Swatchless

This past weekend I was with the K-Botics team in New York City to compete in the FIRST Robotics Competition.  It’s been a busy 8 weeks preparing a robot and fine tuning our team and strategy for competition.  There were ups and downs along the road but it’s all worth it when you get to competition and catch the excitement! 

Part of my job as a supervisor is to help out in the stands while others work on the robot in the pit area.  The stands are full of kids, cheering and scouting the robots as they play.  I generally bring my knitting along with me and see how many hats I can make in a weekend.  Almost everyone on the team has a hat…but this hat, hat #44 is special.  It’s not for our team.  It’s for a member of FIRST team 694, Team Stuypulse from Manhattan New York who very graciously offered to have some of our recent material order shipped to their address because it would take too long to get to Canada.  We appreciate the extra effort extended by this team, and so, to say thanks, I knit them one of our hats (in their colours).

Their logo is one of the cutest I’ve seen.  Of course we signed our thank you gift.  And I very stealthily took pictures of it being worn during practice day-a very intense day where everyone gets a lay of the land, sets up their pit area, gets their robots to pass inspection, and connect to the field.  Some robots work right away, and others take a lot longer to become functional.  Strategy gets discussed, and scouting begins.  It’s the start of a busy weekend.

We spent the rest of the competition cheering in the stands right in front of Team 694.  They are an enthusiastic group who brought vuvuzelas!  They also brought us cookies–We LOVED the cookies.  It’s great that even though we were rivals in the matches, we were friends in the stands.

What else would I be doing now that robot building season is done?  Of course I took a road trip to watch a robotics competition, and brought along my knitting!

I was lucky to be a passenger, so I had lots of time to knit.  That much knitting represents Kingston to Burlington.

It got finished during the VEX robotics competition in St. Catharine’s…and I had time to start another hat while I watched the robots battle each other for control of the stacks of rings.  It’s impressive what high school kids can do!

On the way back home today, hat 43 got finished.  It is topped off with i-cord and pompoms, and glow in the dark embroidered robot and team number.

Slowly but surely our team will be outfitted with the coolest hats in town.  We compete in New York City in 12 days.  There’s lots of knitting to be done between now and then.  There’s lots of robotic preparations to do to.  Looks like we’ll be busy for another few weeks!

This past week has been a whirlwind.  I got a chance to knit on Thursday while in the car for an extended period of time.  This is the result!

Today the glow in the dark wired icord and pompom were added to finish off this hat.  It’s a fun one since the pompom bounces from side to side when the owner bounces…and believe me, he’s a live wire!

We’re spending the weekend at robotics, in a warehouse.  It’s cold in there, so hats are a great addition!

Here’s another hat…I didn’t knit this one, but I did add the ears!  The ears are wired icord so they can be horns, or ears, or heart shapes, or anything else!

A great excuse to get back to knitting!  A long time friend of mine is having a baby pretty soon, and I was thrilled to get an invitation to her baby shower.  Since nobody knows if the little one will be a boy or a girl, neutral coloured clothing was requested.

I’m not really sure if rainbow and blue count as neutral, but I sure think it is cute!

The blue acrylic is left over from the secret santa mittens I knit, and the rainbow superwash wool is from my excellent score at value village.

The hat is my favourite baby bonnet pattern (Top Down Bonnet with Anime Character), and the wee baby booties are a version of Saartje’s booties written for seamless construction and published on Fleegle’s Blog.

I look forward to seeing pictures of the new little baby wearing these bright happy colours!  Best wishes to the mom-to-be.

Finished this weekend:  HAT 40

Hat 41 has been started, but progress is slow since most of my time outside of working hours is spent helping with the robotics team.

One good thing about being busy is that you learn to make every minute count.  I’m getting pretty good at that, and well, its a good feeling to get things accomplished!

Accomplishment #1:  I drank 4 pots of tea last night and slogged through my paperwork until 4AM.  It’s done!!!  I didn’t feel all that awesome when I woke up at 7:30, but I have survived the day, and feel happy not to have paperwork looming when I get home.

I helped out today with robotics.  It was great fun to see things take shape.  The robot is getting taller, but I can’t show pictures because I’m sworn to secrecy.  It will all be revealed toward the end of February.  Needless to say, it’s going to be great.  I ate dinner with the kids, then I left at 7pm tonight.  I did not have to stay until 10pm, and that is a nice feeling to be able to leave and know that things will be just fine without you…

Accomplishment #2  I went shopping.  I HATE shopping, but I did it anyway.  I went to Value Village and got 3 pairs of pants–the first 3 I tried all fit!  Success….

Accomplishment #3  Since I saved so much time shopping for pants, I wandered over to the yarn section–dangerous!  Today it was a real gold mine.  I got all of this for $12.  10 balls of Superwash double knit 100% wool, a skein of handspun, and 2 large balls of roving.  I’m not sure how the roving will spin up, but it is soft, and interesting colours…and doesn’t smell like pets or cigarettes….it smells a bit like wood-smoke, but that’s fine with me.

Accomplishment #4 In the 1 hour since I left robotics I did all that shopping, filled the car with gas, got groceries and got home and into my PJs.

Now what….knitting?  spinning?  sleeping?  so many options.

I took a break this morning from all the things I should be doing.  It was lovely to sit by my window, in the bright sunshine, and spin up 4 oz of “baltic” blue roving from Paradise Fibers.

It’s now one very large skein of 2 ply yarn.

Now…back to the regularly scheduled work…

It’s not as hard as I thought it would be to change a drive band.  I was a little concerned because I would have to take my spinning wheel apart, or cut and refasten the drive band.  I searched online and found a tutorial that made the process look fairly simple. The process of replacing a drive band is simple– it is also not anything like what this tutorial claimed either.  Perhaps it’s because I have a single treadle wheel and the tutorial seems to be for a double treadle.

In any case, all I needed was a flat head screw driver.  I decided that because I have one treadle, and one piece of surgical tubing that connects the treadle to the footman (and the wheel) that I would undo the screw that connects the tube to the treadle, and insert the loop of drive band there, and then put the screw back in.  In a matter of minutes I’m ready to go again!  Thanks so much to Paradise Fibers for the speedy delivery of my new drive bands!

I’m taking advantage of the day at home to give it a test drive.  Back to work and robots tomorrow.

Look at the goodies!!! I stopped off at the post office on the way to robotics this morning, and was thrilled to see that the package I got was a box full of my order from Paradise Fibers.  There’s some gorgeous  baby camel in there that I can’t wait to spin.  Also, and perhaps more importantly, there are two drivebands for my wheel.

After a long sleep tonight I’m going to attempt to change the band tomorrow.  It’s a job that requires a bit of wheel dismantling.  I hope I have the appropriate tools.  If I don’t, at least I know a robotics team that is happy to share!

So….this past weekend was the kick off for robotics build season.  It turns out that I’m putting in over 40 hours this week in robotics mentoring, so the knitting time is seriously limited.  I did start hat 40 one evening while at a mentor meeting, discussing robot designs and competition rules.

I did a little bit more over dinner (yes…with another robotics mentor)

To see robotics progress check here.