Kiss My Knits!

Am going crazy from being home all day as a mom. I love my child, Lord knows I do, but I’m still going a little stir-crazy. Emily’s taking swimming lessons in the afternoon this week and next week, so we’ve got that going, but our early July is pretty light on the summer camp stuff. I need to get more sleep, that’ll help.

I’ve put my 2004 knitting projects into Ravelry. I’ll start on 2005 at some point soon. I am omitting the hundreds of individual Jayne hats in favor of one single Jayne hat project that I’ve listed as ongoing from 2004 to the present.

Speaking of Jayne, I’m almost out of orange and the mill won’t be spinning more for another six weeks. You’re killing me, Brown Sheep, you’re killing me. More road trips are in my future.

The Tofutsies socks were finished tonight! They look good. I’ll post up pics soon. Speaking of posting pics, having to put things up on Ravelry means that I have to put my knitting pics up on flickr. I feel oddly exposed having them all out there.

Am doing Girl Scout paperwork, trying to find a new home for my two rising Juniors and merging with another troop. Also mailing out cookie badges. I have an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach, like I’m overlooking something important, but I don’t know what, and something will go wrong this Fall. However, I did speak with the council membership coordinator tonight, and she gave me some info that gives me a place to go to get more in control of things.

Started to spin up the second half of the red fiber, but you know what? After spinning that gorgeous cormo/silk blend, I couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the red stuff. It was pretty, but just not so much fun to spin. Instead I moved on to the BFL I got from SakinaNeedles. Wow, is that stuff soft. Like buttah. I went to split it, and it fell apart into two perfect little slivers in my hand. Then four, then eight. Easy peasy. I’m still getting the hang of spinning it – I think I need to set my brake a little harder, I’m kind of uneven – but it’s just so soft. Did I mention that it’s soft?


I’m preserving the hard color breaks, so I think it will ply up pretty barber pole-y, but I’m okay with that. This is for fun. I’m going to order more to have for Simucon, since I think this will be fun for newer spinners.

Still recovering from staying up too late a few nights ago after getting the DVD transferred. Maybe I’ll put up another spot tomorrow.

Time for bed. Pics and vids another day.

Hats up for: NC, MO, CA

The third of a series of Next Gen spots. This must have been ’93 or ’94 since that’s when TNG was in its final season. Back in the days before Google, I had to schlep to every library and bookstore in town trying to find a book with a picture of Grant Wood’s American Gothic big enough to scan into the Quantel Paintbox, which back then was like a primitive version of Photoshop. And when I say scan in, I mean lay on a flat surface and photograph with a camera hooked into the machine.

Jeez, I sound like Grandpa Simpson. Of course, we did all wear onions on our belts, because that was the fashion.

The music was Michelle Shocked doing Arkansas Traveler.

My husband and I have been trying to de-clutter our lives, and one way we’re doing this is by getting rid of video tapes. However, some tapes we don’t want to get rid of, such as my old resume reels. Unfortunately, my master tapes are on MII, a format that never really came into its own in commercial use. It’s like the Beta of TV stations. Which is ironic, because Beta was industry standard when I was there. Also like Beta, MII was superior to the format which did come into wide use. Blu-Ray, pay attention! Never neglect marketing!

We were moving to a digital playback system when I left in ’99. I didn’t bother to put my stuff on a more easily accessible format because it never in a million years occurred to me that I wouldn’t be returning. It was simply an impossibility. Funny where life takes you, eh?

However, I did occasionally dup some stuff to VHS to bring home and review, and I did have my friend and former boss dub a few things to a tape for me after I left. Nice of him to do. So now, I’ve dumped a lot of my output onto the hard drive of our spiffy new recorder and made one master DVD. I’ll be making another copy for safekeeping.

From college, it’s got the crappy tape transfer of the B&W student film I edited, plus the Gunsmoke editing project every film student has had to do since the 50’s, plus a weird student video. Weird student videos are mandatory in college.

Professionally, there’s my intern work at WSOC-TV, and the stuff I did after I got hired as a producer there (hello, salary!). It’s got my editing from NBC News Channel, when I was freelancing overnights. It’s got the early stuff I did for WJZY, and my Hawaii 5-0 spot that got an Addy. There are a few later spots done after the advent of Photoshop and AfterEffects, when I could actually, you know, ADD GRAPHICS to my spots. I look at most of my stuff now and think “man, that would be so much better with graphics” but you can only do what you have the tools to do.

There are also a few production oddities that might appeal to geeks, like the slates for ST:TNG and DS9 from the original feeds, with Michael Dorn or Rene Aberjonois identifying the audio channels. There are also some production track only versions of the promos, which are great for pulling clean dialogue and effects out of. I’d love to send those to someone who would appreciate them, but I’m sure Paramount would put the smackdown on me for YouTubing them.

Anyway, I’m hoping to actually put up a few videos of what I did in the old days. It’s not exactly Gone with the Wind, but it’s not terrible TV either. Since rediscovering these, I keep having dreams that I’ve gone back to work in TV. They’re always good dreams. Well, we’ve already seen that life takes you where you don’t expect to go, so who knows what the future holds?

Elizabeth Taylor

Pattern: Basic doll, panties, pants, and sweater from “Toys to Knit” by Tracy Chapman
Yarn: Dale Baby Ull for body, Mission Falls 1824 wool for pants, Lion Brand Cottonease for shirt.
Needles: #2 (2.75mm) for doll and panties, #7 (4.5mm) for outerwear
Gauge: 7 sts per inch for doll held single, didn’t check for outerwear.

Taylor, right, is the completed companion to Elizabeth, left. In spite of how it looks, they are the same size. Taylor’s head might be just a smidge bigger. I blogged extensively about my troubles with Elizabeth. Again, the pants would have been too long with the full 50 rows called for, so I did 42. Also, after seeing how much trouble Elizabeth has with keeping her trousers up, I only cast on 23 instead of 25. The panty pattern, at least, works like a charm.

There was a different shirt for Taylor, made out of blue Lion Brand Cottonease. This pattern had its own set of issues. Why would you call for decreases along the sleeves of a sweater for a doll? They’re not real person arms. They’re little sausages. They don’t taper. Instead of casting on 22 and decreasing to 14, I cast on 20 and did one decrease to 18 after eight stitches on the theory that it might make it a little easier to stuff the arms into the armholes. It worked fine. Just before I started the sweater, Emily asked for a picture on it, a heart. Turtlegirl76 was gracious enough to share some red Cottonease for that. I had to buy a skein of Baby Ull for the doll itself, but the yarn for the pants and main body of the shirt came out of my stash.

We chose Taylor’s name the same way we did Elizabeth’s, by going to a baby name site and perusing a list of the most popular girl names. She has trouble coming up with stuff from her own head, but having a list like that, she had no trouble selecting exactly the right name.

Seeing this picture makes me wonder if this was what was in her head when she bought that issue of Betty and Veronica yesterday. Hopefully they’ll be a good influence on each other, although with a combination name like “Elizabeth Taylor” I kind of doubt it. Well, Emily’s happy and that’s all that matters.

Comics, multicolored food, and knitting.

I have things to write – progress on the doll including a YouTube demo on doll hair, Emily’s and my adventure uptown riding the bus today, my horror of Girl Scout paperwork – but I’m a bit too tired.

Instead, I’ll just say that I got my Ravelry invite today (yay!) and my username is Tvini. I’ve been getting http://www.wearwithstyle.com hits from the Jayne hat pattern that’s up there, so it’s nice to be able to actually, you know, see what’s there.

If you’re on Ravelry, friend me at will!

http://monkeemaker.blogspot.com/ is running a contest. Comment on her blog, possibly win a monkey backpack. I LOVE this monkey. It has a very Aardman-esque quality to it. The original Sirdar pattern has its charm, but the creator gave it some extra personality somehow. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s a singularly British monkey. The signup closes soon, so head on over and poke around. Leave a comment, and maybe get lucky!

Behold! Grapey goodness!

I spun up the last remaining super-soft cormo/silk batt (pictured left) that I had in order to take a break from the neverending itchy red wool that I had been spinning. Last time I spun this, it came out very loose (pictured right) because I was underspinning it for my desired result. This was an early attempt at spinning. I’m still not an advanced spinner, but it’s been gratifying to see how much better, in my opinion, this one looks compared to that one.


I posted after that first attempt, and got a lot of good suggestions. This time, I loosened up the tension on my wheel and treadled like a one-legged duck as I tried to spin tighter. I actually wound up making the second bobbin of singles more spun than the first bobbin, and I think it shows, but I’m okay with that. I two-plied it, and Navajo-plied the last little bit from the bobbin that ran out last. The Navajo-plied bits are hugely more twisted than the two-ply, even though I slowed down my treadling for that section. Clearly I’m letting it take up more slowly with the Navajo plying as I try to get it right. I’ll have to work on that.

When setting the twist, I took a page from ‘s “rough set” book and soaked it in very warm water for about an hour, then in cool for a bit. Then I spun it around in my bathtub, then beat the tar out of it against the tile walls. Then I hung it unweighted to dry. It hung very straight. Pictured: a closeup of the plies. This still isn’t as tight or even as I’d like it to be, but it’s miles better than the last time I tried this fiber a few months ago. I don’t spin as often as I’d like, so I consider this good progress. I’m pleased.

The finished skein has 76 yards, enough to actually make something, but I have no idea what. I’m open to suggestion as to what to knit!

Many thanks to everyone in the community for all their suggestions, they’ve really helped make me a better spinner.

(crossposted to my own journal and )

So there’s a meme going around LJ where you link to your 42nd post ever and it supposedly is predictive of how your life will be. Apparently my life is about knitted hats (correct) and multicolored jeweltone boobs (not so far).

One out of two aint’ bad.

My daughter asked for a doll to be a friend to the other doll I made her and selected a specific shade of yellow for her hair. Unfortunately, nobody local has it. So I’m asking if you have a single skein of Crystal Palace cotton chenille in colorway 1317 which is a pretty straightforward yellow.

I have many skeins of cotton chenille in colorways 6045 and 8166 (purple and red, respectively) and will happily trade multiple skeins of my own for your single skein. Heck, if you’ve got a skein of this and can get it in the mail very quickly, I’ll dig into my Lamb’s Pride, Noro, Lorna’s Laces, Creatively Dyed (some pics here and here), whatever I’ve got, whether it’s a lopsided monetary value trade or not. Just let me know what you want, chances are I’ve got it.

Won’t you please help stamp out doll baldness and make a little girl happy?

(Crossposted to my .)