Monthly Archives: February 2006

24 Feb

Randomly posting ten

No theme this week, just completely random. I’ve been sick for the last week and a half so I haven’t really been up to much posting. But a random ten is pretty easy.

  1. “So Long Baby Goodbye” — The Blasters
  2. “Conversations” — The Posies
  3. “(The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes” — Patrik Tanner. OK, this is not a covers theme list, but I have so many of the darn things that they will appear anyway. An Elvis Costello cover.
  4. “Photograph” — Jason Falkner. Yes, a cover of the Def Leppard song!
  5. “Wide Boy” — Nik Kershaw
  6. “Honey Hush” — Big Joe Turner
  7. “Dancing With Myself” — The Donnas. Another cover!
  8. “This Is Pop” — XTC
  9. “Karma Chameleon” — Culture Club. Actually, this is one of my least favorite Culture Club songs. I think I have it because of the mix cds I made for my high school reunion (which didn’t get played anyway).
  10. “Finally” — The Frames
24 Feb

I’m sort of in the newspaper today

“Temple said 66 percent of King County residents surveyed in a poll Feb. 7 want the county to buy the land and build trails adjacent to the tracks. Just 11 percent of the 10,000 people who completed his automated survey preferred converting the rail corridor to trail use only, he said, and 22 percent preferred a rail-only option. ”

This is from a story in today’s P-I about the potential sale of Railway tracks to King County, and whether the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train would then be displaced.

Anyway, I noticed this because I was one of the people who was polled on February 7. It’s nice to see the results so quickly.

(My poll response? Keep the train. But I’m a train dork of sorts. I love trains.)

16 Feb

Pattern: “A Little Twist” Wristwarmers

I know I said “no more wristwarmers for a while.” But then I lost the pair that I wear every day, so I had to make a new pair. It’s boring to keep making the same one, so I had to come up with a new pattern. So here it is, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out: “A Little Twist” (PDF, should be readable on most systems — This is a big file, it might take some time to download, especially if you are on dialup! Please be patient and wait for the PDF to download!).

They are made of a soft cashmere blend yarn, with delicate cables and a thumb gusset. Like the other wristwarmers I’ve posted, these are a quick knit, and great for gifts.

Here are a couple more pics (click to see the larger ones at Flickr):

Some people have made these wristwarmers and posted their own pictures! I will link to photos here, so send me your URL if you post pictures of wristwarmers knitted from my pattern:

This pattern is Worthware — that means, if you like it, please send what you think it’s worth via the PayPal button here. I hope you think it’s worth something. 🙂 Thanks for looking at my pattern!

15 Feb

The smoky British pub is about to be history

Last year Jason got to go to Germany, England, and Portugal for a work trip, and I had to stay home. He had a good time, and especially enjoyed London, promising that the two of us would go there soon. But, he said, there would be a problem for me — smoke everywhere, and especially in the pubs. I have asthma that is triggered by cigarette smoke, so I can’t be around smoke at all. There are some smoke-free pubs in London, but most of them aren’t smoke-free.

Well, that’s about to change. Like Washington State, England is about to have a complete ban on smoking in indoor public places. The rest of Great Britain will soon have this as well, and Ireland already has one, so we will be able to enjoy the British Isles more safely.

13 Feb

New pattern preview, with buttons

What is this? It’s a new knitting pattern I wrote last week. Or, at least, a close-up picture of the item knitted from said pattern. I can’t show the whole thing because I am perhaps submitting it for publication somewhere, so I can’t publish it myself yet until I know whether it gets accepted. But I wanted to post a tiny pic to mark that I finished it, anyway. So here is a little excerpt of this item, with its silver buttons.

The color is very nice. The yarn is one of the Jo-Ann Sensations yarns, Cosetta, in Cosetta Purple. Which is a blue-purple variegated wool yarn with little bits of silver nylon to make it reflective. I like this yarn; it’s quite nice to knit and it is just so pretty.

I’m not exactly sure where I am going to submit this. It was going to be Knitty, but I missed the deadline for Spring, and this really isn’t a Summer item nor one that matches their theme for the summer issue. So I could wait and submit it for the fall issue there, or just send it somewhere else.

I will post another pattern relatively soon. I know I said no more wristwarmers for a while. But I lost my own pair. Wah! So I have to knit another, and it would be boring to make them exactly the same… so they are just a bit different. A more interesting variation on the One-Day Wristwarmers with a tiny touch of cabling. Nothing all that fancy, but they are pretty. And this time in cashmere — or, at least, a cashmere blend. Yummy. So stay tuned for those. I’m halfway done with one of them; they don’t take long to knit, but I haven’t really had time to knit this weekend.

10 Feb

Random 10 Covers again

OK, I am listening to my Covers Smart Playlist in iTunes, so this is what you get for a Random Ten this week. Covers. Enjoy!

  1. “Common People” — William Shatner (Pulp)
  2. “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” — Daryl Hall and John Oates (Righteous Brothers)
  3. “Hounds of Love” — Futureheads (Kate Bush)
  4. “God Only Knows” — Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet (Beach Boys)
  5. “Smash It Up” — Posies (Damned)
  6. “Hold Me Now” — Eijyu (Thompson Twins)
  7. “…Baby One More Time” — Fountains of Wayne (Britney Spears)
  8. “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” — Al Green (Bee Gees)
  9. “What Is Life” — Shawn Mullins (George Harrison)
  10. “Stop Your Sobbing” — Pretenders (Kinks)
02 Feb

Knitted: Leaf Vein Scarf

This is a scarf made from one of the edging patterns in Knitting On The Edge, by Nicky Epstein. The only thing I did to make it a scarf was to add a few rows of garter stitch on each end. It is about 56″ long. In this picture it’s hanging so you can see the lace pattern more clearly.

It’s neat how the stripeyness of the variegated yarn is enhanced by the angled “leaves”. The yarn itself is interesting. I found an unfinished garter stitch scarf (with the rest of a ball of wool attached) at the Goodwill outlet store recently. I bought it (for less than a buck) and took it home, where I unraveled and washed it. The yarn turned out to be wool, and the variegated colors are just gorgeous. I have no idea what brand of wool it is, sadly — I’d love to buy more.

(Updated to add: Folks on the Knittyboard were able to identify the yarn for me; it’s Manos del Uruguay in the “Eclipse” colorway. See here for a skein of it.)

Here’s another photo of the scarf.

01 Feb

“Wine Spodee-O-Dee, Drinkin’ Wine”

I have a post on MetaFilter today about the Pacific Northwest party beverage “spodee” (fruit and alcohol), and it’s possible relation to the old R&B song “Drinkin’ Wine Spodee-O-Dee”. Basically, I always wondered if the name of the drink was related to the song, and did as much Google research on it as I could; I couldn’t find anything directly tying the two together, but it just seems very likely that the song inspired the name. (But it’s possible it was the other way around, I guess.) I found a lot of great songs while looking, though. (From Stick McGhee to Big Joe Turner, Big Jay McNeely, Wild Bill Moore, and lots of other pre-Elvis rock and rollers, mostly found via the Rock Before Elvis website.)

The funny thing is that I generally don’t drink alcohol (only on the rarest of occasions), and I don’t think I’ve ever had spodee. But it was an interesting topic to look into.

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