Here's a sad attempt to make a post before yet another month goes by without one. I've thought of many a possible blog post over the last little while, but failed to make anything of those thought. And so, a post in bullet points.
- I moved, into a place I bought, and then did some renovations on, and so it was a super crazy end of summer into the start of the new academic year. Because I actually moved in five days before classes started.
- My yarn now lives happily in a bookcase, and seems to have multiplied while it was hanging out in storage, or moving from Chicago back here.
- Yes, even the bag at the top is filled with yarn (that's the KnitPicks Palette, ready to turn into Venezia, whenever I get up the gumption to tackle that), and that bin in the bottom is filled with scraps and leftovers. And even though I've got multiple sweaters' worth of yarn in there, yesterday I had to add another bunch, because I went to Romni Wools to buy something very specific (which I did!) and stupidly went into the sale basement and saw 12 skeins of luscious Jo Sharp Silkroad DK in a... I guess I'd call it a celery-colored tweed. And it jumped into my arms, and there we go.
- The start of the school year has been crazy, because I'm teaching a new class--a co-taught one, for the first time ever, which turns out to be both very interesting and more work than you'd think--and there's been a lot of hullabaloo on campus about issues that interest and concern me.
- Despite that, I have knitted. I did indeed frog and reknit the skirt I last posted about, this time removing all the pink (well, there are traces of it, but essentially removing it). I am MUCH HAPPIER with the result.
- Here it is, slightly over-exposed, after blocking but before I frogged and reknit the waistband. It added too much bulk, and no one actually needs extra bulk around the waist, right? So I pulled it out, picked up fewer stitches, and then knit it in straight stockinette for an inch and a half, folded it over and sewed it into a tube, inserting elastic before finishing that sewing.
- And here's what it looks like on, in a kind of mediocre picture taken with my office computer. Except I've just realized that it should be mirror flipped. Eh, whatever. I LIKE IT. It's not exactly any of the dimensions of the pattern--I just knit until it seemed long and wide enough. And I used MUCH smaller needles than called for, because I wanted a firmer fabric. This was a very good idea, because it still definitely requires a slip.
- I also learned that one should not wear a skirt knitted out of feltable wool while riding one's bicycle, if said bicycle has a rough spot on its seat from where a squirrel chewed on it while it was living on the deck for a couple of years, because if one does, one ends up with a slightly felted area on said skirt.
- I knit a couple of pairs of socks, but am showing neither yet, because the prettier pair is in the laundry and deserve to have a picture taken while my feet are modeling them, because, again, they're pretty.
- The pretty pair were (was?) my TIFF2010 knitting. I saw eight movies this year, despite the fact that I WAS STARTING CLASSES AND MOVING INTO A NEW PLACE AND IT WAS INSANE. I only saw eight because I took people to see two of them. The eight movies were, in approximate order of how much I liked them:
- The Poll Diaries (aka The Summer of My Estonian Anarchist)
- Aftershock (aka Sophie's Choice in China, but with an earthquake, and generally better outcomes)
- In a Better World (aka bullies suck, and produce more bullies)
- Home for Christmas (aka they celebrate Christmas in Norway--plus, there are immigrants there!)
- How I Ended This Summer (aka two guys at an Arctic weather station, and one of them has seen too many horror movies)
- Outside the Law (aka every mafia movie you've ever seen, tied in with Algerian independence and French bastardry)
- Mama Gogo (aka they drink a lot in Iceland)
- The Strange Case of Angelica (aka the movie that had one exciting moment: wondering whether a cat was going to jump at a bird. It didn't.)
- I've been trying to deal with the massive number of leftovers from various projects, especially socks, by starting a blanket made of many scraps. I'm basically doing a giant garter stitch square, made by casting on two stitches and then increasing one at the start of each row. Eventually I'll decide it's wide enough and start decreasing at the start of each row, but I'm not there yet. I'm knitting with three strands of sock yarn at a time, on 10.5 needles. It's... interesting.
- See?