Quick updates…

1) I made my January Help for Haiti donation to Doctors Without Borders, via the KFI matching program. Yay! I’m going to extend the offer through the end of  February. And my total sales were embarrassing compared to most of the other designers who have posted about their thousands of dollars worth of donations, so I’m not disclosing the total, just quietly donating my 75%.

2) I made a couple of updates to the Prismatic Scarf pattern, to fix a chart issue on the WS rows in the i-cord edging, and to add a link to The Textured Knitter’s no-purl mod for the pattern (it gives you slipped stitches on both sides). 450+ projects on Ravelry and nobody had mentioned the WS edging chart issue to me until today… oops! Thanks, juniperr. The new version is 1.3 and the proper PDF should be up on Ravelry now.

Happy new year!

Hello everyone! Happy new year! Happy inauguration!

I got back from my vacation about two weeks ago, but was almost immediately felled by a horrible flu bug and have only just started to feel better. I was mildly sick (runny nose) during the last part of my vacation, but didn’t start to feel truly awful until we got back to Madison, so I’ve spent the last couple of weeks curled up feverish and coughing in bed, imagining all the awful things I might have picked up in Asia (SARS! Bird flu! Malaria! Strep throat! Dengue fever!) and wondering if I would ever get better. I’ve been sick for 2 1/2 weeks now and still not entirely well. Ugh. But as a public service announcement, I would just like to say that if you’re sick and congested, the Neilmed neti pot is pretty much the best thing ever invented. I laughed at Rahul when he first started using a neti pot, but now I’m a true believer. Blowing just doesn’t cut it, nasal lavage is where it’s at! (Probably TMI, but when you’re sick, it’s just great–it will flush what seems like gallons of yellow mucus out of your sinuses and leave you feeling fresh as a non-mucus-filled daisy.)

Anyway, I had an awesome trip and will post pictures soonish. We went to Hong Kong, Cambodia (Siem Reap, Phnom Penh),  and Vietnam (Hanoi, Halong Bay/Baitulong Bay, and Sapa). We had so many great adventures, I don’t even know where to start. It was so worth the astronomical cost of the vacation and all the planning-related stress. Angkor Wat, which I expected would be amazing (and it was, actually!) was not even one of the particular highlights of the trip, if that tells you how great the rest of it was.

One thing I did not do a lot of was knitting. I got a cowl done on the way there, but on the way back, because of the jet stream, the transpacific flight was several hours shorter (about 10 hours total). I slept most of the time, and by the time I had eaten my meal and gotten my in-flight on-demand movie set up and my needles out, we were in San Francisco already. And while we were traveling, I was too tired or busy most of the time to be able to work on anything besides writing in my travel journal.

Anyway, I’m back, I’m feeling better, and working my way slowly through my various clogged inboxes, so if you’ve commented or emailed/messaged me in the past month, I will get back to you as soon as I can. I used to check email all the time on vacation, but not this time. This was very relaxing while I was away, but made the re-entry twice as daunting!

One thing that was awaiting me in my inbox was a gentle Ravelry message kindly informing me that there was (as I had kind of expected) a mistake in the cast-on number for the Tyro Socks pattern. Oops! So there now is a corrected version (version 1.1) available for download. (If you’re in doubt, you should have 32 stitches while working the toe back and forth, 64 stitches once you start working in the round for the foot.)

Anyway, I have plenty of pretty pictures for blog fodder once I have time to do some more detailed entries, and I’m looking forward to getting caught up with everything I missed in Ravelry and blogland! I hope the New Year is treating you well so far.

A list of things

1) An interesting swatching experiment about whether crochet takes more yarn than knitting. However, some people are loose knitters/crocheters and some people are tight knitters/crocheters, so I don’t think controlling tension by using the same size crochet hook/needle is entirely scientific.

2) I think there is another error, a small one this time, in the directions for the Kingfisher Capelet: the instructions where the pattern instructs you to purl on at the end of a row seems to be a typo. Substitute “cast on using any method you like” or “turn, then knit on.” Sorry about that, but at least this one isn’t a showstopper.

3) Erqsome posted a link to this great review of The Gentle Art of Domesticity. It’s a negative review, but unlike the others I’ve discussed, it’s articulate, intelligent, and well thought out, brings up specific examples, and acknowledges and addresses the counterarguments from the pro-Jane camp. Oh, and her description of Nigella is hilarious. I’m adding needled to my list of regular blog reads right now.

OBS! Errata

Lisabee pointed out an error in the Kingfisher Capelet pattern today. I feel pretty lousy about it considering how far she’d gotten before asking if it was really supposed to look like that…

So, in the body of the pattern, the instructions for the selvage on the wrong side should read *sl1, k1* instead of *k1, sl1*. That is, the stitches that are slipped on one side should be knit on the other side. But if you follow the instructions as written, you end up knitting and slipping the same stitches every time, because the selvage is worked on an odd number of stitches. The collar is worked on an even number of stitches, so it should be OK.

Sorry for being an idiot! I can’t believe I didn’t catch this. Man, I suck.