- New releases: Tor.com (YA SFF, genre benders), Book Riot (romance)
- Liinkity from Smart Bitches.
- Patricia McKillip 🙁 .
- On Tolkien and linguistics.
- A ficlet called “Being Villagers”.
- Admire the straw necked ibis.
- Learn a little about chimney swifts.
- Did you know that otters have pockets?
- Mouse deer.
- The concept car that became the Batmobile.
- Ramen-inspired makeup.
- I think it’s a little late for the sign by this point.
- Plant IV bags.
- Very Fancy cat furniture.
- “Dog” beds for people.
- What a $20 million New York City apartment looks like.
- Abandoned funeral home (fortunately not for sale).
- I remain a fan of white ceilings.
- Another castle.
- Those stairs aren’t as attractive as I bet the designer thought they would be.
- Sorry, I got stuck at the pneumatic tube elevator.
- The water wheel is not the weirdest thing in this home – that shower…
- This one has its own mini sculpture park.
- Travel back in time to 1958.
- NO.
- NO!!!
- Another round house, but with built-in bookcases.
- Well then.
- Worst kind of party.
- Fruit cocktail eggnog pie.
- Dusting nightmare.
- Guillotine dining room table.
- Um.
- Sort of cool, but mostly disturbing art.
- “Hereditary taint”?!
- “How deep ends form in pools” – hover cursor/long-press for caption.
Tag Archives: Knitting
Cats and socks and linkity, oh my!
- New releases: AAR (romance), Smart Bitches (romance)
- Linkity from Smart Bitches.
- Some bookish quotes collected by BookWyrm Knits.
- When the “Hero of the Valley” is dragged before the villainous king…
- About dragons.
- The size of blue whales compared to dinosaurs.
- Some ducks of Iceland.
- Feeding a hummingbird.
- Why tattoos don’t vanish when your skin replaces itself.
- Learn about lighting before electricity.
- Not a fun castle house.
- What the inside of a $3 million RV looks like.
- I like the idea of a round home, but I think I would need more flat wall space for bookcases.
- Mad Max but luxurious.
- “A cross between The Flintstones and the Wild West”.
- “God Glam” with “bonus cemetery”.
- Too much touching!
- An accident waiting to happen. And another.
- Huh.
- A $1500 cell phone from 1989.
- Back when phones came in about 12 colors total.
- Who knew Jell-O could look sinister?
- Spork is back with its cousin Speef!
- I think it was also the last small wide car.
- Snake bow tie.
- VERY CREEPY CAKE. CAN’T BE UNSEEN.
- Worst area rug ever.
- Epic burn indeed.
Socks for my SIL’s birthday. Some sort of Regia with the DK Flatiron pattern.
MORE socks for my SIL’s birthday, plus Harry (not for her birthday). This was Opal with a R1: Knit, R2: K1, P1 pattern.
First linkity of 2022…..
Oh hi… :waves: We’re all alive! Thanks to everyone who checked in – those were bright spots in some dark days.
So far I’m giving 2022 a 0/10 (do not recommend), to be honest. On New Year’s Eve day, I fell on ice and felt fine at the time but felt less fine over the next few days and then spent most of the next two months in bed. My hip and lower back feel SO much better now and I’m even back at work. And when I venture outside, I’m wearing something called EXOspikes on my shoes to deal with the snow and ice.
- New releases: Tor.com (YA SFF, scifi, fantasy)
- Linkity from Smart Bitches. And more!
- Linkity from BookWyrm Knits. And more!
- A ficlet about magic, power, a demon, etc.
- “It’s a beautiful day in the Shire and…“
- Have you seen the list of new snowplow names as announced by the Minnesota DOT?
- NO.
- Also NO.
- WHY.
- Sooooooo unique, indeed.
- UMMM.
- Oh sure, why not.
- EWWW.
- Spam Yahtzee.
- Soup-scented candles.
- BOOM.
- Wow, that is some top-tier quilting.
These look great, don’t they?
I hope they don’t just dissolve when my SIL wears them – I knit them from Poem yarn, which does NOT seem durable at all. Partway through, there was a knot and (although I couldn’t tell at the time) the colorway was attached backwards. 😮 Again, 0/10 (do not recommend) this yarn.
Mayhem on her way to a routine vet appointment.
In which linkity contains a photo of completed knitting! (I hope you were all sitting down.)
- Linkity from Smart Bitches.
- Linkity from Bookwyrm Knits.
- Learn a bit more about Shel Silverstein.
- A ficlet for writers.
- A ficlet about a Dark Lord with “a strict moral code”.
- Turning knitting into construction materials. (Thanks, KittenWithAWhiplash!)
- Don’t skip the tags on this one.
- All aboard the opossum bus!
- If you’ve ever wondered how centaurs would sleep, wonder no more.
- A sweet story of LEGOs. Maybe they’ll try this set next?!
- A sweet story that starts with foraging for hazelnuts.
- Art about everyday ableism.
- :blink blink:
- :blink blink blink:
- A little comic about a train.
- It’s tough being a knight.
- Oh snap!
Socks for me from Sparkly Grainbow yarn (Artistic Yarns by Abi) – Nicole knit herself a pair of socks from this yarn and I HAD to do the same. (Guest appearance by Polly.)
Art Journaling Monday! Now with 100% more knitting than usual.
Welcome back to Art Journaling Monday! 🙂
- Hope.
- No one’s careful…
- Let America be America again.
- Rainbow critter!
- I am the Bill of Rights. Revolution intact.
- Very bright write over.
- Eye exam.
10 journal prompts to get you thinking about politics… if you can stand to do so.
The really funny thing about these socks I “finished” a few days ago? I discovered them when I was looking for something else… and they only needed two ends woven in to be done. Of course, I do remember moaning and bitching about the skein of yarn I used for them, which I firmly believe should’ve been sold as seconds due to the truly alarming number of ends in it. I’d planned to knit these matchy matchy, but by the time I started the second sock, I knew that wasn’t going to work (too many knots) so I knit it from the opposite end of the skein.
“What are these things on the floor?! They seem somehow familiar, maybe from a long, long time ago.” -Mayhem
Linkity wishes you a happy new year
Randonymity
- This turned out pretty well – it’s a gift, for a late Christmas gathering later today:
- Wingspan, knitted from a red Zauerball. Ah, the magic of short rows and yarn with long colorways!
Bookity
- New releases: Fiction Vixen (UF/romance) and Tor.com (genre benders, scifi, fantasy, paranormal/UF/horror)
- Book and publishing news from Dear Author.
- Dear Author on making reading a safe place again.
- My local library system (Hennepin County) is one of 10 public library systems that have passed a million OverDrive digital checkouts.
- How having an ereader changed one reader’s reading habits.
- List of best of book lists from Largehearted Boy.
- “Filing off the serial numbers: Making the transition from fanfic to original fiction“.
- Neil Gaiman’s wishes for the new year.
Learn, Make, Do, Think
- What the heck are DDoS attacks?
- What If? tackles faery demographics.
- Weird things that were dropped at midnight on New Year’s.
- 2014 in a minute.
- 50 most embarrassing stories of 2014.
- The year in numbers from Consumerist.
- 86 fake viral images of 2014.
- “The state of the trans nation, 2014“.
Cookity
Gluten Free
- New York Times-style sugar cookies.
- Rum balls.
- Hazelnut crackers with vegan herbed cream cheese.
- 2014’s best gf recipes.
Crafty
Cool
- Best space pictures of 2014. (via emmaseasall)
- Space at 17,150 mph.
- Wintery sunset over Lake Calhoun.
- The best NHL holiday videos.
- Linkity from kmkat.
Cool or Wha…?
- T-shirts and buttondowns with constellations printed on them.
- Spacesuit-inspired sweatsuits.
- TARDIS fold-down bed.
- 20-foot long triceratops for your garden.
- Animated latte art love story.
Wha…?
- Really, Play-Doh? None of you noticed how phallic those frosting extruders were? I am not sure the replacement is any better…
- Getting married in the Costco frozen food section.
LOL
- Looks like my New Year’s Eve (only there was less blood here, fortunately!).
- Best autocorrects of 2014.
- New Year’s in Cake Wrecks. And more!
- Fox News tried to start a Twitter trend and it didn’t go quite the way they wanted it to. (via tracykitn)
- Star Wars action figures being fabulous.
- Cat knot.
Teh Cute
Reading Update
Down on the Farm (The Laundry Files 2.1) by Charles Stross. Good paranormal short in which Bob is sent to the Laundry’s psychiatric in-patient facility to investigate a patient complaint.
Equoid (The Laundry Files #2.9) by Charless Stross. Free online. Good paranormal horror short about Bob being sent forth to hunt for unicorns, which have rather more tentacles and carnivory than Bob (or the reader) expects. This won the Hugo for Best Novella this year.
Overtime (The Laundry Files #3.5) by Charles Stross. Good short paranormal holiday story about Bob working overnight in the office on Christmas Eve. Of course he doesn’t have a quiet night.
The Rhesus Chart (The Laundry Files #5) by Charles Stross. Good paranormal horror thriller in which computational demonologist Bob discovers what seems to be a nest of vampires, except everyone he works with is convinced that vampires can’t exist. While this didn’t end with a cliffhanger, it did end with me exclaiming, “Wait, what?!” and looking for additional pages…
Halting State (Halting State #1) by Charles Stross. Weird but good scifi novel about a crime (or not) that may (or not) have occurred inside a virtual reality game. It’s told in second person (to give you the feel of playing a game, I think) from the alternating perspectives of three people who are trying to figure out what happened (or didn’t). Definitely took me a bit to get used to the unusual storytelling mode.
Rule 34 (Halting State #2) by Charles Stross. Rule 34: “If it exists, there is p0rn of it. No exceptions.” Good scifi thriller about memes, spam, and life in the surveillance state, told in alternating second person (mostly) from three main points-of-view, although the POV number ratchets up toward the end. While there’s no POV character overlap with the first book, one of the main POV characters played a significant role in the first book. Again, it took me a while to get used to the storytelling mode, but once I did I was immersed.
“More socks! Are you feeling ok, Mom?” -Mayhem
And without Mayhem:
Linkity for a surprisingly pleasant (so far) early August
Randonymity
The neighbors across the hall recently had a baby, so I knit some bibs for a baby gift.
Bookity
- New releases: Fiction Vixen (UF/romance) and Tor.com (PNR)
- Book and publishing news from Dear Author.
- “Literally” now frequently means “figuratively”. D’oh. (Thanks, Jase!)
- If 50 Shades of Grey was written by a man… (Thanks, Lorraine!)
- Poetry break: “The Sciences Sing a Lullaby” by Albert Goldbarth.
Think, Make, Do, Learn
- Neil deGrasse Tyson on how long a person would survive on each of the other planets in our solar system. (Spoiler: You’d best have your affairs in order.)
Cookity
Drinkity
Gluten Free
Crafty
Cool
- Watch hockey players dump buckets of ice water over their heads to raise awareness of ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease). (The post has short videos of Sidney Crosby and Craig Adams of the Pittsburgh Penguins and what seems like most of the Boston Bruins.)
Cool or Wha…?
Wha…?
LOL
- Thesis defense done memorably. (Hover your cursor for additional text or long-press if you’re on mobile.)
Teh Cute
Reading Update
The Kid: A Season with Sidney Crosby and the New NHL by Shawna Richer. Very good account of Sidney Crosby’s rookie season with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2005-2006. I’m pretty sure that any use of the phrase “beestung lips” is too many – this book used it three times! As a Pens’ fan, it was fascinating to discover the origin of the much-repeated taunt about Crosby diving (blame the Flyers) and disheartening to realize that several of the things Crosby knew he needed to work on during his rookie season (such as letting rival teams get him wound up to put him off his game) remain problems for him today.
Ok, it wasn’t that long ago that I took this picture, but I can’t tell exactly how much of Mayhem is there on the right. You can see one of her back paws sticking straight up in the middle, but anything to the right of that… (Sorry, Cheryl.) Anyway! It’s possible they wouldn’t feel quite so done in by the (moderate) heat if they weren’t on a fleecy blanket…
Vintage Knitting Patterns: Hand Knits for Men (reposted from 2007)
Mayhem presents…
“Um, what am I doing?†-Mayhem
Never mind, May… Let’s peruse Hand Knits for Men (revised, 1961), shall we? Feel free to caption amongst yourselves, although let’s try not to make my hit statistics too interesting, eh?! In a rare show of restraint, I’ve confined my captions to the picture titles – hover your mouse pointer over the pictures to see.
In which Mayhem discovers stripey socks on the floor
I finished knitting these socks a bit after midnight on December 22. I knew I’d be mailing them over my lunch break that day, so I took pictures as soon as they were finished. When I set the socks on the floor, Mayhem woke from a deep sleep and came over to see what was up.
“Hey!! Stripey socks!!” -Mayhem
“Yup, definitely stripey socks. I approve of their bright pinky purpleness!” -Mayhem
“Oh, nice texture, too.” -Mayhem
“Were you trying to take pictures of stripey socks without my assistance?! For shame, Mom, for shame.” -Mayhem
“Ok, carry on, then.” -Mayhem
The yarn is Grignasco Strong Print, colorway 013, and the pattern is a basic blueberry waffle.
In which Mayhem appears to be very happy that there are socks on the floor
Back in, um, February, I started a pair of socks for my SIL’s birthday in early March. *hopes no one notices what date it is now* Those socks are now complete!
“Socks on the floor! Yay!!!!” -Mayhem
“Is there a problem?” -Mayhem
Apparently you’ll just have to imagine what the rest of the socks look like…
“Socks! I love socks! Even if they aren’t stripey.” -Mayhem
I even started knitting a new pair of socks for myself.
“Stripey! Hurry up, Mom.” -Mayhem
Yes, dear…
Hopefully all the knitters were near padded surfaces when they collapsed from the shock of seeing knitting on the blog. 😉