I'll just have to be more descriptive...

I saw Charlie and The Chocolate Factory on Friday, and I really liked it. Everyone keeps making comparisons between Johnny Depp (as Willy Wonka) and Michael Jackson, and I see what folks are saying, but the entire time I was watching all I could think of was Francis McDormand in Fargo... We had a fun night, though, it was a friend's birthday and we went to a Turkish restaurant where we were treated to an impromptu amateur belly dance performance by the middle-aged mustachioed owner of the restaurant, some of the waitresses, and some excited diners (including two members of our party) .
Scareport left yesterday for Japan, with my yarn requests in hand, as well as our digital camera, so there might be a dearth of photos in the next few days... I might bust out the old webcam, but I might as well draw, with my left hand, a picture of whatever it is I'm trying to show you. I just knitted an i-pod cover in cotton for a friend who's birthday is coming up very soon, I'm not even sure if it will fit since I don't have an I-pod myself. We'll see.
I just found a preview of the new Rowan stuff... Check it out here. Scroll down for #38.
So, that's about it for now...

Save a few quid, burn your house down

Here are the charred remains of my toaster. I was very excited about having some toasted pita, as I often do without conflagration, and not even considering the possibility of ignition when I pushed the lever down and wander off to the computer to check email whilst waiting for my bread to pop. I was so secure in my pita warming ability that when I smelled smoke, and then turned and saw my kitchen filling up with smoke, the last place I looked was the toaster. It didn't take too long for me to notice it though, because there were orange flames licking up from it. First I freaked out a little and cursed myself for not having a fire-extinguished. Then my fire-safety training (yeah,I was head fire marshall in my student housing first year.. not by choice, but I did get to wear a kicky hi-visibility vest during fire drills), and I doused the toaster in baking soda, then put it outside. You would not believe the amount of smoke produced by a kamikaze toaster, if I were a more dedicated blogger I would have photos of that too, but I was more interested in getting it out of my house. So, now I have no toaster and it stinks in my house of plastic and pita smoke. Please let this be a cautionary tale to anyone who thinks that the £5 toaster is a good bargain.

Before all of the toaster trauma, specifically yesterday, myself and Stitchdrop went to get our ears pierced. She had been thinking about it for a while, and I told her if she went that I would go too and get just my right ear pierced. I've had my ears pierced several times, and for some reason, the right one always heals up and won't take an earring after a while, but I figured if there's piercing to be had, I'm in. We of course then went to the yarn shop around the corner, and saw that it has just expanded it's yarn section. Unfortunately, it was still disappointing, and the folks that work there are always mean, so we walked away empty handed. I have just won some Rowan handknit cotton on E-bay a few days ago anyway, and it got here this morning, so there is new yarn in the house, anyway. It's light blue and pink, for the edging of the anthropomorphic cardi. Speaking of, I finished the back of said cardi last night, and you can see it here, reclining on the curtains that came off the wall when I was trying to open the window to throw the toaster out.

August Eat Locally Challenge

I just read the post over at Knitting Notes, and I've been inspired to join up to the August Eat Locally Challenge. There's a great market here in Cambridge, and I do quite often use it in the summer time, just not as much as I should. There's even a weekly vegetable delivery service that I might look into. Anyway, if you're interested, have a look here. Can't go wrong with helping your local economy and the evironment!

Ring it up, dude.

I've decided to start over with the sock. I won't post a photo, because it's too bad. I was in denial for a while, but have come to the conclusion that the best thing would be to put it out of it's misery. I mean, all of the parts of it that make it a sock rather than a cool stripy tube are not ideal.. The toe is not wide enough, the heel is a bit wonky, and I've got a bit of a ladder where the stitches changes needles. The hardest part was admitting I had a problem. The rest will be therapeutic.
I did made some progress on the Anthropomorphic cardi, I'm still trying to find some cotton yarn for the edging, but the back is coming along. I gave the new Addis a spin as well, and I can see what everyone goes on about. I can imagine they would be much better for wool than for cotton, but I'm enjoying using them.
In other news, I've just 'applied' for the knitters in Europe ring, you can see the button below. I've also decided that I should buy myself a laptop, so if anyone knows where I can get a VERY cheap one, let me know.

another button

Secret Knitting Surprises

While you weren't looking I knit a mini-sweater. Not the famous Glampyre mini-sweater, but an actual miniature sweater. I told a friend of mine that I would make him a jumper once he got his PhD, and that it would be ready for him by his birthday... Well, his birthday was a few weeks ago, and, as you have probably guessed, I have not even bought the yarn for his jumper. So, I made him this one, so I can be cheeky. Right now it's keeping my nail polish remover warm, but I plan to wrap it around a small bottle of gin when I give it to him, because we all know that it's a tragedy to let one's gin get cold. The specifics are : Knit with 5mm needles in Rowan Kid Classic, can't remember the colour names, but the main sweater was knit in a light blue with a little collar picked up in navy, as well as a freehand 'J' done in nave duplicate stitch. Good fun to knit.
I'm making progress up the leg of the sock, but it's so boring (and hard to photograph), that you'll just have to take my word for it.

Nail polish remover gets cold, too.

For those of you who are wondering the outcome of the Butterfly Egg Experiment, your update is here. A few days ago, the little caterpillars hatched, and then made short work of everything green that was inside the jar. I have been supplying them with more leaves of rocket, and they have been munching away. And pooping a lot. It's starting to stink inside the jar, I'm thinking of relocating them to a bigger honey jar that has just been made available. The photo shows about 25 of them, and all together, I say there are about 3 times that. Imagine all the butterflies!

They grow up so fast.

I've finally fallen under the spell of the Addi Turbo. I found myself a cheap pair in my most often used size (4mm) on Ebay. I have yet to try them, and I'm a bit afraid to. If they're all they're cracked up to be, I don't want to feel like I should replace my current needle collection. I love the way they look like surgical instruments. They have a certain aura that seems to imply that whatever I knit with them will be done with precise importance.

Resistance is futile.

Salina finally puts out

As promised, over and over again, I've posted a photo of Salina, being modeled even. This was my attempt at a mock up of the photo of Salina in the Rowan Vintage Style pattern book... I'm not very happy with the photo, and the whole thing was very embarrassing, but I hope you can get an idea of the jumper from it anyway. Here are some specifics : Knit with Adriafil Point with 4mm needles, pattern as above, knit in the XS size, but with the larger gauge, was supposed to be more like the S size. It's a bit big, but should be fine when it gets colder and I want to wear something underneath it.
So, the yarn, right? I was really excited about the Adrialfil point because it's tweedy, and mostly merino with a bit of Angora. I thought that would be lovely for this vintage-style jumper, and I do quite like how it turned out, but I have some beef with the way it knits. It feels weird and squishy, kinda spongy and loose. It splits like a mother, and there were still bits of field in it, which would of been fine, and I would've just picked them out and kept my mouth shut, but because of the consistency of it, when I tried to pull the bits outs , the plies would rip up. So,I can't say I would recommend this yarn unless you are willing to overlook the less than ideal knitting experience for it's nicer qualities (including the very low price).
There you have it, and here she is. Be gentle.

Taking advantage of the scaffolding

Since I was already outside and the sun was shining, I decided to take a photo of the progress on my Anthropomorhic cardi. I spent hours and hours on E-bay and scouring online stores looking for some cotton yarn I need for the edging I plan on making. See, the yarn I'm using now was bought by Scareport when he went on a trip to Florence with his mom, and I put in a specific order for some Filatura di Crosa cotton yarn in all of the colours I wanted for this cardi. None of the shops he went to had what I wanted, but he went to really great shop that had loads of really inexpensive stuff, and he bought me loads there, including the chartreuse that I wanted, and then a lot of random (but very cool) other bits. He wasn't able to find the other colours (a soft yellow, a dusky rose, a deep turquoise, light blue, terracotta, and lilac) I had requested there, though, so I'll need to find some replacements before I finish the cardigan (not that there's any fear of that happening too soon). Too bad they don't sell Sugar n' Cream in this country, that would be perfect! Anyway, photo.

Why does it kinda seem to be floating?

Hopes= Dashed

So after a somewhat tipsy conversation concerning my plans to harvest the caterpillars for silk with Stitchdrop, I was very embarrassed to be reminded that silkworms make silk, not caterpillars. Awww. I still took all the leaves that had been impregnated and put them in a jar so we'll see if I can at least get a caterpillar army to do my bidding. Speaking of leaves, and harvests (you'd think it was autumn around here...), I actually had some of the salad that I grew myself for dinner last night and the night before. I was a bit worried the whole time that I overlooked a butterfly egged leaf, but even if I did, the salad was quite nice. I'm just waiting to see now how well it recovers from it's trim.
In knitting news, I've finally decided to pay a bit more attention to my sock, and am just at the heel. My anthropomorphic cardi is coming along nicely too, expect photos to come. Also, whilst trolling about on the internet, I found this photo (see below) from the upcoming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film. How cool is his fair-isle jumper!?!? I'm hoping there will be a pattern out soon, or maybe I'll make one up myself.

Cool jumper, Chaz.

The Birds and the Butterflies

My first attempt at 'designing' my own sweater seems to be coming along okay. I guess it will be hard to know how successful I am until the whole thing is finished and wearable, but at the moment, I'm confident. I had fun busting out the calculator and writing down the pattern in knitspeak, it reminds me of the programming classes I took in undergrad. If you can't tell from the photo, the pattern is a combination of moss stitch, openwork, and cables. The cotton is fairly heavy, and a bit twine-y, but it is softening up as I knit it. I'm sure the observant among you have noticed that almost everything I have knit is green, and I can't really explain it. I usually tend to wear more red, light blue, pink, etc, and I do have a few green articles of clothing, but something about green yarn calls to me. I'm making a concerted effort (after this project of course) to expand my colour palette.

An experiment

Openwork extravaganza!

Now, for my gardening update. Ye Olde Salad Trough is kicking major salad butt. I'm thinking of a harvest soon, if not just to get a bit more sunshine to the newer sprouts. I'm so excited that my planting endeavours have yielded something aside from disappointment. As I was photographing the trough this morning, I noticed a visitor, who I thought at first was just checking out my exciting salad jungle, but then realised he (or, um, she) was making herself quite at home. If you look at the close up you can see the eggs! as they are being laid. I was thinking if it's a butterfly rather than a moth (I can't really tell), that I could leave the leaves (haha) with the eggs and let them become caterpillars, and then have a silk factory!

Almost ready for the slaughter

Making babies.

Happy knitting content

This post will be short to counter the novel I wrote last time. I finally finished Salina, and sadly no one is around to take a photo of me modeling it. I started on a cardigan of my own design (the Anthropologie knock-off) this evening, and have made embarrassingly little progress on my sock. If anyone has any good pattern suggestions for a lacey wrap-around sweater (cache-coeur-type deal) for my Kid silk haze, they would be much appreciated. There will be some exciting photos to come soon, I'm sure.

Whoa.

It's been a very eventful few days. This will be quite long, so get comfortable. I don't really know where to start, so I guess I'll just go chronologically.

Part I - The trip to Edinburgh and the Demonstrations/Concert

I set off for Edinburgh Tuesday night from London. I'm not sure how many people took advantage of the megabus offer, but there were at least a dozen double-decker buses completely full of people. These were not coaches in the sense of like a big National express coach where you have room to breathe. These were buses that are usually used to transport people for short journeys within a city, so there's barely enough room to open a magazine. So, we set off at about 11:30pm and I tried to settle in and deal with the fact that I wouldn't be unable to uncross my legs for the next 12 hours.
As we were traveling along, we saw one of the buses of the Megabus fleet pass us, and it was almost entirely empty, needless to say, when we stopped at a rest area, myself and the three people I met and made friends with found that bus, and relocated. We were then able to strech out and had 4 seats to each person, and I actually slept quite well.
We arrived in Edinburgh at about 11 in the morning to reports of all of the protests going on around Gleneagles. Apparently, protesters were lying down on the train tracks, and trying to block the roads and trains into Auchterarder. Now, as I said before I was just in Edinburgh for the demonstrations, but the super nice people that I had met had an extra ticket to the Live 8 concert, and they gave it to me. So I set off into town, and as I got off our bus, noticed there was a large media crew at the bus in front of us. As I looked in, I saw that the reason, Bob Geldof had gone into the bus to talk with the passengers. This was my first Sir Bob sighting of the day. I walked into town to get some breakfast, but saw another gathering of people around a hotel right next to the train station, and waited there for a minute to see Mr. Geldolf leaving the hotel to go to Gleneages. As he was leaving, the demonstrators were turning onto Prince's Street, and that's where I joined them. I was then updated to what was going on around Gleneagles, and that all of the coaches from Edinburgh were being stopped around Perth, if they were even allowed to leave Edinburgh in the first place. Eventually, some more coaches were allowed to leave Edinburgh, but no one was very optimistic that it would be worthwhile to get on them because we all believed they would be stopped on the way.
So, most everyone stayed in Edinburgh, and we walked up and down the length of Prince's Street, being stopped by the police about every 50 metres. They blocked us before we got to the Scottish parliament buildings, and we had to stay in a small area on the street for about 45 minutes. Someone had announced that London got the Olympics, and the mood was quite good, still. It started raining at this point, and continued for on and off for most of the day. The police then let us march back up Prince's street to about where we started, stopping us over and over again. We were finally completed stopped when we tried to turn up into the financial district. After stopping there for about an hour, everyone decided just to sit down. So, after about 30 minutes of everyone sitting, the police told everyone to get up. When some people refused, the policed started grabbing people to their feet, and dragging them across the street. Some of the protesters started yelling at the police and forming a human chain to keep the police from pushing them off the street. They brought in the police on horses and the riot squads from Manchester and London, and everything got a bit heated. I was standing back from the fracas, but still amongst the area occupied by demonstrators, and the mounted police started pressing us forward and trying to push us into the area where there was fighting. I have no idea why they were trying to get us to move into a fight. I won't go into it too much, but I do feel the police handled it very badly.
Anyway, at this point I left and went on the the concert. I had seats way up the the stands but was happy about it after being on my feet all day, and since it was covered at least I was out of the rain now. The concert started at about 7pm, and it was awesome. The crowd was jubilant, even with the rain and cold. The music was good, after a while I was getting quite anxious to see James Brown, and fearing that if the concert went on longer than was originally though I might miss my coach back to London. So, I sat there freezing and wet, but enjoying myself for most of the evening. James Brown was AMAZING, I left about halfway through his last song though to catch my coach. I think everyone at the concert left with a real sense of optimism about how the situation with poverty was going to improve.
Now, because of all of the traffic, protests, etc, the drivers weren't sure when we got off the bus in the morning where they were going to be picking us up. So I went to the place where they dropped us off, and then to several likely suspects, and couldn't find my coach at all. So I decided to try to catch a train to London, but got lost, and didn't make it to the train station until after 2am, and they were closed for the evening. I sat outside the rail station until it opened at 4am.

Part II - Trip back to London and the Bombings

I got a ticket for the first train back to London at 5.50am, and then waited in the relative warmth of the rail station. The lobby area looked like a refugee camp, people were everywhere, you had to step over them to get across the place, and they were giving out water to everyone. I got on the train, and luckily again, found a place where I could have 2 seats to myself (although most of the train was completely packed) and tried to sleep some more. I finally awoke around Peterborough when the train was getting too full for me to have 2 seats, and let someone have my spare.
As we left Peterborough, someone on the train had heard that there had been some explosions in London, but at that time they were blaming them on power surges. There were no announcements from the actual driver, etc to the people on the train yet, so this was all just information for phonecalls people were getting. The train continued on its way to the station at King's Cross. Finally the train was stopped, and the announcement was made that there had been some incidents in London, and we were waiting to hear whether we could continue on into the station. After being stopped for about 30 minutes just outside of London, they turned the train around, and took us all back north. Through conversations with other passengers, I found out that the explosions were due to bombs, and all sorts of speculation as to who and why were flying around through the train. When the train stopped at Peterborough, I got off, and got on a train back to Cambridge. I still didn't know the full extent of the damage.
When I finally got home to Cambridge, I found out all of what had happened. I didn't know what to think. So much had happened and I was so exhausted from lack of sleep and from walking and traveling so much. I of course realised how lucky I was to have missed my coach, as I would made it to London earlier than by the train I took, and would have had to travel to King's Cross via the Underground. I was frantically trying to respond to texts and phone calls from people who knew I was going to be in London, and try to text or phone people I know that live in London and make sure they were okay. Of course, loads of the lines were blocked, and I wasn't able to get through to a lot of people. I was of course, quite shook up, as were lots of people, but it really only hit me when I had a chance to stop for a second after I got home. I don't really know what to say. It's of course horrible and unnecessary. After feeling so positive about the way things were going with the G8, feeling like a good change was about to take place, and of course while London was still celebrating winning the Olympics, then all of these good things were instantly overshadowed by something so so bad. I just hope that everyone who reads this and your friend and family are okay.

I'm off

We're leaving tonight to head up to Edinburgh for the G8 rally. I'm a bit nervous due to the violence and unrest that was going on yesterday, but I'm hoping that most of the violent elements are under control now. We've already heard stories from folks in Edinburgh that have been told not to even leave their houses, and to board up their windows, but I think it's all being a bit sensationalised. We'll see. If it gets too heated we can hightail it out of the city centre and just come back when we need to return home. Anyway, I'll be sure to give an update once I return.
Oh yeah, I hope everyone who celebrates it had a good Fourth yesterday, it was as always a bit weird trying to celebrate American independence in the country that we fought to win it from. I've pretty much given up, in fact. There was other reason to celebrate, however, as Miss Stitchdrop (my partner in knit-crime) has triumphantly returned from her field work in sunny Cyprus. We had a nice meal out, and then back to her place for some champagne, etc. It's very nice to have her back, and maybe we can post some photos of some of her stuff soon.

Make Salina History

I'm STILL not completely finished with Salina! I did block all the pieces though, and start the finishing. After failing miserably at getting a nice looking backstich for the shoulder seams, I decided to give up and fake graft, which looks okay. I knitted the rest of the collar whilst watching Live 8, and cursing my lucky friends who actually got tickets. I started to set in the sleeves, as well, but go too tired and had to go to bed.
I had to do a lot of running around during the day before then, and I heard that Robert Sayle (Cambridge's John Lewis) was having a sale, so of course I went to see if maybe that included yarn. I wasn't really expecting there to be any good clearance yarn, and I was soo wrong. I had to gather up every ounce of restraint in my body to not buy the whole lot. They had some really lovely stuff, but I settled on what is pictured below, all Rowan. That includes : 5 balls of Kid Silk Haze, aka Knitters' crack, I'd like to make a very lacey cache-coeur or something similar; 3 balls of Biggy Print in a lovely oceanic blue colour-way that will be a scarf for Scareport that I promised him a long time ago; and 2 balls of Biggy Print in another really nice colour way consisting of deep lilacs, mauves and beiges, that I'm going to give to a friend who was coveting a scarf I made out of the same stuff last year. I'll give her the option of making the scarf itself or having me knit it up. It was all less than £30, and I'm very happy with it all.

The stash that Rowan built