What I wore

This is something I have seen a bit of lately on blogs. Not fashion blogs, just hipstery knitting-and-pictures-of-my-dinner blogs. I saw another this morning. That looks easy, thinks I.  I will throw my instagrams on the clothing pile. BLOGGING DONE.

  7:30am

Tank top by Old Navy, Summer 2008. Bra straps by Wonder Bra, via Ross. Sweatpants stolen from friend in 2007 while sleeping over on her air bed. Knitted porcelain coffee cup from Starbucks, Winter 2009. Hutch in background features knitting books, beer brewing magazines, computer debris, and cat pee enzyme spray.

Yesterday I also read two - two - blog entries narrating the holiday weekend from the perspective of their dogs.

Well, I think I can do that, too.

"THE FUCK IS THAT GREY CAT WITH THE FLUFFY BALLS DOING IN MY FOOD BOWL?! Also, I left you a dead rat in the candy bag from preschool graduation. Rats are candy for everyone!"

And that is enough of that.

We have a stray cat trying to move in. Specifically, into the food dishes. Maura (black cat) was sleeping on the lanai and didn't notice Mr. Flufferballs stroll by and into the kitchen, Leif leaped in yelling, "HI NICE KITTY I PET YOU!" so the cat bolted out the screen door, Maura jerked awake, flailed all her legs, and fell sideways off the balcony. I died.

In other news, am going to the otolaryngologist because my ear has been hurting for 8 months, which has baffled my doctor because it looks like a normal ear when she shines a light in it. I also told her that I have been having electrical pulsing sensations in my brain which feel like they could lead to seizures or blackouts, and she said, "Huh, I've never heard anyone say that." Will ask Dr. Footlong-Tweezers when I go in for my ear. Avoiding google, as it will tell me I am incubating some horrible creature inside my skull.

Summer break!

I do not have a summer break. But the boys do, so I mailed the large one to his grandmother for a month-long trip to the mainland. As a kid, my mother and I spent the summers living in the truck, camping at KOAs and preserving our innards with giant sheets of truck stop beef jerky. It makes me really happy for Gavin to be tromping the US with my favorite road captain. She knows all the rules, like "thou shalt stop at every Dairy Queen in the Southwest" and "thou shalt sample all the foods for which the region is famous" and "if you see a 50 foot fiberglass cow, you MUST PULL OVER". 

Once the smaller child goes to stay with his dad next week, it will be an illustration intensive as my deadline fast approaches, but until then, I have been rolling in yarns.

 My Mother's Day box arrived. I have sock blockers now, fancy.

All my socks will be foot-shaped! Or else!

I got a sweater's worth of pink heathered cotton, for my storytime librarian disguise.

And sock yarn! Doctor Who stripes, and a tonal skein in the "wine tasting" colorway, for a particular librarian who needs to be smacked with boozy socks.

Heather! ALA conferences are great sock-smacking forums! We should plan this.

I will knit all the things. If anyone can coax me off of my beach towel and pry the drink from my hand.

FO - Java socks

DONE. I am no longer sock provider to the one-legged only!

The Java socks have been hogging my needles since last September. I cast on in Washingtonville, NY, while visiting for a friend's wedding. In the winter, I focused on the stitches to bring myself through the black rows that swept up my shmoopy shcarf. I cannibalized needles from them when I went into a spring sock frenzy. And last night I broke my kitchen chair when I finally finished them, jumped up to try them on, and put my foot through the wicker seat. Lesson: it is not always necessary to stand on chairs to wear socks.


The instep creates a sexy little arch over the top of the foot.

Here I almost snapped my spine arching up from the patio to get my legs over the rail into the sunlight.

I am smudged from elbow to knee with pastel, scribbling appointments and meetings and flight schedules and illustration deadlines on the end-of-school-year calendar, so actually finishing something is kind of exhilarating. I can do ANYTHING NOW!

3KCBWDAY7 - crafting balance

Crafting balance. I do not have it. I binge on whatever project blows my kilt up; months of knitting, months of quilting, months of thematic cocktails. But what this theme is asking is whether I mix it up with knit and crochet, and the answer is: no.

I do not know how to crochet. And it makes me go rage-face when I get to the end of a perfectly reasonable pattern and it ends with "finish with crochet chain". Without telling me what that is. Instead of looking it up, I always improvise, and manage to painstakingly re-invent the entire craft from base zero. Time and vocal chords would be saved if I could just admit that I needed to learn to be a hooker.

 But there is bias against crochet. It probably has something to do with toilet paper covers.

And then I see something that shakes my knitterly world.

Tiny amigurumi.

via

Japanese micro crochet. 

And this blanket.

Made by Myrtle & Eunice.

And so crochet is on my to-do list. Next to making a fondant-covered cake, running in an organized running-type event, outrigger paddling, archery, paintball, and classic car rebuilding. 

Any day now.

3KBCWDAY5 - Something a bit different

I'm going to knit you something. TIME WARP POWERS ACTIVATE.




Video tutorial 
Step 1: try to get Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist to play on crappy old DVD player.
Step 2: knit.
Step 3: gin.

Ta daaaa, I made you a mushroom!

3KCBWDAY4 — A Knitter For All Seasons?

Yes, here it comes. I have posted a picture of my latest knitting project. I am pleased with it. I even show a bit of boob, to interest the non-knitters in my feed. And then someone says it.

"Haha, why do you knit in Hawaii?!"

I have had people - cold, complaining mainland people - pull on a hat I've made for them and say, "Wow, thanks! Haha, why do you knit in Hawaii?!" And then I snatch the hat back and beat them around the head with it.

Some folks really want to know, though. So for them, I may explain:

1) Library air conditioning is cold. Librarians wear cardigans.
2) People ask me to make them things.
3) Hawaii actually does have weather.
4) I DO WHAT I WANTS.

In the winter, cold rain sweeps in off the ocean, turning to snow up on the mountain. We have no heating in our homes, with window louvres that rattle in the wind and leak cold air in while we sleep under piles of heavy comforters. Hobos are not going to freeze to death, but everyone starts wearing hoodies and huddling under blankets and enjoying the excuse to covertly slip cold hands under each other's clothes. At high noon on most winter days, you can peel off your socks and sweatshirt and try to make a dash for the beach between cloud bursts, until the evening chill drives you back under the couch blanket. And while we huddle together watching a movie before bed, I knit. In the summers while the kids play outside, I sit in the shade with a cold beer and knit.
 
In Hawaii. 

3KCBWDAY3 — My Knitting Hero

Heroes are not easy for me. Somewhere around 1995, VH1 told me that Jimmy Page had done terrible things to a groupie with a shark, and a hole was punched through the paper wall of my blind adoration. I've never believed in God, so my faith acts more like a sonic shriek, bouncing back from trees and mountains and bare skin to form a landscape of happiness in my psyche. Knitting feeds my radar; the act of using sticks and string to make fabric is absurd and fantastic. It brings you into the present and allows you to drift there, still free enough to look up and connect with other people. I tuck balls under my elbow and knit socks while standing and talking - whereas if people interrupt me while illustrating, I will use my elbows to try to break their faces.

I took up knitting to stop myself from prodding my heartbreak while trying to reconcile with the ex-husband. I was facing the rest of my life without the person I had thought I loved, as well as the person I still loved but couldn't reach, and the only way I could think to keep walking on that path was to look at my feet and focus on the place I was instead of the place I wasn't. So with a trip to the craft store and a stack of library books, I sat obstinately ignoring the 4th of July explosions outside, staring at the diagrams in Stitch 'n Bitch and painstakingly casting on little rows of twisted knots to somehow wrestle from one needle to the other. After an hour or two of struggling, some dormant ancestor got tired of watching me and turned on an ancient brain connection. It was like seeing sounds.

There are many knitters I admire. Funny, vulgar, sexy, wise, and scary knitters. But the more I read history and collect old books about lost gansey traditions of the British Isles, the more I want to travel, dig through regional archives, visit museums, and walk the standing stones of my ancestors to find out who they were before they were me.

My heroes are the ones in our blood that walk us down the path.

 Knitting a Fisher's Life Story

1949 Scottish "gutter quines"

A ball of yarn: 1918

Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C.

 

Knitter 1879, William Adolphe Bouguereau

 

Buxtehude Madonna, Master Bertram of Minden, 

Germany, late 1300s

3KCBWDAY1 – Colour Lovers

sarahapple and I are participating in Knit and Crochet week, a week when fiber geeks all over the world blog daily according to a schedule of topics. I will try to keep up. It is possible my posts at the end of the week will just be phone pictures of me crying in my stash.

Today is colour! With the extra U!

I am completely crap at colors (sorry Canadaland, my lazy American computer is throwing up auto-correct complaints every time I use the extra U). As an illustrator, being crap at color is a bit of  a problem, and I have to do a lot of study to compensate. But this is just yarn, not dinosaurs on surfboards - easy! I thought. My favorite colors are golds and browns and earth tones.

Only evidently I am SO BAD with colors, I don't even know my own favorites, because I tossed open my stash ottoman and it was all blood and fire and ash.

I am seduced by heathers and subtle tonal variation. Reds with red and red. Undertones of blue. High saturation. Dark, complex greys.

Texture is not color. I know this. But texture can hold color back or push it out. I like it pushed right in my face. (leave it)

I tend to keep my fair isle simple, and go for contrast over color. I also snarl the working yarns into big angry wads and have to stop to untwist my balls every few minutes (like your mom). I think I am doing it wrong. But nobody can tell, so I can willfully resist learning to do it correctly for a while longer.

I am enamored with the combination of black, grey, teal, and lime, but I refuse to start my Little Birds until I see Sarah in hers.

Color. I love you. And I hate you so much. Like theater candy.

 Still time to join in!

Easter 2012

This is the first time ever that I have had a holiday without either my mother or the man. It was okay.

Six children, four adults, a carpet of empty chocolate wrappers, kiddie pool, egg hunt, dance party, and MORE BOOZY JELLO. Evidently the key to pulling off a successful spread of ribs, fatty fat fat (tomato-cheese pie), casserole, mashed sweet potatoes, and pecan pie is the simultaneous consumption of a bottle of champagne and a few handfuls dainty spoonfuls of pina colada suspended in gelatin. I only dropped the ribs off the baking sheet into the oven once, and totally grabbed them out before they could catch on fire. Which, incidentally, you should not do with your bare hands unless you've had way more jello.

I still mangled the mold, but it all tastes the same in your mouth.

The kids left carrots and a paper with "sign here" for the Easter bunny again - and, again, the bunny ate the paper and gnawed up the pencil. I have to explain every year about rabbits not being able to read and write.

AND - drum-roll with pencils and travel mug - I am working on two more books. My royalties are starting to be able to pay for more than a plate lunch.

I went to court - I'm an adult

our pocket-courthouse

I was promised throngs of onlookers hanging in the windows to hear salacious details and clutch their pearls in delighted shock, so I dressed the part with a sun dress and heels. Sadly, the rain discouraged entertainment-seekers, and the judge took a look at the subject, then delayed our case to the very end so that the gossipy onlookers got hungry and went home. For four hours, I knitted a sock and threatened to smack flirtatious child-support delinquents with my rolled up legal papers.

By the time we were called up, the courthouse looked like this - only with a tired judge at the desk and a hungry clerk where the tv is:

I kept my statement simple, and didn't cross-examine anyone or make a closing argument because I didn't know how. My stalker brought forms and notes and a computer, and interrupted everyone until the judge threatened her with contempt of court. I was granted a 1-year restraining order (I could have asked for a 3-year, but I am still willfully optimistic about people) and she left calling, "I want to appeal!" Because, evidently, harassing librarians at their homes is VERY important. 

As predictably and simply as it played out, my heart still hammered in my chest like a scared rabbit while I sat in the little witness chair. I was already feeling weak and trembly from not having eaten all day, so I gave my shitty knees a good mental telling-off while getting down from the stand, in case they decided to collapse and complete the picture of Poor Fragile Librarian. They did not, and were rewarded with a premature bottle of Easter champagne. Blood pressure/sugar problems solved.

stink-ass ho