AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

being a geek is hilarious

Last night we had our gaming session. I'd call it old school D&D, but 4th Edition only feels like old school D&D in terms of the body count. We had a near TPK, and I spent much of the evening laughing my ass off (and between combat rounds playing Words with Friends - multitasking helps make combat less dull).

Our lack of preparation and tactics has burned a whole in our party 3 characters tall by three characters wide. And I ran like a frightened school girl clutching my remaining 2 hitpoints to my scaly chest and hurrying back to town. I spent a lot of session laughing my ass off, because what was happening was so ridiculous. Even if I had died, I would have continued laughing my tail off. I just haven't had a lot of time to become truly attached to Zeshra (dragonborn warden of paultry levels).

And it wasn't a wasted evening in any of my other defining terms either. I worked on my sweater, my camp Loopy project 3, that i have just 2 weeks left to finish. I'm almost through chart A of the fairisle yoke of Oranje. There is even a chance in hell that I will have a progress picture before I finish it up. Progress pictures are definitely not my strong suit.

Enjoy a three day weekend. It's a good time to be a knitter in Massachusetts. The temperature has been a lot cooler this week, so a pile of wool in the lap doesn't feel hideous.

Mittens of Majesty

Mittens of Majesty: These thick woolen gloves do not restrict the wearer's manual dexterity.  They generate a continuous endure elements effect which protects from the cold only.  They also grant a +5 competence bonus to Diplomacy and Knowledge (nobility and royalty) checks.  Finally, once per day, the user may use mass suggestion as an 11th-level caster (Will DC 19 to resist).

Moderate abjuration and enchantment; CL 11th; Craft Wondrous Item, endure elements, mass suggestion; Price 87,780 gp.

My husband has been calling these mittens of magesty as I have been working on them for their complicated-looking pattern, and their purple and gold color.

I started these mittens closer to the end of July than I would have liked, because these were for Camp Loopy project 2. I was busy trying to clean up the last of the knitting for my husband's sweater. However, last Thursday (August 4), I finished the first mitten at the Pints and Purls night at Gather Here, and immediately cast on for mitten 2. The second mitten took me until Saturday evening to finish.

The pattern for these looks complicated, but in the end these are very simple cables combined with the simplest of colorwork. If you were afraid of the cables, you could get an awesome impact just doing the stripes on the front and the tweeding on the back.

These mittens were my first colorwork project since taking the class with Mary Jane Mucklestone at Squam.

These make me ridiculously happy!

This pattern by Pamela Wynne (I've also made the February Lady sweater) is awesome. The instructions are clear, the charts have a good legend which makes following them simplistic. The hardest part of this project are the first few rows of the color pattern, because you start the thumb chart and the cable charts at different times. I have yarn to make at last one more pair of these (though I do not know if I have enough yellow left for a second pair).

Pattern: Elinor's Mittens (project ravved here)
Yarn: Cascade 220 in Purple Jewel Heather and Goldenrod
Started: July 24th?, 2011
Finished: August 6, 2011

nanowrimo day 12 almost tpk

Today's writing prompt:
Taken almost completely from tonight's game session - You and some friends are exploring an old ruin when you open a door and see a group of fighters ready to take you on. What do you do? Do you fight them or run? What if they get reinforcements? And how do you deal with a friend betraying you to the other side.

(Left deliberately vague, so you can use this for more than a recap of our D&D session.)

Yup, tonight we had an almost total party kill. All that was left was Graargh (a half orc fighter) and Sam Twiceborn (a gnomish wizard). We could count our remaining hit points on our hands and have fingers left (14 total for 2 people).

Once we got home, I walked Victor who apparently had a peeing and pooping day, so I shouldn't have been surprised by another round of peeing and pooping even though it was really late. Now to bed. There is nanowrimo and Patience tomorrow, and nanowrimo and singing on Sunday.

oh, wii

We are watching The Gamers: Dorkness Rising on the streaming Netflix for the Wii. So darn funny, that I have actually been paying more attention to the movie than to either facebook or games or the book I was reading.

Tomorrow I have off, because we are bringing Victor to the vet. Poor guy still has pooty butt.

my poor little bug

My poor little bug, Victor, has been under the weather for the last week. He was playing in the yard while we tried to rake even more leaves (our yard might be more work than we realized when we bought the place), and he came tearing around the bend with what looked like a strip of moss dangling from his mouth.

I tried to get it from him, but it was too late. He ate the entire strip of moss (and I caught him trying to eat something else) before I could get it from him and put him inside to play.

So, he had a bit of diarrhea (yes, you need to know this, duh!), and he was getting extra walks and bland food per the vet's orders. His energy is fine, but I think he's a little uncomfortable.

I feel like I have done nothing but worry over Victor and think about dog poo for a week. It's not true. There was crochet, and thoughts about color work and working on socks. But the little bug has gotten a lot of thought and quite a number of homecooked meals (foul disgusting meals, especially if you are a vegetarian). 

I go on our walks and I talk to Victor. I imagine most dog owners do (talk to their dogs that is). I tell him that these are the consequences of eating the green moss and that Gary Gygax knew what he was talking about when he made the mosses poisonous. I tell him that doggie digestion fails its constitution check against moss on a regular basis and that he might want to instead go back to staring at squirrels. At least they are the right challenge rating after all.

Yup, I indoctrinate the doggie into being a geek, one small poo at a time.

the geek in me finds this funny

I have D&D tomorrow evening (garlic soup, because we're hunting undead).  I'm going to either knit during the dead spaces, like when the party rogue goes scouting, or I will be helping a friend with one of her orders by removing worn out velcro.  Hrm.  Must remember seam ripper.

I guess I could find some wood and start whittling.  It would be awfully funny to have the game within a game pan out for even a few minutes.

Thursday night after work I went to Windsor Button (again, I swear I don't actually live there).  I bought another ball of crochet cotton, a skein of yarn to finish a scarf, and a couple of skeins that I was going to combine to make a hat with a cute reversible band.  I will be knitting, cooking and smu-ing until my husband gets home from his game.  It will be nice to have a quiet night at home.

Here I am - Knitter #3

Today (fine, yesterday), the Yarn Harlot commented about popularity and knitting patterns and broke knitters up into different categories based on their response to popular patterns.  Unsurprisingly to those that know me I am a knitter #3.  I see what is popular, but I have a tendency even for the patterns I fall desperately in love with to knit them rather late.

A case in point is the Bird in Hand mittens, which I saw all over blog land a year or so ago.  I bought yarn to make them, bought the pattern and then they languished unstarted.  I will probably get to them later this year or sometime next year.  Hopefully, if I am smart, before it gets too cold to even think about taking my time and doing a good job.  The endpaper mitts were also on my list of favorites, but have mostly met the same end.  My queue is full of some other examples of this phenomenon, though I eventually either take the item out of my queue or (slightly more frequently) finally knit it.

A non-knitting example?  Harry Potter.  While I didn't wait until all of the books came out to read them, I did wait until there was a fairly largish gap between books so the noise about the series could die out a bit.  I enjoyed the books a lot more by waiting than reading them at the top of one of the hype cycles. 

I know that my gut reaction to something popular is to go far away.  There is something about the cult of the popular that makes it (the book, the project, the tv show, what have you) feel to me less like a choice and more like a dictate.  Nothing irks me more than someone else dictating what I am going to like.  Heck, it is the sole reason why I don't like the Sound of Music.

Umm, and well, the image is unrelated but so necessary. 

Happy Valentines!

First some pie. It's been busy, and I have a fair amount of pictures.  I've been holding on to them all week and then some.  The tiny picture is the Shaker Lemon Pie with our first two slices taken out.  So delicious, but with a double crust with 20 tablespoons of fat (shortening and butter) it is like a heart attack or a Buddha belly just waiting to happen.  Since mathing out the probable calories our slices have gotten quite a bit smaller, though the pie is still tasty.  We're just being judicious.

I am back from the three day, mostly non-posting days at the chocolate shop.  Au Chocolat was fairly busy Wednesday-Friday this week with the common refrain being (when people commented about coming in when it wasn't quite so crazy) that we had heard that there was some holiday coming up this weekend.  It was a wonderful change of pace from my desk job, though I will be happy to go back to it after the three day weekend.  Not standing on my feet all day is always more appreciated after my stint there.

One of my friends last week had given everyone boxes of Sweet Tarts (or conversation hearts, I should double check these things) with a cute little valentine on top.  It almost made me think of grade school again, where you hoped that you didn't end up being the one that everyone forgot because you were a bit wall flower.  Never happened to you?  Lucky dog!

I made cookies.  I got Cookie Craft a little over a week ago, and have been learning the techniques in the book.  Not having cookie slats (and having been a little too lazy to buy the materials to make my own), the main uphill battle has been in learning to roll my cookie dough less thin.  Usually for pie and other similar items, you want to make your dough a little thinner and while I have the rubber things that go on the rolling pin, they never seem to result in me making evenly rolled dough.  On the other hand, many of the tips are just really good to know.

Things that I learned: 

• Separate your dough and shape into disks for faster chilling time in the fridge.  To speed that along even more, I would roll dough between two sheets of wax paper and then fold the ends over the wax paper/dough and put in the fridge.  Then it was only about 10-15 minutes in the fridge to have a nice stiff dough.
• If you have a pet and you need a place to hide your iced cookies while they dry, put them in your cold oven and shut the door.  My oven had enough air flow that the icing got appropriately dry without me worrying that my kitty was going to jump on the counter while I was asleep and investigate the cookies.
• When the instructions say not to use the royal icing after a certain amount of time, my experience tells me that the older icing will taste fine but will be a bit foamier and have a certain bit of bubbly texture rather than drying to that perfect finish.
• Applying the pearly powder, dip the brush in and make sure it is almost completely 'dry' before decorating your cookies.  Excessive liquid will dissolve down parts of your cookie creation before your eyes.  Still tasty but no longer beautiful.
• The assembly line method really works!  Pipe all of your outlines and then they will be starting to get a little dry and stiff when you start the flow.  I need a #2 tip, because my #1 was too thin to stop the flow from spreading off the cookies and causing a bit of a freakout at the end of a long day and my #5 was a relatively thick piping.  Also note, the #5 worked better for the colored piping (mine was slightly thinner because of the food coloring/gel coloring added) than it did for white.

The cookies were wrapped in cellophane bags and tied with ribbons from Au Chocolat, which really saved my veggie bacon.  I just didn't have time to go to Michael's and pick up cellobags and ribbons to decorate them all up. 

The cookie-ing I did in stages over the week, but in planning on doing it again I think I would try to make it closer to a single day project.  I would make the dough the night before and plan what I wanted the cookies to look like.  Then I would bake the cookies in the early or mid-morning so I would have some time for multiple rounds of decorating and drying.  While it works to do it over a day or two, it is a lot more enjoyable to not have the project looming over you all week long.

I did the cookies with their names on them and people seemed really happy to get a little bit of personalized Valentine's love last night.  I have a second batch of cookie dough (I store my cookie dough wrapped in plastic and then in a freezer bag in the fridge.  No getting all dried out and nasty for me!) waiting for me to make cookies over the weekend.  I might get a different color of the pearl powder, because I got the shiny white and it understandably didn't show up that well on the white icing.  Even more pretty decorated cookies are in my future!

Oh, and the cookie that started it all?  My hubby's gaming buddy said this in a game ages ago before I met them all.  He wanted this quote in cookie form and this was how I chose to express it.  My next batch of cookies will probably not have random words like Iron on them, but they will probably end up as eclectic.

a gift for my husband

I normally refer to my really old unfinished projects as "shame" projects, and I've been trying to finish at least one a month (usually I limit it to one even if it was a really easy finish).  Last year I started and nearly finish a bag for my hubby.  It was going to be a prototype in my geeky craft store.  I loved the idea, but the bag needed a lining and a closure (and some ends woven in).  I am not a big sewing fan, though I like handsewing more than I enjoy sewing by machine most of the time.

The monster, a beholder, wasn't hard to make.  I made the mouth opening out of a picot bindoff, picked up and knit the tongue, and used bobbles as a bit of a surface for the eyestalks.  I did a lot of waste yarn in the body of the monster and went back later to pick up stitches to knit the graduated icord.  I probably should have stuffed a couple of the bigger icords to give them more roundness.

I used a large piece (though less than a half yard) of gauze to line the body and black snaps to close the mouth.

There are a lot of things I would do differently if I made another one, including making sure that the mouth opening was at least 6 inches to 7 inches around.  This mouth is a little too small to allow easy access to the contents.  Beholders normally have big mouths!

sometimes categories aren't very useful

I've been listening to Wicked a lot lately.  It's one of the only musicals currently on my iPod, because I need to finish reloading all of my music.  I loved the book, though it took me a couple of times to truly get into the story.  I love reading coming of age stories, so I needed to get to the school segments to really enjoy the book. 

But one of the things the music, specifically Defying Gravity, makes me think of is Mage: the Awakening (or whatever the latest edition is called). 

Something has changed within me
Something is not the same I'm through with playing by the rules
Of someone else's game
Too late for second-guessing
Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts
Close my eyes: and leap!

This lyric makes me think of the process of, well, awakening that a mage is supposed to experience in the game.  The idea that becoming a mage is a one way switch.  You are completely changed and you don't have any road maps to follow.

Of course, that doesn't really have anything to do with knitting.  But my inner geek was trying to jump out, so I gave it a bit of time away from mathifying¹ the baby blanket.

¹Mathifying: The act of calculating progress in terms of stitches or rows per inch in a fruitless attempt to explain why the last hour has not produced any appreciable or measurable progress to the goal of completion.