One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Last night I worked the base row of triangles on my entrelac pillow in the chenille.  This seemed to go fairly well.  It's really hard to say because the yarn is so fuzzy that if I screwed it up you'd never know.  Then I worked the first side triangle in the Homespun.  This was really frustrating because the yarn didn't want to cooperate and was much harder to work with than when I was just swatching.  In the end, I really wasn't pleased with the way the corner looked so I ripped out the side triangle and set it aside for the night.  Today when I picked it up again, I decided I would just start completely over and unraveled the whole thing.  One thing that is really bugging me is the fact that this pattern is backwards from other entrelac patterns that I've seen.  Instead of working the base triangles from right to left so that the stitches lean to the left, it has you work them from left to right with the stitches leaning to the right.  Now I suppose it doesn't really matter in the long run since both of these yarns show little to no stitch definition.  Still a couple other things bugged me -- it had you start every row with a slip stitch and also used M1 increases in the side triangle -- I knew patterns I followed in the past didn't do it this way.  Now I'm all for trying things a different way but not if it doesn't seem to work any better than the old way.  The slip stitches bothered me because it left me with 5 chains up the side of a triangle where I know I'm gonna have to go back and pick up 6 stitches along that side.  As for the M1 increases, it was very hard to pull up the bar in between the stitches because the Homespun just wanted to split.  I've decided I'm going to use the entrelac instructions from Priscilla Gibson-Roberts' Knitting in the Old Way and just use the numbers from the pillow pattern.  But since I have other things to do tonight, I think I'll let it rest for a day or two before I start in on it again.

This afternoon I wasted spent a lot of time playing around with Google Maps' new satellite photo feature.  First, you pull up a map of the area you want to look at (i.e. your house).  Then you click the satellite link in the upper right-hand corner, and the map switches to a satellite photo of that area.  Of course, I looked at my apartment now, the apartment I'm going to be moving to, and places I've lived in the past.  Then I was having fun looking up port cities and zooming in on any cruise ships that happened to be in port that day.  One cool thing about it is that you can just click and drag the photo (or map) to look at adjacent areas.  For some reason this sort of thing can suck me in for hours!