Stealthy!

I may need a set of these DPNs just for the awesome geek factor inherent in using carbon fiber stealth needles.

This is not the blog you're looking for....

I have this idea in my head that no one reads this blog (except like maybe my Mom and a few close friends that just like to look at the pictures) because if I start to think that Other People are actually looking at my crazy I might have to go have a quiet mortified freakout in a closet or random dark corner somewhere.

Anyway this week I sent my mom the following email (verbatim):

[fangirling] OMG Jasmin from the Knitmore Girls commented on my blog! [/fangirling]

So, point being... you out there - reading this - You are not actually reading this. Its all a figment of your imagination. Everything you think you see me saying? Its all in your head.

There.

I feel better now.

I am kind of informally doing the Tour de Fleece this year.

By which I mean I am trying to spin every day of the tour but I don't have set goals that I am aiming for (considering the hours I am pulling at work just spinning every day is actually a pretty challenging goal). I really wish there was a winter version of this because summer is just never a good time for me to take on big endurance projects.

So anyway, what I am working on to start is 8oz of Targhee from yarnorama. I purchased and started it on the 3rd at the spin in and as of last night I'm finished with the first 4oz braid. I'm tentatively hoping to get through the second braid this week (not unreasonable) and then ply the last few days of the Tour with some merino spun up in between.

I brought home a lb of Ashland Bay Merino in English Garden along with the Targhee so I can finish the sweater yarn that started with the teal merino singles I finished awhile back. It has some of the same shades in it, but I'm hoping that plying a solid with a blended multi gives a bit more interest to the finished yarn. I don't expect to get that done during the Tour, but if I could get through 4 or 8 ounces that would still be pretty satisfying.

Alternately (read - if it gets here before I finish the Targhee) I purchased some Foot Notes pencil roving from Fiber Optic this week in the color "Ultraviolet" which I think (with a bit of firestar drafted in perhaps or plied with some holographic thread) will work out to make a pretty badass demon yarn. *

* For anyone that keeps wondering what the heck the the demon yarn is about - in Supernatural when a demon isn't possessing someone they are visible as this black smoke that often contains flashes of purple lightning. I tried to find a picture or video of this but all I could dig up was this fanvid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsMBlEQyeiM which does have the bonus of being set to a song by Imogen Heap and being generally well done even if the cloud shots are a bit short.

Fandom is stalking me again

I have freakishly overlapping and unrelated interests.

I guess its not that weird being a knitter and seeing knitting things everywhere, like in Dragon Age when Wynne jokes about knitting Sten a cloak or when the ads on the Citadel in Mass Effect try to sell me handspun and handwoven robes.

Then a few weeks ago Misha Collins joked on twitter* about knitting (I assume he was being facetious but then again the man seems to be both an evil genius - with minions even - and also quite predictably unpredictable so god only knows) and then this week I was catching up on the Knitmore Girl's podcast finally and they were talking about Supernatural and even knitting supernatural socks! With demon cloud yarn!

Not kidding.

The actual yarn from the podcast has a bit too much pink and white for my tastes (really... almost any pink is too much pink for my tastes) but it did give me an inkling to dye up my own evil type yarn in black and violet, maybe with really really small flecks of an acidy-sorta fuchsia (which is the only tolerable shade of pink-like-ness IMO and even then only in small quantities) and ideally on a Kraemer Sterling base because evil demon yarn should be sparkly.

Alternately, it might be fun to ply some of fiber spun in said colors with some of that trippy hologram thread like I used in the Mardi Gras yarn - but ya know.... in black or red instead of gold.

I am not sure if this means that a lot of knitters like Supernatural or a lot of Supernatural fans are knitters. Or maybe it didn't start that way and fandom is just something that knitters pass on to one another like a virus transmitted through yarn fondling (A Knitterly Transmitted Disease if you will).

More likely I am a crazy obsessed person reading too much into the overlap.

Or else my obessions really are stalking me.

One of the two. **

I have new yarn and a finished cardigan that I should talk about also. I think I'll do that when I'm feeling a little less geeky though.

*We're going to ignore the part where I am actually following someone on twitter in spite of my general opinion that twitter-ers are crazy ego-maniacs and no one wants to hear that much about how some random famous or un-famous person got groped by a guy with a purple mohawk at starbucks or whatever

**If Dean winds up being a closet sock knitter in season 6 or something I'm calling it full circle and the second one clearly true which will turn me even more into the first.

How much knitting have you torn out today?

Sometimes I think my brand of crazy would traumatize me if I stopped and considered it too closely.

Instead of being content with my new project(s) or better yet being all enthusiastic about finishing my Firefly Cardi which is seriously a sleeve and a seam from being done, or finding a pattern for the Black Magic yarn or even working on finishing some of my other spinning projects I am having a weird kind of creative freakout/geekout.

I have somehow managed to restrain myself from any major geek knitting meltdowns since I finished the Deadpool mitts (half-finished and stalled out N7 gloves notwithstanding - I anticipate they will be back in progress either this winter when I start wishing for fingerless mitts again or when ME3 approaches depending on my relative flakiness and the availability of a good gunmetal gray sock yarn which I never did locate).

Anyway. I've been good dammit.

I have however had it in my head since sometime during watching season 2 or 3 of Supernatural that the Devil's Trap Heptagram would make a really really sweet circular shawl.

Seeing as a) Circular shawls are a pretty big time and yarn investment and b) I have never actually knit a circular shawl before I managed to stuff this into the back of my head for later.

Seriously.

I held out like a whole two months.

Anyway, the design that was used in the show appears to be based on a pentacle from the Key of Solomon (which - real book and everything) taken with some artistic licence and a scorpion thrown in. It features a Heptragram inscribed inside a Heptagon inscribed inside a circle. The original pentacle its likely based on actually has a second heptagram inside the larger one inscribed in its own circle.

For the sake of my sanity I decided straight off to ignore the additional details of the design (mostly writing) and for the sake of not having a huge block of nothing in the middle I decided to use a second heptagram in the interior of the design.

This is what I'm trying to acheive (roughly)

There actually end up being 3 Heptagons and 3 Heptagrams in the design. I considered having the interior second Heptagram inscribed in a circle instead but I'm struggling enough with how I'm going to handle rounding the outside edges. Its just easier to either have all flat planes or all round edges. I may yet wind up with a Heptagon shawl rather than a circular one simply because my only possible solution so far is a buttload of short rows.

The nice thing about this overall is that, even though I'm going to be making it because I am a huge geek it doesn't scream "Huge Nerd" the way the DP mitts do (or the N7 mitts will). The design ends up being just attractively geometric.

And face it - if I'm going to bother to knit this giant thing its going to be something I can wear around without it being too obviously dorky.

Rough design sorted I have charted, knit, torn out, re-charted, re-knit and torn out the interior rows working out how the increases should fit. The upside to this is that I am fairly confident now that the rate of increase I have worked out is going to work fine. The downside is that I'm pretty sure this is all getting pulled out and restarted again.

I started out with some of my Arucania Lonco and its giving me gauge problems. If I try to tighten up the stitches I'm fairly confident that this shawl will end up weighing about 10lbs, but its not going to bloom enough to look right at the gauge its being knit. Also I am considering that I may have waited too long to start the interior Heptagon and if I continue on I will be knitting less of a shawl and more of a blanket. A really big not attractive 10lb blanket.

Unfortunately my yarn alternatives are a little slim. I have some Malabrigo lace in a sufficient amount but that means the shawl will be purple... which... purple doesn't feel very badass-demon-hunter ya know? and I have some Wollmeise in Red... but its this really cheerful candy apple red so... again not exactly what I was going for. There is some laceweight merino in light teal which I am tempted to over-dye into a more sinister blue (expect that I actually really like the teal) and some white sock yarn that I could dye into a dark red or navy. I've also considered possibly going with Knit Picks because I can get the needed quantity of Shadow for around 12$ (It even comes in a suitably sinister color called "Nocturne") and that might just save me enough angst to be worth breaking my yarn diet.

What all this amounts to?

I have probably clocked around 15 hrs of knitting time in the past day and a half and all of it has been or will be torn out.

I think I'm going to go work on my Aeolian for awhile and not think about that.