Knit Geek Life

My father's birthday was Friday and Matt's birthday was yesterday, so to celebrate we went over to Matt's brother Mike's house to visit with him, his wife and daughter... which of course, was the perfect opportunity to play with the new camera!

Mike and Addison

Heidi and Addison

Sheepie giving Addison a kiss.

Addie

Addie taking a walk with my mother's knitting bag.

Steve making funny faces.

The turtle.

Moving this pattern to be available over here.

The Baby Monkey socks were based on Cookie A's Monkey socks... It more or less is the same pattern, just pretty much halved.

Forgive me when I'm writing this pattern, I'm assuming that you pretty much already know how to knit socks so this may not be the most obviously written pattern for a beginner...

I used size 1.5 needles (2.5 mm) because that's what I had available at the time, but you could probably use US 1 (2.25 mm) or US 2 (2.75) just as well, depending on how tightly you knit.

Twisted rib:
K tbl 1, P1 repeat to end of round.

Lace Pattern (Worked in the round over a multiple of 8 sts):
Row 1: K all stitches.
Row 2: (p2, k4 p2) to end.
Row 3: (p1 k2tog, k1, yo2, k1, ssk, p1) to end.
Row 4: (p1, k3, k1 tbl, k2, p1) to end.
Row 5: (k2tog, k1, yo, k2, yo, k1, ssk) to end.
Row 6: K all stitches.
Row 7. K all stitches.

-----------------------------

Cuff

CO 32 stitches. Divide evenly between needles (8 stitches on each needle) and join to begin working in the round, being careful not to twist.

Work in Twisted Rib for 6 rounds, or however many you feel is suffiecient.

Leg
Work rounds 1-7 of Lace Pattern 3 times.

Turn Heel
Turn the heel using the method of your choice. I chose to use a short row heel. I'm going to assume you already know how to turn a heel. If you don't, go find a sock knitting friend and she'll teach you.

Foot
Continue lace pattern on the top of the foot, 2 times more. K all stitches on bottom of foot.

Toe
K 1 round.
Decrease round...
1st needle: k1, ssk, k to end of needle.
2nd needle: k to last three stitches, k2tog, k1
3rd needle: k1, ssk, k to end of needle.
4th needle: k to last three stitches, k2tog, k1
Repeat these two rounds until there are 4 stitches on each needle.

Slip stitches from needle 1 to needle 2. Slip stitches from needle 3 to needle 4 so the top 8 stiches are on one needle and the bottom 8 stitches are on the other. Graft toe closed.

Don't ask how I managed to get three scrapbooking layouts done today among all the other random stuff that I did today... but I guess I was inspired... and The GIMP only crashed once! Yay!

These were all made for challenges at Elemental Scraps.

For the It's Elementary Dear Scrapper challenge:

Syapotter - June 16 QP
Irene V Alexeeva - Altered Melody
Elemental Scraps - Requiem

For the Flip It challenge:

Elemental Scraps - Requiem

For the Pimp this Page challenge:

Anja J - Black & Pink
Viviane - Photo Frame Freebies
Text credit: Medicine by Orbit (I'm still undecided as to whether I actually remember this song from when I was in... uh... middle school. But nonetheless, Jeff Robbins is t3h 4w3s0m3m3$$. )

In honor of Matt's 29th birthday which is next weekend, we decided to upgrade our camera. We now are the proud owners of a Canon Rebel XTi... It takes pretty snazzy photos.

We also hosted the second NH Ubuntu LoCo meeting this weekend, which gave me lots of time to spend knitting and spinning. I completed a two socks, and spun up a single... and I also finished up somedigital scrapbook layouts on this weekend. Creative things abound!

Bellatrix socks, completed! Made with Madelinetosh sock yarn in Vintage Apron. This pair was started in a knit-a-long in memory of the pattern's creator MommaMonkey, who passed away in February.

Eleanor - The first one's complete! In Artsygal Merino/Tencel - Sock Club January #4.

The spun up single... I swear, I need to buy myself a Woolee Winder.

These layouts I did for challenges at Elemental Scraps.

Scrapjack challenge:

Leah Nicole - Office Chic
Shabby Princess - Splendid
Scrapkut - Romantic Thought
Amy Fenner - Girls Night Out
Racketty Scrappity - Template 55

Fresh Meat Challenge:

Amara - Blue Romance
Michelle Coleman - Renewal

Bits and Pieces Challenge

Sweet Digi Scraps - Sprunk

Among other things, I've spent part of this weekend tinkering with The GIMP, and in the process managed to come up with two scrapbook layouts.

One of Claire and Wyatt for the May technique challenge at GoDigitalScrapbooking which was to use a page template that was inspired to look like a quilt.

Credits:
Helen Ehrenhofer - When Life Gives You Scraps Make Quilts
Claudi Designs - Jenna
Shabby Princess - Two Soon

The other was for the It's Elementary My Dear Scrapper challenge at Elemental Scraps, a challenge where you're given a quick page to work from, and then to add things and make it your own.

Credits:
Aprilmouse - Magic
Anja J - Summer
Peppermint - It's Elementary June QP

Both of which, I used The GIMP for. I have to say... I really am impressed with how far it's come since the last time I tried to seriously use it. I was actually figuring out how to do things on my own that I hadn't figured out how to do in Photoshop!

For example, rotating and resizing layers. I figured out how to do this in The GIMP right off the bat. It was really simple to find... There were buttons in the toolbar for it, as well as being accessible by Layer -> Transform and Layer -> Resize in the menu. It seemed to be a really logical place to put the functionality.. In Photoshop? The same functionality is found in Edit -> Tranform. No wonder I couldn't find it! Every time I'd tried to look for it previously, I'd been looking in Layer... because... uh, you know, when you're rotating or resizing a layer, that's where you'd expect it to be.

There's still some rough edges in The GIMP... The extendability of The GIMP is really freaking confusing... Just take a look in the Xtras menu... There's Module Manager, Plug-in Browser, Script-Fu, Python-Fu.... and that leaves me wondering, what's the goddammned difference between these things? And there's things that I was looking for, like something similar the Custom Shape tool that's in Photoshop. that I couldn't find that probably exist somewhere as a Script-fu but I wasn't sure where that was either... but all in all, I actually caught on rather quick.

The only problem I was having with The GIMP was the fact that the version that's in the Ubuntu package manager seemed to possibly have a memory leak (or at least, that's how I interpret freezing my computer up harder than a Windows box), so I did sadly lose some work... However, I grabbed a Debian package off of GetDeb.net of the latest version that isn't in the package manager, and that seems to work great... Haven't had any of the problems since upgrading it.

I've been plugging away on three knitting projects as of late... Well... There's more than that on the needles, but these are the ones that have been getting the most attention lately. Yay mindless knitting!

First up, the Bellatrix socks.

In MadelineTosh Sock - Vintage Apron

I've finally turned the heel of the second sock! We're in the home stretch!

Then, there's the Eleanor socks.

In Artsygal Merino Tencel Sock - Sock Club January #4

I'm on my last repeat before the heel, so I'm not too far behind schedule with this sock...

The method to my madness when it comes to socks seems to be to have one pair where I'm knitting a second sock, and one pair where I'm knitting a first... It seems to combat the whole "second sock syndrome" thing pretty well, because I'm not totally bored on the second sock of the pair because I have something exciting and new to be working on.

The mindless non-sock project is the Feather and Fan Scarf, which I'm absolutely loving how it's turning out....

Malabrigo Merino Worsted in Curacao

Talk about an elegant looking scarf... I was thinking of using this as a Christmas present, but I'm really not sure if I'm going to be able to part with it... The colors are just too gorgeous together.

And the finished result from the last post?

This has only been sitting on the wheel since.. like... January or so. I finally was inspired to finish spinning it up. I actually can't remember what the stuff is... Only that I bought it from Miss V's big destashing sale way back in December. It still needs to be plied up, but at least now it's all on one bobbin. Yay!

As I was standing in line today at one of the local ice cream places, listening to the music, circa 1960-something... A thought crossed my mind... in thirty years from now when all the boomers are elderly or dead and I'm middle aged, will we be still listening to 1960s music at our ice cream stands?

I feel like I did a little bit of everything this weekend.... A little bit of knitting, a little bit of digiscrapping, a little bit of spinning, a little bit of playing video games, a little bit of reading (gasp!) and in the end, accomplished very little. But tis the nature of taking a med holiday.

I was going to take some pictures of my craftiness, but alas.... My camera ran out of battery power, so now the batteries are charging, so all I have to show right now is the digiscrapping I've done.

Picture from Addison's 1st Birthday Party
Credits: Franziska Altmann - Love Actually

Picture from our wedding.
Credits: Rachel Martin - Around the Corner, Sarah Bryan - Peep Show

Picture from Addison's 1st Birthday Party
Credits: Marianne Walhberg - For Real

Pictures from Addison's 1st Birthday Party.
Credits: Beckie Wallace - Dreaming Under Water, Silversword71 - Quick Page Freebie, Designs by Vicki - Fizzy Pop, Theresa Hernandez - Just Hanging Out

I'm not entirely sure how thrilled I am with the last one... but I was feeling a bit experimental, so I used Photoshop CS2 for it...

Normally, I have no patience whatsoever with this sort of thing so I use iScrapbook, a program for the Mac that's very drag-and-drop and point-and-click oriented... The drawback to iScrapbook is it only has very very basic editing capabilities. For example, the cropping capabilities in iScrapbook are extremely limited... you can only really do rectangular shapes, which for this final layout wasn't going to work because I needed two circular photos to work with the quickpage I used in the layout.

I learned a few new tricks with this one... Like what layer masks are, and how to use them (not sure if I was doing things the most efficient way, but it worked)...

I suppose the end result is that I've resolved myself to start learning Photoshop better than I do. Considering that I do work in the web industry, it could never hurt to be a little more proficient, and the whole digital scrapbooking thing doesn't seem like a bad place to start.