What a great weekend! The perfect mixture of getting things done & relaxing – sigh!

On the getting things done front ….. Here is The Vest!! This project was begun in early 2002. In the fall of 2001 I attended Stitches East and took a class with June Hiatt. She pounded the importance of gauge into my skull. Not simply trying to fit your gauge into the pattern, but also changing the pattern to suit your gauge.

This is a lot of math for me. I am not exactly bad at math – I lack numerical self confidence and lacking the courage of my calculations, I am easily confused.

So I undertook The Vest as my first foray into the Land of Swatch. The pattern is from Interweave’s Fall 2000 issue. It is called Cider House Rules Vest and the designer is Linda Daniels. The yarn is an alpaca blend – I have long since lost the skein bands, but I did buy it at a Smiley’s Yarn Riot.

Despite the ungodly amount of time I let this project languish, I would say it was moderately successful. I did indeed swatch & measure. It fits My Boar like a glove. This is why I am giving it a moderate grade. It is not supposed to fit like a glove – I neglected to allow for ease. Knit & Learn. My swatching and calculations were right on the money – next time I will remember the ease!! and yes, I will stretch it next time it needs to be washed!

In blogging news, there has been a bit of a brouhaha out there in webland. All over the content of knitting blogs. Ridiculous really. It does however pertain to things that I have been mulling over.

What to put in the blog. What to leave out. The sites I love to read are those that mix it up – learning about the fiber projects is great, but I also love to hear about people’s lives. But where do you draw the line concerning your family’s privacy? Some funny yet aggravating yet typical yet maddening things have happened this past week with one of my lovely daughters. It would make a terrific post – it consumed my mind for two days. But if I put in on the site, it would probably upset her. (although I never did ask her, I suppose I could have simply asked her permission) If I want this to be about life situations as well as knitting, how is that achieved exactly?

so, feedback please! and I will leave you with this photo

What a great weekend! The perfect mixture of getting things done & relaxing – sigh!

On the getting things done front ….. Here is The Vest!! This project was begun in early 2002. In the fall of 2001 I attended Stitches East and took a class with June Hiatt. She pounded the importance of gauge into my skull. Not simply trying to fit your gauge into the pattern, but also changing the pattern to suit your gauge.

This is a lot of math for me. I am not exactly bad at math – I lack numerical self confidence and lacking the courage of my calculations, I am easily confused.

So I undertook The Vest as my first foray into the Land of Swatch. The pattern is from Interweave’s Fall 2000 issue. It is called Cider House Rules Vest and the designer is Linda Daniels. The yarn is an alpaca blend – I have long since lost the skein bands, but I did buy it at a Smiley’s Yarn Riot.

Despite the ungodly amount of time I let this project languish, I would say it was moderately successful. I did indeed swatch & measure. It fits My Boar like a glove. This is why I am giving it a moderate grade. It is not supposed to fit like a glove – I neglected to allow for ease. Knit & Learn. My swatching and calculations were right on the money – next time I will remember the ease!! and yes, I will stretch it next time it needs to be washed!

In blogging news, there has been a bit of a brouhaha out there in webland. All over the content of knitting blogs. Ridiculous really. It does however pertain to things that I have been mulling over.

What to put in the blog. What to leave out. The sites I love to read are those that mix it up – learning about the fiber projects is great, but I also love to hear about people’s lives. But where do you draw the line concerning your family’s privacy? Some funny yet aggravating yet typical yet maddening things have happened this past week with one of my lovely daughters. It would make a terrific post – it consumed my mind for two days. But if I put in on the site, it would probably upset her. (although I never did ask her, I suppose I could have simply asked her permission) If I want this to be about life situations as well as knitting, how is that achieved exactly?

so, feedback please! and I will leave you with this photo

I saw this on ZenNeedle. A reading checklist – I have read those that are in bold. Looks like I better get to the library! Does it count if you have read a different book by the same author? How many have you read?

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua – Things Fall Apart
Agee, James – A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane – Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James – Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel – Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul – The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton – The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate – The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph – Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore – The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen – The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel – Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel – Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles – A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor – Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore – An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre – The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George – The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph – Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo – Selected Essays
Faulkner, William – As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William – The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry – Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott – The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave – Madame Bovary
Ford Madox – The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von – Faust
Golding, William – Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas – Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel – The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph – Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest – A Farewell to Arms
Homer – The Iliad
Homer – The Odyssey Hugo, Victor – The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale – Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous – Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik – A Doll’s House
James, Henry – The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry – The Turn of the ScrewJoyce, James – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz – The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong – The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper – To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair – Babbitt
London, Jack – The Call of the WildMann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García – One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman – Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman – Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur – The Crucible
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris – Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia – The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan – Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel – Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas – The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria – All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond – Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry – Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. – The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William – Hamlet
Shakespeare, William – Macbeth
Shakespeare, William – A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William – Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard – Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary – Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon – Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles – Antigone
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William – Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David – Walden
Tolstoy, Leo – War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan – Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire – Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. – Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice – The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith – The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora – Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt – Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar – The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee – The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia – To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard – Native Son