I'm an Intermediate Knitter (almost)

I had signed up for an intermediate knitting class a couple of weeks ago. The first class was tonight. I wouldn't say that it was earth shaking, but it was so good to be in a room with knitters and be trying out a couple of things. I knit my first cable. Woo Hoo! You never know, I might knit an Aran sweater for someone now. We also learned to do the Suspended Bind Off. It was pretty smooth. I didn't like the Cable Cast On as much though. It just felt kind of awkward.

Next week we will learn about intarsia and fair isle. I'm rather excited about fair isle. I want to try to knit Eunny's Anemoi mittens and her Endpaper mitts someday.

I've been reading up a storm. I finished Monstrous Regiment and liked it. I re-read Mort and The Fifth Elephant. Then off to the bookstore, where I bought Lords and Ladies and Pyramids. I've finished Lords and Ladies and am about halfway through Pyramids. All of the above are by Terry Pratchett.

I also picked up Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser and The Islandman by Tomás O'Crohan. I'm enjoying both of them. There are sooooooooo many names to keep track of in the Marie Antoinette book, but it is nice to be reminded of the politics of the time, it helps to make things much clearer. The Islandman author's name caught my eye. I picked it up from the shelf and proceeded to read the first twenty pages while standing there. I can't explain what it is about it that is so interesting, maybe after I have read more I will have a better idea.

Hiatus

I've taken a bit of a blogging and knitting hiatus. A week and a half ago I knit an entire row wrong. 203 stitches to undo. I finally undid them, but then half of them are twisted so, now I have to untwist them. It really isn't that big of a deal, but I've been reading a lot instead. I've read Equal Rites, Wyrd Sisters, Witches Abroad and Hogfather. They are all Terry Pratchett novels, quick reads and very silly. I'm still listening to Vanity Fair when I do knit. Librivox.org is such a wonderful thing. Yesterday I started reading Monstrous Regiment, another Terry Pratchett and The Prestige by Christopher Priest.

The most exciting thing is that I have started spring cleaning/reorganizing. It is always daunting because we are not very good housekeepers and there are two cats, a dog, a 3 year old and two untidy adults.

I'm supposed to meet some friends at the zoo in twenty minutes, so I guess I had better go. Sometimes I find it easier to write the blog as if it were a letter or email to someone.

A question regarding hanging out the wash

Being raised around clothes dryers, I have never hung clothes out to dry on a clothesline. I'm going to put one in the backyard this spring/summer and give it a go. I've noticed when people have shared pictures of their washing hanging out on the line that socks are pegged by the toe. I've hung my wool socks up in the past, but always by the cuff. This leads me to believe that there are handy dandy tips out there for how to hang what so it isn't stretched out or damaged. So, to anyone who has any hints, please fire away.

Look what the postman brought...

I joined Flibbertygibbet's fabric swap on something of a whim. My swap partner from London sent me these lovely things. Thank you Abi!



Fiona squealed with joy when she saw the fruit leather. She was even more ecstatic when I told her it was for her. It was promptly devoured. It is kind of hard to see, but there are some really cute buttons attached to the postcard. It was hard for me to stop at each step and take pictures, so I'm afraid the pictures aren't as good as they should be.

And for the grand finale...



I just don't know what I am going to do with it yet. For whatever reason I keep thinking of some sort of skirt for Fiona. There isn't enough of course for a whole skirt, but maybe I can incorporate some patchwork or something. Ponder, ponder, ponder.

Thank you for the fun Gail! Thank you Abi for being such a great swap partner!

Some lovely new life...

Here are some things from my garden (front yard). I don't know what this plant is, it was here when we bought the house. This is the only time of year I like it, because of its sweet little flowers. Really, its only offense is that it is in a bad location, and I could certainly remedy that.


This was one of my favorite surprises when it bloomed the second year we lived here. Again, I don't know what it is, but it makes these lovely purpley-blue flowers that last for a long time. There are blue bells coming up around it. It was hidden in a hedge. The hedge started to die off and then we saw them.


Here are some of the crocuses that I planted last fall. I love this picture.


Here is my clematis (macropetala) that I thought for sure would not survive our winter as it was in a pot the whole time. Just look at that litte flower bud.


Here is a little fern frond. I believe it is a wood fern.


The lovely orange crocus with the crimson stripes up the side. I haven't been able to get a good picture of it open yet. I will keep trying.


Here comes a tulip, again planted last fall. I didn't mark where I planted what, so it will be a nice surprise.


Here is a little hyacinth just peeking its little head out. Come on out, the weather is fine!

Death, again

The former co-worker I was knitting a scarf for died this past weekend. He was 36 or 37 and had cancer. The doctors had told him he had a year or two to live. I keep thinking "this sucks" and yet those words are so completely inadequate.

Reading leads to rambling

Lately, I have been on a classics kick when it comes to reading. First, I have to say that I have read most of these books before, but I have a memory like a sieve, so that often it is as if I am reading a new book, or a book that I keep having a strong sense of deja vu about. Anyway, it all started with the Which Jane Austen Heroine Are You quiz. I simply had to read Persuasion, then I moved on to Pride and Prejudice (which I really enjoyed), then Emma (I didn't like her a bit), then Northanger Abbey (it was ok). I felt as if I were getting into a rut with Jane. Now I am reading Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell. It is interesting to me that the discussion of whether women should work outside the home, and what the benefits and the problems are, were being discussed back them. The problem of urbanization and industrialization and how that impacts society is still being played out today.

I have been working at being more environmentally conscious and remembering to donate food to those in need. Oh, that sounds so self-important, but that really isn't my intent. Fiona really likes to pick out things to put in the donation bin. It is pretty cute. She seems to pick out the things that are her favorites. This last time it was tomato and roasted red pepper soup, two kinds of macaroni and cheese and a jar of pickles.

One of the first times she noticed one of the people who stand at freeway on/off ramps asking for food/work/money she said that the construction people would come and help the person and build him a house with his own bedroom and they would build him a bed and they would build him a blanket and then he would have his own house and be warm.

Why doesn't it work that way?

A victory

I was sure that this post was going to be about failure, and yet it isn't. I started knitting something a few days ago, I can't really say what though. It has some YOs in it. I forgot one. I didn't realize until I had finished the row, and of course it was at the other end of a lot of stitches. One imperfection isn't too big of a problem, so I decided to pick up the bar where the YO was supposed to be. I thought that would add the stitch back and things would be ok. It looked terrible after I finished another row. It needed to be fixed. To write it out, that I needed to make a YO, K1, YO and then purl those three stitches for the row above, sound easy and straight forward. It wasn't. I've never done anything like this before. First, I confused the which yarn was for which row and it was a tight, awful, twisted mess. The second time it wasn't as bad as the first, but it was still not right, then I realized I had forgotten to take out the stitch I had added to make up the for missing YO. I tried again. Third time's the charm. I wanted to have a glass of champagne afterwards.

Thank you

Thank you all for the thoughtful, heartfelt comments you left regarding my cousin. He was very loved in his community. There were probably 400 people at his funeral. His parents are doing amazingly well, and I am sure it is because they are surrounded by so much love.

A slowdown

Sorry for not posting for the last two weeks.

My 17 year old cousin commited suicide last week. Things have just been kind of chaotic all week. I hope to be back to posting at least twice a week very soon.

Thank you to everyone who still visits my blog.

I felt like Lucille Ball the other day.

A friend gave me her breadmaker a couple of days ago. I decided to try it out right away. I had everything to make Yogurt Whole Wheat bread. Yum. I was adding the ingredients, being very careful while measuring them out. I picked up the flour bag with one hand to pour some flour into a measuring cup when the bag started to slip out of my hand. My reaction was to clap two hands together on the sides of the flour bag to catch it before it fell. A great cloud of flour shot up out of the bag all over my head and shirt. One nice thing is that it didn't hurt to get flour in my eyes, but it did make it a little hard to see.

The bread was quite yummy.

I finished my first sock!

And I have already cast on the second.

The kitchener stitch looks like crap and I don't know why. I don't have anyone to ask right now, so it will have to stand as is.



As soon as Fiona put the sock on she said, "Mama, you have to make me another sock, my other foot is cold!" I think she was a little disappointed when I explained that I couldn't just make one right now it would take a little while. At least she likes it.

I don't think I'm Anne, but then again,

I don't think I could possibly live up to any of Jane Austen's heroines. I read the book and watched the movie. I love to read, but I can read a book and have it go completely out of my head, even if I like it. As I was reading Persuasion, I would suddenly have an inkling of what was going to happen. I love the tension in Jane's, or should I say Miss Austen's, books. We all know that it will work out in the end, but the possibility of two people who really should be together, not getting together is almost too much to bear. I have to admit when watching Wentworth lean down to kiss Anne at the end of the movie, I got that tingly in my stomach feeling as if he was going to kiss me. I guess I got pretty wrapped up in it after all. The movie was a little disappointing, in that Anne's sister was a gross caricature of how I perceived her in the book. Anne also seemed to be rather mopey in the film, and I just didn't read her that way.

I read this article on green cleaning in the Guardian via The Worsted Witch. It was interesting, but mostly things I had read before. The one exception was the part where the person was cleaning her hob. I've never heard of a hob before. After a little googling, I found out that it is what I might call a stove top or cook top or a range.

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
--George Bernard Shaw

Nameless post

There is a story that Fiona has that has a witch in it called Louhi and at one point she shakes the nameless finger at someone and it is the most powerful finger. I don't know which finger it is though, the picture isn't very clear.

This is a post for the sake of posting, with no particular intent involved. (What a strange choice of words. I can be kind of weird at times. The word weird, always looks misspelled to me.) I had some free time today and I went to my LYS. I wandered for over an hour. I walked out with only five ounces of merino roving. That's not too bad, especially since I was able to use a gift certificate for it.

On reading Elsewhere this evening, I decided to take the Jane Austen Heroine Quiz.

Take the Quiz here!

It has been a while since I have read Persuasion, so I honestly can't say if this is good or bad.

I'm finding it much harder now that I am home to keep up with all of the blogs I used to look in on everyday.

The scarf that I am working on is, after a fashion, a prayer scarf. The funny thing is that whenever I try to knit it while chatting, or watching a movie, I always make a mistake. My subconscious is probably trying to tell me to pay attention to what my initial intention was with this scarf, to focus on it and pour love and hope into it.

Oh yes, ostensibly this IS a crafty blog

Pictures are nice, too. I apologize to anyone on dial-up.

First are the socks, and by socks, I mean sock that I have been "working" on for Fiona for a while now.



They are based on this pattern. The yarn is the Fig and Plum colorway from Yarntini. I absolutely love the yarn, love, love, love it! Anyway, I turned the heel, it went so well. I knit the foot. I thought at one point, I wonder if this is long enough and it was precisely the right length. There were no ladders. No holes in the heel. I was so happy. I thought, I'll just figure out how many stitches there are. I checked gauge. I had apparently gone from knitting 8 stitches to the inch to 10 stitches to the inch by the time I got to the foot. I did some math, I had knit 5715 stitches. Then I thought, Fiona should try this on before I graft the toe. The foot is snug. Not tight, but snug and I think it would be uncomfortable. The foot will have to be reknit. I'm hoping that if I go from US size 0 (2mm) needles to US size 2 (2.75mm) that it will be ok. So knowing all of this, the sock has just been sitting. I don't have the heart right now to rip back all of those stitches and start the foot over. Picking up such small stitches is a nightmare to me.

Here is a little magic, the color changed just as I was doing the short rows for the heel.



Here is a photo of the scarf I am working on for my sick co-worker. It is going slowly and I feel terrible about it.



The yarn is Louisa Harding Kashmir Aran. The pattern sort of evolved through swatching. It is reversible. I will write it up one of these days.

I've been interested in spinning lately. You may remember that a coworker invited me over to her house to try out her spinning wheel. Since then I have wanted to try out my spindle again. We didn't really do well together the first time. So I pulled it out a couple of weeks ago and spun, and it/I worked. I think spinning with the wheel helped me understand. Anyway, I decided that I wanted to wind off what I had spun so I could practice plying sometime. Since I don't have a nøstepinde I looked around the house and used this instead.



The sad thing is the relatively well spun fiber is at the center of that little wad of yarn-to-be, so you will have to use your imagination.

For Christmas, I made a patchwork doll blanket for Fiona to go with a doll bed she received.



This is only the second time I've touched a sewing machine. Not bad, if I do say so myself. It is based on the tutorial at Happythings. It is backed with off-white chenille.

While reading Feministe I came across a post about this Face Transformer. It was really interesting seeing myself as an Afro-Carribean or West Asian. They also had a couple of artistic options.

Here I am as Botticelli might have painted me:



And here is a Modigliani me:



And the last picture is of little bird foot prints on my doorstep from when we had snow eons ago.



I love watching birds and have several feeders including one just to the side of my front door. This morning at breakfast we saw a Varied Thrush digging and pecking in the duff beneath the large firs we have in our backyard.

I quit my job

Last week when I took Fi to school, I saw her teacher speak to several children in a way that was horrible. He obviously had favorites and ones he didn't like. He may have been having a bad day, but that isn't allowed (to the extent I saw) when you are the main adult around two and a half to four year olds. The secondary teacher didn't even react when he was talking to the kids, so to me that says that it is something that happens with some frequency.

So, the next day I quit my job and she is no longer in daycare. It is a relief. Of course, when it comes time to pay the bills next time it won't be fun, but we will manage.

Much better thank you

As I said, I am doing much better. Fiona and I went to the park yesterday on a last minute whim. We had fun. Then there was grocery shopping, amazingly that was mostly fun, too. We belong to a co-op that offers all kids a free piece of fruit when you come in to shop. It is a lovely thing. As we were going through the store she kept telling everyone that her apple was a piece of candy.

She has been very interested in the story of Heidi. She has a Little Golden Book version, the full story and we recently checked out a movie version. When we were at the store I asked her if she wanted to buy some goat milk. Now, I have to say she likes goat milk, so I expected her to say yes, but with all of the Heidi influence she got more excited than I would if someone offered me a free vacation, alone, anywhere. "Goat milk?! I LOVE goat milk!! Hurray, goat milk! Goat milk, goat milk, goat milk, goat milk! People in the dairy section were either looking and and smiling or staring and confused.

I just finished reading the Unprocessed Child by Valerie Fitzenreiter. It is about how she unschooled her child, what their values were and how things turned out. She is a bit fanatical I think in her approach, but I came away with some things to think about. Specifically, that if you want to homeschool you have to really enjoy being with your kids and you have to respect them. I've been working on these two things. I often find myself tired at the end of the day and I don't feel like I have enough energy. At least once or twice a week I look at the clock and think, "Oh, thank goodness, only an hour til (her) bedtime." It makes me think of the times when I have read Thich Nhat Hanh's writings and practiced as I could. Maybe it is time again.

I keep seeing the Six Wierd Things meme. I don't know why I like doing memes, I just do.

1. Most people are quite surprised when I tell them that I was in the army

2. One of my favorite snacks when I came home from school (I was a latch-key kid) was a head of iceberg lettuce and a bottle of red wine vinegar. I would tear off a leaf, then pour vinegar into the bowl made by the leaf, drink it and then eat the lettuce. I really, really like the taste of vinegar.

3. I dyed my hair "Atomic Pink" about two years ago. I always wanted to have crazy colored hair, but I was too afraid to do it. I realized that as a stay at home mom I didn't have to worry about my job. I also figured out it would only look sillier the older I got, so at the ripe old age of 35 I dyed my hair pink.

4. I only had three wisdom teeth and they were laying completely on their sides inside my gums.

5. My husband and I worked together (while dating and married) at three different employers. We have finally figured out it isn't the best idea.

6. When my husband was a freshman in high school he visited my high school when I was a senior. We met for the first time in a different town 13 or 14 years later.

Food poisoning

Yep. I ate at the company cafeteria and I got food poisoning. After I was sick the first time and feeling a little better, I thought, I might actually knit while I'm home from work. I'm afraid not. I have, however, read most of Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. It has been an interesting ride and read. I wasn't sure if I was really enjoying it until about a third of the way through. I would definitely recommend it.

I'm still "working" on the scarf for my co-worker.

Fiona's daycare is still closing. We haven't quite found the best solution yet. Thinking about a new place for care then rolls into pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. I don't want her to go through more changes than necessary. I went to 14 different schools between kindergarten and high school, and I went to the same high school for three years. I don't want that for my child.

I have lately been intrigued by unschooling/homeschooling. Am I a nut? I don't know. My husband doesn't like the idea one bit.

Be well.

I am here but...

things are kind of crazy right now. Work is busy and my daughter's daycare decided to close in a month. Nice.

I just picked up some Louisa Harding Kashmir Aran in a lovely gray. I'm going to try and knit a scarf in the next two weeks (deadline is set by others at work who are also knitting) for a co-worker who had cancer a couple of years ago that has come back with a vengeance. The doctors say he has 1-2 years left. He and his wife of only 3 years, were in the process of adopting a child. He is on chemo and still at work. He says he keeps coming because every minute he thinks of something at work, he isn't thinking about dying.

We are so lucky

When I was pregnant with Fiona I took a Birthing From Within childbirth class. There I met two wonderful couples (who also had the same midwives as we did). We all stayed in touch after the classes were over. All of the moms and babies went to this wonderful support group for new parents here in Seattle at the Community Birth and Family Center. The group was called First Weeks. There we made friends with a couple of other mothers. After First Weeks was over we decided to meet at a coffee shop and hang out with our babies. We picked up a couple more people along the way. Three years later we are all still friends. We don't get together as often, but it has been such a blessing for all of us. We found kindred spirits. These are people I expect to be friends with for the rest of my life. Here is a picture from our second annual Christmas party. There are the eight original children (all born between June and Sept of 2003) and now four second children join the ranks.