About this time last year, I finally got round to buying some yarn and a pattern to try re-learning to crochet. Last time I crocheted, I was about 12 and my efforts were limited to creating hair bun nets (as in the kind of things little girls wear – and indeed I wore – to ballet lessons). I think the last one was bright red for wearing to school on No Uniform Day for Red Nose Day. After that, I got bored of it and lost interest.

So after completing a smaller practice project last Spring, I decided to tackle something I’d actually wear. And as it was July, I figured it would be timely to make a jumper for the Winter (or even the Autumn, in my more optimistic moments). So I chose the Unseamly Sweater from a book I have called Stitch ‘n’ Bitch: The Happy Hooker. This weekend (8 months later, and on the verge of Spring),  I finished it.

Here’s a photo of me modelling it, catalogue-style (photo courtesy of Tony Whitmore):

I’m really pleased with how it came out. There was a moment last weekend when it seemed I wouldn’t be able to complete the second sleeve because I’d run out of yarn, and my original supplier was permanently out of stock. The combined wonders of Google and Ebay saved the day.

So, being a good little IBMer, I now turn to Lessons Learned:

• Hold the crochet hook; don’t grip it. I struggled for the first two-thirds of the body (crocheted as a tube – front and back at the same time) to get my ‘guage’ right. Guage is the number of stitches to the inch, and is determined by a combination of weight of yarn, size of hook, and how tightly you hold the hook and yarn.
• Use the right size of hook. Related to the point above, I started the jumper about 5 times before it was neither fit for a child nor fit for two of me at once. I actually used the right-sized hook for the arms (a size bigger than the pattern suggests) but, for the body, I used a size smaller and I ended up having to increase the wrong number of stitches to make it the right size of jumper. This also meant that I ended up buying more yarn than I should’ve needed.
• Buy enough yarn first time. Every book tells you that this is the only way to ensure a consistent shade throughout – something only guaranteed by all the balls of yarn being dyed in the same batch. Because of the previous two points, I ran out of yarn not once but twice. Consequently, the body and the first quarter of one of the arms is a teeny bit darker shade than the rest of the arms.
• I enjoy the decorative bit more than the…um…mundane bit. This is the same as for the sunflower pots I made two years ago. Being crochet, it was actually quite quick to get through the mundane bits and I enjoyed it more than I expected. I do, however, much prefer making the fun frilly bits and changing stitches. So while I really like the finished effect of this particular pattern, it did get rather repetitive along the way.

Incidentally, the yarn I used (for both this jumper and my previous project) is Anchor Bamboolo, which is actually made from bamboo mixed with some cotton making a lovely soft, light, shiny yarn – similar I think to mercerized cotton, which is what I’d looked for originally. Bamboo is probably better for the environment than cotton, which is usually really bad for the environment because of the phenomenal amounts of pesticides that have to be used to grow it (though this article and its comments ponder the pros and cons of bamboo as a material from a furniture design perspective).

So, bearing those lessons in mind, I’m now keen to find my next crochet project. I seem to have acquired a few patterns already and they might make more sense now that I’ve done a relatively easy one!

This was my geeky Christmas project:

What’s happening in the video…

The red/orange lights flash faster when the electricity usage in my house increase. The green/blue lights flash faster when the electricity usage in my Mum’s house increases (though in the video, the usage stays at a constant level so the lights don’t speed up).

Initially, the lights are flashing at the default reading of 1 kW. Then as the electricity usage levels vary, the red/orange lights start to flash out of sync with the green/blue lights. After a short time, though, I switch the kettle on (you can just about hear it in the background!) and you can see the red/orange lights start to flash a lot more quickly (as the kettle takes about 3 kW on top of whatever the current reading is). The lights slow down again as the kettle switches off.

How does it work?

In my house I have a Current Cost monitor, which reads the live power usage of the house and publishes it (using IBM messaging protocol MQTT) to a server on the Internet. An application on my laptop (to which my Arduino – small circuit board with a processor on it – is connected) subscribes to the readings in real time and passes the information to the Arduino. The Arduino does some calculations to convert the readings to speed of flashing so that the higher the reading, the faster the lights flash. The Arduino uses that speed calculation to control the relay switches connected to the Arduino, which in turn control the power to the lights – when the relay allows power to the lights, the lights come on; when the relay cuts the power to the lights, the lights go off, and so on.

This slideshow on Slideshare shows the overall connections between all the parts, and some pretty pictures:

For a while I’ve wanted to update the theme of my blog but not really got round to it. So when I had a spare evening a couple of weeks back I did a bit of a search for free WordPress themes and came upon the one that now graces the area around this post (also known as Notepad Chaos).

When I set up my blog, back in March 2006, I adorned its posts (and pages) with the RedStripes theme. Which was particularly exciting because, despite never having seen PHP previously, I managed to fix a bug in it!

The RedStripes theme was always slightly awkward because it didn’t resize very well (either if you changed the size of the font, if you used page titles that were too long, or if you just added too many pages). While also rather pretty, IMHO, it was also slightly dated (I like to think ‘retro’) in style, even at the time I adopted it.

So, having seen the bang-up-to-date artistry of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge’s blogs (basically the fact that they have natural curves that emulate the real world, rather than straight lines), I went looking for something similar.

Notepad Chaos was one of the first I found and no matter how many themes I found this one stuck out because, well, it doesn’t look like a WordPress blog.

So I spent another couple of evenings customising it slightly to fit the content on my blog, including creating the tag cloud pinned note, and tweaking meta information in the post footers, I give to you my new theme–unless you’re reading this on the blog rather than via RSS, aggregated, or on Facebook – which would make it all rather pointless!

P.S. Coincidentally, when I first applied the new theme to my blog so that I could see how it looked and how much customisation I’d have to do, @benjamindyer was searching for something, came across my blog in the search results, and tweeted his reaction and observation (though I can take no credit for the actual design)!

The tallest of the two is now a respectable 119cm tall (from soil level to flower).

Last year, I attempted to grow sunflowers for the first time. Blue Peter always encouraged me to grow them as a child but I never did. So, last Spring, I bought some seeds and planted them in little pots. They all germinated nicely so, just before we went on holiday in May/June, I planted them out in the garden. Unfortunately, in under three days, the slugs had eaten them all. I was devasted for about a day then started plotting how to beat the slugs next year.

So, this Spring, I’ve started collecting toilet roll tubes (also in the spirit of Blue Peter) so that I can stick them in the ground around my small sunflower seedlings when I first plant them out. Hopefully, that’ll fool those pesky slugs.

In the meantime, I’ve bought a couple of packets of seeds (hoping that if one is so tasty that the toilet roll tubes fail to foil the crafty slugs, I can try again). I’ve planted the first packet into small pots on the windowsill and the first few seeds have germinated nicely:

That’s despite me mixing in too much of the water-saving crystals with the compost so that every time I water them, the soil expands so much that it starts to climb out of the pots!

I’m hoping these ones work because I want to see what they come out like. They’re not your usual yellow sunflowers. They’re a species called ‘Moulin Rouge’ and the heads are a dark red instead of yellow. If they work, I’ll post a photo here.