stars and flowers

I'm at 39 pages and need to convince myself to get to 40 today. It's the last week before I start an internship at a library, which I'm looking forward to, but there are lots of things that I have to do this week, because next week I'll be on standard work time for the first time in a few years (2006 actually) and there are some things that can only be done in the mornings in Vienna, such as visits to the university offices to straighten out all the red tape hoops - or would that be red tape skipping ropes? - that I need to jump through to get my thesis on the official tracks. I hate red tape. Thank goodness my mental directions finally reached the history department and they put together something of a checklist, which looks fierce and dreary. So tomorrow I shall gather alllllllll my university papers and on Wednesday I'll go visit the hopefully nice people at the student service office to ask them what papers, signatures and whatnots I'll still need.

Gee, that was a lot of text! Would that my thesis would grow whilst I blog. But let's talk about flowers. I love flowers. I love taking pictures of flowers. And if my dinky little camera from 2004 was a little better at taking pictures of particularly vibrant flowers, I'd be overjoyed. It still takes pretty good pictures of roses, though. To wit:

That's my favorite rose in the whole garden. New Dawn. A climbing rose with a wonderful, not too overpowering smell and it blooms from May to September. Then there's Constance (Constance Spry), who after a few years of growing without any blossoms is now always full of them:

It's no wonder that roses would also inspire my knitting. I made up this Rose Mitten pattern on the go with a chart I found somewhere, the curlicues are part of a fairisle design. The yarn is Lana Grossa Mood Print, which is soft and squishy with a little silk to make it extra-nice. I finished these in September 2009 and haven't even woven in the ends yet ... tsk. Maybe in September 2010 so I can wear them.

Here's the palm ...

The thumbs are a bit of a weak point, design-wise, but overall, I'm pleased. Apart from the roses there are plenty of other flowers in that garden. Like peonies, which I also love very, very much. The light pink ones actually have a bit of a minty smell.

And an intriguing visitor ...

Here's the darker variety of peonies. Funnily, when I was searching for project pictures, I came across pictures of these same peonies and roses that I had taken in May 2008. I'm really glad these flowers decide to delight us again every spring. To be honest, I'd love to plant even more roses and peonies and all kinds of beautiful flowers, since they mostly take care of themselves, unlike vegetables.

Strangely, even though I love flowers so much, I don't actually have many knitted items that use an explicit flower design. I have a few with leaf lace, but flowers, not so much. This is one of the few items, the Plum Blossom mittens - frogged, sadly, because the yarn needs smaller needles. But I have the yarn still and will remake them at some point. I love the design of these so much and there are so many things you can do with the idea. The yarn is Lana Grossa Baby Alpaca, soft and lovely, but not very stretchy, hence the need for smaller needles.

In that garden, there's also a tree that my mother calls Japanese Lilac. I have no idea. It's from the botanical garden in Frankfurt, planted probably a hundred or so years ago, since it's rather large. This year the spring was so cold that it's blooming only now and the bees are all over it and making a lot of noise.

Funnily, the bees entirely avoided the following plant, I have no idea what it's called in English, we call it jasmine, but it isn't jasmine (I know, I have real jasmine here in Vienna).

I made a yellow spot on the kitty's forehead with that pollen. I like doing that, since all cats are yogis and he looks cute like that. Too bad I didn't take his picture. Overall, this blog really does lack cat pictures, I must say. Like the bees, I have avoided the following project. It's crocheted and actually very simple to make. I only made it because it looks like a flower. And I made it in those colors, because they were available, I have no excuse, really. Never wore it. Still love it. Just don't know what to do with it. The Chrysanthemum Tea Shawl by Doris Chan has been redesigned by her into a skirt as well, so maybe I'll try my hand at that at some point in a different color.

Now I'm definitely more in the mood to write. The star that I mentioned in the title is the evening star. I've been watching it every evening since the weather has cleared up. I know it's actually a planet, Venus to be correct, but it's still my favorite.

Operation Sonnenstrahl

Sounds ominous, doesn't it? A friend told me that a friend of hers had christened her thesis "Project Sunshine" instead of calling it "the damn thesis". But my thesis needs a much more nefarious name. After all, it is a laser that will be directed at the moon ...

Right now it is at 25.5% of its operational power, i.e., some of the structures needed have been built. At 50% I think we can start warming up the generators which power the laser. At 75%, the laser will be programmed and adjusted with the correct coordinates. At 100% the laser will write something pretentious in Latin, Greek or Japanese on the moon. Yes. *evil cackling*

So right now it's a little like this weather below, since I received so much praise from my professor that my insecurities have been dampened down quite a bit.

I guess I need to produce more pages (and sleep more, lack of sleep is really not helping). That's why I'm once again repairing to the country to cut myself off from the internet for a little while.

Meanwhile, as I may have already mentioned, Herzblut is my only allowed knitting project. Funnily enough, its original name Lehtivihreä means chlorophyll in Finnish, but mine is blood red.

I'm using the Schoppel Zauberball Laceweight in Cranberry for this. My favorite yarn store got in a shipping of lace Zauberbälle in winter and I snagged up two, thinking they'd be sold out in a rush. No such thing! Even though I posted about their availability on Ravelry. Maybe there is a secret source for laceweight yarn in Austria that I haven't discovered yet.

Speaking of my favorite yarn store and yarn - I already got to see some of the winter yarn and it's gorgeous! Another reason to finish the thesis - unlimited knitting time! And the time and qualifications to look for a paid dissertation post or a proper job, which lead to more yarn money. The colors were simply incredible. And there is no on the other hand here. I might have a large stash (by non-knitter standards), but there are some yarn opportunities that just won't come again.

We'll see at what operational evel the laser is when I get back from the country.

uphill slog

Since the last post, my thesis has grown to a grand total of 20 pages. 20% or 1/5th done, not bad! I'm counting and celebrating every new page as a victory, keeps me from despairing. It isn't easy being completely insecure *and* a perfectionist. Right now, the weather is back to what it was a month ago, no light, no pictures possible, so in lieu of showing you pictures of my Herzblut shawl, which is on its second chart and growing slowly, I thought I'd show you some pictures of past shawls.

I actually love shawls, but don't get to wear them often. It's because in continental Europe you can't buy shawl pins for love or money and I'm not good enough at working with metal to make my own. I'm going to skip the shawls that I made for other people and just show you my personal favorites here. The one that I use most often - as the more fashionable substitute for my Lifesaver, which should have been a genius invention, but the execution was too flawed and I haven't wanted it since - is my Winged Black Sheep, which I can wrap around my hips, or around my back and front or around anything I want, really. Since it's dark grey, it hides dirt well (not that I get dirty a lot, I'm a nerd after all) and is most important for keeping my kidneys warm.

Right now it's waiting to be washed, reblocked and put away for the summer. The yarn for it is a handspun  then dyed black yarn that I got on a trip to Hamburg ... in 2008! Time is starting to pass too quickly for my peace of mind.

As I said, the Black Winged Sheep is the shawl that probably gets the most use. Another shawl that sometimes gets taken out of its little plastic bag is my beautiful, beautiful, beautiful Anna's Scarf (officially Ene's Scarf). Knit with vintage Swiss yarn that my father gave me, it's the perfect accessory for a visit to the Vienna Film Museum and the walk back home when it's a coolish night. Also perfect for over a nice coat or a nice dress.

Anna's Scarf is knit from the bottom up, so you start with those pointy bits. And what an endless slog it was until I finally reached the top. Maybe a better pattern for my thesis shawl, but I suspect Herzblut will be something of a slog as well.

Next up is my first foray into entrelac. I had had this yarn in my stash for the longest time, it's Lana Grossa Dasolo Stripes, and I just didn't know what to do with it. Then at some point the idea presented itself - entrelac! It's extremely easy and just a teeny bit tedious as well (is there any shawl that doesn't get tedious at some point?) and is actually a very good technique for striped yarn, whether the color changes are long or short. I think I might have worn this one ... twice? so far. I really need a shawl pin.

In my stash there is some beautiful, beautiful Lana Grossa Qui just waiting to be made into a similar shawl. It's been waiting there since 2008 as well.

Back to lace. One beautiful triangle scarflet - completely in fashion in 2009 - is the following Orkney Triangle. The pattern is called Shetland Triangle, but since I bought the yarn on Orkney in 2007 and it is exactly the color of the sea around Orkney, I think that name is more appropriate. I haven't worn it at all. It is a little scratchy, but the main thing is that I just haven't had the peace of mind to pick the outfit to go with it.

So ethereal. Just like the Ethereal Lace Lattice Wrap, which hasn't even been blocked yet. Blocking takes a lot of space! And you need lots of pins and sometimes even blocking wires or if you don't have such things (and I don't), constructions with pins and bits of string and all that. Tsk. The yarn is a mohair mix, fluffy and delicate and really hard to unravel if you have to. But soooo pretty!

I'll close here. There are plenty of other shawls that I made and haven't worn or blocked yet, some are in construction right now and some are sitting in the stash waiting patiently for me to finish the thesis and get on with life and knitting. I shall now print out over a hundred pages of citations that need to be sorted into my big binder of citations so that I can write five more pages tomorrow to make it 25.

To brighten your day, here's a video I found on Jezebel today:

getting in the mood to write

I'm going to compose a blog post to see if it helps with the thesis writing ;D. It's not like I have writer's block, I just ... have a very large mental wall to climb over. Sometimes that happens in knitting, too. That's when I usually lose my knitting mojo and do other stuff for a while. Losing your knitting mojo isn't all that dramatic, unless you are a knitting designer and actually have to make a living off of your skills. But I've lost my thesis mojo time and time again and every time that mental wall got higher and higher.

So when I lose my knitting mojo or just can't find the right pattern for the right yarn or can't think of anything I'd like to knit (because my queue does not have over 300 patterns on it, nooooo), sometimes I just turn to socks. Back during my first sock phase, I racked up a large queue of socks I had to knit and bought lots of sock yarn. I'm still always tempted by sock yarn and have large quantities of it. But the sock knitting craze stopped after six or seven pairs. It's really boring to have to knit the same thing twice, after all and as with my mittens, the second sock is usually much more even and tighter than the first one. So, when I lost my knitting mojo a while ago, I knit two pairs of socks - but took pictures of only one of them so far (with gratuitous shiny bug).

These are the Parrot Primavera socks - a mere exercise to use up yarn and get the pattern off my queue. The yarn I picked up at a supermarket in Styria along with a lot of other sock yarn, some of it very, very nice. I did regift them to my friend M., whose birthday was just around the corner, knitting is kind of convenient that way. The first pair I made will join my precious sock collection.

When trying to trick the knitting mojo back into flowing, simple sock patterns are best. A lot of repetition, nothing special, nothing too fancy, just a little pattern, because just plain stockinette is extremely boring (ask my lonely stockinette alpaca sock). Like these Charade socks, also made from Styrian supermarket yarn and also gifted to a friend:

Or, if you don't have a pattern and just feel like using up sock yarn, there are plenty of easy structural stitch patterns, like the one I used on my Ginger socks (made out of Lana Grossa Meilenweit):

So, socks that are made while the mojo flows look different. Like these Kew socks, also done in Lana Grossa Meilenweit:

The irony of it all is that I don't wear woolen socks very often. That's also kind of why I stopped knitting socks. I only wear them over cotton socks when my feet are cold and only around the house, so that's another reason why I prefer knitting mittens and gloves. Sometimes I wonder whether I should do a queue purge ... but then, what would I do if my mojo failed me again?

Now I'm going to try and wrap my brain around something thesis-related. I'm trying to imagine my mental wall like below and just picture the blue sky.

Edited to add: Well, whaddayaknow, 3 new pages, bringing the total up to 12! That's 8,3% of the total or over 1/10th.
Edited to add: As has been pointed out to me, 8,3% is less than 1/10. My mathematical brain has shrunk from pea-size to ... grain of sand-size? 12 pages are 12% of the total *blush*.

playing around

So, new design.

Today I went to the World Wide Knit in Public Day Pickknit in the Stadtpark and it was a lot of fun, even though it was so hot that knitting or crocheting was nearly impossible. I puzzled around, trying to find a good pattern for the yarn I had, but am still kind of lost on it. I think multicolored yarn just isn't me. And it's really hard to find a pattern that will make it look good. I just can't think of anything else to do with it and I like it so much. Frustrating.

I did pick up a beautiful skein of merino lace yarn in one of my favorite colors (dusky rose) from Karlaa - it will become a beautiful scarf of some sort. Right now I'm not supposed to work on it, though. I'm not supposed to work on anything besides my thesis. There's only one piece of knitting that is allowed - my Herzblut shawl, using the lace Zauberball yarn. My first attempt with it looked like this:

That's Spanish Armada, but it just didn't feel right. Right now I'm still kind of torn between Lehtivihreä and L'Aux Anges. We'll see. I have two red lace Zauberbälle and I'm a little more tempted to do a rectangular shawl, but on the other hand, that ring effect is just too cool. It must be square or rectangular. Just not sure on the design ...

The best part about the picknick - apart from seeing so many knitters and their projects and their yarns and their techniques - was seeing my friend R., who usually lives in Budapest. Seeing her is always fun :D Sadly, the evening has been ruined about 10 minutes ago by a spider that first crawled over my naked leg (AAAAHHH) and then vanished. I really would like to know where it is so I can kill it. I mean, it's bad enough that I brought in a spider in my backpack two weeks ago, but I thought I was safe from spiders on the third floor, here! No fair! Brrrrrr.