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On August 31, I started a pair of Eunny Jang’s Endpaper Mitts. I finished the first one on September 3rd, and only worked on them for an hour or two a day — they’re that quick and easy! Here’s the first one:

I used my new KnitPicks Essential Solid, which is a very nice yarn to work with. It took me a few tries to pick a color combination that I liked — tried brown/green and brown/orange but neither had quite enough contrast.

The pattern is well-written and easy to follow. I made the smallest size, which fits my palm perfectly, but my wrists are so thin that the wrist is baggy. So I might give these away and make them again with ribbed wrists and patterned palms, or fancier shaping.

Oh, also, I only worked two reps of the pattern for the wrist, instead of three, and I shortened the palm by about half a repeat.

I used my regular ultra-stretchy 2-needle, 2-strand cast on. Was watching BSG when I started them and didn’t want to learn a tubular cast-on :)

And I learned the trick of the two set-up rows for the kitchener bind-off! I always use kitchener bind-off with k1p1 rib, but I’d never worked the setup rows before (k1, sl1wyif around, then sl1wyib, p1 around). It lets the stitches line up properly and makes the result ever so much more elegant!

Not sure if my brother reads my blog, but just in case —
Happy Birthday Ken!!!

It’s very very hot today. I’ve just started a new batch of morsbags, orange ones, and, while I was, cutting, ironing (gah, sweaty work), and sewing, I proof-listened all of Shell‘s recordings for Letters of Two Brides. As much as I hated the book while I was recording Self-Centered Louise’s letters, I really enjoyed listening to Goody-Goody Renee’s letters. And Shell is such a good reader!

Also, we had a report from a very kind listener that a great many of the recordings for Barchester Towers are much too soft, with parts that fade away to nothing when he listens in his car. Our dear reader Eva (I think she’s Hungarian, with the most delicious accent!) had her input turned down too low and our proofers didn’t catch it. It’s really hard to tell when files are too soft when you’ve got good speakers hooked up to your computer.

Anyway I downloaded the files last week, or was it two weeks ago, and finally got around to fixing them today. The process is:

• Open file in SoundStudio
• Mixdown to mono (makes all the other processes twice as fast)
• run compressor and amplify anywhere from 4 to 10 dB, depending on how soft the original is
• If levels are still all over the place, repeat compression step
• Save as mp3
• Open original in iTunes so you can see the tags
• Open new recording in iTunes and copy tags into it

Each of the SoundStudio steps takes several minutes. It took all day to fix up these 15 files but now, finally, I’m ready to do the replacing business — but the page at archive.org, where all our finished recordings live, is down! Heheh, maybe later :)

Did I mention that it’s hot? Also I’m hungry. Also Henry wants me to think of extra jobs he can do to earn money for the Geddy Lee Fender Jazz Bass that he’s saving up for. He vacuumed and washed my car a couple of days ago and did a good job, and for that he earned $10. We also decided that for every hundred gold he earns at chorewars I will pay him five actual dollars, and he’s got 300 gold saved up so that helps too.