On the better hand, I've no pieces left over from putting it back together...

... and several pieces of rather lovely fabric for which I'll soon get about drafting patterns, and cutting. I feel terribly like a small child when I use my sewing shears -- my hands aren't quite large enough to use them one-handed (but they're such a delight to use, all the same!)

I've seldom managed the patience for quilting, although irrationally enough I do have the patience to draft patterns from first principles, and modify patterns to suit ;)

I'd be curious to hear from folk here that sell occasional pieces -- there's things I'd like to make, but have no particular inclination to keep, once finished (but can't justify creating and handing off to the local thrift shop).

Xeger, have you thought about Etsy? I have only hearsay to report, but it seems to be a good place.

The quilting design is especially jaw-dropping. I keep wanting to run my hand over my monitor to feel it. (Oh, and because I did click through to your Flickr set... the doll quilt with the tree is also incredibly lovely.)

Then again, they cost like a small car. But damn, the right tool for the right job and all that.

I do all my quilting by hand; in the early days I didn't even have a hoop. Machine quilting really requires a walking foot to pull the top layer through the machine at the same rate as the bottom, to avoid the bunching problem. Some day I may buy one and try my hand at machine quilting.

My quilts have almost all been made as gifts; a couple I made for me. They take too long to make to start one without a particular purpose in mind. The stuffed animals I also make go much faster. Those are just for fun, or to try out an idea I've had. I've sold a number of the science-fictional ones at convention art shows and have given a lot of the others away (some of those were intended as gifts from the beginning, but not all). But that still leaves me with quite a few hanging around. Selling them on Etsy has crossed my mind, but I don't want to start feeling that I must make something so that I can stock my Etsy shop. That would take all the fun out of it.

I've thought about making a small quilt. That would be a great winter project.

(My sewing machine use is somewhat hampered by the fact that we sourced it from Brussels and the owner's manual is in Dutch. I've sat down and put the time in to read the bits about oiling the machine and such, but I've clearly missed the finer points here and there.)

Must source and English-language manual.

But, I confess, I actually kinda like the pleats. I know I shouldn't because they're Not Proper Quilting. But until the Quilt Police kick down my door, I'll run my hand over them and enjoy.

There is *one* rule in quilting and stitching: the thread goes through the eye of the needle. That's it. That's the rule. Everything else is a matter of taste.

Should I ever return to quilting, I have yearnings to make a black whole cloth quilt with a multi-colored version of a Lorenz attractor machine-stitched in rayon or silk.

Some day.

Enjoy that Bernina! They're wonderful machines.

(I have an Elna 1010, a nice basic machine (non-electronic), and I bought a walking foot for it.)

As it happens, I'm working on a math quilt of my own:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/photo.php?pid=2587346&id=576136283&ref=nf

(hope that works)

It's a quilt version of a Penrose tiling (rhombus version, as I can't figure out how to make paper templates of the kite-and-dart version), and it is aperiodic: the pattern will never repeat. I guess I'll keep going until I run out of fabric or get bored.

Nightsky (20): I've thought of making a quilt using Penrose tiling, but haven't gotten around to it yet. (Your link isn't working for me.)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/islandmamarose/2423943697/

I'm amused how many of us get stalled at that stage. Makes me feel better about how long mine sat and glowered at me from atop my second-best book press.

Nightsky @23:
That link works. Wow. Looks really neat.

My most recent sewing projects were a second big giant squid with its Winslow-cultist hat, which came to Worldcon with me, and a bunch of little squidlets, some of which also came to Worldcon. My most recent non-sewing project was replacing the propeller on my bike helmet which I lost a few years ago.

I now have two big plush giant squid, which is at least one more than I really need, and I'd like to sell one. A couple of friends have suggested Etsy, and I need to look into it -- I want to know more about how the process works, including selling from Canada into the U.S.

Nightsky (23): Gorgeous! When you get tired of adding to it, are you going to square off the edges or leave it jagged?

Nightsky @ 23, that's lovely!

I forbade myself to do anything quiltinglike a while ago. I do have some quilting-type supplies, but that's for big square things like pillow slips. I am not allowed to learn to quilt until I've had a job for a year. Then I shall become insufferable.

(I've now learned how to knit socks, having started with sweaters. Toe up is easier, you don't have to pick up stitches around the heel.)

I do a fair amount of sewing by hand, and have made full garments by hand multiple times -- but for some reason it's much easier to find time to sew by hand when I'm traveling than when I'm home[0].

[0] I've no logical reason for this, it just is.

My mother was a superb seamstress; I'm at best indifferent. Oh, the stuff I sewed was okay, but it was frustrating more than it was satisfying. I can do it in a pinch but prefer not to.

OTOH, today I put up 5 pints of tomato sauce, using the boiling water canner. It's been a while since I've done any canning, but I swung back into it. The fact that my current kitchen is much more canning-friendly also helps.

I may just do it again tomorrow. I heard one jar seal, for certain. We'll see about the rest.

For others who like geometry and math in their crafts, I would direct your attention to Woolly Thoughts' Etsy site. Their website is www.woollythoughts.com, but at the time of posting their website was down for maintenance. For those of you who have Ravelry.com accounts, you can see their projects here.

As for my own blanket-related creativity, in June I completed a handspun, handwoven and hand-stitched blanket. It's 70 by 80 inches(Here's a shih-tzu for scale--her name is Mulan), and everything but the warp was handspun on my spindles by me. I am so thrilled with how it came out-- some people who have seen it likened it to Saori free-weaving, which I had never heard of before, but I guess that's what I did. My little Schacht Rigid Heddle Loom is only 20 inches wide, so I made the blanket in 2 long strips, cut them in half, secured the cut edges and assembled. While I was weaving, I put small curly and crimpy locks alongside the weft, and that added so much fun to the texture. Of any spinners and handweavers are interested, this Flickr photo has mouse-overs that detail dyers and fiber sources. Here's a shih-tzu for scale (her name is Mulan).

I've entered that blanket into Schacht's I Made it on my Schacht! contest celebrating their 40th anniversary. The submission deadline has passed, but on September 14th, the finalists should be posted at that same link.

In other creative news, last week I spin, felted and beaded (and belled) a headdress sort of thing for my friend who wanted something special for Burning Man. Pictures don't do the final product (8 hours of spinning/felting/beading and 3 hours of tight braiding) justice.

Enough self-promotion. What else have you wonderful people been making?

I am also thinking about what embroidery project to start - I should be working on two wedding afghans (couple's name, date, and a ring or something wedding-y) or better yet, I will finish my sweetie's Christmas present! Thanks ML for reminding me that I have to work on that!

I have a number of bags of unfinished crochet projects and a stash of yarn for future projects. I'm currently alternating making hyperbolic crochet coral reef pieces for a wall sculpture with other things like necklaces, scarfs, collars and blankets. Yarn stashes grow almost as fast as paper piles do.

Anyway, my mother quilts, and in particular when she heard that Katie and I were moving to Texas she worked frantically to get one ready for us to take. Successfully, too. We use the quilt as a bedspread (though since we keep the indoor temperature at about 80 degrees, we usually just fold it back at night). It's reversible; one side is brown with a pattern of hollow squares in different colors, the other -- my preferred one, though the other is nice -- is white with a number of stars and symbols. When she gave us the quilt she gave us also a card with descriptions of some of the symbols: ginkgo leaves for protection, cherry blossoms as a carpe diem, a Texas Star; things like that.

It's absolutely one of the most beautiful things I've ever owned, and I'm not just saying that because my mother made it. I really need to put up some photos of it.

She also recently finished a quilt that she entered into a traveling, juried show. The theme of the show is "Wonders of the West" and it depicts her grandchildren (my niece and nephew) looking over a vineyard at a setting sun.

Now, to digress from quilting to literature for a moment:  is the thread title a reference to Hesiod (whom I’ve never read)?  If so, is there a link from Hesiod to Goethe?

The title is Hesiod by way of TS Eliot:

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

(Prufrock, of course)

The Goethe quote, which I originally picked because it's about spirals, echoes the Prufrock passage for me, particularly rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution. That bounces nicely off of a hundred indecisions...a hundred visions and revisions.

The whole essay is kind of about bringing a two-dimensional pattern into the third and fourth dimensions (more the fourth than the third). And Prufrock's little time-riff there is one of my personal touchstones, so I wanted the allusion in there somewhere.

Getting Hesiod and the transformative value of work thrown in for free was an added bonus.

There is a technical term for beautiful things that one does not use. That term is clutter. Learn to drink from the cup as though it is already broken, because the alternative is to choose between a cluttered life and an ugly one.

That's beautifully put. It's going to be my mantra of the month. It has taken us a long time to come to that realization here at home, but we're learning. I bought a lovely set of ceramic dinnerware at a crafts fair this weekend, then packed and stored more than a hundred plates and glasses articles we never use (and most of which fall under the category of ugly clutter).

Onward to another topic here: I like the quoted piece of poem! I've never read that one, though it's been vaguely on my to-read list since the reference in Tam Lin.

Abi, this is brilliant. A very good summation of a problem and its solution.

It must be accounted a character flaw, and a double-wide one at that, but I lose interest in anything I make as soon as I'm done designing it. Whether it's a piece of code, a way of fixing a lamp socket with a nail, an essay, a bookcase made of foam-core, or the proper eigenfunctions for a problem, or (theoretically) a battery-powered steam-pipe suitable for use on a space-station (thanks a _lot_, Ken, _now_ how do I get that half-hour back?), once I Know How it's Done...well, the fun part's over. (And, speaking as one normally given to self-deprecation, I'll baldly assert that I've never learnt anything interesting about a problem after and if I've reached the I.K.H.i.D. state.)

True, there can be pleasure in proper use and development of technique, but it's always mixed with irritation that that thing in my head doesn't exist outsude it yet. (And yes, the first time I ever heard anyone opine that it's the Journey, not the Destination, my eight-year-old heart told me, 'This person is _insane_,'---I have since moderated my opinion to include the possibility of sour grapes, or that the person is merely alien to me in this respect.)

So, instead, I'm going to go finish one of my embroidery projects before starting on my reconstruction of a Worth gown. Seems like just the thing to do on a lazy holiday Monday.

xerger @ 34 because at home, there are a lot of other things you *could* be doing or *should* be doing. As you travel, there are fewer distractions to the work.

Thus, on saturday, I finished cuffs and collar on a tunic that has been on my "finish someday" pile for years and knotted a mala for a friend, while I was at an SCA event. Because it was easier than getting it done at home.

And it's nice to have an actual thing that I can show off to other people, or give to someone.

I love the characterization of quilting as 'finicky', unlike reconstructing a Worth gown... ;)

I figure I'll do the one scarf, then it's time to learn how to make lace. Anything I can do more easily with crocheting, I may as well do so. It's still nice to have another thing to do with yarn.

Perhaps tonight's the night I'll upload photos of things from the last few months.

The other quilt photos linked in this thread are magnificent. *Almost* enough for me to want to learn how to do it. Instead I will be an admirer, I think.

And yo, all you other sock knitters! You-know-who (the usual culprit*) has figured out yet another way to revolutionize sock knitting. Now she knits a sort of ball and puts in an afterthought leg! (It's not exactly toe-up, although it is... ...you have to see it to believe it.) The book will be out on the 24th. I. can't. wait. She even has a sort of promo for it on YouTube, with details and pictures. And scary-beautiful socks!

*˙ǝɹoɟǝq ǝɔıʍʇ ʇı ǝuop ʎpɐǝɹןɐ s,ǝɥs ¿ǝsןǝ oɥʍ ¡ǝsɹnoɔ ɟo 'ıɥpɹoq ʇɐɔ

I can be reached at jpolowin@hotmail.com . (Is it no longer possible for posters' E-mail addresses to be viewed from the "view all by" links, etc.?) Shipping cost would depend on location, and of course I'd be happy to transport the thing within the Ottawa area myself.

Quilting is a different kind of finicky involving really small pieces of fabric and keeping track of the overall pattern while sewing straight lines with appropriate seam allowances...forever. At least with the Worth gown, all the finicky bits are tailoring, resolved in the pinning/fitting stages, and all the pieces are big and not easily confused.

When I'm done with that one, I get to do this one. Both of these projects fall under "stop calling your underwear Victorian steampunk."

Did I get emphatic on the matter when we had lunch? I do, rather.

Oh, by the way, you gave me enough spare yarn that I knitted myself a little tiny Sackboy with it! He's only about 13cm high, but I put a little metal endoskeleton into him so he's poseable. He hangs out at my office. So you not only gave me toys (the kids love theirs), but inspiration! Thank you again.

Joel @64:
Is it no longer possible for posters' E-mail addresses to be viewed from the "view all by" links, etc.?

'Fraid so. There were too many spambots harvesting addresses, so Martin moved the email address indexing under the covers.

And the book - very NotClutter - is a joy and an heirloom in progress. (It holds poetry, as promised.) Thanks so much for being its maker!

For one thing, I agonize endlessly over the quilting pattern. It has to in some sense stand alone, but also complement the patchwork, and finding something Just Right is daunting to me. And then the actual act of quilting is pretty much Houpelonde Hemming, to borrow Xopher's description from the LitCrit thread.

Many of the quilts I've seen, and certainly the ones I tend to make, turn out to become a sort of focus for meditation (or something). I find myself contemplating them for ages.

*you can get fancy with the quilting, but you don't have to. It seems a good compromise, and a way to get a usable blanket more quickly.

And for those who have trouble with machine quilting, you might want to look into machine hoops— they'll help with keeping an even tension top to bottom.

My mother-in-law has gotten to the point where she's gotten a full-size quilting rig. I swear, my next big project is going to be timed so I can quilt it in Oregon...

Diatryma @ 30, I find that I only ever have the patience for knitting if I combine knitting with gossiping. Otherwise I get bored with it very quickly. It has to fill the "fidgeting with something" niche while conversation is taking up my brain. But it's fantastic for that.

I am re-learning to sew, with help from my mother, but the pencil skirt I'm making is on hold while we look for the chalk wheel and buy a zipper. (The maternal sewing supplies are in some disarray, and I have not yet bought my own.) It is excellent fun so far, but I could not learn or re-learn by myself -- it needs at least a bit of apprenticeship.

I took a sewing class in school thirteen years ago. Did you know they invented sewing machines that thread themselves now? Yes. That was always the part of sewing class that made me feel most useless and idiotic, and now it is not a problem.

I have also recently made and presented a talk at a conference, which went quite well. I am proud of myself for finally producing and presenting something from all my work so far. Now I need to finish the paper and start work on the prelim.

I've just finished an enormous (6x6) lace shawl. I love the feeling of finishing up a big project, standing back, saying "Wow!" and "What next?"

I think this is powerful and often true (yes, I also have found that getting people to actually USE the blank books I bind for them is an uphill battle), but I have another term for beautiful things I do not use, and that is art. The painting on my wall, given to me by a beloved mentor, is not useful in any typical definition of that term, and yet it brightens my days.

I'm also in the midst of making a mobile for my art studio space (actually a repurposed bedroom), and when it is complete, it is not going to help the air circulate better, or do anything for me - except be beautiful. And the process is keeping me sane in the midst of a pretty terrible emotional time. So it's useful, I suppose, in that sense.

Of course, this can lead into the impossible argument of Art versus Craft, and why our culture seems to find useful things to be of less artistic value than non-functional objects. But I just wanted to point out that for me, what I own that is beautiful and useless isn't clutter, but is art.

Everyday Use by Alice Walker, for those who might not know it.

Art you have wrapped in cardboard and stashed in the attic is clutter. I say this as the owner of a number of paintings and prints in exactly that place; it takes a few years before I'm moved into the house enough to finish hanging.

I knew I wouldn't be able to put up Blackbeard's Rugged Tampons (someday I will have a bathroom large enough) but still. Very little of my art matches the rooms.

Caroline, the amount of time knitting takes is a feature, not a bug, though I think I was unclear. I like that it takes longer, so a scarf is more than a two- or three-week Knitter's Breakfast project. I dislike that something about it hurts my eyes ('motion-sick' is a better description) and that my first project is boring. If I watched TV, this would be a good use of my hands.

I think I'm dissatisfied that it doesn't feel the same as crocheting, where I know what I'm doing and get a lot of feedback on things-- latest project was a filet piece, and those look more impressive than they are to make. I'm not getting a rush of finished! or progress! or boy that looks cool! at all.

You'll learn nothing (other than patience) from making a scarf that you won't learn from making the same stitch pattern into a pot holder sized square.

If you don't want a scarf and aren't giddy with pleasure at the thought of wearing the one that you're going to produce, I'd highly recommend casting off and starting something in a lace pattern, since what you want to do is knit lace.

As a crocheter, you already know how to boss your yarn around. And if you're doing a scarf, you can knit, purl, and cast on and off. Additional lace knitting skills are trivially easy to pick up.

And if you want suggestions for patterns, I've got a million!

I did mystify my parents in my first apartment by hanging all my art before I unpacked any more than the most necessary boxes. Which may indicate something about how useful art is for making a space feel like home, to me.

Art that is packed away is probably clutter. Though the pieces that don't fit on my current walls are carefully stored, waiting for the next house, the one where I'll have a space for them to be. So it's art-in-waiting, I suppose.

Some "clutter" is probably necessary. I have clothing I'm not currently wearing, too; is it clutter when it hangs in my closet? I may be being overbroad in my definitions.

What I'm pushing against is the all too common reaction of, "What a lovely [book/quilt/other useful thing]! I couldn't bear to use it!" So very few people go the other way and say, "That painting would make a perfect doormat!"

There is definitely a balance between "clutter" and "stuff that I really do need/want to keep, that I'm not using right this moment. "Clutter" has a pretty strong negative connotation, but I'm not coming up with a better word.

I've definitely had the same problem of something beautiful not being used because it might hurt it. I've actually used "The Velveteen Rabbit" to combat that mindset before - something may be beautiful, but it's not real until it's used. But I like your clutter definition, and it's useful (there's that word again) to have more different angles in the arsenal of "no, really, it's meant to be used!"

Anything that works to get over people's anxieties about Doing Things Wrong*. For really difficult situations, I use a guilt trip:

[RDP]: Oh, Abi, I could never bear to write in this!
Abi: Oh, great. Now I've cluttered your life. I'm so sorry! I never meant to!
[RDP]: Oh, no, no, no! No, it's not clutter! I'll use it! Here, see? I'm making a mark in it right now! See? Using!

----
* I do actually understand this perfectly. When I was a kid, I had a copy of A Hobbit's Journal which I started writing in, abandoned, hated the handwriting in, and generally felt I had completely ruined. But I was wrong; those entries were important at the time. My only misdeed was in not using the rest of it.

Many organizations regularly run art auctions, and are delighted to have donations. A particularly satisfying combination is to offer not only the artwork, but an accompanying discussion with the patron of what you were aiming at, digressions and diversions during the construction, and how you fetched up. What? As Abi has given us?!

Work for clients is like wiring a lamp base: figuring out the best way to accomplish the task straightforward for the money, no surprises.

The most satisfying creative work for me is having a definite goal, and a definite game plan, and being able to follow the inspirations that come of following it through. That technique refuses to give a hard edge? How can you let the blurriness redefine the outcome?

Abi's textured pleated quilting (as one of several elements) pulls the entire experience into its own space.

http://www.carolkimball.net/mission/

I'm not sure I could write instructions for that...one just, um, does it. (Years of spreadsheet abuse have clearly polluted my cognitive abilities in this area.) But I'll try.

The design on the right is done with conditional formatting: if the cell has the value "3", the sheet knows to turn it dark red, "2" goes lighter, "1" goes lighter yet. (Go look at the Google sheet to see how that worked; conditional formatting is labeled "change colors with rules" under the Format menu.) So all I did was manually enter the values and watch the colors till it looked right.

Then I got fiddly, because the cells in the spreadsheet were each 1/4 of a "square" in the quilt (not to be confused with the "Fibonacci units" that I used for quilting, which are 4 "squares" or 16 cells in the spreadsheet). I wanted to make the squares first, then sew them together to make the pieced top. That section of the spreadsheet was a recipe for how many of what I needed to make.

(Still with me?)

The next column over was done manually. I figured out how many different kinds of 4-cell squares were in the quilt (remembering rotations), then counted them by hand. I printed the sheet out and ticked off the different squares as I went, then put a checksum at the bottom of the column to make sure I'd come out right.

Then I calculated how many cells of each color existed in each 4-square piece, using the spreadsheet's COUNTIF function (most spreadsheet programs have help on these functions). Multiplying that information by the count of squares I'd just done in the last paragraph gave me the total number of "cells".

I added them in columns on the extreme left, to get a grand total of each cell-sized bit I needed.

At the bottom right, I then calculated how many cells I could get across the two standard widths of fabric available here. Dividing the total number of cells I needed by that, gave me the number of cell-width strips I'd need to buy. Multiplying it by the cell width gave me the length of fabric I would need in each color.

You'll note that that leaves me overbuying, because if I have a square of 4 white cells, I don't cut 4 white cells and sew them together; I just cut one square. But I figured I'd rather over- than under-buy.

Now, this is all hugely complicated and probably hard to follow. If you'd feel comfortable doing so, you could put together a Google document of your sheet and open it up for public viewing; I'd be happy to help you work through the process.

I call it "stash," personally ... but the line between stash and clutter is drawn in different places for different people. My partner views much of my deep-storage stash (supplies for crafts I'm currently too busy to do, for example) as clutter to be, ideally, removed right away.

Peter Darby (73): That's a wonderful* quilt.

*in several senses of the word

Anyway. There are lots of organizations that take the products of process crafters like ourselves and do good with them. For example, Project Linus gathers and distributes quilts and blankets for children and teens in crisis -- I've crocheted a few baby blankets for them. Google "service knitting" or "charity knitting" -- you'll never get to the end of the list.

So, now you know my hobbies.

Seriously, that's wonderful. I can't say I wish I could do that, because I don't. Crafting has never been of interest to me, unfortunately. But I can be impressed. And I am.

Oh well. I can learn whatever else on scrap yarn, then trade scarfyarn for the stashed silk-merino and do something gorgeous with that. It doesn't count as stashing that way.

Current projects include a Dr. Suess-ish looking wind instrument I'm making from a dipper gourd and other odds and ends, and a knife from half of a broken pair of scissors and an antler tine. My tent frame needs a minor repair - one of the badger heads on the end boards came off while I was loading it on the honking big SUV I had to rent after my car broke down on the way to Pennsic. I am also in early planning stages to remake my Gayla peregrine falcon kite as a white gyrfalcon. She's really too big for a peregrine, with a 54" wingspan, and is getting a bit faded and battered looking.

Anyway, there used to be a company that made kits for all sorts of down jackets and other items, including bathrobes and ski pants**. The kits were brilliant. My jacket was (is! I still have it) actually a vest with attachable sleeves and inner and outer pockets. All sorts of tricky things were involved, including three zippers and sealing the nylon fabric edges using a candle flame, but everything was included, and the directions were crystal clear. As I said, satisfying on every level.

*'serious' being a relative term, I know!
** The company was Altra. They appear to be out of business, but you can find items on vintage clothing sites. Ouch.

What's the trouble?

(If you want to try another method of circular knitting, I found Cat Bordhi's instructional videos on using two circ's very helpful. Part Two is here.)

First attempt: I somehow managed to knit on the wrong side after 4 rows (as though I'd switched to purling after knitting), and still don't understand how I did it.

Second attempt: I dropped a stitch in one row and only noticed 3 rows later; didn't know how to backtrack and fix that.

Third attempt (it was already past midnight at this point): There was a twist in my stitches when I joined the ends, even though I coulda sworn I triple-checked to make sure there wasn't any.

I frogged the first three tries. As for take four, so far so good!

Also, the pleats are not mistakes. They're "Design Elements". I'm a big fan of the TLAR method (aka: That Looks About Right) when it comes to sewing, knitting, crochet or anything else hand made. If I wanted perfection,

My first quilt was a 90" x 90" 16 patch for a friend for her combined birthday/christmas. The recipient just wanted a plain front and back, quilted, and thin bed covering. (Think something along the lines of a very thin duvet.) I made the mistake of starting one side with a fairly small african violet print because I coulnd't find two solid colors that both she and I would like. After matching the lavendar (easy) and the white (difficult) from the flowers, I ended up making one huge sixteen patch. The quilting consisted of a modified compass rose inside a diamond.

Wrestling that aligator was a lot of work, but the payoff was worth it. My friend rolled up in it that night to sleep and uses it year round.

Fixing dropped stitches without ripping your knitting is easy and deeply satisfying.

You need a crochet hook, but in times of direst need, I've used a DPN, a toothpick, or a ballpoint pen.

Good video of instructions is here.

A smallish crochet hook - for socks, somewhere around a 7 or 8 - is a handy tool. Or a couple of needles a size or two smaller. (Susan Bates has a 'sock set' that's six DPs each in 000 through 1. Aluminum; the smaller ones will bend.)

I'm doing socks from the toe up; the beginning is more difficult, but the heels are much easier to knit: decreases instead of picking up along the flap, and you can decide how long to make the top when you get to it.

The fourth try is going well - socks are next!

There are several crochet hooks among the knitting needles I have at home - I picked them all up at a flea market for a song. All are either aluminum or steel. I have since discovered that I like working with bamboo needles a lot more, at least for the bigger gauges. Figures.

if you choose to replace the non-bamboo needles, your local knitting guild probably has a group which teaches other people to knit or crochet, and could use the ones you don't want anymore.

I could say I've been, in my way, making light (and generating heat).

I am playing catch-up in ML, because I was in Chicago, where I was speaking about torture, and what to do to make it happen less.

I took advantage of the flourosphere to do it. Bill Higgins, Beamjockey, pointed out to me, that despite my sense of being one of many minor players in the chorus here, I am a tolerably heavy contributor (he says I've written some 500,000 words here).

In that time I have polished my rhetorical skills (if not my typing prowess). I've borrowed freely from people here (Teresa, I've found great use from the idea "story is a force of nature" and used it liberally; there is reference to it in the WBEZ interview.

As a result, I've also been making friends; I wouldn't have done it without you.

I've also been, as is my wont, making pictures, and some of them may rise to art.

Examples to follow, though perhaps not with speed.

It looks kind of cool the way it is now... sort of a roundish blob shape. If I leave it natural-edged, though, I'll have to figure out how to put a binding on.

When you're finished, be sure to provide pictures!