I’m sort of participating in Knitting Olympics, in that I’m knitting and watching them. I did cheat (not with steroids), but by casting on the toe and knitting it before the opening ceremonies. This yarn’s color is “Lemon Drop” and the stitch pattern is a bit lemon drop-y too. Adam, without seeing the label, remarked [...]

I was inspired by this Fig and Plum post, which she called “The UFO Chronicles, Part I.” I, too, have many Un-Finished Objects, so perhaps blogging about them will inspire me to get a move on and finish them. If only I didn’t have startitis.
Anyway, the socks. They’re almost done–I’m doing afterthought heels on them, [...]

Hello blog readers! I am still alive! I sort of fell off the blogging wagon there for a while, for a variety of reasons, most of them good–I’ve been working on a big freelance project in-house (meaning I go into an office) and I had a bunch of other freelance assignments, all of which were [...]

Sorry for the silence–I’ve been busy, um, going to the gym, and freelancing, and I don’t know, reading Wikipedia? (Wikipedia is a serious time-suck. I can’t stop click on weird links. I now know way more about Monaco’s royal family than one person could ever need to know.) Sometimes I think I need a firewall [...]

I temporarily lost my blogging mojo last week, what with the heat and all. And trying to slog through George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
That book is no laugh a minute. Actually it has this problem that many multi-plot novels have, I think, which is that the reader tends to only be interested in a couple of the plotlines, [...]

Last week, a friend of mine who has season tickets to the Cyclones (the farm team for the New York Mets) out at Coney Island, invited us out to watch a game with her. I recently saw a game at the Mets’ new Citi Field (which replaced Shea Stadium) and I was surprised by how [...]

I don’t know what it’s been like in the rest of the country, but this summer has been the year of non-stop summer rain in New York. Like EVERY DAY. I think we need to build an ark soon.
Here’s my latest second sock. I like knitting socks because they have definite stopping points…knittttttttttt and then [...]

We came back from our annual trip to the Jersey Shore yesterday and it rained (a lot), but fortunately, not for the whole time. I turned the heel on the sock on the bus going down to the shore, and on one of the first days of downpour, we went bowling (photo 1). We did [...]

We went to the High Line at night last week. (The High Line is a new elevated park built on the remnants of an old elevated railroad track in downtown Manhattan.) It’s quite beautiful and currently stretches from the Meatpacking District down to about 20th Street or so.)

Walking down the High Line makes Manhattan look like [...]

Far in the distance–if you squint hard enough–is the Statue of Liberty, and the cuff of the second loud monkey sock. I admit it–I like hideous sock yarn. I think a little vulgarity in life is fun, plus I can’t resist brightly colored skeins’ siren call: “I am so ugly and bright…please buy me!” Anyway, [...]

I’ve taken up sock knitting again, and moving my socks out of hibernation. The squares and the sweater are just too difficult to knit on the subway. I’m trying something new with these Loud Monkey socks–I’m knitting them on 9″ circulars (Hiya Hiya brand). It’s definitely a different feel than DPNs. I think I prefer [...]

Some random thoughts: I happened to catch Steel Magnolias on television the other day, and I realized why so many commenters pointed out that Julia Roberts’s character had died of diabetes, not cancer, when I brought it up. The whole movie was about diabetes! As a closet Brothers and Sisters fan, I was amused to see [...]

Here I am, wearing my shawl and eating a hot dog, during a cool evening last week. (This is on a pseudo-boat, the Frying Pan.)

We took an impromptu trip on the Staten Island Ferry on Friday night. Opportunity to knit, of course! (P.S. I happened to work on a freelance project last week about movies [...]

On Saturday night, Adam and I tried to go a bunch of restaurants, all of which had an hour and more waits (sometimes, I’m like people! We’re in a recession!), and at some point, we were waiting for a table at Pastis.
I like Pastis a lot–it’s a fake Parisian brasserie and I think it’s considered [...]

I know some people knit stuff and then never wear their finished objects, but I actually do wear most of mine a lot. I thought I would include a shot of something I made  in action, so you can see how I actually wear stuff, not just when they’re styled for the blog, which tends [...]

I love the flowers every spring–look at these irises! I’m almost done with the shawlette–I have a few more stripes to go and then I’ll block it and see how it goes.
I looked up my horoscope, and apparently, last week, Mercury was in retrograde on the 6th! Perhaps astrology is true. I think that part [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about how much we, as bloggers, share on the internet about our personal lives. I like to steer toward less info about my personal life and more about knitting, but I wonder if it’s weird NOT to share about our personal lives occasionally. I know that I was really saddened [...]

My dad was at the hospital yesterday for exploratory surgery  (they’re still not sure what disease is causing his tumors), so I ended up spending a lot of time at San Francisco’s Japantown, wandering the dollar stores and eating udon. (Japantown is a few blocks away from the hospital.) And of course, going to Kinokuniya. [...]

Here’s the shawlette so far–it’s a good traveling project because it’s easy and portable. 
In other news, I saw I Love You, Man, which I kept calling P.S. I Love You, Man, and it was hilarious. I highly recommend it. I think my friend was sort of horrified that I laughed through the whole thing–I think [...]

Am I the only person who finds status updates on Facebook a bit stressful? Mine are decidedly un-witty. I don’t think I can Twitter, because even writing Facebook status updates makes me anxious. Anyhow, I’m blogging from my parents’ house, because my mom suggested, correctly, that I should refrain from visiting my dad while I [...]

My dad had to go to the emergency room, and he’s still in the ICU (far from my threats of play-by-play recaps of Gossip Girl, much to his relief, I suppose. Though I noticed the ICU had a waiting area with many copies of The Economist and a copy of The Thorn Birds, which I [...]

So, I’m here in California, and here’s how far I am on Adam’s second sock. Just a few more stripes to go before it’s done! It’s nice to have some knitting while I go around in the car with my parents (I’m licensed to drive, but am such a terrible driver, I really can barely [...]

The colorway name of this yarn is “Secret Garden” and at first I was like yeah, right, if by “secret garden” you mean NEON*, but I went to the Orchid Show at the Bronx Botanical Garden this weekend, and it’s true, many flowers do come in shockingly bright colors. (*Also, the name “secret garden” sounds [...]

Okay, apparently none of my readers wish to weigh in about the location of the sock. Anyway, I went with Adam (and the sock) to Milwaukee for the weekend for a funeral, and we ended up staying a couple of days afterwards as well. I wasn’t sure what the etiquette was for blogging about a [...]

The sock and I had to go out of town. Where is the sock? (There is no prize, um, except bragging rights that you guessed right.)

Adam’s sock. In the picture above, I used the white balance function, in the one below I did not. Small things. Big differences. Anyway, both of these photos were taken outside my window…it’s like that movie Smoke, but with knitting.

We had a big snowfall here in New York (the top photo was taken last Thursday). [...]

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories. [thunk thunk]<–That’s the Law and Order scene change sound, duh.
And this is my story, of being an extra on Law and Order. [...]

I totally meant to blog this story a while ago, but forgot all about it. Kathy Kiely, a political reporter for USA Today, followed the Obama campaign last year, and knit a scarf during all of the campaign stops. She also kept a little photo journal of the traveling scarf and wrote a nice article [...]

I recently came back from a week in San Francisco, which from a knitting point of view, was a series of very small, minor, semi-unfortunate events.
When I was a kid, my parents snapped a series of photos immortalized in the family photo albums. I am sitting in a rowboat, and at first I am proudly showing off [...]

I’m almost done with my scarf, though I’ve already knitted nine more repeats than the pattern, and I haven’t decided how many more to do. I’ve also started another project, which will be the subject of my next post. <–And if that preview sentence isn’t the most exciting one you’ve ever read, then clearly you haven’t [...]

I voted and I knitted.

I found this blog dlittlegarden that had a funny tagline: “Ugly things: all made by hand.” I’m like, hah! That should be the name of my blog.  Recently I’ve been thinking of knitting a dickey, and I realized that I may have totally lost my mind. I wish that I, like Brooklyn Tweed, only knitted beautiful and elegant [...]

I’m watching the Olympics and knitting, but not joining Ravelrympics. Since knitting is a hobby, I try not to get all deadline-ish about it, because I would probably get stressed out (and not finish anything). I’m also trying to only knit from stash, but not go on an Absolute Stash Diet, because things like that [...]

We went to the Jersey Shore for a week, and I did a little knitting.

Here is Zoltar, the magical fortune teller who transformed Tom Hanks into Big. Well, or one of the Zoltar’s kind. He is skeptical about the sock. “But how can I grant your wish, sock?!?”

The sock appreciates the view down to the [...]

  
It’s good I started the sock over again because I realized I had been doing the double decrease wrong. I realize everyone and their mother in blogland has made Jaywalkers, so, this is hardly revelatory information, but when you slip the two stitches knitwise for the double decrease, slip them together, not indiviudally.
Okay, above is [...]

 So the shawl is pretty much done–it just needs to be cast off and blocked out. I had wanted to finish it before the 4th of July, but you know, life gets in the way.
We headed up to Ithaca for the holiday weekend and I took along a ball of rainbow sock yarn, intending to [...]

  
Did you know that part of the Berlin Wall (above) is in New York? Who knew? It’s hidden away in Midtown, near the Museum of Modern Art. Anyhow, I have a total dearth of exciting knit-blogging fodder, or exciting life-blogging fodder. (Not that my normal posts are SO exciting, but anyway.)
I’m knitting another shawl, out of [...]

I’ve been dragging my sock around town, annoying everyone, but putting in a row here and a row there.
Here it is visiting the parachute jump at Coney Island. (My knitting has now visited two of the remaining remnants of the 1964 World’s Fair, the other being the awesome Panorama.) By the way, as an occasional reader of weird [...]

Sometimes, I hate learning new things. I like doing things the way I always have, and assume, grouchily, that no new way can be better. I am, however, determined to try all of the different ways of how to knit a sock, and this pattern (Swirl Socks by Sulafaye), required learning how to knit toe-up. After some [...]

Adam has become obsessed with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. So obsessed in fact, that he was champing at the bit for volumes 2 and 3, which no Barnes and Noble had in stock. We had to go to Forbidden Planet to find them, and inside, we saw this Dalek [which due to Adam's other nerd [...]

I once had an argument with a friend (this was probably in 2001) about whether the term “emo” was a well-known term. I said that if *I* knew what emo is–and I am someone who owns 5 CDs and no iPod–then it was a well-known term. We then proceeded to poll random strangers at the [...]

Adam and I were discussing what constitutes a hobby, with Adam arguing that reading was not a hobby. His argument boiled down to two points: If the activity in question is a commonly listed question on an online dating profile (favorite book / favorite movie / favorite tv show)* and if it doesn’t require gear, it’s not a hobby. Though I agree [...]

The traveling shawl has got to be the most uninteresting thing to photograph:

Stay tuned for a new traveling project!

I am lacking in knitting blogging material, and thus I turn to my favorite filler: The Traveling Project!
(Top left and bottom right) Adam and I were invited to a preview night at a new bowling alley/bar in Williamsburg, The Gutter (well, I think really Adam was, but I tagged along) and the shawl came along [...]

Michele from Knitsane tagged me with a meme, but I’m still thinking it over. In the meantime, you get this photo–I think it’s one of the better ones from this traveling project gimmick. 
The AMNH is kinda racist* but still cool. I love the dinos, the gems, the whale room, and the old-school vitrines.
* See this photo of a vitrine [...]

Here are six skeins of Rowan Scottish Tweed Aran that I bought at Purl (they were 40% off, and I had a gift certificate from Adam, so it ended up only costing me $24) to make this:

It’s Kate Gilbert’s Equestrian Blazer in the Winter 2006 Interweave.
It calls for a 6 needle, but I seem to [...]

Many people, including me, have been defeated by Robert A. Caro’s massive biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker. I own the book, and got as far as Chapter 5 in a week, and I’ve been stuck there since November 2006. Anyway, I went to see two of the Robert Moses exhibits currently in New [...]

1. Front of the HPM 2. Trekking sock at the movies 3. Triad Election 4. Back of the HPM
Hot Pink Mitten is adapted from Folk Mittens. Yarn is Patons wool. More info to come when HPM is actually finished.
The Flower: This was the weekend for cherry blossom extravaganzas everywhere. My neighborhood actually boasts many cherry [...]

Every spring, I am re-amazed at pink magnolia trees. I wish I knew more about plants, so I could tell you the correct latin name of different magnolias species, but alas, my magnolia knowledge is limited. What I do know is that in San Francisco, where I grew up, we have magnolias, but the [...]

Knitting in front of the Coney Island MTA station sign.
In an attempt to liven up my blog, I came up with a new and exciting feature. Get ready, You Three Readers! In a totally original concept*, I will bring my current knitting projects around New York City and show it visiting exciting areas!
*In fact, so [...]