Crafty Kim

Dashing through the day

When I'm writing papers for school, one of my best tricks to get over procrastination is called a Dash. I have a really hard time concentrating for long periods of time without breaks. Under a normal scenario, I decide to take a break and then realize a few hours later that I've been goofing off for a long time. When I use the Dash idea, I do 16 minutes of work and then get a 4 minute break. I have a little timer application that I like to use called FlexTime that reminds me when it's time to take a break and just as importantly when I need to get back in gear. The biggest benefit of this approach is that I'm giving myself permission to goof off in advance so I don't feel guilty for taking the breaks I've earned PLUS I've got a defined way to convince myself to get back to work. I know this might all seem a bit over the top, but seriously - I'm a Master Procrastinator. I need this kind of system.

The important thing is what I do with my 4 minute breaks, especially when I'm working from home like today: knit of course! The problem is that 4 minutes doesn't give you much time to make progress. I definitely couldn't work on, say, my icarus shawl. Knowing that I've got a lot of writing to do this week and next, I cast on for a sock yesterday.

I'm using the Tofutsies yarn that Tim got me back in May. Looks a bit odd on the skein but it knits up nicely. I've heard about people having problems with this yarn being splitty, but aside from the cast on that hasn't been a big problem for me. I've found some horrible tangles that took a while to undo though. It's nice yarn to work with though, very springy and pleasant to knit with. It makes a super stretchy fabric, stretchier than any sock yarn I've knit with before. I'm not sure exactly where this sock is headed - the colorway is a bit too variegated for anything fancy, but I am thinking about the Tidal Wave socks from SWTC. That sock has a plain stockinette foot, so I've got plenty of time to decide.

There were great discussions last night at guild about stash and about sock knitting. I'm clearly a n00b regarding my stash - I don't have a huge stash, although my yarn bookcase (pictures eventually, I promise) is starting to look a bit full. The sock knitting discussion revolved around the big questions: toe up vs top down and DPNs or circulars. It was really interesting to hear why people preferred specific sock knitting ways over others although I doubt anyone was converted one way or the other :)

Random smattering of knitting and other stuff

Reminder: The Nashville Knitting & Crochet Guild meeting is this Thursday at 6:30 pm at the West End Home for Ladies on Vanderbilt Place (right by the Vanderbilt police station, near the Vandy stadium). I'm mostly posting this so that I remember to go, but if you're in the Nashville area come on down!

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Random project that I finished right before I started my blog and never bothered to post about...

This is a baby blanket I made for my great-nephew Dillon, who was born in February.

The picture's not the best, but I believe I finished this at about 8 pm, took a couple of pictures, boxed it all up, and then ran to Fedex to get it shipped so it would get to Wisconsin before the baby shower :) As it was, I shipped it directly to where the shower was being held and paid extra for Saturday delivery. Waiting until the last minute to start a project? Yep.

This is knit out of alpaca (I think Cascade Baby Alpaca Chunky?). The pattern is a mash up between the Mod on Mod blanket in Yarnplay and log cabin blankets from Mason-Dixon Knitting. It's mainly a mash up because I fell in love with the Mod on Mod blanket but only flipped through the book at the bookstore before starting this, so I made a huge SWAG on how to put it together. I caved and finally bought Yarnplay a few months later, this is definitely not how the actual pattern works.

It's funny how my thoughts about my knitting projects have changed over time. Looking at this picture, I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out but I can also see what I'd do differently this time. I made all the squares separately and then seamed them together, which worked fine. If I were doing this now, I'd take the time to block each square before seaming. I'd also definitely use proper seaming techniques, because I think I probably used something along the lines of "whip stitch it all together and hope for the best" and I know how to actually seam things together now. I really liked the asymmetric squares within squares but I don't think the log cabin approach worked that well for getting consistent square sizes. And I'd chart out all the squares and shapes in advance to be sure I liked the color layout.

Of course, it was still a deliriously soft and yummy blanket. And non-knitters wouldn't know that it didn't turn out perfectly by the book. But, as Maggie Righetti says in Knitting in Plain English, "Good finishing is critical to the difference between fine handmade and just homemade articles." I'm not sure that I buy that handmade is all that much better than homemade, but I'm happy I'm finally improving my finishing skills.

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Last night at knit night, I tried to work on my icarus shawl since I'm still working on repeats of the "most boring lace knitting ever" chart (chart #1). I don't think I made any actual errors, but I gave up after one row. It was a combo of difficulty concentrating on the yarnovers and having difficulty seeing the thin yarn in the bad lighting at the coffee shop. I pulled out my ribby cardi (back) and made some decent progress on that. I pulled out the two fronts to check the number of rows in the ribbing and I was totally struck by how much softer Cascade 220 gets after a good wash. It's practically a different yarn.

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My passport application got sent off (expedited!) this week. Keep your fingers crossed for me that it gets here quickly.

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Oscar wants you to know that we're still climbing both sets of stairs on the hill by the capitol (and sometimes even the third set to go right up by the capitol building) and that he wishes we would move our house to the top of the hill by the capitol building. Not really because he wants to get out of walking up the stairs, but mainly because there are many many many squirrels there that need to understand that they should be worried that he's walking by them instead of just ignoring him. On the other hand, I wish we could move our house to the top of the hill so we could stop climbing the stupid stairs :)

Yesterday morning, we actually saw a car ON FIRE on our walk. Fortunately, the person inside and his 2-3 year old son got out safely and were uninjured. The fire trucks came very quickly. Not really the kind of thing I expect to see on our morning walk though.

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I'm not sure that there's any way to actually top a burning car, so that seems like enough random points for the day :)

FO Alert: We Call Them Pirates Hat (the grrrly version)

I feel like I've finally found my knitting niche - colorwork! It's so addictive and fun and challenging and interesting and I've got nothing but good things to say about it. Lace? Eh, could live with it, could live without it. Colorwork? Can't wait to do more.

The only real drawback is that it creates nice toasty warm finished objects that aren't the most practical things for Nashville. I mean, I can get them out during the 10 days in winter when it's below freezing (underestimating there, I know) but at some point I'm going to have enough hats, gloves, and scarves for every single cold day of the entire winter. I doubt there's any way it would ever be cold enough to wear a colorwork sweater here - I'd need to leave a window open or something :)

I guess all my Wisconsin relatives will be getting colorwork knitted presents from now on! This one though... this is for me. Ignore the expression on my face here, I think I was in the middle of complaining to Tim about how dumb I was to take pictures outside in my nice wool (cashmere lined!) hat when it was 95 degrees out.

Nothing but good things to say about this hat. I think the Koigu KPM was a good choice, it really showed off the color pattern. I chose to have the pink as the dominant color and it worked out well. I'm tempted to knit a swatch with black dominant just to see what happens. The Karabella Boise is too soft to even describe. Wonderful to work with, but even better to wear. (Although people at knit night might have noticed when I shouted out in anger when I found a splice in the middle of the $25 ball of yarn - geeeeez.)

Project stats:

Pattern: We Call Them Pirates from Hello Yarn (free pattern! Thanks to hello yarn for providing such a great fun pattern for free!)
Yarn:
Exterior - Koigu KPM in pink and black (100% merino wool)
Interior - Karabella Boise (50% merino wool, 50% cashmere)
Needles: Addi Natura Circular Needles Size #3, Clover DPNs Size #3
Started: 5/29/07
Finished: 6/2/07 (exterior), 6/10/07 (the whole thing)
Mods: Just using crazy yarns instead of the Dale of Norway recommended by the pattern
Will I make this again? For sure. Must explore new crazy color combos.

Here's the top of the hat:

If you look carefully, you can see my little mistakes in the vertical rib. Click on the picture to go to the flickr, where there are notes about them. I didn't make a single mistake in the skull pattern, only in the vertical pink/black stripes. Weirdest thing - I just forgot to do the pink stitch every now and then.

And finally, the inside:

I'm showing you this because:

1. I think stranded colorwork is really cool looking on the interior!


2. So you can see how I attached the lining to the exterior - using a single chain of crochet (GASP), it's in pink. I swear, it took me as long to do this single crochet chain as it took to knit the entire lining piece. Yikes, I really stink at crochet.

I think this would probably make a decent first stranded colorwork project, for anyone out there thinking about dipping into the fair isle-ish pool. The only thing that's a bit tricky is that I felt like the floats were a bit long in the main parts of the skull. Easily remedied by wrapping the strand but something someone new to colorwork would have to pick up. And for most people, the floats were probably just fine regardless. Color me a perfectionist.

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I got my invite to Ravelry on Sunday. All those good things people are saying on blogs about it? All true. There are definitely some beta type issues to work out, but it seems like they're making steady progress. Hang tight if you haven't gotten your invite yet! Trust me, the waiting was killing me too. My ID is kimz0519 if you want to add me as a friend! Kudos to Jess and Casey for putting this together.

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Did you see that the Summer Knitty is out? I wish I could find a bra in my (um... large-ish?) size that would work with the Coachella top. Anyone with a suggestion?

A mini restaurant review: Chappy's on Church

I was going back and forth over whether I should do a little review of Chappy's or not. I'm sure that there are people who love Chappy's. I'm not one of them.

When Chappy's first opened, I was thrilled. I drive past the restaurant every day on my way to and from school so I watched as they renovated the building and got ready to open. I was pretty irritated when they painted the exterior of the building a funky mustard color, because I really thought the original dark weathered brick exterior was quite pretty. Despite my dislike of some of their design choices (there's a backup on Church almost at exactly that spot every evening - I had a lot of time to think about it), I was enthusiastic - New Orlean's style food in Nashville! Inspiring starting over after the hurricane story! Seafood in our landlocked city! Then a few of our friends went on separate occasions and their responses were not just tepid, but actually really negative, including one friend who travels to New Orleans frequently for fun and is a huge fan of that style of food. That put us off trying Chappy's for a quite a while***.

When a group of my friends decided to go out to lunch and suggested Chappy's, I was hesitant but decided that surely the concerns others expressed earlier would have been addressed by this point. I'm not going to do a fully, minute by minute review but here are a couple of key points about my Chappy's experience:

• The butters they brought out to our table along with warm bread were yummy. Unfortunately, the bread wasn't. You know how bread can be all nice and crusty? This bread was basically limp. It was nice that they warmed it up, but it really reminded me of Wonder Bread.
  
• Our waiter? Bizarre. A strange man. Slow, incredibly slow. We were there for a late lunch and the place was almost empty, but there were these incredible long stretches when we were just sitting at our table waiting. And it wasn't slow service in the nice European leisurely meal style, it was unpleasantly slow. Fortunately, we were a chatty group so it wasn't a huge deal, but I still wasn't happy about taking a 2+ hour lunch.
  
• One person in our group is a vegetarian, so it was a little disturbing to see they didn't have a single vegetarian item on their menu. When she asked our (bizarre) waiter for advice, he suggested the fish. And then the chicken. And then we finally got the message across that vegetarian means "no meat" not "no beef" but he was still completely stumped for suggestions. She ended up ordering one of their salads with no meat and it was quite nice, but still... no vegetarian options on the menu? Waitstaff unable to make recommendations for vegetarian modifications? Waitstaff who don't even understand what a vegetarian is?!? Nashville's not exactly vegetarian central but come on!
  
• When I ordered grilled shrimp, I wasn't expecting it to come to the table swimming in butter. I chose the grilled because I thought it might be a healthier option than fried shrimp. They were quite tasty but then again anything literally drenched in butter tends to be, no?
  

Anyway, I'm not doing a full review because last week Carrington Fox of the Nashville Scene said pretty much everything I could say in this review. I could take the easy analysis and say that, based on his review, I must be some kind of food snob but, honestly, I'm not. I'm just a graduate student with limited funds, and it really ticks me off when I spend my limited (heh, call it "non-existant") eating out budget on bad food and bad restaurant experiences.

***Okay, truthfully, it was a combo of the bad word of mouth combined with the fact that Tim keeps misreading the Chappy's sign as "Crappy's", probably the worst font choice ever.

Garden update

It hardly seems possible that it's actually time to start picking produce from our garden; it feels like we just planted everything yesterday.

Here's a picture of one of our raised beds - it must have an ideal balance between sun and shade and rain etc etc, because everything grows well in it. Click on the image to go to flickr to see what everything is.

Here's our arugula, which is totally ready to pick - this is planted where the asparagus used to be, it's exciting to be making better use of that space!

Radishes seem to love the new raised bed, they're growing like gangbusters there. This picture is one of our white icicle radishes, tasty but spicy:

The purple bush beans have some lovely purple flowers (and since this picture was taken, actually have little beans on them):

And the blackberry and raspberry bushes have a million berries on them, which will be awesome if we can get them before the birds do:

I even have a genuine garden mystery. I apparently mis-labeled the seedlings in the seed tray. I planted something that I thought was a jalepeno pepper plant in the raised bed, but I've never seen a jalepeno plant that looked like this:

I have no clue what it is, possibly a flower plant?

Even our daylilies are delivering nicely this year:

The only real downside right now is that we're still in the middle of a drought. The lack of consistent rain combined with the unseasonably high temperatures we've been having the last 2 weeks mean that we need to irrigate more than usual. Tim painstakingly installed a drip watering system when we first built the raised beds, so it's the most efficient and effective method of watering available to us but I still hate having to use it. We're not watering our landscape plants at all but they seem to be doing well so far. I have thought about installing a rain barrel or a grey water system, but I've been told that you should not use water from these options on plants intended for consumption which is the main thing we need. I know we're as efficient as we can be, but I just wish there were other options.

Icarus update

Frankly, I'm in shock that a single line of a pattern can take as long to knit as it's taking me to do the repeats of the first chart of the Icarus shawl. I think the line says "Repeat rows 19-41 5 times". That's all. But maaaaaaan, it's slow knitting. Slow and not really challenging knitting. Also, I'm happy that I've read that lace looks like total asshat before blocking, otherwise I'd be worried.

See?

I'm actually a little further than this now, I finished the next repeat. But still, so much to go. I'm leaving my little lifelines in for a while, this whole lace thing makes me nervous.

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The magical land of colorwork

I finished knitting the cashmere lining section of the pirate hat at knitting on Tuesday and then I went ahead and blocked it yesterday. The instructions say to tack the lining in place before blocking, but my cast off edge was too rolled and so I decided to block first. I really need to get one of those head forms from the beauty supply place (you know, the head that you'd store a wig on? David says it works well for blocking hats). Instead, I'm using my lame-o blocking tool - the bottom of my craft room trash can.

I had a huge debate with myself on how to block the hat. Here at Crafty Kim headquarters, we're all about a good wash and full wet blocking. No steam irons or spray blocking for me!!! This clearly comes from too much working with sturdy wool yarn. I did a little poking around on the internet and definitely got the impression that cashmere might need a little more babying. I got the hat all set on my trash can and sprayed it down with water. I'm going to go ahead and tack the lining in place and then possibly reblock.

In other colorwork news, Tim & I stopped off at Borders last night where I fondled two books on colorwork that I'm milliseconds away from ordering, Traditional Fair Isle Knitting and Traditional Scandinavian Knitting. I've currently got The Art of Fair Isle Knitting checked out from the Nashville library and it's a really interesting book, but what I really want is a book with scads of color charts so I can just start throwing fair isle motifs into everything. I'm not really into it because of the historical value (although WOW there's a lot of interesting history behind these sweaters) or even because of the finished product, it's all about the process of colorwork for me. Right this minute, I totally can't get enough of it, I just want to leap into my next colorwork project.

Wednesday Night Wags

Just a quick post, to let you know about some great concerts for a good cause. Happy Tales Humane in Franklin has a series of concerts on Wednesday nights Wednesday Night Wags for the next couple of weeks (including tonight) with 100% of the ticket sales going to the shelter. We adopted Oscar from Happy Tales, and they're really a great no-kill shelter group. They have some surprisingly well-known artists participating in the concerts, so check it out.

FYI, Happy Tales also has a retail store (Happy ReTales, LOL) in Brentwood, next to the Publix on Old Hickory. They have a great variety of pet supplies and merchandise, and the proceeds go to the shelter as well!

Thank goodness for paranoia

I thought to myself yesterday, "Kim, are you sure that your passport is okay? It would stink to make all the way to Los Angeles on August 15th thinking you're heading to Australia only to discover you're actually just going straight back to Nashville."

Paranoia won, so I asked Tim to retrieve my passport from whatever super secret location he squirrels these kinds of things away in so that I don't move them and cause them to be lost for all time.

Guess what? My passport expired in December. Can anyone say "expedited passport processing"?

I'm happy to finally get rid of the fugly passport picture of me wearing an Abbott polo shirt (company motto: free shirts? gladly. decent raises? not so much.) though.

I just finished practicing a presentation for a meeting I'm going to at the end of June, so my brain is a bit fried. I'm going to be the first presenter in the first session on the first day of this conference, in a session that basically everyone going to the meeting will be at, with a high degree of certainty that a bunch of well-known people in my field are going to be in attendance. Absolutely terrifying. I had to cut down my 45 minute thesis defense presentation (a beautiful work of art, my friends) to a 15 minute presentation. When I practiced it with Tim last night (the man is incredible, he's listened to versions of this presentation at least 10 times and he still manages to at least seem interested), it was 21 minutes long. Today, in front of my lab group? 15 minutes on the head. Apparently I talk like a bunny rabbit when I'm nervous. Fortunately, the group agreed that I wasn't talking too fast - does this mean that I'm a slow-talker in normal life? The best part of my presentation? At the end of my presentation, on the closing slide that says "Questions?", I put up a picture of Oscar wearing the dogasaurus rex sweater that I knit for him. This one, if you haven't seen it before:

A random Monday jumble

Big accomplishment for the weekend: the second set of stairs on the capitol hill! The weather was reasonably cool on Sunday morning, so we decided to give it a try. Once we got to the top of the stairs, we discovered a cute little park area and... a third set of stairs. They were short though, so we went to the top of those stairs and ended up right next to the capitol building. We discovered the hill the capitol is on appears to be the highest point in all of downtown Nashville, so it feels like a real accomplishment to actually make it to the top. If you were wondering, we did get passed again - this time by a neighbor (who actually walked straight up the hill, skipping the stairs) and by an older woman who just whizzed past us while we were taking a break after the first stairs. She was fast!

Big accomplishment of Monday morning: we went to the top of the second stairs again. As Tim said, it's our punishment for actually managing to get out of bed on time :)

Oscar is more excited about it because there are some squirrels between the first and second stairs who aren't scared of people or much of anything. He attempted to pull me right down the hill this morning, which is only funny if you remember that Oscar only weighs 10 pounds. He has some mad pulling skillz though.

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I finished knitting the main part of the pirate hat on Friday. It's a super fast knit! I'm stunned that I didn't even touch the second skeins of the black and pink and have big chunks of the first skeins left. I estimated those yarn requirements poorly! The hat fits me - yeah! I headed over to the Haus on Saturday because I knew they'd have some special luxe yarn that would be perfect for the lining. I think they were heartily amused by the yarn I picked (more on that later, when it's all done).

I have an inch or so left on the lining, so no pictures yet. The lining is straight stockinette, so I totally could have finished it this weekend but... The Lace was calling my name. I'm working on the Icarus Shawl from Interweave Knits Summer 2006 in mmmmmalabrigo lace weight. So far, my reaction to the shawl is that it's 8000 rows of semi-boring lace. I know it's going to get more exciting once I get this center/top-edge section done, but I'm finding that I can only do about 8 rows at a time before I need a break. The lighting at the coffee shop is horrible so I don't think I can even take this boring part to knitting night. I wonder what they would do if the whole knitting group showed up with big floor lamps and plugged them in, taking up all the outlets the laptoppers normally use?

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I just got my plane tickets to Australia. Qantas had to issue paper tickets for some obscure administrative reason. I have no clue how I'm going to avoid losing these tickets at some point before or during the trip. Who does paper tickets anymore?!?

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Our garden is going crazy, between the warm temperatures and the minor downpour we had on Saturday. We picked our first produce of the year on Sunday morning, a radish. A crazy spicy, makes your mouth burn kind of radish. Tim washed it off with the hose and we ate it right in the yard. Loved it. We also picked two raspberries, one red and one gold, mmmmm. IF we can keep the squirrels, birds, and general varmints from stealing them, it looks like we might have a bumper crop of blackberries and raspberries this year. Of course, the varmints took off with a bunch of our strawberries, so we'll see how successful we are with protecting the rest of the berries.

I just realized that I've failed to take a picture of any of our CSA baskets this season. Our farmers are really branching out this year, so we're getting even more variety than last year. Having this fresh, locally-grown produce in the house inspired us to finally get back into the kitchen.

Because I had the leftovers for lunch today, here's a recipe for one of the dishes we had this weekend. I originally got this recipe from my brother Gary, who found it in the newspaper a long time ago. This marinade is excellent on flank or skirt steak, although it's also really good on shrimp and chicken. I think it would work on just about anything. We used some green garlic and small onions from our CSA basket in place of the garlic and onion this weekend.

All-Purpose Fajita Marinade
1/2 cup tequila
1/2 cup orange juice
2-4 limes, juiced
3-4 cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped
1 onion (or half, depending on size), coarsely sliced - I like to use a white onion, but it doesn't really matter
1-2 jalepenos, sliced thinly - we leave the seeds in
Salt & pepper to taste

Mix everything together and pour it on your meat/poultry/seafood in a glass dish. Let sit in the fridge at least 4 hours (for chicken) or overnight (for beef). Discard marinade and grill your meat/poultry/seafood. Serve with grilled onions & peppers, pico de gallo, cheese, sour cream, and tortillas.

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Have a great Monday!

And today...

We walked up the first set of capitol steps again this morning. The joggers weren't around but we got passed by a number of state government employees on their way from the parking lots by the park to their offices near the capitol. Yes, today we got passed by office workers wearing skirts and high heels. That's how slow we (sigh, mostly me) are. Although today I'm also partly putting the blame on Oscar, who has decided all this extra walking really stinks and is being Mr Uncooperative.

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Remember my mixed feelings on the shrug? Along the lines of - well this is pretty, but what good is it? Freakishly, it's become one of the handiest things in my wardrobe. I'm wearing it all over the place. I love it. It adds a wee bit of warmth without making me overheated. Must. Make. More. Shrugs.

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I'm making really good progress on my current knitting project, a We Call Them Pirates hat (a free pattern from Hello Yarn) in pink and black Koigu KPM. I cast on Tuesday during knitting night and I'm already well into the second skull. Fair Isle? It's crack - I can't stop knitting. I keep saying "wait, I have to see what this looks like when I add another row!". Every time when I get to the top of a skull and can actually see what it's going to look like, I start laughing out loud because it's so darn fun. I'm not sure if this hat is actually going to fit me, but this is definitely more about the knitting than about the wearing. There's something really delicious about knitting piratey skulls in pink. Seriously.

See - doesn't this just make you smile?

While I was taking this picture, Necco hopped up on my sewing table and made it clear that this hat really was more her style than mine. Necco the bad ass part-Siamese kitty cat feline princess (sorry, Necco!) who excels at drinking like a pirate.

The cast on stitches are still live stitches because you're supposed to knit in a wee bit of a plush lining, an important feature if you're using scratchy yarn for the pirates. I probably could have skipped this part since the KPM is really fairly soft but I think I'll probably add it. If it fits me, I might need to take a brief trip to the land of cashmere or possibly the isle of mmmmalabrigo. If it doesn't fit me, maybe it will be more of a "use up the leftover KPM" excursion :)