Kiss My Knits!

I’ve got stuff to post, including an actual non-Jayne project completed today at Worldwide Knit In Public Day, but that can wait.

For now, fun with homonyms. Needs no explanation.

You may think the toothy smile drawn at right is odd, but there are all kinds of faces in the world.

Emily enjoys playing soccer with her friends on the playground. I was skeptical that she was doing anything but randomly booting the ball or maybe cheering a little from the sidelines, but when we actually played in the back yard, she wasn’t bad! So when she said she wanted to do a soccer camp this summer, I said okay. She’s signed up for “Soccer FUNdamentals” next week.

They required us to get shinguards, so we stopped by a sporting goods store to get some. Then we realized we needed long socks to go over the shinguards. And probably shoes would be a good idea. Anyway, one thing led to another, and now we’ve got a little Mia Hamm running around the house, dressed in all the pink clothes she picked out.

By the way, she now wears size 6 1/2 girls shoes, which apparently translates to size 8 women’s. She can now share footwear with my mother. Thanks a lot, bigfooted husband.

Here’s our budding soccer star. If she enjoys it, maybe she can play for my alma mater UNC one day! Lady Heels! Woo!

Emily’s signed up for soccer camp next week. She says she wants to play. Apparently she plays on the playground some. I was skeptical that she was really playing, as opposed to randomly booting the ball or cheering, but I took her on in the backyard, and she’s actually not bad.

Tomorrow, per camp requirements, we get her itty bitty shin guards. Immediately afterwards, I DIE OF CUTENESS.

Em has re-watched the Phyllis Diller episode of the Muppet Show several times today. Picking up standup tips? Hmm…

I may have mentioned that a couple of weeks ago, Emily tried out for her school talent show. Her talent? Telling jokes. Pretty big for an kid with autism who doesn’t like to make eye contact and routinely tells us that she just doesn’t want to talk right now.

Well, today was the show! I asked Emily how she felt onstage, and she told me, “I felt so, so, so, so, excited!”

Em’s teacher said that onstage, she was very confident and expressive, “like she is when she’s reading sometimes, with the eyebrows and everything” and was loud and clear. (Em does have a very expressive voice when she reads, giving things a lot of appropriate and sometimes dramatic inflection.) Her teacher says that Em got good laughs from the kids.

I asked Emily to tell me a joke that she told at the talent show: “What goes ‘ha ha ha plop plop?’ An audience laughing their heads off!”

Then when they got back to the class, she spontaneously started leading the class in song and dance. It was a song about “thumbs up, thumbs down” that she learned in school. You know, for a kid with Emily’s challenges, she really has shown an affinity for showbiz. She is, at her request, having a week of drama camp this summer.

My baby was born to be a star!

WAY too much to do today, and too little time to do it. So in lieu of a long post about my crappy time with teacher gifts this year, we have one piece of art and one cool link.

“Mom, Dad, the burglar alarm is ringing. A burglar.”

We do not own a burglar alarm, but Emily loves watching burglars in the Sims 2. We have a cheat that permits her to send a burglar to a house, and then a police officer comes, and they get in a cartoon-style fight with a cloud of smoke with the burglar crawling out and being dragged back in, etc. That’s where this drawing comes from, not from any anxiety about our house getting broken in to.

What I love about this picture: she’s facing away, looking at the alarm, and you can see the line across the back of her head representing her hair. It looks like she’s wearing earrings – you can see the backs.

Note the concentric rings coming from the alarm representing noise. All that time in the comic book shop is clearly paying off!

And now, a link that really makes me smile: sneaky, sneaky dolphins.

Have a good one! I gotta get cat food before the cat eats me!

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Super easy.

Materials:
Long size 11 needles
1 skein Noro Iro

Cast on 150 stitches.
Knit 10 rows.
Bind off all stitches.

Voila! Longways-striped scarf!

This colorway was 60A, but I’ve done it with others to good effect. This pic is from 2004 but this scarf is still Em’s favorite scarf. It’s weathered a lot of use, too, which is testament to the yarn. You want LONG size 11 needles because it’s a lot of stitches to jam on there. Here’s a picture showing how bunched up you have to make the stitches.

Very easy, and a good way to use up that one skein of Iro or Big Kureyon that you shouldn’t have bought but just had to have.

Okay, maybe it’s just me that does that. Heh.

Here’s a skein from the dye day at Jetsy’s. I experimented with winding the yarn in a different way. Five twists around the blue side, then looping around the black side twice. This should make a long strip of blue before the black comes into play. I combined different shades with one base blue for the longer section for some gradiations within the loops.



I thought unwinding the skein might be a challenge. Normally you’d put a skein wound this way back over whatever you wound it around in the first place, but I didn’t have access to that. So I used a pottery cup and a copy of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator to keep it from getting tangled with unwinding. It worked well.



Here’s the yarn wound into a skein. 220 yards of worsted weight – I don’t recall what the base yarn was. I’m not sure exactly what to knit with it, but I did enjoy dyeing it and I learned a lot. My warping board is still one of those “one of these days” thing, so this was a nice basic experiment. And at this point, having a good learning experience is still the goal.

I was feeling a little low the last few days, and when that happens, I try to think of things which would make me feel better. Spinning yarn is one, but it takes a certain commitment of time, and besides I loaned my wheel to Jetsy, so that’s off the table for now. Mainly because of the time, Jetsy, don’t worry – I’ll definitely ask for it back when I want it!

Playing piano is another. So I did, and that was good. I think I’m also going to order Denes Agay’s Best Loved Songs of the American People. The songs are old folk songs that I grew up with, and they’re quick and easy to play. That book was on my Amazon wishlist for several years, and it’s ridiculous that I haven’t managed to buy it when it’s one of my top picks. It’s vanished off my wish list now for some reason. No idea why. But it’ll be a quick fix to help me with a little piano pick-me-up when I’m down.

Third, play DragonRealms! And I mean play, not just GM. Usually I’ll play for a few minutes and then start thinking of new things to do for the game, and then I’ll wind up writing new vision messaging or shop items while I’m hacking and slashing. That’s probably what’ll happen today, but we’ll see. I logged my moon mage in this morning to discover that I had a couple of new spells from the Analagous Patterns spellbook. Woo! So time to practice a little magic, and maybe do a little hunting. I can take a break this morning for a little mindless entertainment.

And no, I’m not scripting while I write this entry. I follow the rules. 🙂

I have some non-Jayne knitting to show later. Nothing too complex, but still a nice break. Jayne hats do continue apace. Hats up for: Charlotte, Phoenix, and Chicago.

Pardon, I have to go kill monsters. Elanthia awaits!