Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Surprise! It turns out I don’t have to change all my Ravelry photos just because I changed Flickr accounts. This has led to a frenzy of photo-taking and project-updating, not to mention a backlog of things I want to post here.

And so, some hats. I’ve recently started growing out my hair which means lots of hair days, and hence lots of hats. I’ve been knitting a number of hats in fingering weight yarn, which makes them light enough to wear all day, indoors and out, at least at this time of year.

First up was Cecily, which I knitted in Knitpicks “Shine” fingering weight (a wool-silk blend). Instead of the ribbed hem I did a picot hem, and I wear it slouchy rather than beret-style. The lace pattern — you can’t see it very clearly here because of the dark colour and because I didn’t block it open, but trust me, it’s there — is easily-memorised and fun to knit. I suspect I’ll be doing this hat again in the not too distant future.

“Cecily” hat, in Knitpicks Fingering, with turned picot hem.

Next up was the Skye Hat, which has a very simple garter ridge and yarnover design, in Mountain Colors “Bearfoot”, which is a mohair blend sock yarn. The colour is a dark warm brown with lighter orangey streaks — this picture has some bluey tones because of the lighting, but it’s really not that colour at all. With regard to the pattern: I didn’t do the contrast border, and I tried to fiddle with the stitch count to make it slouchy the way I wanted, but I probably shouldn’t have messed with it because the ribbed band came out a little loose and I found it difficult to make the decreases work out right. It’s okay but a bit loose around the ears. I’m tempted to undo the band and reknit it on slightly tighter needles.

Skye Hat in Mountain Colors Bearfoot

And finally, a hat with an upturned garter stitch brim that ties to form a bow — a little bit 20s cloche style, I think — again in Mountain Colors Bearfoot, this time a semi-solid dark red. I’m making it up as I go along and wasn’t sure how to do the band and bow, so I actually started by knitting the main part of the hat (the stockinette section) upward to the centre/top, and then picking up around the bottom edge and knitting downward from there. I’m currently about halfway through the garter switch band. When I’m done I’ll post pics and maybe even write up the pattern properly.

Hat with bow, in progress

I have lots more WIPs and FOs to post, but I’ll space them out so as not to spam you.

Mirrored from Infotropism. You can comment there or here.

I’ve seen a few people, over the years, compare knitting to programming. It usually goes something like this:

Wow, have you ever looked at a knitting pattern? It looks kind of like source code! Those knitters must be real geeks!

And it’s often accompanied by a snippet of a set of actual knitting instructions that look like incomprehensible gibberish to the uninitiated, but which your grandma could probably read and turn into a jumper or a scarf or an attractive toilet-paper-roll cover (my Nanna actually knitted these!)

In case you haven’t seen this kind of knitting pattern before, here’s an example:

A typical knitting pattern from the 1940s. This one is Sun-glo pattern #2616, "Country Club", a sporty cabled sweater in two colours, in case you were wondering.

There was even a post a little while ago entitled Knitters and coders: separated at birth? that talked about knitting patterns as code, and worked through some examples using regular expressions. It was a good post, but I don’t think it went far enough, so I want to riff on it a bit.

Here’s the thing. Let’s say you have a pattern that says:

row 10: k2 p3 *(c6f p6) rpt from * 8 times c6f p3 k2

(Or as the aforementioned article would put it would put it, (c6f p6){9}.)

You read those instructions and do what they say, producing a row of knitting that incorporates a number of cable twists against a purl background.

Is what you’re doing programming? Of course not! It’s the reverse of programming: you’re reading a series of low-level instructions and doing what they say. It would be more accurate to say you’re an interpreter, or possibly a compiler, since it’ll usually save you time and trouble to read a pattern right through before you begin. (Ask me how I know. Ugh.) You might even be called a human computer.

But let’s be clear: even though what you’re doing when you read a pattern is a complex technical skill, and involves code, it’s not programming.

Despite that, I very firmly believe that knitting is like programming. I just think that the common analogy drawn — of printed knitting patterns as source code — is not a very good one for describing the intellectual process of knitting as it is practiced by the current generation of geeky crafters.

Mirrored from The OEconomist. You can comment there or here.

Garden:

We have 4 enormous tubs, 3 large pots, and a couple of middling sized pots filled with potting mix and/or various vegetable matter. For the big tubs, I raked up a heap of leaf litter and filled them 1/3 with that, 1/3 with chopped lucerne, and 1/3 with organic potting mix. There’s more lucerne left over to be mulch.

I’ve planted the 4 tomatoes, 3 peppers, basil, and thyme into the tubs and the largest of the pots. I’m waiting on seeds to arrive to plant stuff in the other ones.

Our worm farm also arrived today. Darebin (our local municipality) is a Transition Town so they have various programs to encourage sustainability. One of them is subsidised worm farms. Ours cost $60, and I’ll head down to CERES tomorrow to buy some worms to put in it.

Cooking:

Emily was going to make dal saag but she forgot to get spinach, so instead we had fried gnocchi. I threatened to blog her cooking, but she said she’d blog it herself at the food/craft/domesticity blog she shares with our friend Ana so keep an eye out for it there. Suffice it to say that she fried gnocchi in olive oil with vast amounts of garlic, then added kalamata olives, roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes, and fresh parsley. We ate it with parmesan sprinked over, and it was amazing, especially after all the gardening work.

(Updated: she’s posted her recipe here.)

Now she’s got some lemon slice in the oven, using the lemons we found in that empty block yesterday. I am looking forward to them so much — that sort of slice is just like Nanna used to make, and something I hardly ever do myself but love intensely when other people do. She’s using this recipe.

Preserving:

There is going to be a lot of food preservation going on around here this summer. I bought an 80s-era Fowlers Vacola preserving unit from eBay the other week, but only after determining that actually, you don’t need to use the expensive Fowlers branded jars with the pain-in-the-arse lids. Seems you can use any jar you want, as long as it is clean and unchipped, and has a fresh lid. Green Living Australia sell bulk lids for standard Australian jars (the ones you find most often in supermarkets, such as jam, pasta sauce, and pickle jars), so I got a bunch of them, and they came today.

Now historically I’ve just re-used the lids that came with jars, but I was usually making sugar or vinegar-heavy recipes (jams, chutneys, pickles) that didn’t really need heat preserving and where bacteria would basically be scared off before they got anywhere near it. This year I want to preserve stewed fruit and passata (tomato sauce) without masses of added preservatives, which means hot water method and being much more finicky about the jars and lids I use.

Anyway, the Fowlers unit should be good for the hot water preserving in the summer, since it is an enclosed container with a lid, that runs on an electric cord (basically like a kettle or an old fashioned hot water urn), and which you can even put outside to run on a hot day, which means the kitchen needn’t get too overheated.

Also from Green Living: yoghurt culture and assorted bits and pieces for yoghurt making. In the past I’ve mostly just made yoghurt from other yoghurt, but I thought it might be worth a try doing it from dry culture for a change. We’ll see how it goes.

Christmas: I don’t think any of us in this house are massively into Christmas decorations, but we do like fairy lights, so we’ve been buying them and decorating the carved woodwork around the house with them. Today I discovered that you can get solar powered LED lights in the garden department at K-Mart for cheaper than the ones in the Christmas decoration area, so we’re going to put some of them over the front door and around the gatehouse. We’ve got the plain white ones and we’re intending to leave them up year-round.

Knitting: It’s warming up but it’s not so hot I can’t knit. Since I’ve been reunited with the bits of my yarn stash I left in storage in Australia, I’ve cast on a few things in an attempt to get rid of some of it before my other stash arrives from the US.

I have several not-quite-a-jumper amounts of 8 ply wool, so I’ve got this stranded yoke pullover (body in an oatmealy colour and yoke in grey-blue and cool brown), and a striped EPS in cherry red and black Cleckheaton Country on the needles. The former of those is up to the armpits and I’ll probably join them tonight and start on the yoke. Unemployment turns out to be good for my knitting productivity. Surprise.