Don't panic...

...I have towels.

# # #

We have been using one of these inexpensive bathroom mats

Ours happened to be the light green color
(fourth from top)

in front of our bathtub/shower for quite some time. It has rather scratchy "fingers" on top and a rubberized backing. The rubberized backing is supposed to keep the water pooling on the non-absorbent nylon fingers from seeping through the mat and onto the floor tiles. Leaving it on the floor only causes mildew to breed in the grout so after each shower, it needed to be taken up and hung on the shower door rail. While this encouraged additional water evaporation, the mat never really dried properly between uses.

What can I tell you? It was given to us and we used it.

A mat of this type can only take so many vacations in the washer/dryer before it decides that it needs a vacation of the more permanent type.

"Fine. Be that way. Fall apart. Go ahead and let your rubberized backing crumble off onto the bathroom floor. I don't need you anyway. And I never liked your particular shade of snot green, either. So there."

Oh, dear, I guess the mental editor was off on a tea break there for a moment...

Ahem.

We had received bath towels from the in-laws for a couple of Christmases past. When Neatnik was very young, Number Guy and I invested in some very nice spa-style bath sheets. I really like these because they are very thick and highly absorbent; they dry between showers and; they do not make me feel like I am trying to dry off using a hand towel. The gift towels were relegated to the top shelf of the linen closet, brought out primarily when the gift giver(s) visited.

When I noticed the post-laundry, bat mat crumblies the other day, I didn't have time to run out to the Bed, Bath, and Linens Are Our Thing Store, so I came up with a quick and thrifty solution. Behold the bath towel bath mat created by sewing together a pair of Christmas gift towels. Thick, absorbent, and dries between uses.

No rubberized backing
and it does not skid at all.

Best thing about this hack? This new one actually fits the space. The old bath mat really wasn't big enough for the space we wanted to cover.

This worked out so well that I whipped out a second pair of towels and sewed them together, too. Always nice to have a backup for laundry day and it really didn't take long to do.

Instructions

She's a little teapot...

Earlier this week, I reached into the cabinet to retrieve my little teapot and my grip slipped. The top broke into half a dozen pieces. While I was able to apply a bit of cyanoacrylate to reassemble the lid successfully, using it near something I intend to ingest... Let's just say that I am thinking about drilling some holes in the base and calling it a flower pot.

Fortunately, I was able to order a replacement the same day. In the meantime, I did need a temporary solution whilst awaiting delivery of the new teapot...

Who'd've thought we'd have a bowl just the right size?

My new teapot arrived in only two days. I think that she is a very cheerful teapot, just perfect for greeting one on a bitterly cold, dark morning.

Doesn't she look cheerful?

How about now?

She is such a cheerful teapot that I think that she deserves a name and not something overly obvious like "Sunny".

I do believe it may very well be time to get to know my cheerful new friend a little better. Tea anyone?

Missing time

This past Saturday night, Number Guy's bagpipe band was hosting a fund-raiser. It was really more of a couples event, so we enlisted the babysitting services of the local grandma for the evening.

When I got undressed for my shower, I took off my watch and tossed it onto my dresser. I clearly remember it being on something off-white. In the last-minute rush to get out the door, I didn't think about putting my watch back on my wrist. Later that evening, I went to check the time and realized that I was not wearing a timepiece. No worries, though, I had my cell phone on me so I checked that and I knew that I'd put the watch on my dresser.

Sunday morning came and I looked for my watch. It wasn't on my dresser. I decided that I would look for it after church. I tore apart the bedroom and could not find my watch. I resigned myself to the fact that it would surface in a day or so...

Fast-forward to Wednesday evening...

I was thoroughly sick of not having my watch. My watch was one of those digital jobs which was all programmable and stuff. It was set to beep at me just before Neatnik's school bus is due to arrive. Being a digital device with a largish display, it also was responsible for informing me of the month, date, and day of the week.

I was starting to feel that I was either a victim of alien abduction or a patient with dissociative identity disorder, what with the missing time phenomenon spiraling about me. Something had to be done.

I ransacked searched the entire bedroom again. After pulling out my dresser, I sneezed mightily. The dust bunnies had had a population explosion back there.

I stripped the bed and shook out each sheet, blanket, and pillow case. The bed had been wearing off-white sheets, you understand.

This morning, I went to the store with an older watch needing a simple leather strap and battery to be functional. They had no straps. They did have a newer versionof my lost model for about the same cost as a new strap and battery would have been. I'm wearing it now. I like the pretty pink accents.

Neantik had a playdate this afternoon. Her classmate's mom and I were shooting the breeze and we somehow got on the topic of stuff getting lost. As I was telling the mom how I lost my watch in my bedroom and the measures I had taken to locate it, my fears of alien abduction and multiple personality disorder, and the subsequent securing of a replacement personal clock, Neatnik came sprinting down from her bedroom.

She had found my watch in her Ugg-ish boot, which was on top of my dresser Saturday evening, and

which has an off-white lining.

Oh, well, the old watchband was starting to show significant signs of wear and the keeper was nearly broken through anyway...

In which they blog

Greetings to the blogosphere from professor trek! Spring semester is now in full swing, which means that on Friday and Monday mornings I jam on my collegiate cap and sally forth to educate the Mongol hordes of students who have waited in near-interminable lines in order to glean knowledge about computer systems and information technology under my experienced tutelage.

I met the second half of my spring semester students yesterday morning. Things went pretty well; we spoke of the information processing cycle during lecture and worked on blog creation, manipulation, and maintenance during lab. They created blogs, edited settings, added gadgets to the sidebars, and made their very first blog posts ever.

Oh, look, they used what they learned: they put the information processing cycle into practice!

Inevitably, there are always some people in any crowd who just do not seem to be able to follow directions and yesterday was no exception, but as I wandered about the room, I was pleased to see that most of them required only a little assistance in getting their posts published and their settings correct. I sent them on their way at the end of class feeling very good about my skills as an educator and their abilities as my padawan learners.

At home, I ensconced myself on the couch, balancing the computer on my lap, surrounded by rosters, syllabi, and handouts, a hot cup of English Breakfast at my elbow. For five hours, I checked and graded blog posts and created blogrolls for my students. In most cases, I granted full credit, merely whipping out my Good Homework Rubber Stamp of Approval in the comments of their posts. In other cases...

Those "other cases" always seem to spring up without warning, don't they? Life would be much less interesting without the "other cases", easier, of course, but also less interesting.

May you live in interesting times

and all of that.

Some students did not create their blogs using the URL format specified in class. A few of these students' blogs I was able to locate through some creative manipulation of the ASCII character set. As for the rest of them, well, I remain ever-hopeful that those students will read the class blog and realize that their names are not in the blogrolls for their sections and contact me promptly.

A few students did not use the display name format designated in class. This is a very simple change, as you, my blog peeps, are well aware. On those blogs, I left instructions for the edit. Now, if the students visit their own blogs occasionally and actually read the comments...

Perhaps I should email them individually and directly.... I was going to do just that last night except that I could not access my college email account...

Email access was restored by this morning, just in time for the first wave of panicky student emails requesting my immediate and undivided attention.

To: professor trek
From: Student Requiring Access Code
========================================
professor trek,

I was wondering if there is a website that I can order the access code from, seeing as I am borrowing both textbooks from a friend.

Thank you.

SRAC

# # #

Well, look at that. This student is not panicky and is respectful.

# # #

To: SRAC
From: prof trek
========================================
Yes, there is. Visit this site [hyperlink] and follow the directions.

# # #

In addition to returning her email, I also made a post on the class blog with the same information: lots of students lend textbooks to their friends taking the same course during the following semester.

After making this post, I checked the stats on the blog. I have already made twelve posts this semester.

Did I mention that my first class meeting was this past Friday? Yes, I thought I had.

In addition to the how to purchase an access code post, I have one welcome post, four blogroll posts, two assignment posts, two tutorial posts, one reminding students to bring their access codes to next class, and one reminding students to use only their college email accounts for communicating with me.

To: professor trek
From: Student Needing Google Account Access
========================================
professor trek,

I tried logging into [blogging software] multiple times and it keeps saying my email or password is incorrect. I tried typing my email different ways to log in. I don't understand which way to put it in when logging.

SNGAA

# # #

After a small flurry of email exchanges, in which I reminded SNGAA of the password rule I provided in class, I received the following email:

# # #

To: prof trek
From: SNGAA
========================================

Well, I used the email [blog URL] and the password [correct password] and it won't let me in.

# # #

Aha! I successfully logged into SNGAA's blog account.

# # #

To: SNGAA
From: prof trek
========================================

Ah, I see your problem now. Your login is not your blog URL. It is your college email address.

Log in with [college email address] and [correct password]. I was just able to log in to your account with these credentials.

# # #

Haven't heard back from SGNAA.

# # #

I still have a small heap of administrative work to do so get things situated here on my end but it is well in hand. Blog posts are due this evening at six and again Thursday evening, also at six. The comments should then begin to trickle in.

You might say that I will be rather busy over the next couple of days, especially considering that I also have to prepare my lab and lecture material for Friday morning.

Don't expect to see much of this

Gratuitous sock yarn picture

knit into the mitered squares blanket anytime this week.

Wet and dry

"Well, the weather outside is frightful,
But the yarn is so delightful,
And since I do need to fly,
Let it dry, let it dry, let it dry."

Opal, Lorna's Laces, Online, Fleece Artist,
Trekking, Koigu, and Pagewood Farm

Going solo

Edited 24 January 2010, 6:19pm - uploaded photograph.

Sunday morning and I am the only one home at the moment. Sunday Morning Bullet Posting shall now commence.

• I am the only one currently at home here at chez trek.



• Only human, that is.



• I don't usually tot up Little Feet in the count of who is currently in residence. She's always at home.



• Unless she is in her Blue Plastic Ball of Freedom.



• That is not precisely, 100% true: she did get to go to the church parking lot in October for the blessing of the pets on the Feast of St Francis but I don't think she enjoyed it all that much.



• She was in a small cardboard box and I'm sure she could smell all of the dogs and cats nearby.



• Little Feet had a nice couple of hours in the BPBF yesterday while Number Guy tended to her housekeeping needs.



• I took a nice walk and went to the mall where I found a turtleneck sweater on clearance for $7.49. It was marked down from $36. I had a 15% off coupon so the final out of pocket cost was a mere $6.37.



• I wore the sweater (red) with a pair of black jeans and a black leather jacket to Number Guy's pipe band's fund raiser dinner last night.



• I looked good in it.



• While I was out shopping, the mail was delivered, including a package for me.



• It was from Robin, who sent me a heap of little balls of sock yarn leftovers in response to my colorway conundrum.



• Thanks again, Robin!!!



• No, I still don't have enough yarn to complete a blanket but I now have the ability to knit about twice as much blanket as I did before yesterday's mail call.



• I should take a picture of the yarn I received but the lighting here is really crummy today (not so much a grey sky as a dingy white one).Decided to take an indoor evening picture of the yarn which I skeined this afternoon. I'm planning to give it a bath before rewinding it for use. (Robin has a cute Jack Russell Terrier. He's a busy fellow.)
  
  
  Half a dozen or so yarns;
  fourteen new colorways!


• Tomorrow's weather is predicted to be heavy rains and very windy.



• Excuse me, I didn't quite catch that question from the back of the blogosphere. Yes, you in the blue shirt. What was your question?



• Oh, why am I the only one at home on a cold, grey Sunday morning? I am the only one here because Number Guy took Neatnik to the early mass so that she could follow up with Doughnut Sunday in the church basement.



• She will come home well and truly sugared-up.



• I'll have to catch a later mass solo.



• I opted to stay in bed a while longer since my cold/sinus infection/whatever-this-round-of-respiratory-ailment-is forced us to come home from the fund raiser early last night.



• Perhaps I should contact our friends who were there some time today: see if I won a door prize or a fifty-fifty.



• Nah. If I did win something, they will call here and since this C/SI/WTRoRAI came accompanied by a side serving of laryngitis, they will understand if I am not the one to pick up the telephone.



• When I try to speak, I am making noises somewhere between those of a pubescent human male and a full-grown harbor seal.



• I shall not be singing today when I attend that later mass.



• That would be just too awful - both for my vocal chords and anyone unfortunate to be anywhere within the blast radius.

Well, I have achieved my goal of completing my Sunday Morning Bullet Post before the return of Number Guy and Neatnik. I think that I shall now adjourn to the medicine cabinet.

Maybe an overdose of antihistamines will make my head fuzzy enough that I will not notice the orbiting blur which will be the vibrating, sugar-filled Neatnik.

Or at least enable me not to care.

Why blog?

I received the nicest note in the mail this week. An anonymous lurker sent it to me wrapped around fifteen Box Tops for Education. I was very touched by what she wrote and decided that I wanted to share it with my blog peeps.

Dear trek,

You can not possibly know the pleasure you give me - your cyberlurker (cyberstalker?) through your blog! You, Number Guy, and Neatnik have become such good friends that I sometimes forget I don't really know you.

Here are my (few) Box Top thingies. More later.

- Anonymous Lurker

Note to Anonymous Lurker - Thank you so much! Your note? IMMD! Be proud of your contribution to Neatnik's school and remember the school motto

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

     -- Helen Keller

I'd say that making someone else happy is a pretty darned good reason to blog.

# # #

Another good reason to blog is that knit bloggers are generous people who volunteer to send a fellow knitter scraps of sock yarn in response to a colorway conundrum. Several lurkers have come out of the woodwork with offers.

I'd love to give your leftover bits of yarn a new home in a new project. Please shoot an email to my Gmail account (trekcelt) so I can send you my snail mail address and thank you all! If you are interested in swapping for more variety in your own sock yarn blanket, shoot me an email and I'll respond with the colorways/yarns I have. Cheers.

Colorway conundrum

This morning, I had thirteen mitered squares; twelve squares had already achieved pantagamous bliss and were all bound together in wanton, woolly matrimony; then there was the odd loser loner single square still seeking a soulmate.

Tonight, square number thirteen has been happily assimilated into the collective, along with squares fourteen through seventeen; the yarn for square number eighteen sitting on the couch next to me.

For an indication of scale, with the red and yellow square
attached at the top right, the work is as wide as my laptop,
which boasts a 17" widescreen monitor.

As I work the squares, I can easily recall the original project knit with each yarn. You probably see thirteen mitered squares. I see five pairs of basic vanilla socks, a couple of pairs each of Dublin Bay socks and SJ Crew school socks, a Moonlight Sonata shawl.... You see where I am going with this: I am knitting a blanket of memories.

What a wonderful concept - memory blankie, a knitted record of projects past! Take that, Madame Defarge!

I entered the pattern and project information on Ravelry and started adding the different yarns in use as I pulled them out of the scrap yarn bags. I just added two three more yarns to the list. Oh, look! Now, there are ten eleven different yarns here and twenty twenty-one colorways. Uh, oh, potential project problem popping up.

:: cue spooky music here ::

You perceived the problem at least four sentences ago, didn't you?

I've only got twenty-one colorways. This means that although I can pseudo-randomly mix up the colors, attempting to prevent repeated placement of pairs of yarn in close proximity, eventually I will have used up all of the yarn at hand but not finished a blanket. Sure, if I knit up some more socks, I will have new yarns and colors to incorporate into the fabric of the project but I will still have colors repeating in one corner or one "zone" of the blanket which won't make encore appearances on the far side of the work.

Hmm. I see several options here.

• Option 1: I could continue exactly as I am, using up all of the yarn in the bag, and doing my best to keep the colors from appearing in repeating groups. To aid in this plan, I can stagger the starting point of the self-patterning yarns so that the mitered squares do not knit up the same way twice but in the final analysis, I would have to accept "miter pooling".


• Option 2: I could arrange with other knitters working on their own sock yarn blankets to swap yarns with me in order that we each end up with a greater "gene pool" with which to work.


• Option 3: I could beg unabashedly plead pathetically humbly state that I would be willing to give unloved, orphan sock yarn leftovers a new home.

None of these options is ideal. In an ideal world, I would have already knit 5,692 pairs of socks and saved all of the leftovers before casting on the first mitered square of a king-sized bedspread.

I don't have the patience to wait until I've knit thousands of pairs of socks and while Number Guy can accept that I have a "yarn dresser", I don't think that he would be quite so understanding of a PODS perpetually parked in the driveway.

Arranging yarn swaps with other sock/blanket knitters is appealing on several levels. My personal palette tends towards jewel tones with lots of blues. Swapping leftovers with knitters who gravitate towards different color families would bring a rainbow of variety to my blanket and theirs but then I would lose a bit of the blankie as knitted record.

It might still be worth the trade off, but would it seem too much like cheating?

For Option 3, refer to the arguments above but make note of the credit (net gain in sock yarn - good for my blanket progress) and the debit (net gain in sock yarn - do I really want to be known as a "yarn sink" on these here interwebs?).

Another idea just occurred to me. What if I were to tap into the unknit skeins in the yarn dresser? Simply sneak in under cover of darkness and remove a measly little three grams from each unknit skein in the drawers? For many yarns, this wouldn't pose any problems later. I usually have yarn left over after completing a pair of socks - as evidenced by the current project. On the other hand, it positively will not work for all of the yarns. Skimpy Koigu hanks spring quickly to mind.

This last possibility would make the blankie seem more like a prophetic project than an historical record.

What would you do?

Mitering

What happened? There I was, posting fairly regularly from the beginning of the new year - pictures and everything - then a whopping four day silence. I really should make a post-knit night Monday Night Bullet Post...

• The cable/rib cardigan still does not have a zipper.



• Saturday night, while Number Guy went out with a friend to play pool and watch the football game, I had a couple of ladies come over to watch a movie and to do our craft things. Waiting for one of the ladies to arrive, I painstakingly hand-basted the zipper to the sweater.



• Despite my best effort, one side of the zipper ended up higher than the other side. Noticeably higher.



• I am half-tempted to staple the zipper into position.



• The sweater and zipper are currently considering their inability to play nicely with one another.



• Why, yes, I do realize that I am treating the naughty hand-knit and zipper like a pair of naughty children caught fighting with one another.



• At least it will be easy to remove the basting stitches when the time out is done: I used bright red thread.



• The lpsz came off the needles on Saturday. All done except for the blocking.



• Yep, just a week's knitting.



• Without a major project on the go, I was a little lost for a project last night. I thought about all of the leftover sock yarn floating around chex trek. Aha! A mitered squares blankie (Ravelry link).



• I watched several provisional cast on videos on YouTube, several times each. Couldn't get them to work.



• Finally went with Knit and Tonic's provisional long-tail cast on (pdf download link).



• Thirteen squares in twenty-four hours.



• Nice.

You'll just have to take my word for the mitered squares. I'm way too tired to take a picture tonight. Maybe tomorrow I'll take a picture or two. Maybe I'll even knit some more squares.

Baby, it's cold inside

Rumble, clank, crunch!

That's what awakened Number Guy and me at 3:30 yesterday morning.

While we do live in an older house, I may have mentioned this in past, which has its occasional old-house noises, those particular sounds are not amongst the normal set of noises. They were, in fact, symptoms that something was not right. Number Guy made Miss Clavel look slow as he leaped from bed and clattered down two flights of stairs to the basement where the furnace is located. The horrendous noises ceased when he flipped the furnace's cut switch. The next sound I heard was rushing water: Number Guy had decided to bleed the pipes and then to flip the cut switch to the on position again to test the efficacy of this intervention.

Yes, it was the middle of the night but it is January and the temperature was in the upper teens - we needed heat and he figured that anything he could do was better than doing nothing.

No, flushing the pipes didn't do any good.

It did send an awful lot of very hot water down into the sump pump. Unfortunate, that.

What was I doing at this time? I was on the phone with the furnace repair company with which we have a service contract. Since we have a contract, we were guaranteed service. Since it was same day, we were given an all-day window.

Oh, joy.

Amazingly, Neatnik slept straight on through until regular wake up time.

One would have thought that I could have posted about this yesterday afternoon or last night even but one would be mistaken: I was just too tired. Number Guy went back to bed and back to sleep after the furnace incident. I was wide-awake and ended up working on the lpsz and puttering around as the temperature dropped.

In order to prevent suspense-induced implosion of blog readers, I shall skip all of the shivering and shaking and the careful listing of the things I did outside the house to avoid the cold and the layers of clothing I was wearing to insulate myself against the encroaching cold once I returned home and how much tea I was sucking down in an attempt to warm up from the inside...

Where was I?

Ah, yes, now I remember: the service call.

Sorry about that, the mere memory of the yesterday's thermal deficiencies temporarily chilled my brains.

The service guy called at five to twelve saying that he was en route. An hour or so later, we had a newly repaired water pump and the beginnings of heat spiralling up from the basement.

For free.

Gotta love it when the service contract covers everything.

lpsz

Last week's sweater steeking and subsequent zipper installation was somewhat traumatic so I am allowing myself a bit of a breather before tackling another zipper, so while the cable/rib cardigan is finished with respect to the knitting and the weaving in of the ends, it does not yet have its zipper installed. I cannot truly call it "done" until the zipper is fully functional and I can wear it as planned, but I have another project occupying my fingers at the moment.

Introducing the Lacy Prairie Shawl - Zenith Edition (Ravelry link).

I call it the lpsz for short.

Why, yes, my inner geek is showing.

So is yours if you got the joke.

And the string will be zero-terminated if you accept the definition that a woven in end is zero-terminated.

This shirt intentionally made smaller

I wavered back and forth between several descriptive titles for this post.

• Candidate Number One was "T-shirt Surgery: How to Resize a T-shirt"; descriptive, short, to the point.



• Candidate Number Two was "Now I Understand How Much Time Is Required When a Book Mentions a Woman Character Cutting Down Her Husband's Old Shirts to Fit Her Young Son"; rather long and since I used the sewing machine, I didn't spend quite as much time as Pioneer Polly or Amy Amish did.



• Candidate Number Three was "How to Do Too Much Work for Too Little Return"; longer than Candidate Number One and slightly significantly more cynical than Candidate Number Two.

Allow me to show you what I was doing.

You need a well-fitting t-shirt to use as a template

Use the smaller shirt to mark the new shoulders,
sides, and sleeves of the larger shirt
I used a ballpoint pen

Cut along the pen markings

Pin the new (smaller) sleeves to the new shoulder

Sew new seams; turn shirt right side out
Admire your fine handiwork

I am right now wearing the down-sized t-shirt. Despite the fact that the shirt now fits me really well, I won't be resizing all of my over-sized t-shirts any time soon.

Just doing this one shirt took over an hour. Yes, I realize that there was a learning curve involved, it being my very first attempt, but that is still quite a chunk of time.

Would I try this again? Probably. I do have a couple of large t-shirts and polo shirts that I would prefer not to retire but which are not very flattering in their current states. If I do, though, I will be leaving the hems alone. Folding this one up and pinning it where I wanted was a real pain.

On sweaters and zippers

Since I had a very busy day of errand running today, the time is ripe for a Wednesday Night Bullet Post...

• There was an anonymous comment on yesterday's post about not having heard much about Box Tops for Education lately. The Box Top collection at Neatnik's school is an ongoing concern. I continue to collect them and send them in to school when our little collecting box in the kitchen gets full or when they are having a contest.



• The contest prize is usually that the class which collects the most Box Tops gets to pick a non-gym day to wear their gym uniforms.



• I had 35 Box Tops in our box. Then, while walking in the mall with Number Guy on Tuesday, I found a Box Top on the floor, so we now have 36 Box Tops in the box.



• Hey, you'd stop to pick up a dime, wouldn't you?



• Temperatures here have been in the 20s and the wind has been howling for days. This is why we have been walking in the mall rather than outside on the highways and byways around town.



• I prefer walking outside for a bunch of reasons:
  
  
  • Fresh air
  • Varying sights
  • Running errands
  
  but if the fresh air is so cold that it steals the very life from your lungs, it isn't worth it.



• Completed last night:
  
  
  • One cardigan collar
  • Ends woven in
  • Zipper pinned in place
  • Sweater modeled for Number Guy


• Discovered last night:
  
  
  • Zipper approximately one inch too long
  • Zipper installation more stressful than steeking
  • Yarn intended for next sweater is cabled


• Neatnik decided she wanted pigtails today.



• Have I ever mentioned that short-cropped me isn't really good at braiding hair?



• I gave it my best shot and my child went to school this morning channeling Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls.



• There are worse looks.



• This afternoon, I bought a zipper for the steeking project.



• Positioning the zipper was infinitely more stressful than cutting the sweater in the first place.



• The slightly felted fabric tended to bunch when I pinned it to the zipper.



• Solution:
  
  
  • Place a pin in the end to hold zipper and fabric together.
  • Start basting by hand.
  • Remove pin and continue to baste zipper into position (carefully!).
  
  
  
  Be sure to use contrasting thread!


• Machine stitch zipper in place and remove basting thread. You may wish to run a second line of stitches to ensure that the zipper will not part company with the garment during normal wearing.
  
  
  Success at last!


• I cheated a little bit with this picture.



• I'm holding the back bunched in my hands to make it look less boxy.



• Show off the "buff"!

Well, that's my mid-week round up. Some knitters will tell you that cutting the knitting is stressful. I think that the follow up task of installing the zipper is far, far more angst-inducing.

Did I happen to mention that I bought a zipper for my cable/rib cardigan?

Perhaps I need a wee lie down before contemplating that.

Or maybe even a full night's sleep.

In which trek cuts a handknit

Is everybody ready?

On your mark, get set, steek

I am definitely committed now.
Or should I *be* committed??

Steeking? Nothing to it!

Just a zipper and a couple of minor details remain...

Veni, arti*, steeki?

Folks who have been visiting the wool and the word for a bit might remember that I cast on and knit a sweater that actually fit me back in 2008. This was a major milestone! It fit me.

The picture in that post, however, is about 30 pounds ago. I needed to make the sweater a wee bit smaller to fit on the new, "buff" trek.

Let me remind everyone here - just in case anyone out there is a thick as I am at times - one should never walk away from the dryer into which you have placed a 100% non-superwash wool sweater. Not even for a minute because a minute turns into ten minutes all too quickly.

While the sweater was not ruined by any stretch of the imagination, it did tighten up lose a small bit of stitch definition shrink slightly.

Uh, oh. Would somebody wave some smelling salts at the knitter over there in Albuquerque? Thanks.

Sorry about that.

My sweater is a wee bit smaller which, in theory, was the desired outcome, but some unforeseen changes also occurred.

• The forearms are a mite snugger than I prefer, especially as they progress on up towards the elbows.
• The collar is a tiny bit higher than is strictly comfortable.

The slight bit of felting of the fabric means that I cannot simply unravel and re-knit. I had to start thinking outside the box on this one. One very MacGyver solution presented itself and I think it has both merit and value.

As long as I don't screw it up.

I could steek it.

This is a time-honored tradition of Fair Isle knitters so I should be able to trust it, right?

What I am thinking is that I will lop off the sleeves above the elbows and slice up the middle of the front, creating a short-sleeved, semi-felted jacket. I thought a zipper for a closure and maybe a little v-neck work around the collar.

Is this doable or has the lost stitch definition caused me to complete my pilgrimage around the bend?

While we are all pondering the sanity of this plan, I think I shall go work on the cardigan's sleeve, which I shall never bring within line of sight of the hellish, fire-breathing dragon in the basement the dryer.

* arto - Latin for "to press together"

Fixy stuff

Hi, blog peeps! So good to see you here at the beginning of 2010. I have to wonder, do you say two-thousand-ten or do you say twenty-ten?

Whichever way you say it, I'd like to say "hi" to you here at the beginning of it.

Mommy and Daddy did some fixy stuff yesterday afternoon. I'm not a very big fan of fixy stuff but they sure were busy doing it.

First thing Mommy fixed was the liner of the pocket on the leather jacket she found at the thrift shop.

Lots of teeny, tiny stitches.

After the pocket was safe for use once more, Mommy took Neatnik's unicorns for some re-tail therapy.

Insane Mucilage to the rescue!

Too bad Christopher Robin didn't have this stuff.

That sort of glue didn't work on the cracked license plate frame, though: it started to dissolve the plastic!

Mommy used hot glue instead.

Mommy and Daddy have this big pantry cabinet in the kitchen. It has lots of shelves but a couple of them were kind of wobbly and they wanted to make them level again. Some of the shelves just needed pegs others needed the

broken off bits of pegs

to be drilled out first

and then

MacGyvered a bit

so that they became the right heights to level the shelves.

Some just needed

a little help

others required

a bit more assistance.

One shelf needed its trim piece reattached, but Daddy straightened out the staples, slathered the wood with some Cow Expoy, and clamped it tight.

Looks like new, Daddy!

Glad I didn't have to help with the fixy stuff: glue is murder on the fleece.

NYDBP

Happy New Year! Let's wrap up a few interesting things from 2009 to start off 2010 in style with some New Year's Day Bullet Points!

• I was really hoping to finish my Cable and Rib Cardigan (Ravelry link) before December waved good-bye. This did not happen. It was due to a series of unfortunate events - the Monkey Pox figured prominently as did the end of semester exams and grade posting. Another contributing factor is the rather nasty razor cut currrently inhabiting the pad of my left middle finger.
  
  It is hard to knit with a self-adhesive bandage stuck to the end of your finger but impossible to knit with an exposed quarter inch long incision: wool fibers getting into it is reminiscent of lemon juice flooding a paper cut.
  
  Since this sweater is still in progress as is a Grown Up Skweffle - Cornflower Edition, I am starting the new year with two WIPs, one of which is a SIP.



• With this cardigan still not complete, I tried hitting up the local thrift shops and mall stores for a wool sweater or two. Did I find anything? Nope. Well, that's not entirely true. I did find a lightweight black cardigan at the thrift store. It was marked Dry Clean Only. In retrospect, for four bucks, I probably should have gotten it and simply hand-washed it.
  
  There was also a Fair Isle pullover at the mall which interested me briefly - until I felt how long the floats were. Why do clothing companies think that three inch long floats are in any way wise?!



• While working on Christmas lights for the tree last month, I realized that I was holding one of the bulbs that make a twinkly set twinkle. I tried plugging it into the strand of lights I was testing. It didn't work either in the first position from the plug end nor the farthest position, therefore I concluded that this was not a twinkling strand.
  
  Neatnik really wanted the lights to twinkle. She didn't seem to understand that you need a twinkly strand and a twinkly bulb to make the magic happen, so I tried to explain it to her.
  
  "Neatnik, a twinkly light bulb without a twinkly light strand doesn't work. It's like if you are running Windows, no number of Linux drivers will make your hardware run."
  
  I really said that to the seven-year old.
  
  Gosh, I am such a geek.



• Recently, I noticed that a new Mexican restaurant opened up across the road from one of the local thrift shops. It is a small eatery about half a block down the street from a well-respected, similar establishment. Number Guy and I decided to give the new place a try yesterday.


The dining room was empty when we arrived. We weren't worried, though: we deliberated planned an early arrival so that we wouldn't have Neatnik out late. We ordered dinner and fell upon greedily devoured daintily nibbled on tortilla chips and salsa. What delicious chips! They were piping hot and you could really taste the corn flavor - not too salty, either.


• Number Guy ordered a quesadilla and burrito combo. Neatnik selected the very traditional Mexican chicken fingers and French fries. I opted for a house specialty called molcajetes, named after the searingly hot vessel in which it was served.
  
  Most awesome Mexican meal I have ever had, including the homemade tamales and other ethnic goodies Celtic Beadie's mom's little old Mexican neighbor lady cooked when we visited for Thanksgiving back in 1991.
  
  We enjoyed this meal and the location so much that we called friends on the drive home to tell them about it.
  
  I have to admit that singing the praises of this restaurant isn't entirely altruistic. This is a small, new place and we want to encourage people to eat there so that there will be enough patrons to keep them in business in between our visits.



• I've mentioned in some past posts how happy it makes me when an author I've read comments on my blog. Late last night, I received a comment from Candace Calvert, author of Critical Care.
  
  Candace's next book, Disaster Status, hits the book shelves in April, with Code Triage scheduled for release in September.



• I went through my blogroll on Bloglines last night. There were quite a few blogs which have not been updated in months and I unsubscribed from them. I was kind of sad as I clicked the "unsubscribe" button but I was virtual house cleaning in order to make room for new feeds. I am very hopeful that I will find new (replacement) blogs to read. If you have a favorite blog which you think I might enjoy reading, leave me a link, okay? New blog friends are always a blessing.
  
  New physical friends are also a blessing but, as adults, making new friends is hard. There was even a thread on Ravelry about it recently.
  
  Where/how do you go about making new friends? Do you find it hard to make new friends or to re-establishing ties with old ones? I've never been big on new year's resolutions but if I were to think of having one, making new friends while maintaining existing relationships and reconnecting with old friends would be a very worthy goal.

While we are not particularly attached to resolutions around here, Neatnik did sort of make one: to read two hundred new books in 2010 - or at least more books than Mommy.