Some new projects, while recuperating

It's been longer than I'd like since last posting here, due to a one-two punch combo: spending a week in California visiting my family over Memorial Day, and then just as I was settling back into a routine upon my return I came down with something that knocked me out for a week. I'm over it now, thankfully; while it wasn't particularly virulent it was tenacious, and just kept hanging on several days after I expected it to clear up.

Although I wasn't feeling particularly creative while ill, I found such creativity as I had focused on some hobbies I hadn't done much with in a while. I turned my hand to wood-burning again, for really only the second time since I tried it soon after moving back to Hawaii while my things were in transit. I had a piece of wood that I'd picked up last year and never done anything with, so I was able to use it for something that'd been on my mind for a while, ever since Gemini Observatory got a new logo last year. The new logo uses just a few shades of orange/brown, making it fairly simple to mimic with wood-burning. At least, that's what I thought, and it did sort-of work out that way in the end, it just took some trial-and-error to figure out which of the various interchangeable tips that came with my wood-burning set could produce what level of darkening. Anyway, here's the finished result:

The logo is intended to represent the two telescopes of Gemini (north and south), hence the negative space line down the middle (and not, as some joked, representing a serious structural flaw in the telescopes!). There's basically just three different levels of orange in the original logo, so the stars should all be the same lightest shade as seen in the telescopes, but such are the pitfalls of experimenting on your canvas. I did learn some interesting stuff about wood-burning from this project, though, so it was a good learning experience. Principally, the fact that it's difficult to get a solid gradient; you can approximate it with a hatched pattern (and I think I did a decent job of that), but there can be differences in the wood grain itself which make it burn faster or slower at different point. (There's a wavy dark mostly-horizontal line in the medium-dark section of the dome on the right, just below the windows, where a line in the wood burned so fast that it got dark no matter how quickly I moved the tip over it.)

Anyway, it was a fun little project, and I'd like to get better at wood-burning, maybe combine it with painting or something in the future. That's something I haven't really gotten back to other than a few abortive attempts at pictures, but instead, this week I found motivation to get back into crochet; and not only that, but to finish a project started and abandoned all the way back in 2017, when I moved to Australia:

Yes, I had a crochet lei in progress that I ended up leaving behind with the rest of my crochet equipment and some other things with some friends while I was away. What I hadn't anticipated was missing crochet enough to pick up some more hooks and yarn in Australia, leading to something of a duplication of effort; but this is the first time I've gone back and looked at what I left behind here. I found this in-progress lei, and since it was already started it was easy to get back into the swing of things and finish it. The center “backbone” (as it were) was done, and maybe 15% of the flowers; I wasn't able to successfully reverse-engineer the stitch sequence I was using back then, but I found one close enough to mimic it. (Though you might be able to work out the original section in the photo above if you squint.)

It's been good to get back to doing something with my hands, and it'll be nice to have something to do in meetings again. We'll see where things go. I was recently given a big collection of knitting needles as well, and I wouldn't mind trying my hand at more knitting in the future. And now that I'm back to mostly-healthy I might have some other projects to share soon – I had a great time flying drones with my brothers in California and have some footage that's begging for editing. But for now, I need to get some sleep, so I'll leave it here. A hui hou!

Fake edit: I realize, looking back at my posts from around the end of 2021, that I don't think I ever mentioned my first foray into wood-burning. A friend at Swinburne had suggested I might find it interesting, so after I first moved into my current place in November 2021 (and while the majority of my hobby materials were in transit) I picked up a little wood-burning kit at Wal-mart for something like $12. It's essentially a soldering iron and some interchangeable tips, nothing too fancy, but I find there's a surprising amount of nuance that can be achieved. Anyway, I picked up a cheap piece of wood along with it and started doodling, ending up with the scene below:

This one, I think, shows the strengths of wood-burning off better; it's very good at creating a sense of natural depth and subtle nuance, rather than my attempts at solid gradients above. I didn't have much of a plan when starting this piece (and it probably shows), intending it mostly as a scratch pad for experimentation, but everything I put down kept working so well that it ended up being a picture with very little I wasn't at least satisfied with. Anyway, that's the extent of my wood-burning experience to date, but as mentioned I'd like to practice more with it in future. For my second project, the one above, I experimented with scratching the outlines of the areas into the wood first, allowing me to invisibly sketch a picture to fill later; that worked pretty well, I think, so I'll be interested to see where that might lead.

A Doily and a Scarf

Approximately three centuries of subjective time ago, back in October 2018, I mentioned that I had taken up knitting and begun work on a scarf. And a few months ago (I think in May), I finally finished it! Then, because I had some yarn left over, haven't crocheted anything in a while, and was bored, I used the leftover yarn to crochet a doily off the top of my head in a few hours.

And here they both are!

When I picked that scarf pattern I decided I wanted something more advanced that a real beginner's-level pattern, and boy did I get it. Doing that cabling turned out to be really annoying, though it does look cool when I didn't mess up and make either one too many or too few rows between crossing the cable over. A friend of mine at the JCMT used to tell me that knitting was simpler than crochet and I finally get what she meant now, though in a way knitting is actually harder for me. It's true that crochet has a large variety of different stitch types while knitting only has two, but knitting is about keeping track of numbers of stitches much more than crochet generally is (at least, the things I tend to crochet) and it turns out I am pretty rubbish at keeping track of numbers of stitches, so I have a long way to go in knitting. But I do enjoy it. As of this writing, I've just ordered a few skeins of yarn online to give me something else to do as Melbourne goes into Stage 4 lockdown for six weeks. (I've never lived under a curfew before, it's mildly exciting. [For, I'm sure, the next day or two.]) I'm planning on both knitting and crocheting something, though I have yet to pick out patterns for either. We'll see what I end up doing! And maybe it'll take me less than a year to do this time. A hui hou!

The Knitter of Oz

I've written before about my crochet hobby which I've been pursuing for quite a while now (though I did take a several-year-hiatus over college), having learned from my mother in my teens. She never picked up knitting, however, so I never learned it either.

Until this past week, when I learned from a friend here in Melbourne! I've often wondered how the two compared, since I had friends who knitted and it always seemed so complex to me, even as they told me how crochet was more complicated. Now that I've learned both, I can say that knitting feels simultaneously simpler and more complex than crochet. It's simpler in that there are mostly just two stitches compared to…uh, “several” in crochet. It's also more complex in that it uses two implements instead of one. It's also more nerve-wracking, at least at this stage, since it always feels like you're about to lose an entire row of stitches all at once in parallel, whereas in crochet you can only lose stitches serially.

Ultimately, I'm really enjoying it! There's a weird feeling of cachet that accompanies being able to whip out my knitting needles on the train or wherever (even if I'm as likely to be undoing errors as making progress at this point; I'm still somehow adding stitches in without meaning to). Maybe it has something to do with people almost invariably asking me what I was knitting while I was doing crochet in the past, and it'll be nice to finally not have to correct them. Whatever it is, I'll be sure to take photos once I have something worth showing! A hui hou!

A Wedding! And the Flu.

It's been pretty quiet on the ol’ blog front here this month. The main reason for this is that I was in California last weekend for my sister's wedding, then caught something (apparently the flu) just before flying home on Monday. I then spent the rest of the week primarily being miserable and bedridden, barely able even to passively enjoy anything let alone write a blog post. A week later and I've recovered enough to write this short post, though I'm still tiring pretty early in the evening.

Other than getting sick, it was a good trip. I finally finished the doily I'd been working on for practice since last summer and gave it to my sister as a wedding present:

And here's a picture of the happy couple themselves:

Congratulations guys!

And happy leap year while I'm at it for everyone else, I guess. I dunno, I'm still a little addled from the flu. A hui hou!

An Abundance of Lei

Well, by “abundance,” I mean “six,” because that's how many complete crochet lei I have lying around at the moment. I'm now finishing one about every two weeks or so on average.

Some of them are fairly simple, such as the “Rosebud” one on the top right, creating a sparse appearance with the center “stem” easily visible. Others, like the “Hibiscus” one at lower left, have densely arranged petals that hide the stem. It doesn't show up well in this picture, but the two pink ones are actually slightly different shades of pink. The two orange ones used the same color, but are different patterns; the one on the top is a bit sparser than the one on the bottom, though again it doesn't show up well.

I realize, looking at this picture, that some of these lei look rather similar. This is partly because, when I first started crocheting them, I only bought a few colors of yarn that showed up in multiple patterns so I could easily reuse them. I've since bought more yarn in a wider range of colors (the red and pink lei on the bottom were both products of that trip, actually), and I'm planning on doing some with a wider variety of colors in the future. I'm working on one called “ ‘Ola‘a Beauty” at the moment which has dark purple petals and a yellow stem.

Most of the designs are really quite simple in practice, being nothing more than a simple repeated motif which is twisted around the stem to create a (mostly) radially symmetric pattern. The lei in the middle on the top, however, is a different design, and much trickier to pull off.

The book I'm using calls the flower “Mauna-loa,” and instead of radial symmetry it requires a sort of bilateral symmetry which gives it two markedly different sides.

This photo's not the greatest, but you can see how the matched sets of petals emerge on opposite sides of the stem, which itself required a novel, tricky technique to make. Instead of being a simple chain it's more like a flat ribbon, and is the source of the different look of this lei. There's another lei using the same pattern for the stem which also looks pretty interesting, and I plan to get around to it sooner or later.

Since people keep asking me what I'm going to do with all these lei, I want to mention that I've already given away the first three I made while I was visiting family this summer. I also gave away another I'd just finished to my boss, who served as the Associate Director of JCMT for the past two years on loan from the National Research Council of Canada but whose secondment ended at the end of September and had to return to Canada. I'm sure I'll find opportunities to bestow more of them in the future, too. A hui hou!

More Lei Crochet

Boy, once you get the hang of it these simple crochet projects are really easy! In less than a week I've finished a second lei (it helped that I had several long meetings and presentations to sit through this week). This one is supposed to resemble a lei made of flowers from the ginger that grows wild around here, or ʻawapuhi to give it its Hawaiian name.

I can confidently state that I've learned a lot in the process of making these two lei. After the first one, I realized I'd been making it wrong; rather than producing the coiled structure by rolling the lei lengthwise, I'd actually physically attached each petal further around the central stem chain. I fixed that mistake on this lei, only to realize after I'd finished that I'd been doing my double crochet loops all wrong, and that my connection of the two ends could be vastly improved. I've got another meeting tomorrow and I'm looking forward to starting another lei, correcting those shortcomings, and putting my new end-connection plan into action. A hui hou!

Lei Crochet

I've never mentioned it on this blog because it happened a few years before I started writing it, but in my teens I asked my mother to teach me how to crochet, which she graciously did. My actual output never amounted to more than a doily and a couple of simple scarves, and I slowly petered out of doing it as I went through college, but I enjoyed doing it, and occasionally thought about taking it up again.

Around the time I stopped I put a book on my wishlist called “Hawaiian Lei in Crochet” by Roberta E. Wong (I think I had just moved or was about to move to Hawaii at the time and was interested in all kinds of island things). I'd pretty much forgotten all about it after a few years until it showed up at my door a few weeks ago, a birthday gift from my dear aunt Susan.

Having been thinking about taking up crochet again, a book full of neat but relatively simple pattterns was just the impetus I needed. I picked what looked like an easy recipe, went out and bought some hooks and yarn, and set to work. I found it to be a wonderful activity during long meetings at work – having something to occupy my hands with actually lets me pay more attention to the proceedings than otherwise.

Anyway, fast forward a few weeks, and I've just completed my first lei.

This particular lei is meant to imitate the ʻākulikuli flower, one I'm not personally familiar with (I chose it because it looked like a nice easy recipe to start out with, as indeed it proved). A little searching on my part reveals that there are multiple different plants in the Hawaiian isles with that name, with accordingly varied pictures available, but I found some pictures of lei that look pretty similar (if a bit more vividly pink).

Anyway, I'm pretty excited to have completed my first crochet project in several years, and one that looks so good to boot. I'm not entirely sure I followed all the instructions correctly, but I got something good-looking out of it so I'm happy. There are about twenty recipes in the book, many of which I'd like to try at some point, so I'll probably have some more pictures of crochet lei up eventually. A hui hou!