String Notes

A lady brought an afghan to knitting night. She’d knitted it years ago and now wanted to make another one, but had lost the pattern. Can anyone help identify the pattern/book/magazine?

A quick search of Ravelry didn’t find anything with both the bobbles and the slanted stitches (forming the attractive pointed edge).

What do you think?

Snomageddon! SnOMG!!

It all started innocuously enough, steady but light flakes descending, barely even sticking.

The forecast only called for 4-8 inches, and they’ve been wildly overestimating all winter. I thought we might get 6 – that would be fun. I had no plans for the day that required leaving the house.

But that’s what it looked like when I got up this morning. Six inches? Not quite.

Fourteen? That’s some serious snow for this part of the world. If only it had fallen on a weekday…

This man is my hero. He lives two houses one side of me, and when it snows heavily he likes to go out and snow-blow the walks for the lady who lives on the other side of me. So he just clears half the block, down and back. I told him how wonderful he was. Then I went across the street to help out the poor unsuspecting man who moved here with his wife and infant from Florida. He told me that he had no idea that driveway length was something to consider when choosing a house…

Morgan finds this all fascinating, as long as he doesn’t have to go in too deep. Padding around the edges is quite interesting.

The dog was excited until he discovered that the snow was deep enough to reach his belly. Then he just asked to come inside. We couldn’t convince him to venture out far enough to pee until late afternoon, and even then he just slunk off into the bushes where there wasn’t so much snow. He feels the same way about water: wading is great fun, but water should not be more than ankle-deep.

It’s getting dark now, but the sun came out and it turned into a beautiful bright day. Still no urge to go anywhere, though, nor are the roads in very good shape. Which is fine since I have plenty to do at home.

Though I might have to take a break to celebrate the snowpocalypse by baking chocolate chip cookies.

My dog is dual-coated! (Click for bigger.)

See the tog and thel?

Okay, not really, exactly, quite. But it’s a neat photo.

In other news, Ernest Shackleton’s whiskey has been recovered from the Antarctic. Apparently some of the bottles are still intact.

In other other news, it’s snowing.

I’ve run out of brightly-dyed skeins to photograph, so I’m forced to show photos of what February really looks like in central Pennsylvania.

February is a dreary gray month here, but the sky was not pitch black when I left work today so there’s hope.

I have some creative and colorful links for your enjoyment.

• Leaf-cutting
• The Hours of Catherine of Cleves online

I was asked earlier this winter about escarbuncle rubber stamps, since I already do escarbuncle stickers and t-shirts. I said I thought I could do stamps, but would need to experiment with the technology a bit.

It took me a couple of tries to get a good escarbuncle. Then I discovered that water-based inks will not work with the clear stamp material – they bead up on the surface. So I went out to Michael’s, and picked up the acrylic block and the ink pad.

The clear stamp material will adhere to the acrylic block without any adhesive as long as both are clean, and can be easily peeled off for storage. The ink pad I got claimed to be for use with clear rubber stamps. Other brands should also work – stamping is wildly popular, and there’s lots of information online about supplies for use with clear stamps.

You don’t need an acrylic block, just something completely flat to mount the stamp on. The block is convenient because you can see through it to get the stamp in just the right spot.

The stamp material is thin, so it’s easy to get ink on the block itself and smear the stamp impression. I wiped off the corners before stamping. The impression is cleaner if there’s something a bit soft underneath the paper. I expect with a bit more experimenting it would be possible to get a better impression, but I don’t have any experience with rubber stamps. The internet suggests that the image quality improves after the stamp is used for a while.

These aren’t listed in the catalog yet, but will be about $2 for the size of stamp shown here, and more for larger ones, of course. I don’t think I can cut an escarbuncle any smaller and still get a clean cut, but I can make stamps up to 6 inches.

I can also do custom rubber stamps, stickers, and heat-press t-shirt vinyl. There may be a setup fee for converting your design into the correct format, but after that I will keep your file and can cut your design in any material at any size with no additional fee. It’s just that it is a time-consuming process to convert many kinds of image files into the correct format. If you can provide me with a clean vector file, there will be no setup fee.

It is both Monday and February, and I’m not entirely certain how I feel about either of those things. Neither is Morgan (still the number one Ferocious Monster [Yes, I mention that periodically. Sorry if you are bored, but I find it a fascinating example of the quirkiness of search engine results.]).

But here, have some cheery colors. I spent some time yesterday taking photos of dyed yarn under different conditions and with different camera settings. The silk and the wool are posed together here, though I no longer have all the silks in the complete color wheel. They were dyed with identical procedures and identical proportions of chemicals by weight.

Thank you all for the links to museum databases. I’ll get them added to the list soon. There are so many great things online; it’s very exciting.

This morning when I left for work it was 25F colder than yesterday morning, and instead of torrential downpours it looked like this. (The title of this post should be said in horror-movie tones, not rock-star tones, if you were wondering.)

January has returned, and just in time for February.

This time of year always makes me hungry for color (and don’t the seed catalog companies know it!), so I’ll share with you some new photos. I did wool samples with the Lanaset dyes, and they came out very nicely.

The wool might even be more vivid than the silk, though not as lustrous (same percentage of dye by weight for each).

I feel better just looking at them, don’t you?

The wool is a thin worsted (20/2), and tablet-weaves very nicely.

I just need to decide what pattern I want to weave: I keep changing my mind. I wanted to experiment with space-dyed warps, so the black is solid and the green is variegated. I originally had something with trees in 3/1 twill in mind, and will probably eventually go back to that plan.

It was hard to get out of bed this morning: gray, wet, dreary. I had a dog draped across my ankles, and a cat on my chest. Nick suggested I might suddenly develop a horrid 24-hour bug. For all I got done at work today I might as well have stayed home. Paperwork, filing, email: all the things that accumulate after being gone for a week, and not so much actual work. When I left for the office this morning it was 54F and pouring rain – where did my January go???

I spent last week in Vermont. The snow-covered and frozen lake looked very pretty, I think, but the conference arrangements were such that I mostly saw the inside of a hotel conference room entirely indistinguishable from all other hotel conference rooms. I didn’t take my camera, so you’ll just have to take my word for the “pretty” part. I did come home with three pounds of wool. (Yes, I managed to score wool at a professional conference. What??)

Instead of anything relevant, have this photograph of Grendel and his buddy Fenris (the shorter one; sadly now deceased) playing in the water in New Mexico.

I survived the week (hooray!) and got everything done (hooray!!!), and am enjoying a three-day weekend (hooray!!!!!). Tomorrow I’m off to Vermont for the week.

I’ve been collecting online museum databases, the good ones with lots of objects online, with photographs and descriptions. The first few are listed here, (and linked from the header if you are reading this on stringpage.com). I hope you find them as fascinating as I do, and if you have suggestions for the list please leave a comment or send me an email.

I somehow managed to schedule an undoable amount of work for this week, and have now had some additional meetings added, so I may be scarce around the internet this week.

Fun things I did this weekend:

Dyed a series of wool skeins to match the same colorwheel I did with the Lanaset dyes on silk. Very happy with the results – better pics to follow. And yes, I did take them to the office so that I could admire them to dry.

Finished a project that went very badly for a very long time.

Learned to make sprang diagrams in Inkscape. I’ll write up a tutorial if anyone is interested. Later, though.