Sunday, February 03, 2008

Yipee, More Words

Hot diggety if the FreeRice vocabulary game hasn't just announced "NEW...five levels of super-hard words...." How hard are they? Well, I don't rightly know yet, because you have to get through the first fifty levels to find out. But it's nice to think they are out there, waiting. Let's see, tomally means lobster liver, burgee means yacht flag. D**n, thrasonical does not mean grooved. On the other hand, I now know what a "muley cow" is. And don't ask me where I ever saw that phrase. It just lodged itself in my brain sometime during the course of a lifetime of reading. And I now know what it means. And I'm not going to tell.


Good grief. Is anyone else old enough to remember those "humorous" kitchen aprons emblazoned with: "For This I Spent Four Years in College?" I'm beginning to feel that way about the vocabulary game and my obsession therewith.

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This morning I spent an hour with yarn wrapped around my neck. Why? Well last night a reference to Portuguese/Greek/Peruvian(?) style knitting sent me on an internet search, and I found a couple of descriptions, and a couple of rudimentary videos, and I thought what the heck, I'll give it a try.

Basically, this involves tensioning the yarn by running it around the back of your neck and forming the stitches by flicking the working yarn with your left thumb (not too difficult a concept for me because I'm a Continental knitter).

Now I understand why some Peruvian knitters work stranded colorwork in the round in purl. It is easier to purl than to knit with this method. I can also see how, with practice, it would be possible to work really fast, especially with hooked needles.

I doubt that I will be completely revising my method this late in the game, but it's always good to have one more arrow in the quiver, and inquiring minds want to know, and it might be fun to try in public sometime, just to see if I could blow some other knitter's mind.

The Knitter's Review discussion that caught my attention is here. A series of short You Tube video tutorials from chuanavit starts here. And a video showing it done with hooked needles is here. It's a bit fuzzy, but I was fascinated by the needles.

Hmmm, just found a YouTube video titled Peruvian Knitting that is a totally different style. Right needle held like pencil, yarn thrown with right middle finger. Looks interesting. May have to try that next.

4 comments:

Leslie said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Leslie said...

It's posts like this that make me glad to live in dial-up-only land. If I had a decent connection I'd now be spending the next few hours trying to learn these techniques instead of doing the checkbook, the housework, making dinner and making my latest project. Just call me easily distracted, er, addicted...

junior_goddess said...

Eeek. I am also in dialup only land. So close....and yet so far.

YarnThrower said...

I can't wait to see your demo of Peruvian knitting at our next "last Saturday knitting" get-together....