Lesson learned

The other day, I was fishing through one of my craft cubbies (don't we all have those?) and I dislodged my embroidery scissors. I didn't really hear them land, but I didn't think about it. When I went to retrieve them, I found this:

Boy, am I ever glad that my foot wasn't there. That's a wooden floor it's buried in. That's not good.

So, now I am a bit (lot) more careful with what I am doing with my scissors in storage. I am aware that if they fall, they're potentially horrific stabbing devices.

And that's what silence looks like

In truth, not much knitting has happened since last I wrote. Sure, I chugged away on the dark blue socks, but they're apparently mistake-magnets for me. Don't know why. But I have unpicked them more than I have any other project in a long time.

So, no news but I felt like saying that I am still alive.

Maybe I'll make myself a penguin sweater in green and black and white (with a little tiny ugly patch of pink)

At the risk of being too too terribly Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, I offer you an image of the sock I on which I am currently working. The image is not so much meant to impress you with the quality or quantity of sock in it but with the background. It's supposed to illustrate how very travel-y I've been. That spike in the distance is the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, under which a number of Frenchmen were decapitated during the French Revolution. The sock and I were both resting in the lovely comfy chairs provided in Parisian parks. I do like those reclining chairs. I started that day in a different city and finished it in a different country, but I had a very nice lunch in the Tuilleries, so once in a while the travel offers its own reward.

But only once in a while.

My travel schedule, by the way, continues apace for the next few weeks, so I am not likely to return to daily posting for some time. I am, however, likely to finish one pair of socks.

A nice run while it lasted

Oh, well. I couldn't keep up with the internets while I was travelling. That's the way it goes some times.

I have been knitting that sock. Photos to follow. However, I've been doing a LOT of unpicking on it, too. Like, more than I think is normal. Too tired, I guess. It's the third time I'm knitting this pattern. I should be able to manage it, don't you think?

Socks again

Yes, I went and got another skein of sock yarn and I plan to turn it into another pair of ricks. They're so comfy. And good travelling knitting. It's what I gotta do.

Late & irregular posts will be the norm for the next little while, most likely.

A thousand and one words

I generally don't do much to a photograph after I've taken it. Once the shutter has opened and closed, I consider most of my task complete.

One thing I will do to post-process, especially when photographing knitting is to crop the picture. As my somewhat limited abilities go in the world of photography, I think that framing is a key part of the package. With cropping, you can re-frame to change the dynamism, remove unwanted visual clutter, or just plain old clarify the object of the picture. Plus, it's fast and not complicated.

My shallow depth-of-field lens is a 50mm fixed-length jobbie. Get yourself one. It will only set you back $100-$150. You can take a lovely, artistic image of any (stationary) object in just about any light. However, the fixed focal length means that framing isn't easy. Especially because the nearest focal length is something on the order of 1/2 a metre. I want to take this picture (from yesterday),

but instead I have to take this picture:

I cannot get any closer to the thing and have it in focus. That is the maximum amount of space the swatch can occupy.

I admit, I like them both. But one is a picture of knitting an the other is just art. You only see the shape in the real, uncropped picture. You don't see the knitting. Since I was trying to show images of knitting yesterday, the cropped photo was the choice I made. If I were trying to express something ... enigmatic (but not to do with the craft of knitting), I would be better off choosing the uncropped.

A thousand words?

This is what the dull grey swatch (which I took off the needles last night) looks like:

If I work it, work it, work it, I can take a picture that looks like this:

More attractive, sure. Still dull and grey. I think that photographing knitting with a very (very) short depth of field is a sure-fire way to get an attractive picture. It's a cliche by now, to be sure, but there is a reason why people take arty pictures of their knitwork in this fashion. It draws in the eye to the detailed stitchery and yet you still get the impression of all of that luscious, fluffy out-of focus stuff.

The other option I have is to frame it interestingly or position it interestingly (we're letting it be a given that the dull grey thing itself is manifestly NOT interesting).

The final thing I might do is to give it a really lovely background. That option wasn't available to me this morning, but I thought I'd mention it here as another way things that are dull as ditchwater can be used to generate photographs you'd want to look at.