Ohai, Blog :)

Put on your MovieDude voice! In a world filled with distractions, her blog went un-updated for nearly four months....

What have I done? Where did the time go?

As shown in image one, I saw a buncha sheep. Kate, Catherine and I drove up to Rhinebeck for the New York Sheep and Wool festival. It was a blast! Kate worked both days in Miss Babs' booth, while Catherine and I prowled around separately, fondling yarn and ogling sheep, goats, and alpacas. I ate fabled artichokes, and brought back some maple sugar cotton candy for Veronica (and it was pretty tasty; she shared it at knitting night before becoming slightly ill from having so much... hehehe).

Also in the past three months, the sock pattern I designed for Kate's yarn club went out. It's called Kaguya-hime, and was part of her World Folktales Yarn Club shipment for September. I also wrote the re-telling of the story, and made some little Japanese paper bookmarks to go with the pattern. The pattern will be available for non-Club members in December! Yay!

What I liked about this sock pattern is that it was easy to memorize and customize. I also used a band heel for it, which worked out really well as it's a simple style that's perfect for two-at-a-time Magic Loop socks. At first, I used info on it that I found on the internet, but after doing one pair of socks following the dimensions on those other instructions, I realized that I didn't particularly like how the heel turned out (even though those socks turned out well), so I changed it up to the version in with my pattern.

I also designed another sock pattern as part of Ravelry's Sock Knitters Anonymous June challenge, but haven't written up the pattern for that as yet. My August socks were knit in a cool cotton blend yarn that Donna gave me for my birthday, so I need to do another pair in actual wool to see how well it works. It's an all-over lace pattern derived from the same Japanese stitch pattern book from which I got the Kaguya-hime stitch. Opera Socks (the cotton socks) will be written up and released later as well. Squee!

And, also for Kate, I designed a shawl for a kit she wants to put together for her Etsy shop. It's called Molly's P'shawl, and the first test knit of it came out rather nicely. I made a half-sized version and gave it to Kate's daughter Lili. Super cute, if I do say so myself, and easy to knit, with a gorgeous lace edging. I'll knit a full-sized one later on, but the first p'shawlette, less than 50 grams, took no more than a couple of days to work up. It would have been done more quickly had I actually spent more time knitting.

For lo! The true reason this blog has languished isn't because of knitting and designing patterns, but the fault of Mass Effect, both 1 and 2. O.o I've done three playthroughs as FemShep, and now have MaleShep nearing the end of ME2, after importing him from ME1.

Dude. I've spent hours at this game (well, both), and I love it! And also, I am tickled to death to learn that Chris (my c-worker) wrote Ashley Williams and Thane Krios, as well as all the planet descriptions for the first two games.

I found out the latter fact when I mentioned how writing nearly 400 Operatives descriptions for The Agency, plus corporate backgrounds (which included bios of all their important people) gave me a case of hating biographies, and that I felt sorry for the person who wrote those planet descriptions. Hehehe!