KnitBot

And, here you have it — a year in yarn!  (Finished objects, that
is).  Click on any image for more project details.

Four of these projects were started and finished in 2011.  Four
were carried over from the previous year.  And one (the crochet
cable cardi, which I’d bought
as a kit in 2007) had been a WIP for about 4 years.

Not nearly as prolific as many knitters/fibre artists in the
blogoverse, but it is what it is!  I’m pretty pleased with this
outcome — there are some large projects in that batch, and I managed
to get something onto & off the big loom.  Now, my challenge
for 2012 is to actually get my computer to control one or both of the
knitting machines to produce something (while carrying on with
everything else, of course!).

Not a comforting warning from the ATM at an actual bank!

I’ve never had such an elevated latte before… Taipei 101:

Weaving is fun and rhythmic — once you have the loom set
up.    And, you can’t really set up a loom until you
have the parameters of your project pretty well nailed up, including
the yarns for warp and weft, as well as the sett and specific threading
pattern.  While you can vary the weft yarn once you’ve started, on
a typical loom you’re pretty much fixed for sett and threading pattern
once you’ve got the loom set up.  And, depending on the particular
yarns, things can look very different in the pattern once you actually
start weaving — they rarely line up in tidy little squares like on
your graph paper!

I imagine that experienced weavers have a good sense of what threading
patterns will produce, and the various effects of different types
(thicknesses, composition, colours) of yarn with those
patterns.   

I, however,  I can only imagine, becauseam not an experienced
weaver!  And, I found I was impeded in making progress on becoming
one when I could not figure out how a pair of yarns were going to play
together for my next planned project.  I really didn’t want to get
into calculating warp lengths and number of warp ends unless and until
I had some sense of how the yarns would play together.  So, I
stalled for several months.

Finally, I did a couple of things to break the logjam.

First, I ordered a weaving kit (Halcyon
Yarn’s Waffle Weave Dishtowels).    It includes the
yarns you need, tells you what sett to use, as well as the
threading.  So, it’s just execution:  measure off 402 warp
ends in various colours, sley the reed, thread the heddles, re-thread
the heddles when you realize you made a mistake 1/4 of the way in
(sigh), tie up the treadles, and you’re good to go!  

And, waffle weave is pretty!  Perhaps others would understand it
intuitively from the pattern draft, but I had to actually weave by rote
for a bit before I could start to see how it was building up the
texture in the fabric:

Given that it still took me a month of on-and-off work to get those
warp ends measured et cetera, it’s pretty clear it will be a while
before I’ll be an experienced weaver with the kind of “mind’s eye” for
pattern work that I describe above.  I really wanted something I
can play with  to see
the different possibilities with the yarn before I commit to a real
project.

So, the other thing I did was get a Northwest Pioneer loom. 
This is a loom that is specifically designed to facilitate re-sleying
and re-threading mid-project.   Here it is, still bolted onto
the base of its shipping crate.  It’s a 15″ table loom, and to
keep that in perspective, the shipping box fit in the back seat of my
car.  It’s a lovely bit of hand-worked solid maple — pretty!

In terms of re-threading — note that the shafts in the picture above
have no “top”.  The headles have a slit through which you slide
the yarn from the top — and which you can pull out and rearrange
(under loosened tension) mid-project.  Likewise, you can remove
the top bar of the beater and re-sley the reed, for a different sett.

As an added bonus, it also supports
continuous warping.    The pictures below show it with
its warping rails extended.

Errr, yes, pardon the lovely studio decor — my fibre equipment is
slowly taking over the basement, but we haven’t done anything to finish
it.

Within an hour or 2, I had it warped up and ready to roll, launching
into a twill pattern with the brown linen warp and variegated pink,
shiny acrylic yarn:

Among the things I would not have predicted accurately — the weft
dominance.

Satisfied with that experiement, I re-threaded the warp to a different
pattern, and test-drove it some more:

Again, the weft dominated.  For this, I tried (completely)
different yarn — a wool of finer gauge:

And, the experimentation continues.  But, by the time I’m done
playing, and I have it off the loom and wet-finished, I will have a
very firm sense of what I want to do with my pinks and brown, and I’ll
have the confidence needed to plan and set up the project on the big
loom — a 10″ wide table runner is the plan.

And,  I’ll start throwing more yarns on the Pioneer to see how
they work together :-)

Well, you know that “one” is
an unstable number for looms, right?  People who have one loom
either decide they don’t like weaving and get rid of it… or they are
hooked, and more follow…

Haggis, that
is. 

I’ve heard haggis described as “a sheep, turned inside out”. 
Traditionally consisting of all the bits of a sheep you weren’t going
to serve up in recognizable form (the “offal”) made into a sausage and
cooked in the
sheep’s stomach.  Well, you asked.    And before
you get disgusted, set
down that forkful of breakfast sausage you have in hand, and give it a
good, hard think:  its ingredients aren’t a lot different.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed haggis from and in Scotland.  Sadly, it’s not
the sort of thing that is easily importable, anywhere, labeled as
food.  As I’ve only ever managed to get to Scotland once, it
occurred to me that the only way to get a haggis fix would be to figure
out how to make it myself…  though I drew the line at having to
cook it in a sheep’s stomach.

Pictured above is Haggis the Second.  Haggis the First was
pleasant, but really more of a  lamb hash — made with ground lamb
and rolled oats, it tasted far more of, well, lamb than my recollection
of something slightly chewy, spicy, and oaty.  I decided I needed
to tackle the oat problem, as well as introduce some of the more
“intense” bits of meat (offal).

First up, the oats.  And, here’s a visual aid:

Clockwise, from the top
left: 

• old fashioned rolled oats,
  made from oats that have been parcooked and pressed through rollers
• Irish, or steel-cut oatmeal,
  oats that have been literally sliced into pieces
• Scottish oatmeal,
  stone-ground oats
• Quick-cooking rolled oats,
  same as old fashioned, but flaked into smaller pieces

Naturally, I decided I’d better go Scottish for this application. 
Unfortunately, I didn’t have any in the cupboard.  Wasn’t really
sure where to find them around here, either.  So, I took the
simple route, and ordered online from the
MegaOnlineEmporium.   I was only mildly put off by the fact
that I had to purchase 4 20oz packages (5lbs).  Then there was an
unfortunate collision betweent their choice of CutRateShipper and some
bad weather in our area, which lead to me exercising my Angry Customer
Rights when the 2-day delivery still hadn’t shown after 5 days, and
another box was sent (free of charge, overnight, free of charge, with
ReputableShipper).  Never mind that there was more weather — the
second box was on my doorstep the next day.  And a few days later
(making it a week late), the first box.  “Sorry, no returns on
grocery items”.  I had 10lbs of Scottish oatmeal (in convenient
store display boxes):

For reference, that is enough for Haggis the 2nd through 16th.

Moving on.  To get that nutty flavour, I toasted the 2 cups of
oats:

And then the trick was to get the proper meat texture.  Apart from
the 1lb of ground lamb pictured above (beside the toasted oats), I
boiled 1/2 lb beef liver and 1/2 lb beef heart, with onions.  That
essentially cooked the meats, and made a broth.

Offal about to be chopped —

Mixed all together with ground lamb, toasted oats, spices, and ready to
go (cheesecloth, not sheep stomach):

A couple of hours of steaming (using that fine broth) — voila!

My (completely non-authoritative) opinion:  the texture really
worked, and I need to work on the spices.

Of course,  I’m going to have to get some proper haggis soon to do
some taste comparison!

I have long struggled with finding the right way to keep track of
calendars, lists, plans, etc, while on the go.  I was an “early
adopter” of the whole “Personal Digital Assistant” (PDA) thing.  I
had one of the early (though not earliest) Apple Newtons, and bought a
final generation Newton
MessagePad 2100 in 1998, just weeks before Steve Jobs announced
that Apple was dropping the whole product (and screwing over thousands
of 3rd party application developers — you’d've thought they’d learned
a lesson? I doubt many of them are writing iPhone apps). 

The Apple Newton was cool.  It was quite powerful as a digital
assistant, and even occasionally useful for things like taking notes in
meetings, when you didn’t want to bring a luggable notebook (if you
even had one).    But, it wasn’t a fully-fledged
computer, and had challenges sync’ing seamlessly with your desktop
applications.  The Palm got that part right — drop  your
device in its cradle and press a button to sync. 

After the Newton, I went through several generations of Palm devices
(only some of them died from
deceleration trauma!), and my last one, the Tungsten T3, is still
sitting in its cradle, plugged into my computer.  I stopped
carrying it around last year when I finally found an iPhone app that
could do the T3′s last remaining task:  manage my grocery
list.  

Which is not to say that the iPhone does all the things I used to do
with the Newton.  I suppose I could download a Libertarian quiz
app for it.  But, mostly, I gave up on using these small devices
to manage my increasingly complex (and possibly indicative of neurotic
leanings) ToDo lists, etc. 

It all kind of felt like reverse progress.

So — when I saw someone with an 11″ Macbook Air, the week before
Christmas, a number of threads wound together in a momentary
flash:  here was a device that was not a lot bigger than the
Newton, and only fractionally bigger than an iPad, but which could
support all those new lists and calendars and applications as well as be a reasonable sole
compute platform for a week’s business trip.  YMMV, of course, but
this made a lot more sense for me than an iPad, cool though they
are. 

Enough about me — let’s compare the MessagePad 2100 and the 11″ Air,
shall we?

Okay — the Newton has a smaller surface area:

But it is at least twice as thick as the Air:

The Newton (sans keyboard) is most of a pound lighter than the Air:

And it has genuine PCMCIA slots for expansion!

But, when it comes time to set up for work, while the Newton’s keyboard
has a much nicer feel (key travel), frankly the Newton/keyboard combo
is a lot harder to balance in your lap:

Why, yes, the Newton does still work!  (Battery is fried, though):

How do you spell “frustration”? Two runners up: half-baked iPhone blogging software and craptastic (Future) Internet connections.

But, the real winner for frustration — being 5,000 miles away from the next ball of yarn for the knitting project which is on a Christmas delivery deadline :-(

So glad someone of influence reads the blog, and got the memo… (though I still did not find any coconut milk)

One of these years (evidently, not this one), I’m going to get better
at starting meal planning from what’s available, instead of working
from recipes and engaging in elaborate scavenger hunts to find the set
ingredients.   Now, it’s not the south
of
France or anything, but there is a summer Farmer’s Market on
Grand Manan, and goodness knows there’s plenty of local fish and
seafood to be had.  And, it’s always a bit of a gamble as to what
will be at the grocery store on any given day — some days, the chicken
thighs are boneless/skinless, some days they’re not.  Some days
there are lemons but no limes.  Others, it’s the red onions that
have vanished.  I have sympathy — inventory control must be
hellish on an island that can double in population on a sunny summer
weekend, and who knows what they’ll all take it in mind to want by way
of groceries.

So I decided to make Indian Butter Chicken.

Actually, I was looking for a set-and-forget meal, and came across one
for
Chicken Makhani, and decided to give it a whirl.  Of the
ingredients I needed, the grocery store was obliging with the chicken
(though with bones & skin) and the lemon.  IXNAY on the curry
powder, coconut milk, and cardamom pods (garam masala, fenugreek –
right out).

Not deterred, I picked up some (unsweetened) dessicated coconut, and
headed home to sort it all out.  The Internet was as obliging as
usual — turns out there are Ways to
make coconut milk from dessicated coconut.  Of course, that
requires spinning the drenched coconut in a blender (which I don’t have
on the island), and squeezed through cheesecloth.  Hmm.  I
didn’t have any of that in the house, either.    Moving
from “not deterred” to “obnoxiously stubborn”, I elected not to race out to the store in the
few remaining moments of openness on a Saturday afternoon, and worked
with what I had — my busted up  old Braun food pro, and a tea
towel.  I had to work very
hard not to think about how much fabric softener I’d used when I’d last
laundered it…

Does that coconut milk look faintly blue…?  (No!).

Next up were the spices.  I knew “curry powder” is a generic label
applied to a spice combination you can (and should) make up
yourself.  Even with the lack of critical components, I wanted to
have a go — my random spice collection included some important pieces,
such as coriander seeds.  These toasted up nicely in a hot
pan.  Of course, I don’t have a mortar and pestle ono the island,
or a blender (see note above) or a spice grinder.  I was resigning
myself to resorting to the always-suboptimal ziptop and rolling pin
method (yes, I have a rolling pin — and no blender.  I didn’t say
it made sense, did I?), and then I recalled this trip’s extravagant
addition:  the table salt grinder, with its ceramic mechanism.

In the end, I didn’t have anything like the right components, but I
added extra dried mustard, and a bit of this and that, but the grinder
did it’s thing, and I had  curry powder & garam masala:

In the end, I guess all that really mattered was the chicken and the
butter — set to slow cook for a number of hours.

And plated:

It was, actually, quite tasty.  A flavourful braise of
chicken.  Someday, possibly even soon, I will have to try the
recipe again with more of the expected ingredients.  It certainly
won’t be quite the same adventure, but I’m sure it’ll be tasty.

I need to sew in the ends, cut off the test strip, wet finish this thing and take better pictures. But I can’t resist sharing a preview! My first weaving project, off the loom. It is very much a first project, with all the expected mistakes and shortcomings. But, it was fun! And, I think I’m hooked… :-)

Amenities in an Amsterdam hotel: shampoo, conditioner and hand lotion in “mood therapy”.

Moods are: “calm”, “happy” and “alive”. I must confess, I had not really considered the state of being not dead was especially a mood, before!

I laid the washed swatch out to dry in the sunspot. It was mere seconds until the cat was there to “help”.

Someone else quite happy with where she is right now…

Well, yesterday, it was that time again –  time for a different
view on my way to work.

(Luckstone Quarry lookout, W&OD bike trail)

A momentary aberration in my daily commute — Bike to Work Day! (Or, as
I like to think of it — “Guilt-free eating day” ;-) ).

Yesterday’s ride was 19mi in, and 19mi home, in about 90min
(each).  I was pretty pleased — given that the last time I’d
ridden seriously might well have been BtWD 2007.  I had arranged
myself not to have to bring lots of stuff with me (left the computer at
work the night before, et cetera).  It made a big difference not
to have to use a backpack.  Though, to do this on a basis more
regular than every 3 years, I’d want to do something about those knobby
tires, too.

Riding on the W&OD was mostly pretty good, except for the areas in
and around towns — it’s pretty hard to get bike traffic, cyclist
traffic, roller bladers (with their wide-swinging arms & legs),
dogs, toddlers (random and erratic trajectories) to mix on one
trail.  I only saw one accident — I think the toddler will
survive, and the cyclist picked himself up and passed me (again). 
But — far better than trying to deal with bicycle & car traffic on
some of the 8-lane concrete oceans around here.  It’s nice to have
the trail.

Routing courtesy Icelandic volcano ash cloud…

Leesburg VA reports 27.5″ of snow from the storm.

I’m still miles away on
a different continent, but, here are the reports I’ve gotten from
home — digging out.

08h00 Sunday, February 7, 2010 –
the sun does come up, post-snowpocalypse

16h00 Sunday, February 7, 2010
– dug out, to the road,
anyway

Here’s how the current winter storm  is playing out in the
Washington DC area:

Reporting from the LA
Times (!).

“As of late afternoon, a total of 32.4 inches was recorded at Dulles
International Airport outside of Washington, according to the National
Weather Service. That two-day accumulation topped the previous record,
compiled during the blizzard of January 1996, the weather service said.”

I’m “enjoying” my first business trip of the year, so I’m miles away on
a different continent.  But, here are the reports I’ve gotten from
home — snowpocalypse in evolution!

10h00 Friday, February 5, 2010 –
first flakes fly

16h00 Friday, February 5, 2010
– hunkering down

09h00 Saturday, February 6, 2010 –
buried

16h00 Saturday, February 6, 2010 –
there are cars in there?

And, weaving fun was had, for sure! 

So, the first thing off the loom is not “a piece” or really even an “FO”.  It’s just a sampler, warp that I filled with weft as I was playing around to get to know what this weaving thing is all about.  I won’t even begin to discuss the challenge that is “selvages”. 

Without further ado, here it is:

Perhaps worth noting — from this perspective, I began at the right and worked my way to the left, so that the final 2 sections of plain weave were what I did to fill up the warp as much as possible (to figure out how much waste I can expect with this loom).  Not particularly visible in this photo, the selvages were becoming somewhat credible towards the end.

Per the instructions for the exercise, I put on a 2 yard (72″) warp.    Less 7 1/2″ waste (fringe, below) at the front, and 14″ waste at the back, that gave me room to weave 45″ on this warp.  (The other ~5″ were presumably lost to take up, as the warp and weft threads crossed).  Post-wash, the worked length was 43″.  I had set it for 10″ wide (120 ends, 12 dent reed).  It ranged between 8 1/4″ and 9 1/2″ wide before washing, and shrank to 8″ – 9 1/4″ after washing.  (The variations in width have to do with the different weave patterns (plain or twill), as well as the density of packing, through heavier beating).

Total time spent weaving… probably not more than a few hours.  And, it was a lot of fun — very rhythmic, when it got going.  It was easy enough with a simple treadling pattern to follow (1-2-3-4, or 1&3-2&4, for eg), but I really don’t know how I’ll do when it comes to more complex treadling.  I envision having to learn the fine art of figuring out where I’ve gotten to and having to backtrack to work out mistakes :-/  The weaving equivalent of learning how to fall, I guess.

Above, from left to right — brown tightly packed (weft-dominant) 2x twill, white loose (warp-dominant) 2x twill, and some basic 2×2 twill making a herring bone pattern, followed by plain weave in various degrees of packedness (mostly intentionally :-) ).

Closeup of plain weave — tightly packed at the right, loosely packed in the middle and left (white & brown weft, respectively).

So — there you have it:  first thing off the loom!  Next step — planning a project with a result I’ll want to keep…

Oooh, lookey!  Another weekend!  More Quality Time with the Baby Wolf.   I managed to thread the heddles on the shafts, in the appropriate order, and get the warp threads actually attached to the front and back beams. 

And — treadled! 

Don’t look now, but this warp is ready to be woven!

On the weekend, I finally had the opportunity to spend some Quality Time with the Baby Wolf.  I measured 120 warp threads (in 2 colours), and got as far as getting the reed sleyed.

Still a ways to go — have to thread the heddles on the shafts, in the appropriate order, and get the warp threads actually attached to the front and back beams. 

I’m following the excellent, detailed instructions in Deborah Chandler’s “Learning to Weave”.  While it’s slow going, it’s making sense so far, and seems like the sort of thing that will get faster as you learn what you’re doing.

Of course, actual weaving may be an entirely different matter!