Rowdy Crowds, Skinny Jeans and Where the Hell Did October Come From?

So it’s Thursday. I’m sitting in the library at Indiana University’s School of Education, wondering where the week went. It’s not one of those weeks where there are large chunks of time I can’t account for, as there sometimes are when there are television marathons or inane projects that I get totally sucked into. It’s been a chock-full week, filled with car appointments (Oskar is totally better now, although I was worried there for a day or two), assignments to be written and graded, and some fun sprinkled in there for good measure.

Like Ray Lamontagne. There is something about that gruff-yet-velvety voice that is crazy good. His new CD, Gossip in the Grain, comes out later this month and his tour supporting said CD began in Indy on Tuesday. I checked it out with grad school friends and was blown away by how amazing the man is on stage. He’s quiet, not a lot of interaction with the crowd, but insaney passionate about his music. There were moments I thought his body might break apart from the sheer force of his performance.

The crowd, however, left something to be desired. It was a drinking venue, which some people seemed to equate with bar, and were constantly leaving their seats with empty cans and returning with full ones. It made for a lot of distraction – seriously, are you here to drink or here to listen to the man’s music? Lots of hooting and hollering as well, which I can handle to an extent but it did have moments of obnoxiousness. Perhaps this is a clue that I’m getting old: I preferred the Dar Williams crowd a few weeks ago.

I need to buy new clothes. Normally, this would be a good thing, especially since the reasoning behind the new purchasing of the clothes is that I’m now at my lightest weight in about a decade. Unfortunately, I am on a graduate school budget (read: $0), so I’m going to have to be picky and choosy about what I buy… I miss my job and real paycheck some days. Most days.

The weight loss is also interesting in how anti-climactic it was. I’m now at that weight I envisioned in my head as being the be-all, end-all. I would step on the scale, numbers would appear on the digital read out, I would celebrate. There would be music and ticker tape. Instead there was just the whirring of my laptop in the next room and me mumbling, “I thought this would feel… skinnier” to myself in the wee small hours of the morning.

Haven’t been doing that much knitting lately, which I need to remedy. Christmas is approaching and I’m beginning to freak out. Just a smidge. Working needle time in with the demands this semester has been tricky and I might have to resort to buying some gifts rather than making them. It was a good thought…

I’ve also been playing with the idea of a separate knitting blog, one just about my knitting. I think one of the problems with keeping everything in this, my general blog, is it gets overwhelming. I have all these ideas and no time to organize them. A separate blog might enforce some structure I don’t currently have…

Must work now.

In Which I Make a Laptop Sleeve

My last laptop sleeve was definitely a learning experience: I figured out where the pattern needed to be changed and what I could go to make the end product better. Learning to sew somewhat consistently was definitely up there. Anyway, when I convinced my friend Clara to make her first personal computer a MacBook, I decided to take up needles and make her a laptop sleeve, keeping in mind everything I learned from the last bag.

This is a lot of stockinette stitch. The nice thing about this project was it used up a lot of scrap yarn I had lying around. I used the random stripe generator to come up with the stripe pattern and, despite the size, it only took me a good week of knitting at random times to put everything together.

All the notions: I really liked the flannel liner I placed in the last laptop bag, so I went with another vintage owl print from Joann’s. This one is a little brighter, more 70’s, and matches with the general vibe of the bag.

I sews up the bottom seam and the side and it’s ready to go into the wash.

Something went awry with the felting – the bag came out of the wash felted but misshapen. Additionally, one of the yarns I used didn’t felt… at least not very well. This totally reaffirms that I need a better way of tracking those loose balls of yarn and what they are good for. Thankfully, the yarn, while not felting all the way, felted enough so that it would not fall apart when cut through. I ended up cutting the bottom and the top to even them both out, leaving me with a tube and whole lot of thinking to do about how I was going to put it together.

Initially, I attempted using a sewing machine to sew the bottom seam together and, in the process, broke Margi’s sewing machine needle. (And proceeded to lose it… oh, yes, I am the master sewer!) I gave up and brought it with me to Wisconsin, where Joanna’s ability to sew bravely would hopefully yield results. After playing around on her sewing machine, I finally hand-sewed the bottom seam, going over it several times with several difference stitches. Then we sewed the edges of the liner together and began to sew the liner into the felted sleeve until we realized that we had laid the liner in the bag incorrectly:

Oops. After a lot of stitch ripping, I got the liner sewn into the sleeve with the fun print facing the correct way, leaving me to think about how to seal it up. I attempted to create a flap, eliminating the need for buttons or Velcro, by cutting slits along each edge and cutting one side along the top of the liner. I sewed the sides of the remaining flap to the sides of the laptop sleeve and flipped it over. The end result wasn’t perfect, but functional. I attempted bias tape but haven’t figured out how to make it look presentable rather than clumsy.

All in all, it turned out pretty well. The sewing skills need work – not all of us can be sewing geniuses like Adam, but they’re coming along. When I attempt the next one, I’m going to try to figure out a way to construct it so it felts with the flap. I would need to make a slightly longer piece of knitted fabric with a different orientation… still wrapping my head around possible ways to accomplish that.