Studio Marlowe

I carved this guy last week, but I thought it would be more appropriate to show Drac off today. Don’t get *too* impressed with my carving skills–I used a template. If I can get out at a timely manner this evening I’ll be lighting the candle again and handing out candy to the trick-or-treaters. Hopefully the 20 yards of yarn I ordered from Artfibers will arrive this afternoon and I might then be doing some finishing work on this in between waiting for doorbell rings:

And before anyone asks, no, that’s not my bra, it’s a camisole.

Sometimes I don’t feel like cooking dinner, or I get home too late to get into a full-blown cooking extravaganza. Time for a salad!

Of course, if it’s going to be the full meal, a salad needs some substance. This one is spinach, red bell pepper (79 cents each at the grocery store this week!), cucumber, carrots, avocado, chopped almonds, and a dollop of hummus in lieu of dressing (I hate dressing. It’s not a health thing, it’s a remnant of childhood pickiness). Delicious. I’m having some more for lunch today.

In knitting news, I’m checking out another craft night this evening. Technically I really don’t have time so I don’t know if it’s going to become a regular thing, but it’s always good to know what’s going on, right?

 Just a quick post to note that I’ve created a new Studio Marlowe Flickr group.  If you’ve knit any Studio Marlowe patterns (free or purchased), please feel free to post them to the Flickr group!  I would love to see what people have made.

Okay. I *might* do NaKniSweMo. Might. But I need to figure out a project. And I’m absolutely not buying new yarn. So, I rifled through the stash last night and came up with four possibilities:

Clockwise from top left:

1. Rowan 4-ply soft. The fine gauge might make this a bit ambitious, but the project I have planned is mostly plain stockinette, and I think I have many of the details worked out (as much as you can before starting a project, at least).

2. Allhemp3. This one would be pretty ambitious. The yarn is small, and, I have to say, kind of tough to work with. I’m not sure I’d be able to dedicate long enough chunks of time to the project to finish in a month.

3. Rowan Calmer. Probably the most realistic project in terms of gauge. But I also only have a vague idea of what I want the finished product to look like, so I’d have to spend quite a bit more time figuring out design details.

4. Rowanspun DK. Not totally unrealistic in terms of gauge, BUT, anything I have envisioned for this involves loads of cables, which would slow things down.

I’m going to have to think it over this weekend.

Even though this is, in theory, a knitblog, and furthermore, my knitblog, which you would imagine would feature my knitting rather heavily, I have been rather remiss in posting anything I’ve knit lately. Sure, I’ve been cooking, and acquiring yarn, and ogling knits on PBS, but you might be under the impression that I have given up on actual knitting.

Fear not, gentle reader, my own personal knitting has not stopped. It has slowed a little. And also, I am working on something that I justmightmaybewhoknows submit to somewhere, so I feel the need to keep it under wraps at the moment. But I have also been plugging away on my personal goal of the moment, getting myself out of this glut of purple projects that I seem to be lost in at the moment (the new and unnamed project is, incidentally, also purple–but I think that’s the end of purple yarn I brought out in the move so variety should be forthcoming soon). To that end, the front bit of Anne is moving along, slowly but undeniably:

I snapped this this morning before running out to my 9AM lab. The lighting situation in my apartment is seriously unfunny–I think this weekend’s project is going to be finding a suitably sized box and making a new lightbox! At any rate, I’m now into the plain stockinette part of the front of Anne, so the major looming design decision is how low to scoop the scooped neckline. Risque or demure? Hmmm.

Since I moved, I’ve effectively given up television. Not for any particular virtuous reason, but simply because I don’t personally own one and so far it’s simply seemed like too much effort/too expensive. Also, at the moment, my chair reupholstering project is taking place in the corner where a TV might normally go and I’m not sure where I’d displace it too (the patio, I suppose). This means I’ve been listening to lots of radio. I’ve always been a wee bit of an NPR junkie, but in the past couple of months I’ve become quite devoted. However, a) my apartment does not get the greatest reception, and b) even NPR does not always have riveting programming. Recently I remembered that, duh! my laptop has a DVD player, and many libraries have DVD collections. So I’ve been checking out DVDs for entertainment also. My current viewing pleasure in a series called Foyle’s War, which airs on PBS here in America. Of course, if you knit, you generally start looking at knitting everywhere, including your television. It’s not even deliberate, you just can’t help yourself! And Foyle’s War has some great looking knitwear. Here, for your viewing pleasure, screencaps of some of my favorites from the latest episode I’ve got out (hope this isn’t violating any copyright laws!).

Okay, the color is a bit dowdy, but the design up the front is quite distinctive, no? I think it would look great in a nice deep red or perhaps a purple (although for my personal recreation attempts, I would probably try to avoid purple as I’m currently drowning in it).

I honestly don’t care for the style of this vest–it’s a bit on the short side and makes it distressingly obvious that the man wearing it has extremely high-waisted trousers (even, if the costuming in this series is anything to go by, by WWII standards). However, I love the color scheme and the look of the fair isle pattern. I actually have a load of green/brown/cream yarn earmarked for a fair isle sweater for myself and I may be using this screencap as inspiration on the drawing board. I have to say also that I wonder if the costume department has it in for knitwear–the only characters ever wearing anything technically interesting are unattractive or not especially likeable. The woman in the grey cardigan is a Nazi sympathizer and a traitor, for example.

Anyway, it’s a great series! Aside from the knitting, the plotlines are great, it’s set in a very scenic part of England, and Anthony Howell gets lots of screentime and is very easy on the eyes:

Really, what more could you ask for?

Note to self: knitting, hairbrushes, and the dark pit of my backpack….do not mix well.  At all.

I know, I know, I’m trying to cut down on stash. But I feel one can make a small exception for discontinued yarns, right? They really won’t come along again (well, I am still holding out hope that Jaeger will see the light and undiscontinue all their yarn, but…that’s a whole other post on “wishful thinking” in and of itself). The new but discontinued yarn in question? Rowanspun DK, color “Catkin”:

There is still actually quite a bit of this stuff floating around ebay, but it’s coming up less and less often. I had (seriously) been drooling over this yarn for over a year so I decided to finally snap it up before it all disappeared. And…this is the really good part. Usually I am very leery of buying green yarn online because it’s *so* hard to get an accurate idea of the color (and if the shade is off, it can be so, so horrible). Well, this yarn was actually (I think), a *better* shade of green in person than it was online. So I really lucked out!

As far as comparability to current Rowan yarns go, I think Harris Tweed is probably the nearest thing they have to Rowanspun. But, the Rowanspun is a lot thinner, though it does seem to bloom out a bit.

Believe it or not, this is the first yarn I’ve bought since I moved (two months!). Might be the last new yarn I buy this year…I’m trying to enforce a “finish two, buy one” rule but at the moment I’m all about starting stuff and less about following through, it seems.

I’m continuing to work my way through Vegan with a Vengeance:

This is a spinach chickpea curry. There are actually tomatoes in there too, but they’ve blended in so much with everything else you can barely tell. I decided to take a liberty (just barely) with the recipe and throw in some diced potatoes, rather than serving it over rice, a modification I think I may be repeating in the future. Very tasty!

Not much knitting to report on, unfortunately–the school year is really kicking into high gear and I have roughly a million things I need to be doing. And I’m having guests staying with me later this week so I’m trying to get everything done before they arrive so I can play hostess without constant fretting about the work I’m supposed to be doing.

P.S. I noticed in one of the forums I occasionally frequent that today is Blog Action Day, and that the topic for this year is the environment. Frankly, I don’t feel like writing a whole other post, but as my “real” life is all about the environment, I’ll just make this one do double duty. So: see the delicious vegan food above? Did you know that in addition to being delicious, that vegan food is also reducing my carbon footprint? In case you’ve missed it, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization came out with a really interesting and informative report a while back, Livestock’s Long Shadow. I won’t bore you with all the statistics (read the report!), but one of the major points is that meat/dairy consumption is as big a contributor to greenhouse gas production as the transportation sector. So cutting down on your meat intake is a great way to green your lifestyle up a bit. If full blown vegetarianism/veganism is not for you, consider replacing a few meat-centered meals a week with vegetarian ones. It’s good for the planet AND good for you!

I was listening to the radio last night while doing laundry, and On Point was doing a piece on corn, with a focus on this new documentary that’s coming out, King Corn. I am absolutely fascinated by food so of course I listened and now I really want to see the documentary! It was also really interesting to get some of the history on how corn became such a ubiquitous (insidious?) product in America following WWII. I used to do a lot of reading of food labels (mostly looking for hidden meat or meat by-products in my early vegetarian days) and it is seriously unbelievable the number of things that contain high fructose corn syrup! Even foods that you don’t think of as needing to be particularly sweet seem to have a bit of it in there. I’ve heard it also gets added into a lot of low-fat foods to make up for the flavor lost with the fat (which sometimes means that the calorie count is exactly the same….check out the label on your low fat peanut butter sometime if you don’t believe me). It is also used a lot as animal feed, which makes me wonder what the ethanol-driven spike in corn prices is going to do to the cost of meat–naturally I would be thrilled if it meant people were going to consume less:) Anyway, the radio piece was really fascinating, so if you’re interested at all in food, agribusiness, etc., you might want to listen to it!