here it is. i'm a little punchy with looking at it by now, and i expect that letting it fall into its natural habitat will give me time to appreciate it more. so much harder to block something wide when it's going to hang, vertically, from a rod. after an hour of swimming this morning i am more sure than ever that the gravitational pull on this planet is downright inhospitable.



in the interest of full disclosure, there's double-sided garment tape from victoria's secret holding the curtain somewhat in place. i have not decided if this will be a permanent part of things or not. also, the little crocheted loops at the bottom, i could have done without, but i knew that when i saw them in the pattern.

i look at both this flash photo and the non-flash one above and think my house must look either like a bergman film or a carl larsson painting. i guess things just start looking kind of swedish when you use a lot of reds and greens in your interiors.



i remain very satisfied with the knitting i did. only slightly less sure of it as a curtain rather than as a prêt à schmatte. handmade items do tend to have a personality beyond what one imparts to them, and this one is putting of a rather moody, painterly vibe, although that's not so out of place around this home.

UPDATE: as predicted, the plastic woven mat in front of that doorway was too much, even for my eye - and my eye would never be hired as a doorman at an exclusive club, believe me. it's rather freewheeling.



instead, i've moved a small painted oilcloth down here, so the curtain can reign...






...and moved the woven plastic mat up to my spinning room. perfect match! (to my eye.)




EXTRA-EXTENDED UPDATE: (it's not every day you finish a lace curtain).

here's why everyone's going to think we live in a brothel now...







and here's what it looks like to our neighbors at night! (and we love our neighbors.)

i bought this floor mat from ten thousand villages. it was made in vietnam, from plastic packing material. it'll be right in front of the door where the curtain i'm knitting will go. it'll steal thunder, sure, but again, we're a little chez pee-wee in our decor around here.

note that flannery is on the mat. in front of the front door. why? because tim called on the phone to ask me if he could pick flannery up around eight o'clock this evening. mind you, he made this call at three-thirty in the afternoon. and it wasn't on a speakerphone or anything. and flannery not only heard it, but - even lacking a part of her brain that can process syntax - UNDERSTOOD every word of it - except, of course, the "eight o'clock" part. so she's waiting at the door, and i guarantee, she will be, until tim rings the bell.

here we are! checking out this new color of this NEW yarn, in the printing room, from which one can see the newly-stained and soon-to-be-poly'd staircase.




our first floor seems to be using green and red more or less like neutrals. other scenes from this room include:

i think a red curtain -- the design is very arts and crafts, and will be going on that light green door you see in the first picture -- with the purplish door leading to the outside -- will work quite well in this room. ben has given his stamp of approval. it's a lot of openwork and is going to require swatching in pattern and blocking and i can't say i'm not excited. because i am excited.

in an article that i read in a health and fitness magazine last week, i found that the all-important pilates workout session can be maximized by sitting in borders an hour beforehand, with hot chocolate, feverishly copying little appliqué patterns out of a nicky epstein book. (hey, these magazines are available to everybody -- you do the legwork.)

since october was highlighted by some very splashy and autumnal events -- the very fall-themed wedding of our friends, and an afternoon of pumpkin picking, ice cream eating, carousel-riding and loudly singing hebrew songs for an hour in the car with a considerably younger set of friends, i have made both sets of friends a little album, with photos from those events included. i haven't handed them over yet, so don't think of the surprise as "ruined" so much as "current".

didn't expect to see THAT, did you?

the template for my frame is made from two pieces of book board. the "photo" on the inside is the knitting tarot's nine of skeins figure. she's cute, and since i have been waxing poetic about these little faces lately, i decided that this one -- a recent favorite -- needed a frame.

the instructions state that one should be using very coarse, and brown, if possible, thread. i find this interesting, and wonder why, in the victorian era, brown coarseness was so intrinsic to the needs of this frame. but sometimes there's no better reason to do a thing than that dead victorians told you to. i, of course, ignored them. i used black.

i stuck upholstery tacks into all the corners (the bookboard is thick enough to allow for this) so that the yarn didn't slide off the points of the star. thread coverage over the bookboard is not 100% perfect, but for the time and energy put into this prototype, i am not displeased. this frame reminds me of the god's eyes my sioux indian girl-cousins made for gifts for the family shortly after they were adopted. i see no evidence that the god's eye has anything to do with being a sioux, though. but i really like the complex multiple god's eyes.

my hands wanted to make a holiday gift for tish. i wanted to give her earrings. here is what i made: it's fishing line knitted as though for a four-stitch i-cord (which isn't really what happens, because the line doesn't want to be i-cord), with star sequins "caught" in it.



lovely against the skyline, even in the morning!






they are, clearly, a pair of earrings that know a good jazz piano when they hear it.




(see tish in her earrings here).

here are the teatowels i made for ben for christmas. they are red and white kitchen cotton (leftover from a disappointing endeavor) and are, obviously, mitered squares. they pose here with my new spatulas (from ben) and our new, long-coveted, chemex coffee pot.

i worked for what seemed like a very long time on these teatowels. i started calling them "teatowels" rather than "dish towels" because when the young (and not-so-young) rittenhouse square mothers in the park would ask me, "what are you making?" the answer "a dishtowel" seemed to bother them. "isn't that a lot of trouble for a dishtowel?" one asked me. "i have the time," i said. and we weren't friends from that moment on.

in a related story, in giving ben his other christmas gifts, i was finally able to explain the story behind How I Hurt My Ankle -- a story that, if you are playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, gives me a rather stellar Bacon Number of one. (if you want the story, e mail me, and i will tell it to you.)