My friend Samantha is the strongest woman I know.

Bar none.

She rides her bike to work every day, even through the biting cold Philadelphia winters. She yells at idiot drivers when they don't see her in traffic. She demands to be seen. She's 5'3" and full of fire.

She's got a great career and is constantly working to improve herself. She earnestly fights to keep her work and personal lives separate. I really wonder if I'd recognize her in a business suit, but I'd love to be a fly on the wall in some of her meetings so I could learn from her.

She's got a love life that everyone should be jealous of. She found her soulmate. They connect. They love. They are perfect for each other.

Know the Symptoms. Save a life. http://ovariancancer.jhmi.edu

Until there is a test, awareness is our best defence against ovarian cancer. Signs and Symptoms of Ovarian Cancer Abdominal pressure, bloating, or discomfort. Nausea, indigestion, or gas. Urinary frequency, constipation, or diarrhea. Abnormal bleeding. Unusual fatigue. Unexplained weight loss or gain. Shortness of breath. Take action. Consult a healthcare professional if any symptoms persist for 2-3 weeks and are unusual for you. Experts recommend a pelvic/rectal exam, a transvaginal ultrasound, and a CA125 test. Pap smears test only cervical cancer.

She's a spokeswoman for ovarian cancer. She speaks to medical students about being a patient so they can become better doctors. She organizes raffles to raise money for research and awareness. She was featured in Women's Health magazine as an "Action Figure". She goes to events as a representative for the HERA Women's Cancer Foundation. She gives speeches. She's a survivor.

It's not easy for her to put herself out there. To put herself in front of a crowd of people and proclaim herself to be a survivor. To talk about her diagnosis, her treatment, about the symptoms to look for. But she does it because ovarian cancer has so few survivors. She does it to save other women's lives. She does it to save her own life. The more awareness that is brought to ovarian cancer, the more money that will go to researchers. With research money comes grants, the ability to diagnose ovarian cancer, and the ability to treat it.

Sam was diagnosed with ovarian cancer again last week. But because she knows herself, because she knows the symptoms, and because she had her surgery performed by a gynecological oncologist, they caught the cancer at stage 1A. It's almost unheard of to catch ovarian cancer so early, and with that news, it also gives her an over 90% cure rate.

Sam is a survivor. The next few months are going to test her. She's going to undergo chemotherapy, she's going to lose her hair, she's going to deal with a lot of stuff that no one should have to endure, let alone do it twice. But Sam is a surivor, and the strongest woman I know.

Three years ago I found the perfect pattern for a knit jacket for my step-mom. It was lacy, it was stylish, it was vintage, it was gorgeous, it was Angelina from White Lies Designs. I worked on it for 2 months and finished 95% of it. I just had a bit more lace to finish on one wrist...

Near the end of my knitting, I was starting to have doubts. I didn't think it would fit well, I didn't think it would lay right, I didn't think I'd picked the right size... I'd invested so much time knitting it, that I didn't want to admit that all that time was wasted. Maybe somehow it would work. Maybe the magic knitting fairy would make it fit perfectly and make it look as good on a person as it did in the picture. But the more I knit, the less I believed in the knitting fairy. And then... I was given the perfect excuse, the perfect reason to put the project on hold: I ran out of yarn with only inches to go. This gave my fingers another project to play with, and my mind a way to stop thrashing over how to save the project.

Three years passed.

From KnittingAndCrochet

When my step-mom was here last December I dug it out and pinned it on her, so I could see how well or how badly the jacket actually fit. It didn't. It needed another inch or so around the width of the arms and the same along each side. This normally wouldn't be a complete loss for a sweater. Typically, the arms are knit separately from the body, so width can be added... but this sweater is one giant piece. Which is great from a seaming standpoint, but crap from an adjusting-after-the-fact standpoint. This is one of the problems with taking on a big project before you understand what all those measurements that come with a pattern really mean.

Fast forward to last night. I finally accepted the fact that I needed to unravel the whole jacket and reclaim the yarn. There was no way to make the adjustments to the jacket to make it fit and be happy with the result at the same time. So I sucked it up and unraveled the whole thing. Two month's of work, gone in two hours. But at least I got all that yarn back. Now I've just got to break it to my step-mom that she won't be getting an Angelina jacket, and find a new perfect pattern. And this time... I'll understand the measurements before I start.

From KnittingAndCrochet

I can procrasinate with the best of them. A year or so I made this scarf for my friend Michael. I even wrote this lovely blog entry about it at the time with the pattern, materials and all... The scarf then sat at my house in a bag for much, much to long. I finally got my act together and mailed it out to him -- so here it is -- pattern, pictures and one-year-belated text:

Last year I made Michael a cool fair isle hat. This year, I made him a nice warm scarf to go along with it. Unfortunately I couldn't find the loden-colored Wool-Ease yarn, so I did gray instead. Hopefully it still looks ok with the hat.

I tried my best to make the stripes random widths throughout the scarf and a random order of colors. You'll be happy to know that I resisted the temptation to write a java program to make sure that the stripe widths and colors were a truly random distribution. And I also resisted the temptation to encode messages using base 3 values (kinda like binary but with the numbers 0, 1 and 2). Yes, I'm a geek, this I know.

This pattern uses double knitting. If you're not familiar with double knitting -- it basically gives you a double-thick scarf that has knit stitches on both the front and back of the work. This technique provides a lot of neat features to the scarf: it makes a really warm scarf, you can make some great patterns without having to worry about long floats, and double knit scarves don't curl! (Check out the other double knit scarf that I made a few months ago).

• materials:
• yarn: 3 balls of worsted weight yarn in contrasting colors. I used Lion's Brand Wool-Ease in Black, Wheat and Gray Heather.
• needles: one pair, size 8 needles.
• pattern:
• Cast on 30 stitches in color A (the scarf will only be 19 stitches wide, but you need double the stitches to cast on both the front and back)
• Row 1: Pick up color B. * Knit one stitch with Color A, purl the next stitch with color B. Repeat from * to the end of the row. When knitting be sure to bring BOTH strands of yarn to the back and when purling be sure to bring BOTH strands of yarn to the front. Check out the double knitting video on knittinghelp.com to learn more about the technique.
• Row 2: k with color B, p with color A, repeat for 19 stitches. k1 with color A, p1 with color B.
• Row 3: Knit all of color A's stitches with Color A, purl all of color B's stitches with Color B.
• Row 4: repeat row 2
• Row 5: repeat row 3
• Row 6 and beyond: use the color chart below to start off the scarf, then randmoly chose the colors and the dots. Make sure that each color section starts and ends with row 2.
• ...
• Bind off when you're happy with the length of the scarf. I used a modification of the basic knit bindoff method: k2tog, * k2tog, pass first stitch over second, repeat from *

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