So all of a sudden, this blog is getting a dozen visitor stats from what is apparently an online English/Czech dictionary. It looks kind of like Wikipedia, in that anybody can submit a Czech definition of an English word. (Hey, Ann, "modrá stužka" is "blue ribbon"!)
But nothing for "blueberry pie" yet — anybody?
Wha-at?!
Knit. "Mommy, can I have a snack?" —
Knit, knit. "Honey, the truck registration is due. Can you go over to the Auto Club and get the tags for me?" —
Knit, knit. "Mommy, will you push me on the swing?" —
Knit. "Grandma’s dog just threw up on the rug!" —
Knit. Sigh. The Cotton Glace just isn’t working for me. Love the color, but it feels stiff and rough in garter stitch, even at a fairly loose gauge. And I am coming to the realization that the current ball will end somewhere in the middle of the sleeve again, with nowhere to hide the join —
Knit. "Honey, I’ve got to be at work at six tomorrow morning. What can I take for lunch?" —
Knit, knit. "Mommy, Laura called me ‘stupid’!" —
Yawn. I wake up early. Knit, knit, knit. Julia wanders in and adds a few Duplo blocks to the tower she’s been building. "Ma, can I have some break-tiss now?" —
"My tummy hurts, Mommy" —
Knit, knit. An email from my friend in Australia. "K is getting bigger and bigger. No baby yet, but sometime in the next couple of weeks, we think." So soon?! Aaugh —
Knit. "Mommy, Julia threw her milk at me!" —
Knit. Sigh. I dig out some Anny Blatt merino that I got at Cheer Wool. It’s heavier than the cotton, so I can use a different set of needles to try it out. I swatch and start at the same time — only ten or so more stitches than my usual swatch size, so what the heck. There’s a new episode of "Foyle’s War" on, with the always-watchable Michael Kitchen —
Knit. "Mommy, how do you spell ‘love’?" —
Knit, knit. The merino works up nice and fast. I check the pattern again. "Cast on 45 sts for sleeve." 45? that sounds familiar. Oh, nuts. I was in such a hurry to make up for lost time the other night that I cast on for the sleeve instead of for the back. Rip, rip, rip —
Knit. "Mommy, is it time for Brownies yet?" Laura’s first Scout meeting! —
Knit, knit. "Mom, where’s Sparkle-Fairy’s wings?" —
Here are the Booking Through Thursday questions for today:
Pick up the book that is closest to where you’re sitting right now.
I got tired of seeing this unfinished project in the drawer, so I ripped it out this morning, and tied the wool back into skeins.
I must say, I get a bit of a kick seeing how kinky wool gets when it is knitted. After washing, it was a sorry sight, though —
especially since it once was this —
Classic Elite Inca alpaca. The color is apparently long-since discontinued, since I’ve had it around for I don’t know how long. (Cough–twenty years–cough.) Very nice stuff, so soft, in a rich purple that the digital camera cannot seem to capture. Here is the first repeat of the Beginner’s Triangle from "A Gathering of Lace".
One of the things I like about blogging is that my resolve to finish things is much stronger. Who wants to show off a bunch of half-started projects?!
Booking Through Thursday‘s questions for this week:
Garter Stitch Jacket so far —
This is Attempt Number 3 at the sleeves, Number 1 of which came out when it was obvious that they were at least two inches too long, even after rolling up; Number 2 was ripped back when there was a knot in the cotton that would have entailed a join at the center of the cuff, garter stitch worked sideways, remember, and nowhere to hide woven-in ends. I was obviously not thinking very clearly when I went from a project knitted on US9s in wool held double, to one in fine-gauge cotton on US3s, either.
What I’m Trying to Get My Head Around Today: the "Dickens v. Domesticity" thing. I’ve noticed a number of bloggers mentioning this lately, the gulf between the life of the mind, as it were, and of home and family in women’s lives. (Is is the beginning of the school year? I seem to feel this same thing welling up in me every September, when I drive past the college and the students with their shining morning faces, on my way to the grocery store. And should it be "v." and give a legal, even if I may, "courtly," sense of an intellectual argument, propounded over wine and chicken Marsala, or "versus" and sound like a trashy, no-holds-barred wrestling match?)
It always sounds more than a little poignant to me when women say, "My life began when I met X." I don’t mean to disparage this sentiment, which is sweet and nice, which I hope I am myself most of the time. But what does it imply about the years before this event? Isn’t that a big part of the Dickens side of an intellectual woman? where does it go? Perhaps my dismay comes from the fact that I met my husband-to-be when I was already in my thirties, and the Domestic side of me had given up hope, and the Dickens part rebelled at the fact that I even labeled it "hope" when I Should Not Need a Man to Make Me Feel Complete. A part of my life began at this point, certainly, and an extremely vivid and fulfilling part it is, to be sure. But I was already fairly solidly established intellectually, even allowing for the fact that there is always something new to be learned — I’m not the brainiest person I know, not by a long chalk, but the Dickens part was how I defined myself for a long time before I met my X. It’s an old argument, of course — women have been feeling this disparity ever since they started being intellectual. (And we all know how long that’s been.) How does one reconcile a career and family, scholarship and housekeeping? Why does it seem that one side must start and the other stop, why does a woman define herself as "before and after," can we possibly have it all? I’m tempted to add "Dickens v. Domesticity" as a category for this blog, it’s such an eternal question. (And I love the alliteration.)
Sigh (both regretful and amused). My life is a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps these days, with the steps backward beginning to outnumber the steps forward. I found my stack of "current" reading yesterday, buried under a mountain of artwork schlepped home from the girls’ Hong Kong preschool. I am finding it incredibly frustrating toilet-training a stubborn child, especially when much of what I love so much about her is that she is so strongly and wonderfully her own person. My cookbook shelf is now bigger than my women’s studies shelf. Instead of pondering and marveling on the relationship of wool skeins to art, I find myself refereeing the battle between two little girls about who has more Thomas engines in her train.
(No kidding! Look at this —
The skeins have this wonderful organic-ness about them, they seem almost alive, the way that they twist and how the light and variations of color add extra dimensions. They remind me of Michelangelo’s slave studies, the way the arms wrap around their heads, the legs that bend and seem to emerge from the rock surrounding them.)
Well, I will close this rant with a misquote from Virginia Woolf — "I meant to write about knitting, only life came breaking in as usual"!
Here is my "Big Bad Baby Blanket" — project one of two for the Baby Knit-Along over at Emy’s vintagefusion.
This is a fast knit, and makes a very handsome blanket. I didn’t think that I really had that much time for knitting, but it worked up in a little over a week of half-hours here and there. Mine came out bigger than the original, of course — 37 inches square, after blocking — as the Nature Wool is heavier than Koigu. I adjusted the row numbers to fit the larger gauge. I like the Nature Wool very much. It is a bit rougher than, say, Jaeger Matchmaker merino, but not unpleasantly so; oddly enough, it seemed softer to knit with when doubled than with a single strand. I had a half-ball due to the earlier attempt, so in order to keep any variances of color from showing (and I had already seen that they would), I started with one full ball and the half-ball, thus blending the skeins. This has the added benefit of keeping the splices well-spaced apart. I love the subtle color changes within the skein. It has a nice woolly smell when wet too — I liked the smell of it on my hands after I’d washed and blocked it!
(And note that designer Lisa Shobhana Mason at My Life in Stitches has a Big Bad Baby Blanket gallery….)
This one is for a "northern hemisphere" baby — the other project is for a "southern hemisphere" baby. One will need something warm for winter, the other something light for spring and summer! I have started the garter-stitch jacket from Debbie Bliss’ "Quick Baby Knits" in Rowan Cotton Glace….
Have spent the last few evenings, after the girls have gone to bed, watching the 2-disc DVD edition of "The Philadelphia Story". I can recommend it for the movie itself, of course, but the extras are good too. Film historian Jeanine Basinger provides a commentary — she sounds more than a little professorial at times (at one point, in fact, shuffling pages can be heard), but nevertheless she gives a lot of interesting information about the film and its cast and crew. (I can, by the way, highly recommend her 1993 book "A Woman’s View : How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960", a fascinating look at "women’s movies" and their stars.)
The DVD also includes two full-length documentaries, one on Katharine Hepburn and one on George Cukor, both about an hour long and packed with details on their respective careers. There are also two (!) radio versions of the play, with the main cast from the movie. One, from 1942, cuts the play down to about an hour, including war bond commercials and a war effort plug from the four stars and Cecil B. DeMille at the end — the other version, from 1947, is a zippy half-hour total, including Lady Esther ads for hats and face powder. (Actually, here is the "Lady Esther" version itself. Apparently Lady Esther was a cosmetics company in the forties. And for a rather long digression about advertising as a "reflection of society" in the 1920s and 1930s, read this, which is in some ways related to Basinger’s book that I mentioned above, discussing how a particular social group reflects and is reflected by a particular media, being both its audience and its target.)
I am not sure why the Robert Benchley short "That Inferior Feeling" and the MGM cartoon "The Homeless Flea" were included on this DVD, as they seem to bear little relation to either "The Philadelphia Story" or to any of its cast — perhaps the DVD producers wanted to give us an idea of what it was like to see "The Philadelphia Story" in the theater in 1940. It is kind of fun to do the whole movie thing, pop some popcorn and watch a short and a cartoon and the feature! (It was funny to notice that the first set in the Benchley short was used in a Spencer Tracy movie featured in the Cukor documentary, even down to the Holbein print on the wall behind the desk.)
Well, back to knitting — I’m making an effort to schedule some regular knitting time, since I’ve had to let things sit for so long. I decided to rip out the two squares I’d done so far for the green baby blanket. I still like the idea of the stripes of the Nature Wool going in different directions, and I had grafted the two squares together, then come to the conclusion that the seam as worked was too stiff for what one hopes will be a soft baby blanket, after all, and I did not want to use the limited time at my disposal in fiddling with grafting methods. So — out it all came, back to the beginning, and started again as a Big Bad Baby Blanket proper. Luckily, being worked with two strands at once, it grows fairly quickly.
I love the Escher-ness of the center, where the four squares come together — always going down the staircase.
Our shipment from Hong Kong finally arrived! The girls were so excited that they leapt and cried out with delight every time they saw something emerge from its box, no matter what it was. Daddy’s hiking boots got the same glorious welcome as did their Barbies, their school uniforms, and the box of play food and dishes.
Since we were there in Hong Kong at the time of our ninth anniversary, and the traditional gift for that year is china, we had bought ourselves a vase from Wah Tung in the Queen’s Road East — lucky red, with the double happiness character forming part of the decoration. ("Mommy! your red thing! It’s here!")
I was surprised to find that our book collection had apparently expanded while we were gone, as despite our having taken a good couple of boxes with us, there was no room on the shelves for them when I tried to put them back. Curious.
I took a couple of minutes to fondle my new yarn stash, and its new home. Did I say fondle? I mean caress.
So the afternoon was spent, by me, in putting things away (taking the opportunity to rearrange the kitchen drawers as well) and, by the girls, in playing with all of the things they haven’t seen for a month. You’d think it had been a year, such was their joy. Double happiness, indeed!
Knitting, reading, other stuff.
A Bluestocking Knits 
