Oh, the cleverness of me

Dudes! (and dudettes, but then again, I tend to use expletives in a gender-neutral sense)

I finished the dot-y part of the front of my Dalek vest last night!

I just wanted to show this off in a moment of zen and happy pride, before I wrestle with the bust section. I still have a small garter-stitch section to go, and an eyelet row in the middle of that for a drawstring, but after that it’s even more intarsia, with even more bobbins, and I have a sinking feeling I’ll have to come up with something better than my freezer-bag solution.

Still, it could be worse.On the left are my preliminary sketches from a week ago, when I tweeted things like tentatively charted middle section of dalek vest. it now involves fair isle as well as intarsia. and maybe intarsia with 36 bobbins. The good news is that I held my sketch against the finished bottom section (since it’s almost 1:1, with a quarter stitch to the inch difference), and then asked Saskia, and looked at some more Dalek pictures, and realized them panely-things were much wider than I’d remembered. So it’s only 2 per dot-repeat (note to self: need a better name for that) instead of 3.5, which means 6 total instead of 14, which is… a lot less bobbins to deal with.

The new design also blends better with the purl columns, which are the ones with the squiggly lines in them – I’m just adding another one in the middle of each dot-repeat, which should add some texture, stretch, and most of all, dark yarn, of which I have way more than of the light yarn. Granted, I still have 73 g of light for the front, and 150 (I think) for the back, but… I’m getting a little antsy.

Anyway. Yes. Zen and happy pride. And uni.

Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba

(views worth being up at 5am for)

Things I learned this week: the African beginning of ‘The Circle of Life’ can be summarized as ‘HOLY SHIT IT’S A LION’.

Summer is the time for light entertainment, so I’ve been on a bit of a Disney phase. Except The Lion King isn’t that light a movie (apart from Timon and Pumbaa) and I downloaded it in Spanish. Which… was a surprise hit. And led to me downloading a couple of other favorite Disney movies in Spanish.

Anyway, with my *cough* avid studying in the face of the Spanish exam in less than three weeks (shut up! watching movies in a foreign language totally counts as studying!) I’ve been having a lot of time to knit, which, yay. It also helps that the temperatures have dropped to a tolerable level, and that I’ve been dragging Girl Friday everywhere.

I just noticed, though, that I made the armholes slightly too long on the front parts – half a repeat, to be exact. Apparently I can’t count. I wish saying this came as less of a shock to me and everyone who has ever met me.

Ah well, it could be a mistake much harder to fix. Which, I’ve been thinking… maybe I should rip both the fronts back to the beginning of the arm holes. I just realized knitting them a size bigger might not have been the smartest idea, not because the sleeves have taken a bit of calculating, but because due to the different depths of the backs and fronts of the armholes, it might get… funky and kinda weird sewing fronts and backs together. Is that fixable by blocking? Hm.

Anyway, everything from the heel flap down I knit yesterday down at the pub, watching Germany almost flunking out of the world cup early. Well, kinda almost. Also, Dalek is coming along, even if I’m kind of worried about the vertically striped middle section. My latest sketches kind of require intarsia with about 36 bobbins, if I remember correctly. Shudder. But I’ll be working on that some more when I watch ‘El Método’, the movie to go along with ‘El método Grönholm’, later this evening. (Or, you know, something more… animated.)

In other news…. recipe recs!

These babies are Stuffed French Toast, breakfast food of the gods.Now, I make it no secret that breakfast is my favorite meal of the day, provided I don’t have to get up earlier than about 9.30 for it, and I’ve been doing my damndest to establish a tradition of a big Sunday Morning Breakfast in this apartment. So far, it’s working, and this is partially due to this easy, quick, absolutely delightful dish. I deviate from the recipe and make them with English Muffins, and add chopped strawberries to the cream cheese filling. Now that’s what I call breakfast!

Aside from possibly being the most dorktastically-named cookies in the history of mankind, snickerdoodles are also easy, fun and absolute comfort food. I loved these when I was in the US, but I never found a recipe that came up to my standards of deliciousness and chewiness (while being crisp at the edges). And then I spent too much time on Tasty Kitchen and was bored and had two eggs left in the fridge, and… here they are. Delicious, chewy, and still crisp at the edges. Snickerdoodles. I had two of these with a glass of milk for breakfast the other day, and oh man, my college life is what every 8-year-old dreams of.

This is… a recipe for disaster. (ba-doom-tshhh!) I was cleaning out the cubby that holds a couple of scarves and many, many hats and gloves, and just kind of shoved a pile of wool at my roomie – ‘Here, hold this!’ *topples*

There’s the distinct possibility I need to knit a little less.

EXTERMINATE

(a TARDIS-blue sky, people. a TARDIS-blue sky)

**

So, I might have mentioned in passing that I’m a bit of a geek.

And also, the astute may have noticed that sometimes, I have just the slightest tendency to knit geeky stuff.

Ahem.

There may be just the slightest possibility that… I’m knitting a Dalek vest.

I swear, it started out as a joke! I was reading a fanfic that had geek!Jensen own a Dalek costume, and Saskia and I were talking about how awesome it would be to have one, and how I should knit one, and… and then I kind of immediately ripped back the slightly, subtly geeky Ghostproof sweater, wound the 4-ply yarn into 8-ply, and started charting, and here I am, with the first of three rows of circles finished and only stopping because I have to study at some point and also I need a breather from intarsia.

Seriously, intarsia! Holy crap. This is my first intarsia project, and while it’s kind of fun, I haven’t yet figured out a technique to get rid of the tangling. As of now, I’m using two little balls of yarn to freezer bags with the corners cut off, and it’s working moderately well, but it still kinda fries my brain. And I still get tangled up.

I had to pick up the front of my cardi a couple of times to do some calming down (especially before I got the freezer bags), but, you know. I’m thinking it may be kind of worth it, though it’s definitely a long way off from becoming my favorite technique ever. (Then again, nothing will ever beat lace, so…)

That’s already a lot of Whose Line episodes right there! I just try to keep calm and carry on, and I chant ‘With great effort comes great satsifaction’ under my breath a lot. It’s a good thing to make those things round-ish, I needed 14 center stitches instead of 9, so I’ve already finished a third instead of a quarter of the lower body. Right now I’m just trying to decide whether I should make the dots in the other two rows the same size or have them get smaller as we go up. I’ll mull that over a bit, since I really need to get to that studying I’ve been pushing back to get some knitting in. oÔ

Back in… Beige!

Guess what I just finished with spot-on gauge?

That’s right, the back of my Girl Friday cardigan. I wanted to start the first front piece down at the canal, but I forgot to pack the yarn after making sure that I had the pattern page. Still, go me.

It’s still a lot of fun – granted, I said that about the miles-of-stockinette Weasley Sweater at this point, but having finished a third is still a pretty good feeling regardless. Plus all nice and pinned out, the pattern is almost hypnotic… or like one of those Magic Eye things. Autostereograms?

Anyway. I come bearing recipe recs, cause it’s summer and it’s nice and finally not as terribly humid yet still sunny and…

That’s Buttermilk Biscuits (which are the best I’ve ever made, three times in a row in about a week) and pearl oat salad with tomatoes and scallions, and a nice light vinaigrette. Seriously, the biscuits are awesome, but you need to add a little more flour, otherwise they dough is just a tad too runny.

Also, and this is a definitive oh my god, make this, STAT is Chicken Tikka Masala. It’s the British national dish (as mentioned in Robin Cook’s Chicken Tikka Masala Speech) and I’d heard a lot about it but never made it before.

Oh my god. This is easily the best dish I’ve ever tasted. No kidding. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I’m a pretty decent cook – but this, this just knocked it out of the park. Seriously, I could eat this every single day of the week and not get sick of it. I made my own Garam Masala and everything for it, and oh wow. Everybody should make this at some point. I’ve already invited Christian over for Chicken Tikka Masala next weekend, and I’ll make some Naan to go along with it, too.

So, yeah. Chicken Tikka Masala. In other news, I’m still neglecting my Garden shawl (although I did do about 4 rows this morning during Doctor Who), but at least I’m… photographing cherries.

Hot blooded

Summer’s picking up speed, all I do all day long is sweat profusely, and my brain works only sluggishly – which must be the reason for this insanity: worsted weight. merino. cardigan.

Yes, in what must have been a momentary lapse of reason, I started Girl Friday last night, and I already have a good six inches. It’s kind of ridiculous, I’m so used to hundreds of stitches that I laughed out loud when I saw the back was only 107 stitches in the 2XL, which I’m making. 107 stitches! The front parts are slightly smaller than a round of a sock!

So, thanks lace knitting for putting things in perspective. I guess. Still, the pattern is ridiculously easy to remember, makes for great TV knitting. I basically looked at it, knit the first half repeat, and had committed it to memory. Very nice. TV choice last night: first two or three episodes of ‘Pushing Daisies’ until Chuck annoyed me too much to bear, then as a contrast ‘Shortbus’, which I hadn’t seen in ages.

Also, despite the utter annoyingness that is Chuck, Emerson Cod the PI is hilarious AND awesome. He’s this big, burly, black dude who… knits. Which explains my squee. In stressful times, he apparently finds the stockinette stitch especially calming, and he also freed himself, the Pie Maker and Chuck from a rather precarious situation involving body bags, wrist ties, and a car running on dandelions – with the help of a straight, purple knitting needle. Yay!

He also has a drawer full of money cozies in a lovely shade of light green. And he says things like ‘I’m gonna do XY… once I’ve finished purling this row.’

Working vigorously on the cardi means I’m abandoning the Garden shawl (aka the DicksWithWingsShawl) a bit, but that’s okay, I guess. I still have all summer for that. I should be concentrating on the Swallowtail anyway, that thing’s due in a month and a half.

Sadly, the warm weather also means the Tilting Tardis Cowl hasn’t seen any action yet apart from me camwhoring a bit.

And here, exclusive photographs of the socks I cast on the same day as the other pair of socks:

It’s the old song-and-dance with the SALT line where I’m the only one who can actually read it, plus the dark blue has some lighter spots that make it even more hard to read, but I still find it highly amusing and don’t give a damn if I’m the only one who thinks so.

Now, one of the few good things about summer that I’ve discovered… I can pretty much live off fresh fruit and vegetables. I’ve had this for the past three days:

Never mind that it was my side for biscuits and gravy today. *facepalm*

Ooh-wheeeoooo, whee-oo-ooooh…

While at my parents’, I caught up with a lot of friends, drank a lot of alcohol, got sunburned, drove around in my car a lot, started the Garden shawl for the SPN #dickswithwingsshawl summer KAL, and last but not least, bought buttons for the TARDIS cowl.

They’re little time vortexes!

And, needless to say, I’m pretty in love with the whole thing.

Pictures of the KAL shawl once my camera batteries are charged.