Author Archives: admin

It is so not fair

… when you see this poking out of the top of your mailbox: not_fair.JPG
And think, after the day at work that you had, a little yarn porn could make your day. “Yaay!”
So you pull out the “catalogue” only to find this:
not_fair-1.JPG
I know my stash is an investment, great maker knows I’ve been trying to convince my husband that my yarn is an investment, but I didn’t know they knew it!

Blumengruss Translation

I’ve been working on the translation of Blumengruss from the book New Style of Heirloom Knitting for a while, and by using the sites mentioned in the last post, I think I’ve finally got it all.

So, I present, Blumengruss Translation.

You will, of course, need the book for yourself, because there are a number of charts that need to be referenced and I won’t reproduce them here.  That would violate the copyright of the original author, so please don’t ask.  

Yarn: Lace Weight. It translates phonetically as pappy pappyness which I can’t find reference to anywhere, but it seems like any laceweight will do. I list the color numbers below anyway.


Gauge
: 24.5 sts and 60 rows over 10 cm.
(This seems a little off to me, but it’s what it says in the book)

Finished dimensions
: 156cm x 84cm


Colors:

Color Number Color Name Amount needed
211 Rose 75g
237 Pink 10g
203 Ivory 15g
206 Light Grey 5g
219 Purple 13g
220 Wine Red 5g

 

Needles:

Japanese
Needle Number
mm Closest US
2 2.7mm 2.75mm
3 3.0mm 3.00mm
4 3.3mm 3.25mm


Directions
:

With #2 needle and Rose yarn, cast on 3 stitches.
Knit the first chart(Yellow area of diagram).

Use the e-wrap cast on for the increases at the end of the rows. 162 rows.

Place stitches on a holder or extra needle, break yarn.

blumendiagram.GIF
 
With # 3 needle and Rose yarn, pick up 80 stitches on the first side of your knitting, pick up the three cast on stitches, and then 80 stitches along the other side, 163 stitches. (Pick up one stitch for every other row you
knitted in the first chart.)

Knit rows 1-53 of second chart (the large chart) with needle #3, according to the color sequence in the chart below. (Pink area of the diagram.)

Change to #4 needle and knit the next 91 rows (chart rows 54-144).

Leave stitches on the needle, break yarn.

Color sequence:  30 row repeat, start from the bottom and work up.

5 rows Rose
3 rows Purple
2 rows Wine Red
3 rows Purple
5 rows Rose
2 rows Pink
3 rows Ivory
2 rows Light Grey
3 rows Ivory
2 rows Pink
Setup of 6 rows
Work only once. 
Rose

With #3 needle, cast on 22 stitches in a waste yarn using a provisional cast on.

With Rose yarn, knit edging chart, joining to outside edge of the last chart (around the bottom of the vee).

Knit on 846 rows of the edging chart to 423 live stitches of the bottom of the vee.

Knit on 144 rows of the edging chart to 144 rows of the end of the vee.

Knit on 326 rows of the edging chart to 163 stitches left on the holder from the first chart.

Knit on 144 rows of the edging chart to 144 rows of the other end of the vee.

Remove the waste yarn and graft the last row of the edging to the first row of the edging.

Soak, block and enjoy!

Now, I haven’t knitted this yet, but it’s high on my list.  I may actually use a single variegated yarn instead of following the striping, or I may buy some KnitPicks laceweight and dye my own stripes, I haven’t decided yet. 

I’ve only seen one other version out there in blogland, and it was done in a handpaint and came out very nice.  Maybe you were thinking about it but were put off by the pattern.  Maybe this will help?

Let me know if you find any errors or info you may find valuable that I can add to the translation, then we can all have a good version of the pattern to work from. 

Help for knitting in Japanese

I’ve been struggling for weeks with trying to translate some characters in the Blumengruss pattern from New Style of Heirloom Knitting. I was doing sort of ok with the kana because they are mostly foreign words and with some clever pronunciation, I could figure them out. (The best one so far? ra i to gu ri – light grey!)
But the kanji. The ABC’s of Knitting covers quite a bit of the kanji I might need, but not all of it. It really only covers the knitting terms. But in the book, there are more than knitting terms, there are descriptions of the knitting that aren’t covered in the ABC site.
Tonight I came across this site: The Kanji SITE – A guide for students of Japanese Kanji It’s a well organized site, and even though you have to search several pages to find the character you are looking for, once you find it there are often very good definitions, and also definitions of the character combined with another character and even sometimes a “not to be confused with” example. I’ve not come across a site with such a nice layout and so much content.
Plus it has the kana as well, with charts comparing them and explanations of the combining of symbols with the characters, such as adding the degrees-looking symbol to he makes pe, and adding the quote marks-looking symbol changes he to be. Many of the charts on the wikipedia don’t have all that. Plus there’s some nice commentary on the pages, and the author clearly has a sense of humor, which many sites don’t seem to have.
I’m thinking this will be helpful for translations of sites like Ten Old which has some beautiful Fair Isle style patterns (although I hear the author of that page speaks english if you email her) and also Pierrot which has a lot of crochet patterns available to download as .pdfs.
Anyway, I’ve still got more to figure out, but I thought I’d share this great resource.

WX Alert Radio hell

It’s damn hot in so. cal. today. I went to the gym and about died after exiting and heading home because during the hour that I was in the gym it got to be about 500F in my car and thank the great maker I was wearing longish pants because I surely would have had third degree burns when my pale white skin hit the charcoal grey leather interior of my CR-V.

So now I’m home and resisted putting on the A/C until about 3 pm when it was over 90F in my living room. I’m trying to listen to some music on my laptop while I convert a bunch of tunes I stupidly ripped in Apple Lossless(read GIGANTIC) files into much smaller AAC files.

But about every 20 minutes for the past 3 hours, the weather-alert radio goes off, and I have to run to the other end of the house and turn it off. So far we’ve had:

  • Flash flood watch for the mountains north of LA but not the Santa Monica mountains
  • Flash flood warnings for the Palmdale/Lancaster area
  • Extreme temperature warnings for the valleys and northern LA county with temps of 106F to 113F til Sunday night
  • Hailstones 5 miles north of Lancaster and Palmdale
  • Tornado Warning!!
  • Severe Weather Statement
  • Hazardous Weather Outlook that includes Long Beach
  • Excessive Heat Warning

And it’s all in that creepy robot voice that NOAA uses to announce the alerts.

We bought the radio because it had a short-wave receiver, and leave the WX on just because, why not, there may be a tsunami one day, and although we are 7 miles from the water, it might be useful to know it’s a potentiality.  And it goes off a few times a year, so no big deal.  But holy cow, they must be having some crazy weather in northern LA county today.

Passable Housekeeping* tip o’ the day

If, and I’m not saying you are, but if you are the kind of person who:

  • Makes a huge batch of spaghetti sauce in your
  • Super-exquisite French Blue Le Cruset 8 Qt French Oven and
  • At one point, the pot boils and sends molten spaghetti sauce all over your shirt, arms and counter and
  • You slam the lid on that puppy, turn the heat down and change your shirt and let it simmer down for a few hours and
  • You make a mess o’lunches for the week with the sauce and
  • You pack all of the remaining sauce in nice neat quart-size freezer bags for later and
  • You remember to remove the bags from the glass loaf pan you used to keep them upright in the freezer before they have frozen into a solid block of glass and sauce and
  • Six full days later your husband says “babe, did you know there is spaghetti sauce all over the ceiling?” and
  • As a matter of fact, you didn’t know (see molten sauce on arms, above) then

apparently, it’s perfectly safe, depending on the type of paint on your ceiling, to use your Swiffer® with a Swiffer® Wet Cloth to clean six day old spaghetti sauce off the ceiling.

Not that you, dear reader, would ever have a need, but just in case.  Just putting it out there. 

* I say passable housekeeping because a)someone else owns the name Good Housekeeping, and b)clearly Good Housekeeping would have noticed it six days earlier.

What is that???

I woke to a loud rumble. I don’t know what time it was, because our clock is so bright we keep it covered with a piece of thick cloth. You know how it is, you wake in the night and stare at the clock so you stress about how long you have til it’s time to get up, and you can’t get back to sleep because you are stressing about it, rinse, lather, repeat.

Anyway, this loud rumbling. My first thought was that we had just had and earthquake, you know, the kind that roll, and the sound was the sound of the earthquake rolling southward. Must have been up in LA or something. Then I thought, no, maybe it’s a train going too fast. Sometimes the trains leaving the Port of Long Beach, with all the goods of the country on them, can be heard when the wind is right. Then, no, maybe it was a big truck barreling away from my street. What is that?

I opened the curtain and could see my whole backyard as if it were daylight, the sky was clear and the moon bright overhead. I left the curtain open a bit because the air felt nice and cool after such a hot-and-humid day. I started to drift off again, and a flash through my eyelids caught me. Huh? Is there some kind of freak out in my backyard taking pictures through the little triangle of curtain that is exposing my sleeping face to the yard? I reached for my glasses, and a little startled, I peer out of the triangle of exposed window, ready to scream if I saw someone.

There was nothing out there, but then I heard a little rumble again. What is that?? I start to fall asleep again, and there’s another flash, and a rumble right away this time. Then it comes, the most incredible dumping of rainwater just started falling all at once, as if someone slashed the bottom of a giant ziplock of water over the backyard. It was raining so hard, and the air smelled suddenly clean and fresh, and I didn’t even mind the temporary increase in humidity.

And I do mean temporary, as it was over as soon as it started. I don’t think it rained for more than 15 minutes over my backyard. I must live on some strange climate-cusp, because more often than not, when we experience these torrential rain pours, they occur only in the backyard, but if we look out the front windows, we can see that it’s just spitting or not raining at all in the front of our house. I didn’t bother to check this morning, since it was all over so fast, but I was glad that there wasn’t some pervert snapping photos of my through my bedroom window. Somehow my husband slept through the whole thing.

The things the mind comes up with when interrupted from a good sleep…

Some baby things

cassidy-4.JPGcassidy-3.JPGcassidy-2.JPGcassidy-1.JPG

A former colleague just had a baby, Miss Cassidy, and she was clearly in need of a trendy, pink, kimono shrug.  Don’t you think it’s adorable? 

This is from the Mason-Dixon Knitting book, and is made on size 6.5 mm needles from Lily Sugar & Creme yarn. 

I think it came out quite nice!

After I finished it, I had and idea.   I had made those sock monkeys last year for my niece and nephew, and had some socks left, so I made a sock-horsey for Miss Cassidy too. 

Normally, you would put some button eyes or something, but this is for a newborn, so buttons are not a good idea.  So I embroidered some eyebrows.  This is a skill I need to work on.  I was just going for “not scary”.  I think I did ok. 

Today I was in Target, and picked up another pair of socks on clearance that will be perfect for a sock-zebra.  They are black and white with some pink stripes too.  I may make one up to have on hand for the next new addition to our planet.

Does anyone have any tips on sewing knit fabrics?  The only thing I could figure out to do on the machine is knit a few stitches, lift the foot and let the fabric snap back, then drop the foot back, all while keeping the needle in place.  That’s probably not the way you’re supposed to do it…

Here’s hoping…

I’ve been beta testing the new MT4 in another directory for a few weeks, but was too chicken to try and upgrade my real blog. Seems like it worked though – if this posts I’ll know for sure if I broke something.
Well, posting worked but commenting doesn’t work yet. I’ll work on that tomorrow, I guess.
Ok, now the comments are being posted, but you don’t get any sort of acknowledgment that they posted. I’ll work on that tomorrow, really.