In this issue....

I'm new to the whole podcast world. I didn't really understand why people were listening to them at first. What's the point in listeningn to the music that some random person puts together? Then someone told me of a knitting podcast, and someone's blog was mentioning it, and there's that article in the new Vogue Knitting about knitting podcasts as well. My interest was finally piqued after all these attempts, and my mouse pointer wandered over towards iTunes. My fingers felt themselves grabbing the words to spell out "knitting" and lo and behold several knitting podcasts loaded onto my screen. After a few initial troubles, I finally managed to download an episode of Knit Cast and a few episodes of Cast-On. I got a chance to listen to a show of each while I was finishing up on some stuff at work.

I listened to the interview with Debbie Bliss on KnitCast. this is the only episode I downloaded because I love the feel of the Debbie Bliss Alpaca Silk and the person who could create such a covetable yarn must be awesome. It was, in fact, a really interesting podcast. The content was really interesting even if I wasn't fond of Ms Irshad's interviewing techniques (it sounded more like a barrage questions than a fluid conversation) and there was background noise (there was a chair specifically that scraped and I found distracting). Overall, her podcast sounds more professional than what I was really expecting.

Cast On is a much longer and more elaborate podcast. It sounds like what would happen if I were to put together a radio show on knitting. There's songs interspersed with with knitting news and anecdotes, reviews of podcasts and the sweater of the day. It sounds amazingly professional.

It hit a nerve. Not that I'll be starting my own podcast anytime soon, but the seed has been planted. It's not that different from the radio show I had in college. In fact, I realized that this whole podcast thing is more like community radio than anything else. It's great, and amazingly inspiring!

On another front, I've finished one of the opera gloves. It came out beautifully, and I'm sure it will make a great addition to my friend's book. I've written a first draft of the pattern. To be honest, I didn't think that pattern writing would be this difficult. I think the biggest issue I'm having with actually committing the pattern to paper is wrestling with the style of wording.

It seems to me that there are multiple ways of writing patterns. The pretntious wasy, and the real people/readable and workable ways. I desperately want my pattern to be readable and pragmatic. I have a chart (and a key that has a wrong symbol definition in it - I'll have to fix that). I noticed that my first attempt at writing the pattern was pretentious. Not only does it have a lot of steps (nothing can really change that unfortunately), but it makes notes of what row you should be on. I don't know why I did that, there's only one part of the pattern that you actally need to pay attention to rows. I've started to revise it so that I tell people how many repeats it should be worked against. Also, I need to count out how many stitches I have at the end of each section of decreases. I'm hoping that I can put my email address somewhere so I can answer questions on the pattern.

But enough of my teasing. i think I've found a project for the time between I finish the other glove and when the Knitting Olympics start. Your prize for readig this far is a picture of the yarn I'm going to be using for said interim project:

Blue Heron Yarns' Rayon/Metallic Blend
in Colorway: Old Gold

This is going to turn into a beautiful hipscarf for my belly dancing escapades. I need to find some jangly thingeys for it. The goal is to get up relatively early for a Saturday and head to M&J trimmings to see if they (or any of those similar types of stores around them) have janglies. The idea is that I want to hear it when I move my hips. I'm thinking of a row at the top of janglies, thena few more a bit farther down (2-4 rows?) and then maybe another row of janglies. Depending on my mood, I might trim teh whole thing with fringe or jangles. So another pattern to make up! But it shouldn't be too intense. It's just a miniature triangle shawl. I'm planning on using rather large needles so it'll be pretty airy. OSmthing like a size 10 or 11 should do the trick. Maybe I'll pay for webhosting or something and put the pattern up on the site.

I was talking to a few people today while I was at The Point and we decided it's kinda like Cheers. We know nomatter when we come in that we'll always know someone there. Either one of the staff or a random knitter hanging out. This lead to a discussion on how unifying knitting is. How it's the only hobby you can take out and about with you and how people don't stare at you with apathetic eyes when you exclaim "Oh! I'm a knitter too!" Perhaps this unity is why knitting is getting so increasingly popular. Because people like to be a part of things that are bigger than themselves, and because all this technology, the blogging, the emailing everything is encouraging people to remain isolated in their own homes.

OH! I'm just so inspired by everything right now! Actually, I noticed that there's a severe lack of icons and buttons for the Knitting Olympics Sweater Knitting Team. I might try to be uber artsy tonight. Or later this weekend. Or next week....

But I felt the need to share this link and photo a non-knitter posted to his livejournal this afternoon: