Feet, Don't Fail Her Now

My friend Mel over at Pipe Dreams and Purling Plans needs your help. She and her husband Tad will be walking 60 miles for Breast Cancer research - 20 miles a day on October 3rd, 4th and 5th - to honour the memory of her mother Linda, who succumbed to the disease in 2004. To increase awareness and to raise funds to benefit research, Mel is holding a little blog contest.

She is offering a chance to win one of her beautiful prizes for every $10 donated to the 3Day. She started out offering two prizes: a copy of the out-of-print Poems of Color - Knitting in the Bohus Tradition, and a skein of beautiful mohair yarn. As word has begun to spread, though, others have donated prizes for her to award, and her full collection (so far) can be viewed here.

Please click over to Pipe Dreams and Purling Plans and read Mel's story for yourself. Donate if you feel you can, or if you have some irresistible knitterly prize, consider passing it on for the cause.

Land Ho!

Drifting is almost completely finished. I have numerous - not to say multitudinous - ends to weave in, and she will be all done. I tried to get some nice pictures for you but it was horridly dark today and the flashed shots were just too garishly lit for my taste. I opted to suppress the flash, ending up with a more subdued colour than in reality, but preferring the mellow tone of these photos.

I went to the fabric store this evening in search of buttons. Buttons are difficult. Buttons are problematic. Buttons are a tricky thing. You don't want them to overwhelm the garment, but it's all too easy to err on the side of caution and end up with nondescript, boring buttons. You want them to be eye-catching, but not obtrusive. As to size, you have to be careful with knitted items because the buttonholes are often fairly tight to begin with, but are easily stretched. A too-large button will pull the band out of shape - a too-small button will come undone at inopportune moments.

Today I had a pretty good button-search experience, actually, only trying seven different buttons before I found the winner. I tried two or three rather rustic-looking, matte plastic hearts and flowers, but though they looked fine on the papers, they looked cheap on the sweater. I went to a more standard, round button, but they were jaw-crackingly boring.

Then I spotted, hiding on the bottom rack of the button spinner, some beautiful pewter butterflies. They are a great shape for knitwear - about twice as wide as they are tall, so they will be easy to button (provided you put them in wing-tip-first) but the width will keep them in place once they are there. Also - butterflies! Pretty!








And here's more button love for you.





I spent yesterday blocking the sweater, and tried a new technique this time - forcing steam through the knitting using my iron, without touching the soleplate to the fabric.







It worked remarkably well. The knitting smoothed out beautifully, and dried quickly. I love blocking - everything looks so right, pinned flat and with a patina of mist over it. Wool loves water, and water covers a multitude of sins. I'll use the steam blocking method again, because it was so darn fast and easy. I still prefer the soak-and-stretch, but this garment was already biggish for the child's age.







Which brings me to, how can the final knitted piece be three-quarters of an inch bigger than the pattern says it will be, when my tension was spot-on? I am getting exactly 22 stitches over 4 inches - I should have a piece that is identical in size to the schematic given. That it is not, is just another example of how knitting can mess with your mind.










I'm trying not to get too annoyed, because it doesn't really make any practical difference in this case - the child is not going to get any smaller, after all - they can always roll her sleeves up for the first year she wears it.



But still. Irritating.

I will soon have the FO post ready, but I have a date with a tapestry needle, first. I will be busy for a couple of days, I think, weaving in ends, and then I will give the entire thing a once-over with the steam just to pretty it up a bit. The button bands need a good steaming, as they weren't knitted yet when I blocked the four individual pieces.




The button band, before the advent of buttons.

This was a nice quick knit - I would definitely do this pattern again. More notes on that, in the FO post later this week....or possibly next. In the meantime, here is a glimpse of the (pre-blocked) wrong side of the Fair Isle band, in case that floats your boat (as it does mine).

New Happy Place

I spent this past weekend camping with my daughters, along with my cousin and her two girls, at a lake in the mountains about forty minutes from town. It was a sun-drenched, lazy-water weekend with long, hot afternoons and just the right amount of breeze. I took some pictures for you. (Click 'em - you'll be glad you did.)




I love how the lakes around here are all the same - deep, cold, clean, with conifers right slap up to the edge. It was a bit crowded, though: there were four other families enjoying this lake on the same day we were there - a Saturday. It was hard to get along sometimes, but we managed not to step on each other's feet too often.


I'm being facetious.






Here's where I realised I was not capturing the feel of the day and the lure of the water, so I shifted my perspective a bit. I put my camera in mortal danger for you all




but decided it was worth it.


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This is such a cool spot. On the left of the above picture you can see there is a narrow channel (it's about 8 meters wide) between the mainland and the sandy beach of an island. The children could easily cross this little land bridge - it was covered by only about 70 centimeters of water.



We took the girls up to one of the boat-in sites we could see from the beach - it was vacant but I promise you, at this time next year it won't be. (I'm looking at you, Mark. I'll bring the Hermann's.) This was one of the most beautiful places I've ever been - looking down on the bay in which we'd just been swimming.





There - you can clearly see the little neck of water between the island and the mainland.





It was hard to get a smile - everybody was hot and thirsty by now.





And here they are, happy and tired. They're smiling now because I am holding up two golden marshmallows on a stick.

Pepsi and a Top Dog, and a spot out of the smoke...doesn't get any better than that...even if you DO have a gigantic mosquito bite on your leg.

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I have finished Drifting, and will show you blocking pictures tomorrow. It's beautiful. I'm seaming right now but have yet to pick out buttons. Maybe I'll get to that tomorrow as well.

I have needs, y'know.

It's a little Google fun, brought to you by the big, bored Internet.

I Googled Shannon needs and found that I am more high-maintenance than I thought.

Shannon needs to be more vigorously investigated by the Irish government. Shannon needs an alibi. Shannon needs to stomp that Latin out. Needs your support. Needs Atlantic Roadway now. Needs to stop singing. Needs to learn to soothe her moods with something other than food. Shannon needs more cred. Shannon needs no more treatment. Shannon needs a car.

And Shannon needs to shake her booty more.

And I'm going to add one more thing: to put away the clean laundry.

The End of the Road Not Taken

Erudite Mondays at HalfSoled Boots

Volume 5, Number 3

The Other

David Guterson

Seconds ago I turned the last page of David Guterson's new book, The Other. In between setting it down and picking up my laptop, I murmured, involuntarily and in a subdued voice, "Wow."


At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, this is a huge book. Not physically - there are only 256 pages - but thematically.


Written in the first person, this story is a complicated, delicate retrospective of a long friendship between boys who become men - boys who inhabit each other's thoughts and emotions. John William Barry is the son of prominent Seattle money, and Neil Countryman's is a family of "nail bangers" - construction workers and tradesmen. They meet at the end of a footrace in 1972, after John William defeats Neil by three-quarters of a stride, and offers his hand at the end with "heartfelt, ruddy, exclamatory" sentiment.


The next two hundred or so pages are the firelit, pot-scented chronicle of adventure and misadventure as experienced by John William and Neil. I couldn't drag myself from this book. It led me inexorably from paragraph to paragraph, greedy to discover the next turn of the wheel: to pull aside the curtain a little bit more, hoping for another glimpse at the character and history of John William, Hermit of the South Fork Hoh.



There are beautiful moments in this book. You love, and disapprove of, the two boys. You understand, and then you don't. And if you read literature with a critical eye, as I do, you can't help but admire Guterson's technique - his choice of metaphor, his light hand and deft touch. The way he often says, in this novel, "In other words". And the voice of the narrator, Neil Countryman, is consistent and honest, believable.


There is a wonderful evocative use of language - images and sounds that convey the light and shadow of life with ease and richness. I often turned a page to a new chapter, only to laugh involuntarily, or catch my breath in foreboding, as I glimpsed the heading: the first chapter is entitled "No Escape From the Unhappiness Machine". There is also "Loyal Citizen of Hamburger World" and the second-last, my favourite, "Periodic Irritable Crying".


The book is about many things. It's about the choice given us, every day, to either live in the world or be apart from it. And it's about what happens to those people who are dragged in the wake of genius, or psychosis, or fanaticism.

Stories are compelling things. Well-told, they can occupy your thoughts to obsession, making normal living impossible. Guterson is amazing in this novel. He gives away the end, right at the beginning - on page 6. You could quit reading there, if all you wanted to know was what happened. But you don't, because it's not the end that matters - it's what lies buried at the beginning, what is uncovered in the middle - and, even more importantly, why?

Before I rate this book, I'd like to encourage you to leave a comment telling me a bit about your favourite book. Not just title and author, nor even a plot synopsis - what I'd like to hear about is how it makes you feel, and why. I'm giving away a hardcover of The Other to one commenter, selected from all those who leave me a note before the next Erudite Monday.


HalfSoled Boots' Highly Specialised Book Rating System
The Other gets:


Reread? Yes. At least yearly.
Given to Others? Yes.
Bookplate? Absolutely.


3/3

Glass Half Full.

Will somebody please come over here and teach my stupid dog not to eat fridge magnets?



Look at him. You'd think he wants what's INSIDE the fridge, right? Wrong. He wants to finish the snack he was having when I caught him earlier today.



On the other hand, scooping poop is really easy - you just walk around the yard with a spade held a few inches off the ground, and Zing!

'S'all about you

Happy Birthday to my darling sister Gwen....




......wish we were here.

XOXO