It’s Furious Balancing

Orange really isn’t one of my favorite colors.  I’m drawn to almost all the shades of blue there are, and I’m growing more fond of burgundy and darker greens, but orange just hasn’t done it for me.  I think it’s because if I wear anything with yellow undertones, I look like I have a bad case of jaundice.

This is all a preamble to the many photographs I’ve been taking in the past few days. First up, chrysanthemums:

I’ve been saying every fall for the past six or seven years that I want to put mums in my garden, but I’d never gotten around to it.  One day last week, I got a wild hair to go to Downtown Home and Garden during my lunch hour — it was only a block away, for Pete’s sake — and buy a plant.  The orange-copper flowers are my favorite color for mums.  This one seems to start out with a fresh yellow blossom which changes over time to a darker shade of orange.  Of course, I threw out the plant identification tag when He Who Does Manual Labor Since He Wife is Made of Spun Glass  helped me plant these. 

Next, some knitting WIP’s.

This is the scarf I’m making for my friend, Jen.  I started it in early August as part of my “Help Keep Laiane Relatively Sane During the Summer” program.  Well, I’ve since determined that winter is coming and I need to wrap this one up.  It’s almost 40 inches long now, and I want it to measure 60 inches before blocking.  I’ve once again entered the Knitting Black Hole where I knit and knit and knit and knit for an hour and it measures the same as it did before I picked it up.  The pattern is the Chicabean Scarf from Kelly Green Rogue and the yarn is Paton’s Classic Wool Merino in Paprika (Color 238).

That is the back of my second More Stripes vest by Amy King, and I’m actually following the pattern as written this time around.  I did my first version in only one color of Noro Kureyon, but this is done with two dramatically different colorways.   I know I couldn’t get away with using the bright orange-pink Noro on its own, but I think that the neutral colors help tone it down.  I’ve decided that I’m addicted to steeking.  I get some weird adrenaline rush, I think.  I’m going to do a crocheted steek on this vest so I can truthfully say I did it all on my own.

The last WIP is made with the Alchemy Silk Purse I got at the Lansing Shop Hop.  Like I said, orange usually doesn’t appeal to me, but this yarn yelled at me from across the room.  I think it’s the autumnal colors.  Click for big.

Eventually, this will metamorphsize into a Dragonscale Scarf to go with my leather jacket.  The key word here is eventually.  It might be next autumn.  Working with 100% silk takes patience; I have to slow down my knitting speed to avoid splitting the yarn.  It will be drop dead gorgeous when I’m done, though.

Finally, a gratuitous kitten picture.

Chrissy needs to wear a bright orange collar when we go out in the backyard to nibble grass.  Well, he nibbles grass; I just supervise.  If he doesn’t have his collar on, I can’t find him if he dives into the bushes.

Don’t let the cuteness fool you.  This cat ate a ton of bricks for breakfast; he is very dense and I swear he weighs 20 pounds.  One of his nicknames in our household is “Kissy Lardbutt.”

Welcome to autumn, cats and kittens.  Happy (Belated) Mabon.

I’ve created two new pages for the third Ravelry Knitters for Obama Raffle taking place from September 20, 2008 through October 31, 2008.  Information and rules are here, and the list of prizes is here.  You can find these in the “Pages” list to this blog, but I want to be blatantly obvious.

No, that isn’t my Thomas in the picture.  Thomas is a Cranky Old Man Cat and I suspect he may be leaning towards McCain.

I’ve been avoiding the blog, and it’s not because I’m knee-deep in yarn from the Shop Hop last weekend.   Well, I am knee-deep in yarn, but the Blogging Avoidance is because I’m utterly speechless at the galloping stupidity from the so-called, oxymoronic “liberal media”  and the Repugnant Cretins Republicans, who, for the purposes of this entry, I’m defining as “people who are daft enough to support the presidential and vice-presidential candidates their party has thrown up — and I do mean vomited in this instance — for the 2008 general election.”

I can’t even write one paragraph — albeit a very wordy one — without my jaw clenching.  I think if I were to enumerate all the ways Caribou Barbie Sarah Palin is not qualified to be anything more than a small town mayor, if that, I would break my teeth.

I surf the Innernets a great deal.  I read blogs and opinion pieces from the (minority) Liberal Media.  There’s a lot of anti-McCain/anti-Palin writing out there, but the one that gave me pause this morning was Judith Warner’s column/blog post in the online version of The New York Times. She cites an interview with Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia.

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view.  Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

I rattle on about the stupidity of the Repugs, but Haidt argues that it is the Liberals who are damaged by their own blindness.  How, he posits, “can Democrats learn to see — let alone respect — a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?”

Haidt’s article, What Makes People Vote Republican?, is worth the time to read and worth the time it took for me to go to the dictionary to refresh my memory on the definitions of anomie and heuristic.   I easily can place myself in two of the five moral foundations he sets forth to define overall morality — harm/care and fairness/reciprocity — but I measure up on the low-end of the scale for the other three — ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity.  I’m a selfish, godless, insubordinate malcontent as far as the conservatives are concerned.

Because I love graphs and charts, here’s my test results from the Moral Foundations Questionnaire at www.YourMorals.org (registration required).  You need to click the image to see it properly; my blog post formatting skillz aren’t on today.  My score is green, self-identified liberals are blue, and self-identified conservatives are red.

I would suggest taking the test before reading Haidt’s article; it could skew your results.

Being the open-minded Liberal that I am, thinking about “How the Conservatives Think” gives me a lot of food for thought about my own definitions of morality.  I can attempt to stand in the shoes of a conservative and see how he/she defines morality, too.

My knee-jerk disgust at the conservatives, however, makes me think that they themselves are incapable of exploring their own relationship with morality.  Sorry, cats and kittens, but I have issues with people who live their lives with the Orwellian concept of “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” or, as the Yarn Harlot posted recently:

It is the interpretation of those [basic rules that almost all faiths and all good people have in common] that defeats me.  Stuff like “Thou shalt not kill” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” being interpreted as “Thou shalt not kill unless you happen to think that the other person isn’t really a person because of your own rules” or “do unto others as you would have them do unto you unless you think that simply being a human isn’t a good enough reason to receive human rights” is a problem for me.

Yeah, that’s a problem for me, too.  /sigh

Capital Area Yarn Shop Cooperative’s Back-to-School Shop Hop, September 5 – 7, 2008.

I stayed within budget.  That’s all I’m going to say right now.  Pictures.  Thousand Words.  Click for “biggy sized.”  And so on.

Unfortunately, not quite.  September has started off with days in the 90°F range, if not hotter.

I hate the summer with the fierceness of a thousand burning suns.   By the end of August, I’m ready to sell a majority of my possessions and take up reindeer herding.  Or a lighthouse job in Newfoundland.  Or hanging out with the scientists in Antarctica.  I’m not of a scientific bent, but I make a mean cup of coffee.

Autumn means wool.  Wool sweaters, wool vests, wool scarves, wool hats, and all manner of sheepy goodness.

Autumn, this year, also means Election Season.  I’m sure I could offer all sorts of snarky commentary about John McCain and the rumors surrounding his choice of Sarah Palin as a Vice President, but I’d rather concentrate on the good qualities of Sen. Obama.  The man has class.

Well, that and commenting on the Republicans is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.

I’m sure many of you have been thinking, “Laiane, what’s up with that steeked Noro vest?”   Cats and kittens, it is a done deal.  I used the three-day weekend to wind up some projects, and I have Finished Object pictures.  I also have a close-up shot of some kitten toes,

but I digress.

The Steeked Vest.

Pattern:  More Stripes by Amy King, Knitty (Spring 2007).

Yarn:  Noro Kureyon, Color No. 195, approx. 4.5 skeins (approx. 500 yards)

Modifications:  I used only one color of Noro (the pattern calls for two, alternating the stripes), knitting from the bottom up until I divided for the armholes.   I raised the v-neck a considerable amount.  I prefer a tighter fitting vest than the one modeled in the pattern, so I made the smallest size and in a clingier yarn than suggested.

I love it.  I think the blue in this colorway is the most perfect blue imaginable.  I can see myself wearing this frequently this fall/winter.  I want to make another using two Noro colorways like the pattern calls for, one in neutrals and the other in brights.  I need a TV Watching Project, and that sounds like just the task.

I don’t think I posted anything earlier on this next project, except in passing.

Mr. Greenjeans, Now in Teal

Pattern:  Mr. Greenjeans by Amy Swenson, Knitty (Fall 2007)

Yarn:  Cascade 220, Blue Teal Heather, 4 skeins (880 yards)

Modifications: When I first started this sweater, my cables looked awful.  I did the sweater in plain ribbing instead of the alternating ribbing/cables.  Now that my skill with cables is improving, I would make it with cables the next time around.  I used two buttons instead of one, and made the button band wider.  I used single crochet to reinforce the buttonholes and even out the band at the bottom of the sweater.

For the record, buttonholes suck, especially when you’re making an item with slippery metal buttons.

This cardigan was part of the Mr. Greenjeans Knit-a-Long (KAL) for one of my Ravelry groups.  I finished it on the very last day of the KAL.  Considering my poor showing in the Ravelympics, I wanted to make at least one deadline.

I’ll put a picture up of my actually wearing this sweater soon — like when the weather cools off.