Still not panicking. Still trying not to gloat.

• Printing and assembly of all patterns - check.
• Dog to vet - check. (A bigger check than I expected, actually. Turns out he needed some meds and some bloodwork because - poor baby - at some point after we get through the next few weeks he’s going to need some more dentistry. And then all kinds of new-fangled preventive stuff to save whatever he’ll have left. sigh Apparently he has inherited his grandmother’s unfortunate teeth and gums - unlike lucky me. I guess sometimes these things skip a generation.)
• Cat litter - check.
• Bills paid - check.
• New cell phone activated - check.
• The vast majority of the items on the list - check, check, check, check, check.
• Laundry? Packing? Oh, come on. This is ME we’re talking about. For heaven’s sake, we’re not leaving until tomorrow afternoon. What’s the big rush?

The only remaining question is… where are we going? and it’s a good one, because yesterday Jennifer and I took a good look at the listings on the Festival web-site, and… eeek, there we aren’t!

We’re still waiting for final reassurance on this, but since the booth is paid for and Jen has the vendor passes in her hot little hand I’m damned if I’m going to lose sleep over that minor detail. Actually, Jen thinks it was just a matter of timing - that her booth booking wasn’t confirmed until after the listing went to press. So for anybody who is still wondering, here’s where you’ll find us:

          VanCalcar Acres
          Building 28, Space 30

And in other news….

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding

Lookie here what arrived in my mailbox today:

How cute are those? They are tiny wooden beads in the shape of bells, and I bet you can guess what they’re for. My thanks to Sherry (AKA KnitByGod) for pointing me to them! They are not as weighty and impressive as the beautiful ones Beth gave me, but they’re light and attractive and will be great for everyday bell markers, freeing up my original set for state occasions. I think I’ll add these to my second set, simply because I can.

Needless to say, I bought out the whole stock. I don’t know how many people are actually going to want to knit either The Nine Tailors or Belshazzar’s Nemesis following my ultra-geeky method when there are going to be perfectly good charts they could use instead. But if anyone does, we’re ready for them and we’ll be able to provide the markers, ‘cos I gots the bells that (don’t) go jingle-jangle-jingle!

And I’m actually nowhere near as far behind on the preparations as I should be by now. (Ptui ptui ptui I spit through my fingers I shouldn’t jinx it.)

My main list of lists has been sprouting check marks like there’s no tomorrow, or perhaps no yesterday.

(One of my favorite tricks for this is to do things I’d forgotten to write down, then write them down retroactively for the pleasure of checking them off right away. Hey - works for me.)

No doubt Murphy is lying in wait behind the next door, getting ready to pounce on me (as Ptolemy is doing with Juliet - the two of them have been waging World War V up and down the house all evening). But at least so far I can tell myself that I haven’t set myself up for it, haven’t overtly asked for it. I think.

The printing is almost done. The time-critical errands ditto. The new ads are ready. The animal appointments and arrangements and reservations are made. The packing is mostly figured out. OK, so I’ve slipped a little on the laundry plans. So what else is new - this is ME we’re talking about. At worst I can still get a few things clean in time and shove the rest out of sight, and that will be counted in the success column - because I say so.

Swatching and knitting have proceeded sorta kinda almost on schedule - though on semi-stealth items I can’t show you yet. And along the way some really exciting plans have started taking shape for the future of Tsarskoe Tsocko. It’s way too soon to specify, but… well… riddle me this, Batman: what is a Tsarina without tserfs, hmmmm? We’ll see. We’ll see.

I had better stop gloating right now because you-know-what goeth before a you-know-what. I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop, the one where it’s two hours before departure time and I suddenly realize I forgot three six-hour print runs and I try to squeeze them into the time allotted and get increasingly full of fail. Or the one where I’m half-way there and realize that I left [A] the stove on, [B] the milk on the counter, or [C] the dog behind.

Yeah, definitely, I’d better stop now.

‘Scuse me while I write “Quit Gloating” on the list - and put a check mark next to it.

There’s no predicting… but I have a feeling things are going to get a little quiet around here for a while. This weekend is the New Hampshire Sheep and Wool Festival, and Jennifer and I will be there with a few goodies. It’s my first time there, and I gather it’s not as wild a ride as Rhinebeck, but still… a show is a show is a show, and a road trip is a road trip is a road trip… so the next few days are all about the organizing and the packing and the printing and the assembling and the planning. Blogging will be irregular at best. Which it is anyway, come to think of it. (Note to self: keep camera handy at all times, and remember to use it. Blogging delayed is not necessarily blogging denied.)

Lists???? My lists have lists.

Astonishingly, I even look at them once in a while, actually do the stuff written on them and then get to check it off. Maybe I’m trainable after all.

I don’t know how it got to be Monday already - I suppose in the usual way, huh - but that basically means I have three days to get my act together and take it on the road. Heading up to Jen’s on Thursday so that we can go to NH together on Friday (mmmmm… car knitting!). Then the show, then back to Jen’s where I will stick around for a day or two, seizing the opportunity to work out a few color details in person without monitors and cameras interfering. I’m hoping this will be our chance to nail down the colors for the tsweater bands and, well, a few other things.

Anyway, I’m about to take the leap into Preparation Purdah, so no guarantees - but I’ll surface when I can.

Sock Club Members Please Note

For the non-Ravelers among you - I’ve put up a series of pages on my regular web site that reflect the more “mission-critical” traffic that’s been going on in the KAL threads. FAQ, Announcements, Notes and Errata, and no doubt some other stuff TBA. I still need to add a few notes, but it’s mostly current and I plan to keep it that way. There’s a prominent link on the Ts Ts home page, or you can go directly to the club info pages here.

But before I get into that, I would like to assure you that Luke and I are entirely reconciled. I have apologized (in the form of extra biscuits and snuggles at bedtime) for scolding him, because hello? which one of us knows how to close the door? and which one of us forgot? and which one of us knew better? Um, yeah. That would be me, and of course I knew it all along. Bad Tsarina, bad, bad.

Incidentally, I would like to point out that Luke has a classic velvet mouth. He may tear a plastic bag to tatters and reduce a cork to pathetic crumbage, but I hope you’ve noticed he never damages the precious knitting, never causes any harm at all to the lovely yarn or the fragile wooden needles.

Ptolemy, on the other hand…! Last night I was sitting quietly, minding my own business and innocently knitting an oak leaf, and damned if Mr. Evil didn’t mount a stealth assault. Not just on a ball of yarn, but on the ball I was using at the time. Damn, that cat is subtle, and I’m telling you, them pussycats is quick! It was right next to me and I never noticed him picking it up until he started to run off with it, me still tethered to the other end all the while. By the time I caught up with him, gasping with mingled curses and laughter, he’d made a trail of yarn down the hall and down the stairs and around the living room. Luckily something startled him, and he dropped it while he was still out in the open, or I hate to think what it would have ended up winding around.

Then as I was gathering it up and rewinding it, who should blunder along and get tangled in it but poor Luke.

Needless to say, I have neither pictures nor video of these 30 seconds of insanity. Which is just as well, because there’s already enough blackmail material out there as it is.

Anyway, I got the ball safely rewound, finished my leaf, and moved on to the next - no harm done, and I even got a little healthy exercise. Another bullet dodged.

 
So as I was saying… Bluebells again. Sort of. You may recall that I’ve played in this arena before, but now we’re upping the ante some. And I’m not going to tell you anything about it yet - I have to Maintain My Air Of Mystery, you know - but at least I can show you the yarn candidates and the beads, all of which arrived today.

Mai pretty yarnz, let me sho u them.

Disclaimer: I’m having the usual problems with color balance. On one of my monitors these look much bluer and less purple than they really are (though actually Jennifer did, at my request, skew these pretty heavily toward the blue side); on the other they look pretty close to accurate. So if you’re not seeing the purple you’ll just have to take my word for it, I’m afraid.

Close-ups? Sure.

In order:

Actually - that little red skein is a little red herring, part of a separate and and mostly unrelated project that… hmmmm, can’t tell you about that one either, I’m afraid. All I can say right now is that the white and the beads, and one of the blues, will be used for the next instalment of the Flock Sock Club. Now to figure out which blue is… exactly right. Decisions, decisions. This is one of those moments when it’s really tough being me.

I can just tell already that you sympathize. Deeply.

my mum got mad at me today. she called me a mean name and she said now i have to tell everybody how bad i was.

the trouble with that is, i dont understand why she thinks i was bad. i didnt do anything wrong. she got upset after i had some fun in her room, but she knows what i like and she left me in there by myself, so what did she expect2

there was some good stuff in that basket today, too. i dont know what all those tiny round white things are, though. theyre not interesting. they get all over everything in there. and there are so many of them11 ive noticed theres usually a lot of them in there after she sits on the floor with the big piles of paper. she cuts them up and she makes holes in them and then she puts them back together in smaller piles with round things to hold them together, and then she puts them in a box and takes them away and theyre gone. seems like a lot of work to me, and at the end of it you dont have anything good, right2 not even the piles of paper, any more. and i dont know why youd want those either. so then all thats left is the little round things, and i dont know what use those are. they dont taste or smell interesting at all. i wish she wouldnt put them in the basket, because they just get all over everything, and if you get them in your mouth by accident they get stuck on your teeth and tongue. yuck. i have to push them out of my way so i can get to the good stuff. there were some bags that smelled kind of interesting, and there was one of those little white stick things that tpolemy likes to hunt, and best of all there were lots of those soft white things that i like to chew. those were yummy. they smelled just like my mum.

then after that i looked in the bag where she puts the sticks and string, and i totally found my favorite thing of all in there, those little chewy brown things111 i love love love those, they are yummy and they squeak on my teeth and it feels so cool. i only got one of them and i had to dig for it because it was hidden inside another bag and it was stuck in that clear thing with the sticks, and also attached to it with a string, so it was tricky digging it out, and the string was too short and i had to bite it off, but it was so worth it1111

i just love those things. mum has lots of them, and i wish she would let me have more of them, but she likes to keep them to herself. because shes mean to me. like today she told me i was a bad dog, and i wasnt, honest. im never bad. im always a very very good boy.

i just dont understand.

the only thing i can think of is i guess maybe she wasnt feeling well, or something, and that made her act weird. because normally she never calls me bad names and normally she never says awful things about me that arent true. yeah, that must be it, shes probably sick or something. because this just isnt normal for her.

well, i hope she feels better soon. i want her to be nice to me again. its no fun when shes mad.

she should try barfing. that always makes me feel better.

Oh noez! Where did a week go?

Well, there’s been hecticness of various kinds around Tsarskoe Tsocko. Some of it Stealth, some of it personal, some of it just garden-variety hecticness.

At any rate, I have been anything but idle: among many other things the hecticness has included further megaswatching. In fact - I’ve made a whole ‘nother megaswatch, in a whole ‘nother color.

The new swatch, on the left, is done in this yarn. Lovely though it is, among other things it has served to confirm that I love the other, darker, greenier color more. Which is kind of nice, because the other, darker, greenier color is what we were originally trying to replicate when Jennifer came up with this one.

Sorry, I know the references to “this” and “that” and “other” are kind of confusing - fact is, neither of these colorways has an official name yet. They are both by-products of the Search For Bronze that was part of the development of The Nine Tailors. I ended up using something quite different, but I’ve always known I wanted to use these colors for something. The lighter one has drifted in a sort of subtle stormy-sea direction, though it does also definitely have a bronze - or urinated copper - flavor to it. The other… oh, I’m not sure any more that I even care what it looks like, I just know that it’s also bronze-ish in a streakier and more dramatic way, and I love it and it’s what I’m going to use.

Of course the real point of doing this was not only to ascertain my color preference under actual swatching conditions but to test out the new aspect ratio for the twist patterning. Actually, in defiance of good lab practice, the new megaswatch tests several ideas at once. It’s four rows per change instead of six. It’s a different method - Nemesis Delight Maximus. It uses linen stitch for the band facing.

Here’s the original megaswatch, at six rows per change:

And here’s the new one, at four rows per change:

Mind you, I still think the old approach looks great. But so does the new, and the new is what I wanted, what I intended. And from a mechanical standpoint, it really works. It’s kind of astonishing to me how much quicker and more harmonious the whole process is now - now that both types of patterning are based on multiples of four. It just - well, it just FEELS right. And I have been noticing again and again lately that what FEELS right, in knitting, very often IS right.

Next - the linen stitch facing:

Here again, I think we’ve got a winner. There are still some problems with it - for one thing I made this section a couple of stitches too wide, so it doesn’t tuck under as neatly as it should. But that’s easy to fix. For another, linen stitch is even less elastic than the colorwork band, and it has a tendency to pull in vertically - which makes perfect sense when you think about the fact that every other stitch is slipped and the rows are staggered. Of course it would pull in vertically! Heroic blocking was required to make it lie reasonably flat in relation to the rest of the piece. Answer: gonna work the linen stitch panel on a bigger needle. (I’m testing this now on the latest edging swatch, and it’s going to work just fine.)

In addition to making the new megaswatch, I’ve been experimenting with horizontal bands on the old one:

Any hopes I may have cherished of actually using this swatch for anything else are receding, because I went out of my way to make all my mistakes on it, and… a lot of this work is pretty sloppy. See how the seed stitch panel pulls in at the edge in the picture above? Um, yeah, I was experimenting with different row/stitch aspect ratios for attaching the band to the selvedge.

I also used the band to test a method of joining color strands…

… so I could learn the hard way which aspects of the technique work well and which ones don’t. At the risk of pointing out the obvious - the bulgy bits are the ones that don’t.

And I tried three different styles for the crease (top views and side views for each):

Click on any thumbnail image to biggify.

- with the third (i.e. the one on the far left) emerging the clear winner. Funny thing about that, too - again the one that was simplest to work, the one that involved the least wasted effort, the one that felt most logical and least convoluted, was also the one that looked best and the one that will best match the vertical bands.

I just love how knitting works that way.

(Oh - you may be wondering about the corners where the bands meet? Don’t ask. Wonder on, till truth make all things plain. I do have something specific in mind, but I’m not there yet.)

I bound off the new megaswatch on Saturday evening, and I immediately had a terrible struggle with myself. I knew the linen stitch section was going to require the above-mentioned heroic blocking, and I thought to myself, now I really should wash and block this thing BEFORE I cut it, so that part will be all flat and well-behaved when I come to hem it. And you know what? I answered, THE HELL WITH THAT, I WANNA CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT IT NOW! Angel on my right shoulder murmured that this was not the prudent or proper thing to do. Devil on my left shoulder promptly jabbed at angel with pitchfork. Missed angel and stabbed me right in the ear, all the while yelling CUT! CUT CUT CUT CUT CUT!!!!! YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!!!!!

So of course I did. Because yes, I really really WANTED to. Desperately. Urgently. Hungrily. “Oh my friends, be warned by me” - once you’ve lost your steek-cutting cherry there is no turning back. The second time feels even better than the first, and it doesn’t even hurt any more, not even a little - not that you’d give a damn if it did, because all you care about now is the feeling of the fabric as it stretches and parts, until at last… you reach that farthest edge, hurtle beyond it, and finally come to rest, gasping in joyous release. Yes, you are on a slippery slope now, and it just gets steeper and steeper as you slide farther and farther down. And the scissors! Those big… long… hard… blades that formerly struck fear into your very soul? have now become an object of ardent desire. Oooooohhhhhh, baby. How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve had hot steeks? You ain’t. Cut successfully once… and you’re a cuttin’ fool forever. Ride ‘em, cowboy!

So yeah, I cutted mai knittinz - and I enjoyed the hell out of it and I can’t wait to do it again.

And then AFTER I cutted it, I pinned it and hemmed it, and THEN I blocked it.

HARD.

And the next morning when I woke it up and unpinned it from the board? Damned if it didn’t love and respect me more than ever.

The life of a hardened, wanton sinner; I could definitely get used to it.