Charlotte Heart Walk Raffle Results

Okay, time to report the results of my drawing from my Charlotte Heart Walk fund raising effort. I raised $130 overall, of which $25 was seed money from me, and $105 came from folks who bought $5 ‘raffle tickets.’

Many, many, many thanks to everyone who helped me raise some cash for heart research.

=============================

I entered each person’s name into a list, listing them multiple times if they bought more than one ticket. Then I went to RANDOM.ORG and used their “List Randomizer”  to sort the list. Here is the result:

There were 21 items in your list. Here they are in random order:

• Christina 3
• Ed 3
• Ed 4
• Dinah
• M.C. 4
• Ed 1
• Nancy 2
• Josh
• Christina 2
• M.C. 5
• Christina 4
• Ed 2
• Chelsi
• Christina 5
• Christina 1
• Donna
• Nancy 1
• Alex
• M.C. 1
• M.C. 3
• M.C. 2

Timestamp: 2011-09-20 11:18:57 UTC
==============================
As you can see, Christina is the winner! I will contact Christina to discuss what she wants me to make for her. I’ll of course blog about it on my knitting blog!

Here I am with my team leader for the event.

From 2011-09-17 Charlotte Heart Walk

Charlotte Heart Walk Drawing – Sept. 17 deadline!

This year I’ll be walking in the Charlotte Heart Walk.

I’m a terrible fund-raising person, so the only money in my account so far is the $25 worth of seed money that I donated. So I’m stealing an idea from Melinda Steele-StCyr!

For every $5 you give through my page (link below), I’ll enter your name into a drawing… donate $20 and your name goes in four times… $30 – six times… you get the idea. After the walk I’ll do a random drawing to choose the winner of a custom pair of socks or a hat or a pair of mittens (or anything else [small] of a type I’ve made… stalk my Ravelry projects page) using worsted-weight or heavier yarn. Your choice of fiber and color …up to $30 in materials. If it’s in my stash, even better!

The Greater Charlotte Heart Walk will be held on September 17th, 2011 Charlotte, NC, so you have a little more than two weeks to donate. If you’re the only person who donates, you get a custom-knit item (for you or as a gift), possibly for less than the cost of the yarn. If I get a few entries, your chances are still great!

Be sure to put in the comments that you’re entering the drawing for the knitted item!

Thanks very much in advance for your support of this cause.

-Jorah

=====================

I’m walking and raising money to help reduce death and disability from cardiovascular diseases and stroke by 20% by 2020.

I’m joining the American Heart Association’s Heart Walk to promote physical activity to build healthier lives, free of cardiovascular diseases and stroke.

Please support me in helping to reach this lifesaving goal by giving a donation today.

================
Rav projects page:
http://www.ravelry.com/projects/Jorah

Rav stash page:
http://www.ravelry.com/people/Jorah/stash

My donation page:
http://heartwalk.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?msource=Gigya&supId=329536589&ievent=456696

Little sock goes ripit, ripit, ripit

My attempt at making one of Cat Bordhi’s discovery socks didn’t go very well. I did discover that it was too tight to go over my heel. I’ve ripped back to the arch of the foot and I’ll set the project aside for a while. I might turn this into a classic sock and make a discovery sock with larger yarn. I’m a bit discouraged, I won’t kid you.

Stripey sock is stripey

This view shows most of the foot, the heel, and the too-tight cuff.

Knitter’s Inventory

I’ve been thinking this morning about my “knitting journey.” This fall I’ll hit my 4-year mark from when I started to learn to knit. I have 54 finished projects in my list on Rav, or about one F.O. per month. More than I expected, really. But I’ve never been interested in churning out projects. I’m a lot more interested in learning new things.

Looking at the list that way shows that I’ve been true to my focus; most of those projects are first of a kind for me, or steps in learning, where I’ve done a clumsy first effort and progressed to a harder or more-finished project on the next project of that type. My only ‘gimee’ projects tend to be for charity knitting… for instance, the mittens I made early this year using super-chunky yarn.

I haven’t done anything often enough to get really good at a particular technique, but I don’t believe that learning happens in a linear fashion (at least for me). I seem to learn in a way similar to accretion, where each bit of learning (when it actually sticks) builds a bit more of the structure. So learning to do stranded color work leads to increases in my skill in yarn handling and tension control, and learning to cable helped me learn to ‘read’ my knitting on my lace projects.

Overall, I’m pleased with the progress I’ve made so far. My frustration with my current convertible mittens centers on the feeling that I didn’t push myself. I suspect that I’m going to thin out my queue of any simplistic patterns and focus on things which… after two months or more of work… I’ll be thrilled with, not just happy the project is done.

Some things that have changed for me over four years of knitting:

• I thought that I’d always do simple patterns. Now I look for complexity.
• I thought I’d always use thick yarn. Now I work mostly with fingering weight.
• I loved rugged-looking, uneven yarn at first. Now I love smooth, tightly-wound yarn.
• I used to compulsively buy any yarn that appealed to me. Now I have so much yarn in my stash that I (generally) only buy for specific projects. Any time I think… “ohhh, that yarn is so cool!” I try to remember the ultra-cool skeins lurking in my stash, which have never yet seen a moment of use.
• I thought I was alone being a guy who knits. I’ve discovered a rich community of men who knit, but even more importantly, I’ve discovered that the Charlotte knitting community is incredibly welcoming to male knitters. In fact, I’d say that I’ve had only a tiny percentage of knitters anywhere react to me in anything but a warm and helpful fashion.

What has not changed…

• I still haven’t found time to really learn to spin, nor prep the fleece I have in my stash, nor refinish the spinning wheel. (However, at least I know about these things now!)

Some snaps of the 1st Broad Street convertible mitten

I finally got some photos uploaded of the first of the pair. I’m about half way up the palm on the second mitten, about to get to the fingers.

Looking at these, I realize that I need to get photos of someone wearing them.

I used Jeny Staiman’s Interlock Bindoff (from the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Knitty) for several of these fingers… and I love it. Which is not the same as saying that I’ve memorized it.

Finger detail

Back of the convertible mitten

I’m particularly pleased with the job I did in picking up stitches across the back of the hand (where I joined the pop-cap portion of the mitten). I haven’t previously done a particularly crafty job of such tasks. I stretched the fabric out across my left hand, and working in strong morning light during my 30-minute train ride to work, I was able to pick up one side of each stitch across the back, using a steel US #0 DPN.

Palm of the convertible mitten

Broad Street Mittens – Progress

I actually hemmed and sewed-in all of the ends on that convertible mitten I’ve had OTN since May 30. Hoping to cast on for the second of the pair tonight, but for dentist-waiting-room knitting, I dug out that silk/wool scarf I was working on all spring. Nice to see it and not dread working on it. Putting a project aside for a while isn’t always a bad thing. Photos to follow.

Out of the gloaming

I am still moving along on my “11 mittens in 2011″ project, albeit slowly. My most recent FO is a pair I’m calling “Gloaming,*” and made from a very, very popular mitten pattern called Bella’s Mittens.  I’m planning to send these off to the Great Frozen North of central New Hampshire.

Close-up of the hand

This pattern was easy to follow, and if you’ve done any cables at all, I think you’ll find these to be very easy. If you’ve done lots of cables, you’ll probably be able to memorize the repeat after one or two times.  I really like this project and suspect I’ll do more.

The pair! Proof that I finished both!

As is so often the case, I customized the thumb of the first mitten, didn’t take any notes… and couldn’t recall exactly what I’d done for the second thumb. No worries; they both seem to fit a wide variety of hands, but it would have been nice to have some notes.

Here’s a final shot showing the palm.

*obscure joke

“You must be very patient…”

For some reason, people who don’t knit will often say something along these lines: “Wow, you knit, huh? You must be very patient” or “I don’t have the patience to do that.” This may be code for boy, that looks boring, but let’s take it as an honest statement.

The fact is; most knitters I know are no more patient than non-knitters I know. I certainly am not patient. If knitting required patience, I wouldn’t do it. If knitting gets boring, I stop and read a book or clean the bathroom. Evidence exists (in the form of the growing stack of books next to my bed) to show that I don’t often quit my knitting to read. Let’s not talk about the state of the bathroom.

But as I was carefully taking out about 8 hours of lace knitting a couple of weekends ago, and trying not to weep over missed yarn-overs, it dawned on me that there’s one type of ‘patience’ that knitters do need.

You need the willingness to be patient with yourself. When I was first learning to knit, it did not come easily. I had a couple of false starts, and I couldn’t even do garter stitch very well for at least the first two months. I had to learn then to forgive myself for making the same mistakes repeatedly. But once you have the basics down, it’s easy to get a bit smug about your knitting.

Then you try something new. The self-congratulatory smugness evaporates. Basic cable knitting isn’t technically difficult, but there are many things that can go wrong. The first time you make a thumb gusset, do two-handed stranded colorwork, or try to figure out how to cast on across a gap when making glove fingers, it can feel as if you’ve started fresh.

Lace knitting, for me, is as hard to do as learning to knit my first garter-stitch scarf. Since I need to block out uninterrupted time to work on my lace projects, it can be weeks or months between sessions. Skills like reading complex charts, or leaving a little extra slack in certain stitches (allowing those K3Togs room to happen later), or just being able to read your own knitting can leak away in the meanwhile.

But getting mad at myself doesn’t help. Having some patience with my own need to relearn techniques I’ve already forgotten three times, forgiving myself for making mistakes I’ve made a dozen times before…

Yeah, patience can be a virtue.

Quick update

I figured that since two months have passed since I last updated, it would be better to do something than to leave this until my angst level reached some sort of overload. Since last we spoke, I’ve been very busy. Very little angst, really. We went to San Fran and had a great time. The communications conference went very well, although trying to keep up with normal work while also attending day-long sessions was exhausting.

View from our room at the Westin St. Francis

The view from our room was really nice, though the room itself wasn’t.

Myr and I played tourist where we could. We had a fantastic dinner at The Slanted Door, we rode the cable cars to Fisherman’s wharf, I bought a bunch of nice yarn at Artfibers, we did get to see the Britex store, and we were really glad that we’d brought warm clothes, as after the second day of unusually warm weather, the fabled rain closed in, and our trip to the north shore area was very damp, though still stupendously scenic.

View from the cable car on the way to Fisherman's Wharf

Knitting a swatch at Artfibers

Surf along the coast north of SF

 

Oncoming cable car seen while crossing the street outside the Weston

Back home, I’m actually knitting with some of the yarn I got at Artfibers. This is a simple basket-weave scarf that I’ve been knitting on as my ‘train knitting.’ It’s coming out okay. This will be my scarf for next winter.

A scarf I am making from some Artfibers silk and angora yarn

The weather continues to improve here in Indian Land. One of my favorite spring trees is blooming. I love the colors of American Redbud.

Closeup of flowers of the American Redbud

On the knitting front, I am only two fingers away from completing the second of a pair of knitted gloves. I finished the first one about a year ago. It will be very nice to have the pair done. I can count it as a half pair for the 11/2011 challenge on Rav, too. I’ve also finally cast on for the first of the Electric Purple Eisblume, which look to be the most-advanced knitting I’ve tried yet.

Also since my last post, I went to a technical conference in Denver, and on both the SF and the Denver trip I spent the flights knitting two pairs of baby mittens. These turned out well, but I’ve managed to lose one mitten, and I still haven’t bound off on another. They were uninteresting except that on the Denver flight the light was bad, and I forced myself to do most of the body knitting without looking more than occasionally at my hands. I’ve never previously been able to knit more than one or two stitches without looking.

Okay, that’s enough for now. More to come, I hope.

SF CA or Bust

I’m going on my first out-of-state business trip in… ever, it seems like. The last plane trip I took on business was from Mass. to N.C. sometime around 1984. I’m attending a two-day meeting in San Francisco, and Myr is coming along for the trip. We’ll extend it into the weekend, and spend a couple of days looking around SF (a city we’ve each visited only briefly), dining at wonderful restaurants, and visiting…. (wait for it)… yarn shops! I know you are shocked. So far we’ve a plan to go to Artfibers, and of course we are open to suggestions for other great shops. We’ll be staying in the financial district, so if you know of a must-visit LYS in the city, leave me a comment. I’m hoping that Myr will visit Britex Fabrics, which isn’t really my type of store but I may break down and visit just for the chance to look through their button selection, which is reputed to be amazing.

 

As for food, I’m hoping to have lunch on Friday somewhere in Chinatown, we have reservations that evening at The Slanted Door (near the SF Ferry Building), and we’ll probably be up near wine country north of the city on Saturday, so we’ll be likely eating out in a little town called Petaluma. I’m thinking of renting a car for the day and taking a drive along the coast