World of Beer

Beer,

So I was eating the best hamburger I’ve ever had from a restaurant today (at Burger 21, a new-ish place in Tampa) thinking that it was going to be hard to top.  Down the street was a beer shop I’d read about online called World of Beer.

Luckily, World of Beer did indeed top the burger: they had nine coolers side-by-side, full of beer from around the world, with very few duplicates or empty spaces.  I’d estimate 350 unique bottles.  5 of the coolers were European beers (2 coolers just for Belgium!), so that was great.  Unfortunately, it was local beer I was looking for.  I bought their last 3 bottles from Saint Somewhere.  Other than that, they only had two other Florida beers, both IPAs which I’m not interested in.

So I had to make do with a couple of Belgian abbey ales and some Scottish wee heavy to round out the cooler for the trip home.  And of course, now we’ll have to go back.  The bartender said they were going to open up a shop in Gainesville, but who knows how long that’ll take…

Project #1

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Back from a cross-country plane trip… the ONE good thing about being hurled through the air in a metal tube after waiting in line to be searched is getting some time to knit. Thank goodness for all the little old ladies who demanded we get to keep our needles, at least. (They are so much safer than shampoo and toothpaste.)

Anyway… I finished Project #1:

I’d been itching for a reason to try out one of those multi-fiber yarn-esque skeins forever. I bought one while my mom was in town, and she whipped up an easy pattern for me to make a shawl/wrap/scarf with it. Basically, I started in the middle of the triangle at the top, and added 4 YOs (at the ends and two in the middle) every other row. Super easy, though I did track how many stitches I needed to get to the middle of each row. I only had to stop and recount during a row a few dozen times. I blame dehydration.

Anyway, it was fun to knit, and I got quite a few positive comments while I was working on it (including from one of the flight attendants!). Working with this yarn felt a bit like a sampler pack – I got to try knitting all kinds of weird things and see what I liked enough to do a big project with. The overall wrap is not really “wrap” sized, but it makes a great scraf-wrap hybrid. If I did it again, I would use two skeins instead.

This yarn had a lot going on – here are the highlights:

Super fuzzy dark green: Like mohair but less fun. Much less fun.

Ladder yarn: Let us never speak of ladder yarn. It is designed by sadists.

Thick’n’thin yarn: I was prepared to grit my teeth and bear through this part, but I actually quite liked both the yarn and the effect, so I’ll have to try this again.

Ribbon: Weird, but easy, though there was a thin sample that was super slippery and somewhat tricky to get the tension right with.

On to finishing the next project!

New Projects

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My mom came to visit this weekend – which was fantastic. We did indeed go to the yarn store (among many other activities), and I stocked up for three, no four projects, with expert help from my mom.

No doubt I’ll be outlining the victories and setbacks in these projects in the days and weeks to come, but here’s a preview:

(1) Alligator scarf (with pattern)

(2) Felted tote bag (without pattern)

(3) Stuffed owl doll (with pattern)

(4) Shawl/Wrap (with hand-crafted pattern from my mom)

Will post more with links to patterns and pictures soon… I’ve already made a lot of progress on the alligator scarf, avoided the 8-stitch double-pointed needle start in one project (the tote bag), only to have to do not one, but TWO 6-stitch DPN starts for another (the owl). I guess I’d better learn to like doing this – so many projects I’d like to do involve starting to knit in the round from 6-8 stitches. If only there was a way to grow two extra pairs of hands…

Still here, no really

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Wow – it’s really been over a month since I last posted. I’m not sure how it’s already mid-March. And I’m a little fuzzy on what happened to February.

Real life has been seriously interfering with Knitting life, but I did manage to finish a long-promised scarf for one of my best friends. The same ruffle scarf I’ve done in the past, but I changed it a little bit, and added a border at the end:

I like how it came out, and hope my friend does, too. But (true confessions), I only thought of adding the border when I, uh, ran out the white yarn I’d been using. So, I dithered between going to store and getting more (Excuse to go buy more yarn!) and trying out something new. The test scarf I made for myself is very soft – almost too soft! – and so I thought the border with a different type of yarn would give the scarf a little substance. I wasn’t expecting the sort of vintage look that it adds, but I count that as a bonus.

My mom is coming to visit this weekend – so a trip to the yarn store is definitely in order!

code4lib BrewUp (aka Beermaggeddon)

Beer, ,

One of the nice side effects of having people come from all over the country for a conference is that if everybody brings a bottle or two, you wind up with the beer tasting to end all tastings. In fact, we had so much beer we decided to do a pre-tasting last night (which was mostly dominated by stout).

Tonight was the main tasting, and we had a bathtub full of bottles on ice, a two-room suite packed with tasters, and a makeshift bar staffed by my boss and coworkers from UCSD. I started out with my favorite beer from last year in Asheville (French Broad Wee Heavy-est) and followed that up with some Lost Abbey Sinners 09, a Belgian-style sour fron San Marcos. There were some stouts and other interesting things in the middle (even a white chocolate ale), but I finished the night with the beer I brought: Cigar City‘s Sea Bass, also a sour, though Cigar City’s labels are so clever I wasn’t sure until I drank it.

The Sea Bass was a real hit, and I think I’m going to need to pick up a few bottles when I get back home. Though the tastings were all by the thimblefull, so we’ll see how I like it by the pint.

Working without a net, or at least a pattern

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Drunk with knitting power (and maybe some beer), I recently asked Redbeard what I could make for him. He thought about it for a minute, and finally asked if I could make him a glasses case. Redbeard has worn glasses since he was 12 and has an aversion to direct sunlight that means that he never goes out without prescription sunglasses and some sort of brimmed hat. This means he’s almost always wearing one pair of glasses and carrying the other – in a sequence of never-ideal cases that have failed him in one way or another.

So – no pressure. Just not to fail him where countless others have.

I decided to go the felt route, and found a wool-mohair-angora mixed yarn in a color Redbeard likes. I did a felted test patch, and wasn’t happy with how well it felted down with size 8 needles, so I knitted it on my smallest needles (US 5) instead. I didn’t even really look for a pattern, because I couldn’t believe anyone else had this crazy project, and I knew what I wanted to try – a rectangle combined with a triangle-y flap that ended in a string that would be wrapped around the case to help secure the glasses. Here’s what it looks like, before stitching the rectangle into a pouch:

I used the SSK and K2tog stitches (that I learned from the market bag) on the knitting side to create the triangle flap, but wanted to reduce on the purl side, too. I couldn’t find anything that made any sense to me to use as the purling counter-point to SSK, so I just cast off one stitch at the start of each purl row. This worked really well, actually! The P2tog took care of the last stitch.

I’ve sown up the pouch, but am too tired to get a picture, let alone start felting.

BUT before I trudge to bed – I want to also bring up my other project, that I mentioned awhile ago and have been making slooooooow progress on. There is something about this scarf that makes it hard for me to want to work on it. Apparently I’m not so good at counting to 7 over and over again and find it really challenging (knit 7, purl 7, knit 7, purl – wait how many was that?)

Or, even more likely, the “keyhole” experience that I suffered at the beginning of scarf has scarred me for life. Which is how long it will take me to be ready to face it again at the other end of this scarf. Don’t ask why the keyhole is off-center. Just don’t ask. (I have no idea.)

Ruffle scarf 2: Wider and much more grey

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As promised, I have revisited the ruffle scarf, but this time I added some extra rows to make it a little wider. The yarn I thought was mostly grey was actually white to black with grey in between, so I’m glad that I used it for this scarf because the minor pooling  is not so obvious!

Each project is still a learning experience for me – and for this scarf I learned several things: First, I learned that it is possible to start knitting the wrong way in the middle a row if you’re not paying attention. Second, I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter if you’re knitting with mohair! I love this stuff! I didn’t even bother to pull out the wrong stitches (in part because I couldn’t figure out how many there were), I just turned around and knitted the other way.

Boxing Day Brew In Bottles

Beer, ,

We bottled the scotch ale last night, after a nice day out at the zoo with the kids.  The gravity was still a few points higher than what the recipe asked for, but hadn’t changed in a week, so I figure it’s done one way or the other.

I did a quick search for the final gravity being too high, and found people suggesting problems with

  • the grain bill
  • inaccurate thermometers
  • mashing temperature
  • stale yeast
  • going to second fermentation too soon
  • temperature fluctuations during fermentation

So I’ve got a few ideas of what to do better next time, but I’m mostly confirmed in my paraphrase of Tolkien:

Go not to the tubes for counsel, for they will say both yes and no and RTFM!

Success!

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The market bag is drying on the rack (that sounds so much more professional than “my son’s plastic toy shopping basket balanced precariously on top of his plastic toy microphone stand).

It’s almost there, and it looks like the re-felting worked! (I ran it two more times through – for a total of four complete “quick wash” hot-cold cycles.)

Here’s the close up:

And, the bag in its final felted glory:

It’s weird, though – I deliberately used the same type of yarn for the green and yellow so they would felt the same, but I think that the stitching must matter because the sides are definitely more felted than the bottom. I’m already planning to do another one – making the sides and handles longer.

Felting questions remain

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So, I may have been subject to irrational exuberance yesterday – upon closer inspection this morning I realize that I can still see some stitch definition in the felted bag. There’s no doubt that it’s felted, but it’s not felted-beyond-all-reason-felted, which I was hoping for.

I’m going to look online to see if people have had success with further felting even after something is mostly dried. I won’t be all that disappointed if this is as good as it’s going to get – I’m still pretty happy with the bag! But… if I could felt it further….

And, for my next trick, I’m going to turn this lump of fuzz into a scarf:

Redbeard and I were convinced that this had to be roving until the nice lady at the yarn store patiently showed us how, yes indeed, it was really yarn.