(no subject)

The importance of good tools for the project: I'm knitting a hat now (Flowers on the Grave) that will be felted into a cloche. I'm using size 10.5 dpns and... the needles suck. They're a kind of plastic that is really grabby with the wool so the yarn isn't moving smoothly over the needles and even with moving stitches around I'm still getting horrible laddering between needles. Also, they're too long so everything is just awkward. So, in the future I may order a set of wood or metal dpns for felted objects because I like doing them but hate these needles so much.

Knitty.com released their winter surprises yesterday and I really, really, really want to make the Bloody Stupid Johnson hat. Discworld knitting fen for the win!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Stupid_Johnson

I kind of want to make a comment about the "controversy" that the Free Press is talking about from the Tournament of Hearts (the Jones team called in the officials when the lead on the Flett team burned (but didn't move) a rock in front of the house, and instead of Flett taking 1 Jones stole 4 and there's more to this but it mostly boils down to "do you follow the law to the letter, or just go by intent? also, if you're the popular several times defending champ do you really need to press every advantage when you're leading the underdog fan favourites by 3 already?") but... it's not really much of a controversy, beyond what's been reported. The thing that bugs me more about it are the perceived gender roles/stereotypes, the reporting of Flett crying after the game and Jones as this heartless competitor. It's not really so much of a gender thing, I think, instead of it being an age/experience thing. Flett's team just came up from the juniors and Jones has been on the national/world stage for a while now.

doing things you know will be unpleasant

I finished knitting my Flowers on a Grave hat and tossed it into the washing machine with my pieces of grass to felt. As they were spinning around, I did more work on my room/the basement, and listened to MCR some more. I checked on the felting, decided it needed some more so I listened to another song and sorted through my clothes.

Once the grass was felted enough I took them out, made sure both sides were still the same size, and laid them out. I looked at the hat, worried that it wouldn't be big enough, then realized what I would have to do. I wrung it out a little bit (I wasn't worried about felting it, just wringing into weird shapes) and, taking a breath, pulled the wet woolen hat onto my head.

It fits, and now sort of has the shape of my head. Also, I kind of smell like wet sheep. Lovely.