1933

The year my dad was born. In that same year, the Lone Ranger radio program starts on January, 30 and runs for the next 21 years; Shirley Temple, age 5, is signed to a studio contract; the first woman is appointed to a cabinet post - Frances Perkins named Secretary of Labor; FDR conducts his first fireside chat; the first sighting of the Loch Ness monster; the World's Fair opens in Chicago; the first drive-in theater opens in Camden, New Jersey; John Dillanger escapes from jail in Ohio; Albert Einstein flees from Germany; Adolf Hitler becomes the German Chancellor and the horror leading to WWII begins.

Joan and Ikkinlala guessed correctly! Please email me your addressed so I can send the fibery goodness your way - yarnhausATgmailDOTcom.

My dad is quite a guy. Here he is with his brother. My dad is the beat cop - his brother the cowboy. I think this picture was taken at Christmas, 1938 or 1939.



You can see from the background in this picture why Dad identifies with much of the props and scenery in A Christmas Story.

A few facts about the man - he taught his parents how to drive a car and picked out the first family car. He can tell you the make, model, and year of most any car by sight - going back to the Model As and Ts. He grew up on the comedy of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and the 3 Stooges, passing on love of slap stick humor to his kids. He loves good bakery, like his father before him. On the few occasions when my mother has been felled by stomach flu and he has to fend for himself, he inevitably cooks up a stew of cabbage and stewed tomatoes, making Mom even more nauseated from the smell. He drives a hard bargain - you want him along as negotiator when buying a car or any big ticket item. He beat every grandchild (ages 7 - 24) at Wii bowling. He loves to tell a good joke and smoke a good cigar. His funeral instructions are "buy a cheap casket but serve a good lunch."

He will deny this next story, but my younger 2 brothers can vouch for the veracity of it. When I was in elementary school (7th grade) my mother got a job. Now, this was a Big Deal, not just in our home, but outside it. The church where my father was a minister never had a pastor's wife who worked outside the home. (This should have been a clue about the abysmal pay, but I digress.) My mother started work at 6 a.m. so that she would be home by 4:30 p.m. Every morning, my dad drove her to work and picked her up again at 4 p.m. This meant my dad had to feed us breakfast, lunch (we came home from grade school for lunch, returning for noon recess), then often start dinner as we had to eat at 6 p.m. so that we could eat as a family before my Dad left for evening meetings which usually began at 7 p.m. This also meant my dad now had to do grocery shopping, often on his own. I think we kids had asked that he buy Life cereal - probably because of the commercial.




So, he bought us the cereal (probably so that we would cease and desist our begging). As we were pouring out the cereal the next morning, he exclaimed, "Hey! Where are the blueberries?" He was flummoxed by the fact that there were blueberries pictured in the bowl of cereal on the box, but none in our bowls. My Dad became a much more savvy consumer after that incident.

So congrats to Joan and Ikinlala.

And Happy Birthday, Papa - and many, many more.

Happy Belated Blogiversary!

First off, I've missed my blogiversary. Looking back, I see that March 25, 2007 was the first post. I've been thinking about how to celebrate this auspicious occasion. I want to do some type of contest but, frankly, I'm too lazy to go around my house, find all my WIPs, or all my needles in order to have an accurate count for any "guess how many I've got" contest.

Instead, we shall do this - my father celebrated his birthday on the 20th. Leave a comment with your guess as to his age - closest guess wins some gorgeous yarn from the famous stash. Deadline for leaving the comment is this Sunday, March 30th, by 10 p.m. US Central time.

Speaking of yarn, I toured more LYS in Illinois recently. I headed to Chicago, stopping here.



This is a VERY small shop located near the Drake Hotel. In addition to yarn they also carry needlework supplies. It was not my favorite place I've visited so far because I really dislike yarn being in bags on the shelf. I realize it keeps the yarn clean and the skeins intact, especially for slicker fibers, but I really hate trying to see the skein through the plastic. If you go, check out the bargain bin near the door.

After checking out some local restaurants, I headed back towards the border, stopping in East Dundee at the Fishbed Knitting Emporium.


From the name, I was expecting maybe a gas station/post/office/grocery/bait shop (scroll down and see The Chequanmegon Junction or Deb's Y-Go-By Bar & Bait) with a few skeins of yarn in the corner.

Boy, was I wrong...not a lure in sight...but I was immediately hooked. Look at all this.





The Emporium carries Cascade, Misty Alpaca, Noro, Debbie Bliss, and much, much more. This place is definitely worth a stop if you are ANYWHERE near the area.

The last stop was the Fine Line Creative Arts Center in St. Charles, IL. This location is also worth a visit if you're in the area.






In addition to yarn and looms, they sell handcrafted jewelry and pottery. They offer classes in textiles, pottery, metal and glass. It's a beautiful location on a nature preserve which is slowly being surrounded by suburbia.

The EZ Baby Surprise Jacket is off the needles but the seams are not yet sewn. Photos to come - along with proof positive that spring is on the way.

Sunday Morning Brunch

It's hard to believe over a week has passed by since the last post. There's a whole buffet of activities to cover today.

Last week's Guild Knit In. The speaker was the person who The Knitting Curmudgeon refers to as the Tiny Diva - L*ly Ch*n.



While I respect KC's opinion, I wanted to see and judge for myself. Unfortunately, I must concur with KC. The topic of her speech was finding inspiration and translating the inspiration to your knitting. She showed her patterns and the sources of inspiration for those patterns. It did not impress me that most of her choices were for garments knitted in the early to mid-90's, 10-15 years old and looking VERY dated.

The other thing that did not impress me was her claim that one size fits all. As a plus size woman myself, I feel I have experience enough to comment on this claim. Puh-lease! Not even hats or mittens are one size fits all, much less a sweater or coat. She had on a jacket she claimed was such a garment. Now, it looked very good on her - and probably would on women up to a couple sizes bigger than she - but it did not look good on the plus size guild member who tried it on. It did not have the same drape and did not meet around the hips like it did on the Tiny Diva. Did you ever read magazines that had fashion dos and don'ts where they would take candid shots of women on the street - with black boxes over the eye area of those women whose choice of what to wear that morning turned them into a Fashion Don't? This jacket on a plus size woman is a Don't.

I had no regrets missing the monthly guild meeting this last Monday, as the Tiny Diva was the speaker. Once was enough for me.

Now, to me, the biggest name at the Knit In was sitting, unobtrusively, in a corner of the market area. Oh. My God. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was the Grand Dame of Lace, Hazel Carter!



These are all from her lace projects.






Oh, all the lace projects I have plans for - so many projects, so much yarn, so little time!

A new project on the needles is a Baby Surprise Jacket.



I hate to admit it, but I needed this to guide me through some of EZ's instructions.



The yarn is Ella Rae Palermo. Looks good enough to eat, doesn't it?

Breaking With Tradition

There is a strong tradition where I live - fish fries on Friday nights. Thanks to the Associated Press even Hawaiians have read about our tradition. It is apparently the stuff of folklore. Unfortunately for me, but on a positive note for my arteries, DH dislikes seafood of any kind so we rarely indulge in this tradition.

I was on the road today, stopping for lunch at a mom and pop cafe. This is the kind of restaurant found in any small town large enough to have a restaurant. The decor was Midwestern Grandmother, circa 1973 - lots of knicknacks, wood paneling, and plastic/silk flowers and plants. It's the kind of place where the waitresses know every customer (except me) and most of the customers know each other. The kind of place where you read the local paper to see who was arrested for drunk driving, who's celebrating wedding anniversaries or the arrival of a child, but come here for the REAL news of the town. The special today was fish - beer battered alaskan pollack, cod, or perch. The salad bar included with the special is also a midwestern tradition - iceberg lettuce (no greens or spinach!) croutons, fake bacon bits, carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes strip mined in Texas because we won't see local garden-fresh tomatoes until July. If I hadn't been such an oddity on display for the locals (stranger in our midst!), I'd have taken pictures.

Breaking with tradition, I didn't order the special - much to the waitress's disappointment, I think. I'd already indulged in deep-fried goodness last week (see prior post on cheese curds) - gotta give the ol' arteries a chance to unclog before Knitting Camp.

One Stash Haus tradition I did follow was to start a new project even though I have PLENTY of wips to keep me busy for a month of Sundays. Work has been particularly rough this past week and once at home, I've felt that anything other than garter stitch is too taxing. To keep me from falling into an abyss of knitting boredom, I started the EZ Baby Suprise Jacket. This had been the perfect project - mindless enough after a long, difficult day, yet interesting enough to keep my attention and thus keep it from becoming another wip.

Tomorrow is the local guild's Knit In - the only drawback being that I have to get up at 7 a.m. on a day I normally like to sleep in. Oh, the sacrifices we make for knitting. Stay tuned for a full Knit In report.

Excite-o-Meter

So the excitement around the Stash Haus today was about cat sh*t. This subject rarely attains any level on the excite-o-meter around here, until it is combined with the need to call in a plumber.

Aside from not going into the stash closet, remaining woefully ignorant of the contents of the stash, mowing the lawn, and shoveling snow, DH has only one other permanent job around here - to clean the litter boxes. I am sorry to report that he is not faithful in his duties, to say the least. We have flushable litter and when the boxes get into Day 2 with no cleaning, there's much "buried treasure" so to speak. When this happens, rather than flushing a little bit each time until all is disposed of, DH dumps in the whole kittencaboodle (haha!). He still has to flush repeatedly, so I don't know why he thinks his process is saving any water or time.

Last night his luck ran out and our toilet revolted. His penance was having to wait for the plumber to arrive today. The plumber said he'd never dealt with a worse clog. Whether the expense of the plumber will cause DH to change his ways remains to be seen. One can only hope. Sigh.

Be thankful I didn't take before and after pictures. Our bathroom would have been condemned by the health department.

Now, what does attain the highest level on the excite-o-meter 'round here is Knitting Camp. I've been breathlessly awaiting to find out whether I had been accepted. I was having nightmares, nightmares, I tell you!

First dream - long, involved dream, but in part of it, DH and I are let into the back room of a fancy jewelry store. The back room is FULL of collectibles. I find on a bookshelf an out-of-print EZ book that's priced at $362. DH is appalled that I want to purchase it. I tell him, "Are you kidding? On Ebay and Amazon, you can't find this book for less than $600! They obviously don't know what they have here!" Also on the shelf is an EZ family photo album. I really want to purchase this, bring it to camp, give it to Meg, thereby earning her undying gratitude and a permanent spot at Knitting Camp.

Second dream - for some reason Meg comes to my house (which looks like the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island) to meet my whole family, all of whom are acting like they've just been released from a mental institution and have all gone off their meds at the same time. Meg has a look on her face - a look that I'd imagine Queen Elizabeth would have if she were ever at a rave party or a cheap strip club in Vegas - but of course she is much too polite to comment on the family antics. I'm appalled and running around, trying to pretend the situation is not as crazy as it seems, panicking that my family is ruining, absolutely RUINING any chances of getting into camp.

The nightmares are over - and I'm in! I can only imagine the same type of thrill goes through any actor when they get a call saying they're nominated for an Oscar or any chemist or physicist when they get the call from Sweden about that peace prize.

So I leave you with a non-knitting foretaste of camp. I haven't had them since camp 2 years ago.

What's in the bag?

Hmmm, could it be...

yes, it's cheese curds!

#!*$&%^#!@ Cotton

Spring still seems far off. Our bushes have become miniature caverns with icy stalagtites.



Today was spent doing a bit of this and a bit of that - some tidying up (ho hum), some knitting, some work (blah), and ending the day with a great movie and a Thai dinner (yum!). I can highly recommend In Bruges. (Rolling Stone review here.) Next on my list to see are Married Life, The Band's Visit, and The Counterfeiters. Last night DH and I watched the DVD of Good Night and Good Luck. Very interesting film - and with scary parallels between the McCarthy era and the current administration. Strange how 50 years later the labels of unamerican and unpatriotic are still bandied about and placed on anyone who questions those in authority.

OK, I'll step down from the soapbox and into the knitting bag.

This may appear to some to be a repetition of prior blog entry, but no. I actually finished the second Estonian Lullaby Baby Blanket today. I'm not too late as the baby who will receive this blanket was born in late December. (As slow as I knit, I'm just happy the kid isn't walking yet.) I tried to finish it last night - but by 2:30 a.m. my hands were aching, my eyes were bleary, I'd hit that seemingly endless garter stitch border, and I was having my Scarlett O'Hara knitting moment - "as god is my witness, I shall never knit with cotton again!" Oh, my aching hands! But I gotta admit - the result looks pretty good.





I also finished a Mistake Rib Scarf



and a Farrow Rib Scarf.



The photo shoot took a bit longer this afternoon as my assistant was more a hindrance than help.


The assistants at the Stash Haus are SO demanding.