Harper’s blog

Mark with bold the things you have ever knit, with italics the ones you plan to do sometime [I only marked those I’d like to try within the year], and leave the rest. I elected to bold and italicize techniques I’ve learned but not yet used in a completed project.

• Afghan
• I-cord
• Garter stitch
• Knitting with metal wire
• Shawl
• Stocking stitch
• Socks: top-down
• Socks: toe-up
• Knitting with camel yarn
• Mittens: Cuff-up
• Mittens: Tip-down
• Hat
• Knitting with silk
• Moebius band knitting
• Participating in a KAL
• Sweater
• Drop stitch patterns
• Knitting with recycled/secondhand yarn
• Slip stitch patterns
• Knitting with banana fiber yarn
• Domino knitting
• Twisted stitch patterns
• Knitting with bamboo yarn
• Two end knitting
• Charity knitting
• Knitting with soy yarn
• Cardigan
• Toy/doll clothing
• Knitting with circular needles
• Baby items
• Knitting with your own handspun
• Slippers
• Graffiti knitting (knitting items on, or to be left on the street)
• Continental knitting
• Designing knitted garments
• Cable stitch patterns
• Lace patterns
• Publishing a knitting book
• Scarf
• Teaching a child to knit
• American/English knitting
• Knitting to make money
• Buttonholes
• Knitting with alpaca
• Fair Isle knitting
• Norwegian knitting
• Dying with plant colors
• Knitting items for a wedding
• Household items
• Knitting socks (or other small tubular items)on two circulars
• Olympic knitting
• Knitting with someone else’s handspun yarn
• Knitting with dpns
• Holiday-related knitting
• Teaching a male how to knit
• Bobbles
• Knitting for a living
• Knitting with cotton
• Knitting smocking
• Dying yarn
• Steeks
• Knitting art
• Knitting two socks on two circulars simultaneously
• Fulling/felting
• Knitting with wool
• Textured knitting
• Kitchener BO
• Purses/bags
• Knitting with beads
• Swatching
• Long Tail CO
• Entrelac
• Knitting and purling backwards
• Machine knitting
• Knitting with self patterning/self striping/variegating yarn
• Stuffed toys
• Knitting with cashmere
• Darning
• Jewelry
• Knitting with synthetic yarn
• Writing a pattern
• Gloves
• Intarsia
• Knitting with linen
• Knitting for preemies
• Tubular CO
• Freeform knitting
• Short rows
• Cuffs/fingerless mits/armwarmers
• Pillows
• Knitting a pattern from an online knitting magazine
• Rug
• Knitting on a loom
• Thrummed knitting
• Knitting a gift
• Knitting for pets
• Shrug/bolero/poncho
• Knitting with dog/cat hair
• Hair accessories
• Knitting in public

From Just Hungry

A List of 100 Japanese Foods To Try At Least Once

1. Properly washed and cooked, top quality new harvest white rice (shinmai)
2. Freshly made tofu, as hiyayakko or yudofu
3. Properly made misoshiru and osumashi
4. Properly made homemade nukazuke
5. Very fresh sanma (saury), sizzling hot from the grill, eaten with a drizzle of soy sauce and a mound of grated daikon radish
6. Homemade umeboshi
7. Freshly made, piping hot crispy tempura. I prefer vegetable tempura like shiso leaves, eggplant and sweet potato.
8. A whole grilled wild matsutake
9. Freshly made sobagaki with sobayu
10. Mentaiko from Fukuoka, or tarako
11. Onigiri with the three classic fillings: umeboshi, okaka, shiozaki
12. Assorted fresh-as-possible sashimi
13. Saba oshizushi
14. Mugicha
15. Kakifurai
16. Morinaga High-Chew candy, grape flavor
17. Karasumi
18. A pot of oden, preferably with homemade components especially ganmodoki, boiled eggs and daikon radish
19. Ika no shiokara
20. Calpis
21. Ankou nabe
22. Unadon
23. Komochi kombu or kazunoko
24. Yamakake, grated yamaimo with maguro (red tuna) cubes (or just with a raw egg)
25. Properly made gyokuro shincha
26. Milky Candy
27. Wanko soba
28. Omuraisu with demi-glace sauce
29. Handmade katayaki senbei
30. Yohkan (yokan) from Toraya
31. Ishi yakiimo - sweet potatoes cooked in hot stones, available from street vendor carts
32. Natto
33. Fresh seaweed sunomono (can also have some tako in it)
34. Ikura or sujiko
35. Tonkatsu
36. Goma dofu
37. Chawan mushi or tamago dofu - the same dish either piping hot or ice cold
38. Freshly made mochi, with kinako and sugar, grated daikon and soy sauce or natto
39. Gindara no kasuzuke
40. Hoshigaki
41. Inarizushi
42. Chikuzen-ni
43. Surume
44. Yakinasu with grated ginger
45. Tamago kake gohan
46. Kabuki-age
47. Nikujaga
48. Spinach gomaae
49. Fuki no tou
50. Okonomiyaki
51. Yakitori
52. Ohagi
53. Japanese style curry, with rakkyo and fukujinzuke as condiments
54. Kenchinjiru
55. Yakult
56. Kakipea
57. Takoyaki
58. Sakura mochi
59. Buta no kakuni
60. Daigaku imo
61. Kappa Ebisen
62. Chicken tsukune
63. Hakusaizuke
64. Hayashi rice
65. Goya champuruu
66. Dorayaki
67. Ochazuke
68. Sakuma Drops
69. Stewed kiriboshi daikon
70. Takenoko gohan (or in fall, kuri gohan)
71. Cream or potato korokke
72. Fresh yuba
73. Real ramen
74. Monaka
75. Ekiben of all kinds
76. Edamame
77. Chicken karaage
78. Kuzumochi
79. Mitarashi dango
80. Konnyaku no dengaku
81. Yukimi Daifuku
82. Sukiyaki
83. Nama yatsuhashi
84. Panfried hanpen
85. Nozawanazuke or Takanazuke
86. Kiritanpo
87. Amanatto
88. Narazuke
89. Aji no himono
90. Baby Ramen
91. Kobucha
92. Kasutera
93. Tazukuri
94. Karintou
95. Sauce Yakisoba
96. Kamaboko
97. Oyako donburi
98. Atsuyaki tamago
99. Kuri kinton
100. Japanese potato salad

"Below is a list of 100 things that I think every good omnivore should have tried at least once in their life. The list includes fine food, strange food, everyday food and even some pretty bad food - but a good omnivore should really try it all. Don’t worry if you haven’t, mind you; neither have I, though I’ll be sure to work on it. Don’t worry if you don’t recognise everything in the hundred, either; Wikipedia has the answers.

Here’s what I want you to do:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results."

1. Venison

33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar

37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat (I've had a goat stew but not curried)
42. Whole insects (chocolate covered ants and grasshoppers)
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin 
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (if you really mean one of the ingredients in Kaopectate, I have)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian

66. Frogs’ legs (First time was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Louisiana when I was about 8)
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis

69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette (chit'lins)
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill 

76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky (or something similar).
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam 
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Gee, I guess there's not much I won't try.  I sorta hate to say it but I'd even try dog if I was in a country where it was a common food. 

Okay, I hate memes but I love reading lists so when I saw this on another blog I decided to use it as a prod to add some new titles to my next library trip.  I read in such infrequent small bits of time anymore that it takes me forever to read a single book (although I just read a book in its entirety during lunch -- hmm, could this be why graphic novels are so popular?).  So. . .

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. [Note:  I'm going to asterisk the unread titles I own for my own info]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel *
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote *
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov *
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad *
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations

American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books *
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex *
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel *
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo *
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys *
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels *
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time *
Dune
The Prince *
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present

Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere *
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything *
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel *
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences *
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

I'm surprised how few of these were read for a class.   And how many I've started and not finished.  Part of that could be the aforementioned slow reading combined with the fact that I exclusively get books from the library and end up returning things either before I've started them or after I've started but for whatever reason had to return and didn't re-check out.  That is true of Mailer's last book - The Castle in the Forest - I was enjoying it but didn't finish before it was due.  Okay, I'm going to the library tonight to pick up some holds -- I'll see if it is there and start where I left off. 

I'm at a strange place in my knitting.  I am no longer an eager beaver beginner excited by each new technique or pattern but I'm not yet an experienced skilled knitter able to eyeball a sweater and recreate it.  I still like learning something new with every (now maybe every other) project but I find I get impatient with my rate of progress even as my knitting speeds up.

Contributing to this is that I am trying to not buy yarn without a specific project in mind or, better yet, only use stash yarn.  Makes me realize that shopping must be an integral part of my knitting enjoyment.

As for my blogging silence, much of what drew me to blogging -- documenting projects -- is being satisfied by Ravelry.  Coincidentally my invitation to join came the same month as my last post.

IMGP2646

Visited south Louisiana last month.  Geese, chickens, peacocks, and lots of lovely friends and family.

IMGP2747

So, I am rushing to finish a lace scarf/stole for Mother's Day.  I was trying an experiment and knitting it in the round with the plan to drop stitches at the end to make the fringe.  Perhaps lace is too strong a word -- it is stockinette, sock yarn, and size 9 needles.  And it was taking me twenty minutes to complete one round so I had put in at least 11 hours when ---  a stitch was caught and pulled out.  We are not talking a small pull we are talking feet of yarn, my scarf looked like an open-ended drawstring bag.  "Don't panic," I thought.  "You can fix this." 

No, I couldn't.  I tried pulling what I thought was the errant thread at a further point to help (!!!) the process but it was a different thread so now I had two hideous pulls.  And the part that I had un-pursed looked like crap anyway so I decided to let it go.  I haven't frogged it yet but that's its future.

I have had the yarn (3 balls of expensive Touch Me Due) for the Minimum Scarf from The Knit Stitch by Sally Melville (love that book) forever.  I had started it with two balls thinking I would just make it shorter than the pattern (which calls for four), bought a third when I realized it would be way too short, then frogged it after finishing one ball which showed me it would still be too short with three.

I cast-on 24 rather than the 32 called for (3/4 stitches for 3/4 the yarn so hopefully) and have been knitting like mad since last night.  I've put in around three hours and have over 15 inches (the final length should be close to 39 inches) so I still have hope I can mail it off to my mother in time.  And I received the fun scarf pin I purchased for Mother this weekend (all the way from Canada) so perhaps the stars are in alignment.  I do have to felt the scarf after it is done which means a laundromat for me but I am feeling strong.

I used to crochet.  I crocheted an itsy-bitsy bikini for myself in high school and wore it outside while I wrote a term paper.  Omigod -- I was burned on every part of my body because folks, at least the way I crocheted, crochet has holes!!!   Although it wasn't crochet's fault that I was a foolish teenager I pretty much never crocheted again.

Fast forward twenty + years.  Now I knit.  I love to knit.  I love to read about knitting and look at knitting patterns.  And I love all the tools and gadgets.  I love how knitted fabric looks and feels.  No interest in trying crochet again.

Until. . . Wendy showed a cute striped bag she is working on.  I followed her link to kpixie and beheld this tiny purse kit and it is crochet.  With tiny yarn and a tiny hook required (1.75 mm -- smaller than US size 0 -- whoever heard of such a thing?).  But it is very very cute.  And it is a bag, another obsession of mine (really containers of all sorts and each large bag must have several small bags in it to contain my other obsession -- tools).

So, I've been eyeing this cute Aero hook set (why buy one hook when you can satisfy two hungers at once -- tools in a container!).  And the other colors of the adorable yarn.

Stop me.

Well, obviously I am not a dedicated blogger which is funny because I get impatient for a new entry in the blogs I read if a week goes by without one.  My knitting has increased in one sense -- I am knitting hats and vests for a great charity, Warm Woolies -- and slowed in another sense -- I'm trying to stop doing as much knitting for individuals because I find it rather stressful, at least if they know about it. 

A case in point; I have been trying to make the half-dome hat for a friend who requested a kufi-style hat (moslem prayer hat) and it turned into the CURSED hat.  You knit the majority of the hat on number 5 needles but the brim is knitted with 3s!  I started with addi turbos which I have liked on other projects but they were a nightmare on this one.  I made more errors in the first three rounds than I had for all my previous projects put together.  Small needles are hard enough for me but small slippery needles?  And to get gauge I should have gone down a size but that wasn't going to happen.  So I frogged it, got some bamboo needles and started again. 

One thing I hate about small needles is I find the small stitches hard to see (and this was in a dark slate blue) so I end up dropping or mistakenly adding stitches and not discovering the problem until several rounds later.  I frogged the middle section of the hat a half a dozen times.  I also hate how long everything seems to take with small needles.  And my friend had a much larger than usual head (he wears a size 8 fedora -- I have a big head and I wear a 7 3/4 hat so we're talking a long circumference to knit around. 

Then the decreases added a fresh level of hell.  Not the decreases themselves but more needle issues.  I switched to two circulars and had one of my Denise needles separate and drop a boatload of stitches.  I love my Denise needles and they had never come undone like that before.  But this was the CURSED hat.  So I laboriously picked up the stitches and started using dpns (look at these great colors).  They fell  (were pushed?) out.  So I put the hat aside and my friend pretty much gave up. 

Then I saw the Knitty sweater pattern Thermal and I loved the waffle stitch.  She described it as stretchy so I thought it would make an excellent hat.  I decided to make my own pattern using the waffle stitch but I couldn't bear to unravel the hat and use the same yarn, what if the curse came with it?  I bought a new ball of what I thought was the same slate blue color and cast-on a narrow brim with silver gray (from the CH but it hadn't actually been knit  so I thought it would be safe) and started away. 

It went very fast at first and was enjoyable (size 6 needles - yeah!) but then I got to the decreases and realized that I had cast on too many stitches for the decreases I wanted to do (but what was needed for the stitch pattern and his size) so I had to do a lot of thinking and decided to decrease 5 stitches in the non-ribbing section of the waffle stitch and then I'd be fine.  But I wasn't.  I had thought to do the waffle stitch on the entire hat and because I was doing double decreases it should reduce in each section by one rib pair.  But I somehow added a stitch or forgot to do one of the decreases and couldn't figure out what I should do so I put it aside again.  Then I was reading AlterKnit and she had a beautiful silk kufi style hat that changed to stockinette stitch at the decreases and there were 5 paired decreases which looked cool.  Aha!  I started doing the same and it looked great but then I started to panic a bit because I was getting close to the end of the skein.  No problem, I'll just use a teeny bit of the cursed skein, right?  Oh no, different blues entirely.  Thankfully I eked out the yarn and finished the hat 6 months after I started.  And here, modeled by me is the no-longer-cursed hat (And my friend liked it):

Waffle Skull Cap-4

Alpaca Earflap Hat

 Other recent projects (I love that you can see the snow falling in the earflap shot:

Mission Falls Striped Hat

And projects for the Charmed Knits Knitalong: A Ravenclaw beret is on the needles (using the cursed yarn but the curse appears to have been broken) and Gryffindor and Slytherin waiting in the wings.  I don't have a yellow wool so Hufflepuff will just have to wait.

Harry Potter Yarn-1

Dog in window with scarf

I did finish a scarf for myself.  Lengthwise scarves are great.  I know it is the same number of stitches as a scarf knitted the usual way but without as much turning of the project it felt faster.  I used two colors of a yarn I first saw and loved in Yarnplay called Filatura Di Crosa 127 print and made a simple garter stitch scarf. 

Long suffering dog

Well, I thought it would be brilliant for my co-worker's dog to model it since she has similar coloring but she was much more interested in treats.  She's a sweetie and I wish she visited the office more often.  She is a coonhound though and every once in a while let's loose a bay that rattles the windows.

Filatura di Crosa scarf

Here is a non-modeled version draped artistically around a bookend.