my life in pictures

Really, just this one picture is enough. This is my new life outside of work: study, study, study. All the studying and problem sets and data plotting are really cutting into my knitting, yoga, pleasure reading, beer-swilling and whooping-it-up time. But especially my knitting time.

I realized the other night that there is no way in hades that this year I'll be knitting any of my dear family members a sweater, vest, shawl, felted bag, or any of the other lovingly-handcrafted goods they've come to expect to find waiting for them under the Xmas tree. I'm a little sad about it, because I really love spending cozy fall & winter evenings making a special thing for each person.

That's not to say that I'm not going to knit anything at all, though. This year I'm planning to put all my eggs in one basket: socks! I can have fun with them, but unless I get stupid and start knitting ridiculous cabled lace patterns or trying to make thigh-highs, I should be able to squeeze them into my very-limited knitting time. Lucky for me, there will be moral support, since it's almost time for Socktoberfest. Thank you, Lolly!



Failing a dozen pairs of socks, maybe I'll have time to make a realllly big batch of cookies. Because the mall is just not an option. If you see me there in December, please escort me home and pour me a glass of wine. Pour one for yourself too, while you're at it. The fall can be rough.

In related news: there will be no posting of the top-down baby bolero pattern conversion. You know what? When you start out with a stinker of a pattern, you still end up with a stinker, even when you try your best. I just don't like the way it's coming out. But in its place the Baby Om sweater pattern will soon be posted, and it's a better knit anyhow.

my other car is a co-op beater truck

Meet Red Betty.

This pretty little lady is the common property of five lucky households here in downtown. Mr. Seamless and I went down to Holly Springs to pick her up today from the guy who sold her to us.

The idea is, we each pitch in 1/5 of the purchase price, plus an annual maintenance fee. The truck lives at Ms. Why's house, since she has a nice big driveway for it, and we use a Google calendar to reserve her for up to 4 hours at a time - the only rules are that you don't take her outside the Triangle, and you bring her back full of gas.

This is so brilliant for so many reasons, not the least of which being that it wasn't much of a financial investment at all, yet we now have access to a pickup truck whenever we need it. Load of mulch? Cleaning out the shed? Trip to the household hazardous waste collection site? MOVING? We've got it covered. But you don't have to go out and buy your own truck.

We also have an amateur mechanic in the group, so hopefully the maintenance won't kill us.



What we haven't quite figured out yet is whether/how to rent her to friends for their hauling, mulching and moving needs. If you've got a co-op beater truck, it seems like a pretty good idea for lots of folks to get plenty of use out of her. On the other hand, if her dance card is pretty full we may not want to share her. She is such a little cutie. We might get jealous.


she's so fine!

Now I want to go co-op on all kinds of other practical items: lawnmowers, hedge-clippers, sanding belts, screen printers, internet service... the list goes on. There's no point in having four or five of each of these things, when one would serve so many! I would love to hear about what kinds of stuff you & your friends go co-op on, whether to save money or just tread a bit more lightly.

best war ever

Go watch this web movie! www.TheBestWarEver.com

John Stauber & Sheldon Rampton have a new book out, The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess in Iraq. These are the guys from PR Watch, and I have long been a fan of their books, including Toxic Sludge is Good for You, one of the books that led me down this path to full-time environmental health advocacy (what I do when I'm not doing most of the stuff I blog about).

The concept from this book that freaks me out the most: infectious propaganda: When you actually believe your own spin, and it leads you down the path to defeat.
[shudder]

niñolandia

Best. Birth control. Weekend. EVER!

I can't begin to count how many curtain-climbers between the ages of 0 and 6 I interacted with this weekend. Suffice it to say, any involuntary baby-pangs being suffered by HWWLLB or myself recently have evaporated and been replaced with the very strong need for beer, immediately.

Pictured above you see a shot from the birthday party of miss Jay, who turned four this week (she is the un?lucky recipient of the colorbox sweater). Her parents claim to have liked it - I think it's rather too loud, myself, but she's a kid who looks good in bright colors, so it will probably get some wear this winter. The infants aren't in this picture, but besides miss Jay's 10 week-old sister the party also contained a set of 11 week-old TWINS. I pray for their parents. This party came complete with a kids' race, a moonbounce, and a Barbie cake, which was the highlight of the party for me. It was strangely fascinating.


help! eeeek! masher!

Cute idea, but totally macabre in the execution. The best part, once we recovered from the slicing off of the dress, was later when miss Jay and I got to try all the different outfits on her. Barbie really needs to learn to wear colors other than pink - because if not for the color, I would have worn just about everything in that baggie of fashion (except the shoes - Barbie seems to wear hooker heels exclusively). You should have seen the long tweed coat with the fake-fur collar - to DIE for, really.

So as if the birthday party wasn't enough, today I had to work at my organization's booth at La Fiesta del Pueblo, and our booth just happened to be located in Niñolandia (we do a lot of work on children's health issues). I have no idea how many ladybug temporary tattoos I applied to grubby little hands today, but it was right many. Did I mention Remi the clown? Yeah, he was right next to us. Remi is the real deal, as Puerto Rican musical clowns go - he had those kids revved up to 100 RPM. But being located right next to the inferno of entertainment that is dozens of psychotic toddlers screaming along to songs about eating vegetables and good behavior... it was a little much. Just a wee bit.

So I'll be recovering chastely from the weekend over the next few days. In fact, you may not hear much from me this week - it's a busy week and I'm behind on hideous biostatistics homework - but I'm hoping to get the top-down transformation of the baby bolero done in time to post for Free Pattern Friday this week. Keep your fingers crossed, and have a great week. Unless you're Barbie, in which case, girl, you need to get you some flat shoes. Seriously.

hardest button to button

I just finished tearing off all the too-bright green buttons off the Colorbox Sweater and replacing them with nice bright (but not too bright) pink buttons. Just in time, too... I'm supposed to be giving this sweater to a kid on Saturday at her 4th birthday party.

One of my most favorite activities is trawling antique stores for cool buttons. Some places will take matching sets and wire them together on cards and then charge outrageous prices for them. I prefer sifting through buckets of buttons and finding the matches myself - and paying more like 25 cents a button. Here are some of my favorites:



These came from an antique store in Selma, where they had a huge rack full of plastic bags full of buttons. These all came in the same bag - I think the bag cost around $3 and had about a dozen buttons in it. Last time I went back to that place, the rack was gone. Boo hoo!

This week I got my vintage button love indulged by GreenKitchen, who led me to the Vintage Buttons flickr group (for pictures of peoples buttons and things they've made with them). Total button porn. Yum.

Vintage buttons don't usually come in big sets, so it can be hard to use them for something like a whole cardigan, but they are wonderful as closures for something like a purse or cape. I also love vintage buckles. You don't see enough of these cool closures on clothes and accessories anymore. A few months ago Bugheart sent me a surprise package with wonderful old buckles inside, including the big funky wooden one in this picture:



I have this fantasy that I'm going to use up all these great buttons and buckles on fabulous clothes and accessories that I've knit up for my friends and family, but at this rate it's going to take the rest of my life. I guess I'd be okay with that, though...

unpleasant guts

Have you heard enough yet of me ranting about how much better knitting all-in-one-piece from the top-down is? You haven't? Maybe you should just read back through some previous posts... and don't forget this one... and this one. So I'm obsessed. Big deal!

Okay, so case in point. Here we have a cute little baby bolero sweater, all finished up and ready to go. Hm... raglan sleeves... cardigan... hey, this ought to be knit top-down, right? Well, in theory, yes. But I bought the pattern (buying a pattern - my first mistake) that came with the yarn, which called for knitting up all the itty-bitty pieces of the sweater and sewing them together. Can we say tedious?? The dang sweater took me longer to sew up than to knit. And then there are all the ugly interior seams:



I like the guts of a knitted item to look just as good (or maybe half as good) as the outside. I hate sloppy-looking insides. All these ugly seams and yarn ends everywhere are just so very unnecessary.

Last night I finally got started knitting the top-down transformation of this pattern. I'm going to change things a little bit - hopefully just enough to justify posting it for you, because this really ought to be easy to knit, it was just the hideous instructions getting in the way.

By the way, if you're looking around for just the right pattern to make someone special a fabulous Christmas gift, look no further than the Flying Spaghetti Monster hat pattern. A true original for the Alternative Creation Theory enthusiast in your life.

Don't miss out on the remaining free yarn from Saturday's big giveaway!

free stuff, courtesy of ernesto

Yes, that is a large tree on my house. Overall, Ernesto was not much of a threat to North Carolina compared with some of the doozy hurricanes we get from time to time. But thanks to the moronic off-balance tree-whacking done by my wackadoodle next-door neighbor last year (yes, that is a clinical diagnosis), one of our most favorite trees wound up sideways on my roof yesterday around 5 AM. The roof is more or less all right, but the tree is not. We are really sad about the state of the backyard at the moment - normally our oasis. Right now it looks like a hurricane came through there... oh, right.

But nothing makes you feel better than giving, so in the spirit of the Great Monday Giveaway (I know, it's not Monday), I present some free stuff. First-come, first-served. Please let me know in the comments what you'd like, and let me know how to get in touch with you about shipping. Domestic shipping is free, but if you live on another continent I will need you to pay for the shipping (sorry Australians). Enjoy!

item #1: 7 balls of cotton blend yarn - taken!



Seven balls of Zitron Evita, a plied DK weight 40% cotton, 40% acrylic, 20% rayon. This is a lovely, very soft lightweight cotton blend yarn wrapped with a strand of shine. 121 yd/110 m (50 g) per skein. Color #10 is a soft sage green.

item #2: 2 balls of snazzy eyelash yarn



Two different balls of great carry-along eyelash yarn. On the left: Knitting Fever Flutter in color #130. White with subtle metallic silver interspersed, 75 yds/70m (20g). 100% polyester. On the right: Berroco Plume FX in color #6743, Caffe Latte. 63 yds/58m (20 g). 100% polyester.

item #3: buttons - taken!



The vintage pink buttons would look wonderful on a coat, a chunky sweater or as purse closures. They're 1.25-inch (34 mm) buttons (there are 4 of them). The leaf green buttons are new, but they would look great on vintage-styled items. They're 3/4-inch (19mm) buttons (there are 6 of them).

I hope you find something you like, and I hope all your trees are upright.