Number three on my list of projects to have finished before Dec 25, the Burberry Inspired Cowl, or how not to spend $750 on something wooly to wear around your neck.
I cranked out one and half repeats of the pattern this afternoon, while catching up on Season 6 of Dexter. With any luck I’ll have this finished by next week, and can start on project #4.
There are lots of other projects over at Tami’s Amis, if you are looking for a little holiday knitting inspiration.
Via xkcd.
With less than two months to go until Christmas, I’ve decided on my holiday knitting. The first project is finished, the second a little over half way done. I have at least two (maybe four) more to go. Four of these are for colleagues at work, so I wanted to make each one something different. Our office is overly air-conditioned most of the year. Many of us had space heaters on under our desks in August, so my hope is these gifts will keep my friends warm while they work.
The first is A Little Jazz, an elegant little ruffled scarf.
This is my first time knitting a scarf sideways (much more fun than the traditional way). All the shaping is done with short rows, creating the crescent, and then the ruffle is formed on the increase row. After that, a couple of inches of garter stitch and you’re ready to bind off.
Technical Specs:
The halfway done project is the Lacy ZigZag Mitts, which got stalled at the thumb gusset of the first mitt because I had no waste yarn at work. The third project will be a cowl, and I’m leaning toward a shawlette for the fourth project, though I haven’t settled on a pattern yet. I have 555 yards of Louet Gems fingering weight (100% merino), and am considering:
Other potential pattern suggestions are most welcome, as are comments from those who may have knit these patterns already. How’s your Christmas knitting coming along?
The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World
Dr. Snow traced the outbreak through the neighborhood, documenting cases geographically to look for patterns.
To understand just what Dr. Snow was up against, consider this:
To build a case for waterborne cholera, the mind had to travel across scales of human experience, from the impossibly small – the invisible kingdom of microbes – to the anatomy of the digestive tract, to the routine patterns of drinking wells or paying the water-company bills, all the way up to the grand cycles of life and death recorded in the Weekly Returns. If you looked at cholera on any one of those levels, it retreated back into the haze of mystery, where it could be readily rolled back to the miasma theory…Miasma was so much less complicated. You didn’t need to build a consilient chain of argument to make the case for miasma. You just needed to point to the air and say: Do you smell that? (p. 131)
From the data he collected, Dr. Snow was eventually able to determine that the factor common to all the cases was the pump where the households obtained their water, and was able to get the pump handle removed, thus possibly saving Soho from a second outbreak, when the father of the infant who was determined to be the incident case, also became ill and died. His wife, as she had when her infant daughter became ill, dumped the waste into the open cesspool in the basement of their home, thereby contaminating the pump a second time.
The Ghost Map is an interesting historical detective story, providing insight into the development of epidemiological methods for both the specialist and the general reader.
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For October, I’ll be reading the first book I checked out under the new Kindle public library lending program, Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art.
What’s on your reading list?
