Hungry Knitter

The first in non-knitting posts…

Today we walked down to the new-ish famers’ market on 61st St and Dorchester-Blackstone. I am personally really excited about the whole social project going on down there: some local folks heard about the Woodlawn neighborhood’s (just south of Hyde Park, where I live, for those of you who aren’t local) identification as a food desert and decided to take some action and bring the people there something they need: healthy food. What I don’t understand, however, is why I see so many of the same vendors over and over again and various Chicago farmers’ markets, and why prepared foods and non food items (such as handmade soaps) are so prevalent at the smaller markets. For instance, at the 61st St market today there were stands for two different bakeries - the Medici (a local restaurant/bakery on 57th St) and the Bleeding Heart Bakery. First of all, I never buy baked goods at farmers’ markets. I suppose it is probably nearly impossible to find things like organic or decently baked bread in the Woodlawn neighborhood, but this is not what I go to famers’ markets for. But it’s there, fair enough. Bread and pastries and cupcakes and whatnot are just not staples of my diet. Vegetables are. Frankly, I’m just tired of seeing the Bleeding Heart Bakery at every. single. market. in our city. I find the name of the place really unfortunate, and not to mention unappetizing. Perhaps they are nice people, whatever. But I don’t really find baked goods to be soooo totally necessary at EVERY MARKET. But you know, it’s a successful local business, so whatever. I can deal with it. I don’t particularly understand why the Medici needed to be there, however. Out of, say, 10 booths at the market, having two bakeries made about 20% of the market consist of baked goods.

a view of today’s market

Probably another 30% of the market was taken up by people selling prepared foods and non-food items. There was a booth with jars of salsas, preserves, soups, etc. There were other people selling some hand-made soaps. This leaves about 50% of a pretty small market dedicated to people selling just straight up farm food items - by that I mean fruits, veggies, herbs, eggs, and meats. So what I’m wondering is this - is it hard to get more farmers to come sell their produce at your new market? Are there other, bigger, older markets happening elsewhere in the city, so that it might be hard to attract folks to a small, new market? I’m curious to see how the 61st St market will develop, though, and I’ll definitely keep going - probably on a weekly basis. I just hope my options for fresh produce increase, and I could do without prepared foods and non foods.

***aside #1: Ironically, we had stopped in the Medici bakery on 57th St on the way down to the market, and when my friend inquired politely about her iced latte, which the staff seemed to have forgotten about (she ordered it right after Peter and I ordered ours, so I guess I see where the confusion arose, but then again, both this friend and I have worked in a few coffee shops and it doesn’t seem that strange that more than one person would order an iced latte on a hot day - but human error happens, no biggie) one staff member turned to the other and said, totally audibly, while looking right at my friend, “this girl’s a bitch.” Wow, thanks Medici. Your normally crappy service just got that much crappier. Personally, I didn’t know it could get much worse than constantly forgetting peoples beverages, just never bringing the check, and being generally slow an irritable could get much worse. I guess I forgot that you could just abuse people, too. I just don’t think asking for your drink in a completely polite tone of voice warrants being called a bitch.

***aside #2 that has nothing to do with this farmers’ market - a few years ago I lived in Logan Square, a neighborhood on the northwest side of the city. (Hyde Park is on the south side.) Logan Square’s farmers’ market was in a similar stage of development at that point. There was a girl there selling her hand-made soaps, and my friend (actually, the same one who was called a bitch in the Medici this morning) and I stopped to talk to her. She was really friendly and I needed soap, so I bought a couple goat milk soaps from her. Now, I don’t know what the deal is with these things, but I’m pretty sure they actually were rotting as I was using them. There were dried herbs in them, which was nice, but I would have to rinse a layer of dried herbs off my body before I could get out of the shower every day - that was a little strange. The soaps themselves, however, started to smell like rotting milk after a little while. Then toward the end there I developed a mysteriously wretched BO problem. Finally I realized this was because of the soaps. I’m sure this was a different person selling soaps at the 61st St market this morning, but I still don’t buy them because of this experiment.

It’s so nice to post and say that I have a big ole sweater to share with you all, and not a big ole failure like the last time I blogged. This is the February Lady Sweater by Pamela Wynne. I started it right when the pattern came out and the ladysweater CRAZE hit ravelry. I like to call mine my grown-ass woman sweater. I can’t wait for a freezing cold Chicago winter so I can wear this thing! Taking these pictures on a hot summer afternoon = not fun. But basking in the glow of my new orange sweater? Super fun.



Here’s the specs:
The yarn is Alia Lend Inca Wool, which I got on the cheap from a destash a while back. It’s a DKish weight 100% wool yarn, and I can’t tell you a whole lot about it because the ball band is in Russian. Anyway, it’s wooly and warm and I like it. Actually, I used some green Inca Wool on a Rusted Root that I finished a little over a year ago (but it didn’t make it to the blog for a while). The Rusted Root has held up well, with only some minor wear in the sweaty-pit region, so I have high hopes for the grown-ass woman sweater. So I held the yarn double-stranded for the grown-ass woman sweater on US 8s, which resulted in a nice smooshy fabric.



Buttons from our local humungoid JoAnn’s on Elston Ave.

What else is there to say about this? A super fun, fast knit that I can’t wait to wear over and over again.

I see it’s been a while. My theory is that flickr is ruining my blog. Seriously, it’s where I spend all my internet time lately, and in many ways it is a lot more rewarding. But then again, I like having my own space to toy with. So the blog stays. I think, honestly, I need to come up with some new things to blog about. I’d like to get myself writing more, and not just about knitting. You may, dear readers, see a newly widened scope soon here at hungryknitter. There will be more food, and probably more fun things around Chicago, and more of my thoughts on whatever I happen to have read/thought about that day. So hungryknitter will still be an appropriate title, because I am pretty much always both of those things, but I also do some other things, and think about other things. There you have it.

In the meantime, I will soon have a super spectacular and exciting new knitted object to write about, but it doesn’t have buttons and I have no hope of getting to a fabric/craft store in the next few days, so don’t hold your breath. Today, however, I’ve come here to lament the demise of my raspy sweater. (at first I had a ravelry link there, but thought better of it since I have friends who … DON’T knit, who may or may not still read my blog.)



There’s not really a picture of what I’ve done so far that’s worth putting online, but suffice it to say that I clearly do not have enough yarn. This is the second time I have run out of yarn for this, actually. When it happened the first time I was at least able to go online and find some extra skeins. See, I was using Debbie Bliss cotton denim aran. (ravlink) And you know what, there is substantially less yarn in a ball of that Debbie Bliss yarn than there is in a ball of Rowan denim, which is what the pattern calls for. And I could have sworn I did the math before I started knitting this, but either I screwed up the math, I screwed up the knitting, Debbie Bliss cotton denim aran has screwed up yardage (you know, it’s pretty screwed up in other ways, too, besides being discontinued), or the pattern is screwed up. I’m fairly certain the error is on my part, but I have NO idea how it took place. See, I have 15 balls of that Debbie Bliss yarn and I have made a front, one sleeve, and about 2/3 of a back. I have two balls left. That is not nearly enough for the rest of the back, a sleeve, and seaming. My first instinct was to search desperately for some more of this in someone’s sale bin somewhere, look on ravelry, etc. But you know, nobody has it anymore, and maybe it’s for the better. I’m not really loving miles upon miles of stockinette anymore, and the more I look at the sweater the more I just don’t really want it that much. I put it away for the time being, but I may end up making an Indigo Ripples Skirt with it eventually. I did some math (although who knows how reliable THAT is, apparently) and it looks like I have JUST enough yarn.

And you know, even though it’s been discontinued (maybe not in all colors? whatever.) I feel like I should say something about this yarn. It feels nice and all, and it bleeds, which is to be expected from a super dark denim yarn, but I really feel like there were more knots in those skeins than there should have been. And one had a fairly substantial section that had been way, way overspun or plied or something and is a completely different texture from the rest of it. I knit it into the sweater and it looks like crap. Good thing I won’t be wearing it, anyway.

As part of the ongoing drama of my psychotic need to read ten millions blogs and sites in a certain *way* I have yet again switched RSS readers. Netvibes was nice, and I liked how I could read a blog on its original page, but it hadn’t been super functional lately, and then they said that offensive thing that got me all angry, and well, I left. Now I’m with Pageflakes and I’m enjoying that thoroughly. I have all my ten million knitting blogs arranged on their own little tab, and I’m really trying, in the interest of time management, to just leave them be. But the thing is, I need them to be alphabetized. And in three columns of equal length. This is insane, I know, but this is what I need. And it takes a lot of time, ya know?



In the meantime, I’m trying desperately to finish up the end of the school year and the LAST CLASSES REQUIRED FOR MY PHD!!! After that only like, ten million more years! But they won’t be spent in classrooms, for the most part.

Not much knitting since the burst of cowls. I’ve been trying to finish up my raspy, but it’s just too freaking hot lately, even for cotton, and it turns out knitting while writing a paper is kind of a sham, and it just consists of knitting, no writing.



I’ll see you all on the other side, hopefully with two papers down. (And a couple incompletes to go, but we can celebrate after the two papers, right?)

I may have gotten behind on my episodes of Lost lately, and the catching-up may have involved a lot of knitting

This is a Birthday Cowl from Novamade, and the pattern is spectacularly fun and fast. I used more of that Jo-Ann Dolcetto yarn that I made Becko’s scarf with, and I think my original evaluation of the stuff still stands - really soft, pretty color, but this yarn has just absolutely no elasticity whatsoever. I like it, but I don’t think my hands could take more than a small project with it.



Maybe soon I’ll complete a knitting project that I actually get to keep for myself?

And at that time, even though it was just earlier this month, that cowl was seasonally appropriate. And even though it’s not really warm enough in Chicago right now, I wouldn’t exactly want to be walking around with alpaca around my neck. Nevertheless, I am blogging about a cowl.



It is a moebius! The pattern is Cat Bordhi’s (pdf alert!), and it’s absolute genius. The whole time I was knitting it I was thinking, “how…. did she …… figure …. this OUT!”



Mine is in some Misti Alpaca Worsted. I forgot the needle size I used, honestly. I can get the moebius around my neck twice, which is what you see in these pictures. And yes, I do venture outside of my apartment to take pictures of myself in completely out of season knit garments.



Happy spring, everyone!

Netvibes is my preferred RSS reader. I’m not really a user of their fancy, shiny widgets so much as I just read my regular old blogs on there. I like having tabs so I can organize the feeds by subject matter, etc. I like how you can drag and drop things to move them around. I like how I can view an entry *on* the web page in my netvibes window. There is now some kind of social component to the site that I have never paid one bit of attention to. But recently I saw this entry on the Netvibes blog I found extremely troubling. The subject heading is, “This way girls!” If I may just quote the beginning of that entry:

Hey girls, now let’s talk serious! You might feel left out from the widgetosphere but you’re wrong. A lot of things are changing in the crazy world of Netvibes…..Thanks to our editorial team you can now get the latest news automatically updated from your favourite feminine websites by installing their widgets.

They go on to tell us about some new widgets we can put up on our Netvibes page from Glamour, Marie Claire, Hint Fashion Magazine….

What I’m wondering is, seriously, NO ONE at Netvibes thought, “hey, is this post might not be a good idea?” before they put that up there? Why are they addressing their female users as “girls”? What’s with the patronizing writing? (”hey girls let’s get serious”? - I didn’t realize we weren’t serious.) Also, I can appreciate that plenty of women are interested in a widget feed gadget thing from Cosmo. I, however, am not, and frankly I’m insulted by the implication that all, or even most women would care about one thing, be it fashion, make-up, whatever. Also, as one person who commented on that post pointed out, it also implies that women might be dissatisfied with the widgets currently offered, when in fact there’s a pretty wide range of topics covered, including feeds from about a billion different news sources, calendar widgets, mail, social networking sites, etc. I’m sorry, but is that New York Times World News feed just for men? Would I perhaps be more interested in the New York Times feed on weight loss because I am a woman?

You know, and I just noticed, all the comments to the effect of “this post is offensive” have been deleted, including my own comment, which is why I feel I can rant about it here. That’s fine and all - it’s your blog. I would delete people’s comments off here if I didn’t like them because it’s my space and I can do that. I would say most of those comments were pretty well thought out and very articulate. I didn’t see anything along the lines of “OMG YOU GUYS SUCK.” So what’s with the lack of dialogue, Netvibes?

There’s a comment from Diane, who is apparently a Netvibes person, who says (typos hers not mine), “This post is just one among a serie of others that will soon be published on various subjects (such as : sports, video games….) The aim of this is to promote our content, not to share ou opinions on life or any ideology with our users.” First of all, regardless of intention, this is still a really ill-conceived entry to post on your company’s blog. Second of all, posts for “fans of sports” and “fans of video games” are aimed at people who all have those interests. Women do not all share the same interests. Shockingly, I can be a woman and be interested in make-up AND video games. Or just make-up. Or just video games. And you know, that’s okay.

I do. My blog buddy the nsCKG is having a cat caption contest right over here.

So I’ve been spending plenty of time online … as usual, way too much; it just hasn’t been on this blog. Not even other blogs that much. I’ve been kind of skimming things but that’s about it. Mostly I’ve been hanging out with my 365 Days Project on flickr. Admittedly, I’ve missed some days in the project here and there (mostly when my old camera broke and I was waiting for a new one), and I took a brief hiatus when we were dealing with Peto’s cancer (wouldn’t it have been nice to document that in some artistic way, but let’s face it, I was just dealing with keeping myself fed and walking back and forth between the hospital and home), but I still haven’t quit yet which is really saying something. Today is day 58, I think. Honestly, taking a picture of yourself every day is harder than it sounds. At least for me. Remembering to do it is hard, and on a lot of days it gets left to 2 seconds before bedtime when I think, “CRAP I forgot, but oh I’m so tired, oh here we go…” and take a picture of myself falling into bed or something not at all artistic like that. But I suppose that in and of itself is a reflection of my life sometimes. I’ve noticed that tends to happen on Tuesdays and Thursdays when I have class. (I know, I know, the schedule of a graduate student sounds so luxurious - trust me. It’s not.) Here’s a couple of my favorites from the project so far:



Why yes, I do post pictures of myself playing videogames in my pajamas on the internet. And you know, it doesn’t really bother me. Anyway, this is clearly from the moment we started playing the new MarioKart for Wii. HOLY CRAP is it fun!!! I think I’m going to go do a couple quick runs after I’m done writing…

New haircut, in sunlight.

I’ve been trying to eat healthier as of late, maybe lose a few pounds before our wedding. I know I know, bride wants to lose weight, bla bla bla, but I came back from Yemen sick in September and when I got healthy I put the weight back on, and then it just kept coming. I’m not pleased.

In knitting news, there’s not a whole lot I can blog about right now! I knit up some cargos from my dear dear friend Jenny’s little son Dylan (soooo cute) in record time, and didn’t manage to take a picture of them before I gave them to him at his first birthday party! Man, that was a fun pattern though, and I put the most finishing effort into it that I’ve ever put into a knitting project, I think. Lots of ends, there were hems involved, and even and elastic waistband!!! The yarn was frogged from the first sweater I ever made (I know, I have no soul), which was an ugly old rowan pattern (and after tooling around on ravelry I can’t find it anywhere, so I guess I was the only one stupid enough to knit this hideous sweater) and that pricey rowan yarn just made much better cargo pants for a baby than it did sweater for me. I did, however, notice this apricot jacket from Rebecca all over the rowan all seasons cotton pages, and HOW. CUTE! I want it, and I may just have enough yarn left to knit that sucker too. Yeah, all I have to do is get a hold of a 4 year old German magazine. No problem.

Besides those pants I’ve knit a present that has yet to be blocked and given to its recipient, a present for a baby that may have been outgrown by now, and a few more stitches on the raspy sweater I started last November. Pretty aimless stuff. I’ve got more gift knitting planned, hopefully I’ll finish it up quickly and put up some pictures!

I haven’t been feeling the blogginess lately. I don’t know what it is. I’m not interested in writing, not in reading, etc. It could be any number of things. Busy end of the quarter, followed by fiance having surgery (he’s fine now!), panicking about caring for the fiance after surgery and spending every waking moment with him to the point that it’s driving him insane … You know, these are big time commitments. But on a more serious note, I never really understood what it was like to care for someone who got sick until now. And trust me, we went through nothing even close to the magnitude of what many people go through. Peto’s surgery was simple, and it was to treat a very early, very treatable stage of cancer. It still seems like the surgery was enough and that he won’t have to undergo any chemo or radiation, but I’m still knocking on wood every chance I get. But I got a glimpse of what it is like to really care for someone with cancer and it was just nowhere near what a lot of people have to go through. And the impact on me from just that little glimpse of that world was more than enough.

Definitely one way to cope with long hours in the hospital waiting for news from doctors was to knit. Ohhh boy did I knit. It’s the best thing for me to do when I have too much nervous energy to concentrate on reading. One thing that came out of this is these socks:


pattern: first-time tube socks by Ann Budd, in the winter 07/spring08 Knitscene
size: long
needles: US6 denises
yarn: Sublime Yarns Extra Fine Merino Wool DK, 3 skeins

The only real mod I made was to use a smaller needle than the pattern called for. The combination of this stitch pattern and that cable-spun merino is just so squishy and wonderful. And the pattern is so incredibly stretchy that it’s not at all weird that there’s not a heel. These are for Peto. I finished them up last night, and he could have worn them on his first day back at work today had I gotten up at a decent hour. See, I’m on spring break. I still have a paper to write and all, but I’m sleeping IN.