Lace is pretty.

As I crawl back out of the nebulous, all consuming black hole that is my graduate education (or really my data crunching software), I am reminded that I have hobbies. I have things I enjoy doing for fun in that magical, mythical space known as "free time." I like to knit. I really do, but lately it just hasn't been happening with the frequency and volume I might prefer (aka, all the time).

That's not to say I'm not knitting, though. No, there are bills to pay, and more specifically accountants, and the accountant gets paid in knit goods. (BEST. ACCOUNTANT. EVER. You get me several hundred dollars back on my tax return, and I get to knit things? Where's the catch? [there isn't one]). Last year I knit her Gingko, and she loved it. I was sort of spinning my wheels for this year's bit of pretty, but then I remembered a shawl that has been lurking in my knitting PDFs for quite some time. Viorica.

I really love this shawl. I think it's probably because the gentle crescent gives the overall shape this subtle, sweet ruffle. I may make a window dressing using this pattern as a guide, because it's just too perfect for that sort of thing.

Anyhow, I think it turned out quite nicely.

 Whenever I block irregular shapes, it always takes a bit of massaging before I finally decide the best fit for the fabric. Large sections of stockinette certainly can be blocked as tightly as the lace portions, but that clashes with my personal aesthetics regarding the nature of knitted fabric. I feel like the V's of the knit stitches are beautiful and I put them there for a reason. Because of this, getting the tips of curves to stretch without wonkifying my stockinette is a little tricky. Pinning something like this usually takes a few hundred T-pins and at least an hour and a half.

It's totally worth it, though. Good blocking makes beautiful lace.
I'm almost finished with my sister's birthday present, which is good, because I'm seeing her in 3 days... I should probably get on that...

 

More Fluff and Stuff

Everyone is having babies lately (everyone but me), and that includes my fellow grad students. One of my buds, bless her heart, will be 9 months pregnant when she defends her prospectus. 9 months. No thank you.
Her baby shower was this week, and it was a rather gender neutral one, as the wee one has refused to uncross its legs for the last 3 ultrasounds.

So I asked her what kind of animal she wanted and she said they were decorating with a sort of "cow theme." Cool. New stuffed animal.

I flipped through the cow patterns on Ravelry and finally settled on Milkshake the cow. It seemed cute enough. The one I really wanted to make was this one, but it's in some book that I cannot access... The udder is freaking hilarious. Oh well. Milkshake was a quick knit--the pieces are made flat and sewn up when it's stuffed. This was the first error free stuffed animal pattern I've encountered in a while, so kudos to the designer.

It's not without quirks though :)

 For starters, in the original pattern, the head is attached to the body using the base of the nose... I... I can't do that... I just can't. Heads connect to bodies with necks... noses, well, they're independent of the head-neck system. You can't just go around connect noses to torsos like it happens every day (yes, yes I know it's a stuffed animal and you totally can. By you I meant me.)

 Thing #2 is that body--those are stripes. Cows have spots. It totally works out okay in the end but when I first held the head an body together, all I could think was "Oh no... It's a Zebra."

 On the plus side, I now have a pattern for a zebra. (Ear up higher, no horns, nostrils a bit lower. All very small changes, really).

Overall, I recommend this guy pretty highly. It's a cute little pattern.

We celebrated my belated birthday this weekend with my folks. Everyone had requests for knitted goods, and I got enough yarn for a sweater for the husband (win), so I'll be cranking out gifts here for the next couple of weeks if I'm being efficient. I've got requests for a teal Les Miserables for my mother, I cranked out a hat for my little brother (no pictures, unfortunately--it only took a few hours, so he left with while it was still drying.), and a Caroline for my seester. I also am pining away for a kit that knitpicks has had for a while, but I think I've got enough knitting on my plate to last me for the next couple of eons, so I'll hold off on that for a while. Knitting for others is more fun anyhow. I don't have to figure out how to store finished objects.

Christmas, or things I now have pictures for

For Christmas this past year, I knit my sister the Scallop by the Sea pouch, a pattern that she had tagged me in on Pintrest. I like it when people tell me exactly what they want, and then act surprised when they get it. It makes me smile. The pattern is essentially a pillowcase. You sew up the bottom, make a lining, get some stiff(ish) interfacing, and stick a zipper on the thing.

And by you, I mean my mother, because I sew like an idiot. My mother, on the other hand, has divinely inspired sewing machine capabilities, so when it came time to decide how to put the thing together I called her. She did it begrudgingly (thank you), and the end product is much nicer for it.

Photo credits go to my sister, the recipient, who takes lovely pictures of landscapes and knitted goods which make it into her hands before I have a chance to photograph them.

Aren't those lovely? (The answer is yes. Yes, they are very lovely.)

The interfacing I used was, perhaps, a touch to stiff, and the pocket was a royal pain in the rear end to install, but on the whole I am pleased with the finished product. It was fun to knit, too (Bonus!). More things ought to be lined in pussy willow fabrics. I'm not sure how I'm going to make that happen, but it needs to.

Back again for more

Somewhere between my junior year in my undergrad and actually graduating from college, I tried to make a hat. It was a cute hat, to be sure. The basic form was a cloche, but it had this charming little ruffle on one side and a carefully sewn ribbon. It was one of those "love at first sight" patterns. I even had the yarn it called for sitting in my stash, left over from a sweater that exaggerated its yarn requirements by a full skein and a half (the designer must have meant to include this cloche pattern along with the sweater; that's really the only acceptable explanation for overestimating by that much). It was certainly meant to be. The pattern was Caroline, which has since been purged from the active internet. Fortunately, the Way Back Machine can get me most anything from the internet archives.

I made most of the hat on an airplane related adventure, and as a result I had not carefully read through others notes on construction, size, and, well, general issues.

When the entire internet agrees that the big hat is "way too big," no amount of claiming you have a large skull will help you (which I do, but it didn't help). The large size was gigantic. It fell down over my eyes, didn't hug my skull, and was pretty much the saddest excuse for a charming hat with a dainty ruffle you've ever seen in your life. This hat needed structure, and structure it did not have. I loved it though, and it took me a few months to get up the gumption to rip it out.

That turned out to be a complete and utter disaster. Somehow something had gone all wonky when I picked up the turned hem, and I had an odd moebius of yarn without an actual moebius strip of knitting. Suffice to say it was weird and knots were involved. The yarn was eventually salvaged, but 2 bad experiences was enough to make me shelve the idea. Still, I never used the yarn for another project. It sat in the front of my yarn drawer, but I couldn't bear to use it, after all, it already had a telos of sorts.

Well, about two weeks ago, I sat down and made the small version of the hat. I went out and purchased ribbon. I sewed my pretty little bow together and slowly and carefully tacked it to the hat.

I really couldn't be more pleased.
Can I say that?
I love this hat.
Too bad winter is over...

So I baked a cake

It's Darwin Day at the local biology department (February 15th) and they have a cake baking contest. It's supposed to be relevant to Darwin's work... which I suppose means it needs to be biology themed, since, you know, pretty much after you get through RNA world hypothesis you've start dealing with selection pressures. (okay, maybe you don't know, but trust me, after things start having genes, you start worrying about gene flow.)

Anyhow, this week was tremendously, heart-wrenchingly stressful and my cell biology class was offering extra credit for cakes with cell themes. I tend to make things when I'm coping with awful, so baking a cake suddenly sounded like the best idea ever. (Around midnight last night it started to seem like the worst idea ever, but what can you do...)

And so I started to bake a cake. The theme I went with was the mechanism of the highly conserved sodium/potassium transporter. It takes 3 sodium ion and puts them outside the cell in exchange for 2 potassium ions. In layman's terms, that's 3 salts out, 2 salts in, which really helps you maintain osmotic balance with the environment.(aka, it keeps the water from flooding into your cells and making them explode) If you are an animal by the simplest of definitions, which I assume you are as you are reading this, you have lots of these.

This was the original plan--4 pumps displaying the process for swapping out ions in 4 simple steps, plus a bit of membrane to separate out the pieces.

The cytoplasm (cell innards) would be blue, and needed the largest quantity of frosting, so I mixed my colors and went to town.

 Next, the extracellular fluid (the "not cell" bits) would be green. Which you can definitely perceive visually on these lovely photos taken in the dead of night by dim incandescent bulb.

 Unfortunately, the plans were derailed when this happened.

As it turns out, frosting the inside of a cake is nigh on impossible. Seriously. I even stuck the thing in the freezer to see if temporarily binding the insides with ice crystals would solve the problem (it does not). There needed to be a rapid change of plan.

Nilla wafers are the best cookie-cracker in the world. I piped in some phospholipids because the inability to frost the large cake chunks meant frosting tiny cubes would be an exercise in futility. It probably looks better this way anyhow.

 Next I added my ions (orange for sodium, pink for potassium), as well as some cute arrows to direct traffic. Next time I will not use those tubes of gel for writing on cakes. The shiny stuff doesn't stick to frosting worth a hoot. I suspect the black has some slimy coating to keep it from bleeding everywhere...
 

I added in my ATP, labelled everything, and crawled into bed an hour later than I should have.

Overall, a biology success. The cake itself was nice and tender, even after 18ish hours and well worth the $1.18 I paid for the white box cake mix. Self distraction=success.

LISTEN TO YOUR BRAIN.

Or, alternately, I am an idiot (part 3)
 I never thought that my idiocy would become a running subject, but apparently I make enough hideously awful mistakes to merit regular use of this title.

And man, oh man, did I earn it today.

I washed the sheets and comforter cover today, and as I loaded our apartment's incredibly bad washing machine a thought floated across my brain.

"This seems too dense to be just sheets and a comforter cover."

LISTEN TO YOUR BRAIN.
40 minutes later, when I opened the washer I was greeted by a smell that I love, and a smell that simultaneously broke my heart. I knew, just from that single whiff, exactly what I had done. The smell was wet wool.

I had washed my wedding afghan.
The afghan made of squares knitted by my dear Michigan friends who are now a continent away from me. The afghan which reminds me that I am dearly loved, that I don't need to fret too much about the small things, that brings back a hundred memories of sitting in Lola's shop, laughing and chatting about nothing and everything. I may never see many of those women again, and that thought alone is enough to make me get all misty. I treasure those memories as closely as any other college memory. That's how deeply those women impacted my life.

And I just destroyed the afghan they made me--their cooperative effort to shower me in affection. I killed it.

LISTEN TO YOUR BRAIN.

This afghan is made of  various animal fibers which felt at different rates. It was bunched up oddly, so it was not agitated evenly. If I had to give its current shape a new name, I'd hedge my bets with trapezoid... or maybe be even more conservative with rhombus (it still has 4 sides...)

I'm reblocking it into a square-er shape. Unfortunately, this means some squares will be stretched at odd angles. Some squares felted completely--you can't even tell what the old stitch pattern was. Some didn't felt at all (guess who gets to stretch.). Some are felted Alpaca, which apparently still possesses Alpaca's propensity to stretch and drape, in spite of  being a completely different fabric (Alpaca is weird, folks.)

So, my beautiful, gorgeous, love filled blanket which graced our bed for the past 2 winters is a bit smaller, a bit less square, and a lot more heartbreaking to look at.

I have it pinned to "near square"

The brown has felted into the white

This is the felted alpaca... It's clearly felted, but it's also stretching.

The central basked weave was one of several cables...

"stretching to compensate..."

The central one used to have welts

Ruffled edges that didn't felt

Cables + Lace + Felt. Someone has to lose 

There were cute embossed leaves here

More missing cables

Formerly even squares stretching for neighbors

 I wish there were more of a take-home message from this. You know, aside from don't be an idiot. Apparently I can't get that into my thick skull, though. I don't think I've ever done something that has made me kick myself as much as this...

LISTEN TO YOUR BRAIN.

Fluff and Stuff

A baby has been born to my dear friends on the other side of the continent and since I can't go see this new wee one (who the internet assures me is most adorable), I must make things for it.

I get to make stuffed animals (!)

The more little plush things I make, the more I enjoy it. There's a lot of freedom in a stuffed animal pattern--certainly there are a certain number of pieces in a certain shape, but they need to be assembled. That's when you get to make choices. Will it look more like a cartoon or the real animal? How and where should the limbs be attached (Does it have shoulders and hips?). What size should the eyes be?

I usually make these decisions the same way--Is this animal food for something else? If it is, the eyes go further back and to the side. I've found that herbivores just don't look right with eyes facing directly forwards. Rabbits look like dogs, sheep start looking like lions. I think it's one of those subconscious things where your brain is making decisions you're not aware of, but I could be wrong. The other biggie for me is the ears. If the animal is going to look "realistic" (for a knitted, stuffed thing) the ears get crimped and placed farther back and lower on the head. Almost no animals have aural cavities above their brow. If the animal is cartoonish, the ears sit much higher. They exist exclusively to enhance the cuteness.

Arms and legs are usually decided  in that order. Once the fore-limbs are attached, the legs usually need to go somewhere specific to make a cohesive piece. By that point, everything else usually falls into place.

So, without further ado, a slightly realistic armadillo and a very cartoonish kangaroo. 

 The armadillo is "Don the Dillo," a pattern which I cannot recommend to anyone as a first stuffed animal. It's pretty error riddled, which is okay since it's free, but could prove very frustrating to someone with no idea what they're doing. I did some shaping on the face to turn up the nose, crimped those ears and placed them lower so that they peak out of his shell like a real 'dillo, and moved his eyes to the side of his head. The original construction for this guy makes him look like Piglet from Winny the Pooh, which is pretty ironic considering I basically gave the kangaroo Pooh Bear's face.

 

This little guy is "King Aroo" sans crown and belly stripes. I don't feel like looking it up, but I'm pretty sure this pudgy kangaroo can't be a king because only female marsupials have pouches, since their ugly jellybean babies need to live there and nurse until they have things like eyes. and bones. Marsupials are weird.

(Weird marsupial factoid from your resident embryology graduate student: Marsupials fertilize multiple eggs at a time, but only have one joey at a time. They actually hold the other fertilized eggs in stasis just in case joey #1 dies [marsupials are crappy parents when it comes to caring for very young joeys]. If they lose joey #1, they can have joey #2 without needing to mate again by simply pulling that egg "out of the freezer" as it were. Awesome.)

But back to knitting. Because the kangaroo has the body of an ostrich egg, realism really wasn't ever on the table. I still follow my rule for eye placement. While Kangaroos are strictly herbivores, there isn't really anything to eat them, so they aren't too concerned with predators (especially since they can crane kick them across the Outback), therefore eyes go front. Ears are high and legs are silly.

So, that's what I've been working on. I'm a bit more than halfway through my pooling stole and I had the most terrible realization--what if hank #2 has a different stitch:color repeat ratio than hank #1. I may have to get creative in the very near future. More creative than usual. Hoo boy.