Selfie with Helen at the Knitters Guild stall. Come say Hi if you’re at the Show! @ Sydney Showground
Tag: knitting
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The Faceless Large Bunny haunts my dreams.
My favourite item from the Show this year: Inexplicable Carrot Bolster.
Me: “DAMMIT! It’s not for sale!”
Random Lady: “What would you DO with it?!”
Me: “Plop that sucker on my couch, of course.” -
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No love from the RAS this year. I’m cool with that. @ Sydney Showground
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I couldn’t drive through Rylstone without some stash acquisition… @ Convent and Chapel Wool Shop
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Blocking. (Did I mention how annoyed I am they killed the Intarsia category at the Show?)
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Rakers are happening. This is the fun bit…
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Happy birthday, Lyn!
Shades of Grey: Celebrating seventy – Just realised that I have finished one other knitting project this year: a garter stitch strip for Lyn’s blanket. I’m not 100% certain, but I’m guessing I’m the only one of the participants that used a pair of 12-sided D&D dice to determine the random placement of my stripes.
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Tsumugi Who and Moneta Dress
Actual finished craft objects! I should probably blog these before I completely forget.
Tsumugi Who
Is this going to be my ONLY knitting finished this year? Only time will tell. At any rate, earlier this year I decided to splurge and buy myself the Tsumugi Who kit from Dairing that I admired at Camp last year. (Note: They have since changed the name to Seta Soie. I don’t know why. Supplier change? My kit did come with grey instead of the beige.) I cast on in the winter – probably at the Abernethy knitters retreat? – and I remember questioning the pattern. (Teresa Dair’s “patterns” are only patterns in the strictest sense of the word.) I decided to go with garter stitch so it wouldn’t curl. And I was off. I went through the entire pattern once and found myself with significant silk left over. So I kept going. Once it got to about 14 feet long, I figured Tom Baker would be happy so I cast off. Then it took me a few more months to finish weaving in the ends. And now it’s done. I even managed to wear it a few times before it got too warm. The colours are gorgeous and strangers have complimented me on it, even guessed the reference. That was nice.
Moneta Dress
I haven’t sewn much this year either. But at one point I ordered the Colette Guide to Sewing Knits along with the Moneta dress pattern. That was step one. The history of making this dress is one of diving in before my brain had a chance to object. Step two involved making an excursion to Tessuti’s during a sale with some of my (then) co-workers where I picked up a couple different knits to experiment with. This was a black merino double-knit. Step three was me cutting it out many, many weeks ago… and then packing it away in my office. Finally, this past weekend, it occurred to me that if I actually finished the damn thing, that would be one more unique dress for Frocktober. So on Sunday I pulled it out and finished it during a Gilmore Girls marathon on Netflix. I think my seam allowance was inadvertently too wide and my waistband elastic was HELLA WONKY, but to my delight I found that the knit fabric completely hides every flaw. It looks great. I’m very, very happy with this project. -
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Selfie with “plarn”. Highlight of my night!
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What Do You Know?
A few weeks ago I got an email from the fine folks at Web Directions inviting me to speak at their next What Do You Know event. They put these on a couple times a year, and it’s basically an evening of short lightning talks around any topic tangentially related to the web. Never one to turn down an opportunity to flaunt/embarrass myself publicly, I accepted. The organisers were aware I’d done a geeky knitting talk in the past and suggested something along those lines. (As the Snook joked: my talk was pretty much intended as comic relief.) With all that in mind, my topic was: Granny Was a Hacker: Knitting as Computer Code.
My slides are available here as a PDF that includes my speaker’s notes as well.
I wrote the talk over two nights and then spent a day or two practicing it. On Thursday I actually got half a dozen co-workers to watch me go through it in a conference room as a final dress rehearsal. My biggest fear was actually having a coughing attack in the middle of it, as I’m still getting over a cold from last week. But I’m happy to report that on the night my talk went SO WELL! Adrenaline kicked in and I didn’t cough or um or even hesitate a little bit. I had been a little worried how the topic would go over, given that the audience was 95% male and probably skewed very technical. But it ended up being a massive hit. (The Snook hypothesised that it was an advantage that pretty much nobody there knew anything about knitting, thus it was equally interesting to everybody.) I had lots of people come up to me afterwards to congratulate me! Here are some of the tweets from the night.
Watching @web_goddess slay the #WDYK audience with binary knitting, ‘creative mittens’ with QR codes, and more. Super fucking epic.
— Lachlan Hardy (@lachlanhardy) April 3, 2014
MT @Xavier_Ho: Thoroughly enjoyed tonight’s WDYK event by @webdirections. Tons of great ideas!
— Kris Howard (@web_goddess) April 4, 2014
Thanks again to Maxine and John from Web Directions for inviting me!
