Tuesday, April 04, 2006

bum belly

Must admit, I'm a wimp when it comes to being sick. Sure, I like to play tough and proudly display the beautiful purple blue black temporary tattoos on my knees and shins (what do you expect when a girl who walks into walls takes up hanging on rocks?) and I feel a tender pride in the ache of laughing the day after a hard workout, but really being sick sucks. So it's only a bellyache. But the expression "quit your bellyaching" must have come from someone sick of listening to someone like me. Therefore, I'm not the only wimp.

The problem is that if I'm right in my suspicion of what is making my lower abdomen cry foul for hours merely after a glass of OJ, then the tantalizing recently and rarely purchased Michaela's tortillas sitting in the fridge will have to be consumed by someone else. In the interest of letting my body figure itself out through dietary changes, it's looking like my anti-Atkins diet based around pasta and other friendly carbs might be going on hiatus. Much as I love my noodles, my adversion to pain seems to be successfully keeping them off of the stove for now. I wonder if turnip cake would be bad for me? So far, tea is going down fine. Eggs seem to slip in nicely. Steamed salmon with shitakes, ginger and green onions may not have been the best idea, but so far so good. I know I'm bigger than the bugs and a few days of eating less or even nothing won't really hurt me, but I'm used to eating so much that I feel light-headed just at the prospect.

On a less woe-is-me note, in between the bed and the couch, I've spun up 50 g of fine yarn (hand-dyed blue-faced leicester, fingering wt maybe? I'm too lazy to check) to use on my knitting machine for socks.



The initial swatch looks good; I like the slant the energized singles is giving. I'm planning on alternating S-twist and Z-twist yarns to create subtle pattern from the slant, then using complementary mohair to strengthen the toe, heel and ball of the foot. I still haven't decided what sort of pattern to use, but I'm leaning towards knitting a tube on the machine, then handknitting an afterthought heel with the energized wool single held together with an opposite twist mohair single for strength. I can also handknit the toe. As far as patterning, should I? I may play with duplicate stitch, though I'm not sure if that would change the thickness too much. And as the ball of the foot seems to wear out fast, I'm trying to decide how to strengthen it. If I were handknitting, I could do circular intarsia, using an extra yarn on the bottom of the sock...hmmm....

A slightly guilty confession. Received "A Handbook of Weaves" by Oelsner in the mail. Excellent resource with in-depth breakdown of different weaves. Super nerdy and I can't wait to use it (But first must get current weaving project off loom. Made one mistake in the threading of heddles and am not sure where I put the extra heddles--since it's my northwest pioneer loom, there's no top bar so I can't just make a string heddle like I would for any other loom). And for some odd reason, I was browsing and ordered "Overshot Weaving" by Donna Lee Sullivan, another good weaving resource, and "Loop-d-loop" by Teva Durham, a super cool book of knitting patterns that I probably shouldn't have ordered since I almost never use someone else's patterns. But it will be good for ideas. And maybe I can suck it up and make something from a pattern without altering it. much. At any rate, I'm paying $6.29 for the two books thanks to the magic of instant rebate. Well, to absolve myself, I finally finished Aries' gloves and delivered them before his party. That's one thing done, now next pressing project continues to be Bishop's armwarmers. Here's the start:

I started spiraling the stripes, then reversed them and knocked out all but four, then knocked out three and let the fourth continue into a horizontal stripe. Now I'm knitting four rows at once in a spiral pattern, but it looks more like horizontal stripes than a spiral so I may not continue this. Contemplating short rows. Or intarsia. I didn't spin/dye enough of the green so I'm a little worried about running out (this is a new darker set of greens than the ball that journeyed to Arcata with me--that one was a little to bright for Bishop). I suppose I could solve that with spinning/dyeing some more. Hmm...

1 comment:

Amie said...

Welcome to the Spinning Wheel!