Author: Susan

The sleeves for Rogue are finally finished!! (and by finished, I mean “no more knitting”, not “done”) I tried wet-blocking them, so here they are drying:


 

The different blocking options for wool mystify me. From this article, I kind of think you should wet block wool unless it has tons of cables, and then you should pin it out and spritz it. This may just be superstition and confusion on my part however. I have no idea.

Regardless, the sleeves are all laid out, smelling like wet wool, and working on drying. I also did the body & hood (no pix, it doesn’t look like anything new), and despite my initial fear that I’d greatly elongated it, everything’s looking good. The stitches are even, the issues are worked out, and I’m ready to sew it all together. Woohoo!

Well, the vinegar did the trick on the protein skimmer, and now it’s all shining and new… with one little problem. You’re supposed to run non-vinegar water through to rinse the thing out. So, we did.

(Quick protein skimmer background, before continuing the story: The way the thing works is it sucks in water through a big pipe, air from a little pipe, and churns them together with a motor to make very fine bubbles. All of the nasty things in your water stick to the bubbles, which rise up a tube to form foam. Then, every few days, you skim off the top few inches of foam, and thus all of the nastiness. Voila, clean tank.)

Our formerly foam-producing filter suddenly only spat out large bubbles. Kevin (aka, Mr. MIT Electrical Engineering degree) spent a long time playing with it, not wanting help, only to decide that somewhere along the way we must have lost a spacer and the bubble motor was now positioned too far forward to work. Sadness.

So, fast forward to tonight, when I was reading the fish book where it talks about filtration. It mentioned that protein skimmers can only be used in marine tanks because there isn’t enough surface tension in non-salt water to form the fine bubbles that make the contraption work. (Vinegar also provides this surface tension, apparently.) Mystery solved! And I found it! 😛 It’s nice to come up with the answer sometimes.

You know how every now and then you have a brilliant idea, but lack some of the skills needed to execute it? Well, I have this sweater that my parents gave me for Christmas a few years ago that’s a great color, a great shape, and a great weight… except that it has poufy, ruffled shoulders. Due to these, I’ve never actually worn it. I’ve put it on several times meaning to, but they just got in my mind’s way. I’m not a fashion plate by any means (ask my sister…), but still, too much:


 

So, enter the brilliant idea:


 

I’ll just rip back, reshape the sleeve cap, and sew it all back together.

I’ll let you know how it goes. 😛

I took a jaunt over to JoAnn fabrics before the game to pick up three things: lining, black grommets, and a magnetic clasp, all for the booga bag. Apparently grommets only come in brass and silver (they have to exist somewhere, right?), and while dear JoAnn believes strongly in bamboo purse handles, she has no interest in magnetic clasps. *gusty sigh*

Luckily, I found a great cotton print for the bag. I’ll save pictures of that for when it’s all done. I had to get it cut, however, so I grabbed a number (#57), and stood back to wait. The next number they called was 89. It turned out that JoAnn Fabrics holds a two day 50% off sale the weekend before Halloween. A smarter girl would have cut her losses and gone home. Instead, I spent the next two hours watching frazzled, angry mothers scream at their children, threatening not to make a costume. Ouch. It really seems like the world is out of order when adults make children cry over their costumes. Supposed to be fun, anyone?

There were several bright spots: a great conversation with an octogenarian quilter, free time in an enormous craft store (paint! buttons! sparkly things!), and a huge collection of fat quarters, some of which found their way home with me:


 

When I get low on projects, these are slated to become a small bag. 🙂

This has been a difficult week for progress. My main purpose in life right now is supposed to be finding a job, which has been going slowly. I have quite the list of places to apply, but only one resume out. However, all of my non-main-purposes have been going well: the Red Sox (woohoo! I believe!), baking things out of the bananas in the kitchen, the fish tank, Rogue. So, I think I’m going to focus on the positives instead of whining about the negative. Here are the Rogue sleeves that I worked on during games 3-7:

 
Amazingly, the stitches are pretty uniform. I feel like they should go in waves of looser-to-tighter (“oh, they’re in extra innings again”) — the baseball & knitting equivalent of tree rings.

I’ve never knit two sleeves, mittens, etc on the same needle before. It makes counting so much easier!! Thanks to the many eastside stitchers that suggested it. The going feels slightly slower but I’m definitely a fan.

Right now the sleeves have a vicious curl at the bottom — luckily sewing should take care of the worst of it. 🙂

Also, I have to share the new trick I learned from Needles On Fire in her 10/13/04 “Progress Every Day” post: she wrote about how to make M1 either right or left slanting, and wow! I love it. You can see the bottom 4 increases on the right sides of the cabled triangle are *very* visible. The top four are so much neater. If I was feeling more type A this week, I would have torn down to my old increases and replaced them. As is, I’m just going to leave them in for contrast, so that I can appreciate how much I’ve learned. 😛

Last Monday night, we drove down to SeaTac to buy a 55 gallon tank, a stand, and a hood with lights and a heater from a guy who listed on Craigslist. We paid $200, which felt like a pretty good deal. Due to a certain baseball team, among other things, we hadn’t gotten around to cleaning everything off and testing the setup for leaks. After a suspenseful 14 innings tonight, we finally got the salt off of everything and started putting water in. Kevin manned the bucket:





I mostly manned the sponge. Ahh, the glory. 🙂 We were both having fun just watching the tank half full of water. Fish may be too much excitement for us. 🙂





We also finally found a way to clean out the protein filter. Apparently running it with a 3-1 water/vinegar mix is supposed to be safe and effective. Kevin got it all set up and running, and after admiring it for a while, we’ve left it to do its work overnight. We have a slight dilemma with the skimmer because it’s about an inch too tall to fit in the stand. For a while we were going to put it behind the tank, but it sits in a sump that needs about a foot of clearance. Now I suppose it will have to go next to, but I’m not happy about either the sight or sound of it… We’ll keep thinking — maybe we should just find a cabinet for it?

Short of my last-year’s apartment four blocks from Fenway, the west coast has definitely been the right place to watch the Red Sox-Yankees series. Late games!! Friday got rained out (massively disappointing), Saturday went to the wee hours, and last night, we didn’t start to make dinner until after 10:30. Everyone in Boston must be so sleepy!

There was an article in the Boston Globe around this time last year on the weird semi-religious tics that Red Sox fans develop this time of the season. Apparently, there was some group of people who jabbed each other with forks every time Damon came up to bat because it had happened once accidently right before he hit a home run. There were countless examples of what to say, what not to say, knocking on wood, who sat where, etc. I love it. The best part is that there’s no way to keep yourself from doing it. Kevin and I were bribing the Red Sox with drinks: they bat well when offered red jello shots, but crack up on blue. David Ortiz hit his game-winning run after I mixed buttery nipples using the last of the Boston-bought butterscotch schnapps in Kevin’s MIT martini glasses.

I’m just glad that they have at least one more game… I’m not ready for the season to be over.

Between church and the Red Sox game, Kevin and I headed over to a farm stand in Woodinville to go pick up pumpkins. Their pumpkin patch was great, the kettle corn smelled awesome, and even though it was too cold to stay for long, I’m finally feeling like it’s October.

Here’s a shot of our pumpkins, waiting to become jackolanterns. We’re taking our chances with pumpkin smashers and leaving them outside…


 

And here are our mini pumpkins and gourds. I like the green, yellow and orange one on the left the best, even if its stem DID fall off:


 

I finally finished the hood this morning! This is some sort of record for me: look how much I’ve gotten through in the last 3 weeks and one day. Certainly all of the baseball and debates have been helping, but I’m still pretty pleased. I obviously haven’t blocked yet, since this is curling all over the place (esp the shoulders), and I haven’t sewn the hem in place, but all of the ends are at least woven in. Yay for progress!





The best part of this is that I finally made myself attempt the kitchener stitch to bind together the cable at the top of the hood. My verdict on the stitch: not impossible, but certainly worth its reputation. I loved the result. I think grafting this way would be a breeze for stockinette now that I have the rhythm down, but figuring out how to make it flow with the cables was something of a trick. I ended up (after a bit of trial and error) just turning it inside out for the purl stitches and working from the inside. It took a bit of work to figure out where to make the turn to make it look right, but on the whole, I think it worked out well. You can only see the seam on two stitches, so i’m pretty happy. 🙂 Hopefully in the detailed hood shot, you won’t even be able to make it out at all!

Last night, we had one of our best sunsets yet. I was in the car driving to Diana‘s to help paint, and Kevin was in the car driving home from work, and we both thought it was stunning (especially the reflection off of Rainier! Wow!). Neither of us had the means to take a photo, though. Tonight’s sunset wasn’t spectacular, but it was still quite pretty. This is the view from a few houses up our street. Lake Washington and the Olympic Mountains. You can’t see it here, but my favourite part was watching all of the lights glittering on the hills across the lake. Washington is a beautiful state.