Deconstructing

I woke up this morning to an intensely humid room. I go to sleep far before my other half (and occasionally wake up after my full 8 hours before he's gone to bed), and even in the summer, he closes the door. So I figured it was us breathing in a closed room. No, it's humid. In Colorado, that's always strange. I don't own an umbrella. I take pictures of leaves when I travel elsewhere because we don't have green here. So humid=weird.

One result of this is my desire to work on a shrug for Korea. I went without shrugs and such before. I wore short sleeves through summer when I was teaching and *gasp* tank tops when I wasn't. But I have a tattoo, and Korea doesn't like tattoos. In general. I was told once that tattoos can only be given by licensed doctors over there--it's considered a medical procedure. Anyways, tattoos are one thing. Korean-language tattoos, like the one on my shoulder, are probably another thing entirely. So the quest for comfortable covers for an intensely hot summer begins.

I made the Inamorata tank from Knitty last summer, but never quite finished it. Why, you ask?


I appear to be one of those women who has a little trouble figuring out what my actual size is. I am 5' 7". I am not wider than I am tall, especially around my torso. I'm not sure what I thought was going on when I made this. Didn't bother with buttons or straps. So now this will become several rewound balls. Then I'll figure out what the next step is. Any suggestions?

March 18 Goals

Almost every year, someone in my family gets me a day calender for Christmas. And almost every year, I've stopped pulling off the dates by February and instead use it for scratch paper whenever I need some. Which is why on May 28, I am just now removing March 18. At least it's for this year.

I have until I leave the country to write a thesis proposal and literature review for said thesis. This gives me, at this point, three months to write maybe twenty pages. 20. I once wrote about 65 pages in three weeks, and still managed to knit in my free-time. It's a little tough to get myself moving on this process, despite the fifteen or so books I need to read in order to write the lit. review. If you include source books, about thirty. So I make lists on the months-passed day calender sheets. In one week (ie, by next Saturday), I hope to:

• read Peter Pan
  
• read Through the Looking Glass
• read The Wizard of Oz
  
• acquire and read Ozma of Oz
• read at least three printed articles (but preferably everything printed)
• write lit. review stuff for all articles (re)read
• find articles about bildungsroman and women/girls (I was told very briefly in a class years ago that novels about girls cannot be considered a bildungsroman or coming-of-age/development novel. The intent of the genre is an escape from family and home. Girl's novels are about the submission to the family and home. Now I need to see if someone actually made this argument somewhere.)
• spin a tuft
• make at least 4 more coffee sleeves
• check with Korea about documents by the end of the week, if not heard back
• get boyfriend measured for tuxedo (for the wedding I made the shawl for)
• buy yarn for a yoga bag for one friend, and appropriately sized needles for various upcoming projects
• block and maybe actually complete one day Camden

So them's the plans. I will almost guaranteed add to the list, and have little expectation of finishing everything, but it gives me things to focus on. This may become a consistent listing if it seems to help.

Morning Routine

I had the urge to record my routine. I'm a big fan of routines. I'm a fairly early riser, even during the summer when I have no reason to be--I'm usually up by 8:30 every morning, whatever else has been going on. I get up, make my coffee (in the mug with half-naked mermaids on it), read several webcomics (in a very specific order), read through my blog reader, and head to League of Legends (LoL) to play a game or two. LoL is a tower defense game, which I am told is based on DotA (Defense of the Ancients, maybe?). Through all of that, when I'm not clicking furiously (usually when I'm dead, which means I have about a minute until I can continue playing) I am knitting.

The green yarn in the back is just some acrylic yarn I've been making coffee sleeves out of. I'll probably discuss those eventually. The blue is the shawl I'm making for my mom for her birthday. I'm kind of non-plussed about it right now. Not excited, not quite exasperated. Just getting it done. I'll show/explain it (and the annoyance it creates in my younger sister, perhaps) when it's finished.

Brief Crafts

Knitting is an often time-consuming process. Few projects take hours, some take days, but many take weeks if not months. Especially if you're as destractable as I can be, and start multiple other projects in the meantime.

So occasionally I'll pick up something that is not knitting and will therefore hopefully take an hour tops. I sketch sometimes, and will very likely scan in some of my favorites sometime soon.

I've made these little contact-paper decorations for various places around the house that I share with several boys (I should call them men, as they are all older than me, but not a one seems more mature.) The eyes watch T.V., the cyborg above reads our refrigerator poetry. The samurai below was made for a friend who has since moved out, and I realized that it didn't quite fit the guy who took his place so well. So this:
became this:
in about 20 minutes of cutting and tracing. All images originate from Deviant Art, but have gotten lost in the ether since I got them; the last, drawn by Octobig, can be found here. (The original images used as outlines are not mine--if they belong to you and you want me to give acknowledgement/remove, please let me know.)

THE Shawl

Initially, my desire to start sharing my knitting came from knitting something I was really proud of. Way back in...oh, say August of last year (I really don't remember when exactly,) Friend Em asked me to make her a shawl during the same dinner her fiance asked my boyfriend to be his best man. Given our level of friendship vs. her fiance's and my boyfriend's, this still seems oddly appropriate. I had never knit a shawl before.

I sent Em a variety of options, of which she chose Aeolian. The big one. For a wedding, and for the drape and whatnot, I started perusing silk yarn. There's the second first: I'd never used much besides acrylic and wool yarns. Also never used lace-weight anything. Oh, and never blocked. I hadn't realized previously that I followed a go-big-or-go-home philosophy to knitting. Claudia Hand Painted Yarns, Silk Lace, Shells on the Beach.

The single snag along the way was mice. Yes, mice. I very carefully stored the shawl anytime I wasn't actively working on it in a sealed plastic bag, in amongst my other yarns. And they chose this one bag to chew through and try to take away its contents for their home. Most luxurious mice on the block, I tell you. But they didn't get away with it and somehow managed not to cause a single break in the yarn. Yay!

Come January, the shawl was knitted up completely, but still didn't look like much. I got some blocking squares and pins from KnitPicks but didn't have the time or inclination to actually block until April. In the meantime, I made and blocked two other shawls for practice. It was another month practically before pictures could occur. I have a battery charger for my camera now.



Modifications: Skipped beading, and for the most part (read: after the first row) did 7-stitch nupps instead of 9-stitch nupps. Not bad for a first time, eh?

Come back end of July to see it in action.

First Post and the Explanation

I've been contemplating starting a "knitting" blog for awhile. I use scare quotes because I don't intend to just talk about knitting by any means. Given where my life is right now and the various changes that are coming up, now seemed like a good time to start recording so that, even if no one else reads this with any regularity, I'll hopefully pay more attention in the coming year. If only to put it here.

So Unfinished. This actually came to mind a month or so ago while I was playing around with Ravelry. I realized that I had twenty projects that were started, at 90%, and only about two that were completely, 100% done. Unfinished: Because my knitting doesn't ever quite get there. Unfinished because that's what my schooling is. I'm leaving to go back to South Korea while I work on my Masters Thesis. Unfinished because that's what my time in SK was, apparently. And because I am, as yet, unfinished in figuring out what I'm doing, where I'm going, and what comes next.

So for anyone who starts here to decide if it's worth it to keep reading, this will be, among other things, a record of my knitting, my experiences preparing to go back to South Korea and my time there (I'll be leaving in August, so will probably talk more about it late July), my rants about research and hoops to jump through towards writing a thesis, and probably just whatever comes to mind. I'll try to tag accordingly in case someone wants just knitting.