• Rogue Quandary

    I was just finishing off the back shoulders of Rogue tonight when I came to the short-rows. Now I’ve done short-rows before on socks, so I started “wrapping and turning” without hesitation. Then I came to a row instructing me to knit across all stitches, “picking up and hiding wraps.” Huh? That’s puzzling. I’ve never seen the expression “hiding wraps” before. I’ve had patterns tell me to pick them up and knit them together with the wrapped stitch, but I wasn’t sure if that’s what the designer was indicating here. So I went searching. Thank goodness that Google indexes PDFs! This page from Interweave’s Knitting Glossary explains it well. In fact, I also learned that my “wrapping and turning” was completely wrong! I’ve been taking the wool to the opposite side, slipping, putting the wool back, and then slipping the stitch back – but I should’ve been slipping, taking the wool to the opposite side, slipping, and then wrapping. I wonder what sort of a difference this is going to make to my short-row heeled socks in the future. Anyway, the back is officially done. I still think this thing looks small. I’ve stretched it around myself and it’s going to be a snug fit! As if I needed more weightloss inspiration.


  • An Interview with John C. McGinley

    An Interview with John C. McGinley. You may know him as one of the Bobs from Office Space, or as the one-and-only original sarcastic bastard doctor Perry Cox on Scrubs. (There, I said it. Suck it, House!)


  • I Was an Ice Cream Man

    “I Was an Ice Cream Man.” That always used to be my brother’s dream in elementary school. (Part Two is here.)


  • Mango the Shark

    Wow, a bright yellow shark! That’s not somethin’ you see every day.


  • I am a slave to marketing.

    After two days of being home sick, I got it into my head that the only thing that would cheer me up was a beautiful, soft new Bonds hoodie. It’s those damn commercials! After a quick trip to Kmart, I’m sitting here in fluffy pink comfort. Ahhhh… (And if anybody else is wondering, that awesome “Little Red Riding Hood” song is by Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs.)


  • Brokenman.net

    The Sydney Morning Herald has finally tracked down the guy responsible for all those annoying “brokenman.net” chalkings around Sydney. I’m deliberately not linking to his site and I’ve made a personal pledge to never visit it myself. He’s chalked Newtown several times and I used to think it was just a cryptic (and annoying) marketing campaign. Now I know he’s just a stupid publicity-hungry conspiracy theory wanker. I hope I spot him the next time he’s chalking our neighborhood so I can give him a good kick in the bum.


  • Final Oscar Contest Results

    I didn’t bother working out the placings, because really there were only eight of them (from seven correct down to zero). Here’s a list of everyone who played and how many they got right. See you all next year!

    (more…)


  • Rugby

    The Snook and I went to a rugby match last night to see the Queensland Reds annihilate our New South Wales Waratahs. Quite frankly, I had no idea what was going on on the field for most of the match. I’m an intelligent person (I even understand cricket!), but I just had no clue. There’d be a whistle and everyone would groan, and I’d look at the scoreboard to see that someone had been charged with “intentionally collapsing the scrum” or “joining tackle in front last feet”, and I’d just have no frickin’ clue. Now I know how the Snook felt when I took him to a Notre Dame game.


  • Craftiness + Hoochiness = Knitted Bikini

    Knitted BikiniCheck out what I made! I felt like I’d been making scarves for years, so as a change of pace I decided to knit a bikini using Get Crafty’s fabulous instructions. It’s knitted with cotton, not wool, and as I used a double thickness throughout it’s pretty dense (and therefore ensures no nipple visibility). Unfortunately this design is just not the right swimsuit for my body shape. The trunks, which just barely manage to go over my thighs, are pretty cute, but they’re so low that I have major plumber butt (even though I followed the instructions for “more coverage”). And the top… Well, I think the main problem is that string bikinis aren’t made for girls with larger boobs. I’m a C cup, and the whole triangle thing just doesn’t work. Even if I made them bigger, they still don’t fit the shape of the breast very well. (I really need to figure out how to knit one with an underwire.) So needless to say, I shan’t be sporting this puppy at the beach anytime soon. It was a fun experiment though.Some notes if you’re interested in trying it yourself:

    As I can’t get the kind of cotton recommended in the pattern here, I just went with normal DK weight cotton. Unfortunately I knitted a test swatch and my gauge was way higher than it needed to be. I was afraid to move up a needle size though, for fear that the weave would be too open (and I wanted to keep the nips covered). So I played around a bit and discovered that if I doubled up the cotton and went to a 5mm needle, I got the correct gauge and the fabric was nicely dense. Unfortunately that meant I needed twice as much cotton. Luckily I’d bought 4 50gm balls, and I used up just about all of it.

    Another problem: I knitted the two boob triangles on different days and my knitting tension changed significantly, which means they’re slightly different size. I’d suggest that you knit them both at the same time to avoid this.

    The biggest problem I had was the bit at the end of the pattern where it tells you to “single crochet” around the trunk elastic and the bikini chain. I posted a request for help on Glitter and was directed to this page of instructions. That’s for making a hair band, but I figured out fairly quickly to adapt it to what I needed to do. I did the bikini chain easily, but I decided not to finish the trunks since they don’t fit well enough to ever wear.



ABOUT

My name is Kris. I’ve been blogging since the 90’s. I live in Sydney, Australia, and I spent most of my career in the tech industry.

No AI used in writing this blog, ever. 100% human-generated.


search


CURRENTLY LISTENING


CURRENTLY READING


LATEST COMMENTS

  1. My home economics teacher taught us to use “J cloths” as press cloths. (Cellulose cleaning cloths). The upside of using…


BLOG ROLL


STAY CONNECTED


Special thanks to Matt Hinrichs for the site logo!