afuna | Vests, Knitting, Crochet, assorted

My mom has commissioned me to make a vest for my grandpa, so I am searching through ravelry for suitable patterns (male or unisex, forgiving fit, separate down the middle so you can shrug it on rather than pulling it over your head)

In the process, I have fallen in love with a lot of the for-female patterns and I think I would like to make vests -- lots and lots of vests.

I applied for a new credit card a couple weeks ago, one which supports double currency billing, which means that when I buy stuff in dollars, I'll get charged in dollars, rather than in pesos. :D Process was surprisingly painless! Not as painful as my first card was, and applying for one meant I didn't feel skeeved about about it the way I do preapproved cards (what's the catch? I still haven't figured out what they'll get if I accept, so I just reject them.)

So I haven't been buying anything online, because I know that I'll get a better conversion rate pretty soon -- but looking at all these patterns I am so very tempted *_*

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the LYS to learn crochet. It was awesome! I managed to catch the owner, and she helped tweak my handling of the hook so that I'm no longer fighting the stitches as much. Turns out that I was crocheting too tight, and that I was insisting on turning the hook around with every stitch so of course my wrist got sore quickly.

She also helped me figure out how to count my stitches -- I tended to alternate between skipping a stitch, and adding an extra stitch because I wasn't sure how to count. I'm getting much better at it. Ummmm. I need to pick a more interesting pattern soon, though. I'm getting bored with the sc-only pattern I picked out as a beginner, so I keep putting it off in favor of knitting.

Right now, I'm finding that with crochet, I love the finished product more than I love the process, so I really need to venture out and pick something cute but fast that I'll love at the end rather than something to teach me stitches, which will only seem like a chore.

Note to self: find time

Knitting projects are chugging along well:

I finally finished the magic mirror mittens, eeeh \o/

Magic Mirror Mittens - friend modelling white cabled mittens, half-covering her face with her hands

Here is the friend I knit the mittens for. They fit her perfectly, which makes me so very happy, you have no idea ahahaha. I was nervous because her fingers are pretty long, and I didn't have anyone with long fingers around to test the mittens on. (Everyone in the house has short stubby fingers. Curses!)

Magic Mirror Mittens - close-up shot of white cabled mittens on hands

Here is a close-up of the Magic Mirror Mittens. Friend is wearing the mittens and clasping a ball (you can just barely see it, though it doesn't matter really!). The shot isn't as good as I'd like, being as it's indoors with crappy lighting and a crappy cellphone camera :( the background is in focus while the hands are not, not sure how to fix that *g* Perhaps next time I should take the picture from further away?

Comparison between blocked and unblocked projects. The unblocked mitten is stiff and shows uneven stitches more clearly. The blocked mitten is softer and the unevenness is not as obvious.

I was worried about the texture of the mitten until I blocked it, because it was so stiff and harsh! After blocking it was perfect. Now I want to knit more clothes with this merino.

One good thing I got out of having to do and redo (and redo) the mitten was that I got to practice the technique of cabling without a cable needle. It's gotten so that I'm reluctant to pick up the extra needle, except when the stitches are really tight, or the yarn is really slippery.

(Hmm I can't find the tutorial I actually used though, which led me to leave alone the crossed / temporarily dropped stitches while I knit the next stitches, and then putting them on the cable after, instead of putting them immediately back on the cable the way that was done in the tutorial from knitty).

Besides the convenience and the reduced number of needles to juggle about, doing cables without the needle made it much clearer how the stitches are oriented when cabling, and why holding it in the back leads to a right-leaning cable while holding it to the front leads to a left-leaning cable. It's kinda like -- instead of focusing on the cable needle, I was forced to look at the stitch without anything else in the way. That alone is worth the cost of an extra mitten's work.

I... after finishing the mirror mittens, I may have cast on two more projects to make up for it. Oops?

Having fun with Summit, a very hole-y shawl, which I'm knitting in a glittery slinky black yarn.

So far I've learned ~~patience~~ backwards purling. My backwards purling is a lot tighter than my forwards one, but it doesn't matter as much for this pattern.

I also just signed up for my first test knit *glee* It's a mitten with a flap, it's really nifty, and it's really challenging me to figure out ptbl / ktbl when I'm doing combination knitting which twists the orientation of the stitches for me already half the time. I found a couple of minor typos, so I don't feel useless (or like I'm freeloading) already :)

Last step in this pair of mitts, though I'm very far from it, is to add buttons. Why did I never know that buttons could be so pretty? :O Today I went to Carolina's (beads, buttons, sequins, ribbons, feathers, etc) and bought buttons. Lots and lots of buttons :D Lots and lots of different colored, different sized, buttons. Nothing that's perfect for what I need, but a bunch of them that are really interesting and that I think might work (if not for this project, for the next one).

Oh! Also my LYS is being helpful and is asking one of their other regulars (sort-of-employee?) to see if she has any of the yarn I need for. I may finally be able to finish the english driving cap, and knock that project off of my list *g*

Something not knitting related: I'm watching the concrete examples of accessibility problems that

deborah linked to. Fantastic idea, really useful resource, awesome videos.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Eeeeee, those mittens are so cute! Congratulations! :)

*grin* Thank you!

Hmm, talking about figuring out how to crochet things properly helping you makes me wonder if I just hold things wrong as well. I kind of gave up on crochet and knitting because they were too painful to keep up. Possibly sometime I'll look into that again and see if someone can help me figure out if I'm making it more complicated than I should. (I do that frequently with everything, so I wouldn't be surprised.)

And I like those mittens!

Thank you!

If you ever do end up picking up either knitting or crochet again, three things to look out for are:

* size of hook in relation to yarn (bigger hook == looser stitches / smaller hook == tighter stitches)
* efficiency of movement (less movement == less strain == less pain. Unfortunately this bit is the hardest to figure out on your own!)
* whether you're tensing up involuntarily when pushing the stitches around. (this is definitely one of my big problems :()

Good luck :D

Wow, those mittens are awesome. Makes me wish I knew how to knit.

Thank you *G*

(If you ever end up learning to knit, you can find the mittens easily via ravelry, or poke me and I can dig them back up for you!)

Thanks.

Totally agree with everyone who says those mittens are awesome. Not to mention they are things of absolute beauty.

*grin* Thank you ♥

So, credit cards. In short, any credit card company (pre-approved or not) generally gets both a small portion of the actual amounts you charge, plus the interest on the balance you owe, plus any fees mentioned in the terms and conditions of the card.

That's why they want you to sign up - even if you pay your balance in full every month and are never late (and thus never owe any more than the actual amounts you charged), they still make money off the transactions you put on their card.

A longer explanation is thus: when you purchase with a credit card, the merchant doesn't receive all of the money you just spent - they are charged a fee (in the US, it's often 30 cents plus 2-3% of the transaction amount) for accepting the card you used.

Out of that 2-3% of your transaction, most of it goes to the bank the merchant uses to receive their funds, some of it goes to the credit card network (Visa, etc.), and the rest of it goes to your bank as what is called an interchange fee.

This is why many cards will offer "perks" like frequent flyer miles, points that can be redeemed for items, or cash back -- all of these are paid for out of the interchange fees they receive, plus any late fees and interest on your account, with enough left over to make the bank a very healthy profit.

And, alas, in Australia, the law was changed a few years ago to allow vendors to pass that fee on to the consumer, and some are less than scrupulous in what they claim the amount to be. 8-(
Shops prefer customers to use EFTPOS, because they aren't charged a fee for that - but banks charge the customer for every EFTPOS transaction.
And the customer doesn't save by using cash either, because banks charge fees for cash withdrawals too.

The only ones that win are the banks.

Edited 2011-03-28 22:49 (UTC)

Wait, do banks charge fees for all cash withdrawals? That seems horribly unfair o_o

They usually give a certain number of withdrawals a month for free, depending on the particular kind of account. But if one uses an ATM which doesn't belong to one's own bank, you get charged by that bank for using it, on top of whatever fees one's own bank charges for withdrawals. Banks have gone fee-happy over here. It's been over a decade since I've actually gotten any interest in my normal bank account without it being much less than the fees I've had to pay. And so many things are tied into one's bank account that it's a huge bother to change banks. And it wouldn't make much difference if one did change - all the banks are the same. 8-(

Edited 2011-04-01 11:14 (UTC)

Thanks, that's really interesting! I was aware that the credit card was taking some portion, but it hadn't sunk in that it would amount to quite that much.

I'm more leery of credit cards that are given to me than those I apply for because I have no idea where they get my name/address, so there's some possibly increased risk of there being a scam or some fine print or some way they're taking advantage of my greed, that I won't know about until I bite (and it bites me back).

Also if they're extending a line of credit to me without having enough information on me to know whether I can pay them back (which is what I'm assuming all the requests for documentation are for, when you're applying on your own), it feels really suspect!

Aha. So, I don't know how it works over there precisely, but I would imagine it's not too different from the U.S.

Here, the law allows the credit reporting bureaus (the agencies in charge of keeping track of your credit record) to supply a list of people meeting certain credit criteria to companies upon request. For example, a credit card company can go to the credit bureau and ask for a list of everyone with a credit score above 600 who lives in a certain postal code. You can opt out of this process (in the US) but by default, you'd be included in the list if you qualify.

That's where they get your name, and a basic idea (from your credit score) as to your ability to repay. You have to provide more information when you apply on your own, because they haven't already pre-screened you.

Huh that may explain the reference from some bank personnel I've talked to, about a shadowy Database which all the banks have access to. It's terribly exciting -- well not really, it's more that it's amusing that half of them won't say anything about it at all and the other half only will if you ask them point-blank.

I don't believe we have a credit bureau or credit record in exactly the same way. I get the vague impression that you can ask for your own credit rating over there, which I haven't heard anything of here at all.

But I am guessing from what I found out when I started asking questions from someone who was offering a preapproved credit card, that they list my name, the name of my credit card provider, and that I was in good standing -- of course then they spoiled it by trying to get me to tell them my credit card number and my current credit limit so they could get me a better deal.

Which is when I decided to back off because legitimate or not, it was ringing up all these phishing warnings in my head. Later on I found out that it was probably legitimate insofar as they would be using the info to get a referral bonus, rather than purchasing items with my card, but *handwave*

I wonder if it would be possible to opt out here. Hmm.

Thank you, this has all been very enlightening!

Vests, Knitting, Crochet, assorted

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

The economics of credit cards

Re: The economics of credit cards

Re: The economics of credit cards

Re: The economics of credit cards

Re: The economics of credit cards

Re: The economics of credit cards

Re: The economics of credit cards