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August 30, 2009: "We Become Silent" This video was mentioned in a natural thyroid activism group I belong to. I think it's well-done and should be watched by everyone. "International award-winning filmmaker Kevin P. Miller of Well TV announced the release of a new documentary about the threat to medical freedom of choice. 'We Become Silent: The Last Days of Health Freedom' details the ongoing attempts by multinational pharmaceutical interests and giant food companies — in concert with the WTO, the WHO and others — to limit the public’s access to herbs, vitamins and other therapies. 'We Become Silent’ is narrated by Dame Judi Dench, the noted UK actress who has won multiple Golden Globe awards, an Oscar, and a Tony for her on-stage work, in addition to dozens of other honors throughout her prestigious career."
August 28, 2009: Late-Summer Heat Wave I wish that we could send you poor people on the east coast some of our weather. You've all been wondering where summer went and we're all wondering why summer won't leave. I always tell people who want to visit Montana that late August/early September is the nicest month in which to do so. The weather is decent and all the kids are back in school. However, we don't usually have temps in the upper 80's and low 90's like we've been having this week. I'm ready for cooler weather—makes for better knitting. I've had a few days of power knitting finishing the last project for the Fall issue of Twists and Turns. I love how it turned out. It fits me perfectly and I'll take it with me to wear on the cruise next week. But now I am experiencing post-project letdown and I have no idea what I want to work on next or take with me on the cruise. I think a visit to the stash is in order. Is there anything you Twists and Turns subscribers would like to see in the newsletter? Camas Creek is having a big sale this weekend. I'm scheduled to work tomorrow and I am curious to see what the traffic is like. Other than that, I don't have anything interesting to share. The girls went back to school; DD#1 has to leave at a ridiculously early time every morning in order to drive herself to school for a 7:15 class (don't get me started on why I think that's an awful thing to do to teenagers enrolled in the IB program), and DD#2 likes both the upper-level teachers at our school. I'm so grateful that our school goes through 8th grade. A lot of the rural schools only go through 5th or 6th grade, at which point the kids need to go to the junior high in Kalispell. I'm glad she's been spared that transition. I've got some fire department business to take care of today, so I'll be knee-deep in Quickbooks, not yarn. But send those ideas over.
August 25, 2009: Planning The Fall Schedule This is my new best friend:
I love planners, because I like to see my schedule all neatly lined out and organized. I haven't reached the point where I color-code events based on type (fire department, school, etc.), although I've thought about it. I like this planner because it's laid out as two big pages for each month, with lots of room to write.
A few things still need to be added. I don't have the band schedule (I am treasurer of band board this year) and I don't know for sure if DD#2 will be having dance classes. Her teacher hurt her knee and as of few weeks ago she wasn't able to teach. I probably won't know for a week or two yet. I stopped at DD#2's school yesterday and talked to the secretary. There were four of us on the sub list last year who did the bulk of any subbing that needed to be done (although I didn't do as much because I was traveling). The school has hired the other three as full-time staff, which leaves me at the top of the sub list. I have no doubt that I could be employed as a full-time substitute teacher—if not at our school, certainly if I put my name on the county sub list because substitute teachers who can teach music are in short supply. I mentioned to our secretary that I was thinking about putting myself on the county sub list, and she threatened to call the county and tell them I wasn't available. She says they can keep me as busy as I want to be at our elementary school. They have a vested interest in having subs who know the kids, know the other teachers, and know the routine. It's much easier to have me sub than to bring in someone from outside the system. It's not that I necessarily want to be a substitute teacher, but it's a good way for me to bring in some steady income over the winter months. I can tell that the economy—especially the building industry—has really tanked here in Kalispell over the past year. We've been lucky in that the husband has had enough work to keep us afloat thus far, but I always worry going into the cold season. Last winter he was off for almost two months—that hasn't happened since we first moved here sixteen years ago. I want to be prepared for the possibility that he might be off for four or even five months this year. The good news is that the weather forecast is for a dry, open winter with above-average temperatures. But even good weather won't matter if no one is building any houses. So I may go ahead and do as much subbing as they want to give me at the elementary school. It's not exactly what I would call a high-stress job and the commute is short. Yeah, it means that I'll have less knitting time, but at this point, I'm kind of disillusioned with the whole knitting business anyway. We'll just have to see what happens.
August 24, 2009: There Was No Commerce Before E-Commerce One of the funniest comments I saw in the free pattern discussion at Ravelry was one which stated (and I am paraphrasing, but not much) that "before Ravelry and the Internet, indie designers didn't have a way to charge for their work because PayPal hadn't been invented yet. The Internet and Ravelry are inspiring them to monetize their work." I don't know for sure, but I suspect that poster is also a young-un who thinks that there was no commerce before e-commerce. I was an indie designer before PayPal and the Internet—I got paid via those old-fashioned pieces of paper known as checks. Someone else had the good sense to point out to that poster that Elizabeth Zimmermann was also an indie designer—way before PayPal and the Internet. I know, 18 year-olds have a much shorter frame of time reference than do those of us who are older. I just think it's funny that some of them think business wasn't invented until the creation of the Internet. I've been writing and grading patterns for the past three days. Once I get into the grading part of it, I really do enjoy it. I do it within a spreadsheet and it's almost like a puzzle, trying to get everything to line up and make sense for all the sizes. I'm grading one of the sweaters for the Fall issue in ten sizes, all the way from 28" around up to 56" inches around. I ama tad concerned that the design is going to be a bit out-of-proportion in the sizes at either end of the range, but it's been an interesting intellectual exercise. Not all designs lend themselves to that wide a range of sizes. School starts in two days for DD#2 and in three days for DD#1. I'm trying to be nonchalant about it, but I will be very excited to have the house to myself again during the day.
August 23, 2009: Theories of the Economic Kind Warning: This is a really long post with no pictures. I managed to get myself entangled in a Ravelry discussion this week; I really should just stay out of the Designers Forum and keep my blood pressure level down. Every so often, the topic of free patterns raises its head, and someone will come in and champion some fringe economic theory that would pretty much put me out of business. After all, designing is easy and therefore designers are ripping off customers by charging $8 for a knitting pattern. Yeah. Okay. I will admit that I got a bit snide in the discussion once I found out that the poster stirring up the debate was an 18 year-old college student. I remember being 18—I thought I had all the answers to the world's problems and along the way there were more than a few people helpful enough to slap me back to reality. I made a comment to the effect that I would be more interested in hearing that person's opinions when s/he had graduated from college and was having to make a living. In response, the poster pointed out that s/he was working several jobs to support him/herself, although I noticed that when I threw back the fundamentals of that poster's economic theory and asked if s/he would be willing to abide by them when it came to his or her job, the poster did not respond. It's all well and good to champion an economic theory in theory; it's something completely different when the rubber meets the road and the economic theory you are championing puts you out of a job. I like the concept of a free market (I've been living with a Libertarian for 22 years, can you tell?), but I also agree with Marnie (she was part of the debate, too) when she says, "It’s easy to say that capitalism should go unchecked . . . but left unchecked, capitalism tends to spawn monopolies which are entirely anti-competition. No system is perfect and no theory works out exactly as expected in the real world." Someone else in the discussion pointed out that no theory works out exactly as expected in the real world because theories tend to discount human nature as a part of the equation. I love being self-employed, and knitting has given me the flexibility to do a lot of things I couldn't have done if I had a different kind of job. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that—more and more frequently—I've been thinking about bagging it altogether and doing something else, because the playing field isn't level anymore. Thanks mostly to the Internet and Ravelry, there is a lot more knitting information available for free out there. Once people find out they can get something for free, they aren't usually willing to fork over money for a similar product. It's not that I don't want competition; I think competition is good for the customer. The best example I can think if is how InDesign supplanted Quark as the most commonly-used layout program. The company that made Quark got lazy and complacent and assumed that anyone who had to do any kind of layout work would have to use their product. They were outcompeted by Adobe. But their playing field was level—InDesign didn't take business away from Quark because it was free or even less expensive (it's not)—it took away business because it was a better product. I can compete with someone offering a similar product for less money by improving my product, charging less for it, etc. I can't compete with someone giving away knitting designs or information for free, because my business model isn't based on giving away my hard-earned knowledge for free. As an analogy, I posted the following scenario in the forum discussion. Substitute "knitting" for "waitressing" and you'll get a taste of what I mean: The scene: College student shows up for work one day.
This, sadly, is what I am facing more and more often. I'm having to come up with news ways to market my product so that I am not in competition with people giving the same information away for free. Case in point: knitting videos. I happen to think my Cabling 101 DVD is pretty darn good—it has almost a half an hour's worth of footage showing how to fix cabling mistakes three different ways depending on where they are in the knitting. But I am competing with videos all over the Internet showing how to fix a cable for free. I happen to know that those videos don't do it as well or as comprehensively as I do in my DVD, but no one is going to shell out $23.95 to find that out if they can zip over to a website and see it for free. I've got the better product—but it's not free. So the answer to that dilemma is that if I do another knitting video, I've got to do one that contains information that can't be found for free on the Internet. That's business; adapt or die. I know that there will be a review of my Cabling 101 DVD in the Fall issue of Knitty, so we'll see if that gives the DVD a much-needed bump. I've noticed a lot of changes in my business over the past 18 months or so, and not all of them have been good. And not all of them have been due to the downturn in the economy, either. I do want to finish the next two cabling books and perhaps do another DVD, and then I'll re-evaluate. I just wish I could say to everyone who wants it all for free: Be careful what you wish for—you just might get it. And it might not be what you thought it was.
August 20, 2009: Patternfish Thanks to some persistence and assistance from the lovely Julia, I've now got a design up for sale at Patternfish. The plan is to add more as days go by, but I've got a bunch of stuff on my plate at the moment so they may be added slowly. Remember the issues I was having with my printer a few days ago? The saga continues. . . The new printer was delivered Monday afternoon. I hooked it up, turned it on—and it threw an error code and refused to go any further. I called Xerox tech support. We did some hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo (which didn't work) and then the tech abruptly said, "I'm scheduling you for a service call. We will overnight a part to you and someone will be there this week to fix it." Huh. So on Tuesday I got a call from Patrick, the service tech for the western half of the state of Montana. He tried to make it up here from Missoula yesterday but couldn't, so he promised to be here this afternoon to fix the printer. In the meantime, FOUR BOXES of parts arrived at my house via UPS yesterday. It seems that not only is Patrick going to fix the printer, he is going to completely rebuild it. If this printer turns out to be a lemon, I may have to take someone's head off. This is really getting ridiculous. I can't print patterns without a reliable printer. And I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a $1000 printer to work properly out-of-the-box. The Denise sweater is all done and ready to send off today; the pattern is written and went to the tech editor last evening. I've moved on to finishing a sweater design for the Fall issue and hopefully in a week or so I'll get to take some time off and start a new, fun project. I was knitting in a meeting at church last night and one of the other ladies (who also knits) leaned over and whispered, "Do you ever make a mistake?" Her eyes got really wide when I nodded. Designers don't have a corner on the market when it comes to perfection, trust me.
August 19, 2009: G'ma Milly
Mildred Johnson Schipper The husband's grandmother died yesterday, just ten days short of her 96th birthday. Affectionately known as "Grandma Milly" (or G'ma Milly in all correspondence), she will be missed greatly by all of us who had the pleasure of knowing her. The husband and I have been together for 22 years, so I was the lucky recipient of a lot of G'ma Milly wit and wisdom. She came to visit the husband at college one spring, just after we had started dating. I got a hint of the high regard he had for her even before she arrived: he put on a long-sleeve shirt and began removing all the pictures of him from the walls of the apartment he shared with our friend Michael. When I asked him what he was doing (it was 90 degrees outside and a bit warm for a long-sleeve shirt), he answered, "My grandmother doesn't know I have a tattoo, and I don't want her to find out." A little later that day, she and I were standing alone down at the boat dock and she leaned over to me and said, rather conspiratorially, "I know he has a tattoo." Not much got past G'ma Milly, and she loved the husband a lot, tattoo and all. Before we moved to Montana, we spent many a wonderful weekend at her house in Pennsylvania. She was a fabulous gardener, known far and wide for her collection of azaleas, and the yard was a stunning sight when all of them were in bloom. G'ma Milly welcomed everyone as family, even those of us who weren't blood relations. I was married to the husband, so as far as she was concerned, I was simply an additional grandchild to feed and love. Thanksgiving dinner always included lots of extended family and anyone else who happened to be passing through. She generously shared recipes and gardening tips, and although I will never be the cook that she was, I try to keep the husband supplied with baked goods in her honor. She drove with me from Maryland to Ohio when I was four months pregnant because my father had just been diagnosed with multiple myeloma and no one wanted me to drive by myself. She had first-hand experience with the disease; her husband had died from MM in the early 70s. It was something she would have done for any of her grandchildren, so she did it for me, and I appreciated her presence that weekend. G'ma Milly handed down a collection of stories about coming to Kalispell in the early 40's, when her husband was a park ranger at Glacier Park. Back then, she told us, Main Street was a dirt road, and she had to chase away a grizzly bear that came to call in their yard while she was hanging diapers up to dry. She enjoyed coming here to visit when my girls were little. As an artist, she created beautiful images in her paintings and quilts. We have one of her quilts hanging on the wall of our bedroom, and it will be a constant reminder from now on of her loving influence in our lives. She will be missed.
August 18, 2009: Conspiracy The news on the thyroid support forums I frequent is not good. This morning I checked in to one forum only to discover that RLC Labs—the maker of Naturethroid natural desiccated thyroid hormone—has announced a shortage of that medication. RLC was inundated with orders for Naturethroid after Forest Labs changed its formulation of Armour thyroid (another natural desiccated thyroid hormone) to something that didn't work. RLC is having trouble keeping up with the increased demand, but I wonder if there isn't something larger and more insidious happening. I try very hard not to be a conspiracy theorist, but I've had enough bad experiences with the American medical system to know who's actually pulling the strings, and it isn't the doctors or patients. It's the drug companies. I wouldn't be surprised in the least to find out that a drug company is behind the shortage of desiccated thyroid (with the complicit help of the FDA) in order to drive millions of thyroid patients to their synthetic thyroid medications. I've seen what lengths they've gone to to try to get bio-identical hormones banned from the marketplace so that patients would have to take their products instead—products that have been demonstrated to be harmful. Don't get me wrong—I have nothing against synthetic medications. Lots of good things have been synthesized in the lab. I am on liothyronine, which is a synthetic thyroid hormone that happens to work well for me. However, there is a well-documented body of evidence that synthetic levothyroxine thyroid hormone doesn't work well for most people. [Without going into gory detail, the difference is that liothyronine is T3, the active thyroid hormone, and levothyroxine is T4, a storage hormone that is converted to T3 as needed. The problem is that many. many people cannot convert levothyroxine into T3 adequately and are left feeling symptomatic.] Not everything synthetic works well in the human body. The generic liothyronine I took in June was considerably weaker than the brand name that I take now. I don't want to start a political discussion on this blog. Suffice it to say that I don't think we are going to get ANY kind of good health care program in this country no matter which political party is in charge, because Congress is going to allow the drug companies and insurance companies to write legislation that favors them over consumers. It happened with the prescription drug program and it will happen with a health insurance program. As long as their dollars are flowing to our elected representatives, they will have the most influence. (I've written to Max Baucus, the Democratic senator from Montana, who happens to be the head of the Senate Finance Committee and is helping lead the charge for health care reform. I sent my letter over a week ago and have received no response thus far—but you can bet that if the head of a drug company contacted Mr. Baucus, he or she would have immediate and unrestricted access.) At this point, I would rather maintain the status quo than change it to a system where the drug companies get to call the shots. I find it terribly scary that people I know are going to get sick again because they cannot get the medicine they so desperately need to stay well. I just hope the groundswell of patient complaints is enough to overcome any strong-arm tactics by drug companies to dictate what medicine should be available to thyroid patients. People should be able to take what works for them, no matter if it comes in synthetic or natural form. One good thing is that now—thanks to the internet—patients can communicate and compare notes with each other. I think that scares the living daylights out of large corporations, because informed consumers cannot be duped as easily. Why else would the corn lobby in this country spend millions of dollars in advertising to try to convince consumers that high fructose corn syrup isn't bad for you? If it truly weren't bad for you, they wouldn't need to do anything. DD#1's senior project is on the dangers of artificial sweeteners. Both of my girls have been a big help when doing the grocery shopping, as they have become excellent label-readers and are good at sleuthing out alternatives to products containing HFCS. It's time to get to work; I have three sweater patterns that need to be graded and written today. Fun fun.
August 17, 2009: Vintage Wool and Zephyr Needles Today my blog readers get mini-reviews of two new products. The first is a new yarn by Berroco, called Vintage Wool.
When I got to Camas Creek yesterday afternoon, Melanie thrust a skein of this into my hands as she was walking out the door to her mother's birthday party (Happy Birthday, Mary Lou!). "It's a new yarn I am thinking of carrying for afghans," she said. I asked if I could swatch it and she said yes, so I sat down with yarn and needles and knit up a cable-and-seed stitch swatch. This stuff is really nice. It's a blend of 50% wool and 50% acrylic, smooth and tightly spun. As much as I like the Berroco Comfort yarn for easy-care garments, it has a tendency to split while knitting, and that can be frustrating. This yarn feels and behaves much like a well-spun wool, but has the easy care of an acrylic—the best of both worlds! Melanie will be getting it in in September and I think it will be very popular. The other item I wanted to mention is the new Zephyr needle from KnitPicks.
I actually tried these out when I visited the KnitPicks office last September, but I was sworn to secrecy. They are quite nice and the flexibility of the acrylic tips makes them really good for cabling. It would be worth buying a pair and trying them out to see if you find them as nice to work with as I did. I was so busy swatching that I forgot to get pictures of Chrissy's class yesterday, but everyone looked like they were having a wonderful time. I hope Chrissy comes back again to teach more sock classes!
August 16, 2009: Toe-Up! Chrissy Gardiner is in Kalispell today to teach a class on knitting socks from the toe up. She's just come out with a wonderful self-published book entitled Toe-Up!: Patterns and Worksheets to Whip Your Sock Knitting Into Shape.
Most of the world knows that I am just not a big sock knitter . . . I've done socks but I really have to be in the right mood to enjoy them. But Chrissy's book might just make me change my mind. I'm going to sit in on her class today and I am sure I will learn a thing or two. Chrissy and her husband and their two kids came over for dinner last night. I just love her kids. We had a lot of fun playing on the fire engine when they were here last summer. Chrissy gave me the Sock Summit recap and it sounds like it was great fun. How could it not be? We had a very busy day at Camas Creek yesterday. I was scheduled to work from 10-2 but actually stayed until 3 because we had so many customers. I taught one woman how to knit (again—she knew from childhood but needed a refresher) and helped untangle a baby blanket project for a delightful 95 year-old lady who was born in Germany and taught by her father to knit after they moved to Mexico when she was a child. Her mother died when she was only 3, and her father wanted her to learn how to knit, so he taught her using instructions his sister mailed from Germany. Quite a story. I do like working at the yarn store. I don't think I would want to be there every day (surrounded by all that yarn but not being able to knit would be too frustrating!), but the occasional Saturday is a lot of fun. I will take my camera with me to class today.
August 15, 2009: 2nd Annual Camas Creek Winter Retreat I know, it's only August. Why am I talking about a Winter Retreat when it's still hot out? Melanie and I have scheduled the 2nd Annual Camas Creek Winter Retreat at the Izaak Walton Inn for the weekend of January 23-24, 2010. Room space is limited, and when I talked to her yesterday, she told me that spots are already filling up. I will take up to 25 students in each class, but a spot in a class doesn't guarantee you a place to sleep. If you're interested (and so far we've got students coming from as far away as Michigan and Canada), you might want to call Melanie at 406-755-9276 and talk to her about registering for the weekend. Classes on the schedule for the weekend are:
We had a fabulous time there in January and it should be just as much fun in 2010! Bring your skis! I just looked at the calendar and I leave for the cruise three weeks from today! The cruise has been in the planning stages for over a year, so it's kind of a shock to realize that it's almost here. I spent some time yesterday revamping one of my class handouts. I have a tendency to cram way too much stuff into my handouts—a practice I started after the very first class I taught at Stitches Midwest in 1999, when I got through all the class material in an hour and a half and had to pull stuff out of my armpit to fill up the remainder of the time. That's the stuff of knitting teachers' nightmares. I'd rather have too much than too little, but in this case some trimming needed to be done. One of the techniques at the end of the handout always gets short shrift because we spend so much time on the techniques at the beginning. I pared it down and now it should be much better. The Denise sweater is done and the shawl collar looks really nice. I need to set aside a day this week to do nothing but write patterns. I have to be in the right frame of mind to write patterns, and I have to do it on a day when I know I can work with few interruptions. Those days are few and far between.
August 13, 2009: Rise of the Machines Yesterday was one of those days. Fiber Trends sent me a pattern order, so I set to getting it printed after lunch. I took the first page off the laser printer and discovered that there were ghost images appearing on the page. Huh. I got out the manual and looked—nothing about ghost images; I located the service manual online and found that it did have something to say about ghost images. It suggested that cleaning the printer using the troubleshooting software—which was included on the installation disk—might help. I found the installation disk (I keep everything—I found the installation disk from TouchAmerica, when we still had dial up-back in 1996 . . . it's probably time to do a bit of cleaning). I popped it into the computer. The troubleshooting software only works under Windows. Blah. Stupid HP. But wait!—I have Parallels! I can pretend I have a Windows machine! I booted Parallels up, only to find out that I had to register it (again . . . I am pretty sure I registered it the first time I used it). I found the license key, went online and registered it, booted up Windows, installed the software, ran the troubleshooting program, and cleaned the printer. It worked . . . for a while. I suspect that to really fix this problem, the fuser will have to be replaced. The part alone costs $250 and I have no idea who around here would want to service this printer. I'm tired of throwing money at this thing. I print $800 worth of patterns and have to spend $400 on toner. It's ridiculous. I bought this printer (an HP Color LaserJet 2500) because I have a LaserJet 1200 that's been a workhorse for over 10 years. I've printed several hundred thousand pages on it. The 2500 doesn't even come close to being the same kind of quality machine as the 1200. I am done with HP. So I ordered a Xerox Phaser 8560 from Staples. Several of my knitting colleagues have the Phaser and have given me glowing reviews. And I am really looking forward to the two-sided printing capability. It will be here in a week. Oh, and my cell phone? The one I washed last week with the laundry? I put it in a bowl of rice (thanks, Mary, for the idea) and it dried out nicely. It even started up. It dials. It rings. But no one can hear me when I speak into it. That's a problem. And none of the phones on our plan is up for renewal, so a new phone would cost me full-price. I went to Alltel Tuesday to see if they could transfer my number to DD#1's old phone. The woman there was having issues with their computer. She took the information and gave me a card and told me to dial up a special number to activate the other phone; only the special number didn't work. And DD#1's old phone doesn't have Bluetooth, so it can't talk to my truck. Hands-free capability is kind of important when driving a stick shift. DD#2 solved the problem for me. We have a fourth phone—the one DD#2 has been using—that does have Bluetooth. DD#2 had some birthday money, so she bought herself a different phone. I will take the Bluetooth phone in to Alltel and have my number transferred to it and hopefully we'll all be able to talk to each other (and to the truck) once more. The chief called me yesterday because dispatch e-mailed him and said text messages to my phone were bouncing back to them. I explained the whole situation and said I would have it fixed today. I hope. To top off a lovely day, the husband informed me that someone in a white car opened their door into my right front fender and left a fairly serious dent. Thanks. But today is another day. The girls are off to the dentist to get their teeth cleaned and then DD#1 heads to work and DD#2 and I head off to run errands. She's taken over the zucchini bread production. Yesterday she churned out half a dozen more loaves. Yay.
August 10, 2009: Be A Bone Marrow Donor I've been trying to think of some way to commemorate the fact that this year is the 15th anniversary of me surviving leukemia. I would like to do something knitting-related (perhaps an auction of some sort to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society), but until then, I can't think of a better way to do it than to ask everyone to consider becoming a bone marrow donor. I did not have a bone marrow transplant as part of my treatment, but I knew a lot of people who did. My sister registered as a donor. It's at the front of my mind now because we have a gentleman in our community who desperately needs a transplant but cannot find a matching donor. So I am asking that all of you who read the blog considered becoming a bone marrow donor. It's not a commitment to take lightly, but it is a very important one. It would be a great way to help me celebrate 15 years of survival. If you're interested, please visit the Be The Match website and join the registry. If you don't feel you can make the commitment (and that's okay), would you consider making a monetary donation so that someone else can become a donor? (Sometimes there are costs associated with the DNA testing.) Or consider going to your local blood bank and making a donation there. I used to donate blood regularly until I got sick, and now they won't take my blood anymore. Thanks. I appreciate it. And so will lots of other people. Today's zucchini haul:
I just can't keep up (I let these get a bit bigger than I should have). I think I will start freezing the shredded zucchini to make bread with later. My friend Susan is getting a couple of these because she's involved in a local group that provides meals in Kalispell and she's responsible for part of the meal tomrorow night. The collar is almost done on the sweater. Yay! I got a bit of a reprieve because the author doesn't need the sweater until next week. So I will finish the collar and then I want to add a belt and some pockets. And then it will be done.
August 8, 2009: I Love Set-In Sleeves I love to watch "trends" in the knitting world. I always have, starting way back in the 80s when I was in college. I knit a lot in college. I made many sweaters from the book Great Knitting in Vogue, and I learned designing basics from a book entitled All Sweaters in Every Gauge by Barbara Goldstein. The Vogue book contained designs from the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s. Set-in sleeves were a common design element, so I knit them. No one told me they were hard. I did have to have my mother help me set in the sleeves on the first sweater I made, but her technique was so easy that after that, I had no trouble. One of my very favorite sweaters was a simple crew-neck, set-in sleeve pullover made from blue and gray ragg Brunswick Germantown. Alas, the sweater is no longer with me (not that it would fit now anyway), but I do have a supply of blue and gray ragg Brunswick Germantown and one day I will re-create that sweater. If you go back and look at knitting magazines from that period, you will see that a shift takes place, driven (naturally) by fashion. Set-in sleeves become "dfficult"—difficult for designers, difficult for knitters—and the style shifts to boxy, oversized garments made mostly of unshaped rectangles. Now we're shifting back to more fitted garments. Thank goodness. The sweater I designed and have been working on for someone else's book has set-in sleeves. My comfort level with set-in sleeves is such that I didn't really even do any fancy math while knitting the sleeve caps. I just did them—I looked at the armscye, looked at the sleeve, did a few simple calculations in my head, and knitted away. I figured if they weren't correct, I could re-knit them. I didn't have to. I put the sweater together last night. First, I joined the shoulders with a three-needle bind-off. (If this weren't a proprietary project, I would have taken pictures.) Then I pinned the sleeve cap into the armhole opening, centering the top of the sleeve cap with the shoulder seam. The sleeve cap fit into the armscye perfectly. I slip-stitch crocheted it into place. Then I sat and (I kid you not) stared at the sleeves for a couple of minutes—that's how awesome they looked. My method of shaping sleeve caps comes mostly from Deborah Newton's book Designing Knitwear (a most excellent reference book). I follow her guidelines, although I follow some more closely than others. For instance:
So what does this mean in terms of the knitting? When I got to the place where I wanted to begin the cap shaping, I bound off a group of stitches at either side to match the number of bound-off stitches at the beginning of the armhole shaping of the body. Then I bound off one stitch at the beginning of each RS row and one stitch at the beginning of each WS row 22 times (11 times on each side). At that point my sleeve cap was approximately 3 3/4" tall. Remember that my sleeve cap can only be about 5 2/3" tall, so I've only got a bit less than 2" left in which to complete the shaping. I switched to a slightly faster bind-off rate: two stitches at the beginning of each RS row, and two stitches at the beginning of each WS row. I did that a total of 12 times (six on each side). That left me about 3/4" to knit. I increased the bind-off rate to three stitches at a time—a total of six times (three on each side). I bound off the remaining 3" worth of stitches and ta da!—my sleeve cap was complete. The combination of different bind-off rates gave a nice curve to the top of the cap. The goal is to have the measurement along the top of the cap equal the measurement around the armhole opening (flexible rulers are useful for taking these measurements). Once the sleeves were sewn in, all that remained was to sew the sleeve and side seams. Today I will pick up and knit the shawl collar and the sweater will be done! Yay! The husband put my bookcase together for me yesterday morning. I rearranged and reorganized the books that were already out, then retrieved the rest from storage and added them to the collection. It's lovely to have my gardening books and spinning books within reach again.
August 7, 2009: Think Your Doctor Is Treating You? Think Again. I know I'm on the verge of sounding like a bit of a nutcase lately (and we will get back to knitting later in this post), but unless you've had to fight to get well from some disease (like leukemia or hypothyroidism), you have absolutely no idea how bad the state of American medicine is. Doctors aren't practicing medicine in this country; the drug companies are. I was astounded when I read the following on Mary Shomon's Thyroid Blog this morning:
You can read Medco's notice and Mary's response to Medco at her website. In a nutshell, natural desiccated thyroid has been used to treat thyroid patients since the 40s and 50s. It's made from pig thyroid. The drug companies make a synthetic version (levothyroxine) of one of the thyroid hormones we need. They have worked very hard to defame natural desiccated thyroid, convincing a whole generation of doctors to prescribe the synthetic version instead. One of the companies that makes natural desiccated thyroid—Forrest Labs—recently changed the formulation of their product known as Armour, and that did result in shortages for a while. However, natural desiccated thyroid is still available from other companies. There are people who cannot get well on the synthetic thyroid drug. They need natural desiccated thyroid. And since when does a pharmacy tell your doctor what drugs he or she should prescribe for you? I may have to start a separate blog for some of this stuff. My apologies to those of you who came here looking for knitting. The deadline sweater pieces are blocked and drying upstairs. I want to get the collar knitted this weekend and then it's just a matter of writing the pattern and getting it all shipped off. The first draft of the Fall issue is going to the tech editor on Monday. My bookcase arrived yesterday (hooray!) and the husband offered to put it together for me this morning so I can finally get my mess of an office cleaned up. It will be nice to have my books out instead of packed in boxes. If the husband and I ever build another house, we will just have to accept that fact that we need one room to be nothing but a library full of shelves. It'll take me a while to catch up to Joan Schrouder and her collection of knitting books, though.
August 6, 2009: My Fabulous Doctor I belong to a couple of thyroid forums, and it always saddens me to hear stories from people who cannot get decent medical care from their doctors. Most of the time their doctors are arrogant endocrinologists spouting the drug company party line that the drugs are working even when the patient complains that they don't feel better. "Look, your labs say you are normal. Why are you complaining? Have some Prozac, that will make you feel better." Unfortunately, this kind of substandard medical care seems to be the norm, not the exception. All of which makes me really appreciate my doctor. He and I have the kind of working relationship that I wish everyone could have with their doctor (and I have lots of experience with doctors, most of it bad). Case in point: he was worried that the thyroid meds I was taking might have adverse effects on my bones. In January he said, "Some time in the next six months, I would like you to have a bone scan so that we have a baseline to compare to in the future." I scheduled the scan for the beginning of April. He didn't dictate, he didn't order; he simply presented his reasoning in a straightforward manner and I was happy to comply. I saw him yesterday morning and he was thrilled with the results of my scan. He said my numbers were the best he'd ever seen—my bones are strong and healthy. And I don't drink milk or take calcium supplements. (I haven't drunk milk since I was really little—my mother says that one day I tossed my bottle out of the crib and that was it.) My personal feeling is that milk is bad for humans and drinking it actually leaches calcium from your bones because milk turns acidic once it gets into your digestive system. However, this is America, where we do what's good for the corporations, not what's good for the public. We have a huge dairy lobby that spends a lot of money telling us how good milk is for us, and a lot of drug companies making a lot of money on osteoporosis medications. But I digress. I told my doctor how annoyed I was with the generic thyroid medication and that I had gained back all of the weight I had lost over the spring while taking it. One of my friends also sees this particular doctor and—under his supervision—is doing HCG injections. HCG is a hormone that jump-starts a person's metabolism by telling the hypothalamus it needs to burn excess fat. My friend has already lost close to 30 pounds in just a few months. I have another friend doing the program under a different doctor's supervision, and she's lost 62 pounds in about four months. Both of these women have tried for years to lose weight, to no avail. If I hadn't seen them get skinnier and skinnier before my very eyes, I wouldn't have believed it. My friend who lost 62 pounds says that now she's "addicted to hiking," something she couldn't do before. My doctor offered to start me on the same program. While the thought of losing these extra 15 pounds so quickly is appealing, the program is pretty rigorous and it just won't fit it with my schedule right now. I told my doctor that I'd rather try to lose weight the way I did in the spring, by taking an adequate amount of thyroid hormone, exercising, and sticking to my mostly-vegetarian diet. As long as my thyroid meds don't get screwed up again, I should be fine. As a bonus, my doctor's wife is a knitter, and I run into her from time to time at Camas Creek. We had some thunderstorms come through overnight. The first couple were dry thunderstorms—lightning and thunder but no rain. Then we got one with about 20 minutes of a steady, soaking rain. It's supposed to be like this most of the day—I just hope that we get enough rain to put out any fire starts from lightning strikes. It'll be a good day to knit.
August 5, 2009: The Usual August Funk I've reached that point in the summer where I would like everyone to go back to school. I love my kids, but I want my routine back. I want to clean the kitchen in the morning and have it look nice for longer than 30 seconds. I want to leave the Weather Channel on all day without people commenting on how lame my TV-watching habits are. I don't want people to use my computer to check Facebook because they just don't feel like going upstairs or downstairs where the other (non-business) computers are. I desperately want a massage, but I can't get one for another three weeks. (My kids are old enough to leave at home by themselves, but I don't like to do that during fire season.) I want to lose this weight I put on when my thyroid meds got screwed up. I want to enjoy my knitting again and not dread having to sit down and work on something. I want to take a day off and not feel guilty about it. I'd really like it not to be so hot. Blah. Let's look at some gratuitous garden pictures. Columbines are still blooming:
The bee balms are also blooming. The red ones are always first:
Only one of my echinaceas has bloomed so far, but it's a prolific one:
And the lavender is out, much to the bees' delight:
I went out one early evening a few days ago and just sat in the garden and took pictures with different settings on my camera. I was hoping to get the hummingbird at the bee balms, but he wouldn't come back while I was there. DD#1 still seems to be doing okay. I know she's got some discomfort, but either it's not that bad or she's really good at holding it in, because she hasn't complained much. We'll see how she's doing this morning. I think if she can get through today, she should be fine.
August 4, 2009: Teeth My trip to the dentist's office yesterday was quick and (mostly) painless. She shot me up with so much novacaine that the numbness didn't wear off until about 3 p.m. (this was from a 9 a.m. appointment). I have had trouble in the past with my mouth not getting numb enough for her to work on my teeth, so she now errs on the side of too much rather than too little. That's fine with me. She also took DD#2's baby tooth out. And according to the oral surgeon, DD#1 did "very well" having her wisdom teeth out this morning. The extraction took about 45 minutes. She's hanging out on the couch now, watching Sponge Bob. The novacaine has worn off and she says her jaw is sore, but she declined the offer of some Advil to help (as suggested in the post-op instructions). She says she just wants to tough it out. So it's going to be a quiet week here. I'm off to put some fringe on an afghan, and then I have to iron. Ugh. I let it pile up until it threatens to take over.
August 3, 2009: Organizational Progress The husband and I (okay, mostly the husband) put together the storage racks for my yarn bins yesterday. They are quite fabulous:
In the process, I had to clean out the yarn room, which has become a dumping ground for all sorts of stuff. Some of it is going to Goodwill. Some of it is going in the trash. Some of it will have to stay until I find a better place for it (there are two boxes of books that eventually will end up on the new bookshelf in my office, if it ever arrives). There are also two old and non-functioning computers and a non-functioning monitor. I found a place that will recycle them; I just need to get them packed up and shipped off. I have a dentist appointment this morning to get a small cavity filled. The dentist has been watching it for about DD#1 has an appointment tomorrow morning to have her wisdom teeth out. This is going to be such a fun week around here. I've got a sweater to assemble, another one to finish knitting, and an afghan to fringe. Oh, and about 10 loaves of zucchini bread to make.
August 1, 2009: Works Better When Dry My cell phone went through the wash yesterday. Trust me, I did not intend to launder my cell phone. I've taken to carrying it around in my back pocket recently, because we're now getting our fire department pages as text messages on our phones in addition to hearing them on our radios. That's so much more convenient than toting my two-pound radio with me everywhere. All of which led to me washing a pair of jeans with my cell phone in the back pocket. I won't be wearing my phone on my body again, that's for sure. One of my designer friends suggested putting it in a bowl of dry rice to dry it out, so that's where it is. We'll see if that does the trick. If not, maybe I'll just get a Crackberry and be done with it. I spent most of the day at my computer yesterday, working on the layout for the Fall issue of the newsletter. JC Briar, my tech editor and knitting partner in crime, is teaching at Sock Summit. I promised to have the first draft on her desk the day after Sock Summit is over. I made quite a bit of progress; there are only a few spots left to fill. One will have a review of Chrissy Gardiner's new book Toe-Up! Patterns and Worksheets to Whip Your Sock Knitting Into Shape. I am trying to channel Chrissy—once she got it into her head to finish her self-published book, she got it done in about six months. I still want to get Cables 2 done this fall. If I could have a string of days like yesterday, it wouldn't take me long. Debbie, you asked for the zucchini bread recipe, so here it is. This was given to me by a lady at church about six or seven years ago. I like it because it's not overly sweet. 1 3/4 cup flour 1/2 cup oil Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredient in a separate bowl and add to dry, mixing gently. Pour into muffin tins or loaf pans. Bake at 350 degrees for approximately 40 minutes. Variations: Add 1/2 cup shredded carrots, 1/3 cup raisins, and/or 1/2 cup chopped nuts. The baking time is an approximation because a) I have high-altitude issues (although probably not like you do, Debbie) and b) my loaf pans are pretty big. I am going to get some smaller loaf pans today and see if that makes a difference. Sometimes I have to bake mine until the tops are pretty brown in order to make sure the center is cooked. These are also excellent as muffins, and they freeze really well. I used two fairly sizeable zucchini (about a foot long each) and they made five big loaves of zucchini bread. There are still another dozen or so zucchini in the garden, so as long as I remember to get eggs (I had to borrow some from the neighbor yesterday), I will be churning out zucchini bread for the next couple of weeks. We lost another tree in our yard. A front came through and it was pretty windy Thursday night. The husband got called out for a downed power line, and when he got back, I said, "I heard a crash while you were gone—I think a tree came down somewhere." He said he hadn't seen anything when he pulled into the driveway. Last night Rusty cornered something under the gardening shed and was trying to excavate it. The husband and I were watching him, and I happened to glance over at the far end of the yard, where there was a big tree lying on its side. Ha!—I hadn't been dreaming. We'll cut it up and add it to the mountain of firewood we already have. There is another dead one right next to it, but it looks like the woodpeckers are using it, so I told the husband we can't cut it down just yet. [Why yes, the animals run the show around here, why do you ask?] Thanks for all your comments yesterday. It's nice to know I am not alone, but you'd think this Neanderthal behavior would have died out by now, no? I'm off to work at Camas Creek for a few hours today. The weather forecast is calling for hot (90s) and dry for the next five days, with occasional thunderstorms. Fun and games. |
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