SockTart

SockTart Episode Nine: More Generic Goodness!

Maire gets together with Lhiabelle (Sherri) and Sukuti (Morgan) for a few drinks, some turkey, and banishment of the husbeasts to the basement.  Join us for a real Canadian Kitchen-party, Socktart-style!
**Warning: We talk briefly, yet frankly, about hormones at one point, particularly regarding birth control**

On/Off the needles:

Morgan:

• Monkeymen for her husband Wargh, yarn from Dyelots in Eugene OR.
• Had problems with the Susanna pattern, couldn’t get it working with the BMFA Chapman Springs yarn
• Is also doing a pair of Monkeys
• Has cast on Luminiere with the Chapman Springs.

Maire:

• Done both Mummy socks from Super Sock Scarefest (Gets Sherri to model as the Mummy Socks attack her feet!)
• Not sure what the Sunstone is going to be.  Possibly Nevermore by Yarnyenta.  Needs to read the errata.  Had been thinking of the SKA Mystery Sock for September, but not sure.

Sherri:

• Gusset done on Sweetpea socks
• Muscari sock (by Suzi Anvin) casted on and ripped back.  Pride colourway didn’t work out well with it.
• Now going to be Pembrokeshire Pathways.

Random Chatter:

• We discover that none of us are continental knitters, and discuss the Yarn Harlot’s production-style knitting.  All of us are multi-generational knitters.
• We talk about how WoW interferes with our knitting progress
• How needle size throws off your gauge
• Having to think more than usual about knitting.
• The Yarn Harlot’s Production-style knitting
• Guilty pleasure movies & Christopher Walken. We’ve been told to check out the Chicken & Pears video on Youtube
• Warcrack and Evercrack are discussed
• We fondle yarn, particularly Noro Silk Garden Sock
• We discuss Noro in general.  Kureyon and Silk Garden sock in particular.
• We discuss spinning wheels & the proper pronounciation of ‘Louet’ (Canuckistani Grammar Lessons — Zed, Not Zee!)
• We go over how survival skills have changed into leisure activities.
• Sherri gushes over Eric at Cables & Lace.com’s dyeing work.
• Morgan will be sending Maire her alterations of the Monkeymen pattern that includes the purls.  Makes a more stretchy fabric for those with wider ankles & feet.
• We debate colour names and how sometimes Orange is really Deep Yellow.  What really IS Seafoam?

New Socks on the Block

We find & comment on a small handful of recently released/published sock patterns on Ravelry. Yum!!

We are operating without a computer at the moment!  And the Professor’s phone alarm goes off.

• Luminiere: (Maire can’t find this pattern quite yet, so will wait til Morgan finds it & gives her the link)
• Unravelling Ribs by Amy Tyszkiewicz: lovely pattern that travels all over the ankle
• Sherri gets us talking about Kristin Benecken & bavarian knitting
• We have some general discussion about the new Knitty
• Nevermore by YarnYenta (Heatherly Walker): Chart seems confusing, but the socks look beautiful. (Sherri renames Maire’s project as “Goldfinch” instead of “Nevermore”)

Credits:
- Intro clip from “8 BIT Junkie” by George Wood
- Outro clip: “The Table Near The Band” by Power Salad

Specifically for The Professor, and our usual rickroll target, B!

more music charts

(I know it’s generally not polite to rickroll your podcast listeners and/or blogreading friends, but c’mon…it was funny! Thanks to Rycrafty for finding GraphJam in the first place…)

You pretty well have to have a bit of background in World of Warcraft to understand this one.  I just had to link it.   Amazing what happens when the Quebecois give a treatise on PVP

Two words, sweetie:

Atkins Bento

Yep.  I’m trying to figure it out.  I need to start packing lunches and I need HELP!!!

Anyone else who does the Bento Thing and reads this is more than welcome to comment.  I have to keep up my studied aura of pretention, don’tchaknow

Happy Talk Like A Pirate Day!   May all your buckles be swashed, and your barnacles be scraped

In other news…I can’t believe that the Summer of Socks is almost over, and we’re just a couple of weeks away from Socktoberfest…where the heck does the time go?  And why does it feel like the Pembrokeshire Pathways Will. Not. End?  I feel like I’ve been knitting away at the foot for ages….yeesh!  I’m starting to worry about running out of yarn on this one….ook.

The Shamrock Elfines are doing a lot better.  I’m mish-mashing them with the Cabletini sock heels per Manda’s suggestion for toe-up-heel-flaps.  Good thing I read the directions….I can’t knit much more on the Elfines before I have to start in on the heel portion.  Instead of stopping an inch to an inch-and-a-half away from the heel, I need to stop 3 inches away.  So we’ll see how it goes.

Work time!  Say it again with me….YARRRRn!

Just a quick one, because I don’t want to lose the link…

I’d love to take part in this….but I just don’t have the time.  It’s too close to End Of Year, which means knitting projects out the wazoo.  I decided to “take it easy” this year…so I’m not going to want to go anywhere near something like this.

Grr!

Why couldn’t something like this have started in, oh, say…March? (sigh)

My SP11 Pal contacted me last week to let me know that my parcel was in the mail…wowzers! That didn’t take long…I’m still working on getting stuff together for the person I’m sending things to!

At any rate, all this arrived on Tuesday. I guess that the Mailman woke Robin up, because the package was waiting for me on the landing when I got home.

I descended on this package like a rabid hyena, let me tell you.

I didn’t have this book…and I had been drooling over it at our local Chapters last weekend (I put it aside in favour of one of the Yarn Harlot books that I hadn’t picked up yet). Now I’m glad I did! The yarn that my Pal has sent me (thank you!) is for making one of the projects in the book…the Candy Hearts on page 105. After looking through the book, Robin has told me that there is no way in hell that I am allowed to embroider “WoW” on them. I think he prefers the messages featured in the book (wink wink, nudge nudge).

He also really likes the Bob Dobbs sweater. Something tells me that I may be buying copious amounts of sweater wool sometime in the future. He’s already trying to get me off the sock kick…not that he’s complaining TOO hard. I just finished his Sideshow Husband Jaywalker socks

(This is true…I cast off the Sideshow Husband Jaywalkers. He proudly wore them to work last night. I’m going to have to tackle him this weekend so I can get pictures. In better light than my poor basement affords…)

We’ve gotten addicted to Katamari Damacy in the past couple of weeks.  It’s one heck of a video game….weird language pattern for the main character(s), and the fact you have to “roll up the world” in a ball is really funny.

Yes, I’m a nerd.  Sorta.  I found a crochet pattern that I’m going to have to buy.  It’s the little Prince from Katamari Damacy.   Of course, to actually MAKE it, I’m going to have to learn how to crochet, but that’s not the point.  The point is that I could make little Prince dolls.

It’s amazing the things we see on the net.

Got a few rounds done on the Monkey sock yesterday, and a few rows on the Persephone scarf.  Thinking of  writing out the Persephone pattern so that I can take it to work, but I’m not going to stress on it.  Still waiting for my order from Lime & Violet to get here.  I had picked up two skeins of yarn when Miss V updated the store.  I’m hoping that there’s just a little delay from customs, and that it’s  not a matter of the postman misdirecting our mail, or a neighbour deciding that they suddenly need wool.  I find the misdirection by the postman a more likely event, mainly because the guy’s a lazy arse.  We get mail for other folks all the time.  Yeesh.

In other news, have been eating mostly properly for the past few days, and it’s making a difference.  I’d been gaining and losing the same 5 pounds for the past two months, and it’s been driving me nuts.  I guess it could be worse… I could have ballooned back up to my highest weight.  At any rate, I’m on the way back down, and I hope to break the barrier that’s sorta sprung up at that 10 pound mark.  That is…I seem to hit a glass wall at every 10 pound mark.  It keeps me within a certain 10 pound range for a while, then allows me down to the next 10 pound range.  Maybe it’s just the way my body adjusts; I don’t rightly know.  I just know that the past 2 months have been pretty frustrating.

Of course, eating all that ice-cream to counteract the insane heat wave earlier this month didn’t help (grin).

We’re trying to strike a balance in our eating habits.  Cutting a lot of the junk carbs has really helped.  I have to admit that the goal of getting rid of the next 30 pounds is exciting.  That will put me at the weight I was when I first got to Calgary.  Another 10 pounds beyond that, and I’ll be the weight I maintained in college (of course, by “maintained” I mean “kept off by eating Smarties, fried rice, and orange-pineapple juice & walking everywhere because the trolleys moved slower than my own 2 feet!”).

Very exciting stuff.  Now time to get ready to go to work (pout)…don’t wanna!!!

I tell you…the nice part of waking up at 5am for a 7am shift?  You get to come home at 3:30pm.  The drawback?  You have to wake up at 5am.  ***THUD*** (sigh)

I keep forgetting that furniture is three-dimensional.  In the context that you can do more than just use it as intended.

Robin and I are currently working through a mutual frustration with our furniture, our storage, and our decorating style.  Right now it’s a mixture of hand-me-downs, junk, and assorted odds & ends that we’ve either picked up on the fly as needed, or brought into the house on our own.

We’re working on getting rid of the junk & clutter, but it’s taking some time.  In the meantime, I’m looking at different options for how to decorate with storage possibilities.

Everyone loves IKEA, right?  Well…IKEA is good for certain things.  Cheap, modernistic furniture?  Yeah.  Might not be at a cheap price, per se, but definitely not as expensive as many high-end shops.

At any rate…There are folks who don’t necessarily use IKEA as “intended”.  Okay, okay, yeah, walking through IKEA shows you that IKEA doesn’t even use their furniture as intended…but painting it, using it as a balcony hardwood floor, or turning it on its side & attaching legs?  Oh yeah.  Bookshelves are now sideboards, and a TV shelf plus a platform turns into a Captain’s Bed.

Head on over to IKEA Hacker or IKEAFANS and boggle

Obligatory knitting content: Hedera are cast off & grafted.  Whee, pretty!  Now there’s a pair of Monkeys on the go, in a vibrant pink Tofutsies sock yarn.  Yeee!  Cute! How many more exclamation points can I use??!!!!111 

Now…Robin has often mentioned to me that he feels he should have a hobby (other than WoW, urban poetry, or remarking on my miniscule yarn stash as “oh my god, it’s taking over the house!”)

Well.  I think I’ve found just the thing for him.  After all, earlier today he remarked to me that we should be saving up for a new digital camera that will actually take printable photos (as in: has enough pixels per inch that we can take the flash disc in to Black’s and actually have prints made).

Thing is…the person in the article…uhm…well….yeah.  That’s Robin.  Down to wanting to know if there is acid-lite paper.

I will not point out the fact that his Grandmother scrapbooks, and that we inherited a lovely book stuffed with family photos that was originally supposed to be all about his brother until Grandma realized that maybe Robin and his Significant Other might want a book too, particularly one that shows all the embarassing pictures of his youth that most grandmothers collect (and most young men wish they’d burned as soon as Grandma brought them over to the house to show Mum & Dad).

But yeah.  He has photos, I have some photos…we’d like to have more photos, particularly of our life together.  Scraptarding may just be in our future.

Oh!  Should really mention…The Evil Palace of Yarn Goodness got some shipments in this week…and so I dragged Robin down there today so that I could spend some money on my favourite brand of frivolity.  I came away with 4 skeins of Artyarns Supermerino (two of my own colour choice, two of Robin’s colour choice - the object being 2 pairs of socks) and some really cool Tofutsies in a cherry pink-and-white twist colour.

They’re also now carrying some of the much-needed tools of the knitter’s trade.  I walked away with a swift.  They practically had to pry the ball winder out of my arms.  Robin now claims to have ideas as to what to get me for Yule.

You don’t want to know what I’ve found to be the best substitution for a ball winder.  No.  I’m serious.  You really don’t.