KCBW Day 7: Looking forward

"One year from now, when the 5th Knitting & Crochet Blog Week rolls around, where do you hope your crafting will have taken you to? What new skills, projects and experiences do you hope you might have conquered or tried?"


First off, bag a new job, so I have some money to spend on hobby-type pursuits. I am eyeballing a jump from public libraries to academic, on a campus I could happily grow old and retire on. They would have to pry my decrepit old carcass out of the stacks with a trowel. The American dream.

Academic librarians working in sub-arctic air-conditioning need cardigans. Tight ones, with pencil skirts, for better negotiating hobos.


So next year, I would like to be swanning about in a little black sweater, jammed industrially into sturdy undergarments and striking fear and awe into the hearts of magazine-thieving undergrads.

Focusing on the simple things.

KCBW Day 6: a tool to covet

Oh shit, I forgot there were two days left in the week. I am still doing this thing. On my phone, now, since there is an infant at the breast and chicken cooking. Overcooking. And now the baby has burped cottage cheesy milk all over my boob and latched back on. Hmm. Clean up or keep typing? She looks happy. Proceed.

I don't need all that much, really. I've successfully knit with toothpicks, in a fix. But a yarn bowl would be nice - not some sort of smoking paraphernalia bedecked in knitting motifs (oh shit -my glass knitwear collection!), I mean little handmade ceramic bowls with a swirl cut in the side for yarn to thread through.

Like this one

It is possible I would use this for knitting, though I would probably just put wet tea bags in it.

I would also really like a new ottoman. And stuff to put in it.

Woe cakes.

KCBW Day 5: something different

And entirely unrelated to knitting. The baby was sleeping, so we got into photo booth.

KCBW Day 4: Color review

Hey, guess what happened yesterday? I discovered that my bank number had been stolen and all my piddling money was gone! Plus overdraft fees! So I had to have my card shredded and file a claim with my bank! Oh yay! KNIT PICKS.

But I will not go into that. I am still writing about yarn.

SO, COLOR.

In garments, I buy a lot of grey. In craftsmanship, I buy saturated colors. These should go together in most instances, but what I actually need is a black cardigan. Why I have not done this, I do not know.

Since bailing suddenly from Maui, my stash has been reduced from a storage ottoman to a tupperware bin of skeins I am too fond of to use. (Ok, there is also a tupperware of leftover death-wool for Zenny's Christmas stocking.) My favorite color to covet and not actually knit with is obvious.

I'm working on it, though. Most recently, I made a blanket in dark purple, which I argued was almost red, and almost a dark neutral. Which it is neither, of course, but off I went.

This achieved by sneaking a ball of yarn into the cart every time we went to Walmart.

Tomorrow we are supposed to blog differently. Coming up: video of me with barf down my breasts, singing songs about liquor and knife fights to an unimpressed infant.

KCBW Day 3: Infographics

The whole of human history and the Internet at hand, and this is all I came up with.

THINGS THE CATS ARE SITTING ON

I would like to claim excellence in domestic management to excuse my shitty pie-chart abilities, but then there is this page from Leif's journal.

I should have done a flow-chart.

KCBW Day 2: a mascot project

This is my project library.

Cables are not flashy. They look good in the window of an overpriced designer retailer, they seem impossible to the new knitter, and they feel as good to make as a life drawing, or bread from scratch, or... some other thing that is fun to make and rewarding for the whole process. Whittling. Moonshine. Lightsaber squirrel gifs.

Every now and then I pull out the same three books and flip through them lustily. And secretly, too, because feeling lust for sweater patterns is a bit sad, as lust-having goes. I TAKES WHAT I GETS.

I imagine knitting a modern guernsey and having a man who suddenly sprouts mermaid tattoos and a pipe.

Or hey, in dark grey or a heathery black - maybe this one, instead.

Man's Tweed Pullover (great name)

NO, THIS ONE. Men's sweaters are hexed, anyway.

Eala Bhan

But my browsing always comes back to this one - St. Brigid. The one I am too timid to actually attempt. Partly because it looks so hard, partly because I hate the neckline and I'm scared of Alice Starmore.

Maybe some day. In a dark heathery red, modified for a graceful neckline, with a pair of slim jeans and boots. And a pipe.

Tomorrow: infographics.

Knitting and Crochet Blog Week 2013

Yeah, I'll do this thing again. Even though I have virtually no time for knitting - and whereas knitting was usually something relaxing I did at the end of an exciting day of hobos, angry patrons, and police reports, it is depressing to me now that knitting is the most interesting 8 minutes of a day full of house cleaning, diapers, and cooking.

This year, we choose houses. I am house Monkey.

"The House of Monkey: Intelligent and with a fun loving side, Monkeys like to be challenged with every project presenting them with something new and interesting."

I usually choose projects that teach a new skill or use a challenging stitch pattern. I sometimes howl and tear them up and throw them. Grafting is fun. Toe-up socks are the devil.

Fair-isle would be my niche if I didn't live in a climate where stranded knitting would kill someone to death with hotness, or if I lived with people who's lungs didn't swell shut at the sight of wool. I would be buried in a mass of Cthulu and Totoro mittens, swaddled in Tardis sweaters and police tape scarves.

if only

 But I can't. So instead, I cable.

Cables are the shit. I cable socks and blankets and tiny impractical sweaters. I have a collection of white porcelain serving platters and coffee mugs molded into cable patterns. Cabled pillow covers give me love-eyes, but I know the cats would knead them into felted hairballs.

Here I tried to find a lovey-eyed gif, but got sidetracked. We have this, instead.

Next: mascot projects. If I can figure that one out.

doctors and inadequacy

My hands have been going numb. At night, my fingers and legs won't bend. I can't lift my arms because the joints freeze up, so I tuck my elbows to my body and turn my forearms out when I need to reach things. I look like a broken action figure. Better than an upended tick, anyway. The vog rolled in and settled in everyone's lungs, so I've been driving back and forth to the doctor, unable to feel my fingers on the steering wheel and too sorry for myself to change the radio when it starts playing shitty music.

I made thumbnails out of the illustrations and sent them to my editor. They don't look right to me. The style is wrong. The colors are bad. The computer just sits there, hedged off by small people. There is a box from the state library on my dresser, containing a panel for the centennial mural I'm supposed to paint by next month. I knew it was laughable to think of these months as time to work on my illustration career, but it doesn't make me laugh now.

 very cute time/life force absorber

This is the part of baby-having you brace yourself for; the tired, sore, fat, impoverished, cluttered-home phase that stretches out on both sides of you like it will never end.

BUT - have new crackpot life-plan: to become an FBI-trained forensic sketch artist. Art! Crime-solving! Intrigue! 

Or, you know, I will send Leif off to kindergarten and get back to library work. 

What happened to Easter?

I can't find the camera. That is what.

This weekend there were Highland Games. I went along, slathered the kids in SPF 80, and the baby went pink anyway, causing me to go into a guilty panic about RUINING HER FOREVER. Stayed home alone with the sprog on the second day of the festival, and made cookies while watching a documentary on a couple of charming elderly twin prostitutes in Amsterdam. Safe and wholesome domesticity re-established.

Also, our friend Sal has been on Jeopardy and kicking ass for 2 days running, and today makes Day 3. I am not a game show watcher, and have been horrified by how few questions I have gotten right while watching the damn show. I could TOTALLY look them up, though, I say defensively as the trivia police come for my Master's Degree. Next up: mike and I form a posse to kick the asses of everyone on facecrack making jokes about Sal sharing the money.

RSCDS dances at the games (mom and aunt in the middle - I was in the audience yelling at my cousin for tampering with a stranger's camera and throwing monkey pods at ducks). They only missed a few steps, pretty good this year:

No, no, PAS DE BASQUE!

RUN AWAY

Oh, knight. I know.

When Mike held Zenny, he got congratulations. When I held her, I got looks of sympathy. Hey.

Not ruined.

Blue eyes. I win genetic-roulette for pigment and sunburns so far.

Teeth are all accounted for

Mom-ignoring-kid-while-fiddling-with-phone-at-playground post. At least there is no tequila in the sippy cup.

Sometime in January, the aluminum spaghetti colander launched itself off the ceiling pot rack, and I decided that the best thing to do was to try to catch it with my foot. Feet can't catch, though, and all I managed to do was kick it very hard at the stove. Then my foot swelled into a ham hock, and I chalked it up to being about 12 months pregnant, not seriously considering for a moment that I may have broken my damned foot.

Months later, my foot still hurts, and now that the swelling has gone down I can see a lovely little knob of bone where I am not supposed to have one. So I look at it and think, what is the worst that can happen if someone breaks their stupid foot and lets it heal on its own? If I go in now, will they re-break it or just make me hobble around in a boot? It's like losing a toe - if the toes are designed to keep us balanced upright, and one falls off but it doesn't affect your balance, it's no real loss, is it? Toes are not teeth. Or arms. Or some other bits you know for sure you need. And there are a dozen bones in the foot - I'm reasonably confidant I don't need ALL of them.

So I'm probably not going to the doctor.

In other news, I tried to do Pilates yesterday with the pulverized remains of my abs, and it was a humiliating display of upended-cockroach limb-flailing. Today I did sissy push-ups and a handful of crunches, instead. 4 more weeks before I am cleared for proper activity, at which time I will try to jam my feet into running shoes and maaaybe re-evaluate my "who needs foot bones" approach to health care.

Maybe.