I'm continuing, bit by bit, to knit away at the yoke of my Tea Leaves cardi. Progress is admittedly slow here, but I've been super busy over the last week. So much so that on Monday, around mid-day, I stopped and said aloud to myself, "Today is the busiest day." And it kind of was. But there have been some free minutes for knitting, and so I've made it about forty rows in.
pinhole viewboxes from Volume Eleven
I've also been occupied with tying up the loose ends on Volume Eleven of Alphabet Glue. I'm surprisingly close to being finished, so much so that I might even classify myself as being ahead of schedule this time around. But it never seems to make good sense to do end-of-the-week launches of a new issue, and I'm sure that there are ducks that have escaped the row, so to speak. So, I'll plan for a Monday release.
When not knitting or Gluing, I've been reading. I'm currently about three-quarters of the way through Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott. It turns out to be the perfect book for me to be reading right now, and I've been enjoying every word. "Courage is fear that has said its prayers," she says. Yes, indeed.
Sometimes people ask me what my daughter is like in actual life. Or family and friends that haven't seen her for awhile ask what she is up to these days. The other day, I noticed this Playmobil princess of hers sitting on the edge of the bathtub and I thought, "This. She is like this." The princess in swim flippers and a snorkel mask. Always in a dress, but never turning down the opportunity to climb a tree. A funny, quirky, clever mix of the girlie and the practical.
Unpredictable, but (usually) in the very nicest ways.
Perhaps you fellow East Coasters are already aware of this, but I do feel the need to state, on the official record, that it is very, very cold here. I think that today's low is something like negative eighteen and because I am neither an Arctic explorer or a native of Siberia (or northern Minnesota for that matter), I find this turn of events ever so slightly shocking.
The windows of the house are covered in this feathery, thin ice that is pretty to look at, but obviously indicates outdoor conditions that might be best avoided. It is sparkly though, and it makes us house-dwellers feel awfully grateful for our cozy indoor environs.
The baby is taking advantage of the extra time spent housing-about by working on his incredible case of bedhead. Mariam's hair used to look like this in the morning when she was a peanut as well. Actually, it still kind of does a lot of the time. I love it.
It turns out that everybody enjoys a good pomegranate when it is made available to them. The baby especially. He sat at the table and ate seed after seed with his little fingers this morning, affording me enough peace and quiet to drink a cup of coffee undisturbed. Amazing.
And, it being the last week of January means that I am all but living in Glueland. Designing, printing, cutting, pasting, digging through stacks of library books and compiling lists of favorites. Volume Eleven is coming together quite nicely, and should land in your virtual laps sometime very soon, although I'm still in the midst of determining exactly which day this will be.
After spending my free weekend moments knitting up about a billion gauge swatches (okay, more like four) I finally settled on a needle size on cast on my Tea Leaves cardigan. I think that this sweater is my first experience with such acrobatic knitting. Doubling stitches and changing needle sizes in one row, only to cut the number of stitches in half on a smaller needle just a couple of rows later. I tend to be a "begin at the beginning" and "end at the end" type of knitter, often being, I admit, overly focused on the part where I am finished and can move on to the next project that has taken up residence in my crowded brain. So it is as much to my surprise as anyone, I suppose, that I am enjoying this pattern so much.
I've been contemplating the purchase of a yarn bowl for some time now. The animal life around here has nothing if not affection for balls of yarn that have rolled off the table mid-stitch and this fact is becoming an ever-present source of consternation. The temporary fix du-jour is to put my ball of yarn into a little candle holder that we keep on the dining room table. This works well enough, but if anyone has recommendations for a simple and aesthetically pleasing ceramic or wooden yarn bowl, I would be much obliged.
I was doing a bit of digging around in the living room book bins this morning, trying to locate our love-worn copy of a particular Eric Carle book when I ran across Press Here, by Herve Tullet. And then I remembered that I have been meaning to share this book with you all for the last many months, but somehow keep getting distracted by things like books about submarines or snow. But Press Here is a brilliant little book, absolutely worthy of having its Library Monday in the sun, so to speak, and so it shall.
I suppose that the first thing to know about Press Here, is that it is very likely a complete departure from any picture book that you've read before. Indeed, Press Here reads more like an interactive instruction manual than a typical narrative tale, with each successive page appearing to change for the reader based on the following of directions on the previous page. For example, one page tells you to press the pictured yellow dot with your finger, (which, of course, being a dutiful reader, you do) and when you turn the page, you might find that the dot has turned red. Or multiplied.
Flipping through the book this way- reading the instructions and following them before turning the page- the reader is given the impression that the book itself is an active participant in the process of reading, changing with each new page, magically responding to the actions of the reader's finger. Very young readers find this amazing, and may even be slightly bewildered at first as they try to figure out just what is going on. Older readers, even if they quickly figure out just what is really happening, will be amused at the unique and clever approach Tullet takes with this book. And grown-ups? They will be massively relieved to encounter a children's book that is unpredictable, unexpected, and absolutely delightful. I have as much love for anthropomorphized animals and their need to learn to make friends, or have good manners, or find lost things as the next girl. Believe me I do. But this book is a big breath of fresh air all the same. You can bring home a copy of this one guilt free, because I promise that you don't already have anything like it.
Oh! And Ginny has a fantastic post up today with all sorts of great pictures of her kids putting Volume Ten to good use. Definitely check it out. Makes a girl feel proud, I tell you. And since there have been so many new visitors here and to the Alphabet Glue website as a result, I'm extending the January sale a bit longer. Enter "twenty" at checkout for 20% between now and next Monday.
Thanks to all who expressed important concern about my need to have the new yarn in hand as soon as humanly possible. I did indeed greet my mailman at the front porch, throwing open the door and yelling "My yarn!" when I saw him coming up the stairs. He did an excellent job of keeping his game face on, but I suspect that my enthusiasm was unexpected.
In other news, some people have taken a liking to spending a good deal of time at the dining room table "having a snack." This is an excellent location for extended hang-outs as far as I'm concerned because it minimizes both cat chasing and crawling into the bathroom at top speed and slamming the door before grown-ups can catch up. Everybody wins- cat included.
Also, it is zero degrees outside right now. Zero.
The Pioneer Woman has a nice post up about Ginny right now, and I would definitely recommend checking it out. And not just because it is fun to see an Alphabet Glue project in action (the acorn boats!) on such a hugenormous website. That is nice, of course, but nicer still is Ginny, and it is cool to see her lovely little corner of the internet being shared with a wider audience. I think that I have mentioned this before, but Ginny and I do a good bit of emailing back and forth and really, she is just an exceptionally kind person.
Alright, then! Off to knit a gauge swatch! Again. Remind me that I should always start at least one needle size up from the one recommended in the pattern, eh?
So, despite my longing glances at the mail truck each afternoon, it would seem that my yarn for the Tea Leaves sweater I'm planning to knit has still not arrived. I'm quite positive that today is going to be the day, and that I will be able to greet my mailman with enthusiasm when he trudges up the snow covered stairs to our door. At least I hope that this is the case because stalking your mailman is probably against at least one federal law.
Since I finished Mariam's mittens over the weekend (no photo taking opportunities are available this morning because she wore them to school today), I've had to rely on my backup project the last few days. The Backup is actually a perfectly good project, it is just that the lovely, lovely yarn that it makes use of results in progress that is preternaturally slow. So, as much as I am pleased with the sweater so far, I need to take breaks from it so as not to feel that I am trapped in a knitter's Myth of Sisyphus. Not to be dramatic or anything.
A couple of other little notes:
- Amanda is doing a limited second print run of the first issue of Kindred. And I say that that you should probably jump to it considering how quickly the first run sold out.
- The January Glue sale continues. Enter "twenty" at checkout for 20% off all issues.
- Stephinie is having a sale too! Check out the Gypsy Forest winter sale here.
For the last couple of months, Mariam and I have been casually reading our way through The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester by Barbara O'Connor. My girl has been pretty interested in spending her couch time engaged in independent reading lately, and with Dan being gone for most of November and December, I'll admit that read-aloud time has been tricky to find consistently. Which is exactly why it took us until today to finish this book.
The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester is the story of a boy named Owen, and a summer spent living with his parents at the home of his ailing grandfather in a small, presumably rural, southern town. The titular "fantastic secret" lands in his world when it falls from a freight train one evening, and before the end of the book it has turned his restless summer into a proper adventure and even helped him to make friends with his former adversary, a know-it-all neighbor girl named Viola.
As is the case with another of O'Connor's books, The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis, this novel might draw some small objections from parents of particularly sensitive readers. The dramatic tension is not overly intense, but our kid characters here do defy adult edicts on occasion and are not particularly kind to one another in their lead-up to learning to work together. I did find myself doing a bit of on-the-fly editing of some of the the insults that get traded during dialogue scenes. That being said, my impression from Mariam's reaction to all of this is that it is simply a realistic approach to writing about the way that kids interact with one another when grown-ups aren't looking over their shoulders. Plus, all of this conflict leads into some reasonably triumphant cooperation. As in Popeye and Elvis, the reader's invitation to witness the eventual formation of unlikely new friendships, in cooperation with O'Connor's knack for an ending so pitch-perfect it is almost luminous, makes for a book that you can just really and truly enjoy.
The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester is a book that speaks to the importance of approaching friendship with openness and of following your heart when it tells you that something is right- even when right doesn't mean easy. And I love that the book expresses these messages in a way that doesn't feel heavy-handed or preachy but instead just feels like the natural course of action. There is always something satisfying about a character doing just what you hoped that they might.
Oh, and if you are an Alphabet Glue family and want a hint about just what young Mr. Jester's secret is, check out which booklist this title landed on when I included it in Volume Nine.
And don't forget- the January Alphabet Glue sale is still on. Enter "twenty" at checkout for 20% off!
It turns out that the January Thaw is not just a song by your favorite hipster-slash-folk band. No, it is a real thing and it is coming to a winter landscape near you. Or, near me, rather. Every year in January, with surprisingly reliability in a place with otherwise notoriously unreliable weather patterns, we have a warm spell. Of course the word "warm" here is used to describe temperatures in the thirties, so I suppose all is relative. But it is certainly warmer than it has been, and the result is melting snow, dripping icicles and quite possibly, the realization of an embarrassing concern of mine.
Those of you who engage in Twitter based banter with yours truly already know of the pumpkin (well, more of a large, blue colored squash, actually) that somehow ended up living in my trunk well beyond the appropriate seasonal time allotted to such things. Halloween came and went. Pumpkin in the trunk. Thanksgiving dinner was had. Pumpkin in the trunk. And then one day, without really thinking about it, I took the pumpkin out and placed it on top of the bushes next to the driveway. I planned to come back for it when my arms weren't full of wiggling baby, but that never seemed to happen. And then it snowed almost two feet in a day and a half and my pumpkin problem was safely hidden from spouse and mailman alike.
Until the January thaw. Now everyone is going to know about my pumpkin stashing proclivities unless I get out there in the slush and do something about it. Hmn.
In other news, I had very much meant to have an Alphabet Glue special of some kind on offer in honor of this new year we are all beginning, but I got busy and just sort of forgot. So, between now and January 20th, enter "twenty" at checkout for 20% off issues of Alphabet Glue. And, if you download Volume Nine or Ten, I'll email you a free copy of your choice of Volume Four or Five. Just make a note of which one you'd like in the "notes to seller."
I'm back! Oh, you didn't notice that I was gone? Ah. Well, I was. Just a little bit though. We drove down to Cambridge for a few days for Dan's residency interview there. It all went decently well with the exception of trying to squish too many family members into a suspiciously small "queen" size hotel bed. That, actually, was a mess. When I looked at my clock yesterday morning and saw that it was nearly seven, I sat upright and said outloud "Everyone. It is now seven. Can we get up now so that this night can be over?!?" They unanimously voted "yes."
All this is to say that I finished the mittens that I was knitting for myself, and, finding myself with a bit of extra yarn, decided to cast on a pair for Mariam as well. It would seem that I really like knitting mittens. It is a remarkably satisfying endeavor, even when one discovers that two right mittens have inadvertently been knitted up and there is frogging to be done. In her book, Knitting Without Tears, Elizabeth Zimmermann has this to say about the making of mittens:
Aha! Many people's sole activity in the realm of knitting. To them I say, skip this section. You are making the very best mittens, keep right on.
--- Eliabeth Zimmermann
Something about this makes me laugh a little every time that I see it. But after doing some mitten knitting, I completely understand what EZ means. So much.
But moving on from mittens, I am hatching plans for the next knit, and thought that I might invite you all to knit along. I mentioned on Twitter the other day that I am planning to do a Tea Leaves sweater, and a bunch of folks chimed in to say that they were thinking of doing the same. My friend Sarah and I are going to be knitting it together and both have gotten the pattern and ordered yarn. I ordered mine from WEBS, but it hasn't arrived yet. So, if you think that you might like to knit a Tea Leaves cardi (or a Tiny Tea Leaves) just leave a comment here. I'll set something up for next week where we can all see each other's blog posts about progress (or just chat here in the comments about how it is going). Yes?
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