Enormous?

Does this carpet make me look fat?

Ergonomic?

E is For...

Edging

I've started putting the edging on Daughter's stole. As you can see it's pretty wide and it will go all the way around, so it'll take a little while to get it done. My speed will not be improved by Husband's attitude lately which is, "If you're knitting you're not paying attention to me." I haven't been reading or knitting in the evenings when he's around for the last week or two. Cuts into the productivity time, but makes him happier. Now when he's out playing tennis...



E is also for Evildoer. Yesterday I got a call from Son, who was at the train station. He was calling to let me know that someone had broken into his car and stolen his stereo. Son does not drive a fancy car and he didn't have a fancy stereo so I'm wondering what made Evildoer decide to choose his car out of the entire parking lot full of cars. On the plus side, Evildoer didn't break any windows (he punched a small hole in the passenger side door under the handle) and when he removed the stereo he unplugged the connections, rather than just cutting the wires. Son got to spend a couple of hours with a Sheriff's deputy and a C.S.I. guy, including having his fingerprints taken. Luckily we had the box the stereo came in with the serial number on it, so if Evildoer tries to pawn the radio in a reputable(?) pawn shop it will come up as being stolen property. Of course the odds of this happening are somewhat small; I'd give slightly better odds on the second coming happening tomorrow. I try to be a kind and forgiving person, but I must admit that there is a small part of me who hopes that Evildoer accidentally electrocutes himself when he tries to install the stereo.

Ask and You Shall Receive

I was thinking that I didn't have anything to blog about. Life running along smoothly, nothing really out of the ordinary happening. Knitting the same thing as last time. Children haven't done anything too weird or obnoxious.

Then I decided I would get out the swift and ball winder so I could ball up the last skein of merino for Daughter's stole. I took a couple of pictures to illustrate why I usually wind my balls twice. Invariably I get the wrong end when I start, and the yarn gets hung up which causes it to be under a lot of tension. Photo #1 shows what 880 yards of lace weight merino looks like when it's wound much too tightly.

So then I pull out the yarn from the center and wind it again. This loosens it up quite a bit. Photo #2 shows how much larger the ball is after the second winding.


After taking these photos I figured, "Well, it's not all that interesting, but I guess I could make a blog post out of it." Then I decided that while I had the swift and winder out I might as well wind up a skein of Rayon Silk from Interlacements. This would be that part where the knitting fates laughed and said to one another, "Watch this!"

The first hurdle I got to was that the skein was very heavy, 16 ounces. I love my swift, it serves me well and often, but it was a little overwhelmed by the weight of this baby. After performing some creative gymnastics I was finally able to get the yarn loaded on the swift. I then began cutting off the ties. For those who aren't familiar with how a skein is put together, imagine that you are putting away your vacuum cleaner. If you're like me you wind the cord around between your palm and your elbow. A reeled skein is like that, only bigger in diameter. In order to keep the yarn from getting all tangled up it is tied in several places, usually two or three. As I started cutting off the ties I discovered that there were a lot more ties than there usually are, and they were in strange places, but I didn't really think too much of it at that moment.

I got all of the ties cut off and started winding. I had no end of trouble. Things were sliding off the bottom of the swift, the yarn kept getting caught, and finally I ended up with this:

Make sure you click on that to make it bigger so that you can really appreciate how much yarn is twisted around the center of the swift. After straightening that particular mess out and figuring out a way to proceed, even with the large mass of hanging yarn (put the swift on a kitchen stool. The big yarn tumor just swirls around it,) I proceeded with the winding. Imagine my surprise when the end of the skein came off of the swift... but there was still a huge amount of yarn left on it. Curious, I checked for another loose end and discovered one. I had to take everything off the swift, however, because it was such a tangled mess. As I was trying to untangle things I discovered one of the tricks that the fates had played on me. It wasn't one skein of yarn. It was four that had been bundled together. I checked the label to make sure that I wasn't losing my mind. It says, "1100 yards per approx. 16 ounce skein." I'm sure they meant to add, "4 mini skeins bundled together," but the printer must have left that part off.

I put one of the remaining 3 skeins on the swift and what do you know, this time it wasn't so heavy that it was falling off. Hooray, now we can get cracking on this! Not so fast. This particular skein should have also had a warning label. Something along the lines of, "Abandon hope all ye who enter." I have never wound such a tangled, knotted, messed up bunch of yarn in my life. I swear to you that I never got more than 3 cranks of the winder before the yarn got hung up and I had to stop and untangle it. It took 35 minutes to wind about 250 yards of yarn. I did eventually get it all wound and now I have this to play with.

So for anyone who feels like they don't have anything to blog about, just wait. Those fates will get to you eventually.

Fashion to Freeze In

Daughter and I went shopping for her Easter dress and confirmed that there is not a dress designer alive who lives north of the equator. I know that Easter is supposed to be when we kick off spring, and some years it's late enough that the cute little sleeveless dresses are somewhat practical. In 2006, for example, it was a lovely warm day, so Nephew, Daughter and Niece were just fine in their warm weather gear.

But Easter is in March this year people. In fact this is the earliest Easter that we've had in roughly 90 years, and it won't be this early again for another 200 years, give or take. None of us will ever see Easter this early in the year again in our natural lifetimes. (For those who choose to cryogenically freeze yourselves, you may get another chance, but why would you want to thaw yourself out just to experience another freezing Easter?) March is not the time of year for cute little dresses with skimpy to no sleeves, at least not in Chicago. Naturally the dress that Daughter chose has two cute little straps, so she will be adorable when we're wheeling her off to the emergency room with an acute case of hypothermia. I imagine that the egg hunting will be lots of fun as the children attempt to pick up slippery plastic eggs while wearing their gloves and parkas.

With luck I can help stave off some of the chill, as I have finished the body of her stole and have only the edging to go, so there's hope that it will be ready by Easter. It's made with KnitPicks Dye Your Own laceweight Merino, so it should help warm her up a bit. That and the parka she'll have to wear over it.

Winter and my Discontent

This is not my favorite time of year. I like going outside every now and again. I like to look at the flowers or stroll through the forest preserve. (For my relatives in the UP, the forest preserve is the tiny piece of forest they didn't develop into suburbia. You'd just call it "the back yard.") I like to go outside and sit in a lawn chair and knit out in the sunshine and listen to the airplanes roaring overhead birds twittering in the trees.

I could live with the cold, really I could. If we had enough snow to do something with. There's not enough to ski on, there's not enough to ride a snowmobile on. And the sidewalks that didn't get shoveled after the last snow are now covered with ice making plain walking treacherous. There's just enough to be annoying and useless. Even though there's not much I am willing to be a good sport and box the whole mess up and send it on to one of the polar ice caps. I understand they're melting and I'd sure like to do my part to help out that situation.

So as I sit here bemoaning the sad state of weather affairs (it hasn't been above freezing in many, many days) I receive this in the mail:


Oh goodie. Tropical plants. Let me just go get comfortable and browse this baby over.

Gee, it looks like Husband put away all of the comfy chair cushions. I wonder why he'd do a thing like that. Now to decide where these lovely plants would look best in my garden. Maybe a little something over by the clematis?

Or maybe it would look better over by the asclepias?

Or perhaps this is just some kind of cosmic joke that played out in the Chicago suburbs today.

There is a glimmer of good news though. I have discovered that the Harlot will be in Madison on the day before my birthday. I have already spoken to Husband and arranged a little road trip. I have also arranged that Husband will be in charge of getting daughter off to school the next day, so I can have a bit of a lie in if I want to. True, I will have to wait for 2 more months, but at this point it's about all that's getting me through my days. That, and knitting lace.

D is for ...

First, D is for Dad. That's he and Daughter on the breakwall at Presque Isle in Marquette a couple of years ago. Dad's a tough one to put any kind of label on. He's a very conservative, hardworking guy. He's never bored and always has a long list of things that need to be done, nearly all of them outside between the months of March and November. He makes his own wine, maple syrup, apple cider, and pickles. Brother and I learned many things from him, most especially the value of hard work.

Next, D is for the Dead River Basin. The Dead River is located in the middle of the U.P. It is dammed in several places, and there is a large storage basin (basically a slow moving lake) in the middle. Dad built a cabin on the basin in the mid 60's. The cabin is composed of 2 rooms, a sleeping area with 3 bunks, and a kitchen/dining room/ living room area. There is no running water, and no electricity. When Brother and I were little we spent almost every weekend of the summer at camp. We learned to swim there, we learned to fish there, and we learned that Grandpa Van got mad when we ate all of the fish he had prepared, forcing him to eat peanut butter. It is still my favorite place in the whole world, even though you have to get there by boat; the road doesn't go all the way out to our place.

And finally D is for Dart. He is our social cat. He loves everyone and will jump in their lap especially if they don't like cats or are allergic. He and his 2 sisters were born under our front porch. We had recently had a cat put to sleep, so it worked out well that we got to keep him. His name is short for D' Artagnan. I was thinking he should be named after one of the Three Musketeers (since we found 3 cats) but Athos, Porthos, and Aramis didn't really have the right ring to them. He's grown considerably since we got him. His all time record was close to 24 pounds. As a comparison Cookie weighs almost 9 pounds.