Doings Lately

This is a long Valentine’s weekend, chez kmbrknits, with all of us home Monday for President’s Day. It's also been rainy and cold—well, for SoCal anyway—so we’ve been doing some cozying up and hibernating.

Recently, we got a new TV, in anticipation of the digital switchover. We’ve been watching movies and catching up on recorded stuff. SysGuy installed an HD antenna on the back of the house a few weeks ago, and got the cabling strung in the crawlspace (ugh). At first, we had our 26" CRT tv hooked up to a linux box with a signal converter, and I have to say that even in analog, the picture was much better. There were, however, some pretty good deals on tvs prior to the superbowl (which we’re totally oblivious to), so we did take advantage of one and plunked down for a—gasp!—52" hd monitor type monster. I know, its huge. We were really conflicted: a tv to actually fit the space (the couch is about 15' from the tv), or be cowed by the McMansiony ostentation of it. I pushed for the bigger tv, I’ll admit. We could always send it back if it was too horrifyingly large. It is in a back room of the house, so its not the first thing you see when you walk in the front door (that would have been a deal killer right there, I hate that).

Over the last few weeks, we’ve managed to get used to it. SuperDad pointed out that other members of our family have several tvs in their houses that probably add up to the total screen real estate in our one (humongous) tv, so its a wash. That made me feel better, anyway. The picture is seriously awesome, though sometimes TMI on the complexions, but its good to know that tv people are human after all. What to do with the old one now, though?

So the movie watching over this long weekend has been particularly excellent, since previously we were watching movies that were letterboxed on the 26" tv from 15' away. The new tv is freaky, in that it is more like a computer. It has to boot up, how bizarre. It makes chirping noises. Its a massive dust magnet. The remote actually works!

Tv time is perfect knitting time, of course. At this point, I’m basically incapable of watching tv by itself. I’ve been known to knit in actual movie theaters. The last few weeks I’ve been making several scarves on spec to dip into selling stuff on Etsy.com. I’ve been using a lovely soft handpainted sock yarn in merino and alpaca. These are the colors (one for each scarf)

I bought the yarn online at knitpicks.com, and while I like the softness, I of course have a couple of minor complaints. I suppose if one were actually making socks with smaller needles, it would be less of an issue, but the longer “fuzzy” strands you can see here happen to fall off quite a bit in the knitting. I hope they stay put once they’re in the matrix.

For the color in the middle they only had one skein available, so I made a skinnier scarf. For the two on the ends, I did get two skeins. I was really irked that even though the skeins were of the same dye lot in the camel colorway, one skein was significantly muddier in color than the other. Having learned that this type of thing would drive me crazy eventually, I had to frog the entire half of the scarf I had already knit (rather than the whole thing, later), and rewind the skeins in a giant ball so I could interleave* them, blending them so the difference wouldn’t show. Augh. I suppose I'll just do this up front with the green colorway, but it is still disappointing. Usually a dye lot is more internally consistent.

Of course, I am aware that I'll never get a decent “hourly rate” by using fingering weight yarn, but I decided it was less about the pay than the pleasure in the knitting, and this way I won’t continue to amass a stockpile of scarves I won't actually be able to use.

*Interleave: after every “lap” (2nd row) using the strand from the other skein, back and forth.