So Faux Meaty

"Dmmmmunnuhphhh?"

Yes, Bernini's David?

"Whhhphh phnuey iph thph ahbuhmuh mphcuhluh phuhm?"

What finery is...what?


"Ahbuhmuh mphcuhluh phuhm?"

About your miniscule fume? What are you talking about?

"Ah. BUH. Muh. Mphculuh. PHUHM!"

Man, I can't understand a word your saying. Let's talk about the scarf. It's a catch-up Finished Object post from earlier this year. By the way, you look quite handsome wrapped up in it.


Details
Yarn
Elsebeth Lavold Silky Tweed - two skeins and
Berroco Softwist - one skein

I bought the Silky Tweed a few years ago from Webs, back when it was being cleared out. I'd intended to buy more of it if I ended up liking it, but never got around to it. The Softwist was left over from the Two-Tone Shrug I made a couple of years ago. The Silky Tweed ended up in one of those Lantern Moon small project bags, which I kept shifting around to different spots in my house. When it came time to put the leftover Softwist away, I shoved it into the bag as well. They looked good together, so I figured that they should stay that way. As it wasn't enough to make a full garment, I spent the next couple of years planning to buy more Softwist. It became a Too Special to Ever Become Anything (TSEBA) yarn.

Pattern/Design Thoughts
I tried a few motifs, and I thought about making granny squares with it, but nothing seemed right. I finally got frustrated with my inability to decide, and just started double-crocheting. I winged it from there, thought about making the various stripes thicker or thinner, but ultimately came up with this pattern.

Hook
Brittany Birch, size F

Time
I packed that little embroidered sack of yarn into my laptop bag and took it with me on a business trip to Nebraska. I started crocheting it when the plane was over Nevada, worked on it in my hotel room that week, and finished it up right before crossing back into Nevada from the other direction. May 9th through 14th 2010.

Conclusion
I love how this came out, and that the yarn isn't sitting in TSEBA-ville. For a while, I was worried that it looked a little like vegetarian bacon, but I've made peace with it. I've worn this one a few times, and I'm happy with how it's holding its shape. Good scarf, nice body, good form...

...oh! About your muscular form?

"Yepphhh!"

Don't talk with your mouth full.

Neoprene Cockfighting Suit

"I just had a flash of a dream. It was a tight shot of a woman's hands wrapping blue neoprene pads around the legs and feet of a rooster. There was an even tighter shot of the neoprene covering the rooster's talons. I watched as she then put a full body suit on him, pressing it firmly closed at the breast, and pulled a tiny hat over his head and fastened the extended neck guard, all also made of neoprene, under his beak. I didn't see any more of the woman than her hands. The whole scene took about ten seconds, and it looked like background video from a newscast."

"Sounds to me like someone's angling for a spot on Donny Deutsch."

"That's my big idea? Protective gear for fighting chickens?"

"It practically sells itself!"

"No, no it doesn't. Because here's what else I remember. The suit completely enveloped the body of the rooster, pinning his wings to his body. How long do you think the cockfight's going to last if the roosters lose their balance, fall flat on their backs and end up futilely kicking the air with their little neoprene legs?"

I had that dream a little more than a year ago. I still don't know what it means.

Meanwhile, I finally decided that I hated the idea of a Big Kureyon garment, but that I hated the idea of ten balls of the stuff sitting in my stash bin even more. My knitting friend, let's call her Natasha, and I recently took a crochet class. I already knew how to crochet, but it sounded like fun, so what the Hell. Anyway, someone asked the instructor what would happen if one kept adding rounds to a granny square, as though there were some punishment to be meted out for not stopping at the prescribed number of repeats. "You'd just have a bigger square. But why would you want to do that? It'd be so boring."

Challenge accepted, my good man.


Details
Pattern
No pattern.

I took a ball of Kureyon, chained six stitches, joined, made granny square rounds until I'd almost run out of yarn, then fastened off the last loop. It ended up being eleven rounds for each of the big squares.

It seemed like it was going to be too small when I finished, and I spent a good bit of time thinking about how to stretch it out to twelve squares. No matter how I did the math, I was never going to get more than eleven out of it. I'd play around with Post-It notes during conference calls, rearranging the squares on my desk in as many ways as I could think to shift them, but all of the best arrangements, meaning those that would make the final product look like a blanket instead of an unfinished craft class experiment, had either nine or twelve squares. I finally came up with the four little squares solution.

And you know what? The instructor was right. It was really, really boring. The only thing that kept me going was watching the color changes happen.

Yarn
Noro Big Kureyon in color 8, long discontinued. I used about eight and a half balls of it.

The color's hard to photograph. The close-up under the bright light captures it, but that's not entirely true, because it's never under that kind of light in my house. It ends up looking murkier than that most of the time.

The yarn itself is, well, it's Noro. Some of the balls were continuous, some of them had three or four knots in them. The color repeats weren't consistent from ball to ball, which is obvious when you look at the squares. Each was started with one end of the ball and worked straight through. No two are the same. That's the nature of Noro, and that's why I don't work with it much. That much inconsistency drives me crazy.

It made a fairly stiff blanket, because the yarn is bulkier than it seems in the skein. It'd work almost as well as a rug.

Needles
Brittany Birch hook, size I, except when I'd forget and pick up the H by mistake. I don't think it happened too often, though.

Time
About two weeks to finish the squares, mostly on lunch hours. It took another week for me to get around to linking them all together, and a couple more days before I felt like weaving in the ends.


Modifications
None, because it wasn't a pattern.


Conclusions
Is it the most finished, elegant blanket I've ever seen? Well, no. I got bored when sewing in the tails, so some of them cross back over other stitches. The wool is more rustic than I usually like. And, you know, it's granny squares. It's going to be more country than rock 'n roll.

But here's the thing. I was never going to make anything else out of that yarn. Ever. I got a good-size blanket out of it, especially after washing and blocking. It took three weeks total, and that's with a few days of staring at the stack of squares and sighing because I didn't want to put the damned thing together. I got rid of about 1400 yard from my stash, with enough left for a scarf.

The most important thing is that I like looking at it when it's wrapped around my feet. The colors really are beautiful. All in all, a success.

...and then I saw this. Now I feel inadequate.

Hooky

In the interest of not putting yarn back in the bins, I took the rest of the Silkroad Aran from FEFI and made this sporty scarf. It took about three hours last Friday. Stash busting isn't just for big projects. Every little bit counts.

Details
Pattern
Hmmm. Yeah. Not so much. I chained until I thought it'd be long enough once it stretched out a little, somewhere around 60" (stretched out to about 72"). Turned around and half-double crocheted across. As I ran out of one color, I'd add another. I had this idea that it'd create a color block effect, but it didn't quite come out as I'd planned. It would have worked if I'd done a taller stitch. I thought about fringe for the ends, but it seemed like it would have made the whole thing too fussy.

Yarn
Jo Sharp Silkroad Aran in the following quantities: Parchment - 25 grams, Merlot - 25 grams, Casket - 34 grams, Venezian - 14 grams.

Needles/Hooks
Brittany Birch size K. Good, big hook. I have a set of metal hooks, and I use them when the yarn's clingy, but I much prefer the Brittany hooks.

Time
Rough guess? Maybe three hours. I started it here at work last Friday, and then when my boss' boss came by and asked why we were all still hanging around on such a nice day, I packed it in my purse and took it home. I remember watching 'Fast Money' while working on it, and I think I was done about halfway through Cramer's show.


Conclusions
I hate to say it, but I think I love this scarf about a hundred times more than the Fairly Easy Fair Isle sweater. I think up excuses to wear it, find myself looking for casual tops that will just 'happen' to go with it.

It's slightly itchy around my neck, which tells me that I wouldn't want to make a turtleneck out of Silkroad Aran. A.B. asked me last night if I'd bought any more SA in the discontinued colors. "Shouldn't you do that before it's all gone?" Good man, that A.B.


I love half-double crochet. Look at how cool those rows look. It's reversible, which is a prerequisite for any scarf that I make. If I have to keep worrying about the right side showing when it's hanging around my neck, then forget about it.


I'm getting better at photo location scouting around my house. I think it's a matter of getting to know the new house and coming to terms with how different it is from the old one. In the old house, the front room got pretty much the same light all year round because it faces south-southeast, so I could always use the chaise for flat pictures, and the kitchen for modeled shots. This house is on the lot in such a way that the light in the summer is totally different from the light in the winter. We're in the part of the year where the natural light comes in at dramatic angles. Good thing I took this picture when I did, because when the house isn't being lit at dramatic angles, it's very, very dark. That's why my modeled picture was taken at work. Pale skin and wide pupils mean that I can't ever use a flash when taking a picture of myself without looking like a demon.


All I have left on Alexandra is the arm seaming and attaching. I got the sides sewn up last night, and I tried it on. It's a tad small when compared to the voluminous sweater shown on the model, but it's a good fit on me. I can't wait until it's done...which it has to be by the end of the night tonight so that I can start on my November sweater. Here's yet another reason that A.B. is the best husband in the whole wide world. When I told him that I had a deadline for Alexandra, he told Buddy and Winston that they needed to settle down and stop hassling me. "Guys, the Woman has to knit. Leave her alone. How's it going, honey? Can I get you a soda while you work?"

Kelp

Remember this gorgeous stuff? No? That's because it's from way back in 2006. I said I was going to use it before starting anything else, because it was a gift and it seemed rude to add it to the piles and piles of stash yarn up in my attic. I kept my word on that, never storing these two balls of silk in the yarn cave at the old house. I kept them in a basket in the spare bedroom, which was just as unproductive, but I didn't consider them fully stashed. When we moved, however, they made their way into the dark recesses of Bin 3, buried under odd balls of Manos del Uruguay and some sock yarn that I never intend to use for socks.

I never stopped thinking about it, the beautiful green yarn that Donatella gave to me for my birthday, and I kept hoping the right project would come along. I tried knitting the herringbone scarf pattern that came with it, but the yarn's sort of thick-and-thin, so the stitches didn't look good to me. I attempted to make La Mer from the latest Interweave Crochet, but I got frustrated by the instructions for Tunisian lace, and by the fact that the pattern isn't entirely reversible. We were headed for that dreaded "It's too special to become ANYTHING!" place.


When you're driving around Liberty City in the stolen sports car that you spent two hours trying to find, suddenly that same car appears in every intersection you cross and in every parking lot you pass. The Boteh pattern was like that for me. I saw it out on TurtleGirl's blog, and then I started seeing it everywhere. I decided that Boteh was as good a pattern as any, and I didn't care if I got gauge or if I'd have enough yarn to make it as long as the pattern. It just needed to be done.


Details

Pattern
Boteh from Interweave Crochet, Spring 2007 (Link to Interweave Crochet) (Link to Ravelry)


Yarn
Artfibers Chai - 100% Tussah silk, color 10. I didn't realize until I went to find the link that this silk is harvested from cocoons already abandoned by their moths. Neat.

It wasn't exactly easy to work with, although it always felt good in my hands. The thickness varies from worsted weight to laceweight, which might have been easier to handle if the stitches were all on a knitting needle. As it was, I kept losing track of the thinner stitches and having to rip back rows to get the right count. I used almost all of the two balls. I've got maybe ten yards left.

Hook
Brittany Birch E-hook.

Time
This took about a week and a half. I started on July 21th, finished on July 31st. I worked most of it while watching A.B. play Grand Theft Auto, and a couple of triangles during lunch breaks from my training class. Here we see it enjoying a break on the landing outside the classroom at Bishop Ranch 8.

Modifications
I didn't have as much yarn as the pattern called for, so I made fewer triangles and I didn't go all the way around the border with half-double crochet. It's a little slinkier as a result, which is alright by me.

Conclusions
This is the perfect use of my two balls of beautiful silk. It wasn't going to work with a pattern that required more stitch definition or attention to detail. In the places where I was working, the light wasn't strong enough for me to see what I was doing half the time, so I needed a foregiving pattern. This was it. I'd get to the end of a triangle and not have enough spaces to make all of the long side stitches, so I'd have to make a couple of chains and squeeze them in. No two triangle ends look the same for this reason.

It's lightweight and comfortable. I'll get a lot of wear out of it. The only problem is that I won't be able to wear it when I'm in meetings or somewhere that I need to pay attention, because I can't stop picking up the ends and looking at them or draping the triangles around my hands. I don't think the pictures can do this yarn justice. It's mesmerizing.

When I finished and laid it out on the granite, the scarf looked like a long piece of seaweed.


I kept thinking of little stories to associate with it, and trying to find the right tone for the FO post, but nothing sounded good once I sat in front of the computer. I read back through my older posts and thought about how much I liked the entries where there was some thought put into the story, more than just "this is my everyday life and here's some yarncraft." I'm simply not able to make that happen right now, and that makes me sad.

It's been a rough summer physically and emotionally at Casa Banana. Job stress, family stress, "I killed the lawn AGAIN?! Are you f$%king KIDDING ME???" stress...yes, apparently I missed a step when setting the sprinkler timer over at the old house, so it's still not watering the lawn properly. It's fixed now, really fixed this time, so maybe some of the lawn and plants will come back. It's all weighing on me, all of the uncertainty and the hastily scrawled lists of things to do. In yoga class this weekend, I realized that I was so tense that I couldn't exhale through my mouth. My jaw wouldn't open. I tried to read a time management book when we got home from the gym, but I couldn't get through the first chapter without being interrupted. I know it's an old joke, and believe me I thought it was funny while it was happening, while I was standing in the middle of the living room with the book in my hand, looking down on my dog and my cat as they engaged in a game that I call Play-Ball-Slap-Fight. "Really, Buddy? Five pages? I can't get through five pages without having to keep you from trying to eviscerate him? If you don't want him to step on you, why don't you STOP RUNNING UNDER HIM?"

So for now maybe I can't write the posts that I'd want to write, and maybe I can't spend three hours finding the perfect light to capture the beauty of the yarn and the stitches of my new scarf. I have to let that go so that I can check something off of my list.

I've got a lovely project on the needles now, using that Colinette yarn I bought last month. More on that later. When I have time.

With Both Feet

"I'n fly...I'ma pilot..." - Russell T. Case, Independence Day

My love for this movie knows few bounds. I've seen it probably fifty time since I last wrote about it, because all of the movie channels are rotating through it right now. Yes, I know it's not a good movie, and that the characters are all horrible stereotypes, and that, as Daisy points out every time she sees me watching it, the female characters all end up dying or being weak and subservient to the men. I mean, c'mon. The president's wife shows some backbone and stays in L.A., and gets rewarded by being knocked out of the sky and buried under rubble, and then she's rescued by the stripper with a heart of gold, who gets to live and marry the man of her dreams as long as she puts on a dress to cover her shameful feminine wares. Then Connie spends almost the entire movie following around the menfolk with the lovingly obedient look of a champion Irish setter.

Then, there's the crime against language committed every time the president has something poignant to say. Poor Pullman. "Today, we celebrate our INDEPENDENCE DAY!" It would have been so easy to rewrite that so that it'd make sense. "Today, we celebrate our freedom. Today is our Independence Day!" Would that have been so hard? That speech has more clunks in it than my old Pontiac J2000.

So, no, I have no illusions about it. I love it anyway.

I especially love Randy Quaid's character, Russell Case. He's a messy drunk, inattentive on his job, and widely regarded as a wacko due to his rantings on alien abduction. There's a longer version of the movie that shows up on the Fox Movie Channel. His character gets fleshed out a little, you learn more about why he's fallen apart and why the older boy hates him, and why the younger boy looks so sweaty and sickly, but seeing it is totally unnecessary. In fact, it actually makes the movie worse, throwing off the pacing and adding fifteen minutes of clumsy dialog. No, all you need to know about Russell is that he bumbles around a lot, but when the chips are down, he jumps in with both feet and gets the job done.


You know what I like about that? It's what I do, too.

Here at the ol' workplace, things are a bit chaotic. Mortgage company, credit crisis, uncertain future and all that. Not everyone is childless and married to the securely employed and highly compensated Accountant Boy. Not everyone can risk staying on to see the ship right itself. Last week, another of my team members jumped to safety.

Sitting in my manager's office, half in the bag on cough medicine and Sudafed, I asked what we were going to do about filling her spot.

"You wanna do it?" he asked.

"Yeah, what the hell. I'll take it. I like doing new...stuff," I said. ("I'n fly...I'ma pilot...")

Now, several days later and exactly twenty-four hours since the announcement went out, I'm fielding calls from users about a system in which I have no experience. Zero. Zip. None. The only guy who can help me, departed co-worker's husband as it turns out, is working from home today, so I keep sending him frantic e-mails with questions, and he sends back single-line replies like "Look at the video I sent you." Only there's no e-mail with a video file attached. I'm lost.


Further complicating matters, I've also volunteered to be on a committee geared toward improving our diminishing employee base's morale. Turns out that the committee wanted me because they felt like they needed someone technical. Oh, dear. Apparently, they think I know something about network security, firewalls, and e-mail servers. I'm a database programmer. I don't know nothin' 'bout no networks. I don't have the heart to tell them, so I'm taking on the role anyway, dragging network and server guys into my cube every time I hear them coming down the corridor.

I might not know what I'm doing, but I'm going to get the job done, by God. When I jump into the shit, I do it with both feet.


What does that have to do with this finished project? Not a damn thing.

Details

Pattern

Not a pattern so much as an experiment in sculpture. The neat thing about crochet is that you can see what it's going to do in three dimensions as you're working on it. I figured I should be able to look at this after every row and see if it was still on the right track, molding it as I went along. I based the shape and the length loosely on a fitted woven shirt I have from Banana Republic. I picked triple-crochet because I liked how it looked with my yarn.


Yarn/Notions

Six balls of Trendsetter Dolcino in various colors, two skeins of Tartelette left over from the doomed fisherman's rib tank. The Dolcino was a dream to crochet, so elastic and soft. The Tartelette, well, let's say it was easier to crochet than to knit and leave it at that. Both were from the stash.

I used hook-and-eye coat fasteners. They're covered in black cloth, which seemed to be a good match for the project, and they're huge, which seemed to be a good match for the size and bulk of my stitches.

Needles/Hooks

Boye aluminum crochet hooks. I cast on with the K-hook, used the H-hook for most of the body, and dropped down to the G-hook when working with the Tartelette, which worked up to a different gauge than the Dolcino.

Time

Three weeks, although it would have been much, much less if I hadn't had a nasty cold for half of it. It went really quickly.

Modifications/Design Thoughts

I chained roughly enough loops to go around my hips at a certain point, then started moving up. After a few inches, I decreased twelve stitches in from each front and from each edge of the back, creating darts. After a couple of rows of triple-crochet, I increased a couple of times along the same dart line. When I tried it on right before separating for the armholes, I saw that the bust was huge. Took out three rows of TC, redid them without the increases. It was that simple. No frogging, no tinking, no wondering if I'd done it right the second time. I just redid the rows and wrapped it around myself again.

Like the big Limari sweater, I was working under a yardage restraint. I only had six balls of the Dulcino, and I didn't realize that the black clashed with the Tartelette until well up into the bodice shaping. It became a challenge to figure out how to use the grey and the scraps of the other colors to separate the two, and not run out of any of them.

That's really what took the longest, all of that second guessing and redoing. If this had been a pattern and I hadn't had to worry about the colors of the yarns, it would have taken maybe three nights.


Conclusions

It was fun. I like the little top that came out of it. Of all of the ribbon yarns I've misguidedly tried to use, Dolcino is far and away the best to work with. I'll use it again, once I get back to a point where I can buy yarn.

Why aren't there any really good pictures of it, and why have I purposely cut my head out of all of them? We've spent the last week under a blanket of smoke. The lighting's all weird as a result. Buddy the Cat is pissed, because his warm, sunny spot on the chaise is neither warm nor sunny. Also, my hair looked horrible.

Here's the picture from above, without any color correction.

The Forward March

I know how this looks. It's the third new project that I've started this week. I haven't finished anything in months. That's a motley collection of ribbon yarn, a type of yarn that I've done nothing but hate for the last couple of months. Look closely. They aren't all even the same brand, width or texture. It looks as though I've lost my way. What am I doing?

I don't know. I just have a feeling about it, like this batch might turn into something interesting. These are more balls from that estate sale haul from a few years ago. I don't quite know in which order I want to work the colors. I have to deal with the gold being different from the rest, something I didn't see until I stacked them all up on the hood of my car a few minutes ago. I only have 675 yards, including the gold. It's possible that I'll run out of ribbon and have to order more, undermining the stash-busting purpose of the project. I haven't decided what I'll do in that case. Fortunately, unlike most of the yarn I bought at that sale, this one is still available on the market.

I don't have a pattern, but I do have a rough idea of what I want. If it works, I'll have a cute garment to show for it by the end of the week.

Pan o Palo

Pan o palo. Yes. Hmmmm. Interesting choice.

Buddy, I don't think that phrase means what you think it means.

Of course it does, the Woman. "Bread or stick". Am I the only one in this house versed in the art of babelfish?

Yes, literally translated that's what it means if you take it out of context, but what Diaz was saying was...

Good, then. We agree. I'm staring at a scrumptious cake of yarn, and cake is much like bread, and very near the cake is a beautiful, shiny brass stick. I do so love playing with sticks. And so I'm faced with a choice, yes? Bread or stick? Hmmm.

Oh, God. Here comes that headache again.

At least I'm not trying desperately to shove the whole ball in my gaping maw. Advantage, Buddy.

Who's trying to shove...WINSTON!


I decided that the way to learn to crochet was to just dive right into it, and to Hell with all of that "knit a long, skinny scarf" business. I found a pattern in Stitch and Bitch Crochet that had arms worked separately from the body, and I'm going for it.

This is Debbie Bliss Aran Tweed, which I got in a swap from KnittingSpaz right about this time last year. I don't know why I wanted it, but I traded some Koigu and The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns for more than twenty balls of it in green and orange. I've knit with Aran Tweed before, and it was an experience in pain. It's rough, hard to slide along the needles and prone to breaking. Luckily, these things are less of an issue with crochet. I think it's going to turn out great, but then again, I am only a couple of inches in on one of the sleeves. We'll see how I feel once I get to the body.