Things I recently learned to do


1. Make a blog badge. At the final, I gave out five awards to members of my criticism class -- most versatile, best first person writing, best editing, etc. The immediate reward was a party lei for the winners to wear for the rest of the day (I dearly hoped). But the real prize I promised them was a badge to put on their blogs.

I tried to rope one of my graphics-savvy students to design a badge for me, but there were no takers. So several days ago, once the immediate furor of the semester-ending activities died down, I downloaded Inkscape and scoured the internet for tutorials.

Never having used any raster-graphics software before in my life -- nope, no Adobe Illustrator, no CorelDraw -- I needed something for the complete novice. Luckily heathenx came to my rescue. I spent a total of about three hours on a weekend morning and afternoon creating the badges, which came out rather snazzy for a first effort, if I do say so myself. You can see examples of the results at the blogs of the "Most Transformed" and "Best 3rd Person Writing" winners. My design services are now for hire at reasonable rates.

2. Knit I-cord. I got to the top of the Sophie bag last night and was faced at last with the prospect of starting the handles, using a technique that is common in knitting but is new to me. When I'm about to start learning a new skill, I like to read as many descriptions of how to do it as possible, because I want to try to visualize the whole thing and get an overall grasp on the process. I've found that this is very difficult for me to do in knitting. Pictures help, but prose descriptions (e.g., "knit three stitches, then slide them to the other end of the double-pointed needle without turning and knit again") just do not help me get a movie going in my brain. So because I hadn't been able to get an image of how I-cord works (by the way, it's short for "idiot cord," because it's a deliberate version of a mistake made by some beginning knitters), I embarked upon it last night with trepidation.

But it all made sense the first time I slid the stitches to the other end of the needle. Aha -- it's not that you don't switch needles -- as usual, the needle in your right hand is transferred to your left hand. But instead of flipping the two 180 degrees horizontally (as if the needles were on the page of a book, and you were turning it), you rotate that needle through 180 degrees counterclockwise as you shift it to your left hand. Slide the stitches (now at the bottom of the needle) up to the top. The working yarn will now be on the bottom stitch, rather than at the top where it usually is. Knit that top stitch anyway, drawing the working yarn through tightly to pull the top and bottom stitch together. (That first knit stitch doesn't "pop" when you wrap/catch the yarn, at least for me, so I had to hold the wrapped yarn with a finger while pulling it through to maintain tension.) Then you're on your way back down to the bottom, when you do it all again!

This probably was pretty obvious to everybody else who's ever learned I-cord, but like so many knitting techniques, I find that the questions I have about how they work tend to be exactly the things that most descriptions of them seem to elide.

Anyway, my I-cord is proceeding apace, and if I weren't going to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3 tonight, I'd probably be felting before midnight.

3. End lists at two items rather than making up a third item that doesn't really fit, just to satisfy my sense of order that says that two items is not a list.

Posted: Fri - May 25, 2007 at 03:55 PM         |

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