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Brilliant devices

This is my new favorite toy:

It's a Norwegian knitting thimble -- for two-color knitting (I hate to admit where I bought it -- it was $2.50 on a clearance endcap at Mall-Wart). Even though I'm still pretty clumsy with it, it's making my knitting go faster on my latest project:

It's a scarf for my sweet 11-year-old daughter -- covered with lots of sweet little skulls and crossbones. (We banned the color pink a few years ago & this is what we replaced it with.) If you are piratically inclined, you may find the pattern here. Mine's not done or blocked yet. I know it looks a bit lumpy, but give it time...

The knitting thimble in action:

Before the knitting thimble, what slowed me down was carrying the unused color on the back of the work. You have to twist it past the working color every few stitches, so that you don't wind up with great huge floppy strands of white on the wrong side, looking for ways to get snagged.

I hold the yarn in my left hand while knitting, although when I first learned to knit I held it in my right (I switched because I go quicker holding it in my left). I had hoped that for two-color knitting I could hold one color in each hand and keep them out of each others' way. I wasn't coordinated enough to make it work, so I wound up with both strands on the left. So what happens as you knit is the two colors tend to twist together as they come from the skein (due to all those twists on the wrong side. I can't seem to alternate them so they cancel out). Then you have to straighten everything out before you can do a single color row.

The thimble keeps the colors from twisting -- now different parts of the job slow me down -- like trying to keep the stitches from bunching up on the right side of the circular needle (they don't want to just keep marching along the needle without a shove from me).

What I really need is more hands -- it's a juggling act keeping everything working together at the same pace. Someone else has already envisioned the solution to this.

May I be reincarnated thus, even if it requires millions of kalpas...

...and if anyone wants to get me (or themselves) Kali on a t-shirt, head here.

Labels: knitting, things to make and do

Summer, bottled

Last summer I spent an evening pitting five pounds of cherries (sweet cherries and pie cherries) while watching a really good movie. It was slow going. Five pounds is a lot of cherries -- and the movie was subtitled and fast-paced, so I was trying to pit the cherries by feel alone without looking down at what I was doing. My hands were pretty gory for a few days afterward -- stained reddish-purple -- and my fingernails were horrible.

But it was all worth it for the end result:

I made an apple wine too, a couple of months before the cherry wine. That was easy -- done with store-bought apple juice. We tried them both this past weekend. The apple wine was sweeter than I expected, but a nice acid balance. The cherry is almost opaque unless you're looking at it with a window behind it. It smells and tastes almost like port (to me anyway) with raisiny, tobacco-y notes to it. Both of them probably need to sit a little longer before they're really ready to drink.

Now I'm doomed -- I want to go out and buy some stuff to I can play with my wine recipes a little more -- check the sugar and alcohol contents and adjust thing. This time I just followed the recipes and let it do its thing. I am full of ideas for what I'd like to make next...

Labels: things to make and do, winemaking