July 09, 2003
Duck! Milk!
My sister and I have a wonderful shared e-hobby: Finding web pages about insanely wacky crafts for adults. This all started when I stumbled across knitting forum discussions about knitting with strips made from supermarket plastic bags*, and it mushroomed from there. The very fluid rules for this game go something like this: The craft has to (1) appear online; (2) be by and for adults (jelly bean art created by kids – natural; a mature adult sitting in a dark, lonely room gluing jelly beans to piece of paper – not natural, albeit infinitely more entertaining); (3) involve the use of an unusual medium; (4) be either freakishly weird or amazing and astonishing; and (5) make us snort milk out of our noses. Sadly, a lot of milk-snort-worthy URLs have already been found, enjoyed, and forgotten by the two of us but here are a few surviving examples:
- Art made from cocktail wieners
- Jelly bean art
- Escher pictures reproduced using Legos
- Duct tape art One and Two
Anyone out there wanna play the game?
*My apologies if I offend anyone with my implied comments about knitting with plastic bags but there's probably no one out there to offend since I’m preeeeeetty sure the people who knit with plastic bags are the same people who will blanche, shriek, and desperately pound the Back button on their browser when they find out this blog is written by a gay person. And that, my dear readers, is as close to discussing politics as I will ever come in this blog.
Knitting Knews
My friend Sheila at FiberRavenSoiree firmly but nicely encouraged me to do a gauge swatch for the Egg Yolk Sweater, especially since I’m substituting a thick worsted for a chunky. Grumbling all the while, I did the swatch and got surprising results. According to the pattern, on a size 10.5 knitting needle, I was supposed ta’ get 19 stitches over 4” but I got 17 stitches instead. Apparently my heavy worsted is chunkier than the chunky or perhaps I knit tightly. I frogged the sweater (all 2” of it; no big) and started again on size 10 needles. (No, no second gauge swatch. I’m slowly becoming convinced of their value but I’m not up to doing two swatches for one measly project yet.)
Had to frog the toe of the Opal Brazil sock because the pattern I'm using said to stop the foot 2.5" before the desired length of the sock and start the toe but, post-toe, I discovered that my particular yarn/needle/tension combo only gave me a 2" toe. Unless I want to wear the socks with my toes all curled up inside, I need to frog back to the foot, add another 1/2" and retoe. (That's what I love about knitting. You can make up words like "retoe" and people will think it's a real word.)
Dyeing Dyegest
A break from Ryan’s Excellent Dyeing Adventure. Instead, a couple of pictures of the dye garden as it looks now. For your enjoyment, a "before" picture…
And a couple of "after" pictures.
In the "before" picture, see the tiny green speck in the dirt behind and to the left of the birdbath? In the first "after" picture, see the huge muscle-bound bruiser of a sunflower in the middle? Yep, one and the same plant! Any day now, we expect to find this sunflower ensconced in K’s overstuffed chair, brewski in one hand, remote control in the other. And you can be pretty sure it won’t have wiped its roots before it came in.