Scavenger hunt!

Warning: this post is going to be totally uninteresting to anyone except present or former Bloomingtonians… oh, or if you want to see pictures of me wearing my finished Rusted Root and being totally sweaty and gross from running around town.

A while ago, I blogged about the Bloomington scavenger hunt I did with my friends Steve and Jeanne, the same day as World Wide Knit in Public Day. (We won the scavenger hunt, yay!) Well, Steve recovered most of the pictures he had accidentally deleted and I finally got the pictures up on my Flickr. Here’s a list of (slightly paraphrased) questions from the scavenger hunt, and explanations of any obscure/tricky ones (listed in white, in case you want to play along and guess for yourself–to see the answers, highlight the text). Click through the links to see the photos we used to score points. We had to stick together–no splitting up–and a team member had to be in each photo. Using the internet to find answers was allowed, but we didn’t have an iPhone so we ended up just grabbing random people on the street and asking them questions. Or calling them with desperate, weird chemistry questions (thanks, Leigh!) Too bad we didn’t have an iPhone, since Bloomingpedia would have made a great resource for figuring all this out.

The back door of the Upstairs Bar (this is right on Kirkwood, across from the Jungle Room)

Get a glass of water from someone over the age of 35 (taken outside Nick’s English Hut on Kirkwood)

You and six of your best buds (bonus points if they’re all empty; extra bonus points for bringing the beers to the judges, which we did after a bit of debate about whether it was worth hauling the six-pack around town). Taken in the Big Red across from the Copper Cup.

Beefeaters at Nick’s (This is a photo of bartenders at Nick’s English Hut, holding up a bottle of Beefeaters gin. The one we actually used for scoring had Steve in it, but it got deleted.)

Which way to the gun show?

Bonus points for having a team name, extra bonus points for being in a team uniform by the end of the night (we put sticks in our hair and called ourselves Team Brown and Sticky, after my favorite joke: Q: What’s brown and sticky? A: A stick!)

Swap shirts with a stranger. Bonus points if you swap shirts with someone of the opposite sex. Extra bonus points for a permanent swap. (I was not willing to swap my Rusted Root permanently or have a guy put it on and stretch it out, same with Jeanne and her NORML T-shirt, so Steve had to be the intrepid swapper.)

An IU Valentine’s day tradition at the Rosewell House (sic). Bonus points for something creative. (The Rose Well house is that pretty round gazebo thing in the meadow near the statue of Herman B. Wells. This is not actually a V-day tradition, and it’s spelled the Rose Well House; the IU website says “Tradition holds that a female student is not officially a co-ed until she has been kissed beneath its dome at midnight.” As for the kink, we went for the good ol’ threesome.)

The NYSE stock ticker (Steve just got his MBA, and Jeanne and I are “Kelley partners,” i.e. significant others of business school students, so of course we all knew this was in the atrium of the Kelley School of Business at 10th and Fee!)

The old entrance to the Little 500 stadium (now the Arboretum–just across from the business school)

That fucking light pillar (right outside the IU Art Museum, of course)

A freshman with a backpack, bonus points if they’re with their parents (we found a fresh-faced youngster in a car on campus with her parents, outside Woodburn. Check out the dad’s face.)

IU’s United Colors of Benton (Thomas Hart Benton painted a series of murals about Indiana history in 1933, and it includes an image of a KKK rally, leading people to protest and demand its removal. The mural can be found in Woodburn Hall, and I’m told a special lecturer has to come in and explain its historical context every semester to the students who have classes in this hall. More information here.)

A proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem (we stopped in a computer lab to take this photo)

A union member card (we used Jeanne’s credit union membership card)

The bridge that Roosevelt built (I knew this one right away because I’d taken the photos of The Water is Wide there! It’s behind the little chapel beside the Union. If you’re wondering what we’re doing in this photo, we’re pretending to build it.)

A Little 500 bike; and bonus points for photos of the judges (this latter clue was printed in tiny gray type and we didn’t even see it. Fortunately, we saw one of the judges riding around campus on her Little 500 bike and took a picture of her, after which she told us we’d get bonus points for that. Apparently there’s also a Little 500 bike hanging from the ceiling upstairs at Nick’s.)
In the Jordan River (this is the little stream running through Dunn Meadow)

Burritos as big as your head; also, the old Den (it’s gone now, but there was a burrito place upstairs from what was the old Den and was Trulli Flatbreads and is now Finch’s Brasserie–visible across the street)

Two men in a sex position

A full moon (it was 3 days before full moon when the scavenger hunt took place. The judge was relieved when she saw this photo, of the label of a hippie candle at Bloomingfoods. She said she had never seen so many bare, hairy, ugly man-butts in her life, because most people had taken a picture of someone mooning. We tried to get random people on the street to help us out with this, but nobody obliged. Even a crazy punk guy lying on a bench on the street seemed embarrassed and said his butt was too hairy to show us.)

Lloyd Dobler’s iconic moment (Lloyd Dobler sounded so familiar, but we couldn’t pin down who he was. I knew he must be from some movie, so we ran into Plan 9 Film Emporium and asked the clerk. Turns out he’s John Cusack’s character from Say Anything, so instead of finding a boom box for the photo, we took a recursive sort of photo of Steve doing the pose holding the DVD case for Say Anything, depicting Lloyd Dobler holding up a boom box.)

The porch of the old Uncle E’s (Uncle Elizabeth’s was a gay bar that used to be at Morton and 9th. I really liked it–too bad it’s gone now. It had a patio with Christmas lights and outside tables, and fun music on the jukebox, and a laid-back vibe)

We lost photos for some of the clues we got…

- A sample resume from Career Services

- Your own resume

- Bring us the LD50 of 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione (I left the chemgrrl a message asking for help and she called back to explain what LD50 means. We ran into the Chemistry Building to try and find someone to help us out on what 1,3,7-trimethyl-1H-purine-2,6(3H,7H)-dione was, but ended up getting the answer from another team. To get partial points for this clue, we took a picture of me in front of Starbucks… the actual LD50 is pretty high, corresponding to about 96 pounds of milk chocolate or 173 cups of coffee.)

- Hoagy Carmichael’s graduation hangout (now BuffaLouie’s/the Gables on Indiana and Kirkwood)

Here are some of the clues we didn’t get:

- A photo from the archive where Stacy worked last summer (we were fuming about how unfair this question was for a while, but it turned out the judges didn’t expect anyone to show up to the scavenger hunt except their friends, hence in-jokes like this)

- The top floor of the main library

- A Greek goddess, bonus if she’s holding her shoes (all the sorority girls were out of town, it seemed!)

- The old Pit Stop (the current location of Player’s Pub, but we didn’t have time to go down there)

- Items from the U of C scavenger hunt

- Bonus points for money for the judges–one point per dollar

- A photo in a dorm bathroom; bonus points if you’re showering, minus points if you’re using the toilet

- The second floor of McCalla (the art school at 9th and Indiana)

- A Roly Poly sub

- A picture containing both the ghetto Kroger and the Square in a single photo (the ghetto Kroger is the one across from Seminary Square; we went up some fire escapes trying to get this shot, but apparently you need to go up onto the roof of a parking structure to get this photo)

- You do this to forget my name while you collect your fame (wear your sunglasses at night! I was kicking myself for not getting this, I knew it sounded so familiar)

I’m back!

I took a refreshing few weeks off from the powerful lure of the Internet and now I’m just a wee bit overwhelmed with trying to catch up with work, seeing what’s happened in blogland, and trying to pack up my house.

I battled food poisoning of some sort (probably brought on by eating too much kebab at a really great Afghan restaurant my parents took me to), finished the Loquat Shawl with one day to go, and tried to model it during a crazy heat wave–my dad said it was 107 degrees where they live.



My camera didn’t like the light and the pictures didn’t come out that great, but they’ll have to do.

I fulfilled my bridesmaidly obligations–fetched and carried, walked down the aisle, did my toast, and toted a Maid of Honor Emergency Kit around with me everywhere. A word of advice to any other first-time bridesmaids–everybody wanted safety pins for one thing or another; they will be the most useful thing in your purse. The groom needed one for his boutonniere, one of the wedding guests needed one because her dress started to come apart during the reception, etc.
Other things in the emergency kit, most of which were useful at some point:

• ibuprofen
• Pepto-Bismol tablets
• bobby pins
• Kleenex
• baby wipes
• granola bar

I wish I’d had bug spray, too, because the mosquitoes were out in force, but this is not something that will be applicable to most other weddings.

The wedding was beautiful, a 70-person affair in a little wooden chapel by a mountain lake. It was small, short, informal, and intimate, in stark contrast to the grand party of multiple ceremonies and costume changes at the wedding I went to the previous weekend. The cabin where we were staying didn’t have electricity or potable water and was only accessible by boat, so there were some good times after the rehearsal dinner when the boat motor broke down and the 8 people in the boat took turns rowing across the lake by moonlight (we were saved after 45 minutes by a neighbor who came by and gave us a tow). Thank God it was informal, and that my hair is pretty low-maintenance, because there was no real opportunity to iron my clothes or blow-dry my hair before the ceremony.

I slept in a sleeping bag in the cabin attic with the mice, and ran down the granite slope to swim in the clear, cold lake the morning of the wedding.

Sarah ended up wearing the shawl during the reception, not during the ceremony. We danced in a meadow and ate olallieberry pies and her dearest wish was fulfilled when we set up a fight in the meadow, complete with hats and lasso and fake gun, between a Viking and a cowboy. She watched her sister (in a cowboy hat) roping her uncle (in a Viking helmet) and turned to her mother-in-law and said, “This is just how I always imagined my wedding day would be.”

It was lots of fun–how all weddings should be.

So, aside from that, I saw family and friends (between the wedding and family visits, I somehow ran out of time and didn’t get to meet up with everyone I had hoped to see) and got to go play in the Bay Area a little bit. The best part was when my parents and I went up to Point Reyes and, while we were walking on the beach, saw a humpback whale frolicking in the water! It was out there for a long time, so we saw its tail and back and face and lots of puffs from its blowhole. Plus we saw pelicans, spotted fawns eating grass in the marsh, turkey vultures, egrets, various little birds, and what was possibly a seal turning around in the waves.

After that initial terrible heat wave, the Bay Area spent the rest of my visit living up to Mark Twain’s adage “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”–I was freezing most of the rest of the time I was there, as the temperature hovered around 60 or below, with chill winds whipping in from off the Bay. But I did some of my favorite things–I saw friends and family, went to Thai Temple, Chez Panisse, the Edible Schoolyard, Berkeley Bowl, the Ashby Flea Market, Stonemountain and Daughter, and a pub quiz at the Missouri Lounge.

I finished a Branching Out scarf for Molly in the llama yarn I got from Yellow Wood Llamas, and we spent a craft-shopping day at Lacis, General Bead and Artfibers, topped off with yummy crepes from Ti Couz. (This was the only day I actually made it into the city the whole time I was back home.) I did stop off at the new yarn shop in my old neighborhood, K2tog, but only for a few minutes while I waited for Molly (sorry, Kristen, I was going to look you up but didn’t have time!). I got fabulous but expensive Japanese stitch dictionaries (one knit, one crochet) at Lacis, some earring supplies and vintage blue glass buttons at General Bead, and some more Kyoto (the glowing red color) and Golden Chai (a silvery gold color) and yarntastings at Artfibers.

Back at home again now; in the last week, I sewed a dress and a shirt from Simplicity 3835, the ubiquitous Built by Wendy pattern, spent a long day helping our friends Steve and Jeanne move out and clean their place, packed some stuff, made a yummy beet and tempeh salad, and went on a 25-mile bike ride along beautiful, empty rural roads to Unionville and back… that was a heavenly morning; the sun was shining but not too hot, blue and white flowers were blooming in the meadows, the corn was high and green, the roads were empty and filled with the sounds of birdsong and cicadas. Aside from one giant hill and a time when I lost balance while getting started and very slowly fell off my bike and bruised my hand, the ride was easy and stress-free. (There were a few places where Rahul said dogs like to come out and chase you, but we didn’t see any this time, thankfully.)

I’m looking forward to coming back to Thursday knit night this week, and I hope to have some time to put up pictures of the llama scarf and my Built by Wendy FO’s–the dress I made from blue striped shirting is very uniform-like and I’m not sure how to fix it, but perhaps I’ll have some adornment ideas soon. I may have to consider the blue version my muslin, and make it again with a cuter fabric, like Mari’s. It came out pretty well overall, though–i.e. it fits and I didn’t make any really horrible mistakes! And it has pockets. I strongly approve of pockets in a dress.

Gee, your ghee looks terrific!

I’m safely in California now, and at long last a few rows into the edging for the wedding shawl. I decided on the Wave Edging with a bit of faggoting between it and the body of the shawl.

This last weekend, I made it through Rahul’s cousin’s wedding, an intense, three-day party, full of dancing, drinking, and delicious food, for hundreds of friends and relatives.

After the wedding, Rahul and I and a couple of his cousins were asked to help clean up the altar. Most of the stuff went into a big trash bag or a box to take back up to the bride’s family’s rooms. However, we came across one problematic item–a big bowl full of ghee (clarified butter) that had been used during the ceremony as an offering to Agni, the fire god. The priest had been dipping a wooden stick of questionable (but surely very holy) origin into it the whole time, so we thought we shouldn’t put it back into the jar. However, also, apparently, at this point, the ghee was special or blessed or something and should not be thrown away. (Plus, I knew from my parents’ work at Three Stone Hearth that it was really awfully expensive to make that much ghee, and I couldn’t bear to put it in the trash.)

So, as we gathered up betel nuts and flowers from the altar, We handed the ghee to Rahul to dispose of somehow. Afterwards, we went out into the hallway outside the hotel’s banquet hall and found this sitting on a table (his head got a little bit cut off, but that is Ganesh, you can tell by the rat he’s sitting on.)

Free Ghee

Off on my vacation now!

Leaving for Toledo today, California on Sunday. I may or may not be posting while I’m gone over the next 2 1/2 weeks or so. Any suggestions for good yarn shops to visit? I have no idea if I will actually have any time for such things–I’m not going to be in the Bay Area for a decent chunk of that time due to the wedding, and there are plenty of other things I want to do while I am in the Bay Area, but just in case. I know there’s a new one in Albany called k2tog, and I am always interested in visits to Artfibers, Imagiknit, Article Pract, Stonemountain and Daughter, Lacis, and Stash Yarns, but I’ve been to all of those except k2tog already.

Project list (I certainly won’t knit up all of it; it sounds like a lot, but there will be many hours in the car and airport/airplanes, and I expect many hours of downtime, too, so I should be able to make pretty good progress on something else once the shawl is out of the way):

• Loquat Shawl and extra yarn to finish it
• Barbara Walker Volume 2 and The Lacy Knitting of Mary Schiffmann (a slim volume I found at the library with a number of nice charted patterns, including several edging patterns I might try, and a non-charted but very exciting peacock doily akin to, though not exactly the same as, this one) to help me figure out how to finish the shawl
• My skein of turquoise llama yarn, since I should be seeing Molly in CA and am hoping I can finish something for her before I do
• Yarn and needles for the Tangled Yoke Cardigan (lots of stockinette!)
• My skein of Sundara Sock in Arabian Nights to at least start swatching for a lace scarf

l’empire des lumieres

Here’s the last new dress finished before going on vacation. It’s super comfy, if not especially flattering (the fabric reminds me, now that the dress is finished, of pajamas).

It’s a nod to my favorite Magritte painting, The Empire of Light/L’empire des lumières–dark clouds below, blue sky above, business in the front, party in the back. I might make a bird applique out of the remaining sunny sky fabric, and make it a La grande famille dress.

Pattern: Titus Summer Blouse. I’ve sewed this twice before–once in orange cotton, and once in an adorable Japanese bunny print (I keep forgetting to blog this one). A nice, simple pattern.

Fabric: Bears Just Wanna Have Fun, minus the bears… 1 yard of dark sky, .25 yards of sunny sky; .25 yards of some random white cotton fabric to line the yoke

Mods:

• Cut the outer edges of the yoke about 1/2 wider because I didn’t have enough fabric for sleeves.
• Lined the yoke with contrast material because I ran out of the sunny sky fabric.
• Instead of cutting the bodice pieces as shown in the pattern, I sewed the entire yard of dark sky fabric into a tube, laid it flat with the seam at the back, then used the corner of the pattern to cut out armholes on either side. I gathered it to the width of the new yoke and sewed them together, then hemmed to the appropriate length with a double-fold hem.
• Since I left the sleeves off, I turned the outer edges of the yoke to the inside about 1/4 inch, pressed them, and topstitched them together, sandwiching the raw edges inside the yoke. For the underarm parts of the armholes, I just turned the fabric under and stitched it in place–didn’t clip the curves or anything.
• I gave it an empire (ha ha) waist by cutting the elastic Hanes Her way waistband out of some disintegrating underwear, pinning it to the inside of the tube, under the bustline (stretching the elastic out to the width of the fabric as I pinned) and then sewing 3 lines of stitches to secure it in place. I stretched the elastic out as I went and removed the pins one by one as I came to them to keep everything in the right place. I didn’t put enough pins in the first time, actually, so I had to do this twice after winding up with almost no gathers on one side and a giant avant-garde mass of drooping gathered cloth on the other.

Rahul’s verdict on this dress: “it looks like felt.”

Loquatlicious

The latest and greatest on the Loquat shawl:

I’m having some doubt on the edging pattern. I was thinking of using this one (Classic Bead Edging from Barbara Walker), with that top garter strip changed to faggoting to match the pattern in the main part of the shawl, but maybe it looks too bumpy, too open/uneven in contrast to the stockinette triangles in the Honeybee lace. The swatch below has been blocked, by the way. What do you think? The Wave Edging used in the Print o’ the Wave stole might be nice–it’s one of my favorite edgings of all–but I was worrying that it might be too small-scale to work with this shawl and might not be stretchy enough to bind off the faggoting stitches, which are very wide. I’ll make a swatch tonight if I have time… otherwise, BW vol.2 is coming with me on my trip to Toledo.

Perhaps I shouldn’t do the sideways edging, but extend the pattern downwards (I was thinking of using a variation on the Razor Shell pattern in order to make scallops). Full of doubt now, as that part of the shawl gets closer…

Anyway, it’s a good 42 inches across the top, now, stretched out. I knit a bunch on it last night and finished Fitcher’s Brides (it’s based on the Bluebeard fairy tale, so perhaps was not a great book to be reading as I was knitting a wedding shawl… I will have to find a “happily ever after” book to read to counteract it. Bridget Jones’s Diary, maybe.)

It actually goes over the shoulders now (I will have more to say later about the cloud dress you can see me wearing):

Here are details of the mini-cables leading into the honeybee lace at the 4 increase points on the shawl. They twist in opposite directions on the two sides of the shawl.

Stretched out, the shawl reminds me of a big, yellow, pretty, lacy, manta ray:

In which an East Asian and an Indian go to White Castle

I am almost comically tired and stressed out from work and wedding/trip prep: I’m attending two weddings in the next week, I don’t know if I mentioned that, but the first one is in Toledo this Saturday, and I will be driven to the Indianapolis airport on the way back from that wedding so I can catch my flight to California for the second one, the one in which I will be a bridesmaid. This afternoon, while I was in the midst of my work day and feeling very busy indeed, we discovered that I thought we were leaving on Friday morning, and Rahul thought we were leaving on Thursday morning, and his parents were coming to pick us up for this wedding a day earlier than I had planned.

So I had to take an additional day off work, which I really hadn’t wanted to do, and then the rush project I spent my weekend slaving over suddenly blew up and became a mild disaster around 4 PM. So I spent the next 6 hours or so downloading new files, proofreading, copy-pasting, generally trying not to have a nervous breakdown. Gah. Rahul got me out of the house around 10 PM and because the comedy show we were trying to go to was sold out, we ended up having a relaxing white trash trip to White Castle, Wal-Mart, and the gas station, and the surprising thing is it actually seemed to help me unwind. I think that must say loads about how shitty my day was up until that point. I got a new pair of pantyhose (no runs!) and these patterns, in anticipation of more relaxing days: Simplicity/Built By Wendy 3835 and Simplicity 4077 (the latter totally inspired by Flintknits’s awesome series of Simplicity 4077 blouses). Say what you will about Wal-Mart, patterns are cheap there.

Aside from eating gluey burgers and wandering the aisles of the Megalomart, the good things from today are:

1) Purlescence is now carrying my patterns! And Robynn is going to be putting them together with yarns into luxe little kits. Her yarns are all delectable, so I’m really excited to see which yarns she ends up pairing with which patterns.

2) I got my order in from Knitpicks. (Um, my first order. Simply Shetland 4 came back in stock, and since it’s kind of hard to find it on Amazon, where I buy most of my books with my credit card rewards gift certificates, I decided to go ahead and get it since it’s 40% off, and I am dying to make Autumn Rose at some point. Wow, that was a long sentence. Although I sold two books this week, they have immediately been replaced with two more. Net destash: 0.)

In today’s package, I got some Options needles, yay!–so I’ve transferred my Loquat Shawl to a needle that’s actually long enough that I can stretch it out to see its real size–just about 40 inches wingspan at the moment. (Should I be panicking yet? I have enough time, technically, to finish it before the wedding, since I have approximately 8 hours of airplane time, 15 hours of time in the car, and an unspecified, hellish number of hours in the airport between now and then, without even counting days once I get to California, before the wedding… but it will also need to be blocked before Sarah can wear it.) I also got New Pathways for Sock Knitters, which looks fascinating even though I don’t really knit socks (yet). I figured it would be a book with lasting value. Perhaps I’ll take it along with a skein or two of sock yarn as vacation knitting, and make a pair of socks once I’m done with the shawl. I’ve made a lot of sweaters over the course of my knitting life, but only one and a half socks (1.5 socks, not 1.5 pairs). And four pairs of felted slippers, which should count for something.

3) I’m going to knit a row of the shawl and then go to bed and read Fitcher’s Brides for a while. I hope I can finish it before I have to return it to the library.