The chill room at Sunrise in the West Indian Centre Leeds.

Everything I hate about late Autumn and Winter in the UK; Grey, damp and never drying out!

I can do almost everything I need to do in OS X but just occasionally I need Linux. So I recently installed a VirtualBox VM running Ubuntu 9.10. I use Eclipse as my favoured IDE since I can run it on all three of the major OSes and it has good support for C, C++ and Java which is what I use mostly for work. So the next thing for me was to install Eclipse. This is where things became interesting.
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I finished my first knitting project in a long long while. Its a simple knit scarf of 24 knit stitches per row in Rico Design “Roxy” yarn (73% acrylic/27% new wool – 50gm/60m – Colour violet 007). It took four balls to get a decent length using 8mm needles.

Finishing it off turned out to be problematic. I didn’t realise how much yarn I would need to bind off and ran out half way through. This meant I had to undo the bind off which wasn’t easy and I dropped at least one stitch doing it. I then had to unknit a few rows to give me the length needed and to be able to correct the dropped stitch. Whilst doing this the yarn broke. I ended up having to lay the piece flat, take it off the needle, pull off several rows and then carefully rethread the needle. I succeeded though and here it is.

LinuxChix is a global community of women (and their supporters) who are fans of, users, or just interested in Linux and Open Source Software. LinuxChix has various chapters around the world. Currently there is only one in the UK, based in London, but I am proud to announce the LinuxChix northern chapter, LinuxChixNorth.

LinuxChixNorth is a chapter for LinuxChix members, or potential members, based in and around the M62 corridor in the north of England. This covers the cities of Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and York. It is intend the first meetings will be held in Leeds and Manchester but there is no reason why members shouldn’t organise meetings in other cities. The first meeting will be in Leeds at the beginning of December. I am finalising arrangements for a venue and will announce the date as soon as I know it.

Apart from the website we are on twitter as @linuxchixnorth if you want to follow us. You can also e-mail the current organisers at uberchix at linuxchixnorth dot org dot uk.

Knitting was once a necessity if you were anything other than very rich. My grandmothers’ generation all could knit. My mother can knit but many of her contemporaries do not. Knitting when out of favour especially amongst feminists who saw it as “women’s work” (even though there is a rich history of male knitters) and everything they were trying to fight. But a new generation of feminists have emerged, many of them geeky women, and they are reclaiming knitting. These third wave feminist knitters think that rejecting the craft devalues the work of past women and rather than rejecting it we should reject the opinion that knitting is in any way a second class activity.

When I was very young my mother taught me to knit. I knitted a small red stuffed bear which my mother probably has stored away somewhere. I haven’t really knitted since then, until now.

A couple of months ago I decided to give it another try so I ordered both Stitch’n'Bitch and The Happy Hooker from Amazon. These books, by the same author Debbie Stoller, are partly teach-you-self books and partly pattern books for knitting and crochet respectively. The approach the crafts in a fun way working through from the basics to advanced techniques with instructions and diagrams. The second halves of the books comprise funky patterns, such as hoodies, alien scarves, fingerless gloves and so on. These patterns are devised by young knitters and crocheters, by a new generation for the new generation. They are an excellent buy and thoroughly recommended.

My current project is a beginners scarf. Knitting is like cycling you never really forget how to do it and its amazing how quickly you pick it back up again. I find knitting relaxing and carry wool and needles everywhere. I am learning slowly but it is now something I will stick with. I’ve already had a request for a scarf from my sister and with Christmas two months away there are bound to be a couple of gifts I could make for people. I haven’t really tried crocheting yet so that’s my next challenge.