Best Quote I Heard All Day
Holidays are an expensive trial of strength. The only satisfaction comes from survival.—Jonathan Miller

15 days until Christmas.
Presents Bought: 0

I cannot cope with the idea of wrapping the unbought.

Wrapping presents is the ultimate form of torture by paper and is, in my opinion, the second cousin to origami, another fine Oriental art-as-torture.

I was born to create with yarn, not paper.

Scarfs
In my neck of the woods, when someone “scarfs” something up, it means they inhale their food. So I suppose I could use this form instead of “scarves” to describe my scarf-making activities. Two finished, one to make in red and black eyelash for my little punkista grandchild, Lizzy, and another in Touch Me, which is for someone who reads the blog. Liz wants all articles of clothing to be decorated with flames.

Jesus, but scarves are boring. However, the Multidirectional scarf did keep my interest, sort of. Thanks to Judy for the link. Here’s my rendition in Noro:


I put a single crochet edging around it, as suggested by Lisa. I think it stabilizes the garter stitch as well as eliminates the garter bump edge.

And now, back to my regularly scheduled knitting.

Stitch and Motif Maker 3
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned Carole Wulster’s software for knitters. Well, I got my upgrade to Stitch and Motif Maker 3 and I’ve had a chance to play with it.

Oh boy! What a vast improvement over the original. Finally, a charting program that’s worth having and using. And I am using it. The new features are so plentiful, it would take me way too much space to list them. Suffice it to say that Carole has included pretty much everything needed to make this software easy to use and more important, useful. Here’s a sample chart that I did.


Don’t bother knitting from it because it’s just bullshit symbols. But you can see some of the new features—the ability to draw horizontal and vertical lines (handy if you want to separate motifs visually), a fine array of cable and stitch-action symbols, and a nice selection of general symbols that can be used alone or in combination with the color palette for Fair Isle.

Which brings me to a personal pet peeve—why do magazines and books persist in using only color blocks for Fair Isle charts? I truly dislike them. It’s so much easier for my aging eyes to follow symbols that are assigned color numbers.

But I digress.

What I found most handy was the ability to save the chart directly as a .jpeg or .bmp rather than importing the chart to Paint and then doing the save there. The user can still import to Paint if you want to add a “legend,” which means you can type any damned instructions you wish along with the chart. See what I mean?

Add to all of this the new palette format for the symbols and colors AND a gamma box for selecting custom colors. I haven’t even mentioned some of the other new features. Just take a trip over to Carole’s website and see for yourselves.

It’s so nice to see something useful for knitters, for a change. Give me a tool like this rather than dopey teddy-bear point protectors any day.

Lost in Space
For some stupid reason, the mail from all my Yahoogroups lists, the Knit List, Socknitters, and a few others, bounced while I was away for Thanksgiving weekend. So naturally, I shipped off a reply to the e-mail Yahoo sent me to reactivate.

They didn’t reactivate. So now I get no mail except from Knit U, which I read only sporadically anyway.

I don’t miss any of the lists. I mean, I can still read them from Yahoo, but have I?

Nope. I may be list-less for the first time since 1996. I’ll depend upon you, Tontant Weaders, to let me know if there’s something new or amiss in KnittingListLand.

Christmas Crap-Along
So, what gives? Anyone doing anything? All this big talk about dressing action figures and I have yet to see one submission. Not one fucking thing.

Of course, I haven’t checked my Yahoo e-mail in two days. But still. I can see that I will have to take out my boxing nuns that Sissyboo Karen gave me a few Christmases ago and do something for one of them. Am I going to have to enter my own contest? And worse, win?

Get handy, you knitting ass-sitters and get with the fucking program. I’m not German for nothing, verstehen sie?