As I was uploading those photos, I had the news on in the background. Of course there is some high speed car chase going on just down the highway from us that they are filming live.
I think this is the second one I've seen since I moved down here less than a month ago and I almost never watch the evening news.
I don't have a photo of the silk sweater I made for my mother but I'm working on it. In the meantime...
...my first branching out scarf is done! I have even bound off and woven in the ends although these photos are from just before that point. This is BFL that Thuy and I dyed with Smart and Final food coloring. I spun it up on a spindle and knit it as a single. The one I knit in Moco quiviut is also done but looks really dumb without being blocked. I had two skeins of the quiviut (one in navy and the other in a burgundy/wine hybrid color) and one skein was not enough to make a scarf even though I used the second skein for the garter stitch border. To lengthen it I added a bunch of garter stitch to both ends but that part seriously flares out while the lace section pulls in. I will block it to within an inch of its life and it should all even out... I hope!
Martha asked what had broken my cable. It was, of course, the cotton linen stitch afghan that will not end:
Sadly, when I spread it out to take the photos I discovered this:
Yup. It pooled. I had three cakes of yarn that I got from a sale bin when we were in Cary, NC years ago. The first skein worked up nicely with only a little pooling. The second skein started out the same so I stopped worrying about pooling. Clearly this was a mistake. Normally I don't mind pooling colors in my space-dyed yarns. I just REALLY don't like regular pooling, which is what I have in this afghan now. If it had formed interesting patterns, I might feel differently but regular blobs really aren't very appealing.
So.
I will rip it out. And the afghan that will not end, will take that much longer to end so that I can alternate between skeins to break up the blobs. On top of all of this, it looks like I will run out before it is the size I want (2lbs of cotton only goes so far apparently). So now I'm on the hunt for a solid cotton to compliment this color-way. Given that it's basically a deadened rainbow (basic colors with a bit of black added to them), I have lots of options. Suggestions anyone?
Oh, and for the record, my replacement cables arrived yesterday from Denise. I'll let you know how they work out but I still love their customer service.
I took the promised photos on Sunday but haven't had time to upload them and it's too late to do it tonight. We spent the evening watching the documentary "Why We Fight" which, while dated, is documentary about the industrial military complex as evinced by post-Vietnam wars in the U.S. (with an obvious focus on Iraq). None of the information was new (at this point although had we seen it when it came out we would have been more than a bit outraged -did you know that over one billion dollars of our defense budget between 2002 and 2003 was spent on domestic advertising?).
I'll upload the photos of my knitting projects tomorrow and everyone can see why I must rip out nearly half of the linen stitch afghan I've been working on for the past year (on and off). Sadly I haven't spread it out much in the past couple of months and so only noticed some really bad pooling when I took the photographs. So now it will be the project that takes me forever and a day to finish.
So I still haven't broken out Marius' nice fancy dSLR camera to take photos of my knitting (but I will by the end of this upcoming weekend Martha!) . But I must share my small victory today.
In Santa Barbara we didn't have a very big apartment. In fact it was so small that my desk doubled as our dining room table. Well we're in a bigger place now and had bought a second hand table from a grad. student who was leaving town right before we moved. However, we have been lacking dining room chairs since we moved into our new place. Since our new table has gray metal legs, I've been wanting to find something like this:
Now this chair is being sold at DWR for $370/chair. It was on some t.v. show and is insanely expensive now given what it is. Hunting around online however, I found these:
Which are nearly identical to the above chair. The biggest difference is that the front legs are round as opposed to squared off (and the chairs are bolted together as opposed to being all one molded piece). I agree that the first chair looks better, but how much better? Certainly not the $330 difference in price. That's right. The cheaper chairs are just $40 at kmart of all places (just FYI: our table does not look like the one in the photo).
So I procrastinated on going out and buying the chairs for weeks until last night. I drive out to the nearest store and find that they are sold out of the chairs. This is not because people saw the chairs on t.v. and realized how similar (but much cheaper) the ones at kmart are, but because they didn't sell and so were placed on clearance. At the store I'm at they can't even tell me what the new price is since they don't have any information on them now that they are all gone. I go home a bit discouraged because I assume that this will be the case at all local kmarts. They are still available online for the original price as a last resort (for a $35 shipping fee) but I decided to brave near rush-hour traffic today and try another kmart today. They HAD them! They not only had them in stock, they had almost 100 of them. And the best part is their clearance price is just $8/chair. Yup, I spent a total of $32 on these bad boys, less than what one chair would have cost me if I had bought them at their regular price.
So I have learned my lesson for the week. Procrastination pays.
So I contacted them (last night!) about sending the broken cable for a replacement (and mentioned that it has happened once before -both time with heavy projects). I also asked if they had thought about reinforcing this part with a bit of metal (both breaks were at the exact same place) even though I realize that such a suggestion is a bit presumptuous. This was their response.
One is unusual, but two is miserable. Occasionally, a kit that is exposed to extreme heat or cold somewhere during the course of its travels can exhibit this type of fragility. Another possibility is that the machine that forms the cord tips was not venting properly when your kit was being manufactured. This can allow air bubbles into the material and cause weak spots. Either way, we'll send you out a new set of cords right away.
Our manufacturer has made some hidden improvements to the tips over the past year, and he's also being extremely careful with the air/material mix as well as humidity in the material when he's making them, so these new ones should do just great on even very heavy projects. We have considered making the cord tips metal, or having the internal part be metal, and I'd like to see something like this happen, because though the breakage is normally very rare, it's still NO fun when it happens!! Thanks for your input on this.
We'll get the new cords right in the mail to you. The post has gone for today, but these will be in tomorrow's. Many apologies again, and please let us know if you ever have other questions or feedback. Happier knitting ahead!
All the best,
Emily McKeon
Once that last post went up I realized that my blog was sadly lacking in photos. So, since we haven't taken any new pictures (that I still have), I dug up a photo of the very first thing I ever made out of yarn. Of course it is crochet (how many people knew I learned that before knitting?) and it is Red H***t, but it was before I knew any better. Plus it went to a dear friend of mine who likes to machine wash things to death so I'd probably still use an acrylic yarn to make her a blanket today (just not that acrylic). She and her husband use it to cover and frightening chair they own from the late 60's/early 70's that is in no possible way ever going to be "retro."
Note: I think that yarn is excellent when used for dog blankets that will be seriously abused so I don't completely hate the stuff.
Today I had a cable from my Denise needle set break. This is the second time this has happened to me. Both times, I was over half-way done with an afghan (so the project was getting heavy) when the black connector piece just snapped in half. I'm generally a huge fan of these needles but I'm beginning to wonder if anyone else has experienced this. Perhaps I need to keep my heavier projects on other needles from now on (even though I know the company will replace the cable asap and I own both of the super long cables that they make just for afghans).
Of course this happened at a knit group I was visiting in Santa Monica and anyone who heard the snap immediately started checking to see if they had a substitute needle that I could borrow. Fibery people are really wonderful sometimes. For all they knew I could have made off with their needle and never shown my face again (because you know that's just the sort of person I am).
It's been an exciting Saturday night in the van der Brien household but I have finally reached a point in unpacking where the place just looks messy as opposed to unpacked. We are very excited about this as it means that the floors can finally be cleaned (Marius has been living here with the fortress of boxes for just over a month -yuck!). Even the patio is beginning to look like a place where one might choose to spend an hour with a glass of wine.
There will be photos eventually although not of the NYC trip as I had been promising several posts back. It seems that our point and shoot digital camera is the major fatality of the move and I hadn't downloaded the photos yet. urgh! Cameras can be replaced, the photos cannot -the lost shots also include the lovely cake Susie baked for me.
The other fatality was the lid of a semi-high-end commercial (an oxymoron right?) yixing teapot that M got me several years ago as a Valentine's Day present. He, being the sweetheart that he is, said I could get any other pot I wanted to replace it (sadly it cannot be replaced as only a few were ever made). Where upon I pulled up the website that is selling the teapots of one of the craftsmen of factory 1.
Now this may not sound like much but there are only two "factories" that are recognized as producing authentic yixing teapots (factory 1 is the "original" and the other one is supervised by someone who spent most of his career at factory 1). This is where the masters work. The lowest rung on the ladder is craftsman. The teapot by one of these lowly craftsmen that I lust after sells for $425. As dear as M is, he did say that he meant one of the less authentic teapots.
Wanna see it?
Here's another one by the same guy.
So you see, it could be worse...
note to readers: Please don't go and buy the first pot (I know you're all running around with $400 burning a hole in your pocket!). It has been for sale on this site since I started collecting and I live with the pipe dream that some day I might actually be able to buy it. Of course, then I'd probably break it in a move and lose what little sanity I have left.
A true collector would scoff at this as people in Taiwan have been known to sell their homes to buy a one of a kind pot by a dead master. This would be the little sanity I still have that I mentioned above. House=higher priority than pretty clay teapots. See -that must count for some form of sanity.
I'm still sad though as the one that broke was one of my nicest yixing pots. Murphy's Law I suppose. It couldn't have been the machine made pot my mother got from some museum catalog not knowing anything about them other than the fact that I have a small collection, the one that, if I really loved it, could be replaced with a simple internet search (and Mom, if you're reading this, I REALLY appreciate the fact that you even thought of getting me one at all). No... it has to be the one that NO ONE on the planet can get for me again unless by some odd twist of fate I run into one of the few other people who bought one when they were made.
Okay, so I'm having a little pity party for myself here when I have a nearly equally fine and unbroken pot still in my collection.
Oh yes, poor me.
-although I have to wonder what it is about me, teapots, and moving. My brown betty and another mass produced teapot broke in the move from Chicago to Santa Barbara. I suppose they're beginning to sound like a bad thing for me to collect. Odd.
Okay our house is still a mess. I'm not going to upload photos of anything even located in the place as it is just depressing how many boxes still need to be unpacked after two weeks.
So, in lieu of anything about our life, I bring you Liza, our niece (Marius' niece to be precise). How cute is she?
And Cossett (my bil's dog) is the reason we would really like a whippet one day. She is great with Liza as you can tell from the photo. We've really missed Liza's first few years since they are in Kansas but we got super cheap plane tickets for Thanksgiving so we'll get to see her then. I guess people don't fly to Kansas for the holiday -perhaps they all vacate the state. It should be interesting...
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