Just keep knitting, just keep knitting...

This is my Spring Shawl - see the safety line, see, see?



So - everything is going along very nicely, but I thought I'd better have a peek at the pattern, seeing as we'd grown apart over the past few months. And I read this little line :

Repeat Rows 1-8 [ie the diamond pattern] until there are 195 sts on the needle.

Bottom Edge : etc

Um. I have 307 stitches on the needle.

Currently the (unblocked) shawl is 44 cm down the centre back (~17"). The pattern says that after adding the edge and blocking the shawl is 58 cm (23") down the centre back.

So - here are my options:

1) I just keep knitting the pink bit until the cone is empty. I can't get it off the cone to weigh it, but there's only 1 cm 'depth' of wool left before I hit cardboard. My main concern here is that I'm using the Caterpillar Yarn to do the edge (it's light greens and pinks and greys), and have 49g of it - I want to make sure the 'Caterpillar' Edge is reasonably wide.

2) I stop the pink bit now (I'm at the end of a pattern repeat as luck would have it) and get started on the Edge Pattern (8 rows of it). The shawl is going to get a fair bit bigger once I block it, isn't it?

Whaddayareckin?! I mean, a shawl can never be too big, can it?

Dictionary Madness

For the past months I've been working on my Master Word List, something every professional crossword writer needs.



Crossword words are an unusual subset - plurals, superlative forms (-ier -est ) and verb & adverb forms (-ing -ly etc) are best avoided, there should no offensive or swear words, no gory, medical or highly technical terms, no sexual terms, no really depressing words (coffin, cadaver, suicide etc), no American spellings, etc. So I'm removing as many words as I'm putting in. I'm adding things like well-known Australian slang, place names from around the world, foody terms, very short phrases, and names of well known people. My word list helps give the crosswords I write "my style", so it's a vital part of my professional 'tool kit'.

I have a basic word list (of ~ 58,000 words) which is from an American university - but it's not a really good list as it contains many American spellings, mixed with UK spellings, lots of technical scientific terms, names of chemical compounds, disease names, etc, and lots of variant forms of words, some of which have been automatically generated and aren't real words. For example, coming up soon is :

• coincide
• coincided
• coincidence
• coincidences
• coincident
• coincidental
• coincidentally
• coincidents
  
• coincides
• coinciding

Out of these, I'll probably only leave coincide, coincidence, coincides, and maybe coincided.

So I'm going through the list word-by-word, checking it against the Australian Oxford Dictionary (AOD). Yeah, I'm reading the whole dictionary. Pity my memory isn't good enough to remember every word!

In the side bar you'll see a new item, which is which word I'm up to, what number it is in the Master List, and which page I'm up to in my Australian Oxford Dictionary. Just to help me keep track of this huge job, and get some sense of progress. It's taking quite some time. I don't work on it every day, but really should do at least 10 pages of the AOD every weekday if I want to finish by the end of the year!

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And now, just cos Julie did it, here's which die I am :




Take the quiz at dicepool.com

"You are the rare, the overlooked, yet incredibly useful dodecahedron: the d12. You are a creative, romantic soul. You often act without thinking, but make up for your lack of plans with plenty of heart. You easily solve problems that stump others, but your answers tend to put you into even deeper trouble. You write long, detailed backgrounds for all your characters, and are most likely to dress up as one or get involved in cos-play. You can be silly at times and are easily distracted by your own day dreams, but are at the end of the day you're someone who can be depended on."

Yup. Sounds about right (especially during my old AD&D playing days... quiet you - it was a long time ago!) LOL!

Colour tricks

As I think I've mentioned before, I'm keen to make the Mariah cardigan, but I'm having trouble deciding on which colour and yarn to use. I had a bit of a brainwave just now, and thought I could do some of my graphic designery tricks on the Mariah photo from Knitty (hope this isn't a problem - the original photo is by Peter Zimmerman, and Jodi Green is the model and designer. I can remove this post if there are objections to my using this photo here).

So here is the design in different colours (my approximations according to my Bendigo shade card). I was tending towards the light olive green, but am surprisingly attracted to the Red Tweed, now, actually!

Blue Mix (Bendigo Alpaca)

Elm (Bendigo Rustic) or Pistachio (if a bit lighter) (Bendigo Alpaca)

Red Tweed (Bendigo Rustic)

If anyone wants to know the Photoshop tricks to do this, here's what to do :

Open the image in Photoshop. Select the area to change colour - use the Lasso Tool. This can be a bit fiddly. If you want to try lots of changes, it can be worth putting this selection into a new layer. Go to the Layer Menu > New > New Layer via Cut (Shift Command J) or via Copy (Command J).

Go to the Image Menu > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation (Command U)

Make sure that Colorize and Preview are ticked. Then use the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness sliders to adjust the colours to your heart's content! Other colour adjustment options are useful too, such as Selective Colour, Colour Balance, and so on. Levels is also useful (Command L).

I'm using Adobe Photoshop CS2, professional version - not sure if lighter-weight versions of Photoshop can do all of these options, but it ought to be able to!