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I've been doing a lot of pattern-writing lately, because it doesn't feel quite right to me to be knitting from another person's pattern. It doesn't quite feel like my own work. Beyond this though, it's just so exciting to me to create my own patterns, solve the problems I encounter, and end up with something unique.

That being said, sometimes I run across a pattern that I just sort of fall in love with, and last week I decided to knit one of them.

CRAZY KIWI!!!!!!!!

I found this pattern a few months ago on Ravelry and saved it in my favorites. After finishing the Gravitational Lensing Mittens, I decided to take a break and knit something quick and, more importantly, cute!

Knitting the kiwi-bird was really fun! It was simple, though I did do some learning about short rows for the neck, and on size six needles it went quite quickly. In two days a tweedy kiwi had popped right out of my hands! Obviously, I named him Tweedwi.

In truth, two days was just too fast for me. I decided to knit a friend for Tweedwi. I used some old wool from my Ireland sweater as well as some of the last of the first wool yarn I ever bought years ago. I rounded off the beak and feet with the birthday cotton I got at my birthday party last fall. I wanted to stripe him every-other round with cream Donegal tweed and the light brown first-wool-yarn. But the cream yarn was a very small ball - I probably wouldn't have had enough to knit a whole kiwi.

So I made things more difficult for myself and charted out a color-transition into the dark brown Donegal tweed to round him out. I must confess, Tweedwi's Friend is a little bit cuter than Tweedwi himself...

They're both very sweet. : )

love, Jimmy

Blocking Day

So ever since I've started knitting for serious, I've been hearing talk about this blocking thing. Patterns say, "Block the sleeves to the same size before assembling," or this witty knitting-tips book I saw somewhere says, "Don't believe what they say - it won't come out in the blocking," or the Stitch n' Bitchers say, "I'm sure this shawl will open up after it's blocked."

Yeah, whatever. If I want my sleeves the same size, then I'll knit them that way, and if I want my shawl more open, if I ever made a shawl, well I would sure as hell just use some bigger needles.


The theory of blocking has to do with fiber-memory. Natural fibers like wool or cotton, when they get wet, learn the shape they are placed into and remember it when they dry. The idea of blocking is, then, to wet your knitting down, to shape, stretch, and scrunch it perfectly, and then to let it dry.

"Oh please," I have often silently scoffed, "- that will never work!" Knitted fabric is like a liquid - it drapes over whatever form you place it on, but it doesn't inherently have a shape itself. Fiber-memory can't actually be that strong.

Even if it was, the implication is also that blocking is temporary: what if I spent ages perfectly blocking my sweater, and the next day my sweater got rained on, I'd have to block it all over again or it would dry and remember the shape of rain.



Now a couple of months ago, I completed knitting my Ireland sweater, which was my final project on the Ireland study-abroad program this summer. I'd been working on this sweater since August, and finishing it was a huge accomplishment for me. Trouble was, when I put it on, the shoulders puffed up like the 60's, and I just looked like a goofis!

I didn't want to admit that my sweater made me look like a goofis, so I compensated by conspicuously never wearing it, and I told people that all the joy had come in the knitting process - wearing it was not important. Not a complete lie, but yeah kinda.

I grudgingly took my sweater to the Stitch n' Bitch at Panera a week or two after I'd finished knitting it, terrified that they would make me try it on for them. I would self-consciously put on the sweater, looking at my toes, and the ladies would avert their eyes too, not wanted to say the truth, that the shoulders were horribly awkward. Anyway, they didn't make me try it on, but I explained the problem to them anyway. And the ladies said, "Oh I bet that will come out in the blocking!"

WHAT?! No.

But I wondered of course, what if they're right? Maybe I should actually try blocking it and just see what happens?

Anyway, I put off actually blocking the thing for about two months. I'd told my mom that I was going to do it though, and she kept asking me whether I'd done it yet. When she asked I would vaguely say I would do it soon, not really wanting to.

What made me finally bite the bullet was my spinning. One of the most essential steps in spinning is to wash the yarn once you have spun and plied it. Otherwise, the yarn will unravel. But by washing and drying (that is, blocking) the spun yarn, the yarn learns to the remember the twist and does not unravel. This had worked for me. Maybe blocking would too.


So Sunday morning I awoke, and it was blocking day!

I'd studied the theory closely with the help of this and this youtube video, and without further ado, I filled up the bathtub. I thought my dad might yell at me for wasting water, but he didn't. I soaked my Ireland sweater, the argyle sweater-vest I knitted several years ago, my newly completed gravitational lensing mittens, my new handspun hat, and the wool sweater I'd gotten on Black Friday that I hadn't really wanted to wear since Leo accidentally threw it in the trash.

While the knitting stewed, I got out some towels, and I fetched Momo's pin cushion.

One by one, I removed the things from the slowly-draining tub. As instructed, I wrapped them in towels and stepped on them to press out the water. Then I lay them out on Laura's bed, shaped them, and pinned them down.


I blew the fan for around 24 hours, and when I got home from work today, things were basically dry. I tried on my sweater. It was... INCREDIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Everything was true, and though the shoulders aren't perfect, they sit about a hundred times better on me. Even if the sweater is still a bit itchy, I will definitely be able to wear it now. My knitting days are transformed.

love, Jimmy


PS - my two mittens? after I blocked them, they are like totally the same size.

In a proper kitchen

Okay so I just posted an entry like 4 minutes ago, but I want to write this next one right away because I'm in the mood. It is all about cooking!

When Justin, Rebekah, and I were living in our Dublin apartment and cooking all of our dinners, one of the most difficult things was working in a very sparsely-furbished kitchen! We had one saucepan, a Teflon-flaking skillet, a spatula, plates, some measuring cups, bowls, knives, spoons, drinking glasses, mugs, and forks. We had a fridge and an oven/stove. I don't think we had very much else.

Anyway, now that I am home, I have at my disposal some very cushy things like a blender, an electric mixer, spoons and spatulas in basically all sizes, a garlic press, and an assortment of pots, pans, and skillets.

So I haven't done quite as much cooking since being home as I'd kind of imagined, but I've been doing some fun stuff! On the table:

I've been making guacamole! I knew I wanted to do this ever since last spring when Julie Klassen my German prof had our class over to her house and she charged me with making the guacamole. It was so easy and super good!!

So Momo picked up some avocados from the store, and I chopped up some cilantro and an onion, and I made some yummy guacamole. It was really simple. You basically just put the ingredients together in the bowl and mash up the avocados. Here's the recipe I used, minus the peppers and tomato!

I'm on my 3rd batch of guacamole, and the biggest problem I've noticed is that after you've made it, the avocado turns brown, kind of like an apple turns brown after you slice it from the oxidation. This doesn't affect the flavor at all, but it does look a little unappetizing. I've tried increasing the lemon juice and getting rid of the oxygen by putting saran rap on the surface when it's stored, but so far I haven't been successful. Oh well!



I've also been making hummus! This has also been super simple (though I've been using a blender, which I've realized takes a little more skill than I used to think, and plus I used a garlic press) - you just mix the chick peas and stuff in the blender and liquidize them. Here's the hummus recipe I used.

The hummus is really soft and has a great texture. It also caused me to buy an ingredient I had never heard of, which is tahini sauce. Tahini sauce is ground-up roasted sesame seeds! Momo and I ate a little by itself, and it's very quick-sandy in texture and strange in taste, but in a good way! Anyway, it came in this giant jar, and I've only made two batches of hummus so far, so I don't know how quick it's going to be used up, but maybe I can find something else to do with it...



Last night, I decided to make a souffle for dinner! I suppose I was spurred on just to see if I could actually do it, since I'm so used to movies where people's souffles fall down and stuff, or there's some huge big deal drama about a souffle.

Anyway, I found this website that walked me through it. Making the souffle was actually pretty simple and really fun! The hard part was that you had to do everything very quickly and mind the temperatures of a few different things at once. But it was really not that hard.

The souffle had a really neat texture, a lot like a puffed-oven-pancake if you've ever had one of those, and it basically tasted like cheese, since it was a cheese souffle. It didn't fall over and collapse like I was expecting, but I think it sort of slowly deflated after it was out of the oven. Next time I'm going to try adding veggies and things!

I'm hoping I'll do some more cooking before I go back for spring term. Do you guys have any ideas of things I should try? What is delicious and fun to cook?

love, Jimmy

Zero t(w)o Mittens!

So it's been more than two weeks since I posted here! Let's change that.

The first weekend in February, I spent Saturday night at Carleton for the Mid-Winter Ball. Of course I was really excited for all of the dancing and seeing of friends, but in one way I was equally excited to head home:

Friday night I'd stayed up until 3AM finishing up spinning, plying, winding, and washing my red 2-ply yarn!

This was the second batch of yarn that I'd spun, and this batch was substantially more difficult. More difficult because I tried to spin the yarn as thinly and evenly as possible! This means I was letting fewer wool fibers into the yarn with each drafting pull. Because they have less friction in between them when there are fewer of them, thin yarn also requires more twist than thick yarn to stay solid.

Spinning thin meant that the yarn was weaker and far likelier to break from the weight of the spindle! If I spun a section too thin or with not enough twist, my spindle would crash to the floor and I would nervously inspect the hook - if it snaps off, I'll be in trouble!

Incorporating fewer fibers into the yarn at a time also meant that I moved through my fiber supply much more slowly than when I was spinning the thick butterscotch slubs! So spinning all of the red wool took me a little over a month. By the time I was done, I was really sick of it!

Once I finally finished spinning the red wool, I had a spindle-full that needed to be plied. Plying is where you twist the yarn together with itself in the opposite direction of how you twisted it during spinning. Plying strengthens, thickens, and balances, the yarn. With the butterscotch yarn I spun at the start of January, plying was a relatively fast process, because the yarn was thick and thus relatively short (86 yards after plying). But when I set out to ply what ended up being 426 yards of red 2-ply, I didn't realize how long it was going to take.

It took hours!!! This is what I was doing until 3 in the morning the night before going to Carleton!

Thankfully, once I'd plied it, the rest went pretty fast: I wound it out onto a chair back, measured it, washed it, and set it to dry.

This is a very round-about way of saying that, when I went to Carleton last weekend, I was really excited to come back home because I knew that by that time my yarn would have had time to dry, and I could try knitting with it!



I'd decided that I wanted to use this new yarn to knit a pair of mittens. I wanted to do a fun pattern, and I was really interested in trying entrelac, which is a neat pattern of individually-knitted rectangles in a basket-weave type pattern. So I spent a couple of days teaching myself entrelac and trying out some variations, but I ended up not being happy with it. Maybe I could have gotten it if I'd stuck longer at it.. But I decided to try something else!

Once I had a pattern, I cast on my ball of red 2-ply! How exciting!!! I was using size-2 needles.

It soon became clear, however, that size-2 was too large! So I decided to use the size-0 needles Momo gave me for Christmas. Size-0 needles are two millimeters in diameter, so not much bigger than toothpicks, and I'm really terrified of snapping them!

So for the past couple of days I've been knitting these mittens with my size-0 needles. It goes super slow because the needles are so small and the yarn is so thin, but I'm really loving it and I'm really happy with the results so far! Wish me luck!

love, Jimmy

Four months or so coming!

Way back in September, Jolene and I made a nighttime trip to Goodsell. We were thinking about doing an astronomy project together and decided to refresh our memories on the telescopes by imaging something cool!

We decided on M-27, the Dumbbell Nebula. M-27 is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, near Cygnus the Swan. It was a good one to image that night because it was high in the sky, so its light would have to pass through the least atmosphere to reach our telescope.

Anyway, we hauled the telescope (an 8-inch Meade reflector) out to the launch pad, focused the camera, and then directed the telescope over to M-27!

We were using a CCD camera with red, blue, and green filters, and with each filter (plus with a clear filter) we took ten or so 40-second exposures of M-27.



All of that was back in September! Just yesterday when I was down visiting Carleton, Jolene and I finally got around to processing our images! We aligned them all (because over the course of our imaging, M-27 moved slightly in the sky more than our telescope was compensating for, so the stars showed up in different places), and then we stacked them (because otherwise it would be much too dim)! Then, in photo-shop we channel-mixed the red, blue, and green images and added the clear as a luminance layer to get the final image above!

love, Jimmy

For my roots

For about three weeks now, I've been hanging out all over the Northern Clay Center throwing pots, trimming feet, pulling handles, and generally potting around. I've been way more prolific than I really expected to be, and this is exciting but also slightly daunting when I think about what glazing them will be like, and then about what I will do with them once I get them home.

But for now, they're all still just greenware! YAY!!!!

Actually, some of them have started to come back bisqued.. whatever, I am ignoring them for the time being.

More will be coming, but here are a few highlights of pottery so far:

On the first night of class, I threw just a few things, but it felt so good to be back on the wheel!


The next week, I trimmed on feet and added mug-handles. These are my two batter bowls, and a little mug.

Big mug!

I've always wanted to throw those lovely round pots with tiny long bottle necks. My first attempt of the year ended in a flopped-over neck that didn't look quite like I intended (this is the pot on the left). But when I added the two handles, I was really happy with it. The back handle is like a bird's wing, and the front handle is a ram's horn.

Adding a spout! This bowl was a little too dry to really be doing this, but I risked it. Maybe it will fall off in the kiln.

Pots with holes. The sphereish one is going to house a candle, and its base is right next to it in the picture. The baby vase in back grew a hole when I fluted it, so I just started carving holes in the other flutes and all was well!


love, Jimmy

A slightly random project

A couple of weeks ago now, I made for dinner some egg-drop soup. I'd always loved eating egg-drop soup, and it seemed such a very bizarre thing to me that I really wanted to know how to make it myself.

So I googled a recipe, and on the night when Momo made fried rice and cashew chicken, I set to work on my egg-drop soup!

It was actually really simple. I substituted vegetable broth for chicken broth, and I heated it up, adding ginger, salt, and chives, and while it was working its way to a boil, I beat the egg mixture and got ready to drop it.

Dropping the egg was definitely the best part. The broth was boiling, and I kind of scooped bits of egg into it using a fork. The fork lay the egg down in long strings that instantly cooked when they hit the broth. They just sort of crystallized from translucent invisibility to being opaquely white!

I encountered a problem in that, by the time I'd added about half my egg, the egg I'd already added was staying near the surface of the broth and was clinging on to the new egg I added. This made for some clumping, which was sad, but the chunks broke apart pretty easily when I stirred.

The soup was a little bit salty, but really very good. : ) Next time I will decrease the salt and work to somehow stop the eggs from sticking to each other. Maybe if I have more of a constant stir going, that will keep the dropped egg fibers sliding right on past one another.

love, Jimmy