#cottonkhaleesi

[cottonkhaleesi]

Enjoy a little real-time recording of this shoelace in progress

[cottonkhaleesi]

It's me boy I'm the box, speaking to you inside your brain. Listen to me boy, ignore the above, we don’t need that mantra.

Come with me, add to your box army, may it ever grow!!!!

Lord, grant me the strength to throw away this box that i'll never use, the courage to throw away this box that i'll never use, and the wisdom to throw away this box that i'll never use

[trashpandacraft]

tag games! i love these.

tagged by: @ellanarose, @disgruntled-lifeform, and @indrid-hot, for which i'm very grateful.

currently reading: i spent many years reading constantly for work (i'm an editor--maybe at some point i should do an intro post) and sometimes have a hard time reading for pleasure, so i often find myself picking through several books at a time.

so i'm reading women's work: the first 20,000 years by elizabeth wayland barber, which is interesting but also frustrating--it was written in the early 90s, and you can tell. she has some real specific (and gross) ideas about gender, beauty, and labour that show up in the text, which makes reading it a lot less enjoyable. she's also surprisingly quick to tell us that ancient people would have thought about things, which is obviously unknowable, and i don't love that, either.

it's interesting enough that i'm still reading, but it's a little slow.

i'm also reading new ways to kill your mother: writers and their families by colm tóibín, and rereading connie willis's the doomsday book, which is my favourite book ever in the world.

favourite colour: blue, with green and purple as very close seconds.

last song: we had the local classical station on in the car on the way home from sheep and wool yesterday (post forthcoming, omg), but i couldn't tell you the exact song, mostly because we were too busy talking about wool!

last movie: we don't watch a ton of movies because i have commitment issues and get a little stressed out by having to commit to two hours of something, so the last movie we watched was the d&d movie. i recently found out that my wife has never seen ever after, though, so i think that's likely to be the next.

sweet/spicy/savory: it's savoury, spicy, sweet for me, though i have to be careful with spicy because i get wicked bad reflux. i'm largely indifferent to sweet, though--i'll eat it if it's there, but would much rather have fancy cheese than fancy chocolate.

currently working on: haha. 😅 ok well. orange jumper for my terrible child, socks for my wife, a shawl for my wife, a little honeycomb brioche cowl that i might rip out (again) because i think i'd like it more at a looser gauge, and some tea towels (on the loom). shockingly, i'm mostly between spinning projects, because i wanted my bobbins free in case i came home from sheep and wool and needed to start spinning immediately. there's one bobbin that has maybe five grams of some lovely gold/red rambouillet on it, but i think that is i'm not planning to ply it, I'm spinning too thin, so i think that's getting pulled out, and I'll either respin it and enough twist that i can ply it, or toss that bit and start over, spinning it thicker this time. and i'm probably about to start seven more projects because if who i an as a person.

tagging: @binchickencrafts, @bronzeagecrafts, @cottonkhaleesi, @yarnandink, and @knittingferns, but only if you want to

[cottonkhaleesi]

Ok. Here’s some cats I’ve looked after (+1 I stitched into being) in the past few years.

IT IS INTERNATIONAL CAT DAY!

POST SOME FUCKING CATS!

[cottonkhaleesi]

Bought these absolutely stunning prints from 8pxl and immediately knew they needed to stay together. Fashioning a frame out of a box might be a little low tech for most people when it comes to gifts, but I love the look it creates here, especially once it was covered in wrapping paper!

I am in love with the pearlescent yet still pixelated sheen on everything ✨

[cottonkhaleesi]

I loved this pattern too! It was the first sock pattern that didn’t make me want to quit out of boredom. I made mine shorter at the ankle portion and out of mystery yarn from a charity shop and they’ve made great bed socks.

Yours look stunning, I love that blue!

Pattern: Sock Around the Clock by Natalia Vasiliev, free on Ravelry. these have a really fun heel construction!

[cottonkhaleesi]

You would not believe how excited I am to try these

[cottonkhaleesi]

In other news however, a pattern starts to emerge!

[cottonkhaleesi]

Wooooahhhh-oh, we’re half way there~

Wooooahhhh-oh, -

323 rows left!

[cottonkhaleesi]

Had a bit of a week….. fallen into the noob zone with this weaving… it looks good, but let’s just say the tension couldn’t be more out of whack if I’d tried; the outer edges are tighter than a suspension bridge whereas the middle is requiring more weights than I own. Gonna stop whilst I’m ahead and start again….

Then Madame Georgina imported a mouse nest she discovered wholesale. Been chasing these guys around my godmother’s kitchen all afternoon…. At least they’re cute. Rather mice than a mole, or a rat. And at least I get to go home now….

[cottonkhaleesi]

I wanna be the very best like no one ever was 🎶

Love how the underside looks vaguely like Unknowns.

[cottonkhaleesi]

It’s off the needles! Much yelling as I tried to take some pictures. Georgina clearly felt it wasn’t orange enough for her tastes 🐈

[cottonkhaleesi]

I have 16 squares left and an something amount of parallelograms until I get to a minimum viable product!

[cottonkhaleesi]

I, uhhh, cast on some socks of my own volition. I have a surplus of 4ply yarn and figured I should stop letting my mistakes with the last sock (cameo in the first picture) and the malabrigo put me off.

Pattern is called I Walk The Line and it’s deceptively simple and a neat ‘chevrons if you look at it one way and stripes if you look at it another’ shadow knitting trick.

[cottonkhaleesi]

Aw heck, guess which muppet had to frog eight whole parallelograms because they were happily doing alternate colours rather than actually referring to the pattern?

Fixed, and I have now eliminated half my ends….

[cottonkhaleesi]

So I’ve run into a few… hiccups;

my 3D printed loom is not holding tension because the front bar ratchets are the wrong way round (which will be a bitch to fix as to get them on in the first place required judicious use of a hammer); I have decidedly bought The Wrong Kind of cotton for my practising (and too similar colours too); and apparently I cannot recall from one moment to the next at the end of a four row repeat whether I was turning forwards or backwards mere moments ago.

But!

I am getting used to how the turning of the cards go, I am learning to feel how hard I need to beat, and how tight my working yarn should be, I can now parse a card weaving pattern, even if I can’t quite recognise it on my weave, and I can fix or adapt around some of the issues above (backstrap weaving here we come!) I will persevere and the great shoelace creation of 2025 will not be postponed!!

One has to suck at something in order to have the foundations of becoming good at something!!!! That’s learning babey!!