Project Bag

Most hexipuffers (lingo for people working on the Beekeeper's Quilt) have a sweet little project bag for their hexagons. They are generally bought for an enormous amount of money on Etsy, and I often find myself quite jealous.

But now I have my very own, and all I had have to pay is several hairdos. That's how it works when you have a sister who can't do her own hair.

Isn't it adorable? It's actually completely lopsided, but you can't very well tell in this photograph. I actually can't very well tell in real life, but Mary Margaret wasn't satisfied so she gave it to me. 

It's the perfect size for a couple of mini skeins and my needles. Unfortunately the 7 inch dpn I use for the three-needle bind off doesn't fit, so I'll have to get some 4 or 5 inch ones. 

Fellow beekeepers, I understand how jealous you are of my new project bag. If you don't have one already, I'm sure you will one day. Even if it isn't as good as mine. 

Ynys Afallon Cowl

Yns Afallon is Welsh for Avalon. And it's what I've finally decided to call my Entrelac Cowl.

The pattern has been a long time coming, but it's here at last. 

Ynys Afallon is a loosely knit cowl that uses the entrelac technique and has a panel of seed stitch diamonds down the center. 

Materials:
110 yards of Bulky Weight Yarn such as KnitPicks Biggo (110yards/100meters, 100gms, 50% Superwash Merino, 50% Nylon)
US15 (10mm) needles

Beorn

I am knitting my first sweater. I'm following the pattern Oh My Bear! by Tiny Owl Knits. I started on February first but I didn't have the right needle size so my gauge was off, so I put it on hold till I got the right size. I started again yesterday, and I'm about 13 rows into the colorwork chart. I am loving this project, but the intarsia knitting gets incredibly tangled every single row. And I'm pretty sure my gauge is off for the bear face, but it'll all end up all right and if it doesn't, then I can rip it out and start again. 

I'm obviously going to name mine Beorn, for the giant person in The Hobbit who turns into a bear. Another thing I misremembered from the book, I thought Beorn was Radagast and that Beorn lived in Mirkwood. I was so confused. 

That's it for me tonight- I have to get to bed. Knowing me, that'll happen in an hour or so and not right now, but I'm not going to spend that time writing a novella of a post. 

Jewelry for Knitting Needles

Stitch markers are an essential tool in knitting. Some people use jump rings, some people use scraps of yarn tied in loops, and some people use these fancy, beaded, dangly markers they buy on Etsy. I personally prefer to just use yarn tied in loops; it doesn't cost anything and it doesn't get in the way of my knitting. But I thought I'd give these dangly things a try. 

I bought beading wire, crimp tubes, and two different kinds of beads at Michael's. I followed the instructions from here. Each one took me about five minutes to make and I don't actually know what it's like to knit with them. But it doesn't matter if I don't like them, because I'm going to give a bunch of them away anyway. 

However, I'll soon find out whether I like them or not. Also at Michael's I bought some super bulky wool that's going to become the face on my Oh My Bear! sweater. I'm using KnitPicks Brava (it's 100% acrylic but at least it's soft) for the main color in the colorway Umber Heather. I actually cast on on February first, but I didn't have the right needle size and my gauge was off, so I had to rip back a bunch today, but now I'm on track with the right needle size and I can't wait to get to the color work. 

WIP Wednesday: Productiveness

I've had a very productive day. I did three lessons of geometry (two of which were supposed to be done on Monday and Tuesday; but I couldn't do them then because I was busy doing Friday and Saturday's geometry), all my other schoolwork, got some knitting done, watched Arsenic and Old Lace, and dyed 7 mini skeins.

The highlight was definitely dyeing the mini skeins.

Only 6 are pictured here, and the colors aren't completely accurate, but I wanted to take some pictures before I started knitting hexiflats out of them. I'm giving all of them colorways, and I'm naming the colorways nerdy names, so from left to right: The Shire, Mirkwood, Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey, Rainbow Pumpkin Pie (not nerdy, but my sister insisted. It's actually a rose color but it shows up brown in the picture), Smaug, and The Shire 2. There's also a bright red one that wasn't quite dry so I couldn't twist it up.

Beekeepers (not actual beekeepers, but knitters who are making a beekeeper's quilt), I highly recommend this. What I did was buy a 100gm hank of bare KnitPick's Palette. I'm winding it into 30 yard mini skeins and dyeing them with food coloring. It's super cheap and it's possibly the most rewarding thing in the world. 

I think my favorites are Mirkwood and Smaug:

Smaug is actually more like a short-striping yarn with half coral and half yellow-orange/white. It's the first one I dyed and I love it. 

I was really trying to get a Mirkwood-like yarn here. Mirkwood is described in The Hobbit as dark, with a few patches of sunshine every once and a while that grow more and more infrequent as the forest grows deeper. I managed to get a murky gray-green, a few bits of brown, and some greenish-blue, but I don't think I'll really be able to get proper dark colors without black dye. 

While watching Arsenic and Old Lace, I knit a hexiflat in The Shire 2. As I had the lights off I couldn't see how it was turning out until the movie was over. I was gleeful at the result. 

Another terrible picture, sorry. The blues are more sky-colored, the oranges are lighter and brigher, and those brown stripes are actually pink. 

Pre-Valentines Decorations

Wow, I just realized that I've done pretty much no knitting posts this month. That's surprising, and also soon to be remedied.

I made this little chain of hearts a couple of weeks ago, actually, using this pattern. I think I have six or seven in total, all strung up on a little crochet chain. Each one takes about ten minutes to make and the pattern is really easy to memorize. I'm considering making about a hundred more in the next ten days and showering the table with them on Valentine's day. 

Not that my family celebrated Valentine's day much. We used to get plastic cups filled with candy hearts every year, but not anymore. I think we usually forget it's the fourteenth and move onto the next day. But it'll be nice to have a little decoration like this on my bookshelf. Unfortunately, once I put it up it'll probably stay up till next year or longer (seriously. we only took our Christmas tree down today).

I grafted the ends of the first few, but I didn't like the look of that so I did what the pattern said, and that turned out much better and was easier. I used Red Heart yarn (I hate the stuff but it's good for things like this) and US7 needles. 

Wishing you a happy Valentine's day now, 'cause I'll probably forget on the actual day. 

Doctor Who: Dark Horizons

This is the third and best Doctor Who novel I've read yet. J.T. Colgan didn't overdo the Doctor and she didn't manage to create a totally stupid monster. I enjoyed reading it, the characters were well developed and stayed true to their personalities, and it occasionally made me laugh. It helps that one of the main characters thinks the Doctor is Loki for the entire book. 

It takes place on the tip of what will one day be Scotland, with lots of friendly people who aren't too fond of the vikings that attack them every so often. It also takes place on a boat full of vikings and one Nordic princess, who is being taken to her wedding to the revolting king of some place. But that's only until the boat is consumed in fire... while it's floating in the middle of the ocean. Most of the crew are killed, but those who are not- the Princess included- definitely want to know about the fire that burned on water, and about the mysterious man in a bow tie who rescued them. 

But the fire doesn't stop at the water. It soon travels to people, using their minds until they burn up. The Doctor isn't sure what to do about all that, so he does the usual thing, talks to the alien and asks them what they think they're doing. 

With the help of Princess Freydis and her unlikely boyfriend, the viking Henrik, The Doctor talks to the underwater-dwelling, shape-shifting alien called the Arill and, after a few more deaths, figures out how to defeat it. And everybody (except the people who died and their families) lives happily ever after. 

★★★☆☆

A Whole Year

Didn't I say sometime that I would try and get 200 posts completed by the time this blog's one year anniversary came up? Well, I almost made it, and almost is better than... not almost. But that's okay, because December was a pretty busy month and I think I would have had to write more than 31 posts in January to meet my goal.

How has my blog changed over the course of 12 months? Quite a lot, in many different ways. Firstly, I've discovered the use of cameras. There was a time in this blog when a photograph was so rare that there was an entire category devoted to posts with photos in them. And I suppose I started knitting and spinning more in June/ July, because in the first few months there were very few posts about the fiber arts.

Also, looking through the archives, I can see monthly themes developing: in May, June, and July, I loved doing people's hair, drawing superheroes, and reading. In September/ October, I started to get into Merlin and I got more advanced in my knitting skills and yarn tastes.

Keeping a blog and looking back at past entries can really make you despise your past self. If I were to step into the Tardis right now and go back to one year ago, I would probably be extremely annoyed by the obnoxious little brat I used to be. And I'll probably say the exact same thing in another year.

So I guess this blog will just keep on improving. My writing will get better with practice, my photography skills will sharpen, and I'll get even better at knitting. The only way to get better is to not stop.

Full of Ideas

For my 13th birthday, my aunt and uncle gave me a notebook that has, in the last twelve months, become home to possibly hundreds of ideas. It's been my go-to place whenever I have an idea for a book or an image comes into my mind that I have to describe immediately. You could find bits and pieces of short stories that never saw the keyboard, snippets of dialogue I've used in my books, and random thoughts and ramblings from my never ending flow of ideas.

I had some fun with the camera, photographing different bits of different pages, comparing my handwriting over the months. It's all extremely messy, so I feel fine sharing a couple of my innermost ideas:

This is a bit of In Saint Helen's, the book I wrote in the June session of Camp Nanowrimo. I started it about five times in this journal, and all of the beginnings are relatively similar but at the same time are very different. 

Just an idea for a book that I'm not saying any more about. It'll probably never get written because the plot never got very far in my head, but maybe one day...

A snippet from a book I have yet to write. Once the whole thing is down on paper, though, I can tell you it's going to be amazing. 

This is more of the beginning of In Saint Helen's, describing the house the main characters live in at Christmas time. I actually based the exterior decorations off of those on my own home. There's an awful lot of real life in my stories.

This was just a funny idea that came into my head, pretty stupid but I thought it was amusing. The entire thing is:

"You can call a popsicle flavored ice, yes?" said the salesman. "But flavoring the ice is costly- meaning that it costs money, not that it's expensive. So this is my new product. I call it Flavor Lice."

He brandished a long ice cube on a stick. 

"What do you think?" he said.

"Flavor lice?" I replied, slightly disgusted. 

"Yes, it's a play on the words 'less' and 'ice.'"

"Makes me think I'm eating vermin."

Not really worth putting into a story, not really worth reading, but I rather liked it just the same. 

I had a include a little bit of the King Arthur legend in The Pandora, what with it taking place in the Middle Ages and all. This idea isn't actually going to make it into the Pandora, but it was a good tribute to Merlin.

From the short story I talked about a while ago. I started it on paper but quickly went to the computer with a slightly different plot in mind. 

So there's a little peek inside my head. My mind is busy, illegible, and sometimes rather insane when it comes to writing. But sometime, years from now, after I become a best-selling author and when I'm buried in my grave, someone will dig up this journal and publish it. A.T. Lowery's Journal of Ideas. 

Ain't Them Bodies Saints

There are some movies that make you think, I could see that again. Fewer are the ones that make you say, I need to see that again. And every once in a blue moon, there's a film that makes you think, I need to see that movie again right now.

Ain't Them Bodies Saints fits right into the last category.

You might think that my opinion of the movie is biased because my brother made it. But no, I loved this movie and I loved that my brother made something so beautiful. Since I saw it last night, it's happened a few times; I've been thinking, and not really paying attention to what I'm thinking, and then I realize that I'm thinking about Ain't Them Bodies Saints.

The movie takes place in a time before now. It never says exactly when. Mid nineteen seventies I think.  It's very Texan, with all of the characters speaking with Texas accents. It has a very old fashioned quality, and has an intelligence a level above most of the movies that are coming out around now. I think that, if I were to summarize the plot, I could not do it justice. I'll leave that to the more talented.

All I can say is that I can only hope that I could one day create something so amazing and beautiful as David has done.