Slumberland

Not a lot of posts lately — sorry. I’m kind of overwhelmed with stuff lately. Anyway.

This is art along the new light rail line on MLK Way in SE Seattle. It’s all reflectors. It’s by the same artist who did the reflector art that used to be on the side of the Henry Art Gallery. I loved that installation and I love this one too. It lights up so nicely as you drive by.

I was just driving down MLK tonight and happened to have a camera with me, so I pulled over, and propped the camera up on the dashboard, and took the picture with a 10 second delay, so that any wobble would hopefully die down before the shutter opened. It worked well enough to get these pics. Not ideal (I couldn’t really position the camera at the angle I wanted), but better than nothing.

The light here is what was reflected from my headlights (I was parked at an angle, not really pointing at the reflectors) and perhaps a little bit from the nearby streetlights, but it doesn’t take much to get the reflectors to glow.

Someday I’ll get out there with a tripod and try some more interesting shots, maybe with some light painting as well.

This beaded lace scarf pattern is knitted with light fingering weight yarn and 6/0 seed beads. The lace pattern is relatively simple, and this scarf can be knit very quickly. The entire scarf is knitted in one direction; no grafting necessary!

The pattern contains both stitch-by-stitch written instructions and charts, so you can use whichever type of instruction you prefer.

(Etsy and craft-fair sellers: This pattern may be used to knit up to 20 scarves for sale. If you wish to sell more than 20 of them, please contact me for licensing terms.)

Materials needed:

200-240 yards of light fingering weight yarn. The yarn called for is Brooklyn Handspun Signature superwash merino. I used roughly half a skein.

US6/4.0mm needles.

25g of 6/0 glass seed beads.

Gauge:
Not vital for this project; I suggest starting to knit the first part, then doing a partial blocking. If you like the look and drape of the lace, go ahead with it.

Skills:
Intermediate knitting; this is a relatively easy lace, and the lace stitches are only on one side of the fabric.

You can purchase this pattern for $5.50 via this link:

Here are some more pictures (click to see a larger version at Flickr):

Since I posted the latest medieval pouch project on Ravelry, I’ve been getting a bunch of message requests from people who would like the charts. So I’ve made them available. You can download them here.

It’s done!

The Melusine scarf is done! Here it is. I would like to get some better pics when I get a chance.

The pattern is coming soon! If you like this and want to knit it, keep your eye right here; I’ll be posting about it when the pattern is done.

Tech specs:

• Brooklyn Handspun Signature fingering yarn, about half a skein (240 yards)
• US 6 needles
• 24 grams size 6/0 seed beads (I didn’t need all of them), and three larger beads for the tassels

Scarf was 54″ long pre-blocking, and it is 72″ long x 5.5″ wide now.

I am very happy with the way it turned out!

Here’s my second medieval pouch. This took a while because I haven’t been working on it very often. I got the majority of it done while I was at the Legislative District caucuses a few weeks ago (for 14 hours… don’t get me started on that. I didn’t knit the whole time I was there or I might have actually finished it all that day!).

Technical specs:
Green and grey yarn: Cascade 220 Heathers
Blue yarn: Vintage 1970s Brunswick Germantown from Goodwill
Needles: US 6, 16″ circular
Cord and tassels: DMC perle cotton. Cords are twisted plied cord because I haven’t yet gotten around to learning fingerloop braiding.

Chart: Refined version of my own earlier chart, based on motifs from period knitting in Rutt’s History of Hand Knitting, and also inspired by charts created by Dame Christian de Holacombe, found here. I used Excel to draw out the chart.

I encourage anyone interested in a project like this to try it. It is very easy. It looks much harder to knit one of these than it really is.

Now, no more pouches for a while, I hope.

Photo by Audin, Creative Commons.

Jason, in his new vehicle. He looks way too happy.

It’s a Comuta-Car (here’s another one), an electric car from 1979 or so. He and Audin both bought Comuta-Cars today. They aren’t running at the moment.

It’s spring and time for some lightness and green. So I switched to one of our alternate stylesheets for the blog, at least, for the moment. Maybe I’ll make a new one later. Or not.

Recently I had an opportunity to design a knitting pattern using Brooklyn Handspun sock yarn. I had been kicking around the idea of designing a beaded lace scarf for a while, and was planning to use some pink Spritely Goods yarn in my stash. But creating the pattern for Brooklyn Handspun sounded like fun. I’ll do something else with the Spritely Goods.

During my projects lately, I generally put periodic updates on my Ravelry page for the project so as not to clutter up the blog, but I thought it would be interesting to post about the process of designing this pattern.

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Well, it would have been nice if I’d finished this on Pi Day, because it’s from a pattern called “Kitty Pi,” but at least I finished it in March. This is a bed for our cats.

Technical details:

It’s felted, and knitted from Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Bulky, with size US11 needles. I used two skeins of Ruby Red and one of Orange You Glad, and have a little bit left of each color. I also used some Target Fuzzy Fur around the edge, but guess what? It doesn’t even show in the final felted item. So it was useless. Oh well.

Do the kitties like it? Well, I haven’t caught one sleeping in it yet, but Sherman will at least cuddle up to it:

The possible names for the new Seattle MLS team have been announced, and oh my God, do they ever suck.

I hate singular-noun team names anyway, but “Seattle Alliance” and “Seattle Republic” are stupid even for that genre. “Seattle FC” is boring, but is the best of a craptastic bunch.

Sounders. Sheesh. Would it be that difficult to show a little respect for tradition around here?

John Wayne Gives A Driving Tour of Seattle is an awesome clip from the early 70s movie McQ, in which Wayne starts at the Amazon Headquarters on Beacon Hill (which was PacMed back then), drives around Chinatown and SoDo, then up to South Lake Union.

The interesting thing about it is that the path he takes is relatively logical. In a lot of movie car chases you see random things filmed here and there, and once edited together to make a single sequence, they aren’t actually following any path a real person could follow. This one is sort of real. There are a couple of things here and there that wouldn’t work, but basically he does drive Beacon Hill –> Chinatown –> SoDo –> Chinatown –> I-5 north to the Mercer exit (backed up with some traffic, as usual) –> South Lake Union. He takes the real freeway exits that one would have taken at the time (one no longer exists, on Dearborn), but occasionally drives on the wrong side of the street. And somehow managed to get a car wash (perhaps at Elephant, on 4th Ave. S.) in the middle of the car chase.

It is interesting to see what I-5 looked like before the Convention Center and Freeway Park lids.

Photo by Chris Breeze.
(Creative Commons)

It’s that day again; yes, the day when all Irish pubs are jam-packed full of people and you can’t hear yourself think.

On St. Pat’s, I recommend going to a Mexican place. It will be dead quiet.

Cinco de Mayo — now that’s the day to visit the Irish pubs.

If you decide to stay in, how about a couple of Irish recipes from the always great gumbopages.com website? Stew with Lamb and Guinness and Scallion Champ oughta do the trick.

Photo by steve.wilde.
(Creative Commons)

While looking for an image for someone tonight, I stumbled on one of the most beautiful photosets I’ve ever seen on Flickr: Gordon Plumb’s Stained Glass. 183 beautiful photos of stained glass, including some lovely photos of William Morris-designed windows.

After viewing Plumb’s set I wanted to look at some more glass, and found the English Stained Glass — Pre Victorian pool. More great photos. Something I found interesting in this one was the large amount of windows that are made up of fragments of older windows, put together in a sort of collage. It makes me quite sad that so many windows were destroyed, though the new versions are nice, too.

And finally, there is the general Stained Glass pool, with more than 11,000 pictures to enjoy.

Becca used my Detlef-13 felted laptop sleeve pattern to make a laptop sleeve with Zelda hearts. Very cool idea. I love how the last heart is half-empty; I guess that had to be done, otherwise they’d just look like normal hearts. Lots of old game graphics lend themselves quite well to the pixelly quality of multicolor knitting. Perhaps I’ll create some game-related charts that I can include with the Detlef-13 pattern.