Seamripper

Too Much to Do

I haven't had time to go to Dharma and get help with seaming up all the items I need help with, which are (for the record):

• Chad's cap
  
• Prentice's baby sweater (well, Owen's sweater, but Prentice's baby)
  
• Three cell-phone cozies
  
• The Freda poncho I've barely started on but will need to seam up

Work is killing me. I want to do Bay to Breakers with Erika in May (Team in Training is letting people run for them if we just raise $200), but I haven't had time to train because I've been working so much. I'm just wrapping up another three-hour evening on the blueprint for Play Guitar!. It's fun but draining, and I feel like I don't have the time now to devote to anything. Especially not this road bike ride Chad and I are supposed to do next weekend!

And that half-finished handbag and unhemmed skirt from last year (I hemmed the pink tweed skirt, but not the lining) stare at me every time I go into our dining room. Maybe I can finish it up this weekend...

The Bens

Ben Folds, Ben Kweller, and Ben Lee got together one day to make an EP. They called themselves the Bens. You can buy it on iTunes, and you should think about doing so, because the Ben Folds song and the Ben Kweller songs are pretty good.

Speaking of Ben Folds, if you have the chance to see him live, do it. He's one of the few modern musicians who really are showmen--who invite the audience in to enjoy and participate in the experience. And he does some sweet cover versions (see my "Under the Covers Part 2" iMix on iTunes. Someday I'll add some more. (Actually, I had Ike and Tina Turner's "Come Together" on there, but it's not on iTunes so they didn't post it.)

Blog anxiety

Chad and I are up in Tahoe visiting Chris, skiing/snowboarding, drinking wine, and, for me, trying to do some work. Chris is obsessed with blogs. He's determined to become a B-list blogger. All this talk made me a little self-conscious about my blog, so I Googled "seamripper" to see if anyone mentioned my blog.

Not only does no one mention my blog, but there's another seamripper blog! I feel like I'm at the prom and a more popular girl has the same dress on as me. She has some really cool stuff on her site.

King Solomon

Chad and I saw Solomon Burke at the Palace of Fine Arts on Friday. What an amazing show. He had a killer, killer band, and especially for someone who's 60-something, has fathered 21 children, and weighs more than I can imagine, he is an amazing showman. People of that era knew how to entertain. They knew how to work a crowd, to make them feel good. And they knew how to sing. I wish more entertainers these days were like that.

It IS My Bag, Baby

As I was home Monday, waiting for the baby sweater to finish blocking, I decided to start up an old project. I got this great pink and black material at Kweejibo on Haight, back when they were selling fabric remnants. I made a skirt out of it and wanted to make a jacket, but I didn't have enough left over and they didn't have any more when I went back. (The picture on the left shows the real color.)

So a few months ago, I decided to make a bag, using Vogue 7328. I pinned the pattern to the fabric and cut out the interfacing a few months ago, but I haven't had time to pull out my sewing machine since.

So far, it's been pretty easy to sew, and the fabric isn't fraying as much as it did on my skirt. I messed up the zipper a bit, but by then, I just wanted to see what the finished product looked like, so I left it. I just have to finish the strap and sew the lining and I'm done!

I think it would be cool to widen the handbag and make it a knitting needle and project holder!

Ripping Out

Since I have to do this so frequently (now you see why I named my blog "seam ripper"), and I always forget exactly how to use the handy technique By Theresa Vinson Stenersen describes in this article, I thought I'd post it to my blog.

The baby sweater is blocking as I write this. Hooray! I used a ripping technique in the Reader's Digest Guide to Needlework (what a great reference this is, and if I ever like 1970s fashions, I'll have a million patterns ready to use), but I like the "no dropped stitches" element of Theresa's approach.

A Break in the Storm

Work is finally settling down somewhat (and my job is allegedly changing again so that I'll be less busy, but I'll believe that when I see it), and I finally got a chance to work on the baby sweater for Prentice. It took me a while to rip back to where I added the extra stitch at the beginning of an arm row, mostly because I just couldn't bear to do it.

Once I got back to where I started, the arms went really quickly. I bound off the neck (adding the second skein of yarn to knit the other side) and even started the buttonholes, which, of course, I started to put on the wrong side. I decided to leave that mistake in. So far, I've bound off the front sides of the sleeves. This weekend is supposed to be rainy and I'm taking Monday off, so I hope I can finish this project up and get started on a couple of other things.

You Can Do It!

Am I ever psyched! Today, I just got my comp copy of my favorite book that I've ever proofed: You Can Do It!: The Merit Badge Handbook for Grown-up Girls.

It was such a fun project. Each chapter is for a different badge--knitting, surfing, beading, getting to know wines, throwing parties, etc.--grown-up girls can try. As I proofed it, I felt really inspired. Each badge has a mentor who leads you through the steps to achieve the badge and there are words of encouragement along the way, success stories--it's great. Buy it for your friends.

P.S. You can buy if from Amazon.

Rowan Subscription

I fell in love this winter with Rowan yarns and patterns, with the Ribbon Twist shawl I made. So I subscribed to their magazine/knitting club and just got Rowan 37 in the mail today along with a kit for knitting a cute ruffled-edge short poncho. I can't wait!

I'm hoping to get back on track with the baby sweater for Prentice's baby. I've almost ripped back to where I made the mistake. Argh!

Ode to iTunes

I was going to download William Shatner's version of Pulp's "Common People" tonight from iTunes, but I got distracted by a Ben Folds EP I stumbled across. Then I read through his playlist. In stark contrast to J. Lo's one-sentence description (which her publicist probably wrote), Ben Folds wrote this whole big thing about how iTunes has changed the music buying experience, that it hadn't been exciting for a long time, but now it was again for him.

Chad and I have been having this whole discussion on Rhapsody vs. iTunes. For a while, I thought that Rhapsody was for people who were music experimentalists, who wanted to try out lots of different things, and iTunes was for people who wanted to go online and buy one song.

But tonight, as I was checking out artist playlists (Maroon 5 has a really interesting one--although I think they make only somewhat interesting music), following one record to another, I thought about when I first got into soul music in college. Before Amazon and eBay, it was so hard to track down CDs. I had read that Dusty Springfield was really influenced by Baby Washington, so since I could never find a Baby Washington CD in Boston, I asked at a black record store down the street from where I lived in Portland. They special-ordered the CD for me.

It actually wasn't a very good CD, but the point of the story is that while I was waiting for that CD to come in, I couldn't have been more excited. I love tracking down people's influences. I came to love Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins through the Beatles, and found T-Bone Walker while trying to track down a rockabilly guitar instruction book or tape (a guy at a classical guitar store told me that T-Bone Walker played something like rockabilly. Even then, I knew he was wrong).

Chad always talks about record stores that let you hear a CD before buying, like Waterloo in Austin. iTunes is that for me. And here's where I get to my point: I like BUYING music. I like owning it. I like knowing that, since royalty fees from sales of actual songs and CDs is pretty straightforward (even for record company accountants who seem capable of screwing up almost anything), the artists are actually going to make money.

Since I've signed up with iTunes, I've bought EPs by Ben Folds (who knew that he, Ben Kweller, and Ben Lee formed their own little group, the Bens? I wouldn't have, if it weren't for iTunes), Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Garden State soundtrack (and for the first time, I like Thievery Corporation), and overall, I've rediscovered my love of discovering music. Sure, it'd be nice to listen to whole albums streaming over my computer like Chad does on Rhapsody. But I like iTunes just fine.

And now I just discovered the Bluegrass radio station I can listen to through iTunes! Marvelous!