etc.

There has been sparse knitting content around here lately, hasn’t there? I do have a couple of fibre-friendly stories to tell, but I’ve been cagey about current projects because they have been mostly gift-knitting. From now until December 26th, you can probably expect to see intermitten knit-talk. No big surprise.

Lately, I’ve completed a modified version of Stepannie’s Silk Garden beanie (modified to toque proportions: i.e.: rib for about 2.5″ and stocking stitch for about 6″) in Lamb’s Pride Superwash and a standard pair of socks in Regia’s delicious new silk/merino blend. Both for etc.’s most faithful reader, my dad. No pictures of either yet, perhaps I can wheedle a modeled shot out of him.

And, in Buffy content (I’m seriously resisting the urge to start a “buffy” category, even though the author of this book is quoting this post on the back cover of her volume), this is a good article that talks buffy, politics, morality, cosmic balance, and who you should vote for for president next week, all in one place.

• You may or may not remember that some months ago I bemoaned a tight schedule of several forthcoming deadlines. Those deadlines came and went, most were met, some weren’t. Which is to say that one of the deadlines that was met was for an article on writing for publication that was just published in Knowledge Quest (Journal of the American Association of School Librarians), in their issue for newbies. It’s not online, but Steven’s article on keeping current (same issue, pdf) is, and it’s definitely worth a read.
• In a 30-minute fit of pure self-indulgence yesterday, I plumbed the Internet Archive for a little e-j.com history. I’ve saved some screen shots to my server and provided a little design retrospective here. In all likelihood, this will be of interest to no one but me.
• A few weeks ago, I acted on a hot tip and picked up season 1 of Buffy and Angel, respectively. All told? $39 (Canadian), including shipping. With all the recent vampire-slaying mania at my house, I knew it was just a matter of time before the personal library got off the ground, but who could have hoped that the inaugural steps would have been so painless?

A few people have emailed me asking if I visited any yarn stores in NYC and if I did, what did I think of them. Well, you’re damn right I visited a few yarn stores while I was there, and for those people who asked, and anyone else who might be interested, here’s what I thought of them.

Knit New York (307 E 14th St.): the first yarn store I went to. Not a huge selection, but lots of lovely handpainted Manos hanging temptingly on the walls, and almost everything else is displayed in singles in little plexiglass cubbies in the wall (I never did figure out how you get to the actual stock of the yarn, perhaps the shop attendees bring it out for you?). Also, as you may or may not know, KnitNY is also a coffee shop, and hello bustling coffee shop. I was stunned at the amount of people packed into the place when I walked in, there was all sorts of wonderful energy spilling out of there. As a result, I spent three hours there (2.5 hours longer than intended), drinking organic tea and talking to the knitters around me. And, I should tell you, all I bought was that single cup of tea, the yarn was just too pricey. Still, I’d go back for the ambience alone.

The Yarn Connection (218 Madison Ave.): this one wasn’t on my list at all, it just happened to be around the corner from our hotel. It’s tucked away on the second level of a building and I don’t recall any signage, but the big windows stuffed halfway up with yarn was a dead giveaway. It was tight and musty and overstocked, but the selection was impressive and the staff friendly. And I walked away with nothing. Once again, prices were too high. Almost dollar-for-dollar, in fact, compared to what I pay here. To wit: the Noro Silk Garden was $11.95 a ball, and locally I’d get it for $12.95 a ball (Canadian!).

School Products (1201 Broadway): this one was on my list, and happily turned out to be around a different corner from our hotel. Another one that is tucked away in a building, an office building this time, on the 3rd floor, and there definitely wasn’t any signage because I had to go in and ask security where the shop was. It’s a large store, also impressive selection, with lots of neat shop samples and yarn on cones. I’ve never bought yarn by weight before and will admit that it scares me a little. If it doesn’t scare you, you will probably be impressed with the coned cashmere, silk, and merino. It was all very lovely, if a bit overwhelming, and I didn’t bother looking at the prices at all so I have no idea whether they were good or not. I did find the standard imports to be, once again, on par with what I’d pay here, so I left yarnless and not at all distressed about it.

Purl (137 Sullivan St.): I liked this store, mostly because I got to look at and fawn over a lot of yarn that I’d only ever heard of and never seen, like Lorna’s Laces, Lobster Pot Yarns, Alchemy, and Blue Sky Alpacas. I spent about an hour fondling, which is a considerable amount of fondling time given that the store isn’t enormous, and ended up leaving with a couple of skeins of Manos in colourway 113 (Wildflowers). Mostly because of all the fondling, rather than the price.

You may or may not have noticed but I’ve been doing a bit of tweaking around here over the past couple of days. I’ve added three local links over on the right-nav: the about page, a link to the image index page, and the contact form. When I think of all the site detritus that littered this domain not so long ago, it shocks me somewhat that I could have boiled it all down to three links. But there you go. All that detritus is still littering this space, mind you, it’s just all in the background, unlinked. I’ll start the housecleaning once I’ve completed the massive archive categorization project.

Also, I’ve turned on comment moderation. I went the open-to-all route to start with but then last night, comment spam hit in torrents. I had 74 comment spams this morning and I manually deleted each one. To guard against this in the future, I’ll be approving each comment before it appears here. What does that mean for you? Not much, really. Comment as normal, there will just be a slight delay before your comment actually shows up here. All comments will be accepted, except for the ones about free online poker and how to increase the size of my member.

Aside from it being the most unplanned trip I’ve ever taken, NY was lovely. It’s silly really, I’ve known about the trip for months, but I did absolutely nothing to prepare at all, and if it wasn’t for the pocket Lonely Planet my sister slipped me the night before, I would have arrived without much of a clue. Of course, when you’re going to a city you’ve already been to a whole bunch of times, this isn’t cause for much concern. Still, a quick fact check would have saved me the 51-block walk to The Met on Monday, since it is, you know, usually closed on Mondays. Here’s the very small handful of pictures I took over four days.

Spotted in copious numbers in New York City over the past two days: Ugg boots, ponchos, and anti-Bush/Cheney graffiti and media. Two out of three made me smile.

To-day I rambled about Greenwich Village, Soho, and Tribeca. I also made it over to Knit New York where I spent about 3 hours chatting with three local knitters over a cup of Earl Grey and a purple mitten (one down, one to go). To-morrow, the Met followed by a coffee with an old buddy and her daughter (who I get to meet for the first time). I love this city.

A surprise package on my doorstep last night: 1 skein of Morehouse Merino Variegated in a delicious purpley colourway and a pattern for mittens, from Ms Melanie. Thank you Melanie! I’ve had a hankering to give mittens a go lately, given my recent sock-knitting success. And a word about purple: my undergrad alma mater’s school colour was purple, and I think I hit saturation point with the colour after four years there, so I’ve spent the last few years casting aside all things purple. But lately, I’ve found myself warming up to it again, seeking it out in yarn stores, in all it’s royal splendour. What better way to usher it back into my life than with a pair of purple mitts? Thanks again, Melanie!

Have I told you about the plantar fasciitis? It started a year and a half ago, I remember it exactly because we had just moved into the new house and I was greeting every morning with agonizing pain in my insteps. At first I thought it might be all the house-settling activity, all that stair-climbing and cardboard box carrying, all over four storeys. But then the unpacking was over, and while the stair-climbing continued apace, I rationalized that simple ascending and descending couldn’t be responsible for the searing pain I woke up to everyday. So last week, I mentioned it to my doctor and she claimed chronic plantar fasciitis. Curious, because WebMD claims it to be most common in middle-aged adults and atheletes, and folks, I am neither. Regardless, I’m doing the exercises and starting physio in a couple of weeks and exploiting every opportunity to get out of doing things I don’t want to do with some variation of: “sorry, can’t. The chronic plantar fasciitis is acting up again.”

I feel like I’m playing catch up on long overdue pictures. Here’s the completed Kittyville, cast off the needles about a month ago. I used Phildar Legende (hot! pink!), which is a soft alpaca/wool/acrylic mix with a tweedy sprinkling of blue, green, and brown. It knit up to a tighter gauge than the pattern called for, and I made no adjustments whatsoever for this, but thanks to some stroke of bizarre luck, the finished hat ended up being just my size. And I’ve never been a fan of the pompon, but I’m quite pleased with these mini ones.

If I had planned this properly, I would have blocked the front and back pieces of Klaralund as I finished them. I did not plan properly, you see, so the front and back pieces blocked on my one card table while the sleeves were well past done and waiting in line for blocking themselves. This is the front and back all blocked and ready for seaming while the sleeves have their turn on the blocking table. Got all that?

The other part of this Klaralund debacle is that I didn’t properly plan the stipey bits either. That is, I didn’t plan for them to match up and I didn’t plan for them not to match up. So, as you can see (did I mention that pictures now are clickable? Folks, pictures are now clickable!), the stripes are off by about an inch, which will be just enough to make the non-matching-upness rather obvious. Would this bother you? I feel like it should bother me, but it doesn’t.

And, do you get the Elann newsletter? The have this wonderfully quaint practice where they send you an actual newsletter in the post (on paper!) and every yarn they highlight includes 2.5″ samples taped right to it! It’s positively charming.