Odds and Ends and Pictures

Sent off our vendor information for Maneki Neko Con 2, which is the anime convention run by the Anime club at Prairie State University, in Chicago Heights. We did well enough last year that we'll do it again. We'll be there Friday afternoon/evening and Saturday. Vendors can also set up on Thursday for faculty/staff/students/general public, but that would mean another day off, and I think my August-September may be busy enough as is.

This means I really should get back to making leather stuff. Real soon now. Yeah, I should. 

Stopped at Rockler yesterday. Robin successfully resisted anything, Ron had a minor fail. coming home with several blanks and some pencil kits. I got a new mechanical pencil out of it - the wood is stabilized spalted tamarind. "Stabilized" means its been soaked, via pressure (probably vacumn) in a resin. Spalted wood has been discolored by fungi, which also weakens it, but it can be pretty, and stabilizing it fixes the weakness issues. Here's the new pencil (bottom), along with my purpleheart pen (top):

 
Started signage for MuseCon, got all the room signs done, I thought, on Saturday, then went back on Sunday and added "MuseCon" and the MuseCon logo to them (which wasn't too big a job). Still need to make a few more signs, will probably start on that again tomorrow - I've finally accepted that I don't really accomplish things Monday night, so not planning to do things on Mondays means less frustration with myself.

If you go back and look at older posts, you may notice pictures have vanished. I went through and sorted almost 200 pictures from Picasa into folders, which warning messages say breaks links to them. I can live with that. I can re-link (if I can remember what a picture was), on request.

On the personal/posting pictures side of things, I have been knitting.  

Friday night I did the last couple rows of ribbing and cast off the socks I was working on. Lorna's Laces Solemate, color is "Flames". The Lorna's Laces website is, btw, craptastic, featuring an excess of stupid flash tricks, so I can't just link to the description of that yarn. Grumble.  Knit toe-up, with gussets and a short-row heel.

Friday I also started a pair of mittens, using the assorted mini skeins of blues and purples I got at the fiber fest recently, and some fingering-weight sheep's-white Blue-Faced Leicester yarn I got to go with it. The yarn is from a Wool2Dye4, who sells white yarn for dyers, usually in bundles of 10 skeins. However, they have the "Secret Stash", where they sell odd and ends from shipments/mill runs. I got two 438-yard skeins (plenty for a pair of socks from each skein( of their BFL 4-socking for $17.40 (plus shipping), which is not bad at all, as sock yarn goes. 

The wave pattern on the right is the back of the hand, the more simple geometric on the left is the palm (which is one color repeat shorter in the picture). The last repeat of the waves is a verigated blue. The top wave is dark purple, the two medium purples are different shades. I need to darn in ends again, before the number gets too large - that's the problem with switching colors, more ends to darn in.

The wave pattern is a pain. Here's the chart I've madet for the mittens:

It takes seven vertical repeats before it starts at the same spot again. You can see it better from my chart, the white spaces form the same wave pattern as the color. The palm side pattern is much simpler, I only charted out the mitten tip and a little past to be sure I understood the repeat (and because I had space on the paper to go past the tip).

The kinda dirty and wrinkled spot is a muddy pawprint. Pippin came in with damp paws last night, decided Ron needed to play with him, and levitated onto Ron's chest, with a paw on my pattern.

Haven't quite decided what I'm going to do for the thumb, either pattern, color, or type of gusset. I'll decide when I get there, and start knitting the thumb. I'm working top-down, so when I get to the point where the thumb joins I take a break from the body, knit the thumb, then join it and keep going. I like top-down mittens because I can make the pattern come out nice at the top, without ending up with a mitten that's too long or too short. Charts done for knitting cuff-up work just fine for top-down, you just turn them over (or not, and just flip it in your head), and work increases instead of decreases and vice-versa.