Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Censorship Rears Its Head

Watch the video and then read this Lifehacker article that further explains the bill and what you can do to make your voice heard. We need to to defeat the attitude "We're from the government and we know what's best for you." The Internet has worked pretty well without interference from government. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Works in Progress

I have these two works in progress along with an afghan that it is getting chilly enough to get back to...but I don't have enough hands! My fingers are itching to get the projects done because I have a long list of others I want to try.

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The progress on the hat (knitting it in Knitpicks City Tweed in Jacquard) found in Vogue Knitting Holiday 2011 issue was interrupted last night when I finally updated the ios on my Ipad2. Despite the fact that I synced my device, and backed everything up before updating the ios, when everything was updated and restored, the Vogue Knitting issue was not there, and in fact, the app itself wouldn't function. After a moment of panic, I searched and found the support link and emailed the app help address given, but there was no more knitting last night. Thankfully this morning I had a response and following the instructions restored the app and access to my purchased e-issue of the magazine. Whew!

Paper has a lot going for it, in my opinion. No electronic gremlins when you purchase the paper form.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Serendipity

According to Wikipedia, serendipity is when someone finds something that they weren't expecting to find. It's one of those small pleasures that can just make your day a little brighter.

My serendipitous moment this week came in the form of an article in my Facebook news feed titled "Margaret Atwood on Knitting a Great Auk in the Arctic." As an English major, librarian, birdwatcher, and knitter, you know I had to read the article just because of the juxtaposition of such unlikely terms.

It turns out that Margaret Atwood is an avid believer in the preservation of bird species and had been asked to contribute an artwork to an exhibit highlighting birds that have become extinct. Most of the hundred plus artists contributing to the exhibit did their art in paintings, drawings, and prints. Since she is also an avid knitter, she wanted to use wool as her art medium. And there, buried in the middle of the article was the method she used to get a graph of the auk she needed to craft her knitted piece. Just a tiny little mention of a tiny little program available free online to turn your image into a graph suitable for knitting or cross stitching. Whoa! That snapped me to attention!

And here's why:

I'd knit a table runner or wall hanging canvas (I hadn't yet decided which) a couple of years ago. A friend had provided me with a photograph of a lighthouse that I wanted to turn into a graph and stitch onto the canvas I'd knit. But I needed to find a good way to do that. I didn't want to buy an expensive program to do it. I tried various options that seemed possibilities but none really did the job I wanted it to do, so I put the project aside and moved on to other things.

The free online Web2.0 app she used for her graph is Knitpro and I found it with a simple Google search. There are a few easily adjustable settings for you to get the size and direction you want for your graph.

This is the lighthouse I needed to get a graph of for my planned project:




This is a screenshot of the graph generated by Knitpro that I saved as a jpeg and cropped so I could show you what Knitpro did with the image. What Knitpro generates for your use is a pdf that you can then print. What's great about it is that the lines on the graph are numbered to make it easy to follow.



And this is the blank canvas I knit with the plan to stitch a lighthouse on it, painted with stitches, so to speak.




Now thanks to the serendipitous discovery of this little gem of a program, I am now prepared to finish my own artwork using cotton yarn on my knitted canvas.

Knitting Socks




I used fd's Flickr toys to make this mosaic of some of the socks I've knit over the past year. I've knit 45 pairs of socks, but the mosaic only has part of them. I used my Facebook album Knitting Socks to generate the mosaic.