The Fool decided yesterday to knit his brother a pair of socks. (Story to follow; it's pretty good.)
For Christmas.
Which is really, really soon.
(We have cast on both, we are both knitting, and we are pretending that gauge is the same between knitters. Don't tell us otherwise.)
The Fool is getting a new year's present from me. He says assisting him in the crazy knitting of his brother's socks is enough of a present for now.
Even though I haven't finished any of the Christmas crafting projects I already started, I just added two more to the docket.
... Am busy taking advantage of naptime to work on some Secret Christmas Projects around here. It's not bad, except that with Jamie asleep, the cats start vying for affection, so in order to properly work on the SCP, I have to first evict and move cats. It's mostly Spoot and Mab who get in the way. Romeo and Angus like to nap near Jamie.
This is the vile black walnut bath I cooked up several weeks ago, but totally failed to post about.
Basically, I peeled the hulls from a bunch of black walnuts, nearly a 5-gallon bucket full. I covered them with hot water and soaked them for a couple days (admittedly, because I got busy and sort of forgot what was going on.)
When the Fool started asking why the kitchen smelled like compost, even though he had emptied the pail and the garbage and cleaned the fridge and looked for scary things in the sink trap .... I moved on to the next step.
I poured the black walnut mess into an old enameled kettle and boiled it for a while.
Then I strained it back into the bucket and added three skeins of KnitPicks Wool of the Andes and two skeins of their undyed tweedy sock yarn with little colored flecks.
Here's how it came out - a nice dark brown.
Last night, as we tried to work on our Christmas knitting (I say 'tried,' because I frogged a sock for the third time, and I was past the gusset, too, and the Fool was busy tangling a ball of yarn over and over as he tried to wind it), he said, "I have too much knitting to do; I don't think I'll make it."
This is funny. Usually, because the Fool does no Christmas knitting at all, or such small amounts, it's downright comical, what he considers a knitting time crisis. He says stuff like, "Oh god, I don't think I'll have time to finish this felted mouse by Christmas."
Meanwhile, I'm trying to knit him a sweater or something goofy like that.
But this year, he actually has Christmas Knitting to do. And now, while Jamie is blissfully occupied throwing things down the basement stairs, or dropping silverware down the heating vent, or any number of vaguely destructive toddler activities, I'm going to see if I can get that stupid sock to go anywhere at all, other than to the frog pond ... again.
I've been having an owl period, much like Picasso had a blue period, but not resulting in the generation of actual art. My mother collected owls, but she was selective in her collection, only acquiring ones she thought were particularly beautiful or interesting. These are a couple of my favorite ones.
Owls have been popping up otherwise, too. We dressed Jamie as an owl for Halloween, but he wouldn't stand still long enough for a good picture. (Martha Stewart pattern, hat hand-knitted by the Fool out of Cascade 220.)
And I knit him an owl hat (Hoot Hat, one of the Spud and Chloe patterns), and for a first try at this pattern, I think it came out OK. I think the body of the next hat needs to be longer and the beak needs to be bigger. I'll have to find another little kid who needs an owl hat this winter. Again, an uncooperative model. I sense a trend here.
(body of hat in brown Sheep Shop Yarn Co. bulky weight, bought from WEBS at Stitches Midwest, top in doubled Cascade 220, features in odds and bobs of worsted weight.)
I had a dream this morning, between waking up, falling asleep, and waking up again when Angus and Jamie came tromping in to visit me (The Fool was out in the living room, only barely supervising the livestock and working on his own knitting). It wasn't a very profound dream; it was about eating breakfast. But I was really disappointed to wake up and learn that I was not eating a freshly made fruit-filled crepe with Nutella and coffee for breakfast, but instead, peanut butter toast and tea.
Sigh.
I could taste the strawberries, I swear to you.
is the sound of the Fool knitting on dpns.
"Oh, wait," he said. "These aren't circulars. I can't just drop the one I'm finished with."
... and now I am very tired.
The Fool and Jamie and I packed up on Friday and headed north for the Chicago contra dance community's big weekend dance camp, with lots of jamming and dancing and what-have-you into the wee hours of the night.
Except Jamie and I started coming down with a cold and so our activities were somewhat curtailed.
Look at that expression - that's a kid who wishes his nose wasn't running.
He had a good afternoon on Saturday while I was calling square dances, because it was sunny and warm and he found a pile of sand and a stick to scratch in it with. The Fool and Edward played tunes with a couple friends and kept an eyeball on Jamie, beetling around in the sun, and all was well.
The Fool and I played a set of tunes with our friends Spider and Steve on Friday night, and after the Fool saw us safely to bed last night, he went back for some more tunes and dancing and jamming and passing-of-a-flask.
Spider had a tuba with her that she had bought on behalf of a friend (Spider plays banjo), and at 3 a.m. or so, when I was up nursing Jamie again, I heard a sort of mournful tunely bellow across the camp's empty field, through the dark and the fog. I hadn't woken up enough to sort out the sound, so at first, I thought the Fool was singing in his sleep, but then realized no, Spider had probably just gotten a little bit tipsy and decided to take this tuba outside with the other late-night revelers for a honk.
(Amusingly, the Fool also heard the tuba in his sleep and thought it was Edward singing outside in the field, maybe, or from his bunk bed down the hall.)
The tuba.
It is a good start to the end of the year and the darkest season, although because of my cold, maybe not as much music and dance as I prefer to fortify myself for the winter. We've had a rough year, the Chicago contra community, with death before its time and a long-time fiddler and dancer in hospice right now.
Saturday night band.
In my own life, I received news a few weeks ago of a friend from grad school who died of cancer, a year older than me, two kids and a wife. With all this darkness in my mood, I wanted my spirits lifted a little higher, but instead, I played spectator at the weekend and provided Jamie a good solid lap to cling to.
We're into the holiday rush for sure now. I had to frog a Christmas present for the second time - grr. I will defeat this yarn. I feel better about Christmas this year than I have in years past. I think it's going to be more fun.
And now, I'm going to take my running nose and go see my dripping kid about bedtime.
Baked good photos for Lanae.
