Erin and I are doing a knit-along. We're making Elizabeth Zimmermann's Baby Surprise Sweater -- she for her cousin's new baby-to-be, and me for Anju and Rahul's 10-week-old baby girl. (I'm sure that the surprise will keep as I doubt A. and R. have any time for blog reading between grad school and taking care of baby Aruni.) Erin's plan was to use some yarn from her stash. I ordered the pattern (link above), and on Saturday I ran out to Webs to pick up two balls of Jellibeenz. Arriving shortly after I returned from my Webs mission, Erin came in clutching a Webs bag of her own. "Look what I got in the bargain corner," she said, pulling two hanks of Araucania Pehuen hand-dyed cotton in a green colorway from the bag. I went over to my Webs bag and pulled out two hanks of the SAME yarn in the orange colorway. Of the hundreds and hundreds of yarns to choose from at Webs, we bought the same stuff! (We're both saving it for some other as-yet-to-be-determined project. Any ideas?)
Now, you'd think that a sweater knit all in one piece in garter stitch would be easy-peasy, right? Wrong! Elizabeth Zimmermann, who is, apparently, the knitting goddess of Britain or the universe, wrote this pattern in 1968 in a conversational, tweedy English lady prose that's a wee bit short on the details. We cast on our 160 stitches and puzzled over how to mark the places where the decreases were supposed to occur. Finally getting the hang of it, or so I thought, we knit four rows before heading out to the annual Roe v. Wade anniversary event. Later that night, thinking I was on a roll, I knit another half dozen rows, reaching the tricky row 11 where I totally screwed up. I couldn't figure out how many stitches I was supposed to have on either side of the markers, and I ended up un-knitting back to row 7. Next day I went online and found the BSS notes -- a row-by-row explanation of what the fuck we're supposed to be doing. Now, just what kind of screwy thing is it where you need a pattern to follow a pattern? I think I'm back on track now, and I'll be posting some pix of the WIP here and/or on my Flickr page. Erin and I will give each other e-mail progress reports as we knit along. I'm pleading for words of support and helpful hints from anyone out there who's made this sweater and lived to tell the tale.
Sunday afternoon I put the BSS aside to go to the Silver Chord Bowl, Northampton's a cappella alternative to the Super Bowl. JJ and I met for lunch beforehand and she gave me my birthday giftie -- a little Uglydoll to be the mascot of the Mini Cooper, the SAME Uglydoll (Icebat) that Erin has hanging from her rearview mirror. This is just too weird. It's like I've been reincarnated as Erin and I'm not even dead. I went over to Faces and exchanged Icebat for Bop n' Beep, all the while having this Freaky Friday feeling (although Erin and I don't look anything like Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis). Something cosmic was definitely going on. Comet McNaught? Groundhog's Day? Who knows.
It was a year ago today that I created my Flickr account, just after giving myself the digital camera for my birthday (I'm still accepting this year's birthday greetings until the end of this week -- hint, hint). Here's a snapshot of my stats as of today:
Number of photos: 338
Number of sets: 13
Number of contacts & friends: 23
Number of groups: 29 (Guess Where London is my favorite)
Views of my photostream: 4930 (My goal for my anniversary was 4800)
Flickr inspector number: 1483 (I'm not entirely certain what this means. It's some kind of relative number based on your photos, views, comments, favorites, etc.)
If you haven't looked at my photostream in a while, check it out. Leave me some comments if you're so moved. If you have a Flickr account, add me to your contacts and I'll do likewise.
One of my loyal readers (of the four or so that I have) has requested pix of the xmas crafts. Here they are:
This is Erin wearing her lime green, vegan zig zag scarf. The yarn is Feza Carnevale, which was a bit of a pain to work with because the fuzzy bits obscured the adjacent stitches and I often dropped them. But the results are quite nice -- soft, warm and a bit stretchy, with a hint of shimmery stuff. We decided that lime is the new black.
Velvet bag with milagros. This is the one I made for JJ -- it has milagros that are significant to her (cat and fish) on it. The one I made for ST has a bird and an ear. The arms, legs and donkeys may become significant at some point -- you never know. Spooner brought the milagros back from Mexico last summer. I'm now out of them, except for babies, pigs and praying figures, so I'll need to have a pal fetch me some more from south of the border.
See, I did do some holiday decorating! It took me a bit to get these pix uploaded because I've been laid low with a stomach bug for the past couple days. Before I got this nasty little virus, I also managed to get all holiday gifties finished and wrapped, although not entirely distributed. But I forgot to take photos of my creations before wrapping them. I'll just have to snap the lucky recipients wearing their swell gifties.
Excellent stuff arrived from Spooner today! A hefty box contained McVities HobNobs and Ginger Nuts (biscuits from the UK), some Pope John Paul junk he picked up in Italy, two Jesus shot glasses, a book of London street art, and -- from his recent visit to the Reagan presidential library in sunny southern California -- a Ronnie Raygun pencil and a postcard of all the living first ladies. Cool! Apparently his brother lost the package of gifties I sent him. If it ever surfaces, he'll see that we were thinking along similar lines in choosing meaningful items to give each other this year (hint: Jesus and writing implements).
Happy new year, y'all!
(Note: If you're a serious vegan or some kind of animal rights nut, I suggest you stop reading right now.)
As far as I can tell, there are few good things to be said for living with another human. Fobbing off pest eradication duty on that other person is one of them. My pal ST has learned much about getting rid of mice in the years that she's lived alone, and she's passed her wisdom on to me. I know that I have mice in the basement but, without someone to assign to mouse patrol duty, I generally ignore them. A couple years ago they decided to nest in my kitchen towel drawer and that put me in serious trap-setting mode. ST's technique is to put the trap into a paper bag which is laid on its side, so that all you have to do when you've caught, i.e. killed, one is pick up the bag, fold the top over and toss it in the trash.
Recently, I've seen meeces in my garage when I go out there in the morning or open the door to drive in at night. They must be getting in the wall between the garage and the house because Florie often sits in the hall and stares at that wall. They're nesting in a heating unit that's suspended from the garage ceiling. Needless to say, I'm never going to turn that heater on! But the sight of them running up and down the wall was getting to me, and I put a trap-in-a-bag in the garage a couple weeks ago. After about a week without finding a mouse in my trap, I had almost given up on it. Then one day I looked in the bag and the trap was gone! No sign of it anywhere. A mystery. Slowly the realization of what I'd done sank in -- the mouse had no doubt been caught by the trap, but not killed, and carried the trap off with it, to die a slow death somewhere. There's now a faint odor of rot that greets me when I open the door to the garage, but I'm not going to move everything in search of the putrefying mouse carcass.
This brings us to yesterday, a Saturday afternoon of chores and pre-xmas tasks. I'd brought a bunch of wrapping paper down from the storage room, and was planning to sit on the living room floor and wrap gifties but got sidetracked by another trip upstairs for something. When I next came downstairs, what did I see but a MOUSE among the rolls of wrapping paper and Florie circling around it! With the horror of what I'd done to the garage mouse still weighing heavily on me, I didn't want to kill this one. (Anyway, how could I do that without making a mess on the carpet?) I shoved Florie aside, grabbed an Amazon.com box that was in the hall and put it upside down over the mouse. That bought me some time to think.
Now what? Get the mouse out of the house. Catch and release. I carefully slid the box across the carpet to the edge of the lino in the front hall. Not quite sure what to do next, I saw the carpet doormat -- flexible yet sturdy -- and slid it under the box. Then I slid the whole assemblage, with mouse still inside, onto the front porch. Lifting the lid, I saw the mouse lying on its side. It didn't look dead, though, so I ran back in the house and turned off the porch light. I wanted it to leave, but I really didn't care if it did that under its own power or if it was taken away by a neighborhood critter.
Five minutes later, I turned the light on and saw that it was sitting up, looking out towards the steps. Another five minutes passed, and I checked again. It was gone, probably to creep back into my garage and start this whole thing over again. I hate those meeces to pieces!
