Posie Gets Cozy

Busy Girl

Just a fun, mish-mashy day. I was a busy girl. As I write, we have raisin bread in the oven (it's just the Dutch oven bread, which we make every few days, but with some raisins and cinnamon added), and when it's done we're going to make turkey sandwiches with Swiss cheese, lettuce, and Thousand Island dressing for dinner. Trying to re-create sandwiches from the Belgian Village Inn in Moline, Illinois. It's a weird combination but really good. I finished the Bosom Friend and it's way too big. Bigger than I intended. I don't like it. Boo, Bosom Friend! My fault, I didn't really follow the pattern at all. It was a Civil War pattern. I might try again. (Or just do another Tess, which I absolutely love and wear every single day.) The wonder girls were here all day unwinding floss. Love having them here. I have some photos of our contraption, "the machine," which is working like a charm! Yippee. I'll show you tomorrow. Andy repainted our little guest room over the weekend, and I fussed with it. Curtains and roller shades are on order. I'll show you when it's all in place. Gray walls, yellow gingham, flower drawings. My dearest friend, my Martha — she and her baby girl are coming all the way from Boston to visit. I'm so, so excited. Two weeks from today! Martha.

It's no secret that all of us are a little bit afraid of the Bee. There's reason. No sooner did I get done bragging to Andy about how the Bee lately follows me everywhere, sits near me wherever I sit, and hangs out watching whatever I am doing than did she keep me from getting a big fat head about it by slapping me on the wrist (literally) when I petted her the "wrong" way (on the chest instead of [only ever] on the forehead). Andy heard the thwap of her tiny, lightning-fast little paw (and my surprised whinny) all the way across the room. Beeeeee!!! Why you gotta be that way??? We made up shortly after (after I apologized profusely). Getting roundly scolded by the Bee is always very nervewracking. It's hard not to want to pet her, because she's so dang cute. Well. Maybe cute isn't the right word. Cute like a baby goblin is kind of cute? Cute like the thing might . . . I don't know . . . suddenly decide to grab you by your nostril and not let go? Cute like that.

Reading How to Know the Wild Flowers by Mrs. William Starr Dana. It's so sweet. It was first published in 1893. I found this 1989 copy at Powell's yesterday when I was browsing around there as a little treat to myself yesterday afternoon, having finished the taxes, sent the sampler pattern off to the printer, and received word that our supplies for the kits should start arriving on Thursday. I have a new idea for a new embroidery project. These botanical drawings I've been spending time with are so beautiful. They are really inspiring me lately. My poor cyclamen. I guess it needs more sun than it is getting in our house? Or perhaps in the Pacific Northwest in general. It's like a visual manifestation of Portlander Vitamin D levels, somehow [swallows 5,000 IUs, stat].

Oh, my sweet little poet. I think she's writing villanelles in her mind. She's very serious. Sensitive. So sincere. My Clover Meadow. I love her so.

Weekend WIPs

Crocus blooms : : A big pancake : : A bosom friend : : Yarn I don't like : : Taking the chair cushions in : : Making garden plans : : My Aestlight, finished a year ago, well-worn, just photographed : : Late nights up talking : : Watching American Pickers : : Pretty plant names : : Rose mallow, feverfew, hollyhock, sweet pea, foxglove, Kiss Me Over the Garden Gate : : Gray light and candlelight : : A new knitting basket for me : : Just to name but a few.

My Heartwarmers

"Why is this dog bed so small?" Precious girl.

My Tess Durbeyfield heartwarmer. Have hardly taken it off since I finished it. Making one inspired by this now, in those same colors. Next I'm going to do this one. And just look at what Nadia made. I wonder if I could do that. In sport weight, like she did. She is my knitting hero. Beautiful Nadia.

Recipe Box

Many years ago, maybe ten years ago, my mom gave me her 5" x 8" wooden recipe box. It was always in our River Forest house and then when my parents moved I think that's when she gave it to me. I've used it for my big pile of smaller-sized handwritten or printed-out-and-glued-to-a-5- x-8"-index-card recipes. I've had this pile for about as long as I've had the box. Commercial recipe cards are usually 4" x 6" or even 3" x 5". I've never really understood that, because those are just way too small for me — and I even have small handwriting. My mom's card size, 5" x 8", works so much better, in my opinion. But obviously making this recipe box really work has meant rewriting pretty much all of my recipes. And I never did it. For some reason I would get the urge to do it every year around New Year's. I'd usually pull the box out and immediately sort of collapse with fatigue, just imagining all that writing. Then I'd put the box back.

I'm trying this new thing, though. I call it Do Things in Winter You Don't Do in Summer. Or sometimes I call it Take Advantage of February (Which Is Sort of Like Extra January). Or, like, yesterday I called it If You Don't Get This Done Now You Never Will So Sit Down and Write. Because if I can knit bobillions of rows of garter stitch in fingering weight yarn without batting an eye (much), I can do this.

And it's important to me. I love to cook. My recipes are precious. I make them over and over. Andy makes them over and over. Our history together is, in its own way, in this box. I hadn't really realized, until I started rewriting them (on the proper size cards), how much I would remember. The blue table with Ann and Martha on Eighth-and-a-Half Avenue in Rock Island, and no-knead bread with honey. Our first apartment's miniature kitchen in the Rozale, painted top to bottom wedding-cake white, and our little lasagnas. The shrimp crostini we made for the big Christmas party we had the first Christmas after my accident. Memories, memories — it was weird how easily they came. The places we've lived, parties we've had, friends we've fed, friends who have fed us and passed along their recipes. My favorites were childhood things I remember but rarely make (applesauce muffins, chicken and dumplings) and things I often do (Mom's sauce, my dad's chilli). I'll keep my few original recipes that are in other people's handwriting, but not in this box.

This box will be totally functional, and that's what I want. And need. I have a binder with page protectors that contains recipes I've printed off of the internet. I have a small library of my favorite cookbooks. But this box is going to contain all of our personal recipes, family recipes, and our most-used internet and cookbook recipes (I'll rewrite them onto the cards, because I can't tell you have many times I've tried to remember something I want to make and can't remember if it's in the box, or the internet binder, or a cookbook [which cookbook?], etc.).

I wrote out a list of categories: Breakfast Things; Appetizers, Drinks, and Dips; Soups and Salads; Pasta, Pizza, and Bread; Side Dishes; Main Courses; and Desserts. Then I went through some of the recent photos I've taken and resized them to fit on a 5 1/2" x 8" space (so, a little taller than the index cards), added the text, printed them on photo paper, then cut them out and took them over to Julie's to laminate them (should have known Julie would have something cool like her own laminator; we were laughing about this one time when she was absolutely incredulous that I didn't have my own sticker maker — [snort!]). Anyway, they came out just like I was hoping they would, so that was so nice.

For the past few days, every time I walk past the table I try to sit down and write a recipe. It's a big project, but actually going faster than I thought. I might be 1/3 done. It's obvious to me that I now need a laminator of my own, because I'll be laminating every single one of these, too. In my kitchen, recipes on paper get trashed. I can't tell you how many recipes I was trying to copy that I couldn't read because the ink was blurred off by water spills, or whatever. These little guys are getting protection. I've gone through three pens so far. But I kind of enjoy writing things by hand, especially when I'm taking my time. And I'm now thinking, Yeah. February! It's like an Extra January.

Mondaymorn

The weekends always go too fast. I love the feeling of . . . lowered expectations. Something like that. It's early Monday morning here now. Crows calling outside. The heat blowing through the register. The sky turning bright gray. My neighbor's screen door slamming as the kids leave the house, one by one (there are six) on their ways to school. Cars starting up. I have a busy week, too. An inch of rain promised for tomorrow, so I'd better get at it today. What I really want to do is sit around dreaming about the veggie garden we're going to start on the parkway. Maybe I'll do a little of that. I need a stack of seed catalogs. Must get one of those!

I figured out the shirring on my machine — thank you for the advice. Turned out that I just needed to loosen the tension on the bobbin case (and I didn't even know bobbin cases had tension). Then it worked perfectly. I used this pattern to start, but modified it heavily — adding 3" to the neck/upper sleeve edges, lengthening the sleeves another 6", lengthening the whole thing and turning it into a dress, adding shirring at the waist. It was fun. And it will be pretty in linen. (By the way, my apron from last week, which I totally adore, is from here.) I have several yards of nutmeg brown linen and another inky blue. My Tasha Tudor dress.

Cross-stitch tutorial tomorrow. Candlemaking? Here is some information for you. Bread talk is here. Any seed catalog recommendations? I am the world's most pathetic gardener so I'll need help.

Alpaca and Wool

I have a strong personal preference for alpaca and ultra soft merino wools. It's taken me a long time to figure this out, in a way, because when I first started knitting and crocheting I didn't really know anything about fibers other than how "soft" or "scratchy" they were in the skein, and what color they were. Color was the biggest consideration. I would make all sorts of choices based on very particular shades of colors, and pretty much completely disregard fiber content, yarn weight, halo effects, drape, etc. It kind of makes me giggle now. But over and over again, I would start making something and even though the color was lovely, and matched the color of something in my imagination, the fabric I was making was bewildering me — I wouldn't like it, and I had a hard time understanding how the yarn in the skein (which is obviously how you buy it at the yarn store, and often they don't have a sample made up) translated into a particular finished product. My brain just couldn't extrapolate that very naturally. (And I STILL, after years and years of knitting, can't read yarn labels easily, and I've just totally given up. The first thing I do when I walk into a new yarn store is try to figure out if they've labeled their yarn by weight [i.e., worsted, DK, sport, etc.], and I breathe a huge sigh of relief if they just keep all of the yarns organized by weight. If I owned a yarn store, this is TOTALLY HOW I WOULD DO IT. Still, some do it by color, some by fiber content, some by brand [that one truly bewilders me, though I suspect it just makes it easier for them to shelve, or something?]. But anyway.)

So, after many fails, where I would make something and it would have a sheen to it that I didn't like, or I would be knitting and just feel like it was requiring more effort than necessary (specifically with respect to the yarn and not the pattern), or the finished fabric would be sort of rigid when I wanted it soft and floppy, I would be very confused. And I finally noticed that every time I happened to knit with alpaca and with certain wools (or with llama or camel), I would feel much happier, and the thing I was making came out looking like the thing I was dreaming about. "Oh! I get it!" Then I started (years and years into all this), just out of pure curiosity, actually reading the label for fiber content (because I still can't read it for gauge, and always seem to have to ask someone to help me). And lo and behold the yarns that I love now are always alpaca/wool/camel/llama, and nothing with any sort of microfiber, or cotton, or acrylic, or whatever. And that is how I apparently reinvented the wheel for myself the hard way by spending a lot of time and money and knitting a lot of fails. Some things come so easily to me, and some things — egads, I flunk. Just not quick on the uptake. It's like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny when he's talking about how many times he had to take the Bar before he passed (I love that movie). Isn't it like seven or something?

But, I guess, eventually he wins the case, so. . . ?

Knit knit knit.

A Skinny Little Onesie

It's ribbed, so it's all skinny. Hopefully the arms will stretch out a bit. I stretched the body a bit when blocking but the arms didn't want to cooperate, really. I think it's really cute. I knit the second sleeve backwards, oopsie. I sort of think I did the first sleeve wrong, too. Here is my Ravelry link with all of the info on the pattern and yarn. And buttons. I followed the pattern exactly, I think. The yarn is so soft and luscious. It's fingering weight so, egads, now you know what I mean by the 2x2 rib. Endless. But it massaged my frazzled brain into nice smooth waves, I do think. So it was good. I finished it too quickly, in my opinion. Knit knit knit. I did some pants (not pictured — forgot to photograph those) at the same time, alternating. (Those pants are cute, don't you think?) I only seem to be able to knit lately. Nothing else.

Well, purl. I purl, too.

Sit and Knit

Strangely, at this moment, I feel vaguely caught up. This is so weird. A little while ago, I was reading. Like, a book. Book-type reading. It was weird. Now I'm hanging around and drinking tea. WEIRD.

I haven't had time for things like this in a while. It feels very nice. The only thing I've done in my kitchen lately is open various containers of take-out food. I was going to bake something this afternoon but I decided to just sit and have a private tea party with Clover Meadow instead. And then work on the 2x2 rib some more (though it's not really "work"). I think I made the right choice.

Thank you so much for all of the feedback on the Addi needles and other types of interchangeables. Now I am wondering if I can test drive them at one of my LYSs — I'm definitely going to try to do that. And also test drive some of the other brands. That was very good advice. And thank you also for the info on various baby shops — so fun and oddly relaxing to look at those, somehow. Yay! Thank you!

It's raining. I have some candles lit. The windows are all still open. I am ordering a cord of already-split firewood this year so we don't have to chop it. All of the work on the house is done except for weather-stripping the front door, and waiting for the replacement hardware for the new wooden screen door. A new mattress has been ordered for the cradle. There's chicken curry in the fridge to be warmed up for dinner. I feel organized for the first time in weeks. I almost never feel that way. But it feels really good. I should try to do it more often. (I think that every time.)