I swatched! Then it all fell apart.

If you follow my photostream, you’ll recognize this picture from a few days ago. Indeed, I did swatch (a first for me!) and, indeed it all did fall apart shortly thereafter. You see, I was working on the contrasting hem trick outlined here (I will admit, the contrasting hem is a big reason why I’ve had a hankering to knit a sweater at all) and the combination of a whole lot of stitches and a provisional cast-on got the better of me. A few times. Seriously, it took me 5 tries to join the beast without twisting the cast-on row. But I got it right, eventually, and I wish I had an in-progress picture to prove it. I’m about 10″ along and it’s going swell. And that contrasting hem? Makes me smile every time I look at it. Thank you for recommending this pattern, it’s turning out to be Just The Thing.

So, I really just popped in to tell you that. And to give you this: the second installment of Awesome Blogs I’m Now Enjoying Thanks to a Whole Lot of Blogroll Surfing, as a wee apology for disappearing for 3 weeks, and an advance apology for checking out for another 10 days (vacation time!). Enjoy!

• Aesthetic Outburst
• Bloesem Kids
• bookhou at home
• Hei Astrid
• Lineanongrata
• Lost in Transition…
• montague
• perfectbound
• Ravenhill

It’s Monday and I’m dreaming about weekend mornings. Sigh.

Looks like the links list is indeed alive & well. Thank you to everyone who left feedback! I had a feeling that it couldn’t be just me who enjoys the sidebar surfing, so it was neat to hear that so many of you find inspiration in those lists. Since I pretty much have no sidebar in this current design, I thought I’d do a somewhat regular post listing new-to-me art/craft/design/photo blogs that are currently bringing a little inspiration, beauty and light into my world (plus, you don’t need to hop out of your aggregator to see this, like you would if it was in my sidebar!). Here’s the first installment:

• a candy-colored life
• a foothill home companion
• brooklyntweed
• Buttons Magee
• Cozy Nest
• Crafty Brainwave
• Eddy & Edwina
• Evidently
• Keeper of the Chocolates
• Knitting Lemonade
• Little Messes
• Mayfly
• novamade
• Prickly Pear Bloom
• shim + sons
• simply photo
• The Rinrins
• Things are better with a Parrott

The first and second are days 3 & 2 of Project 365, respectively. The mohair scarf is a couple years old (both the picture and the scarf) that I recently added to my Flickr archives for Ravelry. Oh, Ravelry!

I don’t know what it is about orange lately. I want to wear it, eat it, taste it, smell it, surround myself with it. Does orange even have a smell? I know green does.

Day 3 and the project is going well. Thank you all so much for the encouragement! As I mentioned to a few of you over email, when I told the mister about my plans to participate, I was met with a chuckle and a few guffaws. Followed by a, “sorry sweetie, sounds like a neat idea!”, with a barely-disguised smile in his voice. I wonder how those words will taste a few hundred days from now? Heh.

Once upon a time, on this here blog, I used to maintain a page of links to my favourite crafty blog reads. I took down that list recently because my new aggregator (Google Reader) can’t generate a handy list of blogs I subscribe to like Bloglines used to (which I haven’t used in ages). I didn’t feel a whole lot of remorse for getting rid of the links page at the time because I sort of assumed that no one looked at it. But, here’s the thing: every once in a while, I go on a discovery tour of craftblogland by clicking on link lists on blogs I visit. I find it’s a great way to discover new blog treasures, and without those lists of favourite reads, I most certainly wouldn’t find those treasures! And then it’s just me and the usual suspects dancing around in an echo chamber!

I’ve added a whole slew of fantastic blogs to my aggregator recently, as a result of just such a discovery tour (next post: what’s new in my aggregator!). But, I’m curious about what others do. Do you plumb your favourite bloggers’ lists of favourite blogs? Do you ignore the links and walk on by? Do you see those links at all? I’d love to know!

Here are some links:

• A retirement letter template, in case you’re planning on leaving academe.
• New! Furry Crustaceans!
• Fun for Medieval Geeks!
• Wear your librarianship proudly!
• For my crafty friends, art quilts you can stare at for hours.
• It’s International Women’s Day! Hip hip! (but not really)
• Wantwantwant a MacBook Pro as much as I do? Read this review. Then continue with the wanting.
• City-wide WiFi! Right here in Toronto!

Sorry about all those exclamation points.

• Mechak: Centre for Contemporary Tibetan Art. I’ve been visiting this one quite a bit lately, I’m blown away by all the colour and texture, and I’m in love with Sonam Zoksang’s photographs.
• The Industorious Clock. Just neat, that’s all.
• Robert J. Lang Origami. Origami is one of those arts that I have always been just on the verge of trying. This site is all the push I need.
• thanatos.net: Postmortem Photography, Death Masks, X-Rays and Forums. Eminently morbid and definitely not for the faint of heart. I find death photography utterly fascinating.
• The Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects. Cool. And not just for those who get a kick out of perusing new classification schemes and nomenclatures.
• Stephen’s Lighthouse. Another one for my librarian readers, Stephen Abrams is blogging.

I feel like the blinds have been raised and sunlight is beaming back in again. Healthwise, it’s onward & upward. Everythingelsewise is pretty well onward & upward as well, I am making plans that will be put into motion over the next couple of months, and bigger plans for the months beyond that. Sorry, that’s annoyingly vague.

Today, I started an “Ego File”, and I’m not kidding, it really does have a label on it that reads “Ego”. While doing a completely unrelated search in a LIS index, I came across the record for an article I wrote & published last Fall. It was neat. Just that, neat. In fact, I printed it off for the “Ego” file and wrote “neat” across the top.

Also in the “Ego” file, a column in the February issue of Computers in Libraries calls that other little site of mine “pretty helpful”. Also neat.

I get an infinite amount of pleasure from knowing that a certain very good library blog has approximately 1,000 more Bloglines subscribers than the NYT Tech section, 1,900 more than dooce, and 1,500 more than kottke. Very neat.

I’m thinking about pink highlights. Maybe not so neat.

Homemade breakfast bars from Deborah Merlo (March 10 entry). Super neat!

I listened to the complete David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall on my drive to and from work today and, boy howdy, I would very much like to buy a copy of this CD for everyone I know. I do not know of any other author/comedian who can be so misanthropic and so very compassionate at the same time.

I finished Leftovers (last seen here) last week and wore it for the first time yesterday, and absolutely meant to photograph it for you, but I forgot until it was too late, and I was too sleepy, so you will have to wait for another 6-10 days, until it makes its way to the front-end of the wardrobe cycle.

Remember reformat day? It didn’t happen (the reformat, that is, not the day). I never did find the CD for my operating system, so all plans were shelved indefinitely. The very odd and completely unrelated upshot? My computer has shown remarkable stability and speed in the last 5 days. All those threatening glances and very stern words, they worked!

There may be a few more things to-morrow.

Because things have been all quiet and boring around here lately, here are a few links to help bide the time until I can come back and tell you about all the knitting I’ve been doing. There’s been bunches and bunches of it!

• mini knitting!
• When Knitting Attacks: a promising effort of a local Toronto SnB group. Looks to me like good catharsis.
• Fast Capitalism: brand new online journal “devoted to analyzing the impact of information and communication technologies on self, society and culture in the 21st century.” Ooh la. Some titilating goodness for the librarians amongst you.
• Building with Books

(bonus: a rocking chair made out of old directories! Two of my most favourite things).

• Lit Idol. Heaven help us.
• Much hype in the blog-world about “blog” being Merriam-Webster’s word of the year. But did you know that the year I was born, the word “detox” was the word of the year according to Oxford? The horror.

In knitting news, I swatched for Under the Hood from Stitch n’ Bitch last night using Mission Falls cotton instead of the fuzzy wool blend the pattern suggests (which looks lovely), and I’m pleased to report that I got gauge on my first try. However, I was frankly repelled by how it looked. I’ve used MF cotton before, to mostly good effect, but this time around it seemed too uneven and nubbly for such a nice pattern. Instead of labouring over it, I moved on right away, this time to Gatsby from Interweave Knits Spring 2003. I first ran across this lovely beast at Emily’s and liked it instantly, so when I was at the knitter’s fair this past weekend, I picked up a copy of the magazine, along with some Briggs & Little that I was certain would work. And, happily, I was right. I didn’t quite manage to get gauge so I decided to go up a size, which shouldn’t be much of an issue since I’m rather fond of roomy knits anyway. So, Briggs & Little Heritage in a heathery blue, imagine it if you could while I’m still cameraless.

No doubt you’ve noticed that etc. is now sporting Fall-ish colours and a marked absence of image headers. As you already know, my design tastes seem to flow in cycles and I’m currently re-entering a simplicity phase, so I decided to strip away the attention-grabbing elements for something more pared down. Again.

And, lastly, a couple of links that I’m happy to have stumbled over lately: the knitter’s guide to copyright, a superbly comprehensive list of free poncho patterns, and a wonderfully indexed collection of sock patterns (last two links via knitomatic).