Aug

09

Anatomazed

Knitting

Anatomaze dictionary entry

Amazed by anatomy, or more to the point: aKNITomy.

aKNITomy's lab rat

aKNITomy's lab rat

aKNITomy's lab rat

Who would have guessed that a dissected rat could look adorable?

Head over to Emily’s aKNITomy Etsy shop or her Craftyhedgehog Ravelry page to gaze at her other creations: vertebrae, neurons, blood cells, more dissected creatures, and this bisected human head.

Aknitomy's bisected human head

Bisected human head

Should I file this under education or entertainment? I think I’ll consider this my first “Entertainment Tuesday” entry. :)

* Photos courtesy of Emily Stoneking.

Posted by | 6 comments
Aug

07

Expect some bumpiness

Knitting

Expect a few bumps as I do some much needed digital housekeeping. The previous blog template wasn’t flexible enough to accommodate the changes I am planning so I’m transitioning to new blog software, updating the menu, and reorganizing the content into a website that includes the blog. The older posts are still there, albeit with some minor formatting issues. It might take a while to get everything in ship shape. Fasten your seat belts and stroke some cashmere. Meanwhile, testing for Nebbia is well under way and should be completed some time this week. One final round of tech editing and the pattern will be ready. As usual, I am learning a lot from my testers. You girls rock! Every pattern presents its own problems; it’ll probably be years before I can confidently anticipate all issues, and maybe that’s not even possible. It’s OK. After all this is the house of Slow Knits, where things happen at a comfortable pace. You may

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noticed that the name Fluffbuff has disappeared; I’d been feeling for a while that it was no longer a good match. Yes, there are still non-knitting categories in the blog and I am not sure what to do about that. My six readers seem to like the cat/food/language asides and most likely the blog will remain a mixed bag with strong focus on knitting. But enough with the ramblings… I have software to learn. Oh wait, guess

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what I am going to knit next? That’s right; I ordered my first Bohus kit which should be shipped tomorrow and arrive here in a week or so. I can’t wait! Since it’s my first attempt at Bohus knitting (excluding the Blue Shimmer wristlets I made at a workshop with Susanna Hansson back in 2007), I thought I’d better start slow with a hat + scarf kit. Sweaters, if any, will come later.

Poems of Color

Falling hopelessly in love with Bohus again.

Posted by | 9 comments
Jul

25

Keep cool and carry on

Knitting

Definitely not knitting weather, though not as hot as in other parts of the country just now, but all I can think of and all I want to knit is wintery stuff. Super warm wintery stuff.

Monster bougainville

Our bougainville doesn't seem to be suffering from the heat.

For now I am playing with swatches and it may be a while before I cast on for a project so it’s OK. No big bundles of wool sitting on my lap to make me wish I were somewhere in the Alps or whereabouts. In lieu of such bundles, Kelvin or Pipie, who have been strangely non-interactive during Ben’s absence and once installed on my lap would simply not move. At one point last night Pipie turned around in his sleep and almost fell off my legs. Result: several claws dug into my left leg to balance himself. You’ll be relieved to know that he didn’t fall and I had non-expired Neosporin at hand. Life is good.

This past weekend I posted on a testing group on Ravelry (a more laid back group than the one I used for Riva) and test knits for Nebbia are starting today. I am hoping to solve a pesky issue with two rounds of the main repeat which I adapted for knitting in the round from a stitch meant for flat knitting. A weird thing happens on two of the rounds where even though the stitch count is correct, the stitches are offset by one so I had to compensate with a M1 at the beginning and a k2tog at the end of a round and something else four round later. This is the main reason I knitted the hat three times, because no matter how much I tried to pay attention the second time, I kept compensating and not taking good notes during knitting.

This is a shot of hat #3 one very hot late afternoon when I was trying to make it look like fall weather. Yeah, right.

Nebbia hat

Nebbia v.3

Remember Fragile Heart? Nicole finished it and even made some modifications that worked out very well. I love the yarn/color combination she used. I was too chicken to knit mine with the Kidsilk Haze I had available, and now wish I had.

Stay cool this week, wherever you are.

Posted by | 6 comments
Jul

22

Gold quest

Food / Knitting / Language

No, really. The man has gone off gold prospecting in Northern California for a long weekend with two of his oldest friends. This

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is his big birthday year after all, and Scuola di pizza was our own celebration, while the quest for gold is his manly pursuit for a long weekend of driving, bending under the sun in creeks panning for gold, going back to a cabin for the night with the comfort of beer and scotch and brotherly company. I contributed two trays of slow roasted tomatoes to the cause and gracefully declined the invitation so I can spend four days knitting, reading, watching tv, and overloading on kitty love while indulging my pledge to consume almost as much alcohol as the guys — my booze of choice being wine, of course. And since I can’t drink without food, there will need to be substantial dinners as well. <non-sequitur> By the way, is there a word in English that translates the Italian companatico? Italian has this expression — pane e companatico — which means “bread and that which goes with bread.” Basically, companatico means any food that is not bread and all the attempts at translations I found online are, well, wrong. I should start a list of untranslatable words; I amuse myself in odd ways. </non-sequitur> To kick off the long weekend in style, I visited two yarn stores and bought four balls of Classic Elite Kumara that I plan to turn into a huge wintery scarf. I did say huge, right?

Classic Elite Kumara

Classic Elite Kumara

What else is new? Yesterday I sent off the pattern I’ve been working on for a first round of tech edits so my test knitters can get a better first draft to knit from. I am also putting in some time into learning my kanji, mostly at breakfast, before I have to deal with issues of tiles and grout color and type, toilet sizes, cabinetry, and the like. Will the construction downstairs ever

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end? Oh, and I am obsessing again about different cast-on and bind-off methods. Which brings me to the big question of the day: does anyone know of a matching bind-off for the Channel Islands cast-on? I’ve seen suggestions to use a tubular bind-off, but it doesn’t look all that close to me. I am starting to look at picot bind-off techniques instead. Hmmm, what is the correct plural version of cast-on: “cast-ons” or “casts-on?”

Posted by | 7 comments
Jul

14

Going to the dark side

Knitting / Life
Japanese crochet books

Who would have thought?

After decades of ignoring anything crochet, two days ago I found myself at Kinokuniya in Little Tokyo (these things just happen to me) where a seriously depleted knitting shelf (emphasis on the singular) forced me to look around the other craft shelves and against my better judgement I picked up two crochet books.

Before the crochet crowd starts throwing rocks at me, let me explain that by “against my better judgement” I mean nothing disparaging regarding crochet, only that if you decide to learn a new skill, getting your trainer books in Japanese is not the sanest option.

In my defense I can say that my judgement had been impaired by a convergence of brain-draining factors:

— Constant construction work around the house for several weeks this time, with at least two weeks of sawing, cutting, rotating blades ablaze, dust and noise at record levels.

— A sudden spike in errands and things that needed to be done now, including medical and dental stuff. After yesterday’s radioactive pill I am positively glowing.

— A five-day-long smell attack on our house that made the place stink like a body farm in a bad CSI show. We suspect a rather large animal died under the house (we are on a slope and such spaces abound) and with temperatures in the 90s until two days ago… you get the picture. Well, finally the decomp smell subsided and we were enjoying an evening of TV and reading when a skunk decided to restore our olfactory environment to Code Red.

Tile cutting station

Tile cutting station conveniently located under my office window.

As you can see, it’s not that I am going gaga; I had objective reasons for not being at my best when I set foot in that Kinokuniya store.

Tile surgery

Tile surgery

But back to crochet. In case you wonder why I never had the urge before, the main reason is that to me the process of crocheting “hardens” the yarn. If the same yarn is used to knit or crochet, the knitted item will be softer and nicer to touch, and warmer to wear. As a result, until now the only crocheted items I liked were straw/rafia/cord bags and hats. On top of that, I never cared for the granny square look. Then a couple of weeks ago I happened to come across the photo of a shawl crocheted with Kidsilk Haze that looked as soft and fluffy as any knitted shawl. Time to revise my opinion of crochet, me thinks.

Any good crochet tutorial in English or Italian that you know of?
I get the gist of the individual Japanese symbols since I can look them up, but run into problems of interpretation when it comes to putting them together.

Any tips from the pros?

Posted by | 13 comments
Jul

08

The “K” files

Knitting

A bit of reorganization chez Fluffbuff (or should I say chez Slow Knits since I started to use that name?).

Knitting binders

The old binders

My old binders finally got labels on the spine.
new binders

The new binders

And new binders found a spot on a different shelf. Yes, they look exactly like the old binders, just a splash of yellow for a change. For once, Staples was stocking the same product when I went back for more, unlike the plastic containers I’ve been using for my yarn. As soon as I got a good supply of stackable transparent containers, they discontinued the line.
Understanding Japanese patterns

Understanding Japanese patterns

This time I found some dividers with repositionable tabs that come in non-offensive colors. Yes, yes, I’m picky.
Dividers for the Technique binder

Modular dividers

Yellow makes me happy. Wish they’d had those yellow binders a couple of years ago when I started my collection. The dividers aren’t entirely visible in the binders because all my print-outs are inside sheet protectors that come out almost as far as the tabs, but they are still useful when leafing through the pages. How do you store your print-outs? Or do you keep mostly digital files? I am all for saving trees, but find it a lot easier to read on paper.

Posted by | 7 comments
Jun

29

How to shoot a hat

How to / Knitting

… in 27 easy steps.

  1. Knit hat.
  2. Wash hat.
  3. Resist urge to photograph hat while damp.
  4. Look for a sunny spot in the house.
  5. Give up finding a sunny spot in the house.
  6. Get white whitish sheet of paper.
  7. Arrange sheet of paper so that half lies on a flat surface and half leans against a somewhat stable vertical surface.
  8. Remove cat from paper.
  9. Secure sheet of paper so it stops sliding.
  10. Spray cat with squirt bottle.
  11. Position hat on paper as artistically as possible so it doesn’t suck.
  12. Spray the other cat.
  13. Reposition hat.
  14. Talk to cats in Italian.
  15. Go into the other room to get a lint roller.
  16. Remove cat hair from paper and reposition hat.
  17. Put extra food in the kitty dish.
  18. Set white balance and take first picture. Blurry.
  19. Chase cats out of the room and vow never to buy a house with an open plan again.
  20. Take second picture with one hand while keeping cat #1 at bay. Super Blurry.
  21. Spray both cats.
  22. Ask Ben if he can take the cats into his office.
  23. Give up on Ben since he’s coding and can’t parse human language.
  24. Rearrange hat on paper and try to take third picture.
  25. Explain to cat that you need to take at least a few pictures without feline body parts in or around the hat.
  26. Acknowledge the limitations of the human condition.
  27. Shoot whatever pictures you can.
Kelvin and gray hat

whatever

Posted by | 17 comments
Jun

26

House of Gray

Knitting
gray hat

Pretty much a life size swatch

Frantic knitting over the past three days after I hit on a stitch/yarn/color combo I like and decided to knit a hat and scarf based on it. The hat did not come out the way I wanted from the shaping and size point of view, so this amounts to a giant swatch. The main problem is that I have no idea about how to decrease and I sort of improvised as I went. Now I have to figure out the math of decreasing and, even harder, see if I can decrease in pattern. Then I’ll have to knit another hat and find a name for the pattern. This naming thing is starting to stress me.

On a happier note, on Friday I met with Lydia, a fellow blogger from Seattle that I’ve known off an on since the days of my old blog. Meeting in person was a lot of fun and I hope to see her again when I travel up north in a couple of months.

And if, like me, you couldn’t attend Woolfest, head over to Knitsofacto to check out some magnificent sheep. While you are there, look around the archives for historical musing on Welsh knitters, thoughts on photography, and more.

Posted by | 7 comments
Jun

22

A bit of OCD

Knitting

I may have a mild form of OCD. Why else would I have spent half an hour replacing all the pins on my swatchboard to make them color-compatible with the swatches they are securing? Results of the operation: a) a happier me b) a shortage of

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white, yellow, and blue pins c) an excess of green pins (free to a good home)

Blueprint swatch

Matching pins

Yellow pins

Seriously…

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Jun

20

Swatchboard

Knitting

Most of my day is spent in a room that serves as office, craft room, storage, playground, communication center, kitty bedroom, and the list

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goes on. On the wall to my right is a large linen board that for many years displayed photos, postcards, Japanese stickers, and the occasional odd thing.

swatch board

From memory display to swatch board

Last night I took down most of the items on display and converted two thirds of the board into a design prop, more precisely a swatchboard. We’ll see how it evolves over the next few days. Some of the old photo prints from trips to Italy with Ben are still up: a view of the roof tops in Faenza, a garden in Venice, Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the hills around Chiusi (Siena), the Via degli Asini (donkeys’ road) in Brisighella… One photo I remember with particular fondness is the view of a bank in Faenza with a sign that reads “Rolo Banca 1473”. This was Ben’s first trip to Italy and he asked me what the “1473” next to the bank name meant, since it couldn’t be the street number. When I told him it was probably the year the bank was established, his comment was “your banks are older than my country”. As it turns out, I am not sure that particular bank was established in 1473 but Il Monte dei Paschi di Siena was indeed established in 1472 and is the oldest surviving bank in the world, so it is entirely possible. But I digress. Seeing all my swatches up on the wall is going to help me stay focused on the project at hand — something I am having a hard time doing recently. The other thing I am planning

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to do is keep better notes about my knitting. If you have any suggestions on how to achieve that, fire away. My notebook is a mess.

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