Two Sock Knitters

Making good on my threat

2012-01-30T23:31:00.005-06:00

It's a quiet night here. Angus is snoring melodically on the couch and the Fool and Jamie are back from a weekend in Minnesota. I got to stay here. All by myself in the house. With all my various projects and not too many commitments, and some friends who came by to visit.
It was awesome.

I spent a lot of time in sweatpants, didn't do very much by way of household chores and futzed around with fabric and yarn and movies on DVD from the library.

Totally awesome. I haven't done that since before Jamie was born.

Anyway, I did reknit the neck on the Fool's sweater and blocked it and wove in the ends just in time for him to wear it on his trip. He complained a little bit, though.

FOOL: This sweater is still damp. I can't wear it.
ME: Yes, you can. It will dry from your body heat.

FOOL: It is making my shirt wet.

ME: It's not that bad. It's more Irish that way. You can pretend you were out walking around in the misty Galway night on the way home from a session.

FOOL: Mrrf.

To my relief, Blackwater Abbey still stretches vertically quite a bit, and the sleeves were much looser once we got the thing wet. The color is supposed to be a wine red, but I plead dark hallway at night.

Now I'm on to a vest I put in time out for no good reason at all.

Defying logic in knitting

2012-01-24T22:33:00.002-06:00

I'm resurrecting an old project tonight. It's a cabled sweater from "A Fine Fleece," that I started for the Fool in Blackwater Abbey. I think it might have been a Knitting Olympics project, which should give you some idea of the timeline. When were the last Olympics?
Anyway, I knit the whole dang thing, all the way to the neckband, when I decided it didn't have much resemblance to the actual shape of the Fool, so I stuffed it in a bag to ... uh ... magically change shape as time passed. I keep telling myself Blackwater Abbey stretches out when it gets wet and I can block this thing into shape, but I still thought I'd hide from it for a year or so.

The Fool is grumbling, though, because his Starmore is wearing out at the cuffs (because he puts it on in November and doesn't take it off until spring and has been doing this for years) and so tonight, here we go, we'll see how it goes.

Not dead yet!

2011-12-16T10:55:00.003-06:00

Where’d the summer go? Or the fall, to be more exact. The leaves are still on the lawn (we’re calling it mulch) and there is no snow yet, to Jamie’s disappointment. We’ve had flurries, but I haven’t pointed them out to him. Also, I haven’t found him winter boots yet.

That’s a delicate line to dance with a 3-year-old, whose sense of time is still so fluid that Christmas might be tomorrow, despite the Advent calendar to help him keep track. If I buy boots now, he will expect snow soon. If I don’t buy boots now and wait, then he’ll be stomping around in too-big Hello Kitty boots that I paid an arm and a leg for because that's all they had left. be all gone by the first snow.

Ditto for a sled.

Anyway, Halloween blew by, but I did my best to prolong it because I love Halloween. Jamie was a bat and flapped around the house a lot and did very well at his first trick-or-treating outing where he did all the work. He chose houses based mostly on the quality and quantity of their Halloween decorations, and although he seems to have a thing for Tootsie Rolls (really, kid? Who likes those?), he was satisfied with the haul. My favorite part was when he got excited and ran up to two big kids and said “trick or treat!”

Thanksgiving, we had another family over for a nice, low-key holiday. They have a kid about Jamie’s age, and the two of them ran off to play for long enough that we all sat at the table, sipping our wine and sighing happily that we could each speak whole sentences without interruption. Plus! Plus! I divvied up the leftovers right after dinner, and both houses got enough leftover turkey to make our favorite dishes … but not so much that you start looking on the Internet and make a turkey-gravy layer cake with sweet potato frosting and think that’s a good solution.

So now we are heading for Christmas, full tilt. The knitting will continue until morale improves.

Been knitting

2011-08-19T23:38:00.003-05:00

Usually I'm not so single-minded; I tend to flit about from project to project, but this just seized me. I got the pattern (Wing of The Moth by Anne Hanson) and the yarn (Miss Babs laceweight, I can't remember the colorway) at the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Festival in late June and I was really excited about it. So I started telling myself I would cast on as soon as I wrapped up some other loose projects … and then I said to myself, Self, this is stupid. If you're excited about knitting a lace shawl, then knit a lace shawl.
Couple weeks later, on vacation with the Fool and Jamie, I cast on and knit like a madwoman for about a month. I had a couple setbacks. On the way home from vacation, driving from Pittsburgh to Chicago, the middle of the center pull ball leapt out and created a string of smaller balls of yarn all making an awful mess, so I rewound it by hand. it took me from Pittsburgh to Ohio and I was mad for most of that. (Note to self: Wind laceweight by hand, moron, not on the ballwinder. How often does this happen? Every time I knit with laceweight, that's how often.)
Then, about a week ago, I was knitting with a friend at the cafe, an indoor playground/ coffeehouse run by a local church. I like to take Jamie there when he's getting in my hair, because sometimes he gets out of my hair long enough for me to think or knit or enjoy not being touched.
But this was not the case, and I screwed up the lace pattern, and my friend looked at it and said "I can't see a thing; I don't know what you're talking about, you made a mistake."
I was already a row and a half past it and fast approaching the end of my patience anyway, and I knit on … only to discover 11 rows later that the mistake turned out to be significant in terms of ruining my life later.
(Note to self: Like it said in that blog post you read recently, tackle stuff when it comes up, rather than putting it on a to-do list to stress you out later.)
I should have tinked when it was a row and a half out and not when it took me two days.
Anyway.
I tinked, I reknit, I cast it off.

Thousands of square feet in the house, and which one does Romeo want? The one with my folded shawl in it.

I blocked it.

Jamie assists with blocking.

And here it is drying.

We rounded everyone up and took them to the vet last week. That was a rodeo. Mab bent space and time to slip between dimensions, as usual, and it took us forever to find her in the laundry room. Angus and Romeo put up a fight, and sweet dumb Spoot had no idea what was going on. It turns out that Mab, who has always been a little overweight, is fine, but the two pounds extra weight-in-cat has gone to Angus. He's on a diet now, if by "diet," I mean I no longer get up and give him some food when he bites me a lot at 5 a.m.
For Angus' part, the biting will continue until meal service improves.

Regardless, I blocked the shawl and sent the Fool out to cavort artistically with it.

I'm already thinking about the other laceweight in my stash and wondering what I should knit next.

Some free advice

2011-07-06T21:39:00.002-05:00

Today, I was having a lousy day. So Jamie and I decided to go out to lunch - have ourselves a little treat. We picked a Chinese restaurant that recently opened up; soy sauce and ginger and garlic and green onion often cheer me up. Here's what I was reminded of:
1. Don't trust a Chinese restaurant that doesn't put chopsticks on the table.
2. Don't trust a Chinese restaurant with really good decor.
I left grumpier than when I arrived and had to get an iced coffee and a chocolate chip cookie to even start to turn things around.

Bread baking in Indiana

2011-06-16T22:12:00.004-05:00

Another summer weekend, another adventure.

You may remember Eric, from the Cosmic Otters. He’s our accordion player and he and his wife are good friends of ours. Now, they have a third member of the household.

Jamming in the bakery while the bread rises, which is why he is wearing a hairnet.

Wee L. arrived about two months ago, and as Eric and Katie make their living baking and selling bread at their farmers’ market, we thought we’d go down to help with the baking on Friday and selling on Saturday (and, to be honest, to see the baby.)

This is from earlier this spring; for some reason, I didn't take pictures when I was at the market last time.

The Fool and I are pretty respectable home bakers who bust out a couple loaves whenever we need bread. We have a nice sedate gas oven with a temperature dial and a thermostat. We have air conditioning in the summer and heat in the winter. We have a refrigerator if the dough starts to get really crazy and we need to slow it down, because we can always find space for a mixing bowl in there, even if we have to stack a few things.

Eric is a baker in a whole different universe. He makes beautiful sourdough hearth loaves, 50, 60, 70 at a time, bakes them in a wood-fired oven, and does the whole thing in a small kitchen with no air conditioning. (And his pretzels. Oy. The Fool could happily live on these soft pretzels. Eric jokes about starting him a tab whenever we visit.)

Usually, he manages just fine, but this last time was rough. The oven wasn’t at an appropriate baking temperature, and all he could do was wait for the temperature to coast down. The weather was hot and humid, and so the dough was rising fast – too fast. The oven temperature, like a train on an oncoming track in one of those story problems in fifth grade math, was going to intersect with the bread dough at the completely wrong time, and we had nothing to do but reshape the flobbery, quick-rising loaves and try to peel the sticky dough out of the linen-lined rising baskets.

“Ha ha,” I said to him. “Isn’t it fun being on the front lines of the local food revolution?”

He gave me an absolutely filthy look – sweaty, tired, wearing the health-department mandated hairnet - and said nothing. Then he burned some bread because he was helping his wife with wee L.

Everyone I know is having babies, in one case, two at a time, so I decided the smartest thing to do was put the socks on hold and knit Ann Norling’s fruit caps in different colors of Takhi Cotton Classic until I get a good stockpile.

One of the hats stayed with our friends. They keep calling their little baby “Sweetpea,” so it seemed the obvious choice.

Jamie examines baby toes.

Morris On!

2011-06-06T00:32:00.005-05:00

In a slight departure from our usual folk music and dance entertainments, last weekend, the Fool, Jamie and I loaded up the van and headed for Lexington, Mich. With some friends for the 2011 Midwest Morris Ale. We only went because our friend Spider talked us into playing music for Braintrust Morris, her Morris team. (She didn’t have to talk very hard; we’ve been listening to a lot of English folk music for the last couple years, so we were predisposed.)

First-ever Braintrust Morris practice with everyone, at the UM School of Dentistry overhang.

On Saturday and Sunday, the nearly 300 dancers and musicians in attendance split up among a half dozen buses and descended on nearby towns to perform. Morris dance is not a participatory dance like contra dancing; it’s a performance dance. (You can read more here.)

Border Morris. Don't they look fierce?

We danced in parks, we danced at historical re-enactments, we danced by the lake where Jamie watched boats. In between engagements with the puzzled public, the green grass and the blue May sky, we visited pubs.

Dozens of people, most of them wearing white with bells strapped to their shins, poured into local watering holes, ordered drinks and literally – within 10 minutes – started singing. In harmony. Loudly. The Fool was thrilled. He never gets to belt out high tenor harmonies for any reason at all, except for one night when he was doing Opera-Singing Clam Puppet to entertain Jamie in the bathtub. One dancer from Minnesota has my eternal gratitude for covering Jamie’s ears during one verse of a song he was leading so that Jamie didn’t learn a new swear word (he learns enough from me, I’m afraid) and for changing another verse so that it was about a sailor who landed on shore and went down to the pub to find a … date. Uh-huh. Still, I appreciate the sacrifice of the rhyme scheme.

Then, because everyone had brought their instruments with them, sometimes, more dancing broke out.

Jamie was utterly enchanted. In many respects, this was an ideal situation for an active toddler. He got to spend lots of time outside, he got to see many different kinds of boats, he got to see many different dogs, and whenever we went to play, he stood between us and watched the dancers.

Now that we are home, whenever I want him to entertain himself for 10 or 15 minutes, long enough for me to unload some dishes or whatever, I put on Spiers and Boden, hand him two dinner napkins and let him leap around the kitchen.

The camp we were at had animals! We went for a walk one morning to visit them all - rabbits, some goats, some horses, a couple dogs, and an alpaca.

(Knitting: one toe-up sock for the Fool out of cotton. I tried to bid on a big bag of mixed laceweight at the weekend’s silent auction, but lost by $2. Just as well. I have plenty of yarn I should knit first.)

In which Romeo contributes to household knitting projects

2011-05-23T11:35:00.003-05:00

I decided to rip out the toe of a sock that I had worn holes into and replace it with a different yarn with a tighter gauge. It was easy to pick up at the color join, and I had prided myself for doing this while managing a slightly irritable toddler.

So Romeo last night came over to hang out with Meg and me on the couch while we were knitting, which, well... it's sweet when he does that. He's probably our plushiest cat and just loves to be scratched pretty much everywhere. I was busy scratching him, when all of a sudden I realized that he had taken my working yarn between his paws and had snipped it in half! I looked over and I swear I saw a smug face of triumph on that cat.

The arse.

One mouse, two mice

2011-05-19T16:52:00.003-05:00

I reached a point several months back when I decided I would rather be knitting and sewing than blogging about it, time being in short supply.
But Jamie has come around to the point where I can do both a little bit more, and so maybe blogging will shoehorn its way back onto the list of "things I do in my free time."
Anyway, my unplanned blog vacation has been taken up with the usual stuff: traveling, contra dances, baking bread, knitting, sewing, watching a toddler, petting Angus so he doesn't get a complex … so you can pretend you know all about that and we can talk about mice instead.
Now that I hang around with moms a lot, it seems that everyone I know is having a kid. Two of our friends just had a little girl, for example. The Fool and I were visiting them a few weeks back, and Eric was on a rampage because a mouse was in his greenhouse eating his overwintered greens. He set a trap and dispatched the mouse.
So I knit them another one. But I forgot to hide it from Jamie when I wove in the ends (it's Ysolda Teague's "Mousie" - fun knit! Only took an evening, and the ears are very cleverly done without as much fiddly sewing as other mouse ears have taken) and the next day, it had moved into the Fisher Price village playset, kind of like Mousezilla, perched on top of the garage. A few minutes later, he visited the bookstore and retired to a rooftop cafe to read.

The solution became clear: I cast on Mouse II in brown that evening. The next day, Jamie said, "We can send two mice in the mail!" and I said, "If you send two mice in the mail, it means you will have no mice here, so I would like you to think about that."
He thought about it for a few hours and returned with an amended plan. "I want to send the gray mouse in the mail and keep the brown mouse with me." I need to redo Mouse II's eyes; I sewed those on late at night and it looks like someone hit him on the side of the head.

Good thinking, kid. Two mice is fine; three mice, and my knitting group will host an intervention.

on a wintry Saturday morning...

2011-01-09T22:10:00.001-06:00

... the Fool, Jamie and I headed into our LYS. Jamie was wearing the Dale of Norway sweater that the Fool finally finished for him, and a hat that was, maybe, the third or fourth thing I ever knit. It's shaped like a striped Russian onion dome with a little knot tied in the tail, and there's a wonky bit where I knit instead of purled, and the increases are not very well done at all.
Long story short, everyone in the yarn store oohed and aahed over the "cute hat" and totally overlooked the complicated color knitting in the Fool's sweater.
I said it was payback for all the times we were out knitting in a cafe or somewhere, and people fussed over his stockinette socks only to overlook the lace shawl I was making.

it got cold!

2010-11-30T14:20:00.002-06:00

And I discovered today, getting Jamie out of his carseat at the grocery store, that he has nice warm handknit mittens (that have button eyes, thank you very much, so they are not only mittens but alligator-esque hand puppets). The Fool has nice warm handknit mittens that I made him from some tweedy Cascade last year.
I have no mittens.
I have something to do this afternoon.

The day before

2010-11-24T09:00:00.004-06:00

I always find the day before Thanksgiving to be like an extra Friday thrown into the week. Nothing's quite the way it should be, it's usually cold here in the Midwest, so it's easy to make the house feel all cozy, there's baking to be done ....
But I just want to play with yarn and sit on the couch and watch episodes of "Sherlock" on the computer. I don't want to unload the dishwasher and clean up from the Fool's gravy-making extravaganza last night.
I've been knitting along on the socks I want to have finished by Dec. 1 so I can start on the self-imposed-sock-club work. I have two ready for Kitchenering (that's two out of six, so it's possible....)
Meanwhile, in the category of Inscrutable Muggle Comments on Knitting, I got this yesterday.
MUGGLE: What are you knitting?
ME: A sock.
MUGGLE: Only one?
ME: ?!?!?
I never know what to say to that, and I get it a decent amount. "Only one?"
Well, no, not only one. Two. Most people knit two socks. I'm just not doing them both at once because that would be... insane. And that's a lot of explaining.
So I usually smile and say something awkward like, "I knit the first one," or, "I'm planning to knit two."
Or, in this case, six....

Mom on the lam

2010-11-19T13:27:00.003-06:00

I escaped to Target for an unsupervised visit last week. It was terrific! I looked at whatever I wanted, not just the stuff on my list, I read labels, I compared prices ... so much fun! I was standing in the office supplies aisle, wondering if they had page protectors (I have this fantasy in which I reorganize our recipe binder and put the recipes for similar types of food next to one another. Crazy, I know!)
Anyway, this guy, looking confused, turned to me and said, "I'm looking for that sparkly stuff you put on glue and blow off...."
"Glitter?" I asked.
"Yes! Is this the right aisle to look in?"
I said it was, and pointed out the little package with three little tubes of glitter in it.
"Do they have the big jars?" he said. "They just nickel and dime you with those little ones. "
We looked around, but no luck. Finally, as I was making my way to the checkout aisle, I said, "You know, there's a Michael's in this shopping plaza; they might have a better selection."
"Thank you!" he exclaimed. "I didn't think of that ... I'm divorced and I don't have a wife to tell me those things. I need a wife...."

Knitting continues. I'm in a self-imposed-sock-club with three friends, and I've been having a lot of fun picking out the 12 skeins of sock yarn that I'm going to knit up this year, and then thinking of all the patterns I might like to try out, too.

But first, I'm trying to finish up the socks in progress. By Dec. 1. Ha.
From the top: toe-up Wildfoot for the Fool; playground sock 1 in ... oh, good grief, I can't remember, but also for the Fool; playground sock 2 in ... horrors. Something else with heels and toes from the ort bowl, for Eric the accordion player; and then something in Maizy for a friend who's allergic to wool (and corn, which this is made of, but I made her promise not to eat her socks.)
And now Angus is eating a big fat slow moving winter housefly. Horrible, cat. Just horrible.

Some of the moms and kids from the Waldorf class Jamie and I are in came over for indigo dyeing today. We colored silk scarves, and another friend dyed yarn. Really fun. I enjoyed having people visit without having to take off my sweatpants.

Finally, a short parade of FOs.

This is a scarf from "A Fine Fleece," made from two skeins of Rowan Felted Tweed, which I sort of adore as a yarn. I like knitting it, I like the fabric it makes, I like the colors it comes in ... great stuff. This particular scarf, however, is going in a silent auction for Breaking Up Thanksgiving, the Chicago contra dance community's dance weekend. Which is OK. The fun was in making it.

The fun in this, however, was finishing it. I decided to knit an organic cotton baby blanket (Lion Brand) a la the modular log cabin blankets in Mason Dixon Knitting, and let me just say, after knitting this in garter stitch, I am reminded of why I quilt. But done is done and it's sitting in the linen closet, waiting for a friend's baby that's supposed to come along next spring.

Fall

2010-10-28T14:36:00.003-05:00

Today was the first really autumnal day we had, and by that, I don't mean clear blue skies and pleasant temperatures and orange and yellow leaves dancing on the sidewalk. I mean, gray and cold and damp and just chilly enough that going to the park with Jamie, even with a latte in hand and the knowledge that I could visit with some other mom friends, seemed like an unpleasant thing to do.
Sorry kid. I'll do better tomorrow on the whole getting-outdoors-every-day thing. Instead, we delivered some leftover pizza to a friend (I invented this! It had pesto and smoked mozzarella and roasted squash and garlic chunks and sauteed spinach and onions and a little fontina on top because it didn't look cheesy enough to me ... and despite all the roasting and sauteeing and shredding and fridge-diving I had to do ... it was delicious) for her lunch, and stopped at the grocery store.
The fall is especially bittersweet because I am leaving a good, good summer behind. I finally decided to carve out enough time to rub two brain cells together and learn how to upload photos with the new laptop, so ....

The Fool shows Jamie the tools of our people, visiting with Toni at The Fold's booth at the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair. The Fool has a bad thing for these big wheels....

We explore the beaches of Michigan as part of a short break en route to a dance weekend on the shores of Lake Huron. Edward, Rachel and the two of us spent a few days in a cute little cabin being lazy, knitting socks and playing on the beach every day. The Fool had to work, poor guy, and so just caught the train up in time to drive across the state for the gig.
After that, Edward and Rachel moved to Boston, and that is no fun at all. Jamie is short a calabash aunt and uncle, I am short a cooking and knitting buddy, the Fool is short a fiddling friend, and now our band lives in three states. Boo hiss.

Studying ducks at a local forest preserve.

Someone turned two.

The Cosmic Otters quartet (quintet) play in Champaign Urbana. The Fool and I are still playing gigs as a duo, and that's fun, because it's how we started out, but we hear the missing accordion and fiddle parts when we play, little musical ghosts of gigs past. We're going to have to work on some arrangements that aren't quite so dependent on having the four parts for the times it's just the two of us. Meanwhile, Edward is trying to book dance weekends, because we can all get together for those.

I've been knitting like a madwoman. It's like I think I'm going to get a prize if I use up all my worsted yarn or something. Now that I have this photo thing figured out, I'll start photographing my knitting again.

oh hell

2010-09-24T23:58:00.003-05:00

The Fool found the sleeves and is on a tear tonight.
Instructions flying, demands for yarn needles, questions about how to work the steam iron and now, feet pattering down the steps and pattering back up, my sewing machine in hand.
"How do I wind a bobbin?"
"What does 1, 2, 3, mean here?"
I'm trying to figure out if he's being purposefully obtuse in hopes that I will step in.
Meanwhile, I have a button band to knit.

at last!

2010-09-13T14:44:00.003-05:00

In the car, heading home from boring errands.

JAMIE: I want to go yarn store.
ME: You do?!
JAMIE: I want to grab yarn.
ME: Really?
JAMIE: And put it on my arm.
ME: Why do you want to do that?
JAMIE: It's pretty.
ME: You like yarn?
JAMIE: It's nice.

Unfortunately, no yarn store for us today. Probably not even any knitting. We're packing for a contra dance weekend and and some time on the Michigan shore.

Hummf. The Fool won't play

2010-08-25T20:11:00.002-05:00

If he's not going to put his sweater together, he could do something useful, like clean out the Saturn. I'm 2/3 of the way up the hood.

Anything you can knit, I can knit faster!

2010-08-19T15:32:00.003-05:00

I can knit anything faster than you!
The Fool has been plodding along on a gorgeous little Dale of Norway sweater, that, if he were to finish it, would fit Jamie perfectly this fall. He cast it on when I was still pregnant, and has been busy producing it, in fits and spurts. There are completed sleeves, too. All it needs is assembly.
In an effort to get a usable sweater during the time of Jamie's life when it will fit him, I cast on a sweater for Jamie on Tuesday (children's top down sweater from Knitting Pure and Simple) out of some Cascade I picked up at Threadbear a few weeks ago. Then I told the Fool that I was going to be able to knit this entire sweater before he could sew some steeks, attach some sleeves and do a little finishing work on his opus.
He said, "Well, not if I get motivated."
I said, "I'll still beat you."
He said, "How do you know that?"
I said, "Because you don't know where the sleeves are."
He paused, thought, and said, "Oh, crap."
Will put up finished sweater pictures later this week. (The Fool is lobbying for the hooded version of the sweater because he thinks if I knit a hood, it will buy him valuable searching time.)

Sticky hot weather here....

2010-08-12T16:35:00.002-05:00

... everyone is getting a little touchy. Jamie complains loudly every time I put him in the car ("Mama! Too hot! Turn on air!") and the Fool and I are both avoiding spending too much time in the great outdoors.
I started to teach myself how to crochet this week. I'm not sure why, other than wanting to make a net bag for groceries and deciding that knitting one was not the way to do it (been there, knitted that, a couple times at least.) I got a crocheter to show me the basics at the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair, while I was staffing a table during vendor check in, and have been figuring out the rest.
Yesterday, I taught myself how to make granny squares. I made a few from leftover sock yarn, which has been accumulating in balls in vases and jars on the mantelpiece.
The Fool and I had this conversation:
FOOL: You're really taking to this crocheting thing.
ME: Yeah, I guess. It's interesting to learn.
FOOL: What are you making?
ME: Tonight, I made granny squares out of sock yarn.
FOOL: What for?
ME: Well, I read somewhere that crocheting takes more yarn and less time than knitting, so I'm playing with the idea of making a sock yarn blanket.
FOOL: Huh. Really? That's ... that's kind of weird.
ME: I thought I could use up all the sock yarn orts that way.
FOOL: Oh! I thought you were going to make a blanket *for* the sock yarn, to throw over it when the Muggles came over or something, so they didn't see how much sock yarn you had, or didn't get scared by it, or ....
ME: You're so strange sometimes.

In which we have a birthday and lots of summer

2010-08-03T19:14:00.002-05:00

It's a humid summer here with lots of thunderstorms, the exciting Midwestern kind that wake you up at 3 a.m. with thunder and lightning. I love them so much; when I lived in Oregon, summer storms were one of the few things I missed about Illinois. It's made laundry challenging, though. We have a load that's been on the line for a few days now, because we forget to take it in, and then we get a storm, and then it's really humid, so we leave it out trying to get it to dry, but then it rains .... you see where this is going. The Fool and I capitulated and threw it in the dryer tonight because it was starting to get a little silly.
Jamie turned two on Monday. We celebrated with some grocery shopping and a nap, after which the festivities really began. When he woke up that morning, he looked at us reflectively and said, "I want ... ice cream! Chocolate ice cream!" So around 3 p.m., post-nap, I said, what the heck, kid, and we both had chocolate ice cream. Then we played with his new wooden train set, and then we went to meet the Fool for dinner and a contra dance. We brought a watermelon to share with everyone. (See above re: heat and humidity. I say that's nature's way of telling me not to bake, and definitely not to frost anything.)
But now, he is officially a toddler, I guess, and we have conversations that go like this.
ME: How would you like to walk to the post office with me?
JAMIE: OK!
ME: Great! Go get your shoes, please.
JAMIE: No.
ME: You need to wear shoes to go to the post office. Please go get your shoes.
JAMIE: No.
ME: Would you rather stay home?
JAMIE: No.
ME: So you want to go to the post office?
JAMIE: Yes.
ME: Please go get your shoes, then.
JAMIE: No.
ME: How about walking to the bar?

Nothing gets you spinning again...

2010-07-19T23:37:00.004-05:00

...like going to a festival of fiber such as the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair.

I swung by Toni Neil's booth (of The Fold) to ogle (okay, pet) various rovings. I realized that one of the reasons my spinning had fallen by the wayside (other than raising a toddler) was that I had run out of bobbins. (Okay, sometimes really stupid things become enormous hurdles for me.) So not only did I go home with a couple more bobbins to solve this problem, I also went home with a heavenly blend of silk and wool which is just magic to spin up.

I did set the wheel back up last night, but I decided that nightly spinning gratification wasn't quite frequent enough. So this morning, I threw my Bosworth top-whorl spindle (along with the roving) into my work bag, and I very nonchalantly pulled it out on the train and began to spin.

It was really fun. I didn't need nearly as much elbow room as I thought I might. In fact, I found that I could spin effectively with people sitting on both sides of me... though I fear I may have been overexposing my armpit to the fellow sitting to my right. (He would occasionally clear his throat, but it was difficult for me to tell if this was somehow commentary or simply a throat tickle.)

Oddly, even though I thought I would be out of practice, I'm still quite good at the spindle. I had forgotten how much control a spindle gives me... and the Bosworth spins like a absolute dream. I still spin a bit unevenly, but I'm hoping that it all becomes a wash when I go to ply.

I have no idea what I'll use the silk yarn for, but I'm sure that Meg can come up with some ideas. Toni told me to not worry.

Midwest Fiber and Folk Arts Fest

2010-07-17T19:53:00.002-05:00

So I'm the vendor coordinator at this fiber fest ... we're on day two. Last day is tomorrow. The venue (Lake County Fairgrounds building) is terrific. Everyone is having fun. The yarn and fiber and pottery and jewelry and baskets ... all pretty. It's a nice time. We're in Grayslake, up near the Wisconsin-Illinois border.

Jamie and the Fool stop out each day to see how I'm doing. The Fool had a stomach bug yesterday, so I had Jamie all morning. He rode around on my back or in his stroller when I had to run out on the floor to talk to vendors. This worked, as long as we stopped to visit the angora bunnies each and every time we went for a walk.

Angora bunnies? Really cute. And soft. And furry. I admit, I thought, wow, if one of these got along with the cats, I would be OK with having one of these hopping around the place.

And then I took a good look at the rabbit guy, who was wearing a dark blue T-shirt, and noticed that he had an awful lot of rabbit fur on his shirt, and decided maybe not. I can't keep up with the cats. I found an Angus hair in my sandwich the other day and thought, good grief, I've probably eaten an entire cat by now.

Nevertheless, each time Jamie saw the rabbits, he hit me on the shoulder and said, "Mama! Go see really really big bunny rabbits! Go see bunny rabbits! Over there!"

Last day tomorrow. (And I get to go to an indigo dyeing workshop. Can't wait.)

Best Buy is not a super-fun place to take a toddler

2010-06-29T17:02:00.002-05:00

But at least we have a digital camera again. The Fool and I were giggling about how, when we got our first camera six years ago, 5 megapixels was the big fancy-schmancy deal, and now, even the cheapest cameras have 10 or 12.
Then Jamie and I continued on our way to buy lawnmower parts. Big Fish, a large stuffed salmon pillow that lives in the minivan for various and weird reasons, got a reprieve from his car-centered life, and was allowed to come in the lawnmower repair shop. Mainly, I was too tired to argue about why Big Fish could not be shown lawnmowers, as Jamie wished to do. I hope the visit inspired Big Fish to change the air filter and mow the lawn.
Today, I sat in the car while Jamie napped and Kitchenered socks. We had a busy weekend and I was an Irish band wife (sorta like a soccer mom) and so at the Fool's various gigs with Chicago Reel, his new Irish band, I watched Jamie beetle around various parks and knit socks. During sound check, Jamie and I walked down to the big fountain at Millennium Park, that you can wade in, and splashed around for nearly an hour.
By the second-to-last number of the band's 45-minute set, when Paddy and Denis were doing their dueling Irish tenors act, belting - and I mean belting - out "The Lowlands of Holland," Jamie said to me, "Mama, hold you," and so I picked him up, and he put his head on my shoulder, and by the end of the song, he was limp. By the end of the concert, after a big set of reels with stepdancers clattering around in hard shoes and a lot of applause from the audience, he was snoring softly in my ear and didn't wake up when we put him in the stroller.
That kind of behavior gets a person lots of knitting time to finish nearly-finished socks.
I'm not complaining. I'm just Kitchenering.

Tuesday night

2010-06-22T22:33:00.002-05:00

No thunderstorms tonight, which is unusual for the week. We've had a lot of storms over the past few days - big, exciting ones with lots of thunder and lightning. Midwestern summer storms were one of the things I missed when I lived in Oregon. Jamie and I went to a park for playgroup this morning, only to find that the dark gray skies frightened everyone else off. Or we were at the wrong park. I decided, as we'd come all that way and it wasn't raining, he could go beetle around by himself and if the rains came, we'd run for the car.

It's all part of recovering from another eventful weekend. The Cosmic Otters and Rachel went to Lansing, Mich. for their Saturday night dance, which was loads of fun. Jamie played with some neighborhood girls who we hired to watch him, and as the dance is held in a church hall, there was a conveniently located Sunday school room nearby, with a lot of blocks and small tables and chairs - basically all the things he needs to be entertained.

The dancers were terrific fun to watch, and we had a really good time.

Rachel and I had an especially good time, because she had never been to ThreadBear before. We had the guys drop us off and told them we'd see them in 45 minutes. I've been in a bit of a knitting slump lately ... but now? Obviously, all I needed was a couple balls of sock yarn and some Cascade superwash for a fall sweater for Jamie, because I'm back happily making socks again. Also, all I needed, I guess, was a lot of blue yarn, because that was all I got. Except for this self-striping ball with some purple in it that's going to be my next pair of socks for playground knitting.

I bought a ball of dark indigo Pagewood Farms yarn that I'm really excited about. Lots of people in my knitting group love this yarn, and I'm looking forward to making something (Rachel got the purple ball) nifty - but probably not socks. I'm leaning toward Multnomah. And I'm leaning toward putting beads in the border, but we'll see when I get there.

The next day, after chatting with Sam-the-banjo-player, we stopped by Rae's Yarn Boutique as well, and had something like this conversation.

RACHEL: I really don't need any more yarn.

ME: Me either.

RACHEL: Let's just look.

ME: Right.

RACHEL: Oh, except I wanted some dpns.

ME: Isn't this red yarn pretty?

RACHEL: Oooh. And it's not blue.

ME: I know! And there's some with purple in it over there.

RACHEL: Ooh!

The Fool and Edward watched Jamie during the yarn-shop excursions, but the Fool got his fiber on as well.

Saturday night, after the dance, we were hanging out at our hostess' house. Sam-the-banjo-player came over to visit. His sweetie knits, so he's not totally unaware of the fiber arts.

THE FOOL: (Admiring a throw over the back of a chair at our friend Bonnie's) Wow, this is a cool stitch. I wonder what it is?

SAM: Knitted.

THE FOOL: No, I don't think so. That looks like crochet.

SAM: No, look at this. That's the yarn over. This is knitted.

And then, we headed for home the next day with a couple stops en route (Bell's Brewery, Sweetwater Donuts) and here it is, another hot week in which perhaps I will make the time to shop for a digital camera. Because Best Buy would be a super-fun place to take a toddler, right?

Knitters: Naturally agreeable?

2010-06-14T23:51:00.002-05:00

Here in Illinois, they're just starting to try a former governor of ours on corruption charges, and so the news is full of stuff on his trial. Jury selection started, and among the candidates is a knitter. I thought this article was interesting - one analysis of the jurors suggests that the ex-military members might be more conservative, and the knitter might be more inclined to go along with what everyone else says.

I dunno ... I don't think it's fair to say that knitters, as a group, are generally agreeable. I think knitters are as prone to disagree about stuff as anyone else is. And if we were generally agreeable, would we really need three or four ways to knit socks?

Jury pool article:

The camera remains missing in action; Angus has begun to nudge and bite the Fool each morning until the Fool gets up, at which point Angus happily curls up on the bed in the Fool's vacant spot and falls asleep. Ah, summer.

Weekend away

2010-06-06T18:42:00.002-05:00

The Fool, Jamie and I - without instruments or a gig - snuck off to Madison for a weekend. It was great!

I got to go to knit night at the Sow's Ear with Thorny and Renee, which was about 16 different kinds of fun, even though I was darning socks. Note to self: It's not enough to save the online newsletter article on darning socks to read later; one actually has to read it later and maybe print it out for reference.

Leaving for Madison was a little tough, though. Jamie is in the middle of some kind of mad angst, either growing molars or getting over a cold, or both, and so he was disinclined to leave my arms for even a minute, which made packing the car and loading the dishwasher impossible. So the tote bag of odds and ends that needed to go north with me got left on the kitchen counter, and we were without a) birthday presents for Thorny's kids; b) snacks for Jamie; and c) my knitting in progress.

Fortunately, knit night is held at a yarn store, and so I got some Hiya Hiya short dpns, which I had been wanting to try, and a couple balls of on-sale sock yarn. It's been very satisfying, knitting around and around on a plain old sock.

And now we are home, and the Fool is making muffins, and I'm sorting through emails I need to send and trying to corral the hamsters in my head long enough to see what this week will bring.

Summer reading

2010-06-01T20:19:00.002-05:00

I'm listening to this pulpy audiobook in the car (can you have a pulpy audiobook? Anyway.) The premise is that there's this demon hunter who is a minivan-driving stay-at-home-mom by day. She has two kids, one teenager from her first marriage, and a second kid by her second husband (first husband was also a demon hunter and died mysteriously). The second kid is about Jamie's age. The husband knows nothing about his wife's secret double life.

What I was thinking as I put my laptop in the car and escaped the house, leaving a somewhat tetchy Jamie and the Fool behind to "enjoy" each other's company tonight, was: How did this woman get her toddler to sleep so well that she can sneak out to slay demons without worrying that her husband will be woken by a kid with a wet diaper or other small angst and notice that she is gone?!

Jamie would blow my cover in a minute.

The camera is missing. So you'll have to take my word for this:

* Bloomington, Ind. trip this last weekend - so fun! Two good gigs, a really delicious homemade rhubarb pie from our friends Katie and Eric, milkshakes.

* The quilt for my class is coming along pretty well. Lots of flowers.

* I'm on a bit of a sewing binge right now. I'm finishing UFOs and experimenting with new stuff. It's a lot of fun.

* Romeo! Romeo! Whyfor are you always getting it on with Winnie the Pooh? Jamie's poor bear is flat! Flat! (OK. I wouldn't put up a picture of the cat doing the nasty with a stuffed bear. But all the quilting stuff, I totally would show you if I could.)

This bodes badly

2010-05-26T09:10:00.002-05:00

Both of us are underslept, and so Jamie is being an almost-two-year-old, which is to say, a bit of a pain, and I have no patience, which I have learned is a winning combination for parenting.

So I think we will go for a ride on the train and meet the Fool downtown for lunch. The novelty should prevent Jamie from being too much of a twit, and I can get a coffee or seven.

Some things never change

2010-05-20T16:34:00.004-05:00

Jamie and I are taking a parent-child class at the local Waldorf school. Lots of other parents I know spoke pretty highly of the teacher, and the general vibe of the classes is appealing - mellow, quiet, windows open, pollen blowing into the classroom.*

I digress. Jamie likes the table of little wooden animals, seems to get along fine with the other kids, and was absolutely blown away when the teacher handed him a broom! And asked him to sweep! As his grandmother said when she visited over Mother's Day weekend, "Jamie likes putting things away! I can't imagine where he got that from."

And then I tried to kill her with a teaspoon.**

One of the things that happens in class is, the kids get to play and the parents get to make crafts. I'm not kidding! It's so great! Our first project was sewing felt pouches for the Acorn Shop at the annual MayFair. *** The teacher handed out pre-cut pieces of felt, and all we had to do was decorate them with flowers and business and then stitch them together. We got bits of taken-apart silk flowers, and a big bag of embroidery floss and a bag of felt scraps to rummage through. So I did a couple like everyone else, and then I started remembering some of the embroidery stitches I thought I had forgotten about, and put a few daisies on one piece of felt, and then found another piece I could applique, and then ... you know how it is when you really get into something and you're just sitting there in your own little world with a big pile of new-to-you craft stuff, and you get cranking along ... and then someone notices what you're doing and makes a big fuss, and you get all sheepish and sort of wish you weren't there?

Yeah.

I seem to be the class embroidery prodigy. Which is funny, because there is not a lot of embroidery going on in my life.

At the end of the class, the teacher said to me, "Would you like to take some materials home to work on during the week?" and I thought, "Uh, no, because I have lots of other handwork projects I would prefer to work on," but I do try to be a good team player, so I took stuff home for two pouches. In the privacy of my own home, I raided my small stash of embroidery floss and buttons and made these.

And I don't care that they don't look like anyone else's.

* Something about this spring has been driving me crazy, pollen-wise, and I don't really get hay fever. I hate to imagine what it's been like for people who do get seasonal allergies. I was standing in the classroom the other day, the wind shifted, and suddenly, I was sneezing like crazy, my eyes all itchy and watering. Astounding.

** It was one of those things people say that can get taken either way. At first, I thought, oh, ha ha, very funny, and then about two days later, I thought, wait a minute! I spent every spare minute of my time for four days cleaning the stupid house before she visited ... and next thing you know, the Fool is talking me down from a pretty big tree.

*** It's really not worth explaining. Just take the whole sentence at face value.

Long week

2010-04-28T09:12:00.003-05:00

It's only 9:37 a.m. here and I have an eye twitch.
Jamie has been experimenting with some new and bizarre sleep patterns. Sunday night, the Fool was chatting online with a friend of ours who has two small kids, and she asked how dark his room was when we put him down for naps. Some blackout curtains might be just the key, she said.
The Fool leapt to his feet, demanded I put down the sewing project I was working on (nice flowery pretty stuff) and make, that minute, a blackout shade for the skylight in Jamie's room.
He hauled the stepladder out the next morning before work and hung the shade, and now Romeo spends all day in his new, cushy cave, snuggled on quilts sleeping.
Glad someone is sleeping around here.
Now if only he'd help with the laundry.
Anyway, in light of the long week, I combined a 40 percent off coupon at JoAnns with the new Martha Stewart needlework book, and it's been about as wonderful as I expected. I just like looking at all the very tasteful beautiful pictures of needlework projects in their native environments ... soft dusty earth tones, sage greens ... and not a board book in sight. Obviously, no one lives in her photo shoot land.
But, you know, that's all OK ... because we are mostly packed for Maryland Sheep and Wool! See you all on Saturday. I've been preparing Jamie for his first big fiber festival by singing the sheep and alpaca verses of Old MacDonald.

(Annual kid-in-a-tree picture. Spring 2010.)

(Same kid, same tree, 2009. I had no idea he and the Fool collaborated on outfits for these photos.)

The differences between men and women...again

2010-04-15T15:50:00.002-05:00

ME: I dunno, it's been a bad week. I feel like I'm stuck in a rut or something. All my friends are doing interesting things and I'm just plugging along here.
I mean, look at me, I've had basically the same hairstyle since college.
FOOL: That's a rut?
ME: Yes.
FOOL: See, I think that's more "finding what works." You found what works and now you're just sticking with it. Like me.
ME: You have really curly hair that you get cut four times year.
FOOL: Yep. That works.

I decided this morning....

2010-04-09T16:15:00.003-05:00

.... after pawing through Jamie's sock drawer, which has many, many useless socks in it (too small, mismatched, etc., etc.) that when I run the world, toddler socks are going to come in one color, and one color only. I'm leaning toward white. Although I would consider blue or green for a little variety.
I've been told by various mom friends that I should just go to Old Navy and buy a bale of white socks, and other mom friends have suggested that maybe I work on letting go of the idea that socks need to match.
But regardless, Jamie is out in the world today in a white sock (because I found two white socks but on the way to getting them on his feet, dropped one and couldn't find it) and a blue striped sock (because then, I said, 'screw it' and grabbed the first sock I saw) ... and I'm working on not caring very much.
This week, we were at a parent-child program thing, and one of the other moms saw his mismatched socks and said, "oh, did he pick out his clothes today?"
I smiled and said, "Yes."
That's my story and I'll be sticking to it.
To take the edge off, I cast on a sock myself. This is my Basket of Inspiration, or, a basket of pretty pretty sock yarn that I have on my computer desk so I can look at it and start knitting it. The stuff in the front is part of a pair of Skew socks. The yarn I cast on today is Miss Babs "Frog Princess," but to me, it says "Spring bulb garden."
The Fool has the camera cord today, so I can't photograph the sock, but it's from Charlene Schurch and Beth Parrott's "Sock Club."

Back to knitting! Jamie is taking an extra long nap today and I've decided to take full advantage and not do anything useful at all.

She turned me into a newt!

2010-04-03T14:45:00.006-05:00

That's the best excuse I have for the prolonged absence.
Here is how pathetic it is: One of my knitting group friends had to tell me someone posted on Ravelry to see what we were doing because I haven't even been on Ravelry very much either.
Nothing bad, nothing difficult ... just some things getting in the way of blogging.
The Fool joined a new Irish band (but they're arguing over the name, so I can't tell you who they are yet), and so he's been busy with some extra rehearsals, which means I've been busy with Jamie more evenings.
The Cosmic Otters have had a lot of gigs. We just finished a week in the Southeast, which I will blog about in 2014, and we've got some more gigs coming up.
We did some car shopping. The Fool's car developed a bizarre can't-be-reproduced-for-the-mechanic power-steering/ power-brakes failure and we'd been researching for a while, so we took the big step into suburbanhood and ... bought a minivan. Like every other family-with-kids in the suburbs of Chicago. I went to the grocery store, parked my new car and couldn't find it for six weeks in the parking lot. So that ate up some blogging time.

As soon as I got it home, I put an identifying marker on the tailgate so now I can find it in parking lots.

Before spring came, I knit the Fool a pair of mittens.

Old mittens. Notice that when I knit those I didn't understand that thumbs aren't webbed the same way flippers are.

New mittens. Bulky Cascade 122 tweed. So fun to knit, because they were so fast. And the thumbs fit and everything! The contrasting brown strips are because I was afraid I was running out of yarn.

I tried to knit a sweater from A Fine Fleece for the Knitting Olympics, but I didn't quite make it. Still, I was impressed with how much sweater a person can knit if they knit like a madwoman on one thing, and one thing only. I was going to try to finish it for the Fool by St. Patrick's Day, but I was pretty sick of it, so it's on a time out for now.

Jamie continues to prevent me from getting lots of things done. Dear blog, don't feel neglected, because despite my sincere and desperate desire to spend time with my sewing machine, that hasn't been happening. Nor have plans to reorganize the bathroom, fix the screen door or sort through all the books and send some to the resale shop. Instead, I spend a lot of time reading about raccoons and pretending to call raccoons on the phone with Jamie. He's on a raccoon kick, or at least, he has been ever since one showed up on our porch and scared the living daylights out of him one night. Instead, we talk about them a lot. A. Lot.

Also, cussing out cats. I spend a lot of time cussing out cats, especially bad cats who get all friendly with the wool and chew small holes in it to show their love. This was a baby surprise jacket. Now it's going to get felted and made into a sack that I can stuff bad cats into.

This is the most amazing thing I have eaten lately. It was all Rachel's idea. She and Edward were over for a weekend visit/ Cosmic Otters rehearsal, and we had leftover roasted asparagus from dinner and a few mushrooms kicking around in the fridge, so she pulled up this recipe, and ... voila! I was afraid the egg thing would be weird, but it is not in the least.

Portland update

2010-02-23T10:17:00.004-06:00

Knitting continues, but it's not looking good at this point. Jamie completely stymied any attempts at knitting yesterday by refusing to nap, and then I discovered I had actual work that needed to be done, so .. not a stitch yesterday.
I continue to miscross single stitch cables, so every so often, I have to stop, drop those and recross them. Which I am getting good at.

I made a mistake, though, at the very beginning. The Fool is a long, lanky guy, and if I knit this to 14 inches before the armholes, as the pattern says, the Fool will be sporting a belly Aran. As I told Edward at our gig this weekend, when I held the sweater up to measure on him for comparison, next Olympics, I'm picking a guy with a shorter torso to knit for. Edward volunteered. He has been admiring the color of this sweater since I cast it on. I think 16 or 17 inches may be in my future. Maybe 16 inches, and I'll count on Blackwater Abbey's tendency to grow when washed.
Over the weekend, we all went to Valparaiso*, Ind., for another contra dance gig. The Fool and I played with our other band, the RoarSharks, Rachel called, and Edward entertained Jamie and ran the soundboard. Jamie likes the RoarSharks, because I play percussion, not guitar, and it's a lot easier to mess with my stuff when it's a pile of drums and shakers. Here he is sitting in with the band, happily thumping away on my snare drum during sound check.**

Walter, the fiddler, looked at the Fool sadly and said, "I don't think he's going to grow up to play the fiddle."

*I totally know about the great yarn shop in Valpo. Rachel and I checked it out when we were there for a gig last month. I'm not in any great need of yarn these days, as I am finishing projects and anyway, I have a gorgeous basket of sock yarn on the mantelpiece for inspiration, but ... wow. What a cool shop. I could see falling down pretty hard in there.

**Yeah, he's wearing one shoe. One fell off in the car, and the Fool didn't bring it in, and then when we asked Jamie if he wanted to take off his other shoe and be in his socks, he said "no," so he went around lopsided for a while. Toddlers are weird. He also likes clomping around the house in his boots, so, whatever.

Another day of knitting....more miscrossed cables

2010-02-17T23:00:00.003-06:00

Knitting continues apace. This is a photo I took yesterday. The yarn is much more cranberry-colored than the photo shows it. The lovely Chicago winter afternoon light either gave me photos that showed the real color and none of the cables (with flash) or the wrong color and all of the cables.
It's Portland, from A Fine Fleece, by Lisa Lloyd.
I'm knitting it in the round to the armholes, because I hate seaming, and so far, it's going fine. There are some mistakes in the chart, though, and the first repetition of the cable design took a little while to figure out because I had to sort things out.
But there it is.
Feeling a bit brain-dead right now, because the Fool is in a new Irish band, and they had rehearsal last night, and I got Jamie to bed earlier than usual, and I was so excited by the evening to myself that I put on an old episode of A Prairie Home Companion and stayed up way too late knitting.
Like none of us have ever done that. Further updates to come....

the Sweater of Minor Setbacks

2010-02-15T01:05:00.002-06:00

The Fool said, as I knit and cussed tonight, because the chart wasn't matching what I was knitting, that I had very little good to say about the project.
So far, I've had to drop and recross two cables, and drop and fix five stitches that should have been purls that were knits. And now I have a dropped stitch to ladder back up, and there's a cable cross in the way and ... grrr.
If this were Olympic figure skating, I would be the skater who keeps falling down.

Cast on!

2010-02-13T00:52:00.003-06:00

Tonight, at knitting group at Panera, I started the Aran sweater I'm making the Fool for the Knitting Olympics. I forgot how much I like knitting cabled things. It's so much fun. Of course, I had the wrong size needle with me, but Peggy loaned me a KnitPicks needle of hers, and I was able to get things started.
At home, the Fool and Jamie watched raccoons on the porch. By watched, I mean, Jamie cried and hid on the Fool's lap. Raccoons seem to be something Jamie likes in abstract (pictures in his books, video on YouTube), but does not like when they are on his porch, peering through the sliding glass door.
Earlier this week, Jamie and I were at his doctor's for his 18-month checkup. His pediatrician, who also knits, finished up her exam and stepped outside to write up her notes. She finished, poked her head around the door and said, a little quietly, "So, are you doing anything for the Knitting Olympics?"
We compared project notes - she's doing a lace cardigan from the Twist Collective patterns.
Too fun. The camera batteries are charging, I swear, so maybe there will be a photo on this blog one of these days.

Busy day ahead

2010-02-11T09:14:00.002-06:00

Jamie greeted the day by pulling on his snow boots over his pajama bottoms, picking up my box of contra dance cards and a small canvas bag with his animal book in it (we call it his murse) and stomping over to the door to wait.
He looks like a short and weirdly dressed contra dance caller. Which, I suppose, is what I usually manage for gigs, too.
It snowed here. Not as much as other places, but still enough to make my yard beautiful again. It's a bit too cold for my tastes and as pretty as the snow is, I'm tired of winter.
In fiber arts news, as part of my drive to finish works in progress, I'm tackling a big one. I had an inch and a half of ribbing for a sweater for the Fool. I frogged it, swatched to check gauge (because I'm using Blackwater Abbey and I discovered that yarn grows when you wash it) and am re-casting on for the Knitting Olympics at Friday night knit group. A cabled sweater in 17 days seems like a bit of a stretch, but we have two out-of-town gigs in that stretch, so I hope to get some good knitting in while we're on the road.
In other news - I bought a new camera battery charger, so I can put up pictures of this lunacy.

Three things

2010-02-04T17:03:00.002-06:00

1. Whyfor did you get up at 4:30 a.m., kid? What did you have to do that needed such an early start? Because I got up with you, and let me tell you, I think you could have waited until 8 a.m. or so to look at books and chase Angus.

2. I started dismantling the curtain valances I got at the Salvation Army so I could get my hands on the beautiful sunny Marimekko fabric, and I discovered that somebody made these curtains out of a tablecloth. That makes me really happy, to know that this tablecloth gets three lives, not just one.

3. Jamie was helping me unload groceries and in an effort to get him out of the way for five seconds, I handed him four rolls of toilet paper and told him to go put those in the bathroom. Yeah. Next time, I need to go with him and show him the cupboard the toilet paper goes in, because he threw them in the toilet. I rescued one roll, but three are completely done for.

Sick of winter

2010-02-03T16:04:00.002-06:00

My tolerance for winter ran out about a week and a half ago, which is not so good, because the groundhog saw his shadow yesterday, so I've got six more weeks of this nonsense.
Jamie still won't set foot on the snow and I am frankly running out of ideas for places to take him so we can both get out of the house and look at something other than each other all day long. Playgroups are fun, but they only go so far. Although yesterday's featured a house with a mid-sized dog, big enough to not be yappy, but small enough to not scare him. He got a friendly lick on the cheek, and that made him giggle happily. The Fool is afraid we are heading down the road to becoming a Dog Household, but I stand firm.
Firm-ish.
More or less firm most of the time.
Anyway, today, I thought I'd try a little retail therapy, so after getting some coffee, Jamie and I headed for the local Salvation Army store. It was a good day. I found three diaper covers for 90 cents apiece, a fancy beaded coin purse shaped like a red flower and four Marimekko valance curtains, which I snapped up, because I love Marimekko flowered fabric. I don't mind that they're in long strips, because I went and got two yards of coordinating fabric and I'm going to make a cheerful striped modern looking quilt.
Of course, I can't find camera batteries. Oh well. The light's fading anyway, because it's the Midwest in the winter and no one can see anything past 4 p.m. anyway.

Lost and found

2010-02-02T09:23:00.004-06:00

The Fool, Jamie and I were leaving a concert the other night (Genticorum. Awesome French-Canadian band. Soooo good.) I was the official sherpa; Jamie was riding in his carrier on the Fool's front, happily snuggled under the Fool's coat. We got to the car and when he took off his coat to load Jamie into the carseat, the Fool - for reasons I can't even begin to imagine - put his winter coat down on the ground, and we all hopped in the car and drove off without it.
He didn't notice his coat was gone until he went to put it on again the next morning, and unbeknownst to me, embarked on a string of texts and calls, and got Rachel to take a walk for him and see if his coat was still there, which it was.
I didn't learn about this until it was all over, not just because he didn't want to tell me he might have lost an entire winter coat ... but because he would have had to report the missing handknit mittens in the pockets, which I just finished over the weekend.

The old mittens, possibly the first pair I ever made. One skein of Cascade 220. No understanding of how to make mittens that fit hands, hence the too-short cuffs, the loose ribbing and the weird flipper-thumbs.

The new mittens. One skein of Cascade 122 tweed, plus some brown alpaca for visual interest. 2x2 ribbing at the cuffs and thumbs that are actually as long as the Fool's thumbs. Fast knit, as the yarn is almost a bulky weight, so that made them fun.

January, january, blah, blah, blah

2010-01-24T14:52:00.003-06:00

Wow. Time flies when you're trying to chip ice off the sidewalk.
I had a nice post all written about Christmas, but so much of it seems not newsworthy anymore. We've been busy contra dancing, and I have sworn off casting on new knitting until the first day of spring, which isn't too bad. There's enough projects in progress that I can entertain myself very happily.
I put a quilt on the Fool's grandmother's quilt frame and am hand quilting on it now. I don't think I'll ever become a hand quilter. It's nice work, and I enjoy it, because it's different for me, but I think this one quilt will be enough.
It was a good Christmas in many ways, a bit of a rarity for me. I always seem to be longing for childhood Christmases I will never get back, with family who are no longer with me, and no one really to even help me reminisce. This year, the Fool and I made a sincere effort to clear out the clutter of the holidays early and spend time doing things with Jamie and each other. We did pretty well (despite knitting a pair of socks in three days before Christmas, but that's the Fool's story to tell.)
One night, he and Jamie walked around a local shopping mall, admiring all the lights and trees, until the giant tree started blaring out Mannheim Steamroller's "Carol of the Bells," and flashing lights, which the Fool found menacing and alarming and caused them both to beat a hasty retreat to the Barnes and Noble for a restorative drink and some quality time with the train table in the kids' section. (Jamie has acquired a serious train table habit - I've started marking their locations in my head - one at the Barnes and Noble, one at the library, etc.) Now, the Fool calls the band the Anaheim Scrambler (which I think is a breakfast entree somewhere we've eaten) and spent the rest of the holidays avoiding large trees.
We went to church on Christmas Eve with his mom and brother and Jamie, who was really well-behaved and didn't complain at all about having to sit still for 45 minutes. (I was a little worried, because we are Unchurched Heathens, and Jamie hasn't had a lot of practice behaving in church. By "a lot," I mean, "any.") The best part was when we were all singing Hark the Herald Angels or something like that, and the organist pulled out all the bass stops for the last verse and Jamie absolutely went nuts, grinning and giggling and waving his hands.
We also baked a lot. A. Lot. I got the King Arthur Flour Cookie Cookbook from the library and tried a bunch of new recipes in there. The spice cookies were a hit - tasty, easy to roll out and fun to decorate. The Fool made the first batch and after I somewhat testily said, "The cookie cutters are out, just use whatever you want!" produced a bunch of "BOO" cookies from our Halloween selection of cutters. (I counted. We have more Halloween cookie cutters than Christmas ones. I had to make crescent moons and oak leaves and call them solstice cookies.) Snarkily, he said it was a tradition among the Methodists to jump out at each other during the Christmas season and shout "Boo! Christ is born!"
So keep that in mind if you want to liven up the holidays next year. I see it as being one of those universal faith traditions. Shout "boo!" and the holiday greeting of your choice.
Finally, the three of us went to Brookfield Zoo to enjoy the holiday lights and the late hours and see the animals in the winter. We visited the egrets, the otters, the wombats, the fruit bats, the polar bears, and the farm animals. A problem in relying on books to educate yourself about farm animals is that you don't get a good sense of scale. We plopped him down in front of the cow's pen and said, "look, Jamie, a cow! Cows say 'moo!'" and he just stared with his mouth open, like someone had just smacked him in the head. We think he had no idea how big cows really are.
The slide toward spring is beginning, though, and I'm glad of it. This year, we're going to make it to Maryland Sheep and Wool for sure. The Cosmic Otters have already turned down gigs for that weekend, so it's officially on the household calendar.

Hooray!

2010-01-13T00:12:00.003-06:00

Finished the last of the Christmas knitting tonight!
Fortunately, people seem to like receiving presents no matter what the season.
(Camera still out of commission; has turned into Issue With Battery Charger.)

camera batteries dead

2010-01-06T22:45:00.001-06:00

So just to say this:
I love knitting group after the first of the year. Everyone is brimming over with holiday goodies (or post-holiday sale goodies) and big plans and big ideas and it's just so much fun to take over the table at the back of the Starbucks and knit and natter.

Happy New Year!

2009-12-31T20:22:00.003-06:00

There's a real post about Christmas in the offing (e.g., I need to download the photos), but in the meantime, the Fool and Jamie and I wish everyone a happy 2010 filled with all the stuff they love,
and none of the annoyances.
Tonight, we are staying in. I've already made potstickers from scratch from my new Asian cookbook (Asian Dumplings, by Andrea Nyugen. Great!), broiled teriyaki chicken wings, sauteed some bok choy and made almond biscotti for a present for Edward and Rachel (who better be too busy having fun in London to be sitting around reading blogs tonight.)
Jamie got to help clean the house, and he ate potstickers and took bites from my chicken wing, and despite the fact we seem to have a mouse living in the car trunk that scared him when he saw it earlier today, he had a good end of 2009.
(The mouse thing was pretty funny, at least from my point of view. Jamie got startled when the wee brown critter dashed into view and burst into tears, with a quivery lower lip and everything, and kept pointing and howling and signing "mouse" [he knows some sign language] while I held him and told him it was OK, little mousies were nothing to worry about.)
A little later, after Jamie goes to bed, the Fool and I are going to sit up and work on a Christmas present we need to finish by tomorrow. It's going to the same home as the biscotti, and it rhymes with "knee posy."
Happy 2010, everyone!

Pretty far gone

2009-12-22T12:01:00.001-06:00

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.

The darkness is making me delusional

2009-12-18T22:16:00.001-06:00

Even though I haven't finished any of the Christmas crafting projects I already started, I just added two more to the docket.

quick update

2009-12-15T16:02:00.004-06:00

... 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.

The Fool in crisis

2009-12-07T15:19:00.002-06:00

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.

Hoot!

2009-12-06T12:14:00.003-06:00

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.

Clink, clink

2009-12-01T23:23:00.001-06:00

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."

Broke Up Thanksgiving....

2009-11-29T15:46:00.004-06:00

... 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.

Thanksgiving is coming...

2009-11-24T23:06:00.001-06:00

... and then Christmas, and that means I have plenty of things that I can do with my copious (ha!) spare time.
So, of course, the thing I think I want most to do right now is take up spinning.

A parade of FOs

2009-11-17T12:23:00.003-06:00

A tiny parade.
Susan-in-the-comments had asked about the pillow. Here it is. Couldn't be easier. Get 11x17 pillow form, find fabric, eyeball an appropriate size, fold and stitch. Hem open end, slap some trim on, and there you have it, a pillow.
Note the total lack of a sleeping toddler on top of it. That seems to be its biggest flaw. Every time I haul it out for naptime and explain that people sleep with their heads on pillows, he starts pointing at the pictures and giggling.

Baktus on the piano ... the Fool did really well on Freecycle recently and we have an old piano, converted from a player piano, hanging out in the living room. No pianowarming party yet, unfortunately. We had to get it tuned, and as it has not been tuned in decades, we couldn't get it tuned to concert pitch - it's about a half step flat. Oy. In the spring, the tuner will try to tune it correctly and we'll see.

Janice came by this afternoon with a pile of toys she scored from a neighbor getting rid of them (we have entered the Era of the Duplo Blocks, I guess), and a pizza from Homemade Pizza Company, and we made tea and ate molasses cookies and apples all afternoon, and turned this pile of pinecones into.....

This!

And this! I need a big fat red bow. For the wreath.

Where does the time go?

2009-11-14T13:23:00.001-06:00

It's funny; I feel like I have had no time at all over the last two weeks, but I'm not sure what I've been doing. Well, sleeping, for large parts of it. The time change turned Jamie into an early bird, and so now, we all get up together early in the morning and wave goodbye to the Fool as he heads off to work.
Some mornings, when we're especially with-it, the three of us go to a little cafe for a quick breakfast before taking the Fool to the train station, which means I get coffee. Other mornings, I stagger around and make tea and oatmeal and Jamie works on feeding himself.
I've been knitting, too. And sewing.
An old Girl Scout friend, who found me through Ravelry, sent me a nice piece of blue flannel with cars and trucks and trains on it, and suggested I could use it to make something for Jamie. I had it out on my sewing table for a couple months, thinking about what I could do with it. Finally, it hit me.
I found a small pillow form, like you'd use for a rectangular throw pillow, whipped up a pillowcase, put some of the Fool's grandmother's rick-rack around the open edge, and voila, a small pillow for a small person to nap on if he wants. He noticed it the other day, pointed at the pictures on the pillowcase and giggled.
I cast on and finished Baktus in fairly short order for me - less than a month. Ha!
I can see that when I change colors, I pull the stitches of the yarn I'm changing from a bit too tight; the scarf has a funny curl to the two ends that remind me of a manta ray. I think I could fix that with blocking, or I could just see what it looks like on and perhaps, it won't bother me very much.
It was a totally fun knit and entertaining to watch the colors change. I used a Zauberball I got at Stitches Midwest, and the kitchen scale to divide it into two balls of equal weight.
Pat, in the comments, had asked how the Zauberball was to knit with - she'd heard varying reports as to the yarn's consistency and quality.
I didn't find any knots in mine, and while the yarn got a little thick here and there, it wasn't anything I found to be obnoxious. It's two plies, spun together, and sometimes, when I get knitting along, I split the plies, or I'd snag one or two fibers with the wrong needle. It's also not the softest yarn I've ever knit with, either. I'm not sure I'd buy another, not because there was anything glaringly wrong with this one, but because there are a lot of fun, colorful sock yarns out there that I haven't knit with yet.
I'll put up a proper picture later, but this is one I took last night, when I turned away from writing this post to discover Angus on the couch (elements of photo labeled to aid understanding.)

The poor guy has had a bit of a ... cold? something, lately, so he's been trotting around the house like a furry plant sprayer on four feet. It's a little alarming to be woken by Angus standing over your head, spraying cat sneezes everywhere.
Anyway, waffles and coffee are on, and I need to go supervise Jamie's dining efforts. If we don't watch him carefully, he tries to slip the cats food.

Halloween quiz

2009-10-30T18:15:00.002-05:00

What might the Fool be pretending to be, as indicated by his hat? In other words, what types of people wear that kind of hat?
(Rachel, the correct answer is not "Edward." Because that already occurred to us, and the Fool is not dressing up as Edward for Halloween.)

Well, that's one way to knit down the stash....

2009-10-29T20:13:00.000-05:00

Make a house.
She must not have a lot of sock yarn.

We had an unusual gig early this morning...

2009-10-28T18:28:00.004-05:00

... at o-dark-thirty, as my friend Carrie likes to put it, the Cosmic Otters and a sleepy Jamie, travel mugs of tea in hand, bundled into the car and headed for the Paramount Theatre, where a bunch of Christian ministry folks had gathered for Story Conference.
(Given my professional background, a story conference, to me, is not about sharing interesting ways to teach the Bible, but about what's going in the newspaper the next day and also a little bit about dodging your editor. But I digress. It totally would not be something that needed an Irish band.)

They had a bunch of displays and companies setting up their tables in the lobby, including a big book vendor, who was right underneath us. We hung out in the upstairs balcony overlooking all the scenery and played tunes together for an hour and a half.
Not a bad gig, really. Jamie had the run of the area, since nobody else was up there. We had a Plan B In Case of Fussy Toddler, but we didn't have to put it into effect.
The theater had several amenities for a small person to entertain himself with, once he finished dancing around, eating his banana, snacking on a handful of pretzels and sitting on Edward's lap. We were sitting in front of floor-to-ceiling picture windows that overlooked a busy street with lots of different vehicles rumbling past, and the Fox River, with a big splashing dam. Jamie spent a lot of time looking out the windows, and a lot of time looking at the people in the lobby.
It was some lobby.
The guy organizing the event said he wanted us to "lend an air of theatricality" to the lobby. We were not the only ones doing this. There were people in costume, who looked like they had stopped by from "A Christmas Carol" and "Hello Dolly!" There was a harlequin juggling, a pair of angels and a British police officer, which gave Edward a start.

Best of all? On the landing directly opposite us, a group of puppeteers set up and made their dinosaurs and dragons and monkeys dance to our music. I wish I could have gotten a photo of the dancing skeletal dinosaur.

Anyway, we finished up, took our air of theatricality, made a brief pitch to the guy who hired us about our services as a contra dance band with traveling caller who could provide his church with a fun, intergenerational activity, and left.
Then we stopped off at the Corner Bakery on our way home so Edward and the Fool could get bacon-and-egg sandwiches and coffee, and I could get oatmeal (I have become such a creature of habit that when I'm out, I buy the same breakfast I make at home. Lame!) and within an hour of arriving home, Jamie and I were both napping.

fall day

2009-10-21T17:01:00.002-05:00

Today is, I'm afraid, probably one of the last fine fall days we'll have before cold blustery weather sets in. We may get a couple more, but I'm not holding out too much hope for it. The Old Farmer's Almanac says we're in for it this winter.

Anyway, Jamie and I have hooked up with a new playgroup that likes to get outside a lot, so when today's expedition to a local forest preserve with a lake and a walking trail hit my in-box, I made sandwiches, packed a banana and we headed out.

The lake had ducks and lots of people walking dogs, and falling sycamore leaves, and all in all, it was a Good Day. It was such a good day that someone has been asleep for three, going on four hours.

In the quiet, rather than clean, or load the dishwasher, or pick stuff up, or even mess with my walnut skins and my crappy bucket, I cast on for Baktus, a scarf that allows me to do something I absolutely adore in knitting - make striped garments with long-repeat self-striping yarns.
The two-row Noro scarf everyone made last year, or maybe the year before? Loved it. Would knit one for everyone I know with a neck if I could.
This uses a Zauberball I bought at Stitches Midwest, and so far, it's utterly captivating. It's going to be my computer desk knitting.

A trip to the goat zoo

2009-10-20T22:23:00.003-05:00

Jamie and I went to the Cosley Zoo today, a little local zoo with farm animals and some examples of the local wildlife. I couldn't pull him away from the Nubian goat pen, not even to look at the sheep or the two llamas. Goats, goats, goats. He likes to sit cross-legged in front of animals that entertain him, as I found when he planted himself in front of some puppies at a pet store last week.
So he planted himself in the barn in front of the goat pen and giggled when the baby goat walked all over an adult goat.
We had a near mohair-disaster, speaking of goats and Jamie. We were in Knitche on Monday, and Jamie, who is getting over a cold, sneezed, a big, wet boogery sneeze, and before I could get a tissue out of my pocket and catch him, he rubbed his hand over his nose in bewilderment and reached for a pretty fuschia ball of Kidsilk Haze.
I have never moved so fast in my life.
Goats aside, Knitpicks came through, and tomorrow, I will be taking my crappy bucket and my sack of black walnut hulls and starting some kind of a dyebath.
Pictures to follow.

It's gone and gotten cold around these parts....

2009-10-12T10:04:00.002-05:00

... it's making me think of mittens. Particularly Jamie mittens. I looked at some at the store and the problem is that they seem to be sold in sets with matching hats. He has a goodly number of hats already and needs no more. I just need the mittens. Preferably multiple sets of the same color. He seems to be too young for thumbs, thank dog, because I think knitting a tiny thumb, nevermind persuading him to use it, would be crazymaking.
So I think I'll go through the sack of worsted weight yarn, find a cheerful color, and knit him a bunch of little mittens.

And, thanks to the commenters, I'm also thinking about how I could get some plain wool to run through a dyebath of black walnut hulls. Sigh. I guess I could just place the KnitPicks order today and be done with it, or I could horse around trying to find something at my LYS or at JoAnns - maybe that Lion's Brand stuff?
Like I need more projects this week.

Friday night

2009-10-09T20:33:00.002-05:00

FOOL: Are you OK?
ME: I'm trying to get up the energy to trace around my foot.
FOOL: Why do you want to do that?
ME: Because Cat Bordhi is telling me to.
FOOL: If Cat Bordhi told you to jump off a bridge....
ME: (withering glance.)

Apropros of nothing: I wish Nancy Bush would write more. I've been re-reading "Folk Socks," and it has the same effect "Knitting Vintage Socks" had on me - an urge to call Knitpicks, order 40 size 1 circulars and cast on every ball of sock yarn in the stash at once. I suppose I could pick up "Knitted Lace of Estonia," but that way lies madness.

We steeked at knitting group on Wednesday. That's Lorna, working on a Cheryl Oberle pattern. It's funny; patterns that call for steeks rarely offer much hand-holding. Everyone stood around and watched her with a great deal of interest. Or they were standing around watching, the way people like to gape at car crashes on the interstate.
Our Starbucks got remodeled, and Dana was chatting with one of the employees about the new look. The employee said, "Well, some people are complaining because they think it's too contemporary," to which Dana said, "God, they're not living here. They're just coming in for a cup of coffee!" One of the features of the remodel is a big conference table under four overhead lights in the back - the barista showed it off like they put it in for us specially. So funny. Although, you figure, 10 or so people, each good for a drink at least, and usually a cookie or piece of pound cake too, we're probably decent business for them on a Wednesday night.

There's been a lot of knitting going on around here. I've been trying to finish up projects and the Fool, typically the most monogamous of knitters, has ... gasp .. two things going on at once! Last night, he worked on Thing 2 (part of Jamie's Halloween costume, which is from the Martha Stewart Halloween magazine, and let me say, typically "Martha," in that it looks very simple, until you read the directions closely and it turns out you're not only supposed to locate a cloth pilot cap, but you're supposed to dye it to match. Ha. We went to a Pittsburgh knitting store's Wall O'Cascade and did some digging on Ravelry. Dye to match, my foot.) and I finished a Baby Surprise Jacket.

Following EZ's directions, I gave the amorphous bit of knitting to the Fool and challenged him to fold it into a garment of some sort.

Good times, good times.

Generally....

2009-10-07T22:59:00.003-05:00

.... the Yarn Harlot has improved my fiber life. She's funny, I like hearing her give speeches, I thought the Sock Summit was a whole lot of fun, all good.
Except on her blog, in the past, she's talked about the Heat Wars, in which she and her brother compete to see who will be the last to turn on their heat in the face of a Canadian winter.
This year, the Fool decided to play. (Why he couldn't pay attention to the parts of her blog that talk about spinning or Latvian mittens, I don't know).
He issued the invitation on Facebook and has several takers, surprisingly. A lot of our friends live in apartments or condos, so don't have any control over when the heat goes on. One friend has twin babies, so I said she was off the hook. (Although she's a knitter, so she could knit them stuff. But she has two, so, nevermind.) But a handful - either cheap or green - are in. Someone even asked if we could issue handicaps so people in California and Washington DC could also compete.
My friend Barb nobly refrained from snarking when she didn't point out that most mornings, the Fool goes off to a nice, climate-controlled office building, so in reality, Jamie and I are the ones saving money and the environment by keeping the heat off.
The house is well-insulated, though, and is somewhere between 65 and 68 degrees most mornings. It stays cool until the sun hits the big windows in the living room, and then it warms up. It's often warmer outside than it is in the house, at least until about mid-morning.
It's been a little nippier than I like it, but not impossible to manage with wool socks and a sweater. Jamie has been getting lots of mileage out of his frog sweater and I make a big mug of tea first thing. We've also been eating oatmeal for breakfast, and today, I found if I put the bowl in my lap, I can warm my hands on it.
I just wish he'd warned me that he was cooking up this idea. I could have been engaging in protective knitting ahead of time, maybe making myself a nice cardigan over the summer, rather than messing around with lace and socks.

Duck! Bonk!

2009-10-04T22:59:00.002-05:00

We are full of adventure these days, chez Sock Knitters.
On Sunday, the Fool and Jamie and I went apple picking, and then returned home to do a little gathering of our own.

We have two black walnut trees, and last year, after the Fool drove over the fallen walnuts with the mower (ka-thonk, ka-thonk, ka-thonk!), he asked, "how come we don't eat these?" I said, "Because they're a pain in the neck to get out of the shell."
This year, we decided to go pick the walnuts up before the Fool mows next weekend. Somehow, this turned into actually harvesting the walnuts. He consulted that valuable reference for squirrels everywhere, the Internet and Facebook, and decided the best way to get the husks off the walnuts would be to run them over repeatedly with the car. Now, there are trays of walnuts drying, a bunch of walnuts in the driveway (it's my job to drive over them) and I guess I'm going to make a black walnut pound cake at some point in the next couple months.
His fingers are stained black, because the rubber gloves he was wearing had holes in the fingers he didn't see, and so far, people have asked him if he has forgotten to wash his hands, or if he is a mechanic.

The Fool and Edward shake tree branches to knock down walnuts. We giggled about the bike helmets, but both of them got conked on the head with falling nuts.

Today, Jamie and I went to the Cosley Zoo in Wheaton. It's run by the park district, and is just about enough zoo for someone like Jamie to handle. They have a well-stocked duck pond, with many different kinds of ducks, a selection of wild animals native to the area, a pen of peacocks, a bunch of rabbits and a good assortment of farm animals. We were supposed to meet some playgroup friends, but it was raining, and they bailed. I decided we were not going to let some drizzle stop us from seeing animals, dammit, so fortified with the Power of Wool (socks for me and a hat for him), fleece jackets and an umbrella, Jamie and I had the run of the place and only got a little damp.

Damp llamas!

The knitting continues. I recovered from the case of Finish-itis I had contracted last week and cast on a brainless sock for playground knitting, another toe-up sock with Mini Mochi and a hat for Jamie that looks like an owl. Sigh. I thought I gained some ground on the projects, too. Well, the hat is a fast knit, at least.

The dark side of a SWAK

2009-10-04T09:26:00.001-05:00

That's "Spouse Who Also Knits."
We are meeting some friends at an apple orchard this morning. It's about an hour away. The Fool is in the middle of some fancy sleeve knitting that has captured his attention. I'm in the middle of some interesting stuff, too.
FOOL: So, if I drive out there, will you drive back?
ME: Equal knitting time?
FOOL: Yep.

Pittsburgh Family Reunion

2009-10-02T22:53:00.007-05:00

We took a trip to Pittsburgh last weekend to attend a family reunion. We got to see my family again, and Jamie got to meet them.

Outside of the reunion itself, we spent some time with my mother. Jamie got to play with my childhood xylophone.

We met up with my father at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. Jamie got to have a look around. He likes fish tanks quite a bit.

In appreciation and reciprocation, Jamie took Meg to a local yarn store in Squirrel Hill.

On our way back from Pittsburgh, we spend a half day in Cleveland seeing some of the more interesting sights. For us, this included a visit with some friends, a lunchtime visit to the West Side Market and a trip to Knitgrrl's studio.

The market was simply amazing.

We spent an hour wandering around all of the nooks and crannies, buying whatever we thought would last in the car without a cooler (Drat! You should always travel with a cooler!)

We ended up buying some pierogies, two loaves of bread, some cured sausage, salami, and lunch (we both got the chicken schwarma sandwich while Jamie napped on Meg).

We shared a strawberry and Nutella crepe for dessert. Fantastic!

Knitgrrl's studio promised to be devilishly difficult to find, just as the website warned! It is located in a half-converted industrial building on the west side of town. I walked up the front stairs, and one of the locals asked me who I was looking for. When I told him, he said, "Oh, you'll never find it. Let me show you where it is." He was right. We went around two corners, through a door I never would have guessed to open, and down this hallway:

See that blue door way down on the right? That's it.

Anyways, it was fun to talk with Shannon. She's been a supporter of KnitML since she found out about it a year ago. Jamie was immediately taken with the toddler-sized spinning wheel on the floor.

After we took this picture, we realized how quickly Jamie has grown. Both his little lumberjack flannel and his frog pants are noticeably too short. When did that happen?

Anyways, it was a good trip. The drive to Pittsburgh so much easier than last year, for many reasons, but mostly it was because Jamie was a bit older and could appreciate a good car ride. The bad part, however, was the inexplicable vomiting that started during the last leg of the trip. Fortunately, the upholstery of carseats come off and can be thrown directly into the washing machine. Clearly, this has happened to many babies in the world before Jamie.

Socktoberfest fail

2009-10-02T22:40:00.002-05:00

Socktoberfest is not off to a rollicking start around here. I thought I'd celebrate by finishing up two unfinished pairs of socks that have been languishing for a while. Here's my current status:
Pair 1: unfinished sock located, needles still holding the toe stitches of a second sock elsewhere, pattern missing.
Pair 2: first sock located, pattern in my purse, second ball of yarn totally missing.

The second pair irks me. First, I knit a sock, then I couldn't find the second ball of yarn. I found the yarn, but lost the first sock. Then I finally found the first sock in a strange and unpredictable place, only to discover that the yarn is missing. I put the sock back where I found it, noting to myself its bizarro location, and a couple days later, the yarn turned up. Finally, I went and got the sock from its secret home and yesterday? Could not find the yarn. It's like the two items can't exist together in the same knitting project bag.
Ironically, I have been carrying the lace pattern for this sock on an index card in my purse for about a year.

To solve the problem, I went stash diving and came up with two balls of self-striping yarn that will make really nice playground knitting. Grrr.

Happy Socktober!

2009-10-01T13:47:00.003-05:00

Somewhat random Thursday.

1. I made a Concord grape pie out of Nancy Baggett's dessert book a couple weeks back because I didn't have enough grapes to make jam with. Baggett said this was a prizewinning recipe from some grape event in New York. I think that's because a) the other pies must have been really, really terrible; or b) this was the only entry in the category of "purple grape pies."
Oh recipe, my recipe, what is wrong with you? The crust called for vegetable oil instead of solid shortening. Ick. The filling tasted like forkful upon forkful of grape jam. Weird. I'm afraid Concords pretty much taste like grape juice or grape jelly and any other use is doomed.

2. I discovered, when I had to put Jamie in one of the emergency disposable diapers we keep around here for airports and laundry crises, that the only thing the kid has to hold his pants up is his big cloth diaper and cover. In cloth, he wears 12-month pants; in paper, he's lucky to get 9-month pants that stay up.

3. The Fool enjoys talking to me when I am half awake, and I'm only posting this to beat him to it. Previous conversations featured Ron Yaga, the usually anonymous husband of the Russian folklore witch Baba Yaga (the one who rides in a mortar and pestle and lives in a hut on chicken feet) and what Claude Monet's nieces and nephews did when they saw him (answer: Yelled "aaaaagh!") Last night, I explained, in somewhat exasperated tones, that pants are actually called "Joy to the worlds," because everyone is happy to see a person wearing pants and not walking around in their underwear. If the Fool were a dog, that conversation would be the smelly thing he is rolling in with great, overflowing happiness.

4. It is getting colder here and so in honor of fall arriving, and partly because I can, I put on a fresh pair of never-worn-before handknit socks. These are toe up! I have never knit toe-up socks before. I learned how to do this at Sock Summit (I think my reasoning was that I wasn't going all that distance to listen to people tell me how to do things I was comfortable with in sock knitting) from Deb Barnhill's "Toe Up Socks For the Stubborn" class. Next time, I think I need to make the foot of the sock a little shorter. I didn't really understand that until I knit it. I also need to be more diligent about writing down relevant numbers, stitch counts at various points, etc. The second sock had a little creative knitting to it, as I tried to remember how it went.

Judy's Magic Cast-on at the toe, EZ's sewn bindoff at the top, Charlene Schurch's garter rib in between. Yarn is Colinette Jitterbug in Blue Parrot.

it's a miracle anything happens around here

2009-09-17T23:34:00.002-05:00

FOOL: (looking at the diaper pail) I wonder why the thing doesn't close?
ME: (thinking he is talking about the nightstand) Because it's stuffed full of magazines and books.
FOOL: No, it's not.
ME: It is. They're probably stuck in the hinge or something.
FOOL: It stopped working when I took the insert out.
ME: It doesn't have an insert.
FOOL: Yes, it does.
ME: What are you talking about?

Wednesday night

2009-09-16T22:50:00.005-05:00

A few random things:
http://xkcd.com/369/

So once the Fool got out of the hospital last week, we thought we were done with Bad and Inconvenient Things.
Then Angus had a serious and dramatic lapse in litterbox habits that not only required me to use a flashlight to look for cat poop in Jamie's room where he was sleeping, but caused Angus to take a trip to the vet this week.
The vet explained that cats who venture outside their litterboxes in the dramatic manner that Angus did (and I'm sparing you all the gory details, but let me just say if you're ever in my living room, sit on the couch, not the armchair) are generally not ill with any kind of kidney infection, nor are they making a comment about the condition of their litterbox. Instead, he theorized that Angus is suffering anxiety about something, and is generally upset.
The vet suggested I go to the pet store and get some of this cat pheromone spray and spritz that around the house liberally to improve feelings of feline well-being (kind of like lavender for people, maybe?) and put out another litterbox, and if that doesn't work, then we can take Angus to an animal behaviorist he recommended (cat shrink) or try drugs (cat Prozac.) Sigh.
I really hope the spray works.
Then, because he felt better over the weekend, the Fool decided to tackle some household projects. He oiled our deck furniture with linseed oil and threw the rags out. I forgot - and the Fool never knew - that linseed-oil soaked rags spontaneously combust if you wad them up and put them in a closed container. When we returned home Sunday night from a contra dance I called at, the house reeked and I suddenly remembered about the rags. Jamie wanted to nurse himself to sleep, and after we determined there were no leaping flames, I went to settle the kid down, and the Fool continued the search accompanied by inadequate narrative, so I had to stage whisper questions from the bedroom.

ME: What is on fire? Is anything on fire?
FOOL: Sort of.
ME: Sort of? What is sort of on fire?
FOOL: Well, it's not really a fire. It's just sort of ... smoldery.
ME: Not really a fire!?! Is it a fake fire?!
FOOL: It's OK. Mostly.
ME: ?!?!?!

The lidded kitchen garbage can that I felt so smug about buying, because it locks and keeps Jamie out of the trash, is on time-out in the yard until I can figure out how to wash the sticky oily smoke residue off the inside of the lid.
And you should all be warned: Linseed oil soaked rags are flammable.

I've been knitting, too. I finished the Fool's socks from Vintage Knitted Socks. These are with a Dutch heel and a wide toe, made from Opal Hundertwasser yarn.

View of Dutch heel from the bottom.

I wanted something without a lot of fancy knitting going on, so the giant expanses of stockinette were just what the yarn needed.

It's finally cooling off here, so Jamie can wear the sweater his dad knit for him last spring when we were in Seattle. It's a Dale of Norway pattern, which I could go look up if I hadn't gone biking with Jamie today and made my legs tired. I don't know what to make of this picture. He looks really mature for a kid in a frog sweater.

p.s. I found the bratwurst. The package had slipped down behind some other things in the freezer. Thawed, simmered in beer and onions, ate. Delicious.

Ravelry continues to amaze me

2009-09-13T14:49:00.001-05:00

They have a feature that links you to a massive online library catalog so you can search for a book in your local library without going to the library home page, logging in, etc.

Wow. What a week.

2009-09-11T17:27:00.003-05:00

On Wednesday, Jamie took a long nap and I started in on my new favorite hobby - cleaning off the dining table. This time, I decided no matter what I picked up, I would see that object to its final destination, whether it was the trash, the recycling or its home in the house.

I found that I had been avoiding hand-sewing by hiding all the projects under junk mail. Procrastinate no more, I told myself, going for needle and thread.

They are, from left clockwise: a fabric owl purse with a loose eye, four buttons sewn on Jamie's new shirt (he kind of picked the fabric out himself by pointing and hooting), a $1 duck I found somewhere that developed a small hole, and a selection of fabric beans that I made after Jamie spent a weekend collecting small hand-sized rocks. The beans, while fun to make and fun to dump out of a plastic cup and put back in ... are also fun for Angus, who likes to play bean hockey each morning on top of me as I try to sleep.
(Angus acquired another obnoxious habit recently: at 4 a.m. when he discovers his food dish is empty, he climbs on top of me and bites my butt.)

Wednesday afternoon, all heck broke loose when the Fool came home sick from work and ended up in the ER. He is fine now, home and happy to be here, after spending a couple nights in the hospital. Obviously, it wasn't under the best circumstances, but he had the presence of mind to take his knitting when the three of us left for the hospital and made some good progress on Jamie's sweater.

Now we are all home, and the turkey bratwurst I had planned to cook for dinner are mysteriously missing. They've either crept into a far corner of the freezer, are growing disgusting under the seat in the car because they fell out of a grocery bag, or Angus has cooked and eaten them, because I think even he would not eat frozen sausages.

It's Thursday night, so that means minestrone soup

2009-09-03T22:00:00.007-05:00

burbling on the stove, because the Cosmic Otters are heading for Michigan tomorrow to help a dance friend celebrate his wedding with a big dance weekend. It promises to be laid-back, which is nice. Jamie will enjoy the time messing around outside in the late summer sunshine, and we'll get time to hang around as well. I plan to do some canoeing with Edward (the Fool doesn't find lake paddling exciting; Edward is generally up for outdoorsy adventures of all sorts) and look for freshwater jellyfish.
Last weekend, my friend Janice and I went to the Chicago Antique Market, outdoors in the West Loop. The Fool decided that an outdoor antique show didn't sound like much fun, so he and Jamie went to the Downers Grove farmer's market, bought fruit and corn and ate mini-doughnuts while I got on a train and knitted my toe-up sock.

Colinette Jitterbug; no idea what color. Well, obviously, blue. Colorway unknown. Sock pattern largely of my own devising, except for all the numbers that make it work; I got those off Deb Barnhill at Sock Summit.

The antique market was a lot of fun, although I think antiques are more outside my price range than plain old junk. We both saw some things we would have bought had money been no object, and in the end, we both bought a few little things. Janice got a cool purse at the indie crafts fair also at the market, and I bought a string of Indian cloth elephants from some vendor's $2 bin, plus three blown glass balls.

Here's what I love about shopping with Janice.
ME to GUY: How much are you selling these for?
GUY: The little ones are $12, the big ones are $15.
JANICE to ME: You can either hang one or three. Two won't look good. I think you should get three.
ME: Hmm, I dunno (doing math in head.)
JANICE to GUY: Hey, will you give us a deal if we buy three?
GUY: Uh, sure. How about three for $35?
JANICE: (withering glare.)
GUY: Or three for $30?
ME: Sold.
Is she not the kind of friend you want to take car shopping?

Painter Janice stopped to chat with. She's on the very far left in a baseball cap.

Interesting old mirrors. I started trying to imagine where I would hang one of these in my house.

Old kitchenware. I loved the colors, and I sort of fell in love with the glass dishes on the upper left, but they seemed pricey. I may keep my eye out for them at thrift shops, where hopefully they will be priced like junk and not antiques.

The long view. Something funny I should have photographed but didn't: someone was selling old workshop stools for, like, $25 each. I swear they came from my father's garage. Like, if I didn't know for sure those stools were still in the garage, I would have bet this guy had stolen them somehow. I had no idea the junky things were worth money ... heehee.

Jamie and I have been trying to get out and enjoy the sunshine while it lasts. Winter's only too close. We went to the arboretum this week. I took my brainless sock and a relaxed attitude, and he looked at whatever he felt like for as long as he wanted. Here he is figuring out wood chips and coneflowers.

Kid with flooers.

Yesterday, we went to the library, because it was the end of the day and he was getting clingy and I decided for everyone's sanity (OK, mine) we were going to walk the mile to the library and see what there was to see there (which turned out to be lots of books and puzzles and aisles to explore while hooting and giggling). While at the library, I tried to find "Mason-Dixon Knitting," because I have four balls of Lion Organic Cotton I bought at a closeout sale, and I have some friends who are having a baby later this year, and I'm trying really hard not to knit a baby blanket, because I've said over and over, I don't want to fall down that particular crazy-hole, but there are some cute blankets out there, and I could use a brainless garter stitch project for days when Jamie requires a lot of my attention ... and only the fact it was checked out prevented casting on.
(But then Ravelry told me the pattern I want is available for free. Darnit.)

The Fool has been knitting too, but refuses to post, as he believes it's not interesting until he binds off the shoulders. Last night, Angus helped him knit. Angus is preventing the Fair Isle chart from blowing off the Fool's lap.

Back to the hot stove. The dance weekend is largely potluck, and I believe in holding up my potluck obligations, so I'm bringing a Thai noodle salad and a banana cake with mocha frosting that used up the four brown bananas rattling around in the freezer.

Hmmm.

2009-08-29T20:40:00.000-05:00

I seem to have cast on a striped, two-color Baby Surprise Jacket. I have no idea which baby is getting it. Probably the one that fits it when I'm done.

Sugar Hill 2009

2009-08-23T21:33:00.005-05:00

Home and unpacked from the big summer contra dance weekend we like to go to. It's all-volunteer - callers and bands are picked by lottery on Saturday night - and you're just as likely to get a band that's never played together before as you are a band that plays together all the time. The Fool and I played our first contra dance together at Sugar Hill 2002.
Callers might be new, or might be the kind of caller that everyone knows. It's always excellent music and excellent dancing and this year, because the weather was cool for summer, the dancing went until past 2 a.m. Friday night and dawn Sunday morning. The Fool and I, usually happy to hold down late-night time slots until the dancers quit, went to bed early this year, in deference to Jamie, who is not yet old enough to understand things like, "Why don't you read for an hour while I go lie down?"
The Fool was up until 3:30 a.m. playing tunes Saturday night, while I danced. Jamie slept in a nest of blankets on the porch, next to the Fool's chair, until I came and collected him, warm and limp, and we went off to the tent together.

A view from behind our friend Martha (red hair on right, playing fiddle, knitterly aura) of the dance floor. We dance at a Boy Scout camp in their dining hall; fantastic old worn wood floor, which gives everyone fast feet and smooth spins.
Edward's band was playing when we arrived around 9 on Friday. We sat in with them for a couple tunes, which was big fun - I played drums and the Fool added a third fiddle to the lineup. Last night, we borrowed Eric for piano and accordion and added him to the usual Cosmic Otters' two fiddles and guitar. I played drums when Eric played piano so we didn't have to work out chords beforehand. It was great, which is sort of like saying, of a tremendous dinner, "It was good." Or of Mt. Everest, "It was tall." We only got to play an hour on Saturday, but we got lots of cheering at the end, and we got dancers who danced long lines forward and back at the same time and stomped loudly on the balances and clogged at the ends of the lines, and the Fool and Edward and Eric played wonderful harmonies that got tense and discordant and resolved into big, bright sunlight-through-storm-clouds chords. The Fool sort of wants to adopt Eric now (even though his wife would probably object).
Jamie hung out with Rachel through the first two dances, but then rode on my back in his carrier for the third dance, because she was calling with us, and when he complained too loudly, sat on my lap for the fourth dance while I played snare drum.

The $8K String Band (friends of ours from Chicago), playing old-time music Saturday night.

The child development book I have says that babies around Jamie's age become fascinated with putting small objects in containers and taking them out again. The examples the book gives are nice and friendly - a box and blocks, I think.
So far, it's been cat kibble in the water dish, and rocks in the fiddle case. These rocks were a huge hit. I think it's because they were small enough for him to pick up easily, yet big enough that we weren't swooping down to take them away because he might try to eat them. He spent almost all of Saturday afternoon happily messing with rocks while the Fool and I sat around talking, playing tunes and (in my case) showing Rachel how to knit a short row sock heel. Every so often, he'd come over, hand us a rock, sit on a lap for a minute, and then toddle off again on his important explorations.

Jamming on the porch, the Fool on piano, Edward on fiddle, plus our friend Eric on accordion.

Jamie and the Fool enjoy breakfast at FARMbloomington, a restaurant I read about in one of my snooty food magazines. It was not a snooty restaurant at all. We had fresh biscuits with homemade apple butter, coffee and eggs. The Fool's were made into an omelet and wrapped around pulled pork and sliced peppers, with home fries on the side, and mine were over medium, with some kind of deliciously cured bacon, roasted tomatoes and ... French fries. French fries, seasoned with garlic and spices. I sort of wanted their oatmeal of the day, but breakfast is one of those meals that always tastes better when someone else makes it for you, so I picked the breakfast that would dirty me three pans if I cooked it. Also? I really wanted French fries.
Jamie ate eggs, biscuit and apple butter and as many of my fries as he could get his paws on.

The Bloomington, Ind. farmer's market (I want to make a quilt in these colors), where we went in search of heirloom tomatoes and peaches. Found both. Plan to slice the big, beautiful Brandywine I bought for a dollar, mix it with chunks of the tomatoes from our pathetic garden - mostly yellow ones and cherry tomatoes - and serve it for dinner tomorrow with breaded goat cheese, crusty garlic-rubbed bread and shrimp scampi.
And now to bed, because I have not been this tired in a long time, and that's saying a lot.

How You Know You are a Spinning Geek

2009-08-20T23:09:00.004-05:00

So Meg is subscribed to the local Freecycle list. For those who aren't familiar with Freecycle, it's an e-mail list where people give stuff away for free to anyone willing to take it. It keeps stuff out of the landfill, and it's almost always the case that one person's junk is another person's treasure. Just this week someone was giving away zucchini. For anyone who has grown zucchini, you know very well why you might want to do this.

Today's Freecycle conversation went like this:

Meg: Wow, someone in Westmont is giving away "three spindles, all different types."
Me: Oh, there's that spinning guild out in Westmont! I bet they're giving away a top-whorl, a bottom-whirl, and a Turkish spindle! Write them back and ask for them!

(10 minutes later)

Meg: They wrote me back.
Me: Really? What did they say?
Meg: Um... they were a bit perplexed, because they are giving away staircase spindles.

Oregon withdrawal

2009-08-13T23:16:00.005-05:00

A lot of other knit bloggers were talking about post-Sock Summit malaise, and I completely identify. Even though the Fool and I came back to a pretty full week of mostly fun, it was hard getting back into the swing of things after vacation. It always is.
Jamie had his one-year checkup on Tuesday, and I was chatting with the doctor, who also knits (she saw a sock-in-progress sticking out of my purse once and asked if she could take it out to look at while I wrestled Jamie back into his clothes, and another time, she was wearing a Hanne Falkenberg jacket.) I asked if she had been at Midwest Fiber and Folk, and she asked if I was going to Stitches, and I said I probably would go, but only to keep my friends company and not shop because I had just gotten back from Sock Summit.
"You went to Sock Summit!?" she said, loudly enough that Jamie squeaked in startled protest. "I'm so jealous! What classes did you take?"
And my poor kid had to sit there in his diaper staring at the two crazy knitters yammering about socks and yarn over his head.
I'm nearly finished with my first toe-up sock, and it was so much fun, not only do I plan to knit another for my other foot, I plan to knit a couple more pairs after this. I'll put pictures up, because the digital camera decided to heal itself.
I'm trying not to cast on a lace shawl. It may be a lost cause. The only thing holding me back is that Bridgewater takes 1,600 yards and I have a 1,200-yard-skein. I haven't had time to go look and see what I have in the stash, or decide what to do.
I blocked the lace curtain today. It's drying on the guest bed, stretched on a towel covered with a layer of cloth diapers. Hey, you work with what you've got. Angus and Romeo spent today napping right next to it, with barely a toe apiece resting on the actual knitting. Perhaps linen is not as comfortable as wool.
On to the obligatory vacation snapshots.

The Fool and Jamie stand on my aunt's porch in southern Oregon and look at wild turkeys in the yard. Every morning, a flock of them came squawking (it took me eight tries to spell that; time to sleep) through, and every morning, Jamie was fascinated.

Jamie recoils in horror as his father offers him a piece of carrot cake for his birthday. He had a slice of peach instead.

Best stuff ever. Also notable? Pine State Biscuits in SE Portland. Equally good with egg and cheese or jam.
Also notable? The fruit. Dang. We could not eat enough strawberries, cherries or peaches. All three of us just kept hoovering the stuff down. So delicious.

Jamie rides through the Portland Farmer's Market.

Coffee and biscuit sandwiches for breakfast; meanwhile, Jamie goes for a walk to meet other babies.

This is my aunt's new kitten, Sasha. That is my ball of yarn (Bunkybobo's St. Crispin)

Here is Jamie taking the ball of yarn away from the kitten. Good, I said, that's what you do. You take knitting away from cats. You do not ....

... wave it around so they can play with it more.

What I did in Portland

2009-08-11T00:44:00.002-05:00

So Portland was amazing. Not only did I get to spend lots of time hanging around a very cool city with my favorite little guy, but I also got to hang out with friends and family. (Sorry, no pictures because the camera was fully busted by this point.)

Thursday night, we met up with my first cousin once removed in Hillsboro for dinner at her place. She loves food, the outdoors, trips, and really knows how to live life to its fullest out on the west coast. Dinner consisted of locally-caught salmon, an amazing assortment of fresh fruit from local you-pick farms, and vegetables from her garden. We had a fabulous time. Jamie in particular loved Buster and Maggie, two Cavalier King Charles Spaniels 'n 'nat.

We spent Friday dinner with our friends Holly and Steve in Southeast Portland. Meg and Holly got to catch up on old times while Jamie and I played with their two boys. A year back, we had given them a copy of Sam Bartlett's Stuntology. It is out belief that every young boy needs a copy of this book. It was good to see that it was getting lots of use.

On Saturday, Five-Cats-Matt and his wife came down to check out the yarn market and knit on the Big Sock. Well, they didn't know about the Big Sock until they arrived at the Market. But they knit for quite a bit. I knit quite a bit on it as well, for Jamie had fallen asleep on my back at that point. I think we spent about two hours around the table knitting.

Saturday night we had dinner and tunes with Lisa Ornstein, Quebecois fiddler extraordinare. We had a great time discussing music over dinner and then playing some great tunes. I look forward to our meeting again. Also, I think that Five-Cats is now addicted to Quebecois tunes. I sent him a video of Louis Boudreault on YouTube and he is now enthralled.

For the non-knitters

2009-08-10T15:40:00.002-05:00

who read this blog, particularly the Portland ones (Holly? Steve?), here is what the Oregonian had to say about Sock Summit.

Brain full; wallet empty

2009-08-09T02:58:00.002-05:00

Time to come home from Sock Summit.
I spent today in a class on Bavarian twisted stitches, taught by Joan Schrouder, who was great. Those charts are hard to read. And tomorrow, I'm going to a lecture by Anna Zilboorg on Turkish stitches, and I am going to try not to get all fangirl over her, because, wow, do I love Anna Zilboorg. I bought "45 Fine and Fanciful Hats to Knit" when I was a beginning knitter and way not prepared to knit any of it, just because I liked looking at the pictures.
Now to finish packing, and see where the yarn fits.

a thousand words on Sock Summit....

2009-08-08T01:47:00.002-05:00

... because our camera died on the first half of the trip, and so, even though Jamie's first birthday is adequately documented, Sock Summit is, sadly, unphotographed by me. No big deal. Lots of people are taking Sock Summit pictures, but only I took a picture of Jamie recoiling in horror as the Fool offered him a small bite of carrot cake.
When my old newspaper used to send reporters out to cover something big and sprawling, such as the county fair, we used to have to turn in a short feature story on something (rabbit competition, fancy chickens, flea circus, 4H livestock auction ....) and then a "reporter's notebook," which was a short, pithy roundup of other fun things we stumbled across (chat with Optimists' Club about secret cheese curd batter recipe, most popular ice cream flavor by sales volume, names of prizewinning housecats....)
I have a short attention span tonight. Too many short row heels or something.

The Fool has it out for Cat Bordhi
I took a class Thursday with Cat Bordhi, in which she talked about a lot of the ideas in "New Pathways for Sock Knitters," which was really kind of mind-blowing. She showed some other assorted knitterly tricks too, which were not so much mind-blowing but really useful. Then, after lunch, she talked about how she learned to knit while walking. The Fool knits and walks, and honestly, in the past, I've thought it was a little weird.
But having a baby changes one's perspective on things, and now that I have less free time than before, I find myself having arguments with myself about whether I should spend that precious free time going to the gym (nurturing the physical body), or knitting something (nurturing the artistic soul.) As my artistic soul doesn't wear pants, I often pick an entertaining - ha! - step class over knitting - and then I feel a little cheated that I didn't get to knit much that day.
So I listened to her talk about knitting and walking, and this little voice said, "Hey, if you put on your shoes and went for a half-hour walk each night when the Fool got home from work, you could knit and get a little exercise, especially if you got good at walking fast." She made it look pretty easy,* and I mentioned to the Fool that I was going to take this up when I got home.
He was affronted.
"That's not fair! You make fun of me for knitting and walking, but if Cat Bordhi does it ... wait, I get it. You're getting even for the CDs, aren't you?"
See, I often buy CDs by various artists, and listen to them, and the Fool says something noncommital, like, "oh, that's nice." Then, two months later, he stumbles across the CD, pops it into the player, and I come home to find him listening to his new favorite music, which he proceeds to play for two days straight, talking the entire time about how much he loves it.
So yes, maybe it is getting a little bit even.

Speaking the speak of the knit-geeks
Overheard while walking up the sidewalk to Burgerville for lunch (love the Walla Walla onion rings) on the first day.
"We did the French heel, and the German heel and the Dutch heel, and after lunch, we're going to talk about the Welsh heel!"

Setting a world record
I'm never going to be the fastest human being or the tallest, and I haven't the patience to grow the longest fingernails, so when I heard I had a chance to help break the world record for simultaneous knitting, (video here), I signed right up. Me and 934 other people. I think the 236 Australian knitters are toast.
I knit a dishcloth and just before we started, I took it off the 7s I had started it on, and put it on a pair of the Fool's late grandmother's 8s. I like to think she enjoyed being part of the world record with me.

Toes up!
I'm a top down sock knitter. A couple years ago, I started a toe up sock, but I frogged it, because I didn't like it and it was making me nutty. But I have two skeins of yarn with uncertain yardage, and so I signed up for "Toe Up Socks for the Stubborn," taught by Deb Barnhill (who has eaten the same delicious fish and chips in Truro as we did a couple years back; she probably has eaten much more than we have as she lives there, but anyway....)
Now I am knitting a pair of toe up socks, and they are providing the kind of what's-happening-next thrill that a good sock ought to. Too cool.
(Deb also provided a ruling on a question the Fool and I have been debating as we realize we will have to clean up our language right skippy: Is "arse" a "bad word?"
I said yes, because it's too close to "ass," and if some parents (my mother) think "butt" is crude, then "arse" most definitely is. The Fool was hoping he could use it to internationalize his cursing. Deb, who is a parent, said if one of her kids said "arse," she would have to tell them not to use that word. Now we just have to work on making sure Jamie doesn't learn to say "dammit!" from me. )

The Fool and Jamie go to the zoo
Summary of their day: River otters? Good.
Sea otters? Good.
Fruit bats? Beautiful.
Bears? Not dogs. (Jamie is learning sign language. He's not learning it fast enough, because the only two animal signs he knows are "bird" and "dog." I suppose a bear looks more like a dog than a bird, so that's something.)
Orangutans? Not monkeys. (Me: wasn't that a degree of subtlety lost on a 1-year-old? Fool: They're not monkeys. They would be offended if I called them a monkey. Me: I don't think they'd know. Fool: People get offended if you call them monkeys. Me: I'm going to go knit a sock now.)
Monkeys? Humping. (Fool: What is it, every time I see monkeys, they're humping? Me: Are you sure? Fool: This little kid said, 'hey, they're wrestling,' and every adult in there started giggling. They were humping.)

*so while Cat was talking about knitting and walking, the Yarn Harlot poked her head in the room to make sure everything was going OK, and Cat challenged her to a knitting and walking race, but Stephanie never showed up again.

sometimes I'm a little slow on the uptake

2009-07-31T16:40:00.002-05:00

It occurred to me today, as I was hanging out with Jamie at the local arboretum's children's garden, watching him figure out flowers, that .... wheee! I'm going to Sock Summit!!
Yahoo!

eeeee!

2009-07-31T00:49:00.003-05:00

We're busy packing, because it's off to Oregon!
I spent the night going through the list of stuff to bring for classes and winding yarn. The Fool got travel documents ready and looked stuff up on maps.
Jamie got a bath.
The Fool and I had this talk, in which his small-gauge knitting bias shines bright and strong.

ME: I need to remember to bring straight needles.
FOOL: Why?
ME: They're going to try to break a world record for the largest number of knitters knitting together, and it has to be on straight needles.
FOOL: Can anyone do it?
ME: Yeah, if you want. You could participate. You just have to bring straight needles.
FOOL: But I don't have a project on straight needles.
ME: Just knit anything. They don't care what you knit. I'm knitting a dishcloth.
FOOL: Hmm. Well, put these in.
ME: This is a 1 and a 2. They don't match.
FOOL: So?
ME: So, they disqualify people for knitting like idiots, so you have to bring two needles the same size.
FOOL: (Sighs.) Here. Here. Here are some 8s, which are a perfect size for knitting something ridiculous like worsted weight yarn.

I made stitch markers for the stitch marker swap that's going on. The last thing I need to do is take up beading as a hobby, but it was fun to shop that particular aisle of the craft store.

I had no idea Meg is so suggestible

2009-07-28T19:31:00.005-05:00

So our original plan this evening was to make a batch of enchiladas for dinner. Meg doesn't really have a recipe for enchiladas; she just makes it up as she goes along. I, on the other hand, am one of those people who likes to follow recipes to the letter. So guess who was in charge of making dinner!

I decided to clean up the kitchen a bit to give Meg some room to work. Part of this involved me going out back to dump the compost. The compost bin is tantalizingly close to the garden, so I stopped by to check on all of the plants, in particular the tomatoes. There was one ripe cherry tomato and a green tomato that had managed to fall off the vine, so I brought those both in. I figured we could leave the green tomato on the counter for a few days and it would ripen.

So I came back into the house, put the tomatoes on the counter, and continued to clean up the kitchen. A few minutes later...

Meg: *sigh* I don't really want enchiladas for dinner. I mean, I'll make them and all because that's what we planned, but I really want catfish.

Me: *puzzled* ...catfish?

Meg: Yeah.

And it was then that I realized that the sight of the green tomato sitting on the counter set her mind racing about the possibility of Southern comfort food, namely fried green tomatoes and cornmeal-crusted catfish. So after some coaxing, I convinced her to make an unplanned grocery run.

All in all, it was a grand enchilada dinner.

It was a bit of a bizarre day. The power went out some time last night, which meant that my alarm didn't go off this morning. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just work from home.... Oh wait, the power's out, so that means the Internet is out..." On top of that, the Internet went out the day before, so even if we had had power, it wouldn't have matter. On top of that, neither of us were able to shower because we have an electric well pump, and there's only a limited amount of water pressure until the water goes completely.

So we had a nice day frequenting various cafes in the area which have free Wi-Fi.

Jamie had a nice day splashing about at a nearby water park. I guess his swimming trunks ride a bit low, and Meg got a picture of him bending over to pick something up, and... yeah, it's a plumber's butt picture. We'll spare you.

So all that splashing around really tired him out. He took a long nap. On his mom.

Now we're winding down, checking e-mails, and blogging. What crazy adventures will life throw our way tomorrow?

Quiet house

2009-07-22T13:12:00.005-05:00

The Fool is mowing the lawn, Grandma Fool is napping, Jamie is napping, and the cats are all in the basement. So nobody is bothering me for anything and I can use the computer. Here are some random things from the weekend at the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair and beyond.

1. I was the vendor coordinator, which was fun enough that I would do it again. I got to talk to lots of interesting folks, and even though I ran around a lot, I liked it. I got to meet author Nora Murphy, and had read enough of her book, "Knitting the Threads of Time," to be able to say something intelligent about it, other than how much I liked the cover art.

2. Jamie is scared of angora rabbits ... the Fool went to show him the rabbits, thinking, as I did, oh, cute fluffy bunnies, but I guess one of the rabbits gave him a beady-eyed stare (or basically looked at him with a typical rabbity expression) and that was enough to get Jamie to make his "I don't like this" noise and demand to be picked up, safely out of reach of the scary, scary rabbit.

3. Animals Jamie has recently met that he does like: Ducks, toads, alpacas. Every time he saw the paddock of alpacas, he pointed and hooted and insisted that whomever was with him take him closer so he could look at them.
The Fool spent a lot of time at the fair hanging around the alpacas. They were there so often, Jamie even got a little souvenir of alpaca fiber to fondle. Here he is napping with a keepsake from his woolly friend.

4. In light of our stunning success with alpacas, I think the Wisconsin Sheep and Wool Festival is a must-do this fall.

5. Grandma Fool's visit is going just fine. I see my role as facilitator -- I keep Jamie well-fed, clean and happy so his grandmother can get in all the time she likes playing with him. We've been to the botanic gardens and to an Irish festival where the Fool played and out for gelato. The two went for a walk today and yesterday and spend lots of time looking at books together and playing some kind of horsie game in German that I really ought to videotape for the sake of preserving family culture.

6. The Fool is old today! I made him blueberry pancakes for breakfast (note to self: miniature blueberry pancakes for Jamie, while cute and delicious, are too messy to have been a smart idea. Hence the shirtless dining.)

And I made him a birthday cake, which we are taking to a block party this evening to share. That's a triple-layer, made-from-scratch devil's food cake you're looking at. It's in such opposition to things like the fruit desserts and oatmeal cookies I usually make, I felt rebellious melting all the different kinds of chocolate, and banging around cartons of whole cream and cream cheese and butter.

7. Preparations continue for the trip out West. My aunt offered to watch Jamie for one night while the Fool and I go to the Ashland Shakespeare Festival. So weird. With the exception of two wedding gigs, we haven't ever been away from the little wiggler for an evening, and certainly not an evening that resembles a date. So weird. (It's "Much Ado About Nothing" set in 1940s Italy.)

8. The Herringbone Rib socks completely kicked my butt. I could not knit those things correctly to save my life, and they were going really slowly and I have to get these socks done sooner, so I bailed for a simpler pattern from "Knitting on The Road." Picture later.

I had a great weekend....

2009-07-21T09:22:00.003-05:00

...at the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair, and I want to put up a couple pictures and write about it, but Grandma Fool is arriving for a long weekend on Wednesday night, and I have a lot of shopping and errand-running to accomplish, the library books are overdue and Jamie wants a banana. In other words, more later....

In an attempt to save Jamie...

2009-07-14T16:34:00.003-05:00

... from my fate, that of a non-swimmer, he and I have been pursuing the arts aquatic for several months now. My parents tried repeatedly to get me to learn to swim, starting with my mother's ancient Hawaiian traditional method of instruction.
She threw me in a pool.
I sank.
So much for that thing about people knowing instinctively how to swim.
My father sent me to swimming lessons at the park district, where, after six weeks, they convinced me to hold my breath underwater for five seconds, but not to venture beyond an arm's length of the edge.
"You don't have to be a great swimmer," my father kept telling me. "Hell, you don't even have to be a good swimmer, you just have to be able to swim enough to save your life." He was in the Navy during World War II, and when U.S. forces accidentally sank his ship, he (obviously) was able to swim enough. (I also think he might have had some floating wreckage, too.)
My parents sent me to swimming lessons at summer camp for three years. I tried to learn to swim in high school, in college and when I turned 30, each time getting a little closer.
So each week, Jamie and I suit up and go off to the gym and get in the pool with the rest of the Diaper Dippers, and sing songs and play games, and go underwater, and each week, I am greeted with solemn tolerance from someone whose pants I have to change every two hours. Those are the good weeks.
Last week, when we were running late, and I splashed down the steps and over to our class, Jamie tucked under my arm, he was Not Amused and grumbled loudly for the entire half hour, while clinging to my left side like a barnacle.
This week, when I sat Jamie up on the side of the pool for "Humpty Dumpty," which ends with "One, two, three, jump!" I got the same look from him that I used to get from my father, especially in his later years, as I tried to jolly him into going to the doctor, or something similar - an expression that basically said, "I think this is stupid, but I'm humoring you anyway."
That stopped me cold for a few seconds. No one expects their father's face on their small kid.
Then we recited Humpty Dumpty, and after we counted to three, all the babies got to jump in the pool (or in Jamie's case, get lifted), and go underwater, and he came up wide-eyed and yelling mad and stayed that way until the end of class.
Today, we went to a kiddie water park with our playgroup, with fountains and showers and a rubberized surface to run around on, and Jamie was cautiously interested, until a big kid stepped on a small burbling fountain, and like putting a finger over a garden hose, sprayed everyone nearby. Jamie emerged wide-eyed and yelling mad, and clung to me like a barnacle for 15 minutes before I could even suggest he might want to put his feet in a puddle.
Luckily, there were ducks hanging around the picnic tables, waiting for kids to drop sandwich crumbs, or else I think he would have considered the entire day a waste. Oh, and he got to eat a whole kiwifruit when we got home, so more to the good.
I had something to say about knitting, but I can't remember what.

(On a weird note, I was taking a shower tonight, and Jamie tottered into the bathroom, pulled the curtain open and watched me for some time. I explained the whole thing, how showering involved standing under water, and how it felt nice, and how it was pretty rude to watch people take showers, so could he go find something else to do, which was more directed at the Fool, and which actually meant, "Can you come in here and take Jamie away with you and shut the door, too, because I would like five unsupervised minutes of my life today." Point being, he didn't mind the water then.)

The week of fests

2009-07-13T00:16:00.004-05:00

Just finished up with the Chicago Folk and Roots Fest, where the Fool clogged Saturday as part of a team in the fiddle competition (they took second place!) Check out the skirts - Rachel and I made those. Rachel and Edward are on the far left, there. The Fool is on the far right.

Next weekend is the Midwest Fiber and Folk Art Fair, for which I am the vendor coordinator. No fun photo of that yet - it's mostly me answering emails and talking to myself.

I got a skein of yarn from my friend Sandy, who sells it on Etsy (her shop name is Bunkybobo). She's selling it at Sock Summit, but not in person, and I volunteered to knit some sample socks. So far, I like this yarn quite a bit (and I'm not just saying it because she's my friend.) It doesn't pool weirdly. But that doesn't stop me from making hash of the pattern - Herringbone Rib Socks from Knitting Socks with Variegated Yarns. Sigh. I really want to make this work.

Here's a leftover picture of the dancers at the Delafield contra dance weekend. The problem with these things is that when we're playing, I can't take pictures, so you get photos of a lot of people standing around. Trust me, they move more than this in real life.
And now, to bed ....

Among the Muggles

2009-07-09T14:16:00.003-05:00

ME: Sorry I didn't make it to the meeting; I'm doing a lot of work for this fiber festival, and Tuesday turned out to be the only free night I have this week, so I wanted to stay home.
OTHER PERSON: Fiber festival?
ME: Yeah, like, yarn and knitting and fiber arts.
OP: Ohhh! I thought you meant fiber in the diet.
ME: Like oat bran?
OP: Yes!
ME: I don't know how much fun that kind of a fiber festival would be.

Unfortunately, that is about as much time as I'm spending with the fiber arts this week. Unless you count working with Rachel to assemble tiered skirts for a clogging team which she and Edward and the Fool volunteered for, and which is performing Saturday afternoon at the Chicago Folk and Roots Festival. Naturally, because I have a deadline on these skirts, I had a lapse of brainfulness regarding the measurements I needed, and am re-engineering three of them. Sigh.

Jamie took up walking over the Fourth of July weekend. We were at a contra dance weekend, and he walked six steps, then 10, and then a bunch. He still prefers crawling, but periodically walks a little bit too. I'll put up some pictures from the weekend as soon as I remember to bring the camera in from the car. Jamie had a decent time, I think, even though the Fool and Edward and I had to play a lot (we were one of the hired bands.) He hung around with Rachel, and we wore him on our backs when it seemed like he wanted to sleep a bit. Sometimes, he objected loudly and unhappily, but mostly, he looked around at the dancers and everyone else on stage.

All the bipedal business has made Jamie a bit clingy, and Angus has got a mood upon him as well, so now, whenever I nurse Jamie to sleep, Angus comes and cuddles up behind me, which is nice and all, but it's getting hot here - and I do not like being the filling in their Big Sandwich O' Love. The Fool says to close the bedroom door, but I don't remember to do that until I feel Angus leap onto the bed and get snuggly.

OK. Jamie is still napping, and I have one more skirt to fix. We are going to take the train downtown in a bit to meet the Fool and our friends Susan and Christian and Wee Liam for dinner at a place with Thursday-night-specials on fancy wood-oven pizzas. Yum.

There's an oriole in the pear tree

2009-07-01T15:51:00.004-05:00

Not, "There's an Oreo in the pantry," or more bizarrely, "There's an Oreo in the pear tree," which are the two things the Fool thought I was calling to tell him, rather than my latest ornithological observation.
(I'd just called him to go on about what a pill his son was being, so I felt like I should give him something nice to think about too. Instead, he thought he was getting some kind of weird cookie update.)
I finished a pair of socks for Rachel the other night. These were so much fun to knit; Socks That Rock in Puck's Mischief, a pattern from Knitting Vintage Socks. Now the needles are free again, which is good, as I have a sock project in the works that's going to be a lot of fun.

We've been gigging a lot lately, which has been a challenge because Jamie is really trying hard to learn to walk and so tends to be kind of clingy when he's not staggering around holding onto furniture with one hand. It's tough, because we take these gigs months in advance and sort of guess as to what Jamie might be up to when the actual date comes. These days, our strategy centers on keeping him well fed, because he seems happier with a full stomach, like anyone, really. But usually, Jamie ends up on our backs. He slept on my back during the Saturday night Milwaukee Irish set dance gig.

Then on Monday, the Cosmic Otters played our home dance, which was terrific fun. We did well, too, which makes me happy, because Friday night, at the Delafield contra dance weekend, I think we'll be in great form.

Jamie hangs out with the Fool while we tune.

I had to take a couple breaks to nurse, and Jamie wanted to sit on my lap while I played guitar, which is nice in concept, but trying in practice, because he likes to hold the guitar neck. One set of tunes like that, and then he went back on the Fool for the rest of the dance.

I don't get this expression of his at all. But note how he's fretting the bass strings at, like, the 11th fret. So helpful. At least he wasn't messing around with the tuning pegs. I hate to think what will happen when he figures out how to turn them.

TGIF!

2009-06-26T16:48:00.003-05:00

It has been a trying week chez Sock Knitters. I don't know what it was - the heat, the hormones, a thousand small annoyances - but I'm glad things turned around.*
Today, Jamie and I went to the local crunchy moms' playgroup. They're nice people, although in chatting with one, she remarked that she's been in a bit of a mood too this week, which she credits in part to the digestive system cleanse she is on. She was explaining what she's been drinking for 10 days now and how her body has been reacting, and let me just say that if I were doing that, I would not have time to go to playgroup, because I would be too busy looking for places to hide the bodies. I couldn't help but think that if she ate something, that might take the edge off, but, eh, not my colon.**
I'm glad she finds it rejuvanating.
Jamie had a great time.
The host mom put out a wading pool, so he puddled in that for a while. Then he crawled down the porch steps and we went for a ride in a swing hanging from a tree. Then the big friendly dog came over and snuffled at me and licked my cheek while Jamie shrieked with laughter, and then we practiced walking barefoot in the grass and ate some watermelon and blueberries.
Honestly, I think everyone should get a day like that.
This afternoon, I went back to the eye doctor. I have an infection in my right eye and I've been wearing my glasses all week and squinting into the sun when I drive and muttering about smeary fingerprints on the lenses and fooling around with eye drops, and this has not made me cheerful. (Annoyances #756-761.)
Jamie was parked in his stroller by the sink, banging the cabinet door happily, and I was knitting a sock when she came in. We had this talk:

DOCTOR: Oh, what are you making?
ME: A sock.
DOCTOR: What else do you knit?
ME: Uh, well, most things. I make sweaters sometimes, and hats, and occasionally a fancy dishcloth, but I like socks because they're portable.
DOCTOR: (Carries on with eye doctor stuff.) Is that yarn different colors, or are you changing yarn as you knit?
ME: It's variegated yarn - I'm too lazy to do it the other way. So, um, do you knit too? (thinking
she is showing a lot of interest in my knitting for a Muggle.)
DOCTOR: No, but I've been thinking I'd like to learn how to do something with my hands like that.
ME: You know, there's a knitting group that meets at the Panera across the street on Friday nights.
DOCTOR: Really?
ME: Yes. (Aside: I love how people say that, like I'm going to say, 'Aw, no, I'm just kidding. A knitting group? Come on.')
DOCTOR: Do you charge money?
ME: Uh, no. We meet at Panera and sit and knit.
DOCTOR: At a big table?
ME: Well, there's at least a half dozen people, so, yeah, a big table. We get there around 6, 6:30 p.m. and we knit until they kick us out.
DOCTOR: Really? So I could come after work some time?
ME: Yes, you could, and I bet someone would show you how to knit.
So she has my email and I told her if she was going to come, to drop me a line, and I would bring some extra needles and yarn to teach her with.
Here's the socks that helped net a convert.
Feather-and-fan, oh, how I love thee, feather-and-fan, turning goofy pooling variegated yarns into organized stripes. I'm even going to knit a short row heel so I don't interrupt the nifty striping thing going on. It's made of Blackberry Ridge wool in the Tropical Fish colorway, and I bought it one winter when I was sick with a cold, (so judgment was impaired) and needed to look at something colorful.

* Things that helped turn the week around: Iced coffee with skim milk and one packet turbinado sugar; great garage sale deal wherein I got two Jamie-sized playground balls, a cute outfit and a bucket of baby-sized cars that hook together into trains for $7; the eggplant in the fridge we are going to slice, grill and serve with balsamic vinegar and bread crumbs sauteed with garlic and red pepper.

** We were discussing cooking at playgroup, and I mentioned that last night, we made Cajun shrimp with corn flapjacks, and this woman and another mom asked me to share the recipe. I thought to myself, "I bet if I said I'd sauteed our dishtowels in motor oil for dinner, that would have sounded good to someone who has had no solid food for a week."

Random addendum:

Squee! Babies! The Dad Pit from the Midsummer's Party, where all the various dads hung out on the rug with their babies while the moms took pictures. Jamie is the oldest, but not the biggest, of the bunch.

Too hot to think of a title

2009-06-23T15:45:00.003-05:00

The Fool and I had a reckoning with the contents of the fridge Sunday night and all of a sudden, we found where all the good Tupperware went. Eek. We were jockeying the leftovers from the Midsummer's party into place when we realized matters were dire.
(Good party, btw. We were pleased. I was especially pleased because I resisted the urge to add six additional dishes at the last minute and drive myself crazy.)
Anyway, it was a good weekend, even though the Internet was down intermittently for several days. On one hand, it made it hard for me to work on stuff for this fiber festival I'm volunteering for, but on the other hand, it also made it harder to waste time goofing around online.

It also brought you the following conversation:
FOOL: I would have biked to the train station today if I'd known it wasn't going to rain.
ME: Why didn't you check the weather this morning?
FOOL: Internet's down.
ME: We have a radio. And a television.
FOOL: (silence.) Um. I don't really know how to work that.
ME: ???

He pointed out that to use the radio and TV to learn the weather forecast, you have to find the right station and then hang around until they give you the weather, and ....
It reminded me of a talk I had with my father when he visited my junior year of college and stayed at the duplex I was sharing with two other girls.
DAD: Where's the microwave?
ME: We don't have one.
DAD: You don't have one?
ME: No.
DAD: How do you heat up water for tea? (immediate, "I can't believe I just said that" expression.)
ME: Well, Dad, this is a kettle, and we fill it with water and put it on the stove, which is this big box over here with the buttons along the back and then ....
DAD: Smartass.
ME: At least I know how to boil water.

Anyway, the cable guy came out and reported that the problem seemed to be with their hardware, but just to make sure, he would replace the cable that runs from their box to our house. He told us it seemed like something had been chewing on it.
The Fool believes the Gerries are trying to prevent us from slandering them online.
I say that if the cable company would bury their lines like they're supposed to, then nobody would chew on them.
After that excitement, our dryer broke down early Monday morning. Sigh. I can't in any good conscience blame the woodchucks for that, either. I think it's the age of the dryer. The Fool was delighted to find a repair company that specializes in "vintage dryers." I'm just happy the rain has stopped long enough for me to hang out all the wet laundry.
Been knitting socks. My drive to finish projects ended when I cast on a feather-and-fan sock out of madly variegated yarn today. I told Thorny over the weekend that someone needs to sit on me next time I try to buy crazy variegated yarn. I love it in the skein, but it's so challenging to knit.
If I had more needles, I'd cast on more socks, I'm afraid.
Poor Jamie. He spent a couple minutes today trying to play peek-a-boo with Angus, but Angus is not impressed.

I feel like this woodchuck thing...

2009-06-18T11:23:00.004-05:00

... is kind of like when I said on the blog that I was ready to have a baby and everyone jumped in with all these weird suggestions for things I could do that might bring on labor.
I half suspect it's a conspiracy among blog readers to see what they can get other people to do by sheer force of commentary.
Yes, we have used cat litter lying around. And the Fool is not as shy about "watering" the yard as some might think. Any more ideas for things we can do in the yard to cement our neighborhood reputation? Eh?

(A side note: My father had a long history of peeing in the yard, much to my mother's embarrassment. We have a really secluded house and yard - it's on a couple of acres, and when the trees are in full leaf, you cannot see the house from the road - but she was still worried that someone would drive by and see. I always thought it was one of those things fathers do to drive their teenage daughters to a premature grave. I expect, with two acres of yard to work in, he saw it as a time-saving measure, plus his birthright as a guy. So when we moved in, I kept telling the Fool that my family had a long history of peeing in the yard - it would keep other fiddlers out, it would prevent the neighborhood dogs from stopping by, it would tell the wildlife who was boss, all sorts of crazy reasons, just to yank his chain. He steadfastly refused, until he read in the Rodale composting book that it would activate the compost heap, and then, whoa Nelly, it was my father all over again.)

Yesterday, Angus told me that there was something interesting on the front deck. I looked out, and it was one of the weegees, getting even bolder. Getting into the garden isn't good enough, it seems. (Speaking of which, the zucchini and squash are up, so is either the swiss chard or broccoli raab. I did not buy row markers, and will have to wait until it gets bigger to see what it is. It's too organized to be weeds.)

Anyway, the woodchucks are giving me time to knit.

I like to think of this as my Provencal dishcloth.

I have some friends who just finished an especially arduous move from an apartment to a house that included the following stress-inducing elements: two weeks in an extended stay hotel suite with the entire family and all the pets; a moving company that went out of business and neglected to tell them; a title company that waited until the last possible minute to provide any of its documentation, thus nearly giving people heart attacks as they got certified checks with 15 minutes to spare before the bank closed, and causing the delivery of the house keys to be held up until the end of the business day on a Friday ... anyway, I feel like one artistically knitted dishcloth just isn't enough and maybe I should wrap it around a big bottle of wine before I send it off. But it was a lot of fun to knit, even though I haven't figured out how to finish it. The pattern says to Kitchener, but I should have used a provisional cast-on if I wanted to do that. I got the pattern off Ravelry.

Icarus, fully unfurled.

Attempted detail shot of the edge. There are beads there, I swear.

And now off to the Despot for a screen repair kit. Someone with claws tore a hole in the screen last night and the Fool has declared there will be no opening of the sliding glass door for ventilation until the bug ingress is closed.
Someone tell me this counts as a fiber craft - I would really rather be knitting or playing with quilt fabric or ... yeah.

Tuesday morning, the Fool....

2009-06-16T23:05:00.002-05:00

... does weird stuff before I wake up.
He took the advice about using human hair to deter groundhogs, but rather than have to explain himself at the barbershop, he decided to go trim his beard in the garden this morning, hunched over the hole one of the Weegees dug.
At least it keeps all the hair out of the sink.
As soon as we get some sunlight, a few knitting photos....

Monday evening, watching Jamie taunt the cat

2009-06-15T21:06:00.001-05:00

He has one of the crinkly cat balls in his hand, and he's crinkling it like mad, which is driving poor Angus absolutely batty, as he's convinced any minute now, Jamie will throw the ball for him, but no, instead, he just keeps rustling it.

Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me

2009-06-12T08:36:00.003-05:00

My view of the show. We remarked that it was a lot like listening to it on the radio, except sitting outside with thousands of other people.

We're fans, chez Sock Knitters, of this public radio quiz show, and so whenever they do a free live taping, we try to be there. Last night, they taped in Millennium Park in downtown Chicago, and so around 3 p.m., Jamie and I got on a train, rode downtown, ran a quick errand at an art supply store, met the Fool, bought salads for dinner, and met up with our friends.
It's been cool and wet here this summer, and it rained for most of yesterday. Even though we had a rain plan, the weather broke and we were able to enjoy - with the help of tarps - a picnic with friends and the show. Jamie was especially interested in a carton of fresh apricots that were brought for sharing. His verdict? Small and nice to hold, and also good to eat.
It was so cold, however, that Chelsea was wearing her wool socks, handknit by Rachel (who you've met here before.) I took the picture so Rachel could see that Chelsea is showing the socks a good time, not just stuffing them in her shoes for hours on end.
CalicoSarah, our Ravelry friend, stopped by to say hello, too, and we compared sock knitting projects until Jamie decided to start grabbing for needles.

KnitPicks yarn, Broadripple pattern, I think?

Jamie had a four-hour nap yesterday, so he got up at 6:30 a.m. today. But he fell asleep again at 8:30 a.m., so I have no idea what's going on. We're checking out a new playgroup today. It's through a local group of moms interested in natural health, green living, that kind of crunchy granola stuff. I've been assured that they're fun people; I asked a woman I know who's been to these what's appropriate to bring for the potluck snack portion, and she rattled off a few typical healthy choices - but then she said, "I think if you wanted to bring a pitcher of margaritas, everyone would be cool with that, too."
I'm playing it safe, and bringing everyone's favorite neo-hippie, gluten- and dairy-free treat ... hummus! With sliced cucumbers!
Wish me luck; I feel like I'm going on a blind date.

First Harvest of 2009

2009-06-11T22:36:00.004-05:00

So I went out back to check on our strawberry patch. I came back with this wonderful harvest.

Take my word for it. They look nice but taste just awful... I mean, you wouldn't ever want to come over and try our strawberries. You might never come back for fear of having awful strawberries foisted on you. So really, we'll just eat them all ourselves and spare you the agony.

They are especially awful on vanilla bean ice cream.

While I was out back, I noticed our first garden casualty.

That was our parsley. I suspect that Gerry (weegee or otherwise) got to it. I agree with Meg: no more posts about cute woodchucks, the little buck-teethed bastards.

Random Wednesday, um, Thursday

2009-06-11T13:16:00.004-05:00

Flowers at the farmers' market.

1. One of the Gerries came up on the front porch yesterday to bang around. Not a Weegee, more of a Medium-Sized Gerry. All four cats were very concerned; took turns looking through the window at him. No idea what he wanted. Fresh additions to the compost heap? A cup of tea? Wood to chuck?

2. Someone ate the parsley out of the garden. Mrrf.

3. It's probably a Gerry. Because I see one in there right now, even though it is pouring down rain and I put a big heap of potato peelings and a handful of rotten Bing cherries in the compost bin. Let the friendly groundhog blogging cease....

4. We all went to wonderful Ann Arbor over the weekend. What a fun city. Lots of walking around, eating strawberries from the farmer's market, poking in used bookstores, eating wonderful food, visiting yarn stores and going to our friends' wedding.

The farmers' market. Strawberries and Amish fried pies for breakfast.

Happy sheep in the window of Zingerman's.

One of the yarn stores had a rocking sheep. Jamie and the Fool played with that while I bought a skein of sock yarn and two skeins of dishcloth cotton. Some friends are moving into a new house this month and I have it in my head that dishcloths make quick and easy housewarming gifts.

The wedding was great. One of the most relaxing weddings I've ever been to. It was at a park, and after the ceremony, people retired to a big shelter to eat, drink, play lawn games, have an old-time jam and generally hang around.

The Fool bowls at bocce ball.

The bride and groom dancing a first waltz together.

Icarus over a worn-out baby who is not only busy growing new teeth (ouch!) but trying to walk.

Worn out dad.

5. It's been raining all week, so no chance to take a good picture of Icarus. Soon. Tonight is the live taping of Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me downtown, and Jamie and I are going to brave the elements, bundle up and go ... I hope the rain lets up. Our friends have a backup plan, but Thai food for dinner is just not as much fun.

6. Been knitting socks like a madwoman.

7. Have I mentioned how much I love "Weekend Sewing"? Here's another project from that book, fabric from a local quilt shop, vintage buttons from Great-Grandma Fool's button box.

A closeup of the shirt I made. It's a little roomy on him, but that's OK. I'm trying to decide whether sewing has suddenly become so much fun because I have a cool book of projects to work with, because the author of the book has given me a lot of good tips to improve my sewing ... or because it means I get to go down in the basement all by myself for an hour and watch TV while I mess with pretty fabric. My friend Carrie, who has two kids, says it's the being left alone for an hour part.

Hm. That was dumb.

2009-06-08T00:54:00.001-05:00

We drove back from Ann Arbor today, and I drank too much iced tea and too much coffee and now it is 1 a.m. and I am still up trying to write a contra dance program for tomorrow night because I am calling - except the thinking, she is difficult, and the dances, they are not making so much sense, and I really should not be the only two-legs up at this hour. And if I am too tired to do my work, but not too tired to fool around on the Web, then I really, really should go to bed.

"Nice shawl, huh?"

2009-06-05T13:59:00.002-05:00

"Wouldn't it be nicer, with, say, a little cat hair on it...."

So asked Romeo while I was trying to unblock the shawl yesterday. The insult-to-injury part was when he kept rolling back and forth, biting my hand as I unpinned it.

Artsy black and white shot. The subject is still the same. Big hairy cat rolling around on my shawl.

The Fool and Jamie and I are off to Ann Arbor for a wedding this weekend. I'm really looking forward to getting out of town, checking out a new farmer's market, eating some delicious things, hanging out with friends ... all the fun stuff.

I got crazy and made Jamie a shirt from "Weekend Sewing," which I will sew the buttons onto in the car. That book really makes sewing much more fun for me than it was before. I could see getting into this. And the directions are so much better than the ones that come with patterns.

For car knitting, I have a bag of partly finished socks, and I think I'll just knit on them until they're all done. I'm afraid one sock won't quite make it to the toe without running out of yarn, so it's going to get an attractive contrasting toe of some kind.

We also looked under our bed and found everything we have been missing for weeks, nay, months. I found my favorite nursing bra, I found an outfit of Jamie's that I'd been looking for, I found a sock I knit and lost before I could knit the second (a new low in losing track of things) ... it was amazing. From now on, when I can't find stuff, I'm looking under the bed. The sock irked me the most, because it was great yarn and it came out really well. I'll put up pictures when the second one makes it on the needles.

Back to packing. For someone so small, Jamie requires an exponential increase in car luggage when we travel.