Current Projects

I have been haphazardly working on various projects, and finishing none! It’s highly annoying. You would think that with the sheer amount of time I have on my hands I would be whipping out the finished objects like nobody’s business, but instead I’ve mostly been back and forth over the following projects:

Rainbow Over Lahaina

These are the Rainbow Over Lahaina socks from the Sock Club book. I like them a lot. They are pretty easy to memorize.

Then we have Jaywalkers:

Jaywalker

I’ve never knit Jaywalkers before, can you believe it? They’re kind of a classic. They’re being knit up in Knitpicks Felici, which I continue to enjoy working with (and good thing too, considering the sheer amount of it I have in my stash. Does one person need this many striped socks? Well, obviously.)

Then we have this Lacy Kerchief scarf (Rav link) that is going to take me for-effing-ever to finish because scarves are boring. This one is less boring, and I actually desire the finished product, so we’ll see how long it takes me. Not super long, I hope.

Lacy Kerchief Scarf

But I’m really like the garter stitch aspects of it. It’s still not quite reversible, but it’s an interesting knit, which is the important thing.

I also wanted to work on a sweater that’s not totally boring like the alpaca blob (but I will LOVE the alpaca blob when it’s done, hopefully by the end of the summer. I like the look of stockinette, I just hate knitting it when it’s not in the round). So one of the things I have been mulling over was making another Forecast. However, I already have one, and I do like the designer’s Bulky Cable Sweater as well. Though I don’t want a bulky sweater – I just want a regular worsted weight sweater. So I hybridized the two patterns and came up with this:

Red Sweater

It’s knit out of the Stitch Nation Bamboo Ewe in geranium (a tomato-y red) which I got on sale awhile back. It’s actually pretty nice and is half wool, half bamboo (well, rayon if you want to get technical). A little splitty but nothing my inexplicably sharp Susan Bates circulars can’t handle. Seriously, those things are sharper than the Addi lace circulars, which are pretty dang sharp. What gives, Susan Bates? Incidentally, I really like them. If you’re going to go cheap on your needles, go Susan Bates.

Anyway, I think that’s pretty much it around here on the knitting front. I’ve also been working on some jewelry but haven’t taken pictures of that yet.

I have to go to a meeting for the library gala thing I’m docenting at this weekend and then going to Jason’s after for dinner, so I probably won’t have a jewelry post until tomorrow. But hey at least this whole unemployment situation has gotten me to blog more, right? I’m having fun with it again at long last.

Happy Birthday to Malvina!

I just wanted to say Happy Birthday to one of my very best friends!

Happy Birthday, Malv! I’m glad you weren’t TOO mad at me for stealing Sarah’s seat in front of you in Geometry back in 1994. 😉

We’ve been friends for SIXTEEN YEARS. That’s more than half our lives. And as evidenced by the picture to the left in which we were both 14 years old… We grew up okay. (Yeah I totally scrounged around for an old picture. And I artfully cropped Felicia and Edie out of it. Hee. Incidentally, in this picture we were totally cutting school! Since we were all goody-two-shoes, it was the final day of our freshman year in high school and didn’t get in trouble.)

Hope it’s a good one, lady! It’s a brand new decade! I bet it will be even better than the last one. At least we can ring this one in with copious alcohol!

Some Design Work

I like graphic design. I didn’t really study it in college though I did take all the computer design classes offered at UTSA. I took as many of those as I did upper division drawing classes which was my major but they didn’t offer computer graphics or graphic design as a major. Go figure.

Anyway, so last week my sister asked me help her prettify her blog for cold hard cash (or a book, as it turns out) and I was like sure! Why not! The world is a better place for pretty blogs, right? Of course then she’s all, not the WordPress one, the Blogger one. And I was like, *sob*. Because I do not know Blogger from Adam. Actually I do know Adam, he’s my cousin. But I do not know Blogger. I know WordPress. Why, I asked her, did you go back to Blogger when WordPress is so AMAZING???? (This was of course last week, which was Before 3.0 which has changed my life! Or at least motivated me to update my own blog template for the first time in approximately forever.)

Because, she explained. You can’t put Google Analytics on a WordPress.com blog.

I run WordPress on my own server so I don’t know what the regulations are for the blogs hosted on WordPress.com. Since I don’t follow my own stats anymore I don’t know how anything works anymore. Which is partly why it took so effing long for me to get my portfolio website back up and running. My coding abilities were tapped out in about 2004.

But these days blogging is really user friendly. Back in the olden days you actually had to code your own stuff but now you don’t. Sure, I spent a good hour of my time digging into the stylesheet of this particular theme that I’m currently sporting because I hated the default font and font size but if you’re lazy and don’t care it was all automated and you have to do is drag your widgets over.

To make a long tangentially off topic story short (oh so too late) I made Abby a bunch of different headers to choose from. I don’t know what one she’ll choose but here are the ones I made that feature the world famous ROBOSAURUS.

I actually like all of them. I made her other ones too but I was particularly fond of these ones. I took these pictures at the Salinas Air Show I attended last year with my family.