Stuff in my fridge

I thought I had a reasonably clean fridge. I really don't clean it that often, but it doesn't get dirty, and I'm prettty good at not allowing food to spoil in my fridge. That's why I don't understand how this happened:



Does that count as spoiling? After all, those sprouts are thriving. And yet, I'm certainly not eating those potatoes.

In other news, I've been working on my new sock project. I chose the "go with the flow" pattern by Evelyn A. Clark, published in Favorite Socks by Interweave. It's not a toe-up pattern but it makes no difference. Or does it? I don't know if I'm supposed to read the charts from the top down since this is, after all, a cuff-down pattern. The fact that the instep section has the first two purls outside the repeat section makes me think these charts were made to be read from the top.


Just in case, after two inches of pattern I inverted the ssk and the k2tog. I'm not going to rip all the way down to implement this change, because really, those two inches are going to be inside the shoe and besides, the difference is very subtle. Also, I learned early on that if you take the socks off the needles, it is very hard to get them back on in the right order. Other than that, this idea of knitting two socks on two circular needles is great.

The figure eight toe was also a success. I learned how to make symmetrical increases to avoid twisting. I also like how the colors are banding diagonally. The purple and orange are alternating within one single band, like striping within a stripe.

Two-ply vs. three-ply

The doggy rug, which hasn't been touched for a long time, was originally a "learn to spin" project. So I tried different things with my spindles and spinning wheel and incorporated them into the rug. One thing that surprised me was that a three-ply yarn knitted to apparently the same gauge as a two-ply yarn. But my yarn was slubby, lumpy and uneven, and I tried different stitches too, so there is some uncertainty there. I'm testing that hypothesis now by spinning two-ply and three-ply yarns, and when I get to that rug again I'll use the same stitch so I can really tell what's going on. So here they are, two-ply and three-ply. There is no obvious difference.

       

And yet, my spinning wheel does not like three ply yarns. I have to stop often and wind the yarn myself, because the yarn gets stuck in the flyer and is not properly wound. Also, Navajo plying is pretty rough on the hands.

Buuuuut... a long time ago I came across a humongous crochet hook that came with many knitting supplies I got in an estate sale. I didn't know what to do with it, and for a while I put a cd "whorl" on it and used it as a splindle, but now I found a new use for it: Assisted Navajo plying. Nice!



And since the yarn winder was out, I took the opportunity to wind my Glampyre yarn into a center pull ball:

       

That's 100g of Mama-E's sock yarn, 100% merino. It makes a huge center pull ball that looks quite unstable, like it's about to fall apart into a messy tangle. That means I need to knit it right away don't you agree? Plus, I finally need to come to terms with the fact that I don't like pink. I've been in denial, trying to finish a couple of pink things for months and I hadn't realized it yet. I still mean to finish the pink Kiri and the pink Lacy Tee, because I do look good in pink, but I definitely need some green and purple in front of my eyes right now. I don't know about the orange. It does pull together the green and the purple, and I'm curious to see how it knits up.

Here's a short preview of what I'll do with that center-pull ball




Yeah, socks on two circs. Two socks at a time. With a figure eight toe (which I had attempted before without success). If I were smarter I would not try three new things at once, but I'm not smart, I'm adventurous.

I worked a litte more on the Lacy Tee in spite of its pink-ness, but there's only six rows between the last picture and its current state. I'll post another picture once I reach the armholes.

It's Over

I mean the microscopy class, not this blog. Though given the poor attention it has received lately it wouldn't be surprising. But here I am, still knitting, though at a very slow rate, and blogging about it at an even slower rate:


I know, were it not for the funny colors, it wouldn't look much different from the last picture. It is a lousy picture and I thought about making one in natural light, but this way you get to see that it is indeed a different picture from the last one I posted.

And here's another thing I've been working at:



Those are Shetland singles. After looking at them under the microscope, I want to use them up as soon as possible. The doggie rug lies abandoned but hopefully all these singles, once plied, will be enough to finish it.

Many thanks for the positive comments about my electron microscopy project. I had lots of fun working on it.

Really cool pictures

OK, there was no knitting and no blogging, but I was certainly having fun. I got to use the scanning electron microscope on my fiber samples and take lots of pictures. I know it's not the same as knitting, but they're fiber, OK? Bear with me.

This is my absolute favorite, it's angora bunny:



Not only do these fibers have a symmetric and even scaling pattern, they are also thinner than silk. Just so you can compare, here's two other fiber samples:

              

One of them is wool, the other one is dog, can you tell them apart?

I put these and other pictures along with a lot of information in a wiki. Go take a peek if you have time and tell me what you think: http://textilefibers.pbwiki.com/

Meanwhile, I promise to work some more on the pink thing.

Chugging along

It bugs me that I came close to finishing this project and now I'm back to almost the beginning:



I need to keep working on it before I get tired (once more) of all that pink.

I've also been working with my fiber samples and hopefully this weekend I'll get some Microscopy pictures. Here's a cool picture of the plasma sputtering process:


That purple cloud is a bunch of ions coming up from the bottom mixed up with the metal atoms being "sputtered" from the top under vacuum.

More Samples

Thanks to Custom Handweavers, I now have more samples for the electron microscope: Llama, alpaca, mohair, angora and cotton. The big white vial in the middle contains soy silk, which I may or may not use.

I have already mounted last weeks samples on carbon film:


And I will now proceed to sputter-coat them with a gold/palladium alloy. They will look more or less like this:



That's my own hair and some insect eggs. You need to coat the samples to make them conductive, otherwise you cannot see them in the electron microscope.

I have, of course, ripped the front of the lace tee and I am now in the process of knitting it again. What a pain! Eventually I'll get to ripping the back too.

Samples

From left to right: shetland wool, merino, doggy hair, silk. I will start fixing them tomorrow so I can take a peek at them under the electronic microscope. I'm not sure about using soysilk or not. After all, it is an artificial fiber, even if it's made from a sustainable source. I'm more curious about angora or alpaca. Do you think the shop would be willing to let me take samples this small without buying anything from them?

Of course, I have also collected other materials so I can learn different techniques with different types of tissues, but I don't feel like showing any bug corpses here.

Thanks for all the get well wishes about my mother. She's really on her way to recovery. Knitwise, I fixed the length of the lacy tee so the waist shaping fit my waist. Well, it turns out that the lace band at the bottom gathers in the middle anyway. This pattern is designed so that the waist is exactly at that height. My meddling with the pattern makes the band crinkle at my hips in an ugly way. No wonder I'm no designer. Guess what I have to do now.

As promised...

Here's the picture of the swap socks before I sent them in:


Liggy says they fit, I'm glad she liked them. Of course, I also got something in this swap, from Steloide:

    

The pattern is Thirassia, by Mae. They fit great, and the little case will be very useful for crochet hooks and dpns. Those soft candies reminded my husband of "sugus", a type of candy he must have loved as a kid because they are disappearing fast!

My return to California was perfect. My mother is very stable and recovering little by litte. She's no longer connected to an IV line and the new oral antibiotics seem to go well with her.

This Summer I will learning how to operate a Scanning Electron Microscope. I'm already collecting bugs and spiders, but I also plan on taking a peek at some wool, silk and doggy hair. I wish I had some alpaca or mohair, or any other interesting fiber, but I don't, and my finances don't allow for any new purchases. But if there's a fiber addict out there with a few unspun strands to spare let me know. I promise to post any pictures I get.

Where was I?

Gee, It's been a long time. Too many things have happened since my last
entry. The computer died again, the spouse brought it back to life, I
had my final exams, and my mother got sick. That part is still going
on: She has leptospirosis and my father had been taking care of her all
by himself, but I decided to come and help him out. The treatment is
tough: 8 injections per day, mostly through an IV line, which more or
less blows every five days and she must be taken to the ER to start a
new one. The last one blew yesterday night, but the doctor says we do
not need to start another one since she's finally eating on her own and
he needs to switch her anyway to oral antibiotics in a couple of days.
So she'll have to suffer all her injections on her bottom for the time
being, and after that two more months of treatment.





These bugs are nasty, they attack your liver, pancreas and kidneys. One
doctor insisted that she needed to be admitted to the hospital, but I'm
glad my father insisted on keeping her at home. I'm pretty sure that
she would have picked up several other infectious diseases by now.





Not that she does not have enough complications already. Her blood
pressure is high and we need to keep it down with more drugs. All these
antibiotics killed her natural flora and now she has a yeast infection.
Her bottom is sore from all the shots and from being bedridden all this
time.  But these are all easy to deal with compared with the main
infection.





My mother is much better now, so I'm planning on going home next Thursday. By then she will not need any more injections.



All this time I did not read other people's blogs, but I did find out
that Liggy received the socks I made for the swap. I took a picture of
them before sending them and I will post it as soon as I go back to
California. 

A couple of lame excuses

My computer had a near death experience this week. The spouse was able to bring her back to life, but it seems that we need to start shopping around for a healthier one. Well, that's one excuse for not blogging. Another one is that my cousin was here this weekend and though she was mostly working all day, we did manage to spend last Sunday together and also had dinner with her on Monday. She's always traveling, so even when I go to Mexico I barely get to see her. We've been close friends since childhood and I was very happy to enjoy her company for a while.

My knitting isn't progressing much, but I have finished one sock and will soon finish the second one.



I came up with a reasonable adaptation of the feather and sock pattern. Normally, you have to increase the number of stitches because the wavy pattern narrows the width of the sock, but I decided to increase the needle size instead. I like the results.