How the orange dress looks in real life

After a lot of encouragement of my friends I took the orange dress out for some real-life testing. I went to a beergarden to knit with my Sunday knitting group. Pictures here and here.

Remember what I said about stupid pedestrians and drivers? Well, I forgot to include stupid cyclists!



I had to end my Sunday bicycle tour and go home and cool my foot. Obviously it wasn't that bad, otherwise I wouldn't have been so fascinated by it to take a picture of it. :D Gross, but fascinating, right? :D Leave me a comment and I will show you another picture of my toes turning red and purple (which is weird, because the lump is in the middle of the foot). Or not? :D

Turning off animated images with Firefox

Firefox for various reasons is my prefered browser. The developers were also nice enough to allow you control over the freaking animated graphics that you will find on many websites.

How to turn them off:
1. Type "about:config" into the address bar
2. Type "anim" into the filter field
3. Double-click on "img.animation_mode"
4. The default setting is "normal". You can use "none" or "once" to stop the animation completely or to prevent it from being repeated.

Rambling or projektleiterin's pearls of wisdom

*The girl in the movie "Happy-go-lucky" is extremely annoying. If you are a mature adult and know life in London you might enjoy the building up of tension that eventually leads to a happy catharsis and an understanding of the whole picture. - I don't. :D Maybe I would have liked it if I had had enough stamina to bear with her giggle fits at the most inopportune moments and the lack of a story line, but I didn't.

*Romance is a social construct like race. If they produce more movies where the woman is older than her male counterpart then I will change my mind.

*One day when they invent a pill against menopause the world will go down the gutter. When women become independent from their cruel biological clock and can be as carefree as men about reproducing, they will also choose to take a little bit more time to grow up. Women are just a bit more mature than men because they have to. Give them control over their reproduction and humankind will be screwed! Mark my words!

Please keep in my mind, years from this day on, that I was the first one to develop this theory. Future sociologists (my best buddies) will hail my foresight and ingenuity. :D

*Last week I went to a swing dancing class. It was fun, but half of the guys had cold and sweaty fish hands. And two smelled of alcohol. And onions. But no sweaty armpits. Justice where justice is due. :D Most were also very badly dressed. If you think that I am superficial I would recommend that you take a good hard look at yourself. When was the last time you felt attracted to someone? Was it purely because of his/her intellect? His/her inner values? I know people who insist that they be loved for who they are, that wearing make-up is deceit and nice clothes are something superficial. I think, if you want unconditional love you should get a dog or stay with your parents. We all want to be loved for who we really are, at the same time I don't believe that we fall for people for who they really are. It's a double standard. And I really believe we should like ourselves enough to want to give ourselves the best. And go to a yoga class and AA. :D

*I'd like to run all these people over who cross the street without looking at all if a car or bike is coming. I don't support cruelty against animals, so I don't do this, but really... I also would like to run the stupid drivers over who don't care if they kill me or not, but I'm afraid they're stronger and bigger than me. Instead I shake my fist to the heavens and curse the mother that bore them. :D

*Do flatmates know that running around in shorts and shirtless in the morning is pretty sexy? Thank God I do not really dig him that much, but he's eye candy in the morning. :D

*I think I'm digging a guy who hit on me, tried to convince me that he was trustworthy and did not tell me that he had a girlfriend. Doh... He apologized though. I now find myself secretly hoping that he breaks up with her. She's gone anyway and she will be away soon for another nine months...

I do not even think he is that cute... Curse my freaking irrationality... Thanks to my superficiality and the shallowness of my feelings though I probably will be over him in a couple of weeks.

(Thought I should also come up with a dirty confession, you might otherwise believe I'm a saint ;-) Did I mention he is very very likely 7 years younger than me? - No comment. :D )

*I read a blog today that I found pretty good: www.der-englisch-blog.de The English lessons are very short (thumbs up), but entertaining and interesting. Many things I already knew, but it was good to be reminded of some basics, while others were new to me.

It's raining and I'm blocking

It's raining, raining, raining... :( But thanks to that you can enjoy a new blog entry. Instead of going to my yoga class I'm sitting here and putting something together just for your entertainment. :D

Pattern: Rebecca no. 36, originally in yellow
Yarn: ggh yarn "Tara", 72 % cotton, 28 % polyamid, 100 m/ 50 g (that's the orignal yarn, I seldom use the original yarn, but I happened to see the dress in the yarn shop and the owner convinced me that it would look good on me, so my resistance melted like icecream in the sun.)
Price: not sure, less than 50 € but since I have two balls of the orange yarn left, I should look for the receipt so I can return it. In the magazine the retail price is stated as 44.55 € for the kit.
Amount: theoretically 400 g of the orange yarn and 50 g of the white yarn, but like I said, I have two balls left and my gauge is correct.
Needle size: 5 mm
Size: 34/36

Comment: I would recommend that you use 60 cm and 80 cm, instead of 60 cm and 100 cm long circular needles. And start with the short circular needle and not the long one.

There is one minor mistake in the instructions (sorry, I just checked them, but I can't find it now), but it's not that important. I think the stitch count somewhere was wrong.

The dress is tight, not like in one of the pictures in the magazine where it seems to have more ease around the waist (the one I'm thinking of is not on the website, only in the magazine). I had to include some short rows around the bust.

Not sure why I had gone for a knitted dress. Knit with 5 mm (!) needles. And as we all know the line between uniqute and plain weird is thin! I'm not afraid of wearing knitted stuff, but I do not want to look like an esoteric-Birkenstock-wearing-eco-sociologist (I'm pissed off with a certain sociologist, so I felt like including an over-simplifying insult against sociologists. :D Even in high school I was convinced that the majority of sociologists talk too much and are weird. I also bet they don't shower very often. Some people seem to confuse eco and natural with smelly). I also don't really like tie-dye. Now, go and hate me. :D

It looked nice in the window though and it seemed to be a quick knit (it definitely is). I wanted a very mindless project and this one suits the purpose. Good ol' stockinette in the round (not much of a fan of knitting in the round though, you never get to an end, it goes on and on and on...) That was also one reason why I bought the original yarn, I simply didn't want to go hunting for the right yarn and then recalculate everything, because my gauge would be off. I think, I have a reluctance to knitting sweaters, because when substituting yarn I never get the right gauge, which means I have to do many calculations to adapt the yarn to the pattern.

The yarn is ok. I usually prefer 100 % natural yarns, but cotton is a very heavy fiber, it probably wouldn't have been a good idea to use a 100 % cotton yarn for a dress. Recently I have developed a fondness for orange and this one is a quite nice shade. The original yellow is a bit bland in reality. The yarn is also available in a couple of other colors, but in my opinion they are all a bit too bland for a summer dress.



This is another Swallotail Shawl. Follow the link for more details about the pattern. This one is quite old, but I never posted a picture of it. Having been in use for a quite a while it had shrunk a bit and needed re-stretching, so I reblocked it yesterday. It's one of my favorite knitted items.

Yarn: Misti Alpaca lace
Color: natural white
Needle size: 3.5 mm



Still on the needles: Feather and Fan Shawl by Eugen Beugler from A Gathering of Lace. Same yarn as I had used here.




That one is actually finished and I was about to block it this morning, but I didn't have enough of the jigsaw pieces that I use instead of a blocking board. At the moment it's drying outside on our balcony.

Pattern: Lilly's Leaf Shawl

More details when it's blocked.



Instead of blocking Lilly's Leaf Shawl I'm now blocking the Mystery Stole. Yeah, I'm fast, faster than a ray of light. :D I did block it already, but since I did it the lazy way, I wasn't happy with the result, so I decided to do it again. But since I somehow got less and less convinced of its wearability I put it off until now.

I got tagged! And it's all about me, me, me! :D

Domestic Miss told me she reads my blog and tagged me for a questionnaire about me. Uiiiiih! I like it when things are turning around me. :D And someone said she reads my blog! Wooot! Did I mention, by the way, that Krawuggl also said something nice about me? Isn't that nice? :)

Rules:
The Rules: each player answers the questions. At the end of the post, the player then tags 5 or 6 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog. Let the person who tagged you know when you’ve posted your answer.

Here's the questionnaire:

1. What I was doing 10 years ago:
I was in my second semester at university.

2. What 5 things are on on my to-do list for today (in no particular order):
*Going to the gym. Checked.
*Meeting my landlady. Checked.
*Finishing the orange dress (it took nearly three days to dry! But to be fair, my washing machine doesn't spin-dry well, when I took the dress out to block it it was still really wet.). Checked (now I just need someone to tell me how I look in it. Also the collar seems to require modifications.)
*Trying to compose a "Zwischenzeugnis" for myself.
*Looking for a new cycling buddy? (If you live close by and are interested, send me a message.)

3. Snacks I enjoy:
Macadamia nuts, that package with all different kind of seeds, fruits.

4. Things I would do if I was a billionaire:
*Invest my money in innovative green technology.
*Become a generous philanthropist and donate a lot of money to people who don't deserve it. – Oh - kaaaay, I'm just being sarcastic. I'd donate a lot of money to those who need it, but I'd try to keep them away from me. I'd be a very grumpy philanthropist.

By the way, where does my money come from? Am I making money with speculating with food prices on the market and by supporting companies that ruin the environment? I really should start a foundation and give money to NGOs that work hard to protect the environment or help poor people since I don't know what to do with the heaps of money I have greedily acquired at the cost of other people.

*Build big monuments to remind people of my generosity.
*Use the mighty power of money to bribe people and succeed in getting what I want where my temper tantrums didn't work out.

5. Place I have lived:
Vietnam
Germany
Egypt
Spain
USA

I'm going to tag Krawuggl, Alala, Kent, that girl n, Melusine and Angelita. I haven't commented for a very long time on blogs (and have also not been reading many... :o), but I sort of assume that since they have commented recently or in general seem to be patient with my sporadic answers and posting that they won't mind if I tag them.

Edit: Uh, there are rules. I've forgotten to post them.