Oolong knits

Still a sweater, but, after the very simple designs of the last few weeks, a truly showy one. Forest Weave by Yumiko Alexander.

A very cool video tutorial by Xandy Peters . Three videos that show how-to (1) cast-on, (2) knit a row, and (3) bind-off the lattice stitch. That's all folks!

I started reading this book two days before I was to travel to Bath and by the time Anne, its main character, moves to this beautiful city, I was already comfortably seated in the train on my way there. What a serendipitous coincidence! Jane Austen is an author which I am more than happy to return to. Her use of the English language is always a delight, her wit legendary and laughing-out-loud. Her novels (in the genre known as novel of manners ) offer the reader an intimate peek into the private world of the English gentry in the British countryside of the early 19th Century. And this is another reason I find them fascinating. But I must confess that I now regret having chosen this book for the book club. Even though nobody else is reading these posts, I know that there are a lot of nobodies out there that are extremely passionate about Jane Austen. I am just scared of writing nothing at all they may find extremely offensive. Thus I am trembling with fear and more than willing to c...

A very clean square design, but I love the simple colour work. The Fukuro Pullover by Whitney Hayward.

Yes, that's right. Another post on socks. It's funny because even though I do like to knit socks, I am not at all a big sock knitter. My knitting is actually quite eclectic and I knit clothes, accessories and home decoration in similar numbers. But when it comes to writing in this blog, socks seem to be my main obsession. But let's stop talking about me and get down to business. Toe-up or cuff-down, what are the advantages and disadvantages of each method? Their main difference is in the cast-on and bind-off methods. For a toe-up sock you want to use a type of provisional cast-on (some people do not, but I really think this is the best). I recommend either the Turkish or Judy's Magic cast-on and personally use the latter. Cuff-down socks require an elastic cast-on and I very much recommend the German twisted (aka Old Norwegian) one. A toe-up sock requires a very elastic bind-off. My favourite by far is Jenny's Surprising bind-off . It is easy and fast to ...

Borges has a fair reputation of being erudite, cerebral, and difficult to read. But what struck me the most in this book was its sense of humour and the extraordinary imagination. Was it only my impression or is he often making fun of the same erudition he is accused of? I cannot be sure if this was intentional or not, but I often found myself laughing in some of the most cryptic, scholarly passages. You can easily write several volumes on this book, every story is a world unto itself, rich of many possible interpretations. So the first challenge in writing a suitably modest blog post about it is to choose what to write in the first place. The main subject of this collection of short stories is perception and more precisely the gap between what we can know or perceive with our senses and intelligence and reality itself. The stories deal often with illusion in the platonic sense. The illusion of time, as in Funes the Memorious , of historical narrative, as in Theme of the Traitor an...

Iberis by Rachel Søgaard is a beautiful free pattern. A sweater knit in fisherman's rib, seamlessly, from the bottom up.

The Italian cast-on method is an invisible cast-on, because it creates no edge (the chain you see in the long-tail cast-on, for example). It is a very elastic cast-on which makes it the perfect cast-on for two-colour Brioche knitting and also for double knitting (see the video below). I am currently working on a very simple two colour brioche cowl and, even though it meant learning a new technique, I had to use this cast-on because the result is simply far superior to what you get with another cast-on. The good news is that this is really easy to learn. Another great advantage of using the Italian cast-on is that there is a perfectly matching bind-off. This is a sewn bind-off and is really well worth learning, because it is the also used to bind-off standard ribbing . This bind-off has many different names in the literature and you may know it as the tubular or invisible bind-off (named that way because it is a perfect match to the tubular cast-on too). The above video show...

Grey Morlaix by Regina Moessmer is a very simply boxy sweater, knitted seamlessly from the top down. This pattern is free until the end of the year, so hurry up. The photo was taken from BaWil's project . This lady has good taste, her project gallery is amazing.

No matter how well intentioned articles like this one are, they make a disservice to the cause of women's equality. The truth of the matter is that, with very few exceptions, most human beings of importance are male and white. Also, there are a lot more exceptions to this rule involving race than gender. Think Obama vs. Clinton (not that Clinton, his other half). This is, of course, the reason why one of the biggest challenges of feminism is to establish beyond any possible fallacious argument that the main cause for this huge discrepancy is not women's "proved-by-the-facts" biologic inferiority, but men's proved-by-the-facts social privilege. This is only a first step to accept that this privilege is a gross injustice in society and we have a moral imperative to revert it by allowing women to realize their potential. Something that is beneficial not only to women but to the entire society. Once women are indeed given this opportunity, then Google engineers ca...

The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' is a novella (only 122 pages long, excluding the very good preface) and one of Conrad's best works. It is a story of the sea, like so much of Conrad's oeuvre, that begins with the 'Narcissus', a merchant sailing ship, leaving Bombay's port and ends at its arrival in London. I do not want to give any more of the plot away (I apologize for the little that my choice of illustration gives away), because, like much of Conrad's work, it is a story that keeps you wondering what will happen next (and even more how it will come to be). It is fair to say that the main character in this story is the crew of the 'Narcissus', since there is no single main character. The narrator of the story is at the same time an omniscient narrator and a member of this crew (who remains completely anonymous and we learn nothing of him, except the impressions and opinions expressed through the narration). This inconsistency does not devalue...

I have not chosen a sock pattern in a while. You may have started to think that my love of socks is diminishing. Not so! Alluvial Deposits (I love the unusual name) by Rich Ensor have a very nice pattern of twisted stitches.