Awesomeness of the Week

It's not the greatest title, but it'll do until I can think of anything better. There are so many awesome things on the internet, and I want to be able to share them with anyone who has not yet discovered them. You may find them just as awesome, you might hate them, but they will still be here. So let's get started, shall we?

Ctrl+Alt+Del
This is a webcomic I've been following for quite some time. What I love about it is that the author doesn't stick to strictly gag-of-the-week humour. He often has long-running plot lines, even if they are incredibly over the top and ridiculous (talking penguin, anyone?). He also is not afraid to take the comic to hard places, as he showed when one of the main characters suffered a miscarriage. I remember that particular strip as one of enormous impact, largely due to the lack of any dialogue in that page whatsoever.

That said, most pages are aimed to entertain, and he usually succeeds. The current storyline sees Ethan, who is normally off-his-head crazy, suffering a concussion due to electrocuting himself. The result has made him into a perfectly normal guy - possibly the strangest thing this comic has ever seen - and turned his housemate Lucas and his wife Lilah into... well, crazy-Ethans. The switch is, in my opinion, highly amusing, especially when Ethan's only aid comes from his talking X-Box.

Ravelry
This one is aimed at anyone who likes knitting or crocheting. Ravelry is an enormous website designed to help people find patterns, yarns, and like-minded people online. It's such a simple description, but I promise you the site is so much more than that. Just about every published pattern you can think of is listed somewhere in Ravelry's database. Many of them are free, many of them are available to download straight off the site instantly. You can purchase some patterns from Ravelry directly, or if the pattern can't be gotten from the site, they can at least tell you where to find it. It also has a massive database of yarns. Got a question about the particular thickness of a yarn? Not sure if it will work for the pattern you have in mind? Look up the yarn in the database, and check out other people's comments about it. Doing this has saved me from using a beautiful yarn that falls apart as soon as it's knitted, amongst other mistakes. It's also introduced me to new yarns to look out for.

But beyond the incredible database, is the amazing community. There are millions of Ravelers, as some call them, from all over the world. The forums are constantly active, which is brilliant when you have a question or need help with something. There are smaller groups to join as well, such as Nerdy Knitters, or groups aimed at people in particular local areas. You can find just about anything in the forums - and the few things that aren't there already won't take long to be discovered and discussed! If you have any interest at all in the world of knit and/or crochet, go have a look. You'll love it, I hope.

That's it for this week's awesomeness!

The braided join is not my friend

I'm knitting this evening. I'm in the middle of a row, and I suddenly realise I don't have enough yarn left to finish the row and start a new ball of yarn at the end. I really don't want to have to go back two-thirds of the row to start the new ball there. So, I looked up a technique for joining new yarn in the middle of a row. I looked at the braided join; a technique I'd heard of before but never had reason to use. Feeling adventurous, I gave it a go.



Half an hour later, I frogged back to the beginning of that row and added the new ball of yarn.

Clearly the braided join does not like me. Rather than an invisible join, I had a three to four inch section of yarn that looked and felt as if it were made of wood, or metal, or some other not-bendy material. It was glaringly obvious, the ends were poking out all over the place, and even though it was very tightly braided, the ends started coming loose almost immediately. It looked awful.

Now, I know a lot of people use this join all the time. A lot of people swear by this join and don't use anything else. I, however, will not be using it again any time soon, because it plainly does not agree with me. It looks like I shall be continuing to weave in all the loose ends for a long, long time.

February Project: complete!

I said I wanted to finish a project every month this year (that post is here). So far, I'm on track to actually achieve that! Yay!

February's finished project is another knitting creation. This one is a shawl made of some blue yarn which I suspect to be a DK acrylic. The pattern is called Summer Flies. It's gorgeous, and available on Ravelry. (If you're a knitter or crocheter and you haven't discovered Ravelry, go there. Now. It's awesome. No seriously, click the link. You know you want to...)

I started this project in January, mostly as a practise project for my first attempt at lace knitting. I'm glad I picked this pattern, since it's very easy to follow, and looks brilliant now that it's done. Of course, getting to the finish point wasn't as pretty. Here's what it looked like straight off the knitting needles.

Less like a shawl, more like a clump of rolled up sweater remnants. But it's amazing what you can do with some kid's foam puzzle pieces, push pins, and a steam iron.

Much better. And it grew! Stretching and blocking this out added at least ten inches to the width, possibly a bit more. I didn't really measure the rest, but I don't think I really needed to. It's definitely bigger, and more wearable.

I made a few mistakes. In the beginning there was a part of the pattern I didn't know how to do, but that was simply because I hadn't learned beyond knit, purl, and yarn over. I also managed to mess up one of the butterflies in the very middle of the shawl. Oh so conspicuous to my eyes, but I imagine only because I know it's there and it's the first place I look. Other than that, I'm happy with it. I imagine I'll be wearing it a lot come summertime!