Buttons and camels

The boys ran in with arms full of mail, dumping a shower of catalogs and letters onto me. Among them was a brown envelope from Canada. Sarah sent a little hand-knit vest for the impending baby, who has been contentedly stretching small feet into my ribs and making no signs of exit.

I love the little garment so much. The boys laid it on my belly and made d'awwwws over the little buttons.

I'm a bad snail-mail friend, having temporarily relinquished my income and being unable to reciprocate. But in this past hard year the packages and letters have come, flying in from Ontario and Santa Cruz and Bakersfield, and I feel so loved and ineptly grateful. I'm gathering myself, everything is falling into place in increments, and I'll be back up and sending good things back out into the world soon.

Robotaday recently sent a box of lung-friendly fiber, with a spindle and alpaca fleece so exciting that I haven't dared try them yet. I read articles about spinning and look at them greedily, waiting for the day I can sit outside with a tall cold beer and uninterrupted hours to make a studious attempt. Kids play. Babies sleep. It will happen. In the meantime, I wound the skein of camel and silk she had tucked into the box, and freestyled a small Lothlorien pullover. The baby stretched and still refused to come out.

I am feeling slow and quiet and anxious in these long last days, but I'm here.

Tender moments

We sprawled on the couch as a family, watching a movie. The boys were all young shoulders and curls. "Look at my handsome boys, mom," I said. "They're pretty nice," she agreed. Then Gavin reached over, poked his brother, and Leif whipped around, grabbed Gavin's hand, tried to hit him with it, and punched dad in the balls.

Warms the heart, it does.

kilt hose for the small-legged

When you can buy a good pair socks for $3, it doesn't make economical sense to knit your own at $8-20 a skein. Kilt hose, however, can run you $40-80 on the market, and suddenly it makes a whole hell of a lot more sense to just make your own. And while it can take me the better part of a year to make a damn pair of socks, I will inexplicably turn out hose inside of two weeks. A niche! I have found mine!

There are not a lot of patterns for kilt hose. I bought an old book about knitting kilt hose, and it was full of vague guidelines and uncharted, picture-less directions written in terms nobody uses anymore. I read it anyway, and thinking about making my own collection of kilt hose patterns. Traditional hose! Modern hose! Military hose! Flat knit and fancy and utilitarian hose!

 Hose hose hose hose

So I have written the first pattern and made up a pair of simple children's hose.

Children's hose need to be simple, quick enough to knock out before their limbs grow out of them, and durable. The trick is to use slightly thicker yarn on slightly smaller needles, to make a fabric that will hold up a bit and not puddle around the ankles. Here I used a dk weight yarn, worked out a simple cuff that looks fancier than it is, and used single instead of paired decreases to accommodate small sausagey legs.

Around here, the Highland Games come on the heels of Burns' Night, so there is the better part of a year to knit up some nice hose for the kilt season.

And I already need to get cracking on the next pair, because some aspiring RSCDS dance instructor already wore a hole in the ones I made him last year. Since he's bottling a batch of home-brewed hard cider for me this weekend, though, it's a fair trade.

moody

I used to worry a lot about the drive to kaaawa, which hosts the occasional smooshed jogger because of a bend in the road. Then I spent four years driving the long winding cliffs of Maui, and it put the 15 minute stretch of beachside highway in perspective a bit. I drove up to the beach, listening to music and feeling stupid about fussing all those years ago. There is a lot I would change, if I could go back and pry my hands loose before I strangled the things I was so scared to lose.

I discovered years ago that little soothes like sitting on a beach in the middle of the week in the longest part of winter. The same song has played on the radio during these drives for the past 6 years. A few weeks ago, we traded in the Chevy for a smaller car - a car so plain and functional as to be invisible to all speed traps - and its radio is just as possessed as the last one.

Near the infamous bend in the road, traffic halted, and I rubbernecked dutifully as we inched past three cop cars and a truckload of surfers. A too-young teen was slumped on the ground against the fence with plastic cuffs and a "well, shit" expression as he watched traffic go by. The cops were in jeans and body armor, clustered in the shade over paperwork on the hoods of their Chargers. Glimpses of lives I don't intersect.

I sat on the beach and read while Leif drew swirls in the beach with sticks. Tourists stood in the surf and jumped and flexed for cameras. I feel like a time traveler, watching happy moments become old vacation memories.

We ate an orange and I sunned my ham hocks.

Everything happens the only way it can, I tell myself. I don't believe myself, but it's a nice thought.