AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

In a knitting-free world

Supreme Court Patent Case

I love working in a law firm.  I'm not an attorney or a paralegal, but I love reading about how our system (in the United States) works.  A recent case came up in the US Supreme Court about the validity of the Patent test (aka, how the court system decides something is innovative enough to patentable).  I imagine that no matter what the courts do this will be a sticky subject.  How do you legislate creativity and ingenuity? 

While the case is different from copyright, in some ways it makes me feel the same things.  How can we copyright a particular cable pattern.  If you make something based off of someone else's pattern, how much innovation do you need to use before you can consider it different enough to market or sell as your own.  When is the line of old hat to new crossed?  With everything being produced on individual blogs, crafster, and other sites like knitty.com, what is new in the world of knitting?  I love some of the patterns I find, but sometimes I just look at them and think I could have done that.  Is the point simply then that I didn't?

You can be a winner at the...

I did it!  I haven't finished the baby sweater (baby is born, running out of time), haven't finished all of the Christmas presents, and certainly haven't cleaned the condo, but the word count has been made. 

The story isn't done, however.  I think that I have probably another 6-10K of writing to finish the remaining scenes and wrap up the loose ends.  It will probably alternately shrink and then grow again when I edit.  There are some pacing issues and scenes that need to be placed in different areas.  Some spots are wordy and others aren't complete enough, but for a first attempt (or at least the first one where I made 50K) it isn't so bad.

Now, I can go back to the knitting content.  If only I could figure out where I left it.

Oh, well, there are some small pieces of knitterly content.  I have been fixing my old scary photo albums, so now it doesn't just have one or two of the things I have done this year.  It might even be historical.  Stupid pictures not knowing who is boss.  I'll show them.

And really, I don't have anything else to say.

Babies!

One of my coworkers is having a baby (and she is a new to my department coworker, so I really didn't get a lot of lead time) probably in the upcoming weekend (if I see her on Monday I will be shocked). I started the Diamond Seed Baby Jacket last Wednesday.  It is very cute and very long.  Each row is (for me) 181 stitches knit on size 2 needles.  I probably could have gone with smaller needles.  It is always gratifying to see someone think something cute and happily accept the products of knitterly labor (though if she had said she wasn't interested, I would have knit it anyway and sent it to an appropriate local charity).  I am less than 30 rows into the project.  These are slow (for me) rows.  Chug, chug, chug.

I asked her today if she minded that I was making this, mostly so I could ask for her address.  I hope to have this done by the middle of December so I can send it off before the baby decides that he is going to be too big for it.

In other words, I apparently am a woman who loves parantheses too much.  There could be  a book about that, but for now it is just me (myself and I) and NaNoWriMo.  Current wordcount (from memory): 29490.

At a staff meeting

At a staff meeting earlier today, we did an exercise called mind maps, which I had heard of before.  It was part of the project done by Mason-Dixon Knitting (Kay and Anne) for the Perfect Sweater.  We were each handed a sheet of paper and asked to think of a problem (that didn't need to be about work) and make a mind map on how you would investigate or solve it.

People did things about their kids, selling their homes, buying cars or cameras.  I did mine on selling my knitting.  I don't knit too many things that aren't from published patterns, but when I do I would like the option of selling them if I choose.  I sell those (mostly scarves) at the holiday bazaar, but that is just once a year.  I am trying to figure out if I could sell things on Etsy.com and if it would be worth it.  I have five or six scarves that I could put up now, and I make a ton of things that never make it onto the blog (because I seem to have an aversion to the camera, go fig).  What sells in knitting land?

Knitting Fool

I love KnittingFool.  I make a lot of random scarves (and I am actually going to get off my butt and take pictures of them this weekend), but I get bored easily.  I usually take a cable pattern from a sweater that looks complicated and try it out first on a scarf.  Most of my scarves were based on The Pleasures of Knitting, because most of the cabled sweaters looked really busy and I just wanted to try them before committing to something with sleeves (because I really don't finish things very often).

For the past few months I have been looking for stitch patterns that were interesting, but easy on KnittingFool.  I recently made a scarf out of Baby Alpaca Brush, which is incredibly soft and furs all over everything.  But I did a waving rib, which looks nice and provides visual interest on both the right and wrong sides (they both look good enough to use as a right side).

The Lazy Blogger Update

I am a very lazy blogger.  I got this package last month (now given that it is the middle of the month my only excuse is NaNoWriMo, and it just doesn't quite signify. 

The box has been hiding in the closet, because I wanted to make sure that the cat couldn't get into it.  I love the cat (Saru-chan), but she does have a tendency to destroy the things I like the most.  I still haven't wound up the 1400 yards of laceweight that she pulled from the skein.  Makes me shudder.

The spindle is really cute and lights up and the fibers are very soft and definitely pettable.  I am just not suer what my skill with either spinning or camera to show off the goodies are, but this will have to be a quick update because I can hear the kitty trying to get into the trash!

Oops, never mind.  She's stopped.  There was the great hat pattern from Girl from Auntie, which I will probably make first out of some stash yarn before trying to spin well enough to make it.  If I made the hat out of the fibers at the right, it would probably be out of the purple.  It is light enough in color to show the cabling and has a great sheen.

I hear my hubby, so now it is really time to go!  Good day to everybody.

Thanksgiving feast

November is speeding away and Thanksgiving is almost here.  It is my second favorite holiday (right after Halloween), because I get to cook lots of wonderful tasty foods. 

This year I am getting together with friends, and my cooking is relatively minimal.  Mostly I am making desserts.  I am making my eggnog pie (tasty++), ice cream sandwiches (pumpkin ice cream between snickerdoodle cookies), and soups to be used during the snacking/appetizering portion of the day. 

One of the soups is going to be the pumpkin clam chowder that I made for my husband for his birthday.  The other one was going to be butternut squash soup, but I might try and aim for something lighter.  There is an awful lot of food for Thanksgiving, and while everything I am making is vegetarian that doesn't mean it is any less heavy. 

I need to get the food this weekend, because it is just next week and most of the things I am making can be done up in advance so I will get to enjoy the day.

Oh, and NaNoWriMo word count: 20581

Not too much knitting

I haven't been doing too much knitting lately.  Most of my time has been going to NaNoWriMo and making the hubby happy.  It was his birthday this past weekend, so I made pumpkin-y foods (including a pumpkin clam chowder) and running a short one shot for beginning super heroes.  It was interesting seeing how much I have grown as a GM since I last ran a game, even in something as short as this.  Most of my attempts have involved my boredom and random changes that do nothing for game quality and a lot to showcase how bored I had gotten. 

After a relatively busy week, I am most of the way back on track for writing my novel (I feel like I should put that into quotes).  I am about 1500 words away from my initial goal today and would like to break 21000 words (if I can).  It is funny, but when I started I didn't have any faith that I was going to be able to pull something together that would be coherent.  Now, obviously there are large sections that need to be moved (mostly timeline issues as I am writing about the past and the current timeline simultaneously), but it is forming something that I can see having a coherent beginning, middle and end by the time I hit the end mark.  I wouldn't say it will be good, but it will be a passable first attempt, especially because I didn't do any outlining or other organizing before I started.

What that mostly means for my knitting is that it is relegated to my commuting time and my lunchbreak.  I have been knitting a simple scarf with baby angora, which is wonderfully soft and warm.  I am enjoying the feel of it even if it seems to be extra furry (aka, sheds everywhere).  I'll get another few inches done on the way home, and will hopefully be done by the end of the week.  いいですね。

Plunge!

I love my blog.  I don't care that hardly anyone reads it, because it is mostly for me.  I like the opportunity to be geeky and creative, but I don't really like managing my blog site.  F2O was a terrific place for me to host and manage my own blog using Movable Type, but I just got completely frustrated with all of the downtime.  I'm sure somewhere along the line my configuration got busted or something, so I am just going to port my content over and pay for some service instead of trying to get it free. 

Hopefully this will make my life a lot easier and I will be more inclined to post (because trying to publish something 10 times is not my idea of fun).

Getting out the vote!

VOTE

I went to the polling place this morning before heading off to work and did my civic duty.

Voting is important. I am a registered libertarian, which is not one of the powerful political parties. It doesn't matter. Voting tells the government that you care about the issues. Voting for someone who more closely reflects your issues can tell them what your issues are.

This is important. As soon as I have kids, I will take them with me to vote, because it is important to not be political dead weight. (And this way if I don't like what happens in my state I get complaining rights.)