pattern

More strange stuff . . .

/ Tony / 6 Comments

I am currently Home Alone. Mrs H has gone away for a few days, with her sister and father, to a cottage in North Yorkshire. I don’t like that kind of holiday, in fact, these days I don’t really like holidays. So here I am, the ‘saddo’ supposedly ‘enjoying my space’ (whatever that means.)

My sleep pattern does not exist. Some nights I can sleep for seven hours uninterrupted, but other nights it’s three hours then four or five hours of dozing sleep. The kind of sleep where you don’t realise you have slept, but time has moved on.

Well, last night was one of those nights! I staggered off to bed at around 11:45 (wife away, don’t forget) and was soon asleep. I assume I was soon asleep as I don’t remember being awake for long.

At around 3:30am I awoke. Unusually, I still felt sleepy, so after a quick visit to the bathroom, I snuggled down to sleep. After a few moments but could have been longer, I suddenly realised that the room was getting lighter. Sitting up, I quickly noticed that the Amazon Echo Dot that we have in the bedroom had somehow activated and the room was filled with a blue light. It lasted no more than ten seconds, but it was quite disturbing. I spent the next 30 minutes or so, trying to think if I had mentioned the ‘Alexa’ word in my sleep. Very disturbing!

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You may recall, I had a cause to contact WP support over an issue I had. I’m told that the issue has been passed on to the developers. I have now discovered another issue.

I decided that I would like to change the theme I use for my blog. I’ve had this one (Independent Publisher 2) for a couple of years now, and I thought I needed to have a refresh. Endless scrolling followed, but there was a problem! I seemed to be unable to preview a large number of the themes available.

I thought at first the issue was with the ‘free themes’ (I’m not paying any more for this.) But no! The issue affected most of the paid themes too! So I contacted Support! I pay for it so they might as well earn it.

I got a reply the next day (which was good service, I thought). It seems that my current theme is a “Classic” theme. Most of the themes are what they like to call “Block” themes. Support explained, clumsily I thought, that the ‘preview’ only worked properly for ‘Classic’ themes if I was previewing a ‘Classic’ theme. I needed to be using a ‘Block’ theme to preview ‘Block’ themes.

This has also gone to the developers, but as the ‘Happiness Engineer’ explained, they didn’t think there was any chance of it being changed or fixed.

Not had the best of starts …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

Firstly there was the new ‘lock-down’, which was not unexpected if a little late. Secondly, the dishwasher has packed in. We think it may be the pump but are waiting for someone to have a look. Then I had the sad news that a former colleague had died. DWP2Thankfully not the virus. Then we were hit with the snow, again not unexpected. The final kick in the nether regions came with the post yesterday. I got my “State Pension Invitation!” Another thing that was expected, but something I didn’t really think about too much. I do think it is a bit of a strange way of putting it, an “… invitation to get your State Pension“. An “invitation” to get something I’ve been working towards since 1971. Are they really expecting me to pass on it? 

Many people thing I have retired already. However, leaving the Council back in 2016, was actually a form of  Voluntary Redundancy. They called it the “Early Leavers Initiative” or ELI. It was basically redundancy with the ability to take a slightly reduced workplace pension early. Everything just fell into place at the time and with the rumours of compulsory redundancy in the air, it was the right thing to do … jump before I was pushed.

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Step ShawlI finally finished the piece of knitting I had been working on for the past two months. It’s called a “Step Shawl”, but it’s more like a neck warmer than a shawl. I used Aran yarn on 3.5mm straight needles. It got a bit tricky towards the end as I nearly had too many stitches and should have changed to circulars needles. I’ll know next time. I had started this pattern before using some 4ply and had managed to knit six ‘steps’ before it accidently fell off my lap, dropping four stitches which ran to the beginning of the piece. After advice from fellow knitters, I added a ‘life-line’ every couple of steps, just in case. I’m quite pleased with it, but I’ve no idea what to do next.

Update to an update …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

At the beginning of the month I posted about a knitting project I was working on. I updated later after Patternhaving an issue with the pattern. Since then, I have had to restart the thing twice more. I seem to have a problem somewhere between row 11 and row 14. One of the stitches is “SK2PO” which I understand to be ‘Slip 1, knit 2 Goodbyetogether, pass slipped stitch over’ and I think that this may be causing the problem. I don’t know why or how, but it is after the row with this stitch that everything goes to pot.

So after a total of 5 restarts (not including the start when I ran out of the tail) I have decided that the pattern is to be binned. The yarn I got will come in for something else I’m sure. It apparently knits up like Double Knit, so there will be plenty of patterns I can use it for.

Nightmare …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

Quite often, when I’m knitting from a pattern in a magazine I find I get lost when there are the famous “ ** xxx  *** “ closely followed by “ rep from ** to *** ” repeats in the middle of a row. In those cases, what I tend do WIPis to hand write the pattern repeat and use that when it is needed. My current ‘project’ has a 36 row pattern. Each right side row has a 12 stitch start followed by an 8 stitch pattern repeated 8 times. So I did as I often do and wrote out the repeat. Now this is where I made a mistake! For some reason, when writing out, I missed a yarn over after a decrease on row 13. This meant of course, that when I got to the end of the row, I was 8 stitches short. Bearing in mind that this was the second attempt at this pattern (first time, I dropped a stitch, which ran to the bottom before I could pick it up), you can well imagine the sort of language that was about.

However, after an hour of carefully picking back, I have finally got it back to the place where I went wrong. I am now able to breath again! I didn’t want to rip it all back and start again.

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While on the knitting theme, after some gentle persuasion in the comments of my last post, I decided to have a look at the other three groups. But, to no avail! The first group I tried explained that because of the size of the place where they hold their meetings, the number of members was limited. They did say that they would be happy to put me on a waiting list, so that’s good. The second group was basically a crafting group that had a (very) few knitters, but I was welcome to come along and try out. The third one was a strange affair. Membership was by referral from another member of the group, or at the discretion of the chair. I was waiting for her to say that she would use her ‘discretion’ but it never happened. At least I’m on a waiting list Eye rolling smile.

*** Update***

Guess what! When I recounted the stitches at the end of picking the work back, I find I now have 4 extra stitches that seem to have picked up somewhere. I can’t for the life of me see where they have come from, so there is very little alternative but to pull it all out and start again.  Steaming mad Crying face

It’s often described so …

/ Tony / 1 Comment

Not so by fellow bloggers, but by ‘the great unwashed’ that don’t have a blog. I think I have blogged about this before (can’t find the post though), but often get the comment “So what’s your blog about? ” to which I always reply, “It’s not about anything really.” That’s when I get the comment “That’s a bit vague, isn’t it? ” Well it maybe, but if they took the risk and read it, they could be surprised.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. If you’ve been kind enough to have a look at my profile, you will know I’m a knitter. About 3 years ago, I was asked by a ‘friend’ to help with a knitting pattern. Talk about vague, the pattern was originally written in French, and then badly translated into Greek and then even worsley(?) translated into English. It must have translated by someone who could not speak either Greek or English and possibly not French originally. I did eventually manage to get hold of the French copy and, with a lot of help got it translated into English. The problem was with the written description. There was a chart, and it was that that I used to translate it.