All 1042 rows of it.

I’m not trying to brag, but that’s really, scary fast. Especially for a knitting novice like me.

Anyway, this is just a note to document the progress I’ve made before I scamper off to do the final steps. The scarf’s not quite done yet, still have to add the tassels and weave in some loose ends, but it’s very nearly finished. Should be complete by tomorrow, at which time I might have some pics for you all. Might.

Last night I ran out of the gray and tan yarns I was using. Unfortunate because I still had a stripe of each color left to knit and I’ll still need plenty more yarn for the scarf’s tassels. Those particular two yarns were also ones I got from a garage sale, which means when I obtained them they had no tags or bands to identify what brand/color/fiber content/anything they were. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t a great idea to use them in this project where I’d likely need more of the stuff than what I had.

However, as I only have about 100 or so rows left to knit, I couldn’t just give up. I set out with the 9/10ths-finished scarf wound about my neck (with the needle still in one end, ’twas a little awkward) to hunt for yarn.

Lucky for me, it turned out that the stuff was pretty common. (Or at least it’s very similar to the Paton’s “Classic Wool”-brand stuff I got.) I found it in the first place I looked and it was even on sale, 40% off. Huzzah!

Some of my friends have decided to do a group D&D cosplay and, as I’m always looking for excuses to make new costumes, I leapt aboard this crazy train and am determined to run it off the rails. Yes, it means I’m starting yet another ongoing project (up to four now), but it’ll be fun and give me an opportunity to finally use some fabrics that I’ve had lying about for far too long.

At the moment there are 11 of us in on the plan, with each going as a different class. I’m to be the party’s Sorcerer. This means flowing robes, voluminous sleeves, a dramatic hood, and more randomly dangling bits of cloth than you can shake a staff at. No spellbook though, that’s a wizard.

I’m currently in the design phase: Getting the basic ideas, looking through the garments I already have to see what I could reuse, doing a survey of the raw fabric I’ve got on hand, yada. It really boils down to me sitting on the floor alternating between staring intensely at piles of fabric and throwing pieces of said piles about the room at random before scribbling brief things in my notebook.

So far I’ve settled on a black and blue color scheme. Progress.

So, as you likely gathered from the post’s title, today’s been fairly odd. First, I had the day off so I spent it knitting and watching horror flicks. The juxtaposition was fun since I usually don’t link films like Shutter Island (which was good) with yarn. Demolition Man maybe, but beyond that, no.

Good news is with all that time spent knitting today I’m on row 494 of 1042 of the Doctor’s scarf. 47% complete in a little under two weeks, if I start the count from where I unraveled and restarted on the third. I call that… Pretty scary, actually.

For those who wonder, 47% of the Doctor’s scarf looks a little like this:

The other weird thing is this CD.

My dad found it in the CD player of a used car his dealership acquired and, as is tradition there, brought it home for me.

It’s quite an intriguing mystery. The disc has seven tracks of what sounds like really good homebrew techno not-quite covers/remixes of Metallica songs. The original songs are recognizable in each track, but only chunks of them. Whoever made this went and made entirely new songs, borrowing only select riffs. In order the tracks take:

1

2 – No clue. This one’s really tough to pin down.

3 –

4 –

5 –

6 –

7 –

The way the mixing’s done, these songs turn out sounding like Metallica’s greatest hits done in the style of the Tron Legacy soundtrack. (Movie wasn’t great, but the soundtrack was amazing.) I love it.

Try as I might (and I’ve been scouring the web and Youtube for info or sound-alikes for several hours now) I can’t find any trace of who might’ve made these songs; but, despite the mysterious circumstances of its arrival in my house and the off-chance that it may be cursed, I think this will become one of my favorite CDs.

Semi-related, if I were the teacher I’d have given this student extra credit for this answer.

A bit of directed attention and effort later, I had the garment broken down into individual panels (front, back, 2 arms) and began unraveling in earnest. Two days later, that sweater is now reduced to these fantastic little balls of string.

I like string…

The yarn is a 55% ramie, 45% cotton blend. Mostly black, as you can see, but I think there’s enough green there to do some interesting patterning. (Who am I kidding? It’ll be stripes.) Because this stuff seems fairly delicate I’m planning to make it into a light scarf, probably of crochet mesh. Hopefully a design like that won’t take too much wear or put undue stress on the material. Plus it’ll give me a chance to expand my repertoire.

If you’re interested in following along at home I found this excellent tutorial on dismantling sweaters to reclaim the yarn (After I had already finished doing it on my own…) and this similarly outstanding tutorial on winding center-pull yarn balls.

A word about the ball-winding tutorial: It’s good, but I found that using your thumb to hold the ball’s shape as you wind was really inconvenient. Instead I used a stick that my little brother turned for me as a core to wind around, like so. (You could easily substitute a knitting needle for my stick, or a pencil. Anything of a like shape and size.)

Doing it this way allowed me to put the ball down in the middle of winding and use both hands to unravel the sweater. (I worked directly from sweater to ball.) ‘Twas much more pleasant.

The next step is to find out how troublesome or not this yarn is to work with. I think it’ll be all right. Good luck to everyone planning to try this yourselves!

Reblogged from The Daily Geekbit:

Hard to believe it’s been three years already! Since what you ask? Since the Copyright office and the Librarian of Congress met to grant the last round of “fair-use” exemptions to the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). These are the same exemptions that allow you to root (or jail break) your phone, tablet, game machine, etc… legally. I feel that if I have purchased the hardware, its mine to do with as I choose. Not because I want to pirate the world, but because its my phone. If I want to …

People often don’t understand just how important protecting consumer rights is. Take a moment to check this out.

The trip to the yarn shop in town was fun though. It’s a little independent place and, as such, has a way better selection of colors than the chain stores can offer. (Which is good because the Doc’s scarf requires muted, muddy colors that I never see at the big craft franchises.) The staff are excellent too. Good people in that shop.

And here they are, my new skeins! Like a reversed traffic light…

I’ll likely use all of this and need to buy more at some point, but I’m fine with that. All three are 50% acrylic, 40% wool, and 10% nylon so while I wouldn’t risk machine washing this bad boy once it’s finished, I theoretically have the option.

In other scarf news, I’ve noticed that with 41 stitches in each row (must’ve accidentally introduced an extra stitch somewhere) the scarf is pretty wide, about 10″ actually. I’m worried that if I continue at this width it’ll be too cumbersome to use when I finally finish it, as I’m fairly small and at approximately 11′ long it’ll already be plenty tricky to wear.

My plan is to unravel what I’ve got now (all 73 rows…) and re-knit it with each row having only 30 stitches. If I do that the scarf should end up being about 7″ wide and perfectly useable. I’ll also save time, work, and yarn in the long run. Huzzah! (That’s right, keep a positive outlook…)

Addendum: It’s been about three hours since I first posted this and in that time I’ve unraveled and completely re-knit the scarf to the point it was at before. How, I don’t know, as it took me several weeks to get that much done the first time around. I suspect it may have something to do with removing a fourth of the work (730 stitches) from the equation. Who would’ve guessed?

In fact, I’ve begun a fairly involved project. Not complex by any definition of the word, but certainly labor-intensive. My current project is that singular accessory that every crafty sci-fi nerd worth their salt is all but required to at least attempt to make. That’s right, I’m making the Fourth Doctor’s scarf.

Not the most original project, I know. Everybody and their grandmas have made this scarf. (Hm, in this case the ‘grandma’ bit is likely the truth for once.)  There’s even a website that provides free, accurate patterns for the different scarves from each season. (Yes, there are slight changes.) But I don’t care. That scarf is awesome and I want one, so make one I will.

It’ll probably take me a really long time though, if I know myself at all… But at the end I’ll have a scarf. Scarves are cool.

While I didn’t buy much, I got some nice things: A leather Coach bag in need of moderate restoration (Just $5, score!), some old leather belts and a gray linen dress for the materials, and four teacups.

One with ducks.

One with mushrooms. (Makes me think ‘hobbit.’)

An artisan-made one that’s more like a yunomi.

And a nice porcelain one covered in bamboo and calligraphy. It also has a lid.

That last one is way nicer than the cups I usually use for my tea. (My general view on pricey teaware is that it’s pretty, but a waste. Any cup will do as long as it holds liquid, so my money should be spent on good-quality tea leaves instead.) However, these four cups together set me back just $2, so I can dig it.

Lesson learned: Rummage sales require some, well, rummaging to find the good stuff, but are absolutely worth the effort.

And while I’m in accruing-stuff-at-shamefully-low-cost mode, I made a trip to the Salvation Army today and found that they were having a ’10 for $5′ sale. (Gather 10 items with tags of the specified color and you get them all for $5, regardless of what they were previously priced at.) This means that there are now 17 cotton sweaters downstairs waiting for me to unravel them and use the reclaimed yarn for projects.

I guess this means there’ll be some knitting/crocheting/weaving projects in the near future.

This handy-dandy chart shows you how to identify the fiber content of fabric via a burn test, which is exactly what it sounds like. You take a small sample of the material in question, light it on fire, then observe how it burns and examine the ashes to figure out what it was. Since different fibers burn/melt/don’t burn in telling ways, you can usually come to a fairly accurate conclusion as to fiber content.

That image is really all you need, but a full tutorial can be found here.

Also, here are the two quilts I finished back around Thanksgiving. Would’ve shown them off earlier, but I didn’t get a good opportunity to photograph them until recently due to nearly constant rain and other miserable meteorological occurrences throughout December.

My Tents of Armageddon quilt, front and back.

And my Gee’s Bend-inspired Multi-Housetop that was Phase Three of my stash busting campaign.

I’m quite happy with how they turned out.

Also, note the gnomes. It was a very windy day when I took these photos, so the gnomes were useful weights to hold the quilts down and steady (they’re made of cast iron and concrete respectively). Thing is, I have no idea where they’re from or how they came to be in my yard. It’s a little unsettling.

ADDENDUM: I’d like to thank Generation Q and Modern Day Quilts for picking this as their post of the week and featured quilt of the day respectively. I really appreciate it!

Also, for those who were wondering, I looked into the mystery of the gnomes and finally got some answers. It appears the little blighters belong to my mother, who set them up around the house to mess with me. (Thanks mum. Love you too.) Cuts down on the mystery, but when it involves something as sinister as garden gnomes I must admit I prefer knowing it’s an impish prank and not an invasion of malicious tchotchkies.

Making colored fire is easy. In fact, it’s basically throwing chemicals onto the flames. Not just any chemicals, mind you, as random chemicals will more likely than not create horribly toxic vapors without any noticeable change in the fire’s color. (Even worse than sustaining liver damage is doing so and not even getting a good lightshow out of it.) However, there are a whole host of chemicals, mostly metal salts, that are well-known in the field of pyrotechnics for the dramatic colors they create when burned. Some are hard to come by, like strontium chloride (SrCl₂) and potassium nitrate (KNO₃), but many are common household chemicals like calcium chloride (CaCl₂, road salt) and boric acid (H₃BO₃, a disinfectant).

Before I start listing them off though, there’s science to be done. Let’s talk about why burning metal salts make pretty colors.

The phenomenon at work here is a chemical property called the ‘bright line emission spectrum’ (sometimes just ‘emission spectrum’), that is created by activity within an atom’s electron cloud.

We know that molecules are made up of atoms, and that individual atoms are made up of (usually) equal numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons. (Unequal amount of the three cause things like isotopes and ions, but that’s a story for another day.) The protons and neutrons from the nucleus of the atom and account for most of its mass while the electrons orbit them in semi-determined areas/paths (it’s wibbly) called, surprise surprise, electron orbitals. These orbitals are what we’re interested in at the mo.

Electrons, in addition to their negative charge, carry a certain amount of energy that determines what orbital they’ll stay in. The closer to the nucleus an orbital is, the lower energy it is. The further an orbital is from the nucleus, the more energy an electron needs to stay in it.

The order of electrons expanding out from the nucleus is: 1s, 2s, 2p, 2p, 2p, 3s, 3p, 3p, 3p, 3d, 3d, 3d, 3d, 3d, 4s, 4p, 4p, 4p, 4d, 4d, 4d, 4d, 4d, 4f, 4f, 4f, 4f, 4f, 4f, 4f, 5s… ad nauseum.

The letter s, p, d, or f refers to the shape of the orbital (spherical, hourglass, clover leaf, or ‘Oh god, what is that?!’ respectively) while the number denotes what electron shell the orbital is located in. The higher the number, the higher the energy.

Because low-energy states are more stable, an atom’s electrons will fill its innermost orbitals first. This means that smaller elements like oxygen, having 8 electrons, will fill its most central s and p orbitals and stop when it runs out of electrons instead of storing them in the higher-energy d and f orbitals far out from the nucleus.

A more massive atom like, say, good old uranium which has 92 electrons will fill up far more orbitals simply because it has more electrons that need to be stored somewhere. For example, oxygen fills only the 1s to second 2p orbitals while uranium fills all the orbitals from 1s to 7s.

The thing is, even if an orbital isn’t occupied by electrons at the moment it’s still there, just vacant. Oxygen may not use its 8f orbitals, but it does still have seven of them. This is an important concept because, if given enough energy, electrons can jump between their home orbitals and higher energy orbitals.

They’ll stay in the new orbital for a short time (fractions of seconds) before falling back to their original position. When they make that return trip, the extra energy they absorbed in order to jump up in the first place is emitted in the form of a photon. The wavelength, and thus color, of the photon emitted depends on how far the electron jumped between orbitals. (Did it jump a single orbital? A shell? Two shells?) A greater distance requires more energy and will release a photon with a shorter wavelength.

When viewed through diffraction grating the photons emitted by all of an atom’s electrons jumping and falling at once produce a specific pattern of colored lines, called a bright line emission spectrum, which is unique to each element and can be used as a form of identification when trying to analyze chemical compounds.

Right about now all this info should be starting to coalesce into a nice, big, wibbly-wobbly ball of science in your mind.

When you burn metal salts in a campfire, you’re providing those chemicals’ electrons with massive amount of energy, causing them to begin wildly jumping and falling between electron orbitals. All that activity unleashes burst after burst of photons which are the lovely colors we see. The different colors produced by each chemical are derived from the brightest band in their emission spectrum, which is determined by the unique way their electrons jump. Makes sense, no?

Now, I’m obliged to say that because this project involves burning metals, which can create very nasty fumes, do this outside. Ventilation is important here because damage to one’s major organs is not fun. You should be fine as long as you’re outdoors and don’t go out of your way to inhale large quantities of smoke. (Even with a plain old wood fire that’s bad.)

This concludes the educational segment of today’s program. Let’s burn things.

The most commonly used chemicals (called ‘colorants’ in this application) are salts, which are most commonly compounds of a metal ion and halogen. Since compounds of this sort are usually very biologically active (read: toxic) you can find many of them among your normal household chemicals as disinfectants, anti-fungal agents, herbicides, ect. (Can you see why you don’t want to breathe the fumes?)

Taking it from the top of the spectrum (or bottom, depending on whether you’re talking about frequency or wavelength), here are the most common, effective, and least toxic colorants needed to make…

Red fire:

Strontium-containing chemicals like strontium chloride (SrCl) and strontium nitrate (Sr(NO₃)₂) produce a bright red flame. SrCl₂ is a little difficult to come by, but Sr(NO₃)₂ can be obtained from road flares if you’re careful.

Orange fire:

Calcium chloride (CaCl₂), aka road salt, is common, cheap, and will produce a strong orange flame. Just be sure to read the label on your salt carefully and make sure it’s CaCl₂ and not some other chemical before casting it in.

Yellow Fire:

Normal wood fires are already yellow, but I’d adding this for completion’s sake. Every day table salt, sodium chloride (NaCl), will make your soup saltier and your yellow fires yellower.

A lighter green fire can be made by adding borax to the mix.

Green fire:

To make a vivid green flame, use boric acid, a common insecticide and disinfectant that can be found at the pharmacy. (I like this one best.)

Blue fire:

This is in some ways the easiest color to produce and the hardest in others. One way to make a strong blue fire is simply to burn a fuel other than wood. Alcohols of all sorts (methanol, ethanol, isopropyl, ect.) all burn with a blue flame on their own. No need for colorants.

The harder way is using copper chloride (CuCl). The main problem with this is that CuCl isn’t widely available. Your options in getting it essentially boil down to ordering some from a chemical supplier or making your own by dissolving copper bits, likely wire, in muriatic (hydrochloric) acid (HCl), which is a messy and dangerous reaction that you should probably avoid all together.

Your next best bet is just throwing copper wire or powder into the fire. You could also use copper (II) sulfate (CuSO₄), which is a combination fungicide/pesticide and can sometimes be found at gardening and pool supply stores. The only thing is that it burns more blue-green than straight blue.

Sorry, no indigo fire. Yet.

Violet fire

To get purple fire, just toss on potassium compounds. A good choice is potassium chloride (KCl), which is sold as a substitute for regular table salt for people who are on a low-sodium diet and is readily available at the grocery store. Note, it’s not ‘low-sodium’ salt. That’s something else entirely. Failing that, you can always throw on bananas. They’re chock full of potassium.

Now, the only question left is that of a delivery system. How exactly are you going to get your colorant into the fire to be burned?

Sure, you could just throw the raw chemicals on in a powdered or chunked form, that’s obvious (If you do, wear gloves. A lot of those compounds are toxic and can be absorbed through the skin.), but there are other options available as well.

One is you can soak porous materials (pinecones, sawdust, natural fiber fabrics, paper, wood, ect.) in a solution of the colorant then allow the items to dry. When they burn in a fire they’ll carry the colorant they’re saturated with along for the ride.

Another, slightly more hazardous method involves dissolving the colorants in alcohol and using a spray bottle to spritz the mix onto the fire. (Careful with this one.)

However you decide to do it, have fun, enjoy the show, and don’t light yourself on fire. Have at it!

A fire starter is a piece of highly flammable material, often a mixture of wood products and wax, that you can easily set aflame with a lighter or other convenient fire source, such as a torch or flamethrower. The idea being that, instead of fiddling around trying to start the kindling with your lighter, you can just toss this burning ball of stuff onto it and let that do the work for you. There are a lot of ways to make them, usually on the cheap with materials the rest of the world considers trash (old candle stubs, dryer lint, sawdust, cotton rags, ect.), but as long as the end product burns reliably, it’ll do.

This time around I have but one tutorial for you all. I found tons, but this is the only one I felt like passing along:

Waterproof Dryer Lint Fire-Starter

It stood out to me because not only is it well-written, the finished product actually looks cool, especially when compared to the normal designs you see for fire starters where they’re just a big, waxy mess of sawdust in a cup. These are rather elegant.

After seeing that tutorial, I had to make some. The fact that we’d run out of eggs so I had an empty carton on hand and that I’d yet to put my wax supplies away so it was convenient had nothing to do with my decision. I swear.

These are my dozen that I whipped up yesterday before work.

I had a fun time convincing my family that they weren’t actually candy and should not be eaten. To their credit, the wax I used does look a bit like icing from a distance. Kinda.

While I followed the tutorial for the most part, I did make a few changes for safety and convenience. The big one is I didn’t use dryer lint as my flammable stuffing. I’m normally not in the habit of saving my dryer lint, so I didn’t have any on hand (convenience). Even if I did have some, with the way my laundry’s done I would really have no clue how much of that lint is natural fiber and how much is synthetic (safety). Breathing fumes from burning plastic is not high on my list of hobbies, so I decided to substitute a few ingredients for the sake of my lungs instead of risk it.

Instead of lint I used cotton, linen, and hemp threads that I got from picking apart fabric scraps left over from my various sewing projects. It took me about a half hour to pull apart an amount of fabric about equal to the collar of a man’s dress shirt. That plus about twelve feet of cotton twine was plenty of fluffy flammable stuff to put inside the starters.

The green is cotton, the bits of blue and white are the linen below it, and below that is the hemp and cotton twine.

My other change was that, instead of cutting it off close, I left a bit of the string I used when dipping the starters in the wax intact to serve as a wick/fuse when lighting them. Figured it might help speed things up by providing a smaller portion of mass to heat at once. (Small amounts of mass require less energy to warm up and thus less energy to start on fire. That means a lighter shouldn’t have to be held on them as long if I’ve got the wick.) Unfortunately I won’t be able to test my hypothesis until the next time I need to start a fire, tsk.

1. My little brother used most of the firewood during his birthday bonfire. (Which I don’t begrudge him in the slightest. Happy b-day, bro!)
2. The wood we have left is wet because it’s been raining. In December/January. (That’s got me upset.)
3. I’ve been unable to secure a burning permit, which means doing this in the daylight so I can get good photos will end with the fire department showing up in my driveway and giving me a stern talking to. And maybe a fine.

So, instead of me personally erecting and immolating a pile of wood for your edification, I’ve found you a lovely library of videos on the subject from the web. They’ll do a better job demonstrating how-to than I would anyway.

These are all the videos that a search of “campfire” on The Expert Village’s Youtube channel turned up. I didn’t watch them all, as there are quite a few. (197 at the time.)

This playlist has fifteen videos covering basic skills and info on sound campfire building. These I did watch and they’re not bad. The guy doing the demonstration is a little awkward, but he knows what he’s talking about.

This playlist is full of similar stuff, but a little more in-depth and with more of a focus on being low-impact. I.e. not scorching the earth with your campfire when you’re out in the woods and, if possible, leaving no trace of you having camped in a spot.

(Note: These videos are for building campfires. Key word there is ‘camp.’ This is what you do when you’ve planned to be outside roughing it and have brought all the supplies you’ll need to build, light, burn, and cook safely. They’re not meant to demonstrate what to do in a survival situation.)

I’ve also gone out and found several videos of what not to do when lighting a campfire. For example:

Do not stand downhill of a fire you’re using gasoline to light. (You can stop watching after the first five seconds.)

In fact, just avoid gasoline. (The demonstrative part is at 1:14.)

But if you must, at least keep your wits about you and make it look cool when something goes wrong. ( I would have used the original video, but it’s apparently age restricted for reasons unknown to me.)

Not sure how much wit was actually involved, but he acted quickly, didn’t splash anyone with burning gas, and I must admit that trails of fire look cool.

Now, because he’s a rad dude, my little bro wanted me to share this picture from his bonfire with all of you to show that, while I constantly point out possible risks and warn about safety, we do some dumb, dangerous things too.

Let me ask you this: Have any of you ever thrown several fistfuls of fine sawdust on a fire?

We have.

A normal handful will make a fire flare, but that level of… Bigness was achieved through well-organized teamwork. When the fire was already going strong, my bro and his friends threw on a large load of dry pine branches to make the fire flare up. At which point they simultaneously threw handfuls of coarse and fine sawdust into the fire from all sides. Note that they moved everything (chairs, tables, snacks, ect.) way back from the fire circle so they had escape routes in case things went south.

Now, I’m the first to admit that that’s a dangerous trick for the throwers and everyone else around the fire. Anything that makes a fire get that big almost instantly is bad news safety-wise, but that didn’t stop it from being fun.

I guess what we’re trying to say is that it’s okay to do dumb things as long as you’ve thought about what you’re planning and have taken the necessary precautions to prevent dumb from becoming a Darwin Award.

On that note, watch those videos, be smart about being dumb (which is to say safe and prepared), and have fun roasting some marshmallows. (Or just eating the chocolate for the s’mores and then having a marshmallow fight like we usually do. With us the best laid plans for snacks and chow always go awry.)