I am utterly swamped. Who convinced me to take all these AP’s again? Oh yeah…that would be moi.

Senioritis looms and it’s only September.

Yep. School.

But first, an aside for mystery shawl progress! I believe these pictures are quite impressive, considering they were taken in a moving car. :)

And…back to schooly stuff now. We got back from our vacation in Acadia National Park yesterday (hence the moving car pics), which was fun but really tiring. I’m oddly content with school starting - usually I’m in agony that the summer’s over, but I guess one perk of not really having a summer because you were working full time is that you never really got used to lazing about and the transition back to school isn’t painful. I will now make a nerdy list two nerdy lists. So - in no particular order…

Things I’m looking forward to:

1. Tennis team
2. Seeing my friends every day again
3. Ski club with lots of friends…including a certain someone
4. Being a senior and generally ruling the school
5. Scottish Exchange!
6. Interesting classes, almost all of which I’m taking because I chose them!
7. Having a driver’s license, meaning I can actually get places even if nobody will take me!
8. Stitches East!!!

Things I’m not really looking forward to:

1. Bitchy tennis teammates, except for two of them
2. The crapload of homework I’m bringing upon myself by taking four AP’s among other things
3. College applications and decisions
4. Finishing my (20-PAGE!) report on my project from working at the lab this summer
5. Driving, especially if chauffering siblings

Ta ta for now!

I did it!

The tassels were tedious and invaded the entire living room while I was measuring and cutting them, to my dad’s irritation. But I’m glad I did them - they look really nice.

I lovelovelove this blanket. Some stats, if you so desire:

Pattern: Colinette Absolutely Fabulous Throw Kit

Colorway: Cornucopia

Needles: US 10 - first project with my KnitPicks Options I got for my birthday! They’re so cool!

Cuddle Factor: off the charts

More pictures:

It’s quite challenging to artfully toss a throw over a couch. This is a rather ugly picture, but it shows off my gorgeous afghan quite nicely. :)

Gooooood stuff.

My sister recently introduced me to the failblog, a hilarious site with all sorts of ‘fail,’ ‘pwned,’ etc. moments. Here’s today’s - briliant!

By the way, I have been alive and knitting. My Ravelympics project (Colinette Absolutely Fabulous Throw kit) is turning out not to be as big a challenge as I thought - I’m over halfway done already. I think I’ll tack some other stuff onto the end - like finish at least through Clue 4 of my mystery shawl or something.

Work has been interesting. We’ve (meaning my friends there and I) been ’sprucing up our nerd den,’ as we call it. Phrase inspired by this, if you’re curious. We made a ‘garland’ out of a chain of paper clips and hung it in our cubicle, tacked up 24 cards all over one panel, and picked some flowers, stuck them in a water bottle, covered the water bottle with masking tape, and wrote ‘pretty flowers’ on it with an arrow. I think that last one merits a picture, albeit a crappy cellphone one:

Oh yeah, and I have been working a bit at work, too. Even though it’s very challening to fight my Sporcle addiction to do so. I can list all 118 elements on the Periodic Table now! Working on being able to do them in numerical order. I can list every thing mentioned in ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire’ in order, though. *begins to hum*

Recently, I got everybody’s favorite email from Flickr saying my free space on my photoroll or whatever was running out. Not wanting to pay to store my Ravelry photos and since photobucket doesn’t work with Firefox 3 (yet), I went in search of another free photo hosting site. After a goodly amount of searching, I found WebShots, which seemed pretty nice - free unlimited storage, and they even have a desktop client to view and upload your photos. I’d only posted a few images there so far, but today I got a puzzling email from them:

Dear Rachel,

Because people of all ages and backgrounds share photos and videos on Webshots, we remove material that is offensive to or inappropriate for our membership. We remove pornography, sexually explicit content and violent material. We also remove photos showing full or partial nudity, including those of children.

In accordance with our polic IES , we have removed 15 of your photos and/or videos. If we believe that you are engaged in illegal activities, we have the right to share your personal information with law enforcement, including your IP address.

Please do not reply to this email. We are unable to respond to individual replies.

Below is the list of photos and/or videos we removed:

IMG_0028
win
stitches
IMG_0032
IMG_0034
IMG_0034
IMG_0037
IMG_0034
IMG_0037
legwarmers1
legwarmers2
legwarmers3
legwarmers4
legwarmers5
legwarmers6

Sincerely,

The Webshots Support Staff

They were all knitting pictures, except for two screenshots, one of my Stitches schedule and one of a webgame so I could prove my score to someone (LOL). So…err…WHAT?

I’m rather irritated. I’m also at work and probably shouldn’t be posting, but whatever.

If you want to see knitting pics, check out the finished legwarmer I was test knitting on my rav page. I’m not going to bother putting them here atm.

I’m kind of sad to bump that meme off the top of the page; it looked really nice. Ah well. Also, this is probably sounding familiar by now, but there has indeed been knitting (not as much as usual because of the whole working-full-time thing, but still some), but not so many pictures. I finished one old UFO that I’ll probably write up the pattern for, and there’s another design sort of simmering in the back of my head that has a few sketches/charts/swatches, but not too much actual progress yet. But in general, the knitting content will probably be a bit slowed this summer due to The Job. Which got more interesting as the week went on, by the way. At the beginning we were all being bored out of our skulls by various required orientations.

On to the actual post…

I was thinking today about what other uninitiated folks my age might think of my knitting. I know my age group, possibly second only to male knitters, probably get the most comments about being knitters, positive or otherwise (kudos to male teenage knitters by the way, of whom I know at least one or two, although not in person). And I’m cool with that. I like being funky or quirky or whatever you want to call it. But I’m also curious about what they’re actually thinking. So I tried to come up with some parallel, some analogical (probably not a word) craft/activity that I don’t partake in but others do and see what I think of that for comparison. But I couldn’t really think of anything. I mean, something that’s so ubiquitous in someone’s life - not like a sport where there’re set times for it and other times you might be thinking of it, but not actually doing it. I mean, I knit all the time. While watching TV, on the bus, in class, you name it. So I thought of other things I’ve seen people do in class - I don’t think biting nails, texting (which is really the newer version of passing notes), sleeping, or staring into space really count. I guess drawing/sketching could come close, but that you pretty much need to look at, unless you’re doing that annoying art class exercise.

So I basically drew a blank. I couldn’t think of any similar pastime, and I still don’t know what ‘they’ think of ‘us.’ Thoughts?

I found this here. Came out pretty nifty, although I cheated with a few of the search terms - trying different permutations until I found one with a cool picture.

The Questions:
1. What is your first name? Rachel
2. What is your favorite food? I’ll go with…raspberries.
3. What high school did you go to? I’ll let you try to guess by the picture…
4. What is your favorite color? Green
5. Who is your celebrity crush? Don’t really have one…so I’ll say Art Garfunkel.
6. Favorite drink? Lemonade
7. Dream vacation? Europe - skiing in the Alps, touring around and stuff…
8. Favorite dessert? So many. I’m going to say Strawberry shortcake
9. What you want to be when you grow up? Satisfied
10. What do you love most in life? Family
11. One Word to describe you. Nerdy
12. Your nickname. Don’t really have one. I used to be Banana at fencing, so we’ll go with that.

Open three windows. One with the list of questions, another open to Flickr and ready to do an image search, and a third to Big Huge Labs’ Mosaic Maker (create a mosaic with 4 columns and 3 rows). Answer the first question, put your answer in the search field on Flickr and choose one of the images from the first page to represent your answer. Click on the photo then copy and paste the url into the #1 spot on the Mosaic Maker. Do that for all 12 questions, then click create and post the results to your blog. Have fun!

Photo Credits:

Loupiote (Old Skool)
naoko123
astrovine
Hugo Provoste
timotheus.newberg
€eErRbBbiiIEe€
Erin Butler
baostar
ToNo’s world
~Haani~
Orcaholic2007
wave maker

(EDIT: FORGET IT, ALETHIA! I’M POSTING THIS WITHOUT PICTURES. I’LL ADD THEM IF YOU EVER ACTUALLY SEND THEM! :P Pictures of knitting/spinning will come when I take them)

(this post has been written since Monday (by that I mean LAST MONDAY, the 23rd), but somebody *cough*ALETHIA*cough* didn’t email me lake pictures…)

This past weekend, I went with Alethia, her other half (henceforth to be known as Fuzzy), and another friend to Fuzzy’s house on one of the Finger Lakes. I was especially excited for it because we’re not getting to go to my favorite place in the world, my mom’s family’s house on Birch Island on Lake Winnepesaukee (of What About Bob? fame).

It was glorious. We waterskied, wakeboarded, and tubed:

PICS

PICS

PICS

We took the Glen Walk, which is basically walking up a stream that goes down several waterfalls which we had to climb up.

PICS

PICS

And somewhere along the way, I realized something - I think I’ve obtained a quality that I’ve admired in other people for a long time: I would describe myself as laid-back. I can pin down this transformation to the past year or so, but no more precisely. I’ve always loved and admired people who could be spontaneous, easy-going and fun-loving, and up for anything. I think, at least to some degree, I’ve obtained that.

I won’t hesitate to say that I used to be rather uptight. About lots of things. Stupid things. I mean, I still am a it - but I’ve loosened up a lot. I’ve never embarassed easily, but if somebody teased me, I used to get all defensive and irritating, but now I’m better about that - I can laugh at it. Or, I used to have a firmly preconceived notion in my head that I didn’t like hiking. But when we went for the Glen Walk (I capitalize it because it just seems to sound like that when people say it), I was more open-minded for some reason and instead of realizing halfway through that I was enjoying it, I had fun pretty much the whole time.

There are other examples that I won’t bore you with, but this realization is certainly a bit of a self-confidence boost.

The secret to this transformation? I think it is that I’ve confined my minor obsessiveness to less obtrusive aspects of my life - namely knitting. Also beasting sudoku puzzles and such…but mainly knitting. ;)

Now to knitting - the Mystery Shawl continues! I chose chart B for Clue 2, and I’ve gotten through the first few rounds finished the entire clue in one day, although I’m guessing this will be the last one with which I’ll be able to do that:

P.S. Other developments during the LONG period between writing this post and getting the rest of the pictures for it:

• My spinning wheel (Lendrum DT) has been named Lenny
• I’m attempting to spin sock yarn I finished a skein of sort-of sock yarn which turned out to be 207 yards and a bit heavier than sock weight - I might be able to get a pair of socks out of it…
• I’ve developed a slight obsession with socks due to the Knitter’s Magazine contest
• My summer is essentially gone - summer in the sense of sleeping in and lazing about, that is - music camp for a week, seven-week internship, week-long trip, then school again…

When I decided to spin again, to ply that lovely purply stuff, I needed to free up a bobbin. So I balled up this multicolored silk I spun up ages ago - it was just singles, and not spun particularly evenly or anything, but for some reason it said ‘beret’ to me…I don’t even wear berets very often, but whatever. When yarn talks, a knitter listens. So I found a wonderful (free!) beret recipe, which I modified a bit to conform to my vision, and voila! A snazzy multicolored beret! The only snag with this quickie project was that the first time I bound off (it’s top-down), it was too tight and wouldn’t fit on my head. Undoing a silk bindoff is NOT FUN. I repeat - NOT FUN. It took half of the second Indiana Jones movie to do, the silk was so sticky. Then I redid it with two needle sizes bigger and all was well. Well, I supposed you’ll be wanting pictures, eh? Ask and you shall receive…

I’ve been wearing this thing most of the day - it makes me feel very Bohemian. Is that supposed to be capitalized? It always makes me think of it like Bohemia is a place or something…(yeah, yeah, RENT…)

Also, I decided to join the Goddess Knits Anniversary Mystery Shawl group on Yahoo! It’s free, and her designs are great, so I figured it would be a good place for my first mystery shawl and also my second lace project - first big one. I have decided which chart I’m using for Clue 1 - chart A. I’m putting that up here as much to stop myself from changing my mind again as anything else, though…

Here’s the yarn we found for it:

Lorna’s Laces. Mmmm…

Finally, more than halfway through 2008, I begin to fulfill one of my New Years’ Resolutions - to spin more!

I finished some today yesterday - it was skeined today, though. Oddly, Flickr is being mean and not letting me rotate pictures…so you’ll have to turn your head to see them properly. Flickr stopped being mean! But it’s yummy yarn anyway, even if it’s only 55 yards and sideways. Navajo plied, BTW. I forget what fiber it is, but it looks/feels like it’s got some silk, and possibly some merino or tencel.