Thorny Knits

Your Friendly Neighborhood Hermit

2007-09-27T04:53:00.000-05:00

Hey. Hi. Yeah, I'm still around. Did you miss me? Did you maybe forget about me? It's okay. I think I kinda forgot about myself for a while there. Things at casa della Thorny have been strange. Well, not so much the casa as the cabeza. Nothing dire or anything, just... no more than one would expect of someone predisposed to depression who has spent three years at home with young children and who's recently suffered a major loss. I've got an appointment to see someone about that, so hopefully I will be more of my old self soon.

It's 5 a.m. and I just wrapped up some knitting and am going to post up about it briefly.

First of all - what am I doing up until 5 a.m. knitting? Well, y'see, it's September, which means it's Official Thorny Insomnia Month. The whole thing where the days get noticeably shorter? It jacks with my whole circadian rhythm business, and then it's just... bad. So I've been sleeping like a crazy person, at all kinds of weird hours.

The other part of it, though (and it's a shame my camera is acting up, because pictures really would help here) is that I did a preliminary dig through Active Stash - a clear plastic tote where my knitting resides, waiting for the children to decide to fuck with it. The objective, ultimately, is to reorganize the whole works. A few weeks ago (okay, almost a month ago now) I bought some storage goodniks from The Container Store, and it's high time I got them into use. Also, I was looking for something, though I'm not sure what that was at this point.

I've had a crazy-ass bout of Startitis the past month or so. Like... kee-ray-zee. I've been casting on at LEAST two new projects per week, and finishing squat. Things here are getting pretty gnarly, so I decided to do a bit of checking to see what was really going on.

Okay, I /had/ been finishing squat. Then tonight, as Caz got the kids to sleep, I finished the Argosy I started a few weeks ago (out of KnitPicks Swish Superwash in Fired Brick - lovely wonderful yarn, I can't wait to knit with it again). I'm not even entirely sure how that happened, to be honest. It was easily the fastest scarf I have ever, in my life, knit. Granted, I kept it slightly shorter than scarves I've done previously, but then it's not really a pattern that you want to make into a muffler, y'know? Plus I figure it'll stretch a bit with blocking. Even so - a really respectable, cool-ass looking scarf without really trying.

So, once I finished that, I kind of poked around going, "Huh. What should I cast on next? I don't want to drop down below 20 WIPs, after all...." (you think I'm kidding, but really? I'm probably not - it's been baaaaad.)

Surprisingly, I discovered a hat, plus four or five dish cloths in there which are all completed, save the weaving in of ends. I'll have to actually buckle down and do that one of these times. Especially now that I have to weave in the Argosy ends as well.

I also discovered five (5) (cinco) (cinq) (FIVE!) swatches in there, waiting to have their pre-washing measurements taken and recorded. So I did that.

I found the hat I'd started, partially frogged, and re-knit for a friend's birthday (the birthday was in August - I am a bad friend), then cast aside in disgust when I realized I was knitting him a giant cotton bucket. So I laid it out and actually measured it for a change, rather than just eyeballing it. I think the problem is not that it is too wide, but rather that it was getting too long. So, there will be re-frogging, but I've adjusted the pattern I'd brewed up for it, so hopefully the next attempt will be successful.

I found a Flower Basket Shawl I'd begun out of well-aged Malabrigo merino worsted which I'd intended to frog but never had. So I frogged it, then pondered for a few minutes and cracked open a book which is actually intended to be a gift for someone else eventually (just as soon as I can photocopy a few patterns out of it... you understand how that goes), and cast on a totally different shawl with the Malabrigo. I then knit about 35 rows of the shawl. So far it's looking nice. I think I'm going to like it. I just hope I can find the rest of the Malabrigo, wherever it may be hiding.

I looked through some patterns I'd collected here and there, including some culled from one of those "pattern a day" desk calendars. Some cute stuff there - I may have to cast one of those on soon. There's a hat that looks to go nicely with the Argosy, actually.

Finally, I started to put it all back away. And realized that really, I ought to at least finish the damn Hiuumaa Mismatched Mates I started back in May of 2006 (egads!). I'd reached the gusset on the second sock when some enterprising young hooligan(s) yanked the needles out and dropped some of the stitches. So I sat down and picked all the stitches back up, and then knit a few rounds, and then knit a few more rounds, and finally stopped before I hit a "downhill" section (you know, those sections in a pattern where you just /can't/ stop midway?). And then I carefully put it in my fancy new Sock Vault (courtesy of Meg for my birthday, also way back in August - coolest. present. evar!) along with the Kaffe Fassett-stripe sock I started last week and have been working on a lot lately (gorgeous colors!).

And then I looked around, and pondered if I could really justify staying up any later to knit, and well... I couldn't. I shouldn't even be blogging right now. Tomorrow (today to most of you) is soooo going to suck.

I was telling a friend, a few days ago, how really what I want is a nice long weekend someplace far away from everything. I want a nice cozy bed, a really comfy recliner, a DVD player with fresh batteries in the remote, a stack of DVDs to watch and all the knitting I can stand. A fireplace, regular doses of hot chocolate or hot cider (mmm!) would not go amiss either, but are not requirements.

The hard part is, while it would be lovely, I know it wouldn't truly help. Because I would still come back, and would still face the things I need to face - namely myself.

On a political-ish blog I frequent, someone made a comment last week that was, well, far too astute. You know, the kind of thing where the moment you hear the words all you want to do is go, "Shut uuuuuuuup!" and stick your fingers in your ears and sing at the top of your lungs so you can pretend you never heard it?

Yeah well, I heard it. I didn't want to, but I did. And try as I might to deny the truth of it, I won't be able to keep it up forever. Eventually I'll have to admit that, well... I'm more or less afraid to be me. Afraid to declare myself, afraid to step forward and actually /do/ the things I talk about doing, so afraid of failing or being called idiotic names or I-don't-know-what that I'm letting my dreams and goals and hopes escape me.

I don't know how to get past that fear, yet. I expect that's one of the many things I'll be bringing up at that appointment I mentioned above.

But until then... who knows. Maybe I'll see if I can't get another WIP finished.

Calling 1-800-GYPSIES; a story in pictures

2007-07-23T13:46:00.000-05:00

At long last, here is what I believe was the source of my terrible nightmare from the other day:

This is my first-born child.

This is Crown Mountain Farms Sock Hop yarn in the Hang On Sloopy colorway. I bought it for myself last August with a bit of birthday dosh. It is the most expensive yarn I own.

This is what my first-born child did to the most expensive yarn I own.

These are the DVDs which contain the five episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer I watched while untangling the most expensive yarn I own.

Once I was finished, (Damn is orange yarn hard to photograph!)

I bathed my child, and combed his hair, and fluffed it back up so it was nice and curly again. I dressed him in a nice clean outfit.

And I called the gypsies.

This is how much the gypsies offered me for my clean, well-dressed, cute-to-the-casual-observer child.

This struck me as a bit low, considering that at 11 cents a year, that's an abysmally low return on investment.

I thanked them for their time but decided I would keep the child, though I was still mystified as to what would prompt them to make such a low offer.

After they left, I noticed my one and only skein of (accursed) Socks That Rock:

Mystery solved.

Terrible Nightmare

2007-07-22T15:36:00.000-05:00

I took a little nap earlier this afternoon, and despite being interrupted numerous times, I managed to have a really terrible, wretched dream.

I dreamed Caz and I had chanced upon this weird frozen custard shop in Milwaukee we've been to before, but have since been unable to locate (we haven't tried super-hard, mind you). The kids were with us, and so we took them in to buy some frozen custard.

Things were weird, blah blah, but the terrible part was just after I'd finished paying. I realized I'd left my purse sitting on the counter in front of the cashier. I had just stepped away, but the guy behind us had stepped forward anyway.

I said, "Excuse me," a couple times, and he didn't budge. I moved closer to realize that he was going through my purse!

So I shouted "Hey!" and "Get the hell out of there!" and all the usual things you shout when you catch some jerkwad rifling through your purse. He kind of shrugged and stepped away, and I went to check the contents of my purse were all still intact when I noticed he had a ball of purple yarn in his hand.

My wicked purple WICKED!! Somehow I'd stuffed all that knitting into a purse and this asshole was stealing it!

I shouted "Hey!" again and things on the order of "Give that back!" He smirked at me and held it out of my reach.

I took a US7 Denise Interchangeable tip and started jabbing at his chest and face with it. He laughed at me. I got even angrier and switched to a metal US1, again jabbing him in the chest and face, this time intending to do actual harm.

He continued to laugh at me, and started to threaten that if I really hurt him, he could have me arrested for assault. I shouted "Then give me my knitting back, dammit!" He just laughed at me some more and I struggled to figure out what to do next to get this jerk to give me my beautiful, wonderful (giant) sweater back.

And then, mercifully, I woke up.

I know at least some of what provoked the dream, though, which I'll report on later. Hope everyone has much better dreams than me tonight.

The difference between present and past tense

2007-06-23T11:04:00.001-05:00

I was catching up on some blog reading this morning, and happened to read Juno's recent post about finding out a friend she had lost contact with had died recently. I read the comments, and began to post a comment of my own.

When I went to begin the third paragraph, I realized maybe I ought to just post to my OWN blog, if I've got this much to say on the subject.

Dealing with my mom's death has been difficult, of course. I can't imagine the death of a parent is ever easy, no matter how difficult the relationship may have been.

A friend of mine, who I'm not as close to as I once was, lost her father a few years ago. At the time, the only emotion I could imagine her feeling was relief, because her father was... well, he was at best a very crazy man, and at worst a very evil man. Either way, any time she had to engage with him at all, she wound up hurt by it.

I look back now, at how I behaved after her father died, and I pretty much feel like an asshole.

I mean, I wasn't cheering and doing endzone dances or anything, don't get me wrong. But I had a really hard time keeping my own relief - that this person who never did anything but hurt my dear friend was gone - under wraps. And I also tended to assume that she saw him the same way I saw him, forgetting that even a broken clock shows the correct time twice a day. And in an entire childhood, almost two decades of sharing a roof and a dinner table and a life, there had to be some good times, even amongst the very very bad times.

A little over a week after my mom died, I posted to my LiveJournal, talking about how I'd been in the car with Caz and the kids and a song had come on the radio that had just... it had completely smacked me with this memory I hadn't even realized I had, of driving around in our old Chevy Nova on a hot summer's day, me and my mom singing along with John Denver.

It would be so easy, so simple and cut-and-dried and comforting, in the way that the pretty lies always are, to decide that happy memory captured the essence of my mom. That all of the problems between us were my fault, my doing, and my mom was pure of heart and intention all the time, and all the slights and slings and arrows were figments of my juvenile emo imagination.

God, that would be nice. Simple. So easy to just say, "See, the problem, Thorny, was you were just bad. And if you had been less bad, maybe you would have seen how woooooonderful your mom was, and so you only have yourself to blame that you two weren't closer. That, in fact, when she died you two were technically not speaking to each other."

If one were to point out that it's kinda effed up that self-hatred seems like an easier route than wrestling with the big complicated truth, I wouldn't disagree, though I would point out that when self-hatred was a part of one's life for a very, very, very long time, it's relatively easy to go back to. Kind of like how getting dropped in some byzantine foreign country would be terribly frightening for most, but if you grew up there and already knew the language and the customs, well then it's not so bad, even though you're still talking about pre-Glasnost Russia or whatever.

But regardless. I got out of the self-hatred game and learned a lot and spent a lot of time on therapists' couches to learn how to wrestle the big complicated truth, so I guess that's what I'll have to do.

It's not easy to face. It's harder, in fact, to face it now than I think it ever was. Because at least before, when I sat on some therapist's couch talking about how my mom hurt me in this way or that way, I still could cling to this John Hughes-ish fantasy that maybe someday, in some '80s-soundtracked future, my mom and I could sit across from each other and talk, and I could say, "You know, that really hurt me and I was pretty effed up for a long time because of that," and she would say, "I'm so sorry. I never meant to hurt you. I've always just loved you so much." and I would reply, "I know. And it's okay. I know you were doing the best you could. I know things weren't easy for you back then either." And she would give the brave half-smile of the walking wounded, and she would say, "No, things weren't easy for me back then. But I still wish I'd known then what I know now, so I could have just done things better from the start." And I would say, "It's okay. At least we have now." And then we would hug or clink glasses or continue walking down the beach or bake some more cookies, whichever advertising-inspired soft-focus backdrop I'd assembled for my fantasy that time.

And so now, what hurts is not just the loss of my mom, but the loss of that chance. The knowledge that there will be no weepy reconciliation to soaring violins and plinky piano.

There's this whole body of literature out there about star-crossed lovers. What about star-crossed mothers and daughters? There doesn't seem to be a lot of literature about that. No guidebooks on how I'm supposed to deal with all this.

It would be so easy to pretend that it was all my fault. That if I'd only been more forgiving, less proud, blah blah blah, then everything would have been fine.

Except the whole thing about that being a lie gets in the way.

The things I had trouble forgiving really were bad. Were things anyone would have trouble forgiving. It wasn't that I was too proud. It was that after being hurt so many times, I had to put up barriers to protect myself and my family. I didn't make those decisions lightly, either. I agonized over them, and reversed myself many times. Really, for good or ill, I did the best I could.

But it still sucks. It sucks that that was the reality of the situation. And it sucks that she's gone. It sucks that the situation can have no other reality.

I'm finding, thus far, that life after Mom's death is in one way very similar to life when Mom was alive. Some days I think of her fondly and can only remember the good times, and I find myself thinking, "What the hell was wrong with you, that you couldn't make things work?" And other days I remember the bad times, I look at myself and see the scars I've carried for so long, and I think, "Why did it have to be that way? Why couldn't it have been different? What was going on for her, that she felt she had no other choice but to treat me the way she did?"

On the surface, it seems like the big difference is a matter of verb tense. And it is. But there's a reason Mrs. Griffith made such a huge deal about verb tenses and grammar in eighth grade. Because they aren't just words. It's the difference between present and past. The difference between something which is currently true, but may change at any moment, and something which is over and done, and can never be changed.

It used to be that what we had was simply what we had right then, which was transitory. With some work and the right set of circumstances, it could all change.

Now though, what we had is all we had. There will never be anything more, nothing new or different. The ledger on our relationship is closed.

My sister made the comment, in the days after my mom's death, when we were talking about it a lot while planning the funeral and making the arrangements, that while she feels bad that like me, she was "on the outs" with Mom when she died, at least they weren't fighting. Her last interaction with Mom was terse, but at least it was civil, just like mine was.

In a relationship defined by shouting and door-slamming and arm-waving, I suppose it's a blessing that my last words to Mom were, "Hope you have a happy birthday," and her last words to me were, "Thank you."

It isn't much. But considering the ways so many of our conversations ended, it's not bad.

I might still be am!

2007-06-21T02:25:00.000-05:00

Before I begin, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who sent kind words and compassion my way this past month or so. It's been rough, and I've been pretty thoroughly effed up for much of it, but I'm recovering, at least as much as I ever will. I'm sorry for not thanking everyone individually, but I hope you'll all understand. It helped, during a very difficult time, to know there were so many people out there, thinking good thoughts for me and mine. Thank you all very much.

And now, on to the knitting, and a little reminder that life does, indeed, go on.

Second note: So for several days now I've been going, "Dangit, I can't believe no one has commented on my high-larious post!" And then I got a lovely message from Crazy Lanea this morning mentioning that she hopes I can get back to posting soon, as she misses my posts. (Admit it, Lanea - what you really miss are the stories that make you look at your pets' shenanigans with a new, grateful-they-don't-have-thumbs perspective! Am I right? Thought so. grin) And that's when I thought, "Wait, what? But I just posted a few days ago! ....didn't I?"

Yeah, apparently not. As Homer says, "I am so smart! S-M-R-T!"

Written on June 14, 2007:

Lesson learned: Never buy yarn named after an accursed gem.

I've been having trouble with my STR Jewel of the Nile yarn since just about the beginning. I started it as a Jaywalker, was doing well, and then I realized, while working a seriously endless gusset, that I had made the hugest heel flap in the history of creation. The leg was a little loose, but I wasn't too worried about it. The heel flap, however, was right out.

So I frogged back to just before the heel flap early one morning, and Ben woke up to find me frogging directly into the ballwinder.

I guess it looked like fun, because a few hours later he Houdini'd his way into my Active Stash, got out the yarn and the partial sock, and frogged all but the first inch and a half of it all over the living room, including tangling some of it into the workings of my Precious, the recliner, getting freakin' chair grease on my beautiful beautiful yarn.

I set it aside for a while, until I could deal with it without either crying or calling the gypsies (that's 1-800-GYPSIES, for all your child-unloading needs!). Then Mom died, then a bunch of other stuff happened, and finally a little over a week ago I hauled it out, untangled it, trimmed out the greased up section, frogged the remainder of the sock, and wound it all back up. A day later, the little anklebiter got at it again and undid half the ball.

That night I untangled and rewound it, and pondered pattern choices. Jaywalker felt tainted. I wanted something interesting but not too complicated. Alison has been working on Embossed Leaves, and I thought perhaps the predominance of the greeny blue in Jewel of the Nile would work well with Embossed Leaves.

I cast on and worked the ribbing, only to discover it pooling freakily. No way was it going to work for Embossed Leaves. So I decided to change it up, leave the ribbing as it was and do Monkey instead. So I printed out the pattern and got to work. An enjoyable knit, even though I'm still uncertain as to how I like the actual final product. But nice and easy - had it memorized by the end of the first repeat.

I got about midway through the third repeat before I took a long hard look at it and realized that it just wasn't going to work. It was huge. Hugely huge. I was going to have to go down a needle size.

I frogged back to the ribbing, figuring the ribbing would be fine, and started again on US1s. Fine.

Yesterday, the little fiber bandit got at the damned sock AGAIN and yanked out the dpns, but I busted him before he could cause any further damage (though one dpn is still AWOL, dammit). I worked the needles back in without incident, pilfered a US1 from a different sock, and carried on my merry way.

Then this afternoon, the kids were in the bath and I was sitting at the doorway to the bathroom knitting on the sock when I realized that where I should have had 16 sts, I had 17. I counted and recounted and counted again, and there were still 17 gorram stitches on that needle. I then looked and looked and looked, and could not for the life of me figure out where the extra stitch had come from. I counted across the stockinette rows of the repeat previous and it had 16. WHERE was this extra stitch coming from?!

Finally, I decided it was just easier to frog back to the end of the previous repeat and try again. Which I did.

Then tonight, I was on the phone with my sister for a long time, and I was knitting away. All was fine. It was a little awkward, because my nifty super-cool hands-free rig for the cordless phone lost a fight with a nose-miner about a week ago, and so I was back to having to cradle the phone between my shoulder and my ear while I knitted. But I was managing just fine, and had even managed to reach the heel flap. Yay!

So I tried the sock on once I'd done about half the heel flap, and interrupted my sister's charming little anecdote about going to a baseball game with some coworkers with an incendiary stream of cussing. Then I had to explain that my sock, that I'd been working on for almost a week, was too damned small. My sister, who tries hard to understand the Knitting Thing, was as supportive and compassionate as she could be, considering how little she comprehended of the issue. But still, full points for trying.

I chucked the whole kit-n-kaboodle aside, knowing that if I tried to frog it right then I would use Lanea's butane-and-lighter fluid frogging method, and that would definitely kill any last remaining wisp of a chance of us getting our security deposit back some day.

I went and chatted with Caz a bit, and he kindly made me a late-night snack (PMS gives me insane food cravings, it's seriously unfair). I told him about the sock and how mad I was and how I was more than a little convinced the yarn is cursed. I shared with him my plan to give this cussed yarn one more try, and if that blew up in my face, then I was going to throw in the towel and pass it on to some other ~~sucker~~ more capable knitter.

We got up from the table (where I'd spilled a huge mug of water all over the place, and bobbled my scrambled egg sandwich a total of FIVE times - thanks PMS, the clumsy-beyond-all-reason thing is a HOOT!) and I said,

"Oh hey, come here and see this damned sock. I still can't believe it's too fraxing small!"

I got it out, sat down and pulled it onto my foot, expecting it to stop dead over my heel as it had before, only this time? It inched over my heel. It was snug, no mistake, but it worked.

I thought about cussing some more. A LOT more. But instead opted for sitting in near-catatonic shock.

Caz, trying to be supportive said, "Maybe it's just because I'm here. You've always said I've got 'Luck' written down on my character sheet." (I apologize if some of you don't get the joke, but please do not ask, because it is seriously the nerdiest thing since Revenge of the Nerds VIII: Nerds in Spamadise.)

I spoke in a monotone: "No. I think I'm just dumb somehow. I don't even get it. I'm telling you, it did not fit this foot 45 minutes ago."

Caz said, quietly, "I believe you... You can still be mad about it, you know."

To which I replied, "I know. Heck, I might still be am!"

(Yeah. "I might. Still. Be. Am." Those are the actual words that came out of my mouth.)

This prompted him to scramble off the couch and down the hall, cackling and hooting like a loon, leaving me helplessly cussing and trapped by the now-sorta-kinda-fitting half-sock, while he sent out emails to everyone I know calling me The Great Conjugator and laughing himself ill.

One of these days, he's going to wake up with a dpn shoved where the sun don't shine. I'm just sayin'.

Epilogue: I have tried the damned sock on again since, and it still just barely, BARELY fits over my heel. And so I think it's just not salvageable still. So it's definitely going in the time-out corner for a while, and then we'll see what happens.

Besides, I don't want to say too much about it yet, but um... I cast on something new.

The Never Finished Object

2007-05-09T12:05:00.000-05:00

Thursday afternoon last week I got a call from my sister. Our mom had a heart attack Tuesday night in her home and had died. When she didn't go in to work Wednesday or Thursday, and didn't call in, her coworkers got worried and called the police. They went and found her.

The last several days have been very surreal. My mom was only 53 years old, and we fully expected to have plenty more years of driving each other crazy. Her mom - my grandmother - died just over two years ago, so we figured we had plenty more time to mend fences, bury axes, build bridges, that whole business.

In the past few years I've been knitting, I had never found quite the right project to knit for her. I'd come close a few times, but never could quite find something that seemed truly appropriate. So I waited until I did.

Now I never will.

I thought about knitting something small to put in with her, and even got as far as casting on and knitting a couple inches worth. But it just didn't seem quite right. And then I ran out of time to work on it any further, so I wound up just letting it go.

I've cried about a lot of things over the past few days, but I think that was one of the first realizations that came out of no where and really socked me in the gut. I've had many more since then, and probably have many many more to go.

Fiber Trek: The Search for a Flock

2007-04-20T17:12:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in my earlier post, despite my idiotically sprained sternum, I was still all set to drive down to Chicagoville to see the ever-lovely Yarn Harlot do her book-signing, speaking, whirlwind gig. Her earlier tours I wasn't able to make it for various reasons (both small and blonde and generally cute-yet-exasperating - ahem), but this time, finally, we were able to arrange it so that I could go. Meg and Jonathan graciously offered me a place to land overnight while I was there, and so I was set. I was quite happy about this, as you might imagine.

You may recall that I also mentioned that I had decided that I would make my first pilgrimage to The Fold on my way down as well.

Well! Pilgrimate I did and, despite the flattering faith in my moral fortitude exhibited by kimd, I did not actually manage to abstain from purchasing any of the many, many, many pretties I met there. Not by a long shot.

Seriously, does anyone else think Toni could run an organlegging operation out of the back in no time flat? I mean, I've got two kidneys, after all. I'm sure I could spare one, really....

So what did I get, you ask? Well, obviously I was a woman with a mission. I simply had to get my first taste of the almighty Socks That Rock. And so I did.

This is STR mediumweight, colorway Jewel of the Nile. I've been ogling it on Toni's site for ages, and so when I stood there going, "Oh god, oh god, ohgodohgodohgod, what do I pick?" I decided to go with the one I'd been longing for the longest. (Note: Cast on a pair of Jaywalkers with it last Monday, turned the heel and started working the gusset of the first sock last weekend. Am in love. Pictures soon.)

The colors in this picture did not turn out as nicely, but I hope you get the idea. It's the best shot I could get.

In all that talk about STR, nobody mentioned to me that The Fold is apparently THE place to go for Mountain Colors yarns, short of, y'know, the Mountain Colors folks themselves, obviously. How did that escape mention all this time?! Not that I'm looking to assign the blame. All's well that ends well, I say, and the fact that they had the exact colorway in the exact yarn I've been looking for for months now certainly counts as "ending well" as far as I'm concerned. That would be Weavers Wool Quarters in Ruby River, for the record.

I can't wait to make luscious thick boot socks out of it!

Of course I picked up some fiber - this is some Colonial roving in a "Red Multi" colorway. I haven't gotten a chance to play with it yet, but I take it out every so often and pet it like it's my new pet kitten or something. (Not as far-fetched as you might think - I swear I heard it start to purr the other day. Though Caz insists that was just me.)

Of course, to go with that lovely fiber, well... I had to... you know.

My new drop spindle.
I hemmed and hawed and pondered and looked at all the many lovely spindles, all vying for my attention. And then I saw this beauty, sort of tucked behind a few other spindles, patiently waiting on a lower rack, and went, "Oh. Well. Hello then." And I pretended to consider a few other spindles, just to keep them all from feeling too badly about themselves, and then me and this sweetie wandered off to a quiet corner to get a little better acquainted.

Get your minds out of the gutter! I've been behaving the perfect gentlewoman, here. Well, mostly. There was that one night while we were watching TV late at night, but I was properly chastised for my impudence and we're going to take things slow from now on.

I'm trying to finish up the blue on the other spindle and re-read Spin It* and look at some other sources if possible (anybody got any suggestions?), so I have more of an idea of what I'm doing with regards to a drop spindle which I actually intend to, y'know, drop.

So, having met my original purchasing goals (STR, fiber, spindle), and spent all that I could afford, it was time to get back on the road.

* Ha! I originally typed "Spit It!" which I think would be a different book entirely. Entirely.

To Be Continued.....

Heart Healing

2007-04-18T09:43:00.000-05:00

Like everyone in the U.S., and probably the world, I have been stunned by the events at Virginia Tech two days ago.

I look at my children and I see the terrible news, and I just want to hide them away somewhere, forever safe from hate or harm.

But I can't. The darkness can be anywhere and everywhere, and there's nothing I can do to change that.

Today, within about a ten minute span, I read two items - a blog entry and a news article - which brought the tragedy home to me in a way which it had not been before. The first was realizing that I have a friend who once called Blacksburg her home. The second was discovering that one of the students killed was a twin, just like my boys are. The thought of one of them losing the other fills me with agony.

After seeing the terrible news on Monday, there had been a need in me, a drive, a desire to do something good, to fight that darkness, which can be anywhere and everywhere. I had seen Kay's post about Mother's Day Knitting, and had thought to myself, "That's what I'll do. I'll knit a blanket." But soon harsh reality intruded, and I knew that I just didn't have the ability to knit a blanket in that short period of time. After rifling through my stash, realizing I didn't even have sufficient yarn bits for a respectable blanket, I felt defeated. Like this time, the darkness might win.

And then I read Suze's blog, and at first I thought, "My God! Another one! This tragedy keeps getting closer and closer all the time!" All I wanted was to keep this tragedy far, far away from those I adore.

But then I read on, and I felt... hope. I can do something. I can make a difference. And Suze is making it possible. She's asking for 8x8" squares to be sent to her by May 5, and she will sew them together into a blanket(s?) to get them sent out for the Afghans for Afghans Mother's Day deadline.

So, I'm going to get out those yarn bits and start making some squares.

My heart needs healing, and there is darkness to be fought. I'm doing battle the best way I know how - with my heart, my needles and my wool. I will fight darkness with light, cold with warmth, and hate with love. I cannot undo what has been done, I cannot bring back those souls who were lost. But I can and will help keep a new baby, in a land far away, safe against the cold.

Suze needs 25 squares for one blanket. If you all join me in fighting the terrible darkness, how many blankets do you suppose we could make?

Sprains, Spinning and Suze Susses Me Out

2007-04-12T03:14:00.000-05:00

(So I'm a sucker for a little sweet alliteration. Sue me.)

(This post is the first of a series of "retrospective" entries intended to bring y'all up to speed as to what I've been doing with my time the past month or two - which mostly can be summed up thusly: Knitting, not blogging. I'm going to continue to try to catch up here, so expect a few more posts that may be a little more retrospective than usual.)

Sprains

So, about a three weeks ago now, I was trying to bust the kids getting into some kind of mischief, which had included them knocking over the baby gate in the hallway. I didn't want to take the time to pick it up, so I decided to just step over it so I could get to the kid-bustin'.

Well, that turned out to be a bad idea.

I slipped, slid, and tried to catch myself on a handy door frame, only to fall anyway, wrenching my shoulder in the process. I took a little bit to regain my composure (i.e. remember that I know some words which are not, in fact, banned by the FCC), and tried to get up. Ouch. I'd also apparently pulled a muscle in my chest, a seriously undignified muscle to pull.

I spent a couple days feeling ouchy, especially my chest, but figured it was just a pulled muscle and tension and if I could just get it to relax, I'd feel better.

Well, by the time the weekend arrived, I wasn't really any better. In fact, the day Caz decided to reverse the ceiling fan direction and spray dust all over the place, I discovered that sneezing made me want to pass out, it hurt so bad. So when Monday arrived, I called the doctor's office and made an appt. to go to Urgent Care. Went in, saw a doctor, and was pronounced with what I think is the absolute silliest injury I have ever incurred, and I've incurred some pretty ridiculous injuries over the years.

According to the doc, I sprained my sternum.

Yeah, you heard me. I never knew that was possible either. In fact, a friend of mine who is a nurse said, upon hearing that, "Wow. That's one I've never heard of before!"

But apparently that's what I did. So they gave me lovely Vicodin to help me sleep, and advised plenty of ibuprofen for during the day, and at last this point now I seem to be almost back to 100% recovered. Which is good, because keeping up with rampaging twin toddlers when it hurts to take a deep breath is not my idea of a good time. Just in case anyone was wondering.

Spinning
Also about three weeks ago, perhaps even the same day I sprained my stupid sternum, I was suddenly possessed of an urge to dig the spindle I'd bought at Rhinebeck out of hibernation. It turned out I did have some vague recollection of how to spin, so I finished spinning the "practice fiber" I'd picked up at Rhinebeck and wound it off into a ball. (I need to find a good book or tutorial or something on plying, because it needs plying but I have no idea what I'm doing there, so it's set aside for now.) Then I dug through my wee little fiber stash to see what I wanted to play with next.

I chose this lovely blue roving,

which was part of the wonderful array of fiber Jonathan had given to me from his stash after Rhinebeck. I'm not sure what it is, but it's got a much longer staple length than the first batch of fiber I'd been playing with (which I think was Corriedale or Romney, I can't recall now), and I'm loving it to bits. Just... love love loving it.

See how pretty?

I've just about spun up all of it I have, and now I'm wondering what on earth to do with it. I've put enough twist in there that it'll need plying, but... will there be enough yardage then to actually knit anything up out of it? I have no clue how to gauge how much is on there as yet, so I guess we'll see. But I do know I'm way too eager to try knitting it up to consider hanging onto it for any length of time.

I also decided that, as I was plotting a drive down to Chicagoland to see The Yarn Harlot, I would include a stop by The Fold to finally buy myself some Socks That Rock and look into a new spindle. This one has been nice, but it doesn't maintain its spin for very long, which is making it hard to figure out how to actually spin beyond using the park-and-draft method.

And when I'm not spinning, I just want to look at pictures of handspun yarns - most recently I've been working my way through the Twisted Knitters group blog, to see what kinds of cool things people have been doing. Some seriously gorgeous stuff there.

Suze Susses Me Out

So thinking that I had nothing to blog about (yes, I'm a dope, leave me be), when I saw Suze doing up a nifty interview meme on her blog, I decided to throw my hat in and ask to be interviewed. And here are her questions:

1. What aspect of your personality surprises people the most?
It's either the sudden, massive bouts of shyness that afflict me more often than I'd like, or it's the bizarro mix of precision and slobbery which is me. My house is a pit, but I know where absolutely everything is. I'm a total nitpicker about grammar, spelling, usage, but my bookcase is a jumbled mess. I cannot sleep if my bed covers are not carefully aligned, but I never make my bed in the morning, and I can never seem to keep up with my laundry, no matter what I do (and the dirty clothes constantly escape the hamper). I think it confuses a lot of people, but mostly it comes down to this - I am not a half-assed kind of person. I do things either whole-assed, or not at all.

2. Do you play any musical instruments? If so, what? If not, what would you like to learn?
I don't, though I did play clarinet and saxophone in junior high. I liked saxophone a lot, but had been discouraged from playing it because I was told my hands were too small, so I'd taken on clarinet as a compromise, except I hated it. I never practiced, spent most of my time in the school band in the last chair (or, for a while, in the second-to-last chair, because there was actually someone in band who was even more unwilling to practice than I was), and never even managed to memorize how to play the school song. My parents let me start taking lessons on the sax a year or two later, but I really didn't like my teacher, and again took to never practicing, and so eventually gave up on both. I did get really good at playing the theme from M*A*S*H on the sax, though.

I've thought, over the years, if I'd ever like to learn a musical instrument again, but so far nothing has really caught my fancy. If I ever get back into music as more than just singing along with the radio, I'll probably stick with voice - I was in choir for years and loved every minute of it, and would love to see if I can walk the first-soprano talk. Or some other mangled metaphor. grin.

3. What's the worst hairstyle you've ever had?
Easy - the Annie-ish perm my mom convinced me to get in 6th grade. Simply dreadful. I've got a really round face, and the perm made me look like Annie getting the Violet Beauregard treatment. (Well, except for the blue, which probably would have made it a little more palatable, really.)

4. What's the most annoying piece of parenting advice you've ever been given?
Any variation on, "You know, they're going to have to learn _______ eventually." It's become less in the past year or so, but for a while there, I felt like I was hearing it all the time, and usually about things that were, at best, only slightly age-appropriate. Most of the time it was stuff that was well advanced of where my kids were, and so all I wanted to do was reply, "Yes, and they're going to have to learn how to drive eventually too. I'd best get moving on that as well, I suppose?" It wasn't so much the people who maybe didn't know that much about what's appropriate for what age of baby that bugged me, but more the people who used that phrasing as code for, "You know, you're going to have to stop coddling them eventually." They really got my dander up, I tell you whut.

5. Name 3 things that make you smile.
I could cheat and name each of my menfolk, but I will combine them into one thing - my family, and say that bodies of water for watching, swimming in or boating upon are always wonderful, and of course fibery goodness makes me happy.

Thanks for the questions, Suze!

It's Hard to Be Hoppy When You're A Toddler

2007-04-08T19:03:00.000-05:00

Man. Easter is such a rough holiday, it seems. It doesn't help that once again the weather has thumbed its nose at us, and prevented us from doing something lovely and spring-like (and free! and open 365 days a year!) like going out for a nice walk or playing at a park or flying kites or something.

Still though, something about the combination of toddlers and a day that kicks off with a sugar bonanza
just spells disaster, even if there are no heartbreaks or other traumas in the course of the day.

But when Grammy and Grampy are here for a visit, and the boys are just smitten-in-love with Grampy,

and then Grampy has to go away again, and we won't see him for probably another month at least... well, suffice to say the three-and-a-half hours between his departure and the time we got the kids to bed were almost full-time crying. I've never seen these kids this messed up before, seriously.

At least there's good news on the yarn front.

These eggs that I dyed last night (I'm a terrible mother, and will spend eternity in Mommy Hell - instead of dyeing eggs with the kiddos, Caz and I took shameless advantage of the free grandparental babysitting and went to see The Host yesterday afternoon, but then I dyed eggs anyway, because I'm kind of a nutbar like that),

turned out to be such great colors, that I knew what I had to do. I grabbed up a half-pound hank of Henry's Attic Kona Superwash, soaked it in a 3:1 water/vinegar bath for... gosh, probably an hour - we were busy getting stuff ready for today, too. Then I laid it out on a bunch of plastic wrap and Caz and I sat across from each other at the kitchen table and flicked Easter egg dye on it with forks. I should have taken a picture of it in process, because it was cool, but it was like 1 a.m. I totally was not on my blogging game at that point.

Anyway, nuked on high 2 minutes, let rest for 2 minutes, nuked on high another 2 minutes, then rinsed in warm water, squeezed a bunch of the water out (so nice working with superwash yarn for a change! I took a ridiculous amount of flauting the rules and wringing to my heart's content) and hung it in the bathroom to dry. See?

The pink didn't turn out as nicely on the yarn as it did on the eggs. The egg dye kit I used (a Sesame Street version, of all things) instructed not to put vinegar in the pink dye, but to put vinegar in the other four colors. Well, when it came time to dye the yarn, I hemmed and hawed and ultimately decided to add about the same amount of vinegar to the pink that had been added to the other colors. I'd figured the instruction not to add vinegar was because the pink was so fierce to begin with, adding vinegar would just make it too insta-stick for the average home user, but I think I was wrong. I think the vinegar washed out the color somehow - broke it down or something. I'll know better for next time.

I think I might drag the kids to Target tomorrow to see if there's any more of these kits on sale, because these colors really do kick hoop. I'm thinking maybe something in a self-striping for whenever I do this next.

In the meantime, I'm waiting for the Easter egg yarn to dry the rest of the way, and then I'll wind it and see what sounds good to do with it. Part of me is thinking knee socks, the other part of me is thinking that since it's like 250 grams of yarn, I could easily make socks for me, plus have enough left to sell/gift to someone else. We shall see.

Anyway. I've got like three or four entries backlogged here, that have been just awaiting pictures. I finally got a bunch uploaded and will go through and get the posts sorted soon - I'm hoping to get caught up by the end of this week. Though I will be busy - I'll be going to Madison Knitters' Guild tomorrow evening, and out to dinner with a friend on Wednesday evening, and I'm considering going to see Anne Lamott at a local bookstore on Thursday, but we'll see if the week really supports that kind of thing.

"Gosh, Thorny, you're going out a lot for a mother of toddlers married to a man who works second shift. What gives?" Ah ha ha ha, gentle reader - as of Friday my husband no longer works second shift! New job, new possibilities for, y'know, a life and shit! I'm pretty excited about it.

Hope everyone had a Happy Easter!!

One for all those people who say, "Oh, I've always wanted twins!"

2007-03-22T10:23:00.000-05:00

Originally written on Valentine's Day, 2007. Which is a wee little bit sad, come to that.

Man. I just was washing my hands and happened to glance into the bathroom mirror, and I realized that somehow I had failed to change my shirt once I got the kids safely to bed tonight.

I look like an extra from Resident Evil or something.

Dude, I wish I was kidding. But no, my shirt, which in a quirky little twist of fate I had decided would be getting thrown away after this wearing, is like something out of CSI. You know, that piece of evidence they discover at the 35-minute mark, that turns out to be nothing, but looks really incriminating?

That's my shirt.

There is chocolate. And snot. And blood. And something purple I can neither recall nor identify.

This is what happens when your toddler learns both where the candy is stored and how to climb up on the kitchen counter. And then falls.

Here's the situation:

I was trying to do something laundry-like today when I hear that most-hated sound of mothers everywhere, the ominous thud, followed immediately by screaming. Hoo boy.

So I dash out of the laundry room and discover Henry pulling himself up off the kitchen floor, his hands and face covered in chocolate, and a big uglier-than-it-really-is scrape on his face, bleeding away. Egads.

So of course I comfort him and hold him and try to get a look at the scrape on his face. He keeps turning away and smearing his face, along with his now-snotty nose, all over my shirt. I finally get a look at his face, and then realize he's holding his mouth funny, and all I can think is, "Oh god, he's knocked out a tooth." So, I scissor-lock him with my legs and then manage to get hold of both of his hands with one of mine and then try to force the crying child's mouth open, only to discover that no, his teeth are fine.

He's still chewing on a Hershey's kiss.

Gotta admire the boy's priorities, I guess.

Caz got home tonight, helped me smear some Neosporin on Henry's face while he slept (because heaven knows he'd never let me put that horrible stuff on him while he was awake - the child has standards, and though they may include eating Cheerios he finds under the couch cushions (ew!) they do not include letting his mother smear some nasty ol' antiseptic ointment on him), and then went to ask me how my day was. He stopped when he caught sight of the shirt. I think his comment was on the order of "That shirt looks like it's been through the apocalypse."

Yes, dear. But only the shirt. My day, by contrast, was stellar!!

Temptation

So last week Friday, I'd really just reached the end of my tether. Just, you know, one thing after another. Nobody had slept well so we were all on short fuses, the whole thing. The kids were doing this faaaaaaaabulous thing they do, where they sit quietly in the living room looking at books and playing (that's not the "fabulous" part). They do this until I start to go, "Oh, well, okay then." And I get down a bit of knitting, settle down in my nice recliner, and decide to see if I can't knit a row or two. They continue this... this... behavior... until I am about halfway through a row, generally in the middle of something like, a cable crossing, or counting a series of yarnovers, or something like that.

At which point, they spring up and race in different directions, leaving little Tex Avery thought-ballons of mayhem and murder and who-knows-what-else in their wake.

Leaving me to try to gather up my knitting and put it up someplace safe (yeah, I've learned that lesson already, thankyouverymuch) and go fetch them from whatever mischief they've discovered in those 34 seconds, spitting and cursing and generally ready to lose my ever-lovin' mind.

Once they kinda "break the seal" on that, they stop waiting for me to start knitting, and instead just wait for me to turn my back for a second or six. So, you know, I'm fetching some milk for one who's screaming his guts out, and the other one decides now's the time to climb up on Mommy and Daddy's desk and knock over the shelf above it! Or one decides to open the dishwasher, while it's running, and use that as a platform to climb up to the cabinet where the crayons ~~are~~ used to be kept, and then start coloring on every non-paper surface they can find, while the other tries to sit on the cat.

You get the idea. The point is, we'd had a whole day of that, along with the screaming and kicking and throwing themselves to the floor when their little toddler designs were thwarted.

Earlier in the day, one of them had managed (again) to climb up on the counter and get down a box of Corn Chex.

And dump it all over the living room floor.

At first I was angry and tried to pick it all up, but eventually? I was just too tired. The living room floor had been vacuumed the day before, so it wasn't like it was atrocious or anything. And besides - Corn Chex are fortified.

But after a little bit, when their interest in eating Corn Chex off the living room floor had waned and I had gotten tired of stepping on crunchy corn shrapnel, I decided it was time to deal with the debris. So I got out the vacuum and started vacuuming.

And I noticed an amazing thing.

The kids are a bit wary of the vacuum cleaner. The kids had both been on the couch when I started vacuuming. After a few minutes of vacuuming, the kids were still there. No crying or all that afraid, just... wary. They don't know the way of the vacuum, and so don't trust it yet.

And I realized how to use that to my advantage.

I swear to you, I vacuumed that 30-square-foot area for. Ten. Minutes.

During that time, I admit, I got a little caught up in the joy I was experiencing. I started to think, "Okay then! I'll just start vacuuming as soon as Caz leaves for work, and I'll stop when he gets home! I'll even get a little bit of a workout out of it! It'll be perfect."

Except a few little problems started to crop up, even in my happy little vacuum daze.

Hmm. I suppose having the vacuum running for nine hours straight is probably not good for any of our hearing.

And eventually, the carpet is going to wear thin.

And Caz will almost certainly catch on - what, I'm going to go from always leaving the vacuuming to him to vacuuming every day? Hmm.

And then, there was the kicker.

Oh man. What'll I say when next month's power bill shows up and I have to explain why it's $400?

So, eventually, I discarded the plan.

However, I'm still keeping the vacuum and its mysterious power to keep the kids rooted to the couch in reserve. I'll just make sure to use it sparingly. Wouldn't want to abuse it and anger the Vacuum Cleaner Gods*, after all.

*Because the last time I angered the Vacuum Cleaner Gods? They made their ire known about ten minutes before my in-laws were due to arrive, which was also several weeks since the previous vacuuming. There's no way I'm setting myself up to endure that again.

Still kicking, honest!

2007-03-22T09:33:00.000-05:00

Hey y'all. Sorry it's been so long since my last post. I actually discovered one "locked and loaded" as it were from Feb 14th, which I apparently wrote in its entirety and then decided to hang onto for a day to make sure it was all cool, and well... didn't look at it again until, well, five minutes ago.

I'll get it up here in a second.

Mostly things have been kinda rough, I'm sorry to say. There's a big elephant in my living room right now, and so long as there's a chance it will leave of its own accord, I'm loathe to give it incentive to stick around by talking about it overmuch.

But, y'know. Elephant. In the living room. Kinda makes it hard to really wrap my head around anything else I might decide to blog about. Hence the no-blogging for so long.

I'm afraid I don't have photos as yet - I've got a couple of FOs hanging around, but I'm wanting to get them washed and blocked and extra-purty before I blog 'em up, y'know? But there has been knitting going on around here - some socks, a scarf, lots of swatching, and a hat which caused me a surprising amount of difficulty.

See, I was knitting up a nice hat for my dad's birthday, and didn't want to bother with a swatch (feh! it's a hat! who needs swatches for a hat? yeah, that'd be me. anyway). So I made a nice deep ribbed brim, and then decided to switch to stockinette for the crown of the hat. Which is when I discovered I had cast on way too many stitches and the switch to stockinette was resulting in a great woollen bucket.

So I frogged back to the ribbing and decided, "That's okay! It'll just be a ribbed hat. That'll be fine!" I was a little consternated about how to manage the decreases, but recalled a nice ribbed hat pattern in Hip to Knit which I would consult to see how they managed the decreases on that - it seemed nice in the photo, after all. Unfortunately, when I did manage to consult HtK, I discovered that the directions for working the decreases went roughly like this, "Work decreases using either k2tog or p2tog as necessary to maintain stitch pattern."

As you might imagine, this wasn't so helpful.

So I soldiered on and did the best I could, and managed to create, by the time I finished, a great gray nipple hat. Which I let sit on a shelf for a week or so until I could snag a bit of time to blog and fix it, which occurred two nights ago. Except that I completely forgot to take a picture of the great gray nipple until I was sitting in my knittin' chair with a wodge of yarn in my lap, getting ready to put it back on the needles. sigh! Clearly, my Blogging Instincts are not yet fully honed.

Having been failed by HtK, I decided instead to consult Ann Budd, and her lovely Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns. After a bit of poking around, I decided on a concentric circles decrease pattern, and established a couple of "rules" for myself regarding "maintaining the pattern" (which, of course, I promptly broke six rows later). Anyway, it turned out mostly all right, though a bit strange in the Maintaining The Stitch Pattern department. At least it's no longer nipular, which I'm glad of.

I'll take pictures and get them up soon, because the crown of this hat... it really must be shared. It doesn't look bad, per se, but it's just so odd. Not at all what I was expecting. Not at all.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot - emphasis on the Whiskey

2007-02-07T20:00:00.000-06:00

Hmm.

Wow. What an interesting picture. Pretty and yet, inexplicably festive. Why whatever could it be?

I'll tell you. It's a sink full of sprinkles.

Sprinkles?

Why yes. In fact, sprinkles that used to live in this tub by the squizzillion. They were the unfortunate victims of a mass eviction, as perpetrated by one of my children.

See? There they are, all the sad little sprinkle refugees. Tossed from their homes into an unfeeling world full of cold counters and...

...the very real chance that an embattled mother will throw up her hands, decide "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em," and allow the poor homeless sprinkles to be...

...devoured.

Dear gods, the humanity!! The cold-blooded creature has no feeling, no care for the hapless sprinkles clinging to the rim of his ravening maw!

*sob*

Alas! Good-bye cruel world! They shall sprinkle... no more.....

(Note: The child pictured above is not the perpetrator. The Evicter lost interest shortly after he finished the fun fun part of pouring the sprinkles out and watching them bounce and roll all over my kitchen.)

Brain Dump

2007-02-07T00:57:00.000-06:00

Ramble-icious Update
Sorry no posts lately, y'all.

I forget that January/February just wreaks havoc with my headspace. The days and nights blur into each other, Caz working second shift doesn't help matters whatsoever, the kids and I have massive cabin fever thanks to dangerously cold temps and lots of snow and our continued inability to find boots that will fit Ben's flipper-like feet.

I've been knitting, albeit in odd fits and starts, as my cabin fever restlessness permits.

There are socks going on, and some other socks, and a fourth pair of Jaywalkers on the needles. But mostly, lately, I've been working on a lovely feather-and-fan scarf in Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool, ostensibly for my mother-in-law, but we'll see who the final recipient turns out to be.

I do find myself astonished that I've been knitting for close to three years and I never worked in feather-and-fan until now. I love how it's just stupid flippin' easy, and yet looks unbelievably gorgeous and complex. I love that about knitting - that increasing and decreasing in certain orders can give you a gorgeous effect, that knitting your stitches out of order can give you another, equally gorgeous effect. The mechanics of it are simple, but the results are fantabulous. I love it. I'll post some pics soon, though I suspect I will not do well in capturing the true awesomeness of this scarf.

In other knitting news, I'm thinking once again on sweaters for myself. I swatched for Arwen, but never got around to actually measuring my swatch post-washing (yes, yes, you can point and laugh, I won't mind). And I hauled out Brambleberry again, frogged the inch and a half of sleeve I had knitted. Why did I frog it? Couldn't tell you. Think it was Winter Headspace Weirdness or something, because there wasn't a darn thing wrong with it. At least not that I could tell - it's not like I'd even done enough to tell if I was getting gauge or not.

Anyway. So I'm torn between Brambleberry and Arwen (or Samus, or Eris, or FLAK, or a host of other cabled cardigans out there). Brambleberry might win out simply because I don't have to make any big decisions beyond "start Brambleberry." And really, decision-making is pretty hard for me right now.

In Other News

Speaking of decision-making, I'm still reeling from the bad case of sticker shock I got this weekend, when I finally started researching preschool options for the daring duo. Holy crap on a stick. As Caz pointed out - for the cost of one year of preschool for the kids, we could buy a car. A whole car. Maybe not a big car or a fancy car, but a car. A CAR! I knew it would be bad, but man... I seriously about crapped myself when I saw the actual numbers all laid out there.

Oh, and here's that Crazy Twin Story I promised a few weeks ago:

So, back in mid-January, Meg and Jonathan visited us as they were passing through, as rock stars are wont to do. We hung out, they brought really cute knitted bears for the kids (seriously, check 'em out), and we went to a local Indian buffet for lunch (mmm mmm good). In preparation for their visit, Caz and I (by which I mean, Caz) prepared a yummilicious dessert - Sarafina's Almond Cake. We made it a day ahead, and then Meg and Jonathan had to postpone their visit by a day (rock stars, what can you do?), but that was all fine. The cake was carefully wrapped and kept safe, so no big deal. Besides, I could swear Lanea had said that letting it "age" for a couple days did nothing but good for the almond cake.

Well... yeah. You know what's coming, right? Sure enough, Sunday morning the kids got rolling before we did, and instead of coming into our room right away, they struck out on their own to see what they could get into. And so, of course, Henry got into the cake. Caz walked out of our room a while later to discover Henry sitting on the kitchen table, gouging handfuls of goodness out of the almond cake and stuffing his face with them.

So much for fancy dessert for our friends. sigh! At least the kid's got good taste, right? Right? Right? (Humor me here, just a little, would you?)

I tried to get pictures for the blogging, but the camera was not immediately accessible, and Caz, having spent two days on his very best Resisting Temptation behavior, decided, "Dammit, then I'm having some almond cake too!" and started cutting slices from the poor disfigured cake for himself. And well, I sure wasn't going to let him eat the whole rest of the cake himself, so uh... I helped. As it turns out, the goodness of almond cake completely trumps any Grubby Toddler Hands factor. Who'd have guessed it?

HA! Joke's on me! (Or: Update)
So, I wrote up this post this afternoon, but then got sidetracked before I could put in all the links. While I was out in the other room, I finally decided to check that gauge swatch I did for Arwen a while back. My gauge was. Spot. On. Absolutely perfect. The cable was also precisely as it should have been. So... I took a plunge and cast on for the back. And then, of course, got sidetracked some more, so I haven't done anything but cast on. But I did cast on. Looks like Arwen it is. Sorry, Brambleberry.

Blogger (Silent) Poetry Reading

2007-02-02T05:36:00.000-06:00

(with thanks to Cara for tipping me off about this)

Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)
by Nikki Giovanni

I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat's meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can't catch me

For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son hannibal an elephant
He gave me rome for mother's day
My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
the filings from my fingernails are
semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
the earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended except by my permission

I mean...I...can fly
like a bird in the sky...

Blog for Choice

2007-01-22T02:51:00.000-06:00

Sorry for the hiatus, y'all, and sorry that there's no knitting content forthwith. Those who aren't down are free to skip today's post and come back next time - I promise knitting content and maybe even a Crazy Twin Story to boot. For now, though, some politically inspired navel-gazing.

Blog for Choice

In November of 1972, I was conceived. My parents were young - 18 and 19 years old - unmarried (but some reports say they were engaged), and scared to death.

They put on a brave face, announced a January wedding date, and ploughed ahead.

My parents got married on January 13, 1973. Nine days later the Roe v. Wade judgment was handed down, legalizing abortion.

Even though I wasn't born for another seven months after that, I still feel as if my parents' wedding date, in relation to when Roe v. Wade was decided, is somehow significant. Though not how you might think.

I don't feel relief, as if I somehow scraped through a tight spot. The truth is, even if abortion had been legal, I can't imagine my mother getting an abortion. She was a good Catholic girl (fooling around with her maybe-fiance notwithstanding), who came from a large Italian family whose judgment intimidated her more than their love comforted her.

The sad fact of the matter is, my parents' wedding was a grim affair. I've seen the pictures. Everyone looks dazed, in a state of shock, except for the best man, who is quite obviously drunk off his ass. My parents' smiles are brave, but not particularly convincing.

My maternal grandfather looks like he's at a funeral. My maternal grandmother refuses to look at the camera. My paternal grandparents don't look much happier. My mother's siblings look extremely confused. As well they should - my grandparents didn't tell them about my mother's wedding until that morning. My grandparents didn't want them to be distracted for finals week at school.

Everyone appears stunned, at a loss for what to do or how to behave.

No one looks happy.

That day set the tone.

My parents' marriage, which lasted a grueling 22 years, was also grim. We never quite made it all the way into After-School Special territory, but we got close more often than a family should.

I was five years old when I first learned how long it takes a baby to grow in its mama's belly. Being a precocious kinda kid, I then immediately did the math to find out when I'd been "planted" in my mama's belly, only to realize that the math didn't work out. I'd been hoping to find out I'd been a Honeymoon Baby. But something was wrong, because babies take longer than seven months to be born. My mom tried to tell me that I was early, that I came before I was supposed to.

Mom's "brave face" has never been her specialty.

For the ensuing 17 years of pain, misery, resentment and depression, on all our parts, I would think to myself that if I hadn't come along, my parents never would have married. They would have eventually broken up, married other people, and maybe then everyone would be happy. It was a child's view of the world, of course, wherein everything that happened was all to do with me. But how else does a child see the world?

What's this got to do with Choice?

It's true. Even if abortion had been legal before January 13, 1973, I still would have been born. Chances are my parents still would have married, still would have been a bad match, still would have created a difficult situation for themselves, each other and for my sister and me.

But maybe, just maybe, being free to really choose to keep me would have changed things. Would have made my parents feel a little less trapped. Maybe then their wedding album would seem less like every member of my family is doing their best "deer in the headlights" impression.

I don't think for a moment that my mother would have made any different decisions, when she discovered she was pregnant all those years ago. But I do think it would have helped her to have options available to her. To be given the chance to choose to keep the baby she discovered she was carrying, rather than backed into a corner and given no other alternatives.

Because abortion was illegal, my mother was denied the chance to chart her own course, to choose her own destiny.

Maybe, given a choice, my mother would have approached motherhood with less bitterness and anger in her heart.

Some folks say depression is anger turned inward. I believe that's quite often the case.

My mother is the angriest person I've ever met, and she's been angry for 34 years now. She can't voice her anger, of course. She can't actually speak the words in her heart, that she was forced to have me, that she was forced to give up her life in favor of mine. She can't speak of how hurt she must have been by how her parents treated her then. She certainly can't give voice to how betrayed she must have felt, when she found out a few years ago that her parents, who judged her so harshly for becoming pregnant before she was married, had been lying about how long they'd been married, to hide that when they married, Grandma was two months pregnant with my mom.

She can't give voice to her anger, but it always finds its way out. Anger always does. That's its nature, after all.

My mother is the angriest person I've ever met, because 34 years ago she was denied the chance to want to have her baby.

Every baby deserves to be wanted, be it at conception or at some later date, after the surprise has worn off a little.

I'm not grateful my parents got married before Roe v. Wade came down. Abortion being illegal didn't save me, because in all reality, my life was never in danger.

But there's more to life than breathing.

I am the baby no one got to want. A fact which colored how my family, immediate and extended, treated me from the moment they learned of my impending arrival. A fact which colored how I behaved with my family from the moment I learned of it until this very day. A fact which no amount of therapy or medication or positive self-talk can change. A fact which is unchanged by all the protestations of "But we're so happy you're here now!"

Don't get me wrong. I'm a big girl. I've done the shrinkage and the happy pills and the "I'm okay, you're okay!" crap for a long time. I gave up feeling like I never should have been born long ago. Overall I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out. I'm happy with my life, I'm happy to have my life. It's all good.

Well, except that my mother has spent 34 years feeling trapped by my very existence, by a life she was never free to choose for herself, and now lives in such a quagmire of vicious, angry self-loathing that I just don't know if she'll ever be happy about herself or her life (and thus my life) again. We pretty much never speak. She forgets my birthday routinely, and has never made any real attempt to remember my husband's birthday (after 13 years), and has even begun forgetting my children's birthday. When we do speak, civility flees the room almost immediately, and bitterness, anger and resentment come roaring in.

I'm beginning to fear that things will be like this between us until the day she dies, no matter how many times and ways I try to reach out to her.

Illegal abortion didn't save my life, but it still managed to cost me my mother.

No baby should be forced upon its mother. Motherhood should be a choice, freely made, for all women.

I was a baby no one had a chance to choose. I believe all babies deserve to be wanted. Thus I am pro-choice.

Continuing to Catch Up

2007-01-11T03:48:00.000-06:00

So, as my Year in Knitting recap showed, my blogging really has just not kept pace with my knitting thus far, and I really must fix that. So, toward that end, I will first endeavor to catch up a bit.

Here is one of the oldest un-blogged FOs - a scarf I made for Caz in a lovely dark purple, which is his all-time most favoritest color ever!!!!111!!1111one1!

Yarn: Cascade 220, colorway 8885 (at least, I'm pretty sure), used 1 2/3 skeins roughly
Pattern: Feh. Made it up. Just a simple basketweave stitch on, I think, 40 sts
Needles: US7 bamboo straights, US7 Denise Interchangeables
Started: Sometime in winter/spring 2006
Finished: Early November, I think - just in time for the first (and so far only) big snowfall we've gotten

It was a simple knit, and nice to kind of go back to when nothing else I was working on seemed to be going right. Though man, by the end of it? I was sick to death of basketweave stitch. blegh! Caz is pretty darn happy with it, so that's good. Now if we just had weather that he could wear it in without lighting his already pretty-woolly head on fire.

Here's another -

Yarn: Trekking XXL Colorway 100
Pattern: Basic stockinette socks
Needles: US1 Susan Bates Silvalume dpns
Started: Sometime this summer
Finished: October or November, I'm not sure exactly
Modifications: I decided the funky stripiness of this yarn merited a short-row heel, so I looked some up and wound up using these instructions for a "Sherman" heel, and they worked out really well. I'm not sure a short-row heel is my favorite ever, but I figure I'll give them another try one of these days. Will probably mess with them a little more, as these are a smidge tight through the ankle, and the "corners" of the heel stick out funny, and the whole thing doesn't cup my heel quite right. I think it could have used more stitches left un-short rowed.

You may note that these socks don't look much like the Trekking 100 socks you've seen other people showing off. Yeah, I've kind of wondered about that too. I thought at first that I'd just gotten a bad skein, but then I discovered that Crazy Lanea had the same problem, and even gave it a name: Ground Clown. Which, really, is the best way to describe these.

The overall effect is, admittedly, not torturously ugly, but that's hardly a ringing endorsement. They ain't pretty, that's for sure. I finished them and I wear them, because dammit, I knitted 'em, but... I dunno. They're the socks I wear when I've worn all my other handknit socks except the first pair I made, and only because the toes are a bit too short on that pair and so they aren't wonderfully comfortable like the others. And I prefer comfortable to pretty in 9 out of 10 situations.

In other news, my whole "knit the stash" business? Oy. I posted about that, then went to the LYS with a friend of mine, who I permitted to talk me into buying some Elsebeth Lavold Silky Wool in order to make a scarf for my MIL. She didn't have to work too hard, honestly - there was a sample scarf on display that really caught my fancy, and so I was leaning pretty heavily in that direction already.

And yes, I had allowed myself a "Gift Making Exclusion Clause", but still. I felt kinda silly, going right out and buying yarn after all that "No more buying yarn!" talk. sigh.

However, the next night after the kids went to bed I stayed up and organized the "active" stash and got a bunch of things moved out of that because the kids kept getting into it. And I have to say - I soooooo do not need more yarn. Seriously. It's just gotten ludicrous.

Ooh, and before I go: it is apparently Annual Delurking Week, so assuming there's more then four of you out there, go ahead - delurk! Tell me you're reading! Though really, if you're happier lurking, I won't judge you. I just needed an excuse to post up this genius button:

Another Knitting Retrospective - Jaywalkers

2007-01-08T13:02:00.000-06:00

So I'm finally kinda catching up on a bunch of knitting I've done... well, over the year. And I'm finally getting some photos up and like that.

Among the things I knit for myself this spring? A second pair of Jaywalkers. Aren't they pretty?

I suspect they were done on US1 dpns, and I know they were done with KnitPicks... well, Memories, essentially. I forget what it was originally called, but it wasn't Memories back then. Anyway, colorway is "Tropical Sunrise".

The other pair of Jaywalkers I finished in September, after finally successfully grafting the toe of the first sock five months after the previous grafting attempt. I then cast on the second sock, and got it done lickety-split.

I'm afraid I lost the ball band a while ago, but it was one of the Regia 6-ply Crazy Colors colorways worked on US2 needles. I really like them. And the funny thing is? They match a sweater I bought at Target in like 2003 almost perfectly. I'll have to get a picture, because it's kinda hilarious.

I hadn't even noticed until a friend was over and I was working on them while we were talking and she mentioned that she was trying to watch what I was doing, but couldn't because the sock kept blending in with my sweater. Whups!

I have to say, I really do like the Jaywalker pattern. I'm no Cara, but um... I kind of cast on for my fourth pair a month or two ago. They'd been on a major back burner thanks to the sweater-finishing frenzy and then Christmas knitting and then Corazon, but I picked 'em back up the other day in my quest for knitting that wasn't going to defy me, and they're moving along. I'm using a Trekking XXL colorway, and so they're on US0 needles, so they're not moving super-fast, but that's all right. It still gave me something to do with my hands last night when my sister called me to ramble on about the state of her current relationship.

Look! Look! Lookee!

2007-01-08T12:50:00.000-06:00

My first mittens!

Pattern: Corazon from Knitty (Winter '06)
Yarn: KnitPicks Merino Style in Hollyberry and Nutmeg
Needles: US4 Susan Bates Quicksilver dpns and US6 Takumi bamboo dpns
Started: Dec. 10, 2006
Finished: Dec. 25, 2006
Modifications: I lengthened the thumbs a bit from what the pattern said they should have been, and made the top of the mitten shorter than instructed. My hands are a smidge wide and a lot short, so I skipped a few of the knit rounds between dec rounds at the top, and they turned out just perfectly, I think. Oh, also, I unintentionally picked up an extra stitch for the thumb on the right mitten. I fixed that for the left mitten, only to wind up with big gaps and wound up using my ends to sew them shut a little bit before weaving them in.

The start-finish dates are deceptive. Actually this was an insanely quick knit. Suddenly I'm understanding why people make mittens as Christmas presents. There was a good week, maybe a day or two beyond that in which I was convinced I was going to (you may want to sit down for this) actually finish both stockings for the boys in time for Christmas, and so set the first (finished) mitten aside and didn't cast on the second one. Then, when it became all too clear that the stockings just weren't going to happen? I breezed through the second mitten in no time. A killer case of the stomach flu, complete with three days where it was all I could do to stay awake for four hours at a time, didn't even slow me down much.

I'm really loving them. Well, I would if it would just get cold enough to wear them. Maybe this weekend.

Now I'm totally just jazzed to do something else in stranded colorwork. Of course, I also just cast on a new pair of socks and am considering casting on a second pair, so... we''ll see how that goes. But I am thinking I need to hit the LYS to do something new and stranded and fun. Maybe these.

Tardy for the New Year

2007-01-04T06:16:00.000-06:00

Can you believe it? I can. I'm always tardy. Even when I don't mean to be, something comes up. People keep telling me, "But you have an excuse - you have twins!" The sad truth is, I was perpetually late even without excuses. The "twins" excuse is unnecessary enable...ment.

So, the New Year has begun, and while I was going to avoid doing the whole New Year's thing, I'm afraid I'm kind of stuck.

You see, we'd taken a few pictures of the children being just darling, and so I went to post them up to all and sundry, to say, "Look! See? This is why I haven't sold them off to the gypsies yet."And then I realized that the wee little hooligans have somehow managed to stuff the USB cord into some pocket nether-realm located Who Knows Where, and so the Cute Kid Pictures, as well as several knitting-related pictures, are locked on the camera and who knows when I'll ever be able to free them.

Karma, party of one...

So, my New Year was... a little hectic. I took the kids, sans Caz, down to my dad's for an overnight visit. You see, very late Dec. 22, I commented to a friend, "I almost wish Ben's weird off-and-on fever would turn into something real, so we would have an excuse to just stay home for Christmas. This attempt to travel is /seriously/ getting me down." Approximately six hours later, in the dawning hours of Dec 23, I woke up from a dead sleep. If the proverbial dog is as sick as I was, then for the love of all that's holy, someone needs to put that poor thing out of its misery, because leaving it that way is simply cruel. Or, to put it more graphically and directly: I spent about an hour and a half sitting on the toilet with a bucket in my lap, wishing for the sweet sweet release of death. I'm still not sure where my liver wound up. I finally began to feel like a person late Christmas Eve, and was recovered though still delicate on Christmas.

Caz and the kids both got it a bit too, though no where near as bad. Thankfully, the only people who wound up throwing up were the ones old enough to know to dash to the toilet.

Happy New Year!

So, January 1st was my dad's 10th Annual New Year's Day Ravioli Party.

It's a little odd, actually. My mom is the Italian one - she's half Irish, half Italian - but when they divorced, my dad somehow wound up with custody of Grandpa's ravioli recipe, as well as the giant board and rolling pin he fashioned specifically to allow for the making of ravioli.

Shortly after their divorce, my dad was going about starting new traditions for himself, and settled upon an annual New Year's Day ravioli party. Dad starts really early simmering sauce and cooking sausage and the like, my sister arrives fairly early to roll out dough and spoon out the filling and close up the raviolis (Dad did it the first few years, but eventually got tired of getting scolded how he was doing it wrong, so now Sis does it) and then there's always a few people who are there early-ish as well to crimp the edges and score the tops three times with a fork.

This was my second time going, and the first time I actually arrived in time to not only attend dinner, but help (a bit) with assembly. The kids were a little too enamored with the Christmas tree for me to leave them unattended too long. (News Flash: The presence of a tree, mysteriously located indoors, covered in lights and garland and shiny things, and adorned with a hundred or so little figures which are all roughly the size of toddler playthings, is more temptation than the average 2.5-year-old can resist for longer than 2.3 nanoseconds.)

It was a nice time, despite trying to keep the kids out of too much mischief, and in a nice bit of timing, I actually saw the sun for the first time in like two weeks. Somehow the two weeks before New Year's had just been nothing but gray gloomy clouds, and if the sun did come out, invariably it was a day when we were all too sick to leave the house. So for part of the afternoon, the kids got to run around in my dad's blessedly fenced back yard (oh, how I long for that glorious wonderful day when we too will have a back yard in which the kids can play without me worrying about them (too much)) and I even stood out there and enjoyed some sunshine too.

The whole thing kind of does a number on me, though. Because, you know, when my grandfather throws a ravioli party, even though there will be like 50 people attending, he still manages to make so much that everyone is adviced to BYOT (Bring Your Own Tupperware) if they want to take home leftovers.

My dad, on the other hand, grew up with a different ethos - my dad's mom has this astonishing ability to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for a dozen people, and wind up with everyone eating as much as they would like, but still have practically nothing left over. It boggles my mind, not just for the ability (which takes my own goal of getting really good at getting entree and all side dishes to be ready at the same time and rolls it in an alley somewhere), but also because... I tend to lean more toward how my mom's family does things.

Leftovers, to me, are the extra prize inside for a meal well made.

I've honestly never comprehended the whole "struggle to deal with Thanksgiving leftovers" business. Turn the leftover turkey into enchiladas? What? But why? Either nosh it straight, or throw it on a plate with some leftover stuffing and leftover cranberry sauce, and have your own Thanksgiving Instant Replay! The closest I come to "make a different meal with your Thanksgiving leftovers" is, well, open-face turkey sandwiches. Which, let's be honest here, is nothing like a "different meal" at all.

Which is not to say my way is the only way - if other folks are happy turning their T-day turkey into enchiladas, then that's grand. But it's totally not how my brain works at all.

So when my dad throws his Annual New Year's Day Ravioli Party and doesn't send people home with tons of leftovers... it really throws me for a loop. I try to tell myself it's a Zen thing, where I should just be in the "now" of the ravioli and not expect to be able to re-live the event for a week afterwards, but... man. To me? It's a failure to maximize output for the effort. Or, you know, just a missed opportunity. Why go to all the trouble of simmering sauce and making special fillings and making dough from scratch if, at the end of the day, there's not going to be anything but sauce left?

It's a big head-scratcher for me, is what I'm saying. It's also more reason for me to want a house of my own some dang day, because then... oh holy kolackys, I'm totally going to throw ravioli parties that make people literally sit down and write home about.

OOOH! I almost forgot to mention! In light of the Italian-themed occasion, I decided it would be the perfect opportunity to finally get to make Crazy Lanea's almond cake, which she shared with many of us at Rhinebeck. Caz, being my minion in all things baker-ly, got cozy with the MixMaster and whipped it up.

It was, in a word, heavenly. I'm now on a permanent lookout for occasions when I can reasonably (or even unreasonably) find an excuse to make this cake. OMG. And it was very well received as well - after a big meal of ravioli and sausage and meatballs and garlic bread, it was a nice way to have a bit of something sweet that wasn't going to land like a brick in the gullet.

And then, while we all lingered over dessert, my step-mother's sister broke out a legwarmer she was working on for her daughter, and suddenly there was a whole bunch of us gabbling on about knitting. I showed off the boys' sweaters to my aunt and grandmother, who both were very complimentary about them (I would have had the kids wearing them but um... tomato sauce, y'know? Eek. Also, Dad's place is not so big that he can pack 20-plus people in there without it turning into a sauna.) And then my youngest step-sister mentioned that she had started to try to teach herself knitting, but hadn't managed it. So my aunt sat down on one side of her, and my stepmom's sister found a spare pair of needles in her bag and my step-sister found her ball of yarn, and they taught her how to knit. It was. Pretty. Damn. Cool.

Enough Yakkin' Thorny. What About The Knitting?

Oy. Well. There's a report coming, honest. The whole "no way to make the camera talk to the computer" thing kinda puts a damper on it all, for the moment.

But I will say - I've been in a bit of a wiggy slump all the sudden. Nothing seems to quite be going right - lots of mismatches between patterns and yarns, and several false starts, and everything that I /do/ currently have OTN, is all complicated and difficult to do when the kids aren't sleeping, and believe-you-me, the kids? They ain't sleepin' much lately. Which gives us the double delight of cranky kids during the day, and then a mama with not enough time to herself at night, resulting in cranky mama 24/7. It's been... not our prettiest around here, despite the weather being very cooperative and allowing us to go outside and play in sunshine several times this past week.

Anyway, point being - they're too cranky and overwrought and freaksome for me to attempt any but the most mindless of knits (as my aunt describes it - "idiot therapy") while they're awake, and they're awake pretty much all the time I am it seems.

Didn't You Start This Making Veiled References to Resolutions?

Crap. Busted!

Yeah, I did.

I don't really do the whole resolutions thing. I mean, I love the idea, but... I've got a weird Intense Need To Self-Sabotage thing that I haven't managed to get shrunk out of me in over a decade of on-again-off-again shrink-visiting, so true resolutions are mostly just a laundry list of all the things I'm going to keep myself from achieving. Which, really, is just more depressing than I can stand.

However, I do dig the whole, "New year! New start!" vibe going around, and Caz and I did have some good discussions over the holiday season about what we want and don't want in our lives, and how to achieve making those necessary changes. And so I do have some general changes I'm going to try to make in my life this year.

1. I would love, by the end of this year, for us to have a much more organized household. Hell, I would love to see us lose about half the clutter we've got too, but I'm not going to get too far ahead of myself here. Even if we have every scrap-o-crap we've got right now, so long as most or all of it has a place where it belongs, where it gets put away and out from underfoot and not in the middle of everything, I'll be happy.

2. I am going to do my darnedest to go to Maryland Sheep & Wool and Stitches Midwest this year, and to that end I am going to

3. try, without making some big grand commitment to it or anything, to follow some of the basic tenets of the whole "Knit From Your Stash" thing that everyone seems to have joined. MDS&W and Stitches MW will be my two big exceptions, obviously.

4. In an attempt to prevent this year's "I hate people"-a-thon during the few weeks before Christmas, when I had a ton of people I needed to provide presents for and no way to do it, I'm going to try to keep at least one gift item on the needles at all times this year. And not just start some gift and then stick it in a corner until July, either. Actively on the needles, I'm saying. I'm sure there are tons of people who do that kind of thing all the time, but I've pretty much always knitted for myself and my immediate family, and so this is going to be something of a change. But as I mentioned to Meg the other day, suddenly the idea of knitting a pair of socks for someone else doesn't seem insane. It's like it became a more everyday kind of magic, one I don't need to hoard quite as carefully as I have in the past. Having a week's worth of knitted socks for myself might have something to do with that, I admit.

5. Submit some of my writing to someone, somewhere, for publication. Really. I mean it. Honest.

I think that's it. I've had a lot going on in the headspace, but not enough time/inclination/clarity to actually write it all down. But I'm going to work on that and see if I can't make more progress. And today's project, aside from hanging out at the LYS/coffeeshop (to knit, not shop - see #3) and having samosas for lunch, is going to be finding that blasted USB cable so I can finally blog up some of my pictures and make like this is a fer realz knitting blog and not just Ramblemania 2007.

A Year In Knitting

2006-12-21T01:29:00.000-06:00

So, per Carole's request, I'm trying to remember everything I knitted this year. Let's see....

Two hats for the boys (blue and yellow ones)
A hat for Shelby
Two sweaters for the boys
Embossed Leaves socks
Kool-aid Jaywalkers
Tropical Jaywalkers
Striped Jaywalkers
Trekking "Ground Clown" socks
Koigu socks
Three, maybe four warsh rags (can't recall for sure)
Scarf for Caz
Corazon mittens for me (technically not finished yet, but only have one thumb to finish and ends to weave in)

So that totals up to:

2 kid sweaters
6 pairs of socks
3-4 warsh rags
1 scarf
3 hats
1 pair of mittens

UFOs
Two Christmas stockings for boys
Sockotta socks
Huimaa Mismatched Socks
Socktoberfest socks (though I think there's still hope for them)
And a few almost-started projects that are too early in their development to even count as UFOs, as far as I'm concerned

So what was my favorite? Well, the boys' sweaters I'm awfully proud of, and when the mojo was on, they were awfully nice to knit, I have to admit. However, they were also pretty big projects, and the green one languished for what, eight months? waiting for me to finish seaming it and put a collar on it, fer cryin' out loud. So obviously, there were times when the magic of the sweaters faded for me.

As far as the sheer knitting experience, combined with the lovely final product? I think I have to go with the Embossed Leaves socks. The yarn was fantastic, the pattern was great, I had no major ripping incidents, and I remember knitting them with a rather high level of dedication, just because I loved knitting them so much. Seriously, I finished the pair in just under three weeks, if I recall correctly.

Though I have to admit, Corazon has been a close second. I got kind of stalled in the middle, when I thought I was actually (ha ha ha!) going to finish my kids' stockings in time for Christmas, but once I realized that just wasn't going to happen, I set them aside so I could finish my mittens. Which was great, because I totally had that lovely synergy of exactly the right yarn for exactly the right pattern, and it was all just flowing along like crazy and I was just in love love love with the whole thing.

You know what this list really tells me though? I totally need to blog this stuff more often. I mean, half the FOs up there I've never blogged about, and if you actually take time to follow links? You'll see that several of the links lead to pictures of the projects in their early to mid-stages, and that no pictures of the final products have appeared on this blog at all. Which is just sad.

I guess I know what my New Year's resolution will be, at the very least - blog blog blog blog BLOG!

Merry Christmas to all (who celebrate it) and to all (yes all!) a good night!

What Christmas Knitting?

2006-12-11T11:00:00.000-06:00

I was doing really well on keeping up with my Christmas knitting. That is, until the new Knitty came out.

But I was intent on staying strong, sticking with my big ol' long-term projects, and seeing everything through.

And then the kids pulled the needles out of the five rows of scarf I'd started for my sister, and I thought to myself, "Well, I /could/ painstakingly pick up all those stitches and try not to mess it all up. OR I could just start up a fancy pair of mittens!"

Guess what won out?

In case you're curious, that's KnitPicks Merino Style in Hollyberry and Nutmeg, fished out of the stash from projects long ago forgotten or abandoned. And I love this mitten with a love that's deep and fierce and true. I just hope it will understand when I want to bring its fraternal twin sister into the relationship.

Hot $h1t! I did it!

2006-11-27T21:18:00.000-06:00

Check me out! I did it!

Over the Thanksgiving weekend, not only did I /finally/ complete my Olympic-cum-Turtle KAL sweater, but I also managed to overcome Second Sweater Syndrome and complete its companion.

Well well well, wouldja lookit that?

And how about that?

Whoa, look! There's another one!

And the reverse side!

And this is the best picture I got of both sweaters in action. It's strangely apropos - both boys heading in different directions, Henry at top speed. This is my daily challenge, just dressed up in hand-knit sweaters.

Pattern: "Prepster" from The Yarn Girls' Guide to Kid Knits
Yarn: "Candy Cane" from Sandy's Palette, purchased at Wisconsin Sheep & Wool back in 2005. No colorway names given. Roughly 8 oz went into each sweater.
Needles: US6 and US8 Denise Interchangeable Circs
Modifications: On the green sweater, absolutely none. For once in my life, I followed a pattern exactly as written. On the blue sweater, I kinda fudged up a slightly larger size, seeing as my children are giants-in-waiting. I added 4 sts to the front and back panels, as well as adding about an inch in length. I knit the sleeves as written, trusting the additional shoulder width to be sufficient to compensate for the extra sleeve length. Oh, and technically "Prepster" includes a hat, which I decided to skip.
Models: Ben in blue, Henry in green

(If you want to see the beginning saga of the green sweater, which was my official Olympic sweater, you can check it out here. The blue sweater, like most second-born children, had its infancy go virtually unnoticed. Poor thing.)

I loved working with this yarn, which I have come to believe is from the same base yarn as Scout's Twist yarns, and thus is a great worsted weight merino wool with one ply that grabs up more dye than the other plies, and thus you get a pretty cool effect from it.

If you look close, you can see on the blue sweater how those four measly sts on the front and back panels made it suddenly pool like mad. In fact, if you look really close at that picture of the back of the sweater, you can just about pick out where I made my gut check and decided I was not about to rip back the whole bit of back panel I'd completed, but would instead just start alternating balls of yarn every two rows in order to make the pooling stop.

Pics were taken at my in-laws, three days after Thanksgiving when it was a completely insane 64 degrees out. Sadly my camera batteries were low, and so I wasn't able to actually take pictures when Ben started to do goofy things like lean backward against the chilly concrete stairs, and then pause and give me this look like, "Oh yes, I'm soooo comfortable. This is completely natural. Everyone does this. Can't you imagine just how relaxed and at ease I'm feeling right now? The cold concrete wedging between my lumbar vertebrae, my head at an awkward angle just over the edge of the stair above, so if I relax my neck I'll brain myself.... Admit it, you're jealous. You wish you could feel this casual and calm in such an awkward position. If you were wearing this sweater, you would."

It would have been perfect for a Rowan spread, I swear.

Scout's Meme

2006-11-15T22:41:00.000-06:00

So, kickin' gal Scout put up this meme today, and because I can't seem to organize myself enough to take pics of recent knitting stuff, and because I'm in a major introspective space anyway, I figure I'll go for it:

1. How and when did you learn how to knit/crochet? Who taught you?

The first time I learned to knit was when I was probably 10 or so, from my grandmother. I'd been going to Girl Scout camp and coming home doing all this wacky finger-knitting and friendship bracelet-ing and stuff, plus come to think of it, I was doing a bit of plastic canvas cross-stitch and making those potholders out of loops as well. Anyway, I knew she and my aunt both knitted, so I asked her and she showed me. She didn't show me how to cast on, instead she cast on for me and then taught me how to do the knit stitch. And I remember getting to the end of whatever I was trying to do (probably another potholder, honestly) and sort of making up a way to get it off the needles which would keep it together (which, come to find out, is actually the real cast-off), and then not knowing how to cast on so I could start something new, I wound up setting it aside and by the time I saw Grandma again I'd lost interest.

Then, in the spring of 2004, when I was on the cusp of going from "hugely pregnant" to "colossally pregnant" with the twins, Meg came up to help us dung-out the apartment and while she was here, she taught me how to knit. We sat and watched Finding Nemo and I worked on a scarf out of some Lion Cotton and she worked on a sock on dpns.

I fiddled with it on and off for a while, until I was coming to realize that I'd made it much wider than I really liked and by then the kids were born, so I didn't have much time for knitting.

That is, until the kids were a few months old and had reached this stage where they would either nap crappily in the afternoons if I put them in their crib or in bouncy chairs or whatever, or they would nap really well if I kept them on pillows on my lap on the couch. (I actually talked about this recently, come to think of it.) Most afternoons I'd just go to sleep right there with them, and Caz would come home to find me and the kids all passed out in this disheveled puppy-pile. But after a while things started to kind of come together better, and so I'd find myself sitting on the couch, unable to move, with nothing but day-time television to keep me company. (And not even cable TV - when I left work we dropped cable as too $$$ - so you know it was bad.)

I got Hip to Knit from the library, along with a few other knitting books, and some really awful yellow plastic dpns and cast on this skein of Fantasy Naturale I'd picked up at an LYS during one of Meg's visits, intending to make a hat for me. Admittedly, instead of making a hat for me I wound up making a hat so huge that it perches easily atop Caz's head without disturbing his mass of curly hair in any way. But he likes it even if it does make him look like a total stoner (heck, that might be why he likes it, for all I know), and the rest, as they say, is history.

My first really real fer realz FOs that I felt really proud of were hats I made for the kids. Here's one of them, the other was the same, but "spearmint":

2. How has this craft impacted your life? (besides financially!)

It's 'mine'. Caz and I have been together for like, 13 years now, and for a long time we were both really into role-playing games (RPGs). And then we moved and left our old gaming group behind, and while Caz has always been so very into RPGs, for me it was something that was fun to do, but I didn't feel any big ties to it. For me it was a fun thing to do while hanging out with friends. We could just as easily have watched movies and eaten pizza, and I'd have been just as happy.

For a bunch of reasons, once we moved here, when Caz was gaming with various groups trying to find a good fit, I wasn't especially interested. I played along a few times, but for me the friendships have to exist before I really feel comfortable gaming with people. And everyone was always so busy that just finding times to game was hard enough, much less finding other times to hang out and all.

So by the time I got pregnant, I'd pretty much given up on gaming almost entirely. It just wasn't my thing anymore. And that was really hard, because I couldn't find anything that was my thing, which did rather a number on my headspace for a while.

And then knitting came along, and while it took a little while before it clicked, once it did? Man oh man. It clicked hard.

Which has been great. Not only has knitting given me a chance to kind of figure out who I am again, and what's important to me in a lot of ways, but it's also been a way for me to claim various little bits of time for myself, in the midst of all this full-time parenting of twins.

And not just time. Bits of mind that are all my own too. Like, when I made up my little plan for the candy-striped hats - I think that was one of the first truly creative things I'd done in a long time, and it felt so good to remember that I was more than just a milk-making diapering machine. In a way it was a relief, to discover that I still had that in me.

So, you know, you could kinda say that knitting saved my sanity. And I'm not sure that's all that exaggerated. grin.

3. Pick at least one person to talk about who you have met through the knit-world and why you are thankful to have met them. Feel free to get all mushy.

Dude. I would so get my own wing in the Bad Friend Hall of Fame if I don't just say straight out - as much as I love reading all the fab knit-blogs out there, getting ideas, learning about the differences between yarns, learning about spinning, seeing all the gorgeous things people knit and imagine and do... ain't nobody can top Meg.

Okay, I've known her for like, 20-ish years now (oof!), so obviously we didn't meet through the knit world. But I think knitting has been really great for our friendship.

Caz and I are one of the first couples in our circles of friends to have kids, and while a lot of those friends are still around, some aren't. It's never been anything intentional or anything, we've just drifted apart from some of our old friends, because our lives are in such radically different places, because my and Caz's outlooks have changed so much. It's not like anybody slammed down a phone after saying, "Yeah well, screw you too!" and that was the end of it or anything like that. It's more just been a lot of drifting apart. And even the friendships we still have are changed. Friends we used to get together with pretty often we hardly see anymore, whereas new friends who are also parents we see more often. It's nothing intentional, but our friends without kids tend to be busier, whereas the friends with kids are busy, but at home. And it can be really nice, to take the kids someplace where we know all the priceless artifacts have been safely stowed away until college. grin.

Anyway, I think that without knitting, there's a chance Meg and I would have drifted apart some as well. And that would have sucked. A lot. For several years now we've been at the point where we email each other just about every day, and talk on the phone about once a week, and so if she and I had drifted apart, even a little, after I got sucked into the loony world of parenting... I think that would have been terrible. Just awful. Like, I'm all misty in the eyes and hot in the face just imagining it.

When I'm up a tree, Meg helps me back down. When I'm down in the dumps, Meg helps me climb out.

But it's more than that.

Those of us whose families aren't quite... there... often wind up having to patch together families of our own making. It's a bumpy process, and just when you think you've got a nice made-family sewn together, something tears and you have to go back to Square One for a bit. That's never been the case with Meg. She's my family.

Besides... she took me to RHINEBECK!!

Wrong Kind of Funky

2006-11-13T10:04:00.000-06:00

Have been in a bit of a funk, the past week or so, hence the lack of posting.

Part of it was the elections. For all that I'm thrilled with the new direction things seem to be taking, my state voted to add an anti-gay marriage ban to our state constitution. Which managed to really ruin whatever joy I might have felt over things like "Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi" which is a pretty damn cool thing indeed (Caz, on election night, could be heard shouting things like, "Speaker of the House... NAN. CY! PEL. O. SI! Choke on it, bitchez!" so rest assured, it wasn't all glum tidings in Thornyville. He did enough celebrating not just for the both of us, but for most of a city block, I think. grin).

But me? I find I'm still upset about it. I don't understand why some people are being told they have to live their lives according to someone else's ideology. When my Catholic mother decided to marry my Protestant father, there were plenty of people who disapproved. My grandparents (the Catholic ones) weren't thrilled. My mom's priest told her that her unborn child's existence (that'd be mine) would not be acknowledged by the Catholic church, unless they married in the Catholic church and raised me Catholic.

Clearly, plenty of people disapproved. My mom and dad decided to do something which ran counter to the ideology of a lot of people, and yet, they were completely within their rights to do it. Because it was their lives, and since this is the good ol' U.S. of A., we don't make people live their lives according to an ideology they don't subscribe to. Unless, apparently, those people are gay.

I think what upsets me most about this amendment passing is that the measure was on the ballot largely as a calculated move by certain folks in the Wisconsin legislature - they fought long and hard to make sure it was on the November ballot, as opposed to letting it get voted on next spring. It was meant to mobilize their base and help ensure a Republican victory during these mid-term elections. The gay marriage ban was just a side benefit, so far as I can tell.

Except something didn't work, because last Tuesday was a big win for Democrats all over Wisconsin. And yet, the gay marriage ban passed.

So a lot of the hope I felt when I saw some of those poll results coming in got dashed. It saddens me, that there are people so freaked out by homosexuality that they've got to make it doubly illegal here in Wisconsin (that's right, it already was illegal in Wisconsin, the amendment just made it more so, plus banned civil unions or any other status "substantially similar" to marriage for anyone's use). And it makes me feel, I guess, a bit lonely. Call me crazy, but I tend to think of myself as pretty normal, and this points out to me that, well, maybe I'm nothing of the sort.

(Oh, and then I got into an argument with a friend about how to proceed from here, as far as trying to break down these fraxing barriers to gay marriage, which just didn't help matters whatsoever.)

So yeah. That's why-for the lack of posting.

...... Let's move on, shall we? I'm pretty ready to leave that mood behind, I think. It is a new week, after all.

Old Business In other news, I think I screwed up the collar on my Olympic sweater. Well, not horribly, but... I think I picked up too many stitches for it. And so now I keep looking at it and poking at it and going, "Damn, should I re-do this?" I still haven't decided. I've got a week to decide.

I also have a week to do the sleeves on the Olympic sweater's companion so that I can assemble it and have it ready for the kids to wear for Thanksgiving with the in-laws. Shouldn't actually be a problem, I just need to get 'em going. Sleeves are easy. And then, hopefully with the Thanksgiving deadline looming over me, I won't take eight months to go from "completed knitted pieces" to "assembled sweater" like I did with the first one.

New Business

Of course, I need to focus on the sleeves. Which hasn't been easy, because I got in the Winter 2006 Interweave Knits, and A Cardigan for Arwen has really got me in a tizzy. I even have a yarn for it that I thought might work, so I've actually been (you may want to sit down for this) swatching. Yeah, you heard me.

So I was swatching away, and then panicked because I'd never heard of double-sided cabling before that, you know, actually looked like cables on both sides, and so I thought maybe Interweave was pulling a fast one on me. But a friend talked me out of my knitter's tree and so now I'm swatching the actual cable pattern for the sweater, and trying to plot out how I can actually make this work, since of course I'm not going to do the sweater strictly as written. I want to skip the hemmed waist, and I may want to do some short rows in the fronts to make it hang more nicely. Also I would love to make it longer, because as it reads, that sweater will end in exactly the wrong place for me. So as a preliminary step to doing all that wacky math, I made Caz measure my bust for me.

Ouch.

Just ouch.

Oh well. I'll vow to join the Y later, I've got a sweater to try to figure out how to do!

So now I'm sitting here trying to figure out if, assuming my swatching turns out all right and the yarn I've got really will work for this pattern, I can actually squeeze an extra 7" of width out of the yarn I've got (I do have several more balls of yarn than the pattern calls for) in order to make this all work.

Good thing this is all more geometry than algebra - I actually got a C in geometry. Oy!

Not Business At All

Of course, all of that would be easier if I could focus. But every so often lately I stare at the skeins of Kona Fingering Superwash that I initially picked up for Dye-O-Rama but wound up not using and thinking about all the packets upon packets of Kool-Aid I've got in the cupboard. And then I got The Twisted Sisters Sock Workbook from the library again (one of these days, I'll just have to buy it) and so I keep leafing through it before bed every night and dreaming of one day getting to use dyes that aren't also beverages (though that's got to wait until the kids are a good bit older, I know it's just a matter of time) and being able to dye yarns and fiber and make all kinds of gorgeous lovely things.

And that makes me think about all the fiber I got at Rhinebeck that's just waiting to be spun, and I start to ponder what I'll do with that, assuming I wrest some viable yarn out of it, and just... argh. So much playing I want to do, so little time/space.

I know I'll get there eventually, I just want "eventually" to be, y'know, sooner. grin.

In the meantime, here's a few photos of the yarn I sent to my Dye-O-Rama swap pals this summer (I got Three Sisters Yarn, so I sent a skein for each sister):

They aren't the best pictures - it was rainy and crummy when I took them, so the overhead light in the dining room was all I had to work with, but... it's close.

One last Rhinebeck memory

2006-11-05T13:47:00.000-06:00

So, when I was packing up my knitting on Thursday night, preparing to drive down to the The Two Sock Knitters' place, I decided to chuck in my "Socktoberfest" sock. (What? Yes, of course I joined Socktoberfest. You didn't know? Well, just because I never posted about it, never actually filled out the questionnaire, nor so much as put the button up on my blog... well, okay. Perhaps I can see the confusion.)

Anyway, I had a sock I started in October that I've been thinking of as my Socktoberfest sock, because it was an autumny kinda yarn and I had this idea that I would finish the pair by the end of the month. (Try not to hurt yourselves laughing on that one - I don't carry Blog-owners Insurance.)

So I chucked it into my bag o' knitting and went, "Huh, that looks strange somehow," but I was running way behind so I didn't really worry about it.

That night, after Meg and the Fool went to bed, I was kinda restless and edgy and weird-feeling, so I thought, "Well, I'll knit a bit of my sock. That'll help." So I sat down to knit, and realized just why my sock had seemed weird when I'd left.

Can you see it?

How about now?

And then I remembered how, earlier in the day, I'd walked out of the bathroom to discover Henry had scaled this tower of Rubbermaid tubs we have in the living room, and had been happily perched on my knitting bag, contemplating his next move (the cat tree, or the shelves?).

Apparently, that is the mark left by my ~~spider monkey~~ child's bony ass, when he sat on my knitting bag. sigh.

So, while at Rhinebeck, I had to hunt around for new dpns, so that I could continue working on my sock.

For a very brief nanosecond I considered upgrading to some nice bamboo ones, but I saw the flaw in that plan just about the same time Meg did. "Yeah, that way when he sits on your knitting next, he can just break 'em." Yeah, never mind.

I did find some, and transferred the sock to the new needles, so all is well on that front (finished that first sock a while ago, the second sock has kind of been languishing while I start focusing on Christmas knitting). But I can't seem to throw away those bent needles yet. They're just too random, somehow. And odd. Who knows, maybe they'll be good guilt-fodder once the kids are older. grin!

P.S. This is my little culprit. Observe his wee little black-black soul, and again, try not to hurt yourself laughing when you consider how I'm going to fare during his teen years.

So Thorny, what about the knitting?

2006-11-04T17:00:00.000-06:00

(NOTE: This post was almost entirely written on Sept. 16. What, me procrastinate? Neveeeerrrr!!)

Yeah, I hear you. It's still happening, at a pretty nice clip - I went through a wonderful bout of the very rare Finish-itis recently, and managed to finish two pairs of socks and am making strong headway on finishing a third. And then you know what I did? I put those needles away!!

Shocking, I know. But having ~~five~~ six different pairs of socks on the needles at one time was a bit... what's the word, excessive. And I'm trying to stay focused on some of the holiday and holiday-themed knitting I've got ahead of me the next few months, and I need to let my adoration of socks cool off to a low simmer, rather the full boil it had been at all summer.

But what a lovely boil it's been!

First off, I finished a gorgeous pair of socks out of Koigu. Just a simple baby cable pattern done on US2 dpns. Of course, the journey to these socks was not nearly so simple. First of all, I triple-guessed myself when I cast on the first sock, and made a 68-st leg. Which was, frankly, ridiculous. But I'd actually started these socks once before, frogged, skeined the yarn and wet it down to soak out the kinks, then wound it back into a ball and was coming back at them a second time, so I just didn't have the patience to frog them again. By the time I was working the gusset I realized that these socks were just crazy-loose on me. But like I say - I was feeling much too stubborn to frog, so I decided to just extend the gusset and decrease down to fewer stitches for the foot. I wound up decreasing down to 60, and finished the rest of the sock just fine.

And this is where these socks languished for a long time, because while I'm generally not especially perfectionist-y, the idea of deliberately casting on such huge socks made no sense to me. But then I also know that I'm finicky enough about my clothes (even my socks) that having two socks that felt too different from each other would make me go buggy. Finally, because I just couldn't stand to let that gorgeous lively yarn stay in limbo, I decided to cast on 64 stitches for the other sock, and again decrease down to 60 stitches when I did the gusset. So one leg of the socks is a bit wider than the other, but the feet feel the same (basically - the ankle on the one sock is of course a little looser too), so good enough.

I wore them one night going out for margaritas with some friends, expecting the restaurant we were going to to be cold (it had been freaky cold for our last outing, we all sat shivering under the over-enthusiastic A/C trying to make like frozen margaritas had been a good idea). Of course, I was wrong, but I still loved wearing my socks. It was also a nice chance for me to experience first-hand the amazing power of wool. I'd heard people say that wool was wicking and helped regulate temperature, but I'd always been a little skeptical. Well, I am skeptical no longer. They were fantastic.

Aren't they lovely? I cast these on way back around Easter, because the bright colors just seemed very Easter-y to me. Like daffodils and brightly colored Easter eggs and bright cheerful spring-time clothes.

The second pair of socks I finished were my Embossed Leaves Lace socks from the Winter '05 Interweave Knits. I used the gorgeous merino sock yarn my Dye-O-Rama Swap pal Tara made for me (go check out her store, Blonde Chicken Boutique - it's awesome!).

I'd been itching to make the Embossed Leaves socks ever since I saw them, but hadn't yet found the "perfect" yarn. Then, when I received Tara's yarn, I knew. This was the yarn for my Embossed Leaves. So I had to wait a bit until we completed our move earlier this summer, and then weathered our way through a few other things, but then I finally sat down and cast on.

And look how perfect they are!

And here they are in action!

I absolutely loved working with this yarn - it was sproingy and soft and even the slight fuzziness which ordinarily I tend to avoid I found charming. The colors were just variegated enough to really make the socks come alive for me, and was really just a joy to knit with. Then there was the pattern - while initially I found the tubular cast on a pain in the ass, once I figured it out it was easy peasy. And I had a hard time dealing with the 18 rows of twisted stitch rib, especially on the first sock. What can I say, I have the patience of a toddler sometimes. But I love how it looks, and once I began the lace pattern? Whoo! Awesome. The lace pattern was easy to memorize (or at least figure out how it worked well enough to keep track of it easily), and it was a fun, speedy knit.

Well, until I got to the heel. Then... the pattern did this weird thing. First, there was no heel stitch. Which I wasn't keen on - I don't seem to experience any extra wear in the heels of my socks, but I really do like that bit of extra cushioning, so if I'm going to do a heel flap, then darn it - I'm going to do a heel stitch. So I consulted good ol' Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks and decided on an Eye of Partridge heel stitch. Also, the heel flap was done weirdly in the pattern. Apparently you were supposed to finish the heel turn on the wrong side, and then break the yarn, re-attach it on the other side of the turned heel, and then begin picking up stitches for the gusset. This seemed crazy to me, so again I consulted Charlene Schurch and decided to just do the heel flap as made sense to me (which is to say, I begin the heel turn on the WS, so that by the time I complete the heel turn, I'm exactly where I need to be in order to begin picking up gusset stitches - works perfectly every time). So I did and it worked fine and voila! I didn't have two extra ends to weave in on each sock. Nyah!

The other thing I did was a little bit of futzing with needle sizes. I worked the leg of the sock on my US2 Addi Turbos, which are 3.0 mm, as opposed to my Susan Bates US2 circsm, which are 2.75 mm. I was happy with this, because my ankles lean toward the chunky side (that whole swollen ankles thing did not end after my pregnancy was complete as I expected it to, a fact which irritates me to this day).

So when it came time to end the leg and begin the heel/foot, this is what I did:

I worked the heel flap and heel turn on one Susan Bates circ. Then I took a second SB circ and picked up the gusset stitches on the one side with it. Then I worked the instep on one Addi Turbo, then I used the SB circ which was still holding the heel turn stitches and used that to pick up the gusset stitches on the other side. Then I continued on, knitting one half of the "heel flap" stitches with that same circ. When I got to the midpoint of the sole of the sock, I switched to the other SB circ and pretended I was doing Magic Loop (i.e. pushed the picked-up gusset stitches to one end of the needle, making the other end "free") for those ten or so stitches until I had worked the second SB circ free. Then I "un-Magic-Looped" (i.e. pushed the gusset stitches to the end of their needle) and continued on. When I finished that needle, I had my sock on three different circs - one Addi Turbo and two Susan Bates. And that's how I worked the gusset. Once I finished the gusset decreases, I combined the stitches on the two SB circs onto one, and worked the instep stitches off the Addi Turbo onto the now-free Susan Bates circ, thus reducing myself back down to using only two circs.

Granted, that probably seems like a lot of fiddling, but I have an awful time keeping my tension even while doing gussets (they're my least-favorite part of socks, honestly), and using the three circs really helped me keep everything even.

This, of course, is not the extent of the knitting content of late, it's just what I've gotten together so far.

The Perils of Speed Dial

2006-11-01T01:27:00.000-06:00

Yep, that's right. More peril.

Early this morning, Henry woke up and came to see us. Then he took off into the living room, and I kinda blearily stared around going, "What the crap? It's morning already? Please god no!"

And then I heard the buttons on the phone beeping away. And then I heard a dial tone and more beeping.

So I threw off the covers (and probably cussed some, though I can't recall for sure) and charged into the living room to divest Henry of the phone. He'd hung it up already (probably when he heard the cussing) but I checked the redial feature (I just luuuuurrrve my fancy-dancy phone - I can't imagine having to wait a month to get the phone bill before I found out if he'd dialed Bangalore or not) and discovered he'd dialed up my old college roommate Mary Ann.

Who, dear friend that she is, called back a couple minutes later wanting to make sure everything was all right. Thank goodness she's in Atlanta, and thus an hour ahead of us, because my clock was showing 7:45. I apologized and let her know that no, it was just Henry playing with the phone, and thanked her for calling. She laughed and wished us all a Happy Halloween and a good day, and we hung up.

I thought long and hard about calling the Gypsy Dingo Circus at that moment, wondering what kind of price I could get for my speed-dialing little hooligan, and how much yarn that might buy. But then he held up his arms and started to sing "Suuuuhhhh whaaaa beeeya da sea..." (which, for those not intimately familar with the closing credits of Finding Nemo, translate to "Somewhere beyond the sea..."), and I was struck idiotic by the cuteness and decided to let my little proto-lounge singer serenade me instead.

Though, I think he's starting to realize the effect it has on me, because he keeps wanting to slow dance with me and sing "Beyond the Sea" every time he gets into trouble. Gnnngggg!!

Trick-or-treating report and costume pics tomorrow!

The Perils of Poor Eyesight

2006-10-27T08:58:00.000-05:00

It's not a good day here at Thorny Central.

Yes, it's true, I've only officially been awake for 35 minutes, but it's been a much longer morning than that.

This thing where Caz works second shift and then puts in four hours of overtime, getting home at 2:30 a.m.? Bites. Because of course we're not grownups who just go straight to bed when he gets home, nor am I the sort of grownup I ought to be, where I just go to sleep when I get tired, whether he's home or not.

So we wind up staying up for an hour, or maybe even two, before finally going to sleep.

Which is deeply hazardous to your headspace when one of your toddlers keeps insisting on getting up at the buttcrack of dawn.

So from about 7:15 on (he let us sleep in later than yesterday), we struggled with Ben, trying to lure him into going back to sleep with us in our bed, never mind that he almost never does that, and certainly never after 12 hours of sleep. Hope springs eternal when you've only got less than three hours of sleep under your belt.

So there was a lot of drowsing off only to have him bodyslam into us, or only to kind of come to enough to realize that he was scraping a capped pen across the front of the monitor. At which point I staggered up, without even bothering with my glasses, to return the pen to its rightful place in the Writing Implement Cup (pens and pencils - we don't discriminate around here) and drag Ben back toward our bed, to try once more to will him into unconsciousness, even for just one more precious hour.

Whups. I guess there wasn't a cap on that pen after all. sigh.

Today does not seem to be a good day to be a monitor.

Yesterday was not a good day to be a cantaloupe around here, either.

TAGYWTNIF. (Thank any god you wish to name it's Friday.)

Rhinebeck Recap and Rumination

2006-10-26T02:23:00.000-05:00

S-M-R-T!

Okay. So let's make this clear from the outset. If you're hanging out with me and we happen to see someone famous, or moderately famous, or infamous, or just well-known within a certain subset of people, like say knit-geeks? You do the talking. I don't care who you are, YOU do the talking. I promise you, you cannot do any worse than I will do.

Case in point: Saturday, Meg and I are wandering around one of the ~~squizzillion~~ many buildings full of vendors at Rhinebeck. And she'd been telling me a little before how, in preparation of Rhinebeck, she'd sent an email off to Cate saying, "Hi, I'm bringing Thorny to Rhinebeck and I know she'd like to meet you, and I'm really honestly not some weirdo stalking you. Honest."

We kind of get separated and I see a familiar-looking brunette woman and I give her that look of, "Hey, I think I know you!" and she gives me a look that I interpret as, "Hmm, you seem familiar too," (though in retrospect I think it was more of, "Why are you staring at me like that?!"). But I am assailed by shyness and so I don't say anything. A few minutes later, Meg and I have found each other again and are admiring some yarn in a booth when Meg nudges me and points to the same woman I'd seen before.

I give Meg the "What?" look and she responds with the, "You should say 'Hi', you know who that is," look.

So I take a deep breath and give this familiar-looking woman a smile and say, "Hi, are you Cate?" And she says, "Nope!" and continues on (probably thrilled to be away from the crazy staring woman).

I look at Meg questioningly and Meg stares at me. "That was Amy Singer! You know, the editor of Knitty?! How would I know what Cate looks like? I've never seen her!"

I still think the time I told a woman on a local moms mailing list to consider going on a "news diet" to help her cut down on stress during the first year of her baby's life, only to realize several months later that she's a local news anchor, tops my ill-fated encounter with Amy Singer, but I'd really prefer not to have any further contenders for my most embarassing moment with people of high esteem.

Honestly, it makes my ridiculously clumsy introduction to Stephanie (including a vague hand-waving in the air while I mumble, "...from the ah, the Internet....") seem positively suave in comparison.

Spinning

The big thing I brought back from Rhinebeck is my very first drop spindle. I got just a cheap one, that can be used as either a top or bottom whorl, while I kinda figure out what I'm doing and if I really like it. Though, to be fair? The idea of being able to buy lots of blobs of really pretty fluff is about all the incentive I need, here. I think roving is much prettier than most yarns, to be honest.

So after we left the festival Saturday evening, and before going out to dinner, Jonathan taught me a few basics in how to spin yarn. Thankfully, he was kind enough to teach me the whole park-and-draft method, which I described to Caz as "spinning with training wheels," so I've actually got some interesting singles to show for all my cussing.

Which, as per usual for me, didn't begin until I went home and tried to spin on my own. Sitting in a guest house room with an experienced spinner within chatting distance? No problems whatsoever, though that yarn is chunky as all get out. Once I got home Sunday night, though... ooh, the swearing began in earnest.

I did try it again tonight, though, with much less swearing and more success. And also singles that are about in the sport to fingering weight range, which hopefully when plied will net me a nice light worsted-y weight. Assuming, of course, that I can actually make that whole plying business work. (Ha ha ha ha ha ha!!! Oh, I kill me sometimes.)

Not that I'm letting that deter me whatsoever, nor did I while at Rhinebeck. I came home with a single skein of Cherry Tree Hill sock yarn in a lovely flamey orange-yellow colorway, and two bags of fiber that were quickly supplemented by Jonathan upon our return to Chicago, and before I began my drive home.

I promise I will put up pictures soon - the fibers are luscious and I've got some lovely pictures of New England scenery, for all that I never did think to take pictures while actually at Rhinebeck. I'm S-M-R-T that way. grin.

Identity... or Mama Incognito

I think I may have alluded, but did not state outright - Rhinebeck was significant for me for several reasons. Of course there was the fact that my best friend decided to spring a fabulous trip like that on me, out of the blue, and even had the kindness to not joke, "Well, you know, I figured paying your airfare was worth not hearing you whine about not getting to go to Rhinebeck if I went without you, and I really wanted to go."

But the other point of significance was that this was the first time I'd been away from the kids for a weekend. In fact, it was the first time I'd been away from the kids for more than, say, eight hours at a time.

So when I say it was a little strange, to be out and about in the world and have no one be able to tell at a glance that I'm a mom... I'm really understating that. I felt like a secret agent or something for a lot of the weekend. And for the other part, I felt this weird urge to just announce to people, "I have kids! Twins, in fact! I do! I'm a mom!"

When the pilot was bidding us a good evening as we got off the plane back in Chicago, he called me "Miss", which may actually be the first time I've been "miss"'d since 2003. I shit you not.

So it was kind of a weird experience, being out in the world and not having the kids with me.

I felt very shy pretty much the whole time. Often I'm shy during initial meetings with new people, but this weekend I felt a lot more shy than I've felt in a long time. And it was only tonight that I figured out why.

I felt, for some weird reason, like I didn't really belong. I don't work for pay, so I couldn't share job woes with anyone. I'd forgotten to have "mother" tattooed on my forehead before leaving, and there were few opportunities to drop the k-bomb (kinda like the f-bomb, but not forbidden by the FCC) into conversation, so I couldn't talk mama-shop. And I'm a squirrelly sporadic, not-enough-knitting content kinda blogger, so I didn't feel quite like I could call myself a "knit blogger" either.

So I spent a lot of the weekend feeling a little out of touch with myself. Like I couldn't figure out who I was supposed to be. Who is this Thorny person anyway, and what does she have to offer anyone? It's been a very, very long time since I sat with a bunch of adults and didn't have to get up every few minutes to prevent one child from stuffing a priceless artifact up his nose while making sure the other doesn't dial up Bangalore on someone's cell phone.

The thing I realized tonight, though, was that I was just being silly. I already had all the identity I needed to "deserve" to be at Rhinebeck. I'm a knitter. I wore my own hand-knit socks all weekend long. I wore my blue Wavy scarf all weekend. And during the Knit-In at the hotel everyone was staying at, I worked on a sweater for one of my kids. Just because I'm still working on wrapping my brain around how to put short rows into a cabled sweater (if anyone has any tips, please do share!) doesn't make me less of a knitter.

I did belong at Rhinebeck. I was just a little too slow on the uptake to realize it. (Which just goes to show - I've got to go back! grin.)

And we're back to "Value" again...

So, I was on the phone with my dad tonight, hoping that the calming influence of another adult voice would help prevent me from calling the Gypsy Dingo Circus to come pick up my little ragamuffins. They're really embracing their Inner Two-Year-Olds lately. Argh.

Anyway, was telling Dad about my big weekend away, and how I'd gotten some yarn, and also picked up a drop spindle so I could learn how to spin my own yarn. And he, being a wisenheimer, starts telling me about how he's been in these stores where they sell yarn. And not just a little yarn, like stores that sell nothing but yarn. Floor to ceiling, front to back, nothing but yarn. The implication, of course, being "Why make your own yarn when you can buy it?"

And I said to him, "Well, sure Dad, but by that rationale, I could just buy sweaters, too. I mean, why knit at all, then?"

And he allowed as to how I might have a point there.

Summation

Dudes. I'm up waaaaayyyy too late for no summatin'. Besides, being all tidy and organized like that? That's just not how I roll.

(Insert happy dance here)

2006-10-22T23:13:00.000-05:00

Well, I would insert a happy dance, but man, my dogs are barkin'.

So let's just all imagine a happy dance together, and let that be enough for now. I'll happy dance again tomorrow once I've had a little rest.

Why the dancing?

I went to Rhinebeck
I went to Rhinebeck
I went to Rhinebeck

Meg and the Fiddlin' Fool lured me down to Chicago on the premise of having a fab yarn crawl weekend, only what they'd really cooked up was whisking me off to Rhinebeck, for my first weekend away from the kids. Ever.

Of course, I am just about the worst person in the world to try to surprise. All that paranoia and freakishness means that when my friends start acting oddly, I can't help but start collating data to try to figure out what's what.

So Meg and I spent the past 3+ weeks tiptoeing around each other - her trying to keep from spilling the beans that we were going to Rhinebeck, and me not wanting to ruin her fun at making it a big surprise for me. And in the meantime, I inhabited this strange mental space where I knew but kept the knowledge from myself, so that I couldn't truly act on it or even speak it out loud. Ain't dissociative tendencies grand?

But at last, when we pulled in to O'Hare Airport, the truth had to be faced - either we were going to Rhinebeck, or they'd put in some new duty-free yarn store at O'Hare. Happily, it was the former, and so....

I went to Rhinebeck
I went to Rhinebeck
I went to Rhinebeck

It was a wonderful time. But more later. I'm wiped, y'all.

And wouldn't you guess it? After driving like a maniac all the way home? The kids were already asleep by the time I got here. Oh well. At least this way I can unpack in something resembling peace.

Oooh. And try spinning some of my new lovelies!!

Some pictures and stories later, but until then? Thanks to the bestest friends a frazzled mama could ever have - the Two Sock Knitters!!!

What's it worth to ya?

2006-09-19T02:27:00.000-05:00

I had a discussion recently with a friend of mine, about whether pursuing activities you will never "excel" in or make money at is worthwhile.

He's never really had much occasion to work on something he wasn't naturally already pretty good at, and he also comes from an upbringing that prizes excellence and income over those little things like personal fulfillment and the like. Which, you know, different strokes and all that. But he's hit a bit of a slump lately, and we were talking about it, and I realized something kinda odd.

See, while my faithful blog readers don't often see it (count yourselves lucky), I often carry a pretty large chip on my shoulder about the way parenting is treated in this country. I mean, I'm never going to say that having a uterus is the sole determinant of a woman's destiny, because it's certainly not. This uterus was built for baby-building, these hips were made for birthin', these breasts were made for nursing, but none of that changes that this brain was made for thinkin', y'know? And the brain means I get to decide if I put the uterus and the rest to work or not, all by my smart little lonesome. Dammit.

But still - baby-making is an option, and it's something I've chosen to do. And while I don't expect a giant reward or something for it, I do think it's a friggin' crime that if I spend my days taking care of my own children, I'm a worthless freeloader, but if I spend my days taking care of someone else's children, I'm a hardworking, contributing citizen.

So on the one hand there are all these paeans to motherhood and how being a mother is so good and noble and yadda yadda, but at the same time the work mothers do is taken utterly for granted, and is assigned literally no value in our culture. Which bugs me. I hate that I bust my ass every day, not just feeding and diapering and keeping my kids from doing something completely boneheaded and dangerous, but also encouraging them to develop their physical skills, teaching them words and numbers and how the world works, and trying to shape their morals as well, with no guaranteed breaks, no guaranteed lunch, and then I get told loud and clear that all the work I do isn't "worth" anything.

Like I say, it's something I've got more than a small chip on my shoulder about. I try to be mature and all, but sometimes I'm more successful than others.

But so anyway, I was having this discussion recently with my friend, wherein I was encouraging him to think about what he wants to do, and never mind if he's all that good at it or if it'll make him money or any of that. He should just do what he wants to do. And the entire idea seemed really foreign to him.

And I realized that, for all that I still get really frustrated with the hypocritical way mothers are treated in our culture, and frustrated by the weird mix of adulation/utter disdain I get treated to, when people find out I'm an at-home mom, this time outside the world of paid work has given me something of an interesting perspective.

In fact, it kinda ties in with the stuff I was talking about the other day, to do with Judith Levine's Not Buying It. She stepped out of the capitalist world in terms of shopping, I've stepped out of it in terms of working for pay. But it's still the same thing - where you really begin to break that link between the "value" of something and the dollar amount assigned to whatever the item or service might be.

Just that we're so conditioned to think the dollar-cost is the best, and often only, way to determine what something is worth, that it's not always easy to really feel entitled to devote time or energy to something which doesn't add to the bottom line. As if "happiness" or "self-fulfillment" or "personal enrichment" are unworthy goals because they don't have a spot in the Assets column of our personal ledgers. And let's face it, the assumption in our culture is that anything that's not an asset must be a liability.

And so my friend really had a hard time grasping this idea of just doing something because you enjoy it, and never mind if you'll ever be "stellar" at it or if you'll ever make money from it.

It's something I've noticed, actually, as people in my life come to realize that this knitting thing is gonna stick around a while. Lots of people saying things like, "Ooh, you know, you could totally sell scarves to people online!" Which, you know, I appreciate that they think I do a good job at my knitting, but it's so NOT the point.

I knit because I like to. I'm not a full-on "process" knitter - I am pretty keen on the products I get at the end, after all - but I honestly think that I would in no way enjoy knitting for money. And not just because making something actually worth the time investment a knitted project requires would price it completely beyond what anyone would be willing to pay. It just... it's what I do for fun. It's what I do for ME.

When my kids were newborns, knitting was practically all I had that was simply for myself. I'd wind up sitting on the couch, with each kid balanced on a pillow on my lap, nursing or bottle-feeding them to sleep in the afternoons, and then I'd have a little time to myself. Except I couldn't move. I couldn't get up to pee, or take a shower, or get something to eat, or check my email or any of that. Because if the kids weren't right there, on top of me, they wouldn't nap for very long at all. An hour at best, 20 minutes at worst. But if I stayed right where I was and kept the TV volume turned kinda low, the kids would sleep for a couple of hours at a time.

Sometimes I'd just go to sleep right there with them. But as they got a bit older and would actually, you know, sleep at night (man, I remember what a miracle that seemed like at the time - it still makes me wanna cackle like someone who just escaped from the psych ward), I'd be wanting to actually /do/ something while they slept. And that's when I really got into knitting, after Meg (who just finished an amazing quilt, you should check it out) taught me several months before. It was my one way to do something for myself, even though I was still trapped under this little puppy-pile of sleeping babies. (Which is why all my early FOs were hats - I could knit them over the kids' heads without the fabric dangling onto their faces.)

Of course, knitting isn't the only thing that I do that sidesteps the traditional capitalist model of living. Breastfeeding as long as I have also kinda puts that whole thing on its head. The whole idea of doing something that I don't /have/ to do (according to many people), never mind that it's available for free, kinda leaves that whole "capitalism" thing out in the cold. And I think there are a lot of people who don't know quite how to handle situations like that.

Anyway. The point is that being in this weird limbo as far as "not working" right now gives me kind of a different perspective on things. I don't /have/ to look at everything as an asset or a liability. Or rather, there are things on my personal ledger that I think a lot of people don't have or don't allow themselves room for. Things like Happiness and Personal Enrichment, things which don't look good on a resume, which don't help pay the rent, which don't make for a quick one-sentence introduction at parties (not that I go to many, but you get the idea).

When I got pregnant, I never planned on leaving my job. Even when I found out I was having twins, the thought of leaving my job never occurred to me, not until I found out that losing my entire contribution to the household income would actually be less expensive than day care for twin infants. And I remember having a hard time adjusting to the notion of no longer having a 'job'. And then as I began to really experience how undersupported mothers are in our society, that chip on my shoulder began to grow.

But I still think it's the right decision for us. I still think my kids are better off and our whole family is better off by my being home. And I've come to appreciate some of the things I am able to do, some of the things I've been able to experience that I wouldn't have if I had gone back to work already. And now I'm appreciating the perspective all this has given me, the chance to really see (not just talk platitudes about) that the price tag assigned to something is at best only somewhat related to how worthwhile it may or may not be.

(ANTI-"MOMMY WARS" NOTE: Please, do not think I'm talking about any mother's decisions but my own here. Work for pay vs. stay at home are decisions all moms must make for themselves, and I would never presume to tell any woman that I know better than she what's best for her and her family. There are benefits and drawbacks to each, and I'm certainly not qualified to weigh all the pros and cons for anyone but myself.)

Think Big Thoughts Now...

2006-09-13T03:43:00.000-05:00

I've been a reading fiend lately. Not sure what it is, though I'd better watch it or I'm going to get myself into trouble with the library enforcers. Having over 25 books out at once is kinda cool, but heaven help me if I lose track and a whole slew of them go past their due dates.

So what have I been reading?

Well, let's see:

First I started reading The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World Is Still the Least Valued by Ann Crittenden. I still haven't finished it, because I can actually feel my blood pressure rising after only a few pages. It's been such an education in how history really is written by the victors.

I also read Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping by Judith Levine, which... wow. I'd expected something a bit more strident (Shopping BAD!) and dry, but it wasn't. It was like reading a really really well-researched diary. Which it pretty much was. But still - I love books like that, which can combine personal experience and statistical research and whatnot. It was while reading this that I decided that, with few exceptions, from now on people are getting homemade Christmas gifts from us every year, even if it's just cookies and maybe a knitted warsh rag (though if I include soap, I won't be making that, I have to admit). I think the thing she said which is still echoing in my brain a month later is how in our (United States) culture, we're being trained to think that the only way to effect social change is to change our shopping habits. And while I agree that it's important that we remember to vote with our dollars whenever we can, I think it's all-too-easy to forget to vote with our actual votes as well. And not just vote, but also to engage ourselves, even in the simplest, laziest fashions (which are thankfully now available to us via this here In-tar-net), in our local politics.

I'm saying this badly, so you should definitely read the book yourself to have a better idea what I'm saying, but the idea was that instead of thinking of ourselves as thinkers and activisits and letter-writers and opinionated so-and-so's, we cast ourselves solely in the role of "consumers" and most of the folks who run our government couldn't be happier about it. So that's been rumbling around in my head ever since I read it.

To kind of lighten things up, I've been reading my way through just about every For Better Or For Worse (by Lynn Johnston) compendium out there, with the exceptions of Reality Check and Never Wink At A Married Woman, which our library unfortunately doesn't have. I remember reading For Better Or For Worse growing up, and then when I went to college I kind of lost track of it, but I still would kind of keep tabs every so often. My dad's side of the family would often spend a Sunday morning at my aunt's house talking about the latest FBOBW strip, or what had been going on recently in the Patterson's world. And then once I got hip to the Bloglines jive I started subscribing to the RSS feed, but there's all this stuff in the middle that I'd missed. So I decided to go back and read it all.

I also started reading Unconditional Parenting, by Alfie Kohn, which I'd hoped would come in handy now that my kids are really starting to flaunt their "two"-ness. It's been an interesting read, though it's been a little hard to get through sometimes. Such a weird experience, to be reading something and suddenly go, "Sh-yah right! What-evER!" (Yes, I really do think that way - mock me at your leisure.) Only to then kind of go, "Waitaminnit! I agree with that! What the hell?!" And thus we discover sneaky little roots of preconceived notions and whatnot which are not only surprising to find, but then difficult to dig up and bare to the light and examine carefully to see what can stay and what can go.

I'm still not finished with the book - all this root examination being a tricky and slow process sometimes - but I do hope that he's got some alternative parenting ideas that will work with only marginally verbal toddlers. Because there's a lot of great stuff in there, but so much of it I kind of find myself going, "Well, that'll be great... when they're FOUR! But what do I do NOW?!" sigh.

I also took a mental breather (of a sort) by reading the first six volumes of DC Comics' Fables, which if there are any comic book fans out there, is really awesome. A really fascinating basic idea - that all those fairy tale characters and creatures we learned about as kids are real, and have fled to "our world" to escape a voracious and unbeatable invader. Now they live among us, mostly in New York City, a little underground community of storybook characters, just trying to make it in the modern world. I especially like their depiction of the thrice-divorced Prince Charming who lacks any real skill or usefulness in the world, as well as having little in the way of moral anything, but manages to survive because he's handsome and, well, charming. In the same way that Superman might be described as "capable."

And then I just finished reading Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream by Barbara Ehrenreich, who has long been one of my all-time favorite authors. "Bait and Switch" is the followup to her previous book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. Where she went undercover as a blue-collar wage-earner in "Nickel and Dimed", she set her sights on the world of white collar corporate employment in "Bait and Switch", reverting to her maiden name in order to seek a job with a corporation. Her experience was, as expected, enlightening.

Reading "Bait and Switch" was also kind of timely, as well. After eight months of official unemployment - during which time he wrote and self-published a gaming book and a big chunk of another gaming book, as well as partaking in a couple freelance stints for a friend of ours - Caz finally got a job. Make that two jobs, in fact.

The first made me nervous from the start. First it didn't pay nearly as well as his old job, and secondly it was for an outfit that always has ads running. Which never bodes well - if they're always hiring, it means they don't keep the folks they do hire, and if that's the case? There's usually a darn good reason. And, it turns out, there is. Without getting too much into it, it's the kind of job where one should be doing good work and helping people, but instead everything's gone wrong and so the days are full of watching people misuse something which should be noble and clean. Add in crummy hours and benefits which don't kick in for the first 90 days (which only makes sense, seeing as most people apparently don't last that long), and it wasn't a great option. But it was a job.

Well then, a couple days before it was due to start, Caz got a call from this recruiter (read: temp agency) he's been working with. She had a gig for him, he was practically guaranteed the job, but he had to interview on his first day at the new job. Well, he worked it out and managed to duck out of his first day of training at the new job to go interview for the other job without making too many waves, and sure enough he got this second job.

Which pays better. And is a little less soul-destroying.

However, it's still a temp gig, which means no paid time off, no health insurance*, no retirement plan, no nothing. And now we find out (after he resigned from the other job after being told that no, they would not consider moving him to a part-time position instead) that the "possibility" for a non-first-shift work schedule is more like a certainty, unless he somehow really lucks out. And since he's technically employed by this temp agency, there's a decent chance that even if he winds up working third shift, they won't be offering him any extra money to make up for messing with the schedule of our whole family.

So sure, Caz is working again, and now no longer counts as "unemployed". But neither job that he was able to get is remotely equivalent to the job he lost, and so now we're going to have to consider further adjustments to our already deeply "adjusted" lives in order to survive.

Anyway. Back to the reading list.

I also got partway through Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel which has been very good, though I'm still not finished with it. I got sidetracked by Barbara Ehrenreich, and then misplaced it for a few days trying to keep it safe from the grubby hands of toddlers. But I've re-found it, so I expect to get going on it soon.

Ooh, and I also have several knitting books out - Barbara Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns which I never ever ever want to give back. I've been in a big sock-knitting phase still, and I found two stitch patterns I want to try turning into socks one of these days - we'll see if I pull it off. And I got Folk Mittens by Marcia Lewandowski which has got me thinking about knitting mittens lately too, which... oof. So many lovely patterns in there. Yum yum yummy! I also would love to do those pirate ones from Hello Yarn, but they're kind of low on the to-do list right now, unfortunately.

So yeah. Is it any wonder I've been up much too late just about every night the past several weeks, my brain just rattling and rumbling, like a coffee can full of rocks rolling down a hill?

Okay, I really am going to try to sleep now.

* After a certain amount of time, the temp agency (ahem, "recruiter") offers a chance to buy into their health plan, but if it's anything like the one I was offered several years ago by a different temp agency, the cost is incredibly prohibitive.

Mom's Greatest Lesson

2006-09-11T04:30:00.000-05:00

It's late. I should be asleep. But instead I'm awake and dinking around the internet. I was entertaining myself by reading blogs, when I ran across a few which are already talking about this being the fifth anniversary of 9/11.

Chris brought tears to my eyes with her post about David E. Rivers, one of the 2996 people who died on that terrible day five years ago. It's part of 2996, a tribute project wherein 2996 bloggers will each post a tribute to one of the victims of 9/11.

It's things like this, in which strangers at computers erect electronic memorials to people they'd never met, which make me think the world can't be so wrong, can it?

And then I read this post by Suze, which she begins by talking about where she was on 9/11, and I thought, "You know, I should post about that too."

But then she continued, and mentioned that while this is the fifth anniversary of 9/11, it is also the 100th anniversary of Ghandi's declaration of Satyagraha, the philosophy of non-violent resistance, and asks how the U.S. response to 9/11 can possibly go toward making a better world.

And that made me realize what I should write about today.

I've mentioned in the past that my relationship with my mom is... well, it's not so good. Our relationship has been troubled for as long as I can remember, and due to a lot of factors, a lot of the big lessons I learned growing up, she didn't teach me. As a result, we don't share many of the same values.

But there is one lesson she did teach me, one lesson that I learned and have kept with me my whole life, one lesson that I still hold up and can't find a single flaw in it, can't find any compelling arguments against it. And that lesson is this:

Two wrongs don't make a right.

It sucks, too. Because so often, when we've been wronged, all we want to do is wrong right back. We want to make others experience the pain or fear or anger that we feel, we want to make others sorry for reminding us just how vulnerable we are. It doesn't matter if the weakness they've revealed is physical, mental or spiritual - we want to cover up that chink in our armor just as fast as we can, and we want to punish those who have revealed it, that others might see.

But no matter how we've been wronged in the past, if we do wrong by someone else, it's still wrong.

It's not like math, where two negative numbers can be multiplied to create a positive number.

It's not like driving, where you can make three left turns and arrive at the same place you'd have landed if you'd made just one right turn.

It's not like knitting, where a mistake can be repeated a few times until it becomes a design element.

When we have been wronged, and we choose to do wrong in response? We correct nothing. We only add to an ever-growing pile of wrongs, which does little but inspire us and those around us to greater feats of injustice and cruelty and harm.

So while we revisit the terror and grief and rage of this date five years ago, I pray we all can leave a little space in which to also remember the courage, determination, and hope displayed on this date 100 years ago, by a man of peace.

We have all been wronged in our lives, in ways large and small, by design or by accident. If we choose to wrong others in response, we have no hope of progress, no hope of making our world a better place to be.

If we seek peace, if we seek justice, then when we are wronged, we MUST respond by doing right.

Can you get arrested for Blog Negligence?

2006-09-01T01:19:00.000-05:00

Zang, I hope not.

It's been nut-a-ree around here the past month or so. Caz put the finishing touches on his book, working right down to the wire (like, he had to call up the printer with a last-minute change, and luckily the printer hadn't gotten to that page yet!). Then I turned 33 years old, and I'm finding myself kinda dazed by the thought that I'm actually, fer realz, a 30-something. And then Caz dashed off for darn near a week at GenCon demoing his game and selling his book and talking to other folks in the industry, trying to line up other writing gigs. Then we had a week in which to recuperate from massive sleep-deprivation (if anyone ever was unsure, I can hereby declare that one adult and two 2-year-olds can fit in a queen-sized bed, but it's not going to be pretty... oooch! Toddlers have bizarrely sharp knees, especially when they're pressed into your back!) before my in-laws came to visit. It was a wonderfully nice visit, and we had a really nice time. And then we had a week to fret about finances and stomp around on each others' nerves before Caz started (at last at last at last!) his new job.

So now, we're in that weird window that always seems to happen - where there's work being done and you're starting to relax and not think, "Oh god oh god oh god, we're going to be in the poorhouse by this time next week," every unoccupied moment, except you still haven't gotten that first paycheck, so for all the increased relaxation and celebratory desire to spend money on all those things you've been putting off, in reality? You're still just as broke as you ever were. It's temporary, and thank heaven for that, but man... it makes me twitchy as all get-out.

So what's been going on otherwise? Well, let's see....

I have indeed still been knitting. I finished the Embossed Leaves socks from the Winter '05 Interweave Knits, and I love them. I can't wait to take pics of them, because they're just awesome. I also (this is part of that dangerous celebratory relaxing-on-the-budget feeling) have been trolling around the internet for cheap sandals so I can properly show off my gorgeous gorgeous socks. I found what I think are the perfect pair, and now they're sitting in my Amazon cart just waiting for me to have the money to buy them. And if they're back to regular price the same day we get money in the bank account, it will be nothing more than proof that the universe likes to see me sputter and try not to swear when I really really REALLY want to.

Which reminds me of the other latest development(s): the kids, they are a-growing. Not like this is probably a shocker or anything, but man... some of this stuff I'm just not prepared for. Like how suddenly the kids' cribs went from "effective toddler corals" to "laughable". Or Ben's sudden penchant for jamming things like wads of carpet lint or stuffing he squirrels out of the holes Connie (one of our cats) scratched into the couch up his nose. Or, and this is especially dire, their sudden increase in speech abilities (though they seem to have inherited their father's reluctance to actually use them when it would be most expedient to do so). It was cute when I said, "Awesome" and Ben piped up "awesome!" next to me. It was less cute and more, "Oh crud" when I was snarling to Caz that if his recruiter-lady didn't come through with the promises she was making him job-wise, I was going to have to find her and beat her down, and from beside me I heard, "down!"

But really, all of that pales in comparison to Ben making it totally and unmistakably clear to us (and to anyone within a two-block radius) that he is a Big Boy now, and as such would prefer that maternal hands not touch his banana, as he can plainly peel it himself (though if Mama would just start it for him, that would be great - unless Mama likes to see him take great whopping bites out of the banana, peel and all). The Big Boy thing effects all kinds of situations and interactions. So I'm learning to be trickier. Now, when it's time to leave the park? I don't say, "It's time to go now!" I've wised up (after Ben did that go-limp-dead-weight thing in front of a whole bunch of peppy, fit, tanned, chatty parents at the park when I merely suggested we go to another area of the park so he could go on the better swings) and now I just say, "Let's go to the car!" I figure I've got maybe a week or so before he catches on to that one. Oy!

And if you're wondering, "Gosh, Thorny - what about Henry, is he showing any signs of his Two-ness?" Well, not exactly. But then, Henry was kinda born two. Seriously, one of the first times I tried to nurse him, he looked at me, he looked at my breast, and then he looked at me again as if to say, "You want me to believe that I'm going to get something to eat from that?? What, do I look like I was born yesterday?" And I had to shrug and say, as gently as I could, "Well, no. You look more like you were born today, actually." And if I didn't know better, I'd swear he rolled his eyes at me.

Henry has always done things his own way, in his own time. Which is kind of cute sometimes, but man... I really, really, REALLY wish he'd stop insisting on using the wrong end of a spoon. We've been at that one for months now, seriously. Instead Henry insists on eating a bowl of yogurt with the handle end of his spoon, microgram by microgram. Tonight Caz (obviously under the influence of that same reckless celebratory-relaxed feeling I've got going on) compared Henry eating yogurt to me eating crab legs (I'm already famous as a slow eater, food that requires personal disassembling takes it from "funny" to "obnoxious"). The sad part is, he's right, though of course that did not stop me from declaring that I could work my way through TWO pounds of crab legs by the time Henry ate a single serving of yogurt on his own, easy peasy. Luckily, we're a long way from being able to afford crab, so I'm fairly sure I'll never have to suffer the vast indignity of being proven wrong.

So yeah, that's the news. There's more knitting going on, btw - I just finished my second warshrag tonight, and I'm pretty happy with it. And I finally unearthed an old Jaywalker that had been hanging out just waiting to be grafted, and lo, at last I grafted that damn toe!! (Come on, it's only five months later, what's the big deal??) I wound up tinking and re-knitting the last couple rows (after one more botched attempt at grafting it, for old time's sake), and I think the whole problem had been that the yarn is kinda splitty, so that one stitch just wasn't properly knitted, and thus grafting didn't work well. But it's done done done DONE and I've got the second one started. Which is good, because man... my fall knitting calendar is PACKED.

Not only is there Christmas knitting to contemplate (1.5 stockings for the kids, scarf for Caz, scarf and hat for sister, possible scarf for Dad), but there's also my Olympic (now Turtle) sweater that's still waiting to be seamed and have a collar knitted on. Plus, a friend of ours is getting married in October and the kids are invited, and so, um... I decided I would knit the second sweater by then so they could wear little matching hand-knitted sweaters to the wedding (and so I could avoid having to buy fancy toddler wedding-wear we can't afford). Stop laughing!! Nothing gets me going like a deadline, it'll be... fine, really!

Ooh, and I got a simply faaaabulous birthday package from Abigail who was my pal for the August Birthday Swap. (Again, pics at a later time - I'm awful about pictures in general, and lately every time I've had time to take pictures, it's been ucky murky weather and so I end up feeling very "what's the point?" about picture-taking.) She sent me some lovely stuff - some Brown Sheep Wildfoote in a great snazzy red, and some lovely deep olive-y green merino yarn that I think is going to become a new hat for me (probably some time after Christmas, though), and a super red entrelac WARSHRAG! And that's just the knitting stuff - there was yummy-scented soap and treats and goodness a-plenty in there. Thanks again, Abigail!!

(See? I really need to blog more often, because otherwise it just becomes this mad ramble of interesting stuff with no cohesion whatsoever. But having a working computer here at home again will make that a lot easier. Now it's just dealing with me and my daft-ness. Oof!)

Otherwise, I've been reading like a fiend. All kinds of crazy stuff - also not burdened with an overabundance of cohesion, come to think of it. But it's been good, to be reading so much. I remember when the kids were first born, I felt like I'd never be able to read something that wasn't a breastfeeding book or other parenting manual for the rest of my life. Thank goodness that was just temporary.

So yeah. Caz working, kids growing, me knitting and reading and trying to hold it all together. That's about the sum of it. (Don't you wish I'd just written that at at the top, rather than making you wade through all of this? grin.)

Supah-cranky stinkaroo!

2006-08-16T17:28:00.000-05:00

Oh, fer the love of pete!

So, for all who may have been concerned, we're fine. I survived my weekend while Caz was at GenCon, and aside from feeling some residual sleep-deprivation burn, we're doing all right.

Of course, because nothing goes smoothly for us (does it go smoothly for anyone? don't answer that, I don't know that I'm strong enough to know the answer just now), we got back to discover the hard drive on our computer went *skapow!*, so I'm posting this from the lovely environs of my local library, where I recently finally got to the front of the line for Mason-Dixon Knitting (sorry no linky-loo, I'm on clock and on a computer I'm not familiar with), a situation which is creating an intense need in me to knit warshcloths, towels and bath mats like a fiend. A FIEND I tell you!! grin.

Anyway, for anyone who's into role-playing games, you can check out Caz's (other) baby here.

Hope to be back soon, with photos and news and who-knows-what-all!

Such a flake!

2006-07-28T23:51:00.000-05:00

I can't believe it. I almost missed my own Blogiversary!

That's right, a year ago today I started up this here blog, and well... I've been a pretty neglectful blog-parent, haven't I? grin.

Oh well. Next year, I will do better! Really! Stop laughing!!

Here's to a year of bloggy goodness, and to a much more picture-filled second year!!

Why oh why must I be supportive?

2006-07-14T18:07:00.000-05:00

So, believe it or not, I haven't forgotten about this blog. Also, believe it or not, I've been knitting. Knitting a bunch, actually, ever since we got back. And soon, I hope, I will have pictures of said knitting to show you. But first we have to make sure the digital camera survived it's week-long sojourn in the trunk of the car (oh, how I wish I were kidding).

I haven't been blogging much for two reasons.

One, because I have been in a seriously grump-ass mood, and I don't think anybody needs to read grumpiness from me, seeing as there seems to be an awful lot of grumpiness going around these days.

Two, because every time I have a good idea of something to blog, the computer is taken.

"But Thorny," you say, "didn't you say Caz would soon be done with his writing projects?"

Why yes, dear Reader, I did say that. But then a funny thing happened...

I went and turned into a Supportive Partner. Of all the rotten luck.

See, Caz went off for this gaming convention at the beginning of the month, and I was all Super-Mom for a few days, and then we visited my in-laws and then we came back and whined to each other for a day or two about how hard all that travelling was and crabbed about how empty the refrigerator was and procrastinated going to the store for a day or so (don't ask what we lived on, it wasn't pretty - luckily there was some bread in the freezer).

And it was all supposed to be over, the whole gaming convention thing. That was going to be his one con of the year and then he'd be done. And life could get back to normal.

This is the part where God laughed so hard he may have pulled something.

See, it seems Caz's little jaunt to Origins was successful, but not in the way I'd hoped. I'd hoped he would come back and people would think he was a great writer and give him lots of high-paying writing projects to do. Instead, people seem to think he's a cool game designer and are really jazzed about this RPG he's been working on.

So, after spending one night in a total snit saying things like, "I'm sick and tired of sacrificing for your dream!" I spent much of the next day going, "Oh, dammit. Dammit dammit dammit to hell. He's got to try to write this book and release it at GenCon. And he's going to have to go to GenCon too. He's going to have to. Crap on a friggin' stick!" There was a lot more cussing than that, just for the record. But I'm sure you all can guess which of the seven words you can't say on TV figured most prominently in my swearing (hint: it begins with F).

To make a long story a smidge shorter, Caz now has about two weeks to write a book. You heard me. A book. Granted, it's something he's been dinking around with for a while and so the ideas are all put together and it's mostly putting words on a page, but that's still work. Plus he's got to get it all in order enough for his buddy to lay it out for him, and another friend to throw in a little artwork. And then there's all this other crazy stuff we're looking at trying to do, so that he can go to GenCon with cool Upstanding Business Guy things like business cards and a website. And did I mention we're still jobless in this corner of the world and so money is beyond tight?

Argh.

But really, all of that is, well... bizarrely enough, not that unusual for us. That's the kind of thing we seem to be able to pull off. I don't know why, but it's true. So please for the love of mike don't let that fail us now.

The thing that's been really steaming my nuts about the whole thing, however, is in the process of being an Extra-Deluxe Fuck-you Elite Supportive Spouse, I've screwed my own damn self. Because when I said, "Okay honey, you go on to Origins, I'll handle things here," there was the explicitly stated reward that I was going to get for that - Caz was going to handle things with the kids while I went off to Stitches Midwest and fondled a bunch of yarn I can't afford (and maybe brought some home too, even... but let's pretend I didn't mention that part).

Except guess when GenCon is scheduled for? Why, the same weekend everything else in the universe is scheduled for, of course! Grrr!

So, barring some kind of divine intervention, not only am I going to get to face another week or so of single mommy-hood (I know there are women out there who are single moms every day of the year and let me just say right now - I am not that tough.), but I'm probably not going to get to go to Stitches Midwest, either. Admittedly, I could go - I could stuff the kids into the double-stroller and just ovary up and do it. But my idea of a good time generally does not include wrestling really expensive yarns out of the incomprehensibly grubby hands of toddlers every four minutes. Nor of running after unwary knitters to return the ebony needles my little pilferers swiped out of their bags. Plus, Ben has twice now tried to bite a ball of yarn (horror does not begin to describe my feelings on issue), and so a yarn extravaganza seems... seems a lot like pushing my luck.

I know this GenCon thing is the right thing to do. And I know Caz is appreciative and all that rot. And I have a fair amount of hope that it's going to turn out to have been a really good thing.

But all the same? Being a supportive spouse really just blows goats, y'know?

August Birthday Swap questionnaire

2006-07-07T02:29:00.000-05:00

So, perhaps you've begun to fear that all my talk of new directions was a ruse, or another example of my frequently Waylaid Good Intentions.

Not so. Instead, I have been... "vacationing".

I put it in quotation marks because rarely do vacations involve lone-wolfing the twin duties for a few days before driving down to spend a weekend with my sister, who is a full-time lone-wolf parent to three boys ages 10, 6 and 3. Rarely do vacations include spending a morning trying to keep tabs on five rambunctious boys, one of whom is NOT pleased to discover he has lost his title of "youngest" to not one but two boys who get to share the title. They also rarely include spending several days trying to keep twin toddlers safe in a house that is undergoing massive renovations.

In fact, often these are the kinds of things one seeks a vacation from, now that I think on it.

But me? Oh no, I must do things oddly, and so... yes. That is how a solid week was spent in my life, and we are just now finally home and safe and sound and the cats will hopefully forgive us soon for abandoning them (like they suffered so terribly at the hands of our friend the cat-adorer... snort!). Hopefully, at least, this experience will teach my mother-in-law to be more careful of how she layers on the guilt when expressing her desire to see her grandsons.

Anyway. There is much more to report, many thoughts which have been percolating in my head (beyond the oft-repeated, "Spugwort, get DOWN!"), but for now? I needs me a nap. Oh, and I need to remember in the future that Trader Joe's is not kidding when they say "cheese popcorn", and so if I want to eat it, I really ought to take a darn Lactaid tablet before I begin. That is, unless I like burping Zima, which I can assure you, I do not. (Sorry for the TMI - did I mention I'm exhausted? The Propriety Filter is always the first to go....)

So, for now, I shall at least answer the questions for the August Birthday Swap I'm participating in. Before I forget, or lose track of any more days. Oy!

What day is your birthday?

August 7

Are you crafty?

I have great aspirations. Unfortunately, I also have a smallish apartment and two toddlers, so most of my craft-urges go into knitting these days.

Would you enjoy things like: Buttons, ribbons and embellishments?

I love looking at those kinds of things, but they're rarely the kind of thing I actually find use for, I'm afraid.

Do you dye your own wool?

When I'm able, yes. I've been sticking to Kool-aid and Wilton food-color dyeing so far (again the toddlers and the small apartment). I do hope to some day branch into acid dyeing and the like.

Do you like to scrapbook or make homemade cards?

I don't, really, though I love looking at the supplies for them.

What small project would you be interested in making?

I love knitting socks. Hats, mittens, baby items and wash cloths are on my to-knit list too, though.

What are your favorite scents?

I looooove verbena, and I like citrusy and fruity scents as well.

Do you like stationary and cards?

Love them.

Do you like hand lotions or soaps?

Soaps, definitely. Hand lotions I'm picky about, but soaps? I loooove soaps.

Do you like to sew or embroider items?

I keep thinking about sewing, but haven't made it part of my life yet. I used to do cross-stitch, but it's kind of fallen by the wayside in recent years.

Do you like beads?

I love the idea, but have yet to use the ones I've already purchased (fickle me!).

What kind of mail-able snacks do you like to eat?

As my waistline can attest, I like just about all of them (black licorice is the only exception that comes readily to mind). I'm not nearly as well-traveled as I'd like, though, so I love to get things from other parts of the country/world - things I can't get here in Madison, WI, or things that are a specialty somewhere else.

Do you like to wear costume jewelry? Necklace, earrings, bracelets etc.

I don't wear jewelery as much as I used to, though funky casual things make me pretty darn happy.

Do you like to play cards or board games?

Oh yeah. We're gamer geeks around these parts, so cards and board games are always welcome here.

What are your favorite colors of yarn?

All of them? Seriously, I like pretty much all colors - though I am not fond of pastels.

Do you like solid, variegated, heathers, or self striping yarns?

Yes yes yes and yes. I like 'em all!

Do you like kitchen magnets or key rings?

I love kitchen magnets. Can never have too many.

Do you like picture frames?

Ooh, that reminds me, I should get those frames out of storage and put some photos in them finally... um... yeah, I think I'm good on picture frames for a while. grin.

Do you like to make/or use stitch markers?

I use stitch markers, but have never made any.

Do you collect anything?

I have been known, in the past, to say things like, "Oooh, it's got a turtle on it!" Also thistle-things. And canoe-things.

Do you have any allergies?
Smoke is not my friend. I'm technically allergic to cats, but don't tell my two calicos, all right?

Do you have any hobbies?

I dream of canoeing and swimming like I used to at camp, but mostly I read and write and knit. Oh, and I'm a total sci-fi nerd. Well, perhaps not TOTAL, but... no. Total. Total sci-fi nerd.

Do you like scented or unscented candles?

In theory, I'm very fond of candles of all sorts. In practice... I never light them unless the power has gone out.

Are you a fiber snob?

I do have an aversion to acrylic, mostly because it makes me smell bad (oh how I wish I were kidding!) So, um... I guess the answer is yes to this one.

Thorny does stuff besides knitting...

2006-06-26T13:37:00.000-05:00

So, as I mentioned yesterday, I think I'm going to take this blog in a bit of a different direction.

See, lately I've been getting all uppity and Missy Feministy with myself (reading a lot of Feministing lately, among other things). I've also been doing a bunch of other things, and I'm realizing that I just don't compartmentalize well. I'm more of an all-or-nothing kinda gal.

Which means either folks reading my blog get the whole long-winded, chatty package, or you get the occasional anemic update with earnest-but-doomed promises to post up pictures soon.

So I'm going to be making some changes to the template and that kind of thing, to reflect some of the branching out I'll be doing as far as subject matter on this here blog o' mine. But, in a gesture of "walking my talk", I'd like to begin with this:

I recently came across a bit of a mention of how Geena Davis has founded a group called See Jane, which is looking into children's media programming and gender stereotypes and representations within it. If you've got time, you should check out their research, because it's... well, it's kind of shocking. Things like how 72% of speaking characters in 101 G-rated movies (live action and animated) are male. How even in crowd scenes, male faces outnumber female faces by almost 3 to 1.

And I read about that and went, "Well heck, no wonder boys grow up thinking girls don't have anything interesting to say and that girls' stories aren't worth paying attention to."

Which is something that had been kind of percolating in my brain anyway. See, we wound up picking up a little series of books for the boys a while back - there are like 4 or 5 books, and they're all about a different animal. "I love my bunny because..." and a cat, a dog, a duckling.... Okay, I guess there are four books. And the thing is the only female animal in this whole group is, of course, the cat.

Which is kind of ridiculous, because none of these animals are presented in any way that requires gendering. And yet all the animals apart from the cat are presented as boys. These animals aren't even given names, here. No Fido, no Patches, no Squeaker, nothing. And yet they're all male creatures.

So even before I found out about the marvelous See Jane, I was doing things like making sure to read these books with alternating pronouns. One time I'd read it as female, the next time as male, back and forth. And since my boys are still in the stage where they want the same books read 50 times a day, it's been fairly easy to do. I also, in a moment of Indignant Scientific Accuracy, refused to read a book about a bumble bee as written, as if the hard-working, honey-making bee in the book was male. As we all know, the bees which make the honey are female, and damned if I was going to let the male bees take all the credit just because some author was lazy.

But now that I know about See Jane? Well, I'm getting more diligent about it. There were the few things that really caught my attention, but there were lots of other things that I just didn't pay any mind of. I'm trying to fix that. Especially when it comes to the animal world - there's no reason for my kids to watch their favorite Baby Einstein DVD thinking that every creature shown is male. It's ludicrous. Of course not all the animals are male. Heck, some are rather demonstrably NOT male, like the cows, for example. So when we sit and watch and talk about the animals, an awful lot of them I'm labeling as female.

I can't change what human faces directors of children's movies put into their work. Well, I can't change the ones that are already sitting on my DVD shelf (I'll be joining See Jane in encouraging directors to make the faces in their movies more reflective of reality, though). I can change how many of those stories my kids see, however, and I'm going to be watching things a lot more carefully from now on.

Will it do any good? I don't know. But I figure it can't hurt.

A year ago, my mom was visiting for the boys' first birthday, and one of them fell and whanged his head hard enough to cry over. And my mom, I kid you not, told him that boys don't cry, and he needed to calm down. I about exploded. Instead I managed to tell her that wasn't the way we did things in my home, and we kind of went on from there.

But I found it pretty ironic. On the one hand, she's always carrying on about how men her age are so "emotionally stunted", and then on the other hand, she's doing her part in trying to stunt the next generation.

Oh, which reminds me - I've got to go sneak this book out of the kids' circulation. I have no idea where it came from, but I know it got hidden once before and must have gotten unearthed in all of the moving. The last day or so the kids have been all about it, and when I read it last night and found myself carrying on past the last page, saying things like, "Mommies are for organizing peace rallies. Mommies are for splashing in the mud. Mommies can start camp fires with one match. Mommies can be heartless cold-blooded corporate lawyers..." I knew the book needed to go.

Also, anyone have any suggestions for a book that talks more about what actual mamas are about? Because I tell ya, that book just sets my teeth on edge.

Joss Whedon was onto something...

2006-06-25T12:06:00.000-05:00

...when he decided to set Buffy the Vampire Slayer in high school, because it had so much "horror" potential.

So here, swiped from Cara is a sampling of my own personal reflections on the senior year of high school:

1. Who was your best friend? I had a number of good friends, but my best friend senior year was probably an exchange student from Spain named Laura Gomez Garcia. We lost touch long ago, and as you might imagine, trying to Google her hasn't been helpful, but I would love to find out what she's been up to since she went back home.

2. What sports did you play? All the ones they told me I would flunk gym class if I didn't. Otherwise? Forget it.

3. What kind of car did you drive? A 1977 Chevy Impala wagon. I named him Sherman, on account of his almost Army-ish green paintjob. The prevailing theory was that Sherman had started his life as a tank, and then some enterprising fellow stripped the guns off of him and slapped on a Chevy label and somehow passed him off as a sta-wag.

4. It's Friday night, where were you at? If you were to ask my mom, she would say I was bowling. Again. In truth, I was probably hanging out at a park after dark with some friends, eating candy, drinking soda and being dorkly. And in winter, we were at Kellie's house hurling mini-Reese's at each other.

5. Were you a party animal? Not in the vaguest, slightest, most generous sense of the word. Not one little bit. Practically all of my friends were either in DARE (and took it kinda seriously), or were Girl Scouts.

6. Were you considered a flirt? Not hardly.

7. Ever skip school? Yes, once. On "Senior Skip Day". And my mom called me in sick. (See? Total dweeb.)

8. Ever smoke? Not until college.

9. Were you a nerd? I wrote fanfic before I knew what fanfic was. I read sci-fi/fantasy novels in just about every class. I was working on writing a couple sci-fi/fantasy novels, come to think of it. Oh yeah, I was a nerd.

10. Did you get suspended/expelled? No, but I was a regular in detention. My struggles with punctuality began at a young age, sadly.

11. Can you sing the Alma Mater? Sure. "On ye Lions! On ye Lions! Blah blah blah blah blaaaah! Blah de blahblah, Blah de blahblah. Blahde blahblah blah blah blaaaah! Blahblahblah On ye Lions! On ye Lions! Blah de blahblahblaaaaah! Gooooooo, Lions, fight fight fight to win, this game!" See?

12. Who was your favorite teacher? Mrs. Fiore. The irony here is that I don't think she actually liked me very much. And meanwhile, there was another teacher who seemed to think very highly of me, but uh... he gave me the mega-wiggins. *shudder!*

13. Favorite class? Interpersonal Communication and Film as Literature. Great classes. Also, Creative Writing was good too.

14. What was your school's full name? Lisle Senior High School.

15. School mascot? Lion

16. Did you go to Prom? Nope. There wasn't anyone I wanted to go with, so instead Laura and I took the money we would have spent on Prom and did a 3-day whirlwind of complete and utter teenaged abandon. One night at the video arcade/pizza parlor place spending quarters like mad. The next day we went downtown to the Lincoln Park Zoo, and the day after that to Great America with all our friends who /did/ go to Prom. It was AWESOME. We had just the best time.

17. If you could go back and do it over, would you? If you paid me a couple million dollars and promised I wouldn't have to live with my parents for it... no, even then I still wouldn't. (However, if I had no choice of whether I was repeating high school or not, senior year is absolutely the one I would prefer to repeat.)

18. What do you remember most about graduation? Sweltering.

19. Favorite memory of your senior year? Probably that "Prom" weekend. Though there are many. Senior year was, to be fair, probably the best year I'd had since I was like, 11. I did a lot of making up for lost time.

20. Were you ever posted up on the senior wall? Like Cara, I don’t know what this means either.

21. Did you have a job your senior year? I actually didn't. My parents refused to let me work that year, even though I had worked from the time I was 11 - first babysitting, then at the local library once I turned 16. I hated not having my own money that year, but I did get to do a lot more dorking around and having fun.

22. Who did you date? Um, for the first few months of senior year, I "dated" a guy named Ryan via the US Postal Service. We'd met the summer before senior year, but lived several hours apart. Nowadays we would just have IM'd all the time, but back then? Snail mail and cassette tapes, baby. I used to drive ol' Sherman around and talk into my tape player to him.

23. Where did you go most often for lunch? Toxic Hell, that haven of super-cheap, mostly edible food.

24. Have you gained weight since then? Yar.

25. What did you do after graduation? Went straight up to Girl Scout camp to work for the summer. Pre-camp had already started, so since I'd missed the bus, my dad and my godfather drove me up there.

26. When did you graduate? 1991.

There you have it, folks. My old yearbooks are still, um... in a box somewhere. So I can't find a picture for you (nor do I have a scanner, come to think of it). But imagine, if you will, a chunky girl with a lopsided-bowl haircut and big ol' Jodie Watley hoop earrings.

I've got some actual knitting content built up (and some thoughts about changing the direction of this blog a bit, but more on that later), and we're nearing the end of this "Month O' Deadlines" we've been in for Caz's writing projects, so hopefully I'll be able to be on the computer when I've actually got some mental juice to apply to things like blogging more often.

It's all in the timing

2006-05-31T17:50:00.000-05:00

I know, I haven't posted in ages. Ages of ages. I know.

It's because we're moving. Granted, we're just moving across the hall to one of the renovated apartments in our complex (full-size dishwasher and a ceiling fan in every room!!!), but we're also moving with practically no help (one friend came by to help Caz haul the big stuff, but he was only over for about two hours, meanwhile I couldn't help out because I was watched our two and his daughter) and with twin toddlers in the mix. Luckily, the apartment management folks have been very understanding - they gave us the keys to the new place early and aren't going to destroy us utterly or fine us into oblivion for not being completely out already. However, things are getting grim-looking again, so... we shall see. There may be a dreaded all-nighter in our future.

Anyway, though. Into all droughts a little rain must fall. Or whatever that saying I've just mangled is. Or, in the words of Jane Siberry, it can't rain all the time.

So yesterday, while I was leaning against the wall staring at the destruction and bleakly pondering our fates, Caz answered a knock at the door. It was the mailman, with a box. A box addressed to me.

Caz was all, "I didn't know you'd ordered more yarn..." and I was able to look at the label and go, "Ha HA! I didn't! This yarn is FREE*!!"

See, it was yarn from my kindly Dye-O-Rama pal, aka Tara of Blonde Chicken Boutique! Four hundred yards of lovely** green merino sock yarn, which I haven't had much time to consider the fate of but feel a pressing need to make it into something extra-special. It's beautimous. But wait! That's not all! She also sent me a skein of gorgeous green organic cotton yarn that she also hand-dyed! A whole box of greeny goodness, just for me!!

So not only do I have a lovely, generous dye pal, but one with super-amazing timing to boot! There I was, all "Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms", and then in swoops a yarny gift for me to make everything seem so much better! I'm all a-quiver.

Thank you, Tara! And true to my word, I didn't go looking for you at all, so it was a complete surprise.

* Okay, okay, so it's a swap so it's not /technically/ free. Let's not pester the poor guy with details right now, eh? He's had a hard coupla weeks, too. And besides, dyeing yarn is just fun, and I already /have/ the yarn I will be dyeing, so... it's all good, right? Yeaaahhhh.....

** Pictures. You're wondering about pictures, right? Well, I would totally have included them, if uh... I could just remember which box the camera went into....

Don't Knit While Sleep-Deprived

2006-05-21T19:11:00.000-05:00

So, yesterday was one of those crazy-ass days. Some friends of ours were moving into their new home, and since I certainly couldn't help haul stuff around with my two kids in tow, I offered the next-best thing (or possibly the first-best thing), to watch their daughter while they did the bulk of the moving, so they could focus on getting that done and not have to worry about what she was up to.

Of course, then Friday night one of my online parenting groups erupted into controversy and so I got all riled up and didn't go to sleep at a nice sane hour like I should have, since I was facing a day-long 3-under-3 cage match, and there wasn't going to be anyone available to tag me out. (Who knew I could sling a wrestling reference like that? Not me, that's for sure.)

Then, for some inexplicable reason, I woke up at 6:30 Saturday morning. Six-thirty!! Since I wasn't due to get up for another 90 minutes, I peed, sipped some water and put my pale ass back in bed, knowing I was going to need every spare wink I could get.

Little did I know my brain had other plans. What followed was an hour and a half of fitful, restless sleep punctuated with dreams that ranged from the wack-ass to the deeply unpleasant. When my alarm went off at 8:00 I was groggy, confused, and really not ready to face the day.

In the Annals of Bad Parenting, I will be known as She Who Set Three Toddlers Worshipping At the Altar of the Glow-Box For Almost Eight Hours Straight. I'll be going to the Special Hell, with the people who talk during the Mommy Matinee.

However, cast not the stones, my friends - I am paying. We watched Bear in the Big Blue House: Potty Time With Bear FOUR TIMES yesterday. Four times! I still have the Toileteers song stuck in my head, in addition to the theme song and snippets of dialogue. (Bear says "potty" with the weirdest John Ritter-(rest his funny soul)-on-dope inflection.)

If I don't find a new earworm soon (gah! I hate that phrase! Always makes me think of Wrath of Khan *shudder!*), I'm going to be up at midnight listening to Laurie Berkner stuff, just trying to have something new in my brain.

Anyway, so at one point I tried putting my two down for naps, and so it was just me and my friends' daughter. So, in order to keep from passing out utterly, I tried knitting. Decided to work on one of my easier WIPs, which happens to be a dragonfly dishcloth I found here thanks to Carole's mention a week or two ago.

I printed out both the dragonfly and the alien patterns, because at a playgroup a couple weeks ago, my boys managed to break our hostess's lamp. She insisted it was just a garage sale item and not to worry about it (and it was pretty "vintage"-y, so I'm taking her at her word), but... you know, I worry about it anyway. I figured trying to replace it was doofy, but maybe a couple quick washcloths, right? Just a little something. Plus they looked fun.

So anyway, I was about halfway through the dragonfly cloth when I sat down yesterday afternoon with my friend's daughter next to me and began to knit. The first few rows went fine, but after that, things started to seem strange. Where was the head on this dragonfly? I'd done the lower set of wings, and had been at the lower edge of the second set... but where was the head? I couldn't figure it out. Finally, I set it aside thinking I would have to double-check the picture online later (since our color cartridge is dead I had just printed out the text of the pattern) to see what the heck was going on. Surely my memory of it was faulty.

Later on, after our friends came along and retrieved their daughter and left my tired, achy husband in her place (really, a bargain - our friends' daughter's favorite word these days is "no", and I was reaching the end of my ability to stay upbeat in the face of all that "negativity"....), I decided to take another stab at my washcloth. I sat down with the two-thirds completed washcloth and my pattern and was immediately confused.

What? These were not the directions from earlier in the day, what was going on here? And then I went, "Ohhh, I must have picked up the wrong pattern." And I looked at the top of the page and sure enough, it said... wait. It said Knitted Dragonfly Cloth. What the heck?

And then it hit me. I hadn't picked up the wrong pattern then, I'd picked up the wrong pattern earlier in the afternoon, and knit 12 rows of the wrong pattern!!! I'd been knitting an alien forehead onto the upper wings and head of my dragonfly. I was like a yarny Dr. Moreau!

There was nothing for it but to do the Frog Of Shame.

I frogged the dozen or so rows and put it back on a needle and stuffed it toward the back of my WIP box. (Yes, I have a big Rubbermaid bin full of WIPs and WAIPs (Works Almost In Progress) and other shameful things - don't judge me!) I'm hoping tomorrow I'll have the courage to face it again.

Can't blog... clown will eat me!

2006-05-12T00:17:00.000-05:00

So, once again, it's been ages since my last entry. There's been a lot of knitting going on, really (especially thanks to Springtime Startitis, which will have to be another entry later), but I just haven't had the wherewithal to blog about it much. But I have been taking pictures. So I'll blog it someday. Probably. Eventually. Unless I forget.

Anyway, here's a quick teaser for you:

One of my Springtime Startitis (which has been very sock-heavy) projects came from Nancy Bush's Knitting On The Road. I decided to do the Hiuumaa Mismatched Mates.

But I'm not so much a brown sock kinda girl. The feet, they gotta flash. Or be in plain white cotton sport socks. I couldn't tell you why in a million years, but it is what it is.

So I decided to use a coupla different colors from my stash.

Think anyone will notice?

"I'm Not Dead Yet...."

2006-04-22T03:26:00.000-05:00

Nope. Nosiree, not dead yet.

By the looks of this poor neglected blog, you'd think so, though, wouldn't you?

But no. It's more just a weird tardy hibernation thing, I think. Or something. Who knows.

Am in weird headspace. This past week completely blew past me. I started a new entry on Monday, and didn't get a chance to work on it again until Thursday (this is what happens when you neglect your blog and have a lot to catch up on), and then suddenly it was Friday and I was left gawping about that, wondering how on earth a whole week had disappeared without my even noticing it.

I blame the kids' sudden nap-less-ness.

Because nothing leaves you wrung out and slap-stupid like chasing around two toddlers with astonishingly cavalier attitudes toward little things like personal injury and mutilation. Seriously, by the end of the day, it's all I can do to knit a coupla rows without flubbing something up and stabbing myself in the elbow with a dpn or something. You think I'm kidding, don't you? Well, okay, maybe a little bit. I mean, come on, stabbing oneself in the elbow? Perhaps I've gotten a little carried away with my storytelling there.

But it sure feels true.

In addition to the kids not napping, the cats have been yarfing (anyone with any ideas on why my cats are puking? I was raised a dog person, this whole cat business has me completely at a loss), and suddenly the world seems filled with people who just went off Prozac. Or something. I honestly don't know what's happened, but it seems as though everyone I know is either going through some tricky, harrowing-ish kind of thing that just highlights for me all the things that are wrong with the world, or everyone's walking around like they're one big raw nerve.

For example? On a moms mailing list I'm on, there was a gigantic flame war. Like, sixty responses in a few hours. This is a list that's usually all "Try Beaudreau's Butt Paste" or "Hyland's Teething Tablets" or "toothpaste gets Kool-aid and Jell-o stains off your counter tops" and such forth. And then suddenly all these women were at each other's throats. It was thoroughly insane. And the only reason it ended is the list owner showed up and told everyone to take their toys and go home for the day.

(For the record? This was Dr. Phil's fault - I swear, he is the greatest enemy of women since freakin' Cosmopolitan magazine. But I'll try to spare you the rant on that one.)

Anyway. How about a little knitting content, while I'm here?

Okay!

I'll have to post up pics later, but:

I have yarn. Lots of yarn. Enough yarn for two sweaters that will fit me and my "goddess-like" physique. It's beautiful and marvelous and I love it and I just need to get myself a bit more organized and then I can cast on. Oh, and I'm going to get a gander at Big Girl Knits before I make any final decisions. The Ample-Knitters list is just going kee-ray-zee! with buzz about this book, so I figure I owe it to myself (and my beautiful yarn!) to make sure I'm going to knit something I'll love.

I have an almost-finished pair of socks. Another pair of Jaywalkers that I really like. I had finished the knitting, kitchenered the second toe, put it on and realized that it was a smidgen short. So tomorrow (after the yarn and sock dry out from having water spilled on them - did I mention I've also got a colossal case of dropsy?) I'm going to un-kitchener the toe, knit another round, maybe two, and then re-close up the toe and dance a little happy socks-are-finished dance.

I have another pair of socks in the making. They're out of Koigu, and I adore them. The yarn is simply the most cheerful yarn I've ever encountered. Lots of yellow and pink and orange-y pinks and some blues in there for good measure. I started knitting it a while ago and then went really gangbusters on it over the Easter weekend, because the colors just said "Easter eggs" to me. I struggled a bunch with the gusset, due to a number of factors, but I finally am through it so now to just do the foot and toe and then start the next one. But first, this sock must also dry out, as it was caught in the same water glass disaster that injured the Jaywalker. siiigh!

So then, because I had no other socks to knit and couldn't imagine trying to seam up my Olympic toddler sweater under current psychological and physiological conditions, I cast on for a whole 'nother pair of socks. Because, of course, I'm insane. But I am pretty jazzed about these. It's too soon for pictures, but I think they're going to be great. For now, though, it's a seeeekrit!

And now, to try to get some sleep. The cats keep messing around and making me think that either some crazed evildoer is breaking in (of course!) or one of them is puking again, hence the blogging at almost 4 a.m. But I think my heart rate is back to normal-ish, so I'm going to give sleep another shot.

OOooh!!! And I joined Scout's Dye-o-rama!!! I'm very excited about this. I may even make up my own warping board, per Scout's instructions. We shall see.

GRRR!! Grafting BAD!

2006-03-26T03:58:00.000-06:00

So I finished the toe on a new Jaywalker a couple days ago, and set it aside because I wasn't feeling up for grafting at the time (am fighting an INSANE bout of Startitis, and let's face it, the only thing more antithetical to Startitis than grafting is seaming).

Well, tonight I decided that I really wanted to just get this damn sock finished (read: I really needed to free up my #2 needles so I could start a different pair of socks entirely, never mind that there's a second Jaywalker to be done), so I sat down with my lovely Ann Norling grafting directions and my new Chibi needles (in cool-ass green case) and set to grafting.

As usual, it looked entirely wonky the first few stitches, but I kept the faith, persevered, and made it to the end of the toe. I fed the needle and remaining yarn end through to the inside of the sock and examined my work.

DAMNSHITFUCKINHELL!!!! I missed a stitch!!

That's right. Completely missed a stitch. There it was, just hanging loose, practically waving at me, ready to go zipping up the sole of my sock at the slightest tug.

So I undid the graft, as of course the missed stitch was one of the first few.

I got a drink of water, calmed myself, sat down and tried again. I got about two-thirds of the way across the toe of the sock before....

DAMMITSHITFUCKINHELL AGAIN!!!! I missed the SAME blasted stitch!!

One I stopped swearing, I undid the graft a second time and set the sock aside. As I explained to Caz: Obviously, tonight was not meant for grafting. And besides, if I tried again and missed that stitch one more stinkin' time, I would NEVER stop swearing. Like, the world would end and there would just be God sitting there with everyone all angel-fied around him, and me, still swearing my angry black guts out into the post-apocalyptic void.

Grafting bad!

The Perils of Procrastination

2006-03-25T20:02:00.000-06:00

Argh. So, after last posting, I have managed to take a couple steps forward, and at least one GIANT step back on this whole "road to adulthood" thing.

I had meant, lo those couple weeks ago, to reply to all the kind, thoughtful, sharing responses I received and appreciated so much.

But you know how it is - you have a bunch of semi-deep emails to write, and you think, "Oh, I'll do it tomorrow... on the weekend... Tuesday... when I have more time...." and next thing you know half a month has passed and you've sent out exactly squat.

Add in that I started to re-organize the stash one Friday afternoon when I somehow managed to shoo Caz out of the house for a bit, and I took a ton of pictures and Oh Holy Heck do I have a lot of yarn. I mean, not compared to many, but I think all the fiscal savings we were supposed to be getting out of not eating out so much after having kids? Has gone straight into yarn. It's... well, it's kind of alarming, honestly.

So anyway, I started up this big ol' stash post, and then got kinda side-tracked on that, and so... urgh. Anyway. Suffice to say - I'm going to try for that whole "Flash Your Stash on April 1st" thing that seems to be going around. Though I'm... er... more than a little embarassed by it all, really. I've come to embody the phrase "an embarassment of riches", and I'm sure a lot of folks are going to be going, "What? You've got hardly anything!" Regardless, I'm stunned.

In other news - Kool-aid is on sale at the local grocery store. I've picked up... um... a silly amount of the stuff, honestly. I'm really jazzed at the prospect of dyeing a bunch of yarn soon, though. Like, if I could, I would shoo the boys out of the house, crank up the CD player and dye yarn and pretend to be a diva for an entire afternoon. Who's coming over to join me?!

So, for any who might have been concerned, I'm still alive and kicking, just a really bad procrastinator. But hopefully I'll get back into the blogging thing soon. Though, for other news of what I did this past week, you can go check out my LJ, which I have not fully given up just yet.

Goin' Deep

2006-03-08T04:54:00.000-06:00

So, this isn't so knitting-ish. Mostly it's a musing, and so for those of my four readers (I'm like the Conan O'Brien of blogging, only it's not irony - oh well) who don't want to know about anything non-yarn-related, feel free to catch me again in a coupla days. I promise I'll talk knitting then.

I think I'm finally going to have to really grasp, really embrace the fact that I've grown up. That I am, in fact, A Grown-up.

It's weird. I'm 32 years old, I'm a mother, I've been married for seven years to a man I've been with for a total of 12 years now. My best friends are people I've known for two whoppin'-great decades. So you would think I'd come to terms with this by now. That somehow, in 32 years, I'd have figured out that I was actually an adult.

But I really haven't.

I remember several (several!) years ago I caught this thing on C-span, of all channels. Michael Medved, who I'd previously only known as a film critic, was talking about how the rampant consumerism of our culture was sustained by an artificial extension of adolescence. That adolescence, by virtue of a whole bunch of factors, is that time in a person's life when they have the most disposable income as well as a large amount of self-determination combined with low responsibility. Add in that most adolescents are struggling to figure out who they are and who they want to be, plus feel a strong need to express themselves and be recognized for who they are (this week), and you get an advertiser's wet dream. And so, in order to keep expanding their customer base, advertisers and corporations keep trying to widen the range of "adolescence". Which is why you now find nail polish marketed to grade-schoolers in teddy bear-shaped bottles at the same time that auto makers are marketing minivans to the tune of "Teenage Wasteland" and trying to convince the Baby Boomers that they aren't too old to have Sugar Smacks for breakfast every morning. (Okay, these are all old examples, but you get the point I hope, because I haven't paid much attention to ads the past few years now.)

Anyway, that concept has stuck with me ever since. That idea that childhood and adulthood have gotten really mixed up into this uncomfortable mishmash and left a lot of us really confused as to what the hell is expected of us, what the correct path is in our lives... it resonated somehow.

Not surprising, I suppose. My folks used to joke that I was "8 going on 40" when I was a kid. At the time it was a big joke and I secretly took a bit of pride in being "so mature". Now I look back and see there's nothing funny about a 9-year-old giving herself stomach ulcers.

Which is the shortest way I can think of to say that from very early on, there were a lot of situations where I felt like the adult in my family. And while in some ways (okay, a lot of ways) it sucked, it has given me the ability to avoid making a lot of mistakes in my life.

The thing, though, is that I wasn't mature in every arena. And my folks, not always being good at the whole "adulthood" thing themselves, weren't able to teach me much about the things I really was going to need once I was out on my own. Which is why I still find myself having to devise ways to "outsmart" myself if I want to stand any chance of making it from one paycheck to the next without writing a bad check (O Debit Card, how I love thee!). It's why my house is pretty much always a wreck. It's why I get all stupid about things sometimes.

But the past week or so, I've had a couple weird things happen that have made me go, "oh, uh... I guess I'm really not a kid anymore."

The first is I was dinking around the blogosphere, and I happened to notice that a lot of the cool-kid knit-bloggers out there are people who I'd thought were, well, a lot older than me... they aren't. There's maybe a handful who are five to eight years older than me, but most are actually just about my age, give or take a couple years. Which kind of gave me some pause while I realized that no, my peers are no longer primarily working Joe jobs until their "real career" takes off or until they figure out what they want to be when they grow up. Most of them are, if not what they wanted to be when they grew up, in jobs which they're pretty enthusiastic about.

The second thing was that a couple friends of mine are facing real serious marital troubles, to the point where there may well be two more of my friends facing divorce. Which, I have to admit, really has me thrown. Not just because these are people who I care a lot about and I simply ache for them in their pain, but also, in a petty, selfish way because I'm flabbergasted. I mean, divorce is something that happens to my parents' friends, not mine, right? My friends are all still dating and just getting married and being bright happy newlyweds, right? Right? .... Not so much.

It seems I've misplaced the past two years. Not surprising, I suppose, seeing as how the kids are approaching their second birthday in a couple months, and well... what the heck have I done in the past two years except be a parent and become a knitter? Really, nothing. And, at the same time, everything.

Except, of course, become A Grown-up.

I dunno. I mean, when did y'all "know" you were a grown-up? Do you feel like A Grown-up most of the time?

It's all so confusing and seems so impenetrable sometimes.

But it's gotta happen. I mean, somebody's got to be the Grown-up around here, and I'm not going to follow my folks' example and make the kids do it, so... time to grow up, Thorny. Now just to figure out how to DO that.....

Just for Scout

2006-03-05T16:57:00.000-06:00

So, I had to wait until the rechargeable batteries for the digital camera finished, you know, charging, but here it is - my pics for the Knitbloggers Virtual Field Trip. Though, since I don't have a back door/yard, I just took pics out my windows. The joys of apartment living and all that, y'see.

Anyway, this first is a view out my bedroom window - I was hoping to capture the fact that it's snowing like freakin' kee-ray-zee up here, but my flash wouldn't go off, so no dice.

This second is a picture of the same tree, but from the living room, where all the knitting takes place.

And here's another view from the living room, this time if you were to look left while standing at the window.

And then, because I never did get this up ages ago, here's a pic of my Supah-Dupah Knitting Spot:

The neefty little stool is often a home for beverages and other paraphernalia, while the quilt is often over my lap. And yeah, there usually are toys strewn all over the place. It's what happens in a house with twin toddlers, you know? And I could spend time picking up all them toys, or I could just kick 'em out of the way and get to knitting. grin!

And, in case you were wondering, yes, my knitting bag is indeed an Oceanica Airlines bag (i.e. the fictional airline used by the unfortunate castaways on Lost, which is one of my big-time favorite shows (though it better get moving with some more plot advancement if it wants to stay that way!)). I got it via Television Without Pity and I lurves it, precious. Lurves it!

The tag line, as it's a bit hard to read, is "Getting halfway there is all the fun!"

In other news, I seem to be over my bout of the flu, though I'm still kinda wonky in body and mind. Hopefully some more good sleep tonight will help me return to my former self tomorrow.

Oof. Chicago backlash

2006-03-03T00:06:00.000-06:00

Urgh. It's happened again. We went down to Chicago, ran our butts off, and now we're all on the express route to Plaguesville. sigh.

The kids have taken turns running low-grade fevers all week, though without much in the way of other outward symptoms, aside from Ben suddenly turning into a little old man and casting evil glances at the radio while covering his ears. I figure the poor guy had a headache, and the noise was too much, because he uncovered his ears and seemed much less tetchy once we turned the radio off.

Anyway, so I thought we might be doing all right until earlier tonight, when suddenly I was passing out in the recliner for no known reason, and then woke up aching in just every joint. Even my toes hurt! Caz quickly diagnosed flu and I'm too tired and achy and glum to argue.

So probably won't post for a couple days again until I get over this. blegh.

But before I go take a nice hot shower and go to bed, I wanted to get a little knitting news up.

First, I've joined FemiKnit Mafia's Turtles KAL, specially designed for all those who didn't quite make Olympic gold. I'm very happy about this, as turtles are a big favorite for me, and I would have been really sad to have not been able to be a part of a turtle-themed KAL. (And while I'm at it, congrats to Ms. Lefty Mafia on her new status as Mama! Such good news, and such good timing - I was getting overly wound up that the bastards in the Wisconsin legislature are being so bastardy about gay rights issues. Bastards. A little good news did a lot for my personal headspace. grin.)

Secondly, I got my patterns from Black Water Abbey the other day, and I'm about 95% sure that I'm going to do Bramble Berry first. Just as soon as I figure out what yarn to choose. So many yarns, so little time, you know?

I swear there was a third thing, but heck if I can remember it now. Oh well. Too tired and my back is killing me. Time for the healing power of a hot shower followed by sleep.

Agony of Defeat: Not so agonizing

2006-02-26T19:44:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm out. I was fudging a bit on the official rules, initially, saying, "Well, I didn't cast on until like 8:30 on Opening Day, so I should have until 8:30 today, right? Right!"

And so I seamed like a furious little... seamer... this afternoon once the kids were finally down for their naps.

But eventually, after a couple hours and with a really narsty crick in my neck and fingers that were threatening to go crampy, I had to concede.

As you can see, I still have to seam up the sides and sleeves, do the ribbing on the collar, and weave in all the godforsaken ends. (Ugh! Now that I have a better idea of how these things are constructed for real, I'm definitely going to weave in as I go as best I can in the future.) It's not a ton of work, but it's more than I had time for. I figure I should be able to finish it this week easily - it's just a question of when I manage to tear my attention away from the, um... new sock I started. (It's not my fault! The pieces were blocking! I needed a tiny needle fix but had "cleared my needles" before the Olympics started, so I had to start something new!)

I will not get to put a nifty little gold medal up here on my blog. But I'm weirdly okay with that. I mean, it would certainly have been awesome to be able to post up a picture of one of my boys sporting a completely finished sweater. And I'm sure if I'd skipped the movie last night and stayed home to seam, I would have at least gotten as far as I'd gotten today, and perhaps after putting in my time today, I'd have squeaked in under the line. I'm certain that if last weekend hadn't been practically knit-free thanks to visiting my family, I definitely would have made it.

But really, none of that is here or there. Doesn't matter.

When you get down to it, I joined up on this crazy thing specifically to force myself over my mental block regarding sweaters, and I have totally done this. I've gotten past my sweater-phobia. Once I finish the green Prepster, I will decide if the other 8 oz of Candy Cane in blue-y purple will become another Prepster or if I will try my hand at a top-down raglan or something similar. Regardless, my newest goal is to have the other toddler sweater done in time for Easter. (Now watch, it'll be like 80 degrees out that day, making it cruel and unusual for me to make the kids wear wool sweaters while on some big egg hunt or something.)

I also am so very over my whole sweater-phobia that I ordered two sweater patterns for myself this past week:

The Braids cardigan, a big favorite over with the Ample Knitters group, so I'm sure to have a source for advice should I need it.

This one is "Brambleberry" and is a new offering over at Black Water Abbey. I know it's kinda complicated, but I'm really leaning hard toward this one as my choice for First Sweater I Knit For Me.

Also if you haven't happened to notice, the Knitty Surprises are up and I'm completely in love with Starsky. So that's another contender, I think.

So gold or no gold, I say my mission here is well accomplished. Many thanks to Stephanie for imagining and organizing this fantastic experience. While I didn't medal in my event, I do feel as though I've held fast to the original ideals of: citius, altius, fortius. I got a lot more done than I thought I would, considering how my diligence fell off after the front and back panels were completed. I certainly reached beyond my previous comfort zone and did something I was frankly really nervous about doing. And I do feel like I'm a stronger knitter for it.

Of course, no Olympian competes without the support of his or her team, and mine was a big help. The usual suspects, of course, were wonderfully supportive and I appreciate their cheering and good wishes. But a surprise assist came in at the last minute from Sally Melville's wonderful book, The Purl Stitch. So grateful am I for her wonderfully detailed instructions on how to seam pieces of knitting together (including her formula for figuring out the ratio of stitches to rows when attaching the sleeves, without that I probably would have just attempted it blindly and would have burnt the whole thing to ashes by now), that I find myself wondering if she might need a yarn sherpa or something, a la Stephanie's Yarn Boy. Because, you know, I'd be glad to do the job. Anytime.

So all in all, I'm really glad I participated in this Olympics, even though I didn't win my medal. I had a great time, gained new skills, and just feel really successful and pleased about the whole thing.

And to all the gold-medal winners out there: Congratulations. You earned it. Next time I'll be on the podium with you. Cheers!

I have an illness and lack commitment

2006-02-26T02:29:00.000-06:00

So, this evening my nearest mommy-friend asked if I wanted to join her in seeing Brokeback Mountain after we got our respective children to bed. (Thank goodness for 9:30 shows!)

At first, I thought, "But... I need to seam my sweater! I was going to be all super-cool and have one of the kids wear it to Breakfast Club Sunday morning!" And then Caz wisely intervened and pointed out, "You have all of tomorrow. How often do you get out these days? Go. See. The. Movie."

So I did.

Never mind the four blocked and ready pieces of sweater I've got sitting here, never mind the seaming I need to do, never mind that the closing ceremonies are TOMORROW and weren't-we-using-the-Olympics-as-an-opportunity-to-grow and how-is-waiting-until-the-very-last-minute-like-usual-represent-growth-of-any-kind-again? Never mind all that. There was Getting Out to do, and dammit I did it.

The movie was, as all the critics have said, marvellous and amazing. Heath Ledger did such a good job being all clench-jawed and taciturn I was powerfully reminded of my grandfather through the entire movie. Michelle Williams was... I used to watch her on Dawson's Creek, back in its early, non-sucking seasons, and I had no idea she had this in her. Really just... remarkable. You should all go see it if you haven't already.

Here's the funny thing - did you know there are sheep in that movie? There are! OODLES of them! And me, with this weird new illness I just realized I have contracted, got all doofy looking at all those sheep going, "Wow. Look at all that wool."

sigh. Stick a fork in me, I'm done. (What? That's not hip anymore? The kids think that's lame? As is 'lame'? Really? Oh. Well. Crap. The cool kids do still say "crap", right? Oh good.)

Family Not Conducive to Olympic Success

2006-02-21T16:05:00.000-06:00

Gnnnggg!

So I was doing great. Totally great. Right on target, everything going swimmingly.

As of late Thursday night, I had two finished sweater pieces:

So I was thinking to myself, "Gosh, if I really crank this out, I might be able to get the sleeves done and blocking before we go down to Chicago to visit my family!"

Which should have been my first clue.

Our two-day trip wound up getting extended into a three-day trip, complete with changing "home bases" between the first night and the second. I had gotten just an absurdly limited amount of sleep Thursday night, and then Friday night packing just did not go well for a variety of reasons, including marital miscommunication and plain ol' dumbassery on both my and Caz's parts. Collapsed to sleep Friday, overslept Saturday morning, final packing and getting things out to the car got side-tracked when Caz had an ill-timed OCD moment and decided to clean the living snot out of the kitchen, and so instead of leaving by 1 p.m. latest, we didn't pull out of the parking lot until 2:15. Which, all things considered, was pretty good, but still.

Then the kids didn't go to sleep on the way down even though they were by-God supposed to. Well, until the last half hour. THEN they decided to snooze out. So... yeah.

Anyway, lots of craziness later, and I finally cast on for the Green Prepster sleeves Sunday afternoon. Worked on them here and there along the way, but most of the times we were in the car I kept falling asleep, so exhausted by the crazy that is my family that I'd turned temporarily into a narcoleptic.

So as of this afternoon, this is all I had done:

This will not do.

I want to give myself two days for seaming, because heaven knows I've got no flippin' idea what I'm doing with all this, having only seamed like two hats in my entire knitting "career". Which means that I need to have these things blocking by Friday afternoon. Judging by how quickly the swatch dried (the swatch!! OMG! The answer to my What Do I Do If I Run Out Of Yarn prayers! I totally forgot until just this moment, I shit you not), I should have dry pieces by Saturday morning if I wash and set them up to block by Friday afternoon.

So I've got a lot of knitting to do by then. The two sleeves are roughly the same amount of knitting as the back, which took me four days to complete. I've got 2.5 days left to get this bad boy done. Eek.

Suddenly all those people who didn't choose endurance challenge-type events are looking mighty smart. Mighty smart indeed.

In somewhat less frantic news, I got to hang out with Meg Saturday night. Her partner is sock knitting, the Fiddlin' Fool, was unable to join us, but we managed to have fun all the same. She plied my frazzled self with Strongbow cider (mmmmmmmm!) and then we had fun with her ball winder, where I wound off several hanks of yarn - some which came hanked and some which I'd hanked myself after frogging various objects in order to soak out the kinks.

See how pretty?

The purple and periwinkle are Cascade 220 (one skein of the purple, three skeins of the periwinkle), and the two on the right are Sockotta in some gem/jewel-ish colorway (bottom), and striped Regia 6-ply (top) which will become another pair of Jaywalkers. Eventually. Actually I might cast those on Friday after I finish the sleeves (pleeeeaaaase let me finish the sleeves by Friday afternoon, O Marvelous Knit Goddesses!), just to give myself a break. This sweater is kinda startin' to kill me.

Had a lovely time with Meg chatting and comparing knitting things - I showed off my Jaywalkers, she showed off all her preparatory materials for Crossed In Translation - and walked the three blocks to a nice Greek restaurant near her. Normally, a three-block walk would be nothing. But see, it was something like 14 degrees Kelvin in Chicagoland Saturday night, and I'd stupidly left my hat and mittens in the car when Caz drove off to take the kids with him to my dad's. Luckily, I was in the home of knitters, so I had my choice of several hats, and some gloves were found for me as well. Thank goodness, because it was so cold on the walk back I thought my face was going to freeze off.

Meg also pointed out where the LYS near my dad's house (where we stayed the first night) is, so I stopped there Sunday afternoon for 20 minutes while Caz drove around the area with the kids. I wound up leaving with this:

I'm not sure of the specifics, but those will combine to make one pair of socks. I'm going to hold off on making any hard-and-fast decisions for now (look at me, delaying gratification! I think I'm growing as a person!), but I'm pretty excited about the colors.

And then Monday we finally decided it was time for us to visit that Temple of Organization, The Container Store, where we bought several nice things to help organize our apartment into something perhaps a bit more liveable. I also wheedled and looked pitiful enough that Caz allowed me to buy these for the keeping of the stash:

Aren't they gorgeous? As soon as I get this Olympics thing done, I'm going to do some serious stash organization and do my darnedest to avoid yarn temptation. Well, I'm going to try, at any rate. I figure that's got to count for something, you know?

So yeah. That was my weekend. Aren't you glad you got all the fun knitting content and none of the My Family Is Bugfuck Insane content?

Day Six - No Pix

2006-02-15T14:21:00.000-06:00

I know, I promised pictures. I'm a filthy liar.

Actually, it's that I'm all snarly and snappish and so fiddling with the digital camera and then fiddling with the pictures and then fiddling with Blogger to put them up? Way beyond my levels of patience right now.

All this week, there's been construction going on around my apartment. Monday and part of Tuesday (the part before we took the kids out to play in the warm sunshine, of course), it was the razing of a bunch of the trees behind my apartment which make this... ahem, place palatable. (Yes, the italics would be where I'm self-censoring out a lot of "colorful" descriptors of my two-bedroom apartment with a single lonely little phone jack and a half-size dishwasher (and me with two toddlers) and a kitchen with practically negative counter space and no drawers wide enough to be a silverware drawer (oh, how I wish I was kidding!) as they're all half-size drawers (to match the dishwasher, I'm sure) and the smoke alarm directly in front of the stove.)

Anyway, so Monday was spent trying to knit despite the pounding in my skull (from the woodchipper outside my window) and counting how many times Caz or I said to the other, "Are they still cutting down trees?" Eventually, I gave up and napped the afternoon away in sheer self-defense.

Tuesday was spent trying to wrangle the kids and Caz out of the house (how come having two adults around to help get the kids handled and out the door actually takes longer than when I used to do it on my own?) to go play in the sunshine, despite the fact that the woodchipper got fired up at 8:30 and had been shut down 15 minutes before we left.

At least it seems they're done chopping down trees, and it seems they even left a few up. Which is something, though I've got a bad feeling the remaining trees aren't here for long.

Today, though, was something new - apparently they were out in the corridor outside our apartment putting up chair rails and otherwise beautifying the halls. So all day there's been a circular saw (wow, I really am my dad's daughter - how on earth can I tell the difference between the sound of a circular saw and say, a band saw? Weird) running outside our door, plus the usual drilling and pounding and hammering which would accompany such a project.

So, like I say. My head is pounding. My patience has worn thinner than thin, and I'm beginning to feel hustled by this sweater.

The back panel was easy. Honestly, it was alarmingly easy. I even got the cast-on right the first time. That /never/ happens! But now I've moved on to the front panel and well... the tides are turning.

First I forgot to switch my Denise Interchangeable circ from US8 to US6 to do the hem ribbing on the front panel. So I'd cast on and done the first couple stitches before I realized my mistake, had to start over. So I switched to US6, cast on, did the ribbing. But then I forgot to switch back to US8 when I finished the ribbing and moved on to the stockinette section. Did four rows before I realized my mistake. So picked up the stitches on my circ (okay, gotta admit, I looooooove that trick), frogged back, switched to US8 and started the stockinette again. Since then, it's been all right, but I'm on my guard now. The trust between me and this sweater has taken a hit, and it's going to be a while before we rebuild it.

So, I'm about to go back and try to knit now that it seems the sawing in the hallway is complete (please, Knit Goddesses, grant me this one request), the kids are down for naps and Caz has been ~~banished~~ sent out to run a few errands.

But to end on a much more upbeat note: Congrats to Scout who was among the six winners of the Jaywalker KAL contest! I'm sure you'll pick out something extra-yummy!

...and she sticks the landing!

2006-02-14T04:25:00.000-06:00

Okay, that's gymnastics, not figure skating, but it's what I could come up with.

Felt very much a part of something immense tonight, as I cast off the back panel of my First Sweater while some really amazing Olympic pairs figure skating was going on. And I just have to say - I don't think I've ever seen someone with more sheer, unadulterated grit than Zhang Dan of China. If somebody had hurled me through the air and I landed on the ice on my knee? I wouldn't be skating through, I'd be sobbing under the judge's table demanding a cold pack and a bucket of Advil.

So my cast-off took a while, because I kept having to pause to stare, but I did get it done. Tomorrow I will cast on for the front and try to not think about yardage. I am less worried about it than I was previously, so hopefully it was just a bunch of panic for nothing. (Not, you know, that I'm good at that or anything.)

Photos tomorrow, and a Happy Valentine's to all!

(Oh, and this just makes me ludicrously happy. Gleeful all out of proportion to how it should. But hey, it's kinda fun anyway.)

Jaywalkers - complete!!

2006-02-13T01:52:00.000-06:00

Yep, that's right - I finished my Jaywalkers. Did up the kitchenering and wove in my ends just a couple hours before I cast on for the Olympics. I was pretty darn pleased, really - I put them right on and wore them during my opening ceremonies knitting.

Now I know, you're thinking, "Waitaminnit, didn't she give up on her Kool-aid Jaywalker and start up some new ones?" Yep, you're absolutely right, I did.

But that was before I'd realized that if I wanted to finish my Jaywalkers in time for the end of the KAL, I was going to have to knit a complete pair of socks by Feb 10th, in order to make room for the Olympics. It was also before I got down to the heel flap on the new stripey Jaywalkers and discovered (you can guess already, can't you?) that they didn't fit.

So, that was when I went, "You know... I like the Kool-aid Jaywalker. It does, technically, fit, though I could wish the stitches didn't spread so much when I put it on, because it diminishes the coolness of the pooling. But that half a heel flap is awesome, and I've stared at it for close to a month now and still can't bring myself to frog it, so maybe I should just carry on as I've begun."

So that's what I did. I cast on and started the ribbing.

Oh, but that wily Jaywalker, it had to have one last laugh at my expense. Because see, I'd cast on and gotten going on the ribbing, and man... it was taking forever. Now mind you, that first inch of ribbing on a sock always seems to take forever to me. I don't know what it is, but somehow I immediately enter Stephanie's Knitting Black Hole and just have to grit my teeth and slog through until finally, somehow, I manage to escape. (It should also be noted that, if one were to go through and measure the top ribbing on all of the socks I've knitted so far, the smart money would go on the side of "not quite an inch of ribbing" rather than "a bit more than an inch of ribbing". Just sayin'.)

But even so, knowing that that first inch of ribbing is always hellish for me, this still was taking an awfully long time. And yet I persevered, dreaming that perhaps I'd be able to wear my nifty Kool-aid Jaywalkers during the Olympic opening ceremonies (drat, I've already given away the ending...). Finally, after staying up until Oh-God-Thirty one night with Caz, having intended to watch one episode of Buffy and instead watching, um... the whole disc... I finished the ribbing. Oh the glee! The glee! I was so happy! And so I decided, to celebrate, I would knit one last round - that first round of the pattern which is actually just a knit round.

Now, it should be noted that when I start up a sock or really any project on dpns, I prefer to use the lowest number of dpns I can get away with - I just find it more manageable to do it that way, at least until there's sufficient fabric to kind of hold it all together. So even though the pattern calls for using five dpns, I decided to just use four while I did the cuff.

So doing the first round of the pattern stitch served two purposes - it was not only celebratory, but it was also going to be my chance to get the stitches shifted around onto the proper number of needles. So I'm knitting along, reducing the number of stitches on each needle to 19. So I put 19 sts on the first needle, 19 on the second, 19 on the third and... waitaminnit. There's a lot more than 19 sts left here. WTF is going on?!?

I count out the stitches and discover that instead of casting on 76 sts, I've cast on 96 sts! 96! Ninety! Six! Gnnnggg!

See, you can see for yourself here:

The sock on the left is made with 76 sts (I quadruple-checked, so I'm sure that's right). The inch of ribbing on the right? 96 sts.

So I frog and stuff it aside for a day or two until I can cool down and look at it again without wanting to throw it on the ground and stomp on it. Finally managed that last Saturday, cast on, and somehow managed to churn out a whole sock by Friday, which for me is rather an accomplishment. Though um... I do think it was helped along by my spending the whole of Sunday afternoon sitting in my recliner under a quilt knitting while I finished recuperating from a really vile stomach flu.

(And because it's just not a knitting blog until I've included a cute picture of my pet with my knitting, this is my sweet Converse (yes, I did name her after a shoe, but it's not my fault - when she came to us her name was Teva!), napping next to Jaywalker: The Final Iteration.)

So here, at looooong last, are my completed Jaywalkers! Yay!

And check out those heel flaps - it would figure that they would be the parts with the funkiest pooling, eh?

And finally, an action shot. (No, I don't plan on wearing these socks out in public with blue plaid pajama pants - I may be oblivious, but I'm not that oblivious.)

Team Sweater - Day Two

2006-02-12T01:39:00.000-06:00

(Okay, so I'm totally slacking on updates here - was all week. Was not my fault, though. On Wednesday the monitor went ka-fizzle, leaving me with no real way to do proper updates. However, the kind folks at Dell stepped up to the plate and managed to get us a replacement monitor in, I shit you not, something like 18 hours, from the time Caz called to the time the FedEx guy knocked on our door. Anyway, will get caught up later, I promise. Really!

So, the Olympics. I never did get a chance to officially post up what I'm doing, so here it is:

I'm making my first-ever sweater, toddler-sized in deference to my usual time constraints. The pattern is "Prepster" from The Yarn Girls' Guide to Kid Knits in this funky-cool light green Candy Cane yarn I got at the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival from Sandy's Palette.

So far, so good:

(The red and gold bits would be Dove Dark Chocolate hearts - Go Team Chocolate!)

However, I'm realizing that the true challenge of this project is not going to be the whole notion of knitting up the pieces of a sweater and turning them into a wearable garment. The true challenge is going to be resisting the urge to gnaw my throwing hand off out of sheer boredom over all the freakin' stockinette. Good lord! Should one of these challenges come up again one of these days, I gotta remember to pick a project with a bit more interest!

It's quite seriously all I can do not to go start up that other Jaywalker I've got yarn for.

Also? I'm worried about yardage. According to the pattern, I would need 540 yards of yarn for the size I'm knitting (still hitting gauge pretty much spot on, so that's something at least). However, that number is, so far as I can tell, for both the sweater /and/ the matching hat. I've temporarily misplaced the "ball" band (quotes because it was a whoppin' great hank, not a ball), but I know it was over 8 oz of wool, with somewhere between 520 and 560 yards. I bought two skeins - one green and one blue, but I'm not sure which skein was the larger off hand.

Anyway, point is, I'm worried about the yardage. Caz wound it all off for me (now that's what I call an Olympic-level support team!) into four center-pull balls, and I ran out of the first ball tonight. I don't have a scale here at home, so I have no idea what sort of weight I'm dealing with as far as amount knitted vs. amount remaining, but this is starting to make me a little batty. I have, however, decided that if by the time I finish the back and the front I'm still really worried about it, I will do a provisional cast-on for the sleeves and save knitting the ribbed cuffs until the end. If all else fails, I'll do the collar ribbing and the cuff ribbing in a contrasting color. And if I really wind up screwed, once I finish cussing and throwing things, I'll do that ~~freaky ass~~ nifty trick where you can separate a piece of knitting and save all those live stitches. And I'll do the hem ribbing in said contrast color as well, then.

Gnnnggg. It's going all right, but I think I might have to give myself a day off once I finish the back, so I can work on something cool and interesting for a change. I can't imagine doing a plain ol' stockinette sweater for an adult, even a cheeky wee adult quite unlike myself or Caz. I think I'd go stark freakin' mad.

Jaywalcaholics Anonymous

2006-01-28T20:07:00.000-06:00

Yeah, I'm joining the group. Dang, what is UP with this pattern? I don't know what it is.

Anyway, so uh... I got to go out-and-about the other afternoon, Caz stayed home with the kids. Was really nice. Went out to lunch with a friend, then did a bit of wandering on my own. Wound up finally getting inside an elusive LYS that I've only been searching for for like, a year. The irony there being that it used to be located about two blocks from where I used to work, back before I picked up knitting. Walked past the place dozens of times, never gave it a second thought. Then once I learned how to knit and thought, "Hey, I'll go to that place near the hospital!" Well, it was no longer there. And the new address listed for it is misleading - I don't doubt its address is what it is, but it's not actually visible from that street. I found it by accident about a month ago while driving the kids around for a car-nap, and finally made it inside the other day.

Pretty nice place. Some fun yarns I've never gotten to fondle before (OMG Lorna's Laces is delicious! I knew people liked it and all, but DAYAMN!), a nice woman working there who seemed pretty happy to have some company (I don't think I'm the only one who has trouble finding this place).

Turned out they were having a (diabolical) 20% off sale. I kept reminding myself that I didn't want to have to try to get my boys to stay put when we slept in boxes under a bridge, so I was well behaved. However, they did have thick-ish sock yarn, so... I went for that. And then yesterday, I cast on for my FINAL attempt at Jaywalker. If this doesn't work... I'm out. I give up. I will admit defeat. but not just yet....

And just for you, Meg, here's the Sockotta sock I'm working on:

That's a 3x1 seed stitch rib with an extra repeat in the heel flap, just because I think I'll like the little bit of extra length there. Just finished the gusset.

Crap! Crap! Dammit! Sonuva....!

2006-01-26T01:23:00.000-06:00

Well, that's it. I'm not playing games with this any more. Jaywalker? You're not on my Buddy List. I'm going to give you one more chance once I find some nice near-sport-weight sock yarn to use, but since all I've got in my stash currently is fingering weight? Jaywalker, you're off The Island. I love you, I do-y-do, but you. Just. Won't. FIT. Yer makin' me nuts.

Also? Adding to the general Grrr-ishness of my mood tonight - I watched Lost (tape recorded so I could watch Bones "live", since Fox hates me and puts all my favorite Fox shows opposite other really great shows that will trounce them to paste in the ratings) while I frogged my latest stab at Jaywalker.

Man. I haven't been so teed off at a show since Season 7 of Buffy, when Buffy got all high-and-mighty at Faith about "That's because, Faith, you're a murderer!" As if by that point the Summers Homestead hadn't turned into a halfway house for reformed and semi-reformed murderers anyway. I mean seriously, by the end, who hadn't killed someone else in that house? Dawn and Xander are all I can think of. The big difference between Faith and, say, Willow (flayed Warren then burned him alive), Anya (ex-vengeance demon), Spike (ex-vampire), Andrew (killed Jonathan), Giles (killed Ben, the poor med student who was the unwitting other half of Glory), and Buffy herself (killed how many vampires and demons - unless somehow they don't "count" at all, which would kinda mark Buffy a big fat hypocrite after her going off on Riley for "being a bigot" in Season 4, plus she killed Angel at the end of Season 2, even though he had his soul back and so was once again "good") was that Faith was actually trying to repay her "debt to society" for her crime. Which, also? Is the only one of those I can think of which was actually an accident.

Yeah. Anyway. Don't want to spoil Lost for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, hence the ranting about three-year-old episodes of Buffy, but man... I hate when a show gets all carried away with its own sanctimonious pissiness and forgets the characters it's actually dealing with.

And that, I think, is enough italics for one night. At least, let's hope.

Now I will go spritz down my frogged Jaywalker which Caz so thoughtfully hanked up for me, so that it can de-kink, and then I will contemplate the fractious Jaywalker again tomorrow. Also will contemplate frogging the other Jaywalker, which never did fit quite right, and which I've been loathe to frog because, well... look how pretty it is! It's so pretty!! Gnnngggg.

(Note to FemiKnit Mafia: I'm fishin', lady, can you tell? grin.)

I Hate Self-knowledge - or - Sad About Sockapaloooza

2006-01-25T12:29:00.000-06:00

So all day yesterday, the hard-workin' Alison was taking signups for Sockapaloooza.

And all day yesterday, I hemmed and hawed, hawed and hemmed. I kept going back to her blog, staring at it for a bit, then going away. Once I even clicked on the link to the signup form, stared at it a long while, then went away again. Finally, with about 38 minutes to spare, I talked to a friend of mine, who told me what I knew already, but just needed to hear from another person to affirm that it was true.

So I didn't sign up.

Yeah, that's right. I didn't sign up.

Man, I wanted to. I mean, I saw Alison's initial post about signups coming up and was all, "ooh ooh ooh!" about it. And I've seen all the cool socks people have knitted for and received from their sock pals. I'd even started to think about some other coo little gifties I could chuck in the package for my sock pal. Dudes, I was Ex.Cit.Ed.

But then when it came time to sign up, and I looked at Alison's understandably stern reminder that signing up meant making a serious commitment to knitting a pair of socks, and keeping Alison updated on your progress and I realized that this... this was a situation spectacularly ideal for turning me into a raging butthead. And I've been trying to cut back on turning into a butthead these days.

See, the problem is, I do fine doing stuff when nobody knows I'm going to do it. But when I commit to something - when there's someone out there, even a very dear friend or a beloved nephew (to name two people suffering from my jackassery on this stuff right now), who is expecting something from me... oh, I just turn into a schmuck. For reasons unknown and undiscovered despite a decade of off-and-on therapy, I dig my heels in and refuse to come through. Why? No clue. It's just this idiotic, self-sabotaging thing I do. I've actually managed to get better, over the years - I used to just be completely awful about it, now I'm just really really bad.

Regardless, though - the fact that my nephew is still waiting for his Christmas hat and my best friend is still waiting for her Christmas present proves to me that I'm in no way ready to start participating in things like Sockapaloooza, no matter how much it's going to break my heart for the next three months to see all the other Cool Kids knitting away for their sock pals, all excited about yarn choices and patterns and all that good stuff. Even though when everyone else is receiving their sock pal socks in the mail, I'm going to be all, "Nobody loves me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms" because there won't be a pair of socks arriving in the mail for me.

It's just tough nuts for me, because I'm not going to set myself up to disappoint yet another person - this time a perfect stranger.

But man... I wish I didn't know myself this well, you know? Like... I wish I could just sign up, all excited and carefree, and then be all shocked and unaware when I go all WereJackass on the subject. Or even better, if I didn't even /know/ I'd turned into a WereJackass. If I could just go along, make the usual excuses as to how the world got in my way and it really "wasn't my fault!" and yadda yadda horsehockey.

But I can't. I do know myself this well, and so... sigh. No Sockapaloooza for me. I'll just have to enjoy it vicariously through everyone else's blogs. So, you know, take lots of pics for me, will ya? Thanks.

Pics and rumination

2006-01-20T13:00:00.000-06:00

First, the pics:

If you'll recall, this is the yarn I'm using - dyed myself using Kool-Aid.

And here is the swatch I did, making sure I liked the fabric I got and see how pretty it is? I dunno - maybe it marks me a Child Of The '80s, but I really like it.

And here is a progress shot in the early days of Sock #1, when I first started to think, "Hmm. Maybe... maybe I should do this on US1s after all. This fabric really stretches out funny when I try to put it on."

And here.... here my friends is my testament to "You know, I bet if I just keep knitting it'll all turn out fine."

That's right. That's a completely finished sock. Lovely, isn't it?

In fact, if you wanna see some lovely, look at that half of the heel flap - isn't that the most absurdly gorgeous bit of heel flap you've ever seen?

I forgot to take a picture of the other half of the heel flap, which is entirely green. It's amazing. I'll have to take another picture of it before I frog it.

Yeah, you heard me. Frog it. Because while I love the sock, love the ridiculously gorgeous half-heel-flap, and really groove on how it turned out... when I put the damn thing on, I feel like The Hulk. Like one wrong move and I'm going to burst right out of the thing. I know I'm not, but... I just don't like it. It's not even that it feels all that tight - it's just that the fabric is too loose and stretches out too weird and all my lovely pooling goes kaput, and well... what's the point of that. Even with the gorgeous heel-flap. sigh.

Anyway. So now I'm working on the sock again, using 84 sts on US1 needles. So far it seems like it will fit just fine, and the fabric will annoy me less than the first sock does. I have, in case you're concerned, decided that if I'm iffy on the fabric again, I'm not going anywhere past the gusset. Not one bit. In which case, I'll probably start all over again, using 92 sts on US0s. Heaven help me.

And now... some pondering.

Have been contemplating my status in the blogiverse for a while now, and Cara's discussion of her blog really has me going.

See, I've got another blog out there on LiveJournal, which has primarily been "life" stuff, and then when I thought enough of my readers were getting tired of the knitting content, I figured I'd start a knit-blog. Except it hasn't really taken off. Like, I'm not posting to it nearly as much as I thought I would. And part of that is technical difficulties - getting pics from my camera to the computer is not as easy a process as I would like, though Caz is going to try to fix that for me sometime.

But the other part of it is, well... how do you compartmentalize your life?

This morning, we were having one of "those" mornings around here, and after Ben yanked the hallway gate down for the fourth time in a row, I decided it was time for a movie. So we chucked in "Finding Nemo", and the boys got distracted by that enough to stop trying to ransack the rest of the house, and so Caz laid down on the couch to nap a bit and I put my feet up in the recliner to knit a bit. (Toldja it was one of "those" mornings.)

Well, I'm sitting there knitting, and Henry decides to clamber onto the footrest and climb up to me. At first I was thinking he wanted to nurse, but no, he just wanted to sit by me. So I sat there in the chair, Henry happily sitting between my legs, and knitted. It was just a perfect lovely moment, and one of the first times I've been able to actually continue knitting with one of the kids in proximity - usually they're busy trying to grab the yarn or the fabric or poke at the needles or something.

So which blog do I put that in? It was a great moment, but well... it was knitting related, but it also had a lot to do with my "life" (as if knitting isn't life, but that's a ponder for another time).

I dunno. I think I need to figure out if I'm gonna fish or cut bait here. I even think I know which way it's gonna go (seeing as I just put a couple buttons up on the sidebar there - didja see? Huh? Huh? Didja?!), but... you know how it is.

Long time no update

2006-01-19T15:10:00.000-06:00

Crap! The camera is in the kids' room and they're... not quite napping yet. Gnnngggg! In about another half-hour, if they still aren't asleep, I'm giving up. But until then... I gotta try. And I've only been meaning to put together an update for ages and well... yeah. Things happen.

So Jaywalker.

Yeah. Um... how come I never noticed that Cara's preferred yarn for Jaywalker, the really lovely Socks That Rock, is a whole shload thicker than the sock yarn I've been using? It wasn't until I Margene mentioned it that I really thought to take a look at it.

Gnnngggg. No wonder I've had gauge problems up the wazoo.

My yarn weighs about 3.5 ounces and measures 440 yds. STR weighs about 4.25 ounces and measures 325 yds.

I have not yet given up. I REFUSE to give up. However, I am regrouping. Which is too bad, because I really enjoy knitting the pattern. It's just the sock I've completed? Doesn't quite fit. And the second sock I started in another (even thinner) yarn? Really isn't going to fit.

In other news... I've decided I'm going to join Stephanie's 2006 Knitting Olympics! I'm going to try to break out of my self-imposed issue with knitting actual, you know, garments. I've done all kinds of increasingly complex accessories, and I'm feeling pretty darn confident on socks, but for some reason, the whole thing where a sweater is supposed to actually, you know, FIT it's intended recipient? Has had me on the ropes for ages.

So now I'm going to go for it. I figure the Knitting Olympics are an awesome chance for me to get so caught up in the promise of the thrill of victory that I just don't think about it too much. Still have not chosen a pattern or a yarn (have a few in stash which I hope will do nicely), but I know it will be a baby/toddler sweater. Either for one of my boys or for someone else's child, I don't know yet. But I'm working on it, and will get it figured out soon.

Otherwise, am continuing to knit along like crazy, I'm just not chronicling it well. Need to work on that. And get the pictures I've taken actually OFF the camera and onto the computer so I might share them with y'all.

A Very Knitterly Christmas

2005-12-26T12:12:00.000-06:00

Well, as you can see by my previous update, the Christmas spirit did not arrive here until late (which kinda figures - I've always been a tardy kinda gal anyway). But once it did, wow... it showed up in a big big way. I've been all full of sappy Christmas sentimentality and being grateful for good friends we didn't even have a year ago and loving my fellow humans and all that good stuff.

I am, for the record, convinced that my avoidance of all things "mall" aided in this cheerful outlook despite us having no idea how we're going to manage the next month or so.

I was marvelling, last night, that I've somehow become the owner of several knitting books all the sudden. This morning I realized that receiving four (4! FOUR!) knitting books for Christmas - two pattern books, two non - had something to do with it.

So what did Knitter Claus bring me this year? Well, from my dad and his wife I received Knitting Vintage Socks by Nancy Bush, Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter and At Knit's End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much by the always lovely Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.

Then last night, from one of those dear friends I didn't even have a year ago, I got Stitch 'N Bitch: The Knitter's Handbook by Debbie Stoller.

One top of the couple other knitting books I've picked up over the past year, suddenly my knit library is burgeoning. I mean, I know it's not much compared to a lot of people, but considering I only really got into this about a year ago? I'm kinda surprised how much I've picked up already.

Otherwise, it was a lovely holiday. I'll have to do a Jaywalker update soon, but just had to record the happy KnitMas I've had. *beam!*

snarl Feckin' Christmas....

2005-12-16T01:35:00.000-06:00

Most women, when they get PMS, get headaches, cramps, bloating, etc. Me? I get a colossal case of dropsy and then also get to be the special target of Murphy's Law for a week.

This time, ten days before Christmas (oh god, nine days now) is not a great time for me to be having this sort of PMS. Not only is dropsy a bad thing to have when you're trying to churn four different batches of cookies out of your kitchen (what am I saying, the only cookies I've touched I've also eaten - the baking is all Caz this year), but this whole Murphy's Law business? Am REALLY tired of it.

To whit:

I needed to knit three hats for family Christmas celebrations this weekend.

I knit one, and at the end realized that it was, perhaps, a trifle large. I decided, "That's all right. If it's really much too big, I will have the recipient assist me in frogging the hat (which I expect would be a lot of fun since the recipient is like three years old), and then I will re-knit and get it sent off within a couple weeks."

I then embarked on the second hat, then paused after twice frogging the decreases, because I couldn't settle on a decrease pattern that wouldn't leave me white-knuckled wondering when I was going to run out of yarn. That hat is still waiting for decreases.

So then I started the third hat. Again there was some hemming and hawing on the issue of pattern, but eventually I selected one. All seemed well. I cast on yesterday (Wednesday), made a decent bit of headway, then knitted like a fiend today, in between discussions over whether instant coffee would be a suitable replacement for espresso powder in a recipe (We decided to go for it, incidentally.)

Now, I measured my gauge on this third hat earlier today. The pattern called for 20 sts/4 in, and I was at about 19.5. Not quite dead-on, but really quite close enough as far as I was concerned. So I continued knitting, then after rather some time, I realized that the hat seemed a bit large. I tried pulling it onto my head and realized that it was about a perfect fit. Considering this hat's intended recipient is like five or six years old, I was not amused.

And yet, still I did That Thing. You know, where you go, "Oh man, I've really screwed this up somehow," and so your chosen course of action then is to continue as before, in the apparent hopes that somehow the additional length will fix whatever is wrong.

Eventually, I had to admit that Continuing On was not working. Also, it was becoming painfully clear that I was going to run out of yarn and soon. So I pulled out my trusty tape measure and checked my gauge again, only to discover that somehow I was knitting at 18 sts/4 in. CRAPENZIE!!

The moral of that story, clearly, is don't trust your gauge measurements if they're taken when there are toddlers in the room.

So now, with two knitting days completely wasted, I'm forced to face the fact that really, what I'm going to have to do is give my dear nephews cheapish dork-presents on Saturday, and then mail them each their hats in another couple weeks once I get them all completed.

Somebody pass me some spritz cookies and a whole mess of buttered rum cider, willya? I've got sorrows to drown.

Such a dingus!

2005-12-12T10:10:00.000-06:00

So today, as I was gearing up to go back out into the elements, I thought to myself, "Man, I really love that this scarf is such a perfect length. So many scarves are too short."

And then I realized, "Hello! This is what happens when you knit your scarf yourself!!"

sigh.

Yeah, I'm still getting used to this whole wild and wonderful world of handknits.

Busy busy busy

2005-12-10T09:12:00.000-06:00

Okay, despite my lack of posting, I really have been knitting. And having a life. And other crazy things.

Knitting:

I finished one hat, which I fear may be too small, but we'll see what blocking does.

I finished another hat, which I fear may be too big.

I almost finished another hat, realized that it's not nearly as cool-looking as I'd hoped, also realized I had more yarn than I realized, so I frogged back to the decreases and am going to make the nice normal hat I was making into a more stocking-y hat. Now what - I'll run out of yarn. snort!

I started, again, my Jaywalker socks for Cara's Jaywalker KAL, and after a few false starts wherein I decided the small size on 1s was too small, and the large size on 1s was too big, I am now making quite fine progress on 2s using the small size, and so I'm feeling like perhaps I've finally got this figured out.

I'm stalled on Christmas Stocking #1 (remember, I have to do two - argh!), but I have decided to kind of up-end the pattern I've got, which I think will be saner in the long run. But first I have to finish all these Christmas presents so that I can begin the long hard burn to try to get both stockings done. (Yes, Meg, I know it's impossible, but what can I say - I haven't quite given up hope.)

Life:
My kids are huge and strong and waaaaayyyy too smart. It's making me a little bit nutty, actually. And they're sick and tired of being cooped up for two weeks almost-straight. First they both had colds, and then it was about 4 degrees Kelvin outside for most of this past week, so we haven't really gone much of anywhere.

Crazy:
So, Caz lost his job yesterday, which is... argh. We had a couple hours of good strong panic, complete with bouts of near-hyperventilation and some crying. Now we're... we're a bit more composed about it, anyway. Though if anyone is nice to me about it, I'm still kinda inclined to sniffle and gulp and feel my face go all red and splotchy (so attractive!).

We're trying to look at this as some kind of "opportunity" or something. He wasn't liking his job hardly at all anyway, and I've been getting more and more stir-crazy home with the kids all the time, so maybe we'll swap who's the breadwinner for a while. Maybe. I guess we'll see how it all shakes out.

Okay, back to life and living and Oh God Getting The Christmas Knitting Done!

Complete chaos and I haven't even been shopping yet

2005-11-26T19:18:00.000-06:00

Okay. Not perfectly true, as I did go out this afternoon to pick up some yarn. Yes. Some more yarn. sigh.

So determined that what Caz wants is not fingering weight socks, but rather big thick cushy socks, like out of some light worsted weight yarn.

So, after hemming and hawing over an online order and eventually realizing that if I placed that particular order, I'd wind up buying a bunch of other stuff (some /great/ sales going on out there!) that I really don't need but am having trouble resisting, so I decided instead to "go support local businesses!"

Went to the LYS (the marvelous Lakeside Fibers) just before they closed yesterday. Wandered and wandered and wandered some more. Finally chose 100g of Dale of Norway Falk in gray, and 50 g in purple. I hope that'll be enough.

I also picked up two skeins of Filatura di Crosa Zara, in a dark blue and yellow, which will match the boys' winter coats nicely. Not sure how I'm going to do their hats - I think something with ear flaps would be fun, but so far I haven't been able to find a good pattern.

I joined the Jaywalker KAL, and even started a pair in Trekking XXL for Caz. But now knowing that he's not really after fingering-weight socks, at least not most immediately, I'm sorely tempted to pull his sock back off the needles (have only managed about two rows of the ribbing anyway) and give my own pair of Jaywalkers a start.

Have I mentioned that both the Hermione hat and Henry's Christmas stocking have been untouched since Tuesday? Got to get those moving.

Have realized that I've got six hats, two stockings plus ideally one pair of socks that I really want to get done for Christmas. Plus I've got another pair of socks that I'd like to do just for myself. For fun. sigh.

At the very least, I did knit up a nice swatch of my Kool-aid dyed KnitPicks sock merino, so once I get it measured up I'll throw it through a cold cycle in the washer to see if it felts on me or not (please don't! please!). Once that's done, I may also decide to overdye the swatch with some purple, perhaps, per Diana's mention in her blog. Just to see how it turns out.

Oh, and we got a new cat yesterday - another 2-year-old female calico named Lily. No pics yet, I'm afraid, but I'll get some up soon, honest. It's actually a little crazy-making right now. Connie, our first cat, is not taking well to the newcomer. And then when Caz got between her and Lily, because Connie was hissing something fierce, instead of shooing Lily off he shooed off Connie, so now she's hiding all the time and sulking and when she does come out, she's inclined to his at Caz, even. It's all very traumatizing for me. I had no idea Connie would react this way, and so I'm really troubled by it. She even hissed at me when I went to scratch her ears a bit ago, when she came out for a few minutes. I'd been petting her sides, then moved to her ears and she hissed a little bit. Poor little girl.

Sorry still no pics, but as you can see, things have been a bit hectic. Soon, I promise!

Contemplative Over Turkey

2005-11-24T10:47:00.000-06:00

Total lie. The last turkey that was in our house was some deli turkey and we finished that days ago. We're going to a friend's house for our Grateful Gorging.

But I am going to be a bit introspective, here.

No pics of the socks yet - will take a shot this afternoon (perhaps even of them in action) and get it up tonight, if Vitamin T doesn't put me in a coma for too long.

I'm deciding/realizing that the period after completion of a long-term project is kind of a dangerous time. I finished my socks, leaving my pair of #1 circs free, and so I've been all anxious to get a new pair of socks started. Caz's job is apparently Freaky Cold, so I got a ball of Trekking XXL to make him up a nice pair of socks.

I thought at first I'd go toe-up, two-at-once, so I would avoid any possibility of using too much yarn on Sock #1 only to wind up short on Sock #2. But then I was looking at Cara's Jaywalker Knit-a-long and thinking about how cool the stripey Trekking would look all zig-zaggy, and how Caz is kind of a zig-zaggy kinda guy, so I asked him and he was really jazzed about it. So I thought, "Okay, I know people are having problems with the gauge coming out huge, so I'll use that to my advantage, since the pattern doesn't exactly come in a size for man-feet." At least not for my-man feet. But then I couldn't decide which size of the pattern to run with, and so now... now I think I'm swatching the Trekking. Then will frog and see where it puts me. Also, Caz said he thought it would be cool if the stripes matched, except it's, you know, a nice subtle manly colorway, so figuring out where one stripe becomes another is messing with me. And I know that I'm not going to be able to stand it if I wind up with the stripes almost matched. Once the decision is made to match the stripes, that's that. They must MATCH, dammit! Urgh.

We'll see if the stripe business doesn't make more sense to me once I see my swatch knitted up. If it doesn't... then I might just talk to Caz about making his socks fraternal twins instead of identical ones.

So, after all this fiddling and fussing and floundering went on, I really needed to make some progress. On something. Anything.

So I looked up and spied the Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran I got a month or two ago to make a hat for a kid with. So after I rewound it, because the ball was all wonky and falling apart, I cast on (twice, the first time coming up about six inches short on my long-tail cast-on) and started up a kid hat. Likely for one of my kids, actually. We'll see how it turns out, though.

Regardless, though - clearly there's something weird that happens in the mind of a knitter when they've finished a project. Which is why in my need to start a new project, I somehow wound up starting two. sigh.

Soon, every available flat surface in my house ("available" meaning all those at least four feet above the ground, thanks to the Terrifying Twin Toddlers) will have a UFO on it. I better start being nicer to Caz now, huh?

First pair of socks!!!

2005-11-23T01:52:00.000-06:00

I just finished my first pair of socks!!! I'm so jazzed! Plus, now that my pair of #1 circs are free, I'm all dithering on what socks to start next!

Pictures to come, but I just had to mark the date and time officially!

Don't even tell me....

2005-11-18T20:20:00.000-06:00

...how many knitting days until Christmas there are. I have plenty of time. Do you hear me? Plenty. Of. Time!

So, the Hermione hat for a friend is not done. Is not anywhere near done. Maybe I can get it done by the time I see her next week. If not, looks like it'll be a Christmas gift.

Am thinking I might, one of these days, spring for a #5 circ of some nice hat-ish size. I've got my Denise set, which is generally really great, but the #5s can be a bit of a hassle, as the needle and the cable are about the same width. Which still, is not really an issue when knitting 30 rows of 2x2 ribbing (for example) or something else nice and basic like that. But when doing a bunch of cables? I spent more time fighting to get the stitches to move around the circ than I did actually knitting.

Transferred to my #5 dpns, and things are progressing much more smoothly now, though it's still an extremely fussy pattern. Like, I'd been thinking I might make another of these for someone else, but now I'm not so sure. The travelling cable is not so bad, but the rope cables are very "tight" - the crossovers happen about a row more frequently than I think I would generally do. I'm sure they'll look great in the end, but they're a serious pain in the ass now.

The first of the Christmas stockings is going pretty well. I'm past the widest part of the first set of diamonds, and things are really starting to click along for me, so that's really nice. I feel like this is going to work out. I've been pausing every so often to weave in ends as I go. Not only because it makes the whole thing less of a fiasco to work with, but also because otherwise I'm going to finish these things and the kids will be eight years old before I ever get around to weaving in all those ends. And in the meantime, we'll be losing stocking stuffers to the riotous ends inside. Like vicious woolly seaweed or something.

I'm also in the home stretch on the second of the Sockotta #1 socks. (Yeah yeah, this might have something to do with why the Hermione hat is languishing...) The socks have gotten a lot of attention lately primarily because the rest of the knitting I have on the needles is a lot more complicated than I can do with two toddlers running amok. Which means I only do the more complicated projects during naptimes and after the kids are in bed.

Also, my sister keeps calling me. I owe at least two inches of these socks to her, I swear - last night she called and yammered at me for an hour, and I got a good 8-9 rows on the socks done. And it was good I had my knitting - I was able to handily resist the temptation to get really snarky with her when she oh-so-coyly suggested that my eldest nephew would "love" a Harry Potter hat to go with the Harry Potter scarf I made him this past spring.

Now see, I'd already done this math. I have the leftover yarn, there's a chance it's enough for a hat, so... why not, yes? But I sure don't need my sister, of all people, telling me what projects I should do next. It's all I can do not to refuse to do it just to spite her. But I do think my nephew would like a Gryffindor hat, so... sigh. Damn her.

I did, however, take the opportunity to explain to her just how much time knitting takes, and so no, her friend who wants HP scarves for her kids? She can learn to knit herself. I'd be glad to teach her, in fact (if it weren't for us being 100 miles away), but I'm not going to knit scarves for somebody I don't even know. Even for pay, considering just how much it would cost to make even minimum wage by knitting a double-layered scarf. sigh.

One of us must have gotten switched at the hospital, I swear.

Oh yeah? Intarsia you, too!

2005-11-10T01:19:00.000-06:00

Oh lordy. What on earth have I gotten myself into?

I'm knitting Christmas stockings for my kids. Basically, I've got yet another pair of socks to do in the next 46 days. Only these are on size 8 needles and are argyle, instead of a nice easy self-patterning yarn.

So I'm making my first attempts at intarsia, and well... eee-yah. This was perhaps a bit large of a project to start with, just out of the gate. I've got five different bobbins (actually, I just rewound smallish center-pull balls, a decision I'm beginning to rethink) going on each row for the next 70 rows. At which point I put about half the stitches on holders and continue on with three bobbins. (More particulars, and possibly a pic, later.)

I did two rows tonight and... wow. What a mess. It honestly makes me think I might have been better off to try the simple Fair Isle pattern in the book I've got from the library. Except that, well... it's argyle. How does anyone not love argyle? It'd be like if I found a pattern for a Chuck Taylor-styled Christmas stocking. I'd be morally obliged to knit it (don't any of you three DARE find one for me!).

And now, off to bed I go. Eeergh.

On the plus side, I'm about a sixth of the way through the ribbed brim for the Hermione cable-and-bobble hat I'm trying to complete by Nov. 17. It's only a week away. I can totally do this. Really.

Nancy Reagan would be so disappointed

2005-11-05T07:30:00.000-06:00

I caved. Apparently, I am peer pressure's slave.

Yesterday, while the kids clambered about the living room like it was their own personal jungle gym (which, let's face it, it is), I got out one of my hanks of merino sock yarn, a big ceramic bowl, a big pot and the steamer basket (which I poured vinegar/water over but then never used again), four cups, two forks, one spoon, a pair of tongs, 15 packets of Kool-aid (four different flavors), three basting brushes (how did we get so many? two natural bristles, one synthetic), one mushroom-cleaning brush (synthetic bristles), and a shload of plastic wrap. Oh, and a shallow microwaveable dish.

Mixed up my dyes, soaked my yarn in hot water and vinegar, then laid it out on a couple lengths of plastic wrap, and began "painting" my yarn.

Notes for next time: synthetic-bristled brushes are useless, stick with natural bristles. Forget using grape Kool-aid for the purple, it's much too dull, even with a packet of Tropical Punch added to pink it up a bit. Lemon-Lime makes a nice green, but not as nice as when some "leaf green" Wilton gel food color is added. Orange Kool-aid is surprisingly effective at producing a good orange. Strawberry Kool-aid is more red than pink.

So, what are the results? Well, here, see for yourself:

I'm overall pretty pleased with it. The green I wish was a bit stronger. I'm wondering if I couldn't soak it in hot vinegared water again and just re-dye the green parts without screwing up the rest of the yarn. Even if I just leave it alone, I'm pretty pleased with it. I'd forgotten how much fun dyeing yarn can be.

And erm, Caz apparently had forgotten just how quickly I can destroy the kitchen with the yarn-dyeing as well. Whups.

To Dye or Not To Dye

2005-11-04T10:01:00.000-06:00

Oh lordy. I'm soooo in over my head, and just looking to get in deeper.

I've got... I'm afraid to get an actual count... not very many days until Christmas, by which time I need to knit two stockings for the boys, probably winter hats for them (unless this "Whaddaya mean there's no such thing as global warming?" weather continues through December, in which case they'll have no need for hats by then anyway), plus I've got at least one or two hats and at least one scarf to do. That's all stuff that I haven't even cast on for yet. Some of those I don't even have /yarn/ for yet.

What I /do/ have on the needles is one mini-Clapotis scarf, three socks from three different pairs (one of which has made it all the way to the heel flap, so if I keep up current progress, I could have my first pair of handmade socks within a week, maybe ten days), and... huh. That's it. Interesting.

Okay. So that's what's currently on the plate, right?

But now, all the sudden, there are people /everywhere/ dyeing yarn and cloth and cool stuff, and it's killing me.

Meg and Carrie dyed some yarn and fabric over this past weekend, and then Alison and her (really adorable) twin boys had fun dyeing yarn with Kool-aid yesterday. All of which just makes me want to throw caution to the wind, grab up my two hanks of KnitPicks Color Your Own and the roughly 30 (that's right, thirty) packets of Kool-aid I've somehow acquired (have I mentioned I don't even drink the stuff?) and dye up some sock yarn this very afternoon.

Not, of course, that I need more sock yarn. Three pairs currently on the needles should darn well be enough for anyone, but especially for someone who has yet to finish even a single pair. Nor, for that matter, do I have any more free needles on which socks might be knit. But man, do I want to play with the colors and the yarn and the good good fun! Gyah.

Instead, will be a good little toaster... or something... and try to stay the course here. Finish the one pair of socks, get yarn for the stockings (what kind of awful mother would I be if I didn't provide my kids with Christmas stockings??), and go go go GO!! Or, you know, something.

~~What if I dyed just one hank of yarn???~~

More progress, less panic

2005-10-26T08:34:00.000-05:00

So, my eagerness to have a completed pair of socks has combined with some recent insomnia to make a completed 2.5-3 inches of cuff on the second Sockotta #1 sock. I think what I like best with the striped yarn is the whole "fraternal twin" aspect. I think I would like it anyway, but having real live twins that "came from the same ball" but are still pretty different in appearance only increases my enjoyment of it.

Also, insomnia has given me a chance to work a second set of Straight Rows on the mini-Clapotis, and the strange striping which was less apparent to others than it was to me has moved along. I ran a life-line toward the end of the Increase Rows, so should I change my mind, I've still got the option of frogging. And never mind how silly it would be to frog a couple feet of scarf only to save the remaining six inches. For your information, the Increase Rows are a bit of a pain in the ass, so if I can avoid doing those again, I will.

Of course, all this Clapotis-knitting has teamed up with the lovely pics I discovered the other day of Alison's lovely Clapotis that she made out of Malabrigo, which is the same yarn I've got sitting in my stash which was originally for a Clapotis but then I made a mistake and frogged it all (and I'd gotten rather a ways, too) and got frustrated and decided to do something entirely different with it instead. But now I'm kind of thinking, "Gosh, how often am I really going to wear a vest I have to hand-wash? Maybe I'd be happier with a nice stole." Argh.

Also was pondering last night if I have enough yarn left over from my nephew's Harry Potter scarf I knit him last spring to make him a semi-matching hat for Christmas. I'm not sure I do. Well, I've got plenty of the gold, but probably not enough of the crimson. Alas.

And now off to do things which will hopefully make all this lovely insomnia less of an issue. It's tough - I hate what the insomnia does to my life, but man do I get to knit a lot more than usual. sigh!

Knitters' Malaise

2005-10-25T10:17:00.000-05:00

So, I've been very dissatisfied with my life of late, and my knitting life is not helping. The "life" dissatisfaction thing is... well, a subject for another time, preferably one involving a nice hard cider and a real live person to whine to. But the knitting dissatisfaction - well that kinda fits into the stated purpose of this here blog, don't it?

Yeah.

So I just now realized why I keep cruising around knit-blogs, jealously eyeing all the FOs out there, sinking ever more deeply into self-pity that all the other knitters seem to have so much more time than I do.

No no no. Have figured it out. The difference is, all the other cool knitters are finishing things. Granted, I have finished several little facecloths, which helps ease the pain, and I've finished two rockin' hats, but they left the house almost as soon as they were finished. And while it was awesome to be out with Jeff (revised recipient of the Blasted Jayne Hat) and others for breakfast Sunday morning and, while we were waiting for our table to be ready, here someone compliment his hat, it's not quite the same.

The problem is, I haven't finished anything for me and mine. I've knitted my knuckles off for us, over the past several months. There's the sweater for one of the boys that I started and got about eight inches done on before I realized that a) I had no idea what I was going to do once I reached the armpits and I really ought to figure that out, and b) the darn thing is ginormous and maybe I should consider (gasp!) frogging it and starting over a bit smaller, if I actually want the thing to be worn this winter. There's the now three pairs of socks I've begun, but have only even made it to the second sock on one pair so far, and the other two pairs... not so much. The one pair is close, admittedly, but I find I'm still really annoyed with the yarn and uncertain that the course I'm on is the best one and beset with worries that maybe what I really should do is go back and re-do them on #1s instead of #2s and... yeah. Never mind. It's just a mess. We'll leave it at that.

Then there's my vest that I should oughta work on one of these days, but I still need to really settle down and choose a damn pattern before I can even cast on.

So yeah. I did, over the weekend, resist the lure of a really gorgeous ball of Trekking XXL which would have made lovely socks for the husband, and instead got some Galway with which to make winter hats for the boys. Of course, again I'm stuck on the pattern. I want to do stripey stocking caps, I think, but I was thinking about doing a nifty little edging around the brim (one of those series-of-triangles things which has a better name that I can't think of right now), but I can't remember where I saw a pattern for how to do it, and so... again. Can't cast on until I know just what the heck I'm doing. sigh.

Though I should swatch the Galway for gauge, rather than doing my usual guessing thing. Considering how infuriating that's been the last few times out, checking my gauge would be wise. Also I should gauge swatch the Merino Style I've been sitting on for several months now which is destined to become a Celtic Cap for me.

Okay. So that's the plan. Gauge swatch, find a pattern for the kids' hat, and get to knitting. And stop thinking, "Gosh, socks are so great - you can make a whole pair of socks out of just one or two balls of yarn - they must go so fast!" Six to seven stitches per inch is not especially "fast". Dur!

2005-10-21T17:51:00.000-05:00

If one were to judge by how often I actually update this poor neglected blog which I until recently refused to even acknowledge as my own, one would think I didn't knit much. Not so! I knit plenty. In the past month or so I've done several face cloths, including one lacy six-sided star-shaped one. I've also knit the hat mentioned in the previous entry, plus finished the hat which did not get given to Little Miss Chickaboo. I also have knit about eight inches of a child sweater which is turning out to be ginormous, so now I'm going to... well... less said about that one right now, the better. But suffice to say, knitting has occurred.

I also have been working on a few socks. In fact, last week I confirmed that I damn well better not have Second Sock Syndrome too badly, because I do enjoy knitting socks. As evidenced by the fact that when I took the kids out for the day, when it came time to go home for naps, I instead decided to haul children on a blitzkreig through the nicer craft store (has nicer yarns, but doesn't quite qualify as an LYS, imo, thanks to all the /other/ craft supplies they sell there) even though Henry had already passed out and slept through the whole whirlwind trip, so that I could get a set of US1 needles and yet another ball of Sockotta. Then, once I drove around enough that Ben also fell asleep, I drove to a nice park with a view of the lake, parked the car, rolled down the windows, and cast on for another sock. This, for those keeping score, would make the third pair of socks I've begun, without actually finishing a single pair as yet. (Don't judge me!)

However, in somewhat more exciting news, I have indeed finished my first ever sock!!

And then, like a good little knitter, I did indeed immediately cast on for the second sock. I like the stripes thing, honestly - the color changes do keep me going, wondering what color is going to pop out of the ball next. They're also a handy way to go, "Okay, knit one more stripe, and then you can knit something else." Which is sometimes necessary.

Anyway, for the particulars: Sockotta cotton/wool blend stuff, the ballband is long lost, and I'm too lazy to be arsed to find the colorway. The colors as shown here are pretty accurate, though. I did it on two #1 Susan Bates circs. I'm torn on that method, really. I like that I drop fewer stitches on the double-circs, but even so I'm not sure I love using that method. I don't know. I just don't feel as much like I'm Knitting A Sock as I do when I'm knitting a sock on dpns. Which probably doesn't make much sense, but there it is.

And now, for my problem. See, at my First Ever Sheep & Wool Festival in September, I bought a really lovely skein of autumn-y variegated wool yarn. It's really quite lovely, and so I quickly wound it into a ball so it would be ready to be knitted up as soon as inspiration struck. However, inspiration wasn't making its scheduled appearance, so I flailed a bit, and then hit upon the notion of making a half-sized Clapotis out of it. Considering how nicely good ol' Clapotis seems to show off other variegated yarns, I thought this was an excellent idea.

Unfortunately, I've got a pooling problem. The first bit was nice - the set-up rows went just fine, everything was quite lovely. And then, as I finished the set-up rows and started the straight rows, I began to see an unsettling pattern forming.

Can you see it? Maybe it's too early yet, maybe I'll have to work a few more rows so it's good and visible. Which is fine, because I need to work a few more rows to decide if this is going to be all right or if it's going to be awful, in which case, to the frog pond I go. sigh.

Here's a hint - where in the beginning it's all nice and random-y, the inch or two closest to the needle, you'll notice suddenly the bronze-y color migrates entirely to the edges, leaving the green and red to alternate rows in a somewhat obnoxious manner. Perhaps further knitting will prove this to be a temporary phenomena. Otherwise? Urgh. Sooooo not amused.

Knitting as contact sport

2005-10-17T22:23:00.000-05:00

So, in light of the Yarn Harlot's recent surprise, I figure it's time to fess up what I did over the weekend.

(And I figure it'd be nice to actually produce some content for this poor little blog, especially since we've somehow misplaced the digital camera. Which is only fitting, as we just moved it from its somewhat precarious home of "sitting in a CD cubby on the desk, completely unprotected" into a nice padded camera bag. And so now, of course, bag and camera have vanished into thin air.)

So Friday night, I finally finished the hat I've been making for our friends' daughter, whose birthday party was yesterday. I'd swatched, and swatched, and swatched again, and even though I was using relatively thin yarn (KnitPicks Shine) and size 3 needles I was still getting a whopping 4 sts/in. But I went with it, used my handy Knitter's Book of Patterns by Ann Budd, and so knitted up this hat, confident that at last I had this stupid yarn figured out.

Nothing doing.

When I pulled the thing off the needles and put it on Ben's head (his being slightly larger than Henry's), it was a bit too tight. And since our friends' daughter is almost a year older than the boys, I was sure it would be too small for her.

Great. It's late Friday and I need to be ready with a hat by Sunday at 2 p.m. I get the kids to sleep and mid-nursing, I figure it out. I will take some of the KnitPicks Merino Style I bought ages ago to make a skull illusion scarf for a friend of mine, work it tripled and make a somewhat smaller "Fat Hat" out of Hip to Knit. Except I don't actually own H2K, so I need to go out to the library on Saturday and hope it's there, or else just finally buy the darn thing.

Well, Saturday afternoon rolls around, Caz goes out to run some errands, among them looking for H2K at either the library or the book store, I don't care which. He brings a copy of H2K home for my very own to keep forever and ever, and once he gets the kids safely corraled and focused on eating dinner, I start knitting.

I cannot explain why I thought this moss-stitch-and-cables hat would only take me two hours, except that's what I thought it took me when I made two of them over Christmas for various gift-recipients. Obviously, it must have taken me much longer, because I was working on that baby until 5 a.m., then went to bed, woke up at 11 a.m. and got going again. I finished it in time for Caz to leave with the boys at 2:30 (that's right, half an hour late) and I wound up going back to bed, as I'd not even had time to shower in all the hubbub. To be fair, I think it was mostly the damn pompom that slowed me down at the end.

At least the reports coming back say that our friends' daughter /adored/ the hat, to the point of wearing it practically all the time, except when she took it off to try to jam it onto her father's obviously much-larger head.

So there's my little tale of hard-core knitting, and we're not even going to discuss that I started writing this post on September 26. Not one bit.

I am also, btw, not actually admitting I have a knit-blog, even though I have at least now found the damned digital camera, so perhaps I can take pictures of some of the things I've got on the needles and my one big-news FO which I will have to post about... soon. By which I mean (or would mean, if I had a knit-blog) November.

Procrastination makes the world go round... later

2005-09-12T02:55:00.000-05:00

You know how sad I am? I started this post on the 12th. It is now the 21st. Pathetic. Just pitiful.

Egads. I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last updated. Argh.

See, what happened was this:

I've been working on this sock, and I'd left it below the high-child level at some point, and so the kids got hold of it. They managed to mangle up the skein a bit before I could wrest it from their vice-like little fingers. So, in True Blogger Style, I took a few pictures of it. "Ah ha! At last I have content worthy of knit-blogging!" But then when I loaded the pics onto the computer, I realized I had no friggin' clue how to actually enter them into my spiffy blog here.

I was going to ask the hubby, but then he went to GenCon, and then we began re-arranging things in the front room, so that the kids would have access to a larger part of the apartment. Between travel, and recovering from travel, and travelling again, and then colds, it took us a solid three weeks to get it all done. In fact, we just let the kids loose in the newly-expanded child-proofed area tonight. Though we still have weird things all over the rest of the apartment, so I figure it's going to take a bit to get everything back in order.

Have I mentioned we're planning to move in about six weeks? And we don't know where to yet? Yeah. Anyway.

So I never did get the photos of the mangled skein post-able. And by then, well... things were nutty.

And then I finished the Blasted Hat, though not in enough time to get the pictures of it mailed off to my Captain on Browncoats (how on earth have men and women managed to coexist for all these millennia when we can't even manage the simplest communications properly?). And I still haven't mailed the darn thing off yet either, and I really should, seeing as Serenity opens on Sept. 30.

So there's that.

Blasted Hat = complete.

I cast on a new hat, for my friend's daughter, in KnitPicks Shine. Again, it took a couple false starts before I really figured out what I was doing. But things are going well, so we should be ready for the daughter's birthday in a few ~~weeks~~ days.

The socks continue. The KnitPicks sock is about an inch or two away from the toe decreases. The Sockotta sock is... sigh. Okay, so it's a little over midway through the foot. But when I tried it on recently, I realized that it doesn't /quite/ fit. Like, if I wanted it to fit really nicely, what I should do is frog back to the gusset and frog out the last set of decreases from the gusset, giving me a slightly wider sock through the foot. sigh.

I'm so not prepared to do that yet, though. sigh. I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever actually manage to knit up socks that I'm really happy with. Oh well.

And then, in super-extra-knitblog-worthy news, I went to my first Sheep & Wool Festival ~~over the weekend~~ a few weeks ago. Dragged Caz and the kids, and met up with Meg and Jonathan in the afternoon. It was shockingly hot out, particularly for mid-September, but otherwise was quite lovely. Ooh'd and ahh'd over lovely yarns, the boys got scared by a rather assertively baa-ing sheep (I felt bad for the kids - we adults had been laughing at this sheep for a while, because he kept sticking his tongue out most entertainingly whenever he baa'd, and then it turned out the kids were getting freaked out by it), we watched border collies herd sheep and ducks, and Ben took an instant liking to a "livestock herding dog" that we met who, it turned out, was for sale. If the sweet beastie hadn't been $550, we might very well have gotten a new member of the family that day. Heaven knows I could use some help herding the ~~livestock~~ children.

Amusingly enough, it turns out the kids were not as traumatized by the assertively bleating sheep as I'd thought. In fact, now, whenever we come across a picture of a sheep or lamb in one of the many many books the kids has (and pictures of sheep/lambs are remarkably common, I will note), Henry will point at it and say "Baa!" I'm so proud I could just bust.

As it was, I still vaulted past my self-allotted yarn budget, but not by $550. I got two lovely skeins of yarn, one in a blue-purple variegated colorway, and one in a bright green variegated colorway. They're about 560 yds each of worsted weight yarn (roughly 8 oz each), and so I'm plotting garments for the boys. I'd thought sweaters, though I realized once we got home that clearly, I'd snuck off while I wasn't looking and smoked some crack, as they've been too big for 500-yard sweaters for closing on a year now. sigh. So now I'm thinking vests.

I also got a lovely skein of worsted in a gorgeous autumn leaves sort of colorway. And this is where I vaulted over the yarn budget. If I'd just stuck with the other two, it would have been all right, I think, but this third skein is what did it. It's not that it was all that expensive, really - it's just that my budget was pretty small. But I blew it anyway, and got this really amazingly lovely yarn. Like, it was lovely when I bought it, and then I brought it home and was all wowed by it all over again. I love that. I think it's going to become a scarf. The yarn's just too gorgeous not to make something out of it that'll really show it off. And I only got the one skein, and so... yeah. A scarf.

In other news, Jonathan got a drop spindle and some roving, so next time we go down to visit (in the wake of our husbands abandoning us for GenCon, I think Shelby and I are going to visit Meg and Jonathan in Chicago sometime in the next couple months for an all-thrills Weekend Away From The Kids), I'm going to ask for a demonstration and perhaps even a lesson. Perhaps. Though oh I know I shouldn't. The last thing we need around here is little bits of fluff that we're supposed to keep, in addition to all the bits of fluff and dust and crap that somehow we never manage to completely vacuum away.

Knitting Makes Even the DMV Bearable

2005-08-19T17:17:00.000-05:00

Man. I wish I'd discovered knitting ages ago, instead of just, well... not even a year ago did I get really into it.

Had to go to the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) today. I was driving all manner of illegally, and it was very bad.

So a friend of mine mega-graciously agreed to watch the boys for me and off I went, forms filled out and the Blasted Hat in a bag.

Silly me, going to the DMV on a Friday afternoon. Duh. At least the Wisconsin DMV system is pretty organized. Yeah, you might wind up waiting a while, but once your number gets called? You're out the door within 5-10 minutes. Seriously. I had to renew my license, transfer the title on the car my grandmother gave us *cough* back in January *cough* and get new license plates for said car. From the time they called my number until the time I walked out the door - 15 minutes, max. And the rest of the time it took? Entirely my fault. I really should have gone first thing in the morning like I'd bragged last night I was going to.

But so I went, Blasted Hat went with me, and all was fine. I got there, saw the crowd, went to the bathroom, came back, found a seat and set off. Am now probably a few rounds from the top. However, unfortunately, I will not be getting it done in time to send off with the hubby to GenCon today. Oh well. I guess my friend will just be getting it in the mail, then. sigh.

So far, though, it has done nothing to try to buck its fate. Which is good.

Also? There were two girls sitting in the waiting area with their dad. One was probably 8 or 9 years old, the other a year or so younger. The girls were really well behaved, and at one point I looked up and saw the older one watching me very intently. I smiled at her and she looked away. I kind of kept an eye on her, wondering if I should invite her to come over to take a closer look, but from that point on she kept her gazing on the sneak. I found myself wishing I had a pair of cheap plastic needles and some old stash yarn to give her to let her try it out herself. But alas, I did not.

Still though - a trip to the DMV, made entirely bearable by having my knitting with me. I could really get into this.

Well, more into it, I mean.

Sixth Time's the Charm?

2005-08-18T17:08:00.000-05:00

This hat is killing me.

So I went to the Stitch-n-Bitch last night at Electric Earth Cafe.

I decided it was high time I get that blasted Jayne Cobb hat going again, so I deliberately took nothing else. I ran late, of course, but got there just as the only other woman left (others had been and gone already) was packing up her stuff. I apologized and she happily agreed to wait, so I ordered myself a medium iced mocha and a mystery biscotti (there was dried fruit and some kind of nut involved - the dude at the counter speculated apricot and pistachio, which I think was close enough). They were backed up a bit on drinks, so I went to sit down and knit for a while.

We hung out, chatted, I began casting on for my hat. Left my tail too short. I needed 60 sts, I got 55 before I ran out of tail. sigh.

Try again. This time the tail was fine, and after a moment's hesitation as I realized that somehow I'd completely forgotten how to use my circs, I figured myself out and got going. I very confidently knitted along, chatting away before my companion mentioned the word "ribbing" as she described a project she'd worked on a while before. Uh-oh. Ribbing? I looked down at my almost-two-rows of rolling stockinette and realized my mistake.

Craaaaaaaap.

Tore it out, realized I was thirsty. Went up to the counter, mentioned my drink. Dude apologized that it had been forgotten. I went back and sat down, he arrived a couple minutes later bearing my iced mocha, and said he'd made it a large to make up for having forgotten me. Nice of him, eh?

Perhaps now I should mention that I've had problems with insomnia since I was 11 years old, and so in recent years, as my body got too old to function whatsoever on less than five hours of sleep a night, I've cut caffeine out of my usual daily intake. But as I had been wearing out before I even left and Caz and I were planning to put together the new baby gate his parents had kindly gotten us once we got the kids to bed, I figured some caffeine was in order. Plus mochas are tasty.

So I started again on my hat. Cast on my 60 stitches. All was well. I connected the ends and, as I was about to begin knitting, my stitch-n-bitch pal reminded me "Now, don't forget, you're doing ribbing." I laughed and thanked her and began my ribbed hat brim.

Another woman stopped by - she was writing a paper on her laptop and sat near us as she is also a knitter and was really looking for a reason to slack on her paper. Which I can totally understand. I slacked on practically every paper I've been assigned in my entire life. I liked her from the start. So we all chatted knitting, discussed how exactly the two-socks-on-double-circs thing works and how it manages to work without tearing massive holes in the space-time continuum (as Caz insists it must, and he's only seen it performed on one sock - I think if he saw it happening on two socks his head would explode).

Really, it was a marvelously good time. And I happily sucked down my entire large iced mocha, never mind that my no-longer-used-to-caffeine-or-coffee stomach hadn't had any visitors since lunchtime. I had a biscotti, surely that would suffice!

An hour and a half after my arrival, I left having had some great conversation, with a whopping one-and-a-half completed rows of 2x2 ribbing and a gut full of coffee-rot. sigh.

This afternoon, I should note, I put in some more work on the Blasted Hat while the kids napped. So far so good. And I've decided. If somehow it thwarts me this time, and thwarts me one more time, thus breaking any remote hint of magic the number seven might hold for this cussed thing, I will simply wad it up into a ball of tangled horror and send it on to my friend like that.

Along with the remaining last tatters of my sanity.