Back on the Horse

After spending about two solid weeks on a forest green, 3-skein-long, cartridge belt rib scarf, I am in a whirlwind of other patterns, none of which are forest green, 3-skeins-long, cartridge belt rib scarves. The scarf turned out quite nice, but I'm happy to set that pattern aside for a while.

Last night I finished the body of Astrodome, and it's pucker-iffic! That's what I get from not making a swatch for my first attempt at Fair Isle. I'm hoping the puck-itude blocks out, but if not, it's still a fun item. And now I know that even if I think I'm holding the stranded yarn loose enough, it turns out I can hold it even looser.

I got it in my head this morning that I need to do a pair of Fetchings for my friend who is leaving town to go to the East Coast to do research for a month. True, they don't have fingers so they won't help during the next snowstorm, but I'm hoping that they can help keep her hands warm while she's inside a cold office. This is my third pair, the first two having been made when I first began knitting. This pair is sure going a lot faster!

Oh! And on the masters project front, I met with the college writing tutor on Thursday, to strategize about how to organize massive amounts of far too much information. It took a while, but we came up with a plan for me to play with. I now have an Excel spreadsheet open on my desktop, keeping track of little chunks of information, One of my issues is that I've been trying to integrate all of the information together before it's ready to be integrated. Like a fine wine...not before its time.

Love, Downtown Seattle

I saw this yesterday during my afternoon commute, and managed to remember a camera today. Several minutes of scrambling to get the flash turned off, setting the camera to "capture fast image", and fiddling with a full CF card, et voila!

Not only is it a cool idea executed very well, but the surrounding office windows are darkened, thereby saving electricity!

Maybe Some Outside Pressure Will Help...

Here I am, reporting from sunny Seattle, Washington, hoping that a little public pressure will help me get my master's project done. I'm still not quite sure whether or not there should be an apostrophe in "master's" (or is it "masters"?), and I only really get concerned when it's going to some academic agency, or to people being interviewed, because I like to at least look smart.

To quote Bart Simpson, "s-m-r-t".

I'm a graduate student in Cognitive Studies at the University of Washington. I have a work history at interactive science museums, which present a pretty neat professional scene. I'm a dancer, an improviser, an ersatz chef, and, most recently, a rather avid knitter. So avid that I did a project on my own knitterly learning process as it relates to speech and the work of Lev Vygotsky (an educational psychologist so influential that some people insist he's from The Future...reading his work, I'm starting to agree) in a class last quarter. It's actually been fascinating looking at my growing yarny competence through academic eyes!

It's actually a little embarrassing to lay out all that I've made since starting mid-September. I've been on a bit of a "finishing frenzy" for the past day or so, as I can't really start up anything new until I've finished what's already on the needles. Which is a lot.

I've been having a devil of a time with one particular project, ripping it out multiple times, reknitting this and that, binding off more than once...for a four-year old. And her parents are the nicest, most non-judgemental people ever. So I don't know what my deal is. I'll scramble together some photos soon.

And now I really need to read an article!