Still Life, With Cats

On the way to work this morning I passed a woman riding her bike, and it was very hard, as we both pulled up to the same stoplight, for me to not roll down my window and ask her if she was just an idiot, or if she had a death wish. She had a helmet. Of course, it was dangling from her handlebars and not actually on her head. To add to the fun, she had earbuds on and was not paying much attention to the cars passing her by, or anything else for that matter.

I suppose I have to give her credit for at least *stopping* at the red light – I’ve seen far too many cyclists go zooming right through (apparently unaware of the basic law of physics that says when a large, heavy metal object collides with a smaller, organic object, the larger heavy object is going to win EVERY SINGLE TIME). But still. Why even bother with a helmet if you’re not even going to wear it?

Damn kids, get off my lawn. Or something.

*****

Today’s dishcloth was made using the Diagonal Scallop stitch. Sorry, it’s teal again, because this is the color that will not die.

I like this stitch. It gives me Ideas.

Today’s dishcloth was made using the Double Woven stitch.

Interestingly, it’s almost exactly like the linen stitch I did earlier, except that you slip two stitches instead of one, so the effect is very different. Ah, the fun of playing with yarn.

Four more days. I am in no danger of running out of cotton. Sigh.

Sitting here at my computer, I heard a thump (the telltale sound that some cat (my first guess is the culprit was Sherman, because it usually is) was on the kitchen counter where he knows he isn’t supposed to be), followed shortly thereafter by a strange swishing sound. I sat here for a moment, trying to figure out exactly what he’d managed to get hold of this time, and then a small procession of cats charged through the office at top speed, led by Sherman, who had my measuring tape in his mouth, the entire 4 feet of tape trailing along behind him.

I will go rescue it in a few minutes. After I finish writing this up. And also after I stop laughing.

*****

Today’s dishcloth was made using the rank and file stitch. No clue why it’s named that. I really had fun with this one. It’s not too horribly fiddly, and it’s easy to memorize, and the cloth it produces is extremely thick and squishy; so much so that I could see this thing easily doubling as a hot pad or potholder.

It’s always kind of fun when the group in which I sing shows up in the news. Capitol Public Radio went out to one of our educational programs this past week and did an interview and write-up.

Here’s one of the songs we did (part of a collection of 5 madrigals for the information age). I freely admit that that set of 5 songs was my favorite of the concert.

*****

Today’s dishcloth is made using the Linen Stitch. You will notice that once again, I’m trying to make a dent in the massive stash of teal (seriously, where did all this teal cotton *come* from?).

Astute knitting readers may also notice that apparently I goofed on one row in this and likely slipped the stitches with yarn in the back instead of with the yarn in the front. Likely I was distracted by cats or something. Yeah, let’s just go with that.

A couple amusing anecdotes from yesterday’s trip to Stitches:

• While I love knitting, I really do not enjoy seaming at all, to the point where it is not uncommon for all of a project’s pieces to be completely done, and then to have them sit in a bag, untouched, for weeks or months, because I am procrastinating on the seaming.

  This works fine for my own personal projects, but not quite as well when it’s a test knit. As three of us were doing one of our meanders around the market yesterday, I noted that when I got back to the table, I needed to finish up the seaming on a project, and then added that they should feel free to nag me about it. Everyone laughed, we kept on wandering, found the things we were hoping to find, and then headed back to the table, where both of them promptly looked at me as we all sat down and, in their very best Mom voices, said sternly “you have seaming to do!”

  (yes, I did get the seaming done!)

• I did a sample knit for A Verb for Keeping Warm, for Stitches. They needed a quick turn-around so they shipped me the yarn, I whipped out the project, and then I shipped it back, completely forgetting to take a picture of it. That was a couple weeks ago.

  I went to their booth with the express intent of taking a picture of the finished object. Except it turns out there were three of them and now I cannot quite remember which color I made. I know it isn’t the cream one, but was it the lighter olive or the darker olive? I think it was the one on the right. But maybe it was the darker one? I do remember it was some shade of green….

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Today’s dishcloth uses the raspberry stitch. It was a bit fiddly, but at least it’s a good pattern to use with my seemingly never-ending supply of variegated yarn.

Even though today was a day off, I got up bright and early anyway, packed up a bunch of yarn and needles, bookmarked a bunch of patterns, and then headed off to Vacaville to meet up with some friends. From there we continued on down to Santa Clara, to attend Stitches West.

I had two goals for Stitches this year. The first was to check out Apple Tree Knits, to which I’d been only recently introduced via a friend. I normally shun variegated yarn for lace projects, but Apple Tree has incredibly gorgeous colorways that are actually extremely long color shifts, all in one single skein. I stood in that booth for a very long time, dithering between different colorways, narrowing it down to two, and then finally giving up and just getting both. I am glad I went first thing, as another member of our group waited until the afternoon and said the shelves were looking a bit bare. I would not be surprised if she sells out of her stock entirely – the yarn is stunning.

Next on my list of things to find was a just-released new thing from Skacel – yarn that changes color in UV light. I caught site of a little basket of it at the StevenBe booth, tucked off onto one corner of a table, and immediately dug around until I found a skein of the purple. Throughout the day, we all kept discussing the yarn, and other people would hear us, and then we would point them toward that booth, and back they’d come a little while later clutching one or more skeins in their hands and grinning excitedly. It’s a novelty yarn, to be sure, but it’s really neat and I suspect Ravelry is going to explode soon with a lot of projects using this new yarn.

Our group has, over the years, learned that the best way to deal with Stitches is to immediately colonize a table in the far back, so that everyone has somewhere to sit and knit, or to eat lunch, or to just relax before wandering off to do more exploring or shopping. Sometimes we’ve had to come up with a schedule for who’s on table duty, but usually there’s at least one person there at any time throughout the day. So after I scored the yarn I specifically wanted to buy and did a quick pass through the rest of the market (only detouring once for more yarn because I am weak in the face of sock yarn, and oh *my* does 2 Guys Yarn have an incredible selection), I spent quite a bit of time just hanging out at ‘our’ table, knitting or chatting, or checking out the interesting handmade items that other people were sporting. Later on in the day several of us also made a quick pilgrimage to The Mannings booth because they sell awesome and useful accessories.

I haven’t been a couple years, due to either being out of the country (Nerd Boat) or other commitments, so it was a lot of fun to be able to finally get there again. Plus I got to hang out with some people I haven’t actually seen in over a year, so that made the day even better.

*****

Today’s dishcloth was made using the whelk stitch. It makes a pretty thick fabric, so I suspect this one will be especially good for scrubbing…something.

Today started off with a Vox Musica educational outreach to a high school in El Dorado Hills. I got there with more than ten minutes to spare, but ended up parking on completely the wrong side of the school so barely made it to the actual performance space in time. Ah well. The program went well – we talked about what we do, and demoed a couple songs for them, and then took them through a warm-up. They they sang a few pieces for us, which was a lot of fun, because it was an all-girls choir and they were absolutely terrific. Then there was a little bit of workshopping on their pieces, and we ended the entire thing by all joining in on a song together.

And then it was time to hike back to my car and drive to work, where I discovered that the government site where I’ve been extracting data for more than ten years has now moved things around and I cannot find several of the data types anymore, and then I accidentally sent several large zip files to the wrong person, and well that should indicate that clearly the day wasn’t done messing with me yet.

*****

Today’s dishcloth isn’t a pattern so much as just a stitch. I started a completely different one – something called the risotto stitch (no, I have no idea why it’s called that either), but I am sorry, life is too short to do that kind of tedious work in *cotton*. So instead I picked the bamboo stitch (link takes you to a site that shows how to make it), grabbed one of the balls of variegated from the stash, cast on 36, and got knitting.

As usual, click the picture to enlarge, if you can’t see what the stitch actually looks like in this tinier version. This isn’t a reversible stitch (in that it doesn’t look the same on the other side), but I do love a stitch that lays flat, so I count this as a win.

Today’s dishcloth doesn’t have a pattern to link to because I pretty much just made it up. I did up a quick chart of an idea in a spreadsheet, and then I knit it from there. Yes, I will publish it eventually, once I work out some of the issues. Slipping stitches tends to pull the fabric in a bit, which is fine if you’re spreading them evenly across your piece, but not so fine if you cluster them to the sides, like in this case. Only very carefully extra-loose knitting of the slipped stitches kept it mostly square-shaped for this first prototype, so I need to sit and think for a bit on how to alleviate that in a final version (plus do some additional tinkering to get the size more to what I want it to be).

Today’s pattern is a variation on the Two Color Ladder Stitch, primarily because the first time I tried it, I wasn’t reading the pattern correctly in the first place and did the entire thing in stockinette and oh, the curling. Shudder. So I ripped it out and did the entire thing in garter stitch, which looks fine, but hey, upon rereading the pattern, turns out I should have been doing that half the time anyway and that probably would have fixed the curling issue entirely. Ah well.

The color combination sort of remind me of ice cream. I’m not entirely sure why – maybe it’s the brown (chocolate) against the pastels (neapolitan, perhaps?). But since I’ve still got a bunch of both of these colors left in the cotton stash, expect to see it popping up again at at least once during the remainder of the month.

This is what knitting in my house looks like. Note presence of 4 cats (because I know someone will ask, from bottom to top: Ingrid, Rupert, Nutmeg, Azzie).

If they could all actually be *on* me they would, but as it is, they have to settle for being near me. And occasionally yawning, stretching, and oh hey, are you working with *yarn*? Let me taste that for you!

(also, yes, there are also 4 handmade afghans in view as well)

*****

Today’s dishcloth is the Staircase Slipstitch pattern. I do like the look of slipped stitch patterns, except for the fact that the backside usually isn’t as nice looking as the front. In some cases I might mind, but we’re talking about a square of cotton that’s just going to be used to scrub things, so….yeah, whatever.

Unlike with yesterday’s, I am really loving today’s color combo. Alas, this will be the only time it shows up, as there’s not enough of either color left to do this again.