A few months ago, harrock came home with some blue yarn from Mind's Eye, and clamored for socks. I thought I would be very clever and make him two pairs of two-color socks, rather than one pair of light blue socks and one pair of dark blue socks. Sadly, the tension on the stranded colorwork is just a little too tight, and it doesn't fit over his heel. I can put it on, but it's a little too long for me (since it was intended for Jerry, who has huge feet). I am not sure there is really a good target audience who has extra-long but narrow and small-heeled feet. However, if you are such a person, these could be your socks! Having tried three times and failed three times to make a pair of stranded socks for shumashi years and years ago, I really need to internalize the lesson DO NOT TRY TO MAKE STRANDED COLORWORK SOCKS YOU WILL BE SAD. My tension is pretty good for sweaters, but socks just require so much more stretchiness.



This is a pretty good demonstration of the difference between the top strand and the bottom strand. In the toe transition, the light blue is the bottom strand; in the leg transition, the dark blue is the bottom strand. In both cases, that means the toe-side solo stitches are a little more pronounced than the cuff-side solo stitches. (The bottom strand is always a little more emphasized).

Two hats for Vonnie, along cheerfully bizarre lines.



I played around with the German short row again - look at this, isn't it tidy? (All you non-knitters are wondering what the heck I'm talking about). There's no wraps, there's no pick-ups, you don't have to remember which way the thanks-ma goes. The one flaw it has is that it doesn't work well to stack two short row turns right on top of each other - so using it in something like a short row sock heel has to add a row in between - but it's still a trick worth adding to your tool set.

I got the "Steggie" sweater done with days (and a lot of yarn) to spare before Jake's birthday party, so I made the little matching dinosaur. Because all small children should have stuffed animals matching their clothes, I guess.

Tags: knit

( Dragonsbane, The Woodcutter, All Men of Genius, Pledge, Daughter of Smoke and Bone, The Immortal Circus, YouCollapse )

Tags: book reviews

This one is for Margaret, greyautumnrain's eldest. The pattern is by the same designer as the recent purple sweater for Susan - I think she has a nice knack for cute little-girl sweater/dress patterns. These are the first buttons in a long time to not come from Windsor Button - I went and got a set before they went out of business, but promptly misplaced them, and these come from Michael's. I feel kind of guilty for thinking they might be better than the original buttons - they're adorable, and sparkly, and the colors match really well. (Their button selection, as far as I can tell, is not very big, but I got really lucky.)

Tags: knit

For anyone who is reading the Laura Recommended Books but is going really slowly, Leviathan Wakes is on sale for Kindle for $1.99 today, and the audiobook for $4.99.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0047Y171G/

( Shadow Ops: Control Point, Angelmaker, the rest of the Trial of Blood & Steel, Six Gun Snow White, American Elsewhere, Great North Road, A Face Like Glass, The Scorpio RacesCollapse )

Tags: book reviews

My adventures in Google Reader replacement. Personally, I don't need multi-platform with a back end, which is admittedly one reason Google Reader was so great, but I really only use my Mac. So: web services and Mac standalones.

Feedly

This seems to be the service that's trying to position itself as the Seamless Google Reader Replacement. Right now it uses Google Reader as a backend, but they promise that by July 1, it'll seamlessly be using its own backend. Of the web services I tried early, they were the ones with the least problems being hammered under the weight of Google Reader refugees. (At first there was missing UI which made the interface very confusing, but it recovered fast). It has the magazine-style page format, with a focus on pictures, but the categories and individual feeds are prominent, and it has a happy toggle between "show all" and "show unread". Oh! Hey, they have a setting for the format - you can switch it from Magazine to Titles (like reader) or Card (more like pinterest) or other things. Points for them. I can live with this one, and the "seamless transition" (assuming they make good) is a nice perk. It has google ads along the side - my goodness, it's as if they found a way to make money from their free service so they don't have to dump their users!

Pulse

Well, this doesn't really want to be an RSS reader, it wants to be a glossy content provider that might barely let you read RSS if you ask nicely. It starts out by insisting that I subscribe to three of its auto-populated feeds about Sports or Entertainment or whatever, and I couldn't get rid of them. (Maybe in in the iOS interface that would have worked; the UI seems designed for iOS and the web site is a less-loved offshoot). That just irritated me too much, and I quit before getting further.

Netvibes

This requires importing the OPML subscriptions file (which is an XML file that Google Reader will output. It not ending in .opml confused me for a bit). You have to sign up and create at least one of their feeds before you can import, but you can delete their feed after that. It does actually note which feeds are not working (as opposed to most of the others, which just stop giving me articles - I can prune my list of the broken ones! Bonus!) Though deleting the broken ones takes too many clicks - I'm okay with clicking on the "delete" icon and then clicking on the "OK" button to delete it, but the extra window afterwards telling me it's deleted, that I have to click on the "Close" button to close is a little much. Alas, the OPML file does not seem to contain what I have read and what not, so everything is new. I can get it to display only unread articles, but not hide feeds with no new articles, which I kind of prefer (well, maybe that's why I never notice when feeds stop working). It makes clicking to open in a new browser window (as opposed to the in-reader window) easy, but in general, I don't really love the interface. I kind of like the clean white space UIs, and this one is more greys and lines. Maybe better for people who get headaches from too much white.

The Old Reader

Meant to look like the old version of Google Reader. It imports from an OPML file too. However, it took about four days to import an OPML file, and it's still very slow to actually run. It might be fine if it stops thrashing, and I think it has the social features that Google Reader used to have, so it might be the place for the Reader Sharers to go, but that was never my thing.

Reeder

This is a Mac standalone. The in-reader browser window is very nice, and you can toggle on and off "internet plugins" (i.e. video players). I'm not actually sure which browser they are getting the plugins from. In general, I like it, except that videos don't seem to have sound (?), and getting to a browser window is hard to do trivially.

NewsBlur

It looks like it could be good, but I wasn't willing to pay $24 just to test it. (I understand they're swamped, I can't really blame them for needing to ramp up with money.) They do seem to have pretty attentive support, so that

Anyway. I have mostly been switching back and forth between Feedly and Reeder. Reeder is a little faster with the pseudo-browser format, but Feedly is better as far as actually being a browser. I suppose I'll keep switching back and forth until Reader dies, and then see who does better with their back end.

This is a neat project. I hadn't done any swing knitting before (that's the term coined for essentially using trapezoids of short rows to make those curving shapes, and pairing up short rows on one side with short rows on the other to make it all work out smoothly). It also introduced me to the German short row, which is a weird little trick at the turn that avoids wrapping or picking up or anything other than pulling the first turned stitch over and extra-tight. (That explanation will make no sense, but there are youtube videos of it for those who knit).

The instructions were kind of incomprehensible for the first "feather", because they kept referring forward to things that I hadn't done yet, and because I didn't understand swing knitting, but things like "You won't put in any light pins here, because they're cancelling out the imaginary dark pins from later" eventually did make sense.

For mathhobbit.

Tags: knit

I found this yarn on last summer's trip to California. I think this particular store was even "Hmm, we're ridiculously early to where we're supposed to meet people for dinner - I wonder if there are any yarn stores nearby", and it had a lot of particularly interesting things in it. The yarn is a knit tape made out of very smooth cotton thread, so it's a bit like ribbon, except actually stretchy. Working with it, it's very smooth and soft, like nice T-shirt fabric, but when knit up, it's much less soft. Not *non*-soft, just sort of normal. The flat picture gives you a good idea of the colors, but when you look at the object, it isn't really clear what it is or how to wear it. So here's another picture of me wearing it - it's sort of like a cross between a little foofy scarf and a cowl. (And I demonstrate that I'm terrible at taking my picture with my cell phone.)



(Oh, and if anyone is thinking "ooh, that is the scarfy cowly thing of my destiny", speak up. :) At some point I should probably stop making things that don't have a designated wearer before I start.)

Tags: knit