In which she bites off perhaps a bit more than she can chew.

Well, I'm not quite the mama in creative overdrive I'd planned on being, but I've made a few things: a sundress that I worked up in peacock blue with cream dots just about 10 minutes before it got too cold for V. to wear it; a party dress in a very old-timey blue lawn that I worked on in the week of V's birthday but finished in January; and a poncho that I knit from variegated, hand- loomed and painted wool V's Tia A. brought back from a trip to Wales. Also, I've successfully navigated the transition back to full-time work and I sometimes read books.

But now the sew-o-rama begins. I just got Little Things to Sew from Oliver & S* so I could make this for V. to carry her beertje around; that might actually have to wait behind this and this, which I'm making up in various colors and combinations of this, this, and this for V. and five little cousins for Grandmafest this summer at the end of July.

Wish me luck.

*Do you notice a theme? Besides liking to support the business of an old acquaintance, I love these patterns! The construction is impeccable and the instructions are great. I am improving my technique with each pattern I complete.

still crazy

Awhile back, I wrote to tell my old friend D, himself known to wrap quiet desperation in some pretty darn elegant pop tunes, that there was a Paul Simon retrospective running that had brought him to mind, as had an accompanying review noting that Simon had tasked himself with using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in each melody on Still Crazy.

"Ah," D. replied, "this explains why I can never play mid-70s Paul Simon on the dulcimer." (Dulcimers apparently are fretted on a diatonic scale. Now you know.) "This afternoon I finished a 1000-word (precisely, of course) essay on [X ]for our [Y] publication," D. continued. "I once wrote a course description for an academic catalog that was a pangram. At what point does it just become obsessiveness?"

My answer? That darlin', --and this goes for you too, dear reader, if try as you might, all you can see/think/do is one thing, or conversely, you've got yourself some attention deficit or a bad boggle habit--you've got it backwards. It's obsessiveness that sometimes blooms into genius; genius does not devolve, it only transcends. Your obsessiveness and your genius are one and the same real thing.

While I may not actually be doing much to exemplify my own insights these days, I have been enjoying a near-daily reminder in the form of a nearly life-sized coral reef fashioned from yarn and plastic.

Imagine this. Have you ever tried to knit/tat/crochet? Having grown up just one generation after the demise of the dowry, with my own mother's linen closet filled with handkerchiefs and crisp white sheets edged with lace whose makers she'd known all her life, I actually learned my grandmother's pattern and used to give pillowcases to friends on very, very special occasions. It was a labor of love that progressed at a maximum speed of 4 inches per hour.

Now imagine that there are ruffly little anenomes and mildly obscene sea cucumbers in a glass teaser case I pass on my way through the corporate turnstiles each morning, because there are. Think of their slow, practically geologic accretion into the room-sized exhibit we all snorkel past on our way to lunch. I think it's supposed to heighten awareness, but mostly it just makes me happy that that kind of crazy keeps cropping up, even here, even now.

choose your poison.

OK, here's the deal. I have to post every once in awhile if I expect folks to read this. I get that, I really do. But you all need to throw me the occasional bone. Smile and nod your head. Ask me a question. What do you want this conversation to be about?

According to the blog cloud, it's mostly about beer, brewing and food...all well and good, except that I don't get the impression there are too many brewers among you. If I am wrong about that, or if you are at least favorably disposed towards brewing, speak up. I could have some rhizomes for you. Keep quiet and you risk more posts like the following, which basically amounts to What I Did Yesterday.

Wednesdays are my New Yorkiest day, hands down. I work from home, which is pretty New Yorky in and of itself, and sans the commute, I've usually got more time to walk the puppy to the park. While official sources say that "many consider Prospect Park to be the masterpiece of (Frederick Law) Olmsted and (Calvin) Vaux," the way any Brooklynite will tell it, that rating came straight from Olmsted himself as a comment on the relative poverty of Manhattanites who must content themselves with Central Park and who secretly take it hard. It was raining this Wednesday, big fat driving drops once we'd gotten to the farthest point from home without an umbrella, but then later there was long light stretched over the East River as I crossed it by Q train at 6 pm or thereabouts, and who can stay mad about something like spring?

I was headed to Union Square, where lately I've been taking belly dancing classes from a friend of a friend at a Japanese cultural center. Just last week I finally got a little hip skirt fringed with coins which swing and tinkle and are a tremendous help when it comes to telling my zigs from my zags. Imagine me there, an enormous white Calvinist, blocking the sight lines of a half dozen lithe and lovely Japanese women, swiveling my hips as hopefully as I can to the songs of the Near East. Can you do this in Akron? I didn't think so.

It's only because my friend Y. and all the others are so absurdly nice that I've persisted as long as I have, but finally this week I did something right. My arms were doing this kind of swan dive, spiraling in from the wrists and crossing my face defiantly like a bull fighter's, first one and then the other, a little something I picked up from a previous foray into flamenco dancing. I was bad at that, too, and before that in college at tap dancing, which I actually took two semesters of, the first one for the PE credit and the second one because I'd shown early promise that completely evaporated once it was revealed that our teacher could speed up all of our records with a twist of a knob on the phonograph. But last night there was hope for me again and my accumulated despair receded for a few glorious measures when Y. told me to keep dancing and the tiny, beautiful Japanese women to stop and observe my arms, which they did and then even graciously asked me later how I'd done it. That's how nice they are.

After that it was on to knit with the freaks a couple of blocks over towards the East Village. We've been meeting at Professor Thom's lately, and although their website advertises Bingo nights on Wednesdays, the real action is upstairs, where a group of boozy knitters casts on and catches up. This week a few among us had actually taken to hand spinning yarn with little weighted tops and great fuzzy hanks of wool and would have had the unspoken geek competition nailed down if it weren't for the Wii bowlers down on the other end of the bar. While I might otherwise have been tempted to scorn the hilarity of a whole bunch of women and two or three metrosexuals with specialized sensors strapped to their wrists that allow them to simulate a game that is tapped out in Milwaukee, they too were New York and New Yorky, swinging their arms at the projection screen and yawping for virtual joy.

That's it. That's what I did yesterday. What's new with you?

Oops

My Booze & Yarn attendance has been pretty piss-poor lately, but I want to save this Knitty article with its list of DIY fixit tutorials for future reference. In the meantime, author David Demchuk's About-the-Author-cum-confessional cracked me up:

David has been making mistakes in his knitting for more than 20 years. He has made frightful design and colour choices, has knit yurts instead of sweaters when he hasn't swatched for gauge, has confused his numbers and knit two sizes at the same time for the back of a cardigan, has grafted thumbs inside out onto gloves, has seamed the outside of a hat by mistake, and once came very close to making a sock with a toe at each end. He is not too proud to ask for your pity.

boozy knitters in the news.

Almost forgot: Booze & Yarn got some good press. Read it here.

Mohair for May

I made an unexpected trip to Minnesota this past weekend and couldn't put it off any longer. M. finally has her straightjacket. She was a very good sport.

The sound of one needle clacking

Here are photos of some of the most hardcore Booze & Yarn members, taken during a rare daylight gathering last spring for the Knitting Olympics.

The real Knitting Olympians began and completed projects in the time between the opening and closing ceremonies, and then donated them all to a women's shelter. Me, I'm just trying to get points for homemade birthday presents. Right now I am knitting a powder blue mohair straightjacket for my oldest, dearest friend. I have been doing so for a very long time, and the sad thing is that I took it on for the promise its big, loopy brioche stitch (a lace style popular in the Victorian age, says C. the knitting goddess) held for relatively instant gratification.

More than two years ago I got a 1940s pattern book (to which I've lost the first couple of pages so I can't tell you the exact date of publication or quote a few choice bits about virtuous huisvrouwly behavior) and started a handsome sweater vest/hairshirt in a color the husband refers to (happily) as feldgrau. Think brownish-greenish moss. It features a very subtle, elegant 'beehive' pattern of twin knit stitches punctuating a field of purls, and is the kind of thing other knitresses ooo and aaah over but that the general public (including the man for whom it's intended) just can't appreciate because it's not flashy or cable-y and because they've never gone back and forth, back and forth across rows of 160 stitches at 9 rows to the inch. I'm still finishing up the back half right now and hope to have it done in time for our seventh anniversary. Then it will be on to the bellywarmers, just in time for a hip senescence.

Anyhow the really bad news about the straightjacket is that my outside deadline for finishing it was M's birthday two days ago. And about 4 or 5 weeks before that, I lost one of the needles. (I was knitting in church--that'll learn me!) For awhile I just switched back to working on the hairshirt, but then finally stopped into School Products to buy a new mate. There, the size 13 needles looked right, but my instructions said 11, so I left them be. Yesterday I finally went in with the piece itself and discovered that I have indeed been knitting on 13s, never mind the instructions--calling the fit of the whole thing completely into question--and that the 13s in the acrylic needles I find I must have to work with such fine mohair are now out of stock. I looked for awhile at the circular needles because their tips look quite sharp, but decided that that would be lunacy because I'm an old-school armpit knitter--I have to clamp the left needle securely under my arm to get anywhere at all. I came home with wooden needles and a lingering sense of doom.

Meanwhile I'm getting totally backlogged on my DIY projects and this blog because I've suddenly got a pile of real work to do. We're going to be away next week but I hope to update you on the Belgian ale and the IPA, as well as tell you about a tour of Sixpoint Craft Ales before I leave.