As assignments have started piling up with the semester nearing its end, I have started stress knitting, as always. This time around there is a strict theme to what I’m knitting, it is all Totoro related. First I tried to knit this Totoro hat, but I ran out of yarn at the very end. It was a yarn from my stash, that I had bought a long time ago and couldn’t get any more of.

After that failed, I made the mistake of typing Totoro into the pattern search in Ravelry. First I contemplated knitting these Totoro mittens, because mittens are one of my absolute favourite things to knit, but then while going through the rest of the pattern designer, Brella,’s patterns I saw her Chibi Totoro pattern. I had the right yarn in my stash, and the right needles, the only logical thing to do was knit two in one day and completely neglect the big projects I should be working on.

First I made one on a set of 4mm DPNs.

Unstuffed 4mm Totoro

Then I stuffed him with polyester fluff.

4mm Totoro after stuffing

Then I gave him a face. His eyes are lopsided, but I somehow like them. He reminds me of the Totoros in the border of the opening titles of the film.

4mm Totoro with eyes

I think the reason he’s such a strange, but somehow lovely, shape is because I think I skipped the part of the pattern where rows 8-13 were supposed to be knit all stitches. I’m not sure though.

I also made one on 2.25mm needles. Here he is.

Smaller Chibi Totoro

I had never made a bobble while knitting before this pattern, and I’m quite impressed with the method. It’s a bit magic-y.

Bobble tail on the 2.25mm Totoro

Any other fans of the film who want to be mildly traumatised should look at this theory on the meaning of the film.

To combat boredom while sitting around doing nothing I decided to try out one of the patterns called It Cannot Fail to Please.

copyright © arbour house publishing

Some quick specs for anyone interested. I used a single set of 2.0mm straight needles, rather than one set of 2.25mm and one set of 3.25 because when I tried those it was far too large. And I  used seven skeins of Melanie Wolle Sport & Strumpfwolle Klassik in a green colour.

This project has been a see-saw of hellish proportions since I started on the 24th of July. I was almost finished with the back a few days after starting,  but as usual I was too lazy to make a test swatch of the pattern, the English word for which I can’t remember at the moment. Once I was a two thirds of the way in I realised that my knitting was already twice the size of the final dimensions of the largest size. I undid everything.

I started again, and this time did make a test swatch of the pattern on 2.0mm needles that was still too big, but only by a small amount. My mum, a knitting goddess, then looked over the pattern for me, and said there was no way that the medium size was going to be big enough, and that I should be knitting a large. So when I cast on again, I knitted the large size. She later asked me why I was knitting the large size, when the medium looked more my size. So now I have a huge jumper.

Pattern swatch

There are a reasonable number of mistakes in the modern pattern, but most of them are so obvious that I caught then right away, and they were correct on the original pattern, so it really isn’t a big deal. Outside of the sleeves which I think are fine if you’re knitting the original, smallest, size, but at least for the large size didn’t always make sense. Again, it was fairly easy once I got the hang of the pattern to fix up the mistakes.

Because of the lace pattern, I want to make sure to block this before I make it up. This means I’ll have to wait until I get my pins out of storage on the 8th of September before I can put it together. I’ll update on this project again once it’s finished, unless something huge happens.

Until then, here are some photos of the finished pieces waiting to be blocked. I never trust that blocking will make the pattern look like it should, even though logically I know it will, I’m still afraid that it will look like it does now when I’m finished. Rather than the leaves.

Sleeve

Front

There is a fun stitch I hadn’t seen before used in this pattern: purl twice into a stitch. It involves first purling into the front, but leaving the stitch on the left needle, then purling into the back of the same stitch, then completing the stitch.

For my father’s birthday party, my mum and I cooked a lot of traditional Austrian cold dishes and a cake. The cake is one of my dad’s favourites, probably because it has a ridiculous amount of rum in it.

So here we go, I don’t know who to credit for this since it’s one of my mum’s hand written recipes, which she got from her mum, who probably got it out of a newspaper or magazine. The only thing I’ve done is translate it into English, and added a tonne more rum because the amount in the recipe would only have worked for about five lady fingers.

Ingredients

3 boxes of lady finger biscuits
1/4 litres milk
2 table spoons flour
200 grams margarine
200 grams powdered sugar
A bottle of rum, preferably dark (you’ll probably use about 1/4 Litre)
1 packet of vanilla sugar (or a table spoon of vanilla extract)
3 egg yokes
100 grams ground nuts (I used almonds, but hazelnuts are also very nice)
whipped cream (make it yourself, from a can, whatever you like)

Instructions

Combine the milk and flour in a saucepan, stir with a wooden spoon over low-medium heat. Once it looks like the photo, transfer it into a bowl and set it in the refrigerator to cool.

Place the margarine in a large bowl, beat until fluffy. Continue beating while adding powdered sugar and ground nuts a little at a time. Once this is well combined, the flour-milk mixture will have cooled. Add this one or two spoonfuls at a time while beating. Set aside.

Open the packet of lady fingers and get out a spring form cake mould. Get a shallow, wide bowl and pour some rum in. Look at the height of your spring form, and cut some lady fingers to just above that height. Dunk the lady fingers one at a time in the rum. Dunk the side that isn’t coated in sugar, but it’s not a tragedy if you dunk the sugared side.

Line them up on the inside of the mould along the circumference. With some more lady fingers, line them up on the bottom of the mould after dunking them in an attempt to cover the entire base. You will end up cutting some of them to fit.

Pour about half of the batter into the form over the lady finger base. Smooth it out so it covers the base evenly. Now cover this in another layer of lady fingers, placing them rum side up and perpendicular to the ones on the base layer, otherwise you run the risk of your cake falling apart.

Follow this with the other half of the batter.

Next the final layer of lady fingers, rum side up and perpendicular to the middle layer, and parallel to the base layer.

The cake tastes better if you let it sit in the refrigerator for a day before serving it, but it’s your choice. If you plan on refrigerating for a day, place something like a plate over the top layer of lady fingers to put a bit of weight on them.

Soon before serving cover the top with whipped cream. I also grated some chocolate over that when it was done.

edit sorry about the photos, I couldn’t get the regular uploader to work in the way that I’m now accessing the blog. I may fix them once I get out of China.

The recipe I eventually ended up using was a mixture of all the different ones I’d come across on google. Or the ingredients were anyway, the process I took mainly from HOLY SHITAKE except I steamed the dumplings rather than steam-fried them.

Alas, there are no photos since I waited too long afterwards to think about taking pictures, and by that time they were all eaten

So on to how I made them. Be forewarned this was ridiculously time-consuming without a food processor and being one person. With an assembly line and a food processor I’m sure I’d be much faster.

Also, if you can’t find dumplings wrappers, you can make your own, but from what I hear it’s very messy and are prone to fall apart if you’re not a pro dumpling maker, so I decided use store bought ones. I’m glad I did since that would just add more time.

Recipe (makes about 50)

Ingredients

• 500g Soft Tofu finely diced
• 1 head Napa Cabbage
• 1 tablespoon grated ginger
• 2 tablespoons water
• 2 scallions
• 4 tablespoons soy sauce
• 1/2 cup shitake mushrooms
• 2 teaspoons sesame oil
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 vegetable stock cubes
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 2 packets of dumpling wrappers

Method : (Taken mostly from HOLY SHITAKE)

Wash the cabbage, put some of the outer leaves to the side, these will be used for steaming. Finely dice 4 cups of cabbage. Blanch in salted water for five minutes, then strain and rinse under cold water. Squeeze out the excess water and set to one side. Chop scallions and put to one side.

Peel fresh ginger with a spoon (this is amazing!) and then grate (messy and weird and only added to my dislike of ginger). Mix all the ingredients, except the wrappers one of the stock cubes and one of the garlic cloves, in a large bowl. Wash your hands and continue to mix together more thoroughly with your hands. If it’s too dry add some water.

Let the wrappers thaw for about half and hour if frozen, and then keep covered with a damp cloth to stop them from drying out while you’re working. Now for the extremely tedious part, folding. At first it’s difficult but then you get the hang of it.

Fill a small bowl with water sit it near you. Place a wrapper in your palm, place a spoonful of filling in the centre, dip your finger in the water and wet the edges all around. Press two opposite edges against each other so that it’s now semi-circular. Now the tricky part, here I advise you look at the various videos on the technique since it’s hard to explain. Make two pleats on the side facing you, on each end. Then press the top together all the way along. The dumpling should now be shaped like a crescent.

Once they are all folded, or, if you’re like me, you run out of wrappers. Place a small amount of water, a clove of garlic and the last soup cube in the bottom of a pan with a cover. Then, add the cabbage leaves you saved earlier, make sure they are on top of the water, not under it, as they are what keeps your dumplings from the water-soup-mixture. Place a few dumplings on the leaves, taking care to make sure they don’t touch or else they’ll stick to each other. Put the top on the pot and let steam for 5-7 minutes. Continue until all the dumplings have been steamed. Or, alternatively, freeze them while raw and save them for later.

I hope that makes sense. They were very tasty.

First I’d like to make a statement I will probably take back at some point in the future. I dislike hanks of yarn, this project has almost taught me to dispise them. Before this shawl I’d never used yarn in a hank before, and thought they were neat because they look like the symbol for enfinity. I didn’t have the foresight to look up how to best unwind the hank for use, and thought it would be like a skein, just pull and for the most part it won’t tangle. Boy oh boy was I wrong. The first two hanks ended in such a tangle I had friends picking at them at a pub quiz trying desperately to salvage the yarn. Once I moved on to the third I decided to look up the best way to use a hank, and found that I would have to unwind the entire thing on a chairback and then wind it back into a ball. The process took about half an hour each time.

The ball of yarn the hank turned into.

Despite the trauma of unravelling the hanks, I still managed to finish the final two charts of the knitting quickly, which meant it was time for blocking. Having never blocked before I did some searching around before I started, to see what I needed to do. The pattern liked to this tutorial by Yarn Harlot, which I read to get the basic idea. I also looked at what Knitty.com had to say about blocking,  because I vaguely remembered the fact that I was using 100% silk might change the process a little. Knitty had the following to say on the subject, which is why I went into this project a bit aprehensive.

Silk garments can grow since silk is inelastic and has little memory; I personally find silk best in a blend. Silk is very fragile when wet, so wet blocking is NOT recommended. Pin out to required dimensions, spritz, and let dry.

I was fairly excited about blocking for the first time, it looked tedious and time consuming. Two things I really enjoy. Once I finished the knitting part of the shawl I was fairly disapointed with how it looked, none of the patterns that were supposed to be in the lace showed at all. I put that down to my yarn being to think and my needle size too large, and my general capaticy for screwing things up. But, once I started pinning the edges down all of a sudden the patterns emerged and it was beautiful.

The centre edge as I started blocking

I blocked the entire monster out, the whole process taking about forty minutes after stripping my bed. I then filled an empty fabreeze bottle with water and sprayed it. This was at six pm. I left it to dry looking as follows. I appologise for the poor quality of the photo, lighting in the area was using for blocking was far from ideal.

Fully blocked shawl

I returned to my room at ten pm hoping it would be dry so I could rest a bit, since I’m a bit ill. Alas, it was still damp, but seemed to be holding it’s form, so I unpinned everything and put the sheets and duvet back on my bed so I could take a bit of a rest. I moved the shawl onto the floor, still in the same position as it was on the bed, only without the pins. I also wove in the loose ends. I’m hoping despite being moved too early that it will still retain it’s shape. If not, I’ll just try again at a later date.

I will probably edit this tomorrow to add a photo of the finished shawl if it kept its shape over night.

Recent Progress on the shawl.

Since last week I have made significant progress but have fun into more setbacks. I’ve started the first of the two edging charts, which means I should be finished soon. But the pattern says that the edging uses about 40% of the yarn for the pattern. At this point I’m almost finished with my third, and final, hank of Debbie Bliss Pure Silk (colour:19 dyelot:50). I bought the last one I saw at John Lewis Sunday. The McAree Brothers store will probably have some as well, but it is very far away, and I’m not quite sure if I want to trek all the way out there. I think I’m going to see how far I can get with the current hank first, to see if I can get away with just buying one more hank, rather than two.

Close up on the Blossom chart part of the knitting.

When I ran out of yarn recently, I entertained myself for a while by snooping around the patterns on Ravelry. This led me to come across what look like some beautiful patterns in a book called A Stitch in Time. For the most part the patterns I’ve seen are georgeous, frilly, vintage knits. Some of them are a bit over the top, one pattern called Concentrate on the Sleeves (as pictured) for example.

Concentrate on the Sleeves from A Stitch In Time by Jane Waller and Susan Crawford

I think things like this are fun and brilliant, but everyone I’ve shown this pattern to has questioned my sanity and suggested I have problems. The problem is that I love things when they have crossed the line between gaudy and completely ridiculous. This does just that. The book is about £ 30 which is fairly expensive, but oh so pretty. I’m trying to decide whether or not it’s within my budget at the moment. The answer will certainly be yes, it’s just going to take me a while to be able to justify spending the money.

That’s all on this for now. I think the next update will, if it is knitting related, be either when I finish the shawl and try blocking for the first time, or have a copy of A Stitch in Time in my grubby little fingers.

As a side note, this was the first time I used a crochet cast on. At first I was reluctant to try it, especially since the version suggested was not like those I could find tutorials on where the stitches were crocheted straight on to the knitting needle. It worked out well, and I’m eager to try it again.

Anyway, on to the disaster part of this whole shebang. Everything looked like it was going fine, I finished the set up chart with no problems and the correct number of stitches. I then moved on to the star chart, and when the instructions said repeat four times, I thought that meant I should complete the edging stitches, knit the chart once, knit a stitch, knit the chart again, knit the centre stitch, knit the chart, knit one more stitch, knit the chart one last time, and then the edges. Unfortunately, when I ended this, it meant I had something like 99 stitches, rather than the 163 I needed.

I undid the star chart and started scouring the Internet. I thought that my problem was probably to do with the red box around a few of the stitches. I googled all sorts of things to try and understand what it meant. I never found a direct answer, all I found was a hint that it might mean I need to repeat that section a certain number of times, and since the pattern called for four repeats, I thought that might be what it meant. But alas, that was wrong again, and I ended up taking the stitches off again. The below is what I have so far.

The current knitting project

I think now that when it meant four repeats, it meant to knit the chart to the end, and then do so again three more times. Tomorrow I’ll be trying that, and seeing if that brings me success.

If anyone has any advice or knows what the red outlines mean please tell me. I’m at a loss. If I get back home in time from running errands tomorrow morning I’m going to call my mum and ask her if she knows, as she is a knitting goddess.

A parting note: the fact that there is a photo on this post, and finaly a photo on my ravelry account to document my squirrel mittens, mean that my camera seems to be fixed. It has yet to give me the error message.

It is a long email, so I’ll give a brief summary. The students in their final year tried something that is a tradition in US high schools where all the students come together and decide on a date where they will not attend school that day without informing the administration. The email is in response to the fact that today 71 of the 85 final year students did not attend school.

A bit of background on the man sending this email. In my final year the students who were IB diploma candidates suggested that we be granted study leave before the exam diet for study. From what I have heard from other people who did the IB diploma at other schools study leave before exams was at least two weeks. We were granted three days, one of which was already a school holiday. I talked to several students from the school who will be sitting their IB exams this coming May, they have also been granted three days, and again this school holiday is counted as one of them. Yes, I am a bit bitter.

I have removed any mention of the name of the school or names of people.

I want to keep you informed of a developing incident today. Unless you are in a small minority of parents, your son or daughter did not attend school today. According to many students, including their leaders, they unilaterally decided to count this as a “Senior Skip Day.” I want you to know that this was unauthorized, and indeed unknown to the faculty or administration. There is no “tradition” of this at [this school], and certainly not in [this campus]. In the past, students and administration have worked together to organize a fun activity outside of school.

While I may admire the spirit of the class in making a group decision, they also need to realize that this type of group behavior is very disruptive to school, and has natural consequences. We have AP and IB exams beginning within three weeks which teachers are working very hard to get students ready for. We have international APAC tournaments to prepare for beginning Thursday of this week. Having an entire class absent is very disruptive.

This required that we also call the parents of each of the more then 70 absent Seniors, which tied up our entire office staff for most of the morning. Upon calling parents, we found that students were seemingly ill with various ailments this morning to a much greater degree than normal. In more than one case parents I spoke to giggled as they told me their child was sick. Other parents, including some I spoke to, reported that their son or daughter was taking a “Senior Skip Day” or had refused to come to school. Some students I spoke to admitted that they were not sick; others I am sure were genuinely sick, as some are each day. However, when 71 out of 85 students are reported sick on the same day, a perceptive person would question whether some of the sicknesses were genuine. Some parents knowingly reported their children sick when they were not; others were more forthcoming.

Classes continued today for all students as usual. There will be no special “make up” classes for Seniors, nor any particular extra help provided. Teachers were here to teach; students were not here to be taught. If a student missed information, they will have to find some other way to get it than from the teacher. Students for whom the absence is deemed unexcused will receive no credit for work missed.

Any absent students will not be allowed to take part in after school activities or practices today. Please do not send them to school to do this; if they come they will be sent home. If they simply did not come to school they are not eligible to come for after school activities. If they are sick as reported, they should stay home until tomorrow to ensure that they are well enough to come to school.

I am very disappointed in our Seniors, and in some adults who enabled them, who thoughtlessly have caused those at school extra work and trouble and put themselves at an academic disadvantage. While it was meant in fun, in fact the results hurt others.

As I understand it, if the parent consented to their child participating in the skip day, and they do not have a significant number of missed school days, he has little right to punish said student. I know that a fair number of parents let their child stay home from school sometimes without a valid reason other than they want to. It happens maybe once a year, maybe less, but it happens.

Simply, that’s what happened here. The difference is that it was obvious. It was obvious that 71 students, and some of their parents subverted the Principal’s authority. Like most people, he doesn’t like being made a fool of. But I think that he made a fool of himself by reacting as he did. If he would have reacted in a stern but understanding manner, it would’ve been much more appropriate to the situation, and make him look less like a power junkie. It is in fact just one day of school. By reacting as he did, he implies he believes that if you give students an inch, they’ll take a mile. These are students in their final year, most of them legal adults, but they are also teenagers. From my experience this usually means that if you treat them like responsible adults, the majority will behave accordingly. If you treat them like small children, they’ll behave like them. Unfortunately this principal tends to treat all the students like naughty seven year olds, and I think this has to do with why there are a large amount of students and parents who feel an animosity towards him. More than I have ever seen for a school administrator.

With exams approaching I see his point when he suggests in the email that this may not have been a smart move for students. But, I also think that if the seniors aren’t able to judge if they should be attending school on a certain day, the problems run deeper than exam scores. I talked to one of the students yesterday, one who I’ve seen leave half way through a school day on a whim, and he told me about the upcoming skip day. He said he was going to attend school because he had two of his higher level courses that day, and he couldn’t afford to miss them. He showed responsibility and maturity. If students aren’t mature enough to know when they should be attending classes while in their final year of high school, they will  be learning that lesson while in university. Situations like this hinder students from learning proper time and priority management for themselves, and an overreaction like that of the principal just forces the lesson further back.

Or at least those are my two cents.

My canonEOS 400D started showing the error message Err99 when I tried to take a photograph over the winter holidays when I was in Austria. It was only when I was shooting in manual at first, then it started happening every time I tried to take a photograph. Generally very annoying.

After bringing the problem to my most trusted adviser, Google, I was told this meant that there was probably not a problem with the camera itself, but rather something third party for example the lens, battery, memory card, and so further. After using two memory cards, and two lenses. I found that the error message didn’t occur when I used my boyfriend’s telephoto, but did when I used my kit lens. According to the wise people of canon support, this is supposed to mean that it’s a problem with the lens, and the best way to fix it is to use the rubber on the end of a pencil to lightly clean the gold contacts between the lens and the camera. I did this, it worked for about an hour, and then went back to the error message.

I was going to bring the camera and lens to Jessops and tell them what had been happening, hoping they could help, but before I could, spring break had snuck up on me and I was on my way back to China to visit my family. While in Shanghai, I thought I’d give the local branch of Canon a shot. I don’t speak much Chinese, and I don’t even speak that well, let alone camera specific words, so all I could do was show them the error message and hand the beast over.

Four days, some money, and a new shutter later, I have the camera back, and it hasn’t error messaged yet. But because this problem has the lovely habit of not occurring all the time, that means nothing. Either way it now has a three month warranty, so if it does happen again, I can bring it back and have it fixed for free.

I’m off to Tokyo tomorrow for four days to visit a school friend and do some sight seeing. Hopefully the camera will hold up. I have half a mind to bring the camera I’ve been using as a surrogate with as well: a kodak Brownie 127. The little brownie has been nothing but reliable, but also only has 8 shots on one roll of fairly expensive film.

Hopefully this marks the end of my Error 99 worries. Huzzah!