Wow

I saw this link at Deneen's... Faye shows how to move a buttonhole in crochet. Wow. I am *amazed*!

Lace Lesson

Reversing the rows in a lace chart does *not* give an upside-down version of the lace pattern:

On the bottom, the lace pattern from the Monkey Socks. Above, the same pattern, but with the rows reversed. (And the "through the back loop" stitch moved to the correct position in relation to the double yarn-over as necessary.)

A friend and I were having a disagreement as to the outcome of reversing the rows. Stubborn curiosity as to who was right caused me to knit the swatch.

Anyone have any ideas what to *do* with this swatch now? I don't really feel like frogging it (I had no plans for the yarn anyway), but it seems a shame to leave it lying around collecting dust. If it makes any difference, it's knit from Rowan Calmer, a cotton-acrylic blend.

WOW Wednesday

Wow! What a little purl of wisdom! I'll have to try this little tip, since I've noticed my knits next to purls in ribbing look funny. Methinks this calls for a swatch! Thanks Nona!

Fixed!!!

Woo-hoo! I've invented a fix, and it looks pretty good to me! Here it is from the front:

and here it is from the back:

(Sorry about the not-so-good photos... this was the best I could do.)

Here's how I filled in a square below a (to be) filled in square:
1. yarn over three times (four loops on hook)
2. with the hook and working yarn *behind* the chain row you would normally work around, work around the next lower chain row, yarn over and draw through (five loops on hook)
3. yarn over, draw through two loops (four loops on hook)
4. yarn over, draw through two loops (three loops on hook)
5. Loosen last loop so that it doesn't get pulled out, then remove from hook.
6. Bring hook around to front of the chain row, add loop back onto hook and tighten. (Loop now in front of chain row, working yarn in back)
7. yarn over, draw through two loops (two loops on hook)
8. yarn over, draw through two loops (one loops on hook)

Then I repeated this process for the second space-filling double crochets.

Hmmm... it's Wednesday... I'm going to add this to my WOW Wednesdays. ;)

WOW

I've pretty much stopped with WOW Wednesday... I got bored, and it's my blog, so I'll do what I want. ;) But, Adventures of a Stashaholic has a great knit/crochet tip, so you should go check it out. ;)

WOW Wednesday

I feel I owe you two WOWs, since I skipped last week. This first one will be a "feel-good" WOW:



Everyone is a guru to someone.

Case in point: I know very little LaTeX... just enough to get me by, and I have my trusty manual to help where my memory fails. Someone else in the department is currently writing his first LaTeX paper... and I am his LaTeX guru. ;) In fact, last Wednesday, he phoned me up (my phone never rings!) to ask how to get the references to work. Answer? Bibtex the main file name, no extension. (I'm sure there's an extension that works, but I don't know which. Bibtex can figure it out if you leave it off.)

Now, a more normal WOW:



Air Freshener

For a nice, natural scent in the kitchen, run a lemon peel (tough ends removed) through the garbarator (kitchen disposal, for you Americans). I've never tried it, but a more environmentally friendly idea (given Tuesdays' posts) is to run it & some water through a food processor. After you get the nice scent, you can pour the remains on the compost pile. This method could even be used in any room of the house. :)

I wish I had a compost pile, but I don't think my apartment complex would let me get away with it.

You know, I think I like this WOW... you use the juice, then the scent from the rind, and then compost the remains! Very environmentally conscious, and none of that nasty chemical air freshener stuff! It doesn't even have any excess packaging, assuming you don't bother with the produce bags. :) (I don't... I'm usually only buying one, maybe two at a time.)

WOW Remembered

I remembered my WOW! It's another cleaning one. I hope you find it as neat as I do, and don't feel I built your hopes up too much. ;)



Removing Scuffs from Marking Shoes

You know how some shoes with black soles will leave big black streaks on linoleum? They're as easy as pie to get off. Simply put on a pair of shoes with (clean) non-marking soles, and scuff your feet over the black marks. The non-marking soles will erase those black ones like magic.

I learned this tip from a friendly janitor.

WOW Wednesday

I'm tired, so just a little WOW tonight: scraps of sock yarn make great stitch markers. Not beautiful, but very functional. I use the snippets left over after weaving in the ends.

WOW Wednesday

Tomorrow I'll be teaching 125 grade seven kids about origami, math, and science. Luckily, not all at once. They'll hit me in four mobs. If I remember grade seven correctly, "mob" is the correct term. We're going to make modular polyhedra. Is that the right level for grade seven? I seem to remember we did polyhedra back when I was in grade seven. Anyway, since I just finished turning 400+ sheets of coloured office paper from rectangles into squares, I'll share my tip of how to get reasonably good squares with a standard office guillotine paper cutter.



Mass Producing Origami Squares from Office Paper

First of all, ignore the lines on the paper cutter. They are nowhere near accurate, and will only produce bad squares. (aka near-square rectangles.)

Lift the guillotine arm about half way, so that the midpoint of the arm is in contact with the base. Take a piece of paper, and rest it against both the arm and the guide at the top, with the long side against the arm. (We'll hope the guide at the top is at least square and not skewed.)

Take a scrap piece of paper, and butt it up against the first piece of paper, on the opposite side from the guillotine arm. Tape this scrap piece to the base, but don't place any tape along the edge in contact with the good paper. This scrap of paper will be your paper guide, and you will be able to use it by touch. Lining up by touch is much faster than by eye.

Now, taking a few sheets at a time, make sure they're aligned, and then butt them up agains the paper guide and top of the base (this time with the long edge along the top of the base), and, while holding the paper firmly to the base, bring the guillotine arm down.

You don't want to cut too many sheets at once, because the guillotine arm will pull the paper and you wont get squares.

I'd include pictures, but I left m camera at home.

WOW Wednesday

It's that time of the week again.

Let R be the set of people that read my blog, let C be the set of people with carpal tunnel, and let L be the set of people with a latex allergy. Oh, and let A be the set containing me.

Even though the cardinality of (R ∩ C ∩ L) - A is probably very close to zero, I'm going to do this WOW anyway.



Carpal Tunnel vs Latex Allergy Solution

I have carpal tunnel that acts up sometimes. I find that wearing a wrist brace (or two) at night helps. However, all the commercial wrist braces at my local drug store contain latex, and I have a latex allergy. Wearing a latex-containing wrist brace overnight isn't fun. I found a quick and easy solution... all you need is a piece of polar fleece.

Here is my (inexpensive) wrist brace:

Ignore the white bit around the thumb opening... that was a failed attempt at reducing latex contact.

Cut a square of polar fleece that is a little taller than the brace, and somewhat narrower. Cut an "x" just big enough for your thumb:


Put the brace on, with the fleece between you and the brace:

Make sure the fleece sticks out everywhere, especially around the thumb. Voila, a brace that keeps me happy. I hope it works for you too.

This WOW is brought to you by the letter A.

WOW Wednesday

It's that day of the week again... WOW Wednesday... where I give a little pearl of "common knowledge" that may not be common.

Washing Dishes

Yes, everyone knows how to wash dishes. Very few wash the way I do, judging from the strange looks I get from visitors.

I learned how to wash dishes at the lake. We frequently had lots of people at the lake, and there's no electricity, and thus no dishwasher. No one person wanted (or deserved) to be shackled to the sink washing dishes. Thus, everyone took turns. If you were tall enough to reach the sink (possibly with the aid of a stool), you were old enough to wash dishes. No one was too old. One person washed, one dried and put away. Anyone not volunteering often enough was told when it was their turn. I quickly learned that it was a good idea to volunteer at lunch time... not as messy as breakfast (which involved porridge), and not nearly as many dishes as dinner. But this is beside the point.

This is how I was taught to wash dishes.

Treat the dishes like an assembly line. Start by rinsing all the dishes (best done when food still soft), and ordering them by dirtyness, with the cleanest dishes closest to the sink. Fill the sink with hot soapy water (as hot as you can stand to have your hands in), and fill a basin with hotter water (hot enough that you can only stick your hand in briefly). Place the basin on a bar stool beside you, on the same side as the drain rack. The drain rack, of course, directs the excess drip water back into the sink.

Start washing with the cleanest dishes, and work your way to the dirtiest. This way your water stays as clean as possible for later dishes. Partially fill the sink with the first batch of dishes, so that some can soak while you work on others. Never put a bunch of sharp knives in the dishwater... you can cut yourself on the unseen blades. Instead, dunk them individually, keeping ahold of the handle.

Once you wash a dish (using a washcloth), put the dish in the hot water basin to rinse the soap off. From the hot water basin, the clean dishes are transferred to the drip rack. (Around here, this is where I stop... dishes need to thoroughly air dry around here: any remaining dampness not caught by the tea towel will cause mildew in my cupboards.) To dry the dishes, use a tea towel whose only function is to dry clean dishes... you don't want to get those clean dishes dirty!

My mom taught me that it was very important to get all the soap residue off. She claimed it was poisonous. I'm not sure if it actually is, or if that's just one of the things moms say. (She also told me wallpaper paste was poisonous.) I'm pretty trusting, and take her at her word. The dishes end up clean and sparkly this way, if nothing else.

I was good and did my dishes tonight. I was also lazy, and ate junk food for dinner. That's a problem I have... I get hungry before I clean my dishes to cook. (Unlike at the lake, I only do dishes here when I run out.)

Table Time

This seems to be a popular post, so I'm upgrading it to a "WOW". I've also added links to all my WOWs in the sidebar... after adding site statistics, I discovered someone actually googled "noricum WOW". All I can say is "wow". ;)



Table based progress bars

Here's a little tutorial on the progress bars I use. I'm going to make this pretty basic so that everyone can understand. If you're already familiar with html, just cut & paste & make the appropriate changes. Ignore my long rambling instructions. ;)

My progress bars are simple html tables, but the html can look a bit scary if you don't know what's going on. Here's the example progress bar I'll use:

10%

primary socks

Nice, simple little table, right? Here's the scary html:

<table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" frame="void" align="center">
  <tr>
    <td align="left" valign="middle">
      <table border="1" cellspacing="0" frame="border" align="left">
        <tr>
          <td align="left" valign="middle">
            <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" frame="void" align="center">
              <tr>
                <td width="10" height="10" align="center" valign="middle" bgcolor="#99CCFF">
                </td>
                <td width="90" height="10" align="center" valign="middle">
                  10%
                </td>
              </tr>
            </table>
          </td>
        </tr>
      </table>
    </td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td align="center" valign="middle">
      primary socks
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

Okay... let's start with the pieces. Html stands for "HyperText Markup Language", and is how we communicate with the browser. We tell the browser what we want by using formatting "tags". These tags are enclosed in angle brackets ("<>") so the browser can recognize them. The tag that tells the browser we want a table is called "table" (see... it is straightforward, when broken down). To start the table, we use <table>, and to end the table, we use </table>. You'll notice that the vast majority of html tags have matching open and close tags, where the close tag is the tag with the "/" character. The extra stuff in the open tag specifies how we want the table to look. Border specifies the size of the border in pixels, cellspacing is the amount of space between cells, and cellpadding is the amount of space between the contents of the cell and the border of the cell. (Assuming I didn't get the last two mixed up.) "Frame" specifies what kind of border we want.

A table is broken down into a set of rows (<tr>, short for table row), which, among other things, can have a horizontal alignment (align) and vertical alignment (valign).

A table row is then broken down into a set of cells (<td>, short for table data). We can specify the cell width, height, horizontal and vertical alignments, and background colour (bgcolor), among other things. In the above example, I set the background colour of the "percent done" bar to be light blue, which, in hexadecimal (base 16 numbers, rather than base 10), is 99CCFF. The "#" character indicates that the number should be read as hexidecimal. This number represents the amount of red, green, and blue to use for the colour, where 00 is the least, and FF (=255) is the most. If you are unfamiliar with specifying colours in this format, you can find some web safe colours here. (These tables are everywhere... this is a random one that google gave me when I searched.)

Oops... it's past my bedtime now... I'll finish this post up later. (Hmmm... I'll figure out the funky vertical spacing then too..)

Whee... I figured out the vertical spacing thing... I remembered last night that blogger "helpfully" adds <br> tags at each line break... and thus my table was filled with these tags, which, in this case, weren't very helpful. I'll finish this post later... I have stuff to do, and this is a long post to finish.

Continuing on...

You'll notice from the html that I have tables nested within tables. I do this to achieve the exact formatting I want. Let me turn on all the borders, so you can see where all these tables are:

10%

primary socks

The innermost table consists of the two cells representing the progress, 10% done, and 90% not done. Since the 90% box is larger, I've added the text "90%" to this box, so that the 10% doesn't get "stretched" by the text it contains. Note that when you specify the size, you only specify the minimum size, and the box will stretch to fit the text it contains. This also explains why the 10% box is taller than it is wide, even though I specify each should be 10 pixels. The text in the row (contained in the 90% box) is taller than 10 pixels, and thus the row height is stretched to accomodate this.

The "middle" table exists to add a border around the progress bar. I do not use the border feature on the innermost table, because that, as illustrated, includes a line separating the "done" and "not done" areas, which is an effect I do not want.

The outer table is to make sure the progress bar and associated text are formatted nicely with respect to each other. HTML interpreters automatically add space around tables, and thus, if I didn't have both elements in a table, the text for the progress bar would be separated from the progress bar by more space than I want. The easiest way for me to control the space without affecting other tables is to do as I have done. It is probably also possible to use css, but I'm more familiar with tables.

Now we know what the different tables are, we can figure out how to change the alignment of different elements. Setting the table alignment to left, center, or right, controls how the table is aligned within the element that contains it. Thus, having the outer table set to have center alignment centers the table within the area of the browser that it is displayed. I prefer to have my progress bars in the sidebar left justified. Setting the cell alignment controls the alignment of the contents of the cell. So, by having the progress bar left justified, and the text centered, if the text is narrower than the progress bar, it is centered underneath the progress bar, otherwise the left hand sides of the text and progress bar are aligned. If you center your progress bar in the sidebar, it will look better if both the progress bar and text cells are set to be centered.

Wednesday?

How'd it get to be Wednesday already? (Maybe it's because I slept through Tuesday...)



Towels start to smell if you use them more than a week. If you don't want to do laundry every week (and don't want me to wash your towel with my laundry), get a second towel.

This gem of information improved the relationship between me and my last roommate... I can't stand towels that smell of wet dog.

Wow... it's Wednesday

Time sure flies by...



Cleaning Windows

When I was a kid, my mom would use diluted vinegar and newspapers to clean the windows... wow... those sparkly clean windows were a thing of beauty. (Not quite enough to get me up off my butt to clean my own... but then, I don't have a ladder either.)

Method: In a 4L plastic ice cream pail (or similarly sized pail), mix warm water with a couple glugs of white vinegar. (I don't recall her measuring). Use a rag to wash the windows with the vinegar mixture, and then dry the window with crumpled up newspaper.

I don't understand why it works, but this method is magic.

Early WOW

I know I'm going to be busy Wednesday in preparation for a visitor on Thursday, so I'm doing my WOW early this week. This week it's on crochet, so everyone not interested in crochet can ignore this post. ;)



Working with difficult yarns

I find certain yarns very challenging to work with... TLC Amore and LB Homespun come to mind as two yarns I have recently fought with. My problem is that after doing the initial chain, I can't see where the stitches are to insert the hook for the first row. This is the solution I came up with. It requires a ball of plain yarn in a contrasting colour ("marker yarn").

While making the starting chain, place a loop of marker yarn between the hook and the working yarn for each chain made:

When working the first row, the hook goes through the chains at the locations marked by the marker yarn loops. After you're done with the first row, simply pull the marker yarn out by pulling on the end still attached to the ball... because loops were used, they'll just zip out.

This method also lets you easily see if your chain is twisted, which is useful when you're doing circular crochet. In these next two photos, the first one is twisted, and the second is untwisted.

Easy enough to see?

WOW

Four tips for a crackless cheesecake:

1. Put a pan of water on a second oven rack when you start the oven heating, and leave it in while the cheesecake bakes.

2. Line the walls of the springform pan with parchment paper.*

3. Mix the eggs in by hand, stirring as little as possible.

4. Turn the oven off around 10 minutes before the cheesecake is supposed to be done, and don't open the oven until about 10-20 minutes after the scheduled done time. This starts a slow cooling off process, without overbaking the cake. Slooooooly open the oven door.

*I skipped this step for my last cheesecake... I discovered I was all out of parchment paper. I only got a small crack.

If these tips fail, and you still get cracks, never fear... it'll still taste just fine. I've read people recommend icing to hide the cracks, but icing on cheesecake seems wrong...

Words of Wisdom

This may be old news for some, but I discovered (upon leaving home for grad school, and aquiring roommates) that not everyone knows this.

To clean burned on crud off the bottom of a pot: add about a half inch of water, and a liberal sprinkling of baking soda. Heat the pot until the water bubbles... and continue until the baking soda bubbles all the crud off the pot. Voila, no more burned on crud.

For those of us without dishwashers: this saves a lot of elbow grease. For those of you with dishwashers: this'll get off what a dishwasher can't.

WOW

It seems a bunch of blogs I read have something special on Wednesday... some wish everyone a happy hump day, and many have a WIP Wednesday. Sounds fun. :) But, I feel like being different... I think I'll have a WOW Wednesday: "Words of Wisdom". In these posts (no idea how long I'll keep doing this), I'll post little useful things I've learned. (I'd love to hear your WOWs too... the more the merrier!)



Putting the covers back on paperbacks.

Do you ever have a problem where the cover will fall off your paperback book? I'm talking about the whole cover coming off in one piece. Well, the glue holding the cover on (in most cases) is hot glue. Thus, to reattach the cover, simply iron the spine at low heat (so as not to burn the paper cover). This remelts the glue to bond with the cover. :)