Technology Crafts & Lace Knitting

So, a couple of months ago, Robb and I decided we wanted to throw an engagement party/barbecue for our friends Jess and Ryan. (Which is the occasion for which I made the individual ice cream cupcakes with homemade magic shell!). When it came time to create an e-vite, I trolled both of their Facebook pages looking desperately for a photo to include in which they are both eating hot dogs or hamburgers, a chicken wing, anything! But alas, there were no photos of them eating a thing. (Well, there's one of Jess eating bacon at bruch, but I thought that wasn't quite right.) So instead I decided I had to craft my own photo of them eating said barbecued foods. I found the prettiest picture of them I could--at our wedding, in fact, with golden light behind them--and I somehow figured out how to cut and paste a hot dog and a hamburger over their mouths. It looks, in a word, terrible. But I was delighted to have learned how to do something so lame and fun using basic Mac software (i.e. Preview).

Electrified by the possibilities that this new "technology" had to offer, I went wild looking for things that I could annotate, manipulate, or otherwise deface. One of my first practice rounds with arrows and annotations was this photo above, in which I wanted to point out how frumpy my butt looks in these particular cut-off shorts. (Here, all this time, I had been thinking that I had this cute little Daisy Duke butt...nah ah...these shorts are sad little droopers.)

But the REAL benefit of learning how to include annotations on photos is so that I can point things out to you people on this here blog, using precise arrows rather than elusive descriptions. How else, for instance, would I explain to you the mistakes that I made in the Feather Mitts that I knitted recently? These are from a book I edited, Loop-D-Loop Lace, and they were so so so much fun to make. A little bit challenging, but really quick. I finished nearly one whole mitt, in fact, while at jury duty. But it's funny how we learn as we knit. The one on the right is the one I made first, and you can literally see my learning curve. The picot stitch at the bottom (that's the pretty ruffled part) is made by purling the stitch on your needle together with the cast-on stitch several rows below. It's sort of hard to get the hang of at first, and I never know which loop to put my needle through when I'm picking up stitches, so I wound up with this seam line where you can see the pick-up. Note that in the second mitt, however, I'd figured out how to do it...it's seamless!

And then, about 16 rows into the stitch pattern on the first mitt, you can see where I lost count about halfway through the row. (I was watching the Stonewall Uprising documentary on PBS--so good!--and I totally forgot what I was doing.) I looked down about two rows later and realized that my lovely feather-and-trellis stitch pattern was a little more wavy-gravy than feathery-trellisy. While many knitters would go back and fix this problem, I am not one of those knitters. Believe it or not, ripping out lacework is NOT my favorite activity. And so, when I sew up these mitts, I do believe that I'll just wear wavy-gravy on the palm side and flaunt my more polished patterns on the back.

Now aren't you glad I figured out how to use annotations and arrows in Preview? Otherwise, you may never have had this chance to judge me. And my frumpy butt.