just a quickie

the knitty winter surprises are up and i really like this pattern. it's called "thermal" and it's based on longjohn top. laura made it. i had no idea she was studying linguistics.

progress report

even though school has started, i have managed to make some progress on stuff. the australian open has been facilitating my knitting.
here is the progress on the sienna cardigan, using knitpicks swish:



so far i have the back panel done and am working on the right front panel. here is a better look at the front panel (with no flash):



i had to make some adjustments to the way i was knitting this since swish shrinks and my gauge was a little off.

here is an update on the swallowtail shawl (do i have to reference it?!):



as for my austermann step socks, i am having gauge issues on the second sock. the gauge is smaller even though it's being knit with size 0 bamboo needles, just like the first one. the only difference, sock #2 is being knit with shorter DPNs. i think i need to just rip out sock #2 and start over.

that's about it for now. back to work.

what a day

it was pretty cold yesterday. here is what the national weather service has to say about yesterday's weather:

...THE BUFFALO CLIMATE SUMMARY FOR JANUARY 25 2007...

TEMPERATURE (F)
MAXIMUM: 18 at 1236 AM
MINIMUM: 5 at 1159 PM

BUT, that doesn't include the wind chill values. with wind chill, we had single digit temps and potentially negative (fahrenheit!) temps as well.
with "the coldest air of the season" here yesterday (as the NWS likes to say), i decided to drive to school. of course, my car decided to break down, but as i found out, it was under weird circumstances. at the end of the day, i came home with a new radiator, a fully serviced transmission and an oil change. cha-ching.

as for knitting, i am working on the swallowtail shawl with 2-ply shelridge farm laceweight that i got from the destash blog. it's taking a while, but i might post something if i can pin it down properly for it to even be remotely interesting.
i'm almost finished with the back of the sienna cardigan... just a bit more to go on the arm section and then i have to start shaping for the neck. i hope to be around and have enough light to photograph them both tomorrow.

baby stuff

i wanted to take a quick photo to document these guys before they go out to their recipient on saturday.



these are the better than booties baby socks. you can find the pattern on the website for interweave knits here. the bonnet is sort of my own creation, but it's heavily inspired by a pattern in a Bernat pattern book from 1957. the book number is 57. the book is quite cute, especially the cover where it says "the big book of hand knit fashions for small fry infants and toddlers". i love the use of 'small fry'.

the color on the yarn is hard to see since i used a flash. the sun has been in and out all day today. this is the hand-dyed yarn that steve and i made. here is a photo of the bonnet in action on a nalgene bottle.



i have to admit that i was inspired by hello yarn's bonnet for this pattern. you can see her bonnet here.

jazz at the bookstore

steve graciously accompanied me to the free in-store performance by ron sexsmith tonight. i'm not a big fan of the single from his new album, but "jazz at the bookstore" was really good (also on his new album). while at the live performance i spotted a woman knitting. i think she was part of ron's entourage because otherwise i thought it to be out of place to be knitting at a record store live performance thing (right?). she was knitting something blue with big needles. it sort of looked like part of a sweater. i wanted to ask her what she was knitting, but after the singing was over and ron was blowing out the candles on his birthday cake, steve wanted to leave the place.

no knitting photos today, but i finished some baby socks (using this lovely pattern, better than booties baby socks, by Ann Budd) and am working on a baby bonnet from a vintage bernat pattern book. i'm using the yarn that steve and i dyed (the green stuff).

salsipuedes

have you ever started doing something and then at some point during process realized that you were going nowhere. or perhaps you started something, say, you started knitting a sweater and you were all gung-ho about it and then months, maybe years later you thought, that was a bad idea, what was i thinking? that's what i thought last fall with the previous sweater i started knitting with the encore yarn. during my first year of grad school here, i started knitting this sweater. i had done at least the front and the back, but i was so fast and loose about it that i didn't count rows or any of that fancy stuff. i just kind of knit it and took some measurements. then it sat in my plastic storage tub for years until this fall when i thought - salsipuedes, get out if you can. so i ripped it out and here you go, a finished top-down raglan using this pattern by Pamela Costello.



the whole salsipuedes idea came from this book that i'm reading right now by Thomas Bowen called "Unknown Island: Seri Indians, Europeans, and San Esteban Island in the Gulf of California". the salsipuedes islands are some islands that spanish explorers/missionaries encountered while trying to explore the sea of cortez and they coined them as the salsipuedes islands. these islands are part of the midriff islands that have caused lots of problems for seafarers trying to navigate through that area. i've been reading all about it in this book.

yeah but no but yeah but...

although i am not terribly interested in discussions about what a certain social group's (say, for instance, british teenagers) vocabulary size is, i couldn't help but crack up about this post on languagelog. the post talks about vicky pollard, one of the character's from the tv show "little britain". my interpretation of the vicky pollard character was that matt lucas (the guy behind vicky) really was making fun of british youth for similar reasons that the BBC News made their claims and gripes about the small vocabulary size of british kids. liberman's post on languagelog puts this in perspective and his use of type/token plots of vicky's "vocabulary" and data from the 2003 Fisher corpus illustrate that vicky's problem is not her vocabulary.

toe-ups

i'm making some progress on my first toe-up socks. here is a picture:


i'm using austermann step and size US 0 knitting needles and am using Wendy's generic toe-up pattern. i really like working with this yarn and am very excited to wear these socks when they're finished.

i finished the top-down raglan yesterday and wore it out to a party. it's not really what i would call party clothes, but i wanted to wear my first real sweater. maybe a picture of that some other time.

happy new year!