oops

What made me think that I could get a mid-term exam and a new pattern written in the same week? I'm sorry y'all, the new pattern will be out next Friday.

In the mean time, there's always the new issue of Knitty to peruse -- complete with a pattern by Olga (and photos by the multi-talented Paloma!).

But I won't drag the suspense out any longer... you are all right, 8 legs is a sure sign of an octopus! It's a felted octopus for your toy-knitting pleasure. And I can't tell you how delighted I am that octopus knits came by to say hello. Coincidence? Hardly. Octopi are powerful creatures, you know. But I love Stacie's idea of knitted calamari - maybe that will be the next project in line. So - check back next Friday for the pattern. Again, my apologies.

Here's a photo of my desk at work. Just so you don't think I'm spending my knitting time someplace fabulous. I got a new desk this week (thank you larger, richer environmental group for the hand-me-down) and re-arranged the office a little. I think the black-eyed susans are the best feature.


wish you were here

colorful surprises

Here's a tantalizing glimpse of the soon-to-be-unveiled secret whatzit project. I'll be posting the pattern this week on Free Pattern Friday. It's taken me much too long to bring this fun project to a close:



Any guesses? It's not any of the things that you all guessed before (though now I want to make all of these things): leg-warmers, hat with tubular ties, gloves or a uterus.

Also in the surprise category, I'm putting the final touches on the last package (sniff!) to my Secret Pal. The theme for this package is rainbow. See, it's a theme and a color at the same time - brilliant, eh? The big question is, will she notice??

The main feature is some undyed superwash merino sock yarn, a rainbow of Kool-Aid packets and some other little dyeing-related odds and ends. And of course some random treats to further convey the rainbow theme. I hope she likes it. I've had a great time getting to "know" her and putting prizes together.

I also can't wait to find out who is the sweet and thoughtful knitter that's been spoiling me!

my pal

It's not quite time yet, but soon all will be revealed. June is the final month in the tenth round of Secret Pal.

I can't tell you who my pal is just yet, but I am enjoying finding things here and there to include in her final package. Today I picked up a wonderful-smelling eucalyptus candle for her while I was doing some grocery shopping at the Whole Paycheck Foods.

I like to put a package together slowly, usually starting with the yarn, and then building some kind of theme around it. It's very important that the colors coordinate, and that there be a little something for as many of the five senses as possible. But not too much of any particular thing - too much smell, for instance, would be very bad.

So what can I tell you about this Pal without giving it away?

She is funny. She is a stylish geek, which warms my heart to no end. I love a scientist with style. She's kind of sporty, in a way that at first I found a little intimidating, but she spends plenty of time on the couch with her cat, too, so I can relate to her pretty well. Her cat is great - he is big and happy and spoiled like my cat, and he's so cute that I think I will include something for him in this last package. She has a significant other who seems to be highly supportive of the yarn fetish (always a good sign). I'm not going to say where she lives, but it's a place I'd love to visit. I have been there once - much too briefly.

One of the challenges of making packages for her is that she's not a beginner, and she's a yarnaholic, so there's not much out there in the knitting world that she doesn't already have (her various yarn diets go right down the drain as soon as she gets near a yarn store, though she always finds a good get-out-of-jail-free card). So I have tried to find fun, out-of-the-way knitting pleasures to share with her, and to focus on color and texture rather than introducing her to "new" yarns - since I don't think there's a yarn that gets past her untrammelled. She is the kind of person that I'd love to have in my local Stitch & Bitch - she'd be a terribly good influence on my knitting, if you know what I mean.

To my Secret Pal - soon we can be real pals, or at least virtual real pals, or whatever we call each other out here in the internets. I love surprises.

finish what you started

Some of you are going to laugh at me, because you have untold numbers of projects "in progress" hiding in bags and baskets all over your house. I don't know if it's my Puritanical upbringing or just my rabid thriftiness (a.k.a. cheapness), but I really don't like to leave a project unfinished. I don't even like having more than one project going at a time, because of the delay conveyed to one by progress on the other.

I recently pulled out this wonderful yarn I bought a while back from Lazy Perry Ranch to try my hand at toe-up socks. This being the first time for the toe-up thing, I stuck to plain old stockinette, thinking that the toe-uppiness would be challenge enough and I should just keep it simple. I will say that the short-row heel was somewhat challenging the first time, and I ripped and re-knitted it once. But otherwise, it's just a sock, backwards. Not really brain surgery.

So I knitted and knitted in stockinette and eventually realized that this was going to be a really boring pair of socks. I also wanted to knit all the way to the end of the skein on each sock, since the color is "Fade to salmon" and I wanted to be sure use the really intense part at the end (remind me next time to start with the intense part, okay?). So the boring stockinette sock is destined to be a boring stockinette knee-high.

That's all fine and good when you're sitting through a three-day conference and flying around on airplanes with lots of stockinette-knitting time on your hands, but now that I'm back home with one sock and one toe finished, I can't possibly imagine knitting the second one. I think it's worse than second-sock syndrome, because despite the lovely yarn, I didn't even really enjoy making the first sock very much. And there are so many other projects waiting to be knitted!

I'm thinking it's time to cut my losses and stuff this into the back of the yarn cabinet. For shame! Hopefully after a few months my guilt will grow sufficiently strong for me to rip the whole thing out and rewind the yarn for future use. And when that day comes, I will start with the part I wanted to use in the first place. And I think I might also start at the top.

curb the enthusiasm

My horoscope today said " This can be a fantastic day, as long as you can contain your enthusiasm enough to direct it productively." That's exactly how I feel: sort of like a train full of steam (steam=enthusiasm) and moving very quickly... it feels exciting, and productive, but I just hope I don't go off the tracks on the curves ahead.

Hm, maybe the train metaphor isn't quite right. Maybe it's more like a hyperactive puppy with too many toys to choose from... or a bee flitting from flower to flower in a giant field full of things to be pollinated... (can you hear "Flight of the bumblebee" in the background? That's about the right pace).

I am eating lunch just before jumping on a plane to head to Chicago for a conference. This will be my first time there since high school, but I don't think I'll see much of the city beyond the square block where the conference is being held. But I love the feel of big cities. I don't know if I could really be a big-city dweller, but visiting them is so exhilerating.

The city where I live is really a small town that thinks it's a city. We have four or five tall buildings, one or two "wrong side of the tracks" type neighborhoods, and a bus system, which seems to be what it takes to qualify as "city" in many people's minds. But as in a small town, I see the same people on the street downtown, day after day, and most of all, in the arena for which I most love big cities, you really have to go out hunting for "ethnic" food here. If you want really good Thai, Ethiopian, Indian, you need to know someone who knows someone, and you need to venture out into secret shabby suburban strip malls to find the place. In big cities, there seems to be interesting food everywhere, and I always think the prices are much better. So wish me luck in Chicago, I'm hoping to eat something from a country I can't locate on a map.

Also, a big warm fuzzy shout-out to Susanna and Mike who came through town this week! It was such a delight to see these old college-years pals as they whizzed through our big-small-city-town. We ate a lovely outdoor lunch together at a one of the secret ethnic restaurants (sshhh...). Big hugs to you Philly pals!

feeling lucky

Apologies for the long absence. I've been having more of the old "why am I doing this?" thoughts about this blog as various other commitments pile up around me like stacks of unanswered letters or papers with "URGENT" stamped on them towering over my desk, all demanding reply and threatening collapse in a messy heap.

Despite the looming demands, though, I am feeling quite happy these days. There are lots of reasons, but just daily life in springtime seems to be the main culprit. It's finally starting to really get hot now, but we've enjoyed weeks of beautiful, mild sunny days full of strawberries and birdsong, and it's hard not to be happy with such natural splendor all around.

Life has also been full of wonderful wildlife sightings lately. On Saturday night, HWWLLB's parents took us to a secret spot to see the Blue Ghosts. They are an Appalachian firefly that gives off a bluish light, soft and low to the ground. Unlike the blinky yellow fireflies you're used to, the light is steady as they hover over the ground.

We drove to the trailhead around 8:30 PM, as it was starting to get dark. Camping is not allowed in this particular park, and the park closes at dusk, so we were happy to avoid being caught by a ranger on the way in. The moon was bright enough that we didn't need any flashlights, and we hiked back to a side trail where folks had heard these fireflies might be. As darkness fell, we watched the yellow fireflies blinking on and off, some rising high into the trees around us.

After an hour or so, we spotted a tiny, soft, eerie glow, bobbing low to the ground. In a little while the understory filled up with hundreds of them, softly floating like reflections of blue starlight on the surface of a dark pond. They transformed a trail where we had walked many times in daylight to a secret, sacred place, far away from people and their noise and lights. It was hard to believe that the tiny lights all around were insects looking for mates. It felt more like a magical, secret night-time city, which I guess in a way it was. We stayed for an hour or so, and then left them to their magical doings.

I mentioned other wildlife sightings... HWWLLB saw a bear while we were hiking on Sunday down from Mt. Pisgah. He was first in line, and startled the bear, a full-sized adult who was foraging just off the trail and went noisily scrambling down the hillside to get away. I heard it but didn't see anything, and was very jealous of HWWLLB and his bear sighting for the rest of the hike.

The other animal visiting us has been a barred owl. This one is in our backyard. We've heard them hooting since we moved here in December, but the other night at dusk he was sitting on the pole that supports our clothesline as we arrived home from work. The next morning, just at dawn, he was sitting in our backyard as mockingbirds and blue jays swooped around him, screeching. He looked relatively untroubled by the anxious littler birds, but didn't stay long, as it was getting bright outside.

I think that some cultures think it's good luck when an owl visits, and some think it's bad luck. I'm calling this particular owl good luck, since barred owls are noisy and frequently heard, but seen much less often - especially sitting on the clothesline!

Some other things I'm feeling lucky about: my Secret Pal. I haven't had a chance to photograph her last package to me while the sun is still shining, but let me describe it anyway. She sent me a big giant packet of wildflower seeds, which I think I'll plant this fall. On the cover are poppies and bachelor's buttons, two of my favorite flowers. There's also a pack of retro red & black stationery, some green tea which I've already taken to work, some more pretty home-made stitch markers, and some great sexy black yarn from Knit One, Crochet Too for a Cabaret Scarf. That will be a fun project! Thank you, Secret Pal!

One last item of good luck: This video is about some of the cool people in the county where we live (I love the Polyphonic Spree soundtrack!). Thanks to Billie (another star in the neighborhood) for pointing out this wonderful project and video, and for making me count my lucky stars to be surrounded by such beautiful people.

immature or child-like?

Saun thinks that the "inner kid" in me is trying to come out. Truth be told, the kid in me is just below the surface, and it really doesn't take much. Saturday night I rode a little plastic trike down a sloping driveway and into a pile of leaves in order to impress a two year-old. But I digress.

Over the weekend, the population of the momerath village grew to five.


the little guy is making a break for it

I like how they're all a little different from each other. Some look calm and happy, and some look extremely mischievous. The ones with the smooth button eyes look particularly stoned compared to the others. Later this week I'll be shipping them off as a gift for someone whose very patient parents will either think these are hilarious or annoying (or maybe a bit of both).

A few years ago, after something extremely mature that I did, my aunt told me that I hadn't changed a bit since I was six. At first I was a bit miffed, but the more I thought about it, doesn't it sort of seem like a compliment?

Another time I went to a conference, and at the end of the conference we had a no-talent show. There was this woman there who did handwriting analysis - she has worked on cases with the FBI and everything. For her no-talent, which was actually a real talent, she handwriting-analyzed everyone in the room. When it was my turn, she said I was "child-like." I'm not sure whether that was based on my handwriting, or on the no-talent that I had helped someone with right before that, where I wore a raincoat and carried a target and she shot water at me from across the room. But one of the things I learned from that night was that the length of the tails of your lowercase g's and y's carry a lot of sexual connotations, and also that guys don't like you to examine the lengths of their lowercase g's and y's.

It's been so beautiful the last few days. An all-afternoon volunteer commitment that I had planned for Sunday fell through at the last minute, hooray, leaving me a free Sunday afternoon to sit outside in the shady part of the backyard and read. I also got back down to brass tacks with the secret whatzit project and broke through on some serious design issues I was having. Hopefully you'll see the finished item soon.

As usual, I'm overwhelmed in projects I'd like to knit. Besides secret whatzit, I've got a secret X-mas sweater on the needles for HWWLLB, as well as the toe-up socks, and there's some Shine on the way to me from KnitPicks for an Isabella, which looks perfect for summer parties at which one might sip mint juleps (I'm hoping to attend a lot of those this summer). I also picked up copies of Vogue Knitting and Knit.1 this weekend, both of which are full of projects that have me fantasizing about color. Since I put away the winter clothes and broke out the warm-weather wear, I've noticed how dull my closet is. It really needs some more color, and there are all these great quick projects that could do the job... I'm thinking burnt orange, grass green, and of course red. Or maybe I should just dye some of the more boring clothes I already have?

The needles are calling... one last thing: I got a great package from my Secret Pal today - she is awesome. More on that later!