Oh, my friends, rejoice with me.

Hiawatha is done.



(The photos aren't the greatest but I grabbed them quickly this afternoon - I have to leave in about 1/2 hour for a baby shower).

Here's a Cheryl-Oberle-style shot from the back



And three shots showing detail:







I'm always surprised at how much lace CHANGES when you block it - this kind of crumpled up thing opens up, relaxes, even the texture of the yarn changes.

It's kind of like, when you come home at the end of the day, and you're all tense and stuff, you're all knotted up, and you take some time to do yoga, including the recommended 10 to 15 minutes in "Savasana" at the very end, and when you get up, you're like a different person, because the yoga relaxed you so much.

It's kind of like that.

I'm not wearing the shawl tonight - it's rather warm out and we are also having lasagne (I've never been to a baby shower that was a FULL MEAL before). So I don't want to risk getting tomato sauce on it (and then having to re-wash and re-block it. Believe me, I want to go though blocking this thing as few times as I can manage).

Guess who's blocking?






Hiawatha!


Yes, I finished it last night. I wet it down and pinned it out across my bed (Diagonally, and I had to make an "outrigger" from two pillows - this is a very long shawl. I didn't feel up to building the lath frame they suggest using to block it, and I didn't want to go buy a couple of styrofoam pieces and then have to store them.)

I left a fan blowing on it because it is on MY bed (I didn't feel like unloading the guest bed; I have some books stacked on there) and it needs to be dry by bedtime tonight. It's been deucedly humid here which is good for the plants (and the fungi; I have all kinds of crazy mushrooms coming up in my lawn) but it makes it hard to dry anything.

I still can't quite believe it's done. Longtime readers might remember that I started this in September, 2004 - so that makes it just under 2 years 8 months. This is the most complex thing I've ever knit, and in some ways the most difficult.

It does feel not unlike having a thesis or dissertation done and defended, or a major journal article published - it's like, "What....I don't have to work on this any more?"

****

Oh, and dragonknitter: in 2009 analog broadcasting is going to go away and be replaced with entirely digital broadcasting. I think the reason is, some of the frequencies used by analog can then be re-assigned to emergency service providers. Older sets will no longer work UNLESS you buy a converter box (so you will still be able to use your older sets, just with an add-on). In fact, if you have DirectTV, you may already be able to get the conversion right from the satellite.

I do want to get a new television, though. The one I have now has a 13" screen and when I watch movies that are letterboxed, I wind up either having to squint from across the room or move a chair right in front of the tv.

Some project updates:

I am on the LAST bit of the side section (the long panel with the "Flowers of the Forest") on the Hiawatha shawl. I estimate there's about 25" to go. And I'm a lot faster at the edging now that I have it memorized and don't have to even really keep track of what row I'm on.

I might finish this this week. Wow. I've been working on this since fall of 2004.

The feeling is not unlike the feeling I had as the defense of my dissertation approached (well, without the nagging fear of, "What if someone asks you a question that totally destroys your conclusions?").

It's making me excited to begin new projects.

I pulled out the Rowan "Summer Tweed" that I had in my stash (it's sort of an odd pale turquoise color; in the typical Rowan idiosyncratic naming system it's called "Exotic"). I've decided to start Cozy (no, I'm not abandoning the plan of starting the Landscape Shawl but Cozy is an easy pattern - no shaping, no increases or picots to keep track of - and I need something for proctoring-knitting). I'm going to start it this weekend and take it with me this week while I proctor. I think I'm going to write the lace pattern out on a 3x5 card because in one of the rooms, I really have to circulate (there's a ledge on the front of the desks and I wouldn't be able to detect cheating from just the front of the room). And I can just tuck the "cake" of yarn up under my arm and walk around the room, using the card as a reference for the pattern.

I had originally bought the yarn for a shrug but I think a shawl will be more useful to me. And more flattering on me (broad shoulders, large bosom - shrugs don't work so well). And it won't look dated once shrugs go out of fashion. (Shawls always look a little "dated" but that's okay with me; I don't mind looking anachronistic but I prefer my anachronisms to refer to an earlier time period than last year).

I also dug around and pulled out many balls of wool-ease (and a few of Canadiana) bought for projects I have since forgotten (scarves, hats, or socks, I presume, considering I have but one or two balls of each color).

I've started the crochet blanket. Darn, it's FUN! It's all just double crochets but there's no counting (once you're done with the initial chain), no shaping, you change colors every row...it's kind of like what people say about eating potato chips.* This will be a wonderful project for when I have five minutes (while waiting for tea to steep or something) or if I'm really tired or if I wake up in the middle of the night and cannot get back to sleep.

Sadly, it is not a very portable project, with all those colors of yarn (unless I planned the colors needed for the next several rows and just took partial balls of those...)

(*Except I never liked potato chips well enough to keep eating them. I eat three or four - like if they're served alongside a sandwich - and then I'm like, "okay, I'm done.")

I also found some yarn that I'm going to use for the furry monster pattern I linked the other day. I had a ball of Garnstudio Pelliza in a deep blue-green color that came in a grab bag years ago and which I had never done anything with (once upon I time I had thought of making a "kid hat" with it as the brim, but that never materialized). Well, I also found a skein of Muskoka (yes, I have lots of old stuff in the stash) in Exactly. The. Same. Color. So that tells me they need to become the monster. (The pattern calls for knitting a strand of furry yarn together with a strand of plain, worsted-weight yarn)

Not sure what color I'm going to make its "knobbles" yet. Maybe a cream color - I think that would look kind of natty with the deep teal. (I'm also not sure if the monster's going to be a boy monster or a girl monster yet. And yes, you will be able to tell...girls have long eyelashes. [that was my childhood, innocent way of saying how girls were different from boys]).

I love my stash. I love that I can get an idea for a project, dig in, and find pretty much what I need (as long as it's basic worsted-weight). It makes having NO local yarn shops a little easier.

While I wouldn't normally celebrate a television-programming thing called "Manday" (Man-Day, I guess it's intended to be a block of "manly" programs), because I generally think anything that is stereotypically targeted at a certain group is kind of stupid (see: Lifetime Movie of the Week), I can get into the fact that they re-ran the Mythbusters "Ninja Special," which I missed first time around.

So now they've done pirates and ninjas. They need to complete the trifecta with either robots or aliens. (Yes, I know, they did sharks, but that doesn't quite count).

I did get some more knitting done on Hiawatha; I'm nearly up to the middle of the LAST edge (which is one of the long edges).



It looks extremely yellow here - it's actually a just-barely-off white - but I took the photo without flash (flash totally washed out all of the stitch patterning) and used "extreme night" program on the camera.

I also decided on a winner in the "What Shawl Will I Knit Next?" contest:



Found the Landscape Shawl pattern. (One of my summer projects should be to reorganize my book/magazine/pattern shelves. And to get a big, big box of sheet protectors and put all the patterns I've printed off the 'net into sheet protectors).

And finally - a finished object. I did this this weekend, in between working on the shawl:



It's the Dodo from the most recent "Crochet Me" magazine! I used a few odds and ends - the leftover Bernat boucle from the dog I crocheted a while back, some bits of black and orange Paton's wool. It only takes tiny amounts - I used scraps and probably have enough to do a second bird. (Which I may do; there's someone I kind of "owe" and she likes things like this).

Here's a shot of the dodo sitting in my hand, to give an idea of scale:

I've not formally named the dodo yet. Tentative name - which I'm not quite sure fits - is Adrian, in honor of the fact that I worked most of it up while watching one of the episodes from the Monk Season 1 dvd.

As cute as I think the anthropomorphic "traditional*" amigurumi are, I really do prefer critters that make an effort to be somewhat realistic. I like the shape of this toy; there's a little "bump" on the front of the chest that is very like a real dodo.

(I also think with some pattern mods - especially to the beak - you could make a reasonable turkey. Or, using the beak-and-head but making the neck and legs longer, make a flamingo.)

(*as much as you can call something "traditional" that's been around for maybe 10 years)

Well, I don't know if anyone will be able to see this...

several people e-mailed me saying they were just getting the "sidebars," no blog. Ugh. I'm guessing it's a Blogger glitch - maybe a shortlived one, I hope, because I can see the blog this morning and when I reloaded it was still there. So I don't know.

Charlotte, Nancy, Karin - drop me an e-mail if you can see this, please.

I don't know if the problem is related to the removal of the "word cloud" that I did - to speed loading - or not.

If it is a continuing problem, maybe I need to bite the bullet and do the "template upgrade," which means copying and migrating all my links and such. (Ugh.)

****

It was a pretty good evening (and thank you for the birthday wishes.

I decided that since it was Longfellow's birthday, it was an auspicious evening to work on the Song of Hiawatha stole:



The red stitch marker (the leftmost one) is where I started knitting last night. I think I'm going to do that more - put in a stitch marker where I started - so I can actually see that, yes, I am getting something done on the bigger projects.

Well, I had an hour-and-a-half yesterday to knit.

So I decided to see how far I could get.

I put one of those split-ring markers over the stitch where I started.

But then - my fool phone would NOT SHUT UP. I swan, sometimes it is as if people KNOW that I am sitting down and relaxing and they decide to call me.

(And here's a little On Notice: charities that call you up with designed-to-induce-guilt, "Why haven't you sent an annual donation yet! It's almost March already!" call. My standard reply: Anyone who acts like a needy boyfriend ("why don't you spend time with meeeeeeeee?") gets bumped to the bottom of the pile.

I did tell the woman: I have your envelope on my desk. I have put in two fourteen hour workdays this week and I am essentially having to put another one in today. I am not neglectful, merely so busy my head is about to explode. But yeah, they're at the bottom of the pile now, thanks to the "you forgot about usssssss!" call. No, I didn't.)

But anyway. So here's what I managed to finish in the hour and ten minutes or hour and fifteen minutes I actually got:



I'm studiously NOT comparing it to how much remains to be done.

No Wendyknits am I. In many ways.


At least my 14 hour days are DONE (for this week at least). I have decided to treat myself to not one, but two pre-birthday trips: this afternoon, I need to go and pick up the finished Zipper quilt. Considering that I'm alllllmmmoooost out of a couple of the Clinique items I use, and the nearest store that sells Clinique is in the same town as the quilt shop, that works out well. And I'm going to do my "big" grocery shopping this afternoon.

That will leave tomorrow totally free for the trip to McKinney (that is, provided the severe thunderstorms that were predicted earlier this week do not materialize. You hear that, powers that be? Girl coming off of 3, 14-hour workdays. Facing a birthday next week that is 2 years shy of the age at which All Women Turn Invisible (or if you listen to the advertising and fashion media, they do). A birthday that is likely to pass largely unmarked.

I will also note that part of those 14 hour days involved some fairly grueling volunteer work.

So - not to get all entitledy here, Powers that Be, but I'd really REALLY appreciate it if you could hold off with the hail and the high winds and the massive downpours for this once. Because as much as I ever feel I am OWED anything, I think I am OWED a nice day tomorrow.)

I worked a bit more on the Hiawatha shawl last night - I have now turned the third corner (which will be the last "real" turn - the fourth corner is grafted to the start).

I'm back interested in working on it again. As I said, the long sides are a bit easier (less tight; I should not have bound off so tightly on that second short side!) to knit the edging on to.

And I noticed something as I worked on it - and this is something odd about me. I had a feeling of relief, of "I'm finally getting this done!" I don't know why I impose "deadlines" on myself and poke at myself ("Hey, you've been working on this since September 2004! You should be done now!") but I do. And so, when I work on any long-term project, I feel a certain relief - it's like clearing something out.

So I think I'm going to make a concerted effort to finish this, and finish Bloom, and finish the Samus cardigan (which still exists only as the bottom band which is not-quite-knit).

I have a big rubbermaid tub that I was tossing half-finished projects into (long story but: I was having to have workmen over, it might have been at a time when I would have had to ask a friend to come and watch my house, I didn't want her to see the depths of my craziness, having eight different knitting projects going). The problem is, when I bung something into a container, I am very good at forgetting about it. And so, I kind of forgot Bloom and Samus and even Hiawatha. Until the most recent house-clean, when I started digging through the tub.

(And I also found the Regia Bamboo sockyarn I bought last fall, and some of the Berroco Keltic I bought for gloves. And I found the "Spring in Door County" socks, which I should rip back and restart at a slightly bigger gauge).

I don't know why I'm good at forgetting things like that but I am. It's one reason why I do not like to accept late work from students - and I try to articulate this to them - I will put the work in a pile because I can usually get to a whole mess of labs at once and grade them, but just one, I have to find time for, and sometimes that time isn't immediately forthcoming - and the old "out of sight, out of mind" comes into play. If it's really critical, I will write myself a list of things I need to do, but it's really easy for me to put projects or tasks out of my mind if I'm focusing on one.

And that can be a problem sometimes. I've missed meetings because I was deep in research and forgot I had to go to the meeting. Usually people are very nice about it and all, but it gets to me when I realize I've forgot something.

*****

Last night was a late night. It was the first week of the Conversational German class I signed up for here on campus (7-9 pm Mondays for six weeks. Not sure how much I'll learn in six weeks but at least it will be a start).

I knew I was in the right place when I walked into the building and heard German drinking songs playing loudly on a CD player. Hahahahaha. Our teacher is American of German descent but she is married to a German and lived in Bavaria for a dozen or so years, working with the Army and Air Force, teaching the new arrivals to speak basic German.

She is teaching a little German culture and customs along with the language. I know a little bit about Fastnacht now, and why you don't want to buy a car built the few days after Fastnacht (because, she says, a lot of the workers are hungover). And I know that supposedly it's bad form to cross arms when you're going to shake someone's hand.

I know a little bit already:

Ich heisse Frau Corbett (and the instructor tells us that professional women, married or not, now refer to themselves as "Frau" - kind of like Ms. I wanted to ask her the correct order for Doktor in there - I vaguely remember my mom telling me it meant different things if Doktor was before Frau and if it was after - that in one case it was the Frau herself who was the Doktor, and in the other case it was her husband...but I didn't want to slow the class down or look like I was going "Look at me! I'm Doktor!")

(Karin, if any of this is wrong, please correct me. I'm just going by what Frau T. says).

I know a few names of places:

das Rathaus (the city-hall)
das Denkmal (the monument)
die Schloss (the palace)
das Postamt (post-office)

I know already the feminine-masculine-neuter thing is going to screw me up. I'm not even sure I have the gender on those things correct. (I may start subbing French genders. I suspect I will. In French, "house" (maison) is feminine; in German, it is neuter.

I realize this is a very Anglophone-centric thing but I'm not sure I get the rhyme or reason of gendering inanimate things. Especially since it seems to differ between different languages. I am sure there is a linguistic reason that makes sense given the history of the language, but when it's 8:30 pm and I'm trying to wrap my mind around the concept of "Wo ist die/das/der..." I'm not so inclined to be excited by the fact that there are different genders for things.

Oh. I do know one thing that would be important to me if I ever went to Germany:

Wo ist das Kaufhaus?.

(hahahaha. "Where's the department store?" Well, at least in the absence of having the words for Yarn Shop or Bookstore, that would probably be a pretty important thing to me. She also taught us the finger-system for ordering beers - that you hold up your thumb if you want "eine Biere." )

You know? Even though it makes for a late night on Mondays, it feels REALLY GOOD to be using my brain in a different way than I normally am using it and trying to learn something new and different. I can feel my brain stretching and new neurons connecting to each other, and that's a good thing.

Even though this is just a basic 6-week course, aimed at getting us to the point where we could kinda-sorta navigate if we went to Germany without a translator, I think I might invest in a cd or dvd based REAL course in German; one where I learn some of the grammar and syntax rather than just common phrases. I think it would be good for my brain. (I like the idea of a CD based one; I could listen to it and learn while I work out.)

I think German, while less practical given where I live than Latin American Spanish would be, will be more fun. It's different enough from French that I'm going to have to think kind of hard about it.

Jennifer: your letter is A.

*****

I think I once said before that one reason I liked knitting (and quilting, and other craft things like that) was that you could work on a project for a while, put it aside, and (as long as you kept decent notes on where you were in it), you could come back to it:



"If it takes forever I will wait for you
For a thousand summers I will wait for you..."

I started thinking about the Hiawatha shawl last night - I put it aside when the edging got so tedious that I couldn't imagine finishing it. But last night I felt like working on it again.

I almost finished the second short side edging (there is just one long side left after this). I think I'm going to try to work on this - at least a little - until I get it done. (The long-side edging, because of how it's knit on, is less tedious to do than the short-side edgings).

The shawl looks very yellow in that photo; it's the fluorescent bulbs again. Perhaps eventually a digital camera maker will make a camera that's able to correct for that.

(I'm thinking about getting another - smaller - digital camera. Preferably one with a good macro lens, so I could take it out in the field and photograph flowers and stuff without them going all blurry. I like the Mavica but (a) it's huuuuuuge and (b) it's not great at super-close-up.)