Seasilk Lattice Moebius

I am back, gentle reader, and what a journey I have had. I now have a working computer — and boy howdy is it fast compared to the old one. There were a few parts that just aren’t going to work, it appears. XP will not recognize my internal Zip drive, although the bios insists it’s there. It’s very old, however, and may have come to the end of its useful life. Or may have been harmed when the floppy bit the dust. Poor thing. Let us shed a tear. 😥 The floppy drive was fried — quite literally. There’s an amazing amount of smoke that comes pouring out when a floppy drive melts.

Note to self: This is not something that should be repeated with any frequency. In fact, never would be good.

I pretty much have software back in working order, etc. I managed to recover my mail, so nothing was lost there. Whew. Thank you to all of you who commiserated with me. I was tempted a few times to call Bobby’s hunky techie contact. But then I would have to explain what had happened. I’ve had enough embarrassment over this one, I think.

It’s all running again not a moment too soon, because in just a few short hours, I will be heading north for a Floating Knitting Retreat with Cat Bordhi, Lucy Neatby, and other wonderful knitters. Riding around on the ferries through the San Juans and knitting — what’s not to like? I think it’s going to be a blast! I will report back next week.

The first picture is what up to now has been called secret project. It can now be revealed as a lattice-stitch moebius in Sea Silk. (Note that this one is actually the right size!) This was a birthday present for my friend LT, who likes to wear pink. Although she tells me that she is branching out and trying other colors, so I will have to expand my LT palette.

ladybug, ladybug

This is a close up showing how the little ladybug stitch marker from J L Yarnworks’ Etsy shop. Isn’t that just the cutest little thing? I had a ton of fun watching it fly around the moebius while I knit, and every time it came to the front, I just had to smile.

I have not had much other knitting time. The Coriolis socks progress slowly up the ankles. I like the beads. Next time I’ll show you a pic or two.

The Particulars:

• Yarn: Sea Silk (70% silk, 30% Sea Cell / 100g, 400m per skein) in colorway Rose Garden — Parts of two skeins with a goodly bit left over.
• Needle: 47″ Knit Picks Options circular, US#6.
• Pattern: Made up as I went along, with much inspiration from A Treasury Of Magical Knitting by Cat Bordhi
• Modification to pattern:
  • Not really a lot. I used a lattice-stitch pattern.
  • Cat suggests the I-cord bind-off, which I used.
  • I trusted Cat as to how many stitches I should cast on. 😀

Hopefully brief, that is.

Over the weekend, I was visited by some wild hare and decided I really needed to upgrade my computer. Now… my computer has been my faithful companion for three years, and there wasn’t anything wrong with it at all. But it was getting a little long in the tooth and struggling with a few newer programs I’d loaded. It was a little noisy, too, being built before quiet PCs were a good thing. Sometimes I could fancy that the fan noise almost sounded like it was breathing.

In reality it was probably gasping for breath. (Note to self: Blow the dust out occasionally, eh?)

So I decided to upgrade. With a PC of this age, that pretty much means new everything. New CPU, new motherboard, new drives, new video card, etc. I saved my sound card, my CD drive, my floppy drive, an old zip drive and a card reader. And my printer and monitor, of course. And my operating system (Win XP).

After a little research, I ran up to PC Club, where they just happened to have the exact parts I wanted. It was like fate, I tell you.

Note: I’ve done this before. I’m usually fairly successful. The things just plug together. It’s like Legos, sort of.

I got started after dinner Saturday night putting it all together. I had the old computer torn apart and the new one almost ready for a test firing when I realized that I needed a new power supply. Then I remembered that the one in #1 Son’s computer would work. So I pulled the power supply from his, put it in mine, hooked it all up, plugged it in, turned it on, and copied the old disk over to the new disk.

I knew I would have to do a repair install of XP, which I did. But then it would boot as far as the welcome screen, and then reboot, and then go as far as the welcome screen, and then reboot… lather, rinse, repeat. I didn’t know what to do. And, if you are keeping track, you will note that #1 Son’s computer wasn’t working either now, so I had no way to look it up on the internet and see what a fix might be. So I decided to reinstall Win XP from scratch, which meant all of my software, while still there on my disk, needs to be reinstalled because Windows doesn’t know where or what it is.

Note to self: Leave one working computer at all costs.

I should have just gone to bed. In the wee hours of the morning, I fried my old drive, thus rendering any kind of reinstall of the old system impossible. And I melted (yes…. melted… very exciting!) my floppy drive and probably fried my zip drive as well.

I now have two working computers, but I’m still trying to recover software. So you will excuse me because I haven’t written, I haven’t read any blogs. I’ve done a little knitting, but I can’t show you pictures because my PC still won’t talk to my camera. It’s an interesting time over hear at chez PI, gentle reader.

So far I have a nice, new, very fast, very efficient, very quiet….

doorstop.

letter and ladybug markers

Well, it turns out there’s no need to wait for the official markers to use with Cat Bordhi’s new book. (Of course, if you want to wait you can.)

Look at these lovely little markers! They are brought to you by J L Yarnworks’ Etsy shop. Cat’s patterns require the letters A through F. This stitch marker set comes with A through H. I really like the “knit to A then do blah then knit to B and do yadda” directions in Cat’s book, and I see using the same sort of marker philosophy (if you will) for other projects like lace. A couple of extra letters could come in handy. J L Yarnworks’ Etsy shop mentions that the entire alphabet is available. Cool! Maybe next secret pal whatever I’ll spell my pal’s name in stitch markers as a little extra goody. 😉

There are a bunch of different beads available, so no matter what your preference I bet you could get a set that’s your favorite colors. My markers are black and a really pretty silver-blue. These are nicely made markers with no rough edges or pokey bits to snag the finest yarn. And at a very reasonable price! Love ’em, love ’em, love ’em.

socks with markers

Love the little ladybugs, too. OK. Who doesn’t love a lady bug? Sometimes my larger projects need a little bling, too. I’m using one of the ladybug markers on a top secret project (shhhh… ), and every time that little lady bug comes around, I just have to smile at it looking up at me with its beady little eyes. I fancy it’s saying, OK. But I’d really rather prefer eating aphids in the garden.

When you were a child and a ladybug landed on you, did you used to say the little rhyme Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your children will burn. When I was little, my mother taught that to me and to this day I still faithfully recite it to the ladybugs in the garden. But it is rather morbid, isn’t it? A rather strange sentiment.

But I digress.

I would love to show you how fun the little ladybug looks flying around my needle, but it’s a secret project. So, it’s… secret. All will be revealed in time.

By the way, there are other really cute little beads where these came from: penguins and fish. You must go look at the little penguins! You will die from the cuteness.

My socks feel so nicely balanced, now that I have the right stitch markers on both socks. Ahhhhh….

sock progress

This is the instep side. I have one more pattern repeat to go, and then I turn the heels. These socks are almost knitting themselves. Maybe it’s because the pattern repeat is only 6 rounds, or because the cables turn every three rounds, but I always feel like I’m making progress. And before you know it, I’m almost done with this section. Except they’re on hold right now. Because I have to work on the secret project.

No, I can’t tell you what it is. It’s secret. (shhhhhhh…)

On another topic, you parents out there with newly-adult-ish teenagers… How are you coping? This was the conversation I had with my son on Tuesday:

#1 Son: Hi, Mom. Just wanted to let you know I’m on my way to California.

Mom (attempting to shift mental gears quickly): You are? Why? Don’t you have to go to work?

#1 Son: I don’t have any hours scheduled until Saturday. A friend has a family member who is very sick. She needed someone to go with her and there isn’t anybody else that’s available. We’re taking her car. I’ll be back Saturday morning.

Mom: Where are you going? Bay area?

#1 Son: San Luis Obispo. But we’ll probably spend tonight in the Bay Area then drive the rest of the way tomorrow. Her car is a little car with standard transmission. Driving a stick is really fun.

Mom: I love you. Please drive carefully.

Gentle reader, if you are the parent of an almost-adult-ish teenager, how are you coping?

One of the things I do to cope is to concentrate on other things. Like the software under the covers of this blog. I use a lot of plugins to do various cool things like the little gadgets in the sidebars, and the spell checker, and the doohickey that closes commenting on a post after a particular length of time. Sometimes one or the other of the plugins has issues. And sometimes it’s darned hard to figure out which one it is.

Lately, every time I publish a post, the sidebars would only load a little way down the left hand side, and then nothing more would load. The only way I could get the site to load all the way again was to turn off some of the plugins. So, one after another, you may have noticed things disappearing. And coming back. And disappearing again. And going wonky.

Yesterday I finally figured out what it was. It was the little word cloud in the left-hand sidebar. The plugin that builds the cloud takes all of the words from every post I’ve ever written, sorts them out, eliminates words like the, and, but, takes the top words, and makes the little cloud. Well… it turns out that I’ve been kinda wordy. Go figure! The poor thing was just choking on the number of words that my fingers have typed over the years. I’ve taken pity on it, and limited its cloud-making effort to the most recent 500 posts.

Can you believe I’ve written more than 500 posts? Me either.

At any rate, when I hit the Publish button, all should be well. Or, at least that’s the theory. Keep your fingers crossed. Here we go…

[ed.] And everything is OK. Yea! And #1 Son just called to report he is just north of Redding, they will be driving all night, and he’ll be home early in the morning. My request that he be careful and drive safely was met with: Why do you worry? I’ve done this millions of times. To which I can only reply, I worry because I’m your mother. It’s my job.

Evidence of surprise knitting, that is.

A colleague is having a baby in July. Last week it occurred to me that July is in the none-to-distant future, and I’d better get a-knittin’.

This is the Babies And Bears sweater from Cottage Creations, knit in Cascade Sierra in colors 47 (turquoise blue) and 48 (lime green). (Such nice Persistent Illusion colors, eh?)

This sweater was a really fun knit. I love knitting baby things, anyway — they are so little and cute! And I so rarely have a reason to, except for charity knitting. “E” is for excuse also. The Babies And Bears sweater is knit in two sections from the ends of the arms in to the center. The two sections are Kitchenered together up the back while the rest of the stitches remain live. Then the hood is knit starting from the still-live neck stitches and Kitchenered at the top. The trim is added last from the still-live stitches around the edge, and then you bind off at the very end. I hate picking up stitches, and with all of the stitches remaining live until the end, this construction kept the picking up to a very minimum. It was fun, fun, fun!

Maybe, just maybe, there are a pair of little socks in some leftover-and-stashed Cascade fixation in a bright turquoise (ball band long ago lost).

Sorry about the craptastic chair shot. I had to take pics indoors rather than out in the yard because it’s raining.

It’s raining because this is Portland and it’s Rose Festival time.

Similar to the teaser faux-spring in February, we usually have a teaser faux-summer in May featuring a week or so of lovely warm days and clear crisp nights. It lulls even the long-time residents into putting away their winter coats and heaters and digging around in the basement (for those that have them) or garage (for those that don’t) to find the fan that was stashed away last autumn. Then Rose Festival comes and the rains return. It’s not as cold as it is earlier in the year, but it’s not all that warm, either. The jackets and sweaters come back out. The fan goes back to the basement / garage.

The weather sucks until after the 4th of July. Then we have a couple of truly hot, hot weeks. Everyone runs out and buys air conditioners like crazy because, you know, it’s apparently impossible to live through a couple of hot days. And the power demands spikes up while everyone attempts to keep cool. For a couple of weeks. Then the weather moderates and we have lovely 85-degree days all the way into October, with just a spot of rain occasionally to wash everything down. September is Portland’s way of rewarding us for living here through the long, dark winter.

I did turn my furnace off for the season. But I haven’t dragged out the fans yet. And I don’t possess air conditioning (and not likely to get it). So my summer preparation is fairly minimalistic.

PI updates continue, now and again. You might notice a little share this link at the bottom of each post. Clicking on it brings up a little tabbed window — one tab has a list of social bookmarking sites and the other lets you forward a link in email.

Toys. 😀

Thanks to everyone for your well-wishes after my little prat fall last week. I am well on my way towards being as good as new — or at least as goos as I ever am. 😈 . All of you who related your own harrowing tales — Ack! Please be careful, gentle readers!

And greetings to fans of Defect Defect arriving here because they played at a placed called The Knitting Factory… I love my kid, but this might not be the site you were looking for. Google carefully. 😆

P.S — yes, the sweater is for a boy. If the baby were a girl, I think hot pink trim would have been just too cute, don’t you?

For far too long I have not been able to post. Not because I’ve been too busy, although that has contributed. No… the latest WordPress upgrade rendered me incapable of actually saving anything I wrote.

If you visited over the last week or so, you may have noticed that sometimes things looked different. Sometimes there were features missing. Sometimes there were whole chunks of PI missing. Sometimes nothing worked at all. There was nobody I could call because… I’m my own webmaster. I will spare you the long, sad tale of sleepless nights spent slaving over the keyboard, frantically searching for an answer; the countless plugins deactivated / upgraded / reactivated only to be trashed; the numerous discussion groups combed for answers; the multiple configurations tried on my local desktop that worked fine, only to be hosed (technical term) when uploaded to where everyone else could see it. Late Friday night I found the answer: Move from PHP4 to PHP5 on my host’s web server. All things magically began to work again. Posts could be saved without the dreaded blank, white screen appearing (think Window’s Blue Screen Of Death, only worse). Ahhhhhhhhh … sleep

In the midst of the panicked frenzy upgrading a few new or modified features were added. Nicer Archives, the plugin that served me faithfully (with a few tweaks) since WP 1.2 days, finally gave up the ghost (RIP). There’s a new expandomatic archives listing in the History tab. Click on the years and months and it drops down. Cool, eh? Translate is once again available (click on the flags at the top of the left sidebar). Thought Of The Day and Current Weather are driven by new, and hopefully more stable, engines. How People Get Here is a new word cloud that shows what searches are leading readers here. To avoid banging my head against the wall in despair I took the opportunity to finally update the PI favicon (that’s the little icon that shows up next to the PI name in the browser address). It now actually fits into this theme rather than a very old, long discarded, quite garishly colored scheme. (I really wanted to use a ball of yarn and knitting needles to form the P and the I in the icon. It looked great at 72×72 pixels, but when reduced to 16×16 pixels it became a featureless blob that didn’t look at all like yarn and needles, much less like a P and an I.)

There are some other changes under the covers that you probably won’t notice.

I love WordPress, and certainly the price is right. But free can also be read as virtually unsupported. And sometimes the features that the authors think are really, really cool cause some issues in the general WordPress-using public who are not expecting such sudden changes. WP 2.2 was not supposed to be a major upgrade. sigh I supposed I should be happy that it forced me into a few probably much-needed updates here and there.

Thank you so much, gentle reader, for continuing to visit and comment in my supposed absence. I was listening and watching. And now I’m back.

The pictures are proof that I did get a little knitting time in.

The Spanish Lavender Basket Wave socks are up past the heels and heading up the legs. They are posing amidst my Climbing Iceberg rose. It’s nearly time for the annual Rose Festival and everything is in bloom. I really wanted to photo the socks with my Eyepaint rose. But, alas, the bright red of the rose did not add anything to the lovely Walking On The Wild Tide colors. White, fortunately, goes with everything.

Anyway, I worked the heel flap in heel stitch with a garter border. You can sort of see it on the right-hand sock in the picture. I think it fit into the basket theme quite well and looks like it’s lined up nicely with the pattern on the leg. The lower picture is a close-up of the basket weave stitch pattern across the instep. I know it seems sort of un-sockclub-ish to some to use a different pattern. But I’m really happy with the way this stitch works with this yarn. I would not be nearly as happy with the Sock Club pattern, although it is a fine pattern and one I plan to knit with a different yarn.

I am still waiting for the perfect yarn, due in at Tangle any day now, to start the socks for my Sockapalooza 4 sock pal. I have no idea what these socks are going to look like. But I know the yarn will tell me what it wants to be.

[ed 11:12 am PDT] P.S. I almost forgot to mention that there are now a couple of wonderful Magic Cast On videos available on the web. I’ve linked to them in the right-hand sidebar. One, from the kind people at Renaissance Yarns has a voice-over in English, and the other, courtesy of Calcetines Tejidos is in Spanish. Enjoy!

Well… that was the upgrade from hell.

I think it’s all OK now. I hope. After completely rebuilding my WP installation from scratch and completely revamping my theme. I think we’re good to go.

Do let me know if you find something that’s broken or weirder than usual. And thanks for your patience.

Confidential to WP developers: Your opinion that something doesn’t make sense should not be taken as an indication that it’s OK to remove functions that users have come to rely on, or to make those function suddenly out of reach of those who aren’t comfortable hacking about with their templates. Nor is it OK to just willy-nilly rename stuff simply because it would be so much cleaner. And, yes, I realize that this is a labor of love for you. How wonderful. Working for a large company where that sort of no-warning impact to downstream users would get you fired might give you a slightly different point of view. It’s not about you any more. It’s about your thousands of clients who want things to just keep working.