Knitting in Northampton!

I've moved, which means it's time for a new knitting group. I was sad to leave the Takoma Park/Silver Spring knitters behind, but the Northampton club seems friendly. One of them was knitting a mathematical object far more complicated than the now common variations on the mobius strip or kleinbottle. (K7 on a torus, for the topological graph theorists in the audience). They meet from around 6-9 at the cafe La Fiorentina (that information was a bit difficult to find online, so hopefully I've put enough google keywords in here to make this page findable by anyone searching for it!) I've popped my head in to Northampton Wools, a smallish local yarn shop, but I haven't yet had a chance to explore the infamous Webs yet.

We now meet at Sam's Pizza on Main Street right in the middle of downtown Northampton. People usually start to show up around 7:30 and stay until around 10 when Sam's closes, but if you come at 7:30 and no one is there, take out your knitting so we'll recognize you and stick around for a little while. The pizza is tasty, they serve salads, pasta, desserts, and booze, they have free wifi, and Sam, the owner, and his staff are all wicked friendly. Sam's is next to Broadside Books and across from Pulaski park.

Recycled T-Shirt rug

I also finished this T-shirt rug today. It was inspired by a pattern in some knitting book (Alterknits, I think). It took about 12 shirts. I cut them in a spiral from the bottom to the start of the sleeves to make one continuous piece of yarn per shirt. I wish I had been a bit more careful about color changes at the beginning, but I didn't want to have to go out and buy more shirts. I'm reasonably pleased with it, though.

Booties!

I spent some time between bouts of packing today doing a bit of end weaving. I finished up these booties for one of these babies. Sadly, I lost the pattern about a third of the way through the second one. I tried to find it online (where I originally found it a few years ago) but it seems to be gone! So the second one is a very close approximation to the first. I clearly knit a couple of stitches I should have purled along the side of the foot, but I can't figure out quite what I should do to fix it, and it's not all that noticeable, anyway.

boring seed stitch scarf

My parents brought this yarn back from Italy several years ago, and I've only now gotten around to knitting it up. The pattern is just a simple seed stitch. The yarn has a lot of color and texture, so you can barely see the stitch pattern anyway! The yarn is called Magico and I think the company is Filatura Di Crosa, and it's 90% wool, given what I could glean from the Italian on the label.

on the perl side

Some readers (and by that I mean Eliza) have complained that this blog is tending more towards the 'knit' (knitting, cooking, general play) and less towards the perl (CS, linguistics). I spent much of the day at work reading the works of the founding fathers of Optimality Theory, and was reminded of one of my favorite online OT commentaries (click here!). So, dear reader, check it out, then go forth and draw up tableaus. Er, tableaux.

Intermezzo: A cooking magazine you shouldn't subscribe to

I really like to read cooking magazines, and I've been getting some very enjoyable ones. Intermezzo is not one of them, I had my third go-round with their customer service today. Two years ago my sister subscribed me to CHOW, a fun cooking magazine that sort of focused on younger people than, say, Gourmet. Intermezzo bought CHOW or something, CHOW stopped printing (Aside: their website, http://www.chow.com/ is still around, and is reasonably good, but I liked the magazine better) and Intermezzo converted my subscription to their magazine. They did not offer my money back or anything like that. In the YEAR since the subscription conversion, I have received exactly two issues of this so called 6-a-year magazine. Several e-mails to customer service have assured me that issues are in print (although no such assurance in the most recent exchange of e-mails). Furthermore, the magazines were full of mediocre essays about other people taking cooking classes in foreign destinations and things like that, with few recipes or tips. I kept the whole issue of CHOW, which I occasionally look through (and use) for recipes, but I couldn't even find one recipe I wanted to cut out of the most recent (and by most recent, I mean something like February) Intermezzo. It's too bad they had to kill CHOW, but Intermezzo doesn't cut it as a substitute.