Knitting progress
Boy, lots to catch up on here…
There's the hat I knit on the loom to match Nathan's scarf. It came out pretty nice, though it's a little small. That the variegation in the yarn lined up to make a rainbow stripe around most of the hat was a bonus. The loom knitting is really fast, and you can do a lot of fancy stuff with it, but the fancy stuff is more time-consuming. Making a simple purl stitch (say, for ribbing the edge of a hat so it doesn't roll up like this one) is a very different operation than a knit stitch. I prefer knitting on needles.
Nate's getting bored with row after row of knit stitches. He knit an infant hat (he wanted a toddler hat, but I couldn't convince him he'd chosen too small a loom), and not having someone to give it to took the wind out of his sails. I'm not sure if introducing him something like cables or Fair Isle color patterns would help that or not. It requires more concentration and provides more chances of mistakes.
After that, I knit a hair band for my wife for Christmas at the last minute (and finished it a few days after Christmas). I'll talk about that project in the next post.
And then I got back to the hat that started all of this. I finally got into a rhythm, knit 2, purl 2 ribbing… but I discovered I'd made a major mistake. The pattern calls for K1P1 ribbing, and I'd started out that way… and somewhere in between projects, I'd misremembered and started K2P2. No wonder it didn't look right at all. So I frogged the whole thing on Sunday, and last night I cast on, more loosely this time since the tight cast-on gave me fits, and with ten extra stitches 'cause I think the original was going to be a tad small. Fortunately, the decrease counts on groups of ten stitches, because I didn't think to check the math before I'd cast on and knit an entire row. So I feel better about that one.
And before that's done, I looks like I'm going to start a Felted Indoor Boot as part of a men's Knit-Along (KAL). I bought pretty wool, and someone at Twist has offered to teach me to spin. I bought way too much expensive yarn at Twist's recent sale, but it was buy-3-get-1-free, and it's darned pretty. I needed some of it for a new hair band, and I think I'll make some fingerless gloves for myself. Plenty more unaccounted for, though.
Spending time down at Twist more, but not quite as much as I'd like, and it's slow getting to know people because I'm not the "walk up and introduce myself" type.
Maybe going to the Wamego Winter Woolfest this weekend. But it looks like everyone I know is bailing, and I might be going alone. I'd invite my mom (she crochets), but she's recovering from pnemonia.
Whew.
Knitting with Nathan
So my knitting has taken an immediate detour… I started working on a hat for myself (Eco Alpaca's Charcoal Grey undyed baby alpaca) and it's going well, but Nathan, and Christmas, have side-tracked me.
On the way out of Twist a week ago, Nathan (our 9-year-old) saw some bright orange yarn… orange and blue are his school colors (their mascot is a tiger), and he wanted to make a scarf for a teacher.
So last Saturday, we dropped by Twist to knit and I bought him a couple skeins of Cascade wool yarn in bright orange and a darkish blue. Borrowed the round "hat" weaving looms out of the library and Mona, one of the Twist regulars, taught him how to knit on the loom. We abandoned that little bit of work and left the looms behind, and Sunday I bought a set of "long" ("double-rake") looms at Michael's, since he wanted to knit a scarf, and the Knifty Knitter double-rakes are set to a smaller gauge than the round "hat" looms, which is more appropriate for the worsted weight yarn he picked. I also ordered the Knitting Loom Primer from Amazon Sunday afternoon, and thanks to Amazon Prime's two-day shipping and the book shipping from the Oklahoma warehouse, it arrived yesterday.
So when I got home from work yesterday, Nathan had the book out and had started the scarf by himself. He wasn't far in and was having trouble with getting the wrapping right, so I helped him set it straight and he knit three rows before deciding to play a board game. But he enjoyed it, and likes how quickly it goes, and he's making big plans to make all kinds of things and to learn to knit on needles. I'm just hoping he finishes this project.
While we played the board game, I started a hat with the other skein of yarn that matches his scarf. There are a lot of neat patterns and techniques in the book (dang, you can purl, increase/decrease, cable knit and even do Fair Isle patterns… the makers of knitting looms are under-marketing them) and I figured it was a good idea to get ahead of Nathan a bit, so I could help him when he tried something more advanced and had trouble. And he's more likely to finish his work if he sees me finishing something similar. So I'm making a hat, and I've got another small Christmas project I want to knock out, so my own hat is on-hold for awhile. Which is cool.
My son’s idea of “what makes a good mystery”
My son is nine-years-old and in the gifted class. I'm still kind of embarrassed when I say that, because I don't want to brag, but it's just a matter of life. When I talk about my nine-year-old fourth grader, it helps to understand that he's read The Hobbit, the entire "Series of Unfortunate Events", and is in the middle of the sixth "Harry Potter" book.
He can explain the Three Act Model and the sequence of rise, climax and denouement, and how conflict is required to build this sequence of dramatic tension and release. Of course, like any parent, I wonder if he really understands it, or just recites what he's been told.
His new gifted class teacher is well-connected to other such teachers in our district, and some of them got together and had their students read the same book, Chasing Vermeer, a mystery. They then started an inter-school discussion of sorts on a blog set up for the purpose. The first blog post to which they were to respond asked, "What makes a great mystery?"
Many of the responses were the kind of thing you expect from the upper grade school levels: "One that I can't put down," "One with a great cover," "One that keeps me guessing." A few were moderately insightful, but few really grabbed hold of something that explains how to write a good mystery. But here's that proud parent moment, over which you may roll your eyes if you wish… my son's response:
I think what makes a good mystery is:
- a key item or number
- characters who normally don't like each other work together
- no one except main characters know about crime/theif
Chasing Vermeer involved numerical clues, so he focused on "number" there, but #1 hit up on the essential MacGuffin. But #2 is the big one for me… right there, he defines part of a good mystery as creating conflict. Not just the primary conflict of solving the mystery, but secondary conflict between two main characters who don't get along. Sure, he was prompted by the content of the book, but he identified this aspect as being important. I haven't read the book, but I'm guessing that #3 is a source of tension and possibly direct conflict. The big difference between his response and most of the other responses is that his response addresses concrete elements of story and while the others are much more general.
So I have some confidence… he is actually understanding something of the theory he's been taught. Now, I'll grant you, he's been taught a lot more than the usual fourth grader. They did study rise and climax in class, but he and I have looked at some of his favorite movies and books to identify and understand the story elements at work.
On the other hand, he needs to work on that i-before-e thing.