At A Loss For Words

Rose-Kim strikes again. I want to know where she finds this stuff.

@#$%^!!!!!!!

Five more yards. That's all I needed to finish Swallowtail. Sob.

I ordered another ball, but really, what will I do with the leftover 95 yards?

Bull's Eye!

This is one garment that shouldn't be worn during hunting season.

But if you just have to make it, buy the Fall issue of KnitScene.

Squid Knits!

I'd be afraid to wear one of these fetching outfits in Japan. Someone surely would try to serve me for dinner.

Cover Designer Loses the Plot!

The subtitle to this book is 25 Flirtatious Designs That Flatter Your Figure. Um.

I don't know about you guys, but I don't want marshmallow arms and a protruding posterior with a tail wandering down the skirt.

Mind-boggling image selection filed under the category of "What Were They Thinking?"

Nuts to Knots

As I creep my way up the chart for the Black Widow Spider King, I have been encountering Too Many Knots in my balls of Gentle. The other day I was finding a knot about every other row. As I was almost at the end of the ball, I decided to start the second ball I brought with me. Now I am encountering knots every row.

I can understand one or two knots per ball, but this is becoming ridiculous. Not much I can do about it but grit my teeth, because first, I don't have any more black Gentle here. Second, Yarn Place's web site has been a mess for months. You can't order anything, even if you could find what you want amidst the weird slide show thing that now passes for a "store." And third, even if I could order more and have it shipped to Japan, it won't be the same dye lot.

If I continue to encounter more knots, I am afraid that I will be unrecommending this stuff for anything more than swatches.

The Dell Experience

Excuse me folks, for not posting much last week. I've been busy with a toasted hard drive, the replacement of which has added to my already ghastly Dell Experience with my 6400 piece of junk.

It all started a year ago, when I bought a hot, new dual-core with dynamic flibbermemory, fifty glurps of RAM, and a quad-sided DVD writer that produces four-dimensional recordings.

Five minutes after I turned on the machine, I was staring at something Windows users fondly refer to as the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

This screen is, not surprisingly, a fetching shade of blue and festooned with messages such as: Bad_Pool_Header in CXOOOF4 or Your Frinmplewass lorgfoo Caused a Really Awful Crash.

Looking up the error codes on the Web was fairly useless. I was often told to modify registry settings, but then warned that doing so would make the hard drive froth or cause the entire machine to be reduced to a glowing pile of laptop molecules.

Technical service kept replacing bits, and the thing worked fitfully through the summer. It had an erratic Autumn--two new motherboards and a video card. It barely escaped a hot bubblebath during a particularly trying Day of BSOD Wrath.

Alas, just when I was getting used to actually doing some work on the thing, I came into the office on Thursday morning to discover that the hard drive had ceased to function.

When the new drive arrived Friday, I plugged it in, turned on the machine, and watched a totally new BSOD appear: Unknown Hard Error. It was followed, after numerous reboots, by other, more cryptic messages, one of which was adorned with a festive red box.

I spent most of the weekend on the telephone with Dell tech service, where I discovered that the world's best pineapple is grown in the Philippines and the weather in Delhi was very nice this winter. What I did not discover was how to fix this lemon and MAKE IT WORK.

The fourth gentleman I spoke with finally agreed that the machine should be returned to the Computer Hospital where, I was assured, they would repair the dynamic flibbermemory, give me a penta-sided DVD writer that could record in five dimensions, and actually make the thing stop giving me BSODs.

Your guess is as good as mine. In the meantime, I have been too busy poking futilely at keys and dutifully writing down error messages to do any knitting, embroidery, or eating.

I hope next week will be better.

Non-Knitting Knitting

For those who bought the perfect yarn for a scarf, but don't want to actually knit it, you can go here and avoid all that needle-fiddling/knit/purl business.

Knit your own brain-sucking alien in ten minutes or less!

We all know that knitting gauge is defined as stitches per inch. If you go here, you can see knitting gauge at inches per stitch! Serious fiber horror, folks.

I especially enjoyed the orange pumpkinhead scarf/hat/brain-sucking alien, but I am sure you will find your own favorite, um, garment?

Heere Be Dragones Shawl Progress

Well, I can't say I have exactly set my needles on fire, but I am up to row 33. Row 31 is the first one with the weird Horizontal Stitch and Row 32 is the first purl row with Right Twists. This shawl was designed by Sharon Winsauer (aka Mistress of Knitting Pain) and you can read more details about it here.

I thought it might be instructive for anyone approaching this design with the idea of actually knitting it, to see my setup. I don't think I have anything more to add at this point. But I surely will keep you posted on my progress, if any.


Close-up view of workspace:

Knitting Purgatory

Right and left, everything seemed to be wrong-footed this week. First we have several reports from the Needle Morgue:

Name: KnitPicks #0
Age: Maybe two months
Cause of Death: Decordification

Name: Suzanne Ebony #4
Age: 1 day
Cause of Death: Broken spine

On a less cheery note, here is the latest on my WIPs.

First we have DH's Cheshire Cat alpaca/silk sweater in progress.

After finishing two cuffs, we decided they were too tight. Ribbit.

And two Great Adirondack Soxie socks:

I had gotten about halfway up the legs, but decided I hated the way the ribbing pattern looked and felt. Ribbit.

And here's the ratty headscarf (Peacock shawl). I have exactly two rows of this sucker left before I finish. If you see an excessive number of lifelines, it's because half the stitches seem to be leaping to their death when I am not looking. For the rest of the shawl, a lifeline every ten rows or so was just fine. I lifelined every one of the last ten rows after ripping back four times. Ribbet.

Little Post of Knitted Horrors (Just for Laura)

A response to this web site is beyond my ability to articulate. Perhaps a reader could get past the mental block produced by these, um, knitted items.

http://www.mohairknitter.com/Home.htm

You might get a clue from this sentence on the Home Page:

Hi everyone. I have just added willy warmers and a new shade in the monster sweaters.