February 2008 Archives
We just booked our tickets three days ago and now we're on our way! Greece! We're headed for the island of Kalymnos, well-known as a winter destination for rock climbing.
We will be in Greece from Friday, February 29 to Wednesday, March 19.
Thanks so much for your enthusiasm on Inspir(al)ed. The pattern will still be on sale while I'm away, but please note that I can't answer any questions as I won't have any reliable internet access.
In the meantime, here are some links for Greece:
◊ The Wikipedia entry
◊ The Greece tourism site
◊ National Geographic's minisite on Greece
◊ A site dedicated to Ancient Greece
◊ This one, too
◊ A climber's account on Kalymnos
See you in March! Adio!
Thanks for the feedback, ladies! Here it is! Enjoy the pattern!
Inspir(al)ed was inspired by Marnie Maclean's Nautilus hat. The spiral is one of those natural forms whose appearance, anywhere, is so appealing, and finding Marnie's pattern when I was relatively new to knitting was kismet. As anyone who's knit hats will know, the spiral also appears in decreases on a bottom-up knit hat. I wanted to incorporate something interesting around this, and after much trial and error, and two months of back-and-forth with my incredibly generous and patient tech editor (who else), Inspir(al)ed is fit for release.
This knit hat is enhanced by a four-stitch cable that circles up to the top. As well as having two yarn weight options, there are two lifted increase options. The pattern may seem easy, but pay attention to the charts!
Marnie wears the worsted weight version here. This version makes a thicker hat with only 6 spiral sections, whereas the sport weight version has 7 spiral sections.
(Special thanks to Marnie Maclean.)
The upgrade and redesign has not been working out smoothly and I may take the drastic course of deleting my entire blog and starting with a backup Grr. It may or may not be because I customized version 1 so much and I've forgotten exactly what I did in coding. Anyway, I'm not satisfied with this design so I may do it... probably after we return from Greece.
But let's focus on other things now. Namely, this.
Pattern: My own, to be released next week
Yarn: Dale of Norway Heilo (100% Norwegian wool; 1.75oz/50g; 109yd/100m) in 020 Cream
Needles: US4 bamboo dpns
I like to revisit patterns I've knit because there's always a clever detail, or a bit of construction, that goes beyond the pattern. Case in point, Marnie's Nautilus hat, knit from the top down. I knit this hat for a friend some years ago, and I just loved the way the eyelets spiraled down from the center. Then there were the other hats I knit, from the bottom up, whose decreases spiraled up to the top. Isn't it amazing that a simple order of decreases creates such a beautiful pattern? With Marnie's pattern was my inspiration, I had myself a project.
I sought to incorporate a spiral, and cables, into a project. A hat is the perfect form, because it's a tube with a closed end. Now, I didn't bring along a truckload of yarn to Europe, just a box with 2-10 skeins of yarn each in different weights, enough to keep me occupied for our time here. (We're on a budget, a tight one, and I've only bought yarn once since we've been here. And that was on a sale.) I dug around and found a good, reliable yarn that would suit my purposes. I did a lot of charting and swatch knitting; this wasn't a cut-and-dried project at all. A misplace decrease on the chart would render my swatch wrong. Then, having the right increase to match the decrease was the challenge. I decided on the simplest of cables, a right-leaning cable that appeared to climb the spiral to the top.
There you have it.
I've received compliments from strangers when I've worn it outside. Funnily enough, the compliments come after I've walked past people, because it's the top detail that attracts people's attention. "Sehr schön!" is what I hear the most, and these from women who normally don't look up. There's no doubt, they must be knitters!
That's hello, in Turkish.
Mouseover images for captions!
We flew into Antalya from Nuremberg in the afternoon of January 17th, a bit of a chill in the air from recent rain. It was not to last, however, because the following day was sunny and warm. Because we were staying at the JoSiTo campground, we arranged for a pick-up at the airport, which was a good thing, as driving in Antalya was pretty crazy and without any established set of rules. To wit: on our way out of the city, to the right of us a bus filled to the brim with passengers gunned it when the traffic light turned green, and cut off three lanes of traffic to make a left turn. Yikes!
If I had to rate this trip among the ones we've taken over the years, it would be in the top ten. Climbing near Geyikbayiri was great. With the exception of three windy days, the weather was sunny, not too warm, perfect for climbing. Our accommodations at the campground were slightly better than basic but we didn't need anything more. The shower and kitchen facilities were steps away, we had a little heater and borrowed a few pots and plates, and the bar where we had some of our meals served Mediterranean cuisine. (Unfortunately, nothing truly Turkish.) The main crag was a laughable 30-second walk from our hut; we walked back for lunch almost every day. The other crags were within 10 minutes' walk, easy.
I woke up early on most mornings and strolled around, followed by the camp dogs, taking pictures. Beautiful golden light.
The Anatolia and Dragon walls are quite tall. You can see a pair of climbers on the right, on their second pitch (consider that a pitch is 65 - 98 feet long, or 6.5 to 10 stories tall). On the left, a pair of climbers are getting ready to do a route in the alcove.
The rock is limestone and ranges from brown to grey. I favor the brown limestone, because the texture is like stacked beads and relatively softer than the grey kind, which is sharp and spiky. Regardless, all types are gritty, and we suffered from gouges and numerous scratches all over our hands and arms from the rock. The climbing is mostly steep (overhanging) with tufas, pockets, and crimps, and everything is very well-bolted. The best part is that most routes are fairly new; the oldest routes were bolted in 2001 so nothing is polished! (On the downside, your fingertips will be aching after 3 days...)
Here's 8-time British champion Lucy posing for Tim on one of my projects. This is one of the most picturesque routes around, and when I tried it another climber was there taking my picture! The "crux" is at the bulge above Lucy's head; miss the clip and you fall 10-12 feet, which is what I did about 6 times! (Yes, how droll, Drop Zone is what it's called.) It's still a project, however; on my 6th try I almost made the clip, but fell, and I hit the rock and my quickdraws at the same time. Ouch! It knocked the wind out of me and I had to retreat. Two weeks later, I still have scabs and the shadow of a bruise as a reminder of that fall.
And German champion Marietta on her way to redpointing an 8a+ easily, on her second day. How strong is this woman? Fricking strong. She warmed up on a 7b+, a route that would have been my next project had I not fallen so hard. I so want her shoulders.
On rest days we either walked around looking at potential places to climb (such as Trebenna), or hitched a ride to the Sunday market. Sunday market was colorful and chaotic, with cars and pedestrians everywhere. Our second time, we were stopped right in the middle of buying strawberries by a man whose daughter had worked in Las Vegas!
Strawberries, oranges, crispy carrots, gigantic cabbages, peppers, onions, tomatoes, and "mountain tea" herbs were sold everywhere. We would indicate how much of something we wanted, and then hold out coins in our palm so that the vendor would take what he charged. We passed vendors selling fresh yogurt ladled into plastic bags, feta in skins, grains, and nuts. It made me think of Nigeria, this bustling market with its friendly vendors...
Lunch was gözleme and hot mint tea, served to us on a large metal tray. It was fun to eat the yummy spinach-filled dough with our hands, with peppers, tomato, and cucumber on the side. I bought some pul biber, which is ground pepper with a bit of salt; I've been looking for a spicy pepper since the German "hot" spices are, well, rather bland. It was unfortunate that Geyikbayiri and the campground are so isolated, being in the Taurus mountains. It would have been good, on a rest day, to go into town and chill at a café or walk around. We had to hitch rides both going down and up the mountain, the camp being 8 km from Çakirlar. We were picked up by a giggly family in a VW van, a cherry picker from the local power company, and a villager with a load of plastic bottles in the back of his truck. The challenge was not getting thrown out when we rounded a curve!
Days were spent lounging around after climbing, or watching other people climb. It's always a treat, always an inspiration, to watch someone who can just float up a 7a+ like a warmup, which for some people it is. Toward the end of our stay (we left on February 4) more people had started to arrive and at one point every wall behind the camp had a climber on it. Dinner at the bar was always good and full of conversation—mostly we heard German, or Dutch, because quite a bit of the clientele came from central Europe. There was one raucous evening when one of the camp hosts played magic tricks and we spent most of the night trying to figure a particular trick out.
I wish I could say that I onsighted or redpointed more, harder grades, but climbing doesn't work that way. Aside from the fact that we have lives outside of the sport, climbing involves a vast amount of patience and hard work. And mental fortitude. Sometimes BFF's day would be perfect and mine sucked, or vice versa. Sometimes the weather was awful, like when we had those windy days. Sometimes it was coping with our lingering colds, or the cough that would threaten to throw me off my climbs. These little things add up, and the crux is to stay positive. I'm happy to say, however, that I did do some significant climbs, and BFF really outdid himself on what the routesetter called one of his favorite climbs. Our Geyikbayiri trip was a success, and we're looking forward to returning sometime in the fall. Some of our most enjoyable moments, climbing and otherwise, came from there, and we're hungry for more of the same.
◊ View the Climbing in Turkey slideshow.
Four years after it first launched, Yummy Yarn has a redesign. I'll keep it short: it fits a 1024 x 968 pixel browser, it's 3 columns, and it was created in Movable Type 4.1*. There's more white space, a revised logo, and things have been moved around or added, most notably a Patterns page and a new Contact address. I see pattern publishing in my future.
The biggest change is in my copyright, which now allows others to use my images with explicit permission, for which you'll have to email me.
I've been eager to get this redesign off my plate, because I've got lots of finished knits—and a pattern—to show. I'll call this version a work-in-progress, as I still have to refine a few things.
1: My masthead isn't finalized, and I want to be able to change it from month to month (or season to season, depending on my laziness).
2: Fine-tune the global nav items. DONE
3: Reorganize sidebar assets. SKIP
4: Reformat the galleries.
5: Captcha widget not working! Thanks, everyone, for alerting me to the comments flub. I seem to have dropped the widget somewhere in my code, so I just changed the comments setting for now. DONE
6: Permalink not working. DONE. Quick fix: make one-word titles moving forward.
And so on. But first, some sleep!
* If you're thinking of upgrading to MT 4.1, know that every major asset has been modularized and has its own template. It'll drive you nuts for a while, but persevere and you'll get it after a few days. I've waited for this move into modularization since I first started blogging, having done a bit of it on my original blog design. The application, however, starts to get messy when you get to the stylesheets and the sidebar, with so many variables when a handful would do. Six Apart's figured out that people want a friendly stylesheet, releasing a wysiwyg assistant whose code you can just paste into the front-end templates. But for those hobby coders (me!) who want a complete facelift, be prepared to spend hours and hours of time in the application!
