Ripples in my memory, lead me back to you

Related post: Cross my fingers and hope for the best

And so, here we are with in-progress photos of an afghan - my first afghan, an afghan intended for my grandmother.


Having just started on the project, the first four stripes don't look like much.

The pattern is based on a chevron / ripple stitch that I got from a stitch library book; it begins with a multiple of 10 chain stitches plus 4. In this case, I've pegged the width of this thing at 100 stitches.

The pattern consists of a sequence of 3 dc + dc3tog [forming the "valley"] + 3 dc + 3 dc in the next stitch [forming the "peak"]. So, yeah, it's not so much a pattern as it is variations on the double crochet - child's play for most crocheters. The thing that makes it different is the sheer *scale* of the thing, I guess.


Close-up on one section of the afghan shows the peak-and-valley pattern.

I'm making this afghan for someone who is quite special to me: my maternal grandmother. Since I was a kid all I ever called her was "Mama". I have to say she and I were quite close while I was growing up. Vigorous, intelligent, and always easy to talk to, she was very popular among both friends and family and was pretty much loved by all.

In 1999 or so Mama suffered a stroke. She got back on her feet, but, well, she was no longer the same. I'm glad to report now though that things are looking up for her: her memory is improving, and apparently her skills at playing mahjong were NOT affected by the stroke.

Some people reminisce fondly about their grandmothers making things for them like blankets or well-worn stuffed toys. I have to smile because in this case I have to reverse the pattern - here I am, working on a present for her.

The idea is to finish this afghan before December so that I can give it to her as a Christmas present. I had to give myself a long timeframe because I can only work on this project during the weekends. I'm either going to finish it with some kind of simple edging or something, or follow tradition and put tassels / fringe on the short edges.

All I can do is keep working, and keep hoping I can finish in time. Slow but sure wins the race.

Fandom kicks

When I was in high school I received a pair of vivid maroon tennis shoes as hand-me-downs from my mother. I remember being quite delighted to have such a comfortable and unusual pair of sneakers, and wearing them as frequently as I could.

During my three years at Philippine Science High School I was often found running around the halls wearing the normal blouse and skirt of the uniform, but the maroon shoes on my feet - and best of all, no one was enforcing the uniform rules strictly, so I could wear my sneakers with impunity.

Those shoes carried me all the way to university; they finally gave up the ghost after repeated soakings in flooded streets (much to the ruination of my white socks, I might add). After them I'd gone back to my usual routine of wearing shoes in various shades of black, blue, and occasionally white.

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When David Tennant became the Tenth Doctor one of the first things everyone noticed was his clothes. The coat was cool, the pinstriped suit was unusual for a decidedly t-shirts-and-jeans age...and the Converse shoes were wanted by all.

In his first season he mostly wore off-white Chucks with a brown suit; he broke out the black Chucks whenever he had to don a tuxedo; and then when he started wearing a blue suit he wore maroon or red Chucks, just for the sake of the color clash.

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Today I had the opportunity to buy shoes and when I passed a Converse store in the mall, I knew I'd only be picking between the off-white pair and the red one. (No maroon pairs in stock.)


Look, new shoes!

I hope I break this pair in right and that I get as much fun out of wearing them as Tennant did!

Cross my fingers and hope for the best...

In a previous entry I said I'd decided to make my first crocheted afghan out of an assortment of granny squares.

After greedily eyeing some of my pounds of yarn, though, I thought I'd look around for some other options in terms of patterns ad stitches. I figured, hey, two pounds of yarn ought to be plenty from any point of view; if I ate up about three-quarters of each pound and used the rest for edging, then there should be a rather large work completed in the end.

I wound up settling on THIS, or a variation thereof:

[Photo not mine. Wish that yarn was available locally. And I should really save up for those comfort-grip crochet hooks!]

The photo shows just one of the many "chevron" or "ripple" crochet patterns out there. It's a popular stitch for making afghans, hence the many variations on a theme of stitches arranged in a peaks-and-valleys configuration.

When I've made some progress on mine I'll be sure to post pictures. In the meantime, I have to keep working.....

Yarn - gotta have it.

I know I'm supposed to have enough yarn to last me a while, what with the pounds and pounds of the stuff that I recently received....

But my problem is that the yarns I'm going to need for a couple of upcoming projects are in colors that I don't currently have.

If you haven't guessed yet from looking at the colors of this blog itself, I tend towards shades of blue, gray, and black, with a little white and cream thrown in for accent and contrast. I'm not big on bright colors, and there are some that I actually avoid because they make me look weird.

Well, it just means I need to spend some more money on my yarn stash. Hard to believe I'll soon be needing to deal in many more colors than I currently have in my stash. Worse, no one is selling those wonderful printed, tweed-type, heathered, and self-striping yarns locally, at least not in the weight that I prefer to work in....

Ironically, none of the yarns in the photo accompanying this post are multicolored, either. Grr. Goes to show just how rare yarns like this [Vanna's Choice in Wheat], this [Lion Brand Wool in Ocean Blues Print], or this [Red Heart Stripes Yarn] actually are!

Rambling at large

[I haven't had any decent sleep in two days so excuse me if this is just a wee bit incoherent.]

1. I think my subconscious is trying to write my November NaNoWriMo novel for me. Except that I may have to consider moving my noveling month to August because November is a busy time at the office.

2. I have finally settled on a name for the yarn shop that I would really like to open in the future. It will be an easy-to-remember name and it will also be a tribute to my significant other, who is relentless in pushing me towards my dreams.

3. I really want to watch Toy Story 3, but am having a hard time figuring out when to go to the cinema since I only get weekends off, and weekends means tons of kids. I'm not exactly anti-kid but I do hate watching a movie and then some ill-behaved kid screams, cries, moves around, or kicks my chair.

4. The next movie I want to see, after Toy Story, is Inception. So looking forward to Nolan's next work. I really like his very cerebral stories, and this just promises to be the pinnacle of them, what with that kickass tagline: "Your mind is the scene of the crime" or something like that. Wonder if there are any parallels to be drawn with copyright and intellectual property.

5. Current food cravings include a proper spaghetti with meat sauce. Wonder if I could get my parents to cook some for me.

6. Dare I ask how much a Dollfie Dream, the Aoi model would cost? Base price is 39,900 JPY - that's about 21,000 PHP. No clothes or shipping/handling yet. Looks like I'd have to have a minimum of 30,000 PHP on hand - OUCH.

[Incoherence ends here, I hope!]

Inventory for a future little crafting shop

At lunch with the family for a combined birthday and Father's Day celebration yesterday, the topics bounced all over the spectrum of ideas, but the one I got stuck on was the idea of opening a little shop where I could sell crocheted stuff.

Here's the list of things I could sell:

1. Scarves. This is really my type of project; heaven knows I've made enough of them and talked about them, on this blog and elsewhere.

2. Watch caps.

So who got the one I was making last week? My dad. He was quite pleased and said he'd wear it to work, since some of the production houses he works with have super-cold offices.

3. All-purpose mini bags.

This particular specimen contains RPG dice, but the width is just right for most mobile phones. It's then a matter of sizing the bag accurately in order to completely accommodate units ranging from an iPhone to the wide range of Nokias to my mother's Samsung smartphone...for this, the possibilities really are endless.

Hmm. So now all I've got to do is get cracking and start making. Right then. I can haz crafty tiemz nao?

"The rest...is silence"

Well, yeah, I DID say I was a big reader - that doesn't have much to do with being a big theater-goer.

So yes, I have read almost all of Shakespeare's plays, but I have never actually gotten around to seeing many of them performed on stage. I think the only major one I've seen was Richard III - and that only because it was "local" (UP was putting it on) and "sentimental" (my partner was playing a couple of one-liner roles) to me.

During a recent night when I didn't come in to work because of an inability to talk properly without bursting into huge, wet, joint-racking coughs, I managed to catch the TV version of the BBC production of Hamlet from 2008 or so. You know, the one with David Tennant in it, and Patrick Stewart?


This photo is likely to be from the stage version instead of from the TV production, as the "Alas, poor Yorick" speech was given outdoors in the latter. (Of course it would be; in the Denmark of the story, the cemetery is outdoors.)

Impressions:
- Well, of course, the juxtaposition of Shakespeare's English with modern dress is jarring and effective.
- The clear use of cameras as metaphor and as a device to facilitate soliloquy - very modern and metafictional. (And, on an unintentionally creepy note, reminiscent of the Weeping Angels!)
- Patrick Stewart is far more evil when he's playing his villains subdued. Whew. You can feel the menace radiating off him in waves.
- There was a very clever person in costuming, I think - during the "Get thee to a nunnery" scenes between Hamlet and Ophelia, Tennant is wearing a shirt printed with a muscular chest and abs - directly over his own chest and abs, of course. Cheeky!
- How can anyone fence in jeans? I mean, at least Laertes wore a proper fencing uniform at the climax....
- Horatio plays it very, very cool at the climax - but you can still feel how bereft he is, being the only main character to survive the ending.
- Poor, poor Ophelia. I'm sure I'll feel more ripped-up if I should see a traditional staging of this story. What little screentime she gets - and especially in her madness scenes - she really shines in.

I probably owe it to myself to see the Ian McKellen film of Richard III although I am definitely a fan of Gloucester. I HATE the portrayal of the poor man as a villain; blame the book The Daughter of Time for that mindset......

Super hobby mash-up mode!

In the previous entry, I mentioned I'd gotten my fannish mitts on some dice.

Now I'm writing this post to show off the bag I've made for the dice.

It all started with me racking my brains for a present for a family member. I tried to follow the Easy Sideways Hat pattern from Lion Brand Yarns, but gave up in favor of a retread of the hat in this entry.

But that left me with a medium-sized piece of crochet work that was all dressed up and had nowhere to go - and I definitely wasn't in the mood to simply frog it out (i.e. rip it back down to the component yarn).

So it was a bit of an inspiration when I finally decided to make a go of creating a dice bag - by sewing the cloth together to create a pouch. The results are amateurish, but definitely encouraging.

Here's the bag with its contents out for display.

Because the pattern in the hat called for a "ribbed" crochet effect caused by working single crochet only into the back loops, the completed bag is pretty neat to touch.

The bag is a drawstring type.

I braided together three pieces of yarn and hooked the resulting cord into the top of the bag.

The bag, closed and ready to go.

Not bad for a first attempt! If I can acquire more dice I will probably make a larger version of the bag to carry them around in.

Yeah, I KNOW, there is something surreal to be said for the coming together of crochet and tabletop dice-based RPGs, but you know what? I'm hardly the only one doing this sort of thing....

"At last, my arm is complete again!"

And you know, it says a lot for my general chosen fandoms and interests that I had no idea where the quote that makes up the post title came from until five seconds ago.

No, I'm not about to mince people into pies, move to Fleet Street, or sport a weirdo Bride of Frankenstein hairdo.

I'm just going to report about an accomplishment that makes my fannish heart VERY happy.

Acting on a tip from a friend at my office (thank you so much!), my partner and I ventured to Greenhills yesterday morning after shift in search of dice.

[At the end of this previous entry I had rather loudly lamented the utter difficulty of finding proper RPG dice hearabouts.]

But the tip was good and I soon found myself in possession of this:

Real Chessex-brand dice, guys. This is the basic 7-piece set.

My partner teased me for getting dice in black with red numbers, saying that I'd wound up buying Twilight dice. Hell no. These are MY dice.

I've turned all the dice in this photo so their largest numbers (and number of sides each) are facing up. Two of the dice are both ten-sided, one marked with the numbers 1-0 (0 being 10) and one marked with the numbers 10-00 (00 being 100); the latter die is for percentiles, I guess.

Now that I know where to get dice I will probably buy another set before the year is out. I like having lots of dice on hand. Never know when I'm going to need them.

News and notes again

I'm making another one of these, only in a different shade of blue, a different yarn, and a different brim. Not telling you who it's for; it's not a commission either.



Give me another weekend and it shall be done - I hope!

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Damnit parts of my university burned on Wednesday night! The affected building at UP-Diliman was Palma Hall, a/k/a the building where all the freshmen go. Luckily, no one was hurt. But imagine the property damage! The affected parts were the Chem Pavilion, parts of the Physics Pavilion, and the sections of Palma Hall adjoining those pavilions. *grr!*

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In a shout-out to a friend - if you have any horror stories about PH electronics retailer CD-R King, kindly point them Every Juan's way HERE.

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I've spammed my Twitter with this and you might as well know why: Share Moleskine Love! Win a Moleskine SET Twitter contest! And who doesn't LOVE Moleskines? Grab a chance to win them for a friend!

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Man, Saturday and Sunday just cannot come quickly enough. *grumble*

It looks like I'm hard at work again....

Although last night was rather *nasty* in the sense of getting blindsided by a massive-ass migraine. Sometimes the word "migraine" doesn't even begin to cover it - didn't that troubled poet Virginia Woolf write an entire essay on it? Man, there's a great line there about headaches - and she would know; the headaches were, to her, one of the signs of her madness....

How come it never occurred to me to see a neurologist for these migraines? Oh, right, because I kept assuming that they primarily had something to do with my *eyes*. So I see an opthalmologist for them instead. I should do something like that soon.

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Having finished the skinny chenille scarf in purple I am now busying myself with a man's watch cap. I really cannot stop myself making gifts for my family but I will have to put my foot down next time - commissions or bust!

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I don't know if there are any BJD owners reading this blog, but I might as well ask, too: how big around are BJD heads? I find myself in possession of a very tiny crochet beret with an inner circumference of about 4in. What sort of doll could wear something THAT small?

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Looks like this blog has been drawing traffic because of the list of influential blogs that I put up in a previous entry. Welcome to one and all.

PJ Goes Pop's Top 10 Influential Blogs for 2010

Writing project home page, rules, regulations, fine print, and FAQs over at http://www.influentialblogger.net.

I've finally gotten around to sorting out my picks for my favorite blogs of 2010 to submit to this contest, hosted as always by the amazing and tireless Janette Toral.

Without further ado, the list.

1 and 2. The MMOsh Pit and Every Juan

So there's this friend of mine who's been blogging for a while, you see. His name is Joel Tan. Up until this year he had been maintaining blogs on Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games and technology with blogging networks and such.

He's struck out on his own, now, and these two blogs are for geeks of every stripe. I heartily recommend both for extensive coverage and insights. In particular, no MMO is too obscure for the MMOsh Pit to report on!

3. Hallucinogenic Java
What if Darth Vader were a Pinoy "salaryman"? What if he had an interest in all things otaku - from ball-jointed dolls to cars to video games? And what if he dropped in at conventions all over Metro Manila to see what's what? Then you'll get something that rather approximates the quirky originality of this blog.

4. Pixelated Crayons
Another grab-bag fandom blog that stands out for being the brainchild of two smart and funny ladies. Between the two of them, Zizi and Anne talk about food, manga series, great places to eat and drink, and even Plants vs. Zombies. A worthwhile addition to the local blogging scene (but I wish they would update more often).

5. My Favorite Things from Japan
The news, discussion, and blog page for a start-up company that allows fans of Japanese pop culture to purchase original fandom goods, straight from the land of the rising sun. Of particular note is the company's current specialization in goods and merchandise related to the Takarazuka Kagekidan. Not only can you get your fannish mitts on some truly rare merch here, but you can also discuss Takarazuka favorites with fellow fans too!

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It occurs to me that my fandoms are really rather showing in this entry post.... Too bad all the great crochet sites got their start ages ago.

"If you have three strings (a shamisen), you can eat."

Shamisen are the trademark instruments of the geisha, and the title of this post comes from a saying that Liza Dalby quoted in her anthropological study of these amazing women.

But I don't really think that they would have had performances like THESE in mind, hmm?

I got this one from Facebook friends. No idea where THEY got it from, but this is pretty neat.



And then the related videos list includes none other than Kitano Takeshi in another duel of tap shoes vs. a shamisen. I can't embed it, so have the link instead: here.

You know, I once DID a semester of tap in university - and I was very bad at it! Lack of coordination and weak legs for the fail! These guys are just absolute masters.

Random post is really rather random....

I've just posted this one on Twitter (@pjgoespop) and thought you might want to know:

I've just heard both the Steve Perry and Arnel Pineda versions of "Don't Stop Believing" and I now firmly think that either version kicks the Glee version's backside. I always did wonder what Glee was on about - I've had enough of remakes and their High School Musical shenanigans were old LONG before HSM even ever came along.

Listen to the original's glory!



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Oh, it looks like this blog is eligible for the The Top 10 Emerging Influential Blogs for 2010. But the idea is that I can't nominate myself - I have to nominate other blogs and hope someone will nominate me.

...Well, now, that's strange. Wonder how I should go about this. I should put together my list of new influential blogs (i.e. the blogs that influence me).