Diary of a Necromancer

And all that remains is the assembly; once I've got the pieces woven together and sewn at the edge, I shall have a blanket that's about... um, six foot square. Yeeeeah. Surprisingly, did not have to buy any additional yarn, though my worsted-weight stash is pretty well cleaned out and I'll have to nick one skein back from Mum for the edging.

Onward to other ongoing yearlong endeavours: 2016 marks year eleven of Media Consumption lists, with year ten coming in at 146 books, and 57 films, and ten years tilting at this bloody windmill at a grand total of 965 books and 491 films. Um. Yes. If anyone cares to check the math, go ahead, I'll just be lying here with a cold cloth over my eyes. On to the second ten years:

( Media Consumption List, 2016 )

Yep, this is still happening. Which no one is more surprised by than me, believe me. Only two more strips of swatches to go...

I've knit ahead a bit on the Blanket Project to clear the workflow roster for a piece I need to knit to a deadline, so long as I had a bit of time before the yarn for that gets here. Somebody remind me to pick this up again in June, OK?

Nothing in particular to report regarding this batch besides that purling more than 3 stitches together is still a stupid idea, and I'm getting a better sense of when to declare that a given pattern has sufficiently made its point that I can fill in the rest of an irritating swatch with garter-stitch, as I've done twice in the strips here (once after a mere 9 rows demonstrated that the results, while correct, were not only difficult to work but too hideous to really be worth the trouble).

Also, that bag is what five months of knitting 4x4" bits every day makes. It's kind of scary.

The Blanket Project continues apace, and with 6 of the projected 26 strips now in the books I'm thinking that the best plan for eventually joining up into something that's y'know, usable, given some irregularities in width and the part where I really should have planned in a selvedge-stitch if I was going to seam these, is to weave them together once they're all done and have a double-thick lap-blanket of about 4' square. Ish. Yes, this means that half of the blocks will end up wrong-side-out, but srsly, it's not exactly as if this thing was going to be pretty in the first place and as to its value as a reference-book, most of that's in the actual knitting-up of it anyway. So. JUST TRY AND STOP ME.

Sudden insight that the story I've been working on actually needed to start two paragraphs later and the middle of it can be handled as a flashback within one long scene. It remains to be seen whether this will help sort out the rest of it within the three months remaining on the deadline I want to submit it for, but fingers crossed that at least figuring out the structure of it at last will serve as a kick in the rear vis-a-vis getting words to start falling out onto the page...



As to the mad project, today's installment rates a mention as being the first disagreement on technique rather than overall-advisability I've had with the Source: as the photo shows, there are two distinct things happening in that top bit, because the directions as written seemed to produce a result that was visually rather pointless and when I decided to look in a different stitch-compendium for something similar it agreed with my instinct that "no, actually you do it this way round", so I switched methods in the middle. (For the knitters, it was using a twisted M1 versus an open M1.) So, I hereby declare that in case of disputes I'm allowing myself to consult Walker as an arbiter for whether or not Source is perhaps talking out of its arse. So there.

Week one of the blanket project is in the books. Each individual bit takes about an hour, which makes for a good example of how a large task can be broken down into manageable chunks. So far the early leader for "most annoying" is 'lacy rib', third from the top in this photo, because it has a high concentration of contrary-to-muscle-memory moves (specifically, for the knitters out there, yarn-overs between knit and purl stitches, which involve a moment's conscious thought for each and every one of them and it's every two stitches here).

Other early observations are that this sample weighs 54 grams, which since the entire skein of yarn is 200g suggests I'm going to be needing more yarn sometime around the end of April (fortunately it's not like there's any shortage of miscellaneous worsted-weight already in the house, although it does put a damper on the idea of making this a nice blanket considering what most of the miscellaneous worsted-weight in this house looks like), and also that the blanket is going to weigh... ratheralot; and that this 7-day run of swatches is already 26" long, which is way off from initial estimates (it should be about 21") and suggests that a bit of rethinking is in order, namely to knit up the swatches in strips of 14 rather than 28 so that I have the option later on of perhaps laying them out as a 14x26-swatch format instead of the original 28x13 plan, or indeed just making two 14x13 blankets which might end up being the better idea anyway, we'll see. But onward.