Just a Quick Shag

Knitting
I bought a couple of balls of Rowan's Tapestry some time ago, and could never decide what to do with it. Too fine for this, too thick for that. Then I was wandering round Ravelry last week when I came across this (hi, Judith!), the wonderful Shag pattern from Knitting New Scarves, knitted in that very yarn. It's not stealing if you steal from the best, so I cast on right away.


I'm nearly half-way through the second skein now and this time I'm managing without a row counter thingy and am counting the purl ridges instead. It's got three of my favourite colours - light grey, mid grey and dark grey - and I love it. I think it's the sixth of these I've knitted.

I did another little coat for my new friend, in Debbie Bliss Pure Cashmere - before you faint, it was the leftovers from my Felicity Hat.

I've picked up Lara again and she's looking beautiful. All the colours have settled the way I wanted them in the collar, no huge swathes of loud green near my face, which was entirely down to good luck. I did change the order of the colours one night when I was knitting in a bad light, but I ripped it the next morning and put it back the way it would have been if I hadn't interfered. The Noro colour master, he knows best.


I've made a jigsaw of this - lots of stripes in the floor and in the colours - see the sidebar.

It occurs to me that everything I've got on the needles just now is something I've knitted before - Shag, Lara and a Forest Canopy Shawl. I must do something about this soon.

Graham Norton Show
If you follow the Yarn Harlot, you'll know that she (or at least her voice) was on the Graham Norton Show recently, when Greg Kinnear was a guest. Then last week, or it might have been the week before - I record it and watch it later - Graham was talking about the German knitting grannies at NetGranny (they're Swiss, but I think he said they were German) and he spoke to one of them, this one. And, I remember a while ago he had Carol Meldrum on the show - not as a guest, but in the front row of the audience. It was when her Knitted Icons book came out and she showed some of them. So, and sorry if I've been a long time getting here, there must be a researcher on the show who's really into knitting. Who will we see next, I wonder?

Photo Blogs
When I'm not peering at other people's knitting, I sometimes peer at their photographs. I discovered the Big Picture earlier this year and have been stunned at regular intervals since. Click on this one to see it full size.

A U.S. Marine patrols with an opium poppy flower on his helmet on March 19, 2009 near Baqwa in Farah province of southwest Afghanistan. (John Moore/Getty Images)

This is from a recent selection on Signs of Spring, and have a look at these for Earth Hour: you can turn the lights on and off in the photos. Cool.

Fuzzarelly, who has a fibre blog, also has a photo blog called Back Roads of Harrison County. All her pictures can be embiggened and some of them have a lovely, lost quality, sort of Andrew Wyeth-y.

Ospreys
The osprey mum is back at the nest. You can see her on the webcam. No, really, you can sometimes. I saw her yesterday, honest. They don't seem to have the sound turned on; I used to like listening to the wind, but maybe they'll turn it on if and when there are chicks to listen to.

Ada Lovelace Day

This is my post for Ada Lovelace Day, to commemorate the woman who is known as the first computer programmer, although she was born and died long before computers were invented.

She began her life as the only legitimate child of Byron, the poet, but she didn't know him. Her parents parted when she was tiny and her father showed no interest in her. He died when she was eight. Her mother was a difficult person (you have to ask, did Byron drive women mad, or was he attracted to crazy women?) and Ada had a lot of childhood illness, but it was her mother who ensured that she had an education: one of her teachers was Mary Somerville, who has an Oxford college and a crater on the moon named after her. When Ada was 19, she married an aristocrat, William King-Noel, who subsequently became the Ist Earl Lovelace, so she became the Countess of Lovelace when she was about 24. The Earl was a scientist and member of the Royal Society, so it must have been an interesting household. She had three children, and died at the age of 36. I'm always fascinated by family resemblances and characteristics, so I'm pleased that her great-great-great niece is Dr Honora Smith, who has worked for IBM and is now a lecturer in mathematics.

I won't attempt to summarize her work with Charles Babbage because it has been done better here.

The purpose of today is to nominate a woman, or women, in technology whom I admire. My first impulse was to identify someone who works in a particularly masculine field, someone very hard-edged who had to fight lots of opposition to achieve her curent position - you get the picture. In the end though, I'm naming Jessica Marshall Forbes of Ravelry - in spite of all her achievements, I bet she still gets 'It's just a knitting site,' so I think she deserves extra kudos for that.

My last job before I had to give up work involved setting a up a large database and persuading the people who should have been interested in it to use it. It was, as they say, challenging, but also enormously stimulating, exciting and satisfying. There weren't many of us doing that sort of work in that field internationally and we all knew each other; I can remember going to a meeting with our whole database, then about 200,000 records, on a DAT tape and producing the tiny cassette from my handbag to show off. Everyone was madly impresssed. As well as organizing the structure of information on the database, I was endlessly interested in how people approached looking for it, and how it should be structured in order to make it easy to retrieve. I realize this doesn't make everyone's heart beat faster, but it did mine.

So after I had been sitting at home stewing for a few years, I wasn't actually happy to hear about Ravelry at first. In fact, I was quite jealous. Not to mention eaten up with envy and bitterness. I wouldn't look at it at first. And I wouldn't go on the waiting list. When I read about it on knit blogs, I blanked it. But eventually I got over myself and had a little peek. Then I added my name to the list; even checked at intervals to see how near I was. Then I got my invitation and went in and had a look around. And I was right to be eaten up by envy, because she had done a wonderful job. She had thought of everything.


You can approach your subject by what it is, or what it's made of, or who made it; you can post your own stuff or you can lurk; you can photograph every scrap of yarn that has passed through your hands or gaze at other people's stash; you can see how this shawl looks in that yarn and how this sweater looks on several different sizes of wearer. You can do all of this to the extent that you want, in minute detail or broad brush; there is no pressure. (If you knew how much of my life I have spent considering 'the optimum minimum record' ... )

And not only this, but you can talk about it to all sorts of people about knitting, or enter into furious arguments with them if that's what you like. You can make friends with people you already know virtually, or with ones who have knitted the same socks or ones who live in the same place or ones who have the same disease. Myself, I wouldn't have done that as I don't do social networks (yes, I'm on Facebook but not under my real name, for goodness' sake) but it's what makes Ravelry what it is.

And all of this is so flexible, and it's made to look really easy; no sign on the surface of the pedalling that must be taking place below the water line. It's still in beta and I think maybe it always willl be. Employers (and government) think you can set up a database and then leave it to run itself, but in practice they need attention. Information is organic and if it's left alone it tends to decay or take off in unexpected directions. Jessica's design is never rigid, and to the user it is easy, friendly and endlessly diverting.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, Jessica.

You can follow more Ada Lovelace Day blog posts on the map here, and read them here.

Knits in Action

We have some modelling today, first of all by a boy and a bear. Felicity hat in Mirasol Miski, and ad libbed scarf in Kid Classic.

And now by two boys. Two Felicity hats in Mirasol Miski. These are very effective on the snowboard slopes, I understand.

Aren't they cool? All three of them. Jigsaws at the right (scroll down).

And yes, there has been rather a lot of playing with this, thanks to all of your ferocious enabling, for which I am eternally grateful (see comments, last-but-one post).

And yes, I did get iSteam, and I think it's been worth every penny of 59p.

I also got a knitting app, but it remains to be seen whether I will be any better at tapping than I am at clicking.

And I finished its little coat.


Comments
Thanks for the recommendation for French Girl Knits, Cinders. I'll keep an eye out for it. It looks too fiddly for me (I like fiddly shawls, but not fiddly garments: I think the anxiety about fit is too much to bear.)

Thank you, Amy - you're very kind. I'm glad to know you're there.

Thanks to everyone else who dropped in while I was thinking; you are appreciated.

I did try a Mallory, Joan - the first one. I always read books in order, which is tiresome of me but I can't help it. I enjoyed it but couldn't keep track of who was who: this might have been down to my brain fog rather than the author's abilities and I'll certainly read more.

Knitting Mags
I've given up looking so hard for The Knitter. If I come across one, well and good. It's interesting that they've put so much energy into distributing it in the US (Borders, and Barnes and Noble), but not got it into the chain that covers a lot of Scotand and is the largest chain in Britain. I check my local one every time I'm passing and although they have swathes of Knitting, Simply Knitting and on and on, there's no Knitter (can't someone think of more distinctive titles?). I expect Smith's have it, so I'll check next time I'm at the station. I hadn't realized it was monthly and I'm amazed that the UK market can bear as many monthly knitting mags as it does; presumably the same companies are advertising in all of them?

On the subject of distinctive titles, what about 'Designer Knitting', the new name for Vogue Knitting outside the U.S.? They must have been up all night thinking of that one, and the cover looks as if it was designed at gunpoint. I always get the sense that the people who produce VK do so under very difficult conditions, where they're not allowed to talk to each other and no-one has access to a computer. I don't mean that I think it's really like that, just that it seems that way, and there was all that strange business last year when the new editor was disappeared.


The webpage is full of bells and whistles, but is seldom up to date (the About Us page has the old editor's name!) - it doesn't have a direct link to Knit 1, or Knit Simple amongst other things (podcasts are hidden under Web Exclusives); the blog is intermittent to say the least, and the stuff they send out on their email distribution list is frankly poor. They seem to be really struggling and at times it's as if there's a Svengali working there, plotting its overthrow. Interweave Knits do it so much better, particularly the Knitting Daily stuff, which is frequent and lively.

The complication is that Conde Nast own the rights to the name 'Vogue' and Soho Publishing have to pay to use it, but that's not difficult to explain and they could try: perhaps the next issue will have an editorial which includes some effort to make readers outside the U.S. not feel as if they have been cast into the outside darkness. I hope so, and I hope they get their act together, because we can't afford to lose them.

Classes
If you're an Annie Modesitt fan and you're in the UK, you might be interested in this, which I spotted while I was wandering recently. I don't think Annie's mentioned them on her blog yet.