Anyhoo, please join me in wishing Ellen a very, very happy belated birthday.

Happy Birthday, Sis!  I love you!

1.  “What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate.  To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.”
–Doris Lessing

2.  Read this poem. 

3.  Watch this video.  If you have children or grandchildren, do you remember when they laughed like that?

4.  Look at your yarn.

5.  Pet your fiber.

6.  “Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.”
–Robert A. Heinlein

7.  Make Caramel Sauce
In a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, place 1 cup sugar.  Allow the sugar to sit, undisturbed, until it begins to caramelize.  Stir with a metal spoon until all the sugar is liquid, golden, and no longer grainy or opaque.  Meanwhile, in a separate saucepan, heat 1 cup of heavy cream until small bubbles appear around the edges of the pan.  When the sugar is ready, remove the sugar pan from the heat and pour the hot cream into the sugar.  Be careful!  The cream/sugar will bubble and froth violently.  (Be sure to use a big enough pan from the get-go.)  Stir the caramel with a whisk and place back over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the caramel is smooth.  Allow to cool before using.

I typically store this in the fridge in a Pyrex measuring cup and heat it up in the microwave to pour over ice cream.  That is, what I don’t eat outright with a spoon.

Oh, and you can make caramel in any amount you want.  Just use equal parts sugar and cream, and start caramelizing the sugar using only 1 cup in the pan.  Add more sugar in 1-cup increments when the first bit is caramelized.

You really should make this at least once in your life, just so you can brag to your friends about it.  (And because it is totally and deliriously delicious–way, way better than the caramel sauce you buy in a jar.  Trust me.)

8.  Check out some cartoons. 

9.  “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.  They shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
Isaiah 40:31

10.  Live in hope. 

First up, a finished pair of socks in Regia cotton.

I finished these several weeks ago and have been wearing them happily since.

Next, another pair in Regia cotton, first sock not yet finished.

 
This colorway of the Regia just called out to me from the nest last week, and I was compelled to cast on.  I think it has something to do with the gorgeous, summery saturation of those reds in the middle of this neverending cold winter.

In a similar fashion, last week I was also compelled to wind this black/grey superwash handspun off into a ball and cast on for yet another pair of socks.  (You see, in my world, it is not necessary or even desirable to finish one pair of socks before starting another.  Come visit!  My world is a happy place!)

This first sock of the pair lacks but the final grafting at the toe.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, when I was heading out to my spinning guild meeting, well, I had to have something to take with me to spin.  Something new!  Something beautiful and impressive!  (Naturally I could not take something I was already working on.  How could you even think that?)  I did a little digging and came up with a black and red superwash mill end roving and another red superwash roving.  I combed them together on my handheld combs and out came:

this maroon roving.  Definitely greater than the sum of its parts.  It has a kind of shimmery beauty that I was certainly not expecting.

What will I make out of it?  Why, socks for myself, of course.

My picks for 5 favorite blogs.

OK, here goes:

1.  The Panopticon
The unbelievably hip (and hilarious) adventures of Franklin and Dolores.

2.  WandaWomanKnits
This woman makes beautiful stuff, and she looks gorgeous modelling it, too.

3.  Stash Amassed Beyond Life Expectancy
Beautiful knitting, beautiful photos.

4.  JoLene Treace Unraveled
Wonderful designs and thoughts on designing.

5.  Redhead Ramblings
Lorinda’s a delightful person who has been a friend to our blog since the very beginning.

There they are–my five picks.  Enjoy!

I am deeply touched.

We are now “it,” and therefore shall now bestow in turn the “You Make My Day Award” on ten other blogs. My five are below and I trust that my sister will shortly add her share.

1. Affiknitty: She’s smart, she’s funny, and she’s just got that certain je ne sais quoi. And also…who’s going to argue with irrational exuberance since 1969? Which is nearly as long as I’ve been irrationally exuberant. Or just irrational.

2. Enchanting Juno: Here’s a woman who knows the uses of enchantment! Also edgy, funny, sharp as a tack, and the proud possessor of a powerful bullshit detector. Love that!

3. Mama Urchin: Beautiful—and I do mean gorgeous—photographs, a marvelous appreciation of the wonders and varieties of food, great cook (again, from the looks of those pictures), kind, gentle, sweet, and smart.

4. Sean’s Soapbox: Okay, maybe a little unfair because he is a real-life friend and a very good one, but I enjoy seeing what he’s knitting and hearing about what he’s up to on the days I don’t see him in person. He’s a fabulous knitter. One of the best I know.

5. Yarn Tails: Diane shares my love of animals, knitting, beautiful things in the outdoors, and people who either shoot straight or keep their safety on. So to speak. A lovely person and knitter to have gotten to know through these internets.

And a sixth: not knitting, but if you just wanna go, “Aw!” check this out: Odyssey of the Tot. Yeah, I have to admit that sometimes I watch the little videos of my friends’ incredibly cute baby over and over…and then one more time. I challenge you to find a cuter kid.

Everyone else can make my day—at least if he or she lives in one of the 22 Super Tuesday states—by voting in the primaries.

Oh, and last, but not least, I’m nearly done with the second Ice Queen:

Scrumptious close-up:

I love it just as much as the first one.

I taught a sock knitting class at Woolcott, specifically a class on how to make socks on two circular needles.

Here is my little class sock.

I feel that everyone should know this technique, which is my standard practice. Even if you decide to go back to your DPs or to magic loop it (or to switch between all these methods), it’s worth knowing about the two circular needle method. Good to have options, you know?

I had five students, all very focused and eager to learn. Although not all that eager to be photographed—perhaps some of them are in the Witness Protection Program?—which is why you don’t see them here.

Teaching is as much an art as a skill, I think, and teaching something intellectual (read: abstract) is vastly different than teaching something primarily physical and applied (like knitting). I’ve done way more of the former than the latter, so I have to admit that there are certain challenges, although I like to think that meeting them will make me a better teacher in the long run, no matter what I’m teaching.

For one thing, there are special difficulties in conveying a skill that relies, ultimately, on having a “feel” for how much tension to keep on the yarn. And with socks in particular, on conceptualizing how what you are doing now in the knitting contributes to the architecture of the finished product, on “seeing” in 3-D and allowing that to guide you in your next steps.

It can be hard to find the right words or metaphor to make these things clear. Especially when these are things you have been doing since you were a rather small child. In other words, in some ways, I find it harder to teach something that now feels “natural” to me (even though it isn’t at all) than something I could still viscerally deconstruct into its component parts.

So these are things I try to be mindful of and work on as I teach. Teaching knitting, though, gives me a greater appreciation for what we do as knitters. Because handcrafts are really quite devalued in our culture at this stage in the game, it can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that this is just some little thing we do, that it is no big deal, that it isn’t special, that anyone could do it.

Which they could. But for most people, it would take a lot of patience and a lot of practice to get really good at it.

So if you’ve gotten really good at it, you should take pride and give yourself some credit.

And if you are just learning, you should give yourself some time and space not to be perfect for a while. In my experience at the shop, adults have a hard time allowing themselves the time to proceed up the learning curve because they are used to having mastery in most of the things they do. They get frustrated learning knitting in a way that kids, who are used to having mastery in almost nothing, don’t.

If I had one piece of advice to give beginning adult knitters, it would be: allow yourself to learn at your own pace, give yourself credit for learning something new, and accept that there will be mistakes and that those are—if I may be a little “Miss Mary Sunshine” for a moment—opportunities for learning.

Eventually, you’ll get really good at knitting, too. And the rewards of that, believe me, will be worth all the difficulties.

Case in point: between McCarthy’s vision of a post-apocalyptic America, my own personal health insurance fiasco, the miserable prevalence of SUVs in our neighborhood alone, the burgeoning worldwide human population, and American stores stuffed to the rafters with pleather easy chairs, Sno-Globes, and underpants made out of petrochemicals, I have spent the last few days pretty thoroughly convinced that the human species will be extinct within a few generations.

And when have I ever been wrong? That’s right. Never.

Um, I can think of a couple of times. Like when you wouldn’t let me eat that groundhog I killed. You were WAY wrong that time. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Right or wrong, though, it’s been a dangerous frame of mind, not only because it has been very demoralizing, but also because I’m really just a hair’s breath away from spending my afternoons standing on the street in Harvard Square ranting about socialism.

See? Dangerous.

Like any good American, however, I’ve been distracted a bit from my role as “Prophet of Doom” by consumer goods, although I have eschewed the pleather and, heaven knows, the SUVs.

As far as I am concerned, this is the sock yarn dye-job to end all sock yarn dye jobs. I just love this yarn and I can’t wait to knit with it. And after all, when the apocalypse comes, we’re going to need warm wool socks, aren’t we? Preferably in attractive colors.

And who do we have to thank for this exquisite stuff?

Madeline Tosh. Yarn shown here in colorway Peony.

And of course, I have continued to knit my second Ice Queen, which I want to finish even if we are all going to go extinct. Because, look, even long term extinction does not relieve us of our immediate mandate to “look good, kick ass, and take names.”

Which, now that I think of it, would be hard to do while ranting about socialism on a street corner.

And then there’s Shelley. Nothing keeps you honest, grounded, and fully in the present like a dog. The other night, we were watching Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man together and Shelley was sleeping at my feet, as is her wont during home film screenings.

Those of you who have seen the film will certainly remember the scene of the two male grizzly bears fighting quite violently over a female. As soon as the fight commenced, Shelley sat bolt upright, ears at full mast, and stared intently at the television screen. She cocked her head to the left, then the right. Left again. Right again.

Then she looked at me as if to say, “Well, I’ll be—if you’ll pardon the expression—doggoned. How’d you get them miniature bears in that box?”

I said, “Shelley, Miss Puppy, the same species that got those miniature bears in that box are the authors of the coming apocalypse. And that’s just the awful truth.”

She looked at me quizzically and gave my hand an affectionate lick. Then she yawned and went back to sleep.

However, in my own defense, I do have to point out that here in northwest Missouri we have been having one hell of a winter.  Some uncharitable persons might think that unfriendly weather conditions could lead one to do more, rather than less, blogging, since one is effectively house-bound for days on end, but such persons have clearly never experienced a tough winter.  In point of fact, one spends a large proportion of time huddled on the couch (or in bed) in woolen garments and blankets, simply trying to keep warm and keep one’s spirits up:  no small task.  Unrelenting ice, snow, and bitter cold can be very lowering.

Because I live alone and can basically do whatever I want to with my living space, the area around my spot on the couch has been gradually filling up with yarn, fiber, pillows, napkins, remote controls, books, and other sundries, creating a sort of bulwark against the cold dark.  I fear that someday soon I will simply disappear into my nest and will have to be pulled out sometime in April, pasty-faced and blinking. 

But I digress.

I have been knitting (in my nest), and have been hard at work on Rumpelstiltskin, among other things.

                            (The observant among you will note evidence of the nest at the bottom of this picture.)

I am now close to the end of the second long side, about to turn the third corner with the edging.  Let me tell you, knitting on this edging has been a b****, like Ellen’s picot bind-off, only worse.  Cause there’s so much more of it, you see.  The only thing I can do is to attempt a Zen-like state of calm and acceptance while knitting on this thing.  Zen-like calm and acceptance do not come naturally to me.  I have more of a “flail around wildly while complaining and whining” approach to life.  It’s a gift.  Kind of a Protestant thing.

When I’m not practicing Zen-like calm and acceptance, I’m wondering whether I will ever, ever finish this damn thing, and whether, after all, it is really worth the candle. 

But I have a vision:  myself, in my winter nest, wrapped up in a lovely lace-weight mohair shawl, fortified against the cold, snow, and wind by the lovely work of my own hands.

Somebody come pull me out in April, would you?

My friend Andrew brought this back for us from Japan, where he spent two weeks over the academic break. I think it is brilliant, especially considering that the contents were Steam Cakes—a kind of Japanese Twinkies—and the English-language product copy on the wrapper gives you…absolutely no clue that you have just received a box of delicious Steam Cakes.

How refreshing that somewhere in this world there is still a commitment to preserving a sense of wonder and mystery! At least for English speakers.

On a more linguistic-philosophical note, I like to think that “Osaka is a town full of an interesting thing,” is not really a mistake, but rather a change of heart. I imagine the copy writer sitting at his desk, thinking about how many interesting things there are in Osaka, how the city is fairly bursting with interesting things. Bursting! He begins to write, “Osaka is a town full!…

Then he comes thudding back down to earth. He can actually only think of one interesting thing in Osaka. Crap.

“…of an interesting thing.”

I empathize. I have had the same experience with my dissertation chapters. “I have written a chapter full!…

Oh, crap.

“…of an interesting thing.”

Only Hillary Clinton.

When I told Alex I had done this, he said, “You didn’t!”

“Oh yes I did,” I said.

He is now absolutely certain that a “Wacko Alert” has been placed on my FBI file. The FBI file I almost certainly have because of my romantic intrigue with a known Communist agitator during the waning years of the Cold War. Ah, those were good times, weren’t they? When we had just one big, monolithic enemy? How I long for those halcyon days again, those simple, happy times when we knew who to hate and why.

But I digress.

While I’ve been waiting for Hillary’s call, I have been busying myself with my dissertation and with Romi’s Ice Queen, a pattern with which I am obsessed.

This is my first Ice Queen, Kidsilk Haze and seed beads. I think it makes me look a great deal like Jackie O, don’t you? Just without the money. (Photo courtesy of SPR-Boston Photography Studio)

A side view:

I love the pattern, although that gorgeous picot bind-off is truly the bind-off that never ends.
There’s a song about that, isn’t there? Okay, all together now!

This is the bind-off that never ends,
It just goes on and on, my friends,
Some people started binding off
not knowing what it was,
Now they’ll continue binding off forever just because
This is the bind-off that never ends…

Oh, we could go on all night, couldn’t we?

My one slight regret is that the beads on this first one were such a close match with the yarn that they produced a—how shall we say?—well, subtle effect.

But I had a lot of beads left. So I started on a second Ice Queen:

A little higher contrast. Same materials, different yarn color.

Thanks for the great pattern, Romi! You definitely brightened up my bleak midwinter with your gorgeous design. And while Ice Queen is beautiful, it is also surprisingly practical; I’ve worn mine nearly every day since I finished it.

Patterns like this make me especially glad that I can knit.