), 295K.

Also, a photo of a FO from early this year, a poncho for Melissa, my 4-year-old niece. It was her birthday in February. She lives in NYC. I heard she liked it, but I don’t know if she’s ever worn it.

Sorry, I don’t know where the yarn labels are so I can’t tell you what it is, but I remember it’s a superwash merino and I got it at The Knitter’s Studio here in LA. Some eyelash thing in there too, I remember that was called “Fizz” but it’s not Sirdar Fizz. I double-checked when the flammable warning came about Sirdar Fizz. I think it’s Crystal Palace “Fizz.” I never wrote up the pattern for this poncho, but I have notes somewhere. If I find them I’ll write it up. Now that I have this blog, I gotta be more careful about that stuff, huh.

Next up, besides the Stonington shawl, I need a cardigan and I have this stuff for it:

It’s Henry’s Attic Peruvian Tweed No. 113, a natural-colored alpaca, which I bought from Catnip Yarns awhile back (a lot of the yarns in the big blanket came from there too). Knowing how alpaca has no springiness and tend to grow, I was thinking of using these:

The Dura-Europos patterns from Barbara Walker’s Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns, p. 139. I’ve had this book at least 20 years and I’ve been wanting to use these in something. Now’s my chance! They’re done in twisted stitches (i.e. knit through the back), which constrains the yarn a little from stretching. (See, those of you whom I’ve been teaching about stitch mount, there is a purpose to twisted stitches, as long as you’re doing them intentionally.) I’d like to try to get this cast on while I’m in New York and have it done for the winter.

That’s it for today, got a lot to do still. Flying out on Monday, less than 48 hours…

So here’s my knitting blog. Note, no knitting content yet. Give me a chance! Believe it or not, I’ve actually spent weeks — months, maybe — working on getting a blog up. Now, I’m no web newbie. I put my first webpage up about 6 years ago. But this blog business is not obvious, I’m sorry. How are these total newbies doing it?? Even though I can code in php and write html and css and edit images, I’ve still spent a very surprising amount of time scratching my head.

Enough with the kvetching. It’s up.

Okay, some pix. Latest FO, a blanket for my sister’s birthday, which was (cough, cough) in May, in colors she requested. It is not, however, in a size she requested. She figured on maybe a throw. She has a twin size bed. This is being shown on my full-size bed in my none-too-neat room, most (but not all) of which I’ve artfully hidden from your view:

I’ve been working on this thing, one way or another, since January. See, I made a Colinette AbFab Throw for my brother and sister-in-law for Christmas, and ran out of several of the yarns that came with it, and had to replace them to the tune of around $24 a skein — plus overnight shipping from several different places since I couldn’t find them anywhere around here, and the thing wound up costing me like $300 to make. So I thought, Jeesh, these look like Henry’s Attic yarns, I could just buy my own undyed yarns and dye them and make this for a fraction of what these guys are charging.

Well. Now I know why they’re $24 a skein.

First, they’re not white, they’re natural. Fine if you’re dying jewel tones, but my sister wanted white and turquoise.

So. Bleaching. Found a wool bleaching recipe on the ProChem site, using soda ash and serious concentrations of hydrogen peroxide. So I ordered a bunch of stuff from Dharma Trading, looked around in beauty supply shops for strong peroxide, and started collecting yarns…Long story short, this thing cost — Oh, I don’t know, but definitely more than the $300 I spent on the Colinette throw. But I learned a lot. And I have a lot of yarn left over, undyed, heh heh.

10 different yarns, cottons, rayons and a blend. Also an alpaca, a silk and a mohair loop — I left all those undyed, but I did try to lighten the mohair and silk. The silk wasn’t completely degummed, which made for some interesting aromas. Per the book Yarns to Dye For, I wound seven different yarns into 40-foot skeins on a warping board borrowed from my friend Garen from my spinning guild, so I could space-dye them.

I saw several different recipes for that. One said to put soda ash in the dye solution, another said to pour a soda ash solution on the skeins after hand-painting, another said to soak the skeins in a soda ash solution before painting. I tried the first two first, and all the colors ran together. For the last two skeins, I soaked in soda ash first, and got the different colors to strike before running together on those skeins, which you can sorta see in the next two photos.

Then getting the (mostly 8 oz.) skeins (yes, there’s about 5lbs. of yarn in there, but it feels like more…) back onto the warping board and wound — by hand — into balls was a trip.

Quite an adventure, eh? Understand that each of these steps took several days, if not weeks, since I could only work on one or two yarns at a time, due to space considerations, and you’ll understand why this took months to do. The knitting alone was upwards of six weeks, and that was the least of it. Started with the center rectangle in a staggered version of feather-and-fan,

then picked up around the perimeter and worked outward. And outward. And outward. Changed yarns every 4 rounds. In the border, only worked a pattern round every 8th round. Tried to use smoother yarns on pattern half of the repeat.

Next time I take it into my head to do a blanket this big, it’s going to be in squares. But I like dyeing, messy and time-consuming as it is.

Couple WIPs for you. Here’s a long-standing one, this is nearly a year old, a lace shawl based on one in the Martha Waterman book only I doubled it to make a split-front circle, and added an edging-as-you-go, in some taupe laceweight stuff I got on a cone at Weavers’ Cottage. This’ll be awhile yet.

Here’s the most recent one, just started last night at WeHo Stitch’n'Bitch:

It’s the Elizabeth Zimmerman Stonington Shawl from the Best of Knitter’s Shawls and Scarves book, pictured. I’m doing it in a faux-mohair acrylic, which I normally avoid, but there’s a reason…Details when it’s done.

See what happens when you wait too long to start a blog? You get this huge backlog of stuff to post. There’s more, but I’m too fried to dig it up and take pictures. Or dig out the pictures I already took.