Cleverbit

cleverbit icon

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Per the encouragement of at least 30% of my readership I've added a cleverbit.org icon. I was thinking of using a professional one I found on line but given how tiny they are it seemed more fitting to make one of my own. I did at least read a tutorial on how to make rounded edges :).

tea plants

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Check out these lovely tea plants I got for my birthday from my brother. I can't wait for them to get big enough to turn into actual tea. I also got some tea and coffee seeds so that I can grow my own plants but I'm not sure if my thumb is quite green enough for that.

making slow progress

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I recently started my first real fair isle sweater. I've been itching to work on my fair isle technique and try out steeking for a while and I finally got started when I went on a wool shopping trip with a friend a few weeks ago. I was going to make a pattern from Vogue Knitting (Holiday 07) by Alice Starmore but I wasn't that excited about the pattern at the bottom of the sweater so I've been using an Alice Starmore book that I got for Christmas to make my own pattern inspired by the original Vogue pattern photos. I'm still going to try out the steeks, a technique that involves knitting the sweater as a long tube and then cutting the front opening with a pair of scissors, yikes! I haven't actually gotten to that part yet since I'm still working on getting my tension right. I've had to rip out the bit above the ribbing several times - a few times because one strand was so tight that it didn't show up properly in the pattern and a few times because I didn't like the color combination I used. I'm happy with how it looks now and hopefully the more I practice the less ripping out I'll have to do. I bought the number of colors and quantities of yarn needed for the sweater in the magazine and although I've been trying to keep the ratios sort of the same in my sweater I'm a bit worried that I might run out of one or two colors. I guess the good thing about fair isle is that if I have to get yarn from a different dye lot it hopefully won't show up too much. Here is what I have so far.

first sock nearly finished

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I got this yarn for my birthday last year and I was in the mood to make some socks (or more accurately to wear some knitted socks) so I pulled it out and started knitting. I normally make my socks too loose so I tried to be a bit more careful with this pair. I started from the toe using "Judy's magic cast-on" from Socks from the Toe Up by Wendy Johnson. It worked really well and hopefully I'll be able to make the second sock the same even though I've let this project take so long that I'm forgetting how I did the shaping. I think I have a few notes scribbled on a bit of paper. Somewhere. Anyway, here is a photo of the first one.

some progress both forwards and backwards

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Well I had a bit of a rough start with this sweater since I failed to pay enough attention to the hip dimensions and after several inches discovered that it was much too narrow. So I ripped it out, did some math, and stared over. Then I forgot the ribbing on the sides and instead of just dropping those stitches and picking them up in the right stitch, which would probably have been faster, I ripped out again. Now I'm up to about 6.5 inches with the correct width and side shaping. I think I'm going to have to stop and weave in the tails which I normally don't like to do because it impairs further ripping out but the ends are expanding and getting fuzzy and I think it would be wise to weave them in before they get worse. I didn't realize silk could get so fuzzy but I guess it is only partly silk so presumably it is the wool that is getting fuzzy.

return

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Today we had only part of a day before heading back to the airport so we started out with some quick breakfast and a visit to St John's Co-Cathedral and Museum. This Cathedral is truly a monument to the Knights of St John and their wealth. Every bit of the inside is covered with ornate carvings and statues and paintings and each of them contains the crest of the knight who commissioned it, and in some cases a likeness as well. We also saw what was once a receptacle for John the Baptists forearm (the one he use to baptize Christ) but the French stole the jewels and one of the Grand Masters of Malta removed the relic as he fled the city during an invasion so now its just a couple of gold and silver cherubs pointing to an empty gold container. We also saw some Flemish tapestries from 1702 which supposedly cost as much as an annual military budget but their colors were so washed out it was difficult to experience their opulence since I had just left the main cathedral and my eyes were still adjusting to the lack of glitz much as they do when coming inside on a sunny day.

Whereas the audio guide for the palace armory was brief almost to the point of triteness the cathedral guide was long winded and full of details about the painters and the knights and grand masters and symbols and really anything they could think of. Often the narrator would start waffling on about some painting or sculpture or side chapel without given any indication of what he was referring to and at other times he described the obvious bits at length. Yes, having found the most famous paining in the whole place (conveniently denoted by signs, museum guards and no photography signs) I don't need the narrator to list the characters who appear in the painting, nor to describe what they are wearing since I'm looking right at it.

After the cathedral we went to the Maltese Experience which we hardly felt we could skip given that every corner in Valletta contains at least one sign pointing tourists in its direction. When we were visiting the war museum a plaque at the end of the WWII exhibit said that as Malta gained its independence from England it wanted to make a move from a military based economy to one of tourism and industry. Well I think the Malta Experience was a direct result of that decisions. It is an "audio visual experience" cataloging Malta's long history of invasion starting with the original inhabitants and their impressive temples and catacombs and continuing through the Turks, Arabs, Knights, French, English and possibly a few others that I forgot and finally ending with a upbeat description of the Maltese people embracing change and diversity. The film was entertaining and amusing enough although some of the photos looked like they had been snapped in an afternoon by someone who ran around the city (much the way we did) quickly taking picture and sprinting to the next notable location. Some of them were blurry as if the wind was blowing the leaves of the plants in the palace courtyard or the photographer was taking shots on the sly when the museum curator wasn't looking. We also had a bit of lunch and zipped around the art museum where my favorite paining was one of a woman slicing a mans throat open. Despite what you might think my choice was not based on the subject matter but because, unlike so many of the other nearby saint martyr depictions, the woman and the man both had furrowed brows and some actual angst in their expressions. It would appear that the most popular emotions to wear when being killed in a gruesome way are boredom with a side of pouty-ness for women and boredom with a bit of superiority for men. Also the lack of cherubs and halos earns the painter bonus points.

Lastly we wandered around the city for a bit looking for a cab but eventually gave up and hopped on a bus back to the airport where we are now sitting conspicuously in a large section of the airport seating which is empty except for us, a man who I imagine is playing suduku on his phone, and the woman from Diamonds International who is eating a burger which appears much to cheep to be approved by her employer which might be why she is eating in the airport seating section rather than in her shop.

Sunday

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Today we were a bit slower getting started and having so efficiently toured Malta on Saturday we decided to visit the neighboring town of Rabat to see some early Christian catacombs and a Dominican Monastery. We started our trek by heading toward the Valletta bus station which is a huge roundabout filled with orange buses beeping at each other and rolling backwards several feet each time they set out to move forwards. We had to wait quite a while for our bus but once it finally came we had no trouble getting to Rabat especially since the bus driver kindly yelled out "Rabat" when he got to our stop.

The catacombs were bigger than I was expecting. The largest one was a maze of tiny passageways with cutouts in the side of the passage for children and larger chest high blocks of stone carved out in the top for adults and families. In some places there was just as small hole in the wall which appeared to lead to more room(s) of compartments. Maybe there were other passage ways on different levels that lead to these rooms which were blocked off.

Even though there weren't any bodies there (at least that we could see) it was still quite eerie and a bit uncomfortable, especially for Kim who I occasionally exclaimed "Oww!" from in front or behind me as he hit his head on the ceiling.

After the catacombs we strolled along to a Dominican Monastery which was quite peaceful with a square garden in the middle full of pools and lemon trees and a lovely high arched walkway along the outer edge of the garden. We were allowed to walk along a broad, high ceilinged hallway inside the monastery to a chapel which I think was probably smaller than the hallway which lead up to it and had an alter full of what looked like plastic pink flowers but I think they were probably a recent addition rather than a 17th century artifact.

After the monastery we noticed a convenient bus stop across the street with a group of encouraging looking old people who we hopped were on their way back to Valletta. After only a few minutes at the bus stop a bus bound for Valletta did indeed appear and we had a pleasant ride back to the city only to discover ourselves in the midst of the full blown Carnival crowd. The Carnival is, as far as I can tell, a pre-Lent celebration involving lots of floats painted in florescent colors, teens in crazy florescent costumes of things like castles, flowers and lobsters and kids dressed as princesses, cow persons, comic book heroes, and gypsies. And the occasional lizard or tiger but these animal like costumes seemed to be reserved for children to young to pick out their own.

We naively followed the crowd into the city through the main gate rather than taking the long way around and after witnessing a near fist fight between two women with baby carriages who kept bumping into each other and being thoroughly squished as several hundred people tried to squeeze between some sort of food stand and the metal gates lining the edges of the street we made it to the National Museum of Archeology where we saw some headless human figures, a tiny (and rather curvy) "sleeping lady" statue which is quite old and quite famous, and some neolithic stones from the also quite old Maltese Temples with some faint spirals carved in them. As you may have guessed I was getting a bit musiumed out at this point but I did take a photo of this thing which looked like a coffee cup with a 3 foot diameter.

After this we popped back to the hotel for a quick shower and headed out for dinner, this time Italian food at a restaurant that was either on its way in or out (or both). The waitress had to go and check their supply of food and wine each time we selected something off the menu. But I enjoyed the food and then lost my glove on the way back to the hotel.

Saturday

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

This morning we woke up to a lovely sun shiny morning full of sight seeing optimism only to be greeted by our most dismal showering experience to date. We are staying several floors up in our hotel (based on the circuitous route from the front door to our room its a bit tough to say for sure) and the hot water only barely made it to the bathtub tap let alone up the pipe to the shower head. Adding an extra challenge to the showering experience is the step in the middle of the bath tub presumably for sitting on although given that the inside length whole bath tub is about 2 and a half feet there is barely room to stand on either of the steps and sitting on the upper one with my feet on the lower one and my knees right up under my chin made me want to huddle for warmth more than splash cold water over myself in an attempt to get clean. Nevertheless we did manage to get clean and I have since recovered the heat I lost walking around in the warm Maltese sun.

We set out in search of some breakfast but ended up visiting the Hasting Gardens which we stumbled onto before we could find any open cafes.

We wandered around a bit more and finally found a tiny shop selling pies and had some particularly tasty and satisfying meat and cheese pies before setting off for some site of interest which I have since forgotten since we ended up at the completely other end of the city gazing out over the Fort St Elmo.

While we were trying to choose between the nearby War Museum and Malta Experience a man with a horse drawn carriage convinced us to go for a ride around the city. It was a pleasant ride although the wheels were rather loud rolling along the pavement and we couldn't really hear what he was saying as he pointed to random buildings.

Along the way we stopped at the Siege Bell Monument and a random botanical garden which I can't find listed among the PLACES in my guide book. We saw quite a few cats in the garden and we were wondering if Valletta might have an unusually large stray cat population until we saw a sign on the way out of the garden that said 'Cat feeding Point'. So that explains that.

Next I tried to take us to St Paul's Shipwreck Church but failed and we decided to go see the Grand Master's Palace instead where we visited the State Rooms and the Armory. You may be sensing a bit of theme here involving the accidental overshooting of our intended tourism target. Our map of Valletta is about 9 or 10 streets wide and some of the streets are so narrow and ally like that when you walk past them you think 'surely our map is so small that it has left out small streets like this' and then you get to chatting and suddenly you are on the other end of the city having walked right past whatever church or museum you had set out to see. The map is indeed far mor acurate than we give it credit for.

Anyway back to the palace. First we saw the State Rooms which were not really as gaudy and full of stuff as I was expecting but the hallway was quite nice especially since it was lined with knights.

In the armory we saw many coats of armor and lots of weapons and conveniently enough the audio guide pointed out which ones were the most impressive of the collection so I knew exactly which ones to take photos of :).

This for example, is the oldest known or possibly oldest existing or maybe just largest or roundest cannon in the collection.

Of all the things we saw these knight helmets were my favorite.

After the Palace we popped into a cafe for some cake and coffee and had possibly the most tasteless chocolate cake I have ever eaten. Then we went in search of II-Mandragg which was supposedly "the most concentrated and intense slum in the world" in its hight of slummyness but frankly I wasn't really that impressed.

We did pop into Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church which is a large church dating back to the 1570's which was damaged during WWII and unlike the slum the guidebook had a particularly accurate description of the recently reconstructed dome. It is indeed "worth a peek to gape at the dizzying hollowness within" which appears to have been constructed in order to "make Carmel's egg-shaped dome eclipse the spire of the nearby Anglican Cathedral". It is in fact a massive egg shaped dome completely free of any ornament or painting or gold leafing which one normally finds in old cathedrals including this one (below the dome line).

We also popped into the War Museum which described Malta's pivotal role in WWI and WWII and was full of cool stuff like anti tank guns and random videos including one about the German invasion of Albania.

There was also a large speed boat looking thing which didn't seem to have room for any passengers but was apparently a reconstructed version of something the Italians used in a failed attempt to invade Malta. It did not seem from the description however, that the failure was due to no Italians ever actually making it to land to invade which was my chief speculation. Describing the events of the war were lots of standard museum type plaques containing narrative gems such as "The British fleet assumed responsibility for contrasting the Germans in the North Sea, the Atlantic coast and the channel, while the French shouldered the onus for the Mediterranean... France obtained that it would have overall authority over both fleets... [but it turned out that the French and English didn't get along so well and] problems were met at the dockyard [because] British measurements were used, while the French used the metric system. This problem was surmounted thanks to a special apparatus devised by a Maltese fitter." No actual apparatus was displayed but it sounds an awful lot like a ruler containing both measurements to me.

Here is a photo of some butterfly bombs. I don't really know what they are or how they were used but they looked cool :)

When we got back to the hotel Kim chivalrously arranged for us to move to a different room with a working shower (yay!) except when we got there we discovered that the hot water heater had been turned off (boo!) so we had to wait a bit before showering and heading off for some dinner.

arrival

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Our travel to Malta was pretty uneventful. We left work at lunch time which is a good start to any trip and caught a tube/train/bus combo to the airport. We then stood in the check in line for half an hour so that my travel documents could be stamped per the instructions on the boarding pass we printed the night before only to find out we could have gone to a different desk which was not marked in any way to suggest that they provided travel document stamping services and had basically no line at all. Kim set off the metal detector with his chewing gum and we tried eat a nice sit down lunch not realizing how little time we had and ended up having to scoff it and run to the gate only to find ourselves standing in line again waiting to board. The flight was as per usual for Ryan Air complete with a litany of items for sale ranging from food to drinks to raffle tickets to smokeless cigarettes. I did manage to start a new CIV IV game but I only had time to kill off a few barbarians and not any actual competing civilizations. The taxi that the hotel was supposed to send for us never turned up so we chartered our own cab, just one of many many cabbies standing around waiting to bring tourists to the city center, and arrived at the hotel in a speedy manner. Fortunately Malta used to be part of the British Empire so they drive on the left here which is always a particularly enjoyable experience for me given that Maltese cab drivers have the same speedy, reckless attitude that cab drivers share the world over. After arriving at our hotel we set out in search of drink and nourishment and we found a cute little wine bar where we tried both red and white Maltese wines and ate cheese fondue. Until the restaurant was overrun by 20some year old men who spent more time going on smoke breaks and leaving the door open than actually eating. Now it's time for bed but I think this bring the laptop and update the blog along the way method might be my new favorite blogging technique especially now that I have my super cool Ferrari laptop which is way better than Kim's new slightly smaller laptop no matter what he says.

Kim has just declared that he is master of the universe so I think I'd better go and put a stop to that...

rubber heat water bag instructions

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I've been wanting a water bottle for a while now and I finally found one at the local pound shop this afternoon. Actually it was a pound + shop where everything costs 99p+ or less. This appears to mean that it has lots of random cheep stuff some of which costs more than 99p and some of which costs less. Anyway here are some of the instructions from the package several of which I found rather amusing:
1. Heat water bag is used in medical treatment health and common live to get warm.
Right off the bat you can tell we're off to a good start.
2. The water temperature that the heat water bag used should be around 90C. The water should not over 2/3 than the capacity of the heat water bag.
Clearly the Chinese translation of 'hot water bottle' is 'heat water bag'.
3. After filling water, must let the air in the heat water bag out and let the screw tight. Check if there is a leak water phenomenon.
That one is my favorite. Most of the sentences aren't even actual sentences but then they throw in a 4 syllable scientific word.
There are a few more rules after this like "let the heat watter bag a little far from baby" if a baby is using the hot water and especially about protecting the bag from sunlight shoots when the heat water bag is being stored or displayed. In fact "when the heat water bag is used or storage must avert it to be weight on or stabed, not touch sour, alkali, [and] oil". I'm not sure what would happen if you drank a glass of lemonade while warming yourself but I think I'll stick to milk in my tea while relaxing with my hot water bag just to be safe.

scarf

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I made this scarf to match my slouchy hat with the bit of sock yarn that I had left from the hat and some of the gray yarn I had left from the thermal pullover. I can't remember what inspired the stitch pattern but I think it was a scarf I saw on Ravelry.com. I decided to start from the two ends and work towards the middle so that if I ran out of yarn and had to introduce another color or something it wouldn't be just at one end.

Unfortunately I didn't plan ahead quite enough and I made both sides the same so that when I got ready to graft the two halves together the waves did not match up because instead of being complementary they were mirror images. Fortunately being the fabulous knitter that I am I was able to overcome my earlier mistake by knitting one row on each side that had only decreases and not increases to make a flat edge for grafting. It makes for a sort of funny, none matching wave in the middle of the scarf but since it is the middle everyone will just think I put it there on purpose. Well anyway that's my story and I'm sticking with it.

International Mime 2010

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

We saw two productions at the International Mime festival this year. The first one was an adaptation of the story of Tamar from the Old Testament using large puppets and the second one was an abstract piece called The Timidity of Bones. The puppets worked in some ways but the actors or mime artists or whatever they are called kept disconnecting their heads which I found a bit confusing. Also having read the story before I left it seemed as if the artists took some liberties with the relationships between Tamar and her dead husband's brothers but overall but to be honest not as much liberty as I was expecting them to have taken given the womens' lib promo in the description. Also they had voice/written narration which seemed a bit like cheating for mime.

The second production was my favorite. From the festival website: "Eerily impressed into the surface of a large, luminous white screen, the outline of bones and skeletal forms appear." I think it was actually a man and a woman who may have been at least mostly naked who were pressing their own bodies into the white screen but they certainly got the job done. Aside from the loud sound track/sounds of crackling electricity it was almost memorizing and short (only 30 minutes) - the best combination. The way the artists pushed their bodies and especially their arms and hands into the screen it really did look like bones that were sort of rising and sliding along the screen and then slipping back the same way that dolphins and whales do on the surface of water. It was truly artistic and memorable and has made me more of a fan of the mime festival. I will be looking forward to its return next year.

Unforgiven

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The name sums it up. This is a Clint Eastwood cowboy movie that Kim got for Christmas and as far as cowboy movies go it is pretty watchable. Unfortunately it lacks the standard happy ending good guy triumph energy which normally comes at the end of a cowboy movie that makes you want to swing your hat in the air and yell ye-haw! Ok well to be honest I haven't actually seen that many cowboy movies and the ones I have watched put me to sleep but that's not really the point. Clint Eastwood plays a retired gunmen who embarks on a journey to deliver some payback to a guy who knifed a prostitute and each of the characters he meets along the way is suffering from the same affliction: a general lack of forgiveness in the hard harsh desert of the west. It's a good week day movie to watch in the evening after dinner to spark a bit of conversation especially if you've seen enough of Eastwood's other movies to enter into a compare and contrast college essay sort of discussion. Fortunately when Kim and I watched it we'd had just enough wine to avoid Kim's follow up essay about imagery and foreshadowing but you should feel free to have one without me if the mood strikes you.

Avatar

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I didn't have too many expectations when I went to see this movie and in my opinion that is the only way to approach a blockbuster. I had seen a 10 minute filler show (the kind that fills the space between a show that lasted 50 minutes and the next hour break on tv) on the special effects which was what made me interested in the first place but that was about all I knew. Overall I though the movie was pretty good although it was unnecessarily long. When I thought we'd reached at least the 1.5 hour mark I thought to myself, well this isn't so bad the movie is more than half over and I don't feel like I've been sitting here all that long at all! As I'm sure you can guess in retrospect it was no where near an hour from the end of the movie. In fact I was starting to suspect that I was loosing any tangible connection I had to the time space continuum and that it would never end and one day I would finally stumble out of the theater only to discover floating cars and clothes made out of foil but then it finally ended and much to my relief the underground trains were still underground and connected to the tracks (I made that sentence extra long to give you a sense of my suffering). The special effects were as impressive as promised although I'm not convinced that the 3d really added much and I'm certainly not interested in watching my tv at home in 3d. There was a bit of a conservation/its wrong to wipe out indigenous people groups just for cash sort of message but most important is the message that as long as the attractive hero is on your side you can't help but win. I'm not sure I came out quite as concerned as the Pope did about the worship of nature especially since all those plastic 2d glasses were constructed as single use non recyclable items. Overall I would give this movie a thumbs up but as the guy on the train said on the way home "it really wasn't worth seeing twice"

Lost in a Good Book

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I recently finished "Lost in a Good Book" by Jasper Fforde and I highly recommend it. It was witty and amusing and smart and entertaining and more importantly had just enough characters and plot twists to leave me wanting more rather than making me want to stuff the book into a small space under the bed in hopes that it would shrink before I found it again. The heroine of the series is Thursday Next who joins 'Jurisfiction', the policing agency within the book world, to try to track down a man who she trapped in an Edgar Allen Poe story in a previous episode (The Eyre Affair - which I also highly recommend). She teams up with Miss Havesham from Dickens, who I might add is rather more amusing than in her original incarnation, who helps her master book travel. Reading Jasper Fforde books gives me alternating desires to read more classics so I can get more of the literary references he makes to wanting to read more of his books so I can enjoy the witticisms that I do get. His characters are likable (the good guys anyway) and free from foul language and rampant sex and some even have cute and slightly stupid pets. If you are looking for a fun read that will make you want to read more then this is the book for you!

new pattern

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Having just made a pullover from a Vogue that was full of errors I've sworn off Vogue (again) and picked out a more simple Interweave Knits pattern instead. I knitted up a gauge/swatch yesterday and I think there is enough going on with all the color changing in the yarn without adding fancy cabling. This pattern has nice clean lines including a hem, which I've never knitted before, and shaping for both the waist and the cap sleeves. I've only knitted about and inch and a half so far but I like how it looks. Here is a link to a photo of the sweater. It's from Spring 2007 and it's called the Slanted Neck Pullover.

finished!

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I finally finished this sweater after spending an hour or so trying to knit the last four rows of the hood based on a completely incorrect pattern. Thanks Vogue Knitting for reminding me why I swore off your patterns the last time. Anyway I got some help from several Ravelry knitters who had figured it out but then when I finally got it finished I didn't like how big and floppy it was and since it didn't even look good up I just ripped it out and then made the fold over collar you see in the photos. I'm pleased with how the sweater turned out in the end. I did squeeze in one more cable on the back than the pattern called for when I had my second attempt at finishing. Other than that the only change I made was to lengthen the sleeves.

finished!

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I finished this while I was visiting my parents for Christmas. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I didn't bind off for the neck until two inches after the armhole and I changed the sleeves because looking at the photos on Ravelry it seemed like the sweater was sort of pulling off the shoulders on some people. I think I ended up with the shoulder a stitch or two wider when I bound off at the top and I used the article from Interweave Knits winter 07 to calculate the perfect cap. I worked both sleeves up to the cap and then made both caps at once so I wouldn't have to worry about trying to remember what I did for the first one when I got to the second one.

finished!

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

I finished this sweater before Christmas but I only just got around to taking proper photos. I'm really pleased with how this came out. I was a bit worried about how the yarn was turning out when I was plying and finishing it but now that it's knitted and he's wearing it I think it looks really good. I changed the pattern to make it a bit smaller and I continued the cable down the back. Also I changed the sleeves because I didn't want to have to sew in sleeves that were shaped with a bo2 curve so I made the cap a bit smoother.

body finished

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Well I've finally finished the body of this sweater. I knit the whole thing in the round even after I divided/cast off for the neck. I really like knitting this way when I have to modify the pattern because I can modify all the pieces at once without having to try to remember what I changed later. However when you're working 4 different shoulders with 4 different incoming strands of yarn it does have a tendency to turn into a giant tangled mess. I decided to go ahead and to the pick up and knitting for the neck band. Then I'll only have one sleeve to work on. I doubt this will be done before the end of the year but possibly I'll take it home to work on over Christmas.