E for Excellent

I was quite pleased and surprised to see that this blog received an Excellent rating from Gale, over at She Shoots Sheep Shots. In grade school, our grades for Excellent, Good, or Failing. Straight E’s was the big accomplishment, and that Catholic School Girl in my is still glad to get an E.

I decided to nominate blogs I read that don’t have big numbers on Bloglines or Google Reader, but that I enjoy on a regular basis. I am supposed to limit myself to 10, so some of my regular reads are not here. Not in any particular order:

Sheep to Shawl Donna Druchnas is not only a wonderful writer of knitting books, she has lots of interests and wide ranging thoughts that are well-expressed in her blog. Where else can your read about atheism and copyright in the same post?

Ripped Off Knitter - Ragni shares her life and knitting in the far north of Norway. I am always embarrassed to read such good writing in English from someone for whom it is not her native tongue. And some lovely pictures.

How the West was Spun - The only horses and fiber blog I’ve run into. Anne sells beautiful yarn and has kits and clubs galore. Plus, you can follow Behn and Digger and their new friend Sam as they get ready for Spring.

Farm School – This is not a knitting blog, but Becky homeschools her kids out on the Canadian Prairie and shares her history love, reading and resources. I have discovered books to purchase for kids in my life and got ideas for movie rentals. Geek alert: this is where I learned that the author of Roget’s Thesaurus also invented the slide rule.

Misadventures in Knitting
Melinda and I share a propensity to self-inflicted injuries with a knitting needle. She shares her knitting and giant dog owner travails as well as life among the Swiss.

The Independent Stitch

Deborah Robson of Nomad Press talks about life, writing, and publishing, particularly some excellent knitting books.

Inspiration Boards

This blog posts interviews with creative people. They are part of a flickr group about inspiration boards. I know nothing about the concept, but it is always fun to see into the creative process.

Dream Big Live Large

Another creative process focussed blog, with great photos and links.

Irish Sally Garden

Becky used to have her own blog called the Irish Craftworkers Good Life, now merged with the blog about her family’s self-sufficient life on a small holding. Some nice craft, and great gardening info.

Jean’s Knitting
Jean’s lace knitting and intelligent, entertaining musings are a daily visit for me. She has finally finished the gansey made in honor of Barack Obama. Check it out.

I have lots of other places I visit regularly, but had to limit my list to ten.

I hope some of these are new to you and you enjoy the visits.

MLE

Just Call Me Henny Penny

Friday night, sitting watching a movie, me knitting, when we hear a giant BANG from the dining room. The ceiling had fallen in.

The spousal unit had recently finished a bathroom remodel, including a new tub for me. The old one was 4 feet long, I could barely crouch in it, and I do like to have me a nice, relaxing soak in the tub with a good book. As often happens with plumbing work, there was a bit of a leak that had to be corrected. No big deal. Little spot in the ceiling to be patched up. Then a day later, next to the small spot, a bow appeared in the drywall. Must have been more water in there, oh well, patch the drywall.  No big deal.  However, sagging drywall that finally gives way, does not make a giant crashing sound. The idiot we bought our house from had swept all of the construction debris from his hideous remodel of the bathroom into the space between floor and ceiling. Hundreds of pounds of plaster and lathe and miscellaneous sh*t, that he hadn’t wanted to carry downstairs or pay for a dumpster in which to place it.

Our dining room was covered in it, at 11:00 on Friday night. We cleaned up as best we could, then I spent most of Saturday finishing the job, washing down every square inch to get rid of the plaster dust. One interesting note, I had just read about green carpet cleaning using snow at Kristen Nichol’s blog, and found a link there to an article on it.   I got to try it out with the fresh snow in our yard and by golly, it worked.

No article was found, however, on where to find he man we refer to around here as SfB (Sh*t for Brains) as in – come look what SfB did in here — the never ending horror of work done by a man who called himself a contractor. Maybe we could take out a contract on him, and have him sentenced to a lifetime of cleaning up other people’s garbage. This was sadly not our first experience in this area.

Next time back to knitting. I’m doing a stole in Misti Alpaca Lace Handpaint — such beautiful yarn. Oh, here is the nice new tub that started it all:

Poetry and Knitting

I am not a regular participant in Poetry Friday (or in anything if truth be told) but I do like to wander around and find some new poems. A favorite spot to visit is Farm School. Last week Becky lead me indirectly to Jane Kenyon, and I read this lovely poem, Let Evening Come. It really spoke to me as I was just back from a trip home to NJ and the east coast for work and the tour d’aging relatives. I spent a nice day with my 90-year old aunt, who has some dementia. (She describes herself as ‘wifty’.) She is a nun, entered the convent at 16, and is now living in the retirement community she helped to build when she ran the order. Here she is at age one, wearing a helmet her uncle brought home from WWI.

We had a difficult relationship when I was younger, but we both grew and changed and developed a real bond. I miss that, and it’s sad that we can no longer talk about books and ideas, and that there is a bit less of her each time I visit. I picked her up and took her back to my sister’s house, where we spent the afternoon petting the dogs, drinking tea, having lunch and just being together. Of course, I did have to answer the same questions over and over again, but that is not so difficult when you are not with an elder all day every day. She has a deep faith in God, and is not distraught or worried as she faces the great beyond. This poem somehow seemed to capture the feeling of sitting with her, in her own twilight, watching the afternoon sun move across the hill.

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in the long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

Jane Kenyon

A bonus is the reference to knitting — does anyone have any other poems that reference knitting ? I’d love to know.

Yo Yo Diet Socks

Sometimes, when I design, it’s fiddle, fiddle, swatch, swatch, curse, curse, rip rip. Every once in while, all the knitterly planets align and the yarn works with the chosen stitch pattern, and I just keep knitting. These socks were like that. I used Pagewood Farms hand-dyed bamboo merino blend. Nice to knit with, not splitty, as I feared it might be. There is also a lot of yardage in one skein. I have quite a bit left over, enough to make kid-sized socks, as in an elementary school sized kid. The color is called Prism. I’m not sure why, it’s mostly a reddish orange. Less red since I washed it, but quite beautiful. I finished these and several others around Christmas, but I am finally getting around to this post.

This shot of sock on foot up on railing shows why knitting is the new yoga.

The stitch pattern, from a Japanese knitting book, I began calling Yo Yo Diet stitch, since you increase and decrease over and over. It called for a K3tog and a double increase, where you make one stitch into three. There are several ways to make 3 sts into one; I tried the K3tog, but went with a centered double decrease — slip 2 sts as if to knit, knit next stitch, and pass the slipped sts over. Here’s a good link to how-to on this.

I also experimented with just about every variety of double increase I could imagine. Some looked good, some not so much. When Theresa was examining the first sock, she said in her dry, understated, and always kind way, “Wow, you really did try every increase you could think of. I like how the second sock looks.” That translates as, “This first sock is pretty hinky, but it seems like you eventually made an acceptable choice.”

I settled on this: lift back of st below the stitch to be increased. Knit the stitch to be increased. Lift the back of the st below from the left side and knit. It leaves a little hole in the increase that I was quite pleased with. And really, the heavily variegated color hides all the variations unless you are one of the world’s most knowledgeable knitters and looking very closely. (Like Theresa…)

I sure love looking at the more complex sock patterns. There are some gorgeous socks out there, and they are often are designed to really make the most of some of the variegated hand-dyed yarns. I sometimes buy the pattern, just to support the designer. The sad truth is, however, that I am never going to make any of them. Socks are my easy knitting, meeting knitting, waiting wherever it is I end up waiting these days knitting. I only want to make socks that allow me to either pay attention to the topic of the meeting or participate in the witty intellectual repartee among my circle of witty reparteeing friends. When the conversation opens with “I work for an idiot”, I just can’t keep looking at a chart. I have to be able to listen intently, nod along, and agree with the diagnosis. If I can’t do that, I won’t finish the first sock, never mind the second.

I have finished the pattern for these, and the lovely Ms. Incaknits is testing it out. When she’s done it will be at the shop and online, for those who might be interested.