Scientific Ink

Author: Dunrie

  • Ravelry.com has exponentially increased my knitting fun (gratitude #50)

    I love knitting. I love yarn. I love yarn shops. I love bamboo and birch needles. I love starting projects. I love finishing them. I love photographing my knitting. I love looking at other people’s knitting (commercial, machine, and hand-knitted) for ideas about pattern and color and yarn.

    My projects on Ravelry
    My projects on Ravelry

    Ravelry.com has just exponentially increased my knitting fun by providing a huge community of ideas, project photos, yarns, patterns, and stories. I’m completely and totally addicted. I have queued up projects/patterns. I have surfed photos of knitted up socks to try to determine the perfect Colinette Jitterbug colorway (I must keep surfing the photos, and testing different colorways in person, doctor’s orders).

    Ravelry might be my absolute favorite social networking site (Twitter is its close competitor). It is a closed community, so it is hard to share with my non-Raveler non-knitting friends, but perhaps my knitting bores them (you?) anyway. And, if you need a fix of my current project, you can always surf my flickr knitting photostream. Ravelry is a walled garden, but it is easy enough to score an invitation (just ask). If you knit, join me on Ravelry!

  • Size matters – a tale of two needles

    I tackled a fun project with scrap yarn this Christmas: ornaments for my sister, my niece, and my nephew. I started with an ornament for my sister with scrap yarn from the socks I made her – Raphael from Colinette Jitterbug. I kept using the size 1 birch double-pointed needles I’d used for the socks.

    OrnamentsWhen I turned to the kids’ ornaments, I moved to bright colors, and for kicks, even though the cotton El. D. Mouzakis Butterfly cotton yarn was thicker, I stayed with the size 1 needles for my nephew Theo’s ornament. His ornament knitted up quickly, and it made a nice, firm fabric, but I was really straining the needles to work the thicker yarn (note to self, pay attention, when things are hard, it might be a sign you shouldn’t do it that way). I snapped two of my precious size ones making his ornament. I finished it on two broken needles. But, I loved the way it felt – firm and easy to fill with stuffing. I finished the day before we drove to their house in Tennessee.

    I started his little sister Rebecca’s ornament in the car on the way to their house on size four double pointed needles, the next smallest size I had ready to go. Her ornament is huge compared to his. It looks like it could hold the stuffing for at least two of his ornaments….It looks fine in the photo, but the decreases in particular look open and the ball itself is squooshy and less firm than his (I also may not have brought enough stuffing into the car…). So, I think the optimum size needle is in between the ones and the fours – maybe a metal size two?

    Still, I saw her hugging the ornament, so now that the receiver is pleased, who am I to complain?

    But it is an object lesson in the influence of needle size. The two balls are made of the same yarn using the same pattern with the same number of stitches. The only difference (other than color and the initial appliqued onto the ball) is the needle size.

    Here’s a link to the free knitted ornament pattern, when you’re ready to queue up next year’s projects.

  • A happy coincidence – finding Hong Kong House in Knoxville (gratitude #49)

    My sister used to live in Marietta, GA. I was reading a great food blog about Atlanta, the Blissful Glutton, which reviewed Tasty China, a restaurant in Marietta that served Sichuan style food. They specialized in cooking with Sichuan pepper, which provides a numbing experience/taste.

    The food at Tasty China was delectable. We enjoyed several items, including hot and numbing beef rolls, fish cilantro rolls (no pepper here), dry fried eggplant (kind of like eggplant potato chips, but numbing), and more. The Sichuan pepper numbed our tongues so that regular tap water tasted kind of like Sprite (carbonated and kind of sweet). After our first visit, we tried to stop there or get takeout each time we visited my sister. Well, eventually the Tasty China founder (Peter Chang) left, and when we visited after that, the food was still good in our book. I think he was gone by fall 2007, and our take out was still a highlight of our 2007 Thanksgiving.

    Well, my sister and her family moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and I went to visit in early December. On my sister’s fridge when I arrived was a review of Hong Kong House in Knoxville, about 30 minutes away. Turns out that Peter Chang, the chef from Tasty China, had taken over an existing restaurant, Hong Kong House, in Knoxville and he was cooking up the same yummy menu we had loved in Marietta.

    Glad my sister and her family followed Peter Chang to the Knoxville area.

    Here’s a review in the Knoxville paper.

  • Grateful for bad examples and laziness (gratitude #48)

    We’ve been watching Mad Men. We missed the first season, but heard enough about it at the launch of season two that we caught up with Netflix and DVRed this season. We’ve been enjoying it, especially me because I work in Internet Marketing and have worked with several advertising agencies. So, it is fun to see the field in its early heyday.

    Mad Men coverI’ve been astonished by a few things in the show – how much alone office thinking time the creative team at Sterling Cooper has. I don’t disagree that quiet time is critical for creative work, but I can’t believe the amount of open time these folks seem to have in their schedules. Perhaps it is just for affect in the show…or maybe there really was room in the world for that many martini lunches and that much staring out the window. I don’t know, but my days are much more harried than theirs seem to be. Maybe I’m doing something wrong.

    I do know I’m doing at least one thing right. What has most amazed me me is the systematic infidelity on the show, and the effort they need to spend on maintaining the artifice and the relationships (spouse and other). It just looks like an immense amount of work. So much so that last weekend, I joked to my husband that the two of us are much too lazy to make anything like that happen. And that’s certainly a good thing.

  • Easy holiday shopping (gratitude # 47)

    I think this was the easiest Christmas shopping season ever. We did a mix of local and online shopping, and I feel in control and not stressed about at least this one thing at this point in the holiday season.

    I threw myself on the mercy of Vicki at Ann Arbor’s funky, fun store Heavenly Metal and she set me up with great gifts for the hard-to-buy-for – my sister-in-law and my stepfather. Plus she showed me something nice and something local to give to a work colleague – al dente pasta from Whitmore Lake, MI.

    A twitter friend, Keith Burtis from MagicWoodworks.com, made my gift for my mother-in-law, and I’ll be knitting my gift for my mother (though I’ll need another trip to the local yarn store and a bit of time to finish it before Christmas!).

    My sister and I decided we would contribute to charity in lieu of purchasing presents for each other, and she helped me choose clothes and toys for her kids.

    We did a little online shopping to round out the list, but I feel that I was able to get some personal and unique presents this year with a minimum of stress.

  • Charity giving – the difference in giving time instead of money (gratitude #46)

    It’s the holidays now, and calls for giving arrive in my mailbox every day from charities to which I contribute and charities I’ve never encountered. My knitting meet-up, the Ann Arbor Stitch n’ Bitch Knitters, is doing a “Knit One, Save One” Hat Drive. We’re knitting hats for low birth weight babies for Save the Children.
    Baby hats

    Sitting down to knit the little cap was just like any knitting project I do. I’ve knit several baby blankets for friend and family’s children, and in each one, it was like I was casting a spell of love and good wishes for the young’un, making a tangible blessing that (I hoped) would wrap the baby in love first and a blanket second. In this case, knitting a tiny hat for a small baby I’d never meet brought the baby to my awareness, and the experience of offering the hat was more intense and lasted longer than the experience of writing a check.

    I did some exploration of the Save the Children site after finishing the two hats, and I have the sense that the baby hats alone won’t do as much as immunizations, nutrition, antibiotics, bed nets, and the like. So why hats? It’s a strategy to get folks involved and aware of the precarious health of these low birthweight babies. You can write your congressperson and/or senators, call on President-Elect Barack Obama to prioritize child survival, or join one of several online Save the Children communities (including Twitter) to become more involved.