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which_chickI got a fair amount of knitting done over the weekend. Go me! And, obviously, I also did some television watching because that's what I do while knitting -- that's how I get like three inches of wrong-color-scarf. LOL. It could be that this strategy has some issues and also I'm still having feelings about the scarf so it's still in timeout.
I deployed the blocking board successfully two more times over the weekend and once this morning, so that when I get home tonight there will be 4 squares blocked. Soon I will be caught up on the backlog of blocking.
I finished the brown square that was in progress and wove in the ends of him so that he's ready to be washed and blocked. I will be weaving in ends as I go along henceforth because I hate weaving in ends, like, a lot. Better to do it a bit at a time so that it's not a looming mountain of unpleasantness later on.
I cast on a 2w-1b square using the new more-white yarn so that I could see how that knit up. I've got about three inches of square done in this color and I am liking how it knits up. It's some damn fancy white wool. I hope it wears OK, but we shall see.
I spun some more brown wool onto a bobbin but not an entire bobbin full, just some. It's in progress, the making-of-yarn, and has been this whole time. I don't always mention it, but it's happening in the background.
I contemplated making some visual representations of the afghan process, like bar charts or something, so that you could see "at a glance" how far along I was towards Having An Afghan, but that was so damn depressing that I stopped. An afghan is a huge project even if you're just buying the yarn and knitting it. And, obvi, there are way more steps on my path than just "buy yarn and knit it up" because I'm making the yarn as I go.
There need to be 42 squares for this afghan. The finished afghan will be 6 squares wide and 7 squares long. This will generate an afghan that is approximately 54" x 63" but not exactly because my squares are about 9" x 9.5". They are, in fact, rectangles. I'm going to keep calling them squares, though.
14 brown squares (6 knitted)
14 mostly-brown squares (1 knitted)
14 mostly-white squares (1 in progress)
Measuring by square completion, this is 1/6th and a wee bit more of the way done. We have barely begun. :) I am a little ahead on the yarn front -- enough yarn is ready to go for at least another mostly-brown square, 2 mostly-white squares, and a couple more brown squares -- but there's a ton more spinning in the offing as well. I'm getting more consistent with that and maybe a touch faster, not sure, but the practice definitely doesn't hurt.
Do you have enough yarn for this project?
Not yet.
Do you have enough wool or roving or whatever in the correct colors to MAKE the rest of the yarn for this project?
Probably? I'm not sure, honestly. I hope so? I guess we'll find out.
Okay, so if you don't have enough wool or roving or whatever, what happens then?
I buy more ingredients and make more yarn.
But then it won't match!
This is a whole lot less of an issue than you think it is. Breathe out. Be not afraid. It's going to be fine. I'll hold off on putting together pieces until I have enough squares to lay out the pattern and make sure it doesn't look like shit. And then I can arrange them (on the floor) and make sure the layout is OK before proceeding.
To review, the process here is as follows:
Make Yarn -- this takes a while. I haven't timed it but... a while.
1. Card wool or separate roving into spinnable hunks
2. Spin wool into singles (this is the time sink)
3. Ply singles into yarn (3 ply, so 3 bobbins of singles)
4. Unwind from bobbin onto niddy noddy
5. Wash, set twist, hang to dry (typically overnight or longer)
6. Wind into center pull balls
Knit Square -- this takes several hours of knitting for a square. I am not a fast knitter. Perhaps I will time it at some point, or (more likely) time a fraction of it for a guesstimate of how long it takes to knit a square.
1. Cast on sts
2. Knit in pattern until correct size (here's the time sink part, everything else is pretty quick)
3. Bind off sts
4. Weave in ends
Block Square -- this process takes under 10 minutes per square except for the drying part which does not involve me doing things.
1. Wash square in warm soapy water
2. Rinse well, blot with towel.
3. Pin to blocking board (orientation, dimensions)
(dry all day or overnight)
4. Unpin when dry, put on the pile of finished squares on shelf in plant room.
Sew Squares together -- sewing one square to another is a matter of minutes. It is relatively quick. Longer seams take longer but still nowhere near as long as knitting a square takes.
1. Join one square to another
2. Join pairs of squares to make a block of four
3. Join 3 blocks of four to make one row of afghan
4. Join 6 rows of afghan together to make afghan
I'm really just here for the Mexican Cartel Violence...
Right. About that. My dad has a beach house in Mexico. I've talked about it a little before, with some local flavor photographs and stuff. His beach house is located in La Peñita de Jaltemba, across the bay from Rincon de Guyabitos, in the Mexican state (they have states just like the USA has states) of Nayarit. It's a small and rural village-style thing without its own airport.
The airport he flies in and out of is an hour and a half south of his beach house, the Puerta Vallarta International Airport (PVR). Puerta Vallarta is the sixth largest city in the Mexican state of Jalisco and it has a boatload of tourists from Canada and the United States. Tourism is big bucks in PV.
On Sunday, the most-wanted drug cartel boss, the head of the JNGC, one Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, was killed in a Mexican military operation. A handful of other cartel guys also died in the operation.
Once El Mencho was dead, the JNGC (based in the Mexican state of Jalisco, where Puerta Vallarta is located) was left leaderless and pissed off. (There's not a real great structure for succession in cartels. Probably they need better org charts.) So, they engaged in violence and stuff, notably in Jalisco (where the JNGC was based), including in Puerta Vallarta. Dad's flight is on Tuesday, like, tomorrow Tuesday, so I kind of care about this.
At the current time, the Mexican government assures us that Things Are Fine. Good to hear it.
However, the US State Department is telling tourists in the affected areas of Mexico to shelter in place. That doesn't sound like Things are Fine.
Dad says that his Delta check-in app did not say anything about civil unrest. Dad says that planes are flying and flights are not cancelled and the airport is functioning normally. I am not sure I believe him, but that's what he says.
However, I am still concerned. Something like fifty people died (government soldiers and cartel dudes) in cartel-related fighting on Sunday. I'm sure it's all died down now, but... that's a lot of civil unrest.
Mostly, if you are a tourist doing tourist shit on the west coast of Mexico, you do not interact with the drug cartels. You do your tourist shit -- drink your margaritas, go whale watching, get sunburned on the beaches, spend your dollars, fly home and tell people what a nice time you had. It is largely safe and enjoyable, warm and sunny and a perfectly good way to spend your tourism dollars. My dad's been going to PV for more than twenty years. Hell, he's owned the house for more than twenty years and he went to PV for at least five years before he bought the fucking house. The cartels have not really been an issue in all that time.
But he's got a flight home on Tuesday in the state (Jalisco) and the town (Puerta Vallarta) that was involved in recent cartel violence. I sure hope they're done rioting or whatever by tomorrow.
I deployed the blocking board successfully two more times over the weekend and once this morning, so that when I get home tonight there will be 4 squares blocked. Soon I will be caught up on the backlog of blocking.
I finished the brown square that was in progress and wove in the ends of him so that he's ready to be washed and blocked. I will be weaving in ends as I go along henceforth because I hate weaving in ends, like, a lot. Better to do it a bit at a time so that it's not a looming mountain of unpleasantness later on.
I cast on a 2w-1b square using the new more-white yarn so that I could see how that knit up. I've got about three inches of square done in this color and I am liking how it knits up. It's some damn fancy white wool. I hope it wears OK, but we shall see.
I spun some more brown wool onto a bobbin but not an entire bobbin full, just some. It's in progress, the making-of-yarn, and has been this whole time. I don't always mention it, but it's happening in the background.
I contemplated making some visual representations of the afghan process, like bar charts or something, so that you could see "at a glance" how far along I was towards Having An Afghan, but that was so damn depressing that I stopped. An afghan is a huge project even if you're just buying the yarn and knitting it. And, obvi, there are way more steps on my path than just "buy yarn and knit it up" because I'm making the yarn as I go.
There need to be 42 squares for this afghan. The finished afghan will be 6 squares wide and 7 squares long. This will generate an afghan that is approximately 54" x 63" but not exactly because my squares are about 9" x 9.5". They are, in fact, rectangles. I'm going to keep calling them squares, though.
14 brown squares (6 knitted)
14 mostly-brown squares (1 knitted)
14 mostly-white squares (1 in progress)
Measuring by square completion, this is 1/6th and a wee bit more of the way done. We have barely begun. :) I am a little ahead on the yarn front -- enough yarn is ready to go for at least another mostly-brown square, 2 mostly-white squares, and a couple more brown squares -- but there's a ton more spinning in the offing as well. I'm getting more consistent with that and maybe a touch faster, not sure, but the practice definitely doesn't hurt.
Do you have enough yarn for this project?
Not yet.
Do you have enough wool or roving or whatever in the correct colors to MAKE the rest of the yarn for this project?
Probably? I'm not sure, honestly. I hope so? I guess we'll find out.
Okay, so if you don't have enough wool or roving or whatever, what happens then?
I buy more ingredients and make more yarn.
But then it won't match!
This is a whole lot less of an issue than you think it is. Breathe out. Be not afraid. It's going to be fine. I'll hold off on putting together pieces until I have enough squares to lay out the pattern and make sure it doesn't look like shit. And then I can arrange them (on the floor) and make sure the layout is OK before proceeding.
To review, the process here is as follows:
Make Yarn -- this takes a while. I haven't timed it but... a while.
1. Card wool or separate roving into spinnable hunks
2. Spin wool into singles (this is the time sink)
3. Ply singles into yarn (3 ply, so 3 bobbins of singles)
4. Unwind from bobbin onto niddy noddy
5. Wash, set twist, hang to dry (typically overnight or longer)
6. Wind into center pull balls
Knit Square -- this takes several hours of knitting for a square. I am not a fast knitter. Perhaps I will time it at some point, or (more likely) time a fraction of it for a guesstimate of how long it takes to knit a square.
1. Cast on sts
2. Knit in pattern until correct size (here's the time sink part, everything else is pretty quick)
3. Bind off sts
4. Weave in ends
Block Square -- this process takes under 10 minutes per square except for the drying part which does not involve me doing things.
1. Wash square in warm soapy water
2. Rinse well, blot with towel.
3. Pin to blocking board (orientation, dimensions)
(dry all day or overnight)
4. Unpin when dry, put on the pile of finished squares on shelf in plant room.
Sew Squares together -- sewing one square to another is a matter of minutes. It is relatively quick. Longer seams take longer but still nowhere near as long as knitting a square takes.
1. Join one square to another
2. Join pairs of squares to make a block of four
3. Join 3 blocks of four to make one row of afghan
4. Join 6 rows of afghan together to make afghan
I'm really just here for the Mexican Cartel Violence...
Right. About that. My dad has a beach house in Mexico. I've talked about it a little before, with some local flavor photographs and stuff. His beach house is located in La Peñita de Jaltemba, across the bay from Rincon de Guyabitos, in the Mexican state (they have states just like the USA has states) of Nayarit. It's a small and rural village-style thing without its own airport.
The airport he flies in and out of is an hour and a half south of his beach house, the Puerta Vallarta International Airport (PVR). Puerta Vallarta is the sixth largest city in the Mexican state of Jalisco and it has a boatload of tourists from Canada and the United States. Tourism is big bucks in PV.
On Sunday, the most-wanted drug cartel boss, the head of the JNGC, one Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, was killed in a Mexican military operation. A handful of other cartel guys also died in the operation.
Once El Mencho was dead, the JNGC (based in the Mexican state of Jalisco, where Puerta Vallarta is located) was left leaderless and pissed off. (There's not a real great structure for succession in cartels. Probably they need better org charts.) So, they engaged in violence and stuff, notably in Jalisco (where the JNGC was based), including in Puerta Vallarta. Dad's flight is on Tuesday, like, tomorrow Tuesday, so I kind of care about this.
At the current time, the Mexican government assures us that Things Are Fine. Good to hear it.
However, the US State Department is telling tourists in the affected areas of Mexico to shelter in place. That doesn't sound like Things are Fine.
Dad says that his Delta check-in app did not say anything about civil unrest. Dad says that planes are flying and flights are not cancelled and the airport is functioning normally. I am not sure I believe him, but that's what he says.
However, I am still concerned. Something like fifty people died (government soldiers and cartel dudes) in cartel-related fighting on Sunday. I'm sure it's all died down now, but... that's a lot of civil unrest.
Mostly, if you are a tourist doing tourist shit on the west coast of Mexico, you do not interact with the drug cartels. You do your tourist shit -- drink your margaritas, go whale watching, get sunburned on the beaches, spend your dollars, fly home and tell people what a nice time you had. It is largely safe and enjoyable, warm and sunny and a perfectly good way to spend your tourism dollars. My dad's been going to PV for more than twenty years. Hell, he's owned the house for more than twenty years and he went to PV for at least five years before he bought the fucking house. The cartels have not really been an issue in all that time.
But he's got a flight home on Tuesday in the state (Jalisco) and the town (Puerta Vallarta) that was involved in recent cartel violence. I sure hope they're done rioting or whatever by tomorrow.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-23 04:17 pm (UTC)