The disaster from the previous post has been averted, I worked out that the red outlining on the pattern meant I was supposed to repeat the outlined section until the end. I also ran into some trouble when I added too many stitches because I would include a stitch for a yarn over, when the chart shows the stitches that will be there after the row is finished, and thus the yarn over square just includes the physical yarn over. I thought I might put those two tips out there for anyone else knitting the pattern and running into similar problems.

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.

I tried my hand at knitting lace today. I’ve never completed a lace project because I usually screw up somewhere in the middle and can’t be bothered to continue  but through the evils of StumbleUpon I’ve been seeing more and more lace patterns that I wanted to try. Particularly triangle shawl/shrug things. So I went out, found myself some pretty silk and decided it was time to try this pattern by Elizabeth Freeman on Knitty.

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.

My mum forwarded me this email today, she recieved from the principal of the high school I attended.

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.

Well, hopefully anyway. We’ll see how long this lasts.

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!