I’m not reading. Starting about an hour ago, I’m NOT READING. Anything. Especially not books or the internet (goodbye facebook :( ), but also not email (as much as I can avoid it) or user manuals or anything. (Not blogs! :( Goodbye Robin McKinley, until next week! Not the awesome book by Tanya Huff that I just started. :( How will I survive?)
So far this means that I’ve started writing a presentation I’m giving in a week and a half, which I otherwise might have procrastinated for far longer. It also means that I found myself scrolling through the MS Word options, just because I wanted to disable spell check!, and technically was reading ALL of the options, looking for ones I might want to change. Because that was an important use of my time. *facepalm*
I’m not counting IMing or texting with friends in this “not reading” category, because that’s communicating with real live people who happen to be on the internet instead of a phone or in person. Also, writing is not reading. Duh.
In case you’re wondering, I’ve started doing The Artists Way, by Julia Cameron, and I’m up to Week Four, which mandates Reading Deprivation. Since I haven’t been blogging much, this seems like a good time to resume. I’m not allowed to read the internet, but I can still talk to it, right?
Fortunately, this only lasts a week. I can make it.
Ok, so trying to follow a pattern is too hard*. First, finding the right yarn to end up with the fabric that matches the pattern is difficult. Texture, color, weight… there’s a ton of variety in yarn, and patterns are written based on one specific combination of texture and weight. Second, taking a lovely pattern and then identifying all the ways I want to customize it so that it looks the way I want it to look… it’s a lot of preparation**.
What’s plan B? Find a yarn I like, and then figure out how to make it into an object of clothing I would want to wear. On a whim I bought three skeins of this Noro Aya yarn during a sale at my LYS. I didn’t know what to make out of it, but maybe a vest or something.
I said that I wanted to customize the fit of this sweater, and my theory is that it’ll be better to fix before I get started, rather than after I’ve made it and am disappointed. To that end—being the seamstress that I also am—I decided to make a cloth mock-up, so I could see what it’ll look like on me. I decided to use muslin, for the simple reasons that it’s super-cheap (~ $1/yd.) and that thin cotton is easy to work with.
Muslin sleeve of the Pseudo-Sweater
Fortunately, this pattern comes with expected dimensions, and I have sharpies, a ruler, and a basic sense of geometry. So I drew the pattern directly onto the fabric, adding a 5/8 in. seam allowance to each edge that was meant to be sewn together. Unfortunately, I forgot that the pattern already included a 1-stitch selvage. The gauge is 16 stitches per 4 inches, or about 1/4 inch per stitch. So, if I wanted 5/8 in. seam allowance, I could’ve just added 3/8 in. I noticed this before I sewed anything together, and sewed 7/8 in. seams to get a proper sense of how it will fit.
The other thing was that despite its cheapness, I didn’t want to use up as much fabric as it would take to make the whole sweater. Since this was just a mock-up to get a sense of how it would fit, I created the whole back, one front, and one sleeve. Three seams later (I didn’t bother setting the sleeve into the sweater… I hate putting in sleeves), I had a pseudo-sweater and a sleeve. At first I tried to just put the pseudo-sweater on myself, but I realized I wasn’t getting a good sense of where it would hang on me, so I safety-pinned the critical points (shoulders, center back, side seams) to a tank-top.
Front of the Pseudo-Sweater (with the dart at the sides)
This sweater is meant to be baggy. I’m ok with that. But here’s the thing. Yarn is forgiving. You can make it much smaller than you’d ever make something woven, and it’ll still fit just fine, because (in general, and obviously this varies depending on the yarn and the stitch) it’ll stretch. Also, with a bottom hem that just hangs down and isn’t tight to the body, no ribbing around the hips or anything, it’s likely to stretch out and become even baggier, one direction or another. So starting out with a too-baggy sweater, it’ll only become an even more too-baggy* sweater.
The pseudo-sweater seemed to fit just fine around the hips, but around the waist it looked huge on me. Turns out I’m not square-shaped. So, I measured the difference between my hips and the narrowest point of my waist, and divided that by 4 to pick a starting point for how much to leave out of each quarter of the sweater (front left, front right, back left, back right). Then I tucked in and pinned the side-seam by approximately that much (I totally eyeballed it, not having my measuring tape handy), and was impressed by the improvement. It would still be loose, but not crazy-baggy.
Back of the Pseudo-Sweater (don't you love how I've used safety pins to attach the sleeves and mark a random point on my back?)
The next questions are: where do I make that dart**, do I make the dart in both front and back or only the back, and after I’ve decreased that much do I want to increase again back to the hip-width, or do I want the shoulders to be a little narrower, too? Everything I can find about making vertical darts in sweaters indicates I should decrease at the side-seam, not in the back like I would if I were sewing a shirt, but no one seems to explain why. While I will go with that theory, I’m still waiting for the why. Since I took in the proper amount from both the front and the back in my pseudo-sweater, and it looked just fine, I think the darts should be symmetrical about the side-seams. Double-decreases, and double-increases. The third question, I’m going to play by ear. I could see increasing to get the shoulders to nearly the width of the hips, without affecting how the sleeves will fit. From there, I’ll also have to play the sleeves by ear. From the fabric mock-up, they seemed about the right length or a little short, so it’ll just be a matter of how the yarn actually behaves.
So, I think I’ve identified all of the sizing changes. Decrease several inches, with the decrease vertically centered at my waist (careful measurement and attention will be required for that…), then increase probably 2/3s as much as I decreased. And then pay attention to sleeve length as I go.
No problem! o_O
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* Check me out, rockin’ the descriptive adjectives. Oh yeah.
** In knitting, they use the term dart just like in sewing. But in sewing, a dart is where you cut out and sew together fabric, to make a 3D shape out of flat fabric. In knitting, you just don’t knit those stitches, so they never exist. Trippy.
There’s this theory that if you do a little of something every day, eventually you’ll have accomplished a whole lot of it. For example, BIC—Butt In Chair—stands for sitting your butt in the chair every day, regardless of whether you “feel like it”, and just writing. The corollary is, if you do a little every day you’ll get in the habit of doing a little (or possibly more) every day, and so it’ll be less of a struggle to do every day. Twenty-one days to create a habit, or whatever that number is supposed to be.
But then there’s also this theory, which is mine, that there aren’t enough hours in the day, and there isn’t enough energy in my body, to do a little of all of the things I want to do every day. Writing, house-keeping, paying attention to my people, WORKING for money, gardening, brushing my teeth (ok, I manage this one every day pretty well), sleeping (if I could only do without…), knitting, listening to interesting & educational podcasts. Etc. Oh yeah, and READING. I do a whole lot of that already.
So instead, I tend to binge on those things. I’ll spend a weekend vegging because I’ve been pushing too hard for too long. I’ll spend another weekend away Doing Something. I’ll spend the next weekend catching up on housework* and maybe knitting and watching TV. I’ll spend another weekend on a knitting or sewing project. Another weekend caring for my garden. In most cases I’m not devoting the whole weekend to that activity, but rather a significant portion of my energy. Same goes for weekday evenings. This past week, I spent a lot of evenings between work and paying attention to my significant other. Other weeks I manage to write in the evenings. Other weeks I manage to at least compose a few blog posts.
I feel guilty when I haven’t written several days in a week. I feel guilty when Ben’s hat is sitting half-made for several months. It was his Christmas present. With any luck it’ll be finished by next Christmas. I have a sweater I want to start making some day**. I have tomatoes that need my attention, and kefir & yogurt to make at least weekly, and …
But maybe it’s not so bad to accomplish things in fits and starts. I do make progress on those things. I keep them all going, one way or another. Not always “on time”***. The thing is, it’s not that I’m slacking off. OK, I’m not consistently productive on any one thing. But that’s not my style. Maybe it’s time for me to accept my style as the one that works for me, and stop trying to be the person who does the same things every day, or even every week.
And by the way, I’ve read 27 books so far this year. So I’m clearly not slacking off on my reading. :)
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* Apparently it’s been four weeks since I last did laundry. :-/ That’s long even for me.
My mom bought me this fabulous book, POWER CABLES by Lily M. Chin, which is all about knitting different kinds of cables. And this sweater is one of its patterns. See how pretty? I haven’t made anything from the book yet, and I want to start with this one.
Honestly, though, I have trouble following directions. Recipes, assignments at work, patterns, I always notice when they’re just not quite right, and adjust them. Not right for me, of course, I couldn’t say if they’re right for everyone else. (Some people like celery, can you imagine?) This pattern only offers one size, and I’m concerned it’ll be too big for me. So I’ve decided I’m going to alter the pattern. That means a lot more work upfront, but I hope it’ll look better on me in the end.
Now, it’s meant to be an oversized sweater, and I’m ok with that. It’s just that I want it to look like it’s oversized on *me*, not like a hand-me-down oversized sweater. Furthermore, knitted things have a tendency to stretch, so if it starts out too big, it runs the risk of getting only longer and baggier. I think it’ll be the right size around my hips, but I want it to be a little more shapely, and I think I’d like to make it a little narrower in the shoulders. So, I’m thinking of putting in darts on the side-seams, to decrease through the waist and then increase again in the chest.
I’ve never made a sweater before. I’ve been knitting for over half my life, and I’ve wanted to make something like a sweater for years. But sweaters are a lot of work. It’s daunting. And worse, I have just two options. Design my own so it will fit right, which is a lot of work for a first-time sweater-knitter. Or follow someone else’s pattern, which wasn’t designed for me and won’t fit me properly. Or option 3: follow someone else’s pattern, but modify it to fit me better. I’m hoping option three will turn out best.
Being exhausted, achy, and miserable yesterday, I spent nearly all day lying in bed, reading (and finishing) NORTH & SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell.
I just couldn’t convince myself to get out of bed for longer than a meal. Part of that was because I was miserable and achy, and part of that was because I’d totally fallen into the mid-19th century England that Gaskell described. Fancy clothing, proper manners, class distinctions, people dying right and left. Cotton mills, and strikes, and a passionate, scowly man who, despite being part of the upper-crust of his city, wasn’t quite a gentleman—not by London standards. I was sucked into it, I had trouble imagining what in my real world could possibly be more important or more interesting than Margaret moving to a strange new town, than Thornton and his mill, or—I’ll be honest—whether Margaret & Thornton could manage to both like each other at the same time.
I felt lazy. I felt like I was stealing time from the things I need to do–chores, keeping up with people, contributing to feeding my significant other and myself, watering my poor plants—and from the things I want to do—continuing projects I don’t have time for during the week, working on that story I’m in love with writing, writing blog posts because I like telling the world what it’s like to be me. Etc.
But I LOVE to read. I get absorbed into other worlds, other people’s lives. I love it so much that I’ve taken up writing my own stories, because they don’t exist for me to read yet and I want to know what happens. I love watching movies and TV, but I love books in this whole other way. It’s immersive, not just visual and aural, but a truly engaging book will give me a whole-body experience. I feel emotions and believe opinions that aren’t my own, because the characters feel and believe those things. When I read for an hour at a time, it’s a nice pastime. But reading a book all day—that feels like living the story.
That has its risks, too, of course. When a story becomes more important than real life, is something out of balance*? Is it escapism? Or is it just truly enjoying an activity that isn’t bad for my health?
I don’t know. But aside from the guilt, I liked spending all day reading. And I felt less exhausted, achy, and miserable. So it must be OK, right?
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* Don’t they write creepy stories about books taking over a person’s life, a character sucking out the reader’s soul and living in her body? Hmm…
I’ve been making yogurt for a few months now, from a batch that one of my (wonderful) Indian co-workers brought me of her strain from India. Just today, my best friend Sally took home some of my yogurt so she could start making it, too. So, I’m writing down directions.
Here’s how I make yogurt:
I make sure to keep at least a tablespoon of the previous batch of yogurt. The instructions I was given were that one tablespoon is enough to make the next batch of yogurt, no matter how much you’re making. I haven’t tried this too closely, I’ve been making 1-2 cups with one tablespoon of yogurt.
I’ve been using a glass container, but you could use plastic or stainless steel (I hear Indian stores have fabulous stainless steel containers, but I haven’t managed to go look yet).
Put the tablespoon of yogurt into the container, then fill the container with milk. If I make two containers of yogurt, I use one tablespoon of yogurt per container. I’ve been pouring the milk in cold, straight out of the refrigerator, but see my notes below about the proper Indian method.
Put the container with the yogurt in a warm place. I’ve been putting it in the oven with the oven light turned on. I’ve also been using a thermometer to gauge the temperature in the oven (not in the milk/yogurt), and have found that it’ll go above 100°F. I’m not very scientific about it, so I leave it in the oven with the light on for several hours, until it’s above 100°, then turn it off for several hours until it’s at 80° or lower, and then turn it on again, etc., until it acts like yogurt. I after I turn the light off the second time, I’ll usually leave it in overnight.
Once it’s wobbly like yogurt, take it out, put a lid on, and stick it in the fridge. I haven’t been worrying about leaving it in the oven too long, and if I’m not sure it’s ready I’ll leave it in a bit longer.
My theory (and I haven’t done any research about this) is that yogurt bacteria like to be pretty warm to grow quickly. It could be that getting the milk even warmer than that would be helpful, and then you might not need to leave it out part of the day and all night.
Proper Indian directions, per my coworkers who looked at my like I was crazy when I described how I’d made yogurt (I haven’t ever followed these directions*):
Heat up milk in a pot until boiling.
Take it off the heat, and let it cool off until it’s just warm.
Pour the milk into containers, with a tablespoon of yogurt per container. Put in the oven with the light on only if your home is fairly cold. (I’m not sure about the technical definition of that, but I’d guess 70° is nearing too cold.)
Let it sit for about 8 hours.
Cover and refrigerate.
My theory about why my method is working just as well: Milk bought in the U.S. (>99% of it, anyway) is already pasteurized. Boiling it is like pasteurizing it. So here in the U.S. it’s an unnecessary step. Therefore, the only actual need is to warm up the milk. Maybe warming it on the stove or in a microwave would work better than putting it in cold, but it would take more steps before I could move on to the next thing in my day. I’ll let you know if I ever try it.
What’s the difference between Indian** yogurt (or any kind of home-made) and store-bought? Many things. First, home-made yogurt is made up of hundreds of bacteria that are good for your digestion, whereas store-bought uses just a few strains that each company has decided are the “best”, or maybe patentable. Even the brands that advertise that they have live cultures only have a few very specific live cultures… and the strains may have been added in after the yogurt became yogurt. Indian, or any kind of home-made, yogurt is yogurt because it was made with all of the strains of bacteria that were in the culture to start with. (By the way, you probably could start yogurt from store-bought, as long as it’s the kind that has live cultures, but then it wouldn’t have very many strains of bacteria. If you can find someone who has their own yogurt, that would probably would best.)
Second, home-made yogurt can vary quite widely in flavor, depending on what bacteria are in it. The strain I have is a bit sweet, even when left plain. Others can be very sour.
Third, because the beneficial bacteria in home-made yogurt are still alive and active, they don’t leave room for harmful bacteria to grow. This doesn’t mean it can’t spoil, and I’ve been told to keep it in the refrigerator once it’s made (this also keeps it from getting more sour-flavored), but it’s less likely to go bad.
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* I don’t follow directions well. Also, I was given yogurt before I was given instructions. And then I decided to try it, based on what I know about kefir and what I’d heard about yogurt. I guessed wrong, but it worked anyway.
** Other cultures make yogurt, too. Only my Indian coworkers have told me about it, though, so that’s my point of reference.
Today was a beautiful day, and Sally came over and dragged me out on my bike to ride by my coast. I didn’t freak out, I managed (with help) to re-inflate my tires, and I even rode down the hill that my house is on. Last time I went for a bike ride, I walked down the hill, to avoid having to figure out traffic and a hill and riding all at the same time. But I had my Sally with me, and we just powered on ahead, and it was fine.
The coast side trail we rode on is paved, nearly flat, and apparently goes about 3 miles. And if you can stop panicking about balancing on this narrow little thing long enough to look up from the road, it has amazing views of the ocean and the hills. It was sunny, and because it’s still spring there weren’t many pedestrians out (so I didn’t have to worry about hitting too many of them!). Apparently there was a pretty strong wind, and of course it was with us on our ride south, and then against us on our way back home.
I started out very tense, very stressed, but once we’d been going a little ways I relaxed and was able to enjoy myself. (I think, too, it hurts more when I’m stressed & tense.) We didn’t go the whole three miles, because we reached a point where it was swarming with people cleaning up the beach and decided to turn back and stay out of there way. Which was really just as well, because of that headwind. The ride back was far more exhausting than I expected.
As soon as we got back to civilization (i.e. roads with cars), which is also where the hill starts, I got off and walked. Sally rode back up the hill, and I was very impressed. As soon as I stopped huffing and puffing. ;)
And now, I’m lying on the couch, achy and tired. Less than 6 miles*, and no hills, and I’m exhausted.
I need to do this more often.
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* I checked google maps, and between my neighborhood, and the distance we rode on the path, it was about 3 miles out, and since I walked part of the way back, it was less than 3 miles back. :p
I’m suffering from a bad case of The Mondays*. You know, when it’s not just a Monday, but it’s the Monday, when everything is going to go wrong, and it’s not even 10am yet.
Like that day when you came wide awake at 3 in the morning (having been having bizarrely normal dreams, that weren’t even interesting to reflect on), realized the heater was on for no good reason, and you had to go turn it off. And then you laid in bed for half an hour, wide awake, before finally getting up (quietly, so as not to disturb your significant other) and taking your book into the living room to read yourself to sleep. And when you finally start dozing off, an hour and a half later, you don’t actually feel sleepy, like “oh, being asleep will be so comfy!”, you just can’t keep your eyes open anymore. So you go to bed, and do fall asleep, and then all of a sudden the morning rolls around! Who signed up for this? And you prop one eye open to see how bright it is out, and realize you were dreaming about people who could turn into cats**, and then fall asleep again. When you finally get out the toothpicks (to prop your eyes open) and drag yourself out of bed, you feel so crummy that you don’t even want to make breakfast. But then you notice that your kefir is way over-kefired***, despite the fact that just 10 hours ago it was under-kefired†, and you decide that’s ok, it’ll still taste fine in a smoothie. And then you attempt breakfast, and then have to go lie down on the couch for an hour because you have no energy or brain function.†â€
Only then you’re trying to write an email to work, to tell them that you’ll be in late today, and then you remember that your phone hasn’t been syncing work email for a while (and even when it’ll pull email, it won’t send email, so people aren’t getting messages they should be getting, and you’re looking like a lame-ass), so you have to try half-a-dozen different mail apps to see if any will do better. And then you realize it hasn’t been syncing your work calendar to your phone’s calendar, which it used to do. And really you didn’t like the default mail app anyway.†††So you spend your hour on the couch with your phone (battery quickly draining), trying to figure out if anyone else has had this problem, and what they did to resolve it. And when you FINALLY get the thing working, it tells you that your company requires some crazy-strict restrictions on your personal phone, just because it’s connecting to work email–which you can almost understand, except that it gives power over your phone to some random geek who might push the wrong button and wipe out your phone‡. But you accept the bizarre restrictions anyway, and wonder if that’s why your email hasn’t been working for all these weeks. And then your phone’s battery dies.
Or maybe those things don’t happen to you? And really, it could’ve been worse. The world could’ve exploded. I might have needed to be in right early, and too bad that I was brain-dead. (And hey, I seem to have gotten my brain back.)
It’s still The Mondays.
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* Yes, I just made that up.
** That was pretty cool actually. The human/cat in question was able to walk over the (very hilly) highway 92 that I take to work every day, which is 8 miles long^, in just an hour. Why it was doing that… I forget.
^ Right, it’s actually lots longer than that, but my section is about 8 miles.
*** In other words, it had been sittingout for about 48 hours, and had completely separated into whey and a thick, solid layer of soured milk.
†Still sloshy like milk, not thick like yogurt. And it might have been longer than 10 hours ago, but it sure didn’t feel like it.
††But at least the neighbor’s cat came over to keep you company.
†††It wouldn’t zoom in or out on the email body, and if the email was too wide for the screen, you couldn’t make it scroll over to see the rest. Seriously?
I’m cleaning my office. It’s neck-high in papers, mail, and stuff that needs to be put away. Or maybe dragged to the curb and shot.
Part of cleaning my office seems to include things that aren’t actually cleaning, as such. Like, donating to charities that I want to give money to. Or paying bills. Or ripping those CDs, so I can put them in a box and put the box away somewhere, so they aren’t taking up space in my office.*
And it occurs to me that I have (usually) small piles of papers that need taking care of “not right this minute, but sometime soon”. And the problem with that theory is that “sometime soon” doesn’t often come along. Or when it does, it’s not technically “soon” anymore.
So, that implies I need to have a scheduled time that is “soon”, to take care of these things. And “soon” should come around at least once a month.
How do other people manage this?
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* Or, you know, posting to my blog because I’m having profound thoughts on the subject.
