Sunday Update

BOMC says there was a glitch in their system, and they're sending me my June 28 book.

Found stamps to send heartworm prescription to Drs Foster & Smith. Damned expensive snail-mail.



Netgear has decided that I really do know my own email address. Their products may be good. Their website and tech support are the worst kind of annoying. The site won't let you set up an account if it hates your email address for some reason; but if you want to send an email to tech support, it wants you to log-in to your account first. (Um, fellas...) And their live chat is one person. Technical issues often don't go smoothly, especially since there seem to be some language mismatches along the way. Average wait time for a live-chat session is more than 30 minutes. (What kind of language issues? Well, how does Tech Support by email not understand "When I tried to register my purchase, your site said my email address was wrong"?)

Sam was better on Thursday morning--no soft poop. He's been fine since then until this morning. He's had no raw turkey (nor anything other than his regular kibble and meds), but apparently he's still having issues as of this morning. I've changed his metronidazole dose. Instead of getting his maintenance dose of half a pill, every other day, he's getting a full-bore dose of two whole pills a day for a while. (But since I'd already chopped his pills in half, he'll just get a half, four times a day.)

I bought some re-issued knitting patterns from Patternfish (old Sirdar patterns for baby sweaters). I don't like that the PDFs are encrypted. I do not use printed patterns. I work from on-screen PDFs using my Acrobat Pro, which lets me mark correct size info, leave myself notes about pattern changes, put a colored box on the screen to mark where in the pattern I've gotten to, highlight info like changes in needle size. The Patternfish PDFs do not permit any of this. I will make usable PDFs one way or another, and probably in ways Patternfish wouldn't approve of (although the site's Terms of Use don't prohibit my methods). I won't violate copyright on any of these patterns, and no one but me will ever see my usable PDFs. But I think I probably won't be buying much from Patternfish in the future. I've spent $5.95 per pattern; it's ridiculous that I have to work to make the patterns usable.

Did two meet and greets with Silver yesterday: Marietta Square Farmer's Market and the Acworth Petco. At the Farmer's Market, an artist-vendor donated 20 martingale collars to SEGA (1 large, 8 medium, 11 small that will fit whippets or small greyhounds). We'll be offering many of them at SEGA's upcoming online auction. I've done individual photos of the collars; I just need to write descriptions for them so the auction managers won't have that to deal with.


Pile of collars on my laptop yesterday, before the individual photos were taken.

There's one lovely collar I have my eye on...



...prettier in real life, with shiny gold outlines on the flowers.

Poor Sam is sound asleep in front of the back door. I think he doesn't want to get too far from the nearest exit...

And then there was Plan B...

The white Clapotis is getting pretty wide (and I hadn't finished the increases in Section 2), and I'm starting to wonder if there's enough yarn for a decent length. I think there may not be...unless I rip back some of what I've worked. I don't have a good scale at home (I have a lame postal scale; there's a request for a good gram-scale on my birthday/Christmas wish list), but I think what I've done so far has used too much of the yarn to leave enough for a decent-sized middle section. And, the more I look at the "drape" of what I've done, the less happy I am with it. That lovely yarn deserves better.

After I finished bathing dogs at the SEGA kennel, I stopped by JoAnn's to return something I'd bought...and I wound up buying more yarn.



This is a bulky, fuzzy, and very pretty self-striping acrylic yarn. And it's making a lovely Clapotis.



On size 7 needles, this is working up into a nice, smooth, evenly stitched Clapotis, and it's striping very nicely. I'll work with this one, I think, and frog the white Clapotis. I can try again with the white yarn once I get a scale and can measure out the right proportions (and I'll use smaller needles). The general guideline says that a Clapotis uses 20% of its yarn in Sections 1 & 2, 20% in Sections 4 & 5, and 60% in Section 3. I think I'm at close to 25% of the white yarn in the incomplete Sections 1 & 2, and without a good scale I'd have a hard time trying to figure the amount of yarn to reserve for Sections 4 & 5. There's less of a problem figuring how much to reserve on the striped Clapotis, since I can estimate how much yarn to reserve based on the color repeats in the yarn, rather than trying to get an accurate weight.


Bathed some lovely dogs at the kennel, including the drop-dead gorgeous 3-year-old littermates Seco Twix and Seco Reeses.* Sam and Jacey went nuts when I got home and they got a whiff of greyhound all over my pants. They know when I've been around greyhounds instead of Labs or Goldens or Cockers.

*Reeses and Twix are part of a five-dog litter that included Seco Almond Joy, Seco Hershey, and Seco Mr Goodbar. The big boy, Reeses (he raced at 80 pounds), was a lackluster racer (23 races, twice finished first); sister Twix was better (37 races, six first-place finishes). Almond Joy, Hershey, and Mr Goodbar were much worse. All five candy-bar kids were red fawn dogs, and the two now in SEGA's hands are stunningly beautiful, and very calm, well-behaved dogs.

A Clapotis

Friday evening, I started making a Clapotis with lovely Kraemer Silk and Sterling Silver yarn on size 5 needles. (The original pattern calls for worsted weight yarn on size 7s. Kraemer is a fingering weight yarn: 63% superwash merino, 20% silk, 15% nylon and 2% silver fibers--machine wash, dry flat.) (Oh, the February Lady Sweater is going well. It's just getting a bit heavy to work on constantly, so it's resting...and so are my wrists.)



I dropped a few stitches out of the middle of a row at one point. (I put my knitting down midrow, and some of the stitches had slipped off when I picked it back up.) The drop happened at the point where you "K1 twisted, sm, K1, K1 twisted" and the stitches had pulled loose for a couple of rows. I couldn't figure out how to retwist the stitches, so I pulled the whole thing off the needles, intending to frog a few rows, then pick everything back up.

Big mistake. Once you pull the yarn off the needles, your markers no longer are in place. And if you can't read your knitting well enough to judge twisted stitches, then you are in trouble when it comes to figuring out where you are, which stitches need to be twisted, and which stitches desperately need not to be twisted. (This is a pattern where, eventually, you'll deliberately drop a stitch and let it ravel back down, leaving a long crossbar.)

Well, the pattern is easy, so I ripped the whole thing Friday night and started over again on Saturday. This time, I've got markers, I've purled the K1 stitches (where you'll drop stitches, eventually, but it's easier to read "K1 twisted, sm, P1, K1 twisted"), and I've used lifelines. It's a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach--only I've got belt, suspenders, and, um, duct tape.

By the end of Saturday--with some lazy knitting and a couple of dog training sessions--I was almost completely through the first two sections of the scarf (stole? shawl? something long and rectangle-ish?). It's going well, and I really do like the pattern (enough to do it again and again--obviously).

But I kept thinking it looked too loose. Part of the uneven appearance is that the twisted stitches make a different appearance in your work. But still, I was thinking I could frog all of Saturday's work on size 5s and start over on the smaller size 4s. I got up this morning, though, and looked on Ravelry again. Rather than hunt through 8,053 Clapotis projects, searching for ones in Kraemer, I decided to search through 145 projects in Kraemer, looking for Clapotis projects or other projects with nice stretches of stockinette to see what size needles people used. I found a couple of very nice Clapotis projects that were made with size 7 needles (and only a single skein of yarn--I'm feeling better about my having "only" two skeins). And I found another beautiful piece that used 6s.

I'll stick with the 5s. And if I hate it at the end, I'll frog it and reknit with 4s or something.


It's much longer than this, now. This was just a couple of repeats into Section 2 of the pattern. By Saturday night, I'd finished 5 of the 6 repeats in Section 2.


Triple protection: markers, purled stitches, and a lifeline.


In a little bit, I'm heading to SEGA's kennels for a bit more busman's holiday: I'm helping to bathe new arrivals. I've put on work clothes; these work pants may be made of nasty nylon, but they dry super-fast.