Baby Blanket (Knitting Project)

I should have posted this several months ago (when it occurred)...

My god-sister recently had a baby (as I mentioned in this video), and in anticipation, I knitted her a blanket:

Before:

After:

It was originally going to be 8x8 (the father is a chess player) but the squares ended up too rectangular, so I nixed the last row.

Also, the baby is a girl, but these were the nicest colors at the store. Pink is too hetero-normative!

Cover-a-Week #10: "Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)" by Klein Four

For Pi Day (slightly belated), I decided to cover a math-themed song, by the extremely nerdy a cappella group Klein Four...


http://youtu.be/d1TzNJhrM98

The shirt was one of the more useful nerdy gifts I've received. The armwarmers are my own handiwork; they have separate little sleeve-like protrusions for the thumbs. One trick for knitting armwarmers: if you don't want to decrease and increase the circumference (as the wrist is thinner than the elbow and the hand), knit vertical ribs, which naturally scrunch up.

Knitting a Poem

This is perhaps the coolest knitting project I've ever seen:
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/knit/

They're knitting a poem. (And not just any poem -- a Dylan Thomas poem.) My mind is blown.

I'm sorely tempted to try my hand at one of these quilts. New summer project? It would be a tremendously meaningful gift for a loved one, I think, given a particularly fitting poem (one that is, hopefully, not too long!).

Edit: Perhaps this poem? There isn't anyone for whom it would be appropriate, at this time.

Edit II: Alphabet knitting diagram: 
http://littlecottonrabbits.typepad.co.uk/photos/alphabet/

Edit III: possibly the ultimate collection of alphabet patterns:
http://www.chemknits.com/2009/08/assembly-of-alphabet-charts.html

Knitting over Winter Break

The last batch of yarn, barring any major catastrophes:

I bought the four skeins directly above the half-finished scarf two days ago; the others are from a while back. I plan to finish seven scarves over break, which will cover the rest of the friends I plan to give them to when we get back to school. I have about eighteen days. I don't think it's unreasonable, given the (admittedly short) plane rides and (longer) car rides ahead.

I'm also, if there's some yarn left over (and there should be!), thinking of knitting something small and eminently practical for my father.

I won National Novel Writing Month!

30 days, 50071 words written, 6 scarves knitted. It's been quite the adventure.

(There are more than six scarves here, but two of them are unfinished, and three of them are from October, if you remember the last picture.)

It was awesome. It was absolutely worth all the sleep deprivation, all the stress, all the time spent holed up in my room pounding away at the keyboard at ungodly hours. The community was amazing, both my class here at Stanford and the online community that sprang up around the forums and chatrooms as everyone raced towards 50K.

And I actually rather like my novel this year! I haven't really gone back to the other two 50K+ NaNo novels I've written, simply because I didn't think they were really worth editing. (Well, that's not strictly true; I did edit one of them extensively, or tried to, but hit a wall about halfway through -- I think I got through seven or so chapters -- and decided that it just wasn't good enough.) This year's... we'll see. I like it, still, after spending a month wrangling with it, so I think it has some small glimmer of promise.

Anyhow, for those interested, my stats page and user info are here: http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/127574. You'll notice the few days towards the end when I pulled all-nighters and pounded out about 6000 words a day. Worth it, all of it, even so. Don't ask about the plateaus in weeks two and three.

Time to catch up on everything -- work, reading, friends, sleep, life. Same time next year, folks!

If I Used Twitter

last night's status would have been:

re-upholstering a couch, knitting like a fiend, and blasting Bach's St. Matthew Passion.

That is all.

NaNoWriMo

starts now. My posting will probably be much less frequent this coming month, since I'll be spending most of my "free" time typing like a madwoman. And knitting scarves.

That is all -- I have a novel to write. Happy All Hallow's!

Edit: I've added a widget to the sidebar so that interested parties can track my wordcount in realtime. ("Aethyr" is my username on the NaNoWriMo website.)

Christmas Knitting

So I've decided to knit a bunch of my Stanford friends scarves for the holidays -- enough of them that I started in October. I went to buy more yarn with Julie yesterday, and I think I'll need to make another yarn run in a few weeks. Here's (me with) eleven skeins of yarn and three finished scarves:

I've been getting some of my patterns off of this website; it's particularly useful because each entry provides both the full stitch notation and pictures. If you knit, it's a wonderful resource.

I can't wait until I get to give these to people in two months or so!

Phiala's String Page

For all the computer scientists of my acquaintance, this has nothing to do with the sort of strings you guys know. This is a great page on medieval fiber arts:

http://www.stringpage.com

I've done a bit of tablet weaving, and quite a bit of braiding, and have ambitions to try some of the other types of weaving, &c. on the page. I also knit, but that's almost out of period, having originated in its recognizable form around the Renaissance, I believe.