Marching Penguins Border Pattern

A non-curling border that combines linen stitch and seed stitch. Designed to especially suit chunky yarns. I have included the chart and index. If knitting in round, omit the last column and knit this up over multiple of two stitches.

I used cable cast on for the swatch in picture. When you join it in the round, you see purl bumps on the outside. I used this row as the very first row of the border to give an added decorative edge.

Somebody tame the web!

Among my most propelling reasons to launch and maintain my blog was this: web-logging had caught on like a blaze, empowering everybody with a very simple, yet powerful publishing tool. RSS was the hip thing. I wanted to engage in this community and find out first hand what it was all about. A blog is your personal story you want to share with anyone who'd care to listen - you piece the words, the images, the videos and tell a story. Despite the anarchy and consternation it created in the formal publishing world, this was the last that the voice of the web would be this coherent.

XML feed - a standardized presentation of data - is the foundation of this technology. So regardless of blogspot or typepad or wordpress or your own private installation, everyone can subscribe to everyone else's blogs. One other technology that bloggers need to thank: the browser. Its what made access to your blog platform-agnostic.

Multiple changes have coincided since then:
1. the collective amorphous voice of the web is less interested in writing a story and more in sharing raw data in real time
2. the 'cloud' has developed a gluttonous appetite to absorb data
3. the web has long grown out of the browser and into mobile apps
4. walled gardens have set up camp and very successfully too

The result? Crazy s***load of data pushed into the cloud every day. This is not too bad really. What the web is struggling with currently is fragmentation. And that's directly influenced by 3 and 4 above.

You can upload videos in youtube or presentations in slideshare etc. And even though you're using different services, you have the power to stitch them all together, any which way you like by embedding links or scripts into your html. Not so with walled gardens - the most famous one being FB. Interestingly, FB exploits the open access of the web (eg: those ubiquitous 'like' buttons in non-FB parts of the web) while guarding studiously its own space from external services.

Mobile apps have created a different problem altogether. iTunes - another walled garden - is the platform that created mobile apps. Mobile apps are inherently platform dependent. Your total available reader-base is limited by the platform on which the app runs on.

The web today is fragmented. The question is 'so what?'. So what if the basic tenets of the 'world wide web' and its courier service, the lowly browser have been challenged?
1. The online audience is now fragmented. It was that you could publish at http://www and potentially get visited by everybody with network connectivity. Not anymore. You may be online but not logged into specific online platform. You may be online but on a specific mobile device. If you now yearn for the 'global presence' that once used to be served with a simple domain installation, here's your minimum investment:
a. website b. facebook page c. twitter account d. mobile apps - atleast one for apple and another for android (and I won't even get into the various flavors of android)

That's minimum. If you're a knitter and selling patterns, you gotta be on ravelry.

The other add-ons would be a 'channel' on youtube to publish videos, podcasts (the personal radio channel - are they still alive?), etsy or other marketplaces (if you're selling things), HP's magcloud (if you're selling pdfs), betterfly (if you're selling instructional classes). This is just to give you a taste of things. I do not claim to know all the individual services available out there. Point is, there are way many and way too scattered.

2. Along these lines, one quickly starts seeing the effort in managing a coherent, visible and dynamic online presence. Apps are clearly for the big players but even between publishing on your website, and re-publishing on every credible closed platform, that's a lot of re-work. And with how frequently the web expects to get refresh data, that's a load of work.

3. That was the publishing entity's story. But what about the consumer? Researching information online is turning into black art. A very important section of the internet may be completely hidden in your blind spot and you will never know.

4. Finally, fragmentation of a single user's cyber presence.

In all this, I haven't even touched upon google gadgets and facebook apps. Neither those 234 buttons to share, tag and bookmark links.

Google's search is not good enough anymore. RSS aggregators are old news. The new problems need 2 unified platforms:
1. one to publish
2. another to consume

Life would be simple again!

Conjoined i-cord - New Technique

Knit 2 i-cords (of different colored yarn for better effect) side-by-side on a dpn, and twist the yarn once every row. What you get is a perfect join between 2 i-cords.



This creates a double-width i-cord while keeping structural integrity and allowing for multiple colors. Here is an example of how you can use it.

String of Blooms Scarf

Yarn:
Hand-painted 100% pima cotton picked up from Oakland TKGA 2006. This one has made several appearances on my blog: here, here and here.
The second yarn is also a 100% pima cotton I picked up from michaels, a dusty red. I had used it to make this.

Needles:
DPNs - the size of your choice

Abbreviations:
C1: color 1
C2: color 2
DPN: double pointed needle

Skill required: i-cord

Knitty's Nagano Sakura has been haunting my knit-thoughts over the years. That scarf is as much art as it is a wearable. I just couldn't get to make it though. I finally figured why: it is a felted scarf but useless as warm-wear. Perfect for Summer in its styling but not so much in its construction. String of Blooms solves these issues with a new method of creating attached i-cords instead of felting a stockinette strip.

Cast on 3 stitches of C1 and knit about 5 inches of i-cord. On a different dpn, cast on 3 stitches with C2 and knit 8 inches of i-cord. Slip the live stitches of this second i-cord on the same needle as the C1 i-cord alongside, with the same orientation.
Row 1: twist the 2 yarns, knit first 3 stitches continuing in i-cord with first yarn; knit next 3 stitches with second yarn, making sure you tug at the twist so there is no slack.
Continue knitting this row until required length (about 50 inches)

For a tutorial on this method of making conjoined i-cord, read further here.

Now slip the first 3 to a different dpn and knit the 2 i-cords separately for another 5-10 inches and bind off.

Knit a few flowers and attach. I'll write a separate post on different styles of making knitted flowers.

Green Pig (Angry Birds)

Now my Angry Birds series is complete.

Red Delicious and Granny Smith

Apples. Each took about an hour of work from start to finish.