Tephie's Personal Bombshelter MarkII

I want to knit today but none of the projects on my needles appeal. Ultimately that's probably good since I've resorted to medication because my hands and wrists hurt too much today. Right now they're just mildly sore but I know that's just because I took the painkillers.

Knitting status report in brief:

( A cut to spare the non-knitting friends list. )

Non-knitterly stuff:

Despite the pseudo-jossing I'm still poking a bit on my last NaNo, mostly fleshing out side characters and trying to make the set of common technologies make sense with each other. If they have the technology available to accomplish some task and don't use it I have to have a logical reason why. Fortunately, things like "it costs too much" and "they find it morally repugnant" are "logical". Of course, for anything that is not used for "moral" reasons there is bound to be some group somewhere doing just that....

In a vague attempt to clean up part of my hard drive (HAH!) I dug around in my old writing files. Some of those ideas and story fragments are from twenty years ago (having moved from notebooks to my first PC and then traveling from PC to PC) and, well, they show it. I may have to find something that can handle Works files from Windows 3.1 days if I want to actually use some of those.

Anyway, I found some old characters that I might revamp for future NaNo attempts. I have a set of nearly seventy original characters from a Fanfic That Will Never Be Written (can we say Mary Sue tendencies?) that could have their fanfic origins removed quite easily, though some may not survive the operation. A slight tweak of the Childhood Trauma and the Morgan family would be good to go. One side character actually has a pretty good universe built around her so just shifting the lead to her rather than the matriarch of the family could even supply some sort of plot starting point... should I decide I want to write a modern/near future werewolf novel.

Alas, I'm still in the fandoms for the other FTWNBW character sets so it makes it hard to pull them out. They're also tied into the original worlds and character sets tighter than the Morgan set so it might not be possible. It's a pity since some of them are pretty interesting, but it's a multi-generational sort of set the grandkids might be salvageable.

I should draw.

I'm just six rows from the end of the second pattern repeat on the sweater and I can't knit. My right hand is not happy today, at all.

Of course, even after those six rows I still have about one more pattern repeat (thirty two rows) before I do anything interesting but it would be a landmark and I could photograph and update my Craftster KAL (that no one has joined *sigh* ) and my Ravelry projects page.

Thirty eight rows from now I will be starting the armscye and venturing into the real modifications for this sweater. My total stitch count will be cut by one third. Things should speed up, potential screw ups excepted. About sixteen rows after that the front piece will have another reduction by about one third as I shape the neck (I may add some neck shaping to the back too, but that would be about ten rows later).

Then the body would be done.

The sleeves of course will be a bit less exciting. They'll start with short rows of sixty two stitches (as opposed to the body pieces which started at two hundred and two) and increase by two stitches every few rows until they reach one hundred and thirty six or so. But then they too will have a drastic reduction as I shape the sleeve cap. It's sort of like the long slog up a gentle slope until you reach the crest of the hill and can coast down the steeper back side. :)

At that point it's done but for the seaming and the knitting of a few rounds of ribbing around the neck. :)

And with that, 99.99% of my potential readers have skimmed right past this post. :D

Finally completed the first full pattern repeat on my sweater!



Just click to embiggen, and embiggen it will. The full size is 1033 by 683.

The color is pretty danged close to accurate for a change.

( Details of the knitterly sort. )

You know, technically this is my first sweater...

( Personal knitting history behind the cut. )

So, if anyone of you have found this post via Ravelry or Craftster and were thinking that this sweater was too much for a first project... well I don't think so. :)

My left wrist has been acting up so I decided to wear my brace today. But I really want to get going on this sweater so I just tried knitting wearing the brace....

I didn't know I rotated my left wrist that much while knitting. It's awkward and slow and I don't think I'll actually finish this row while wearing the brace. Maybe I'll try it later without the brace if the wrist feels up to it.

"It" being my all over cable sweater using this free pattern. In reddish-purple.

I'm going to be making some changes:

1. I'm only doing about an inch of ribbing, it feeds directly into the cable pattern and I rather like the look of "weltless" sweaters.


2. I have hips and a butt so I'm adjusting the gauge to give me some more room (if I hadn't there would be -2" of ease at the hips, which means skin tight sweater where I definitely don't want it that tight). The pattern repeat is long enough that doing just one repeat with the larger needles will get the sweater to my waist I think, if not I'll do another half repeat to get there.


3. I'm going to fudge the length so I stop either at a full pattern repeat (probably 3) or on half repeat to start the under arm shaping. Just because I like things orderly.


4. I don't like the folded collar. I shall knit about an inch and then use a stretchy bind off rather than knitting for three and folding it to the inside to sew down. I don't have much neck so there's no point in bulking the sweater up and hiding more of it than necessary.

Also, I am insane and am knitting the front and back at the same time, but not in the round, just two flat pieces on the same needles at the same time. I did consider knitting it in the round, but frankly, sweaters in my size are heavy beasts and I think the side seams might provide needed structure.

And I really can't keep avoiding seaming things. Besides, setting in sleeves is a bitch when you have to do them in the round.

I'm a slow knitter that gets bored easily too, so doing both parts at once makes it more likely I will finish. I generally knit two rows (a cable row and a resting row) and set the piece aside, no matter how long the rows are. Doing both at once means I'm effectively doing four rows and I will finish quicker than if I were doing the pieces separately. That's just the sort of knitter I am.

So it follows, both sleeves at once too. But not while I'm doing the front and back, I'm not that crazy. I'll need to revisit figuring out the increases anyway, once I have a better idea about how much I'll have to adjust the sleeve length. The shoulders are dropped so I'm pretty sure I need to shorten them. Or alternately, narrow the shoulders on the sweater and redraft the sleeve cap. I have some time to ponder that still, at least 100 rows of time.

The swatch is of sufficient size that I feel the urge to find something to do with it. It would make a good gauntlet, it goes from wrist to elbow. I'd say that I'll pick up from the cast on and knit a glove but I'd really like to take the cable down onto the back of the hand and I'm not sure I could do that well with the cast on there, it cuts across the middle of a medallion. It is giving me ideas for gloves though, if I can still stand the cable pattern after knitting the sweater.

It's been a while since I posted about my knitting with photos, so if you're curious, click the cut.

( In order of completion, oldest first. )

I heard they had Lion Brand Magic Stripes sock yarn for $1 a skein so I figured I'd check ours and if they had some I'd buy one skein. With that one skein I would make something that I could wear (with the yardage in one skein that might be one sock or fingerless glove) and find out if I'm really allergic to wool or just sensitive to the rough scratchy kind.

Well our Big Lots didn't have the wool/nylon sock yarn, but they did have twenty-one skeins of Lion Brand Suede in the same colorway (I have not yet checked the dyelots) and six skeins of Lion Brand Thick & Quick Chenille in a really nice purple.

All those skeins came home with me. I left the novelty yarns, though I was a bit tempted to grab one or two of the furry ones to make some more knit kittens. There was something really soft and squishy that sort of looked like terrycloth made into yarn but it was a color that, combined with that terrycloth impression, reminded me of dingy light blue towels badly in need of washing. The highway orange boucle tempted me for a few seconds since my brother is (was? I need to find out if he got that job he was looking at) highway superintendent, but I had no immediate ideas for it.

Now I need to locate some yarn storage space and figure out what the heck I'm going to make with this stuff.

In related news, my Japanese knitting book is here! *HAPPYDANCEOFKNITTERSQUEE*

Edit to *squee* more: The dyelots match!!

But I ordered myself a birthday gift with birthday cash. Namely Knitting Patterns Book 250. Yes, it is Japanese.

Now I just need to find a good source for cheap, yet nice, summer minded yarn so I can make myself some lace tees.

The constant "for more info check Ravelry!" links in nearly every knitting related post on any site I visit broke me last week and I put in my email for an invite. It came in today.

So, for any random knitters that come by my journal, I'm Tephra there. Feel free to suggest what groups might be of interest.

Since I whined at you (with the profanity filter off) I suppose I should let you know that the day is brighter now (even if it is snowing again).

I still have major things I need to kick my butt into gear and get done but the little things (that always eat you in the end) have cleared up a bit. hafoc came home at lunch yesterday and dug out the trickle charger (which is something I thought of after my fit but didn't think he had, and didn't ask about to be certain) and we set it up on the Jeep. Even that little bit of charge from 1:00 to 5:30 was enough and it started up nicely. I let it run a bit and then went off (with cellphone in hand, no need to tempt Coyote/Raven/any other "mischievous" forces) to fill the tank and did some errands that could be done after 6pm.

I always get twitchy when I don't have a means of getting away from the house on my own, that didn't help my mood the other day. If my anxiety dreams have any common theme it's that when I feel trapped by/incapable of dealing with anything my dreams involve the loss of the Jeep. Generally the loss thing varies between a nervous "forgot where I parked it" to a horrified "someone stole my car!!", but I digress.

One of the things I did that was rather silly, and fortunately cheap, was "treat" myself to a skein of yarn. Cheap, not very good yarn (from the way the knit purists talk, the Yarn of Satan) but the color is pretty and I've been attracted to it every time I pass the yarn section. I'm in the process of knitting another slouchy hat out of it now, it makes me happy. :) The color knitted up is a bit odd, the skein seemed more blues and purples but the hat is making me think of Easter candy, though a bit darker and desaturated.

And I need to get pictures of the other hat one of these weekends if the weather and hafoc will cooperate.

Getting back to the point, the Jeep started up fine today and I let it run for a while to charge the battery. Then, since it was warm, I tackled that back driver side running light. I don't think the bulb had ever been changed. I needed to use pliers to get the rubber plug to turn so I could pull the bulb out and get the new one in and I'm not sure the plug is securely back in place. I don't think it will managed to work itself out though, and even if it did it couldn't get far.

So, in brief:

Jeep runs - yay!
Tail light fixed - yay!
I can has pretty hat soon! ♥
Snowing again - *thhpppppt!*

I might not win NaNo this year, but I just went from 23,376 to 30,050 today so maybe I just might make it. I just have to figure out what happens next.

I got through today by having more characters to track, alas, I just killed one off. Though I gave the other some past history with one of my main characters, which might generate some long sections of verbiage. Pity they aren't going to meet soon, since he thinks she's dead and all. I don't think she'd approve of how he's changed over the years, if she remembers him.

Also, I finished knitting Mom's scarf for Christmas. The garter stitch scarf of DOOM, is done, I just need to weave the tails and graft the ends so it's a moebius. I might end up picking out the first row, it depends on if the start and ending points are in the right orientation for grafting. Not a big deal either way.

Woohoo! I broke 30k! Four days left so at least 5k a day will make it (I want to get more than that though because I know the verifier is going to eat at least 1000 words on me). If I can think of things to write I can still win. :D

I'm about 12k behind. :(

But I did get 3k down today so it's moving at least. Winning is still possible, if I can manage about 3400 words a day. :P

After I get some sleep I'm going to try to get to 30k between the various stages of making apple pie from scratch. That will be a smidgen over 7k in one day though, so I have my doubts but I won't know unless I try and all that.

I lost some time on the NaNo by working on some knitting. I have two projects to finish for Christmas and now one of them is almost complete and the other I know I can finish if I take the time to put some movies on and knit while I watch.

The hat I knitted Saturday didn't do anything for any of my goals but it scratched the itch for starting something new. It's not done, I don't like the way the brim is going, but I have a life line in there so I'm going to rip back to that eventually. I'll start the brim a couple rows earlier on larger needles to compensate for this particular worsted being on the heavy side (and very "sticky", what a bitch to knit with).

It was more of a "keep me entertained" project than anything else so I might do just the first layer of the brim and bind off without cutting the yarn and try it on. If I don't like how it looks at that point I can frog the whole thing and not really mind. The yarn was a bit heavy for the project anyway. I did learn to do two over two cables without a cable needle by doing the hat though. And really, it would look better in a color rather than black. It's hard to see stitch detail in black.

I tried knitting continental today... I think I'll stick with English/throwing. I know I'd get quicker with practice, and I did have a few points of quick knitting, but the tensioning issues were driving me nuts. I just can't work how to run the yarn in my left hand and not have it be either far too loose or far too tight. (It's sort of weird, I crochet and can tension the yarn for that okay, but not for the knitting. O.o )

And after just fifty or so stitches my left hand started cramping up something awful. It's just a weird position to have my fingers in.

After a few rows of knitting when I was finally able to stay pretty constant on speed and tension I tried purling... I can see why so many people say they have different gauges between knitting flat and in the round now, and why so many people have rowing out issues. My continental purls were astoundingly loose. Sure, practice would probably fix the tensioning, but I suspect I'd cripple my already problematic left hand by trying.

Still no idea where the story is going.

Have discovered a distressing habit to wander into talking head territory.

Like the characters, very WTF on the story. Though the idea of zombies created with technology for use as cannon fodder is oddly interesting. Of course someone else in the house has done it better, now that I think about it.

This original story is not as original as I would like I think.

I was lazy on Sunday so I'm trying to catch up today. Treating myself to an anime episode every 500 words seems to work pretty well.

I hope to have at least 8000 words when I stop tonight (which might be really early tomorrow with my habits).

My knitting is not going well with the writing. I need to do an inch of slip stitch rib on this hat and I hate my size 5 circulars. They are plastic and too flexy. Since the only place to get circulars in lengths other than 24"* is the yarn store I'm trying to hold off buying another one ($10 a circular, cripes!) since I am broke and have hopes for a Christmas gift of an interchangeable set. (I swear, if I don't get one for Christmas I'm going to squeeze the money from somewhere because I can get a set for the price of 5 or 6 regular circulars and save a ton of money in the long run.)

I still have a skein and a half on the garter stitch scarf, that's pretty damned boring to knit and I should leave it out where I will be tempted to pick it up and do a row here and there. The hat is currently in the prime sitting out spot though.

I'm not sure the dalek is going to make it. I'm using Caron Simply Soft on size 4s and there's something funky going on every knit to purl switch, it's loose and it shouldn't be. It's hard to tell though because I don't have enough rows to get a real good look at it. I'm actually very proficient with DPNs but you couldn't tell from this thing. I may frog it and use the yarn for something else, provided I can find some grey in another brand. I don't know. I did decide that bobbles are right out because they are boring, boring, boring to knit. I will be using some purchased mini pompoms instead. Assuming I actually finish a dalek.

*Annoyingly, 24" is actually usable for hats for myself or either of the Bills I might knit for, but the hat is for Dad and his head is only 21", hence having already had to buy one $10 circular for it. If the DPNs hadn't been getting annoying I wouldn't have bought it, short circulars don't get much use in my knitting, sleeves and hats, that's about it.

It's getting to be slipper season and I'm tired of sock/slipper/sock things that are either too tight (the usual) or too loose (somewhat mind blowing). Since I managed to snag a bunch of double pointed knitting needles from my mom while I was visiting I figured I'd knit some slippers that fit.

( Badly lit photo behind the cut. )

Details for any knitters reading this:

Yarn: Red Heart Super Saver (yes, cheap acrylic) the color is way off in the photo, it's 959 Gemstone, much darker, richer, and... purple-ier
Needles: #4 US
Gauge: 6 sts / 8 rows = 1"

Technique: Pretty obviously toe-up. :) My first try at provisional cast on and short rows (wrap and turn method). I'm sticking a panel of lace on the instep, both to keep me amused as I knit and to add a bit more stretch.

Yes, the toe is wide, so are my feet. :P

Right now I have two repeats of the lace pattern started immediately after completing the toe shaping and it covers my toes and the ball of my foot. I think two more pattern repeats (16 rows) will complete the instep. I'm going to be trying some more adventuresome short row shaping before the heel because I have thick ankles and going immediately to the heel after the instep will make the slipper too short, as well as too small at the ankle. If it works out I should be able to add length, turn the heel, and finish the "cuff" without having to pick up any additional stitches anywhere.

I've been collecting free knitting patterns from websites for a while, and while most are in PDF format many are not. PDFs are certainly easier to collect since they are one file rather than several so I thought I'd convert them to PDF myself.

Unfortunately (or fortunately maybe) I started with the ones I collected from Berroco, since the majority of their patterns are in PDF already I figured I'd just convert the few older ones that aren't. After I removed the site navigation and the extraneous ads for the yarn and other patterns and otherwise cleaned up the page so it looked how I wanted it to as a PDF, I tried using Acrobat to convert it.

( Screen captures under the cut )

Is Acrobat just that bad at converting HTML or is there something I'm missing? There's no reason I can see for the inserted line breaks in the heading or for the double spacing in the body. Is it because the containers are tables? Maybe it doesn't like external stylesheets? I don't want to invest too much time into this project but I want the PDFs to look good, and in Berroco's case, like the PDFs they put out themselves.

ETA: Well the link spacing issue is just that, a line spacing issue in the CSS. While 1.5em works on a webpage it needs to be 1em in the PDF. Maybe that's the issue with the lack of padding in the tables as well. Still haven't figured out the problem in that heading cell with the inserted line breaks....

ETA2: In fine hacker tradition I have managed to strip the CSS down so it mostly works. I combined a few tags and removed some empty paragraphs. I ended up adding the padding to the paragraph tags in the instructions rather than to the section ID because Acrobat's CSS handling is borked. It's not as pretty as I'd like and there's a bit more slash and burn than I'd hoped for before I can convert the files, but it works. Thankfully Berroco uses one style sheet for their pattern pages (except for a few really old patterns, which I don't think I saved any of) so the actual CSS hacking is done. I just need to cut chunks out of the HTML and tweak it before I convert to PDF.