http://www.ravelry.com/projects/firecat/an-unoriginal-hat

Unoriginal Hat
Pattern: An Unoriginal Hat by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

Needle: US 10½ / 6.5 mm
Yarn: Rowan Big Wool
1 skeins = 87.0 yards (79.6m)
Colorway 21 (white and gray)

Notes
I used exactly 1 ball of Rowan Big Wool with only a couple of yards left over. The hat is a bit small on me; I misread the instructions and used size 10.5 needles instead of size 11. (But then I might have run out of yarn.) Rowan Big Wool is kind of hard to work into cables because it’s not very elastic. It’s very soft.


( photos )

Tags: i made this!, knitting

Yesterday on the college-campus-like grassy hill outside the Metreon, I was listening to bcholmes and the_siobhan discussing Dr Who. I've only seen a couple of episodes. There are apparently over 700 episodes. If I were to watch some Dr Who episodes, which ones should I start with?

(via kyubi in e-mail)

Baby Got Book (just a blog post so far...although there are several demands in the comments that it be made into a youtube video)

Lately seen in rivka's journal:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place.

firecat adds: There's a difference between "books I liked" and "books I would recommend." I mostly only "recommend" books to people "who like that sort of book." There are very few I recommend across the board; I'm not big on canons. I'll use * for "liked" and # for "recommend"

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell * ( Read more... )

http://www.ravelry.com/projects/firecat/diamond-waffle-socks

Needles:
US 0 / 2.0 mm Knitpicks nickel-plated 16" circs
US 1 / 2.25 mm Knitpicks nickel-plated 16" circs


Yarn: Fleece Artist Nova Socks
1 skein = 355.0 yards (324.6m)
Colorway amethyst
Purchased at Stitches West in Santa Clara, California


( photos and gory details )

Tags: i made this!, knitting

Last weekend I had

• the house to myself
• several white T-shirts (I don't like wearing white T-shirts; I don't like how they look on me)
• two tie-dye kits that had been sitting around the house for years
• an issue of Craft Magazine with an article on tie-dye
• a laundry tub newly installed in the garage

So I embarked on a tie-dye project.

Both kits came with rubber gloves and instructions.

The first kit, called "Tie-Dye Rope," didn't work out so well. It came with several very small packets of soda ash and some dye-impregnated strings, not really particularly rope-like, more like pencil roving. It was hard to tie the stuff onto the shirts, and since there was only a small amount of soda ash, the dye came out pretty faint. I haven't taken pictures of these shirts.

The second kit, Jacquard Funky Far Out Groovy Tie Dye Kit, came with a large packet of soda ash and three squeeze bottles with Procion dye powder in them. The rubber gloves had rotted away while the kit had been sitting around the house, but the rubber bands had not. They were really, really, really sturdy. Using this kit was messy (the squeeze bottles leaked and the dye saturated the fabric and puddled on the plastic) but I was happy with the results. I did three shirts and had dye left over, which I freecycled.

( photos (more on my flickr page) )

Tags: i made this!

I wrote this to a friend and thought some other people might be interested. I'm not really looking for advice but if you have ways of remembering things that you like, go ahead and post them in the comments.

On the matter of remembering events and other stuff, I use the following:

• On my shell: the cal program + a text file calendar. I have an automatic script in my .login to mail myself the next four days of the calendar daily. So if there is a birthday or anniversary in there, I am getting four days of reminders before it arrives. I also mail the calendar to the OH -- but I don't do this automatically, I open the file and edit it, so that way I actually look at what's in it. I put all of my appointments and yearly reminders in there.
• iCal on the Mac, for things I'm likely to forget about, like chores and appointments at a specific time, especially morning appointments. This is effective because the alarm reminder stays on top of my other windows until I tell it to snooze.
• For events where I might take a while to get ready, I set the alarm for 2-3 hours in advance, because seeing the alarm that early gets me starting to mentally prepare. Then I snooze the alarm for an hour, half an hour, 15 minutes, and so forth, so I keep getting more reminders of the event.
• A to-do list (in Yojimbo on my Mac). It gets unwieldy so I have a section called "high priority" which is supposed to be for stuff I have to do today, but it also tends to accumulate a few "sometime this week" errands. I transfer stuff from my text file calendar and my iCal to this list and then try to refer to it throughout the day. I check off items as I do them. I'm not perfect at this, so I'd say this is the weak link in my system.
• SMS from my cell phone to my email. When I'm out and I remember something I need to do, I sms to my email. Then when I get home, I process the item into the proper calendar(s) and list(s).
• The OH sends me reminders to my e-mail. He also reminds me of things when he's home, and asks me to write them down.
• A have-done list. I make a list every day in my personal journal (a text file on my shell) of what I've done. This helps me feel like I actually do a few things, even on the days I am really depressed or in pain. (On days like that, even little things, like feed the cats, "count" and get onto the list.) Otherwise it is hard for me to feel like I do anything.

---

Yes, this looks totally unwieldy written down, and yes I think I really do need all of these pieces in order to remember those things I manage to remember.

Also, you'll notice there is no paper in there. I use paper lists for when I run errands, but usually not at other times because I lose them. I don't tape lists to the mirror or anything like that, because my capacity to turn them invisible after seeing them a couple of times is basically infinite. The OH puts things on the floor to help him remember, but I can turn those things invisible too.

I find myself wanting to knit the Flyaway Free Jacket from Just One More Row. (I would link to JOMR but it's currently under construction.) It calls for bulky yarn and uses an unusual very open stitch.

My question is: What yarn would you recommend? It has to be bulky in volume and lightweight.

Here's one that was knit in Colinette Giotto.

Here's another one; this is two yarns held together and I'm not crazy about the fabric.

listening to: Quintet for Piano & Winds in E-flat Major, K 452 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Chamber Music for Wi

http://men-in-full.livejournal.com/30026.html

It's not about boobs, and although this journal sometimes has NSFW images, this post is safe.

I was intending to give this idea the attention I thought it deserved (none) but so many folks on my flist are talking about it that I feel pressured to put in two cents.

(See how easy it is for some people to feel social pressure? No one is even standing over me asking me to wear a button or asking to feel my boobs. People are just writing about it.)

So:

It's fun to break social rules when you're among friends and people you trust in a relatively safe space. Sounds like the original incident was like that, and that's great.

I object to the "Project" aspect of it. I don't want entire SF cons to become spaces where I feel pressured to walk around advertising my willingness, or lack thereof, to be felt up.

I have some more personal reactions that I may put into a flocked post.

Our DSL is down again and the way Speakeasy is handling our service ticket, it looks like we won't have broadband again for quite some time.

They are now claiming there's a problem with our modem...but last week the problem was on their end, and we are highly suspicious that it's suddenly our modem.

Anyway, they are sending us a "loaner modem," but they can't be bothered to send out loaner modems over the weekend, so we won't get it until Tuesday, and they aren't going to do any more troubleshooting on their end until then.

Last weekend when our DSL went down, they insisted that the OH contact them via phone support despite his telling them he is hearing impaired, and despite the fact that phoning them tied up the line they were trying to test. (They were quite verbose in insisting on this...the entire thing could have been dealt with multiple times over in the time it took them to e-mail him multiple times to explain why he had to phone in. And yes they were personalized e-mails.)

Then when we did phone them, they kept us on hold for over an hour and finally asked us one single question that we could have answered by e-mail and said "It's not our problem, it's Covad and the phone company, they'll work on it sometime Monday."

Our DSL is down again.

[*commences knitting and not checking LJ*]

Early in my knitting career I learned that if I liked a pattern on the web I should save a copy to my hard disk or else the pattern might go bye-bye and I might not be able to find it again. This happened with a pattern I really wanted to knit called the DNA scarf. (I later did find a copy - I don't remember if someone sent it to me, or if someone told me where it had moved to.)

Since then I have used my Mac's lovely "print to PDF" feature to save copies of a lot of knitting patterns.

And then along came Ravelry, which lets you save a link to a pattern in your account. I've been somewhat seduced by the ease of doing that (you can put a button on your browser toolbar to do it) although I still make PDFs of most patterns too.

Apparently today the magknits.com web site (a free online monthly webzine with knitting patterns) went bye-bye. A lot of people on Ravelry are upset that patterns they had put into their Ravelry queues are no longer available.

Which reminds me, I need to make sure I have PDFs of the patterns in my Ravelry queue.

I have no idea how the list was compiled (kshandra pointed me at the original source: an article claiming these are the 50 best TV shows of all time, at which I scoff); it seems to be missing a lot of important shows. But FWIW -
via stefanie_bean

Bold if you've seen every episode, italicize if you've seen at least one.

50. Quantum Leap
49. Prison Break
48. Veronica Mars
47. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (A good chunk of them)
46. Sex & The City
45. Farscape
44. Cracker
43. Star Trek
42. Only Fools and Horses
41. Band of Brothers
40. Life on Mars
39. Monty Python's Flying Circus
38. Curb Your Enthusiasm
37. Star Trek: The Next Generation
36. Father Ted
35. Alias
34. Frasier
33. CSI: Las Vegas
32. Babylon 5
31. Deadwood
30. Dexter
29. ER
28. Fawlty Towers
27. Six Feet Under
26. Red Dwarf (Almost all of them)
25. Futurama
24. Twin Peaks
23. The Office UK
22. The Shield
21. Angel
20. Blackadder
19. Scrubs
18. Arrested Development
17. South Park
16. Doctor Who
15. Heroes (First season)
14. Firefly
13. Battlestar Galactica (Which one? I've seen a few episodes of both)
12. Family Guy
11. Seinfeld
10. Spaced
09. The X-Files
08. The Wire
07. Friends
06. 24
05. Lost
04. The West Wing
03. The Sopranos
02. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
01. The Simpsons