[Mad Hatter]

Jokes on me I already made it on Tuesday. But I still need to weave in the ends and block it and it all seems so boooring compared to knitting I still haven't actually finished it. ?

 

So my challenge is to finish it. 

 

Hopefully it will not take 5 weeks. 

 

I tried to organize my thoughts around this challenge but nothing's coming together and I feel all over the place. There's a bunch of things I want to do, but I'm also aware that my energy/motivation fluctuates wildly especially this season. And that I never stick to challenges anyway.

 

Here's a braindump.

 

• Learn more about knitting and start a second project
• Fight through the handstand setback. Make it more fun and switch something up to keep things interesting. Or decide to take a break if it's really not working or not fun.
• Add back rolling around on the floor practice at the gym now that it's cooler and I don't stick to the floor.
• Do something movement related at home M/W/F. Not sure what I feel like yet, could be shifting the handstand conditioning from the gym to home, some random yoga or maybe BW training. I mostly want more diverse movement and more movement overall and make my training more resilient to bad weather when I can't be arsed to walk all the way to the gym. I think. Or maybe I want something new and shiny. Or maybe I do want to focus on handstands and do things in the hope I'll improve. 
• Finish a sketchbook (leftover from last challenge)
• Dedicate time to career change
  • Try exercise I came up with to improve attitude towards it - pick a random job like astronaut or accountant and list all the reasons why the job could be great instead of instantly dismissing them because I focus on the negatives or the difficulty of getting there
  • Take note of what I'm consuming and what's interesting about it (leftover from last challenge)
  • Or at the very least don't completely ignore it
• Finish my parent's stupid website
• Read something to learn
• Read something for fun
• Destressing
  • Get better at manipulating my noise environment (i.e. dealing with my grandma constantly talking to herself) and take real quiet time M/W/F when she's out
  • Practice breathwork
  • Spend time lying on the floor listening to music
• Experiment with app to get better at dealing with time/energy management (I'm almost tempted to write my own because the one I'm trying is close but not quite right, but then I'd do nothing else which would defeat the point.)
• Find/remember some recipes of super easy things to cook
• Play games (adding it to the list so it's mindful instead of defaulting behavior when I'm in a don't-wanna mood)
• Don't disappear/forget about the challenge
• Enjoy the beautiful fall weather while I can

 

I think that's about it. Nothing calls to me especially to make it into a challenge goal for now, so we're going to yolo it and see what happens. The challenge for now is to actually read this braindump in the morning, plan around something from the list, try not to ignore the more icky items on the list the entire challenge and remember to use the relaxing items on the list when needed. 

 

Or I might completely rewrite everything tomorrow. ?

[Harriet]

I am also going to make a hat. I ordered some super bulky yarn to test for blankets, but I only ordered 2 skeins because I don't want to get a huge amount without seeing it first. So I have to make two fat hats. I found this and love the stitch pattern so that's what I'm going to do.

 

Spoiler

 

Good luck with the items on the braindump. I hope you make progress on some of them.

[Mad Hatter]

48 minutes ago, Harriet said:

I am also going to make a hat.

That’s super cute! How hard is it to make something like that? On one hand it looks like a lot of basic stitches only with section's twisted over each other, but it also looks like it’d easily end up a hot mess if it’s all not aligned properly.

[Harriet]

2 hours ago, Mad Hatter said:

That’s super cute! How hard is it to make something like that? On one hand it looks like a lot of basic stitches only with section's twisted over each other, but it also looks like it’d easily end up a hot mess if it’s all not aligned properly.

 

Cables (where the stitches cross) and other advanced stitch patterns are not difficult as such. You just follow instructions. But if you are inexperienced, you may have trouble "reading" the stitches to know if you made a mistake, and it is hard to fix mistakes if you cannot read your stitches. The elongated stitches also look difficult to correct without ripping back. But for such a short project, you could just rip back a few rows and reknit. I would say as soon as you are comfortable with basic knit and purl stitches, you might as well jump in and try a more complex stitch pattern, and a short project is an ideal place to try it. There will be mistakes and ripping back. That is fine.

[Mad Hatter]

39 minutes ago, Harriet said:

Cables (where the stitches cross) and other advanced stitch patterns are not difficult as such. You just follow instructions. But if you are inexperienced, you may have trouble "reading" the stitches to know if you made a mistake, and it is hard to fix mistakes if you cannot read your stitches. The elongated stitches also look difficult to correct without ripping back. But for such a short project, you could just rip back a few rows and reknit. I would say as soon as you are comfortable with basic knit and purl stitches, you might as well jump in and try a more complex stitch pattern, and a short project is an ideal place to try it. There will be mistakes and ripping back. That is fine.

Already had the pleasure. ? But I got a lot better at both spotting and fixing my mistakes which is kinda cool! Though I got confused right at the very end and couldn't tell which stitch I dropped and how far and panicked because it was all so fiddly and close together. So I ripped out a few rows until I got my bearings again and dearly hoped I wouldn't end up ripping back the whole thing. Afterwards I discovered there are ways to prevent it, and watched videos on how to fix mistakes, but during the project I of course plowed ahead and improvised. So now my hat has a few holes in it, and a few other mistakes, mostly in the beginning before I figured it out. Oh well. Overall I'm still very happy with it! 

 

Which reminds me I completely forgot to ask about the magic loop tricks! I only used it at the very end so it ended up not mattering all that much, but any more rows and the separations would definitely become ugly. I tried it again later and no matter how careful I am it doesn't seem to quite work. ? I have some videos bookmarked on the topic but am very curious what your strategy is.

One mistake I sometimes did was accidentally stabbing the yarn and messing it up that way, like the strands would separate or become more fuzzy. I'm guessing that's not fixable? Are different yarns more or less forgiving?

 

Another thing I noticed when looking at people's project on Ravelry is that some hats ended up looking like a condom. I thought maybe it was they were not blocked yet, but my hat doesn't look like that. Which is good because I didn't want a pointy hat, but what's the reason the same pattern looks so different? Is it maybe the stitch length/width ratio...?

[Harriet]

1 hour ago, Mad Hatter said:

Already had the pleasure. ? But I got a lot better at both spotting and fixing my mistakes which is kinda cool! Though I got confused right at the very end and couldn't tell which stitch I dropped and how far and panicked because it was all so fiddly and close together. So I ripped out a few rows until I got my bearings again and dearly hoped I wouldn't end up ripping back the whole thing. Afterwards I discovered there are ways to prevent it, and watched videos on how to fix mistakes, but during the project I of course plowed ahead and improvised. So now my hat has a few holes in it, and a few other mistakes, mostly in the beginning before I figured it out. Oh well. Overall I'm still very happy with it! 

 

Brilliant! Making mistakes and fixing them is how you learn to read stitches.

 

1 hour ago, Mad Hatter said:

Which reminds me I completely forgot to ask about the magic loop tricks! I only used it at the very end so it ended up not mattering all that much, but any more rows and the separations would definitely become ugly. I tried it again later and no matter how careful I am it doesn't seem to quite work. ? I have some videos bookmarked on the topic but am very curious what your strategy is.

 

One mistake I sometimes did was accidentally stabbing the yarn and messing it up that way, like the strands would separate or become more fuzzy. I'm guessing that's not fixable? Are different yarns more or less forgiving?

 

For magic loop. If there is a nasty gap where you change from one side to the other, then simply shift the place where you change by one stitch every time. So, if your hat is circle is 60 stitches around, instead of knitting 30 stitches, then changing over and knitting 30.... you would knit 31 stitches each time. The stitch where you change over is still a tiny bit loose, but it no longer forms a noticeable ladder. It's a spiral which is invisible.

Some yarns are what knitters call "splitty" where the plies come apart easily when they get stabbed by needles. It should still look okay when knitted up? Unless you got something like a chain plied yarn or a plant based fibre, I can't imagine it's too bad. If you pulled out a thread, you may be able to fix or reduce it by gently pulling on the stitches either side so they "take up" some of the yarn you pulled out. After all, the same length of yarn is there. It's just that when you pulled it out, you stole some from the neighbouring stitches so they were forced to get tighter. Give it back to them, by hand.

 

1 hour ago, Mad Hatter said:

Another thing I noticed when looking at people's project on Ravelry is that some hats ended up looking like a condom. I thought maybe it was they were not blocked yet, but my hat doesn't look like that. Which is good because I didn't want a pointy hat, but what's the reason the same pattern looks so different? Is it maybe the stitch length/width ratio...?

 

Yes, it would have to be the ratio, wouldn't it? It sounds like their stitch gauge was tighter than their row gauge. That can happen because when you go up and down needle sizes, the stitch and row gauges don't always change in proportion to one another. I cannot remember which direction it changes, though. If your hat turned out well, then it doesn't matter if other hats failed. Survival of the hattest, that's what I always say.

[Mad Hatter]

16 hours ago, Harriet said:

For magic loop. If there is a nasty gap where you change from one side to the other, then simply shift the place where you change by one stitch every time. So, if your hat is circle is 60 stitches around, instead of knitting 30 stitches, then changing over and knitting 30.... you would knit 31 stitches each time. The stitch where you change over is still a tiny bit loose, but it no longer forms a noticeable ladder. It's a spiral which is invisible.

Smart!

 

16 hours ago, Harriet said:

Some yarns are what knitters call "splitty" where the plies come apart easily when they get stabbed by needles. It should still look okay when knitted up? Unless you got something like a chain plied yarn or a plant based fibre, I can't imagine it's too bad. If you pulled out a thread, you may be able to fix or reduce it by gently pulling on the stitches either side so they "take up" some of the yarn you pulled out. After all, the same length of yarn is there. It's just that when you pulled it out, you stole some from the neighbouring stitches so they were forced to get tighter. Give it back to them, by hand.

It's a little bit visible, but not compared to the mistakes I failed to fix correctly. ? It's also a lot more visible in the beginning before I figured things out and ended up with random very loose stitches.

 

16 hours ago, Harriet said:

Yes, it would have to be the ratio, wouldn't it? It sounds like their stitch gauge was tighter than their row gauge. That can happen because when you go up and down needle sizes, the stitch and row gauges don't always change in proportion to one another. I cannot remember which direction it changes, though. If your hat turned out well, then it doesn't matter if other hats failed. Survival of the hattest, that's what I always say.

Excellent saying. ? In this case it didn't matter but it's good to know how it can happen for future projects. Thanks!

[Mad Hatter]

Yesterday was handstand day. I could finally feel the fast twitch forearm/finger movements working again! I could balance again! I would've blamed knitting but this weirdness started a few weeks back. I have no idea why, but it's been super annoying. The bad thing was that I was super distracted, thinking about a million things, and on top of that was stressed because I unexpectedly had to rush for dinner at my other grandma's. So my session got cut short and I couldn't get into the handstand groove. But I got to play a bit and hopefully this means I'm past the roadblock and can have fun again!

 

In the evening I played some Shogun, I meant to only play for a bit but got stuck in the "too tired to play well but also getting too frustrated to stop" loop and didn't get around to do anything else.

 

 Today will be a bit of a chore day. My grandma's FaceTime on her computer is acting weird so I made a script to hopefully wake it up. It worked, but only one day so I tweaked it this morning and added some better error handling. I also set up another experiment. She struggles with finding her clothes, so I anti-sorted them so that there are both shirts and pants in every pile, randomly interspersed. It felt so very wrong to optimize for maximum randomness rather than any kind of sort order. ? 

 

Other things on the todo list:

 

- Weave in ends (maybe even block the hat)

- Work on website

- Laundry

[Mad Hatter]

Had a good handstand session yesterday!

 

Today I'm very, very tired after several days of sleeping even worse than usual. Challenge of the day is to not listen to my brain and spiral.

[Harriet]

Ah, did you weave in the ends? Excellent. A thing like that should not be left too long, or it mocks the knitting and the knitter with its undoneness and also the very small distance to completion.

[Mistr]

Yay for knitting your first project!

 

I prefer to weave in ends as I go, as much as possible. That makes the work quicker at the end. A few ends don't take long in any case.

 

On 10/21/2024 at 4:32 AM, Mad Hatter said:

Yesterday was handstand day. 

 

Yay for a good handstand day!  I hope the trend continues.

 

On 10/21/2024 at 4:32 AM, Mad Hatter said:

She struggles with finding her clothes, so I anti-sorted them so that there are both shirts and pants in every pile, randomly interspersed. It felt so very wrong to optimize for maximum randomness rather than any kind of sort order. ?

 

Would you feel better about it if you framed it as having the clothes set up in piles of outfits? Some people set up their closets that way, with coordinating pants, shirts and accessories all hung together. That way they can grab a set in the morning without worrying about matching. Are these the navy blue slacks or the black ones? No longer an issue.

[sarakingdom]

32 minutes ago, Mistr said:

Some people set up their closets that way, with coordinating pants, shirts and accessories all hung together. That way they can grab a set in the morning without worrying about matching.

 

Sometimes I do this, when clothing decisions are too much.