I hate being in limbo! Work is still up in the air, so I have no idea of my future. But I have to plan…

Therefore: I’m announcing my other website: www.LindseyRobbins.com

There’s my resume, and a gallery of my work.

If anyone is interested, I will be opening a ‘shop’ to work on graphics: you need a button? Banner? That great picture you took of your sweater needs color correction? 5$. Almost anything, 5$. New webring? Need seven or eight graphics for it? Let me know. I do 3D work, web work, photo manipulation, and all sorts of stuff. Take people out of photos? Sure. Make a picture of you with Orlando Bloom? Fine. De-aging is a specialty of mine. (Who needs plastic surgery? I can fix you up right now!)

Before Mouse's Magic Makeover
After Mouse's Magic Makeover

Cheap.

Email me at Lindsey.Robbins@gmail.com

Ok, enough pimping, back to the knitting.

I suck. I’ve started and frogged the Madli's Shawl three times. Then I decide to do a smaller repeat until I get the hang of it… frog, frog, frog.

So then I look around in the IK issue for something simpler. Kitten suggested I try for easy lace, rather than start a whole friggin' shawl. I found the Snuggly Baby Hats by Lora Steil in the back of the issue. One is a faggot and lace pattern that is only like 17 stitches and 8 rows. I mean, I should be able to do that, right?

Wrong. Frog, frog, frog.

Maybe I’m not cut out for lace. Maybe I need to stick to cables and colorwork, so I can see where I am.

And I think there might be a problem with the chart: (NOTE: this is NOT the pattern, it’s just an example to make my point.) It’s supposed to be seed stitch.

On the open squares you knit on the right side, purl the wrong side.
On the filled (dots) squares you purl the right side, knit the wrong side.

CHART:

… am I wrong that that produces ribbing? I tried it a few times and got ribbing every time. Am I an idiot? Or am I reading it wrong? Or what?

Not much progress besides that. Fruit hat 2 isn’t going anywhere. The Sophie bag is languishing in my trunk.

I have been doing stuff. I’m about half way done with the teddybear for Red: she picked out these god awful button eyes that look like quarters. “Like the Irish,” she said. “Pennies on the eyes.” Ok, they make the white bear look even more dead than he already did. It’s a little zombie bear. Maybe I should make it drool, or embroider little flies around its head?



I’ll have a picture of Mr. Bear and Red’s Little Dead Bear next time, I think…

The other thing I’m doing is that I’m learning to play the Fiddle. Went to the THING this weekend and learned a few tunes. Love the fiddle. Love MY fiddle…

Got to go for now. Remember, if you’ve got that picture from your weeding, and you need to take out Drunk Cousin Maude from the corner, I can do it. Just email me at Lindsey.Robbins@gmail.com

What a life. I'm almost certainly going to be let go either this week or next, and, with the Mate unemployed as of three weeks ago, we're in deep, deep trouble. See, this is what happens when your blood family decides it needs to fall apart; nobody to help me! But my family by choice, Kitten, RtW, and my Clan (Scottish, not KKK, people!) are there for me, and we'll be ok.

On good news, I've learned to use my sewing machine, thanks to Kitten. I made a teddy bear! Purple and green plaid, lumpy and bumpy and mine. Ok, so he's a bit Frankenstine monsterish, but he's mine and I love him. I'll put a picture up for Mr. Bear eventually.

Had a good time in general. Checked out the new LYS, Anacapa Fine Yarns, who's website apparently isn't in the Google search engine yet. Neat store, though small, and has a nice variety of yarns, though heavy on the scarf yarn. I don't blame her; scarf yarn sells, and a new store is hard enough to open.

Good news? She's carrying Lambs Pride. Yes! Bad news? No Cascade 220. That's ok; Rob and Matt at Threadbear are still my main suppliers, I think. And once things get settled down over there and the Thready Bear project gets going, I'll make Mr. Bear a sweater.

I want to learn to do lace, and I wanted to support the new store, so I bought a magazine (Interweave knits) that has a simple lace pattern in it. Madli's Shawl by Nancy Bush: "Estonian lace in a shawl that's fun to knit." We'll see about that. I know I can get free lace patterns on the web; hell, Wendy put together a page of them. But I wanted to support my local store...

The mag also had two more things I want to do; the "Knot a Knitted Paper Bag", and the "Fair Isle Bag", both fun looking and things I would use. Anyway, Photobucket is down, so no pictures, but I'll leave you with a Meme.

Gacked this from Marie

Copy this list of literature classics (or at least relatively agreed-upon canon, regardless of how one defines a "classic"), and embolden the ones you've read. Seeing the movie doesn't count!

Like Marie, I've read 25. Strangely enough, (or not) it's a different 25. The ones that are in italics I have read part of but not finished, for whatever reason. Edited to add: actually, 26. I forgot that we read "A Tale of Two Cities" in high school.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

The Great Stash Redistribution Project

Ah, what fun I had! And I took pictures!

The Aran box got to my work Friday, but, as I wasn't there to get it, I didn't get it till Tuesday. I hopefully will have it in the mail by this Friday.

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The box!

When I opened it, I was wary. So much has been said recently about the low quality of the contents of the boxes that I was steeling myself for Red Heart and Sugar and Cream Cotton. But LO! Verily, the riches do pour forth!

Yarn. Yarnyarnyarnyarn!

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The cotton: all different kinds. Some beautiful colors, some baby stuff. Enough yarn to make garments in at least 3 different kinds of yarn. I've never knit with cotton, but I'm a bit afraid of it after all I've read about hurting wrists and such. So I fondled it and put it away.

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The wool: not too much wool, but the two skeins of Lopi were interesting. Lopi is one of those yarns I can use without blinking for my Reenactment stuff. But I've got enough wool. I put it aside.

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The Fancy: WOO! All sorts of stuff. Flora in two colors (blaze and passion flower?) and Eros in 1024, and ribbon and all sorts of stuff I've never heard of but the colors! The textures! The... sparkle! Some of it was pure scarf-yarn stuff, but... Fun to look at. Enough in the soft synthetic bocule to make at least 2 tops, one in a bright purple and the other in a color that reminds me, I kid you not, of those Circus Peanut candies. Yuch! A bit of eyelash, in black and white, and other bibs and bobs.

I snagged the Eros.

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Other: this is the small section of silk, angora, and Notions that was in the box. A full set of some kind of dark green silk (note says it's enough for a shirt) and a few handspun skeins of silk. And 2 tiny soft pink angora skeins that I would so take if I could think of a use for baby pink angora yarn... Not enough for a hat or scarf, but I don't think I could make booties that would do it justice. So le sigh, back in the box it goes. A few wooden needles, a peg counter, and some beautiful stitch markers.

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And a bonus: I didn't know there was going to be books in the box! Click on the picture to see it up close. Debbie Bliss "How to knit", a book called Simply Beautiful Sweaters, and patterns, patterns, patterns. A bunch of crochet stuff, and a sock pattern, and a fiber trends hat pattern.

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Well, with all of that, I still have to choose...

I'm snagging the Lorna's Laces sock yarn in the Rainbow colorway, the Eros 1024, and the peg stitch counter. And I'm putting into the box 8 skeins of Lambs Pride. I hope that balances out...

Hmmm.

I found a picture of the big eyes. Awww.

And that was the same look I had when I saw that the ARAN box had arrived from the GSRP. YEY! I'll go through it tonight, and maybe have pictures tomorrow. Um... don't hold your breath though. I'm bad about promising a picture that doesn't come.

In other news, I'm about 19 rows into the body of Sophie. I've had almost no time to knit at all recently, but a row here and there has been fun. Plus the head-sized ball of yarn in my bag makes me look like Igor, and that's fun too.

Sophie's being knit in a god-awful yellow color. If I was being kind, I'd call it "beeswax" color, as that's what it looks like to me. But I'm not being kind (ask my ex-roommate) and I think it's more goose-turd or jaundiced-mongoose yellow. I like it anyway.