knit•er•a•cy |'nitərəsē, 'nitrə-|

Tonight I am the guest at Sharps Folk Club, held at Cecil Sharp House, in the basement bar. As a featured performer I will be doing two twenty-minute sets.

If you're in the London area and would like to stop by, I'd love to see some of you there. :)

( Set List )

( OK, so tell us the important stuff first, Harper! What did you end up -wearing-? )

( And who-all was there? )

( How were the pre-performance floor acts? )

( First Set? How was that? )

( And then it was time for C&LC! )

As usual, I still haven't won my bottle of Ouzo in the raffle!

( But enough about that. On to the second set.... )

( Don't tell us you did an encore.... )

( And after the show? )

The End. For an additional report, check out Highstone's recap.

Schedules, Swiggles, and Machine Knitting!

Working three days a week has changed the way time gets managed around here. There's less time to do the things I have to do and consequently less time to do the things I like to do, like writing in my journal.

Recently, journaling has been eclipsed by work, folk clubs, practice, and taking care of things around the house. I'm still baking all our bread or as much of it as I can, and we've had a couple of really nice meals at home lately (J found sirloin steaks on sale at Sainsbury's, so I have had a little red meat, hooray!).

( Our normal (if you can call anything around here normal) weekly schedule goes like this: )

This week differs from most weeks in that I had to work on Friday and will have to work today as well (I'm switching days off because the Talis Fairy's C is with us for a few days and while leaving one thirteen-year-old boy at home alone is OK, leaving two of them together could be a recipe for disaster. So J has today off and I have tomorrow this week, which means we won't go to Sharps and we'll probably get C to the train station on Wednesday, though Tuesday afternoon/evening is a possibility depending on what else we're doing.

Whew.

Now, special stuff that has happened:

First off, I have a gig in Eltham in December. I know you probably already knew that.

( Secondly, we had a Swiggle on Saturday, )

( Third, I am going to be doing a harp weekend for some Far Isles people in November, )

( Fourth, I have a new-to-me toy that pretty much took up my whole Sunday, which will be why I haven't exactly been the prolific journaler this weekend. (Machine Knitting Natter!) )

I suppose it would be silly to wonder if anyone on my friends list has a knitting machine or uses one regularly? The LJ machine knitting community seems to have been deleted, so I can't look there, and I'm not really keen on joining a mailing list (I'm already on more than I have time to read), although I will if it looks like that's the only source of good information. The UK Machine Knitters' Guild web page doesn't have a whole lot of information on it that I can find, but I'll continue looking around, and any pointers, or pointers to people who might have pointers, that I could get would be really helpful.

So now I'm possibly going to go and try that second knitting machine experiment, to see if I can cast on a swatch and move smoothly from cast-on to knitting without a ton of stitch droppage, now that the machine has "warmed up," so to speak.

Edit: With less fiddling than last time but more than I really want to do, the machine handled a wider swatch (70 stitches) handily and I did about 100 rows in five minutes or less once all the glitchies were worked out. I'm getting to where I can "feel" when the carriage has snagged; the yarn feeds through differently when there's a problem. Next experiment: wool thicker than fingering weight!

We're expecting the Hoover repairman pretty soon, sometime between 8 and 10, I think, so hopefully by this afternoon I'll have a working dryer-- or a semi-working dryer: I have found that this dryer is good only for certain things or very, very small loads, which makes it neither time or energy efficient, but that's another story, and it will still make things easier in winter if we have a working dryer.

After that, it's off to work! And it's Hallowe'en today, so I'll bring my green velvet witchy hat to wear-- it might cover up the fact that my roots are starting to show... ;-)