Per the encouragement of at least 30% of my readership I've added a cleverbit.org icon. I was thinking of using a professional one I found on line but given how tiny they are it seemed more fitting to make one of my own. I did at least read a tutorial on how to make rounded edges :).

Check out these lovely tea plants I got for my birthday from my brother. I can't wait for them to get big enough to turn into actual tea. I also got some tea and coffee seeds so that I can grow my own plants but I'm not sure if my thumb is quite green enough for that.

I recently started my first real fair isle sweater. I've been itching to work on my fair isle technique and try out steeking for a while and I finally got started when I went on a wool shopping trip with a friend a few weeks ago. I was going to make a pattern from Vogue Knitting (Holiday 07) by Alice Starmore but I wasn't that excited about the pattern at the bottom of the sweater so I've been using an Alice Starmore book that I got for Christmas to make my own pattern inspired by the original Vogue pattern photos. I'm still going to try out the steeks, a technique that involves knitting the sweater as a long tube and then cutting the front opening with a pair of scissors, yikes! I haven't actually gotten to that part yet since I'm still working on getting my tension right. I've had to rip out the bit above the ribbing several times - a few times because one strand was so tight that it didn't show up properly in the pattern and a few times because I didn't like the color combination I used. I'm happy with how it looks now and hopefully the more I practice the less ripping out I'll have to do. I bought the number of colors and quantities of yarn needed for the sweater in the magazine and although I've been trying to keep the ratios sort of the same in my sweater I'm a bit worried that I might run out of one or two colors. I guess the good thing about fair isle is that if I have to get yarn from a different dye lot it hopefully won't show up too much. Here is what I have so far.

I got this yarn for my birthday last year and I was in the mood to make some socks (or more accurately to wear some knitted socks) so I pulled it out and started knitting. I normally make my socks too loose so I tried to be a bit more careful with this pair. I started from the toe using "Judy's magic cast-on" from Socks from the Toe Up by Wendy Johnson. It worked really well and hopefully I'll be able to make the second sock the same even though I've let this project take so long that I'm forgetting how I did the shaping. I think I have a few notes scribbled on a bit of paper. Somewhere. Anyway, here is a photo of the first one.

Well I had a bit of a rough start with this sweater since I failed to pay enough attention to the hip dimensions and after several inches discovered that it was much too narrow. So I ripped it out, did some math, and stared over. Then I forgot the ribbing on the sides and instead of just dropping those stitches and picking them up in the right stitch, which would probably have been faster, I ripped out again. Now I'm up to about 6.5 inches with the correct width and side shaping. I think I'm going to have to stop and weave in the tails which I normally don't like to do because it impairs further ripping out but the ends are expanding and getting fuzzy and I think it would be wise to weave them in before they get worse. I didn't realize silk could get so fuzzy but I guess it is only partly silk so presumably it is the wool that is getting fuzzy.

Today we had only part of a day before heading back to the airport so we started out with some quick breakfast and a visit to St John's Co-Cathedral and Museum. This Cathedral is truly a monument to the Knights of St John and their wealth. Every bit of the inside is covered with ornate carvings and statues and paintings and each of them contains the crest of the knight who commissioned it, and in some cases a likeness as well. We also saw what was once a receptacle for John the Baptists forearm (the one he use to baptize Christ) but the French stole the jewels and one of the Grand Masters of Malta removed the relic as he fled the city during an invasion so now its just a couple of gold and silver cherubs pointing to an empty gold container. We also saw some Flemish tapestries from 1702 which supposedly cost as much as an annual military budget but their colors were so washed out it was difficult to experience their opulence since I had just left the main cathedral and my eyes were still adjusting to the lack of glitz much as they do when coming inside on a sunny day.

Whereas the audio guide for the palace armory was brief almost to the point of triteness the cathedral guide was long winded and full of details about the painters and the knights and grand masters and symbols and really anything they could think of. Often the narrator would start waffling on about some painting or sculpture or side chapel without given any indication of what he was referring to and at other times he described the obvious bits at length. Yes, having found the most famous paining in the whole place (conveniently denoted by signs, museum guards and no photography signs) I don't need the narrator to list the characters who appear in the painting, nor to describe what they are wearing since I'm looking right at it.

After the cathedral we went to the Maltese Experience which we hardly felt we could skip given that every corner in Valletta contains at least one sign pointing tourists in its direction. When we were visiting the war museum a plaque at the end of the WWII exhibit said that as Malta gained its independence from England it wanted to make a move from a military based economy to one of tourism and industry. Well I think the Malta Experience was a direct result of that decisions. It is an "audio visual experience" cataloging Malta's long history of invasion starting with the original inhabitants and their impressive temples and catacombs and continuing through the Turks, Arabs, Knights, French, English and possibly a few others that I forgot and finally ending with a upbeat description of the Maltese people embracing change and diversity. The film was entertaining and amusing enough although some of the photos looked like they had been snapped in an afternoon by someone who ran around the city (much the way we did) quickly taking picture and sprinting to the next notable location. Some of them were blurry as if the wind was blowing the leaves of the plants in the palace courtyard or the photographer was taking shots on the sly when the museum curator wasn't looking. We also had a bit of lunch and zipped around the art museum where my favorite paining was one of a woman slicing a mans throat open. Despite what you might think my choice was not based on the subject matter but because, unlike so many of the other nearby saint martyr depictions, the woman and the man both had furrowed brows and some actual angst in their expressions. It would appear that the most popular emotions to wear when being killed in a gruesome way are boredom with a side of pouty-ness for women and boredom with a bit of superiority for men. Also the lack of cherubs and halos earns the painter bonus points.

Lastly we wandered around the city for a bit looking for a cab but eventually gave up and hopped on a bus back to the airport where we are now sitting conspicuously in a large section of the airport seating which is empty except for us, a man who I imagine is playing suduku on his phone, and the woman from Diamonds International who is eating a burger which appears much to cheep to be approved by her employer which might be why she is eating in the airport seating section rather than in her shop.

Today we were a bit slower getting started and having so efficiently toured Malta on Saturday we decided to visit the neighboring town of Rabat to see some early Christian catacombs and a Dominican Monastery. We started our trek by heading toward the Valletta bus station which is a huge roundabout filled with orange buses beeping at each other and rolling backwards several feet each time they set out to move forwards. We had to wait quite a while for our bus but once it finally came we had no trouble getting to Rabat especially since the bus driver kindly yelled out "Rabat" when he got to our stop.

The catacombs were bigger than I was expecting. The largest one was a maze of tiny passageways with cutouts in the side of the passage for children and larger chest high blocks of stone carved out in the top for adults and families. In some places there was just as small hole in the wall which appeared to lead to more room(s) of compartments. Maybe there were other passage ways on different levels that lead to these rooms which were blocked off.

Even though there weren't any bodies there (at least that we could see) it was still quite eerie and a bit uncomfortable, especially for Kim who I occasionally exclaimed "Oww!" from in front or behind me as he hit his head on the ceiling.

After the catacombs we strolled along to a Dominican Monastery which was quite peaceful with a square garden in the middle full of pools and lemon trees and a lovely high arched walkway along the outer edge of the garden. We were allowed to walk along a broad, high ceilinged hallway inside the monastery to a chapel which I think was probably smaller than the hallway which lead up to it and had an alter full of what looked like plastic pink flowers but I think they were probably a recent addition rather than a 17th century artifact.

After the monastery we noticed a convenient bus stop across the street with a group of encouraging looking old people who we hopped were on their way back to Valletta. After only a few minutes at the bus stop a bus bound for Valletta did indeed appear and we had a pleasant ride back to the city only to discover ourselves in the midst of the full blown Carnival crowd. The Carnival is, as far as I can tell, a pre-Lent celebration involving lots of floats painted in florescent colors, teens in crazy florescent costumes of things like castles, flowers and lobsters and kids dressed as princesses, cow persons, comic book heroes, and gypsies. And the occasional lizard or tiger but these animal like costumes seemed to be reserved for children to young to pick out their own.

We naively followed the crowd into the city through the main gate rather than taking the long way around and after witnessing a near fist fight between two women with baby carriages who kept bumping into each other and being thoroughly squished as several hundred people tried to squeeze between some sort of food stand and the metal gates lining the edges of the street we made it to the National Museum of Archeology where we saw some headless human figures, a tiny (and rather curvy) "sleeping lady" statue which is quite old and quite famous, and some neolithic stones from the also quite old Maltese Temples with some faint spirals carved in them. As you may have guessed I was getting a bit musiumed out at this point but I did take a photo of this thing which looked like a coffee cup with a 3 foot diameter.

After this we popped back to the hotel for a quick shower and headed out for dinner, this time Italian food at a restaurant that was either on its way in or out (or both). The waitress had to go and check their supply of food and wine each time we selected something off the menu. But I enjoyed the food and then lost my glove on the way back to the hotel.