Knit Sisters

(With apologies to Dorothy Allison)

1.  Rumpelstiltskin is coming along very, very nicely.

 

The pattern repeats seem to go quite quickly, especially since, unlike Handsome, the stitch count on each row stays the same.  Amazing what a difference that makes–when you’re not increasing out the wazoo every other row.  (To say nothing of that ruffle.)  I am now up to sixteen repeats out of thirty-nine.

2.  I have strep throat.  (Just thought I’d throw that in there.)

3.  I purchased a basket at Tuesday Morning the other day, thinking to use it for a knitting basket.

Doesn’t that look nice and almost gift-basket-like?  Like I actually planned what to put in there instead of just toodling around my apartment picking up random knitting and spinning supplies and dropping them in?  I can only put it down to the innate loveliness of knitting and spinning supplies–certainly not any special skill or forethought on my part.

4.  (Yeah, I know I’m over my limit of three things now, but what the hell.)  I wore the Handsome Triangle yesterday while I was out and about (to the doctor’s office, where I was diagnosed with, well–see #2, above) and got several compliments on it.  It was just the thing for wearing while feeling under the weather:  warm, soft, cuddly, beautiful.

(I figure I need to get some enjoyment out of it before it becomes Mother’s.  Also, when you put that much work into something, you’d darn well better wear it with pride.)

5.  Lawyers call a divorce, a “dissolution.”  Isn’t that just the tidiest, most antiseptic way of putting it?  I just can’t seem to stop myself from dwelling on this word, with its relation to both “dissolute,” a word with which I never much wanted to be associated, and “dissolve.”  Somehow both seem sadly appropriate.

6.  Life goes on, no matter how much your throat hurts or how much you feel you might simply dissolve into a quivering puddle on the floor.

Turns out that even if you are only going to move next door, you still have to pack. It seems at first like you don’t, but then you get to thinkin’. In your mind’s eye, you see yourself as the central figure in an absurdist tableau in which you are walking from your current house to your new house with a brass candlestick in one hand and a ball of yarn in the other.

Seventeen days later, you have a Richard Nixon bobblehead doll in one hand and your original copy of Frampton Comes Alive! in the other. A fistful of broken rubber bands in one hand and an accordion under the other arm. Excruciatingly, you are still carting these items from your old home to your new home.

No, there’s nothing for it but to pack.

I have to admit that I am a downright, stone Marine drill sergeant when it comes to moving. I find myself making announcements to Alex like, “Everything in this house must be sorted and all items that are clearly trash must be thrown away! All items that are of some value but are not being used at this time must be given to Goodwill! No unnecessary items will be moved next door!” (I draw the line at actually addressing him as “soldier,” but it has crossed my mind.)

As is well known, if “unnecessary items” are moved next door, a plague of locusts will be visited upon us and the Lord will smite us by killing all of our sheep and goats. There’s a lot at stake here, people!

Alex hasn’t packed one thing. If the past is any indicator, that situation will persist until 24 hours before the move at which point he will panic and start throwing his own things willy-nilly into boxes, many of which will never be sealed and some of which will contain poorly-packed breakable items that may not survive the trip from one house to the next.

Inevitably, some of these things will be “unnecessary items.” Naturally, this pains me (not to mention what it does to the goats), but I have learned not to become too emotionally involved in his method (if his approach is indeed to be dignified by that moniker) of moving. He has his ways and I have mine.

Anyway, this weekend I sorted through all my clothes (and, to be honest, some of Alex’s), the non-clothes items in two closets, and packed up all the decorative objects in the house. I also decided that this move was a good excuse to organize my stash.

I hasten to point out that I never intended to get rid of any yarn, however. Yarn is in a “protected category” and therefore never to be deemed unnecessary. Soldier.

Here I am in the midst of “Operation Stash and Awe”:

Well, hello there, cashmere!

A partial-stash shot:

This excludes yarn in opaque bags that is slated for particular projects, “core” stash yarn that I’ve had for twenty years+, and five balls of gorgeous periwinkle silk that I recently sneaked into the house and have not yet come to terms with having bought, even though I got it at a steep discount and there was really no way I could pass it up and…

Remarkably, as soon as I had taken all of my yarn out of its various natural habitats and placed the entire array of it on the bed (and at auxiliary locations around the bedroom), my first thought was, “You know, I really don’t have that much yarn.”

Right. The same way that the American South doesn’t have “that much” kudzu.

Oh, by the way, Marsha, sadly blogless, had a very fine idea in her comment on my sister’s last post: in the event that my sister cannot finish Rumpelstiltskin by June 21st, our mother could wear Icarus to the wedding. That is, if she is planning on wearing something that harmonizes with pink. Oh, wait! She was angling for the Handsome Triangle. She obviously has no problem with pink. (And I mean serious pink!) So…consider the offer made.

But I still think Sarah can make the deadline. I have faith.

Thanks to Shelley for stepping in last week during my time of need! By popular (canine) demand, she will be receiving a steak dinner for her troubles.

After all I’ve done for you, it’s about friggin’ time.

I have to tell you: this has been one tough week. This virus hangs on and hangs on and hangs on. But it’s deceptive, you know? After the first couple of days of nightmarish eruptions—the volume of which, by the way, seemed downright improbable (We aren’t really that large, are we? How much can be in there at one time?)—the illness isn’t completely debilitating, so you get bored at home, you go out somewhere, and then after an hour or so you realize, “Oh crap. I have to go home right now or I’m going to run utterly and completely out of energy and have to lie down in the street in front of oncoming traffic.”

It’s not a good feeling.

This bug is so clearly the flu, too. Both Alex and I have had horrible aches and exhaustion to go along with the exciting gastrointestinal symptoms. I was so achy, in fact, that even knitting was not appealing to me.

Can you imagine the horror?

So I have decided to distract you from the fact that I have done almost no knitting with some photos of flowers from my neighborhood. Which just goes to show you that we have lovely flowers in New England, too.

And if you look closely on one of the four days in late April and early May that constitute our “blooming season,” you too may spot them!

So, yes…back to our story: thanks to our buddy Mr. N. Flewinza, the weekend’s activities were a tad paltry. But yesterday we were feeling just well enough to have coffee in the late afternoon with the Incomparable Kate, who was in town for the weekend. (In the spirit of full disclosure: yes, we did inform her that she might be risking her health, but she seemed to want to see us anyway. She has the heart of a lion, this woman!)

It was well worth saving up our energies to see the Incomparable Kate, of course, and afterwards—due to the unconscionably infrequent buses on Sundays…ahem, MBTA are you listening?—we had about fifty minutes to kill, so we naturally went to the bookstore.

Somehow I ended up in the self-help section and, as I do every time I wind up in the self-help section, I marvelled at the sheer number of these kinds of books that have been produced in the past ten or fifteen years. Whether it was the last vestiges of the virus or just the thought of how much money must be wasted spent every year on these tomes, I started to feel just a bit woozy.

A restorative tree. That is not, alas, in my yard.

My family knows already that I am not a big fan of the self-help genre and that I largely think that any time spent reading these books is reading time that you sacrificed when you could have been reading, say, Proust. Or Joyce. Or Elmore Leonard.

And it’s a zero-sum game, people! We only have so many minutes, hours, days given to us to live on this earth, and in my view, life is always too short to read self-help books.

At the same time, life is terribly complex and often difficult, full of ill-timed hailstorms, truculent relatives, colonoscopies, the bridal-industrial complex, obstreperous children and dogs, oral exams, beef byproducts, intestinal parasites, recalcitrant paving stones, sanctimonious neighbors, the poetry of Robert Frost, and the IRS. We must, in fact, help ourselves. We need guidance.

Given this grim set of facts, I have worked out a set of “take-home” messages that I think should be the central tenets of the self-help genre. Not that I’d know since I never read these books. But when did that ever stop me?

The whole point of going to graduate school is to learn to speak with authority about books one has never read! Even whole genres of books one has never read!

So, without further ado, and in an effort to save everyone a lot of time and money, I give you “The E. Bales Seven Pillars of Self-Help” (also known in some quarters as “The Seven Pillows of Strength,” although this phraseology was almost certainly based on a mishearing):

1. Drink plenty of liquids.

2. Get plenty of rest.

3. Get some exercise every day. If possible, go outdoors.

You might see something uplifting, like this.

4. Eat nutritious foods.

5. Have some laughs.

6. Spend time around people you enjoy. Inasmuch as possible, avoid those you find wearisome, odious, or draining.

7. If you do not already have a dog, get a dog.

See how simple? I’m sure someone will point out that all problems in life cannot be solved by these seven measures. I’d be the first to agree. But I think if we all did these things (not that I find them all particularly easy to achieve on a daily basis, Lord knows), we’d have a better shot at handling with aplomb the basic “challenges” that life tends to throw our way. Like, say, an exploding toilet or an unexpected tax audit or a lying, scheming, craphound landlord. I’m just talking about foundational matters here.

Everything else? Well, that requires thinking on your feet.

I don’t know about you, but I’m a lot quicker on my toes when I’m hydrated and I’ve had a few laughs.

I received this

 

in the mail today.  Ten skeins of Knit One, Crochet Too’s Douceur Swirls.  75% kid mohair, 25% silk.  225 yds. per skein.

(Note how cleverly I put that–as though I didn’t even know it was on its way!  Why yes, I get unexpected boxes full of beautiful yarn in the mail all the time.  Don’t you?)

Here’s a closeup, just so you can envy my yarn a bit more.

 

As we all know, I have a serious love affair with mohair, so when this yarn showed up on Elann, I just had to have some.

And just what am I going to do with these 2000+ yards of gorgeous mohair/silk?  Well, it’s funny you should ask.  I have several possibilities in mind.

Maybe this shawl from Victorian Lace Today.

Or maybe this one:

How about this one?

Another possibility:

 

And another:

 

And my personal favorite from that book:

                                                       (Have I mentioned that I really like this book and the designs contained therein?)

Naturally, it helps if you can stand around looking beautiful against the backdrop of a stately English manor.

I’m working on that one.  Give it time, give it time.

Naturally, I did not come home empty-handed from the fiber retreat.  There was a large room devoted to vendors, all of them Missouri fiber producers and retailers.  After all, what’s a fiber festival without a chance to spend some of your hard-earned cash?

So, let’s address the purchases, shall we?

1.  Four ounces of gray wool and silk.  This stuff is supremely fluffy, and I have it on the wheel right now.

                                                           A note:  this was really hard to get a good picture of.  You’ll have to sort of use your imagination, I guess.

2.  One pound of mohair and silk from Chris Hunsburger (the lady I took the mohair class from on Saturday afternoon).  This is her own naturally-colored mohair, blended with green and teal silk noil.  I just fell right in love with this stuff, and, as with all her custom blends, when it’s gone, it’s gone.  So I had to buy a full pound, see? 

                                                Look at the shine on this!  Gorgeous.

3.  Three different small amounts of alpaca roving from a southern Missouri producer.  I bought these just to play around with a bit, maybe do a bit of blending on my small combs.  The price was really right, and even though they are what she calls “seconds,” the quality is still great–better than what you might find in most commercial alpaca “firsts.”

 

4.  One pound of merino/silk blends in four different colorways.  I really like these pre-blended rovings in these kind of streaky (for lack of a better word) colorways.  I bought two “pairs,” with the idea of plying them together for added richness of color. 

 

                                     You can get a little bit of an idea of how they will look by twisting the rovings together.

5.  Eight ounces of merino/mohair blend.  Obviously, I bought this with the same idea in mind.  I really just fell in love with the darker of the two colorways, and then looked for something that would coordinate.  I may still decide to ply these separately, though.

 

That’s the lot.  All in all, I think I was pretty restrained, don’t you?

To go to the Fiber Festival this weekend.

I plied the Suffolk and Romney,

 

thereby freeing up two bobbins.

Since I’m taking three spinning classes this weekend, I thought it would be prudent to have some free bobbins to use.

Shelda asked what classes I’m taking.  Here’s the lineup:

Friday afternoon:  Lumpy Bumpy Designer yarn with Saundra Lungsford

Saturday morning:  Spin a Bunny with Nancy Barnett

Saturday afternoon:  Spinning Mohair with Chris Hunsburger

Sunday morning:  Fully Fashioned and Fabulous with Melissa Leapman

I have some homework to do for the Melissa Leapman class–five little swatches.  Have I started on these yet?  Nope. 

I’m trying to get mentally organized for the trip.  I’ll have to leave between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m. on Friday morning in order to get to Jefferson City in time for my 1:00 p.m. class.  I’ll need my wheel, bobbins, combs, carders, angora fiber, knitting project(s), lazy kate, niddy noddy….

Wish me luck.

Recently posted to the East Bay Craigslist housing offerings:

We are offering a free room for a woman who is willing to provide breast milk for consumption to the household. We are an otherwise vegan house but have recently read A.O. Wilson’s study of the benefits of human breast milk to all human beings of any age. This is not sexual. Neither appearance nor sexual preference are of any concern to us.

The room is 10’x 15′ in a sunny house in Berkeley. There are 7 other people in the house and we live largely communally – shared food and house supplies. You must still pay for food, only rent is free. Reply to this posting and we will set up a time. Contact Dana.

Berkeley is a soul-crushing place for a satirist, I’ll tell you, because reality is constantly climbing up on the shoulders of satire and pounding it into the ground. You might be thinking that this item is somehow special or unprecedented, but there you’d be wrong. When I arrived in Berkeley four and a half years ago, I was given to understand—on good authority—that there was a group of women in town who made a daily practice of drinking their own urine. But only the first urine that they passed each day, you see, because the later emissions did not have the same life, youth, and health preserving properties.

I mean, it’s like…dude! Everybody knows that, dude. It’s, like, a proven scientific fact.

Then there was the housemate, greatly loathed (at least by me), who tried to convince everyone else in our house that what we really needed to live a long, healthy life were thrice-daily coffee enemas. When my friend Joe countered hopefully, “But couldn’t we just drink the coffee and get the same effects?”, she said, without a hint of irony, “Oh no, the enemas achieve entirely different results!”

No one, frankly, doubted that.

Now when I lived in Berkeley, I actually tried to make sense of these various aberrant behaviors. I tried to keep an open mind. I even listened momentarily when various nut-jobs free spirits suggested that I was rigid, closed-off, anti-communitarian, fascist, pro-war, and “part of the problem” because I refused to drink my own pee, shoot coffee up my *ss, or consider human breast milk a legitimate “dietary supplement” for an adult.

But today, I have only one thought, one plea: please, God, if you have any love for Your Faithful Servant, please, please, don’t ever make me live in Berkeley again.

I recently had occasion to go through my stash of sock yarn, looking for that perfect yarn to make a new pair of socks.  (Although, naturally, I am not quite done with the present pair.  But no matter…)  This made me realize just how much sock yarn I actually own.

As a sort of confessional exercise, then, I offer the following pictorial directory entitled:

Sarah’s Sock Yarn Stash

1.  Regia 4-ply Patch Antik.  5 balls=4 pairs of socks.

2.  Elann Sock it to Me! Puzzle.  10 balls=5 pairs of socks.

 

3.  Elann Sock it to Me! Essential 4-ply.  16 balls=8 pairs of socks.  I bought all these colors with the idea of making striped socks and socks with heels and toes of different colors.

 

4.  Regia Cotton.  8 balls=8 pairs of socks.  This was what I used recently for the sherbet socks.

 

5.  Lorna’s Laces (rainbow) and Fleece Artist (blue).  4 balls=2 pairs of socks.

6.  More Lorna’s Laces, with beads.  2 hanks + beads=1 pair of socks.

7.  Assorted and miscellaneous.  3 balls=2 pairs of socks.

The question now:  Which one shall I choose?  What do you all think?  Should I pick self-striping yarn (the easy route,), or venture out into stripes with the solid colors?  A solid pair with different-colored heels and toes?  Perhaps combine a solid with one of the handpaints in a Fair Isle or stranded pattern?

So many possibilities…

Well, as it turns out, the camera was actually a victim of reason #1 (see Monday’s post), and I myself had, indeed, set it down in an unlikely place.  Then, naturally, it was knocked off onto the floor, possibly by the cat,

 

or, more likely, by me.

And, just to compound my humiliation, Rob found it within about five minutes of getting home.

So, after having publicly and completely undeservedly maligned my poor husband, I feel it incumbent upon me to offer an equally public apology.

I’m sorry, Rob.  Mea culpa.  Mea maxima culpa.

And now, those pictures.

                                                           Melissa Leapman’s new book, Cables Untangled.  Full of great projects that are now on my wish list.

Like these ultra-cool cabled pillows.

And these beautiful cabled sweaters.

Wouldn’t one of these sweaters look great in my new yarn?

                                     Elann Uros Aran in that gingery color I was talking about on Monday.

And finally, my progress on the Suffolk lambswool.

                                                One bobbin full.

                                        And another in progress.

“Lord, make my words sweet today, for I most likely I will have to eat them tomorrow.”

I went on an exhaustive search of the house this evening, looking for the digital camera.  It is nowhere to be found.  This can only mean one of two things: 

1.  I have put it down in some strange place and can’t find it amidst the general (ahem) clutter. 

OR

2.  Rob put it in his coat pocket this morning to take some pictures at school, unbeknownst to me, and forgot to take it out of said pocket when he left this evening to go to his fencing class.

Do you know which option I am betting on?  Yep.  That would be number two.

(As an aside, do you ever wish you could just trade in your life, your problems, and your family for someone else’s, just for a little while?  God knows I’m not asking for a life without problems, but some different problems would be ever so refreshing once in a while.)

But, as Harvey just pronounced, I am persevering.

I was going to write about my recent acquisition of this book, and the beautiful cabled designs therein.

I was going to write about another recent acquisition:  this yarn in a lovely sort of gingery cognac color.  About the gorgeous cabled sweater that might possibly be made by me from this yarn.

I was going to write about another raw fleece that is lurking in the closet, one which I have not even touched yet.

I was going to include a picture of my spinning progress on the Suffolk lamb’s wool.  I finished the first bobbin, and started the second, and this sort of progress should be documented, don’t you think?

But no!  It’s all gone down the tubes. 

For want of a camera, a post was lost.

For want of a post….