Photography Fridays

So on Wednesday I saw that the mountains looked really nice, and so did the sky during sunset. Why is that? The gross inversion that envelops the city every year. Let's admit it. It looks pretty but it's a killer. Since I couldn't leave campus after 5PM due to work, I snagged my camera and took pictures of the mountain ranges to the west and to the south. I'm glad I did. I found out that I wasn't the only one wanting to take pictures- a few other people were doing it, too!

Please do not repost this image. Copyright belongs to me.

WIP Wednesday #1- Blankets and Hats, oh my!

Welcome to the first WIP Wednesday! I feel like a lot of them are going to feature the same things over and over, just in various stages of completion. But without further ado, here are my WIPs of the week!

1. Florida Gator blanket

So my dad graduated from University of Florida. He loves them even though their football team sucked this year. Last year, I got the idea to make him a blanket with Alfred on it. I made my mom a Donald Duck blanket, so he deserved a blanket with something he loved. Good idea, right?

WRONG.

I started this last... May? June? Ravelry tells me May 1st. It's not even half-way finished. I don't have the TIME. Luckily, I'll have time this summer. I'm excited for that. 

2. Hexagon Flower Blanket

This was inspired by a blanket I had as a kid. The construction is way different, though. However, it's a fun and mindless project. It's going to need some serious blocking when it's done, though, as seen in the flower above.

3. N7 Beanie

Aaahhhh... my favorite project. Because it's Mass Effect inspired. I love Mass Effect. The third game screwed me up badly but it was so much fun. I made two beanies inspired by the series already, so this is the third in that trilogy of hats! I'm currently working on the stripe. I'm thinking the red's going to end after this row because it's becoming a lot bigger than I intended it to be. Let's see how it turns out! I'm looking forward to seeing how this goes.

National Cuisine

I'm taking a Japanese civilizations class that's all about food. Today we were discussing kaiseki, which had like a ton of rules and etiquette bound to it. Kaiseki is basically often a "main dish" surrounded by smaller dishes and are on trays so it's eaten off the ground. This was the beginnings of what we now consider Japanese national cuisine. It's fascinating how it began!

Now why did I find this fascinating? In my approximately six years of studying Japanese culture and history formally, it never occurred to me that Japan as a nation was relatively young. Sure, it's existed as a country, but a national identity did not exist for a long time. Japan remained splintered until Oda Nobunaga started to unify the provinces. This was then followed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and finally Tokugawa Ieyasu. It wasn't until the Tokugawa were ruling that Japanese cuisine became more standard.

White rice? Surprisingly not that widely consumed until the late Tokugawa era because it was expensive and only the rich could afford it. It was a method of measuring wealth and power.

So what we consider "Japanese cuisine" now is actually a relatively young concept (really only started in the 1960s, after the world wars) and was previously only available to a select few. Commoners had to make do. It had a lot of rules, some of which still exist today!

It's amazing how things suddenly fall into context. It gives me this happy feeling.

Regularly Scheduled Programming? What??

So I've been doing quite a bit of thinking (a dangerous past time I know) and decided that starting next week, I'll be having three days that'll occasionally get to be a series! Mondays will be called "Musings Monday," Wednesdays will be "WIP Wednesday" (for all my knitting/crocheting stuff), and Fridays will be either "Photography Friday" or "Finished Friday" (for my photography or finished projects, if any). I'll try to keep it as regular as possible, but with my busy schedule, sometimes it won't happen.

When is it Okay to Tell Someone to Stop Being Too Much of Something?

It's been a bad week for me. On Wednesday, after having a long day, I found out a good friend got fired from his job. He was, truthfully, one of the few people whose company I genuinely enjoyed at this job, with its long nights and hardships. He said that essentially it summed up to him being "too trusting" of people. Like that's a bad thing? So after this, trying to console our good friend about this friend being fired, and a sexist remark from another mutual friend that left me fuming, I went to bed early instead of trying to study.

Then Thursday, my supervisor made a remark about the events of Wednesday night about how she would've just gone back to her room instead of trying to help this friend through the news. My jaw almost dropped. I had to serve two roles Wednesday night almost simultaneously. Not only is that going against what my job description is, that is rude and disrespectful as a friend. So I ended up being mad at my supervisor. I'm still mad at her. I went back to my room so I could focus on studying for a test on Tuesday when I came across two of my co-workers in the hall. They asked me to swipe them into the key room so that one of them could get back into her room because she forgot her keys. So I did, and asked the one who didn't forget her keys, "Why didn't you just go back to your room? It's right down the hall."

"Oh, you happened to be coming down the hall so I decided to ask you!" she replied. I sighed and rolled my eyes. The next thing she said touched a nerve, especially in light of the previous night's events.

"You're too reliable. You should stop so people don't keep asking you for things."

I didn't really reply back. Gave a noncommittal response that may have been a small laugh before going upstairs to where I live. It really bothered me, that remark. I like to think one of my good points is being reliable. It's something I'm both proud and angry of being, but I'm more proud than anything. So that remark felt like a personal attack. It came too close to my friend being "too trusting."

Since when is being "too much" of something a bad thing?

The Family's Christmas Presents

A couple of months before Christmas, I sent a text to my family asking them, "What do you want for Christmas? Make it easy on my college kid wallet."

The youngest, Johnny, didn't want anything handmade. He asked for NHL 09 or NFL 12. He got NHL 09. Oh, my brother. I swear he's become an All-American teen.

But the rest of my family wanted handmade things, and that was definitely my realm.

The middle brother, Ricky, is a total game nerd. He loves video games, but his current passion is card games. He asked me initially to make a bag to hold an entire deck, but after trying to explain to me how big it was, he eventually gave me dimension and said, "Go crazy." I asked for any specifics, and he said it had to be blue and black, and a water drop should be on there somewhere. Here's the result:

I crocheted it back and forth and then surface stitched over the blue stitches so the water drop motif would look cleaner. The cord is a foundation chain with one row of slip stitching. 

My dad wanted a lap blanket to go with the huge blanket I made him last Christmas. The color scheme was totally different, though. While the huge blanket was brown, gray, and white (neutral colors), the lap blanket was green and brown. I decided a granny blanket would be nice and easy to make. I asked for dimensions, and he gave me 5'x3'- which ended up not being the finishing dimensions. It is still an acceptable size, though!

I didn't block it, so it doesn't lay flat. However, my dad doesn't care. Woo! I did a reverse single crochet edging. I really love the ropy look reverse single crochet gives!

My mother was simple. She's really easy to make things for because we're both craft-oriented, and whenever she sees something she likes, she asks me to make it, and whenever I see something I like, she makes it for me. I picked up a wristwarmer knitting book from a Japanese bookstore a while back, and my mom wanted me to make her sleeveless gloves in order to keep her hands warm. She pointed out the pattern, gave me colors, and off I went! She loved them and wore them all break. I wish I had gotten a picture of her wearing them. They fit her.

My hands are rather large...

There you have it! My crafty 2013 Christmas. I may not do it this year and get one large present my family can share instead. This year, I'm doing selfish knitting. I have a ton of WIPs to work on that are very interesting for me. Keep an eye out for those!