I was really hesitant while shopping around because Windows 8 isn’t something I was interested in being an early adopter of, and a new Acer model meant buying the Windows 8 system. But I ended up with an Acer Aspire M5 with Windows 8. It turns out the machine is really great and the operating system is not completely terrible. I don’t want to turn this into a review of Windows 8, so I’ll say that the whole thing where I had to go through the control panel to tell the clock to talk to the internet about the time in order to set the computers clock to the correct time sums up the system — functional, but absurdly quirky. On the plus side, I think having a touchscreen laptop is completely fantastic.

After the laptop purchase, we headed up to Lovelyarns. I needed some fiber therapy. I had seen on Facebook that Lovelyarns had Cephalopod yarns in stock and I ended up leaving with two skeins of Traveler in the Dark Waters colorway (pictured below). Isn’t it pretty?

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I’m holding off on starting anything with this yarn for the same reason I’m holding off on the Weekend Chunky sweater – must finish outstanding projects first! But I have collected some really gorgeous, inspiring fibers and I have a lot of ideas that I want to start soon, even though most will be seasonably inappropriate in another month or two when I really begin to work on them. Of course I say that and the National Weather Service is predicting freezing overnight temperatures and includes the word ‘snow’ in the short term forecast. We are clearly not out of sweater-weather yet.

On February 17th, the New Look went live and I’ve tweaked the blogs appearance slightly (probably so slightly no one’s noticed – I’ve done things like changed the header and link colors to more gray and slate blue colors and adjusted my fonts slightly).

Under the hood, I’ve been cleaning up my categories and tags. When I started this blog almost four years ago, I don’t think I clearly understood the difference between categories and tags. As of last week, I had 60-some categories. I now have 5 categories and that seems to be all that’s needed because these are the five things the blog is about (in alphabetical order, because that’s how they appear in the drop-down menu to the right):

• 500 Hats (Because knitting hats for kids is quick and easy and a fun way to do some charity knitting)
• Knitting (This encompasses 111 out of the 122 posts on the blog- this post is not about knitting)
• Not About Knitting (In case you need a cupcake frosting recipe or want to hear about how awesome it is to live in Remington)
• Pattern (Posts about patterns I’ve made available)
• WIP Wordless Wednesday (What I happen to be working on when I remember to take a picture on a Wednesday)

I also tidied up the tags a little bit but I’m okay with having a ton of those. I was mainly focused on using my blog clean-up time to get the categories under control (seriously, I had baseball as a category. I don’t even *like* baseball that much, other than to go to Camden yards  a couple of times a year to cheer for Ketchup in the Condiment Race).

It’s almost spring. I consider most of this the electronic version of spring cleaning. And since it is the beginning of March, here’s a picture of the little tulip budlings emerging in the flower boxes on my porch. I can’t wait to sit outside again in the evenings with some knitting and a glass of wine.

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Now that I’m emerging from my food (and really good wine) coma, I can talk about what I started out thinking I was going to post about today – alpaca yarn and the Corrugated Cowl. This week my WIP Wordless Wednesday post was my new cowl pattern, Corrugated. Last November, I purchased four hanks of Misti Alpaca Chunky in the natural cream colorway. I bought it with the intention of making a very warm winter cowl and was thinking it would be perfect for a reversible cable pattern. But when I tried out different reversible cable patterns, the chunky alpaca just wasn’t producing the stitch definition I wanted and the weight of the cables was too much.  Alpaca is really fuzzy and furry so I didn’t like the way the cables I wanted to use looked laying flat and figured they would get completely lost in the fabric of a finished cowl.  The swatches themselves were so heavy, I figured the actual cowl would end up weighing a ton around my neck.

So keeping in mind that I wanted a cowl that would be very warm and reversible, I tried out some basic stitch patterns – various ribs both plain knit/purl and decorative, seed and moss stitches, I even swatched good ol’ garter stitch. I really liked the way the seeded rib stitch looked (I’ve also seen it called cartridge rib), but I didn’t like that my knit stitches weren’t very neat – they almost look too loose. I think it was just the way the yarn knits because I’ve used that stitch pattern before and really like the results. Ultimately, I decided to try slipping the knit stitches. Here’s my version of the seeded rib/cartridge rib stitch with slipped stitches.

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And it is reversible. I slipped the knit stitches for both sides of the cowl while knitting in the round.

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To determine length, I compared the sizes of some of my past cowl projects. The Northumbria Cowl (link to picture) is the right length to just sit around your neck and stay warm without wrapping it double or having to use a pin or something to hold it in place, which you do have to do with the Noble Cowl (link to picture). Northumbria is also my perfect height of a cowl – I like my cowl’s generously sized and at least 8″ tall. The whole reason I wanted a reversible stitch pattern for this cowl was so I could double it around my neck without there being a wrong side. So I looked at some of the longer cowls I’ve made, such as the Ravens Cowl (link to picture). The Ravens cowl is awesome for wrapping around the neck twice for a draped look over a sweater or three times with less draping, more warmth with a coat.  Given that the alpaca is really heavy, I wanted to try and make a cowl that would wrap twice and be snuggled up around my neck (which ended up being perfect, I think if I had gone for a length that would wrap three times, I would have created something perfect for smothering someone to death – heh, death by knitwear).

Using the gauge swatch, I calculated the number of stitches and rows to get my goal length and width (does everyone else use a ton of math in knitting? I use math more now than when I was a biology undergrad). And then I cast on. Like most projects with bulky yarns, this  was a quick knit. But like all bulky yarns, it got to be really heavy with all the stitches on the circular needle. My math worked out and I have a cowl that is  8″ tall with a 54″ circumference (un-stretched)  that wraps twice around my neck for a warm fit. It’s a rib so it is stretchy but the yarn holds its shape nicely, which is good for convincing it to lay exactly how I want it to over my coat.

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I’m putting a pdf  version of the pattern up soon-ish. Oh, and to tie this all back in to my opening comments about restaurant week, the cowl made its debut in Hampden last evening when I went to the Food Market.

Oh… and Go Ravens!

I’ve had this laptop since January 2006 (I actually went and found the receipts in the file with the long-expired warranty) and it has been an amazing laptop for almost the entire last 7 years. It lost a few keys and the left control button doesn’t work, but overall the  laptop is pretty darn amazing. The power cord failed so I bought a replacement and last week, the replacement cord broke. And in breaking, shot sparks several feet into the air.  I’m feeling incredibly lucky that there wasn’t an actual fire, just a light show. Of course, I was horrified and the dog ran out of the room (I don’t think Molly’s forgiven me yet for almost causing a fire).

The problem I’m having now is choosing a new computer.  I don’t like windows 8, but want to keep using a windows computer. I’m looking at getting a model from last year that will come with Windows 7, but don’t know which one to get.  In the interim, I ordered another power cord because the computer seems okay, it just has nothing to plug in to charge.  But I’ve got to make this decision soon-ish, because the poor computer is acting like it can take only so much more (it’s also slowing down and has turned itself off a couple of times).

This is also the reason for the lack of posts – I can’t do my picture uploading and editing and post writing very well on my little devices so until the laptop situation is squared away I’m just collecting a back log of pictures and other stuff.

In somewhat related news, I turned 30 last Tuesday. So hooray for birthdays (scientists have proven that people who have more birthdays live longer so I plan to have many more birthdays after this one) and for birthday presents! I have SO MUCH YARN now. I may be approaching the point where my stash is ridiculous. There are a couple of projects I’ve wanted to undertake for a while and got the yarn for my birthday, like a new sweater vest (six skeins of chocolatey Ultra Alpaca  wound) and a cardigan (8 skeins of lichen Renewal Wool). As well as some yarn that I’m just excited to do something fun with – like Neighborhood Fiber yarns in the Charles Village and Charles North colorways and some gorgeous white mink yarn (yes, actual mink – humanely collected and incredibly soft).

The new power cord should arrive on Thursday so I’ll have my laptop resuscitated by the end of this week (I still have to figure out a replacement, but I’ve bought myself time to consider all the options) and then I can post pictures of all the gorgeous fiber that is overflowing my limited storage space. I’m so excited about my yarns and I can’t wait to share the gorgeousness.

Other than finishing Christmas gifts a whole entire day before Christmas for the first time ever, I’ve been a lazy knitter. I have had three things on the needles during the last week and a half: a bolster pillow to match the Norma blanket, a pair of exceedingly plain self-striping socks, and hexipuffs for the beekeeper’s quilt. And the quilt is really the only thing I’ve made anything that could be called progress on.

The good thing is I’m now feeling incredibly motivated. I’m really excited about my short row ear-flap hat that I designed as a Christmas present for my little sister (pictures and pattern to come soon). The short rows came about as an alternative to doing the ear-flaps separately and then casting on additional stitches to knit in the round or knitting from the top down, which seem to be the more common methods. I have that and pictures for the second part of the holiday wreath I hadn’t gotten around to posting. But no pictures or anything else today. This is more like a practice blog to remember that I do actually post things here — and things are happening.

Happy new year- happy knitting.

Yarn Bombing in support of marriage equality at Lovelyarns in Hampden/ Baltimore

It’s election day here in the United States. So go vote. The best way not to feel like a jerk when someone asks if you voted is to have voted.

Top left: the screen painted bags for handing out treats; top right: fire jugglers from Johns Hopkins; bottom left: cake (because every party needs cake); bottom right: one of the porches “Grove of the Grotesque”

Happy halloween! *Be forewarned this is not a post about knitting*

Last Saturday, Remington held Hauntingdon, a blow-out celebration of all things Halloween. We close down the 2900 block of Huntingdon Avenue and host spooky activities on the porches, have a haunted house, trick or treating and this year, for the first time, cake. The cake was pretty delicious. Charm City Cakes (of Duff Goldman/ Ace of Cakes fame) is located on the other side of the block we hold this party on. They were kind enough to donate sheet cakes which I got to help distribute. The cakes were seriously delicious plus I got to be the person handing out cake, which if you’re going to work at a party is definitely one of the best spots to work. Because who doesn’t like cake (although some kids came up and looked at the cake before shaking their heads and backing away – hilariously similar to those capital one commercials with the baby that doesn’t like free cash, apparently we have some kids that don’t like cake).

This year’s Hauntingdon theme was the End of the World for the Mayan Apocalypse and it heavily featured zombies including a zombie-crab (see my screenprinted bag at the top).

Also in honor of the holiday, I decided to try making candy corn rice krispy treats. They came out fairly well, although I apparently had some trouble making even circles. You basically segment and dye marshmallow before mixing in the rice krispy cereal and make circles that can be cut into wedges. Each wedge becomes a candy corn. And yes, the orange food coloring is as orange as it looks in that picture.

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I used the recipe I found via google on the Chef-in-Training website. It really is a very easy recipe. My only change would be that if you like your treats with a ton of marshmallow-ey goodness, I would use slightly more marshmallows than the recipe says to use. I think dividing the marshmallow for coloring meant a little was lost.  I am going to have to find something similar to make for Thanksgiving and Christmas (rice krispy turkeys anyone?).

Now, back to our regularly scheduled knitting…

The trees passed Molly’s inspection

The park really shines in the fall. It’s my favorite season so I may be biased, but I love the way the fall colors make the Dell look like a tranquil haven in the middle of north-central Baltimore.

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Of course, this isn’t the only thing happening today, so I left the tree-planting and headed up to check out the Hauntingdon preparations. It was great to see all the work coming together, plus we got to surprise the volunteers including neighbors and Hopkins students  (many who have been working with the community for months) with a gigantic check – we won the Mayor’s Clean Community Competition for our quadrant!

Hooray gigantic check!

After that, I ran one last errand I wanted to get done before tomorrow (after all this is a blog about knitting, there should probably be some mention of knitting). I took up hats no. 23 and 24 to Lovelyarns.

Hat no. 23 is a repeat of the Purlbee’s Simple Pleasures  pattern knit out of some soft acrylic. I have no idea how this yarn ended up in my stash. It’s Hobby Lobby’s Baby Bee and since I have never been into a Hobby Lobby, someone  must have given it to me but I have no idea who or when.

Hat No. 23

Hat no. 24 is a pattern I’ve had floating around in my head that has long cables. Unfortunately, I decided to try it out with some forest green Red Heart Super Saver that I ended up passionately disliking. I mean really, really disliking. There’s enough left to do another hat and I actually threw the yarn away. I don’t know what it was because I’ve been knitting with other Red Heart yarns without an issue. This yarn just felt gross. But I love the pattern so I’m probably going to do it again and see if I can’t refine it a little bit (the color pictured is a little lighter than real-life, but you couldn’t see the stitches otherwise so I deliberately lightened it to show the cables).

Hat No. 24

It’s Girl Scout Cookie Time!

I can remember having some fun in Girl Scouts, but for the most part it’s something that I had no interest in continuing past elementary school. Except for the part where they have cookies. I’ll stand in the grocery store seriously arguing with myself about whether to spend $3.50 on a box of Pepperidge Farm cookies and usually talk myself out of it, but then happily and with no second thoughts drop $16 on four boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

Fortunately, a colleague’s daughters are selling Girl Scout cookies so I don’t have to lurk around area shopping centers trying to find one of those plastic-tablecloth covered folding tables surrounded by three Girl Scouts and six responsible adult-chaperones hawking cookies. And double fortunately, the cookies arrived yesterday so I now I have my four boxes of cookies (yes, three of those four boxes are thin mints – possibly the best cookie of all time).

I’ve figured out how to knit while reading, now I just need to find out a way to knit while eating thin mints.

Last Saturday we held the second annual Big Draw. Ryan came up with the fantastic idea of celebrating drawing in public last year like the Big Draw from the UK  and organized a small event that used projectors to project art onto screens and  other medium once it was dark. This year, we got some funding for the event and were able to do a ton of awesome drawing activities. In the picture below, you can see the activities getting set-up. The DJ’s are under the tent and the screens that will become illuminated are set-up.

Getting Set-Up!

One of the biggest hits this year was the Sound Wall created by artist Tyler Tamburo.  He used a Kinect to record the location of the participants hands and then as they painted, their motions created music.  One of the simple but really fun art stations was a cube made of plastic that was drawn on with white board markers. Even Mayor Rawlings-Blake got in on the action.

This cube of plastic walls enclosed a light; as the sky darkened the drawings glowed.

New this year was sparkler art. There are some great pictures on our facebook page; here’s the clearest picture I could get.

Sparkler Art! Time elapse photos were taken as people drew pictures in the air with sparklers.

I can’t believe how much fun the event was. It was a great day to create art in the park. The next event is the annual Winter Solstice Celebration so until then back to the regularly scheduled blog posts about knitting.

Pumpkin Cupcakes with Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting

Woohoo! It’s September and a cold front has come to Baltimore! It’s 65 degrees outside! Hooray fall! Okay, I’m done overusing exclamation points. Maybe. I may need more exclamation points because I love fall and I’m really excited about my cupcakes. I really love pumpkin but was waiting until it was officially September to break out fall ingredients.

Amalgamation of scratch and mix ingredients.

I went grocery shopping today and got ingredients for pumpkin spice cupcakes with cinnamon cream cheese frosting. Sometimes I really like to measure out ingredients and bake from scratch. And sometimes I really like instant gratification and go for the dry mixes. This was a dry mix kind of day. My favorite mix is the Betty Crocker spice cake and I thought adding pumpkin would make for an easy pumpkin cupcake recipe. I googled cupcake recipes and found some recipes that added pumpkin to cake mix. But people only seem to use vanilla cupcake mix. I decided to go with the spice mix anyway because it’s delicious and if it didn’t work I was only out $3 ($1.25 for the cake mix, $1.74 for the pumpkin). Then I googled frosting and there are  ton of frosting recipes out there. Of course, every recipe calls for slightly different ingredients. I copied three that looked good to play with.

Molly being well-behaved (pro-tip: spend two hours at the park, then bake)

The spice cake mix is simple and I just followed the box directions with the addition of one can (15 oz) of pumpkin. After baking, I taste tested one of the cupcakes. They are incredibly delicious but almost too moist. I bought doubles of all the ingredients so I can try the recipe again in a week or so. I think I’ll reduce the amount of water or oil the box calls for when I try making these cupcakes again. While the cupcakes were baking and cooling, I let the butter and cream cheese come to room temperature. Even when I use dry mixes for the baked part of the baked good, I strongly prefer mixing up my own frosting. Freshly blended frosting always tastes better to me. And frosting is so easy to make and such fun to experiment with, buying a can seems like a crime.

Hmmmm…. Frosting.

I added 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and 1 tablespoon of cinnamon to the butter and cream cheese and blended those ingredients thoroughly (less than most recipes I found online called for, but most recipes seemed to call for too much and cinnamon can be overwhelming). Then I began adding sugar, first a cup and then half cups, until that perfect consistency was reached. I’m working on making my cupcakes prettier so I decided to use a pastry bag to pipe on the icing. The results are mixed at best. But I’ll make more cupcakes in the next couple weeks and more cupcakes means more practice. Until then, the recipe for the frosting is below the fold and I’m going to go eat another cupcake. 

Cinnamon Cream Cheese Frosting

Ingredients:

• 3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
• 1/2 cup butter
• 8 ounces cream cheese (1 cup)
• 1 tsp. vanilla extract
• 1 tbsp. cinnamon

Recipe:

• Cut up the butter and cream cheese and place in bowl until at room temperature (approx. 20-30 min).
• Add vanilla extract and cinnamon to butter and cream cheese. Blend ingredients thoroughly.
• Add sugar in increments. Add one cup to start, blend in thoroughly. Add rest of sugar in 1/2 to 1 cup additions, blending thoroughly with each addition of sugar.
• Enjoy!

Blackberries and raspberries.

Today’s break from knitting comes courtesy of a kitchen experiment. I was thinking that raspberry-blackberry buttercream frosting would be delicious, but I couldn’t find any good recipes.  We have a lot of cookbooks – Southern Living, Martha Stewart, etc.- plus I did a good amount of googling but didn’t find what I was looking for. So I decided to make my own. It only took three tries to figure out a pretty delicious frosting.

The first try was too runny. No amount of sugar-adding or setting in the refrigerator could help. For some reason, I thought adding several cups of fruit directly to the sugar and butter was a good idea. In retrospect, I’m not sure why that seemed like a good idea.

The second attempt was pretty good, but I didn’t like having the seeds in the frosting and I needed such a small amount of fruit to get the desired consistency, the frosting ended up not having enough flavor. So the final product involves pureeing fresh fruit so the frosting has a delicious, fresh flavor that is a good match to the chocolate cupcake.

Amareto – Chocolate Cupcake with Blackberry-Raspberry Frosting

The recipe yields enough frosting to generously frost 24 cupcakes (about 4 1/2 cups total). The cupcakes are devils food chocolate with four tablespoons of amareto added. Recipe below the fold.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup Raspberries
• 1 cup Blackberries
• 1 1/3 cup Butter
• 3 cups Confectioners Sugar

Recipe:

Soften the Butter:

• Cut the butter into small pieces and place the cut pieces into the bowl you’re going to use to make the frosting. If you do this before you puree the fruit, the butter will be softened by the time your fruit is ready.

Puree the Fruit:

• Put a fine mesh strainer over a second bowl (not the bowl with the butter) and put a quarter to a third of your fruit in the strainer.
• Use the back of the spoon to mush the fruit. As you mush, the fruit breaks down and the delicious juice collects in the bowl while the seeds and such stay in the strainer.
• Once you’ve mushed up this first portion ofyour fruit, add more and keep mushing. Keep adding and mushing until your two cups of fruit have been pureed. If needed, you can scrape the seeds and excess out in between portions of  fruit ( I didn’t need too, but I have a big strainer. If you have a little strainer, you’ll probably need to scoop the seeds and gunk out at least once).
• After all the fruit has been mushed, you should have 1/2 cup of pureed fruit juice.

Make Frosting:

• Blend your wet ingredients (1 1/3 cup butter and 1/2 cup juice using an electric mixer
  • Tip: Learn from my mistakes – don’t just dump the entire 1/2 cup of fruit in with your butter. Put in a little bit at a time while whipping the butter. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself determining which cleaning product best gets fruit off kitchen walls.
• Once your fruit juice and butter are blended together, begin adding the sugar 1 cup at a time.
  • Once the first cup is well blended, add the second. Once the 2nd cup is well blended, look at your frosting. If it’s still pretty thin, go ahead and add the whole 3rd cup. If it’s looking prettying fluffy already, you may want to add only half of the third cup and then check your consistency.
• You can add more sugar if the frosting isn’t as fluffy as you’d like it to be, but in experimenting, I found that three cups sugar with 1 1/3 sticks butter and 1/2 cup fruit juice makes a great frosting.

Finished cupcakes

As a nerd, I myself am very, very fond of books. As the Doctor said, “Books! The best weapons in the world!” They could be anything, from my Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (which is so large that I literally cannot get it off my shelf at the moment), to All Wound Up by the Yarn Harlot, to my Japanese textbook from last semester. I love all kinds of books, and lately, I’ve been doing far more buying and reading of books than I have knitting. 

I feel like in the last couple of weeks, I’ve done a sort of mini-tour of the local bookstores. I kicked it off in a huge, amazing, mindblowing way – I went into downtown Detroit and went to John K. King Used Books. Now, for those who don’t know, let me give you a miniature history of the store: the building was a glove factory in the 1940s. John King bought it in the early 1980s and within a few years, he was using all four stories to house the books that were for sale, and the basement for books waiting for a place upstairs. Then a few years ago, he bought the smaller building behind the first one, and used that to house his office, his rare books, and even more books that would be for sale in the shop. Today, that store houses over a million books, and there are also two other branches of the store – one on the campus of Wayne State University across town, and one in Ferndale, a suburb about fifteen minutes north of the city.

I want to emphasize a point that I just made. The main store houses more than one. Million. Books. Even before I visited this place, I was geeking out. I probably hadn’t seen a million total books in my life up to that point, much less all in one place. But I took a trip out there to see what it was about, and oh. My. God.

It was amazing. The front room reminded me of a living room, sort of – there was a big wooden table in the middle of it, with a few chairs around it and stacks of books on top, and built-in cabinets all around with books on them, and bookshelves that were full to bursting, and stacks of books on the floor… when you walk into a bookstore and the books are all around you, even on the floor, spilling out toward you – you know you’ve found something really special.

But this place was amazing. There were high windows all along the walls on each floor, and they were all open because – get this – the place didn’t have central air or heating. I mean, that’s not exactly surprising, since the building’s at least seventy years old and it would cost a lot to do that, but still. Anyway, there were huge windows and an old creaky wood floor, and tons and tons of bookshelves. They had to be eight feet high, and there were so many of them! And to get to the next floor, you could either take the stairs, or you could take the old-school lift elevator, which you rode in with an employee. And even that was half-full with waist-high stacks of books. It was really an incredible place.

Another unique thing about it was the books themselves. A lot of them – and I mean a lot, like, the vast majority of them – were old. And not, like, published-in-2000 old. I’m talking, there were hundred-year-old copies of books just sitting on the shelves, waiting to go home with someone. Prior to this, I only owned one old book – this German hymnal that belonged to my great-grandma from the turn of the last century. But here were books from the Victorian era, just hanging out, waiting for someone to pick them up and page through them. And I did pick them up and page through them, although I have to admit, at first I kind of felt like I shouldn’t be. They were beautiful, and they were just sitting there! I couldn’t believe they were for us to, you know, pick up and hold and touch and take home. 

I came away that day with some pretty good finds. I bought a book of Yeats poetry from the fifties, a copy of The Sun Also Rises that I’m pretty sure is from the forties but I can’t be sure, and a beautifully designed book of Tennyson’s poetry from — oh man, this still thrills me – 1881. It’s a hundred and thirty years old! And now it’s mine! It’s beautiful. I’ll put up pictures soon.

There were also these carts in the foyer of the shop that were marked Free Books, and I picked one up for no real reason – Writing From Observation. It’s a textbook from Wayne University in 1942. I originally thought I’d take it home because, aside from the discoloration, it’s in great shape and I wanted to use it as one of those secret books – the kind with the hole in the middle that you hide stuff in. But then I flipped through it, and it’s one of those critical reading books. You know, where they give you a passage to read and then questions to answer, like, “Discuss the themes of this passage and how they relate to the other pieces in this section”. And I’m thinking I might actually read through it, which makes me laugh.

Anyway, I also visited this place called Books Connection that’s a few minutes away from me. It’s a pretty generic used bookstore, but it’s a local place and the same three ladies always seem to be working there, so I thought I’d give it a shot. And I did find some things worth taking home – Slaughterhouse-Five, 1984, The Lovely Bones (speaking of which, I’ve been seeing a million copies of this book lately. Places like the library, used bookstores, everywhere. Why? I mean, I know it was popular when it first came out, but were there that many copies in circulation that I could get this one for a dollar?), and one a few people might not know titled Grass For His Pillow. It’s the second book in Lian Hearn’s Otori trilogy, and I really loved the first book, Across the Nightingale Floor, so I thought I would pick it up and give it a read. It takes place in a country that isn’t feudal Japan, even though it absolutely is, and it’s great and you should go learn more about it. (Click the link!) 

I also visited Barnes and Noble twice in the past week, because they might be a huge corporation that overshadows the great independent and used book stores around town, but they’re really the only huge corporation that deals in books right now, so I might as well support them. Over the course of the two trips, I bought three John Green novels – An Abundance of Katherines with the new cover, Paper Towns, and The Fault in Our Stars – and considered buying one more, Looking for Alaska. (I did not buy this book, incidentally, because I have it on pretty good authority that something excellent is going to happen with Alaska very shortly, so I’m holding out for that.) I also found Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which is an incredible book and one that I really needed to buy, and Philippa Gregory’s The Red Queen, which I just finished and will probably discuss next time. 

The last brick-and-mortar store I’m going to mention is the Ferndale branch of John King. Take everything I told you about the huge palace that was the downtown store, downsize it, and take away most of the random stacks of books lying on the floor. Got it? That’s the Ferndale shop. I found some cool stuff there, too – a book on the clans and tartans of Scotland, a fiction book about the legend of Pope Joan, a collection of Bukowski poetry, and two amazing books that I need to share. 

One is a book that will probably bore everyone except myself. It is a copy of Bullion’s Practical and Analytical English Grammar, revised edition, from… wait for it… 1877. It’s a hundred and thirty-five years old! It’s a book on grammar! It excites me so much! Incidentally, it strikes me that if I had no idea I was a nerd before, I am very aware of it now.

The other book is also very exciting and I think will have a little more widespread appeal. It was sitting on the New Arrivals cart, and I couldn’t not pick it up, especially when I saw what it was. It is a hardcover, UK, first edition of… Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows! Seriously, guys, it’s such a pretty book, and it’s in beautiful condition. And you know how much they wanted for it? Ten bucks. I practically threw my money down. First edition of the UK version, man. I’m so excited to reread this book.

I’ve talked a lot about buying the books, which is something that excites me immensely, and I feel like I need to mention here that I have also been reading them. Lots of them. Not at the same rate that I’ve been acquiring them, not even close, but they are eventually getting into my hands and into my brain. Like, for the month of June, I’ve read – hold on, let me consult my reading journal (yes, I keep a reading journal; it is awesome and I can’t imagine why I didn’t start sooner) – eight books. Eight! In one month! That’s an average of three and three-quarter days per book!

But seriously, I read through all John Green’s books – Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines, Paper Towns, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, and The Fault in Our Stars – as well as After Dark by Haruki Murakami, Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw, and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. It should be noted that After Dark and Will Grayson, Will Grayson were each devoured in a single day… I had a lot of time on my hands, and they were quick reads. But the point is, I’ve been reading a lot. Lots more than I had up to that point, anyway.

And books are so cool, you guys! They’re just these stacks of paper with words on them, but they do so much. They teach us things, they tell us stories, and the good ones bring people and places and scenarios to life for us. They might make us laugh like Mogworld and An Abundance of Katherines primarily did, they might scare the pants off us like Fahrenheit 451, and they might just make us cry oceans of tears, like The Fault in Our Stars. (Seriously, I think John wants to harness the power of his readers’ sadness and take over the world with it. It was a beautiful book.)

You know, I want to bring up something serious for just a second, because while I love books, I have to say that up until, oh, last summer or so, I never really appreciated them as much as I could. I mean, I had so many other things to do! I knit, I watched TV, I spent way too much time online… and I was also a college student — and let’s face it, when you’re a college student, books are constantly at war with your wallet. At the time, I sided with the wallet.

But then Borders closed its doors. Now, I know that people predicted the demise of the brick-and-mortar bookstore years ago, but I think it was kind of a crushing blow when the company filed for bankruptcy last year. It reminded us that, like all good things, we need to appreciate and support bookstores in order for them to survive. And so I took that initiative, with an emphasis on locality – I wanted, and want, to support the independent bookstores that are around town. And one of those was Off the Beaten Path, which brought me to my crafting group! Sadly, the Path closed its doors a couple of months ago, but our group lives on and we continue to enjoy each other’s company.

But there are plenty of other bookstores here in my area that I want to help. I see it as a win-win situation, really – I give these places money, often less money than I would have originally guessed, and they give me books. They take the money and put it back into the business, I take the books and put the words into my brain. I don’t see any downsides to that.

The point I’m trying to get at here is that we don’t appreciate the things we have as much as we could. I mean, as crafters, we do more than most – a lot of our specialty shops are independent stores, rather than big box stores, and that helps our communities so much. But sometimes, we get so swept up in other things that we don’t think about this stuff. We think we have better things to do, so we shop at Amazon and eBay and Walmart, and the stores in our cities, as well as the owners and the communities at large, suffer for it. I know that sounds bleak, but we can change that. Instead of buying a book on Amazon, consider going out to a brick-and-mortar store. Consider ‘voting with your wallet’, as they say. Borders might be gone, but we can help the independents in our communities live on. They bring us more than we may realize.

Thanks for letting me get on my soapbox, guys. My next post will be significantly lighter.

Happy Fourth from the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

I spent the Fourth of July with friends at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. It was lovely.

Obligatory Baltimore skyline picture.

This phrase is clearly bullshit. Most people in our society today are feminists. Really, really shitty feminists, but here’s the screening test:

Do you believe women are inferior to men?

There isn’t much to explain about feminism. Feminist activism falls under the various intertwined categories of fighting overt sexism, discriminatory institutions, and (most difficult of all) insidious ways of thinking that dehumanize or condescend to women.

This should not be radical. I do not believe that this is radical.

There was a time when I did think it was radical. I was, like, fourteen. I lived in a house where my mom and dad fought all the time over what her role in the family ought to be. (My mom had a masters and a BS from a better university than my father’s; she was always juggling her studies and home-making). My mom, despite her own situation, complained about how inappropriately her sister-in-law behaved (she acted like a man, just sitting in the living room instead of helping out in the kitchen). My dad told me I couldn’t take Taekwondo because it was unseemly for a woman. My mom and I got lectured on what we wore. (My brother didn’t). Most of the faces I saw on television were male.

I talked about going to college and doing big things, but I could never really imagine it. I didn’t see anyone who looked like me, doing big things. I couldn’t even see anyone female doing big things. (I’m so relieved that I at least did not come of age when the media was blaring about Hilary being a “bitch” or a “nag.” I can’t imagine what that generation of girls is going to have to work through, as far as internalized sexism is concerned.)

The point of all this is to say–

I remember when I thought feminism was radical. I remember what people were telling me then, and how afraid I was to be a feminist: that I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I self-identified, that I’d be crossing some kind of magic line. I mean, come on, no one wants to be an -ist. Nothing good comes of that (communist, socialist, fascist, Populist, racist).

So I want to apologize to you, women who are afraid to be feminists. I’m sorry someone told you that feminism was bad. I’m sorry that they said it was scary, and that it was bitchy and unwomanly of you to use the f-word. Maybe it wasn’t said explicitly, but you picked it up anyways, and now you’re angry and defensive on a forum full of angry and defensive feminists.

I’m not blaming you. I’m sorry you’re scared to declare that you think you’re equal to men. Maybe one day we won’t have to be the -ists any more, and we, smug and unlabeled, can stare daggers into that chauvinist saying some inappropriate and outdated shit over in that isolated  corner.

But just because you’re completely incompetent doesn’t mean you can’t try!

And in any case, the furniture I set out to redo looked like such ass that whatever I threw at it was bound to be an improvement.

This coffee table was a holdback from the bad old days, when Nimbus and I lived in a student 1 bedroom four or five blocks off the Cal campus. The apartment had just been his for about two years prior, and was horribly dirty from neglect. Half of the furniture was still unbuilt, Liz Lemon style, and while cleaning I would constantly discover bizarre surprises, like a jar of green liquid under the kitchen sink (algae supplements for healthy shakes) or a ladle in a bathroom cabinet, covered in something unctuous and brown (it was not poop, but you can understand why I thought it was).

The table was actually not a terrible piece of furniture– it’s actual wood and it doesn’t wobble. But the top was covered with a big piece of something leathery or cardboardy that was clearly peeling all around the edges, and had collected all kind of disgusting things– the cheeto dust and other debris of our college days– in between it and the wood of the table.

I took off the top and sanded down the gluey raw wood underneath as best I could, then applied a coat of primer all around.

I added a coat of gloss white, covered the edges in painter’s tape and trash bags, and then spray painted the very top in blue.

Several mishaps and stencilings later, I came up with this. The stencils come from a pack of premade Martha Stewart stencils, because Michaels apparently doesn’t sell plain stencil paper, and I didn’t feel like sitting down for a couple of hours and pain-stakingly Exacto-ing out my own, either. (I mean, I don’t even have a printer right now, so that wasn’t an option anyways.)

I originally did the stencils with a Sharpie paint pen, but that was 1) a pain in the ass, and 2) I fucked it up twice in TWO ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WAYS. Third time’s the charm– and the third time, I just used a sponge brush and some acrylic paint.

I still used the pen for the text in the center:

So what do you think?

My husband decided he would make the main dish, and I let him do all of the work. My only request was that he put the dish in the oven before 630 (our guests were arriving at 630, and the dish takes an hour to cook). Needless to say, it didn’t happen and he forgot a key ingredient. When I pointed these things out, he got mad at me for pointing fingers, and I walked out of the kitchen.

Later, after dinner, I was still eating, and others were finished. He was also finished eating. He was then mad at me for not cleaning up. He also was mad when I suggested we rearrange the chairs to face the tree rather than moving the presents into the centre of the living room.

Obviously, we weren’t on the same page last night. This morning he tells me how angry he was at me for not cleaning up, and for pointing fingers at him when he messed up.

I agree with him, on some levels, I should have helped clean up after eating. I should have not made him feel bad for goofing up the meal. However, I was quite drunk, and wasn’t thinking clearly. My mind reading skills were a bit diminished and I didn’t pick up on his non-existent cues that he wanted me to clean up. I haven’t drank alcohol in probably close to 3 months and three drinks was more than enough to knock me off my A-game.

Anyway. Now I’m mad at him for being mad at me. Childish yes. But at the same time, that’s how I’m feeling and I needed to vent.

This is the last time I will speak of that place.

In the morning I was rudely awoken by church bells at eight-thirty in the morning. On a Saturday.

I couldn’t get my somewhat hungover self back to sleep, so I hauled my ass out of bed and decided to take some pictures of the law school campus. You know, #swag and all that.

The first thing I would like to note is that I basically live in Hogwarts or something. This is my dorm, for realz, bro. MacGonagall’s about to pop out of the bushes any moment and make all the statues come to life. I just hope that this one stays a statue:

I have to look at this guy’s weiner before I go to class, every day. It’s pretty awkward, yo.

This is the building they’ve allotted to student organizations. I want to point out that this is our version of Eshleman Hall. Also HAHAHAHAHAHA YOU’RE POOR.

There’s lectures halls and offices in this building. Kind of like an intelligently-built Dwinelle, except extremely attractive and highly up-to-date on the inside. You know, microphones and electric sockets at every desk in the lecture halls and all that. And air conditioning. So, not like Dwinelle at all.

While I was taking pictures of Austin Hall, some students kept giving me the stinkeye. I responded naturally: I trolled the shit out of them by pretending to be a Japanese tourist that had wandered up here from the Yard.

I had a swan boat excursion later in the day, but I’ll save that for another post.

I’m safe and dry. The power is on. I’m well-stocked with water and bread and peanut butter and yarn. I hope everyone else is doing okay, too.

• someone out of school for seven years
• many straight out of undergrad
• a couple of painfully earnest individuals
• a couple of potential trolls
• a climate change denier (lol)
• a corgy-loving con law prof fascinated by twitter
• a douchebag
• a neighbor
• & a new hero.

We had to make an emergency trip to Target for towels and pillows.

It’s surprisingly inconvenient to live without towels and pillows.

On our way back we saw flashing lights in the rear view. We pulled over. The car with the flashing lights pulls up, rolls his window down, and says:

“NO PAAHHKIN’.”

Turns out he wasn’t even a real cop, he was a parking cop. Why he had his lights flashing, I don’t know. Also, which way is north and which way is south? And why is this a five-way intersection?

This land is not ruled by reason. Only by madness.

It may look green and idyllic, but don’t be fooled. Underneath the ivy lurks a terrifying irrationality that prompts the prominent placement of “NO LEFT TURN ON RED” signs at intersections.

(Not that it helps– when you have three different lefts at an intersection, it’s somewhat unclear as to which left is verboten.)

In exactly 6 days.

That’s right, in 144 hours I will be checking in luggage at the airport, and/or screaming obscenities at JetBlue’s scale. (Bitch, this does not weigh 50 lb! If I could lift 50 lb, I would know!)

So this isn’t just a yarn blog any more, it’s also a blog about how I am living in New England for some goddamn reason*.

Five boxes are taped up and ready to go. Shit’s about to get real, son.

*Law School

I’m not subscribing this coming year, but only because it’s a huge pain to reroute my subscription in the summer. It’s been an interesting ride. The magazine as art has definitely been compelling. From the ads to the spreads, Vogue delivers top notch photography and graphic design. Some of the articles were even okay. And considering the state of the news media in this country, the worst of the lot really weren’t that stupid.

Vogue is fascinatingly archaic in many ways. It rarely showcases anyone but the most upper class women within its pages, refusing entry to the middle and working class as though the magazine were some lady’s parlor. The past couple of years has brought several fashion magazines and runway shows doing vague hand-waving towards “women of different shapes.” Most of these attempts have been hilariously narrow-minded (like the runway show with Victoria’s Secret models, who are considered “differently-shaped” from normal runway models). Not great, but at least they tried. Vogue doesn’t even try. Vogue is Vogue. Vogue doesn’t give a shit about your fat acceptance.

Anyways, this issue was one of the few that really hit a nerve with me, so I thought I’d share this page with you. In many ways it whitewashes over the fact that there is like a four page Botox ad in the front (typical– at least this issue doesn’t have a feature article about plastic surgery) and that Vogue tends to feature women in a single shape and a single color (to be fair, I totes saw an Asian this issue. Of course she was skinny as all hell, but at least she wasn’t pimping out Snow Flower and the Secret Fan in full traditional costume).

But despite the hilarious hypocrisy, what’s said is still true. Enjoy:

click for high resolution image

PS: I never found that 96 year old in the leather jacket.

And believe me, I looked.

Fucking Vogue.

This is the Bodie Island Lighthouse in Nags Head, NC. I feel very lucky to have snapped this picture with absolutely no tourists in it!

The marker for the first successful flight in Kill Devil Hills, NC

The campground (Oregon Inlet)

The campground was actually really nice, although the beach part was not the best for swimming or relaxing. This is one of the areas that allow driving on the beach, so there were tons of trucks lined up along the water. Apparently it’s an excellent fishing area.

And finally, the Ocracoke Island Lighthouse, this is the oldest working lighthouse in the US. It is also in someone’s backyard, so the whole touristy part felt a little awkward.

Sunset from the Ocracoke-Cedar Island Ferry, those are shrimp boats in the water.