I hate the nonword "unvent"

"Unvent" is an amazingly annoying knitting thing started by Elizabeth Zimmerman.

Now, I personally despise Elizabeth Zimmerman's writings. I find her unforgivably arrogant, and amazingly ignorant on some topics. The "grandmother of knitting" didn't know why wool felts, OK? (And the math on the Pi shawl is wrong, and I hate to break it to people, but laymen think the Baby Surprise Jacket is UGLY. I did a poll; only knitters think it's cool. And I don't care what gift recipients say to your face; there is a little thing called 'politeness' still in effect in most areas.)

One of Ms. Zimmerman's false modesties was the word "unvent". You see, she never invented anything, because surely someone somewhere in history had done it before. But she'd never seen it, so she "unvented" it.

I hate this pseudo-word, and I especially hate that I'm seeing it so commonly used on so many innovative knitting blogs, like TECHknitting. Why do I hate it? Because it robs women of self-respect, and appreciation (not to mention credit) for their innovations. It doesn't matter even if someone 600 years ago in the backwaters of Germany figured this out and never shared it. You figured it out now, on your own, in a vacuum, when no one else in recorded history has. Take credit. Have a little respect for yourself. Put the modesty aside, and have some pride in what you've shared with the world.

Dammit dammit dammit dammit DAMMIT!

Lumpy, misshapen baby sweater. I now know WHY it's lumpy and misshapen. It's missing a few hundred stitches.

You take a pattern that has you start with two segments of W stitches and 6 small segments, and increase at markers every 2 out of 3 rows until "there [are] two times W stitches in the largest segment and W stitches in the others", you'd think that one of those W segments just stays vertical and the other gets increased, right? You would if you were me, and you would right now be titling a blog post with a string of mild curses. No, that should be "two times W stitches in the largest segments", plural. I'm missing two important wedges of fabric. And without those wedges I have a very nice... blob. And absolutely no way viable way to repair it short of taking it all the way to the frog pond* and starting completely over. Or calling it modern art, but I don't think anyone would fall for it.
*smolders*

I am not having a good week.

Well, I can finish one of the other two knit projects I had started, or I can restart this one the easy, better looking (for this pattern) way, or I can start swatching for a baby kimono pattern I wanted to try. Options 1 and 3 are looking best. I need some time to decide how much of this yarn I want to try to reuse.

*For my non-knitting readers, "frogging" is slang for unraveling a chunk of knitting, and "going to the frog pond" means unraveling a LOT of fabric, often an entire project. Why frogging? Because you "rip-it, rip-it." Hey, I didn't make it up; I just infect other people with it.

We now enter the 'I hate it' phase of the project.

So, the baby sweater I was knitting. I got it ready to stitch up seams, and...
Ew. This doesn't look like I thought it would. It's lumpy and misshapen at the moment. And on top of that, there's an easy version and a hard version of this pattern. I did the harder version thinking it would look better. Now that it's put together, I see the easy version actually would have looked better. And on top of that, the color changes I thought were going on the side back are actually on the right front. ^_^; (I think they'll look OK once I get the ends work in, but... OOPS!)
And it's ginormous. I think my baby sweater may actually be a toddler sweater. ^_^;

Oh well, I'm SURE it will look better once it's seamed, edgings are knit on, and it's blocked. In any event, there's nowhere to go but forward, because I will NOT have knit several thousand stitches for nothing.

Maybe I'll hold off on those socks for a while, though.

Dear Knitting Drawer

It's no use hiding them from me. I know, for a fact, that I have a 5-needle set of US4 Crystal Palace bamboo double-pointed needles, because I drove all the way to our not-terribly-local yarn store specifically to buy them and a matching circular for this bizarre baby sweater. So you might as well cough 'em up.

You know what makes me sad? Casein is too brittle to make circular needles. Actually, let's get more basic than that. It makes me sad that casein is brittle, period. I've had the tips of double-points break in my bag. That's sad. I love casein needles. But I love working on circular needles FAR more than straights, so I only get to use casein on small projects (suitable for 8 inch straights or all on double-points.)

When I can't get those, bamboo's a good second. Wood's nice, too, but the small sizes feel more brittle. And Bunny (Angelina, one of my cats) has eaten wooden needles before. Of course, last night..

OK, last night, I finish up the knitting on the body of the baby sweater, get it taken off the needles. Needles are on the arm of the couch, all my stitch markers on the side table, and a fountain pen is on the notebook on the couch beside me. I leave the room for FIVE MINUTES, and when I come back, Bunny and Keiko (another cat) are playing with my needles in the kitchen, all my stitch markers are on the living room carpet, and my fountain pen is behind the couch! Don't think I don't know who's responsible for that, Demon-Klepto-Bunny!

She didn't chew on the needles, though. She was still busy playing with the cord.
She tries to eat the casein needles, too. Although being made of a milk protein, I guess that's to be expected.

P.S. I did find my bamboo double points. They were, interestingly enough, in my nicer double-point case. (Yes, I have two double-point cases. Maybe more.)

P.S.S. Yes, I really do have a knitting drawer. Well, there's some crochet stuff in there, too. And some Kumihimo stuff I haven't tried for want of a real braiding stand.

OK, where can I steal a baby?

I'm getting back into the knitting thing, and I'm one row away from finishing the body of a baby sweater I had started during the last go. I'm going to have a metric buttload of the yarn left over, so I thought it'd be cute to make a matching pair of socks and maybe mitts. (There should already be a hat running around here -- that's how I did my gauge swatch -- but I think I might have lost it.)

The thing is, the yarn is already set, and I don't like torturing it to match a pre-existing pattern gauge. This may sound geeky or pretentious or just plain weird, but I actually somewhat dislike row-by-row patterns for just that reason. Sometimes you need them, when there's complex shaping or patterning or just plain fiddly stuff. But I'm looking for basic toe-up socks here. Hell, I know how to make socks (well, know where to look it up), but I need to know how big a baby's foot is. I've got some baby feetie jammies running around, I guess I can use those, but I'm afraid I'll end up with huge socks that way since feetie jammies are looser. I wonder if I can find a size chart with length and circumference somewhere.

...

Nope, best I found find was a pattern that gave both for one size, and a chart of foot lengths. :P Damn, babies have big feet.
See, this is why I need to borrow a baby for a minute. Actually, I wish an actual life-sized baby doll was sold at toy prices (rather than collector prices), because that would be perfect for this stuff. Maybe I should try making Runo's baby doll sometime. That just seems like an awful lot of work, though.

Oh well, if I make them too big, the kid will grow into them eventually, right?

[And no, I can't just borrow the baby I'm making this stuff for, because it's baby shower and charity stuff.]

Now, mittens. That might be harder to find a size for. (But admit it, the bunny mittens here are cute!)

Kati-chan done good.

Pens arrived today! The pink Cavelier is nice. Except it has a squeezey converter, and I hate squeeze fillers. The bar seems pretty substantial, though, some maybe it'll be OK.

The Tucky, though. Sa-weet! It is carmine, but beautifully bright and clear, and the transparent section is just about PERFECT. I'm eager to get it restored; I think it'll be a great little pen. I'd definitely prefer to go the Fountainbel (less invasive) restoration method with this little guy. Alas, we've already got four pens with Dillo between Laura and I, so I should probably wait until we get those back and I can try Regulus Black's pen, which will be repaired with that method. (What Regulus was doing with a women's pen, I don't know, but I'm not willing to ask too hard. ^_~ Maybe he likes a bit of a breeze about his pen cap. *<:^) )

*does the Happy Djinn dance*

Buttloads of pen-related toys arrived today. I had orders to both Pendemonium and Pear Tree, and they both came in. I've now quadrupled my supply of bottled Waterman ink (from 1 bottle to 4), which is nice because I like to use Waterman for a pen's first fill and I don't like to have the same color going in more than one pen at once. I like to change which color I write my story in each day so I can tell what I did when. Not that I really have a deep need to know what I did when, but it's nice to be able to.
And a nice bottle of Magenta from Rohrer & Klingner, which I'll probably load up one of my Kulturs with and try tonight.
And a couple of insanely fine Platinum Preppies and a fountain pen ink fed rollerball. I'm hoping one of those will be able to pwn the cheap paper we use at work.

Most importantly, though, my new customized nib from Pendemonium arrived, and that's what's got me doing the happy dance! Yes! THIS is what I tried to order from Binder almost two months ago now. Now, I haven't done a full day's story writing with it and won't get to until tomorrow or Friday, but just testing it out, it feels so smooth! There may be a little less variation than the Binder nib, but it's also usable. And as an extra perk, it cost $40 as opposed to $70.
I'll give an updated opinion in a few days after I've put it through its paces.

Oh, BTW, the Falcon arrived... Monday. It's not quite what I expected. I knew it wouldn't be a highly flexible nib, but I expected it to feel somewhat like a sweet little BCHR I have. That little guy doesn't have any line variation to speak of, but the nib is rather springy, maybe even spongy. The Falcon right out of the box felt rather stiff. However, that seems to be loosening up a little as I use it. The fine nib is also VERY fine. At the same time, though, I don't want to go up to a medium because it would be almost twice as large according to Mottishaw's page, and that would be too big. It is very smooth, though.
Overall opinion: Well, I'm not sure what to say about it, except I find that I keep wanting to go back and use it some more. :)