I’m hoping to finally get Yarnival! out tomorrow morning before I head off to the cottage again on Monday after I get back from the cottage. I only recently got through all the articles (time management will be easier next time hopefully) and whittled them down to around 20 or 30 posts. I’m trying to string them together coherently now, so expect it soon!

I’m also announcing the call for submissions for issue 2. If you submitted after the deadline last time (and there were a few), I considered you for the second issue but you can also submit something from the last month if it’s more relevant. Some pertinent info:

What kind of submissions are you looking for?

Any knitting/spinning content that you believe represents your best work from the past month or so. Pretty much any ol’ cool thing you wrote about in August/September. It should be at least vaguely knitting-related; the kind of things that really stood out for me this time was original work, witty or insightful commentary, and pretty pictures. Please, don’t be afraid to submit your work. It couldn’t hurt to put yourself out there.

When will the issue be out?

The submission deadline for the second issue of Yarnival will be September 15th (that’s a Friday) and the issue will be published on September 29th (also a Friday). That gives you two weeks to submit! I’ll be posting a reminder closer to the deadline.

How can I submit?

Send me your name (or pseudonym), email address and blog address, as well as the name of your blog and the URL of your post submission. PLEASE send me the permalink to your post submission, because I had to reject some posts last time because I couldn’t find them. If I only get a blog link from you and I get lots of submissions this time, it will have to go into the “executive file.” By which I mean the little Trash icon in my mail program. (I’m sorry )

You have two ways of contacting me. You can choose to submit using the automatic form at my Yarnival submission page, or you can use the following contact form:

Good luck and happy submitting! Grab a button! (Buttons are how the internet gives hugs.) Submit to Yarnival!

<a title="Yarnival!" href="http://needles.guzzlingcakes.com/2006/07/23/yarnival/"> <img src="http://www.your_site.com/yarnival.gif" alt="Yarnival! Button" /></a>

I really like the look of the cables matched with the garter stitch in this cardigan from Knit Simple Magazine. The model is holding apples and it reminds me of all the wonderful things that happen during Thanksgiving (and for me, that mostly involves eating). It makes me want to go to Black Creek Pioneer Village. When I was a kid I won second place in an apple pie baking contest there. I cut out a picture of a unicorn in pie crust and put it on top. I even glazed it a little bit with milk so it would turn out a touch darker than the rest of the crust. I think I used a horse cookie-cutter and then added a horn. It was the cutest pie you’ve ever seen! Hmm, maybe I just want pie.

I’ve decided that if I indeed knit this sweater I’m going to refer to it as the Pumpkin Cardigan. I wouldn’t knit it in the orange — even though I’d love to because it’s such a cute colour — because orange is just not complexion-friendly for me. I’d do it in a bright green, or maybe in the purple Lang Fantomas Superwash I bought a little while ago.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/MKX0RN19zc0" height="350" width="425" /]

Make your own Sesame Street Yup Yup aliens using a tutorial via Accordion Guy.

Spectator Grand, finished Saturday, July 29th, 2006 (I’m a little late in posting this!)
Pattern: Spectator Grand, by Annie Modesitt
Yarn: Freedom Cotton DK by Twilleys of Stamford, Shade 08.
Needles: 3.75mm metal circulars
Dimensions: Wide brim, 21″ hat band, which was a bit small. The measurements were taken from the inside of another hat that fit well, and I think an inch or so was cut off because it wasn’t done directly around the head. The band measurement should really have been 22-23″ instead of 21.
Would I knit it again? I would, but I would use the base design and implement my own stitch pattern. I’d also use a different type of wire, because this wire loved kinks.

Pattern Notes:

I knit this for my aunt, just in time for the garden party she throws every year. She’s a member of the red hat society, which is why this hat is yet another red project. It turned out really well, and she got lots of compliments about it Matter of fact, one of the people at the party was a milliner and even she said she really liked it! She was wearing a hat that she had made herself that was 100,000,000 times better, made with all sorts of fantastic fashion-sounding components and apparently certain products that have to be used in well-ventilated areas. So she said she had plenty fun making it in a badly-ventilated area. Altered states improve creativity? I’ll buy that.

Read the rest »

For the past few weeks, there hasn’t been a new Search Engine Sunday because I haven’t had a lot of original search strings to work with. It’s all been “World Cup Soccer Ball” and “tea cozy” and “cast on,” and little else. Until Google indexes me for anything but those and the surprisingly consistent “uruguay porn,” I’m going to have to put SES on hold.

I was going to title this post “In which Eve kills Search Engine Sunday,” but I really like the idea and I’d like to keep doing it in the future. I may even compile a list of tea cozy patterns for next Sunday, as a final send-off. But after that, I will nuzzle it one last time and then guide it gently into its den for a deep winter sleep. Farewell, my furry statistical friend. Farewell.

BING BANG BOOM! ZING ZANG ZOOM!

Read the rest »

I’m going up to the cottage with the beau again this weekend, and this time I want to knit his mother a set of dishcloths to say thank you for all the times his family has let me stay up there. I decided that I wanted to knit a nice cable-y number using an anchor motif that I saw in Alice Starmore’s Fisherman’s Sweaters. I found it at the library a few months ago and photocopied the motif because I wanted to show it to the beau, who is an avid fisherman (as mentioned in my most recent post). Because I don’t have the photocopy with me at the moment (being in Toronto), I decided to look to the internet to find a similar cable design. And what did I find but this: Ripley, a pattern from Knitty and a sweater that makes use of exactly the same cable motif. I remember the chart, and it is shockingly similar.

Does this qualify as intellectual copyright infringement? I mean, it’s offered as a free pattern and all, but that’s no excuse, especially since ad revenue is gathered on the site. The pattern makes reference to “Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts and Deborah Robson’s Knitting in the Old Way and by Beth Brown-Reinsel’s Knitting Ganseys,” but there’s no mention of Alice Starmore. So it doesn’t even qualify under a [[Creative Commons]] attribution license.

It could be that Alice Starmore got the chart from Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts or Deborah Robson or Beth Brown-Reinsel, and in that case Ripley’s anchor was properly attributed to one of those three. Or perhaps it’s part of some sort of marvelous gansey-knitting tradition that has transcended time and therefore also internet copyright regulations. But otherwise, I am not impressed. Not with Knitty, because I’ve learned from several years working at a university paper that it’s very difficult to make sure that content isn’t ripped off from other places. I’m unimpressed with the culture that produced it; the sort that says that downloading a single song from the internet isn’t stealing because it’s not the whole album, and that using a piece of a pattern without attribution is fine, just so long as nobody finds out about it.

(Disclaimer: I have approximately 5GB of downloaded music on my computer, so this rant makes me a huge hypocrite. Also, I hope nobody from the [[RIAA]] reads this post. Sincerely, Eve Q. Untraceable-Fakename.)

I’m starting to do a few swatches for my secret lace project, so what Kate Gilbert has been doing with gauge swatches is particularly relevant right now and particularly clever as well. Forgetting which needles you used for which swatches? Knit (or purl) the number into the swatch! Brilliant!

In the same vein, I also want to talk about a post by Yarn Harlot from a few days ago. Here’s what she says about ganseys:

…After a couple of rounds I knit in Joe’s initials. This is a traditional feature of a gansey, allegedly for identifying a drowned sailor. (Another feature of the gansey is that it is close fitting, so as not to wash off in the water.) Joe is a fine sailor, and unlikely to wear his gansey swimming, but I thought that it was best to include this. If I’m going to knit a handspun traditional gansey then I might as well go all out.

I was completely blown away by this. I love little historical tidbits, so historical tidbits combined with knitting combined with ingenuity and fishing, that’s some tasty gravy. If I didn’t have a standing rule not to knit the beau a sweater (due to the fact that it’s a curse and all that), I would go out right now and buy ten hundred pounds of charcoal wool and knit his initials into the finest darn gansey you have ever seen. The fact that he has four initials makes it even better. All the more initials to love him with.

I moved a few months ago and never really got my curtains up because of this horrifying situation. Now that my room is nicely fixed and painted, I can finally put up my curtains. Unfortunately, my old windows were quite a bit shorter than my new windows, and the curtains were custom made for the old windows… You see where I’m going here. I’ve got about a foot of space between the curtains and the top of the window.

Enter Craft Mag! It’s finally been released, and as if by fate I found this: a valance tutorial. Magnificence! I’ve got a new project.

Here’s a cute picture of a baby sheep to make up for my lack of WIP posting. The beau took a picture of me knittin’ on my jaywalkers, but I haven’t gotten it from him yet. I’m also working on a secret lace project that I may soon divulge. The suspense!

In addition: I give you a story about a woman with two vaginas. Oh, you’re pretending you don’t want to read it but really, everyone wants to read about a woman with two vaginas. Come on, she can have two orgasms! That is crazy.