Knitters-Knitters

To Err is Cotton, to Forgive is Wool: The Spite Smock

If there's anything that feels more like butcher's string than unmercerized cotton, it would have to be organic, undyed unmercerized cotton.  It's always amused me that the less is done to a hank of yarn, the more expensive it is.  (Rowan charges much less for "dead" cotton that comes in pretty colors).  I remember seeing a hank of thick-and-thin yarn hanging in the window of The Knitting Basket in Montclair, CA.  It was undyed, unspun, UNWASHED wool with embedded bits of twig and dirt, scratchy as all hell with barbs that were actually visible.  It may have bleated at me, and it cost $45, ten years ago.  I know you're wondering: no, I did not buy it and I regretted this bitterly when I came running back into the store the next day and it was gone.

This yarn is so all-natural that I'm pretty sure it's biodegrading as I knit.  It splits as badly as you'd expect unmercerized, loosely-spun cotton to split.  And yet, I love it.  What is happening to me?  I am clearly Not Myself, yarn-wise, and I find it oddly worrisome to see my tastes broaden.  I define myself by what I don't like just as much (if not more) than by what I do like.  What next?  Will I start accepting the use of "gifted" as the past tense of to give?   Will I start thinking Elizabeth Hasselbeck is perky?  Will I begin to like perky?  I'm envisioning a huge downward slide, and when I hit the bottom I'll be reading Gwyneth Paltrow's blog while eating hemp cereal with Soy Moo.

The organic pile of vegetable matter you see above is hopefully going to become this little coat:

from Debbie Bliss' Knitting Workbook.  The pattern is called "Child's Smock" and it's supposed to be knit in pieces, but I cast on all the stitches for the back and both fronts on one circular needle.  As you can see on the pic below, I'm using lines of garter stitch (2 stitches wide) as phony seams, to make the counting easier when I do the gathering decreases.  The body and sleeves will be in the beige/gray color, with seed stitch hem bands in green.  The sailor collar will also be green.

From  the age of the child in the picture you'd think this coat would be too small for Olive, but Debbie Bliss patterns run very W I D E.  I can be fairly sure that adding a few inches in length is all I need to do to make the 3T size fit short and portly Miss Olive.

Olive will wear this coat on cool days in early fall.  That's a little joke, for all my readers within striking distance of the Great Lakes.  Of course we have no early fall; it goes right from being 83 degrees and oppressively humid to -3 windchill with snow that appears to be falling sideways.  If this fall's weather follows the usual pattern, Olive will wear the coat exactly once, and that will be just as well since by the end of the day it will have grown four inches and the buttonholes will be too stretched out for future closure.

This has the unmistakable echo of a project I will never finish, and which will wrap up its time with me as the grand prize at the end of a quiz on Knitters-Knitters involving historic Milwaukee monuments.  Hopefully by writing all this down, I'm reverse-jinxing the coat into becoming one of those garments that "seems to knit itself" while a pair of socks in New Jersey amounts to nothing more than a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome for the knitter.

Great.  I just blew it.  Now I've ruined my knitting karma by wishing another knitter bad progress.  Sometime next month, expect to see photos here of the Pabst Mansion and the Spite House on Prospect Avenue.

Schlafenkuchen

This weekend my girls made a cake from scratch.  It was a recipe that involved many egg whites and lots of beating, but since they didn't want to lug the mixer to the lower counter top, they stirred the batter by hand.  The resulting cake was a dessert with the density of plutonium.  Yummy and sweet, but capable of bending your fork. A commitment of a cake, a cake you wrestle with rather than eat, and a cake that beats you, hands-down, whether you're able to finish the slice or not.   When you clean your plate you may feel like you won the battle, but somewhere between taking that last bite and entering catatosis, you realize you've lost the war. 

As I started to drift off this afternoon, I remembered where I'd had this cake before.  It's the cake of my youth, my madeleine, if you will.  And I wanted to write about the cake I knew before and all the fond memories I had of eating this sort of cake and then falling unconscious, but of course, I had to wait until I woke up.

When I was in high school I dated a boy whose father was a German baker.  Like my father, this German baker, Mr. S., was a veteran of WWII.  But unlike OFD, he did not receive any veteran's benefits.  In his East German boyhood, Mr. S. belonged to the Hitler Jugend and after the war, he'd spent six years as a POW in France, working in a coal mine.   He came to the US shortly after his release, and saved for years to bring his wife over.  The marriage didn't last long.  My boyfriend's mother had moved out when he and his brother were small, and Mr. S. contested the divorce until Wisconsin changed the law and he no longer had a choice in the matter.  Mrs. S. once told me that whenever she and her sons watched Disney on Sunday nights, Mr. S. would turn his chair around and stare at the fish tank, unable to bear the sight of his family's blithe enjoyment.  He was not a happy man.

Mr. S. did, however, love to cook and bake, and he loved to do it for others.  If you went to his house, you were going to eat a potato-laden meal followed by a muscular slice of cake, and you were going to leave his house with a jar of plums, which he canned himself.  Jew or Lutheran, German or Cuban, you were going to eat yourself silly or risk offending him.   This is how it was.   And if, like me, you were unused to having potatoes three times a day and thought cake was that supermarket confection plumped up with air, you were going to need a post-meal nap. I never ate at his house without falling asleep on the living room couch afterwards.

So this is what I remembered when I ate the cake the girls had made: that small apartment filled with old world brocade, the sound of Mr. S in the kitchen, muttering to his sons in German while they answered in English, and knowing that the only reason the couch wasn't encased in its plastic slip-cover was because I was there.  I feel safe in saying that I was not who Mr. S. would ever have chosen for his son.  And yet, when I was stuffed to the point of shortness of breath, drifting off to sleep on his couch, I felt safe.

To Your Health

Less angst-ridden but still worthy of mention were my visits to the dentist and the gastroenterologist.  If it sounds like I've been doing a lot of looking under the hood lately, it's because we've recently returned from our extended visit to Milwaukee, so that I could have all my annual appointments in one week.  And if you're wondering why I didn't also see the gynecologist for my annual pap, it's because I did that during my last trip to Milwaukee.  Yes, I do know they now allow the practice of medicine and dentistry outside Wisconsin, but I tend to get attached to my doctors.  In fact, the thing that first attracted me to LB was his striking resemblance to my gastroenterologist.

LB Sullivan

 

Jen's gastroenterologist

You may find it odd that my non-emergency medical appointments involve leaving the state, but consider this: Woody Allen, according to Mia Farrow's memoir (I know, she may not exactly be an unbiased source), is so attached to his doctors that he holds a special screening of each of his movies just for them.  He calls it The Doctor's Screening.  So you see?  I could be a lot crazier.

According to Milwaukee dentist, I definitely need root canal--an unpleasant fact that didn't register until after I'd had my mammogram and was no longer hypoxic.

My trip to the gastroenterologist's office was my favorite kind--no gown required, no hopping up on the table, and not even a stethoscope to the abdomen to hear bowel sounds.  The only real reason for the appointment was so that my doctor could verify to our drug benefits provider that yes, I do indeed still have Crohn's, and thus, do indeed have the right to be prescribed Asacol.  Asacol is a drug with absolutely no recreational value and Crohn's is an incurable disease, yet every year, the powers that be must be reminded of both these factors.  After all, we wouldn't want perfectly healthy people taking Asacol willy-nilly, just for the thrill of seeing the cool way the pills show up in their stool--split in half lengthwise.

I learned many things during my gastroenterology appointment, the most important being that my doctor does not intend to retire before I am due for my first colonoscopy.  I also learned that he loves Barack Obama, thinks Sarah Palin is "an idiot," and that he feels McCain's prognosis is Not So Good.  I learned that his Obama sign has been stolen from his front lawn many times, and that each time it's stolen, he increases his number of Obama signs by one.  He's up to five now.  And I learned he has four beautiful grandchildren ( I saw the photos), of whom he's very proud.

May all your doctor visits be this uneventful and off-topic.

Famous Milwaukeeans, Part 1

I came across this while searching youtube for Desi Arnaz singing "El cumbanchero." I didn't find it, but this rendition certainly does not disappoint!

Contest Results!

The contest results are in!  The city is indeed Milwaukee, and that building in the last photo is the Mitchell Building.  Interestingly enough, while I was photographing it I thought I was capturing the old Grain Exchange. Sindi is right though--t'is Mitchell.

The winner of the Malabrigo is: Julie

and the winner of the CD set is Joan.  By now, you both should have received personal emails from me requesting your addresses.  Thanks so much to all of you who participated, and here are a few more photos of our fair city to enjoy, in the gloaming!

OFD, anxiously awaiting our arrival.