SockLady Spins! Blog
(Quick personal note… happy birthday to my dear knitting buddy, Tony, who I won’t see today but I’m thinking ’bout him. I made him birthday cake last week and took him out for lunch Saturday but it’s still good to send good vibes out there on the proper day.)
Another sock fanatic with a sounds-alike name, Lynne in British Columbia, Canada, knits amazing socks. Some she makes up in stranded patterns she calls fair nordic knitting. Many of her socks are knit from yarn she spins herself. Some she knits from commercial sockyarns.
She is really prolific, and has probably knit significantly more pairs than my mere 108. I met Lynne a few years back, when she was visiting Ann Arbor. A bunch of online socknitters met at a restaurant and had a lively lunch!
I just read a post of Lynne’s on the socknitter list, and she started a blog in December. The current main blog page shows over a dozen pairs she has knit. She’s a color lover like me. Check her out at http://sockladyspins.blogspot.com/
In my own life, I finally slept like there was no tomorrow. I went to bed just after midnight and I slept for twelve hours. I never know what to think when I do that! I obviously needed it, and I have been stealing time to work from sleep time for over a week, but now where has my day gone?
It’s a holiday here (Presidents’ Day, to celebrate George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, who both had February birthdays). My community ed classroom in Haslett is not open so I have the afternoon and evening off, so that will give me some of my lost time back. Ironically, I think I may run over to Yarn for Ewe which is a yarn shop really close to my classroom and a hassle to get to from this side of town. Yarn for Ewe has been my source for the Ann Norling fruit hat pattern since day one. These hats are so perfectly designed, easy to knit, fast, well explained… well, I keep buying the pattern and then giving it to this or that friend. So now I want the pattern and I don’t have a copy in the house.
Right now my friend April has a bunch of friends having babies. I knit a fruit hat for her daughter, Isabel, last April. She is just growing to the point where she can wear the hat, I guess I made it too big, but April thinks my timing is fine.
Anyway, April is good at crochet and has done minimal knitting. She wants to make fruit hats. So I taught her to knit in a circle and she’s merrily starting a hat. I need to get that pattern very soon so I know how long she should knit the tube before starting the leaves. It’s going to be adorable, in very pale pink and pale mint green.
So I’ll call Yarn for Ewe and see if they have what I need. If the pattern is in stock I’ll run over there for a while. On the day when I don’t need to go to that side of town anyway! Go figure.
In other news, I have been needlefelting some fingering weight handspun yarn on a purchased felted beret. I’m making little curlicue patterns that remind me of Nancy Reagan’s short chanel style jacket. Of course, Nancy would always wear red, but this is a soft gray-green/teal with needlefelted turquoise/aqua/white/pink/plum/blue-purple. It looks really good. Better than expected, actually. It takes some time, but it’s satisfying. I was doing this last night at Working Women Artists when everyone else was making collage greeting cards.
A teen who was there thought it looked pretty boring (to stab a needle up and down a zillion times). I told her, I’m not thinking about my right hand stabbing that much. I’m thinking ahead to what shape I’m going to make with the yarn next. She’s right, thinking about the action will make you nuts. It’s sort of the same with knitting socks in stockinette tubes. I knit something like 15000 stitches to make a pair and almost none of them require thought. So it’s a calming repetition, a twiddling of the thumbs, a worry bead.
I’ll have a pic of the hat when it’s done (I’m about halfway after one night of work on it, we’ll see when I pick it up again). Meanwhile, more Africa pictures.
These photos were taken in an area of Nairobi called Karen. This is the area where Karen Brixsen, author of “Out of Africa,” lived. 1) Wooded area in the Giraffe Center complex. The giraffe I fed, Daisy, had a six-week-old baby who is hiding in this picture, very near the middle toward the bottom of the photo. Giraffes have amazing camoflauge so she’s hard to spot if you don’t know where to look. Spot her by looking for the intersection of two branches in an “X” shape, and look directly to the right of that intersection. The baby is facing away from the camera, so we have a view of the tail side. See detail photo at bottom right… it’s fuzzy, but do you believe me now? 2) Garden outside the house where Karen Brixsen lived. This place is a museum now, and you can not take photos indoors but you can take photos of the gardens. Just gorgeous!!! This is the only place where Altu and I lost track of where the other person was… and it was not all that big, but all the trees and gates and hedges made it easy to get lost. 3) Arbor/walkway at the Karen estate. Gorgeous, isn’t it? And it would be very practical in a hot climate, to sit under greenery in the summertime. Feeling the breezes but with blocked sunshine, would be heaven.