Fabulous News and Bad News

Monday, I got an email from Knit Picks telling me that two of my designs had been accepted for their independent designer program!

The first of the two is a scarf with a woven knot in it. I've already done a sample in Wool of the Andes sport weight, and have some really bad photos of both projects.

The wonderful, fabulous camera my sister gave me seemed to be malfunctioning, and the wonderful camera I bought before that seemed to be doing the same thing. Luckily, the problem was with the batteries, but it took me a little while to figure that out, so these photos were taken with my tablet computer.

Here's a view of the overall scarf:

As mentioned, that's in sport weight, and I'm also going to do one in worsted weight.

One of the ladies (Beth) at my knitting group (Flying Fingers) started knitting it. I was there for the meeting yesterday. Beth came in a little late, and when she saw me, her mouth opened, and before she could say anything, I said, "You want to talk to me!" She asked how I knew that, and I told her that she was close enough to weaving the knot last week that I was sure she'd be up to it by now, and I suspected she couldn't figure out how to do it.

So, we sat there, and wove a section of her scarf together. It really is a job for four hands. It was kind of fun working with another person so closely. There were cheers and words of encouragement, and everybody had fun. Afterward, every once in a while, she murmured, "I'm so pleased!" It gave me some ideas on how to adapt the job so it can be done with just two hands.

The other pattern that was accepted was the triangular shawl with the Saint John's cross on it.

You can't see it too well in the photo, but it really is spectacular! The fringe around the two sides is finished, in other words, there are no cut ends to fray! And you can't really see it too well in the photo but there's a picot bind-off across the top. I made it for a friend, who bought the yarn, and I'll have to knit it again for the pattern in Knit Picks yarn.

I'm so excited about this opportunity!

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The bad news is that about a week or so ago, a big, soft lump came up on my right elbow. I ignored it for a while, hoping it would go away, but it hasn't gotten any better so far.

So, today, I looked it up on the internet, and it says that the bursa in my elbow is inflamed. It says to take ibuprofen, use a compression bandage, try to keep my elbow elevated, and stop doing stuff that irritates it!

It said it makes your elbow hurt, and I hadn't noticed that. But then, I'm really good at ignoring things like pain. Once I stopped everything and paid attention to my elbow, I discovered that it really was hurting.

Stuff that irritates it includes knitting!

So, Knit Picks has sent out yarn support for the two projects. It hasn't arrived yet, and I'm going to at least stop knitting until it arrives. I may delay starting it or at least take it easy when I do start.

That not only includes knitting, but also typing, so I'm going to stop now, and you may not hear from me for a while. If you do, it may be very short.

I do have a doctor's appointment, so relax. The internet may be helpful, but doesn't really replace a doctor. I can't see her instantly, though, so I can at least start to treat this before seeing her.

In the meantime, have a wonderful week and the best Memorial Day Weekend ever. I'm going to try to get out at some point to see Rolling Thunder. I don't have to actually go anywhere to see them, they're pretty much everywhere on Memorial Day Weekend, but not in my apartment. I'll have to go out to see them.

Anyway, have fun!

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

I hope you're having the best Memorial Day Weekend ever!

I've been watching the Firefly marathon on the Science Channel, and it's the usual good fun. Yesterday was the Doctor Who marathon on BBC in America. Otherwise, I'm spending a quiet weekend at home watching TV, knitting socks, and wishing I could see the Thunderbirds.

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I still haven't blogged about Tuesday. I had an appointment to have my hearing aids checked at the VA Hospital in DC, and Holly drove me there.

She got to play with my new Galaxy Tab while we were waiting, and seemed to have fun with it.

We stopped at WalMart because she wanted to get some things there, and I wanted to return the light bulbs that didn't work in the old fixtures in my apartment. There was nothing wrong with the bulbs, it's just that the fixtures are old and finicky.

I was afraid that WalMart wouldn't let me return them, but they did. Something new happened, though. Instead of returning my money, they gave me a WalMart gift card. So, I got to wander around the store with money in my pocket that I couldn't spend anywhere else.

I've been looking for a project bag for a while, and while I've found some nice ones, I still haven't found what I'm looking for. I found one there though that comes really close.

It's the perfect bag for this weekend, with all the stars, too. As you can see, there's a zipper pocket on the outside, but there's also one you can't see on the inside. So, there's a pocket for extra needles, a knit picker (tiny latchhook, and this one happens to be lighted), and the outside pocket is for stitch markers and other tiny stuff. It's mostly for sock projects, and there's room for a ball of yarn (even a 100 gram ball) and the sock itself inside.

I also found a key ring (shown above the bag and below).

 And they match! How perfect can you get?

I know. It doesn't take much to please me. But it's more fun that way!

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My TiVo and the cord to plug it in arrived on Thursday, and I got everything hooked up, including my DVD player. When I hooked up the DVR, I knew it was only temporary, and it would have made it a lot more complicated to hook up the DVD player, so I didn't bother.

Thursday evening I got to watch part one of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I think they did a great job on it! I won't say anything more here because I don't want any spoilers, although if you've already read the book, you know what's happening because it's pretty true to the book.

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I promise that there will be some more scintillating conversation about knitting soon. Well, hopefully soon. I really have to get back to writing the pattern for the plain mobius set (hat, scarf, neck warmer and mitts) and finish making and start writing the pattern for the cabled version. The cabled version is not something I can just knit, though. I have a general idea, but I'm figuring it out as I go. It's really nice so far, though.

It's going to look a lot like the lavender set I made for my granddaughter. I was going to add a photo of it, but Blogger seems to have jammed up the photo loading mechanism for the moment, and the technical difficulties don't seem to make it possible.

Have a fabulous Memorial Day weekend!

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Happy Memorial Day!

Happy Memorial Day!

Happy Memorial Day and Towel Day!

Happy Memorial Day!

I wanted to make that headline red, white and blue, but the white wouldn't have shown up and I had to settle for red and blue.

In honor of the day, I have some clippings from the Maple Shade Progress that I just scanned this morning about me. They fit right in with the Memorial Day theme. If you click on them, you can see them large enough to actually read the text.

The first one was published around the end of October, or the beginning of November in 1962.

The second one was probably published in December of the same year.

If you notice, the second one has a credit for the photo--the photographer asked me to be in the photo partly because I was the only woman in the Aero Club at the time, and partly because he wanted to meet me. We later got married, so I guess it was a good way to meet me. 

Flying was one of the most fun things I've ever done!

Check out John's Steve Canyon blog, because he said he's going to write a Memorial Day post, and going to put my photos in it! That's a generic link to the blog because he hasn't gotten the post up yet. I can't wait to see it!

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Holly and I went out yesterday and visited Michaels, where I got a really nice, tiny vacuum cleaner made especially to pick up spilled beads and other small craft parts, and JoAnn Fabrics where I got a plastic container to replace the broken pencil case I've been using for holding small knitting stuff.

We also stopped at WalMart for a while and I bought a copy of the book with the story of the new Star Trek movie. I had been thinking about going to the movies to see it again (it's soooo good!), but the book was a little cheaper, and it was written by a friend of mine, Alan Dean Foster. John and I met him at MonCon in West Virginia in late Winter or early Spring right before the very first Star Wars movie came out. 

He and John and I were doing advance publicity for the movie. He, however, had been out to the studio where they were finishing it, and he got to talk to a lot of people that were involved that John and I hadn't gotten to meet. The thing that seemed to tickle him most was that the banthas were actually "elephants in drag." That's the way he expressed it. They told him that the elephants seemed to really enjoy dressing up!

One of the best things about meeting him was meeting his wife, JoAnn. She and I got along well.

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Here's where I had gotten to on my shawl two days ago. I was inspired to take the photo because it's about one quarter done in the photo. Yesterday, I did the 8 pattern rows that put 42 flower designs across in one row. I'm a real Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy fan, and couldn't resist noticing that.

Today is also Towel Day, by the way. Fans of Douglas Adams traditionally carry a towel with them all day on the 25th of May, and you may remember that I knitted a towel in the Towel Day KAL last year.


As is usual with lace, it looks like something that was wadded up and left in the trash for a week. The true beauty of lace doesn't emerge until it's blocked, so the photo is mainly to show how big it is at the moment. In the photo above, it was sixteen inches, measured along the front edge, and stretched to approximate the stretching that will happen during blocking. 

As of last night when I measured it, it was over 18 inches, and I've done some more knitting on it today. Considering that it averages six more stitches for each right side row, it goes pretty fast in the beginning, and slows significantly as progress is made.

It's intended to be about thirty six inches long measured along the front edge after blocking, so you would think that eighteen inches would be half way, but the halfway point is really at about twenty four inches as measured by yarn usage. The rule with these things is that a section that has a certain measurement uses enough yarn to knit the next section to half of the previous section's length. 

I'm into the second of four balls of yarn that have about 44o yards in each ball. And I'm more than 1/4 of the way through, so I think I'll have enough yarn, with just a little over to make it comfortable instead of close. I'm not so sure about having enough beads, though. I just used 1/4 of the beads that I bought, but I plan to use a pattern for the border that's more heavily beaded, so I may (or may not) need more beads. We'll just have to see.

After two days of perfect, fabulous weather, I woke up to rain today! And the forecast says that it'll be raining for the rest of the week! I'm glad Holly and I got to go out yesterday instead of today.

 

I hope the weather where you are is better than it is here! Happy Memorial Day! And don't forget your towel!

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Addition:

I just read a tweet by Neil Gaiman, and he said something about a show on Sundance tonight called Dreams with Sharp Teeth, and mentioned Harlan Ellison. Read more about it here.

Happy Start of the Memorial Day Weekend!

Memorial Day weekend is here, and it's been frustrating for Holly so far.

She came out her front door today and discovered that the five million people who attend the church across the street from her had, with the help of a bus, double parked all up and down her street and blocked in her car. And as if that wasn't enough, there was a parade, complete with marching band going down her street.

I asked her why Rolling Thunder wasn't also in the parade.

She called to say that she couldn't make it today, but that she'd go out around midnight and move the car to a place where she'd be able to get it tomorrow.

She called back later to tell me that she'd enjoyed the new Star Trek movie so much that she decided to see it again, but that they had sold out all the tickets, and she couldn't go. I wished her less frustration for the rest of the weekend.

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I have gotten one quarter of the way through my shawl today, which was the deadline for the end of the month for my Charms OWL assignment in the Harry Potter House Cup KAL, so I can quit worrying about that. The yarn for the copy of Hermione's hat hadn't arrived as of yesterday, and the post office has been instructed not to leave packages here on Saturday, so I probably won't get it before Tuesday.

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Practical Magic will be on tonight. Check your TV guide, and enjoy! Have a great Memorial Day Weekend!

CBS Is Helping Us Save Money

There was a show on CBS at 8 pm that said it will help you save money. Well, if you earn a quarter of a million each year, it might help. For somebody like me, it would be a disaster.

They started off by telling me that I could save money by only spending $7 per meal. The fact that I spend less than half that for a typical meal, and often less than a dollar means that this would not save money. They did recommend thrift stores, and that was a good tip, but something I already do when possible.

Other than that, they showed how to have a wedding for about five times what I spent on both my weddings combined, and how to get 4 round trip flights to 3 European cities and Tokyo for $600, which is where my perceived reality differed so much from theirs that I erased it from my DVR.

Actually, if I didn't need the space on my DVR, I might have saved it for it's ridiculousness. They said they could save me $120,000! 

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I have gotten to about 13 inches long on my shawl, measured along the front edge. I need to get to 16 inches in order to have completed one quarter of it for my Charms OWL in the Harry Potter House Cup KAL. So I'm far enough along that I'm reasonably sure I'm going to make it by the end of the month. Since it's an OWL, I have three months to complete it, but I have to be a quarter of the way through by the end of this month. 

I'm hoping to get a hat like Hermione will be wearing in Half Blood Prince done for Muggle Studies, too, by the end of the month (see the last post).

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I still don't feel good from all the walking, and have not mustered up the courage to walk somewhere to get a screwdriver, so I'm still sitting on the chair that hurts, so this will be a brief post. I'm planning to walk to the library, CVS (for the screwdriver) and Safeway tomorrow. 

Have a great Memorial Day Weekend, and if you live in the DC area, get out there and watch Rolling Thunder!

Happy Memorial Day!

Well, as everyone in the United States knows (because they have a day off of work) it's Memorial Day.

For those of you who do not live in the US, it's a day that we honor American soldiers who have died in wars (and get a day off of work).

Usually there is barbecuing of meat, and maybe a few vegetables, preferably somewhere out in the country, or at least in a park. 

Many people view this as the official kick-off of Summer!

Where I am, we are, in fact, having the first day this year with a temperature over 83 degrees, so it does seem awfully Summery.

The TV stations have viewed this as an opportunity to get anything worth watching off the air for last week and this week.

In knitting news, I'm knitting a prototype of the rune bag I'm designing. It's fighting back. I need double point needles. I'm going to order DP needles and quit on that for a while.

And I'm knitting the second poncho with the yarn left over from the first poncho. The one where I bought twice as much yarn as I need.

There will be a bit left over, and I think I'll make one of Crazy Aunt Purl's berets and take a photo of it for the blog.

Have a great Memorial Day!

For non-US residents, have a great Monday!