I got nothin

I’ve been sitting here for a while trying to write something gripping, but it’s time to admit…

I got nothin. I’m not even vaguely interesting today. I’m even boring myself. There’s me and some work and the laundry…the same stuff I’ve been knitting for a while. In an incredibly bad move in the blog fodder department, I even knit the same thing last night that I knit the night before.

Smunoringinalhat05111

Another unoriginal hat, this one out of Liberty Fibers hand-dyed merino, held double. This colour is “Summer Mountain” . Judy, the dye artist who made it says you can get it here.

Libertysummermountain0611

It’s really beautiful, soft and a treat to work with. This hat was the perfect thing to do with it, even if a set of mittens would have broken up the monotony for you guys.

In the fine tradition of knit blogging, having nothing to write about leaves the blogger with only two possible solutions. The cat wouldn’t stay still for a picture, so that leaves me with the other.

Q & A

Stephanie M asks:

Umm… do you get anything for winning the furnace wars?

Of course. What sort of idiots would do it for no reason? We get GLORY and the priviledge of hanging something over your siblings head for a whole year. (We also get a lower energy bill, and the good feeling you get from doing the planet a favour…. but did I mention the GLORY?)

Saranlap (and she wasn’t the only one) has a question about the charts and “no stitch” for the Unoriginal Hat:

Help! Love the hat but I’m confused by this ‘no stitch’ stitch…what do you do when you get to this placeholder? Just slip the stitch without doing anything to it??

Nope, you ignore it. If you ever see a “no stitch” or greyed out spot on a chart, you just pretend it isn’t there. It’s usually a result of a decrease on a previous row that sort of disappeared the stitch that would be there. If you have 14 stitches on a chart and on a row you decrease four of them, then there has to be a way to handle the missing stitches on the next row of the chart. That’s what the “no stitch” does. It says “There used to be a stitch here, but there isn’t any more. Move along. Nothing to see here.”

If you come to a “no stitch” stitch on a chart, just go to the next square that isn’t greyed out and carry on. Pretend it wasn’t even there.

Karen asks about my new charting software:

That is an amazing piece of software. And does that fact that you are using it mean it is Mac-compatible?



A-yup. It’s a miracle. You need a minimum of Mac OS X 10.4 or later to run it. I’m still boggling about the price. With the Canadian economy booming so fast and the US economy….well, being less so, the Canadian dollar is worth $1.09 US today. That means that not only did I get good software for the Mac, I feel like I got it on sale.

(I’m starting to understand the line-up at the border.)

Kassia is looking for the yarn:

Where did you get the yarn, though? I looked on Blue Moon’s website and they don’t have a yarn available called “Leticia.”

It’s true. I have it on good authority that they have a boatload of the stuff, but it’s just not up on the website right now. It’ll go up there really soon, in a lot of colourways. I got some the last time it went by.

UPDATE: Apparently I just don’t pay attention. It’s up now, and the page is here.

Finally, a whole bunch of you asked for the gauge on that yarn. The label on Leticia says that it’s 2 stitches per inch on size 10 needles (which I presume is US sizing.) There’s 80 yards (73 m) to 3.5 oz (100 g).

Happy Hunting!