fixing a miscrossed cable

Someone asked the Yarn Harlot how to fix a cable that was miscrossed several rows earlier. Stephanie gave two excellent answers, and got me thinking about yet another way to do it.

It involves cutting a strand of yarn, so may seem scarier than other methods, but it allows an invisible fix, and is easier than dropping the cable back many many rows....

Here we have our miscrossed cable.






















Here is the critical part -- which thread do we cut? If you look at the place where the index finger is really stretching out the yarn, you can see that the thread marked in hot pink is the row before the twist. Those stitches don't want to be there. They want to be in the middle of the cable, where they have happily been for the last few rows. The stitches marked in blue are the row where the twist was made. It's the strand marked in blue that we'll cut.

Choosing the right strand to cut is the only part of this whole scenario for which there is no do-over.






















Having identified the right strand, we follow it to the middle of the cable. I checked that I had the right strand about 8 times. Then cut.





















Now the worst is over. Unpick the cable from its middle to each side. I kept the freed stitches on extra needles. Three extras really would have done fine -- only one of the two rows will get twisted, so all six of the stitches in the row above the picked-out row could have started on one needle.






















Now's when you put the cross back, with luck, in the right direction this time. Cross one set of three behind the other, and put all six stitches on one needle to hold the crossed stitches in place.





















Now kitchener them up.

Weave in your ends, and, hey, presto!, an invisible fix.






















Update, 7-4-06

For me, this is a lot less scary than a steek. Steeks scare me, because I know how often I must rip, and once I've cut all those strands.....

The difference, for me, between cutting a steek and this sort of repair, is that the repair involves cutting one (1) strand. Those two cut ends require one join each -- two (2) joins, total. Each cut end is joined to an end of the short piece I added when kitchenering. My continuous strand is maintained. So if I need to rip, I can. I could even eliminate the bit of yarn used for kitchenering and join the two cut ends of my original strand, if I did end up having to rip.

One more thought -- joins are easy to hide in a cabled fabric.........


Update, 7-5-06

I assumed the joins, rather than describing them. I'll rectify that now.....

What I do, generally, when I join two strands, is work both of them at the same time for two or three stitches, and come back after a few rows and weave in the ends. When I join two balls of yarn in the same project, that's what I usually do.

In this case, what I did was unpick just to the edge of the cable, but I began the kitchenering a couple of stitches further into the knitting. I worked duplicate stitch (in the same row as the cut strand) for a couple of stitches, then kitchenered the ends of the cable, then worked another couple of stitches of duplicate stitch at the other edge of the cable.

With a really slippery yarn, I bet it would be a good idea to have a knot. I've never used a really slippery yarn.... The test yarn was partly wool, and I guarantee you that those joined ends aren't going anywhere. Wool is a nice friendly fiber and wants to help you. It won't sneakily unravel itself, out of sheer meanness.

I urge you to knit a tiny swatch, and cut one thread in the middle. Then pull, pull, pull, viciously, in every direction, and see what happens. It's not anything like nylon stockings, which *zip* a terrible run while you watch in dismay. You may find that one stitch unravels, or two, and maybe one or two will run a few stitches in either direction, but you will need to work to make them do so. With wool in your yarn, I promise you it will be an annoyance rather than a disaster to mend. Not that you want to mend the swatch, though it would be excellent practice for mending a sweater, but *if* you wanted to mend it, it would be easy.

As Elizabeth Zimmermann said, I am the boss of my knitting. I recommend her book Knitting without Tears -- if you don't have it, check it out of the library and see, and I bet you'll want to add it to your library. EZ does an excellent job of making the mechanics of knitting clear and understandable.

turtles

The Toledo zoo also has some local critters. My pics of a barn owl came out all fence, hardly any owl, alas. But the barrier between me and the turtles was a wall, so there was nothing between my lens and the turtles. I'm not sure all of these are local kinds, but I'm pretty sure at least one of them is.

These all have had some intrusive things (floating debris, etc) removed, and have had my favorite "poster edges" filter applied.

still playin with my toys....

This is the most extreme makeover I've done on any of these Toledo zoo pics. The "original" has already been worked over by Photoshop Elements' "auto smart fix." Elements managed to remove a lot of the blue haze of reflection on the plexi between us and the tiger. So it's not really "original." Starting from there, I removed most of the remaining haze by hand (nice to have that almost plain black background!). I increased the contrast (a lot), and finished with the posterizing....

Isn't it cool to be able to do this?????? Without Elements, I had three or four pics that turned out reasonably well. With Elements, I have lots more good ones, and even the ones that started pretty good are better. When I think of "real photographers" Stalking the Moment -- waiting for hours, days, whatever, for the perfect moment, with the perfect lighting, the perfect clouds, the perfect person in a red slicker walking in front of Notre Dame in the rain.... I'd rather spend my time in the comfort of my own study, tweaking the pixels........

meercats

The profile shot was one of my better ones that day, but I still prefer it with the "poster edges." The other shot needed more work (some twigs removed), and I think it, too, benefits from "poster edges."

thunder

There was thunder, Tuesday morning. Early morning thunder makes for happy kids. Outdoor pools aren't safe when there's lightning, so thunder at swim time means no practice.

Sophie was afraid of thunder. Less so in recent years as her hearing diminished. Awakened by thunder at 5:00 am Tuesday, I thought "Uh-oh, Sophie is worried...."

I hope not.

The dogboys prefer to be right with us when there is loud thunder, but they don't pant hard, and shiver, the way Sophie did when she was their age.

Sophie also worried about the kitchen timer, to the extent that she'd go upstairs any time she knew we would use it (when there is rice on the stove, say). I'm glad she doesn't have to worry about that any more.


Here are some more denizens of the zoo. I'm probably getting carried away with the "poster-edge" filter, but I like the way it sharpens up things that are kinda soft-focus in the originals...... It does a good job of picking out the things that I think are the most important, and making them more prominent.

We had noticed that several primates had brown paper bags in their enclosures, but it wasn't until we got to the colobus monkeys that we saw the bags had (or had had!) popcorn and Cheerios in them. From the number of bags, I'm guessing that each individual was given her/his own bag of goodies.....




















Check out them eyelashes.....

another transformed snap

Here's another cropped, background-cleaned-up, "poster edge"ed pic. I like hiding the fences and other obvious human stuff......

editing

Over the last several years I've made a lot of artist trading cards, mostly by extreme editing of photos in National Geographic. I took that ATC-size 2.5"x3.5" frame, and picked out pieces of photos that I thought were interesting.

I believe I was misunderstanding copyright -- I thought that I owned *that copy* of that image, and could do whatever I wanted with that one copy. I knew I couldn't make copies of anything I made from that one original, but I thought I could use that one original however I chose. I now think that is not true, and my making something of a recognizeable piece of someone else's work is not ok. I'm not throwing out my binder of ATCs, but I won't be showing them anywhere or trading them, either......

Taking my own pics offers me the same opportunity to do extreme editing, and since my current pics are all digital, I can not only edit by cropping, as I did with the ATCs, I can go in and remove distractions, heighten contrast, etc, etc, etc.

I can take a very snap-shotty pic like this, and turn it into an image I think is actually rather interesting, like the one that follows......

I *LOVE* that I can do this. I love doing it. When I am working on pictures, I am late to dinner, and I don't hear people in the same room who talk to me. When I get up on a stormy morning, I resent the lightning that means it's really not a good idea to turn on the computer........ Wonder if there's a way to get people to pay me to do this...................

it depends......

Interesting, and scary, how different things look on different monitors..... The elephant, with and without saturated greens, looks quite different on my monitor at work than on my monitor at home.

I know it varies, of course, but as someone interested in putting images on screens, it's scary to think you work hard to get it "just right" and then, on another screen......

Sigh.

I've put up new versions of all three of these pics, since this morning.....

lion, um, well, zebra, tiger, and bear, oh my

I played some more with Photoshop Elements and my Toledo Zoo pics.

In addition to the sorts of things I did to the elephant's pic, Photoshop comes with myriad "filters" that you can apply to an image. Different filters seem to have the coolest effects with different images.....

Zebra -- cropped, background cleaned up, color de-saturated, watercolor filter applied.


















Tiger -- cropped, contrast increased, foreground improved, posterized.



















Bear -- cropped, background cleaned up, contrast upped, fresco filter applied.

web page, graphed

Isn't this cute?

When you go to http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/, it prompts you for a url. Then it parses the html on the page, and graphs the html tags it finds on that page. You watch the graph grow.... It's almost like watching pond scum under a microscope -- it continues to wiggle even after it's done growing. If you reload the grapher page, you'll see that the graph is shaped a bit differently every time, even for the same site.....

Thanks to Mason-Dixon Knitting for the link to the web page grapher.

This is a graph of this blog, from June 19, 2006:





















What do the colors mean?

blue: for links (the A tag)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

playing with my toys

Yesterday I messed around some more with pics I took at the Toledo Zoo. Here is one pic, pushed to the limit....

The original:

















Cropped, and note that I have dulled down the fence, which was too obtrusive.






















Now I've gotten rid of the fence entirely. I wrote over the fence with leaves.... This wouldn't work (or would have been a LOT harder) if the leaves were crisp. But as they are very soft-focus, it was do-able (though it took a while). I also got rid of that light area in the lower right corner.

In addition, I increased the contrast quite a lot.

I just love being able to mess with stuff like this. My end result is SO much less dependent on luck.........






















This is almost the same as the previous one, but I've lowered the saturation of the greens about 30%, to see if I like that better (showcasing the elephant more, and the leaves less).






















This one has the contrast pushed all the way up. I like it.























And here the saturation of greens and cyans has been lowered about 30%. I don't think I like this as well as the previous one........

rhinos

Once upon a time, when we had a little kid, we looked for books that were illustrated by Steven Kellogg. One that we read, over and over, was Appelard and Liverwurst, about a lost baby rhinosterwurst and his adventures.

I present to you the rhinosterwursts at the Toledo Zoo.






















It seems to me that this guy's horns must have sustained some sort of trauma -- malnutrition as a baby? I don't know. I've never seen horns like this, save on this guy (?). He stood posed like this for quite some time, allowing for many profile shots. I guess this is his good side.
















Rhinos and hippos both have such funny little ears. Such BIG critters, and such little ears.........

here there be dragons

The Toledo Zoo currently has an exhibit on dragons. We missed the beginning of it (which, I think, has mythical dragons, wrought of fiberglas), but saw the end, which had several different real critters with "dragon" in their names.

Had I realized the camera was choosing such a narrow depth of field, I'd have messed with the controls that would have let me choose a greater depth. Sigh. But aren't these leafy sea dragons incredible creatures? They were big, too. Eight to ten inches long, I bet. So here is a really-pretty-bad pic, to celebrate the diversity of life on our planet.

















Here is a much more satisfying image (though I suppose the depth of field could have been better in this one, too).

Generally speaking, when Steve Irwin starts talking about how gorgeous some reptile is, I can't quite see it. But there's something about this particular komodo dragon..... The color of the scales, the delicacy of the claws..... Isn't she gorgeous?

gorillas

As you will have gathered from previous posts, I am concerned about how well zoos do in giving their inhabitants reasonable places to live. The Toledo Zoo does its best to do a very good job indeed.

Still, when it comes to big primates, I wonder. I'm not sure they have space to evade our prying eyes. I *am* sure they are bored an awful lot of the time, despite the grass and the different levels and the things to play with and the food scattered around......

We are an awfully arrogant species. We stride across the planet, largely with no concern at all for the size of our footprints, or for anyone else who has gotten crushed as we go where we please, and take what we please. Those of us in the developed world have even more to answer for than your basic homo sap, as we use up energy at a prodigious rate (merrily polluting in every way), and amass more *stuff* than we could possibly use in multiple lifetimes.

Given how poorly we treat each other, it is no surprise that we treat non-humans badly, too.

Alas.

At least these gorillas are safe from poachers......
























The youngsters just look bored. This woman looks like an illustration for "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen." I wonder if she's thinking of lost family members, green jungles, a favorite food not tasted in many years.........

I wonder, if each of us took the bus a little more often, turned the a/c one notch warmer, the furnace one notch cooler, dried a load of clothes outside in the sun and wind, if we all chose a life that was a little less "convenient," would there be enough *more* so that those less fortunate could live a little better?

elephants

The little guy was born in Toledo, three years ago. He is still nursing. He is working on learning to get his health care taken care of in ways that are safe for his keepers and for him -- how to put his feet out where they can be examined and given pedicures, etc.

Not very many places are equipped to keep a full-grown African bull elephant. I hope they can find a super one for him, when it is time for him to leave the nest.

rose

We are slowly adjusting our habits to only two dogs. I promoted Buzz to eat in the Top Dog spot. He's been yelled at a lot over the last three weeks or so to *leave* any food in that spot (as Sophie was less and less able to eat, and more and more likely to walk away from food in her dish -- something she NEVER, EVER did when healthy). So it's a change for him, being allowed to eat food placed there. His dish has been in the corner where the stove abuts the counter with the sink in it, hence my eagerness to not have a dish just there, to trip over or stub my toe on while cooking.

It takes a while to get used to breaking the last piece of toast crust into two bits to share, rather than three..... I am still looking for Sophie to follow the boys to the door when we come home, and am still thinking I need to whisk her outside every few hours, and am still looking for her on the floor in the hallway when I get up at night (she was pretty much wood-floor color -- easy to run into in the dark, unless you were really careful).

She was an indefatigable retriever. It's nice to imagine she has found someone with a tireless arm to throw a tennis ball for her, forever. Good girl, Soph.


The Toledo Zoo has wonderful plantings as well as good habitat for its critters. The sun was bright when we were there -- hard to take un-washed-out pics. I stood so my shadow was over this rose.

Sophie

tiger

There were some serious reflections on the plexi between us and the tigers. Photoshop (Elements) did some magic (auto quick fix) to remove much of the effect of the reflections.

penguin

This has to be one of the older penguin tanks in the country that allows underwater viewing. This was the only penguin in the water that day, so there wasn't much to see from underneath. Not to mention all the algae made it hard to see very far under water!

This is obviously an outdoor tank. The Detroit zoo has a big and elaborate habitat for cold-weather penguins. A few penguins actually live in warm weather, and can tolerate a temperate summer.

I like the way you can see the wake building in front of the penguin. I never thought about an ordinary-sized critter creating a noticeable wake, moving through the water, until one time I watched my daughter during her swim lesson. It was a revelation to me, how much the water moved out of the way as she cut through the water with fins on her feet. Swimmers going at speed don't need to turn their heads as far to breathe as you might think, because their passage through the water lowers the surface of the water just next to their heads. Who knew.

barriers

When one does one's "nature" photography in a zoo, one must contend with barriers. Fences. Netting. Plexiglas. Auto-focus cameras like to focus on nice crisp lines (mine *loved* the zebras), so are apt to focus on the fence, rather than on the critter.

Reflection on the plexi can ruin your shot, with pics that show random bystanders in the reflection more clearly than the tigers you were aiming at. I'm sure there is a comment there, on how people are overwhelming the tigers' world..... But I wasn't trying for political commentary; I just wanted tiger pics....

Anyway.

For the first time, I managed to get the manual focus to do what I thought it should do (before, I'd been trying it for macro type stuff, and I think it just doesn't work in that close-up context).

You can see the fence in this pic, but (imh) it doesn't ruin the shot....

veldt

I love zebras. Such outlandish stripes.

I grayed down the grass in this pic, as I didn't want the green interfering with the monochromatic vibe I was looking for.

The reality of the enclosure can be much better seen in the second pic. I always think that if herbivores have plenty of grass growing in their space, they are beginning to have enough room. This enclosure is big enough that giraffes can *run*. We had never seen giraffes run before Sunday, but two of them ran through this enclosure while we watched. Cool.

polar bears

The Toledo Zoo has done well by its polar bears for a long time. They used to have a big tank, and I have slides from many moons ago of twin cubs playing in the water. Now they have an even bigger tank, with underwater viewing for the people. Excellent.

On Sunday the bears were mostly hanging around, snoozing or just keeping an eye on things. While it's cool to see them do stuff, it's easier to get nice clear pics when they are still.

















What you can't tell from this next pic is how BIG that foot is. About 12" across, is how big. Enormous.....

you can't blog a stink

It's probably a good thing that you can't blog a stink. (Though it would be nice if the food bloggers could post the smell of their freshly baked bread, or their hot-from-the-oven rhubarb pie. Or maybe not.... I get hungry enough just looking at the pictures....)

Wilbur Gilbert got himself skunked, Sunday night. Alas.

Of the five dogs who have lived in this house with us, he is the ONLY one to ever get skunked, and this is his third time! (We live in a 50-year-old suburban neighborhood. There is a woodsy ravine two blocks from our house, and a large park, also with woods, about a quarter mile in the other direction. I don't know if the skunks live right here, or if they travel......)

Wilbur is one of the brighter dogs we've had, but this particular issue seems to do him in..... Perhaps it's his houndy heritage....... Sigh.

The last two times weren't too bad. I'm told that baby skunks don't smell as bad as adults, so maybe the first two times were babies. This time is Bad. It seems that I can smell skunk all over the house (except the kitchen, which currently has a bouquet of peonies). It's worst in the bathtub where Bert was drenched in Nature's Miracle skunk remover, and then bathed.

He doesn't smell too bad, now, considering, but there are clearly some parts of him that I didn't soak down as thoroughly as necessary in the skunk-off. His corgi brother managed to get a little on him, but Buzz wasn't just *broadcasting* stink the way Burt was.

Sigh.


There are lots of stinks at the zoo, too, but since they don't come home and roost in my bathtub, I don't mind them at all. Here is one of the first critters we saw at the zoo on Sunday. I had never seen (or didn't notice, or forgot....) how a seal's hind flippers spread out, making a *big* webbed foot to push the water.

Modern zoos (with lots of plexiglas, huge water tanks, and underwater viewing spots) let us see things an ordinary person never could see in the wild. We can be closer to the animals, and we can see from viewpoints we could never take in the wild.

There are several seals in this tank. On Sunday, they were swimming back and forth. Most of them were belly up (yes, really, back and forth, belly up, who knows), but this big guy(?) was right-side up.

current technology

After I wrote yesterday's post, I sat thinking about how nice it is to be able to make my pictures better after the shutter has snapped back into place.

It's the same, of course, with a word-processor. In the olden times, actually producing the paper copy of your document was a (VERY) laborious and tiresome ordeal. It could take hours (and hours and hours, depending on the length of the item), it was annoying (remember the days before wite-out?), it was ... primitive.

I remember learning that I *dared* not mess with anything as I typed out my final copy. That any "improvements" I made would inevitably mess up something two or three paragraphs down.

Instead of spending our papers' final hours polishing and refining our writing, we spent those hours mindlessly pounding out hardcopy.

It makes me shudder, just thinking about it.

So much more sensible now, to begin with the writing in the computer, to spend the hours one spends on a paper on the *writing*, and let machines whip out the paper copy, essentially instantly.

Of course, with writing and photography, the end product benefits when the original material is interesting. Isn't it excellent, now, how much easier it is to polish up that original material into something that is significantly better than it started.


You'll recall me talking about how terrific the Toledo Zoo is. Yesterday my DH got the radical idea that we should make a spontaneous trip to the zoo. So we did. I got some really good pictures (did I say that I love my camera?????). This isn't one of the best, but it is a hippo, and since I was talking about the hippos before, I'll start with this..... The thing you can't see from this pic is that we were within 6-8 feet of this girl (with some *serious* plexiglass between).

modern photography

One of the many things I love about digital photography is how easy it is to improve pictures after they are taken. I do something to essentially every image, from cropping to major rearrangement of contents, colors, light/shadow, etc.

For a long time, I had thought about Photoshop, but the price is really out of sight. Then they offered us a subset -- Photoshop Elements. I bought it before I got my digital camera, and had used it a few times, but I've been using it heavily ever since I got the camera.

I love Elements. I am pretty much self-taught, though I did work through a "classroom in a book." I would find it impossibly restricting to go back to film and dependence on luck to get everything just right.

This image was cropped, and tilted (I must have tipped the camera sideways when I snapped the pic), and the jellies were all washed out, so I zipped them up. The owl's eye was a sort of distracting blue green, so I dulled that down.

I can remove dog hairs from most things, I can clean up splotches on windowsills, I can make purple swim warm-ups look PURPLE even when they photograph blue.... I am really IN CHARGE of my pictures, and I LOVE it.

pyre

A time has come that we know will come, however much we may dread its arrival.

I don't really know how this happened; I bought this machine, brand new. How can it be old? I don't know. But somehow it has gotten crankier and crankier over the years. From being totally reliable, it has become more and more cantankerous.

I've taken it in. $150 here, $250 there.............

Meanwhile, my sewing buddies are all raving about their new little cheap portable machines, loaded with features, less than $150................................

Yesterday I asked the old Viking to sew up a ripped-out seam on my sweat pants, and it would only go backward.

I am trying to make out the writing on the wall -- I think it says this machine is ready for its trip to Valhalla.

Alas.

Sophie

Here is the only canine member of our household you have not met. Sophie has always loved to fetch, more than anything, and still likes it, though she is not able to go as long as she would like. The spirit is willing.....

She was diagnosed with a hemagiosarcoma last Dec. 24, four days before she turned 14. Hemangiosarcomas are very aggressive. They told us "two months with ($1500-2500!) surgery, and two more months with chemo." For a 14-yr-old dog with some mobility issues, we declined the surgery.....

She is taking piroxicam every other day, and seems to be doing very well, considering everything.

We took her along when the boys had their annual checkups in March, just so the vet could see that she is doing well. She said Sophie is "defying gravity."

Soph's belly is bulgier and bulgier, as her tumor grows, and she has some days when she doesn't feel good at all, but then she rebounds and brings us a toy to throw so she can fetch it up. GO, girl!

Berts and Ernies

I am way too old to have watched Sesame Street as a kid (think Captain Kangaroo....). But I have watched LOTS of Sesame Street with my kid. I'm convinced that's where she learned her letters and numbers....

I think Children's Television Workshop does a terrific job of helping kids make sense of their world, in all sorts of different ways.

My mom gave my daughter the younger of these Berts, way back when she was little. The other Bert and both Ernies came from my favorite thrift store. The older B&E have actual fiber hair, rather than molded plastic. I note that they are not wearing stripes. Did they not wear stripes, in the early days?