What a Life!

Right before all the hoopla started last weekend, I grabbed a number of my finished and on-the-needles knitting projects and snapped some pictures. Here are the highlights…

This is a little Pack-Pack from Little Turtle Knits that I actually did the technical editing for Theresa back before Joey was born. I felted it last winter but hadn’t sewn the straps or buttons on until recently. One of the hang-ups was that it got lint all over it when I felted it so it had to have an appointment with the sweater shaver. But it is a very cute pattern and now that it’s finished, I’m very pleased with how it turned out. It’s for Ben, but I didn’t give it to him for his birthday because it isn’t considered a “toy” (at least, not at the moment). We’ll use it when we fly to Florida to visit my parents – it will be his carry-on and he can have little toys to keep him busy in it.

This is Ayla from knitty.

Knitting content:

There is a gross error in this pattern. It has to do with row gauge of garter vs. stockinette. The number of rows given for the bottom and what it should measure when finished do not match. The measurement given coincides with the other parts of the pattern. Since I’ve done technical editing on a number of projects for Theresa, I took it upon myself to email the author of the pattern. Well, she doesn’t know me from Adam, and based on the types of questions I see on knitting boards, there are knitters who ask really dumb questions, and she assumed I was one of them. Rather than listening to what I was saying, she just argued back that it was correct, stating that garter and stockinette have the same row gauge. They may have the same stitch gauge, but they certainly do not have the same row gauge. I simply gave up and decided I didn’t care if others discovered the mistake (or struggled with the pattern) and she looked dumb to them as well. I probably should have a better attitude about it, but the way she talked down to me, she just made me mad.

This is St. Brigid in progress. The back is finished and one pattern repeat has been completed on the front.

Photography content:

The two pictures above were taken in different places. The one on the left was taken inside in front of our big picture window that faces south, and the other was taken outside under a shade tree. Yesterday I complained that I was unhappy with Ben’s birthday pictures because I had to use flash. This would illustrate why. I much prefer the picture inside with the contrast the natural shadow provides, but in order to get that picture and actually get on that was in focus, I had to do the following: 1) put the camera on aperture-priority mode and open it up as much as possible, 2) use the continuous mode in order to avoid camera shake (you hold down the shutter and take three or four pictures and the shake you create when pressing or releasing the shutter isn’t an issue on the middle pictures), and 3) the ISO in this picture was 200. The resulting shutter speed was 1/15, which is way to slow for candids. Even when I crank up the ISO to 400, it was still 1/30, which is still too slow. ISO 800 has too much noise, in my opinion, and even if you “fix” it, you lose quality. And the thing about candids that day…most candids don’t occur right in front of the biggest window in the house facing the ideal direction to get the best lighting. Many times when I went to take pictures, before I popped up the flash, the shutter speed would be 1/3, which is practically insane and should explain why 90% of the pictures taken without flash were too blurred to be worth anything.

Moving on…

This is a little baby sweater I’m knitting. The neckline is an experiment…and I have not done anything else on this since I still have not decided whether I like it or not.

Here is an up-close picture of the stitch pattern, which I absolutely love…

Did I mention that I absolutely love the stitch pattern? I actually saw it in a store and analyzed the stitch pattern (thanks to what I learned about cables from Alice Starmore in Aran Knitting) and then came home and made up my own sweater design based on what I remembered of what I had seen. So it’s kind of a knock-off, but not really. I don’t even remember who published the pattern or what magazine or pattern book I saw it in. I just love it, though.