crochet!

I got out a couple of books yesterday and that ball of orange cotton yarn that I bought on sale ages ago and settled down to teach myself crochet. It took a while to understand what I was supposed to be doing and I had to cross check several times between the books which sometimes told me to do different things — I don’t think there is ever one book that tells you everything you need to know, which is why it’s ok to buy lots of craft books.

Anyway… I was finally sort of getting the hang of it, although my little swatch was quite ropey really and I kept adding and losing stitches at the edges, but I was quite chuffed that at least the middle was actually looking pretty ok! I put a picture up on Instagram and several people took the time to offer encouraging words. Thank you!

Last night I decided to start a second swatch and this one turned out much better. The movements with yarn and hook are starting to feel more natural too, although it is probably not a good idea to learn crochet while live tweeting a Eurovision semi final, and I did add an extra stitch at one point so I just removed it when I noticed it a row or two later.

Second attempt!

The yarn is quite soft so I might use this for cleaning my glasses.

The green yarn has arrived for the second of my Christmas balls for May in the Merry Knitalong, so I made sure to finish off the first one. It’s the second version of the Xs and Os design from Arne and Carlos’s 55 Christmas balls to knit, and I’ll be using the green yarn for the first version. I think they’ll look quite nice together.

a picture is worth

Another blog post for the Australia and New Zealand librarians’ 23 mobile things. This is the second thing. The next post will feature knitting, promise.

Flickr Photo a Day from this week – Camera360 app with Glowing B&W effect

I have a very old phone with what I’m sure is a fairly ordinary camera, but it really does take surprisingly good photos. Even better, it’s always in my pocket so I can take a picture almost anytime. There really is nothing worse than wishing you had your camera with you when you see something that catches your eye. I’ve definitely taken a lot more photos since I got my phone and I’ve also signed up for some photo challenges which have helped me to keep my eyes open for photo opportunities.

I’ve been on Flickr for years and last year  joined a Flickr weekly photo challenge and added a Photo a Day one this year — although I’m now way behind on the weekly one so I might have stretched myself a bit. It is good discipline though and keeping your eyes open for photo opportunities allows you to see wonderful new things you might not have otherwise noticed. I’ve also met some lovely new people, Flickr is a very friendly place to hangout.

When the Android Instagram app came out I signed up for that too and usually post a couple of photos a week. It’s a different kind of interaction on Instagram compared with Flickr. On Instagram you get some immediate interaction and then it’s gone. On Flickr you sometimes have quite in depth interactions that can stretch over a long time. I probably wouldn’t put an ephemeral photo like what I made for lunch on Flickr but I would put it on Instagram. They’re very different but I like them both and I don’t really understand why some people feel the need to choose.

Unfortunately the Android Flickr app is yet to catch up with the new iOS one and doesn’t allow you to upload to groups. I use it for checking comments but I mostly use another app Upstream for uploading photos to Flickr. I have location services turned off on my phone, but I usually edit my Flickr map manually and I have a geofence around my home location so only trusted people can see the details.

I wish more people would put their Flickr photos on a map. I once found a photo of some fantastic street art in Fitzroy and the Flickr map allowed me to find out where it was located so I could take a photo myself!

I rarely use the standard camera on my phone since I installed the Camera360 app. It has some excellent effects and features and seems to produce better quality photos. If I use an effect in Camera360 I can set it so it saves one photo with the effect and one original, so then I can also play around with the original in another editing app if I want to. I must say that I’m not much impressed with the Instagram filters so I usually take my Instagram photos using the Camera360 camera and apply any effects there, or I make the edits in another app before uploading to Instagram from the Gallery.

I’ve tried a few photo apps over the past year. The ones I keep on my photo home screen are the ones I use most often, the ones I use less often but don’t want to delete I’ve shuffled into a folder, and I’ve discarded some others completely.

I’ve got a couple of other photo editing apps in my folder but I mostly use BeFunky. It has all the basic edits you’d expect such as brightness, contrast, cropping, and straightening plus it has a range of really nice filters. TouchRetouch is excellent if you’re prone to getting your thumb or foot in the corner of an otherwise good photo, but you can also airbrush out anything else that’s spoiling your picture, and PicFrame is handy for making collages.

The best thing about all of this is, of course, the social aspect. What’s the point of taking great photos if nobody gets to see them?

Indian summer

The cable tweed jumper is almost finished, just in time for Winter I would have said, but we’re having a bit of an Indian Summer in Melbourne. I had a day off work yesterday and was pottering around the garden in a T-shirt and shorts.

The neckline is now finished so there’s just some seaming to go. There was a bit of mathematics involved, so I got out pen and paper to calculate out how many stitches and where to pick up at the neckline edges, allowing for a couple of extra stitches at the left shoulder which is yet to be seamed together.

Unfortunately my careful calculations didn’t save me from a stupid mistake in using the wrong size needles to knit the neckband but at least I noticed just before I cast off so it could have been worse, and I was able to rip back to the row where I had picked up and start over.

The Digger’s Club Winter Gardening catalogue arrived in the post this week, which is always inspiring, so with the ground still warm and a little rain expected tomorrow I planted some more seeds in the kitchen garden… two varieties of carrot, Early Chantenay and All Seasons, and some swede turnips, plus a pot of chives in a sunny spot by the back door. I’m also planning to put down seeds in seed trays for silverbeet, spinach, lettuce and spring onion.

It’s amazing how much you can get done just with one day off work. I also finished the first of the “last of Noro” socks.

I usually cast on for the second sock right away but I need the needles for the Merry Knitalong Christmas balls so the second sock will have to wait! There are two Christmas balls in the knitalong this month and I’ve decided to knit the first one in green and white, but my green yarn hasn’t arrived in the post box yet, so I’ve cast on for the second one which I’ll do in red and white. This is  ”X’s and “O’s”, number 15 from Arne and Carlos’s 55 Christmas balls to knit.

a quiet day on Twitter

I’ve signed up to the Australia and New Zealand librarians’ 23 mobile things. Hopefully I’ll learn some new things about mobile stuff. Regular readers (hello!) who have popped by to see discussion of yarn and knitting patterns may care to skip these posts.

I’m quite late to the mobile world. Wayne and I only got our first smart phones less than two years ago when we got a deal for the very first Samsung Galaxy after the Galaxy III came out. We’re both hooked now and often tweet each other through the day. I almost never use the phone for making calls and the first time my phone rang I was so surprised that I couldn’t work out how to answer it.

I did join Twitter quite a while ago though. I signed up when a former work colleague invited me to join and then she never sent a single tweet. Wayne said I should follow Yoko Ono because she always sends you a direct message to say “hello” and she did!

My Twitter account was pretty quiet until I attended the VALA library conference in Melbourne in 2010 where I met some lovely librarians at a lunchtime stitch’n bitch. I didn’t have a smart phone then of course, but I noticed everyone else busily tweeting during the conference presentations and I’d rush home and try to catch up on the Twitter conversations on my computer. That’s when I knew I was missing out and I really needed to join the mobile crowd. By the time the next VALA conference rolled around in 2012 I had my phone! It was great being able to finally join the conversation live.

Today I’ve been stuck in work meetings almost all day so I still need to catch up on what’s been happening on Twitter, but even on a quiet day like today there’s been a bit going on.

It’s interesting that my Twitter timeline subjects change through the day and night. During the day most of my timeline is from other librarians but overnight my feed mostly comes from crafty peeps I follow in the UK and USA so in the morning I check any craft news and gossip and check for any @ replies to see if there’s been a conversation during the night. I also often have some chit chat with other earlybird librarians.

I use the standard Android Twitter app on my phone. You can easily see if you have any interactions by the blue dot under the @ icon or by the Twitter icon in the alerts bar at the top of the screen. Even though it was a quiet day for me on Twitter there was a surprising amount of activity and conversation.

While sipping my first coffee in bed I put up an Instagram  photo of our pooch Willy and I ticked the Twitter box so my Instagram comment gets posted as a tweet in my account with a link to the photo. Sometimes people comment on the photos on Instagram and sometimes they comment on Twitter. It’s lovely either way, but you’re more likely to have a conversation on Twitter.

Arriving at the station I was glad I made the 7.59 train because Twitter told me that the following 8.07 train was cancelled.

On the train I noticed a link to a knitting blog from my Twitter friend Steven and then Andrew (who I “met” on Twitter through a Twitter conversation with another knitter a while back) joined in and we ended up discussing Japanese knitting patterns, and then I found out that Andrew used to work at Morris & Sons in Sydney and I mentioned that another Twitter pal (who I now know in real life) worked at the Melbourne store and he popped into the conversation a bit later while I was stuck in a meeting.

The ticket machine at my station has been playing up the past couple of days so I tweeted them last night and I got a tweet back during the day to thank me and let me know they’d fixed it. On the train ride home I caught up with the news of the day and followed a few links to news sites. Nearing home another librarian Peter tweeted that there was a taco truck a couple of stations up the line from me – handy if I didn’t have dinner waiting for me at home! Twitter really is part of my life now.

The Last of Noro

KnittingSarah has just posted the May challenge for the Merry Knitalong, along with a beautiful story to keep in mind as we knit on May’s project. Of course I should say “projects” actually since there are two balls for this month. I’ve knit all my Christmas balls in red and white so far but I think I might take this month’s challenge as a chance to branch out a bit so, inspired by Martine’s example, I’m going to order some green yarn for at least one of the May balls.

Just as well I’ll have to wait a bit to get started as I realise I’m already using the DPNs I need for the Christmas balls on a sock. This is the last skein of Silk Garden sock yarn from my Noro stash, colourway 289, a mix of blues, greens and brick red.

Hopefully by the time I’ve finished the socks my green yarn for the Christmas ball will have arrived.

The title of this post reminded me of The Last of Sheila which we must watch it again soon. Have you seen it? I did a little review a while back, highly recommended!

Day 7, looking forward

The challenge of the final day of Knit and Crochet Blog Week is looking forward.

“One year from now, when the 5th Knitting & Crochet Blog Week rolls around, where do you hope your crafting will have taken you to? What new skills, projects and experiences do you hope you might have conquered or tried?”

I mentioned to someone at the start of the year that I like to make sure I learn one new thing, or travel to one new place, every year. Some of those things are so momentous that I can remember them years later: for my 38th year I learned to drive, for my 42nd I learned to swim, for my 50th I learned to knit, for my 51st I went to New York.

I remember thinking at the start of this year, my 54th year, that I’d like to add stranded colour work to my knitting repertoire and, through some wonderful  serendipity, I made contact with KnittingSarah who had announced on her blog on New Year’s Day a year long knitalong to make one ball a month from Arne and Carlos’s book 55 Christmas balls to knit. It’s since become a joint global knitalong with Martine from iMake.  I got the book as a present for the previous Christmas but had never managed to perservere but joining the knitalong gave me the support and enthusiasm to knuckle down and develop a wonderful new skill. I can see that I’m getting better every month.

By this time next year I wouldn’t mind taking that skill further, maybe a stranded colour work vest or pullover. I’ve got a few patterns in my library so it’s quite a tempting prospect. The other skill I need to learn is crochet… I think it’s going to be a busy year.

746.43

For day 6 of Knitting and Crochet Blog Week the challenge is to write about a tool we love. I’m not sure this classifies as a tool, but I do love it, and it comes in very handy.

A knitting project tote bag for a librarian! This is big enough for a big project like a sweater, so I can keep things organized at home and I can still take it along to a knit night or to work for some lunchtime knitting in the park. It’s currently holding my cable sweater and it’s even big enough to pack the spare skeins of yarn.

I also have a couple of small Ravelry project bags which are great for things like socks, and another large tote bag — really a book bag — that was a souvenir from the Strand Bookshop in New York.

There are a couple of other really useful little tools and most all of them seem to be made by Clover in Japan. I wasn’t a knitter the last time we went to Japan, so it will be a whole new perspective next time we visit. Japan has entire department stores like Tokyu Hands devoted to handicrafts so I can’t wait to see what knitting goodies await. For now, I’ll have to make do with these…

At the top, stitch holders in two sizes with closed ends so your stitches can’t fall off. Brilliant and essential! There really is nothing worse than putting the neckline stitches for your sweater on hold only to find when you come to pick them up later that a couple have dropped off the needle.

Those hook shaped cable needles are also great, there’s no way your stitches can slip off and you can always tell which direction your row should be facing.

The green stitch counter was recommended to me by a seasoned knitter who had suffered a knitting disaster when her counter clicked over a couple of rows in her bag and she didn’t notice — this little green frog shaped one has a lock.

I find the locking stitch markers more versatile than the closed ones because you can just pin them on your work as well as using them on the needles. If I just need to mark the end of the round I tend to just pin them a couple of rows below the needles, easier than slipping closed markers which always seem to pop off and roll away. They’re also useful for quickly rescuing a dropped stitch, especially if you’re away from home and mightn’t have the right tools to hand — you can pin the dropped stitch safely so it can’t do any more damage.

The blue finger yarn guide tool actually is, I think, my only Clover tool failure. It’s supposed to be for stranded colour work knitting to strand multiple yarns over one finger, but I didn’t find it helped at all and it was easier learning to strand with yarn in both hands instead.

And finally, something that I don’t have but I do covet… a wooden yarn swift as described on Eskimimi’s blog. I did buy a cheap plastic and metal yarn swift and ball winder on eBay but the ball winder broke the first time I tried to use it and the plastic top snapped off the swift. There is a lesson there about investing in quality, so I headed off to Morris & Sons in Melbourne after that and bought a Japanese made Royal ball winder which has worked perfectly since.

I’m still using my cheap plastic and metal yarn swift, but maybe my Mr Awesome will get me a beautiful wooden one for Christmas?