Accomplishments
Dec. 11th, 2003 01:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosToday, I taught myself how to knit. I practiced casting on for an hour, and then started practicing just the basic garter stitch. Which I had to do many, many times before I actually worked out where everything was supposed to go and how to start the next row of stitches. (Note to everyone: learning knitting from a book? Not easy. It's all "make a loop, then dip right needle through the loop and..." And you're going "which way through the loop? What? Where?")
And then I cast on again, 22 stitches, and started doing garter stitch, and now I have around ten inches of that in a nice dull practice-yarn gray which none-the-less will make a warm scarf for me when I've done 20+ more inches. And then I can take the rest of the yarn and practice stockinette and ribbing! Woot! Fun!
Also, today I managed to get AIM Chat to work in Trillian 0.7. This is much harder than it sounds, and involved attempting to start chats multiple times, grumbling and going to the Trillian support forums, discovering that some skins don't support chatting, changing my skin, restarting, getting everyone else to change their skins so they'd receive my chat invites and see if it worked, and then finally getting in a chat room. But![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fiatlouis hadn't made it there, because the invite had arrived before he'd changed his skin, and so I had to attempt to figure out how to invite him from within the chat window.
This is also much harder than it sounds. Why? Because the default Trillian skin (which is what we opted for, because chat would definitely work with it) does not have menus. Right. No menus. So I right clicked on the names in the "users" box. Nothing. I clicked on the user box itself. Nothing. I attempted to invite him from the contact list, which has an option for invitation. But it didn't work. No luck. I went back to the chat and right-clicked, randomly, on the little blue bar which separates the typing window from the chat window.
... this, of course, is what brought up the menu, thus allowing me to invite additional users in.
*sighs* Still, when it finally worked I did feel like I'd really accomplished something. I won! I won! I'm going... to bed.
And then I cast on again, 22 stitches, and started doing garter stitch, and now I have around ten inches of that in a nice dull practice-yarn gray which none-the-less will make a warm scarf for me when I've done 20+ more inches. And then I can take the rest of the yarn and practice stockinette and ribbing! Woot! Fun!
Also, today I managed to get AIM Chat to work in Trillian 0.7. This is much harder than it sounds, and involved attempting to start chats multiple times, grumbling and going to the Trillian support forums, discovering that some skins don't support chatting, changing my skin, restarting, getting everyone else to change their skins so they'd receive my chat invites and see if it worked, and then finally getting in a chat room. But
fiatlouis hadn't made it there, because the invite had arrived before he'd changed his skin, and so I had to attempt to figure out how to invite him from within the chat window.This is also much harder than it sounds. Why? Because the default Trillian skin (which is what we opted for, because chat would definitely work with it) does not have menus. Right. No menus. So I right clicked on the names in the "users" box. Nothing. I clicked on the user box itself. Nothing. I attempted to invite him from the contact list, which has an option for invitation. But it didn't work. No luck. I went back to the chat and right-clicked, randomly, on the little blue bar which separates the typing window from the chat window.
... this, of course, is what brought up the menu, thus allowing me to invite additional users in.
*sighs* Still, when it finally worked I did feel like I'd really accomplished something. I won! I won! I'm going... to bed.
no subject
Date: 2003-12-10 10:52 pm (UTC)I would even get someone to take good close-up pictures of me with yarn and needles in hand to post for you so you have something to reference when wondering "What the ***?!"
no subject
Date: 2003-12-11 10:31 am (UTC)Hey, I do have a question. When you finish a row, and have to switch the needles, is there any way of doing that without being awkward and losing your grip on the yarn?
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Date: 2003-12-11 06:38 pm (UTC)The short answer is no, there isn't a good way of doing it without dropping the yarn briefly.
The longer answer is yes there is, but it takes a lot of effort and practice, and when you start doing patterns you can really mess yourself up if you don't know how it works intimately, but the technique actually involves just knitting with the free needle you just slipped the last stitch off of and going back in the opposite direction- it's called "knitting backwards" sometimes. "Backwards" is kind of a mean term for it, because many left-handed knitters knit in the opposite direction, and when I first learned to knit, as I was self-taught, I was knitting with my left-hand dominant. Later, I was admonished for knitting "wrong" and forced to switch hands, but what that did for me (little did the old lady know she was doing me a great service) was make me an ambidextrous knitter, and so I never turn my work, I knit back and forth without ever dropping my yarn.
But as I said, it is tricky tricky tricky and I wouldn't recommend trying it until you are comfortable knitting in one direction. It is much like trying to write with your off hand, or trying to read mirror-writing... It takes work and lots of frustration to get it smooth and useful to a point where it is actually better than just dropping the yarn and turning your work.
Um... Maybe just the short answer would have been kinder! ;)
no subject
Date: 2003-12-12 07:36 am (UTC)That makes it really easy to do stockinette, though, right? Because you just do the knit stitch on the right and then on the left?
Not that I plan on trying it any time soon. Because I'm still working out how to knit in one direction. *g*