Month: September 2005

After buying my new yarn, and prodded by plenty of recent stash-organization discussion in my knitting group, I finally bought a replacement for the Gap bag that’s been faithfully serving as a stash-holder since college.

I’m a big fan of this. I think my yarn is so pretty, and so it’s fun to see it every day. There’s also space for the extra fabric from quilting at the top, which makes me happy as I have rather a bit hanging around… 🙂

Motivated by finishing the first sock and Branching Out, I cast on for the sleeves for Bomber at knitting on Wednesday. I finished the first cuff at Eastside Stitchers, the second on the bus into Seattle on Thursday, and the rest in the car on the way down to Rainier for car-camping over the long weekend.

For less than a week’s worth of knitting, I’m happy. Also, I love the way that the Cascade Sierra is knitting up in stockinette. I don’t think that the ribs for the body were an ideal showcase for this yarn, but here the stitches are coming out so evenly and I can tell that this will have a great drape. It’s so satisfying to see it coming out this way.

I haven’t posted a picture of the mushrooms recently, and like everything else in our tank, they’ve been on a serious growth kick recently. We’re up to nine separate mushrooms, though there could easily be more hidden under the bigger ones.

I managed to get one photo taken before the ever-inquisitive clowns came over to see what the flashes were about. I gave up when the gramma showed up to stare down the camera. 🙂

Hopefully despite the intrusions you can still see their texture and luminosity — so neat.

Remember, way back in the day, when we brought home our little baby xenia, compared it to an ent, and were enchanted by the pulsing? Well, it’s grown a bit since. (The picture from the side shows the three big branches, the furthest left of which was too heavy for its own weight and collapsed against the back of the tank, where it has since attached and continued growing.)

Grown, in fact, to the point that hands at a time will get sucked up into the filter tube, and we have to go in and rescue them. It’s not very smart, despite being large. So, in an attempt to keep it from doing itself further harm, and cheered by the success of the yellow polyps, I took an exacto to the poor thing and cut off the most damaged part. After three days of looking truly miserable in the quarantine tank, we now have an energetic, pulsing mini-xenia sending up new hands like mad, waiting for a bit more healing to the damaged hands and then to head back to the fish store for resale. Or, if there are salt-water aquarists from the Seattle area who are interested in a silver-tipped xenia cutting (now or in the future) leave a comment and we’ll figure out a time to trade/sell. (We’d love zoos, ricordia, pretty mushrooms, or other interesting corals that don’t require halides.)

I’m eyeing the massive sprawl of xenia that’s left — it’s on borrowed time, especially where both the main body and the cutting responded so well.

I’ve been new-project-obsessive for the last week or two, mostly after seeing the surprisingly excellent Fall 2005 Vogue Knitting). Riding on the theory that the only way to get a song out of your head is to listen to it, and in an attempt to cut down on my yarn browsing online, I took the bus over to Weaving Works. I ended up with a bag full of Lamb’s Pride Bulky (#M-77 Blue Magic) for the green cabled sweater in the Color Theory section. I had a difficult time choosing a color, but this one kept looking so pretty all the way home so I’m happy with it. (Though it looks completely different in each new light, and generally much more purple/periwinkle than this photo.) The yarn definitely sheds (prolifically), but I’ve used Brown Sheep Cotton Fleece before and really liked it, and the price was right, so I’m giving it a shot. Any ideas for cutting down on the shedding once it’s done?

As for the sweater, I can’t start until I’ve weeded down a few more projects, but it’s definitely good incentive to knit faster. I don’t like the cropped look, so I’m going to do a second panel of the cables at the bottom of the body to match the bottom of the sleeves. I’m also a bit concerned that it will be *way* too wide, but I’ll have to sit down with a calculator and a gauge swatch before I decide whether to change it.

I also picked up a dark red sock yarn:

Clever me, I didn’t realize until I got home that I’d picked up the skein that they used to knit the store sample… I think I’ll have to go back and exchange it. Even with that nuisance, I love the yarn. The color is so vibrant and cozy, and the texture is very soft. Looks like the current (blasted) sock won’t be the last one. I wish I enjoyed knitting socks more, because sock yarn is so pretty.

I haven’t posted about our zoos in ages. They’re thriving.

Clockwise from the top-left:
The original zoos are still spreading, and the two colonies have nearly merged. I’d love to be able to get a frag of these, but I don’t know how to get them to grow on another rock from the vertical face. Unsolved problem for now.

The orange zoos (right next to the gramma’s cave, so he came out to see what I was up to when he saw the first flash) have grown a lot. They’ve spread from the original rock onto the supporting rocks on both sides, so we may end up with three colonies if we cut the connections when we move to the new tank.

Our green zoos are still in the quarantine tank, and looking healthy. They’ve lost a lot of the green that we saw in the store, but I’m holding out hope that the brilliant lime will return once we get them under the lights in the main tank.

The sunflower zoos are also spreading like crazy. They choked out all but one of the yellow polyps almost a month ago, and rather than lose the last one, I cut it off with an exacto blade and put it in the quarantine tank in a tupperware to try to get it to attach to a new rock. The poor thing curled up tightly and looked miserable for the first few days, but finally attached to a rock fragment. I’ve been feeding it every third night or so since, and it’s looking very healthy now. I took it out of the tupperware two weeks ago, since it seems firmly enough attached to handle the current. It’s budded off two more heads (you can see the three in the photograph below. Sorry it’s so blurry — the fine fringe makes it very hard for my camera to focus.) and the plan is to keep in in the quarantine tank until we can get a larger colony.