Well I finally managed to finish spinning and plying this yarn. I decided to three ply it in the end since some of it was spun quite fine and because I read several spinners' blogs who were raving how much better they liked knitting with their hand spun when it was three ply. The plying process took much longer than I was expecting. Most of Saturday afternoon and evening and even a bit into Sunday morning were absorbed by the process; my bobbin is not particularly large so I had to stop rather frequently to wind up the yarn on my swift. I did manage to get it all plied and wound though and today I 'finished' it. Since I spun using a woolen method I decided to try to felt it a bit during the finishing process so I used alternating hot and cold rinses with some hand agitating. After hand washing 14 skeins of wool my forearms are a bit sore (mostly because of squeezing out excess water between and after rinses I think). Next time I will definitely go with the potato masher idea on the website where I read about felting woolen yarns. I did smack the skeins against the shower floor and snap them open a few times to set the twist so I'm sure you'll all be happy to hear that there was plenty of water flying and I was a bit wet by the end of it all. I also spun the skeins in the washing machine which significantly shortened the drying time (although unfortunately Kim didn't make that suggesting until after I'd tried to wring out as much extra water as I could manually).

Overall I'm reasonably happy with the yarn as a beginners attempt but I think I probably should have plied them a bit more. Also because the yarn is woolen rather than worsted (meaning that I didn't align all the fibers before adding the twist) and also because I did a but of fulling it is a rather fuzzy yarn. Also some of the color variation in the original fleece seems to have gotten a bit lost and the yarn looks a bit dingy rather than blended. Perhaps I could have done more about that during carding. Below is a photo although I had to use the flash so the colors are a bit lighter than the actual yarn. I'll try to take some more photos this week; when I checked a little while ago the yarn was mostly dry so hopefully I'll be able to knit up a swatch this week and see how it looks.

We finally got some new lights for the hallway to show off our lovely green paint. We even installed them ourselves. It may have taken us a few tries to get both the new hallway lights and the other lights in the flat to all work at the same time but in the end we did it and they look great. Of course they are brighter than all of the other lights so I'm either going to have to start knitting in the hallway or our light improvement program will have to continue to several other rooms.

I'm almost finished spinning this yarn, the bag that started as raw wool is almost full of of spun singles and I just have one shoe box full of rollags left. Granted it is the shoe box that my boots came in so it's not exactly a small box but at least I've finished carding. I'm thinking of making it a 3-ply yarn but I'm going to finish spinning and then see how it looks. I'm hoping to be able to make a sweater for Kim but I have no idea how much I've spun so we'll see.

Well I wanted to change the sleeve cap/armhole but the article I was reading from Interweave Knits gives instructions for making the armhole first so I put the sleeve aside and started on the body. I have about 8 or 9 inches so far but it seems to be taking forever. I'm not sure if I like knitting in the round or not. It does make the rows take forever but I suppose it is nice to not have to make a whole front piece after making a back piece and knowing how long it takes.

As you probably know I've moved and redesigned my website several times since it's original inception and one thing I quickly decided is that it's no good putting real image tags right into my blog posts because then if (or let's face it when) I redesign my website I have to troll through all the posts wrapping the images in html tags or changing them into links for a gallery, or removing the links, or whatever new idea seems desirable at the time. Instead I've replaced the html image tag with a tag of my own. Not to surprisingly this too has gone through several versions but I'm quite proud of the current one and I even wrote proper regular expressions rather than the slightly dubious and a bit hacked together parsing solution I had previously. My current tag looks like this: <my_img id=999>

My parsing code is rather simple, I just go through each my_image tag and replace it with a proper html image tag after retrieving the image name from the database based on it's id. I probably could change it to access the database once for all images but since my posts rarely have more than a few images this seems hardly worth the extra complication.

function replaceImgTags($string) {
      $db = new MySQlImageConnector();
      $found = true;
      $regExpr = '/<[ ]*my_img[ ]+id=\"(\d+)\"[ ]*\/>/';
      $matches;
      preg_match_all($regExpr, $string, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
      foreach ($matches as $matchSet) {
            $loc1 = stripos($string, $matchSet[0]);
            $size = strlen($matchSet[0]);
            $image = $db->getImageById((int)$matchSet[1]);
            $tag = "<p><img src=\"".CB_IMAGE.$image->getFileName()."\"";
            $tag .= " alt=\"".$image->getName()."\" /></p>";
            $string = substr($string, 0, $loc1).$tag.substr($string, $loc1+$size);
      }
      return $string;
}

While I was writing this post I discovered that I don't have a good way of formatting code snipits in my blog and I don't really want to have to hand format each one individually so I added a <my_code> tag with a processor to replace the newlines and spaces and wrap it in a paragraph with a css style.

function replaceCodeBlockTags($string){
      $found = true;
      $reg ='/<[ ]*my_code[ ]*>(.*?)<[ ]*\/[ ]*my_code[ ]*>/s';
      $matches;
      preg_match_all($reg, $string, $matches, PREG_SET_ORDER);
      foreach ($matches as $matchSet) {
            $match = $matchSet[1];
            $loc1 = stripos($string, $match);
            $size = strlen($match);

            //keep all the special characters
            $match = htmlentities($match);
            //replace newlines with breaks
            $match = str_replace("\n", "<br />", $match);
            //replace tabs with a bunch of spaces
            $match = str_replace("   ", "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;", $match);
            $match = "<p class=\"code\">".$match."</p>";
            
            $string = substr($string, 0, $loc1).$match.substr($string, $loc1+$size);
            
      }
      return $string;
}

Ok, I think I know what I want to make but before I get myself knee deep into another crazy project involving making an entire sweater out of sock yarn and size 3 needles or some equally insane idea I'm going to post what I picked here and let the idea settle a bit before I actually start. I might also knit up a swatch and see how it looks but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

The pattern is from Vogue Fall 2006, and is from the 'Gray's Anatomy' collection.

As promised here is cleverbit.org 3.0. I decided to go for a streamlined design both in code and in actual website design. I'm only using code that I wrote myself (much of which has been hanging around in one state or another since cleverbit 1.0). I'm done with spending hours and hours trying to coerce someone else's library into doing what I want while I stumble over load of 'features' that I don't really need. I've also simplified the overall design and user experience of my site; while I still favor a more organized approach to organizing my blog I'm no longer imposing my order on the user. In short my blog feels more like a standard blog now although it doesn't have comments at the moment. But a blog is really more of a one way medium anyway. Also I decided to get rid of galleries since I ended up posting most of my photos within posts anyway so that I could give them a bit of narration. A picture might be worth a thousand words but without a bit of direction how would you know which thousand to pick?

I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. Each notebook/entry/container has a bean like object which may eventually include more validation (although it doesn't include much now, horrors!). Then I have separate logic for retrieving and storing the objects from a mySql database and rendering them in html and rss. The design therefore is quite simple and maintainable and since my site is not particularly high traffic I'd rather have a few extra sql queries then to fight with someone else's optimized framework. I do still want to introduce some more content to my site but its tricky to find the time what with work and knitting and getting distracted by silly things like trying to get with svn in Eclipse to do what I want before finally giving up and using the command line. Also in the spirit of simplicity I've dropped all the icons I gathered (legally) from the web and am using only images which are mine.