Jul

16

Social again

Food / Life

Yesterday an invite to Google+ dropped in my email box and I got sucked right in. Thanks Andrea! After multi-quitting my social apps last year and making a slow comeback on Ravelry and restarting the blog, I still kept off Facebook like the plague. Now with Google+ I hope to set up a better system. I can tell already that I like it much better than Facebook; the circles alone are worth the switch. Let’s see… I already have a whopping five people in my circles and sent out invites to four more; Lady Gaga’s got nothing on me.

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To populate my account a bit I posted a few photos. Here’s what we did one night this week to celebrate Ben’s big birthday: Scuola di Pizza! It was a great treat for one evening to be at Mozza’s Scuola di Pizza for a demo on how to make pizza and a bit of hands on in shaping the dough. At the end our chef prepared ten different kinds of pizza and we all got to try each one. It was fabulous. I am hoping we can take the pasta class together at some point.

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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?

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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.

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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

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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.

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