Other Things I've Been Playing With

One of the Ravelry groups I post a lot in had an auction for Japan, and I donated six modular orgami boxes. Five of them are folded in the first photo.
Two of them have twisted flower-like shapes on the outside, but some of them are like that on the inside instead, so I took a picture of the insides of tops and bottoms after I had folded the sixth box.


The Pi shawl that lives on the back of my computer chair needed a good wash, so I soaked it and rinsed and reblocked it. Blocking is a lot easier now I have these mats - each mat is 18 inches square, so you can get an idea how big the shawl is.

And in the spirit of finishing things I've had hanging around for years, I've been working on this spa washcloth I started two years ago.
I am finally to the point of knitting-on the last border. I have one last corner to turn, and then I'll graft the last eight stitches to the edge and it will be DONE.

I might need to knit a couple more little Nieblings to celebrate!

Socks, Legwarmers (Pi Shawl in the Background)

The Pi Shawl lives on the back of my computer chair, and my son has taken to wearing it when he plays "Heroes of Might and Magic" on my computer.

So, yes, that is its border you can see in this photo of the little knitting I got done over the weekend. I knitted another inch or so on both legwarmers, and only a couple of rows on the sock ribbing.

Saturday we braved not-so-great roads and went to the local Goodwill's "50% off Saturday". I got a couple more sweaters that I intended to frog back into yarn.

Unfortunately, one of them has been claimed by our son as his "furry shirt". That would be the lambswool/angora/nylon blend one, the one I really coveted. *sigh* The child has a memory like a bear trap, too, so no use hoping he'll forget about it if I hide it away for a month or so.

The other one turns out to be 29 ounces of a thick singles cotton in two shades of purple that I think is going to work better woven than knitted. A good inspiration to get my latest stalled project the heck off my loom -- which is also a good inspiration to clear off the "stuff" that has migrated to the horizontal surface of my loom bench.

Sunday Possum Adventure

Sunday was an icy day, and after reluctantly abandoning the idea of going to a local farm to see their Shetland sheep sheared, I was sitting in my knitting spot when I heard a ruckus outside under the windows by the bird feeder: a thump, undoglike snarls, dogs rushing around.

I went to the door and called the dogs in, using the drill-sergeant dog-command voice I learned from my dad. They did not seem to think they ought to come in, so I shut them indoors, put on boots and a coat and went out to assess the situation.

There, under the bird feeder, was the possum from Friday, playing dead. (I recognized it by the frost-bitten ear.) It was still, and holding its lips skinned back from its teeth, but it was also breathing. I didn't see any blood, so I got a shovel and scooped it up out of the snow. (Those teeth looked sharp. And there are fleas.) Every time the shovel bumped under it, it squeezed its eyes shut tighter and skinned its teeth back more: "See? See? I'm dead. Just a dead possum here, folks."

I carried it back up to the pine trees on the shovel. Partway, it opened its eyes: "What's going on? I'm moving. Aagh! A human!" and it slumped back down on the shovel. I left it on the thick red pine needles. I hope it doesn't keep coming back, but a possum is not the brightest light in the string.

Pi, Dry

Although I have a nice, fairly new dryer, I don't use it much. In the summer, I prefer to line-dry clothes (I love that sunny smell!) and in the winter, I have a nice folding drying rack that I put up in front of the soapstone stove. Given the low humidity in the winter, plus the radiant heat from the stove, everything on the rack dries very fast and adds a little moisture back to the air.

For scale, the rack is 36 inches wide.

And here is my husband acting as my mannequin. I think I said I wasn't sure at first if I liked the moss stitch border, but it did grow on me. I think the horizontal line across the bottom gives it a nice finished look, and some contrast to the textured fish-scale points of the lace.

In this shawl, the lace is more of a texture than a pattern (if that makes any sense). I think it makes the shawl warmer. I'm wearing it right now, with a shawl pin at the neck. It turned out just the right length, so I'm not sitting on it in the back and yanking my throat. In the front it drapes over my forearms and ends nicely at the bend of my wrist.

I am 5/6ths done knitting the very last pattern, pattern 28, of Sampler M!

Carla has given us the option of continuing the sampler with other patterns, but I included the edge of my ball of crochet cotton in this photo so you can see why I will be casting off after one more repeat of pattern 28.

Once again I have struck cardboard, and so I'll be finishing the sampler, and finishing another ball of crochet cotton from my stash at the same time. I will probably knit up the new patterns using yet another ball from my stash.

Pattern 28 used crossed stitches, or small cables, with one stitch passed behind three stitches. I also tried it with two stitches passed behind two. I've never done any cable knitting before, so it was a challenge. Since I didn't have a cable needle, I hung the waiting stitches on a crochet hook behind the work, and that worked fine.

My netmaking class went well. I am always so nervous before a class, it's a wonder I ever teach anything. But my students picked it up enthusiastically.

My philosophy of teaching is that the best place to make mistakes is during the class, while the teacher is right there to help you. I view making mistakes as a good thing, so you can see how a successful netting knot looks, and an unsuccessful one. It's important to know what the slipped knot looks like, otherwise how would you know to avoid it?

And in the end, it's only string!

Ta Da!

It's done! My half-circle Pi shawl is finally done! I've been knitting on it since October, and it's done. Just visualize me here doing a happy Snoopy-the-dog dance!

It's in my front-loading washing machine, and I'm waiting for the buzzer to sound so I can go pull it out. I hope it comes out as nice as the swatch I washed, months ago now. Washing brought the mohair fibers out in a frosted-looking halo over the dark grape color. If the shawl comes out like that, I'll be completely happy.

And the handout for my class tomorrow is done.

I usually have a hard time getting drawings started. Then after the first drawing or two, something clicks, and I do the rest and forget what was hard.

I draw in pencil, then re-draw with black marker, erase, and scan in black and white. Then I clean up the drawings a little, resize them, and insert them in a Word document. After much arguing with Word about where the drawings will go on the page, I'm done!

Probably no blog post tomorrow, but if you're going to be at Val Day (St. Valentine's Day Massacre XXXIV in Kalamazoo, Michigan), maybe I'll see you there!

Yes, We Got Snow

Or,
What I Did This Morning Before Coffee

Usually, what I do before coffee is shower, dress, wake our son up for school, get him dressed and fed, make his lunch, eat breakfast myself, and deliver him to school.

This morning, what with --

"Lake effect snow showers will continue to develop this morning and afternoon. Additional snow accumulations of 2 to 5 inches are likely today. This will bring storm total snowfall by 7 pm Tuesday into the 8 to 12 inch range with locally higher amounts expected."

-- first I checked to see if my husband had braved the weather and left for work. His car was gone, so I turned off the outside light. Then I turned on my computer to check for school closings. Before the modem had finished dialing up, the door opened, and my husband said, "You turned the light out on me!"

He had tried to get to work, and after spending 40 minutes driving as far as he usually gets in 10 minutes, he gave up and came home.

So what we did this morning before coffee, after it started to get light, was shovel the driveway so he could get his car the rest of the way up to the house. Then I went around the house with the roof rake and raked the roof again.

Let me tell you, with weather like this, aerobics are not necessary!

And yes, school was closed, and our son put on his coat and snowpants and came out and romped around in the snow while we shovelled, singing, "No school, no school, no school!"

I made enough progress on the Pi shawl border that it is now easier to take a picture of what is left to knit on the border than what is already knitted. Only 8 more lace repeats and the border until I'm done!

I will definitely have enough yarn. See those three little balls in the upper right hand corner? As I knitted to the center of the cone, I had already come to one end. No knots, not in a cone, just a loose, dangling end. Darn it -- well, at least it will be knitted into the border and not the middle of the lace pattern, I thought.

But I thought I would wind off the rest of the yarn into a ball so I could weigh the cardboard cone and see if my guess about how many grams of yarn were left was anywhere close. And I came to another end! Then another! Finally, I had not one but four little yarn balls, weighing from 11 to 15 grams, wound off the very center of the cone. Sheesh.

When you buy coned mill-end yarn, that's always a possibility. But the price was right, about 1300 yards of yarn for $7, so I'm not complaining (much) if I have to overlap ends and knit with two strands of yarn for a row or so.

Half a Pi

Or half a Pi border, anyway. I'm now down to two circulars instead of three, and have finished a row or two over half the border. I keep nervously weighing the yarn cone and checking my yarn-use calculations, and it looks like I should have just a little over enough.

This yarn is a mohair blend, with both polyester and acrylic in the blend. My washed swatch didn't shrink at all. Because of the acrylic, I don't think it is going to block out the way lace knitting usually does. But because I washed my swatch and knew that in advance, I don't really mind.

This shawl is probably going to live either on the loveseat where I knit, or on the chair by the computer. What I want it to do is be quick to put on and take off and be warm.

I will probably wash it, just out of curiousity. But most likely all it will do it bloom a little and obscure the lace pattern a bit more.


We've been having snow this weekend, and I've already raked the roof a second time.

There was snow all over the sweet Annie (Artemisia annua) in the garden, and I was surprised to find that the snow seemed to have brought the smell out. (That's the weedy-looking stuff bending over in the left-hand picture.) I love the smell of sweet Annie, but it's pretty strong for me when it's fresh. Usually I cut some after it has been weathered for half the winter. I gave some seeds to a friend of mine, and one year she cut a dry stalk, painted it gold, and stuck it in a pot of sand like a Christmas tree. And it still smelled good.

We have another lake-effect snow warning for tonight and tomorrow. As long as the power stays on, so we have water, I don't mind snow until I've been shovelling it out of the driveway for days in a row.

Pi Shawl Progress

Elizabeth Zimmermann warns that when you start a knitted-on border, at first it seems like an infinite job.

In order to keep from giving up, I keep moving my white crochet-thread stitch marker to the end of the next lace pattern repeat, ten stitches away. That way I am knitting a small enough patch not to feel discouraged, and I can see I'm making steady progress. In only two-and-a-half repeats, I'll have emptied my first circular needle and I'll be one-third done!

Last week I ordered the netting shuttles I'll need for the netmaking class I'll be teaching in February, and I finally re-ordered the circular knitting needles from my mail order that disappeared back in October. (The whole order disappeared in the mail, order form, check, and all.)

I bought two US size 1 Susan Bates Quicksilver circulars. All the rest are Susan Bates Silverado circulars: two US size 2, two size 3, and a size 4. I would have ordered all Silverados, but they are not available in size 1.

So maybe the next time I knit a round doily, it might be on a circular knitting needle, instead of a dozen double-points!

Sorta Winter

We've been getting little sprinkles of snow, just barely enough for my husband to take our son sliding on the hill in the neighbor's hayfield, but not quite enough to cover the tall grass.

Outdoors, it looks like winter is just starting. If we are lucky, the cold weather will hold the fruit trees back and keep the flower buds from swelling and freezing. The newspaper said so far, it looks like only peach trees were advanced enough to lose buds.

It was beautiful weather for knitting on the Pi shawl. I decided it was long enough after 11 repeats on the outer ring, and cast on 15 stitches to knit the seed stitch border.

You can see the start of the border on the left side of the picture. Although I wanted a wide border that would lay flat and not curl up, I was not sure I liked the strong horizontal lines of the seed stitch, and worried that it would contract the lace knitting too much. But I think it is growing on me as it grows, and after three repeats in the lace portion, it doesn't seem to be pulling in.

I knitted 3 rows of seed stitch across the bottom before I cast on for the knitted-on border. Border and all, it is about 23 inches long. I wanted a shawl that would be just short of my sitting on it, because I didn't want to sit on the edge and yank it off my shoulders. This looks about right.


I finished pattern 21 and started pattern 22 of Sampler M, and I worked a couple more rows on the Valdani bag. I wasn't at all happy with my eyelets in pattern 21, but after frogging them a couple of times, and trying about three different ways of knitting them, I decided I had learned enough about eyelets made on six yarnovers, and went on to pattern 22, "Scales".

Pi Shawl Recovers Knitting Mojo!

The Pi Shawl is getting so big, I can't stretch it out fully without it coming off the needles. I finished knitting the tenth repeat of section three last night and one row of the eleventh repeat. I almost need a ladder to stand on to get the whole thing in the viewfinder!

The wool blanket it is spread out on is a yellow-to-butterscotch color. On my monitor, it looks pretty orange, but in real life it's more yellow.

I'll answer a question here:

"What is a 'placki', anyway? Is that like a latke?"

Lucky you, you are going to get the story behind the story!

When our son was small, he got a lot of the "Veggie Tales" videos. One of them was "The Toy That Saved Christmas" on DVD, which has a lot of "Easter eggs," little fun undocumented features, hidden in the menus.

Okay, it's a kids' video: they aren't exactly hidden when the DVD says "I think there's an Easter egg on this page!" over and over.

On one of the sub-menus of "The Toy That Saved Christmas," the Easter egg is a song, "The Eight Days of Polish Christmas", each day of which is a Polish food.

My husband's family is Polish (and Irish, but that doesn't figure in the story). So we found the phonetic spelling of some of the foods in the song hilarious:

Golabkis, which are meat and rice-stuffed cabbage rolls, pronounced by my husband's family "glum-keys", are spelled "gwumpkies" on the DVD, and chrusciki, described in my husband's big Polish cookbook as "Polish crullers", are spelled "hooscheekies" on the DVD. (I don't have the Polish character set to put the diacritical marks, like slashes in the "L"s, in these words.)

Anyway, my husband got the bright idea that he and our son would do "8 days of Polish Christmas" at our house. The first year, they followed the menu on the video:

1. A Boiled Potato topped with Dillweed
2. Two Steamed Pierogies
3. Three Simmered Gwumpkies
4. Four Baked Paprikas
5. Five Smoked Kielbasa
6. Six Fried Hooscheekies
7. Seven Pitted Prunes
("I don't like prunes!" "With this food, you'll need'em, son," is the comment on the video.)
8. Eight Poppy Seed Cakes

After that, they branched out, picking recipes out of Polish Heritage Cookery, by Robert and Maria Strybel, one of the best presents I ever got for my husband. It has pretty much every Polish recipe his busia (=grandmother) ever made, plus variations.

A lot of the foods he knows by name phonetically, from hearing his busia say them, like the menu in the DVD. Then he pages through likely chapters until he finds the Polish spelling.

So, yes a "placki" is a potato pancake, pretty much like a latke!

I Have A Michigan Blog

I'm not sure how my blog got added to the "Absolute Michigan" blog list. Just because I live in Michigan and often post about our goofy local weather and life in rural Michigan, does that mean this is a Michigan blog? I guess it does.

Surely Marguerite's blog is at least as much of a Michigan blog as mine is. Look at all the snow she got! We only got a fluffy inch or so, which today is turning soggy in 37 degree temperatures.

This morning's southwest Michigan weather headlines show it turning colder again and lake effect snow for tonight.

I meant to knit on my blue scarf yesterday, but I was waylaid by my half-circle Pi Shawl. Here is the last picture I took of it, back at eight repeats, on October 27th.

I realized that one reason I stopped working on it was that while October was Snow-tober (and I knitted on it a lot), November was Summer-vember. It was so warm so often (60 degrees in November?) that a shawl didn't seem high on the list.

Another reason was I had just knitted through a slubby section of the yarn, and was pretty ticked off at it.

Anyway, I sat down by the window last night to knit some more, and the cold air was sheeting down the glass onto my lap. Suddenly having all that mohair in my lap felt a lot nicer again.

I have said before that when a project loses its "knitting mojo," when I just don't feel like knitting on it, I have learned to set it aside. It might hibernate for days, weeks, or even months, but if I force myself to work on it, it might sit for years! I just wait until it looks like the coolest thing on the planet to work on. Eventually it will come around again, or else it will get frogged.

So I finished the ninth repeat on the Pi shawl (cheater picture is from October, as Blogger says "your request could not be completed" when I try to upload a new one), worked my calculations again, and am tentatively planning to work three more repeats and a knitted-on, probably seed stitch, border. That will give me three lace repeats in the first section, six in the second, and twelve in the third, nice and symmetrical.

Speaking of Pi Shawls, Tatt3r is knitting a full-circle one. Having seen this yarn in person, I can tell you that the camera does not pick up its beauty. On my monitor, it looks basically sand-colored. In real life, it has a lot of subtle color shifts, almost an oil-on-water iridescence.

I don't often push charity knitting, even for a good cause. I figure knitters are good people, and they can figure out for themselves where to best send their charitable efforts.

But frame knitters, particularly those who knit on round frames like the Knifty Knitter, pump out hats like nobody's business. Save the Children's "Caps to the Capital" project needs hats for newborns, 9 to 11 inches in circumference.

I leave you to figure out the rest.

Ahhhh, Knitting Weather!

And back to work on Sampler M. This is the start of Pattern 16, with patterns 14 and 15 showing below it.

I am not sure if I want to finish the pattern, or leave myself something to work on tomorrow in Kalamazoo at the Festival of the Arts. (Kalamazoo Valley Museum, 230 N Rose St, Kalamazoo, MI) I could always work on the Pi shawl, as I'm sure I wouldn't finish that even if I knitted for the entire four hours. I have a linen bookmark that stalled ages ago that I can work on if I think about it, but it's probably better if I take something I can work on without thinking about it, since demos usually involve talking to people and getting distracted from the work in hand.

Speaking of distractions, our son will be coming along, since my husband has his November Guard drill the weekend after his October one. By the end of next week he'll have worked three weeks in a row.

Fortunately for our son, the KVM is a children's museum (although my husband and I enjoyed it when we went there during spring break earlier this year), so we will alternate demo-ing with jaunts into the museum, and I think he'll enjoy himself all over again.

Blog-i-versary

Has it really been a year already since I started this blog? How weird. I know some bloggers hold contests on their blog anniversaries, but I am not that energetic.

The hops net is down, and I'm happy to report I did not fall off the roof. On the left, the hops nets all enmeshed with hops vines, and on the right, the freed hops net ready to be washed, repaired, and enlarged for next spring, now that I know that this string shrinks in the wash!

The Pi shawl is getting so big I can't fit it in one frame any more. Eight repeats done, number nine started.

Unfortunately as I reached the center of the cone, I encountered some defects in the yarn.

This yarn is like LB Homespun, a soft poufy fiber wrapped with a thin black fiber. In several places I have run into sections where all the "pouf" has accumulated in one spot. I tried distributing it out over several yards, but that didn't work particularly well. In a couple of spots I got mad and just knitted the whole pouf. It doesn't show on the front, but on the back it looks like a big purl bobble! Darn it.

Well, at least it is at the back of the shawl, on the wrong side, and towards the bottom edge. Given where that will hang when I wear it, I'll be very surprised if anyone picks up the back of the shawl and looks at it. "Evil Death Glare" does not begin to cover the look I would give them.

I did the math yesterday. Yards per ounce, shawl's weight in ounces, and number of stitches knitted so far: then stitches per ounce, and remaining ounces on the cone. It looks like I should ju-u-ust be able to make it to twelve repeats and my knitted-on border. Barely. With maybe half an inch of yarn left.

I am dithering over whether to quit at eleven repeats and make sure I have enough for the border, which will be knitted on a size or two bigger needles, or be a dinghoot and try for twelve, risking running out before finishing the border. I have a couple of repeats and a couple of days to decide.

I'll be trying it on to see if I like the length at eleven repeats. I don't want it to be so long I am sitting on the back edge of it and pulling it off.

Just Stuff

Van is fixed. Wheel bearings, around $300. Well, it's a 10-year-old minivan with 176,000 miles on the odometer, 107,000 of which we put on it.

I sat in the waiting room, enduring Fox News (which everyone in the room seemed to be studiously ignoring), and knitted on the Pi shawl. Seven edge repeats done, the eighth started, nine ounces of yarn used and about five ounces left. Later today I'll figure out how many stitches I'm getting per yard, and if I'll have enough to knit the full twelve repeats plus a knitted-on edge.

Rural buried-cable phone line and dial-up. That's how I connect to the internet. The phone cable access box is standing at an angle again. I wonder if the guy who mowed the sides of the road hit it. The phone line was so staticky the last few days that even though I could hear a dial tone, the modem claimed there wasn't one. When I got home from van repairs and grocery shopping, I didn't even have a dial tone for a couple of hours.

Then Blogspot fell on its head again last night. I was getting "500 error" pages on Blogspot blogs, and couldn't access the status blog either.

Re: Weather

I think I mentioned it snowed overnight here Monday night, and we woke up to measurable snow on Tuesday morning. (Still didn't kill my tomato plants, though.)

Well, Tuesday night we had a killing frost (good-bye, tomato plants), then yesterday after I picked up our son from school, I went home and mowed the grass, because the temperature was up to 50 degrees F again.

Considering I knitted for an hour and a half while waiting for my van repairs, without any breaks to let dogs in or out, add wood to the fire, or refill my coffee cup, and I pushed the mower all around the yard, my wrists feel pretty good today.

I celebrated the frosty night by emptying the contents of the chest freezer into our picnic cooler, dragging the cooler outdoors on the north side of the house (32 degrees at 8am), and defrosting the freezer. The freezer suffered a mishap during the making of our son's loft bed: somehow a couple of the boards fell over and knocked the plug out of the outlet, so that it partly defrosted before anyone (me) went to get something out of the freezer and noticed.

But it is all dried and refilled now, and it was so cold outdoors that nothing could warm up.

After the frost melts off the roof, I have to climb up there and take the hops net down for the winter. If you hear an "Arrrrrgh!" and a thump, that will be me falling off the roof . . .

Joys of Dial-Up

Woke up to snow -- here's a photo montage. The blue photo in the middle is a field of asparagus plants bowed down by the snow. On the right you can see more snow falling off to the east of us.

Our phone connection is terrible this morning, crunching and popping so much that the modem insisted there wasn't a dial tone. I finally (knock on wood) got through. We'll see how long this lasts & how fast I can type.

I can't believe the Pi shawl is crowding three circular needles. Even if I had a 60" circ., it would be crowded. As it is, it's on a 29", a 36", and a 32", with six repeats done and the seventh started.

I am not sure what I will do for a cast-off. The edge is way too long to use the invisible cast-off, which takes about three times the length of the edge. I'd be pulling about ten yards of yarn through each stitch. Naaaahhhhh.

Teaser Snow

I've been trying to get a picture of the little snowballs that keep rattling down. Mostly they show as whitish blurs, but I think I captured at least one as a tiny white speck in mid-air.

This October has been unusual, in that while we have had snow a couple of times, we have not yet had an all-over killing frost. Everything has been patchy.

I drove north by about ten miles, and the fall color is still beautiful up there. Meanwhile, at my house, the snow and the wind have whipped most of the leaves off the trees already. It looks like November, with bare branches and gray skies. That makes me think of pumpkin pies and roast turkey, and we haven't even had Hallowe'en yet.

I was knitting away at the Pi shawl last night just before I left for this month's drum circle, and came to an end of the yarn in the middle of the cone! Boooooo! So I stopped knitting in the middle of a circular needle, in order to deal with joining the two ends in daylight.

Our drum circle was awesome. It is always great when the players synch up, and I always seem to end up charged up and ready for another month. Sadly, our hosts are going to be moving, and we will need to find a new place to drum. Our property has space to drum when the weather is nice, but we don't have a place to drum in winter or wet weather.

Recharged!

I was timing myself as I knit this last night, and it takes me about 19 minutes to knit a row. I'm up to about the 18-20 stitch per minute speed. It was interesting to find that my knitting speed is about the same both on the pattern side and the purl side, and that the Quicksilver needle doesn't seem to slow me down.

It is a rainy, gray October day. Where is my "bright blue weather"? If we get a long enough period without rain, today I plan to dig up my four-o'clock roots.

Since I looked all over for information on this several years ago and ended up figuring it out for myself, here it is in one post:

Digging Four-O'clock Roots

After the leaves start to fall off, dig up the roots. The roots are black-skinned and very tough, like a very woody carrot. Rinse off loose soil and let them completely dry out. Put the roots in an open plastic bag and store someplace where you will remember them in the spring.

I plant mine back out in May, by which time they have knobby little buds, like a potato trying to sprout. If the bud is pinkish, the flowers will usually be the pink-to-red ones. If the bud is green, the flowers are usually the white or yellow ones. But I have had both all-pink flowers and all-white flowers on the same plant, and I've had plants go from white-with-pink speckles to half-white/half-pink over the course of the growing season.

If you have limited space and don't care what color you get, it is easier to save and replant the seeds. But if you get a flower you especially like, the roots are very easy to care for. They don't need damp sand or anything to preserve them.

I am aware that in the south four-o'clocks can be invasive. But here in Michigan, the frost has killed any roots I didn't dig.

That Michigan Weather

You have to love Michigan weather, especially in the fall -- it has such a great sense of humor!

Those white flecks on the tomato leaves and the four-o'clock plant are indeed snow. I have been trying unsuccessfully to get a picture of the snow when it comes rattling down in tiny mouse snowballs.

Snowy weather is great weather to work on something warm, like my Pi shawl. (I had to put it down when it got up to 70 degrees F!) You can just see at the edge where the doubling round is pushing the border rows out.

I checked out Barbara Walker's "Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns" from the library, and I was intrigued by the pattern she calls "Chinese Lace". The third picture shows a "thneed" based on the Chinese Lace pattern, sitting on the Pi shawl.

The word "thneed" comes from a Dr. Seuss book called The Lorax. In The Lorax, a creature called the Once-ler discovers the Truffula trees and:

"I chopped down a Truffula Tree with one chop.
And with great skillful skill and with great speedy speed,
I took the soft tuft. And I knitted a Thneed!"

What is a Thneed? The Lorax pops out of the chopped-down stump of the Truffula tree and asks that very question: "What's that THING you've made out of my Truffula tuft?"

The Once-ler answers, "This thing is a Thneed.
A Thneed's a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It's a shirt. It's a sock. It's a glove. It's a hat.
But it has other uses. Yes, far beyond that.
You can use it for carpets. For pillows! For sheets!
Or curtains! Or covers for bicycle seats!"

My Thneed is made out of cotton carpet warp, basically cotton string, and is meant as a soap washcloth. You put the soap inside and use the thneed as your washcloth. I started out double-knitting it like Elizabeth Zimmermann's knitted baby blanket, thus the moss-stitch edges that look like fins. After half a repeat, I switched to knitting in the round, and the fins became a three-stitch moss repeat. It is fascinating to see how this pattern likes to bias. And the fins are interesting, too.

Now I am thinking (as if I didn't have enough works in progress in various stages of completion) about how I could knit a fish, switching between regular knitting in the round and flattened double-knitting, with the fins an integral part instead of knitted on later. Barbara Walker has another pattern in this book called something like "Dragon Scale" which might work for the body. The simple horseshoe pattern from the Pi shawl also makes scale-like shapes. Hm.

Catching Up

Saturday we went to Vineyard Raids III, and instead of netmaking, I taught basic fingerloop braiding, and did a discussion of knitting in the Society for Creative Anachronism. I am always very nervous when I volunteer to do something like this, but it went all right, and I didn't faint or anything. The apprehension before the class is worse than the class itself.

We had beautiful, cool, sunny October weather. And afterwards, I was surprised and delighted to become a member of the Order of the Salient Hart, the arts award of the barony of Andelcrag.

Sunday and Monday my son took over my computer. He and his dad both had Monday off for Columbus Day. I spent Monday quickly tatting a motif for the West Michigan Lace Group's medallion exchange, which I promptly forgot when I went out the door!

I apologize for this terrible picture. This is my fifth attempt, but this camera doesn't have a close-up mode -- at least not one that works to my satisfaction.

Fortunately I had put my proof-tatting attempt at this medallion in my little tatting box, so I put that one in the exchange.

We had a great show and tell session. One member brought things that had been made by her grandmother for her (the grandmother's hope chest), lacey things, embroidered things. And I got to see Tatt3r's lace pillow in person. Her Milanese sampler is so delicate "IRL", in real life, as my webhead brother might say.

I brought the Pi shawl, which has really slowed down now that I am at the 366-stitch stage. I've finished a repeat and a half of the lace pattern, and I guess-timate that about nine repeats will probably be long enough. The cone of yarn I bought at the fiber festival back in 2005 had about 1300 yards on it, so I think (knock on wood) I'll have enough!

Relax, Needles

Thank you for all the birthday greetings! I had a very enjoyable, low-key day.

After my experience with boiling water and the twisted Tatsy tatting shuttle (a story for another day), I was nervous about dunking the needle cables in hot water. But it worked well enough that they are not driving me completely crazy any more.

I now have all three of the circular needle types that Susan Bates makes: Silverado, Silvalume, and Quicksilver. I really love my Silverado needle. The black cable was limp and cooperative right out of the package.

Both the Quicksilver and the Silvalume have the clear, twisty (less twisty now, thanks to your suggestions!) cable. I can see that the Quicksilver cable is a tad thicker. I like the Silvalume straight needles better than the circ. I haven't knitted enough with the Quicksilver yet to have formed an opinion.

I finished my doubling row, so now each row (366 stitches)takes me about 20 minutes to knit. So I can't show much progress.

Just like knitting on multiple straights, I find I actually like knitting with multiple circular needles. It gives me an ending point without having to knit a whole row, and makes it easy to see how much of the row I've done.

Now I really have to go work on my short hand-out for Saturday!

Happy Birthday to Me!

As I try to get materials ready for Vineyard Raids III. And bake brownies for the school's bake sale at the modular train exhibit Saturday. And sneak in some knitting and reading time.

Last night I went to a meeting of the Lakeshore Fiber Arts Guild in Holland, Michigan. We had a presentation by Jennifer Gould, a charter member of the guild, on printing and painting clothing.

Jennifer wore a jacket she had made out of a sweatshirt and explained how she made it. (It's the one shown in the "Printing and Painting Clothing" on her web page.) She talked about learning to paint, stamp, and discharge cloth and clothing.

She also brought some of the art dolls and discharged and collaged fabric she has been working on this summer. It's always fascinating to see what she's been working on, and the directions she has taken some of the techniques we experimented with at our guild meetings.

I sat and worked on my Pi shawl. I finished the sixth pattern repeat and the 48th row of this round. The next step is a doubling row in the half-circle part.

This shawl is on two US size 6 needles. On the left is a Susan Bates Silvalume. On the right is a Susan Bates Silverado. The Silverado has a nice limp black cable and super-slippery points. The Silvalume has a lively cable that refuses to lay flat.