Now Norma Knits

BLACKLISTED!

Oh, the tangled webs we weave.  A few days ago, Sandy informed me that she was having trouble leaving comments on my blog.  Poor Sandy, blacklisted.  That's not riiiiiiiiiight. (Who was that comedian who did that routine?  I can't remember.)

She later realized it was not just my blog, but all Typepad blogs.  After she got frustrated enough, she started emailing me her comments and I would post them on my blog using her name, email, and URL.

Well, you know what computers do.  You can think of the next thing that happened, eh?  Yep, that's right.  Good old computer cache.  If I wasn't very careful, when I went to leave comments in other people's blogs, I was leaving them in Sandy's name.  So if any of you got comments that sounded suspiciously like Sandy had stolen my voice, that's what happened. 

I have been teasing Sandy that I've been trolling all over blogland leaving mischievous comments in her name.  (This could actually be true.  I could not remember where I'd been to retrace all my steps.)  San actually thought this was kind of a bonus, and thanked me for relieving her of her reading and commenting duties, but it's fun to imagine how many faux pas might have been made. 

A few weeks back, I was having trouble leaving comments on Typepad blogs, as well.  It just kept timing out every time, and it was quite the annoyance.  I contacted the amazingly good helpers at Typepad (I love Typepad) and they said that they would whitelist my IP address and they asked me to give them a list of readers to whitelist.  Well, geeezh.  I explained to them that I'm not as small as I used to be (in more ways than one, but I digress), and compiling a list of readers' IP addresses would be a Herculean task, for me and for them.  But I've set the wheels in motion to get Sandy whitelisted.  Hopefully it's been accomplished.  Try it, Sandy.

If any of you other good folks out there have been unjustly denied commenting privileges on Typepad blogs (This must have to do with a recent upgrade or something -- or maybe Sandy is just a bad person in disguise.) please let one of us Typepad users know and we'll take care of it. 

We know people. Or we know people who know people.

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Okie-dokie.  Onward and upward.  Thank you for all your lovely comments yesterday.  In reading around the bloggerhood, I found that it's something that is apparently "going around."  Other people blogged about the same phenomenon.  It must just be the season.  People are bored or need more fresh air and sunshine or something.  Or possibly, but don't quote me on this, a whack up 'side the head. 

My favorite Wisconsinite and yours left this comment late last night that done cracked me up:

Is it a disease?  Is there something going around??  I can't believe all the rudeness I've been reading about!  Good for you, Norma, steppin' up -- you and your army!  Yikes. Norma's Army... might that be anything like McHale's Navy?

A person on the "outside," new to blogs, (hi, Willem!) yesterday expressed mild surprise that I stated that I had not received any nasty comments before.  I consider myself lucky that way. 

I checked my stats yesterday. It's funny, when you're a new blogger, you check your stats a couple a dozen a thousand times a day.  After a while, you forget (or at least I forget) to check them for weeks or months at a time.  So I specifically looked at the number of comments I've received since I've had the Typepad blog, which is almost three years:  20,099. 

Staggering. 

Some bloggers we all know have exponentially more than that (I'm wondering how I can fit the Arrhenius equation in here for a nonknitting reader), but to never have received a snarky comment, at least not that I can remember, well, aren't I special!  Pat myself right on the back.  I'm taking the piss out of myself, in case that went over your head.  (Oh, how I love the British.)

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A couple of other little unrelated things:  Ryan kindly put my Dulaan Cupcake Hat pattern in beautiful pdf format for me.  It's in the sidebar. Thanks, Ryan!

And a new-to-me blogger, Joan in Rutland, has started a Vermont knitters webring.  I had sworn off any more webrings, but geez, I can't very well turn down a Vermont one, now, can I?  I only know of a handful of us, but I'm sure it'll be growing all the time.  Sign up, Vermonters!   

 

Amaryllis Cam-aryllis

Rilona the Amaryllis is making her entry into the world in a much slower and less splashy fashion (so far) than Sandy's Amaryllis.  Perhaps her growth was stunted by coming this far north and sitting outside by the door on one of the coldest days of the year.  Time will only tell. 

I'm sure you noticed that piece of knitting in the photo. It is the completed back of the new Ribby Cardi.  This one will definitely not be turned into a hat.  I love it, love it, love it. So soft and lovely.  Must.get.knitting on the other pieces.

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And now, we're coming up on my third blogiversary in one week.  I suppose that means it's a good time for some housekeeping matters.

THING ONE:

Is it Rudeness Season?  I'm speaking about comments.  We bloggers love comments.  We do. Love, love, love.  But recently I received a comment that made me squirm.  Why would a person come and leave a comment denigrating a gift I received from someone else?  Why?!  I just can't wrap my head around this one.  I don't want to have to ban anybody from commenting, and I damn sure don't want to have to activate comment approval on my blog. I've got enough to do.

As you know, I strongly appreciate humor, sarcasm, and biting wit. I don't like everything rosy and sugar-coated.  When commenting, if biting wit or sarcasm is your intent, there are ways to convey that.  Sometimes innocent remarks can be misconstrued if they are just written in black and white. 

I've never received any nasty comments from people in my blog before, and I don't intend to start now.  Use your manners if you have any.  If you don't have any, then just go away. 

AND ANOTHER THING:

I can no longer ignore this:  There is a relative of mine who stalks this blog, and I repeatedly hear through the grapevine that she disapproves of some of the content. 

What am I, nine years old? 

If you are the person of whom I speak, and I think you know who you are, please just go away and stay away.  This blog is not for you, it was never intended to be for you, you clearly don't get it, and I'd like you to stop the small-minded gossip.  Or in onlinespeak, POQADCB.  I will not be stopping the blogging or changing the way I write based on hearing your disapproving comments trickling down, so this is really not the place for you.

I have zero tolerance for this kind of ignorant nonsense, and I don't suffer fools gladly (who does?). If you don't already know that, then you have not been paying attention, have you? 

There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds more) of people who come here every day to read. They come, I assume, because they are interested in what I write or they like me. If you don't like what I write or you don't like me, why do you bother to come?  There are thousands of other blogs to read.  Go read them if you don't like my words.  Or here's a novel idea:  Just mind your own damn business. 

Honestly, some people make me cranky.  And that is the nicest way I can think of putting it. 

Raising The Cool Quotient

Reason No. 145.7 that I love having the blog:

The coolest friends.  (Is this really my life?!)

Regina, you know my soul and rock my world. 

I can't wait to wear that t-shirt.  Won't I be the coolest mama?  And I'm so excited to introduce Abigail to Teddy Thompson*. Thank you! The next time I see you (soon, hopefully), I will hug my thanks to you in person.

*It's so super-cool when a mom can introduce her young adult daughter to some music before her friends can even do so.  Wicked cool. 

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The Contest:  Or What Ancient Project Did I Finish?

The long-overdue gift for a friend -- thrummed (fleece-stuffed) mittens made from Coopworth wool roving, which was a beautiful gift from Carole, and which I spun into the yarn used for these.  The thrums are locks of an incredibly beautiful Polwarth fleece, a gift from Kim.  The inside of the mittens look like this:  The story of these mittens is they were knitted for a friend, but I ran out of yarn (and there was no more Coopworth roving to be spun) before I could complete the two mittens, so I went back and took off the cuff of each mitten and knit a different cuff made of Lamb's Pride worsted.  Other things got in the way (notably, the Red Scarf Project and lots of other projects), and it took me over a year to get back to these. 

My friend's wife is a knitter. When he opened the package, containing one completed mitten and one still on the needles, he said:  "I know what this is: A promissory note!"  He asked me if he was going to have to wait a year before he got the finished pair, and I insisted that no WAY was he going to have to wait that long.  Erk.  There have been several sub-zero days this winter during which he could have worn thrummed mittens, and I feel bad that I did not get them done well before now.  I'm happy they're finally done.  I'll package them up and mail them out this week.

And the winner is:  Margene!  She is the only one who guessed these mittens. I know exactly what she needs as a prize.  :)

Project Resurrection

I'm finishing an ancient project.  I challenge you to guess what it is. 

If there is more than one correct guess, I'll place the names in a hat and draw one for a nice prize.

I'll keep taking guesses until midnight (Pacific Time) Sunday.  I'll be in bed by then, but I'll check the email the next morning. 

Finis

I put the finishing touches on the toe just as Meredith was walking back from the dead.  Maybe that is supposed to mean something deep.  Or maybe it just means that I finished the socks. I dunno.

While the plot was predictable last night, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Grey's has redeemed itself to me...for now.  The male actors on this show really do get to me.  Patrick Dempsey makes me cry every time.  I wish we did not know that Isaiah Washington is a jerk in real life, because man, is he a stupendously good actor.  And Sandra Oh,....oh! We're talking range, people. And Meredith's admission that she stopped trying and her delivery of that line were authentic and dramatically satisfying.   So onward and upward.  While I do think LOST is a lost cause, Grey's still has some lives left to live. 

Hm. When the hell did I become a drama critic? 

Megan and her mom read all your comments and loved them.  They told me I have some incredibly nice readers, but of course I already knew that.  ♥

Random Thoughts

LOST is fast becoming lost to me.  Kate's acting sucks.  (was it ever there?)  Dear Evangeline:  You should not change your accent in the third season of a series. I mentioned to Abigail that I was disappointed in LOST last night, and her words?  "I wanted to barf all over it."  So I guess I'm not alone.  Grey's is next on my shit list.  Things had better start turning around, around here, or I'm going to go back to the diehard TV hater that I used to be before falling for these two series. 

I received the purple Irish yarn I ordered.  I love it.  But I keep ordering more colors of this yarn, foolishly thinking they will coordinate, but they don't.  I had the naive idea that tweedy yarn from the same company, the same kind of yarn, would at least have tweedy bits of EACH OTHER'S colors in them, so they would blend and be matchy without really being matchy. You know what I'm saying?  Like I would expect some of the green to be in the red, and some of the red flecks to be in the green, and some of the green to be in the purple.  But alas, no tweedy bits that match.

I started swatching it, and I got frustrated.

I want it to be stripey.  I want it to be solid.  I want it to be predominantly purple.  I want skinny stripes.  I want wider stripes.  These colors coordinate.  No, they don't.  I want it to be predominantly red.  I want it to be predominantly green.  I want green and red together.  I want three stripes.  I want ribs.  I want stockinette.  I want..... Aw, fuck it.  I don't know what I want.

My submission to the Mensa Invitational this year:

swatchophrenia:  The state of mental confusion brought on by knitting a swatch.

The swatch did show me one thing, though.  This yarn wants to be knit on US 7s, not 8s. 

Megan Rocks: A Red Scarf Story

I received this email yesterday from Anna H. from New Jersey.  I just had to share it with you. BRAVO, MEGAN!!! 

The subject line of the email said:  "Daughter earns Gold Award via Red Scarf Project!"

My daughter who is 16 years old just earned her Gold Award for Girl Scouting.  It is the highest award bestowed to a Girl Scout who has demonstrated Leadership, Character and  Service.  She wanted to pick a project that had meaning to her.  She toyed with projects geared towards children or the elderly but none quite clinched it for her. It was thru your website and the Orphan Foundation of America that she felt this was the project that touched her heart.  And she wanted to reach out to her peers.  She also knows firsthand what it means to get a Care Package from home; her older sister is a freshman in college and is absolutely thrilled to get mail, let alone a Care Package.

Megan did not crochet before this.  She does not knit.  But, with a nice lady at our local Michael's Craft Store, Megan was able to learn one stitch.  The single crochet.  Her goal was to make 50 scarves herself and reach out to the community and collect another 50 scarves.  Her goal was a total of 100 scarves.  When all was said and done, she sent in 260 scarves!  She personally made 47 but the numbers alone doesn't tell the whole story.  She taught her grandmother how to do the single crochet and Grandma pitched in and made some.  Megan went to senior citizen's housing, Jersey Knitters, and Girl Scout Leaders' meeting and presented her project.

When it was time to ship the scarves down to Virginia, she sent 13 boxes. The lady at the Fed Ex window was so touched by Megan's project that she helped Megan out by giving her a nice discount.

Do Not Be Alarmed

This blog has not be hijacked.  I repeat:  This blog has not been hijacked.  I really am knitting socks. 

These poor trekkers.  They've had a long, long trek and were ignored for a long time.  They were started last June, to be knit in the now-defunct Trek-Along, which I (embarrassingly) cohosted. The first one had a lot of hikes on hilly mountain trails, as you might recall (see my category "knitalongs" if you want proof), but the second sock hasn't really trekked much.

So the fickle knitter picked them up again this weekend.  I was hoping they'd be done by now so I could show you a completed pair, but I'm not quite there.  I am looking forward to wearing these.  I love the yarn and I love the feel of handknit socks on my feet, and I don't really mind knitting socks.  It's just that I don't get thrills and chills, the way I read some bloggers say they do, when knitting socks. (or are you all just having me on?)

I do rather like the way the stripes in my Trekking 100s are turning out almost, but not quite, alike.  It's purely unintentional, I can assure you.  None of those crazy machinations* to try to make stripes match for me.  Nope. 

*not that there's anything wrong with that

The Sweater Transformer

Recognize this?

Hmmm, yeah, we are very much liking our new lightbox. Those are true colors.  In the late-afternoon light, with the flash. Wow.

I'll give you some hints.

Got it?

I started ripping back the unfinished Ribby Cardi made of Mission Falls 1824 wool.  When I got to this point, I thought, Hey!  Hang on just a cotton-pickin' minute!  This is a nice ribbed rectangle. That's a lot of knitting. There must be something I can do with this.  I held it up to my head.  A perfect fit.  I took the end of the knitting yarn, put it on a tapestry needle, and threaded it through the knitting loops.  I cinched it on the top, and then sewed the two edges together in a mattress-stitch seam.  I rolled up the new brim of the new hat.  I made a quick-and-dirty pompom and sewed it on.  Presto-chango, a Dulaan hat done.  It fits me perfectly and snugly, and because of the ribbing, it should fit a wide range of heads.  It's quite nice and warm because of the wide fold-back brim, too. 
I had crazy hopes of using the tops of the sleeves as earflaps. Don't they look perfect for it?  I cut one of them off.  Did you know that knitting does not like to be ripped back in the wrong direction?  I did not know that.  I was trying to get to a point of live knitting loops, while retaining the earflap-shaped bit at the top of the sleeve, but it just wasn't happening.  It was making me crazy and I spent longer fiddling with it than it would have taken me to knit new earflaps for the hat, so I quit that foolishness.  The Yankee in me only goes so far.  Actually, as Jessie will remind us, that is the very essence of Yankeeism:  It's only worth the effort if it's a practical and economical use of the time.  So I might figure out a way to make it work, or I might knit earflaps. I most likely will just throw the hat in the Dulaan box and forget about it.

Now, what can I use those sleeves for, huh?  They would have already been turned into neckwarmers, but for the fact that they are not actual rectangles because of the increases.

Have you got any unfinished, unloved sweaters that could be turned into warm charity items?

Saturday Cam

In my typical slapdash fashion, I made a rudimentary light box. I spent about 90 seconds on this, as you can see.  [ed: You guys are laughing at me.  Of course I love it when you laugh at me, but I want you to know I was not smart/stupid enough to come up with this on my own.  I got the outline of the idea here.  Of course I unvented it by about five essential steps, and I therefore did not get the effect I wanted, but it's a start.  Go ahead.  Laugh away.]

It helped a little with the photos, but not as much as I'd hoped.  Of course, all I did was put it in the bay window in the morning light, and I didn't use a tripod for my camera to hold it very still.  And I really can't figure out how to turn off the flash.  Of course it turns off when I accidentally do something, but I don't know how to turn it off purposely. And Cara, don't scream at me about reading the bloody manual.  The manual is USELESS.  It tells me nothing, except a bunch of mumbo-jumbo that assumes I know WTF it's saying. Apparently I need a photography for dummies book. I know I'm not alone in this assessment.  Someone else wrote me an email a little while ago, saying essentially the same thing.  The manual tells us nothing.  It says things like, "To change the aperture, do blah blah blah..."  Well, that tells me nothing!  Nothing!  I don't know what practical effect changing the aperture has. And then the domino effect of changing the aperture, so then what else do I have to change, and for what effect?  For example.  These are rhetorical questions; no need to answer.  Just send chocolate.

Other than that, it (the light box) was really great. 

It did help somewhat with color accuracy of the yarns of my sweaters.  It was not accurate at all for the new skein of Rowanspun that arrived yesterday.  It showed tweedy bits of pink and purple when there are orange and blue; and the red, which is a true brick red, showed almost cherry red up close.  This is not accurate: 

By the by, I adore this yarn and can hardly wait to knit it up. Someone outbid me on the lovely Baltic Blue Rowanspun Chunky I was bidding on on eBay.  Was that you?  I'm mad at you, if it was.  (kidding!)

So, on a day when I care more, I will work on the light box some more.  Or not. Meanwhile, I can't stop knitting on that Jo Sharp Silkroad Ribby Cardi.  It is pure loveliness.  I have not forsaken my Peace Fleece Central Park hoodie, though (that's the left front in the third photo).  Perhaps I'll be finishing two sweaters, not just one, relatively soon.