Aes, hatted:

And bouncing gleefully:

Nemesis approves:

But of course , he would. 

Mad-Hatter the first needs a new project.  In the meantime, call me Lanea Magya.  Whoever can tell me what that means gets a prize, unless of course you were with shadowy hatted ones and our companion who came up with it.  Then you’ve already got a prize, and you should let someone else play, and maybe go have another drinky-poo.

Another hat, but taller.

And slightly freaky.  Awaiting delivery and blocking.

La.

The brim is wicked-wavy.  I will see if the strange-head who will own it wants harsh blocking or is wave-savvy.  My guess–the wave stays.

I cast off with black so that if the brim wants a wire, it can obscure one nicely.  I used a single strand of knitpicks Merino throughout.  As is my wont, I cast on three stitches, increased to nine on the first increase round, and then increased by three stitches every three rounds.  There are seven stripes, and the rim was increased by six stitches a round after I knit backwards for three rounds–that allows a nice break from the body to the brim without casting off and picking up stitches.  Next time, I may or may not alter the increases to change the waviness of the brim.  We shall see.

Pre-felt, the hat was 37 inches tall.  It is now 19 inches tall.  The opening is about 24 inches, down from 36.  The hat felted very quickly–18 minutes of agitation was all it took.  It is currently a bit big for its owner, but that will allow me to block it accurately when the time comes.  It may grow some needle-felting.

Some things are lovely:

And some things are charming:

And some things are downright quizzical

Until you figure out how to look at them

and how they need changing.

I felted the first knitting machine created swatch, and I fell in love with it.  It makes me think of this chunk of Patrick Kavanagh poetry:

O unworn world enrapture me, encapture me in a web
Of fabulous grass and eternal voices by a beech,
Feed the gaping need of my senses, give me ad lib
To pray unselfconsciously with overflowing speech
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.

(from Canal Bank Walk )

Which leads me right into “O commemorate me where there is water,/Canal water preferably, so stilly/ Greeny at the heart of summer.  Brother/ Commemorate me thus beautifully . . .” because I was trained up right.  And that will lead me into thinking of the bench with which they did commemorate old Paddy K, because sometimes folks really do get the fine things they deserve.  And that will lead me into thinking on James Still and his cabin . . . But I digress.

I went into a charming little kitchen shop in Middleburg with my charming Mom and my charming Sister-in-law, and I walked out with one charming knitting bag.  I might go so far as to call it cute-schmoot if I hadn’t just had Paddy Kavanagh rolling around in my brain.  I mean, sometimes all the book learning shames the goofiness right out of me.  For a second or two, at least.

Jayme and Jill helped me do some math on Wednesday, so I was able to knit a brim onto that quizzical object.  I had hemmed and hawed about how best to do the increases, but they came up with the right way pretty quickly.  It has some serious shrinking to do, oh yes it does.  I hope the felt ends up relatively stiff.  If not, I can wire the brim.

The knitting machine has been giving me some serious guff.  Post swatching, I set it up to start on a huge piece of knitting that I plan to stitch up into a bag to felt for el presidente.  But the machine got hella bratty when I had about 12 inches of mottled green knitting hanging from it.  The last three rows I knitted made me think a lot about how nice it would feel to hit my new knitting machine many many times with a maul, or maybe an adze, or just a nice heavy sledgehammer.  So I decided to pull that first chunk off and set it aside, and maybe do the body of the bag in two sections rather than one.  I’m sure some kind person out there in cyberspace can tell me why the contraption turned contrary.  If not, there is a kind person who will lend me a chainsaw and maybe some white fuel and a lighter.

Now, well, is the quazi-religious portion of the blogging.  In case you didn’t know, Sunday was fry-day (Fries will not sustain a tyrant!).  I’ll blame Mr. Mike for the institution of Fry-day.  I don’t know whether he actually started it, but it’s been going on for way longer than a decade, and over a decade ago, most of us were still basically kids and thus unlikely to follow through with such a cracked plan.  Mr. Mike seemed to institutionalize Fry-Day, turning it into, well, an  institution for nutbags.  He encouraged us all to take part in his insanity.  He encouraged us to cut potatoes and boil oil in the hot August sun as if we were on KP duty when we were actually on vacation.  Fry-day is almost never held on a Friday.  Its celebration is sacred.  It is a moveable feast in the truest sense of the word.  To celebrate Fry-day, well, you fry lots of stuff.  But to match the spirit of the holiday, the frying has to be truly inconvenient and preferably way over the top.  Making french fries in your fry-daddy?  Not Fry-day.  Frying a whole boar in Antarctica with only q-tips and Cheetos for fuel?  You have learned well, Grasshopper.  Here is your sacred skimmer.

In the early years, we just made french fries while we were camping.  You have no idea what a pain it was.  Then we got better camp stoves and made fries and onion rings and doughnuts and chicken nuggets.  You have no idea what a horrendous pain that was.  But every time we celebrated Fry-day, we were ended up making friends with other folks camping nearby, so we kept at it.  Yesterday, since Dobbs was in town from California, we fried chicken nuggets, and risotto-mozzarella balls, and fries, and sweet potato fries, and pierogies, and then we got serious.  We tempura-ed shrimp and string beans and onions and sweet potatoes.  And then we lost touch with all our mamas’ rules and fried twinkies and snickers and almond joys and cheesecake.   You have no idea what a pain it was.  My house smells like a Chinese restaurant even though we made no Chinese food.  But I managed to keep anyone from frying a) themselves or any parts there-of; b) any of the kids or pets; c) any of inedible possessions; and d) ice-cubes or any of the other things that make grease fires so attainable.

Ugh.  I wrote this post, see, but I got distracted and I lost the whole darn thing.  So where was I . . .

I felted the machine knitted swatch and it turned out beautifully.  The felt is just fuzzy enough but doesn’t require shaving or other fuss.  The Cascade felted a little more slowly than the Arucania, so there are little spots of brightness in the blue section that are absolutely charming.  I am smitten.  And I am going to be knitting up one giant bag this weekend.  I still have to decide what kind of handles to make and how large of an Uffington Horse to needle fet on to the bag.  I think I’ll be using any left-over yarn to make trivets and potholders for Tuatha and Dancing pig, again as an homage to this pottery.  I have two fears though–one is that I will be incapable of letting go of the bag when it is time to give it to its recipient.  The other is that I will go a bit crazy buying Arucania yarns.  I haven’t been to A.C. Moore yet, but I have it on good authority that they sell this yarn.  I will not drive to Bailey’s Corner over lunch to buy yarn.  Well, I won’t do it today.  Well, I’ll try to try not to do it today.  When I sell my house to buy yarn, will you help me knit a new house, please?

I’ve spent much of the past week spinning.  I bought Ken Burns’s The Civil War as an anniversary present for Scott. (Some of you now think I’m an awesome wife, and some of you think that’s a really unromantic gift.  Scott thinks I’m awesome, so we’ll go with that.)  We’ve been watching an episode or two a night, and the images drove me right to the spinning wheel.  That’s a very good thing: I have now spun most of the Coopworth I’ve been so slow to spin, which means that I will soon allow myself to spin some of my gorgeous dyed rovings I have floating about.  See, I don’t let myself start spinning one fiber until I’ve finished off its predecessor.  Anyway, plying is a bitch.  My wheel isn’t wild about turning counter-clockwise. I’m not very experienced plying on a wheel, and my cheapo lazy kate is a big old pain in the hind-end.  But I am getting the hang of Navajo plying, which is good because I have some Lorna’s Laces variegated top calling to me from the studio.  It’s very blue and lovely, and Navajo plying will keep the color gradations clean. 

I had planned to go to Hunt Country Yarns on Monday and get a tensioned lazy kate to fix at least part of the plying problem.  It was a good plan: My sis-in-law, my neice Talia, and my Mom have been planning to have some girl time somewhere pretty, and Middleburg is pretty.  And I have this scheme, in which I extoll the virtues of exposing little kids to fiber-arts because it encourages creativity and develops hand-eye coordination and blah blah.  It’s all true, but it’s also a convincing argument to drag my family to fiber-rich places so I can "accidentally" buy fiber and yarn and tools I don’t really need .  I’ve been gathering kharmic debt, and the collection agent just called.  Hunt Country is closed on Monday.  Sigh.  Must rework plan.  And maybe give something to charity to cleanse my dirty, fiber-addicted soul.

Oh, and there is a big pointy knitted thing in my knitting bag.  I have to do a little bit of math, and then it will grow a brim, and then it will go for a rather painful bath, followed by a greuling massage, and then someone will be able to wear it, cackling.

I knew I would be unable to knit yesterday:  There was a huge pile of ex-tree mulch in our front yard that needed to move to the back yard, and it seemed unlikely to move itself.  And don’t think I didn’t try to convince it.  If I knew what language to speak to a deceased, shredded white pine, my pleading may have even worked.  I changed into my over-muh-halls, whining about how sore my hands were from one day of mulch-moving, grabbed a pitchfork, and joined Scott at the mulch pile.  We were prepared for day upon day of misery, culminating in re-seeding the dead patch of lawn that we would find on Saturday when we reached the bottom of the pile.  I sent Scott in for a drink when he looked wilted, and I started shoveling mulch.  I must have looked really pitiful or maybe quite dainty, because out of nowhere neighbor Paul showed up with a wheelbarrow and a pitchfork, filled the barrow in no time flat, and put the mulch in the big pile in the back.  Paul is a prince among men.  Paul made jokes about moving piles of rocks in basic training.  Paul must not know that I am the kind of girl who knows how to use a pick-axe and throw a javelin.  Please don’t tell him.  Sometimes there is reason to hide my tomboyish nature.

Scott came back out, joked with Paul about being incapable of watching me work so hard, and the two of them moved 12 cubic yards of mulch in under two hours.  And all Paul would accept was one beer.  One beer.  I got to hang out with Rachel, Paul’s housemates’ daughter.  We played fetch with Kayo, who has decided that Rachel is fun to lick and good at petting brown dogs and that Paul is probably one of the pack-members.  We raked and otherwise assisted the guys, assuring them that we recognized their amazing strength.  It was like Scott and Paul were racing.  But I won.  Scott and I are only slightly sore, neither of us have any big injuries, the lawn is fine.  Glorious.

And then Paul mowed his lawn, which didn’t need to be mowed at all.  Maybe he’s nuts.  At least he’s nuts in a good way.  When word gets out about Paul, I expect that there will be a line of single ladies with yard-work needs circling the block. 

Yesterday, a trio of guys with chainsaws showed up at our house.  After about an hour of work, I heard the sickest crack, and a pop, and a very big evil thump.  By the time they left, a two-plus story white pine was reduced to a pile of firewood and a pile of chips.  The tree had to come down via chainsaw, because it was about to come down via storm, and was likely to land on our roof.  I hate having trees removed.  The former owners of our house planted trees badly and never maintained them, so this is the third tree we’ve had to have removed.  I hope it’s the last.   

I sated my pain with Scharffen Berger Milk Chocolate: the best chocolate I’ve ever had.  My life is changed utterly.  If you see me selling pencils on a streetcorner, blame the chocolate dealers. 

In the meantime, I will be schlepping chips across the yard and trying to unload green wood.  Who wants some?  Free giganto logs here!

On Sunday, I heard the sweetest thing ever.  My niece Talia has just turned three, and up until now has spoken very little.  After some treatment and a refined diagnosis and some more treatment and some fish-oil (aka magic pills), she was saying things all of a sudden.  Phrases even.  She pointed to a picture of me and said "Aunt Amy."  And I managed not to cry.  Best of all, talking is making her life and her parents’ lives much easier.  She and Max and the twins had a great time at the party on Sunday, and my Step-Dad officially had his best birthday yet because he was surrounded by grand-kids.  How cool is that, huh? 

A quite large hat is growing rather quickly.  It is striped with red and black.  And it is pointy.  And it isn’t mine.  And the last few rows have been knitted continentally.  The math for the brim is going to be interesting.  And the next bag is on hold while I procrastinate over going to the hardware store to get metal dowels to weight the long hems for my knitting contraption. 

Knit!  Knit!

Generally, I prefer hand-work to machine work.  I always sew my hems  and other visible seams by hand.  I know the supremacy of scratch-made baked goods, and that is, literally, the way I roll.  And I pull weeds by hand–no chemical weed killers in this garden, no no.  And the mere thought of machine embroidery gives me the gibblies–I mean what, really, is the point of machine embroidery, unless of course you own a major-league sports team?

But there are clear exceptions.  Now that I have a kitchen-aid with a meat-grinder and sausage stuffer, I will never return to the old, messier, harder way of making fresh sausage.  And don’t try to hack on me about it–you don’t even make sausage.   I know you don’t.  Unless you are Aes or Etaine, who have made sausages and have used the kitchen-aid because, like me, you know the harder path is very greasy and much smellier; and arguably less safe to your hands and your GI tract what with the increased length of time between grinding and cooking the meat; and much more likely to be woefully interrupted by kidlets or naughty dogs; and thus much less likely to result in lots of really good homemade sausage.  You also know that deer ligature makes their stifles function much like light switches.  But I digress.

I make knitted felt.  Dark Mary wants me to make lots of knitted felt, but to make it affordable to the masses.  Lookie lookie:

That swatch took me mere minutes to make, and I barely even know what I’m doing yet.  I do know what I am making . . . I am making a bag that will look much like a’this pottery.  I’m using a strand of Cascade 220 and a strand of Arucania nature wool throughout–two greens for the bottom, grassy half, and two blues for the sky.  You are looking at the back side of the sky portion of the program.  This will be a pocket, eventually.  The bag is a commission piece, and because I can do most of the knitting on my new contraption, I will be able to charge the cash-poor commissioner very little for labor.  And I will get a lot of grafting practice putting the bag together, but my mistakes will be obscured by the felting.  Good news all around.

Here are the photos of my Mom’s Mother’s Day present.  I love this bag.

I made up the pattern on the fly, making sure to narrow the bag at the mouth and finish the top with an i cord bind off for stability.  The button is a hand-made antler bead that I’ve been holding on to for years.  I lined the bag, and the lining has an integrated needlepoint canvas stabilizer in the bottom.  The lining fabric is a pattern called “flowering star of Ghana.”  I heart it.

I used Lamb’s Pride for the bag, and I have to say I’m not fond of the extra fuzziness from the mohair.  I gave this bag one heck if a trim, but I used scissors as if I were trimming a dog.  The halo passed appealing and reached feral sometime in the felting process.  The color is gorgeous, though, so I am ultimately quite happy with the finished product.

And finally, to celebrate my new office at work, I made this little mini-garden (which, as usual, is much more charming in person):

I hope the new office gives it enough light.  That window behind the plants opens onto the atrium, so it’s not ideal for my green charges.

Off to my Step-Dad’s birthday party, which will be full of adorable kidlets.

Chris Offutt: Kentucky Straight. 

I search for fiction by reading syllibi that I find on-line.  I wish I were still enrolled in a university.  Since I can’t convince anyone that they should pay my bills and tuition, I read about and find classes I wish I could take, and then I read the books and form my opinions.  Sometimes it’s a miss.  This was a hit.  This is one of the best collections of short stories I’ve ever read.  This will make me a fan for life.  I am now an Offutt-evangelist.  Buy this book, please.  It will do you good.  I’m about to buy everything he’s written over at Powell’s.

And unless your heart is made of stone, it will upset you.  Kentucky Straight is a collection of stories set in a nameless section of the Kentucky Appalachians.  The book oozes depression, addiction, illness, cultural collapse.  It’s a downer, but a really delicious one.  The best mountain lyrics live in its spine. 

Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road is what it is: pleasing fluff. I needed some fluff, and I wanted a reminder of living in Dublin. Anyone who has read Circle of Friends will recognize the clueless but kind heroine, the beautiful, scheming friend, the deceitful first love, and the happy-enough ending. I picked the book up and read it in a few days, and it was sweet, as long as I didn’t think too hard about it.