mysteries revealed

Here she is folks... my Secret Pal! Becky (we're on a first-name basis now) just sent me this fabulous package of chocolate, marzipan, and self-fair-isling sock yarn from Deutschland, where she was visiting family. Somehow she found out that I like chocolate and sock yarn - she must be part secret detective.

Check out the cute marzipan bunny! Too bad I will have to eat him.

Becky is a Design & Technology student, who understands the mysteries of the digital universe. She does amazing things like make video games you can play on your cell phone... whoa... (Meanwhile I'm still trying to figure out how to put things on the sidebar of this blog template). Visit her high-tech and DIY blog! No templates for Becky - she knows how to make those 0's and 1's behave.

And for those of you who are playing along with the Use What You Have thing this April, I leave you with some inspiration: The Compact. These amazing people are buying nothing new, all year long. I kneel at the altar of Buy Nothingness (and yes, they are blogging about it).

olga

Say hello to Olga. She's the new sock monster on the block. This is the only picture she would sit still for.

Olga is a ski bunny. I made her out of a couple of orphaned socks from my sock drawer. You'll notice she has a rather unsightly birth mark on her snout (probably as a result of the heel that was stuck inside her head in a past life). HWWLLB thinks her eyes should be closer together, but I'm not sure - I kind of like them wide-set. My favorite part is the buck teeth.

She is a tough little sucker. Here she is chasing Simon away from the back door.


move it, cat!

She just wouldn't hold still - she stuck her face in the camera (trying to look tough I think), before hopping away. If you live in Raleigh, watch out - Olga is on the loose.


don't call me cute, sucka!

Oh, not cute at all. She's really sort of disturbing. Now for cute, I have to show you the prizes that Bugheart sent me along with the Chococat bag that I won last week on the Great Monday Giveaway. Lookee! A paperclip-holding mushroom guy from loloko (sorry I can't remember the source right now - I will update later), and a wonderful-smelling lavender sachet from Turkey Feathers. Joy!


a ladybug clip on top to hold... i don't know what. mash notes? grocery lists?


your paperclips, miss.


sweet-smelling scrap sachet!

By the way, Debbie Stoller was in town yesterday promoting the Happy Hooker. I missed her reading at Quail Ridge Books (damned work), though I swung through at the end to say hi. NC Public Radio did a great interview with her and a couple of knitters yesterday (though I have to say they were a bit long on cute patterns and short on politics for my taste, but that's just me). You can listen online here.

free and fabulous

One of the things about knitting that I hate (y'all know I love knitting), is that it can get expensive. It's not the world's most expensive hobby, but it is rarely free. Patterns, books, Addi masTurbo needles, and for godssakes the yarn - oh, the yarn! I could go broke just thinking about knitting yarn. And then I look at the giant piles of it threatening to burst out of the stash cabinet and wonder why I haven't gone broke yet...

Luckily for me, I'm not the only one thinking about simplifying things a bit right now. Is it the spring cleaning impulse? Is it the tour of the stash - somewhat scandalizing, really - recently posted at Knit & Tonic? Whatever it is, there's a lot of inspiration right now for re-using, or just using up what you've got. The fabulous new incarnation of the Black Purl newsletter, Essentia, is encouraging us all to jump on the "Use what you have" bandwagon during the month of April -- initiated by Simple Sparrow. I am happy to join in! Look, she even made a button for the bloggy geeks.

Using up what you've already got, or re-using something somebody else doesn't want anymore, has always been a passion of mine, though as I get older and tend to have a steady income, I feel less of the financial incentive than I used to. But dang, I still love free stuff. And we all know that buying less stuff is very good for Mother Earth, and April is the month with Earth Day in it (in case you didn't know). Of course, Every Day is Earth Day (TM), so you might as well join in.

In a related impulse, Bugheart is cleaning out the closets and giving away some of her best thrift scores every Monday - get yourself some new old free stuff! So far (after Week One) she has given away some vintage luggage, a Le Creuset tea kettle and the Chococat bag that I scored last week. Another nice freebie: Boogie's compendium of free sock patterns - nothing like a good free pattern to help you clean out the stash. Let's give the earth (and our wallets) some love this month. And please comment let me know about your re-using/stash-lightening projects & where you find your favorite free stuff.

so many monsters, so little time

Ah, knitting. I am enjoying it terribly. I just wish I could focus on getting my shell done for Jay's Celebration Challenge. It's a nice little shell and I like the way it's knitting up, but I just can't keep working on more than a couple of rows at a time. There are so many other things to knit!

At a conference this weekend I finished up a pair of socks for my Secret Pal. It's okay to post the photo, because this is for her final package where she learns my true identity and realizes that all along she's been getting packages in the mail from a left-wing wacko in North Carolina. (This also means that soon I'll learn the identity of the lovely person who's been sending me amazing packages full of chocolate and German yarn - I can't wait! Wouldn't it be funny if she was a right-wing wacko? I kind of think she's probably not, because she sends me things that come from other countries, but you never know...). Any rate, I'm not sure how I feel about the stripes on these socks. They're not stripes so much as blips. I think the color sections should be longer. Other than that, I really liked working with the yarn - it's KnitPicks Memories - 100% merino. You know how I love the merino.

I've also been busy making toys - little knitted body parts are strewn all over my living room, and drawings of sock-shaped monsters are springing up all over my notebooks. Sadly Simon is not so fond of the monsters. He has never liked stuffed animals much, but he was really offended to find a sock monster sitting on the arm of his favorite sleeping chair, and pushed it onto the floor. So far he doesn't seem to care about the bears and rabbits taking shape in my knitting bag, but maybe that's only because they haven't been sewn together & grown button eyes yet.

Why do cats hate stuffed animals? HWWLLB's brother gave us an ambiguous-looking stuffed animal that we decided must be a muskrat. When you squeeze it, it giggles and its head and tail wiggle around. We had to take the batteries out because it was making Simon crazy - he was creeping around the house jumping at every noise. Now that it's been de-powered, the muskrat just holds the bedroom door open, but even so Simon still sneaks past it every time he walks into the room. Maybe I should make a big sock-monster dog that barks whenever Simon goes near Jackie's food dish.

50 minutes

The conference call I'm supposed to be on from 12 - 1 PM seems to have been scuttled due to technical difficulties. So what do I do with the next 50 minutes? Multiple choice response:

a) Head downstairs to join in on the fun at our building's first-ever Tenants Luncheon, which features free food and nice people.

b) Get back to work.

c) Call it a lunch break and surf the web for 50 minutes.

d) Sit here in my office with the door shut and the iTunes on, pretending the conference call is still happening, and knit until 1 PM.

=== timely update (Thursday morning) ===

The technical glitch was overcome & the conference call reinstated, but I sure do appreciate y'all's votes and suggestions. I got the heel turned on the sock I brought along to work, thanks to the wonders of hands-free telephone technology. I would probably have embarked on a blend of b, c and d... too guilty to stop working altogether, too free to not knit or web surf at all. Option a? Sorry, I'm an introvert. No parties with nice people if I can reasonably hide in my office!

bilious

I am becoming obsessed with the idea of making toys. It started over Xmas when I was visiting my cousin, who knitted a whole gaggle of beautifully perfect teddy bears as gifts. They're like Steiff bears - shaped arms and legs, cute little snouts, and wearing little knitted sweaters and scarves. I borrowed her bear-making book because she said she was burned out on them for a while, but I haven't tried making any of them yet.

There are also some great knitted toys floating around on the web these days. The Winter issue of Knitty has the excellent cat doll, Kate, made by Jess Hutch who has a whole world full of knitted animals and robots over on her blog. Bugheart led me to Wee Wonderfuls, which makes me insane with the cuteness. I love going there because it's like crossing into another dimension full of cool toys - the links just lead you further and further into the fairyland. Same with Loobylu - I could spend hours trolling around in her "Month of Softies" gallery. Okay, maybe I already have.

Thusly inspired, I checked out a book from the library called "Making Stupid Sock Animals" and it was good. I made this monster on Sunday afternoon. His name is Bilious, and he is a stomach monster, whose job is to eat all the foul bile and virus bits and other nonsense that's been troubling my stomach. But he won't get ill, he just swallows it all uncomplainingly - hence the stiff upper lip.

I think I'm going to make some more.

One of the things that appeals to me most about this toy-making is the recycling. Scrap yarn, old socks, fabric scraps - this is SO much cooler than running to the LYS or firing up the PayPal account every time I get inspired & want to knit something. I could go a long time making toys from all the stuff we've got lying around here. Speaking of which... got any socks you don't need anymore?

what's going on out there?

It's the third anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, and I am spending the weekend commemorating the occasion with the stomach flu. Somehow retching and moaning seem to be a fitting tribute.

For an update from inside Iraq, visit the Baghdad Burning blog. She says it's the only "girl blog" from Iraq. I find it quite thoughtful and primarily concerned with how Baghdadis are experiencing the political situation on a day-to-day basis. In her latest entry, marking the third anniversary of the invasion, she tries to sum up why this year has been so much worse than the previous, and comes down to the new Sunni/Shia divisions in the country.

I read constantly analyses mostly written by foreigners or Iraqis who’ve been abroad for decades talking about how there was always a divide between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq (which, ironically, only becomes apparent when you're not actually living amongst Iraqis they claim)… but how under a dictator, nobody saw it or nobody wanted to see it. That is simply not true- if there was a divide, it was between the fanatics on both ends. The extreme Shia and extreme Sunnis. Most people simply didn’t go around making friends or socializing with neighbors based on their sect. People didn't care- you could ask that question, but everyone would look at you like you were silly and rude.

I had assumed that the foreign analysis she describes was accurate, and that the fall of the dictator simply unleashed these pent-up divisions. Instead, the author feels very strongly that the sectarian divisions developing among middle-class, educated Iraqis who, she claims, previously would never have expressed such views, are the results of carefully-planned campaigns by the same zealots who are perpetrating the escalating violence across the country. If she is right, then it seems what's going on in Iraq is not just the civil war that the US government so vehemently denies, but also a culture war.

It frightens me that not only are Americans getting only a tiny slice of the picture of what's really happening in Iraq, but that our leaders' views are similarly limited. Bush admits he doesn't even read a newspaper - any newspaper - except the sports page. How can we expect to find reasonable solutions to this horrible mess we've created when our leaders only hear what they want to hear about it?

I really appreciate this blog (Baghdad Burning) and generally speaking, would really like to get more news with broader perspectives. I like reading the BBC, and while it carries a very different view of the US and American policy than domestic sources do, the perspective is culturally still very close to our own. Not to mention that British and US foreign policy towards the Middle East are not so very different - especially, I'd reckon, when viewed from within the Middle East.

Do any of y'all have good foreign news/blog sources?