Author: Susan

Kevin went to the fishstore and came back not only with the desired lights and venturi adapter for the maxijet, but also with two little soft corals that we’ve been keeping an eye out for: green star polyp and a gorgeous loose green mushroom that cost $3. The green star polyp has a purple mantle with green star-like hands that emerge (unlike the xenia, no pulsing…). (See the first picture here for another view — they’re beastly hard to photograph.) They’re supposed to be very fast growers, which concerns me a bit. We have rather a bit of that already…

The mushroom is amazing. The green is a copper green color, in stripes radiating outward. In between the green is a mix of deep red and blue. I wish I had a better camera. (The picture on the left is under regular light, the one on the right is under just the actinics.)

I glued him to a rock, slightly under an overhang. Hopefully, he’ll do as well as the still-multiplying red ones.

During the Eagles game (why are they letting McNabb play? I would have packed him off to his operation so that he can be healed in time for the post-season… they might not make it there without him, but I certainly also don’t see them making it there with him, given recent results.), I finally managed to start seaming the white sweater. I finished the inseam of one arm during the four hour game. *So* impressive. Later in the afternoon, I seamed the tops of the shoulders. They are going to have to be redone (they look awful. fake grafting is really hard on stair-stepped-edged ribbing) but I was at least able to see that there is hope that the thing might fit. The sleeves are definitely long-ish, but I think will turn out to be just under the wire for acceptable lengths.

Then, I finally got the the edging done on the pockets. Third time was the charm. After blocking, it was easier to see that the pickup should be seven stitches for every ten, and on the second attempt for that ratio I managed a little spoken mantra that got me through all of them without too much pain (knit one, two, skip three, knit four, five, skip six, knit seven, eight, skip nine, knit ten, one, two, etc…).

If I was to knit the sweater again (not likely, but just in case), I would definitely cast on 9 more stitches at the edge of the front part of the pockets for the seed stitch panel rather than going through the hassle of picking up those stitches at the end. It’s a good thing to keep in mind for trim in the future. Seed stitch looks pretty much the same horizontally and vertically, and besides, the button band is knit horizontally with the rest of the sweater — there was no reason to make this a second step. I’m wishing that I felt a bit more confident about picking up the stitches around the collar. I wonder if I had used short row shaping instead for the shoulders if I could have left all of those stitches live instead of having to pick them up on a diagonal now…

While I’m waiting for the white ribbed sweater to finish itself (particularly that seed-stitch collar!), I’ve been knitting away on the cabled cardigan from Vogue Knitting. I defied tradition and did the sleeves first, mostly because I plan to add the cabled panel on the sleeves to the bottom of the sweater (no cropped sweaters here!) and wanted to see how long it would be.

The reward of the efforts? Two lovely sleeves, blocking. Bulky yarn knits so fast, I love it. The yarn calls for #10.5 needles, and all I had were #10’s, so the fabric is a bit denser than intended. I think it will be lovely and warm, not suppressive, but it is still going through my yarn faster than I anticipated. The sleeves ate up three balls. I found an extra in my dye lot (#084), but that means that I still only have 4 balls to do the back and both fronts. This is going to either be a tight squeeze or a dismal failure — the jury’s still out.

Also, does anyone have recommendations on what to use to seam up the sides? It seems like the bulky yarn would make a terrible seam. I’ve heard of using dental floss, but that seems odd to me. Any advice??

(note: because this got lengthy, a lot of the pictures are tiny. As usual, clicking on them brings up a bigger version.)

Last weekend was a very exciting one for the fish tank. First we went to the PSAS frag swap, which turned out to be really fun. The host had amazing corals all fragged out, and told us (to our surprise and skepticism) that our 4.8 watts/gallon of light was sufficient for some of his SPS corals. He was growing several under comparable light, and then said that the others that he had under his halides were actually bleached because the light was too bright.

So now, we have 6 new corals. Three went straight into the tank because they needed to be superglued onto rocks. The flat two (orange and yellow) are Montipora Capricornis, which are now only about 3/4″x1-1/2″, but which ultimately will grow into layers of plates or spiraled cones. These guys are supposed to be pretty neutral and benign corals, which is good after all of the stinging and chemical-producing ones we have in there now (torch coral, polyps, and zoos, all of which can kill each other and make humans sick if provoked or placed too near to each other).

The blue one is a bit of a mystery to me right now. I think it’s an acropora (staghorn?), and the color is amazing — a pretty baby blue. My camera’s flash picks up more of the turquoise. The brown bits are little mouths, and again more visible with the flash than in real life. Paul (the guy selling them) also showed us corals that looked like brown sticks with slight blue at the tips in another tank. Apparently the blue disappears under the bright metal halides. Nice for us! This will grow up branching like this one.

I love the new colors. Our tank until now was all orange and purple, so the blue and yellow both introduce an entirely new palette. It’s amazing.

Our other three are in the quarantine tank. The first is a silver pom-pom xenia. I think we fell for this one because the color (a silver-lavender) was so pretty and it looked like such a cute pulsing ball when compared to our current xenia. However, a week later and it’s already growing like a weed (see the picture on the right). You’d think we would have learned our lesson the first time. 🙂

The second is a leather. When it’s unhappy, all of its tentacles shrink in and it really does look like a wrinkled, leathery mass. But, when it’s happy, it sends all of them out to sway in the current. They’re translucent and it looks amazing.

The third is what I’ve tentatively identified as Montipora Digitata. When happy, it becomes covered with velvety mouths, when not, the mouths retract and leave a smooth brown surface. This one will also be superglued to a rock, but is in quarantine now because it also came with a colony of aiptasia (a nasty stinging brown anemone — small but quick-spreading). I cut off the base of the rock that the aiptasia was hosting on, and it’s been in the quarantine tank since. After looking unhappy for a few days, it’s coming back and we’re seeing some new growth.

After buying all of the corals, we had to head to the fish store for food, bulb replacements, etc. While we were there (for an hour and a half… We do enjoy our trips over. :-)), we finally found a yellow tang!! He’s just a baby (still has the paler yellow vertical stripes even), but has quite the personality and seems at home in the quarantine tank.

We had to take down the black backing on the tank because he kept trying to fight with his reflection. It took a solid half hour to figure out what was going on when Kevin and I got home from work — our first guess was stray electricity in the tank from a pump or heater due to the jerky way he was swimming. Now that the backing and enemy tang are gone, though, he’s all happy again. We’ve been feeding him Nori (seaweed, available in the supermarket for cheap!), which he likes, and he also goes racing after the Cyclop-eeze that we give the leather, which he *loves*. I’ve been trying to get a picture, but without much luck, as you can see above. He’s very fast, so I need the flash or he just comes out as a blur, but the flash scares him. I’ll wait a week and see if he’s gotten braver. 🙂

It’s blocking!

The shoulder caps turned out to be a pretty interesting operation, and my pattern adjustments only resemble the book diagram slightly. However, they seem to work for my adjusted sleeves and body, so no complaints. The sleeves are either going to be a “cool” bit too long, or a good two inches… Seaming will tell, but until then, I’m in denial. 🙂 I don’t want to rip them out now that they’re blocked and lovely. Once this dries and is all seamed, I have to pick up along the back of the collar and along the pockets for seed stitch borders. I tried already on the pockets and was having a hard time figuring out an appropriate number of stitches to pick up — I kept taking too many.

I know I’ve been posting way too much about the zoos recently, but this will be the last one for a while. I moved the green zoos into the main tank, and they look awesome under the actinics. It picks up the bright (fluorescent, really) yellow, and looks just lovely.

But then, the lights switch into twilight mode (actinics only), and they are mesmerizing. The have six concentric rings of colour: a light yellow center, an orange smudge, deep teal, periwinkle/violet, dark brown, then fluorescent yellow. My camera doesn’t pick it up without the flash, but I’ll keep trying and in the meantime you can squint at this one:

Most of my Birthday gift money this year seems to be going to yarn. It’s so fun. 🙂 I found some Cascade 220 superwash on sale for 25% off, and so it will become the purple cabled sweater from the Fall 2005 Vogue Knitting.

Yet again, I’m not a fan of the cropped look (or the makeup, for that matter :-P), so I’m going to see about extending the length a bit. A lot of what I liked about the sweater was the color, and so to find a superwash version on sale is exciting. 🙂

The packaging was brilliant. Apparently LittleKnits had a few days delay in shipping it so they bumped it up to priority (always cool and appreciated), and then it came with a nice letter and FREE little bobbles of pretty yarn samples. What a smart way of distinguishing yourself.

After cutting the orange zoos to separate the spreading ones from the original rock, Kevin and I realized that the idea of letting them spread in patches around the tank has a lot of merit. I love our two new little colonies that frame the gramma’s cave. Such brilliance.

(You can also see the yellow polyps — three and counting — in the foreground. I moved them into the main tank last week. The first few days were kind of rocky because crabs kept knocking them over, but they’re in a more stable position now and looking happy.)

So now here’s a truly mediocre daylit photo of the new Zoo Exchange Program. We’ll hopefully get a few more colonies of the orange guys and then we can sell or preferably trade the original rock.

Such fun!

Major sweater progress. They actually finally look like sleeves, instead of, as Kevin so kindly noted, like stumps.

I have about another two or three inches until I start the cap and I’m still on the first ball of yarn for each sleeve. (Isn’t Cascade Sierra great?) I’m anticipating that working with the pattern once I get to the shoulder decreases will be another battle. The pattern calls for Rowan Denim, which was designed to shrink, but Sierra shouldn’t and trying to compensate for that has been difficult. I can’t find any notes on the anticipated shrinkage percentage for the Denim — some sites say 5%, some say 20%, which is too big a discrepancy to be helpful. I’m going to try to wing some sweater math, so if anyone has good references for calculating the decreases and wanted to send them my way, I’d be grateful. 🙂

I can tell my brain is ready to be finished with this. I keep waking up from dreams where I’m sewing up the sides. 🙂

There’s been a lot of action on the fish front. Kevin has been wrestling all of the pvc from the swirling mess at left to the amazing customized loveliness at right.

That’s meant that we’re getting closer to moving everyone over to our new set up. We should be able to turn on the circulation at the end of the week, once the silicone dries completely. We’re both very concerned about the sand that we have in there now — it’s very swirly. We chose the finest grain, aware that some flying-about came with the territory, but the ensuing blizzard has exceeded expectations. Hopefully (though neither of us are holding our breath) it will be wild for a day or two with the extra current, but then settle for good. However, after over a month of attempted-settling, it still turns into a day-long sandstorm any time we add water or move the pumps. Neither of us would be comfortable putting any of our guys (except perhaps the ever-breeding snails) in there now — it’s too murky. It would be like breathing wet cement.