Fait Accompli

February 26, 2008 at 6:47 pm (Life)

The gigantic orange sweater is done and a picture is posted here. The only thing I hate is the zipper which is not really orange. It is not possible to find an orange separating zipper in the entire city of Albany which is rather distressing, but we don’t have a Whole Foods Market here either, so I suppose I should not be surprised (the Whole Foods Market thing is a rant for another day).

I have already started the market bag out of recycled sari silk and it’s coming out pretty well. I scammed the pattern from Lion Brand – thanks guys – and I think the only drawback to it is that you can’t put anything in it that will fall through the holes, like your favorite pen.

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Monday, Monday

February 18, 2008 at 9:22 am (Life, Work)

This should have been a three day weekend, but because we had a phone upgrade this weekend I had to work on Saturday. It happens. Unfortunately, the upgrade went horribly south because of a hardware problem so we will be limping along for a few days until the part arrives. Fortunately it’s Winter Break at school, and if you have to do any limping that’s the time to do it.

The orange cardigan is finished and drying in my dining room….yay! It needed a good washing after it was completed to rinse away some of the excess dye which was depositing itself on my hands. It’s not cool to have orange smudges on everything, especially the seat of my car with its parchment colored seat inserts.

The sweater isn’t even dry yet and I am planning my next project. I am going to do a gauge swatch of the moss Bartlett, but in the meantime I am winding several hanks of recycled sari silk into balls because I want one of those funky knitted market bags. I have had this sari silk in my stash for a while now and it’s pretty wild stuff; every imaginable jewel tone is wound into a light worsted weight yarn and no two hanks are alike. It’s not really suitable for a sweater as it’s got a lot of vegetable matter wound into it, but it makes nice accessories.

School is going pretty well. The topic last week was shell scripts which scared me a little at first. I mean, I write login scripts, .ncf files and batch files all the time, but shell scripts have always intimidated me. Maybe it’s because my friend Dug has a sign outside his cubicle that says, “Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script.” Or maybe it’s because the instructor wanted us to write the scripts in vi (gasp) which is a painful way to write anything. Thankfully someone in the class asked if it was okay to write them in pico, and when the instructor said yes I was incredibly relieved; not having to deal with vi freed me up to concentrate on scripting which is really not so bad. I can think of a number of handy applications for scripting and it will be nice to write my own instead of stealing them from other people.

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So much yarn, so little time

February 2, 2008 at 8:10 am (Life)

I have been incredibly bad about keeping up with my blog.

Classes have started at Sage and it’s nice to be in a classroom again. I’m taking Linux Administration this semester with a lady who seems pretty savvy; many of the students have taken her Java class already and seem to like her. The evening class students at Sage seem to be generally a lot younger than the ESC students which surprised me a little; I think of evening students as falling into a much older demographic.  One of the great things about the class is that half of it is a lab, so if I finish early I can leave. Homework is minimal too, although there is a sizable paper for the final project. Since I have already used Linux in a production environment I can usually get through the labs in good time and part of me is wishing I had taken a second course.

Of course, now that I am not doing hours of homework on Saturday morning I have more time to knit. My current project is a big orange cardigan to keep me warm in my freezing cold office. The yarn was purchased at a garage sale for twenty dollars; a garbage bag full of undyed skeins which I grabbed because I have always wanted to try my hand at dyeing wool. I found a nice fiber reactive dye online and chose burnt orange because I wanted to do something different. The wool dyed up pretty well and has a kind of a light and dark thing going on which looks great knitted up. The cardigan is nearly done and I’ll post a picture when it’s finished.

I can’t wait to finish the cardigan because I have a new project waiting in the wings and have forbidden myself from starting any more knitting projects. I found some great Bartlett wool online in a yummy moss green which is going to be a cabled pullover some day. Restraining myself from starting new projects is a monumental effort; I have attention deficit disorder when it comes to knitting, so starting a new project always gives me a happy little buzz. I also rationalize that I need to have different kinds of projects on the go, such as a pair of angora fingerless gloves (again for a frigid office), a baby sweater for a pregnant niece, a pair of mittens for my sister and a plain black pullover because I always need to have a “mindless” project. This restraint from starting projects does not keep me from planning projects however, and I have had to devise all kinds of creative ways to store my stash in a house as tiny as mine.

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