So I left work yesterday in a race to meet Kim on the north end of London bridge (taking the same route I always take between work and home). I started at point A headed towards point B and suddenly realized I was at point C. How do these things happen??

I can make only a meager defense for myself by saying that I usually either get out of work early and walk to Kim's office so we can walk home together, or get out so late that I take the tube home and thus avoid the walk all together. But I do walk to work every day and you'd think I'd be able to reverse a straight line...

I originally bought this yarn (recycled red silk) to make a scarf for a friend's birthday but when I finally decided on a pattern and a needle size (3) it became clear that it would never be ready in time. I did finally finish it (3 months later, 2 months and 2 weeks after the birthday party) and I'm really happy with how it came out. The pattern is from knitty.com and can be found here. The pattern called for sock yarn and since I used yarn with a bit less spring and a slightly smaller gauge my scarf is more of a lace item than a cozy scarf. I changed the number of pattern repeats although in retrospect I might have widened the pattern instead of increasing the number of repeats. Here are a few photos

It's actually almost 80 inches long but its hard to tell from the photos.

I was trying to get my husband to help me take photos but he seems to always make me blurry or make my head look twice as big as my body, this was the best of the bunch

I'm usually not a big fan of reverse stockingnet but I'm really happy how my hand dyed yarn is looking. Here are two closeups for comparison:

Well I had a few false starts but I finally decided on a pattern from a recent Interweave Knits magazine. The pattern is called "braided pullover" and a photo of it can be found here. Usually I'm a bit skeptical of reverse stockingnet but I think it's coming out really nicely with my hand dyed yarn.

I've finished the body of the sweater (except for the neckband thing) and I'm on to the sleeves. So far I don't think I've modified the pattern at all, the rib part looks like it makes the body of the sweater pucker a bit but I think it will look better once I've blocked it and am using my hips to stretch it out a bit :).

I have been meaning to add some rants to my blog for some time now and the select-a-size marketing scheme is one that we can all experience rage about together.

Several years ago in the US paper towel companies came out with paper towel rolls where the paper towels are about half as long as regular paper towels. This is a fine idea because it makes it easier to use less for smaller jobs because the perforation lines are closer together so you don't have to manually tear the paper towels in half if you want to use about 6 inches worth of paper towel.

The problem arises when they start with the select-a-size marketing campaign in which they suggest that I can now use the appropriate amount of paper towel for a given job which I was not able to do before. Paper towel users have always been able to use as many sheets as they wanted. I have, on occasion, used several large, absorbent paper towels at once to clean up a large spill. I have also on occasion torn a paper towel in half to clean up a tiny spill. I do not appreciate the paper towel manufacturers claiming that they have now empowered me with the choice of selecting the quantity of paper towel that I will use for cleaning up a mess as if I was not able to think to make that choice myself before select-a-size paper towel rolls.

And now that this has become a standard marketing campaign other products are jumping on the ban wagon with items like custom slice cheese. I don't want my cheese slices to be half as wide, I actually want them to be 1.33 times as big since nice bread is often a bit wider than normal bread and often requires an extra third of a slice. And I don't quite understand why the cheese people feel that they are now suddenly offering me the power of choice when they have been offering sliced cheese for ages. Surely that is providing a selection service over having to eat a whole huge block of cheese all at once. Maybe the bread people will start offering half slices of bread as choose-able bread bits and we'll be caught in a downward spiral of bread and cheese companies trying to out do each other with increasingly small portions of their product under the guise of quantity select-ability.