warm arms and dissertations

I haven't been doing much finishing recently (I acquired a pile of mostly-knit donatables from a friend whose sister used to knit, adding to my finishing woes!) but Eliza says she needs this year's wristies before it starts to get cold, so I finished them up! The pattern is from Stitch 'n Bitch Nation, although 1) the chart contains major errors (click here and scroll down), and the wristies look awful if you knit according to the pattern in the book and 2) I missed the direction that said that the cabling is supposed to be symmetrical, not identical, on the second one, so they're identical. At least I got the thumbs on the correct sides, though! I knit them slightly smaller than gauge, becuase they looked big enough. The only problem is that the thumbs seemed a bit narrow, so I picked up a few stitches when I got back to them. Also, I managed to get both of these out of one skein of noro, but I had a total of about two feet of yarn left over.


For those of you dying for information about grad school, my lab went on a retreat last weekend, and we each had to give a dissertation proposal (or in the case of us first years, a "dissertation proposal"). Eliza photoshopped this image for my title page. (For those of you who don't know, my research this year is on topic models, which has to do with extracting groups of words that occur in similar places, and part of which you can read about here if you're feeling interested and mathy).