nog even nadenken

I have given birth to a pattern, a design for a hat written down in both instructions and a chart. I used all the skills I have to complete a polished and clearly written pattern with a nice set of pictures and a clean layout. And now I want to share it with everyone.

I especially got a lot of XP working on my InDesign en charting skills, and I managed to up my photography skills too.

Here you go, the free pattern in PDF!

And check it out on Ravelry here.

(The pattern has only been test-knit by me so far, so please let me know if you have knit this hat and have anything to say about it.)

Some more pictures to convince you into knitting it, even though this is completely the wrong season!

ETA 23/6/09: As you can see in the comments I made a mistake in rounds 23, it should say:

(p6, MB, p7, k1tbl) repeat to last st., p1

I fixed this in the pattern PDF so if you download it now, everything will be fine. But if you downloaded it before the 23rd of June, watch out for my mistake!

There is a museum in Tilburg, south from here, about anything textile related and it’s appropriately dubbed the Textielmuseum. What other reason could I have to mention this museum than the fact that I’ve been there? Probably lots, but the fact of the matter is that I have been there, and it was awesome.

It had to have been somewhere in the 18th and 19th century that we, the Dutch, were pretty big in the textile industry, and the Textielmuseum is one of many old factories dating back to that period. Of course there was a huge steam engine, and all the old machinery used to card, spin, twine, weave and felt wool into woollen blankets was also displayed in all its splendour. If even a factory was such a beautifully designed place back in those days, I can’t help but think life itself must have been much, much prettier back then.

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Of course working in the textile factory would certainly get you deaf, if not handicapped, and I’m sure a lot of people would have chosen the working environment we have now over their prettily designed but merciless machinery any day of the week… But still, it all just looks so damn pretty!

Dat is voor oma’s / That’s something for grannies

Ik heb geen idee hoe dat moet hoor / Honestly, I have no idea how to do that

Is dat je hobby? / Is that really your hobby?

En maak je dan ook geitenwollen sokken? / So are you a hippie too?

Dat doet niemand meer tegenwoordig / Nobody does that anymore these days

Ik weet nog wel dat mijn moeder dat altijd deed / I remember my mom doing that all the time

Zijn er ook mannen die dat doen dan? / There are men that do it too?

-staar- / -stare-

This is what I walk past to and from work. A couple of relatively well-known buildings in Amsterdam and an example of awarded modern architecture: the Mövenpick hotel and the Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ. I don’t really think they’re by beautiful themselves,  but they have something interesting, especially the Mövenpick hotel, being so hideously boring and massively square.

It’s just a huge block sitting there, but still, when you look at the stripes in between the glass layers, randomly alternating hues of gray, opened windows scattered over one side breaking up the big square plane, it’s getting prettier already.

And then when the sun shines just on one of the box’s sides, highlighting the grays, and turning up the contrast, it’s actually quite a nice sight. The massive, heavy block seems to be floating.

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Food is inspirational, the shapes, the colours you just could not have come up with yourself.

When boyfriend is in a picture, chances are he’s doing something food related. When he takes a picture, chances are there’s food in it. When he wrote stories as a boy, they were about food. Even when he wrote about a trips he made with his family, to a theme park for example, he concluded the stories like this:

‘My mother had a vegetarian cheese steak, my sister had soup and orange juice, my father had a burger and I had a burger too. I had a lot of fun.’

I think I’ve been infected with this food-lovin’ virus. The 5-year incubation period has ended (after all, that’s how long I’ve been exposed to boyfriend already) and now I’m starting to show the symptoms.  I caught myself taking and editing the following picture, which oozes a love for food, if I’m not mistaken.

(I added a watermark for the first time. Who the hell do I think I am, anyway? Richard bloody Avedon? )

Let’s hope there’s no cure for the virus.

Sometimes learning is not my favourite thing in the world. I love and am addicted to learning in the narrowest sense of the word, to me that is: learning ‘tangible’ thing like skills and languages, new ways of doing things. The learning that is harder for me, and less fun, are the lessons of life. Patience for example.

The big gap that fell between now and my last post was a result of my camera being sent off to the camera-repairmen. Never before have I had this big an urge to take pictures, as when I was unable to do so. The lesson to be learned from this was obviously patience, but I don’t think I’m quite done learning that lesson.

My camera came back yesterday, all healthy and upbeat and with lots of stories about his trip. So I put some batteries in a charger, yanked them out way too soon, took some pictures and shot myself in the foot because after about three pictures I already had to change the batteries. So much for patience.

But who knows, maybe I have learned something. That it’s wonderful to have a camera again, much more so because I had been without one for so long. Maybe I could not have taken thise pictures if my camera hadn’t broken down. Inspiration through lack of patience.

The past few days have been great, with a friend from Moscow coming over, great wheather, Easter festivities (which translates as seeing relatives and getting up to speed with them, I always love that) and trips to a museum, the climbing hall and the dunes. My camera being back at my bosom is the cherry on the icing.

Next time I will tell you about stuff I made while little cammy was away from home (hats, curtains, a knitted landscape, more hats, and a pattern).

After one camera was dropped on the unforgiving floor of an Indian establishment that was known as the ‘restaurant of the (Something something) Hotel’, only the hotel that was supposed to sit on top of this restaurant hadn’t been built yet, and another camera, the stand-in that had better features than the original and that I got completely grown attached to, had been stolen along with an expensive piece of equipment that really shouldn’t be carried around because it is just such an everyday item and it’s just to goddamn expensive to lose (It was not my laptop, but my boyfriend’s, still I cried over it, and not he. Weird, yes.), I am now without a camera.

Cold turkey I have had to tear myself away from what was becoming a real hobby, in combination with some other hobbies that have gotten the occasional blog post here. It’s completely annoying, and if I don’t want to waste money, I’m going to have to wait quite a while for a new one to arrive.

So today, a day on which I knit a nice and photogenic yarn, hung up hand sewn curtains that really are pretty enough to be captured on a little laptop like my own and be shown to the offspring in…no really that’s just a joke. But I wanted to take pictures today alright.

In the end I cracked, I gave in to other media and methods of creating imagery. Apparently I have to be robbed of my comfort zone to start experimenting…

This picture here is not finished, but I figured I do work-in-progress shots of my knitting too, so why not my Illustrator projects. I’m making a portrait of my deceased camera, and am getting to know Illustrator better and better in the process. Do click on the picture, for a larger version. I didn’t want a partly finished beginner’s version of an illustration to dominate this post, so I posted a small picture.

It’s funny how something tacky like a gradient can make a flat object seem less flat. It’s not realistic at all, but how our eyes want to think it is! They fill in all kinds of things that really aren’t there at all, forms and textures and all that stuff. I’ve seen examples of people making pictures with Illustrator that you just CANNOT tell apart from a photograph, all with the use of gradients. Yes, those are the things you need to avert your eyes from when you’re only just starting to understand how to draw lines and fill them in. So don’t look here.

This is a lace shawl I finished last weekend. It’s been on the first pair of needles I ever bought (bamboo, 4mm, March 2007) since this August, and I’m glad I can finally admire its beauty blocked. It grew a lot after blocking and of course the lace pattern opened up as it was supposed to, which was very fulfilling. It made this project and the endless pinning down of each of the 500 or so picots, worthwhile. It is now approximately the size of a mattress. (!)

The yarn is Rowan Kidsilk Haze, kid mohair and silk, and it’s so soft and shiny. It feels as if your wearing something out of a store where you’d never step inside, not only because every item there costs more than your monthly paycheck, but also because the saleswoman will immediately tell by your clothes that you don’t have the green to shop in her shop, and will give you a stare that sends you running with your tail between your legs. That kind of store, I kid you not. Check it out.

You’ll have to imagine the shine yourself.

This pattern is from Knitty, it’s called Muir and the designer is Rosemary Hill. I did the borders a little differently, with slightly thicker yarn I had left from my Hannah sweater, Kidsilk Aura. Same fibre content, different result.

I love this shawl, I feel so rich. I’m even dressing for summer when I’m at home so I can wear this and not be hot.

Tonight I finished curtains that will serve as ‘doors’ for our doorless cupboard. And while I was at it I sewed a little bird out of the curtain fabric, but because the camera I was borrowing was stolen, I have no evidence of this. I did though.

Yesterday all senseo coffee machines were much slower than normal!

This may not be a scientifically acceptable conclusion, because I only made coffee with two of them yesterday, but the difference was so striking that it had to be the truth. But just to check: who else noticed that their senseo was much, much slower in heating the water than normal yesterday?

I know you have to be out there, because it is just not something you miss easily. Not if you, like me, drink a lot of coffee and have made enough cups with this type of machine to know, or better yet, feel exactly when your machine should be finished heating up the water and ready to squirt brown deliciousness in your favourite cup.

What is a senseo you ask? I would have written this in Dutch had I not expected some people abroad to also know this contraption manufactured by famous Dutch coffee brand Douwe Egberts together with perhaps the most famous Dutch company, also responsible for neat inventions like the CD, Philips. It is a coffee maker that uses coffee ‘pods’ (that’s what you call them in English, we call them pads) instead of just ground coffee in a filter. To prepare yourself a nice cuppa coffee, here’s what you do: grab a pod (pad) and toss it into the machine while the water is heating up in the reservoir. When it’s done making noises, press the button for one or two cups (depending on how many pods (pads) you tossed in there) and like a regular espresso machine, the coffee comes out enthusiastically and under high pressure. Here is some more information, a review of this ‘gadget’ as the writers call it.

I know that they hyped this invention for the high-end market in America, whereas over here just about every person with a toilet also has a senseo machine. I think the tide is turning a little but now however, because ‘true coffee lovers’ have started to come up and declare that senseo coffee is a sad excuse for coffee and that people who drink it have no taste. So I can imagine the situation here is quite different from that in the US, where you can even buy single pods (of course wrapped in plastic) for a dollar a pop.

Anyway, high-end accessory or standard inventory, tell me please if you have also noticed this mysterious difference yesterday, and maybe we can find out what’s behind it.

Resembling the great supercontinent that sat on our Earth millions (billions?) of years ago, the surface of my lips has started to form deep cracks, and is breaking up into large pieces. These newly created islands are drifting apart slowly but steadily, no matter how hard I try to smudge them back together with lip-ointment. When all has been calm for a couple of hours, and I imagine that inhabitants of this special Earth are finding their ways back to their damaged homes after another big landslide, I accidentally smile and everything cracks up again. Its a human tragedy.