jauncourt

Hello to any new folks who have come by to see what I have to offer! You will find that this is a strange mix of a personal journal and a blog. A great deal of my early thoughts on costuming and craft stuff does percolate through here, but a lot of what I say here is friends only or private. All of my costuming info is public, and will be duplicated, eventually on my public blog. Please feel free to friend me, read for a bit, comment if you like, and if we seem to be doing well as a acquaintances, I might friend you back.

If you are looking for my costuming handouts, they are freely available for download at Scribd, and I have a lot of additional content elsewhere. Please see the links list for where you can find my public web content.

Social networking: I'd be honored if you'd follow me on google+ , blogger, Scribd or twitter. I'm going to be adding more handouts and updating old ones, as well as bringing all my old sites' various content over to the blog and updating it, so that would be the best way to find out what's new.


Regarding Facebook: While I am on facebook, I try to keep that personal, for keeping up with IRL friends and family. If you do find me on facebook, I may not accept your request unless I have a good idea of who you are. My twitter is much more public, so I'll be posting costume and other public stuff there.



NOTE TO SPAMMERS: Do not bother. All comments to this post made by anyone not already on my friends list are screened. They will be deleted without being read or clicked by anyone, and you will be reported. Furthermore, this post is dated in the future, and doesn't show up in my friends' reading lists. Nothing to see here, keep moving.

The pattern I've been working on for over a year, a screen-accurate copy of the red shawl worn by Saffron in Our Mrs Reynolds, is nearly ready! Watch this blog for updates regarding the release.




Thanks go out to my volunteer tech editor and the brave test knitters in the BigDamnKnitters group at Ravelry.


This pattern will be a free PDF download, available through Ravelry and my document shelf at Scribd. I will make announcements here, on twitter, at my public blog, and on Ravelry.

I said this about the classic SF I devoured when I was very young, and I think it makes sense and wanted to share it here:

"... I loved SF as a kid, and I still do. However, those female characters in the earlier stories? I never wanted to be them. I wanted to be the hero. I wanted to fly the ship, fight the aliens, explore the planets, translate the alien texts, get lost in the sands of Mars. The female characters were not the heroes. They added depth to stories for boys. They paved the way for female characters who got to be heroes. But they were not the heroes."

Guess who we were talking about?

A wonderful friend gave me my own set of the DVDs. Between that, and our dvd player and tv, I have an updated list of things I've observed about the shawl. A lot of this post is aggregated from a couple of posts on the thread over at BDK on Ravelry.

I had little success the last time (I have a whole card full of photos that really don’t give me much info), and having the DVD set (I had it on my DVR which isn’t really HD) and an okay little DVD player with digital upconvert and a really good ZOOM made a huge difference. I also put a fresh projector bulb in my digital projector tv, and that helped a lot.

I took a whole bunch of photos with my phone, because, of course, the battery was dead in BOTH decent cameras. Between fiddling with brightness/contrast on the tv and saturation on the phone, I got a couple of really decent shots of the back of the shawl. For blurry phone pictures of highly zoomed almost pixelated paused DVD video.. Argh.
I’ve spent hours pausing and zooming and inspecting the still images of the first 15-20 minutes of the ep and I’m pretty sure of several things about it.

• it is for sure a top-down traditional (starts from the center of the long edge) mitred triangle
  
• it has a double-eyelet border knit on or into the long edge
  
• the pattern is a vertical open-chevrons-in-stripes pattern, with repeats of three chevrons and a wider solid chevron marking the ends of the repeats
  
• there is a solid “stripe” between the chevron motifs that is 2-4 stitches wide
  
• the chevrons point down and echo the border points
  
• the openwork chevrons are made with 7 eyelets, with one at the point
  
• the angle of the pattern when viewed from the back is not 45 degrees, so it’s probably a slightly shaped triangle/butterfly if laid out flat
  
• it has a knitted on bottom border that is in pattern (the points of the border line up with the points of the chevron motifs creating an illusion that the border is not knit on)
  
• there appear to be 15 21 points, including the three points of the triangle
  
• that means there are 15 21 tassels or fringes (since there are so few, I am calling them tassels)
  
• the tassels are tied on and appear to be made with 2 or 3 strands doubled over, and the length is not equal (or they are very worn and have attenuated and been torn over time)
  
• it is made with a large singleply (like lamb’s pride worsted) or a very smooth/worn multi-ply
  
• it is probably a wool or wool blend yarn, because the shawl looks like it has fulled a little bit due to age/wear or possibly deliberately during washing/blocking to stabilize the pattern (since it is so large)
  

I’ve ordered 2 different wool yarns from Webs to make the shawl. One of them is bound to be a better fit than the other: Nashua Handkints Creative Focus Chunky in Copper Carmine and Nashua Handkints Creative Focus Worsted in Brick.


Hope this makes things that I think I’m seeing clearer, I scanned some of my notes (not nearly all, just the most relevant ones).

Overview of my notes:


This is the scarf I made for the firefly-themed swap I was in recently, and which really helped with working out the borders and she spacing of the motifs:


Here’s an incomplete (doesn’t include the foundation row that the two halves point out from - it’s grafted in the middle) chart for the scarf above:


and rough charted notes from making the scarf (NOT the shawl!) for the corner of the sideways worked border (purl rows aren’t shown):


SO, that's where we are at this point.

ETA: Got the shawl charted. Took HOURS. Even using a spreadsheet program. The border is different than the scarf border, the shawl has a 1 stitch line between chevrons, I am not writing out the instructions until I have worked any bugs out of the chart, and I'm not quite sure how the double eyelet band is going to work as I have it currently charted, but we have a workable, testable pattern chart! WooHoo!

Swatching has been happening. I've been through a bout a half dozen yarns, first to get the pattern worked out, then I lost all my notes and found them, and the last while I've swatched in three different yarns to try and figure out gauge and likely best yarn for the project. So far, it sucks, a lot. I've been second-guessing myself left and right.

I spent a lot of time snapping photos of the screen tonight while pausing the HD broadcast and now I think it might be made with a 1-ply worsted, like Noro or Lamb's Pride. Fnarr. It would certainly block better than acrylic, and I really really hate knitting with acrylic.

So I need to drop 25 bucks on enough yarn (no, I can't afford Noro, so it's going to be Lamb's Pride, which I used to crochet with a lot and don't hate) to try to swatch something that will work right in pattern AND look right when blocked, with the dense spots and open spots. Hmmm. Maybe Malabrigo Merino Worsted Semi-Solid, in Sealing Wax. Good yardage/cost and colors.

Also, while I have a lace pattern that knits up correctly top-down, and I have a YoSaffBridge scarf pattern written in that stitch, I ALSO have one that knits up correctly bottom-up and I think it'll be more straightforward to knit the triangular shawl as a bottom-up thing. Maybe. I'm not sure.

*tears out hair*

Thought for the day: If you know a little girl who loves science, buy her a labcoat and don't let her give up on it.

I talked to mom yesterday, and she told me that her tomcat, Pougie, had not bounced back from his latest fighting-related infection*, had gone into irreversible kidney failure and had to be put to sleep. Mom held him and he purred and went to sleep.

I loved that little guy. He was a nearly-year-old kitten when I was pregnant with my first child, eight years ago. He was so smart, and a great little fuzzy guy all around. he was a great little companion when I was on bedrest with my second child, too.


I wish I could have said goodbye, but we're half a country away from mom now.

Nine years old, nine major infections. I guess that bit about nine lives is true. Goodnight Pougie.

*He was fixed, but the vet thinks that the previous vet had not done a very good job because Poug just didn't act fixed. And that was what essentially killed him. He'd fight, get an infection, hide it (because, you know, "tough guy"), and need to be hospitalized for a week. He could not be kept indoors. He'd open doors or chew through screens to get out. He was determined to use those nine lives, and he sure did.

Today is already a day that can only be improved by setting my own hair on fire.

This entry was originally posted at http://jauncourt.dreamwidth.org/175898.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

It was written by the man who wasn't actually my grandfather, and finished before he passed away. His wife, the lady who isn't actually my Grandmother, but might as well be, has gotten it published, and I was asked to build a website to help promote it.


The book is called Heaven's Pavement, and it's about WWII. It's a pretty powerful story. I'm still reading it, because I get so little time to read with the chaos of life anymore, and because some bits of it are intense enough to make me need to pause for a moment. Also, I think there is an element of not wanting to let the story be over.

The website I worked on is here: http://heavenspavement.com/index.htm It's been live for almost 2 weeks.

It's pretty much done, but this is why I abandoned my blog and any serious posting anywhere since, oh, September. I was coding and pushing pixels back and forth and trying my best to make it worthwhile. Being asked to do such a thing for someone you love is both an honor and a labor, because the worst critic is often yourself.

Some genuine compliments on the site were communicated to me today. I think I've done okay. I hope so.

ETA: GAH. Cut and paste fail, discovered days later via casual mouseover. I feel like an idiot combined with an asshole now. Awesome. Fixed now, as if anyone will know.

I already have niche-famous parents, and friends with real-famous parents. I think I'm happy with the ones I have, because fame is no gift. Famous parents are still just parents, except that the "----------'s daughter/son" bit sticks with you and isn't just from your family and their friends.

Now, would I have loved to have been mentored by a well-known or lesser known gifted person? YES. I have a list a mile long of who I might have wanted to meet/study with. None of those people would have been good parents to me. Teachers =/= parents.

Also, if the real question is which wealthy people I would have wanted to have as parents, it's not money that matters to a child, it is love and interaction.

Today, it is hot. It is a Lying Around sort of day. Husband is out, doing Star Wars Geeky things up in the LA area and I am home with the Monkeys.

So: Wading pool is filled, beach balls are filled up, patio is clean (did that yesterday), and our 10x10ish hexagonal dome tent is set up in the living room with pillows and a small table in it, for the boys to watch movies from and play in.

I am doing Other Things, but I plan to get out the campstove and cook hotdogs on it on the patio for dinner.

This entry was originally posted at http://jauncourt.dreamwidth.org/175753.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I was awakened this morning at about 8:45 by the emergency notification PA system broadcasting Taps, followed by a pause (moment of silence, I have to assume), and a man's voice saying "So. Here we are."

This is a new development in the observation of a national day of mourning, as the PA system in question wasn't used for this last year, and did not exist before that.

Instead of making me think of the tragedy in question, this instead made me think of other, similar, tragedies and how they were affected by the available news coverage of their relative times/places. The Lusitania, Pearl Harbor (most similar ideology-wise), the Hindenburg (probably closest in character, news-coverage-wise), the Titanic, the 1906 earthquake, Loma Prieta, the Tsunami. All of which are horrible either in body count or sheer destruction, and all of which were watched as closely as possible by the news.

Hindenburg is most similar, coverage-wise, because it was covered almost-live on the radio. People who heard it broadcast felt as though they were there, with all the horror and helplessness that came with it. I have also thought on Pearl Harbor, and how we have long since stopped widely observing a day of mourning for that event. I have to wonder if it is not so much the freshness of the currently mourned tragedy as the fact that nearly everyone with a television in this hemisphere watched it as it happened, and many throughout the world did as well. And that every year, for week surrounding the official day of mourning, we collectively reopen the wound by rebroadcasting all the footage available, with more retrospective coverage tacked one for good measure.

I don't think it's that we won't let it become history, or I hope it's not that. I think it's awful to keep it SO fresh for so long. It disrupts the healing process. Human beings are capable of healing and going on, and we tell stories, but never before in our history has it been possible to completely relive a collective traumatic experience (however vicarious) of this magnitude. For most of us, what we need to heal is the acute sense that we witnessed a horror and did not a single thing to save all those people. The fact that we could not have, any of us, even if we had been right beside the EMS personnel who died trying to do exactly that, means nothing. The distance that seperated all of us from the event means nothing.

We still feel the guilt. We still feel the sorrow. We still feel the helplessness. We keep peeling the scab and it will never heal in a good way if we do that. The intolerance that is rampant currently, the fetishization of a mythical Other and a mythical Us, are the largest symptoms of this emotional scar we keep working at. Knowledge is good. This? This isn't. This is propaganda. It cheapens the memory, by preventing it from becoming one.

My point, I suppose, is that I don't think rebroadcasting the crashes and the collapse to those who already saw them too many times is good for any of us. A better memorial would be a reading of names, a showing of faces, a memorial service with representatives of all faiths and perhaps eulogies for those who died who chose not to practice a faith.

And maybe, just maybe, stop trying to make it a scar on all of our psyches. It's there, we will never forget. The honorable, sensitive thing to do is to stop hurting everyone annually for ratings.

This entry was originally posted at http://jauncourt.dreamwidth.org/174678.html. You can comment here or there.

Unexpected crossover of the day - Something*Positive/Curious George. REALLY.

I am watching an episode of Curious George (I didn't turn off the tv after the kids went to school) in which George carries around, then eats, a pink, melty, ice cream sculpture that looks EXACTLY like ChooChooBear. At the end of it everyone is eating big lumps of pink choochoobear icecream while the head smiles away on a plate.

D:

I'm afraid.

This entry was originally posted at http://jauncourt.dreamwidth.org/174069.html. Open comments on this post, because, well, it's not f-locked.

No, REALLY. Whiskey, Tango, Foxtrot? DO NOT WANT.

I'll probably be making all freinds-only posts private, or just plain taking them down for now. I have everything archived up until very recently. I have a dreamwidth account, I just have to go poke it and get it ported. Too late, too tired.

Geez, LJ. WHY?

ETA: Ported to dreamwidth, posting from there in a bit.

So, watching it. Late, as usual.

Hrm. Not nearly as "OMG! SO ACCURATE!" as everyone had been raving about.

Now, it's a good story, of course, just as the Cadfael books/television series are (they are vastly different stories). The costuming is ... okay. It's not quite The Dirt Ages, but there are all kinds of "WUT?!?" moments. There's an equal amount of Random Burlap and Silly Court Clothes, and some bizarre hair, and the Mandatory Vaguely Hippie-Dreadlock Witchy person. At least it's not so heavy on the Giant Blanket Stitches like the costumes in Cadfael, or TOO heavy on the Dirt Ages aesthetic.

It seems like a decent story, I'll give it a chance, but I dread seeing clothes made after this series.

ETA: Looking at the costumes again, I think it's the idea that everyone below Baronial level was unable to have their clothes hemmed that makes me go "gah!" I hate the Ragged Raw Edges look. Almost more than the Giant Blanket Stitch look.

Okay, if anyone tried that swatch with me last night, they most likely came to the same conclusions:

1) Design is WAY too small. Might be good for a mini version, but SO not for the real thing.
2) Rib separating the stripes was FAR TOO WIDE. it needs to be maybe 4 stitches wide.
3) I need to proofread.

So, I got about halfway through the swatch last night, thought all these things, made a grumpy face and frogged back to the eyelet border. Then I had a Moment of Inspiration and just played around with the yarn for a bit. I'm going to wing a full repeat, while making notes, and then I'll put together a one-width scarf pattern for those who want it, just to tide folks over until I can produce a pattern that makes sense.

At this point I'm thinking it's a double YO (that's purled/knit on the ws row, not treated as a single stitch), because I tried that last night with good effect. It looks almost exactly right. BUT... I haven't done a whole repeat yet, and I don't know if it's shallow enough or wide enough.

what I got out of the swatching process so far, though, is a better idea of what I need to do to reproduce the stitch pattern used in the shawl.

I have some spinning to do, so it's time to get off the computer :)

Huston, we have Swatching!

Right now I'm only concerned with recreating the pattern on the straight grain and testing my theory on the border. If you want to knit along with the crazy woman, here's my test swatch pattern #1:

There are a total of seven eyelets in each openwork chevron, and the scale is VERY large, given the size of the strands you can see between them. I have two theories on this: larger needle than would normally be used for the size of yarn used, OR double YO that are treated as single YO in the next row. I'm thinking full size it's sport or worsted on fat needles. I have some 11s and some really fat ones that I can try for actual size with after I figure out the pattern. For the moment, though, I'm swatching for structure.

I'm making two swatches, and one will have a simple yarn/needle size discrepancy (fingering and size 9 needles) and the other will be sock yarn, 9 needles and double YO.

Swatch one:

This has two full repeats of the chevron pattern, straight grain, so that I can figure out how deep to make the solid chevron between open repeats. it starts with the double-eyelet foundation row like the shawl.

Using fingering yarn sock yarn, cast on 31 sts on a size 9 needle.
Purl all sts first row and every odd row.
Row 2: K2, (YO,K2tog) 13 times, YO, K2.
Row 4: K2, (YO,K2tog) 13 times, YO, K2.
Row 6: Knit all sts.
Row 8: K4, *SSK, YO, K5, YO, K2tog*, K5, repeat *to*, K4
Row 10: K5, *SSK, YO, K3, YO, K2tog*, K7, repeat *to*, K5
Row 12: K6, *SSK, YO, K1, YO, K2tog*, K9, repeat *to*, K6
Row 14: K4, *SSK, YO, K1, SSK, YO, K2, YO, K2tog*, K5, repeat *to*, K4
Row 16: Repeat row 10
Row 17: Repeat row 12
Row 18: Repeat row 14
Row 20: Repeat row 10
Row 22: Repeat row 12
Row 24: Repeat row 14
Row 26: K7, SSK, YO, K13, SSK, YO, K7
Row 28: Knit all sts (not sure about this row - may be too much for the solid chevron!)
Even numbered rows 30-50: repeat rows 8-26
Row 52: Knit all sts
Bind off, wash and block with pins. I think it might block out to a non-rectangular shape.

ETA: It may be a flattened version of this, too, with double YOs and 2x as many stitches width, but I haven't charted that yet.