Tape measure

Someday I will learn how to take reasonable pictures. Today is not the day. Since one cannot have enough cute tape measures, I now have another one. It joins two Lantern Moon sheep tape measures and another one that looks like a bomb with a lit fuse. The bomb was in a swap from a while back and I don't remember the reason behind it. Four WIPs are turning into UFOs for most of the next six weeks. It'll be Tour de Fleece followed by the R Games. There will be many posts with photographs. Really boring photographs.

The R Games

The Ravelry event that occurs during the Olympics has a new name: the Ravellenic Games. It was my favorite among the finalists because it links our event to the original event back in Greece. The people who organize the Ravellenic Games are thinking of informally shortening it to the R Games. I think this is a great idea because it is easier to type and spell. Also, those who wish to can think that the R stands for something else without certain legal people saying rude things about them.

Floss on a Tardis

I've got a bad case of second sock syndrome. Is there a good case of it? I don't know. What I do have is two completed socks that are not related to each other plus one more pattern I wanted to do. I pushed them all out of the way and tried the needle felted dogs. The results were not good so I pushed the needle felting supplies to one side. I managed to get through one sheep repeat on my sheep sweater before burning out on it. I took a nap and decided that cross stitch might be fun. I'd happened upon a web page where one could print out your own Tardis-shaped floss bobbins. What a fun thing for the embroidering Whovian:

Card stock wasn't heavy enough on its own, so I doubled them with a bit of glue stick. I expect to get the cross stitch project done before Tour de Fleece starts on Saturday. It should take until then to clear away all the half-done knitting projects.

Apology accepted, lets move on, shall we?

The apology has been amended to include:

"...we sincerely regret the use of insensitive terms in relation to the actions of a group that was clearly not intending to denigrate or disrespect the Olympic Movement. We hope you’ll accept this apology and continue to support the Olympic Games."

I'm okay with that.

Denigrate?

A law clerk working for the United States Olympic Committee sent a cease-and-desist letter to Ravelry recently.  It's reprinted in a number of places including here.  It has the usual stuff you might expect about patterns with the five rings on them infringing on copyrights.  They are also objecting to the name Ravelympics.  If Ravelympics has to be changed, I'll be annoyed, but mark it down to lawyers doing what lawyers like to do.  The thing that really makes me mad is this:

We believe using the name "Ravelympics" for a competition that involves an afghan marathon, scarf hockey and sweater triathlon, among others, tends to denigrate the true nature of the Olympic Games. In a sense, it is disrespectful to our country's finest athletes and fails to recognize or appreciate their hard work.

Your belief is wrong, USOC.  Naming our events after Olympic events is a salute to the athletes and their hard work.  It's insulting that you think we'd create and participate in an event that would be disrespectful.  I think that an apology is in order.  Instead we got this.

I suspect that the donation stuff at the end was a reaction to the UK handmade cushion disaster.  I'm not making anything for them.  I've already a cast on a pair of Stephen Colbert socks for this (scroll down until you see the picture of Stephen).

Kindle Case

It's my bargain Kindle case for my bargain Kindle.  I traded in a bunch of Amazon gift certificates to get it.  I made the case with a bunch of stuff I had around the house.  It isn't one of the fancy ones you can buy, but it was a lot more fun to make.

I'm not knitting

...or even crocheting.  I got a Kindle this week and it will have a handmade case even before I download my first book.  One must have one's priorities in the right place.  It will be mainly pink and have Tardises (Tardii?) on it.  I found a bookmark pattern and and am cross stitching it.  The bookmark will go on the front of the case.  It seemed like the right thing to do.

Tour de Fleece 2012 Day -7

With a week to go before Tour de Fleece starts, I thought I had best review what I was going to spin this year.  It is a good thing that I did because I didn't have the right materials for what I thought I wanted to do.  I want to use up a lot of the little samples that I've collected from Phat Fiber.  I discovered that a bunch of them will work for the needle felted dogs in Mollie Makes.  Yay!

My original plan was to use up all the wine and grape colored fibers and blend them with something else.  I didn't have anything to blend them with, but I will spin them up and maybe blend them together:

I needed another project, so I dug out a some blue things:

If I need something more than this, I'll grab something at random.

I hope to end up with some reasonable sock weight yarns.  I've got a set of patterns that I want to do. I think they're called Tour de France anklets.  It sounds like an appropriate use of the yarn.

Mollie Makes

I'm a fan of Sublime Stitching.  It's all about embroidery, with patterns and tools and such.  The patterns are whimsical and vintage and sometimes both at once.  I follow Sublime Stitching on Twitter.  Following people on Twitter tends to get me into buying things and that happened recently.

A Tweet about Mollie Makes magazine turned into a purchase that arrived today.  Mollie Makes turned out to be very cool.  It has a lot of great projects using a variety of skills.  I loved the needle felted tiny dogs on the cover (tres chien, get it?  it's a little French joke):

The magazine even came with a package of vintage style buttons.

It comes from the UK so subscriptions are a tad pricey for those of us in the US.  I found it on Amazon and decided that it was more than I wanted to spend right now.  I went to Mollie Makes site and they had a six month trial subscription that sounded like a better idea. 

Those dogs really are cute.  I wonder where I stashed those needle felting tools?

Lost: one mind, slightly used

I bailed on the Shawl of Doom after about 150 rows.  It would appear that I don't loathe myself enough to finish it.  Since Life Is Too Short To Knit With Ugly Yarn, I tossed all of it out.  It was really bad yarn.  Even very poor knitters with no yarn at all would not want it.  I hope the EPA doesn't come after me for throwing it in the trash.  Part of it was from a project I started on a whim, much like I started on the Shawl of Doom.  Part of it was from a grab bag.  Theoretically this should discourage me from doing things on a whim, like buying yarn in grab bags or starting projects just because they make me laugh.

You know what's coming next, don't you?  I joined another sock yarn club on a whim not ten minutes ago.  It was a Ravelry ad that got me.  I don't like ads at all.  I mute them when they are on tv.  I grit my teeth when they blink at me online.  I routinely delete spam without opening it.  Then there are Ravelry ads.  They are frequently focused on me as if they were made with me in mind.  I was patting myself on the back for staying out of the Tour de Fleece discount thread.  There's serious temptation there and I've avoided it so far.  I started reading something in Team Browncoat's thread.  Note that there is no connection between the television shows Firefly and Doctor Who.  Okay, there is Mark Sheppard, but you can connect him to virtually any cool show. 

Where was I?  I hit the bottom of the page in a Browncoat thread and there was an ad for The Ladies of Who.¹  It's a sock yarn club that I avoided in the past because it includes a handmade necklace in each shipment.  I'm not much of a necklace person.  This round of the club included my favorites² so all resistance was overcome.  The last shipment should arrive around my birthday, so that's going to be my official excuse.  I do have gifting possibilities for the necklaces, so it isn't that bad. 

Keep telling yourself that, kid.

¹I went back to Ravelry for the link to the club and was immediately presented with an ad for a craft tour appropriately called Provence Temptations.   It is based out of Australia, so a serious whim attack has been thwarted.  Darn you, Ravelry ads!
²Harriet Jones, Sally Sparrow, Sarah Jane Smith

Shawl of Doom

I'm in a knitalong for the Shawl of Doom .  If you've ever knit a shawl or even seriously considered knitting one, go read this pattern.

No one in their right mind would make this, so of course I had to cast on immediately.  I'm using this horrible cotton/lycra yarn that feel like rubber.  I'm adding Fibonacci stripes in an equally unpleasant yarn with sequins in it.  That one unravels.  You can't weave the ends of either yarn in nicely.  I do ten rows at a time to earn the privilege of doing something else.  My last reward was making a swatch.  How horrible does a project have to be for a swatch to be a reward?

Why am I doing it?  Because I can.  :)

Tardis Blue

I got the Tardis Blue yarn from Knitivity today.  The color's darker than the photograph.  When I hold it up to the screen the darker shades match the official Pantone color.  I like it better than the Lorna's Laces color that the original Bigger on the Inside Shawl was made with.  I think that working with a shaded yarn will be a lot more interesting.

Only 49 more days until the cast on!

Fun Things

I was looking around on Pinterest when I spotted this:

These are knitting clocks.  In one year they knit a scarf.  I want one or a kit to build one.

Looking around at things online continues to get me into trouble.   I made a donation to MSF (aka Doctors Without Borders) and got a sweater pattern.  It was popular back in the 80s, probably because Princess Diana wore it.  It is red with white sheep and one black sheep.  I don't care for red and I'm not small enough to wear the sweater in the sizes listed.  I'm going to change it for my size and maybe make it into a vest instead of a sweater.  I've got yarn on the way from destashers on Ravelry.  Of course I didn't have anything appropriate in my stash except for the little bit of black for the black sheep.

I found something else that I like but don't need:

It uses 13 different skeins of fingering weight.  That would make a nice little dent in the stash.

A little bit off

I got a shipment today from a sock club. Everything was a little bit off for me. I like the yarn texture and color. I could tell that it was going to be stripey and not in a way I like. The patterns were kind of good. One was socks with what looks like an interesting pattern. It gets lost if you use the club yarn. One was a shawl that shows off the yarn well. It's too little for my taste.

I'm not sulking about this (for a change). I bought the whole collection from The Sock Report yesterday. I found a shawlette in the collection that's more to my liking and I'll use the yarn for that. I might even move it to the top of the queue. The colors look a bit like Earth and it might work for the Nerd Wars scientific challenge.

New Knitting Magazine

Thanks to a tweet by Cookie A, I found The Sock Report. It is aimed at those of us who love sock yarn. It has lots of great patterns that can be made with sock yarn (NOT only socks), book reviews, fiction, and other things. Patterns are individually priced or you can buy the whole collection. I need more patterns about as much as I need more yarn, but I expect I'll be getting them all. There are enough patterns that I want to make it worthwhile.

Nice work, Janel Laidman and company. I'll be looking forward to The Sock Report's sister publication (Skein Theory) when it appears in the fall.