random threads

Well, last week, I discovered my faithful, reliable Canon S400 Elph digital camera I have had and loved for about five years now has bit the dust. It fell on the carpeted living room from my computer desk (perhaps 30″ drop) and the LCD on the back is broken and unusable. Waaaah! I was able to take a photo using the eye viewfinder (you remeber, the old-fashioned way of holding the camera up to your eye?), but could not tell if the flash was on or off or the macro setting on or off and it seemed to power off every time you touched it. Self defense perhaps?

Well, as a blogger (yes, not-so-reliable-and-faithful in that department, I’ll admit) and the grand-daughter of professional photographers, I had to order a new camera right away. I did an evening’s worth of research and determined that I still wanted the smaller convenient size of a point-and-shoot vs a bigger body digital SLR. I have been happy with my Canon ELPH. I had an EPSON digital camera before the ELPH, and it was a first generation model (we are talking 8 plus years ago), much heavier and an annoying lag in shutter recovery for the next shot. So I have ordered the latest Canon ELPH, the Canon PowerShot SD1100IS 8MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Blue) in pretty metallic BLUE! Yes, it came in five color choices: silver, blue, pink, brown and gold. I hope it will be here by the weekend if I am lucky. Amazon says it is to ship out on Wednesday the 6th.

This camera will use SD cards instead of the Compact Flash cards my SD400 used. So I have a bunch of 512MB and 1Gig CF cards to retire. I ordered 2 new SD cards plus a spare battery pack, so I should be all set to go when my shipments arrive. Now that COMPUSA is closed, the only local stores that carry a range of electronics are Best Buy and Circuit City, not my favorite places to shop. Well, I guess you could count Wal-mart or Target as well. Hence, I turn my favorite on-line source, Amazon. I do access my Amazon buying through the Ravelry link so Ravelry earns 8% on what I buy with Amazon…I’d rather it go to Ravelry than the big Amazon profit bucket in the sky, ya know?

Sorry, I haven’t posted an update in a while (gosh…over two weeks!) , but I have been spending my spare time knitting a lot instead of blogging. It took me a while to prepare for teaching my first sock class (Toe-Up Socks, Two-at-a-Time, On One Needle) at my LYS, Baskets of Yarn. I had several sips (socks-in-progress) to show the class of six people and had three handouts (pattern, tips/techniques and stitch patterns) to create, including hand-drawn sketches of some of the techniques. So that took up a lot of my time. I hope to teach this class several times so will get more mileage out of the prep work for future classes as well. The first class went fairly well, other than a small mutiny when the class decided they did not care for the needles included with the class (they had difficulty while magic-looping in getting the stitches to slide easily over the needle join area).

This Saturday is the second session of the class where the gusset and heel will be the main topics. Then the class is being offered again in June, the first and third Saturdays. Here are some photos of the sock samples I have been knitting:

The first sock sample, will be used for demo’ing casting off next week. Knit from Tofutsies.

The second sock sample, will be used for demo’ing turning the heel. Knit from ??????Berroco Comfort Sock.

A toe/stitch pattern sample, in Opal Cotton:

Another stitch pattern sample, in Regia Mini-Ringel:

Second item that has consumed more of my spare time: upgrading to Wordpress 2.5 and then Wordpress 2.51. One or the other has broken a number of plugins for me, so I’ve slowly been rebuilding items. The ‘About Me’ and the ability to search my blog have now returned. My anti-spam word on commenting was broken for a day or so, now it has been updated to lasted level of Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam Plugin and seems to be working well. I’m still working on getting some of the post-writing-niceties back in place. (Yay! Alinks now works for me…and Advanced Tag Entry is fixed). Please do let me know (contact me tab above) if you have an issues on the site.

Woot! While my pretty Ravelry progress bars have been working well for some months, over there in the right-hand sidebar, you perhaps have noticed that whenever I finished a project it disappeared into the ‘black hole’ that was titled ‘off the needles!’

Well, no more! I have them working at last, despite my utter lack of Javascript knowledge, I muddled around, copying the progress bars but making changes to eliminate the percent bars, setting the results to only show the last 6 finished items sorted by completion date, and adding a date finished. I’m still trying to get the CSS right, to match the UFOs. Another thing I know little about is CSS…sigh.

Also, I have upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and implemented the Easy Gravatar plugin from Dougal Campbell for commenters. If you want a cool photo next to your comment, register on Gravatar.com and upload a photo. And then make a comment here!

I admitted on Ravelry yesterday that I don’t spend enough time blogging anymore And I want to change that. One suggestion Turtlegirl76 made was that having a regular topic for each day’s posting helps keep her on track for regular blogging. So I’m committed to give it at a try. I can’t go so far as thinking I’ll achieve “daily” bogging, but as an objective, 2-3 times a week would be a definite improvement for me!

Topics I have in mind include:

• Knitting book reviews
• Yarny goodness-discussion and photos of my recent yarn acquisitions
• “Toesday”- information specific to sock knitting
• WIP Wednesday–and I may pull out some hibernating UFOs so you don’t have to see the same work in progress each Wednesday.
• Technique Thursday
• FO Friday - (afraid these won’t be every Friday, not at the rate I knit.)
• and finally, we will have “Caturday” just like one of my favorite websites, CuteOverload.com .

Of course, I reserve the right to throw in random topics whenever the mood strikes me…after all, the name at the top of the page is ‘random’ threads, right?