drinking, breathing, writing, singing

Those of you who read this by checking the main site may have noticed some very bizarre things happening a couple days ago – I apologize. I’ve been tooling around with the back end to get the blog properly set up on swayinglights.com, and it took a little bit of trial and error that meant doing some funny things to the main page for a while.

And hey, speaking of trial and error (see what I did there?), I’ve taken a short break from my sweaters and started working away at something old:

This is the first attempt at a hat I knit most of in the spring, before discovering that the end result was almost comically too large to fit any real person’s head – even as a slouchy beret, which is what I’m trying to make. I ripped back a couple of days ago (I’m on this kick where I’m cleaning out my ‘half-finished projects’ basket), and I’m hoping this one works.

Song of the Entry: Bright Eyes – Road to Joy (Listen)

tutorial time: circular needle organization for power nerds

IMG_8255, originally uploaded by pirateygoodness.

This post isn’t knitting, but it is knitting-related: I sat down this afternoon and turned a binder into a circular needle organizer that suits me perfectly.

I’m a big fan of productivity blogs (I subscribe to Lifehacker’s RSS feed), and repurposing easy-to-shop for things to suit my needs, so when I took a look at my knitting shelf and thought “How the fuck am I going to get my circular needles under control?” my first thought was, “Why don’t I go to Staples?”

I picked up a few things, looked through my apartment, and ended up with these supplies:

(From left to right: 1” binder, package of 25 heavy-duty sheet protectors, ruler, kitchen scissors, white-out pen, Sharpie, pack of 60 mini (9/16”) binder clips)

Then, I used the ruler, sharpie, and scissors to trim the sheet protectors down from 8.5” x 11” to 8.5” x 8”. After that, I went through of my circular needles. I wrote the needle size and length on the bottom right corner of a sheet protector for each needle:

I tucked the needle into the sheet protector, with the original packaging if I still had it. I sealed the tops of each sheet protector with two mini-binder clips, so the needles wouldn’t fall out if I dropped the binder or flipped it upside-down, creating chaos.

And there you have it. I’m very proud of myself.

let's have some fun

IMG_8100ps, originally uploaded by pirateygoodness.

The one drawback to knitting socks is that really, once you get past the initial “this weird tube thing is going to be socks,” there is not a lot to blog about until you’ve actually turned them into socks.

I’m not quite there yet, but I’m close – ready to bind off at the top, at least. I’m knitting these with an afterthought heel, because I have many ambitions but short-rowing two socks at once is not one of them. It’s actually my favourite kind of heel, I think it makes the socks look really polished and neat, and I’m really stoked about being able to get both out of the way at once. This technique is exactly what I needed to actually be able to work on socks.

The Koigu is, of course, pooling terribly, but I’m not surprised. I think it’s something about the size of my feet, but every variegated yarn I’ve ever used just turns into diagonal stripes when I knit it into socks for myself. Oh well.

Song of the Entry: Lady Gaga – LoveGame (Listen)