People, sometimes I look at this poor sad lonely blog, and I get weighed down by how much I haven't said here. Like how I moved and what I'm doing and where I'm living, and how I actually did last month's 12 of 12 but was too busy to upload it until it sort of seemed too late. It's so hard being me!

I can't do those things, but I can tell you about some things I'm pretty into these days, because if there's anything I enjoy, it's making others love the things I love. Here are some of those things:

- The Hemlock Ring
When you're a new knitter, there are certain projects that you think, if this is what knitters do, knitters must be crazy people. Things like, I don't know, lace blankets based on doily patterns from 1942? That said, a good stern blocking and extra-pointy bind-off edge make me feel like a fiber arts badass.

- Espinacas con garbanzos!:
Aha! You wouldn't click if I said "spinach with chickpeas," but this is not just spinach with chickpeas. This is tangy, and spicy, and Spanish, and totally deserving of a gratuitous exclamation point. I make it without the bread, but with a link or two of the orangest, most Spanish-like sausage I can find, and it shocks me every time with the depth of its deliciousness.

- The Civil Wars:
I went to a couple of their shows around LA in December and January—my roommate and I are tangentially acquainted with Joy Williams, having worked with her family and occasionally with Joy herself at summer camp—and fell instantly in love. Now their new album is number one on iTunes (just ahead of Mumford and Sons' Sigh No More, which is also pretty great), allowing me to be both thrilled for them and insufferably smug for knowing allllll about them, like, a month ahead of time.

- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I KNOW. I'M SUCH A REVOLUTIONARY.  But no, really, the entire reading world is not lying to you about this series. I may not sleep until it's finished. (I also just finished Life of Pi, which I loved for completely different reasons; perhaps someday I will read something not from the Book Club Favorites! shelf, or whatever.)

See? Was that so hard? Let's do this more often, shall we?

Making stuff

I made risotto tonight. I did it partly as silent treatment on the script I'm working on (giving it a taste of its own medicine--YEAH, SCRIPT, I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU), but also because I bought zucchini at the Saturday farm stand that has apparently opened across the street from my apartment. And really, in August, when it's 90 degrees and 85 percent humidity outside and in, why wouldn't I want to stir rice on a hot stove for an hour?

I used to make risotto all the time--in the way that some people keep on hand the ingredients for, say, a quick spaghetti sauce or a grilled cheese sandwich, I decided awhile back to make sure I was always stocked up (a little risotto humor for you, there) on rice, onions, chicken stock, and white wine. It's a time-consuming staple--about an hour, start to finish--but it's versatile, one batch keeps me fed for a long time, and it comes with a pleasing sense of Making Something. It's you and the rice and some cooking music and a glass of that wine, like a little starchy kitchen party. And as a bonus, there are few greater motivations for getting through the morning than pulling a Tupperware full of cheesy ricey goodness out of the work fridge. I rarely use a recipe anymore--it's pretty standard, no matter where you look--but I used this one to confirm my quantities after my time away. Delicious.



I also pinned a sweater to the floor this weekend--at long last, I finished the February Lady Sweater, and for lack of a better place to block the lumpy-bumpies out of it, I laid it out on a few layers of towel/bath mat/carpet in the living room and pinned it into submission. All seems to be going well: it's almost dry, the inexplicable short side has lengthened out just fine, and Sherlock has done an admirable job of not batting at the pins. Vintage buttons are on their way via Etsy. Weather-wise, I won't be able to wear it for another month, at least, but all indications are that this may bypass "teachable moment/objet d'art" and go straight to "wearable garment." I call this a win.

Getting started

It's (pretending to be) spring here--I just walked to the store in flip-flops and I still have all my toes--and so I guess it's sort of right that I'm starting things all over the place.

I'm writing a lot these days, and by "writing" I mean "staring into space with occasional frenzied bursts of typing." I'm working on an original television pilot--original pilots being what get young writers in the door these days, plus the story just had to come out--and coming up with a new TV show is, wouldn't you just know, a tremendous amount of work in terms of creating a universe and then paring down and parsing out what fits into a 42-minute episode. This project is the kind of thing that makes writers write, and also the kind that stops them from writing: the world of my show just comes to me, floods into my brain at the most inopportune times (at work, at the grocery store, anytime actual typing is not possible), and then just looks at me, all coy, when I sit down to wrangle it into five acts and three storylines. "Don't you just want to tell me all at once?" it says, and I do. I love it, and I believe in it, and I can't wait to see it all grown up and heading out into the world. It could give me a little help in this all-important outlining phase, but hey. We're not going to talk about that. It'll come.

So in the midst of my writerly highs and lows, it's a good thing I decided to do something really straightforward, right? Riiiiiight. This purplish thing is my fetal Lace Ribbon Scarf, which is really just a jumble of stitches on US-4 needles. All knitting projects start this way, like working blind, with the future hope of something pretty and springy to wear while I wait for the bus (...which will likely be finished just in time for, say, Halloween, but purple alpaca is timeless and seasonless, right?). But it's like the script: you just have to keep going, believe that the pattern's going to be there (the difference being that somebody else made up the scarf design; I have to make up the script). But, you know. I'm glad I picked that activity to break up the uncertainty of writing.

Welcome to March. Time to make something, don't you think?

Weekend in

I spent most of this weekend at home. I mean, I did go out--I saw The Reader with a friend; I went for a run; I grocery shopped; I went to church--but mostly I've been indulging my inner homebody and hanging out with the cat. (Don't worry: Glenna visited last weekend to make me get out. Proof here and here!) Let's just say there's something to be said for the joys of a little at-home time, as follows:



This is not a cooking blog. I'm an avid consumer of other people's writing about food (Orangette and Smitten Kitchen keep me in recipes), but...trust me. From a girl who eats either sausage/onion/apple stir-fry or boiled kale as weekly standbys, you don't really need to know what I'm eating all the time.

But then there's this recipe, one I've been using forever, one which never lets me down. This is the kind of recipe you could make when, say, the entire population of a small country is coming to your home, or when you simply own more Tupperware than any normal human should. It's a little time-consuming--brown rice! From scratch!--but it's worth it, especially if you want to have lunch taken care of for the next two weeks, at least.

Curried Brown Rice with Chicken and Apples

1 TBS oil
2 lb. chicken, chopped
3 medium granny smith apples, chopped
2 onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 TBS curry powder
1 1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 c raisins
5 c chicken broth
2 c brown rice
salt and pepper

In a large (no, really, LARGE) pan, heat oil. Salt and pepper chicken, and brown in oil. Remove from pan. Add apples, onions, garlic, curry, and cumin; saute five minutes. Add broth and raisins. Bring to a boil; add rice and chicken. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer until rice is tender, about 60 minutes.

Eat. FOREVER.




I started a new sweater, the February Lady Sweater, a couple of weeks ago, but I've been cruising through it this weekend with the help of Friday Night Lights, Dollhouse, season four of Doctor Who, and (and now for something completely different) Harvey. It turns out that this kind of bulky lace is really fun to knit, and zooms past--all those holes! I despair of the time when it will actually be warm enough to wear this, but others have assured me that the day will, in fact, come.

The victory here is that the in-progress version actually fits; this whole "trying things on" concept is the joy of the top-down sweater. I am not sure that my spatial brain really gets how top-down raglan sweaters work (starting with a single row and ending up with the three-dimensional shoulders of a sweater is clearly magic and has no basis in rational geometry), but I am all for it.

So...there's that. Health food and handknits.

And, in conclusion, a gratuitous shot of the cat:



He has no shame. Ah, well.

Blessed are the patient, for they shall have sweaters that fit

Phase one of the Tangled Yoke Cardigan is done. This is the body, from the hem to the armpits, plus a few inches--I followed the pattern and then (with much impatience, and a fairly long chat with myself about sweaters that don't fit) tacked on extra rows to accomodate my ridiculous long-waistedness. It took a long time (with, you'll remember, a baby blanket in the middle), but I'm so pleased with it; I just love the way the fabric looks. I sometimes stop knitting and admire the flow of the stitches off the needles--the smoothness of the stockinette and the happy tweediness of the yarn I chose.



Now it's on to the sleeves, which I'm knitting using a new technique, the Magic Loop, which will allow me to knit both sleeves simultaneously on the same circular needle. My boss at work has been teaching me (best meetings ever), and I know it's the kind of thing that will ultimately change my life--i.e. eliminate the possibility of me finishing one sleeve and being simply unable to fathom starting another--but is currently not the epitome of ease and simplicity. Does this photo look like a random tangle of yarn to you? Because it does to me. But I'm slowly figuring out the mechanics of the Magic Loop--a weird study in kinesthetic vs. visual learning, if ever there was one--and I suspect I'll be patting myself on the back when I realize both sleeves are a) finished and b) identical. Here's hoping.

Two great tastes that taste great together

It always kind of surprises me that I've never been in a book club. I'm a book-club kind of girl, right? I read a lot. I talk about reading a lot. So, reading + talking about reading = right up my alley, right? And yet somehow, I'm always a little bit too fickle in my reading moods and habits, not quite willing enough to submit to the schedule and the whole "other people telling me what to read" thing, to join a group.

Well, Glenna asked me this week if I'd like to co-moderate a 20th Century Book Club on Ravelry, the idea of Ravelry book clubs being that one reads and discusses the chosen book and, if the spirit leads, knits an item corresponding to the theme of that book (Example: Dante's Inferno = flame-y leg warmers). How well she knows me. Although I am a semi-contrary reader and a leisurely knitter at best, my love for early/mid-20th-century novels (we'll say 1915-1950) knows no bounds. I may choose my reading material according to the phases of the moon and the color of my socks, but that (Teddy) Roosevelt-to-Eisenhower period is nearly always on the roster. Besides, how could I say no to a book club for which I get to (help) choose the books? I said I'd do it.

The group hasn't started yet, but Glenna and I decided to each compile a list of 20 possible books, then compare notes; I spent this afternoon searching my mental to-read list and my collection of books about books (when in doubt, consult Nancy Pearl), and came up with not one, but two lists: Books I Haven't Read But Should/Would Like To, and Books I've Read and So Should Everybody Else (because I am nothing if not a literary imperialist). The results are as follows:

Books I Haven't Read But Should/Would Like To

1. Native Son, Richard Wright
2. The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
3. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (What a title!)
4. A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul
5. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
6. The Flame Trees of Thika: Tales of an African Childhood, Elspeth Huxley
7. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor
9. All the Names (or other), Jose Saramago
10. Foucault’s Pendulum or The Name of the Rose or The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco
11. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
12. The Locusts Have No King or The Golden Spur, Dawn Powell
13. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
14. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
15. Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
16. Go Tell It On the Mountain, James Baldwin
17. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
18. The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell
19. Amsterdam (or other), Ian McEwan
20. A Word Child (or other), Iris Murdoch


Books I've Read and So Should Everybody Else

1. I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
2. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
3. 84 Charing Cross Road, Helene Hanff
4. Rebecca, Daphne DuMaurier
5. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
6. The Portable Dorothy Parker
7. Behind the Scenes at the Museum, Kate Atkinson
8. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster
9. Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret, Louise Fitzhugh
10. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman
11. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
12. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson


So, bring on the semi-enforced reading and associated knitting!

(Ravelry is still in beta and therefore is by invitation only; however, signing up is both simple and free, and I believe the waiting list is moving quickly at this point. If you'd like to read and/or knit (or crochet!) with us, check it out. The more the merrier.)

Blanketed

Have you ever pondered the very squareness of your average blanket? Square, I'm telling you. Not a strip, not a rectangle--that would be a towel--but every stitch of width accounted for by a row of length. Square, man.

I've been pondering the squareness of blankets lately as I've been working on the baby blanket I'm knitting. It's a winner of a blanket, I think; I like the pattern and I like the colors. But: blanket. Square. Pink pink pink pink white white pink pink pink pink white white. I'm dreaming in stripes these days.

Good thing there's been the AMC Mad Men marathon to keep me company. I'll bet HBO is kicking itself--they passed on the show (created by one of their own, no less, Sopranos alum Matthew Weiner), only to watch it be picked up and produced by AMC and subsequently receive sixteen Emmy nominations. It's the kind of thing you'd never see on network TV. Set at a Madison Avenue ad agency in 1960, it's hopelessly (and sometimes pleasingly) adult--not so much violent or graphically sexy as subtle, complex, and packed with precise dialogue spoken by paralytically conflicted characters. These are people that are almost universally dedicated to a lifestyle that none of them seem entirely comfortable with; they're always trying to break or escape their own situations, even as they work day in and day out to preserve what they have. In short, it makes me positively thrilled to be a child of the 80s, though the flouncy shirtwaist dresses, pencil skirts, and fantastic shoes make it almost worth a trade. (Kidding. Any man that spoke to me like the men on that show would sound like Bobby McFerrin for a week.)

Don't you wish your life was as exciting as mine?

Come on, baby, you drive me crazy

Goodness gracious! Great balls of yarn!

(I'm sorry; it had to be said.)



This came for me in the mail yesterday. At work. I think you really have to be a knitter to understand the joy of unwrapping this kind of volume of yarn, and I wish you could all see these particular skeins in person. These are the skeins that ate New York. They are each the size of a newborn, or a loaf of bread, and although they are not what you'd call super-portable ("What's that under your arm? A small sleeping bag?"), I somehow find myself unperturbed about the possibility of running out of the dye lot I need.

I have to admit: it's not mine, technically. Didn't I tell you? I'm going to be a professional knitter! Somebody I know from work made me an offer I couldn't refuse: I knit her a pair of baby blankets, and she gives me money. (Knitting as income! What a fine world we live in!) I even got to pick the pattern--I'm adapting the Mason-Dixon ballband dishcloth to blanket size. Basically, if I were using cotton (my patroness bought the yarn--all acrylic, which I feel we need to have a chat about), you could soak up half a swimming pool with this sucker. It's going to be awesome (she says, before she casts on).

Making and unmaking

So, I am greatly saddened, kind of, to say that I probably will not be finishing my novel this year. (Again.) See, the deal I made with myself was that I would do NaNo IF I had no other pressing writing assignments. And when I had no other pressing writing assignments, it went pretty well. But then I got one--something I can't talk about yet, but be assured it'll be all over this space if things work out--and, well, 1,667 spent elsewhere each day start to add up. So I'm cooling it. Plus, my Novel Voice is, I'm sorry to say, kind of boring. Sorry, Self.

The good thing about dropping out of a crazy masochistic writing event is the amount of free time I suddenly find on my hands. It seems I'd been neglecting books, movies, actual food that requires actual cooking, a crafty project or two, and maybe some people. No more! This afternoon I made this much chili:

So if nuclear winter hits this week, I think I'm good to go (corn muffins optional).

I also knitted myself a cabled beanie, which ended up being more like a cabled yarmulke. Before:
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After:


This is the joy of small knitting projects: find that your beanie should actually have a propeller sticking out of the top? Rip back to the ribbing; you'll be fine. I think a couple of extra repeats of the cable pattern should make the poor thing at least reach my ears. Note to self: Things that stretch sideways shrink lengthwise. Words for the wise!

And now it's on to Christmas cards and Christmas music and probably a viewing of White Christmas or two. Not to mention The Noise. Are you ready? I...am not. But at least I have some time to think about how unprepared I am.

Cast-onitis

The first knitting project I ever started was a scarf. My mom took me to Mrs. Blaufarb's yarn store on First Street and we picked out a pair of US-8 aluminum needles and two skeins of purple heathered yarn--I didn't know enough to hang onto the ballbands, but I think it might have been Cascade 220. I went home and my mom taught me to knit. I swatched. I ripped out. I swatched some more. And then I started a ribbed scarf. Over a year later, it's about two and a half feet long and still on the needles. I'll finish it someday--I will, after all, need my size 8s again at some point, and putting the scarf on stitch holders counts as admitting defeat--but it's a little scratchy and it doesn't seem very warm, and it's just going to have to be a "someday" project. I've sworn, after getting stuck at the halfway point, never to knit another scarf.

But then I came to work today, and my neck is cold.

I think I'm going to head over to Article Pract later and see what they have in the way of "soft and pretty." I was thinking about a cabled scarf, but then I found this, which is cool and unusual and has an easy-to-memorize stitch pattern. So I'll cast on and start it and see how I feel about it, and maybe it'll end up kooky and so-called, and maybe I'll end up with classic and cabled. Or something totally different. Because, you know, it's not like I have anything else crafty going on, like, say, a pair of green socks, or maybe a cute flowery A-line skirt. And it's not like all of the shows on TV are new and non-knit-worthy right now. So, you know, it's a perfect time for a patterned project! Excellent!

At least my neck will be warm.

Progress, or Knitters *Heart* the Internets

So, there's this website, Ravelry. It's a community/social site for knitters: there are friends and groups, finished-object galleries, patterns-to-knit lists, a yarn-stash database capability, and I don't even know what else. You can search other people's work by pattern (see all finished photos of a particular pattern), by yarn (see all finished photos of items knit from a particular yarn), or, I don't know, alphabetical by needle size. Legend has it that Ravelry will knit on your projects while you sleep, so you get through them faster. (It doesn't make mistakes.) It is, by all accounts, a big rollicking yarn-y party and possibly the Best Thing Ever. There is much raving over Ravelry in the knitting world.

The site is still in beta, so the creators set up a waiting list for invitations before it goes live to the general public. I signed up a few weeks ago and I've been using the handy-dandy "check your place in line!" feature to see where I am.

Last week? 18,000-some people ahead of me, plus the 11,000 who've already received their invitations.

Today? 17,070 people are ahead of me. 3,065 people signed up after me.

Apparently, the revolution will have yarn and needles.

Out of the knitting bag and into the closet

Ta-da!

It's magic! Four and a half months' worth of stitching, cabling, measuring, trying-on, adding-extra magic. It's my first garment and the first thing I've knit just for myself, and despite a few flaws--there's no picture of the back here, but we'll say that the ribbed edge and the "seamless" join are artfully asymmetrical--I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out (blocking helped a lot). And I'm sure I'm not the only one who's tired of monitoring its progress. So: welcome to the wardrobe, shrug! (The shrug is noncommittal.)

The knitterly details, for those who care:

Pattern: Cabled Shrug, Interweave Knits Summer 2005
Yarn: Rowan Soft Baby in Cloud, 4.5(?) balls
Needles: Susan Bates US 5 straights
Notes: This (free internet) pattern didn't include a size of any kind, and it turned out to be written for tiny people. Thankfully, it was knitted from the sleeves in, so I just kept knitting extra rows until it fit. I added a ribbon closure to keep everything in place. Other than that, things went reasonably well for my first big project. Hurrah!

Now I'm working in earnest on the socks I took to England. I love them even though I'm fairly sure that 80% of the stitches will have been knitted at least twice by the time I'm done, as I am flying entirely by the seat of my pants and feeling free to interpret the pattern as I see fit. I'm going heavy on the lifelines, having already performed major surgery once this week--the odds that I'll have to rip back a bit are excellent. I've just turned the heel and taken a first shot at the beginning of the heel flap, but I think I'm going to take advantage of the most recent lifeline and try again. These are my Learning Socks, and I personally think they're pretty great, plain stockinette or no.

Knit on!

In pieces

Contrary to popular (or is it just personal?) belief, it's looking like I might actually finish this shrug before global warming renders it useless. I had a mild bout of knitter's block last week--I'd finished one half and stopped sewing mid-sleeve on the other, knowing that finishing the seam would only mean more knitting when I realized the thing didn't fit.

I was right--I seamed and wove ends all through Kinky Boots (delightful), and then tied the two halves together to check the fit. As expected, the sizeless pattern was clearly designed for people who don't have anything to measure, and the back needed a good three inches to even approach a decent fit. Here it is at the vital "tied and laid out" stage:





In the interest of full disclosure, I've since seen the light at the end of the shrug tunnel and have been knitting like mad, leap-frogging back and forth between episodes of Firefly and Bones. I think that around the time a) Mal and Zoey rescue Simon and River and become Big Damn Heroes, and b) Brennan actually gets to drive for once, I should have things more or less done. The new thing on my mind is: ribbon closure, or no? It's a good problem to have.

Oh, oh, we're halfway there

It all started with one cabley little swatch, and now...half a shrug! A quadrant of a sweater!


Here we have the whole half-enchilada, laid out--that's the left sleeve, shoulder, and the front and back segments of the little bodice. The puckery part in the lower-right corner is the back section, which still has live stitches on a stitch holder. When I finish the right half, I'll graft the back sections of both sides together, and you (theoretically) won't be able to tell. Magic!


Here it is folded to look like it will once I've sewed the sleeve seam--basically a sweater without a body. Made for chilly evenings and wearing inappropriate tops to church. So, perfect. (Kidding. Sort of.)


Cabling allll the way up that arm.

I have the vague suspicion that the (sizeless) pattern is going to be a bit too small, even though my gauge was perfect. If it's too narrow, that's fine--I'll just add more rows to both back sections before I graft them. If it's too short--i.e. The Shelf becomes a problem--I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Or I'll just wear it anyway, because I MADE IT WITH MY BARE HANDS, and that is an excuse to wear just about anything.

Now for His Girl Friday and casting on for the other half. (Oh, the fabulous life I do lead!)

Odds; ends

- I finished Pants 4 yesterday, and couldn't help giving it a little hug as I put it back on the shelf with its buddies. I'm naming it my second-favorite Pants book: not quite as true and honest and heartbreaking as #2, maybe, but still willing to do some heavy lifting character-wise. I loved Tibby and, surprisingly, Bridget--I think the Vreeland family (or what's left of it) is the final frontier for Bee, and I liked the way she finally had to deal with the people she'd left at home all this time. I would have felt good about the outcome of Lena's story either way, I think; I was ready for her to be content by herself, and I liked the ways in which she grew in this book. But I also feel like I can be gracious to Lena and let her have her happy ending, so it's okay. The ending as it currently stands works for me. In short, I'm really impressed with Ann Brashares and what she's done with herself as a writer since the early days of the original Pants book--this final book in the series is so much more complex and mature than I would have expected from her in the beginning. Well played.

- I've now picked up Broken For You, by Stephanie Kallos, which Katie gave me for Christmas with a note that she thought I "really needed to read this book." So far it's pretty readable but also a little heavy-handed and self-consciously quirky in the way that first novels often are. *shrug* I'll reserve judgement.

- The urge to work on my spec script has flagged this week. I think it's related to the lack of TV--not a single one of my shows is on, so my TV is pretty much sitting there silent, taking up space and failing to inspire me with displays of brilliance by people who are writing. So I'm taking this as a break in the belief that my voice will come back soon. In fact, both The Office and 30 Rock come back tonight, so I'm thinking "soon" might actually mean "today." Bonus: 30 Rock has been renewed for a second season, which means it's technically fair game for spec-scripting. Wooot!

- I am not in the mood to write, but I am in the mood to knit, and knit prolifically. I made it through most of the length of Sleeve 1 (10 reps of a six-row cable pattern; increase at row five, twist the cable at row three!) and am getting up to the shoulder shaping. Very exciting! I'm also about to hit the part of the pattern that's full of things I haven't learned about yet, so I'm trying not to read too far ahead, or I get overwhelmed. One new skill at a time, I say, and soon I will have a sweater! Or, actually half of a sweater. I'm having fun with it, but I hope it goes quickly, because I'm dying to wear it.

- Which brings me to my new favorite thing: podcasts! The point of the podcast escaped me for a long time--if a blog is self-indulgence, written and published for all the world to see, do we really need to add the human voice to that?--but now I'm hooked. It's like having a talk-radio station that only talks about what you want them to talk about! My taste in podcasts is typical and typically nerdy: so far, writing and knitting. I like listening to the Creative Screenwriting magazine podcast, in which a vaguely obnoxious host interviews working screenwriters, at work--something about it has that tantalizing "yes, I'm a waitress, but what I really want to do is direct" quality to it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: there is nothing more inspiring than writers talking about writing, and this principle has gotten me through many a long afternoon of edit entry lately. When I've had it with the self-centeredness of writers, I switch on one of two knitting podcasts: Stash and Burn or Cast On. S&B features two San Francisco knitters talking about...well, knitting. Knitting projects, knitting yarn, knitting stories, knitting road trips, knitting books, knitting jokes. Cast On is a little different in that it's a podcast meant to be heard while knitting, and I've tried to reserve it for that purpose. There's indie music to knit to, a weekly essay on knitting (deeper than you'd think), knitting news (more than you'd think), and a segment in which the podcaster shares the backstory on a sweater she's made. It's a little NPR-ish in its soothingness and its vague more-liberal-than-thou quality, but I find it strangely addicting. Now all I need is a good literature podcast, and I'll be good to go! KLIZ, now broadcasting on a laptop near you!

- That is all, except that today is Maundy Thursday. I've never been to a Maundy Thursday service, and I won't be going this year, either. I am very much looking forward to the Good Friday service at my church tomorrow night, though. Good Friday is such a strange day--something to be *commemorated* but not necessarily *celebrated,* which is a tricky thing, I think. Anyway, I loved the service last year, and this year my choir is performing--we get to hang out in the balcony, behind everyone, and sing a Renaissance-era monks' chant. A capella. In Latin. Not that we're the point of the service, or anything, but we sound GOOD.

- That really is all.

Baby's first cable

I am off and knitting on my first piece of clothing--a cabled shrug (i.e. a cardigan without all that cardigan to worry about) for which I bought yarn last weekend. I have swatched, gone down a needle size, and swatched again. And look!



I decided that getting hopelessly, irreparably tangled up in a swatch was better than having to rip out part of a sweater, so I pulled out my new cable needle, followed the directions in the pattern, and voila! A perfectly good cable, right down the middle. It's amazing how that works. New skill: check!

Things of which I am a fan

1. My computer, obviously. I still haven't gotten it together to close out the old PC and transfer my files (mostly music and photos, with some writing thrown in for fun), but I did install Word and Excel, which actually feels like a bit of a betrayal to the Mac mindset. Until we're all using InCopy, though, a girl's got to have something on which to process words, no? Anyway, the nameless laptop is light and quiet and seems determined to not be a hassle in any way. It is the Charlie Young of the computer world, if you will. This pleases me. We are friends, my computer and I.

2. The Second Summer of the Sisterhood: I'm re-reading Traveling Pants books two and three in preparation for a first read-through of four, Forever in Blue, which I got for Christmas. For whatever reason, #2 (I hate the title, so I always call it Pants Two) is my favorite by far--the last time I read it, it resonated with me on a level that probably was not strictly normal. This time, I think the moment had passed, but I still love it more than all the rest. It's the darkest of the books, not in a juvenile melodramatic way, but in a "these characters are badly behaved in ways that are totally recognizable" manner. It's the girls generally at their worst, which is always interesting, I think. Also: Carmen dating Porter, the penguin. Hee.

3. Yarn stores: I "stopped by" (read: spent an hour in) the yarn store on the way home from church yesterday, checking out my options for the cabled shrug I want to make. Article Pract is not my favorite yarn shop--it's expensive, carries too many earth tones, and has occasionally obnoxious hipster employees--but it's conveniently located and I had some store credit there, so I spent a good chunk of time wandering around, squeezing yarn and checking gauge and price. Mostly, I think I like doing just that: I don't always buy anything, but petting the yarn and soaking up the knitterly gossip is nice. I ended up getting some yarn-substitution help from the store's owner (this is the key, I think; she was very nice and very helpful), and came away with nine skeins of Rowan's Soft Baby in Cloud. I also found a good yarn candidate for the log-cabin blanket I'm pondering, which I left in the store for the sake of my debit card, but I'm glad to know it's there. Anyway, this means I can start swatching for the shrug, which I think will break my brain, but maybe in a good way.

This weekend I was also a fan of babies, What Not to Wear, corned beef and cabbage, westerns, sleep, black currants, dinner parties, Trader Joe's, running errands with my mom, and mint-chocolate frozen yogurt. Good times, good times.

Needles

On Monday, I went to my mom's house for a sewing day. Now, I grew up with a Sewing Mom--Halloween costumes as far as the eye can see--but I don't sew, myself. In my mind, the sewing machine is like a mythical beast: the source of great things, yes, but also noisy mysterious and capable of taking off my finger without breaking a sweat. When I was about ten, I sewed my grandparents a pair of matching his-and-hers pillow cases (very Wheel of Fortune of me) with their names puff-painted on the hems. A few years later, I made myself some flannel pajama bottoms. That's been about it for me and the sewing machine: I got away with my pj pants and all of my fingers intact, and felt grateful for it.

Knitting supplies make a girl do crazy things, though. My needle collection has begun to grow, and it's practically a miracle that I haven't impaled myself on a stray US-10.5 on the way to the bathroom at night; instead of tempting fate, I decided awhile ago that I should make myself a needle case. I studied the (sewing) pattern in the back of my Stitch 'n Bitch book; I went to Hancock Fabrics and bought some uber-girly pink-and-brown fabric and a shiny brown satin ribbon to use as a tie. My mother graciously volunteered to help me out.

The case took practically all day, no thanks to a mis-cutting incident where we ended up back at Hancock's for more fabric. It turns out that learning to use a sewing machine is much like learning to drive a stick-shift car: feet do one thing, hands do another, there's a button for reverse, and don't forget to steer! There's a lot of lurching, of S E W S E W S E W sewsewsewsew S E W S E W S E W sewsewsewsew. I measured the fabric and cut it out and spent an hour measuring and sewing seams for the needle pockets. I sewed seams around the edges and only called for help when I'd inched in towards the middle and couldn't steer back. Eventually I turned the whole thing right-side-out and Mom agreed to sew the outer 1/4-inch seam and hand-stitch the ribbon to the outside. And? Voila:





All ten fingers still attached, and my knitting needles are safe and sound (and not sticking out of my bare feet in the middle of the night).

Also, along similar knitting-related lines, proof that I don't deserve my friends--I arrived at work on Thursday to find this shirt:

folded neatly on my chair with a note from Christine. She'd seen it on a recent episode of Gilmore Girls and thought I should have it, because she's super-nice like that. Don't mess with me, yo. I have several pairs of big needles in my purse.