old news

I was sitting here, thinking, "I should write in my blog. But what should I write about?" Then I recalled: "I took a bunch of pictures a while ago! I'll look through those and write about them!" Then there was the problem of picking which pictures to write about...

I'll go with some old news. A year and a bit ago I knit a sweater for my brother. (My fiancé wants a handknit sweater, too, but I'm superstitious, so he's not getting anything more than a hat before we're married.) Jonny loves this sweater and actually wears it without my prodding! Here are some pictures of him on Christmas morning. (Well, Dec 26. We had to postpone Christmas in Cheshire by a day because I had to play the Christmas Eve midnight mass in Rochester.)


Appreciate the sleeve cables:

end of the marathon

I am pleased to report that I finished and mailed off the marathon sweater! I'm very proud of my work on this one. It is really quite soft, especially after the second blocking. It took me about 80 hours, I think, not counting the three times I frogged and re-knit the left sleeve, or the frogging and re-knitting of the collar, which came out too tight the first time. I find it promising that Evan loved the sweater, too. He said that he would be thrilled if I made him a sweater half as good.



I've also been spinning a bunch of awesome looking fiber I got from the Village Yarn and Fiber Shop in East Rochester. I meant to go there on my birthday, but there was a nasty snowstorm, so my trip got postponed until the following Tuesday. I think the roving is a blend something from the Fingerlakes region, but it's not labeled, so I forgot. (Edited to add: The website says the fiber comes from Spinners Hill and their fiber is Corriedale, Finn, Rambouillet Cross.)

I love the colors! So visually stimulating! As I'm plying, I'm trying to maximize contrast. And the yarn is quite soft, too. But I'm having trouble deciding what to make with it. Any ideas? Scarf? Hat? Mittens? Something not wearable? Something that has never been made before?

Seriously, I have a grand total of ZERO comments right now. I would love it if someone would pipe up and cast a vote for the fate of this yarn. Or anything else. :)

Swine Flu?

I had Something last week, and it was a doozie. It came on over the entire course of Sunday the 8th, starting as a sore throat. For several hours I dismissed it as nothing significant: just a dumb sore throat from taking an overnight train. In the late afternoon, however, this pesky sore throat blossomed, knocked me out around 6:00 pm, and kept me in bed for a Full Three Days! Yowch. I'm finally feeling pretty much like myself, now, except that I have a semi-productive cough that acts up when I'm out in the cold, or going up stairs. I was hoping to go to KardioFusion tonight, but I don't think I can, for the coughing. Maybe I'll just use one of the eliptical machines, and burn my calories more gently tonight.

So, mysterious diagnosis:
1. This bug took a whole day to come on. Hence: a cold, not the flu.
2. This bug laid me out flat for 72 hours. Hence: the flu, not a cold.
I am dumbstruck.

The really sad part about the bug was that I was too sick even to knit. I could be awake for maybe half an hour at a time before plunging back into unconsciousness, and while I was awake, my hands felt too weak to manipulate the needles. It was a truly desperate and tragic situation.

But now I'm better, and I'm zipping along with the knitting. First priority still goes to that marathon of a sweater. I'm 9 inches into the right sleeve, and I really want to finish it by this weekend, so I can work the left sleeve, seam the sleeves, pick up and knit the collar, and finally call this thing finished. At some point I'm going to actually calculate how many stitches are in this thing. It will be a very large number.

I am one of those ADD knitters with several projects going at once, though, and I finished and mailed off the gray hat for Laurie (I really hope her project works out!), and cast on for the baby sweater my mom requested. The difference between the baby sweater and the marathon sweater is nearly laughable. Marathon sweater: size 3 needles, fingering weight yarn, 6.5 stitches to the inch, men's size large. Baby sweater: size 8 needles, worsted weight yarn, 4 stitches to the inch, 6-month-old size. The baby sweater is zooming, which is wildly satisfying.

For myself, I really want to knit a coif, because I sometimes wear my hair in a bun, which makes a standard hat not fit, and my ears get really cold outside in this maturing Rochester autumn. The coif should also zoom, since it is a small thingy and uses size 9 needles! 3 stitches to the inch, baby!

I even bough yarn specifically for the coif this weekend during the Rochester Yarn Crawl, which was awesome. At my first stop, my LYS of choice the Yarn Boutique, I bought my first skein of Malabrigo yarn. Chunky. Colorful. Soft. And presumably warm. From there I proceded to the other three yarn shops in Rochester, which I had never visited. I find I really like the Village Yarn and Fiber Shop. I was especially impressed with their book selection, which even included a book on spinning and knitting dog hair! I thought about getting it, but refrained, and instead purchased Knitter's Gift and America Knits. I've actually been looking for a book like America Knits for a long time: something not just technique- and pattern-based, but something, well, inspirational. About knitters and designers and fiber artists and their lives and ideas. With gorgeous pictures. America Knits totally caters to that.

Another bit of reading I've especially enjoyed is this series about working on a sheep farm all year-round. I love the specific, vivid, and humorously related anecdotes, supplemented with beautiful photographs. Barbara Parry's writing really encourages me to luxuriate in my fantasy of having a fiber farm. I kind of want to be her. Especially when I'm sick and tired of counting microglia in the substantia nigra, and there are no windows in my lab, and I just want to get home and knit and read books about knitting and spinning and really work with my hands to create something soft and beautiful and useful.

Then again, today I do have a sense of accomplishment, because one of my advisors approved my abstract, so I can submit it today for the 1st D-CFAR World AIDS Day Scientific Symposium on December 1. Then I need to make the poster... blech, formatting data.