( Aeolian shawl in Sea Silk )
Definitely one of my favourite patterns ever!

( Hand-spun, hand-dyed beret hat thingy )
I loved making my own yarn and dying it! What a fun experience!

( Calystegia cowl )
First time working with Malabrigo... instant love!!!

( Victorian Lace Today Capelet )
I actually hated pretty much every aspect of making this shawl. It was really boring, and took FOREVER and although it looks great, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone who doesn't have INFINITE patience!

PS: I would really love new friends on Ravelry (I'm shystreet on there!) :) bye!

So I've been tryin to come up with some cute stocking stuffer type things... usually I fail pretty bad at Christmas, so this year I'm trying to plan in advance, heh.





Petite <3 pendants! Tiny and cute and just dorky enough for most of my girly friends. They're super simple to make too, except that I had to make the steel "<" symbol stamp first. Originally I was going to make earrings, but I hate making earrings hehe.

I'm trying to knit a hat that has some stripes in it. Is it possible to have just one stripe, one row high, and not have a jog? I've Googled a bunch and come across the jogless stripes technique, but does this work for just one row? I've also come across the barber pole technique, but I want just the one stripe.

Does such a thing exist?

EDIT TO ADD: I'm knitting this hat in the round :)

My brother requested a Gryffindor scarf for christmas, and I was pretty set on knitting him one of the scarves from knit.atypically.net. Alas, the website is offline now and the GoogleCache doesn't work for the patterns, which is really disappointing.

So, can anyone recommend a good Harry Potter scarf pattern? I don't want to do an illusion scarf, just a simple stockinette stitch scarf, so something along those veins would be perfect :) 

Thanks.

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

I am making the Heelhead Scarf (http://carissaknits.blogspot.com/2008/10/heelhead-scarf.html) and I am at the increases, and I don't know for the life of me, what M1LP is, I know its "make one left purlwise" But how?!
If anyone can walk me through it or point me to a tutorial, I searched but to no avail :(
Thanks!

One of my favorite places in the entire world got mentioned in Mothering! Way to go, Baby Cafe!

I bought a digital subscription just so I could read it and share with you guys (click on image for larger size). I’m really so proud of all the work the ladies behind the El Paso Baby Cafe do. They can’t begin to imagine the cascading effect their actions have started. It’s hard to remember now but breastfeeding Jackson was really difficult in the beginning. I had breast surgery 6 years ago and all the experts insisted that breastfeeding would be impossible. Because of the education and support I received immediately after leaving the hospital, I’m proud to say that Jackson is a happy and healthy (except for the little cold he has now!) 100% breastfeed baby.

Would he have been fine on formula? Absolutely. I am by no means knocking anyone’s parenting choices. Breastfeeding my son was a personal challenge that, like labor, hurt terribly at times and made me question just how much I could handle. As it turns out, I can handle quite a bit. I am a more confident and secure mother because I succeeded at something everyone told me just wouldn’t be possible.

Thank you, Libby, for bringing The Baby Cafe to El Paso. I will never forget the time spent in your chairs…laughing, crying, sharing. See you tomorrow!

Originally published at Indie Shopper. You can comment here or there.

Hello! I looked through the user info links and tried a journal search and didn't find anything, so here's hoping my journal search-fu isn't failing. I searched 'stitch computer program' 'stitch computer software' 'cross stitch computer' and the names of a few programs I'm thinking of buying, and it found nothing for any of them.

I'm currently making my own cross stitch patterns via photoshop, but it's rather time-consuming to make a really useable pattern. I've been looking into a good automatic cross stitch pattern making program. Unfortunately, most of the ones I find the free trial download either flat out doesn't work, or when I get it, it's not particularly good. I've noticed a real problem translating black in most programs I've tried- they try to make it dark green, or dark blue, so if you've already got that color in your image you can't tell what is supposed to be black and what isn't. Or else they make it far too pixelly, and there's no way you could tell what the original image was supposed to be.

So I'd like to know what people are using, how happy they are with it, and what some of the shortcomings are. I'm hoping not to spend more than 60, unless the best-best-everyone-loves program is more than that. I don't do machine embroidery, so I don't need a program that is capable of converting to machine embroidery patterns.

I've running on 32bit Windows Vista, but I'm upgrading to Windows 7 relatively soon. I'm finding most cross stitch making programs were last updated for XP, and then abandoned by their creators.

Thanks! I'm going to cross-post this to stitchers as well.

At Last, It Can Be Told...

...Okay, show of hands, how many of you guessed "...Run!"?

I really really love my job. It's in a field I like; it's challenging without making me want to rip my hair out all the time, I don't usually get bored and, for the most part, I love my coworkers. One woman, D, I work with though has a life and personality so radically different from mine that I am often left wondering what things are like in her world. She has taken on this matriarchal role in her late 30s(!) that makes her almost grandmotherly, has a husband and teenage daughter, and she hasn't a wild streak in her anywhere as far as I can tell. I nearly fell out of my chair when I learned she had a small tattoo on her ankle. She also talks constantly. She talks about everything and nothing, about her daughter, her daughter's soccer team, her daughter's school, her dog, her husband, her carpel tunnel (which, granted, is severe), I mean anything and everything. I like her a lot, but we are so different that she makes me days very interesting sometimes and makes it difficult to work as I feel bad for not devoting my attention to listening to her. Fortunately, we only work together for about 2 hours a day as she comes in long before I do and works part time (due to the carpel tunnel, but for the love of god don't ask her about it). In that short of a time I easily tolerate it and actually enjoy her stories sometimes. She is good at the job, so that makes it easier to like working with her.

Anyway, I walked into work this morning and several of my coworkers are standing by the front desk. I say hi and scootch past them to set my stuff down. One of the first things D says, after hi, how are you, good morning is, "well now, I'd wear that sweater!"
I have barely gotten my coat off and am still half asleep. My first thought is, "you can't; I am."
Quickly realizing this isn't what she meant and noticing that in completely non-D-like fashion she has said nothing else, the next conclusion my brain jumps to is that everyone was standing around talking about how none of them would be caught dead in any of my clothes and this particular sweater is less atrocious than most. I think I mumbled something about where I got the sweater, but then, but THEN I got this horrible feeling that perhaps it was one of those situations like when someone gets a truly terrible haircut and you just cannot stop yourself from saying something since you've already had your mouth hanging open for longer than socially acceptable unless you are a bit "touched" (or tetched as my grandmother would say) so you blurt out how much you love the hideous monstrosity of sprayed, teased, and dyed hair that looks more like roadkill than something on a living human's head. I decided I was paranoid, but I spent the rest of the day paranoid about my sweater.

In closing, this coworker is weird in a way that makes herself seem normal and makes me shake my head confused and question my sanity.
Also, and the sweater is awesome. I got it at urban outfitters and it has a shawl collar, henley style buttons and a KANGAROO POUCH! She can suck it if she doesn't like my sweater.

Edit:
Evidently Albermarle County, VA thinks I owe them over $500 in personal property tax which is due in December of 2009. I'd like to note that they sent this bill to an address 3000 miles away in Olympia, WA where I have lived for several YEARS now. Also, I've never owned property and I drive a decade old compact car. That property tax bill is pretty much half what my car is WORTH.

An amigurumi dragon and pegasus that I made

i am thinking of learning to make soap so i can make something other than knitted christmas presents this year. i have no idea where to start and many of the websites i have googled used so many scientific words, i just got confused. could anyone point me in the direction of a good beginner's soap making website? or give any tips/advice on soapmaking?

thanks!

I'm having some trouble with increases. I'm making a scarf that will be wider in the middle than at the ends. It's in 2x2 ribbing, and I want to make the ribbing wider for the wider bit. Problem is, every kind of increase I try leaves a hole underneath. :( I've tried m1-r, m1-l, bar increase/Kfb (doesn't leave a gap but I *hate* that little bar), a modified kfb that goes back into the stitch and slips it purlwise. I've tried purl increases, which seem slightly better, but still with the hole. The gauge is fairly loose (Drops Merino (dk) on US 5 needles), but not so loose that a gap like what's happening won't bug the hell out of me every time I see it.

Is there a trick to increasing on ribbing that I'm not getting, a magic increase that won't leave a hole (some of the ones I've tried normally don't, which is why I'm stumped)? Or will I just have to deal with either the bar or the holes? Any advice/opinion/commentary would be appreciated. :)

This is...a bit odd, but humor me.

I have a stack of recepies. Old ones. Yellowed paper covered in (usually) pencil cursive. A food stamp application, with a peanut brittle recipie on the back, dates from November of 1976. This collection came with a rack of spice jars I wanted, but now I can't help but think these old, yellowed pages might be a neat art project. They might even be good recipies!

Every time I go to toss them in the recycle, I hesitate. I Just. Can't.

So... does anyone want them?

EDIT: TAKEN!

I love my Kindle.
One of the nice things about it is that slowly a lot of the public domain material from places like Project Gutenberg is becoming available in Kindle format so I can hit one click buy for free, and turn on my Kindle, open up the connection, and get it in seconds. The weird part is that a lot of it is not being reviewed. So I went to review a cookbook I downloaded and just started really going through in the last couple of days. The cookbook is The Compleat Cook Expertly Prescribing the Most Ready Wayes, Whether Italian, Spanish or French, for Dressing of Flesh and Fish, Ordering Of Sauces or Making of Pastry which was printed in 1658.(Project Gutenberg link to read online or download) The first reviewer said it was from 1658 and you couldn't make the recipes now. I had to disagree and said this..
Yes, the first reviewer is right, this IS a cookbook from 1658. But I don't see that as being a bad thing at all. A lot of the recipes in it are doable now and adaptable. If you are interested in renaissance era cooking at all, it's an invaluable guide and being in Kindle format makes it easy to bookmark things you want to try out later.
It is NOT a step by step cookbook as we are used to now, so it will take a little bit of research to understand what some of the terms are, as well as a decent knowledge of how to cook to be able to do the recipes in it. It will call for "enough flower to make a past" which means enough flour to make a paste/dough, or for cooking in a "quick" oven which means hot. You don't get exact temperatures or times or even exact measurements for a lot of the recipes.
That said, I read some of the recipes to my husband yesterday and he's looking forward to me trying them.
It also has a couple bread recipes in it, and a lot of bread recipes weren't recorded in the middle ages and during the renaissance because it was generally assumed that people knew how to make bread. Which leads to another thing that people miss in older recipes. We are very used to having instant dry yeast available to us, so when we look at older beer or bread recipes that call for a cup of yeast, it's a bit confusing. Yeast at that point was the sourdough yeast culture, a liquid mix of flour and water that had live yeast growing and active in it.
It's free and it's a nice bit of history.
----
I'll admit, there is something very strange about reading a cookbook that old on something that seems to be science fiction to me still even having one.
You can see all my book reviews here.
Okay..back to beading.

Originally published at Indie Shopper. You can comment here or there.

A silly name, but apt, as there's a story behind the ribbon I used.  Oprah was my commencement speaker a couple of years ago, and she handed out books tied up in ribbons to each graduate.  I kept the ribbons because they were pretty (didn't find the books particularly fascinating), and decided to use one of them for this rose.



It looks like it's attached to the headband, but actually, it's attached to a no-slip alligator clip, and I just layered the headband on top of that for effect.

( Closeup of rose behind the cut )