Baby's Got a Brand New Bag

Emily designed and made this nice bag:


The pattern is typical Free Form Emily: cast on enough stitches to make a scarf in the pattern of your choice: she chose a K4P4 basketweave.

Get about halfway through the scarf, and declare extreme boredom with the project.

Bind off the scarf, and sew the ends together. Then, using whatever other yarn you have around, pick up enough stiches to go around. Knit in pattern of your choice (this time stockinette stitch) until it is long enough to carry a good sized spiral notebook. Then get your mother to do some simple decreases at the bottom because all that stockinette stitch is boring.

Make two I-cord handles using 8 stitches, because I-cords are not boring. There you go!

Stash-ola

I've made only the smallest of dents in the stash and here is what I have so far:


Right now this is a blanket, but it could turn into something else.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

Nice for knitting in the park.

Ambiguous Sexuality, Implied Nudity and the Driving Range

We've got it all here in my little corner of the world.

Emily and I attended a pretty sophisticated production of Hair at the HCST High School this afternoon. While gobbling a Kit Kat bar during intermission I was moved to floodgates of peri-menopausal weeping by this vision: our painful high school years as theater/art/orchestra/French Club social rejects were not in vain, because we paved the way for this group of kids to put on a version of Hair that takes place either in a rehab facility or psychiatric hospital, with lots of boy-on-boy action, off stage nudity and no cardboard guitar props! And in fact no long hair, either. In any event, it was a pretty good show, and we always like to spend at least part of a nice day indoors.

Earlier, though, I did get out to hit some balls at the Jersey City driving range. It felt real good to be out doing a golf activty. This year, I am practising taking the swing back just a little bit further than I started out.

And, of course, keeping my head down.

And my knees bent.

And my left arm straight.

And my feet closer together.

And following through.

Every Last Freakin' Bit

I was really inspired by this afgan that a knitter gave to Stephanie on one of her junkets. Just look, don't you want this in your house?


I plan to use up every bit of leftover yarn in the house on this. So that I can buy more yarn later.

Pork Chop/Sunday /Dinner

We drove through flooding like this yesterday to get to Nancy's house for a good home cooked Sunday Dinner.

Because I was so sly when I talked to Nancy on Friday ("Hi! What are you doing this weekend? Cooking a really good Sunday Dinner? Wow, I wish we could have a nice dinner on Sunday!) I was able to do a little cookin' of my own, on the Pork Chop Patch.

And, it being Sunday dinner and all, I wove in the ends on the back of the patch, and blocked it too.

Golf is Easy, Knitting is Hard, Amen

Golf is very easy, especially when you are doing the laundry on a snowy Easter Sunday and using the time between loads to watch the Master's Tournament from the couch. Except if you are Tiger Woods, and your sobs are miked up on a network broadcast with a close up camera in your heartbroken face the whole back nine. Then, I suppose golf is hard.

In an incredulous stage whisper, the golf announcers told us that the guy who won the tournament wasn't even the best player on his high school golf team.

And this guy who won told the world that JESUS helped him play the winning game today. But we only have Brendan coaching our putts, so let's forget about winning the Masters.

Knitting, on the other hand, can be very hard, particularly with size zero double pointed needles. While I was watching golf I spent the weekend doodling with KnitPro, a copy of which can be found on the very excellent Microrevolt site. This handy program allows you to turn a JPG or GIF file into a knitting graph but you need to apply some thinking to the process.

As I learned from watching three days of golf this weekend, golf success depends on the lie of the ball on the green. Not Jesus! When you are using this KnitPro, success depends on the lie of the image on the graph. And just like golf you can improve your lie by moving the image around, just like you move your ball around! But only if you are playing with friends.

I had the best success with this image, for which I obtained permission telepathically from the artist:


Hopefully as soon as it stops snowing, I can get a real life picture of it, since it turned out pretty good, for a pork chop.

Going Round in Circles

Here's a picture of that Stop Traffic sweater, present for Lou Lou's birthday, which I have renamed New Jersey Circles.

Vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey

Allen Ginsberg died 10 years ago today. I had a writing seminar with him in 1980 or 1981; being neither a talented poet nor a handsome young homosexual man, my contact with the guy was limited.

Sometimes I brought my knitting to class and that was in the funky old days of acrylic and aluminum needles.

If you haven't read Howl in a while, take a break and read it now.

Spring Cleaning? Not me.

Four days off this week
devoting all to knitting
hope the garbage men come to get this
before the family finds out.

Money, Honey.

Now that the LPGA season has begun, just for fun, let's follow what these golfers make this year in Official Money (I guess as opposed to Monopoly money). I picked them because - not because they are my favorite players, but because I can remember their names, because they can cook, or they have animated characters on their websites, or, truth be told, they look cute in a skort. We can compare it to Mr. Misogynist's take for the year so far ($2,748,463) (holy shit).

So far in order of offical money this year, compared to Singh:

• Paula Creamer : $243,187 (8.8%)
• Annika Sorenstam : $158,371 (5.7%)
• Sherri Steinhauer: $76,739 (2.7%)
• Nathalie Gulbis : $22,431 (0.8%)
• Julie Inkster: $8,295 (0.3%)

Wonder how long it will take someone to hit 74% of men's earnings?

Swatch Out , You Made a Mistake

Last night I put the finishing inches on the Majolica Sweater and sewed it all together and sat down to figure out how much blocking it needed and found out - it's not the size I imagined it would be. It's a a bit too narrow and just a little too short on both the body and sleeves.


And do you know why? I didn't do a swatch to check the gauge.

I've been knitting long enough to know better, so I have no alternative but to blame myself for giving in to knitting machismo. We all think we knit right to scale,

Mysteriously, some people wrote a song about the horror of improper gauge, but I am sure they did not know it was about knitting at the time.

Something fishy about this trip

About two months ago, I ran out of yarn for the Majolica sweater project with just about two inches to go on the last sleeve. I wasn't able to find the dye lot in the color I needed to finish it off, even after visiting every yarn store in NYC.

I admit I never gave much thought to dye lot when buying yarn from a major manufacturer. How different could one batch of Lamb's Pride Old Sage be from another batch? Surprise! A big difference.

I was thinking about giving up on the damn thing and making a felted purse out of the completed parts when we took a break from knitting and golf for a family excursion to the NJ Aquarium. After the last hectic few weeks it was wonderful to spend the day looking at nature where I like it best, in captivity, in the Most Dangerous City in America.

You can count on Nancy to find the best possible local place for lunch. This one, which is down Haddon Road a ways outside of Camden, had had great food and the same clock my mother in law had in her old house in Maine. Here it is, set at 8:00:



But other magic was at work on this trip. As we pulled into a parking space near the restaurant I heard the familiar siren wail in my head which tells me a yarn store is near - and lo and behold, we had pulled up directly in front of Jubili Beads and Yarns. Since we were about a minute early for our lunch reservations, I knew I had plenty time to go in and touch ever skein of yarn in the place and look in every magazine.

But I didn't have to look to long before I found the Lambs Pride Old Sage in the right dye lot to finish off this project. How sweet is that?