the very first post on this blog was a special one, featuring a special dog, who died last wednesday. anyone who reads this blog can only imagine how saddened our household is by this passing, which, although we thought we were prepared for it, was a tremendous change for us all.

flannery loved to be everywhere at once, and that's something cremation really gives a dog the opportunity to do. we learned many things from flanny, one of them being: no matter how fast you are, you can't outrun your own flatulence. there were other things too, but i can't remember them right now. when tim, ben and i (after all, she was flanny "two homes" stopper) get all the photos together, there will be a glorious retrospective on my flickr. she had a fantastic life - that much i would stake my own on.

a thank-you to all the friends and fans who were supportive during this time.

after i wrote here about my experiences with flickr's 365 days project and how i thought they might be transposed to knitting, i had an idea. it's not finely wrought, but it's an idea i'm working with nonetheless. i've started a flickr group called "freeform knitting 365", and i bet you can guess what it's for.

it's quite easy to go to the page and ask to be "invited" into the group. please feel free to "ask" for the "invitation"; unless you already know i think you're worthless and putrid, i'll happily grant it. we have, i believe, five people signed up, but it is only myself and one other knitter so far who have made the daily commitment. we're very early in the project and there's only so much to see, but more knitters who could make the daily commitment would make it even more fun. however, even if you aren't going to join, you may as well know where to find us having our fun. (but you can only read the discussion topics if you belong to the group.) it's been really cool so far, and i'm glad i'm doing it.

i totally know what my piece is going to be. that may not be the point of freeform, yes, but i do know.

The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul.

- christian nevell bovee

what i have already learned participating in flickr's 365 days project is that people, in general, have faces that they make in response to the sight of a camera or mirror, and not just when they are caught off guard by these devices - people have a "presentable" face, a "presentable" angle, and since participating in the project i have been on the lookout for the chin tilts, lip purses, eye widenings, that negate the candid moment.

i recently trolled through a breadcrumb trail of knitting blog links and realized that, once you were on the lookout for it, it was easy to spot all the little tricks of language that similarly eradicate the individual voice. although i was looking at knitting blogs specifically, there are some commonalities that are evident in non-knitting blogs too. like that "something mc something" construction - my god, how many variations of this does one have to see before it doesn't look fresh and winsome anymore? (answer: two.) and the "somethingy goodness" thing. i think blogs might be the worst thing to happen to language in centuries.

and it's still remarkable to me that writing about knitting (air quotes around that "write") is so heavily infused with pseudo-sexual or pseudo-semisexual language - as if the only way to express any kind of sensualism is with this limiting, babyish, knee-jerk talk. vixen, trollop, slut, harlot, yummy, tantalizing, sooooooooooo anything. is anybody getting laid out there? because this all borders in my mind on the kind of thing that gets the women's magazines describing chocolate desserts as though they too were blue material.

rather thirdhand - and followed by some research that indicated that this is a more or less universal problem in our increasingly flat world - i recently heard about the justifiable horrors that yarn shop employees sometimes experience when a customer comes into their place of business, picks up a skein or a hank, and then proceeds to rub it against their face luxuriantly. good god! and it's not like they go into a corner and do this hoping to attract no attention; they do it in front of yarn store staff! they rub yarn on their faces - in front of what is essentially a paid audience - to what end? to demonstrate their intense appreciation of the fiber that they haven't purchased and yet are smearing their maybelline all over?

you can just imagine individuals like this striding up to the door of the secret clubhouse and telling themselves with confidence, "i'll just flap my hands around and whatever i do is so likely to approximate the secret handshake that they'll just let me on in." these people, whose incredible lust for their tools has materialized in their sebaceous oil glands, have got camille claudel looking down at them from the great beyond and shaking her head. clay, clay is sexy, says camille. what the fuck is with the yarn?

is there some unspoken suggestion that if one does not succumb to la petit mort upon contact with a limp ball of cashmere, or does not use the words, the tone, that one is dispassionate about knitting? not really "hardcore"? that one is unappreciative, or has such a dulled palate for yarn that they should just sit at home with a couple of plastic straight needles and some acrylic?

it sort of - and i'm the last person who'd call themselves a feminist but i guess it sort of stands to reason that so many, many people are happy to be yarn ho's, but it seems that words like hog, glutton, and pig are, while not entirely unused, a little less popular. i feel that the language has gone from a thread of familiarity to a nest or bunker, to a downright prison, and that iterations of the same sentiments, phrased similarly, used to gain entry like a key for a lock, and are in this capacity detrimental both to originality and to expression.

on blogs - knitting and otherwise - it is sometimes awfully, transparently sad to see how people in the comment fields of any given post will be downright contorting in their efforts to parrot tone and message to the person who wrote the entry upon which they are commenting. what is ironic about this is how much of it is often touted as "outspokenness" and telling-it-like-it-is. it seems well proven: when "vitriol" meets a yes-man mentality, there's no mutual exclusivity; "vitriol" plus yes-man mentality equals blog comment. one might call this phenomenon divide and concur, as it so heavily relies on both herd-culling and boot-licking.

this language, these secret handshakes, both flubbed and approved, are the chin tilts, the lip purses, the eye widenings that people apply to their "faces", not necessarily with bad intent, to make themselves what they think they ought to be. i have learned already - and seen others learn, in the 365 days project - that, while it is perhaps hard to catch one's on patterns as one flits from blog entry to comments on another blog or comments on yet another blog, it is impossible to miss those patterns when you have to take a photograph of yourself for three hundred and sixty-five days in a row. and what might have been a "bad" picture of you on day one is a lot more acceptable on day forty - because, without learning to accept it, you'd have to have dug in hard and believed, beyond all question, that you only have one acceptable face. and that round-eyed mc rictus and all its chin-tilty goodness gets pretty tiring after day three, and starts to look like an outright scam by day ten. maybe earlier.

why should people put leg-irons on themselves when expressing their creativity? haven't i made it through this entire entry without calling it a "rant" or my own thoughts "random"? why aren't tickets being issued for those who do? and what is there like the 365 days project that could be applied to knitting? it would have to take only a snippet of time if necessary, longer if one had the time.

suddenly, it seems so obvious.

the NOSHI KNITTING MONOGRAPH SERIES is now up and running, with a wide range of TWO TITLES available for purchase!

hey. we said we'd be moving at our own pace. (and actually, now that i recall the first time lisa and i ever discussed this project i was paging through the oriental trading company halloween catalog with one of her daughters, letting her choose the treats to be handed out at my house that year. and that was last year.) so it took us almost a year, but it's up, and it's begun, and we are pleased. i myself am pleased with each of our representative works, and how different from one another they are. it's a solid, satisfying, and enticing beginning. i'm also excited about other titles in the works, by us, and by others.

our first order came, surprisingly, about 24 hours before the store went live, and we were still testing and uploading. it just snuck through. then, after sending out the offical NOTIFY e-mail to the NOSHI list, our next "first" order came through three minutes later - from new zealand! by morning we had another from what appeared to be a rather posh address in london england (maybe the all look posh), as well as some domestic sales. it was a rather thrilling beginning!

anything else you need to know about the NOSHI series is available on its website. its editors have, as the one who is not me so eloquently put it yesterday, recently graduated from the "balls in the air" metaphor to the "plate spinning" one, but all print orders placed yesterday will be fullfilled by the end of this month, and any between now and the thirtieth will be fulfilled by the fifteenth of next month. thank you to all who ordered. welcome to anyone who is about to, or anyone whom might wish to request our contributors' prospectus.

you know, i take a lot of pleasure in being a product of my generation. as a matter of fact, i pretty much have nothing but pity for anybody born after 1976.

this afternoon, ben and i found this great old quisp cereal commercial, which features knitting!

or - koogle. does anybody remember that "flavored" peanut butter, koogle?

UPDATE: corvus elrod was able to expediently provide almost full recall of HOOTS cereal to me (i know i was sitting in a high chair while eating this stuff). you can trust a man named corvus elrod.

i was motivated by this enough to continue my search for KOOGLE, which it does appear many remember. koo koo koogle with the koo koo koogly eyes! a peanut butter spread in the flavors of chocolate, vanilla, cinnamon and banana. all i want is an image, and so it seems do many others.

DOUBLE UPDATE: he may be incapable of other, simple courtesies, but nebish found a picture of a jar of koogle. check out the sell-by date! june '75.

does anybody yet recall danish director lars von trier's dogme95 jawn?

if not, here's a quickie overview of the dogme filmmaking movement, as well a nice primer on the dogme mission. i saw the first few of the dogme movies, and it was clear to me that it had been a "worthwhile" experiment - in that it created some really good films and told some really good stories.

people bristle at "limitations". particularly, it seems, voluntary ones. often, people see "limits" as vacancies (or worse, perceive them to be presented as "virtues" by those practicing them). but a rule to "use no additional or effect lighting" in a film is a decision to use natural lighting. it's not an absence, it's a presence. it's not a rubicon, but a way to look at new options.

also, it usually is a tacit expression of the fact that whatever one is turning one's back on is not complete anathema to the person shunning or questioning its use. it's something that tempted that person, or something that person did embrace at one time. what do you think it was that got f. scott fitzgerald in the position to claim, "I only wanted absolute quiet to think out... why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion." ?

when i stopped buying yarn, it was because i was overwhelmed with the commercialism of it. at the time that i became overwhelmed with the commercialism of the handknitting industry, i had been participating within it.

i don't think that new "movements" are necessarily intended to be subject to the law of diminishing returns, in the way that the first hit single released from a pop album is almost invariably better than the third and fourth singles, if they even present themselves. truly, i think that in most cases, people willing to subject their work to such experiments want the next generation of experimenting, whether enacted by themselves or by others, to move things yet again forward - and forward means somewhere new, or with new understanding of something old. but it all does begin with one fumbling, semi-blind step. who would you rather be - the one taking the step, or the one standing over to the side saying "well smartypants! it's not so PERFECT, is it, doing it your way! look at the problem you're having! you didn't think of that, did you?"

i ask "which would you rather be?" as a rhetorical question, but clearly, it has two answers, both of which have active camps, although i suppose one side is more easy with admitting it than the other.

here is a question that i hope is not rhetorical: what do you end up with if, as a knitter, you - as stated in the tenets of dogme95 -"refrain from personal taste" in your knitting, or create a set of rules for it that denies the use of certain materials or the ways you might gain those materials?

one of the first things that would happen is that someone, somewhere, would bluster, "well then what's the point?" of course, the presence of that voice is a good thing, because it gives everybody the luxury of not having to lift a finger to figure out who lacks so much imagination and vision that they can't even see what is left. folks like that identify themselves quickly. they will ask questions as though they are rhetorical questions. "well why not just knit invisible things? well why not just knit with spaghetti? well why not just stop knitting?"

there also seems to be a knee-jerk reaction that, if someone says they are going to do a thing a certain way, or within a certain set of rules, that someone finds it clever to suggest that if the little knitting bodhisattva may as well just throw out the baby with the bathwater. "well if you're going to do it this way, and hope to make a difference, why don't you just do it this (exponentially radical) way?"

in the process of our impending adoption, i have heard story that has really stuck with me: a caucasian mother was in the grocery store with her cambodian-born daughter, and was approached by a pregnant, caucasian woman, who asked "why didn't you just adopt a needy child from your own country?" to which the mother replied, "why didn't you?"

i can certaintly argue that lars von trier did not entirely "refrain from personal taste" by his adherence to the dogme "VOW OF CHASTITY", since he invented the vow. but nor do i tolerate the attitude that "if a person says they're going to do A, i'll just suggest that A is meaningless unless they also do B, and then they will hopefully feel foolish and overwhelmed enough to just go back to what everybody is 'supposed' to do - and this stringency shall not even begin to apply to any of my choices, which invite no scrutiny and therefore do not necessarily beg admiration."

nobody else gets to tell anybody else "in for a penny, in for a pound." we may wonder why people do things a certain way, and may ask questions - because we are curious or because we want to be a bigger part of the action ourselves - but those questions are entirely different from the ones just meant to scare or shame people into quiet. it's important to be able to hear the difference.

it would have seemed certain to some that a filmmaker who abided by the dogme "VOW OF CHASTITY" was, perhaps, not interested in making a movie at all. but those films were not accidents. they weren't even reductive. they had new, and valid, concentrations of effort applied to them, and it showed in the finished work. lars von trier applied his "personal taste" to each of those movies by creating the dogme95 movement itself. and, if upon announcing his intentions, anyone had asked him smartly, "what's the point of making a movie if you can't use the artistry of props, sets or additional lighting, or additional sound or music, or the beauty of black-and-white film, and you have to use a hand-held camera? what's the point of a bunch of arbitrary restrictions like that?" lars von trier or any of his coterie would have had an answer.

the characters. the story.

so much for rhetorical questions.

what would the answers be if the same questions were put to knitting? and what would the restrictions be if the same practice was put to knitting?

because i have to admit, i believe in something i've never seen, when it comes to knitting; something utterly pure and beyond what i know. it has practical applications and beautiful ones; something organic, but which requires all the finesse of human intelligence. it's something i can almost see, like a double-exposure on a snapshot, or a bonebreak in an x-ray. but it's not something i can quite get at yet, although i'm trying to find it.

i remember reading somewhere once that, throughout the history of the film industry, just about every facet of it has had its fifteen minutes as the "star" of the scene. actors and actresses never really stop being significant, where gossip and faces are concerned, but there have certainly been times when just as much oooh-aaaaah credence is given to directors (coppola! scorsese! romero!), or even writers (joe esterhaus?). and, keep in mind, back in the day, it was the heads of studios who were the bigwigs who everybody talked about! (louie b. mayer - what's he eating for breakfast?)

i have no chronology for it, but i have to guess that within the handknitting industry there is some shift from time to time as to who is the "star" - designers? writers? actual artists producing one-of-a-kind works to be shown in exhibition? spinners? dyers? people who run magazines? shopkeeps? bloggers?

or, a little more esoteric - is it sometimes the day-in-the-sun for... needles? of course, that sounds silly, but i think it just as silly, the amount of importance that has been placed on yarn in knitting. i addressed this over a year ago in a post entitled voluptuous stoicism, in the midst of my yarn-buying moratorium. that moratorium was a successful, albeit somewhat foreshortened experience, but put me in a new, permanent space. as mentioned in the "voluptuous stoicism" post, there is something repugnant to me about hearing yarn brand names and colors being spoken of nearly as though they were people. creativity at any elevation is not dependent upon materials to that extent.

more knitters seem to be stirring themselves out of the self-induced trance of buying and "coveting" yarn (the way the verb "covet" has attached itself to knitting lately is in my opinion particularly weak-minded), and there is now a group blog called "knitting simplicity" wherein knitters gather to talk about, it seems, using up the stash they have, using recycled materials, and concentrating on the knitting more than the acquiring. i think it's a good step, but it does bother me that each of the members of the knitting simplicity group blog has his or her own blog as well. why not just talk about the topics that matter to you about knitting, on the knitting blog you already have? is safety in numbers that much of a concern? and, even if it is, if the comment fields are open on your blog (and the blogs of others you read), why not just use them? in that way, i think "knitting simplicity" is a small step rather than a large one; i would feel like the empowerment was spreading even further when knitters just chose to express this heresy about not buying yarn in their own "homes", rather than just in the lantern-lit secret meetingplace. but i do applaud the effort. if that's where things have to start, then that's where they have to start.

but i'm well into the journey of knitting being far, far more than "all about the yarn", and the fact that other forms of fiber art are almost in spite of the materials they use, it's no wonder that i am thinking more about those forms.

when a friend and fellow writer - a woman who sews but does not knit - read my first draft of the interview feature i did with chunghie lee for KOREAN QUARTERLY, she (my friend) claimed to be "very glad (chunghie lee) didn't say 'i just let the materials do what they want, and the pojagi happens.' " that was an unprompted comment from someone completely outside the fiber arts community, and i feel the same way.

i don't let yarn "figure out what it wants to be". i am sure this does work for some knitters, and that they achieve the effects that they desire. it's certainly less likely to work in making pojagi, where the materials aren't as likely to tell you "what they want to be" as much as yarn might, for two big reasons:

one, they already are something (since pojagi are often created from scraps of existing garments and goods); and two, they're going to be a pojagi - which, sure, could be a sock or a hat or a kite or other pojagi-inspired piece. but it's a matter of pojagi materials going from a bigger range of identifiables to a smaller range, whereas with yarn i think it's the other way around.

if i don't know what i want yarn to be, i put it away. then eventually i want something to be, and i'll find the yarn for the job. it might be here, it might not. when i buy yarn i concentrate more on what seems to me to be the quality (which will not alter, regardless of the project) or the specific type of fiber content and color (because they are aesthetically correct for me, for a garment or for my home, and this does not change that much from project to project either.) i have a local yarn store that i trust to give me accurate information on the quality, durability and tendencies of any yarn i choose there, and a decade of shopping there has proven to me that i'll never get upsold or pushed towards the flavor du jour. that's what i depend on, when i do purchase - that knowledge.

here is a java applet that lets you view your website, as a graphic that has a rather joan miro, or maybe marimekko, look. the images above, from left to right, represent: this knitting blog, the the knitting tarot page, and the NOSHI knitting monograph series site. (and yes, we're a couple weeks behind where we thought we would be in getting the first two NOSHI monographs up for sale, but we are currently doing user testing on the site and expect that everyone on the list WILL receive an "open for business" e mail by the end of this month, just in time for back-to-school!)

the key for the above graphics is on the site where they can be created, but it's fun to look at the images before the key has been committed to memory, or even consulted, to see how different they all are, and why. (the graphic for this page, in fact, wouldn't stop "growing", and ben realized it was because of the little flickr rotating images over to the right.)

i like a thing that's a representation of another thing. it's documentary, and it's often good to look at. like alex dragulescu's "spam plants", which are computer generated "growths" in which the attributes of size, shape, color, et cetera, are determined by the variables - headers, footers, text - in spam e-mails. switch out "plants" for architecture if you're not the nature-loving type.

and so when do we switch in "knitting"? and to document what? i understand that in debbie new's unexpected knitting there is a chapter called "cellular automaton knitting" in which she gives principles for self-generating patterns. something like that is about the only knit-along i'd ever get involved in. i'm not smart enough to get a ball like this rolling. there are people out there who can offer hypothoses on how leopard spots form, which has something to do with cannibals and celibate missionaries and nowt to do with knitting, but it could.

feel free to get in touch if this topic as a whole - not just leopard spots and plants and cannibals, but using predetermined data to chart knitting - interests you, and you'd like to make a team effort of looking into it. what data would you represent in knitting? how many versions of the same data could you make, changing the "key"? or would you keep the key the same and make multiple efforts to track fluctuating, or evolving, data?

yesterday i was listening to mingus big band's "tonight at noon...three or four shades of love". i had checked it out of the library. i was enjoying it - a lot - and then a voice that i couldn't call unfamiliar showed up mid-album.

"oh no," i groaned. and was as surprised at this reaction as i would have been if someone else had given it.

i have always been a big fan of elvis costello. but honestly. does he have to wedge himself in everywhere?

a bazillion-squillion caveats. elvis can write a mean song. elvis can write a song that roy orbison wants to sing. elvis can write a song that chet baker wants to sing! elvis is good at the derivative; elvis is a shape-shifter who can write power-pop anthems, country ballads, torch songs, whatever whatever whatever. he can write and he can play and he can perform and he can produce and he must be a pleasure to work with - because he works with everybody.

this is what is tiring to me; elvis and his goddamned collaborating. "i'm doing a string quartet thing! i'm doing a cajun thing! i'm doing a burt bacharach thing! i've impregnated diana krall!" ... it's all boring now. that plaintive vibrato just crops up everywhichwhere and everybody seems so glad to have him on board.

i'm glad for elvis that he's not angry anymo!... and i like his new, older, gap-toothed chortling happiness. but i'm getting almost panicky about needing to avoid him. he seems unnecessarily desperate about securing his legacy. i would pick up a new cd these days if only on the merit of a sticker on the front of it that read NOW ELVIS COSTELLO-FREE!

this is a pretty good corrolary to the way i feel about a lot of knitting. some things just aren't made to be knit. just aren't. i think, even on the wane of the knitting "craze", knitters continue to attempt intrepidness and originality by inserting knitting in places it just isn't meant to be. the last thing the world needs is an entry on a knitting blog with a bunch of "case-in-point: it's ugly!" photographs or links. those who think it's still fun to go to town on that should just get out their swiffers and crockpots and do something useful rather than sitting in front of the computer.

i could come up with a lot more to say here, and maybe i'll come up with a lot more to say somewhere else, some other time, and with more explanations and examples. but i find more than anything lately i think about knitting as something limited in scope, and that's not a bad thing. i think about garments that will never look, or feel, or drape, the way i want them to in my dreams, if they are knitted. do i need to learn to sew? or weave?

while i want to try new things with knitting - and don't mind making mistakes, god knows - i don't want to swear undue allegiance to a pair of sticks and a ball of yarn, when it's really just shoving a square peg into a round hole some of the time.

so much for analogies.

ben and i have decided to "handle" august 2006 by embarking upon a new adventure every day -- things we've never tried or haven't done together in a long time. i am not sure what's on his list, but i'm planning a seance and need to go get a OUIJA board.

for now, i leave you with this: this, my friends, is august in a nutshell.

NEW YORK - Boy George will perform his court-ordered community service by picking up trash on city streets in the August heat, a sanitation spokesman said.

Turso's statement was the first indication of what sort of work the singer would be given. He could be assigned to pick up streets in Chinatown, Little Italy, Nolita or parts of the Lower East Side.

when a man named vito issues your first idol and role model a shovel, broom, bags and gloves, and sends him into the sweltering streets of manhattan to pick up trash - that- that, is august.

here are the things that steered my thoughts about knitting yesterday.

no matter where he was - no matter what the tools were he had at his disposal with which he could try to translate his vision for others - it was enough. in fact, it was too much. up until the last, the people who cared for him and understood him most were still telling him he was doing it all wrong, and that he needed to learn to slow down, calm down, and, well, do things more like things other people were already doing.

maybe what he needed was a little exposure to luxury. like, for instance, cashmere - real cashmere. in his liquid soap. because everybody knows there's nothing as luxurious as real cashmere and the people have softsoap have found a way to bring you that inarguable, ironclad luxury in a pump bottle. because it doesn't matter how you get it, in what form - luxury is what is important. the finest of everything. that's what makes you... soft. and it's not about what you as an individual select - it's about what somebody else tells you is the best. very high-end. do you deserve anything less?

i've seen cashmere here and there in my knitting experiences but my definition of it is circling the drain right now. i think about softsoap with cashmere, and i think about vincent van gogh's fleece vest that everyone kept telling him to take off as if he was wearing some sort of necrotic, seeping pelt.

i am not drawing any conclusions, but i'm not confused, either.

we like robot buttons! that's why we bought one of each kind!

the thing about going to rosie's yarn cellar is no matter how many times you go, if you adjust your vision a half-inch to the side of where you usually look, you'll see something you haven't seen. i've been walking past these for months. it'll be some time before i use them, no doubt, but they are stupendous.

it's going to be so amazing!!! and it's happening right now!!!! or soon!!! so get ready!!! and get to the webcam!

this is a whole lot cooler -- and more humane -- than taking sheep on a book tour, which somebody recently told me was happening. that is the most idiotic, selfish thing i ever heard of in my life, akin to the people who will tell you how race horses "love to run". ask gwen stefani or somebody how much fun it is to tour! and then, pretend you're a SHEEP having to do it!

morons.

anyway go see the amazing sheep!!!

(link via my friend john, who says i am smart, funny, cool and pretty.)

UPDATE! see the amazing sheep in time-lapse faux-wool growing glory.

for another fiber-related treat from the same source - this one with an added bonus for all us koreaphiles - digest your last meal thoroughly, then check out steve's delicious snack of canned silkworm pupas..

let me begin this post by saying: we live in a world of contradictions. black is white! up is down! there's no laws here! it's thunderdome!

and as much as i detest the summer season - and i do - if there is any reliability to "seasonal" disorders and mood variations, summertime is very good for me - i get very organized and energetic. at the gym, i work out harder. at home, i'm less prone to blue moods and racing thoughts. summer, it seems, is my good season, and i post a lot more to this blog when it's hot. i seem to recall posting every single day of last august, which is the month i hate the most.

and i can already feel it ramping up and amping up here, and have a lot of posts in my head, but will begin today's by showing you the big, recycled plastic glands that i bought for eighty-nine cents each at IKEA yesterday and which are now a component of my little spinning room. you see as well that my "little poseur" fingerpuppets have found a home in a box on the wall along with my playbill from when i saw boy george in "taboo" on broadway.

back to the yarn boobs! i think they are SMASHING. they are made of that picky-piecey looking mulitcolored recycled plastic and they can hold a LOT of yarn!

plus, they're just sort of horrible, lovecraftian, and kinda leigh bowery-ish. i am totally in love with them.

i'm getting some new shelving up in that room too, and for my birthday this past winter got a chair and a painted oilcloth for the floor - i'll have pictures when it all comes together but i couldn't wait on the big yarn glands. everybody should have them!

bonus image: our new watercolor canvas of the tingler as rendered by mikey wild, which i purchased last weekend at the 9th street market festival.

probably every american reader here is familiar with the cheap, strong, reusable shopping bags that whole foods market sells for a pittance and for which they give you a nickel back on your purchases every time you use them. the bags have "vintage-inspired" designs advertising bulk items such as lemons, potatoes, and apples - and someone has turned the coffee-themed ones into a summer sundress!

i can't remember the exact names of the two designers attributed, nor can i read them on the sign below the dress but they have something to do with the walnut street theatre.

i was really inspired when i went to zoe "how i learned to stop worrying and be the bomb" strauss' I-95.06 show today.

so -- what's it mean to be inspired by things, visual or otherwise, and to take that inspiration into knitting?

as usual, i don't have the answer, but i am compiling a growing list of what isn't the answer. i'll give you a hint as to where it begins. think fast: are you sweet and stylish or are you fresh and edgy? and are you vomiting? because the vogue knitting conglomerate has a magazine JUST FOR YOU, as long as you're answer a or b.

and since i'm obviously more fresh and edgy than sweet or stylish, it's pretty clear to me which magazine i should be reading. and hey, knit.1 takes it's artistic inspirations just as seriously as i do. they're having, this may 2006, an ART ISSUE. they're "inspired" by frieda kahlo! so they've knit... some frieda kahlo costumes. and they've also been "inspired" by... it looks like andy warhol. i think. and so... they've made a model look like edie sedgwick! and knitted... some... thing to put on her! for the photo shoot!

please. tell. me. there. is. more. to. inspiration. than dressing up. like somebody else. or putting an intarsia motif. of somebody else's work. on a sweater.

there's only so much explaining here i feel tempted to do.

from "the simpsons" treehouse of horror X" original air date 10/31/99:

Milhouse: Check it out Lisa, I'm Radioactive Man.

Milhouse: He would on Halloween.

that pretty much sums it up for me.

it's the thing i've been thinking about today whilst y'all are covered in sunblock, sheep grease and deep fried cadbury egg residue at MS&W.

i'm making fewer entries in this blog lately. that isn't because i'm not knitting, and it isn't because i'm not writing about knitting, either. it's just that i'm doing a lot of it in a different forum.

please visit the homepage for THE NOSHI KNITTING MONOGRAPH SERIES to find out more. while it's all laid out there pretty clearly, we still expect to post a FAQ on the "about" page, so if you have Qs, feel free to use the NOSHI e-mail address (located on the "contact" page) to ask your Q.

i suppose a rather broad Q on the subject will be, "why?" why indeed? you will note upon visiting the page that i have a partner in this venture. she may, in her own time and on her own platform, address her own "why" issues, which are not that different from mine, and yet, come from a completely different place. my reasons for embarking upon the NOSHI series are easily quantified:

1. i love writing, i love writing about knitting, and i often want to write something about knitting that i doubt could find publication in any of today's knitting magazines.

2. the world doesn't need another knitting magazine. nor does it need another book about knitting. do i really need to go into this diatribe again? i don't think so. filler, ads, and crap: not for me.

3. i get published in "real" publications of all sorts, all the time. it's not exciting or special for me to break that barrier to entry. undoubtedly, this fact has softened the blow, so to speak, when it comes to self-publishing; it's not the plan B, it's an active choice. (feel free to read more about my experiences in publishing and editing, as opposed to just writing, in the essay requiem for a literary journal - an essay which, a few months ago, i was surprised to find was being used as required reading, for the last couple years, in a literature course at a university in germany. you really never know who your writing is going to effect!)

4. a lot of the things i might want to say about knitting - this will make you reel with disbelief - would not necessarily be welcome in the great machine of the "knitting industry". furthermore, i think that other knitter/writers - and i don't frankly care if no more than one a decade emerges for this series - deserve a thoughtful, responsible venue. because guess what, folks, not everybody with a knitting blog should be getting a book contract, and way, way too many are. whatever "knitting books" used to mean, it's now one very watered down bottle of gin indeed. same with magazines.

that's about as much as i can put to it at the moment; the NOSHI page itself does a pretty good job, not to mention the pieces that are actually nearing readiness. i would expect to see the site in full operation by july. use the sign-up notification box on the NOSHI page if you want to receive updates.

in the long run, it's about fulfulling a personal need. i've learned, in the last five or six years - and i can't even really say "the hard way" - that this is what means something to me where writing is concerned. i like the little, personal, one-on-one recognitions: i like it when i get a letter from some doctor in manhattan that says "i read your short story in a journal and i thought it was fantastic." or when i e-mail a museum in another state for info about their hours and get a response saying "aren't you a short story writer? i recognized your name." or when a professor in germany e-mails and says "i've been using your essay in my class for the last two years!" this stuff isn't exactly instant gratification. it's the icing on the cake, this recognition, and what i'm very thankful for is that it's never been in response to work i didn't think was the best i could have done.

i write for me. i write with the hope that it will move someone else. i don't go out of my way to hope i will ever have empirical proof that it did. it's very nice when it does. but when it comes down to it, i write for me. and, a postcard featuring this quote by kurt vonnegut is in view of my writing desk at all times:

Still and all, why bother? Here is my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.'

so check out the NOSHI page. it's not a substitute for this blog, but it's keeping me pretty busy. and i expect my partner will have something to say at some point and you'll know where to find her. in any case, she's the only person i'd trust to do this with. but we're easy to tell apart, even on the page. i'm the one who says "fuck" a lot.

i love chuck taylors, and i love african mudcloth. people who know me, know this. they also know that i hate hate HATE bono and would jump at the opportunity to stick my foot as far up his ass as i could get it UNLESS of course i did not want to soil my new AFRICAN MUDCLOTH CHUCK TAYLORS. gimme! i want them so much!

and actually, this left-to-right lineup shows them in the order of my preference. those brown ones are the best. that last one, too confusing -- only in a pinch. but really, i think it's wonderful, and, as i just told ben, if i don't get them, it's only because the gift-givers in my life embrace AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, and shame on them. shame on them.

ben and i took an early weekend in DC. we jumped in the car and headed off with no real plan other than to make a stop at the textile museum. it's lovely, indeed, and its library is particularly impressive! i'd have spent a good deal more time in that library if i'd had a longer visit, but the museum's online research tool textile muse is pretty cool, too. in fact, very cool.

the big exhibit now at the museum is one of greek embroidery, which was lovely, but the thing i enjoyed most was these seemingly-crocheted hats from cameroon. the projecting bits in some cases have wooden bits bolstering them from the inside. they are 20th century hats but are made to emulate hairstyles worn in cameroon before that time (i think that's what the card said. i was busy fake-coughing to cover up the sound of my camera going off, as you're not supposed to take pictures there. and what IS it with these digital cameras that have this phony little "shutter-clicking" sound? it's DIGITAL. it could be utterly silent if it wanted to be.)


the textile museum is located on embassy row, and there, ben had a photo op outside of the chinese embassy. and yes, we saw cherry trees - everywhere - and at the height of prettiness and scentiness.





on connecticut ave., near dupont circle, we found a store specializing in asian textiles. for local philly folks, i will say: it was like ruka, but outlet-sized, and not quite as diverse or elegant as ruka can often be (i love ruka). or, like material culture, but not as overpriced and snotty.



there were a lot of rugs, runners, bedcovers and garments...





and other stuff...









this copper cut is very much like the kind used in letterpress printing, but this one was obviously used for fabric surface design.

we had a marvellous time!

...read the subject line of the e-mail from my friend lisa annelouise. oh, she knows i love to look at crime, and i particularly like to look at corinne may botz' nutshell studies of unexplained death.

are you aware that the yarn moratorium is ending soon?

oh, shit! not as soon as i thought, though. i thought it ended in MARCH. and it doesn't end until mid-april?

this is particularly bad, because i had planned to tack an extra month onto it, since i did buy two balls of yarn to finish edmund bacon. it had to be done, and i don't regret it, but i was going to add an extra month onto my ascetic journey because of that little stumble... but may? wait until may?

there've been times when this was very hard. it's been occasionally hard as far back as august, but everything's hard in august. i hit a bad point around the holidays, when spending time in the yarn store was just becoming painful, and i thought i was ready to go off the wagon then; i heard myself saying, "i NEED yarn -- the only yarn i have at home is for this project, and this one, and this one." and i left the store empty-handed and sad, and thinking i didn't have yarn.

that time, the perspective i got just being away from yarn that wasn't mine was enough to get me back on track. out of sight, out of mind. that time.

overall, there's empirical proof of how well this experiment worked for me, over the course of these last 10-ish months: just look at the blog. it's been great.

however. i've got things i want to make next and they aren't the things that the yarn i do have left can be part of -- nor do i feel like trolling e bay or etsy or spinning or bartering. i have projects in mind, knitting projects in MY MIND, and they require large amounts of reliable, homogeneous, uniform-of-structure-and-composition-and-there's-more-where-that-came-from YARN.

fuck the extra month. april thirteenth it is.

mind you, it's not going to be a slobbering free-for-all. i've just got a new set of parameters planned. we can talk about that later. for the time being, though, i'm really dragging my feet on knitting, because nothing feels good and nothing feels fun. then again, it seems i can go for longer now without knitting becuase i'm working on so many things i didn't know how to do before. and maybe i'll have one more second wind, as it were. or maybe i'll just sew and embroider and do canvaswork and print print print. dunno yet. i'm not bored. but i'm not knitting, either.

for my birthday my dad bought me two volumes of photography from shoichi aoki's fruits magazine. i had admired them in stores but i don't think he'd known that -- they were a very good pick and in fact helped me figure out a hole in something i was writing (that had nothing to do with japan or harajuku.)



i'm sad to read that the hoko-ten has been abolished in japan; feel free to read about it on your own, but i didn't find any link that i thought was as good an explanation as the books' was.





to say that the page scans here are my "favorites" wouldn't be entirely accurate, since i'd have had to reproduce about a third of each book to get in everything i really admired. and it would of course seem simple to say "i wish we had this kind of thing here in america" but i pray to god we won't -- america would fuck it up to no end (as evidenced, actually, by gwen stefani's abortive little attempt to basically minstralize the harajuku girls -- thankfully gwen's gone onto much loftier pursuits.)




anyway, while it's hard to point out all my favorites here, there is one that is far, far and away, THE best of all -- in fact, i think many of you will recognize, when you see it, "yes. this has been amber's white whale. here it is. if she had this outfit, she would never wear another." and you would be right.

change nothing. change nothing. this is the most PERFECT outfit on the face of the earth and it's good for EVERYTHING you could possibly need clothing for. day or night. 365 days a year. this is emphatically the reason why i wear so much black: because i don't have this.

ah well. the books are really inspirational and full of joy and guts and just plain pleasure. jean-jacques rousseau said that "Craft must have clothes but Truth loves to go naked." i think both states are evident in the harajuku kids.

my friend lisa annelouise -- she of many years of extremely original gift-giving and collaboration -- sent me a 1969 copy of famous artists magazine for my birthday, directing me specifically to the textile design competition results.

there are a few things you should know immediately about famous artists magazine.

there was one entry (not in the children's category specifically) that i really loved. i'd wear pants made of this, in an instant! it's rather phantom tollbooth, i think. the entry was from a swede.






i love the text in this ad.









and never forget, all you cleverniks:

my dad was excited to hand out gifts on christmas and he made it clear that this was the one, for me, that he was most excited about: hand knits for service men, published in 1944.





as previously mentioned on this blog, our service man is my cousin alex, who waved away any suggestion that the readers of this blog should bombard him or his men with knitted teddy bears, preemie caps, swaddling bandages, or other knitted tokens of esteem. this is not to say that he is not lighthearted, because, as you see here, he is perfectly happy to wear a (mass-produced, not handknitted) santa hat and kebab it up in iraq on christmas.



i think, though, that were alex to see a copy of hand knits for service men, he might think twice about the useful and practical items he has passed up. like balaclavas...







... and steel helmets. (the name of the pattern that goes with his image is, in fact, "steel helmet". so i can only assume.)







join the leigh bowery army! leigh's influence is felt so many places -- in the thai music videos i have grown to love watching, and here as well, in our armed forces. (the book about leigh's work is still on backorder from amazon -- that is a christmas gift i am still looking forward to, as my dad more or less decimated my wish list and my sister's, and i got quite a few new textile books, as well as a subscription to selvedge, and all the available back issues.)

i hope steven wells is prepared for the shrill onslaught he has opened himself to in his pretty darned funny op-ed piece about the unhipness of knitting. i can't be a part of that shrill onslaught, as there is already an electronic paper trail connecting me to wells by the way of a congratulatory letter i wrote him months back, about one of his other articles.

there's nothing brilliant about his knitting bit, but at least he touches on one thing that few have touched in print...

Philadelphia's alt.knit community is riven by ferocious fratricide. Yes the "laid back" non-knitter-friendly Low bar scenesters are the victims of a savage knitzkrieg waged by bigoted "knitting nazis" who presumably want the uncool non-knitting untermensch (and their knitting-traitor collaborators) wiped off the face of the earth. Ein knit one, ein purl one, ein Führer! Sieg heil!

ain't just philly. although i'm becoming tempted myself -- having heard of and seen some incredible little fits lately -- to post "blind items" here á la new york post. i don't have the patience or connections that it takes to become the dominick dunne of the knitting world but i know a couple of interesting tales that are worth the price of a good lunch.

some are still valiantly trying to turn things around... many pals sent me links to theanticraft.com... but if you take away the site's stylesheet, it's pretty much still just knitty.

eh.

the pottery barn "kids" catalog came yesterday. holiday edition, natch. i haven't got the lifestyle-and-entertaining one yet, i'm surprised to say. but the "kids" edition was so weak i can't even whomp up the rage i usually feel.

this week's rage -- and it's that delicious type of rage, the kind that gives you that powerful thrill in knowing yes, thing are really this horrific, and i could justify far, far more outlandish behavior in response if i wished to go that way -- is directed that what i hear are the REMAKES -- THE REMAKES OF TWO OF THE BEST HORROR FILMS OF ALL TIME (and i make my debt to SMQ known here -- he introduced me to both of these), the wicker man and black christmas.

yes. the wicker man, the greatest scottish-pagan-hippie-horror movie ever -- starring edward woodward AND christopher lee, and featuring a CHILLING faux-donovan soundtrack: being remade by stupid americans. and black christmas, PERFECTION in sorority slasher films, starring keir dullea, margot kidder, andrea martin and olivia hussey -- and directed by the man who directed a christmas story with peter billingsley and darren mc gavin -- that black christmas -- being remade.

that's where my best rage is this week, and i'd have enough left over for pottery barn if they were worth it, but so far, they aren't. nothing's what it used to be, not even pottery barn. certainly not the october-november-december issues of martha stewart living which i still buy every year, and which, so far this year, two out of three, absolutely suck -- do you know what's in the november one? POM-POM CRAFTS.

what do you suppose you'll find if you measure the beta waves of someone who thinks the holidays are the time to break out the pom-poms? didn't martha stewart -- or at least the large staff of artists and designers and professionals whom she continually mistakes for her own brain -- used to be some arbiter of taste, or class, or something?

but again, i'm straying from my weak topic. pottery barn "kids".

once upon a time, well before my buying power years, pottery barn was a very, very uncool little catalog. it was like the lillian vernon catalog. which, i see, in placing that link, has had a little makeover of its own -- but, my point being, that the current incarnation of pottery barn is really a phoenix from the ashes, and i am sure i am not the only one who remembers it.

but -- as great horror movies degrade into anemic remakes... as martha stewart living, at its best full of flaws seems now to be far from "better than ever" as it at least used to provide some modicum of style until the freaking pom-pom turkeys showed up... so pottery barn begins, too, to degrade. pottery barn is... slipping, if the "kids" catalog is any indication. it's starting to look a lot like an OLD pottery barn catalog, decades old, pre-phoenix. junky novelty toys, rampant appliqué and terrycloth, and just about any item that can boast two dimensions is "personalized". names like Max and Natalie and Jack and Dylan and Logan run over wood, fabric, and metal, regardless if a surface design or pattern already exists there or not.

of all the things i never expected -- is this how it ends for pottery barn? not with a bang but with a whimper?


if i want to see something tasteless, i want to see something imaginative and tasteless. and if i want to see something tasteless, i'll watch a holiday-themed slasher film in which margot kidder has a crystal unicorn figurine shoved through her eye -- or whatever it is that happens in that movie -- i don't really remember -- but at least that means i have something to look forward to this holiday season.

since we now know that according to the rules i am still able to buy handspun, i've done so. i've bought a very pretty mohair yarn blend, very autumnal, and i look forward to using it, although i know not how or where.

would you like to see it? shall i... flash my stash?

very well. very well then.

in fact, i relish the opportunity to point out to you all -- there isn't even yarn in that fourth photo! it's only a dead bug! nothing else!

but i beg of you: look at the yarn. look at my bug. is one any more beautiful than the other? it's lovely yarn. it's an astounding bug. i wish i could have gotten the right angle so you could see the way his hands are tucked under his chin -- like his mommy took him to the wal-mart photography studio to get a christmas portrait taken.

the fact is, ben and i knew this grasshopper in life. we found him on the third floor some weeks ago, dark green and lively, clinging to a curtain. ben opened the screen for him, but apparently he didn't catch on. ben was not sure last night, even after placing the grasshopper on a piece of paper and carrying him down the stairs, if he was really dead. that's how much character he's got. (the grasshopper.)

speaking of degrees of deadness...

an e-mail from a friend came today, with an interesting link, and the comment "didn't you think of this like a hundred years ago? still cute though." as much as i appreciate the knee-jerk loyalty, what i saw when i went to the link was more than just "cute" -- it was, well, heavenly. because there's a woman in england who has knitted not just one character from george romero's "dawn of the dead"; she's enacted ALL of "dawn of the dead", in knitting. i'm so happy about this. it's so moving. it proves that, although daily life is overflowing with boring, plebian shit trying desperately to distract us, there is also more fantastic stuff in the world than we'll ever live to see. it's just a matter of keepng one's energy up and staying alert.

i had never thought about doing so many figures on a tiny scale; perhaps i shall now knit the entire ekdahl family from bergman's fanny and alexander.

i'm supremely pleased that it is autumn now but days and days of rain have conspired -- along with 1. the fact that i could not find plain steel wool pads 2. a sad james taylor song on the PA system 3. the fact that apparently reese's has bastardized it's perfectly great old-school peanut butter CUPS for a bunch of other troglodyte candies and our stupid acme-that-time-forgot still somehow ONLY had these NEW items and not a simple, classic, PERFECT peanut butter CUP -- have conspired, i say, to make me cry. in the acme.

perhaps my world is falling apart. nah... but i want a fucking reese's! and i'm sorry but boy's drug bust is still better media for me than... than... franz ferdinand. is this REALLY the best pop music has to offer right now? franz ferdinand? i tried. i really tried. it's not bad. it's not. but it's... it's... it's a reese's "fast break" bar and george, in all his "bloated and pale" redundancy, is still the real peanut butter cup.

in other comparisons, i realized last week that, when eating sushi, when you get a big platter of sushi and it's got those awful clam pieces on the platter? that you just can't eat? clam nigiri is like the tori amos of the sushi world.

isn't it? you know i'm right.

what does any of it have to do with handwork, you ask. oh... not much. i have not much to show, since what i'm working on either doesn't look like anything or is a holiday surprise for someone. and very little of what i'm up to seems to be knitting. maybe a quarter of my total current in-progress workload.

it's definitely one result of the yarn moratorium -- i'm concentrating on other textile pursuits besides knitting. i felt though, recently, that i hadn't necessarily fulfilled the purpose of avoiding the manufactured yarn/primary market since i hadn't purchased very much that i had said i WOULD purchase -- that is, any yarns i could buy or swap in the secondary markets, even manufactured ones -- and of course, handspun, or spinning fibers, could be readily exchanged for money or gifts-in-kind.

i didn't do much of that type of buying, since i am not a stasher, but i have remedied that this morning by purchasing both spinning fiber and handspun. there. one has a purpose, the other yet does not. i bought actual stash! all within the confines of my own little rulebook. it's not that it took me six months to find something worthy. i wasn't looking hard.

in choosing my handspun this morning from an online site, i was rocked by how autumn obviously affects the crafty person in a big, big way. the color combinations in handspun, the leafy motifs on notecards. we love this time of year.

cyril connolly wrote of it in the unquiet grave, which is full of pronouncements that could be emblazoned in neon above my desk every day, and i don't think i'd ever grow to doubt them.

Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than daffodills. Spring is a call to action, hence to disillusion, therefore is April called 'the cruellest month'. Autumn is the mind's true Spring; what is there we have, 'quidquid promiserat annus' and it is more than we expected.

connolly, writing as palinurus, had a lot to say that can be applied both to textile work and writing (while textile references may be analogous, it seems pretty clear that connolly was not pulling punches when writing about literature, and that he had little patience for the jonathan franzens and dave eggerses and jennifer weiners of his world).

To fashion a golden book, to weave a suit that will last some hundred years, it is necessary to feel, to think, and to write....We cannot think if we have no time to read, nor feel if we are emotionally exhausted, nor out of cheap material create what is permanent.

Flaubert spoke true: to succeed a great artist must have both character and fanaticism and few in this country are willing to pay the price. Our writers have either no personality and therefore no style or a false personality and therefore a bad style; they mistake prejudice for energy and accept the sensation of material well-being as a system of thought.

each of these ideas is as delicious as a "fun size" reese's peanut butter cup, and as perfect (halloween-sized reese's cups are a legitimate variation on the quintessent). connolly's distaste for fiction writers who want to add credits to their writing "resumés" like matrons collecting boxtops from cereal and mac and cheese, believing in the empirical power of these to add up to big big prizes is still timely. and, ugh -- haven't i known too, too many people who "want to write" and yet can't stand the unseemly emotions, confusion, and yes, hopelessly unstylish obsessions which tend to add up to really good writing?

in this rainy weather, one can luxuriate in books like the unquiet grave (particularly when one has finished printing the knitting tarot decks and is taking the slow steps toward layout for the book). it's really the perfect book for fall, and is worth spreading around.

you know those bumper stickers that say stop bitching, start a revolution? i have no clue how that's supposed to work -- shouldn't you continue bitching to further a revolution?

IMPORTANT UPDATE! if you are unsettled by the images above, please contact the childhood goat trauma foundation. protect yourself. protect your family.



but check out the armenian doilies i saw at the museum of natural history!





this trip to new york was in honor of truman capote's birthday -- happy birthday truman -- and in celebration of the fact that we finished printing the KT decks.

a scarf of human blood, and doilies embroidered with designs based on the images of fatal viruses. laura splan is some kind of wonderful. and frightening. and beautiful. dammit! i want to feel like this more often when i see a link to knitting and fiber work!

yeah. since i blogged here every single day in august, i'm taking the month off. there will still be plenty going on at home and with the knitting tarot, so feel free to check in there, or to peruse and search by category here. see you in gorgeous october!

in case you wondered, the yarn-purchasing moratorium (any manufactured yarns on the primary retail market, that is) feels hard now. because of course the new fall stuff is showing all it's texturey, colored little faces these days.

i have been to my local and have been shown new things that the folks there were sure i would love. i've also been shown things that have finally arrived, for which i was at least the partial impetus in ordering them. no one is being smug. no one is being pandering. it has been suggested that things might be put aside for me. until i am ready.

and although i have seen things that tempted me, they would just sit in a bag -- i know that -- maybe even until the moratorium was up. now wouldn't it be silly to have bought them, in that case?

and, even though i joked around and said, well, maybe my family will just buy me yarn as christmas gifts... no, i don't think i want that either. i like this gnawing feeling -- over a new silk yarn, in particular -- and the feeling that i might miss out on it has sharpened my senses to what i do have to work with -- and to do just that.

however, there is this sadness, knowing i will not be walking across the park with a big brown bag full of skeins, a chai latte in hand, this october. i keep having the "poor me" moment of feeling like i can't knit a gift for ben this holiday season -- but then i remember, i don't have a gift in mind for ben, and if i do get an idea, i can buy on ebay, or buy handspun. that's been part of the deal all along -- but i've purchased nothing but two skeins of sock yarn that way.

for that matter, today i was itching to start something new, and dug into my bag to find more unopened skeins of various yarns than i remembered i had at all. not sweater-amounts or anything, but, a lot of yarn. yarn enough -- and the right yarn -- to complete a number of projects that do exist on the list.

still, i think i'm going to go see what's new this week. and just smell it.

i'm getting to the end of what i have to say -- in overview, anyway -- about the pottery barn catalog. soon it will only be necessary for me to post a single picture from the catalog, with no caption or commentary at all, and when you look at it, it will be as though i am right there next to you, droning on sanctimoniously.

but we're not quite there yet. and in the pottery barn catalog that came this week, i actually found a picture of a room i sort of admired. (so nice to have the scanner now: the pictures of the catalog no longer look as though they were taken through a fishtank.)

this room has been decorated for the purpose of having a summer sexual escapade with dominick dunne. i like the toile print. i like the engravings on the wall. i don't know why they have been affixed there with gauze-bandage adhesive. but i can imagine a scenario in which it was reasonable to tear them out of the book; i myself once found a large hardbound volume on the street, which looked nice and had really great illustrations, but which was a large-print version of excerpts of "great literature". so perhaps that is the kind of book these were taken from. i hope so.




that room looked almost inviting to me. not quite, but almost. this room, however... i don't think i'm going to need to give any hints here.






i'm trying not to think about it. but... how could it have even happened, a picture like that? did no one say anything?

i'm going to concentrate on the room with the toile bedspread. toile makes me think of fall -- everything does these days. and falling leaves make me think of fall. what if all the leaves that fell from the trees this year bore the countenances of nameless individuals felled in the killing fields of cambodia? such is binh danh's harvesting of souls. his work is incredibly beautiful and is not unlike some of the work of chunghie lee.

an incisive reader and fiber person may speak for many of you when she asks, concerning yesterday's post:

I'm of two minds about knitted fiber art--I know I should be all for it,
and perhaps I could be, but I'm not sure that anything I've seen yet
does anything a sweater doesn't. Well, maybe the pink mohair father
genitals do, but the rest, not so much. What do you think? You post
the links, but you don't say....

while i may take it a few degrees further with her in discourse, i will say this much here:

i have similar feelings in knowing that i "should" get excited about fiber art that i often do not. i like freddie robins' sweaters for the disabled (the special thalidimide sweater, etc.) and i think those fine-tune the functionality of the average pullover.

but i don't know if a sweater 'does' more than a painting. and if a painting on a canvas -- that isn't load-bearing and doesn't feed anyone or provide fuel for anyone -- is okay to do, then this kind of thing must be, too.

i'm more pro "knitting-as-medium" than i am the outcomes i've seen so far, in many cases -- but it does continually surprise me that the party line sounds, to me, like "you can do anything you want with paint. you can do anything you want with clay. but when it comes to knitting, you should follow some rules."

i don't like to fill up posts with links -- i try to keep the content here as exclusive as possible. but i would be hiding much if i didn't disclose how much i am thinking today about mohair birthday suits, eighties raiment, human hair lace, and freddie robins.

now for the see-it-here-first content. it's not knitting or fiber related today, but has a design/DIY theme. if that's digging deep to come up with a post, well hell, that's the whole point of posting every day in august -- to dig deep for something meaningful in every day of it (shitbag month that it is).

ripley and i took a jaunt around the corner to uncle tim's house (rip's uncle tim, my ex-husband) where he and pal lisa were working on a mosaic mural. tim took a class with isaiah zagar and started work yesterday on his own creation. the ripleyamber news team were there!



tim began with a pencil sketch, and then drew his large lotus blossom motif on the wall in chalk. then, with bucketsfull of broken mirrors and tile -- from lowe's home improvement, the mercer tile works in doylestown, and other places -- he got moving, with the help of neighbors and friends.




here's lisa in front of the big lotus. i love how you can see the reflection of tim's tomato plants in the mirrored pieces.







quotations that tim found inspirational were handpainted -- backwards -- onto glass, and placed on the walls as well.

the next step: lugging fifty pounds of colored mortar up to the deck. we look forward to seeing the finished work soon!

i don't often mention the KT over on this side but crossover content is exciting -- like when laverne di fazio and shirley feeney would sometimes wander into an episode of happy days! so if you don't usually look over there, why not check it out? what you'll initially see is the same little scan you're seeing here, but if you check the in progress archives you'll see more, and if you ask the knitting tarot, well, then, you'll know more. and, if you want to find out when the KT book and deck sets will be available for sale a good long time before OTHER people know about it, you might sign up for the NOTIFY list. (you will receive e-mails before then, as well, but being among the first to hear about the book and deck set availability is the THANK YOU you receive for receiving those prior e-mails -- which might just be interesting. they keep us going -- and so do the nice e-mails we get from our KT NOTIFY listers.)

yes it's a little too soon but they sent it in the mail and now i can't stop looking at it -- the wonderful wonderful oriental trading company halloween catalog!

it's just about the best catalog in the whole wide world! this halloween, we will not be wearing elaborate costumes to big events, (unless you count the jones new york suit i bought -- my first real suit -- for amy and scott's mischief night wedding!) but we do just want to be home handing out treats for neighborhood kids.

there are so many great new things in this year's catalog, i don't want to spoil them for anyone, and i just want more time to savor them. i have already got ministry's "every day is halloween" in my head all the time. of course, the catalog has all the great old favorites, too. (last year we gave out gummy brains, among other things.)


although i am sure i will be decorating with handknitted and felted halloween items both old and new, i may also be getting these drippy blood letters. look at the one that spells DANGER. i bet i could alter it to say AMBER very easily! then i can have it forever!


but what is the scariest thing in the new oriental trading company catalog... the very scariest, spookiest thing, that makes my heart turn to ice...



UNLICENSED RED-HATTER KNOCKOFF MERCHANDISE!!!!

this! will! never! do! everyone knows you have to get the licensed stuff. or all you are is... what's it say there? .... "red and wild". oh, god, i love that. that is so pathetic. "red and wild".

the only reasonable use for this stuff is during halloween... or at a pride parade... but only if everyone wearing it also has a big grey handlebar mustache and back hair.

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely. -- Truman Capote

that quote came to mind today when answering the e-mail of a knitter/spinner/weaver whom i quite admire. in her itemization of the points that make fiber and knitting blog entries the most inane, she mentioned (in addition to taking children to school and cleaning up cat vomit), the regular acknowledgement of "secret pal" gifts of yarn and candy.

i have never had a "secret pal". things do come in the mail, but they tend to be from people i actually know. and no, i can't say anything is "wrong" with a secret package to brighten the day -- a little yarn, froufrou little stitch markers, little candies from chinatown, whatever. those are all okay things. honestly, there's nothing wrong with it. i do though know that i don't want to participate. something about it reeks of that sort of "team building" stuff they'd do at inservice days at the school where i once worked. where you're saying what fruit you'd be if you were a fruit, and falling backword blindfolded onto people you know don't even like you much less want to catch you, and shit like that.

i don't want a secret pal and i don't want to be a secret pal. i prefer to be a more revealing, in-your-face pal and i like others to do the same.

but in thinking about the secret pals and the little gifts, the truman capote quote came into my mind. and it made me realize: i would much prefer an anonymous "whipping" to any little nameless gift in the mail.

i guess one would have to think of the "whipping" not as a punishment, but as a method of spurring one on to new areas of thinking and craft. (perhaps secret pals would rather not think of it as a "whipping" at all but more of a "limited-scope intensive non-compete cheerleading section".) i know that i am sometimes involved in a knitting project that i feel i have to keep "under wraps" because i really don't want to lose any steam explaining it over and over, i don't want to hear about how it would look better like this or like this, and i certainly, in the heat of it, do feel possessive about it. but it's not that i want to tell NOBODY. then it's always kind of a hard decision, who are the few, or who is the one, to tell.

when little amber was in production, a few people were privy to every in-progress photo -- had been privy to the whole idea even before beth robinson had approved the commission -- and they were the people that i knew could just accept that this was what i wanted, and that it mattered to me. they didn't slap their own opinions onto the project, nor try to out-weird it, nor make me feel anything but excited about it. that was really nice.

there was more than one person i shared all that behind-the-scenes stuff with, but i did choose in the long run, if only just so i could easily remember who knew and who was going to be surprised. it's fun to share, and it's fun to share with different people -- but maybe when you share everything with everyone you can share with, all at once, is when things run the risk of falling prey to indiscretion, one-upmanship and wet blanketism.

that's why, sometimes, i could use a SECRET WHIP. an anonymous correspondent with whom i could discuss the project that i worried wouldn't work. or was just a tremendous waste of money to make.

a secret pal spends a few dollars on you. a secret whip would (in theory) be someone with whom you had actual trust. someone whose motivation was not to stick some stuff in an envelope and mail it to you, but to try to understand, even if only within the framework of this one project, who you were and what you wanted to express.

if such a thing existed, i know who's secret whip i would want to be. exactly. but, you know, i'd like to think that if the pairings-up were being handed out from above (maybe by TC himself), that i'd be a good secret whip to someone making a shrug, in a knitalong. i would hope i could take the opportunity to see not just the mindless, meg-ryan-masked masses, but the individual behind the project. even if all i had to offer was a seemingly tireless barrage of questions that all bordered transparently on "why the fuck did you pick that ugly thing and why do you have to do it at the same time as ninety other women?" -- i'd hope i could rise above that tendency of mine, because i bet i'd learn something.

oh yes, and why not christopher walken for president? the way children have been writing him christmas letters for years, i'd say he's got the younger generation primed -- if not in 2008, perhaps 2016.

this blog covers broader territory than just knitting these days, to be sure, but it all started with knitting, so let's remember the knitting with a flickr slideshow of some of what i made in 2002-2004. flickr is a really fun tool, and sometimes it's nice to look at the pictures in a new order, and without all the editorializing.

... it's time to get excited!

i have a feeling she's baiting me and has even more.

those overalls. i LOVED them. i had those, which were nameless and brandless and had no tag (i got them at SKINZ) and then i also had a blue canvas "boy of london" pair. the brooch and the earrings, which you can hardly see here, were this horrid "antiqued" metal with "gems" that were army green and hazard orange. the earrings were screwbacks and made my lobes numb.

look allllll around this room. this is lyn's room. i slept here many a weekend.

earlier this week i suggested to lyn that we might want to go see the film red eye together -- a horror movie with cillian murphy -- when it comes out later this month. this made me realize that i had not seen a movie with lyn since... wait for it... mr. mom. and possibly return of the living dead and fletch. but definitely mr. mom. and, yes, in first-run. in a theatre. goddammit.

oh, it hasn't been all that bad. i just really, really hate august, and i am noticing that the people i like to talk to most are also feeling it.

and it's still SO hot for knitting. even for spinning, really.

but let's take heart. there are fantastic things going on in the world!

please check out the lace study centre of the powerhouse museum. fascinating!

or, take a sobering stab at redefining craft.

if you are one of the millions waiting for me to finish bub, the joke's on you -- he's finished. we just need to wait until the fall children's clothes arrive at the stores, to get him a shirt. he has an appropriate jacket, but i need a shirt. (bub is a 3T. he needs a red and black flannel workman's shirt in that size, a plaid will do but i'm looking for more of a check pattern. a bulky shirt would be nice, because the jacket is a 4T and it's a bit on the big side.) if you ARE waiting to see the final bub, you could, in the meantime, stretch your brain with some fairly heavy duty zombie academia, or you could just shop like one. personally, i would like to get in on one of these zombie flash mobs.

or, if you are tired of my foray into zombism, how about seeing some of the textiles of korea -- a new area of fascination for me. here's an entire country that's been dressing like boy george and bananarama circa 1983, for CENTURIES! the color and the fabrics are incredible. and, if you want to see a movie featuring not only gorgeous korean textiles, but gorgeous korean trees, rocks, hairbrushes, sweets, bugs, teapots, and bridges -- check out untold scandal. if you're only going to see ONE korean remake of les liasons dangereuses this year... let it be this one.

or, go for something SCARY (and korean). like acacia -- the story of a (korean) family who ADOPT A LITTLE KOREAN BOY WHO THEN DOES SPOOKY THINGS LIKE UNRAVEL HIS TEXTILE-ARTIST MOTHER'S RED KNITTING ALL OVER THE ROOM, SPOOKILY.

or, if none of these interests...

go see our pal jeffrey and le cabaret mélange every friday night at eight, at their new home -- the monte carlo living room at second and south streets. the elegance, the integrity, will make you want to smash your glass and weep.

you may have noticed the more frequent posting in the last few days: this is what i'm doing to get through the hell that is august. consider this your advent calendar to autumn.

Today's paradoxes are tomorrow's prejudices, for today's grossest and most disagreeable prejudices had their moment of novelty, when fashion lent them its fragile grace.

hell to the yeah!

i spend a lot of time with marcel -- we lie around in the afternoons in a big, canopied bed, with the air conditioner at sixty degrees, all bundled up and slathered in beagle puppies. and that quote above was marcel's very astute take on this week's most virulent knitting catch-22: that some of the same folks who are reading, and commenting, on the evergrowing number of deconstructionist knitting and sewing blogs* are the same people who get excited over, and sometimes even try to knit, the patterns at knitty.com -- which, i have to say, have in this latest "issue" gone beyond the usual dull-to-salvageable and into the realm of complete mindfuckery.

Many women today wish to rid themselves of all prejudices, and by prejudices they mean principles. That is their prejudice, and it is heavy....They would blush to classify anything, to judge anything, to say: This is good, this is bad.

on this, marcel and i almost agree; i think that people -- knitters -- DO say things are good and things are bad, but they say them in voices about as subtles as store-bought halloween costumes, where the character's name is inexplicably emblazoned across his chest.

the incredible hulk didn't walk around with the words THE INCREDIBLE HULK printed on his torso. seeing the words is what makes you sure you AREN'T seeing the hulk... probably. and knitblogs are slopping over with excitement about things that aren't really that great, and acid nastiness over things that are, really, just kinda part of the scenery.

but when the pitch is set so high -- whether towards the good or the bad -- it's easier to retract what was said, if necessary. chalk it up to high spirits. that, i have to agree with marcel, is pretty much the same thing as blushing to classify anything -- honestly, that is.

...women, far from being the oracles of intellectual fashions, are actually their belated parrots. Even today, dilettantism still pleases them and suits them.

you know, sometimes marcel rather overstays his welcome.

(marcel proust on his deathbed. photo by man ray.)

*you know, the ones that make fun of knitting patterns and sewing patterns. some of them are pretty funny, but more of them suck, are flavorless, hollow homages to the sites that "inspired" them, and are written by "devil-may-care", "whipsmart" gals whose every syllable shrilly pronounces i feel my intellect is painfully underestimated in my personal life. if you have ever wanted to see irony devour its own tail, or to have a lady from shanghai house-of-mirrors website experience, where what is being made fun of is barely distinguishable from the voice making fun of it, these are the sites to visit.

i have not scoffed at pottery barn's catalogues for awhile, and in case anyone forgets why i ever started, pottery barn has made it easy, in their recent editions, to remember.

pottery barn's catalogue, more than others of its ilk, nauseates me in its campaign to memorialize "memories" -- family memories -- with its products. yet, at the same time, it attempts to make family memories and personal experiences look as much like mass-media reportage as possible. pottery barn suggests that we must send a message to all our peers/rivals that insists that WE ARE HAPPY, and the way to do this is with very slick, modified versions of what might, in classier circumstances, be meaningful and private, cherished remembrances.

to paraphrase bruce jay friedman, we are far from the city of class.

on an unrelated friedman note (unrelated to the unreproachable bruce jay, but relatively related to a pottery barn mindset), did anyone see the film capturing the friedmans? i was fascinated by it, to the point of watching it twice in a 24 hour period. david friedman touched me deeply and i found it extraordinary that he realized that his family's obsession with taking photos and home movies -- DOCUMENTING their "good family" -- was not only part of their undoing, but also, a way to forget how things actually were. if they could remember the movies and the photos, they were able to forget what had happened to and around them.

pottery barn has always been here to remind you that it's a good idea.

from merriam-webster:

Main Entry: art·ful
Pronunciation: 'ärt-f&l
Function: adjective
1 : performed with or showing art or skill
2 a : using or characterized by art and skill : DEXTEROUS b : adroit in attaining an end often by insinuating or indirect means : WILY
3 : ARTIFICIAL
synonym see SLY

just for the hell of it, since i used the word "cherish", let's do that one to see the differences.

Main Entry: cher·ish
Pronunciation: 'cher-ish
Function: transitive verb
Etymology: Middle English cherisshen, from Middle French cheriss-, stem of cherir to cherish, from Old French, from chier dear, from Latin carus -- more at CHARITY
1 a : to hold dear : feel or show affection for b : to keep or cultivate with care and affection : NURTURE
2 : to entertain or harbor in the mind deeply and resolutely
synonym see APPRECIATE

no new point to make here; it's just a refresher.

pottery barn has more than one way to suggest a household arm itself against the possibility of oneupmanship, and being kept up with by the joneses. it's not just family photos shoved in their faces when they come over to borrow a cup of rice milk. you have to ENTERTAIN people in your home -- and do it well -- to show them how very accomplished you are. sometimes you even have to allow these people -- if they are out-of-towners -- to sleep over! and to prove your value and prowess, the best thing to do is make the experience seem as little like an actual private home as possible. the suggestion here is: i am such an amazing host/hostess, that people would actually think about PAYING to stay here if i asked them to!


this should do the trick. a sign that says HOTEL that you put in one of the bedrooms of your home. this is an item for sale in the pottery barn catalog.






let us not forget that we can use pottery barn not only to sell us the things we need, but to tell us the things we need to know. they are on the cutting edge of information such as... flower arrangement.

tropical flowers, we find, come from humid and warm -- "tropical" -- parts of the world. they have the properties of both color and shape. thank god pottery barn has written an entire book about flowers. tropical flowers, with their colors and their shapes, can lend surprise to an arrangement.

you know what adds "surprise" to a flower arrangement? spring-loaded action.

i guess a lot of handknitters and fiber workers have issues with quantity versus quality. i have been disheartened myself over tales of mass-produced pre-aged houses that would look all loveworn and lived-in and one-of-a-kind and special, and with the bile-producing wittman samplers, which, while not sold through pottery barn, are affected with the same deficiencies as many pottery barn displays.

what then do we say to this?

i have to admit, this isn't the most heinous example in the world. it's actually kind of funny. i like the idea of soccer moms out scrounging brown and green glass bottles in landfills because they read in pottery barn that large numbers of ANYTHING stacked against a wall become "artwork". i mean, who wants art in the hands of clueless private collectors when you can just let disney own it, and go see it there?

pottery barn shoppers really don't know what to do with art, anyway...

... i LOVE this picture. i love the idea that they did this on PURPOSE, out of spite. "nobody is going to come into MY HOUSE and leaf through a book about JULIAN FUCKING SCHNABEL -- not that easily!"

the art books stacked in a way that it's impossible to get to them, all to hold up a vase, is the funny part of the picture. the less funny part of the picture, not shown so much here, is the collection of black and white photos of infants on the shelf there. in the full photo, they are not just photos of infants, but infants being held by seminaked men -- which is always supposed to mean something fantastic and deep and slightly sexy. men who love their babies. or some crap. but all the photos here are of DIFFERENT infants. it's not one infant growing up little by little. it's not multiple infants from different eras. it's a large collection of various, random, infants.

i'm not ready to go into how pottery barn objectifies babies and children, but it is disgusting, and as i said to ben this weekend, becoming parents is going to open doorways for us, doorways through which we will meet people whom we will probably revile more than any we have met to date. but, that's for a little bit later...

forgive me for being freaked out. i realize that pottery barn markets mostly towards young homesteaders -- newly marrieds, new parents, people reaping the earnings of those first big jobs. people anxious to "make their mark", of course, often make it a big louder and messier than those confident with who they are. they doth protest too much, assert too much, buy too much. you need only stand a step or two outside their group to see how strange it looks.

but i think the marketing looks beyond those people also, to the empty nesters who also are supposed to be happy, relaxed, EXCITED to have the house to themselves so they can now ENTERTAIN their FRIENDS (and the framed family photos that those friends will be faced with at every turn just go with the territory).

anywhere you look, the desperation is right under the surface.

if we, just for today, define "culture" as "the debris of our enlightenment" -- what is going to happen to us if our forms of expression turn away from trying to make sense of our pain and struggle, and in effect, sharing that pain and struggle with the world -- and turn towards the obfuscation of everything about our lives that is not perfect and advertiseable? what if things keep going the pottery barn, life-and-family-as-commodity way? the thought of miles davis sitting around arranging photos of his children so that his friends will see them when they come over for tea, and so that they will hopefully think to themselves "wow, miles sure does have a GREAT family," ... that scares the piss out of me. (and not just because he's a dessicated skeleton now and can't be trusted with a teapot.)

in twenty years, is there going to be anything hanging in the museums, or will the artists be too busy being "artful" at home? is there going to be any music to listen to other than the dinnertime, retro-mix cd's you can buy, currently, at pottery barn?

is it october yet?

my understanding was that today's high temperature was 87 degrees. i'm not going to say anything to him though; that's the kind of hands-off, neutral mentor that i am.

you have to agree that the enthusiasm is very appealing.

hoo boy. since you can't knit at the dive on passyunk ave, i wouldn't suggest you go trying it at doobies, either, if this review is any indication.

why anybody ever wanted to knit in a bar, i don't know. your knitting would smell at best like stale bar air and cigarette smoke -- at worst, a lot worse.

you might need to refer back to this post -- specifically, the image that goes with the post -- to fully grasp the import of the image to the right. look carefully at both!

what happened to thursday nights? no more "drink and knit" at the dive. dyke night is still going strong. so's quizzo. in fact, everything else. but knitting... fallen by the wayside. gone the way of the hula hoop.



i think it's just that everyone's starting their empty-along. my god, i hope i haven't put the entire industry out of business! phone calls must be made! i can take it all back!



and band names aren't really getting any better, either... not even revamped versions of old, great bands with new, relevant names (relevant unless you are a patron at the dive.)

i've never felt too bad about having no particular belief system or methodology, when it comes to knitting, writing, or my eternal soul.

a t-shirt, a blog button, a charm on a necklace, a place to sit down for an hour -- people love to follow something rather than nothing, and to advertise that they are doing so. there are people who will absolutely fly apart at the seams if not swaddled in "the way", and they can only seem to grow in their faith by racking up the numbers of people who have SEEN or HEARD or READ ABOUT them participating in it.

i find that it is as important, if not more so, to avoid what you do NOT believe in, rather than sign yourself up for believing in anything in particular. push yourself away from everything that stinks, and soon enough, you may find emptiness -- scary emptiness -- but it won't stink. i feel have as much of a responsibility to myself to reject the things i do not believe in as i do to try to immerse myself in what is right for me. if there's nothing to immerse myself in at times, so be it -- it often takes all the energy one has to avoid the crap.

to paraphrase c. montgomery burns, i'm no critic, but i know what i hate. mr. burns was lucky enough to be able to follow up immediately with and i don't hate this! but we are not always so lucky. it's still healthy to embrace the hate, lance those aesthetic boils, and kick free of the sticky gossamer argument that "everyone is entitled to believe in what they want to, and the things that aren't important to you are just as meaningful as what you care about."

no they aren't. they're nowhere near as important. but people are afraid of fallow periods and they'll fill them with anything -- arena-rock knitting, oprah's book club, or, that ultimate banana peel, faith.

or... a combination thereof!

i'm going to have an empty-along. have you ever done that thing right before you fall asleep -- i call it "unspooling" -- where you just get very alert to any image that flashes on the insides of your eyelids, and you don't make any effort to understand, remember, or maintain any of it. just let it keep going and going. i'm going to (when bub is finished, maybe) have a knitting empty-along, divorce myself from any thoughts of what i have planned to knit, from any pattern i have seen, from any yarn i own, and see if anything knitted -- or anything that i can knit -- shows up.

who's with me? -- nobody!!! right again!!!

...at least, some of the time.

hey, i got a package in the mail today -- and it went through customs! that is so hot!

it's a little-bittle cross-stitch kit of a portrait of my man henry the eighth! i LOVE it! i think i'm going to do it, and then do a little back in blackwork and make a little pillow and affix a ribbon and make it a christmas ornament. no no no NO NO!!!! i just got a better idea!!! but i can't tell you yet.


the gift even came with a note.

"amber, you ignorant slut," it begins. "i hate you and i hate your stupid opinions. who do you think you are? you with your sims and your iced tea. you with your mango mochi and your totemization of bugs, tudor england, pilates, zombies, the eighties, and dogs. you with your all-you-can-eat-sushi and your korean barbecue buffets. i spit on it all! and i scoff at your goofy knitting, tarot decks, short stories, and baking abilities. your hair is getting too long, and when you don't brush it for days, you look like marc bolan. and when you don't brush it for even MORE days, you look like einstein."

oh wait. no, it doesn't say that.

thanks, friend! kiss the ravens for me. and i'll keep you posted about henry here.

a trumped up, bullshit wittman sampler?

or perhaps one of the works of ray materson, who, while serving over a decade in prison for drug related crimes, took apart socks and used the thread to make miniature tapestries.

this is the closest i have ever come to tears over needlework. but at the same time, i didn't know that you were allowed to wear such brightly colored socks in prison! where'd he get all the purple?

i'm still not buying readymade yarns from primary markets.

but, what do you know -- no DTs, no night sweats.

a friend bought me some spinning fiber when she was at MDS&W. this is the single i did on my drop spindle walking to and from pilates class. the fiber is wool with some hand-dyed rayon and some silk noil -- and it is very soft and very lustrous.



this yarn showed up quite unexpectedly from a friend for whom i had done some tarot readings. (yes, i'll trade tarot for yarn, fiber, or sometimes even nothing at all ). it is a wool and hemp blend, and is very perfumey.



both of these together ARE going to work to make a new little something i've been planning. i cringe to think that both of my pals here will perhaps say "i cannot believe THAT is what you chose to do with that fiber/yarn..." but i've got a plan. i've been doing research.

the shabby gluttony still gets to me. i like yarn, i really like yarn. but i remember being in a yarn store in the last few years -- it was not my store -- and commenting to another shopper that i do not keep a lot of stash.

(why do people in yarn stores persist in believing that because they are all there, they must have enough in common with everyone else to have a civil conversation? why did i think it?) the woman in question, this shopper, was someone who thought her stash was a real virtue. "but i just love looking at it," she said.

but we were both "looking at it", and neither of us had purchased it yet. we were in the yarn store, looking at yarn. and yet for her, looking at it meant owning it.

plenty of artists have been too poor to purchase their own tools and media. de kooning worked in black and white kitchen enamel paints when he couldn't afford pigment. i can't help but think of renoir or picasso too poor to buy proper paints and canvases while doughy, triple-chinned dilettantes filled their little baskets with the very best money could buy -- so they could take it to their homes and salons and look at it and get inspired.

it's that "my candor makes all my ugliness and avarice seem amusing and refreshing!" ploy. gotcha.

there are more reasons than just lack of funds to not buy yarns. i think it has really juiced up my creativity, and you little poppets will just have to gauge your agreement over the course of the months while the projects i have in my mind and on the needles unfold.

i certainly didn't expect that i would stop buying yarns and just be given yarns or fiber, and while i am touched, i am also prepared to be neglected from hereon in. my eye is on a drum carder. but these new yarns mean more to me than just turning over my charge card, and i will not forget where they came from.

we all feel shame and suspicion at my inability to remember yarn names. it occurs to me -- that though i don't remember any of them very well, i am more interested in the names of the colors than i am in the names of the different "lines" of yarn themselves. i guess there's more room for expression and specificity there, so i think of it as a freer arena for doing something interesting. of course, nobody seems to be.

i'm no expert, but i know what i don't like. yarns identified by womens' first names -- goofy. yarns identified by womens' first AND last names (isn't there a line like this somewhere? where the yarns are named "marion anderson" and whatnot?) -- well-intentioned, i guess, but pedantic. (if all the other colors in your line of yarn were called stuff like "lingonberry" and "azure" and then ONE of them was called "marion anderson" -- that MIGHT give people pause. "what the HELL about this color evokes marion anderson?" they might say. but only might.) a whole line like that though -- it falls flat.

are there not a bunch of space-dyed yarns out there now named after fairy tales? "peter and the wolf", "pinocchio", etc... that's just moronic. "see the brownish-grey in this one? it's BROWNISH GREY. like a WOLF." i cannot imagine who gets the final word on these names but they are no more talented than the guy naming the kool-aid packets.

ben has me thinking like a UX person. wouldn't it be interesting to stick a yarn consumer in front of a powerpoint presentation, and give them a little clicker, and say, "you click that when you see some yarns that you would consider buying." then, start up the presentation -- but, of course, present EACH yarn TWICE, with a different name each time (separated, of course, by a few other choices.)

in one frame, call yarn A "scheherezade". the next time it rolls around, call it "ebola".

call yarn B "melon buttons " in one instance, and call it "necrotic" in another.

here is my (first) list of proposed yarn color names. some i would suggest for use outside of my own head; the rest are just the ones i might pick up. see if you can tell which are which. then, see if you can imagine the yarns!

mantis
purulent drainage
shemp
neural tube
papageno
nettle
aqualung
andrea dworkin

i have a very hard time remembering the names of yarn brands -- and even yarn types and weights. and i have a resistance to knowing them.

i do not think there is some sort of bohemian cachet in not knowing the names of yarns. i did not cultivate this trait.

remember in grade school, how sometimes, you'd just say something, and some little moronicus would go, "nuh uh" -- usually somebody you weren't even talking to? wasn't that puzzling? it was for me. it just stopped me in my tracks. it's hard when you're a kid, to keep talking under such conditions. i was saying things that were perfectly natural and honest -- which some people, of course, simply accepted -- but some people didn't believe me. my dad's a nurse, my cousins are black, my sister has steel rods running up and down her spine. nuh uh.

my life was literally incredible! i think it still may be!

i have a resistance, a completely conscious one, to the heavy branding associated with yarns and the "industry". but i like words, of course, so why do i not like to learn these words -- and why is it hard to even get them unconsciously, when there is so much other stuff i pick up without trying? i am pretty sure anyone anywhere would want me on their quizzo team, if my "jeopardy" track record is any indication. and yet, we must hope there isn't yarn "industry" quizzo or i am dead.

i am generally familiar with the yarns i have purchased because i have seen the wrappers. once in the last year or two i bought some rowan yarn called ... forgive me... either it is CALLED "big yarn" and i was calling it "big knit" or the other way around. i don't know, i don't know! but whichever it was i was wrong and the young twentysomethings at rosie's yarn cellar would snap at me with exasperation, even embarassment -- not that they do this to EVERYBODY -- a certain level of intimacy has been reached for me there i dare say -- they would snap at me the way you snap at your mom or your grandma when she keeps calling something by a slightly wrong name. "no, nana, it's not big KNIT. it's big YARN."

or the other way! whatever!

here are some words i know go with yarn but i have absolutely no idea what they are: cascade. blitz. um... shit. i knew one more that i was going to put here.

i know what koigu is and i know what noro is -- even if you took the labels off i would know! i know colinette!

we got the orvis catalog this week and it has all kinds of new patterns for flies. it's been slow going with the flies but i've been thinking about it more lately and last night bookmarked a pattern for something called a "hula shrimp". which requires a material called "flashabou". i do not have any, nor had i heard of it before, but i am sure it is some hybrid of krystal flash and marabou. there! why was THAT so easy and pleasant? are these things not the corrolaries of yarn?

(to be fair, when i started tying flies i kept insisting i needed a material called "spackle hackle". there is no such thing as spackle hackle.)

i do not know the difference between dk weight and worsted weight and sport weight and fingering weight and lace weight. but let me guess, i just accidentally listed them in perfect descending order, right?

fly patterns have fun directions like "tie in a bunch of white zonker." that's really appealing! who's gonna forget white zonker? but is there one brand that rates above the others? does it have a name? i think that's where it starts to fall apart for me.



was there a time when yarn brands, and specific lines of yarn, and even colors of yarn, had better names?

like bands used to have better names? they really did -- band names suck now, too. the full-page ads in the free weeklies, for the small clubs that feature about sixty bands a month -- crap name after crap name after crap name. well, no, "better than ezra" is still a good name. does anybody but me sit around shouting "that's from hemingway!" while drinking coffee and eating crumb cake and reading the paper in public? but "death cab for cutie"... does anybody but me sit around shouting "that's a line from a song on culture club's third album and it STILL sucks!" while drinking iced tea and eating crumb cake and looking at ben's paper?

you want better band names? here's your better bandnames. among my favorites: Dudley Piro and the Unseemly Girl Adventure. Handful of Breeders. Donna Nugent and the Fresh Consultant Orchestra. Bag of Thumbs.

(another good way to get band names is to check your blog's stats, and look at the keyword phrases.)

if there were a line of yarn called "Bag of Thumbs", i would so be breaking the self-imposed yarn moratorium. if there were a yarn company called Buckaroo Cooper and the Jerusalem Porn Stars, i would count heavily on its greatness. i am very susceptible to such charms.

what's this? the latest in bridalwear for freshman knitters? hmmm... not sure this is any less ridiculous than the shrug or poncho but of course what it actually is is the festive return of this week's runaway bride. the pressure, the pressure! the pressure to have a wedding that's the "social event of the season". the pressure to have a child (world population being dangerously low as it is). what a world! what a world! what a pressure-filled and dangerous world! run run run! but first: register for gifts!

okay, i digress. maybe they were planning on adopting five cambodian babies. and i don't know for sure where this bride was registered but it MIGHT have been PB.

wait a minute. let's look.

what do you know? from potterybarn.com's gift registry:

JENNIFER WILBANKS AND JOHN MASON
Event: Wedding
Date: April 30, 2005
Registry ID: 1250204
Today's Date: 05/01/2005
Message from the registrants:
GO DAWGS!

(from ben, standing over my shoulder): "is it really all that much fun when it plays directly into your hands?"

answer: yes. yes it is.

sometimes i get "leads" on knitting blogs with which i have been previously unfamiliar. there is a restlessness. restlessness relaxes me.

i've talked about the "sea change" before -- the creeping backlash of dislike for cutsey hip knitting books with crappy patterns and stupid writing. and that's just from the people i'm friendly with. lately i get tipped to blogs where this kind of anger has been brewing like a strong pot of prince of wales tea left out all afternoon in the sun.

interestingly, a lot of these blogs are not in "the ring". in fact, of the few blogs i have regularly read over the last few years, bloggers seem to be leaving the ring -- with an awareness, of course, that it will lower their hits-per-day and make them harder for the average knitter-on-the-street to "find".

isn't that interesting?

i've even heard tell of some folks who privatized their k-blogs, going from a once-public platform to a password-only one. keeps out the riff raff. these marlene dietrich moves are conducted in the public forum -- people often KNOW that people are bowing out and going members-only.

but do people ALWAYS know? are knitbloggers "faking their own deaths" -- posting final messages such as, "knitting. eh. i guess it's not really for me. bye!" and then resurfacing...underground? ringless? gated? so sick of "buttons" and blogrolls dangling from every page like a bunch of stinky old friendship bracelets, that they now move only in the shadows, passing each other with only a knowing -- and undetectable -- look of understanding? because the party has gotten just that big and ungainly and ugly? full of hangers-on and "me-too"'s, and old-timers who stand around inflating their neck flaps in the hope that it is mistaken for some kind of wisdom, wryness?

what if new bloggers aren't joining the ring at all? what if previous knit blog ring members are leaving the ring as though they are actually leaving k-blogging -- and starting new, unmapped blogs? and what if these blogs are different from the ones they had before -- as different as though they were by entirely new people?

if you knew it was happening, who would you tell?

how about a little bag of plush plagues for passover?

i actually think it's rather original. "the black cube of darkness" is my favorite.

you can take it to "the thing's" passover seder!

we totally blew the passover thing off this year. we bought some macaroons and ate them in the car.

see -- this is what i'm talking about.

from a pointed entry about the youngest girl zappa on the brilliant go fug yourself, i found what appears to be the source for "one of a kind wearable pieces of art".

you know. just as long as nobody else on earth goes out and buys one of the bazillion massproduced skeins of novelty yarn that these appear to be made with. and as long as no one else on earth has basic knitting skills.

but these are by frank zappa's daughter, you see.

i love frank. i registered to vote for the first time at a frank zappa concert in 1988, tower theatre. i learned how to take off my underpants without taking my pants off, straight from the mouth of frank zappa.

frank was around at the time nudie suits were being made. but frank is not around now to tell his daughter about it. maybe he would have. maybe not.

sure, she's allowed. we're all allowed. have i not recently also made a point about new knitters -- any knitters -- having every right to enjoy their basic skills and their novelty yarns? yes i have. do i contradict myself? very well then i contradict myself.

except, i really don't, do i?

this right here is a molecule of tap water in the otherwise fabulously perfumey bottle of gin that is knitting.

and there you go.

well, not really.

ruminating on the subjects of knitting revolution and counterrevolution has let me identify more clearly the likes and don't-likes of my knitting life, and given me clues as to what i can do to play with the knob. one of the likes, of course, is the forum for communication with other knitters -- in e-mail, on the phone, in person -- knitters and fiber artists a thousand times more proficient than i will ever be, and people who have been in my life for years and who i never thought of as knitters, who now are, and for who, due to their enthusiasm, april is still very much the apropos time to be making (and giving!) scarf after scarf after scarf.

what i don't care for, for lack of a better word at the moment, is the commercialism. i don't want to participate as actively in the feeding cycle of manufacturer > pattern proliferation > retailer > knitter-as-host-organism-slash billboard for said manufacturer/pattern/store. for me, right now, in april 2005, i believe there is more growth as a knitter available to me in taking a break from the cycle.

although it may change very little about what i choose to knit in the next year -- and may (time will tell) change very little about what yarn actually comes into the house, i have decided that from april 2005 to april 2006, i will not purchase any manufactured yarn through a retailer, whether bricks-and-mortar, internet, or festival booth. i will purchase handspun yarns when possible, and applicable to what i want to work on, hopefully directly from the spinner. i will purchase through secondary markets such as ebay when wanting manufactured yarns such as sock yarns. and i will barter (yes, that copy of walden i got for christmas is levitating off the shelf right now) with other knitters, either in exchange for what little stash i have (i mailed about 3/4 of it to tish this past winter) or for other stuff -- printing-related, or whatever. i will spin what i can, bias-cut what i can, tear up what i can.

i will need new needles and whatnot, assuredly, and will get them through the regular routes. right now my experiment extends only to yarn. i don't buy the knitting magazines. i'll still buy books. let's be clear: i don't think that the yarn business is "wrong", nor do i think anyone is getting unduly rich in it. i do think there are a ridiculous number of knitting books and yarn shops out there, weakening the bonds. that i most emphatically believe. they are serving the bandwagoneers, and as far as i care, that is a match made in heaven. i don't even want them to go away. why would i? just because i think they are boring and useless doesn't make it interesting to eradicate them. it's like putting a celery stalk in a business suit and calling it a stock broker. should we call security?

i cannot stress the extent to which i do not need anybody to participate in this "along with" me. i do not need the "support". i don't need the "company". indeed, i hope that this will help me look at the garter-stitch scarves of my new-knitter friends and see with newer eyes the delight that they have in novelty yarns, and yarns they have just plain never touched before. it would be nice to feel that. kind of the way i feel, sorta wistful and envious, about people who've yet to read catcher in the rye or see mike leigh's naked or hear jon faddis play the trumpet for the first time. barring the ability to experience anything i've already experienced for the first time, i have to put some space between myself and what is i know is "available" to me. right now, it is the sight of all those skeins stacked and stacked, and all those labels, and all those names of colors and types, that makes me feel a little dead inside. this is not what i wanted it to be about.

i feel that, initially, what this will provide me is: less immediate "gratification" at my fingertips. more of a challenge in finding what i need for the work i want to do, and more of an apprecation for how hard it may be to get it. an opportunity to patronize spinners i would otherwise be too lazy to buy from or barter with. a sharpening of the senses, and a welcome break from little loops of paper with SKU numbers and barcodes on them, littering the remote control holder hanging over my arm of the couch.

and if this experiment eventually makes me unhappy, i'll stop, and go by a bunch of something factory-fresh. before the year is up.

right now, i have plenty. i'm going to read walden and see if it makes me feel more on track. and then, maybe, i'll re-read huysmans' against nature and see if there's a way to apply that to knitting.

we'll see what happens.

i have found one swedish knitting blog that gives the most heartfelt anthem for the support of knitalongs, as well as polite dismissal of my scorn for them, as any i could hope for. using the best translator i could, i am very satisfied to see that my opinions were "interesting" but that the blogger in question is still "adoring parallellstickning" and is going to continue doing it "as never formerly". that's the kind of resolve i was brought up with. spend your energies doing what you want and expressing what you want, not trying to bend the contrary people's arms backwards trying to get them to agree with you. go swedish knitters!

in english, and in my inbox, i got so many excited and emphatic rants. politics! ergonomics! innoculation against i-pod-and-cell-phone-cozy malaise! eleanor roosevelt! technique-mongering! all mentioned in often barely coherent e-mails about knitting revolution and knitting counterrevolution. everybody (everybody i heard from) has their own ideas, but shares a common fire in the belly.

here's an interesting point from teresa: to remember, at the heart of revolution is CONNECTION. (she even wrote it in all caps like that). "connection" cannot be easily qualified. fruitful connections happen. synchronistic, spooky connections happen. and surrounding these are millions of connections that are merely white noise -- possibly even to the parties that are sharing them.

my friend john, with his non-knitter and rather floundering (but effortful!) pronouncements on the signs of the knitting revolution and counterrevolution, appears to have sensed this very significant point. remember: in john's version of the revolution, the delivery system for that revolution was an episode of Gilmore Girls. in his counterrevolution, there was "a video with marilyn manson knitting a big satanic sock". in both cases -- mass media is involved. perhaps that video of marilyn manson was an MPEG file, being downloaded around the planet.

i hadn't thought of it that way, but it was right there. proving that, like howlin' wolf said, the men don't know but the little girls understand. (truly, his outer appearance aside, my friend john is a pink-cheeked, crinolined little girl.)

i am keeping my eyes open as this sea change occurs. i'm always excited when a prediction, or something i've considered to be true for some time, becomes something other than just my weird opinion and is considered to have basis in fact. it's happened before.

this ad was in my free weekly paper. for those of you who are not familiar with south philly, or with philly at all, believe me, this is funny. check out thursday and friday nights.

that's a big step for south philly. the knitting thing has reached saturation for sure when it's being advertised as a happening in a bar on east passyunk ave. i like the dyke night thing too -- not that south philly has been without them ever, but it's new to see it flaunted in the paper. and i promise you, they are not pottery barn lesbians. not in this neck of the woods.

i got some thoughtful and inspiring replies to that last post. that's nice; i always prepare myself against an onslaught of dippyness and zealotry, bracing for a bunch of comments like "is it really fair to say this?" or "isn't this all more of a personal opinion?" i know these people are out there, racing to get to the button, people for whom the pedantic and "fair" expression of anemic, passionless, objectivity is a real virtue. and for any writing that fails to do it -- even blog writing -- they are there with the red pencil. it's the equivalent of shrieking "mom says you HAVE to let me play with you!" and it's boring, but again, i'm not seeing any of it in my inbox.

if you read the previous post -- and not even between-the-lines reading, just read it -- it addresses that i am intentionally travelling a narrow path with this line of thinking. it also expresses acknowledgement of the knitting "revolution" not only in that it exists, but that it brings pleasure to those experiencing it. that type of pleasure -- the newness, the giddiness -- is the stuff of life, the fountain of youth. the price at which it sometimes comes is, well, seeming green. being late to the party. i know this from blackwork -- not that anyone has outright scoffed at my wiggly sampler (in fact, embroidery bloggers are a far nicer bunch of people than knitting bloggers are), but i myself often check myself from "asking something dumb" or getting overly excited about my sapling abilities. then again, i am having a fantastic time. soon, i will want to move on to harder things.

i have heard it said from more than one knitter that the problem they have with the "hip to knit" revolution is that many of these new knitters seem to have no desire to move onto harder things. it will continue to be big fat needles, and novelty yarns, and "patterns" for scarves and wrist warmers (what is a wrist warmer? like tennis players wore in the seventies?) and beer cozies, for their entire body of work.

the only new knitters i know are starved to move on, and have moved on, faster than i can even keep up with. knitting itself is keeping their wrists warm.

not wanting to learn is not a very cool thing. and in every revolution, i suppose, there is an element that pushes forward into the new territory, and also an element that attempts to hold it there as long as possible.

one difference, it appears, between the perception of "revolution" and "counterrevolution" is in -- surprise! -- a certain individuality. remember what my non-knitting pal said in the last post: "If I was going to buy that many clothes, at that price, I'd hire knitters and sewers and designers to make everything specifically for and fitted to me."

true dat! and, if she were a knitter, she'd knit for -- and thereby be addressing and catering to -- a very exclusive clientele. i have no doubt of it. that would be fabulousness at work.

another, more experienced knitter, in e-mail, fantasized that the counterrevolution would be marked by the fact that"knitters would no more consider having a knit-a-something-along than stylin' ladies would want to wear the same dress as someone else to a party." she did amend, though, that it was not the construct of the knitalong itself, but the reliance on it, that was at fault; and also, that whether knitalong or knit alone, there should always be room and respect for the garter stitch scarf of the brand new knitter. to frighten fledglings away from a new discipline out of scorn for their newness -- or out of fear of the directions in which they take this discipline -- is pussy.

back to the one-of-a-kind issue. the revolution appears to be marked by a lack of possessiveness. knitters come up with "original" stuff -- and "publish" it as a "pattern" just as fast as the garment has come into existence. is it more important to be the “designer” who wrote and “published” the “pattern” (which will then be used countless times by others) than it is to be the only person who made – and owns – and wears -- an guardedly original and unduplicatable piece?

counterrevolutionary would be, then, blogs full of original items made to showcase the endowments of their makers and their makers alone (or the endowments of the makers' carefully chosen select clientele.) that would be something to see, wouldn't it? something a little more than looking at the progress of whatever cloned cardigan is being created by the twenty other knitalongers with which the soldier of the revolution allies herself (or himself). to be "fair", i have to guess that the reason these knitalongs are happening is because so many people want to knit this same item, and believe it will be complimentary to them when worn. to be fair, i will suggest that it is so. and to be totally unfair, i will say that i suspect that it is not. why then does all this petri-dish knitting produce a bunch of knitted items that, if they had voices, would all talk like meg ryan? sometimes, when i see a list of knitalongers and their little report cards of progress on their identical thingies, i get a mental picture of twenty women in big cardboard meg ryan masks.

so. to be different. different different different. groan. you're just doing that to be different, whine the stormtroopers. okay. don't do anything just to be different. not everybody wants to wave their freak flag. not everybody has a freak flag to wave. that's okay. faking it is not necessary. but there's no harm in being exposed to a new opinion. i mean; i've looked at all those knitalong "buttons" for long enough, and now, this is mine.

how about a knitalong where:

-- everybody who joins knits an item that can in no way be mistaken for any other item in the knitalong

-- everybody knits an item that at least deviates in some significant way from the pattern being used, or is an entirely original pattern

-- contains an element of interest, whether in a stitch, a certain shaping, or otherwise, that the knitter is loathe to share -- out of monumental, possessive and consuming love for what he/she has created

-- everybody either completely fails to address that the item is "part" of a "knitalong", or makes their own button for it (which they may share if that's how they're feeling, or if they're really clever with buttons, but frankly it's more fun to think of multiple different kinds of buttons and some "participants" with no button at all nor even a hint that they are "participating").

what do you think? do you think some of the knitting will be interesting? do you think it will be "edgy"? i'm getting worried about that word now. we've all seen the little-knitted-penises and big-knitted-spliff and cross-stitch-sampler-with-naughty-words and porno-latch-hook and ha ha ha, how very edgy, how not-your-grandmother's, and i wonder if this "edginess" goes beyond the sight gag. isn't there more?

beyond the finished product, is there counterrevolutionary knitting behavior? i do not know for sure. i knit last night while seeing the magnificent le cabaret mélange perform a tribute to kurt weill. no one else was knitting, and in the darkened room, i tried to amplify the light of my votive candle by putting a full waterglass in front of it. revolutionary or counterrevolutionary, or neither? it should be revealed that i asked jeffrey, having run into him in whole foods, if he wouldn't mind me knitting at his shows, and he said he wouldn't. (i had the honor of working alongside jeffrey at the worst job in the world, so how could he let a fellow survivor down?) maybe that takes away from the revolutionary or counterrevolutionary element of it, asking permission. i read once that hometown boy todd rundgren (a wizard, a true star) used to knit in the back of the classroom in high school here in philly. counterrevolutionary knitting. definitely.

but then again, some people were just born to be excellent stormtroopers. i mean, follow your dreams. this way, we're all winning.

although i have not wrapped up this pottery barn thing entirely i am going to riff about something different now, with the same reminders as usual: i am not here to give a well-rounded opinion or to think out all sides of any issue or "support" a "case" for anything or even keep readers interested. this isn't face the nation and i have no responsibility to refrain from taking ideas in the direction i want to take them just because someone somewhere may believe that somehow took the steam out of my position that i did not also address important (to them) issues X, Y and Z, or that i took it too far on issues A, B and C.

in this particular case, i am not even going to censor myself that way -- i simply wish to see how far i can take this particular, oversimplified, idealized train of thought. begin:

recently i was e-mailing with a friend and wondered to her if there would ever be a real "revolution" in knitting. she e-mailed back: this was it. we were IN it. novelty yarns on fat needles and i-pod cozies. this WAS the "revolution".

i did not reply to this; it was too depressing. i didn't think she was wrong; i knew she was right. i also realized i had probably asked the wrong question.

i decided to do some field research, and went straight to some friends who don't knit at all. i wanted to know what these non-knitting friends though it would require to make a "knitting revolution" occur.

i asked my friend lisa.

"visibility: not the end result sweater, but people knitting at the park, in meetings, on lunch break. then the stuff. and maybe a description of what knitting is-- knitting theory-- two needles and certain twists of the wrist make the yarn weave together in a chainmail pattern that can then be made into sweaters, table runners, xmas tree decorations."

okay; that, we got.

i asked my friend john.

"Maybe there could be an episode of the Gilmore Girls (A show I never miss) in which Lorelei starts attending a knitting club for women who hate their mothers?"

i then asked a new question: if the answer to your previous question is what comes to your mind as a "revolution", what then would make a counterrevolution?

i found lisa's answer particularly fascinating:

"handmade vs. machine made. custom made vs. off the rack. personalized
and customized. made for me; made by me for you. blue collar vs. fake. I saw a bit of some show, something like "Shopping Trips of the Filthy Rich". some superstar went to some fancy store, which they closed to everyone else, and just bought everything. If I was going to buy that many clothes, at that price, I'd hire knitters and sewers and designers to make everything specifically for and fitted to me. picking out fabric is a lot more fun that picking out clothes, I think."

john's answer, after more than 24 hours of deliberation, was:

"A video with Marilyn Manson knitting a big satanic sock?"

i was addressing all of this, as well, with emma, who told me about the the southern cross knitters. these folks are australians and new zealanders who are emphatically putting their feet down about something they don't like in the knitting "revolution", and, not surprisingly, they find what they don't like being generated mostly out of america. "In recent years the face of Australian knitting (in particular) has suffered greatly from the promoting of a false view that Australian knitters are the same as the American market.... We see the readers of Southern Cross Knitting as being knitters who are willing to try new things, whether they have been knitting for a week or a decade. They have a sense of humour, but want articles that contain solid technical information without inconsequential “fluff” and filler."

hey! i like that! i want that, too. and so do other americans. i recently came across a blog entry by a very new knitter who, upon reading one of the new and cool hipply bitchly weekendy knits books, was frustrated. "stop trying to make me laugh and tell me how to knit" was the comment i remember.

so at a time when knitting is “hip” and stitch and bitch meetups take place in pubs, why is there seemingly almost no real “edge” to the “movement”? why would something as exciting as a "revolution" become synonymous with "fluff and filler"? will all the little wisps of counterrevolutions band (kinda) together, to rise up (sort of) in united (more or less) offense against the happily homogeneous revolution (if it is in fact there?)

i asked a brand-new knitter the "revolution" question.

"I went into Rosie's the other day and saw crusty punks sitting with grandmother-like women, all happily knitting togetherlike a big family. Knitting IS in a revolution right now. I think that when more and more people discover its relaxing nature and the ability to create something beautiful that you can wear, give as gifts, or have around the house, more and more people will start to knit."

not only is that an accurate answer, it's a sincere, and happy one. the quote above may offer no insight, no previously unconsidered scenario to readers of this blog, or to "seasoned" knitters. it might even generate a roll of the eyes.

who do you suppose is having more fun with their knitting, though?

and why would you want to stop them?

but is it a contest to see who's having more fun?

and what do you do when the knitting majority makes you yawn, roll your eyes, smirk? where do you take your knitting? not physically -- but where do you take it? where will this new knitter, speaking above, and his new knitting partner -- who progressed from garter stitch to bears in the blink of an eye -- take their knitting next?

there is something in my friend lisa's vision -- the vision of a counterrevolution in knitting, as seen by a non-knitter -- that i can grasp as the beginning of an answer. never of course the answer, but one.

what say you, good people?

although the spring 2005 issue of vogue knitting does not hit stores until march 29, it is clear by the quickly climbing NOTIFY list that subscribers are getting their copies -- and seeing the half-page writeup on the knitting tarot. we are very pleased and grateful -- we think vogue did a great job. and, as you see from the drawing, my friends know how i like to celebrate.

UPDATE - i am having a good week for periodical ink. it's a long shot, but if there are any notsoswift.com readers who are members of the alpha omega alpha honor medical society -- the winter 2005 edition of the pharos features an article about the bellevue literary review and contains a half-page boxed excerpt from my short story "working for the doctor" which was published in the fall 2004 issue of BLR.

i love boy george. who among you does not know this. i love boy george SO MUCH. decades go by and george just makes me happier and happier. (i do have a tendency to stay fiercely loyal to my celebrities, as evidenced last week in me crying with joy while watching robert blake's exoneration. he probably did the crime -- but my boy won't do the time!)



okay, so back to george. so we all know his broadway musical tanked. well, it was the only show I'VE ever seen on broadway and i was having a GREAT time. we don't play the soundtrack at home, no, but it was really a magical day for me, seeing it.

and i HATE rosie o'donnell and i didn't care at all that she'd put up ninety bazillion dollars to fund the musical. sometimes gross people do reasonable things; they're still gross people.

so my dad brings me this; this article from the paper. can you see the three little words that made him get out his scissors?





how about now?

god, george, you are so great. biting the hand that feeds you AND contributing to the sea change that uses pottery barn as a synonym for falseness, sterility, and disposability.

okay well maybe he didn't get that far into it. but this edition of studio 360 did. (program #612, show title Knit, Whittle, Tap). it features (groan) a little bit about stitch-and-bitch "hipster" knitting groups, an interview with the daughter of george nakashima, and a bit about william morris' roycroft press (wherein elbert hubbard, a "cross between ayn rand and p.t. barnum", finds a way to put "hoodlums" to work in a letterpress shop, collating pages) and studio.

this segment ends, after detailing the painstaking creation of a birds'-eye maple chair, the roycrofters, with the words "and for the rest of us... there's pottery barn."

remember the cool palomamobile (the last knitted thing i posted to this blog, and a full month ago at that -- i am knitting, it's just that none of it is showing up here yet) that i made for kathy? i mean for paloma?

as previously reported, it was created from a "pattern" in a british sewing magazine. i was certainly drawn to the triangles. today i discovered, clicking through various links, an article about turkoman embroidery that shows some pictures of doga, which are "worn by people of all ages, attached to horse's harness, tied to cradles, or hung in houses or yurts. The doga is shaped from rough cloth into a triangular form....some are empty and others are simply triangular cloth sections decorated with embroidery." they can be used to carry amulets, or as amulets themselves.

mention is made on this page of something that could entice anybody to carry an amulet: "the albasty, an evil female spirit who appears sometimes as a goat but most often as a woman with hair to her heels and an open wound on her back, through which her entrails are always spilling." holy cow, sicilian peasant that i am, even i do not have hair on my heels -- nor does my sister, who, however, having been born with spina bifida, fits the rest of the description rather well.

or did at her birth. all fixed up now of course.

actually i don't remember any mention of entrails, either.

okay, well, she's evil and she did have a wound on her back and sometimes she appears as a goat.

looking at more turkoman textiles just convinces me i should be wearing embellished robes more often. you only live once (unless you are an evil hirsute goat spirit with spina bifida, in which case you probably live forever).

robby is knitting!

i did absolutely nothing to teach him but i have to assume that all these years of seeing me do it has worn off on him a little. he has just finished his first scarf!



see sal wear the scarf! it's actually sal i would have put money on as the one who would start knitting first; i was wrong about that. but if sal does pick it up, i bet he'll go whole hog. i see sal as a spinner, too. he's the type.



since the opportunity is finally here, please direct your attention to this photo of robby and sal not knitting but instead posing with alan cumming; and, as well, a nice picture of robby again not knitting anything for sal but just out-and-out licking him.

it took a loooooong time for that new pottery barn catalog to show up. i thought they were snubbing me.

in this new pottery barn catalog, as in PB catalogs of the past (weeks, months, years) we are shown giant banks of family photographs in multitiered frames of many types, adorning surfaces nearly from floor to ceiling.

i read a novel in my early twenties where one character -- a southern woman -- told another that it was against good breeding to display family photographs anywhere other than a bedroom or otherwise private room of a home. this, although said by a fictional person, has always stuck with me. i don't abide it entirely, but pretty close.

in real life, i like to look at people's photos, when i am in their homes. but it has also been driven home to me, by perusal of others' homes, that abidance by, or failure to abide by the "rule" set out in my southern novel is a litmus test: the more skeletons a family has in their closet, the more likely they are to have a den or otherwise "public" or easily accessible room of their home absolutely full of framed family photographs.

you know the homes i mean. it is almost as though someone is saying, "look. if you added up all the actual shutter time utilized in taking these, you'd realize that this family didn't have TIME to fight or transgress." "look. our adult children can hardly keep AWAY on the weekends -- the highlight of their social lives is definitely here!" "LOOK. he may have slept with her some of the time, but i had the wedding with him, and as you can see in these pictures, we've DEFINITELY..."

taken more pictures. uh huh.

the pottery barn catalog scenarios do not seem to focus on the multigenerational, time-spanning types of displays. some of the multiple photos in the multiple frames on the multiple surfaces in the pottery barn shoots often seem like they might have in fact been taken on the same day, and very recently. they send the message that "since i began my life anew with this wonderful partner/bought myself this fantastic house -- and got all my wedding/housewarming gifts from the POTTERY BARN gift registry -- life has been PERFECT, perfect in a way it never was when i was stuck with YOU, (mom, dad, ex-boyfriend, ex-girfriend, competitive 'friend', etc.)"

look closely at the pottery barn catalog and you will see in these displays of photos, there is almost always a wedding picture. american culture has a tendency to totemize weddings. there are people who will coast on their own wedding for years, not only as a point of identification, but as a source of decorating and even gift-giving fodder, attempting to rekindle the embers of their own big moment by presenting framed photos of their own wedding to friends and family members long after the fact -- and, clearly, with no idea how eyes will be rolled as soon as their backs are turned.

photographs are part of our corporeal life on earth, and, like touching and tasting and putting colored lacquer on the little spiny exoskeleton bits that protrude from the tips of our digits, they are something we can only experience while alive, and by dint of that, somewhat tribalized in how they are revered. this is not to say that photographs are not meant to be in some ways talismanic. they can be, and are. only while we are alive may we have congress with such items. taking pictures, arranging pictures, posing for pictures: all for the living alone. and certainly for sharing. but barricade-like totemization of our own loved ones is spooky, acquisitory, grabby.

the pottery barn catalogs send a loud message about DETAIL. paying attention to the details in our lives and in our homes, tweaking, leaving no corner without a stealthy yet understated whitewash of new/old perfection. but if you apply this kind of voracious attention to detail to the "homes" in the pottery barn catalogs, they start to look freaky. i imagine that if an entire pottery barn catalog "home" was constructed from top to bottom, walking through it would give one a rather "hill house" experience.

it's not just the photos, either.

ben found this picture yesterday, and was hit hard by pottery barn's insidious instruction that people should use their whiteboards to advertise meeting up with "mrs. pritchett". if we were meeting up with, say, "mrs. krapp", it wouldn't look so hot on the whiteboard. certainly not the whiteboard that other people coming into one's home might see. that's the whiteboard on which we should mention mrs. pritchett. and "hannah". and "marc". "mark" is coming later in the week but there's really no need to put it on the board. we'll remember.

oh yeah -- and look -- mom and dad have been married 35 years, and just as happy as ever! (and if mom and dad have been married 35 years, what do you suppose the average age of a pottery barn customer is?) good thing uncle pat is back from paris in time to celebrate.

what ISN'T on the whiteboard? "oncologist appt", "family court, 8:30 am", "parole hearing", "call for neuro test results".

a brief aside: we all admire the arbitrary little design snippet here and there, and stick it to our corkboard or fridge -- particularly if they are cute little gardening-related somethings from the netherlands -- but did pottery barn HAVE to pick one so evocative of a certain murderous cambodian dictator?

this one makes me want to cry. while i do need to write an entire entry on the pottery barn "kids" catalog, this needs to be included here: this poor little boy. look at what is printed carefully -- VERY carefully -- on his little chalkboard.

i seriously doubt this kid LIVES TO SKATE if his preferred method of stating that ideology is in tiny chalk letters that he apparently employed both protractor and ruler to get uniform.



and, to round it all up, here's a big pink multiframe that encourages children to understand just what it is that big pink multiframes from pottery barn provide us; check it out, it's etched right into the bottom of the frame.

MEMORIES.

the pottery barn catalog also sells a book of "style recipes" specifically geared towards displaying photos.

i bet some of the ideas are attractive. i bet i would like some of them. i am not going to rehash every caveat i originally gave when i started writing about pottery barn, like the small text being read aloud on a commercial for prescription medicine. it isn't that the ideas are unattractive. it's that i will never use them in the quantity or locale pottery barn suggests, because whenever i have seen it done in real life, in real homes, i immediately wonder, what areyou trying to prove? what are you hiding?

perhaps the fact that the novel i read so many years ago, where characters introduced the idea that the way a household displayed its personal photographs could be done "right" or "wrong" (could be done with class, or done in a way that was vulgar), and that the characters in the novel had such a strong "southern" identity (localized, even tribal) indicates that there is more than one "right" way, and somewhere else, the inverse of what those characters believed is true.

we have a lot of culture. what is it that makes rich culture? what is it that makes rich memories? do the photos in the pottery barn catalog featuring displays of personal photograps look like an expression of rich memories, or something else?

pottery barn cannot rob us of our rich memories, but i'm not so sure they can't rob us of a rich culture -- that's for next time.

this is not really the next installment of "the case against". i would however like to take a moment to share the rules and regulations of the WIN A CHANCE TO STALK RICHARD CHEESE contest that i found inside my cd this week.



if you want to enter, you have to either tattoo the lyrics to the album in question upon your person, or scrawl them "in blood (preferably your own) on a mirror in a public restroom or a Pottery Barn."

i might enter.

or i might wait for the next contest: WIN A CHANCE TO GIVE RICHARD CHEESE ALL YOUR VICODIN!

in the beloved style of the early DIY movement, the gorgeous ladies of 1223 wharton sent valentines to those they adore.

cats can't send valentines. everybody knows that.


i'd have sent knitting tarot valentines myself, old school-style, but in the grand tradition, there were none left for me. you'd think that there'd be power in owning the means of production, wouldn't you. like, i could just go make some more. it doesn't seem to work like that though.

a little more on valentine's day, vaguely crochet- and spinning- related. for valentine's day this year, among other things, i got ben a dvd of the colorized carnival of souls, with audio commentary track by mike nelson. SIGNED by the man himself. i mean, talk about cool. i could do without the colorization, but we do love mike.

we did love mike. a little idol-toppling has occurred for me surrounding this whole adventure. i found the carnival of souls deal through mike's website, which also features some of his "random" writing. (those of you who know me are already cringing at the ooze of acid with which i pronounce the word so disingenuous and overused in the blog "writing" worlds, "random". well, mike didn't use it, but this is random writing if i ever saw it.)

the link may not stay active -- who knows how often mike nelson randomizes -- but if you scroll to the bottom of the current page, you'll find the "Stupid Hat Round-Up". o ho ho ho. so mike trolled the internet for pictures of hats to which he could attach his zany commentary.

he has an ana voog hat there.

big mistake, mike. once again -- for many, many years i have adored mike nelson. those straight-world good looks, the top notch MST3K writing and host presence. he had it all. but apparently i had it all, and was just applying it to my vision of mike. because what my mike nelson would have said about an ana voog hat is, "this hat is so fucking sexy i can hardly stand it."

mike didn't have the sense. i LOVE ana voog's hats. anybody worth their salt would know better.

i'm sure we'll enjoy the dvd, as we will continue to enjoy our MST3Kfests. i don't think i mentioned on this blog that, this past christmas, we had a "gift of the magi" moment surrounding MST3K. i went to one of those fan sites where they make bootleg episode tapes for you for a little money, and got ben a bunch for a gift. i was SO excited, i could not wait to give them to him (and watch them), so i suggested that we each give each other ONE gift, early, on xmas eve. so excited was i about giving ben his tapes, that i did not notice the telltale size and shape of the gift from ben that i myself was opening, which was in fact... a big stack of bootlegged MST3K episodes.

out of sixteen episodes total, we only doubled up on two.

which brings us back to valentine's day, by way of true love.

(and my sister's boyfriend got her a llama -- whose care is being paid for in megan's name for the next year at the lehigh valley zoo.)

nope, did not knit this, but it's so interesting to me that i thought i would memorialize it. (in fact, in trying to get this shot, i accidently took a short movie of it, with my nose.) this is the plasticymesh bag in which my organic lemons came -- stretched over a glenfiddich bottle.

surely someone could be prodded to interpret this into a knitted lace, yes? i mean, not me. it's pretty for someone, but it's one of those elegant-on-her, peasanty-on-me dealies. it's just how i'm drawn.

pretty tho.

a fabulous message from the universe, a day early for my birthday.

if i were a doll -- the kind of doll with a string that you pulled, that said a limited assortment of things -- one of the things i would be programmed to say, i think, would be "why didn't i buy that r. crumb 'heroes of the blues' trading card deck back in 1985, when it was available in every little record store i ever went into?"

because i have said that a whole lotta times in the past 20 years. in fact, i can think of two times in the past week that i've brought it up. for twenty years, twenty, i have been scouring the surface of the earth for the r. crumb 'heroes of the blues' trading card deck. i have looked on e bay. i have queried kitchen sink press and begged them to reprint it. (and they said they had no plans to.) my dad has bid online for copies. no avail. no hope.

last week, discussing the knitting tarot via e-mail, i was commenting on the deck-of-cards format in general as a "delivery system" and how it is particularly pleasing to some, and lamenting, once again, on how sorry i was that i had not purchased an r. crumb 'heroes of the blues' trading card deck when i'd had the chance. then i brought it up again over the weekend, looking at some crumb and harvey pekar stuff on my dad's coffee table.

lament lament lament.

an unexpected chain of events: last night, ben showed me a short digital movie inspired by an m.c. escher woodcut, and i fell in love with the soundtrack, which turned out to be erik satie's trois gnossiennes no. 3. i went to tower records this morning to find a satie disc featuring the six gnossiennes, which i did, and while waiting in line, turned my head to the right, towards one of those shelves with "living dead dolls" and marilyn manson action figures and candy and other stuff piled all over it.

i bought two decks. and the satie disc. happy birthday toooo meeeeee.

we all know i like QVC. and i tolerate some pretty lowest-common-denominator stuff, even if only for the tragicomic entertainment of it. i have soldiered through irish halloween; i have wondered what it would be like to wear a scent that would make ernest borgnine want to have sex with me. i have sat in stunned silence, taking notes, while the true antichrist makes his appearance at holidaytime, along with his black velvet-clothed, platinum blonde wife, and black velvet-clothed, village of the damned daughters.

QVC has now gotten involved with the (excuse me if i don't put a link here) red hat society. maybe some of you know about this already. i didn't. unless i blocked it out. if i hadn't known i was watching QVC, i would have thought it was a teleplay of a kurt vonnegut story. it is vile. it is demeaning. and it is predatory, taking the money of the weak and the lonely while making fools of them in ugly cheap clothing and "lifestyle" accessories. because, for those of you who don't know, to be in your full regalia for the red hat society, you have to have a bunch of red and purple cheap shit hanging off of you everywhich way. and also -- the live studio audience and viewers and shoppers at home were reminded -- it's IMPORTANT to purchase only the "officially licensed" merchandise, that has no identifier other than being RED and PURPLE -- when red and purple are (i checked it out) FREE to the world (as are joy and happiness, which it appears the red hat society believes they are selling in an official capacity as well).

the "society" is for women over 50. who decided that women over 50 were so automatically pathetic that they would need the bovine beatitudes of identically-dressed women in the same age demographic to make them feel "joy" and "love life"? trust me, tova borgnine ain't there. joan rivers ain't there. and martha stewart, regardless of how her misfortunes thrill me, would be in the green room along with tova and joan and elaine stritch tearing these doddering red-hatters each a new orifice, i am certain, if anyone suggested to her that she should "join". the list of shit-kicking women over fifty who would chew off the hand that tried to put a red hat on their heads is really endless. reader challenge: come up with the list. double reader challenge: put your name on it. triple reader challenge: then throw the list away and forget everybody except yourself. it's not a club.

I am sick to think of the decades' worth of needlework and textile experience that must have been in that live studio audience last night -- but of course, why knit your own hat (even if it HAS to be red and purple) when "Lady Max" is onstage telling you it's so IMPORTANT to get the OFFICIALLY LICENSED MERCHANDISE?

i used to work in special education. i have been at christmas parties held by the united states navy, given for combined special education facilities in eastern pennsylvania. at these parties, held in what was essentially an airplane hangar, batman, gumby, "the mask", and other costumed characters did the macarena with adults with down's syndrome, balloon "art" on their heads and icing on their faces. these parties had more meaning and dignity than seeing those horrible, desperate women of the red hat society in the studio audience at QVC.

if they were all murderers, with really poor interpersonal skills, i could understand it. "you have to wear your red hats and purple dresses, ladies, to remember the JOY. and that you LOVE LIFE. and if you see any other ladies wearing red hats and purple dresses, you should NOT destroy them. they are LIKE YOU in their LOVE of LIFE and JOY."

but i bet they do attempt to destroy each other anyway, all the time. the red hat society has provided them with new ways to "come together" and identify those who have "come together" -- which always means new ways to shut people out. i bet the infighting in the red hat society is pretty damned amusing. adult children the world over probably hear their mothers bitching about it all the time. "she acted like my outfit wasn't purple enough." etc.

ah, to be the outcast heretic in a herd of stupid pathetic women who think fifty is "old", but wear prescribed clown outfits -- officially licensed -- to feel "young".

what an edict. glossy, thin, and easily smudged, like a page from an old copy of good housekeeping that's been thumbed through in the doctor's waiting room far too many times.

but of course (of course) i would like it if men were allowed in. does anybody remember gary from the "boyd's bears" hours on QVC? he was this fabulous crossdressing MANIAC. see, you watch long enough, you see good stuff.

my father was telling me recently how, in backlash against the "mc mansion" trend (in which huge "luxury" homes are built by people who must build their own house as part of their version of the american dream, but in which they build them out of exactly the same bargain, prefab materials used to build "habitat for humanity" homes), "real" mansions are now being built on philadelphia's mainline. high-end materials, including carved limestone (carved with lasers these days, but that's progress for you), the works.

these "real" mansions are also artificially aged. chains are taken to the beautiful hardwood floors, to make them look scuffed, worn, trodden upon by generations. in one example, my father reported, the person who had made the house had added, against the wall of the fireplace, a small groove -- where, had a fire poker stood for a hundred years or so, it might have created a similar groove. you know, in real life.

i wondered to my dad if the closets of these mansions didn't also contain pencil marks representing the ages and heights of the various children who had "grown up" there. he didn't know.

the integrity of building -- and of buildings -- is something i learned the most about in ayn rand's the fountainhead. but in reading that book -- rather later in life than many -- i discovered that the popular consensus is that rand lacks finesse, is a rubber mallet of overblown symbolism and ideals so, well, ideal, that they are downright immature. i asked around, and yeah, it seems, at parties where people talk about such things, that is just what people say.

so don't go to a party and try to impress anyone by saying you are reading the fountainhead. because you will be laughed at and mocked by someone who has paid huge amounts of money to give their home the "evidence" of imaginary people having lived in it. i'm just trying to save you the pain.

back to the mansions. what's the next possible step?

maybe these mansions will be built, solid as san simeon and unapologetically shiny and new, without the vulgarity of "distressing" and artificial aging. and the owners will then hire multiple large families to live in them, quickly -- and hard. raise those kids! pace across that floor! be thinking of really emotional and family-oriented stuff while you do that pacing. don't be just DOING it and thinking about your paycheck, people! get a good mix of thoughts going, too: some sadness, sure, but make sure it's mostly joy. we have to live here.

they could get multiple families going, living really hard, making the mansions all loveworn, 24 hours a day, in shifts.

who are the families they will get to do this? i know it's all a hypothetical, but we know one thing for sure, in the present, and in the real: people who build, or would even live in, houses that are aged for the purpose of looking like they have been lived in a long time, do not relish the prospect of, nor trust the authenticity of, their own lives adding anything to their mansion.

so they'd have to hire out. there's plenty of families out there. families who'd love to live in a big house like that, even for a prescribed number of hours a day. families perhaps down on their luck, but full of heart, and full of love.

families with nothing but their memories.

we haven't gotten to anything specifically pottery barn, or textile related, yet. or have we? maybe there are a whole bunch of folks out there in FREE MARTHA t-shirts just thinking i am being so reactionary and blaming a company for just providing what people want to buy -- how can that be pottery barn's fault?

i am looking at the difference between pottery barn -- or toll brothers, or whomever -- is selling, and what they actually have to sell. and i'm not saying YOU need to do look at this because YOU can't see the difference between good and bad, between cheap-and-fake and good-and-worthy; this is my exercise more than it is anyone else's. i don't care if everyone else skips these entries entirely.

i'm not saying pottery barn (or toll brothers, or martha stewart omnimedia) is WRONG for selling items people will buy. i'm saying that when i started to look at it in a new way, i started saving shitloads of money that i was then able to spend on yarn and books, foundry type and handmade paper. when i found a way to separate in my mind what pottery barn was "selling", and what they actually had to sell, i found that i had most of what they were "selling" already, and what i didn't have, i was willing to wait for, in the fullness of time, and in the context of the actual history of my life.

i think it has helped me appreciate what is beautiful and meaningful in my life. i think it helps me as a knitter.

i haven't gotten a pottery barn catalog in about three days, but we did have the king holiday this week, so they might be behind.

to begin, i wish to say: our bed is from pottery barn. there are probably a few other items in the house as well. oh yeah, this desk. and a chair. possibly more. there. let's get that out of the way now to squelch any all-too-obvious counterpoint zealotry. i LIKE a lot of things that pottery barn sells. moreover, i find the stuff to be pretty decent. even the large furniture items.

let's get some other for-granteds out of the way:

-- the things that bother me about the pottery barn catalog are not necessarily EXCLUSIVE to the pottery barn catalog (but i think pottery barn leads the charge).

-- it is of course HYPERBOLIC to say that the pottery barn catalog way of thinking is even indirectly responsible for the murder of laci peterson -- but, as i've said before, my mind makes a link here and i feel i must take advantage of my freedom to write about it.

-- i do think this soapbox does have a good bit to do with textiles, as well, and i doubt anyone needs me to draw big black lines to prove it. most anyone who is here reading this will look at the textile work they hold in their hands tonight, or later today, and know without having to write a thesis on it why it means so much more than any item in the pottery barn catalog. then again, that isn't my point.

at least part of my point is that pottery barn would have you believe otherwise. or, more specifically, pottery barn capitalizes on the very human need, vague and hard to define as it may be, which is met by knitting and other handcrafts -- and suggests that it is a need that can be met instead through buying mass produced items through their catalog. heirlooms and family history in all their quirky imperfection are merely a sixteen digit credit card number away.

READER CHALLENGE: find something in YOUR OWN HOME -- perhaps part of, or augmenting, a "collection" that means something to you personally, that you find not only "unique" and "decorative", but USEFUL. extra points if, upon entering your home and seeing it, no one has ever EVER said to you "oh wow, i saw that in the pottery barn catalog! cool!"

that's part one. no, i didn't get very close to explaining the laci peterson part. i might need to wait a few hours until my next pottery barn catalog shows up.

of course, of course, we would all rather have a buy nothing christmas. but really -- if you buy nothing, then you do not get to sample and appreciate the talents of many others! nobody said you had to buy jean naté gift sets or anything -- just buy smart, and buying is okay!

here are some things i bought for my rosie's yarn cellar friends, who are always there for me -- to machine stitch my steeks, to mend the hole i cut into the back of my garment while cutting open my front steek, to let me extort marshmellows from their children... and these are just recent examples. i bought them mini-handcare kits from handwork products, which is run by elaine benfatto, who i think is wonderful.

as someone who has been known throughout life as Not Making The Most Of Her Looks, my ablutions tend to be minimal. and, appearance aside, i don't take care of my hands. i chew away at anything that snags on the yarn -- sometimes i even "file" rough skin or nail with my teeth.

elaine's products have fresh, clean smells -- personally i am reminded of the combined scents of hot mint tea and hot rosewater fingerbowls at a moroccan restaurant -- and they are not at all greasy or heavy. furthermore, they made my hands feel better! and the delivery systems by which the serum and cuticle cream are dispensed -- too cool. DO try them. (the cool knitting postcard is courtesy of the very cool stella marrs).

are you buying for a little person? a little person for whom maybe you did not have time to knit something? these little books are perfect for textile fans who want to teach babies how to eat internationally.



each of the pictures in the book is a photograph of a collage of sewing, beads, xeroxography -- illustrating jewish deli foods, dim sum, and sushi for the tippy-cup set! ben and i fell in love with them and bought them for us.

the books are by amy wilson sanger. i am not an amazon.com "affilliate" so i see no need to make a link -- you'll find them if you want them.

and... last but not least... now that the mystery recipients have all safely received theirs... it's always okay to shop for grumpy santa hat-wearing sheep toys that defecate root beer flavored jellybeans!





it's more than okay to buy gifts for the holidays. because some people (like elaine) are better at making certain things than you are -- and, as you would wish them to for you, you feel they deserve to be paid. that's a tribute to their talent! what is money, anyway, but the international language of appreciation? it can be. it should be.

and, in other instances, you just need to buy a bunch of something, without ever wanting to be responsible for owning it, much less having created it. a jellybean defecating sheep fits this category better than anything, or anyone, i know.

last week we took a quickie daytrip to manhattan to do the quickie holiday things that one must do to feel holidayish: have lunch at saks. (half a tuna sandwich and the crab and corn bisque, please.) check out the new MoMA. and, a first for us both, make a visit to tender buttons at 62d and lexington. it was lisa's idea. i needed a button -- one button -- to complete a christmas project. and this was the place i had to go.

there were many to choose from. the store smelled heavenly and christmasy. it was a beautiful place. it was easy to linger. and, while of course, if you chose buttons from the seventeenth century, you were going to pay for them -- i paid less than $25 for my assortment of five, which i may now present to the giftee, allow him to choose, and attach to his garment on christmas day! (as long as he does a good job on the pierogie dough this year.)

tender buttons is definitely a destination worth the trip! and, it's located on the same more-or-less block as the new york doll hospital -- a place that has always fascinated me. but i was afraid to go upstairs and look. dolls, you know.

buttons are far safer this time of year. watch out for the dolls.

we call it "the spinning room" or "the knitting room", but really, it is just one of the extra bedrooms at the new house, where a lot of in-progress craft stuff is going to be stored. i love it!

when we first toured the house, this was the bedroom of the owner's very ancient and catholic mother. the woman must have been in her nineties and the room was absolutely dripping with cheap plastic rosaries (i still find them in closets here), medals, trial-size bottles of holy water, plaster crucifixes, busts of the virgin, and an entire mirror festooned with various funeral and death announcements and mass cards from what i assume was the woman's husband. (he died in the 1980s, yet these clippings were still very much a part of the room.)

when we walked through with the home inspector, we closed the door when we all huddled in this little room, to gawk with more privacy. for ben, the experience seemed to be akin to touring the Batcave: "what's this do? what's this do? what's this?" there was one of those pictures of jesus where the eyes open and close. there was probably even a picture of jesus flashing the sacred heart (this is ben's favorite image in catholicism), although i don't remember. and there was a toilet seat for the old lady, and a little single bed, and a pervasive scent of floral talc.



well, none of that anymore. i did keep the unusual wicker light shade on the ceiling -- i rather like it.

the little built-in cabinet against the wall now holds secret holiday gifts, yet unwrapped, as well as some fiber. we have all our framed family photos here (do you know that it is considered bad etiquette to have framed personal photos anywhere but a bedroom? i read this somewhere and it has always stayed with me.) we also now have a nice little corner shelf for my royal daulton "bunnykins" figurines. yeah, i like rodents in clothing. what of it. when i was a teen, it was a bit of an identity crisis, to sit around admiring the bunnies in my bedroom while blasting the sex pistols. but i am such a grown-up now that things like that don't phase me.

all my knitting and fly-tying and whatnot books are here, and my spinning wheel and spindles, and what stash i do have is here. and these neat little glass thingies on the wall hold fly-tying stuff, and buttons, and whatnot.

considering the fact that, by mid-october at the latest we will need to have:

- moved into our new home
- finished knitting most of our halloween costumes
- begun to package and ship new knitting tarot shirts and totes
- completed the printing of a holiday-oriented letterpressed book AND our change of address/halloween announcements...

...you'll not be seeing TOO much new posted here for awhile. but, knowing me as you might, be sure to check back before october 31!

"The creative moment of a writer comes with the autumn. The winter is the time for reading, revision, preparation of the soil; the spring for thawing back to life; the summer is for the open air, for satiating the body with health and action, but from October to Christmas for the release of mental energy, the hard crown of the year."

where writing is concerned, i could not agree more. i think my knitting patterns change with the seasons as well. i certainly spin more in the summer than i do in the winter. in the fall i'm usually so crammed with holiday knitting i wouldn't know my natural patterns; i'm trying not to do that this year.

you know what else effects knitting? sims 2, which arrived here yesterday afternoon.

ya know, if i can do this when i'm in my nineties, i can't wait to get there. it's amazing to me how much this old italian tatter looks like my own sicilian tatting great-grandmother:


...seen here with my mom, who is pictured smugly flaunting physical attributes she never gave to me (although i occasionally dance around the apartment in that veil.)

i have posted entries about my great grandmother's tatting a couple of times. maybe more. (please remind me to get a better picture of that pillowcase when we are fully moved into the new place.)

UPDATE: having showcased my sicilian side, here's what's possibly zipping around in my slovak DNA. thank you, michelle. your knitting blog has always been one of the best.

no, he's not in the bag. he's under it. whatever self-destructive tendencies i have are all channeled into encouraging the kitten to play with my knitting. i know i shouldn't.




but i figure, if he does it and wrecks anything, then i can discipline him, by giving him grueling tasks to do that will ultimately benefit me -- like cleaning and sorting letterpress type, for example.

oh wait, this is what i was going to do to my child.

i should really write that plan down somewhere.

anyhow, hillel gets tired of yarn rather quickly.

as many of you know, i like watching QVC. it's a seasonal thing: QVC in the fall and winter, court TV in the summer and spring.

yesterday, i decided to check into QVC to see what was new for the holidays.

they were hosting an entire hour called "irish halloween", which almost made me late for work. "irish halloween". i do understand that ireland is the "birthplace" of the holiday, but still -- there is something about the word "irish" that evokes a synonym of "accidental" in my mind. ("irish twins", par example.)

it was ben's theory that, if you had a pumpkin left over from last year that was all moldy and dessicated, that you could have an "irish halloween" with it. QVC had other ideas.

once, i was watching a hanukkah program on QVC. it was an hour-long show, or so it was scheduled. i have watched a lot of QVC in my day, even if most of it out of the corner of my eye. and i have never seen a show tank midway -- coming to an actual HALT and turning into another show, due to lack of purchases and call-ins-- except for this hanukkah show. why? why not hanukkah? don't tell me jews don't watch QVC -- joan rivers yaps herself hoarse shilling jewelry for hours at at time on QVC!

one thing i noticed about the hanukkah program, was that they refused to use the word "jewish" at any time. once or twice, someone started to say it by accident -- they got the "j" out -- but they quickly corrected themselves with the euphemism "traditional". uh huh. but "irish halloween" decor is showing up at doorsteps all over america today.

i guess everybody gets what they deserve.

by the way -- are there any other knitters and spinners out there watching american chopper? that is a great show, and it is really geared towards the knitting, spinning, needlework mindset. watch it once and you will see what i mean, i guarantee it.

for me, it's become a question worth knowing the answer to: even when i have strong opinions of my own.

ana voog's most recent fashion show fills me with joy and makes me feel more at home in the world. and, when i'm setting type for letterpress, i most enjoy listening to her music via internet radio.

my short story writing is going well. next month, i believe (no later than october i am sure) i will have a short story in the bellevue literary review. and i have two other stories making the rounds now. i don't submit too many different things at once anymore; it makes me feel uncomfortable to court the possibility of publishing more than three stories in a year. now, i am where i like to be.

i've got a couple of mostly-jelled pieces that i want to work on in the morning, but i wonder if i will. the stories can wait, but i HAVE to harvest and dye one more time with indigo this season, before it starts to go to seed.

dyeing things blue isn't writing, but it feels just as vital. tarot, textiles, printing, writing -- all just different ways of organizing information, all similarly important.

sometimes i think my simultaneous projects WOULD be very harmonious and even symbiotic if there were just a few fewer of them.

sometimes i think i am getting them down to a manageable level and then i can't remember why i wanted to do any such thing. i think it has something to do with then having time to start new things. well, isn't "time for starting new things" exactly what i keep giving myself, with the result of... many things going at once?

sometimes i get thinking the answer is simply not adding any new projects. but that's really no good either. because when you just can't stop yourself from working on some new idea -- whether in writing or knitting or spinning or whatever -- that's when it feels the best. i'm not going stop myself from working on things that really get my blood pumping just because it makes life more "manageable."

i have been thinking for some years that it is a full-time job to be me. now i think i need an intern to be me along with me.

in addition to all this, we are making settlement on our first house in two weeks. we will have an actual "printing room" (rather than just a printing press in our living room) and a sort of spinning/stash room (i am not much of a stasher, but the spinning stuff seems to be growing. and i really want a drum carder.) we will be painting a lot at the new place. pulling up carpets in a few rooms. flan, gib and hillel are all pleased to hear that they can each have their own bedroom now, and a lot more room to spread their disgusting hairs and spores in a thin and diabolical film over our possessions. but they can't help much with the painting.

i think the next few months are going to seem preternaturally busy and strange. in addition to getting the house ready and moving into it in october or so, we are working on one "little book" project with the handpress that we hope to finish before the holidays. so much is happening at once. things that normally would be the most exciting thing that happened all week, now sometimes happen two in a day. the mantids all have little wings now.

i want to start doing lace.

he's not actually this cute in real life. it's the ointment in his eyes giving him that walter keane-portrait look. (he has conjunctivitis.)

he is our new rescued kitten. we call him hillel.




"i worship at the Chair of Unfinished Knitting!"






"mommy, i could puke up better handspun than this!"






we are trying to be sensitive to the fact that gibson looks like a large outdated filing cabinet next to the adorable new kitten. we are giving him extra special attention. don't worry.

but does this mean that i'll need to knit multiple toukies from now on?

because adam ant wouldn't be bothered with R2 and neither would these people.

i've always had a soft spot for the finnish, with their marimekko, and their blood doping olympic scandals. hitting themselves with twigs, making outfits like this... finland. i think it's going to be 1984 there forever.

which is, frankly, exactly what i hope heaven is like. and these hats should be there too.

(image used with the kind permission of elina saari.)

here's one reason why, and here's another similarly compelling reason. neither of which -- surprise -- appear to have anything to do with any corporate push for the "offbeat". because they rule. it's as simple as that. no bar coding required.

don't even get me started on rowan's pre-fab, "make it look like a xeroxed zine" R2 crap. it's idiotic. it's idiotic to buy a guide and materials to learn to be individual and creative and cutting-edge. and mr. ed was a horse.

(image used with the permission of the very inspiring ana voog).

the weather is warm, i'm walking home more often, and the drop spindle is out and spinning.

i was approached on broad street by two slightly pre-teen schoolgirls.

GIRL ONE: make me one of those.

AMBER: make the wooden thing or the yarn that goes on it? because i don't know how to make the wooden thing.

GIRL ONE: oh.

AMBER: and all it makes is yarn. what are you going to do with a bunch of yarn?

GIRL ONE: make something. make stuff.

AMBER: well, i only know how to make the yarn. not the wooden part.

GIRL TWO: you go to school?

AMBER: nope.

GIRL TWO: nurse?

this had barely left her mouth, and both of their eyes had glazed over and they had forgotten me, because a schoolbus was driving by, encasing people they knew.

i liked this conversation. it was completely unfettered by either politeness or rudeness; it carried no expectations, even though it was nothing more than a list of unmet demands; and it ended painlessly the moment that most of its participants lost interest in it. i also appreciated the high value placed on making; just the act of "making", even before you need to know what it's going to be. that's a good thing in kids. of course, if it doesn't mature into a finer urge, we end up with a LOT of knitted cellphone cases and palm pilot cases, don't we?

from my motherland of sicily: the cappucin catacombs of palermo. a less professional-looking site, but with far more macabre pictures, is available here. the way the garments, not to mention the bodies, have been preserved, is amazing.

poor neglected little knitting blog! i actually did more knitting this past week than i did either writing or printing. i am starting to see a pattern where one or two of these emerges in a strong lead over the remaining, as a theme for the week. it keeps the roses in your cheeks, that kind of unpredictability.

i originally didn't consider this entirely bloggable, but now i see it in action and would be sad to have ignored it. it is a little scarf that i knitted from the same sock yarn as made the straithairn socks. it isn't as "deep" as a normal babushka, and sorta stands up on my head, but it's purpose is for wearing during printing; one gets warm, and i didn't want my head covered, i just wanted all my hair -- which these days, it takes a forklift to move -- held back. one hair can mess up a letterpress job in a big way. you want to keep 'em out of the press, for sure.

we did a lot of printing yesterday. we are doing small items lately, notecards and tags and such. we just did a "big" (for us) typesetting job -- a gift for my mom -- and will be working on some other projects involving more typesetting after this week, when our new 18 point baskerville arrives. yesterday, just playing around with little cuts and compositions, we worked with black paper and silver ink -- which was mezmerizing. not much to show yet because we haven't scanned much, but a webpage devoted to the press will be up by fall. and of course, by fall, i think the knitting tarot will be possibly the only thing we are working on with relation to the press.

so you see, this "cap" is more like the type seen on waitresses in tea houses in england. it would be an act of mortification to wear it in public. but now the sight of it on my head -- like the smell of naturewash and ink -- reminds me of good stuff. mmmmm, i like good stuff.

having recently made the statement that i'll be focusing my knitting energies on larger projects, you see i have posted twice consecutively about projects that could fit in your pocket. well. but what about what you don't know? what aren't you seeing? think about it...

i don't often post links to outside sites, but for heaven's sake. there's one named albertine. (i take this as a possibility that this guy has read proust, and i am always on the lookout for that.) and they are the way i will recycle my own handknit socks when the time comes to do so.

at this year's maryland sheep and wool festival, we took the ubiquitous "get your finger swallowed by a baby lamb" picture...




as well as the ubiquitous "woman spinning angora bunny right onto the wheel" picture. and we had our deep-fried twinkie and whatnot. (rose, sorry we missed your call -- undoubtedly could not hear the cell phone over our own masticating.)

i did not buy a single shred of fiber for spinning or knitting. we got a few things, sure -- a duster, a poster, a very nice wooden box -- but my stash is all i need right now. and for some time to come.

trivia: did you know that my first trip to sheep and wool fest was in the company of a nun? tim and i didn't have a ride and somehow through an AOL message board ended up getting door-to-door service both ways with "sister ellie", a sister who was in the process of being ordained as a priest, or something. something episcopalians do. she was really nice.

this year, i had ben in the car. after an hour or so of really mundane AM radio, he started fumbling around with the cd changer. and put on the dean martin christmas album.

it's may. but ben thinks you can do this. it's a jewish thing; apparently, before we were a couple, he would just listen to bing crosby's christmas album and the chieftains 'bells of dublin' whenever the mood struck him. i have told him that i do not wish to hear christmas music unless it's christmas time. and then today, he tried the dean martin thing.

amber: you can't play christmas music now.

ben: but we're out of state.

that was his actual argument. we weren't in pennsylvania, so it was okay to listen to christmas music. maybe this is just as bad as my "i know it's leavened but it's not really fluffy so let's eat it" argument during passover.

good festival. we have some nice cheese for this evening.

Think of a sheep
knitting a sweater;
think of your life
getting better and better.

"auto-lullaby," and other poems by franz wright have won this year's pulitzer prize for poetry. the image you see is one i used in the trinity doughnuts tarot, but have not written the text for yet, and now i'm glad i haven't, because i'll have that stanza to include in it!

here, there is a noticable drop in the amount of knitting being done, but life is definitely getting better and better. i think my knitting energies are going to be concentrated on larger, more complex projects, completed over longer stretches of time. the printing press has definitely altered things. i am enjoying the new perspective.

i love the oriental trading company. they have all this "faith" based crap -- doodads and "crafts" -- that looks a lot like the animation for "south park" to ben and me.

this isn't so much "crafts" as it is "assembly line production".

here are some biblical characters i know nothing about. shadrack, meshack and abendingo. the boys seem rather delighted to have been "thrown into the blazing furnace", don't they? shadrack, meshack and abendingo. coming thursdays this fall on fox.

somewhere, both carl sagan and the historical jesus of nazareth are sitting, shaking their heads in stunned silence.

i've never before had an entry that i needed to put in three separate blogs: knitting, french and gardening!

mme. tessier, i have lost your e-mail address! please contact me! and, for the rest of you, gaze upon the many trucs mignon that were sent to me from paris this week:

un dessin, by my french pal's daughter

yarn samples from her very own stash (see how nicely displayed? it is up to me to choose one, see, and she will send it along to me.)

des graines. mais des grains de quoi? je me demande. florence, you didn't say.

anyway: i'm very excited and happy! this was only my second piece of mail at my brand new p.o. box, and the other piece was a valentine, so this seems to be a bon chance mailbox, non?

apparently helpless against their own niceness, the folks at ex libris anonymous sent me these lovely badges -- three of them -- because i talked them up a bit.

three pink badges! the COOL size, too. the little kind. with the tucked-under pin part. the right kind.

"knit against the machine!" their kind note implored me. perhaps i will.

i am still in the swirl of assimilation -- this past weekend, i saw boy george on broadway. boy george: the most influential role model i have ever had. it's been twenty years with him; i've managed to include him in both the eighties tarot and the trinity doughnuts tarot decks. i can't think of a reason to put him in the knitting tarot, but he is definitely present in my knitting.

boy george is present in my knitting because he demonstrated to me, at a precious young age -- when i yet had a hint of neuroplasticity -- that the best reason to do a thing is to please yourself; and that something one-of-a-kind is worth far more than something off the rack. sure, george was not the only or the first person demonstrating this. he was, in part, a product of the DIY/punk ethic, which is a very admirable one. i've not grown up to be much of a clotheshorse, or even very interested in my clothes -- although i can put on the dog when i choose to -- but without a doubt, george helped form me, and the way that i knit, and i dare say, write.

i think i was very, very lucky to be a teenager in the early 80's. it was an excellent time to be forming a character. among the other distractions enjoyed in that time, people made their outfits. i know i did. even if it was just a lot of intricate pinning and fastening -- i've never been a seamstress -- i was just as happy in my bedroom listening to kajagoogoo and doctoring old clothes as i was doing anything else.

in george's musical, taboo, the character that george plays -- artist and demi-icon leigh bowery -- responds to a friend's plea that he get more organized with his "career" by saying that he designs for only one client -- himself. what a relief this kind of thinking is, particularly after a weekend in new york where every female between the ages of five and sixty is sporting an angora bucket hat purchased from a street vendor. i say today's look is nothing: does that make me "dated"? what's this obsession with time and the idea that what comes later in it is somehow advanced? it seems rather like saying, "the best thing at the salad bar is always whatever's in the last chafing dish." but we all know that could be anything. don't we?

the nice thing about inspiration is that it's very slippery to attack, and unnecessary to defend. consider yourself lucky enough to be inspired by anything, if you are. this past weekend in new york, seeing boy george on broadway, carrying my trash bag bag, i felt quite sure that if the fourteen year-old me could have looked twenty years into the future at the thirty four year-old me, she'd have been very satisfied. and so am i.

... and another good gift idea, if you should happen to need one. and EVERYONE needs blank books -- especially knitters.

you can see that the book i got for myself (yes, i did purchase another as a gift for someone, too) fits my "blue period" quite nicely. this book was made by the clever folks at ex libris anonymous, who take old, orphaned books -- whose covers are probably a lot more fun than their contents -- and make them into sturdy and charming blank notebooks!

the price is right (eleven dollars a book, and that includes shipping and handling), and they are quite one-of-a-kind!

in the last two years i have been busy setting up house, with a partner, for the second time in my life.

much of that "setting up" is being articulated in knitting. as the apartment fills out and warms up, and numerous handknit hats, slippers, sweaters and pillows are strewn about, well utilized here in everyday life, i find myself wanting to taper the flow.

i have been recognizing -- and battling -- my anxiety over halfknit projects vs. the virtual lack of anxiety i feel over half-written stories. i have no problem at all letting essays and short stories sit around for literally half a decade; the length of time they have been "alive" has almost nothing to do with my desire to see them completed. they are, after all, nicely organized in a folder on my computer desktop (and on various backups), and the fact that they do not exist in the three dimensional world adds to the satisfaction i feel in their "neatness". to finish them for the sake of finishing them would be like pinning a friend against the wall and saying to them, "let's get the whole relationship over with. this week."

with knitting, i often feel that something is lost when too much time goes by without working on a project that is just sitting on the needles. and without a written record of some sort, as to what is in progress, i tend to forget -- or believe that i might forget, and end up using energy in an inner litany/roll call of knitting. boring!

the anxiety about half-baked knits vs. half-baked stories does not seem to be related to my actual completion/successes. in the long run, i finish everything, both knitting and writing.

i have endeavored to corral my current incomplete and in-my-mind-only knitting in a convenient checklist-style template that i found with microsoft word. (nothing of the original format exists, actually, except the font size -- but it did help). voila! now i have, at a glance, the ability to see which projects on the needles are time-oriented and which may proceed at any whim; which projects need to come next, and which are merely hypothetical.

i can get the list out, move projects from category to category, delete some entirely, and add new ones. i love it. this practice has eliminated my fretfulness. i am pleased.

i think there might be some satisfaction when finished projects are checked off the list at a slightly faster clip than new ones appear, but i haven't seen it happen yet.

perhaps this need to clear my knitting out of the forefront of my mind is due to the fact that our printing press will be arriving within the next eight weeks or so. of course, i have projects in mind already, and maybe i need to provide a bigger space for those to percolate, given my fledgling experience with an iron handpress.

i am so excited about it: it is as though my lifelong loves of literature and textiles are two vines, and the printing press is the first hybrid bloom.

the printing press will, of course, create a brand new pile of half-finished projects to add to my half-finished knitting and half-finished writing. sometimes i do catch myself wishing for this magical white peaceful space where all projects of all types are finally completed and there are no loose ends anywhere. then i realize that there is a space like this. swedenborg space!

oh, look it up yourselves.

i am filing this primarily under "family textiles" (a rather chilling post-halloween suggestion, really), but it is the living, pulsing, arm and shoulder of my oldest friend, rai. (sometimes ray.)

rai has a lot of birds in her house. cats and dogs too, but she really likes birds.

and she really likes tattoos. she's had quite a few done on her over the years. it seems lately she is picking up speed (both she and her partner carole are, actually.) she's getting these feathers done currently, and from what i can tell, there isn't an end in sight.

tattoos. as with anything else, it really depends on the person who has them, how seriously they need to be taken. there was a discussion at the office about this last week: a young woman was rather painting herself into a corner by insinuating that people who didn't want to get tattooed must not have anything in life that they feel strongly enough about. if they didn't want it drawn on their flesh, they must not be committed to it -- be it a partner, family member, hammerhead shark, or whatever.

luckily, someone (not me!) responded to this young woman's challenge with the calm assertion that it might in fact be the tattooed folk who were less sure of their own devotion -- otherwise, why did they have to try so hard to advertise it to the world? what was the matter with privately and quietly re-asserting that particular loyalty, to person or shark or sports team or whatever, in one's own mind, day by day? and for that matter, this person also said, they had never seen a tattoo that made a person look better anyway.

this wasn't a long dialogue, thankfully, but it was nice to hear two sides of it.

where would rai fit into this dialogue? first of all, she'd probably be bottlefeeding a tiny macaw hatchling in her pocket and wouldn't be listening. rai is on the extreme end of the tattooing spectrum, but she means it. rai has the courage of her convictions.

those convictions were put to the test for me when she got the "tank girl" tattoo. i thought, oh god, why are you doing that? why not just get an "urkel" tattoo? but rai still loves her tank girl tattoo. and that is why it is cool.

and the feathers -- the feathers are just cool because they are cool. because now she has feathers.

i have known rai since i was fifteen, and i worked washing dishes in the kitchen of the boarding school she attended. rather romantic! she was my maid of honor in my wedding, and whatnot. (that was, in fact, nine years ago... today!) rai's been happy with some of her tattoos longer than i was happy being married. "tank girl", "holy matrimony"... can't say one's more important than the other in this house, can we?

hey, did you notice that i did not title this entry "becoming papagena"? i didn't, did i? i've mentioned, haven't i, how i hate those verb(ing ending) + proper noun titles for things. they are rampant. in the few minutes before i fall asleep at night, i tell ben stories about how i want to cultivate microbes that eat all the useless things in the world, like the dead skin on one's feet, and books and movies with verb(ing ending)+ proper noun titles. when will it ever, ever stop?

wowie wow wow wow! a big thank you to lisa of blogdogblog. when i saw that she had made socks from what appeared to be the most interesting self-patterning sock yarn i had yet seen, i got the gimmes, and since that yarn wasn't available in philadelphia, she offered me some from her own LYS!

this will be my first time using a space-dyed yarn. this is a superwash wool blend from germany, and something about the colorway just tugged at my heart. i think i had a culture club twelve inch dance mix that had a cover in these colors -- somewhere between "i'll tumble 4 ya" and "church of the poison mind" (i'm not even remotely joking here. i'm pretty sure this is really why i like these colors.)

my trade for this consisted of the extra string of LED lights i had used to make my skull lights, plus written tips on the actual skulls' construction. lisa, who clearly enjoys a good skull herself, also sent me four of these...



... and this little guy.

i'm already pretty sure that i will use this peu de crâne en métal in a sweater: i envision a plain black pullover (as i am wont to wear) but i am going to work this little guy in, right over one of my nipples. ha! left or right, readers?

what a good mail day. even got my sister's annual halloween card, which is always worth looking forward to.

she's not a knitter though -- i seem to remember trying to indoctrinate her both to knitting and drinking scotch last thanksgiving, neither of which she seemed particularly impressed with.

the only difference between me and many knitbloggers is...

i like to knit. apparently more than many of them do.

i recently began teaching a co-worker, someone with a strong fine arts background, how to knit. i appreciate her mystification with the big, bad world of knit blogging.

i am never gonna be one of these knitters who know the name and number of every color of every rowan yarn and read every magazine and when the magazines come out talk about how THAT design was really THEIRS and they wore it to the "stitches" convention and brandon mabely-mobely loved it but then so-and-so made her own "version" which was inferior in every way....

the more talk there is like that, the less time there is to knit.

there are people out there knitting leper bandages and preemie caps by the truckload. i think that some of them would continue to do it even if the preemies came to their doors en masse to say, "um, hello, thank you for the hats, but our heads are really growing now, we're doing great..." (take heed that ye blog not your alms before men, to be seen of them)...

but you know what else i don't know? how so many people can bust on those knitters -- as well as Unpopular Knitting Stereotypes X, Y and Q -- so repeatedly and so often. there are blogs out there with practically no content OTHER than UPDATE! I STILL THINK PEOPLE WHO KNIT HARRY POTTER WASHCLOTHS ARE INFERIOR TO ME! AND EVEN THOUGH I'VE BLOGGED MY FEELINGS ABOUT THEM ALREADY, THEY PERSIST IN NOT CHANGING INTO ENTIRELY NEW PEOPLE! WE'LL SEE WHAT THEY DO TOMORROW!

again and again and again they post. whatever happened to going off and finding yourself a worthy opponent?

there are people touting "designs" left and right and blogging incessantly as though they believe that the number of hits they get per day is something they can put on a resumé or cover letter to a publishing house. there is this strange, new (people tell me it wasn't always this way) need to be a FAMOUS knitter.

and there is definitely this need to cluster, to put everybody's "buttons" on your blog to show who your "friends" in the knit blog world are. there seems to be a lot of scuttling around trying to figure out who the best people are to ally oneself with. here is a quote from the brilliant writer dawn powell, and i think it's as applicable to knitting as it is to writing, or anything else:

"...the exhausting business of friendly daily exchange takes ten times more out of me than ten hours of solitary writing. Women -- good God -- telephoning, yapping of nothing -- just to keep somebody from working. Knowing it or not, the general ambition of all women is to prevent somebody from working."

i think the general ambition of some knitbloggers is to keep people clicking around online, and either befuddle them or outright scare them into not knittng.

and i wish everybody would stop saying "random" (see the 9/16 entry). it's as bad as books, movies, and whatnot that are titled using the formula (verb + ing) + (proper noun). that stopped being cool with raising arizona. but people still persist in doing it.

i wonder if any new people will do it tomorrow. i'll let you all know.

i got on the C bus on broad street yesterday, and a few blocks later, an older, black woman got on, with a bright red satin team-jacket that read HEROINES OF JERICHO on the back, and was emblazoned with a spinning wheel.

what a freakin' hardcore find a jacket like THAT would be at the salvo, huh? regardless, i did a little research on these heroines, and they are apparently a black womens' masonic organization.

the "regalia" available is rather impressive...

i think i know what i want for christmas now.

so joel goes to south america for seven weeks. before he leaves, i say, "get me some yarn if you can."

i did not say, nor did i imply, "rob a peruvian woman of her livelihood for the equivalent of nine american dollars." however, you know joel. and if you don't, let me tell you something about him: he's the kind of guy who would rob a peruvian woman of her livelihood for the equivalent of nine american dollars.

or not. regardless, joel tells me, with a little help from the locals, he was able to purchase this spindle, and the yarn that was being spun on it, from a tiny lady who apparently thought joel was an idiot and laughed at him. maybe people don't ask to buy other people's yarn and spindles right out of their hands in peru. maybe joel started taking the malaria pills too soon.

joel seemed a little surprised that i wished to just keep the yarn on the spindle the way it is. it's hauntingly artifact-y this way.

so it begins.

my sister meg and i are working on a new tarot deck. after the rather daunting popularity of the eighties tarot, we are doing something much simpler and maybe a little less silly. it is in progress, and parts of it will appear here on notsoswift.com: the knitting tarot.

i say "parts" will appear here because, while i think it will be fun to play with megan's illustrations and my text in blog format, the deck will be created, physically, using metal engravings of the drawings, and printed on the pratt-albion iron hand printing press -- we have named her ludovine -- that ben and i have fallen in love with. ludovine will arrive early this winter, possibly late fall. the knitting tarot will not be the first project we print, but it's certainly on the hot list.

while the primary illustrations for each card will appear online, the bells and whistles, designwise, probably won't. the text on each card will be set separately from the engravings as well, so it won't appear with the corresponding online images. but the blog will provide a running account of cards as they get fleshed out.

the link to the page featuring the in-progress the knitting tarot deck will be located in the sidebar to the right. the notecards that megan designed, located on the sidebar still, will likely stay up through the holidays, but probably not much longer than that. i'm not entirely sure, as that's meg's call. but since people have recently commented on them and said they'd like to order, i would definitely do so sooner than later.

how fast will the blog entries for the knitting tarot show up? pretty slowly. i think the eighties tarot took us a good year. so, don't get too excited yet, but remember -- the sidebar is where to click to find out what's new. the text and illustrations for the deck will not appear on this page.

as time goes on, if you like the images and text and think you would like a handpressed deck of your own, just drop me a line, and we'll see what we can do!

my broad street friend, my biggest fan, the-man-who-would-be-played-by-ossie-davis, was outside of the check cashing place this morning when i walked to the office with my drop spindle.

i don't know all that much about mental illness, but if this man's condition is in any way graphable, suffice it to say he was on a different point in the graph today than on other days when i have seen him. whether he remembered any of our previous conversations, i am not sure. but he zeroed in on the spindle immediately and said:

"what i need to do is get some sheep, and some goats, and bring them to you, so you can have cashmere."

i agreed wholeheartedly, because i thought doing so would expedite the "see you later" part. it didn't. suddenly, it seemed, we were making actual plans.

"i will need about three sheep, and a ram," he said. "it'll be about six weeks from now before they're ready for you. the goats..." he trailed off. "well, i'll eat the goats."

i told him that if he was buying, i'd eat the goats too.

"i do this in homage to you, for your devotion to your craft," he said.

(ben never says stuff like that.)

this is the first time i've talked to that man in awhile. we saw him a few weeks ago, when we were in the car, and he was walking around the subway entrance brandishing a power drill.

ben and i love to look at stupid catalogs at the breakfast table.

we both have a tendency to scoff at the way the advertising industry represents the most mundane products. frankly, we seek this stuff out. we try to keep our schadenfreude aimed at things that don't have real feelings -- like the advertising industry, or j. lo.

but we were unprepared for this.

i have been getting this catalog ever since i ordered the "wonderful" "can't live without them" piece of sh*t "hand-eze" crafters gloves a few months ago. the catalog is full of ugly cross stitch, hideous yarn, and "decorative items" to soothe the blackest soul. i was speechless, though, when i came to this page:

how can sentient humans, in good conscience, attempt to make a link between "family togetherness" and plastic canvas?

on a vaguely related topic, it has bothered me ever since i was a kid that "choosy moms choose JIF" because it is made with roasted peanuts. ALL PEANUT BUTTER is made with roasted peanuts. NO peanut butter is made with raw peanuts. nor is any peanut butter made with necrotizing flesh, methamphetamine, bird droppings... so really, what is the point of getting all sanctimonious about roasted peanuts?

my belief is that the lion's share of the people upon whom the crafting "industry" set their sights are mothers; stay-at-home, midwestern mothers and wives whose sociological "master status" is that of Person Who Keeps The Family Together... i easily envision some desperate woman whose husband and children don't "need" her or respond to her the way they once did. so, until the ice capades come to town... plastic canvas!

what keeps a family "together" like forced, fabricated fun, facilitated by cheap supplies? (other than roasted peanuts?)

when i was a kid, my father regularly threatened to turn our home into a sweat shop, where i would be forced to labor until i dropped dead. i hope that maybe someday i will be that kind of parent.

yesterday i saw kathy. "i need help," i said. "there's something i'd like to crochet but i really don't know how. can you teach me?"

kathy sighed laboriously, as though i had asked her to carry my mortgage for a few months. "fine," she snapped. we walked to rosie's yarn cellar and kathy bought some extra crochet hooks, so my failure would not have to mar her own personal tools.

we found a seat in the park, and kathy looked at the pattern i wished to work on. "god, this is ugly," said kathy, "but at least it's easy. you'd have to be missing your cortex not to be able to crochet this."

i got out the yarn i had brought. kathy handed me the hook. "make some stitches," she said. "i'm not going to do it for you."

i chained a few, excited to have begun my first real crochet lesson. some children skipped by with their nanny, blowing soap bubbles. kathy stepped on them.

"is it finished yet?" she snapped at me. "are we leaving now?"

"i don't think i understand exactly how to get started," i said.

she grabbed the pattern from my hands. "honestly," she said, "we are going to be here all night at this rate."

an old man walked by, with a bag of breadcrumbs for the pigeons. kathy kicked the old man, and ate the breadcrumbs in the bag. "now," she said. "i am going to show you this once. if you don't get it then, it isn't my problem."

with her back to me, she made some movements with her arms. "here," she said, turning back to me and handing me a wad of knotted yarn. "at this point, i've practically done the whole thing for you. can't you at least try to understand my instructions?"

a little bird with a broken wing hopped bravely by. kathy mugged him. i sat staring at what appeared to be a completely random set of loops and knots, afraid to move or speak.

(actually, kathy, it's not going all that well... i may need a book or something.)

an article found by my buddy lisa, entitled "the silence of the lambswool cardigans", has me thinking today: about knitting, spinning, and dyeing, and for that matter, printing. (ben and i are on the precipice of, not only putting off human parenthood for an unforetold number of years more, but of buying a 19th century working replica iron handpress).

i'm having fun spinning my pre-fab batts and sliver, but it is rawther the equivalent of... brownie mix out of a box. which i do use. but i don't use cake mix. and i'm beginning to wonder if i could produce batts as good as the ones i purchase.

but i also love knitting the handspun of my "secret" source. i feel like we're doing something together. i feel like that handspun is a gift to me, which is the way that it feels when lisa illustrates something for me. (like the knitting logo on the right, or the xyz girl or greta the transgendered rooster, who was the logo for night rally.) the article mentioned above makes me think about, and feel grateful for, all these things.

isn't it kind of funny that the day after i first dyed with indigo, we would see this place in cape may?

i've barely begun, and all i can say is get it.

drunk gay guy after the pride parade: oh, look, she's looming!

me: no, she's spinning.

drunk gay guy: looming.

well, it was his day, not mine...

i also saw my friend outside of the check cashing place recently. i was happy to see him and showed him that i had moved on to green wool.

"you've been working in earth tones," he said, "and now you're moving into color !"

he does this very booming, ossie davis-thing.

ben is going to be very surprised when he comes home and finds that we have, not a beagle like i've been threatening, but a brand new Old Black Guy.

this isn't my handspun. it was made by a buddy. i would recognize her stuff just as i would recognize a friend's handwriting, or voice. isn't that something? doesn't that right there answer the question, "why would you make yarn?"

i know just what i'm going to do with all of this. three different projects.

remember the guy on broad street who was talking to me about spinning?

today i'm walking down broad, and there he is, outside of the same check cashing place, half a block away. he has a splint on his hand.

"i was wondering," he yells to me, "why you chose the university of the arts over philadelphia university, the former college of textiles and sciences?"

"i don't go to either," i yell back, "i just do this because i feel like it."

"that's even better," he calls. "that's the artiste in you!"

i had a chance to do a swap with minako, and i took it. she needed some self-patterning cotton sock yarn -- preferably jacquard, and in a beige-blue colorway. it's hard to get in japan.
so i got her some. i also sent along a sock monkey keychain (i did not knit that...) interesting cultural aside/update: minako reported that the keychain figure looked to her like a "glove sprite", but was unfamiliar with the infamous "sock monkey" icon. "glove sprite"?



and i also sent her this teeny, tiny, bone-and-wood crochet hook. anyone who knows minako knows that she likes to make tiny stuff! that wooden hand is just to show how little the hook was. i didn't send her that. that's one of my favorite chopsticks rests.



...and, since i collect chopsticks, the wonderful minako sent me all of these! i love them -- and the little cement chopsticks rest is my favorite. i have not decided yet how to display these yet, minako -- sometimes it takes a long time to match a pair of chopsticks with the perfect chopsticks rest! but be assured that i LOVE them.

finally, a way to combine my love for chopsticks with my love for knitting.

i was spinning on my drop spindle while walking up broad street to my office. a man -- i cannot say he was a homeless man, but can say that he was a dirty man, waiting outside of the check cashing place, ostensibly for it to open -- looked at what i was doing and said, "i love seeing someone spin their own yarn!"

he knew what i was doing. that's more than i can say for most of philadelphia. most people seem to think that i'm just toying with some trendy new street combat weapon.

i told the man i was having a great time with it and he said, "my... ex... used to be a textiles major at university of the arts, back when it was PCA." he seemed a little reluctant to say this, perhaps because the memory of this long ago time, and his current situation, were widely separated. then he pantomimed the use of a loom.

it was a pleasant encounter. better than the occasional pasty-faced bunch of conventioneers in the park who will decide upon spotting me that this must be colonial f---ing williamsburg and that i owe them a demonstration.

when ben woke up this morning, the first thing he said to me was: "i dreamed about sheep that had heads like carp."

i'm sure that this came from a story i was telling him where i was wearing a beautiful prom dress that looked like it was made from mackerel skin, with a headpiece made of catfish whiskers. thankfully, it was not any kind of portend to our day in maryland, which had the best weather of any sheep and wool festival i've visited in the last ten years.

the first time i went to the festival, tim and i drove up in the company of "sister ellie", a nun we had "met" on an america online message board. in subsequent years, we often went with my father, his current girlfriend, and sometimes even met up with family there. this year, ben and i drove while listening to david sedaris CDs.

we did a few things differently this year than we've done in the past: things that really made the day more comfortable. at the sheep and wool festival, the most comfort you can get is that of cleansing yourself, inside and out, of various substances that accumulate throughout the course of your day: lanolin, sunblock, horseradish, animal saliva, sweat, mint jelly. a few bottles of cold seltzer water and a container of wet wipes really make the day run smoother.

also, we ate a spartan cereal breakfast at home, rather that stop and friendly's or denny's on the way. although it was fun to sit near the biker gang that was having their breakfast in the booth next to us last year, it was better to have grape-nuts this morning, to prepare for the onslaught of french fries, lamb ribs, chocolate dipped soft serve and deep fried twinkies that we consumed at the fair.

we shopped, of course. i am happy to say that, as i do dislike to put the cart before the horse, almost everything i purchased was done so with an already-thought-up project in mind. in fact, i found some really perfect missing ingredients for some secret projects. i got no yarn at all, but did get some wool batts for spinning, as well as indigo plants and seeds and a book on indigo, some flax seeds, and a stockpile of very nice handmade soaps.

i almost bought a book featuring patterns on some very detailed knitted historical figure dolls -- henry VIII, an old testament rabbi -- it was intriguing, but expensive, and i had no idea how to fit it into an already too-long list of plans (although i do swear that one of these years i'm going to do hooked rugs. and bobbin lace. one of these years.)

i did go a little overboard, with no particular need in mind, on these. this company has no website, so there's really nothing you can do short of go to newburyport MA and find them. but i spent almost fifty dollars on buttons.

"this one is yummy!" ben said. and truly, they are.

we got a few other plants for outside, including a moonflower vine. mon mec is outside planting them as i type.

i've never before been tempted to link to another knitblog. but everyone -- you've got to see this. from minako in tokyo comes little stitches.

before and after the yarn swap at rosie's yarn cellar . look, some of the stuff i came home with even had a swatch attached to it! the neutral-ish stuff there, the four balls, i had hoped would be appropriate for another bucket hat for benjamin. alas, it is too yellow next to his skin, making him look almost muppet-pink. but i'll come up with something.

... and are ready for the "ultimate in non-orientability"...

how about a klein bottle hat?

maybe it's just the model wearing the klein bottle hat (see link), but i fantasize about knitting them for all the members of jethro tull.

the dude sells them, but offers no pattern. aesthetically, it just doesn't grab me as a project. but somebody out there must be interested in figuring it out.

julie likes to swap. these are really worth it, believe me. ask julie if you've got what she wants! maybe you too can get lucky.

unshrinkable wools! ask for them at fine draperies. (according to babelfish).