Some Juvenalia, and a sweater.

I am searching my house up and down for a poem I wrote last year on same random sheets of paper.    Just to be safe, I pulled out my poetry folder from the writing drawer and check to make sure I hadn’t out it away – I hadn’t.      It was interesting though to look back at some of my writing that dates from the late eighties and early nineties, when I was a child.

Very little of this material is dated,  but two of these pieces (Circles, and It Couldn’t Last)  are typewritten,  which means I most probably wrote them the summer I was 13, while staying with my grandparents in Wyoming while the rest of the family moved from Wyoming to Illinois.    The untitled tanka is from a school project on poetry – a little volume demonstrating different forms.   Other poems in the handwritten volume reference the Horned One and the Lady of Sea,  placing the writing somewhere between the summer ’84  when I first encountered goddess spirituality while searching for books by Andre Norton, and ’89,  when I got my first typewriter.

It Couldn’t Last

Laughing in love,

saying words we neither meant.

If time in love is wasted,

it was wasted time well spent.

 

Circles

Circles circumscribe the world.

Red slashed for no, green lit for go,

and foiled latex assuring save sex.

Coffee mugs, and water jugs,

the throat the killer throttles.

The needle, pill, the cigarette,  and of course the bottles.

Sugar cookies, ice cream cones,

smiley faces, aerodomes.

With each life take, each baseball hurled

another circle round the world.

 

Untitled

Blue sky high above.

Quite bright sun glowing high up.

Birds’ shadows darting

across the ground.   Dark, smooth like

stones skipping across the water.

 

And the sweater:

  Some assembly required.   5 skeins of golden brown, two of white,  100% wool, and so old that the labels are just ‘ounces of worsted’, with no yardage.    Roughly estimating 150 yards per skein,  that gives me just over a thousand yards,   enough for a small sweater.   I’m thinking colorwork in the yoke, maybe at the cuffs.

 

A first.

Dragonfly Socks!

This is the first pair of socks I have ever knit exactly to pattern! Except the pattern calls for a gusset heel, and I am doing a short row heel. But I think that is okay, because in the pattern the designer says she knit them with a short row heel, but wrote it out with a gusset heel because that is what everyone wanted.

To fix or not to fix.

I have 8 inches of the panel knit so far — I need to knit to 11 inches, and then I can start the flap.

I finally figured out how to address the issue I had with the cabling on the center of the panel — it’s a little hard to see in this picture, because of the grey yarn. Now I need to decide if I want to just leave the cables as they are, with all my experimenting in sight, or drop the six or so stitches involved back to the beginning and re-knit it all in the fix I worked out. I’m leaning towards just leaving them, since it is pretty inconspicuous, and it does make a good story. Plus dropping and re-knitting a section of the cable panel would be a bit of a pain.

Snapshot 5/14

The cable pattern on my little bag is giving me problems. It’s a pretty pattern, but it has a disconnecting jog in a few places that is annoying me. I’ve been fiddling with different ways of addressing it.

I also got my weekly grocering done, so my kitchen is full of yummy goodness, and the Bee had tae kwan do in the evening. So it’s been a pretty full day. No pictures.

Friday Haiku

It is spring – summer
is hiding between cool dawn
and firefly dusk.

What I was knitting just before I put it down to write this.

A small bag that I found on Ravelry.  I think it will be just the right size to carry my netbook in.

The pattern is Celtic Memories (I am not sure if you need to be logged into Ravelry to see the pattern page) , by Ganiggle. I am working on US3 circs, using a skein of grey Patons Classic Wool Merino from the stash — it should be just enough for the bag — if not, I’ll knit the flap and strap in an accent color.

This is a a great little stashbusting project for me,   and I am having a lot of fun knitting it.   The cables travel very organically,  and I can tell that in another repeat or so I will have the pattern down pat, making this a nice travelling knitting project.

Snapshot.

Creme Earl Grey tea.

Swatching for the Dragonfly socks.

Sleeping comma of a dog to one side.

News of the day.

I have finished carding and spinning all the Cormo.  The last two bobbins of singles are waiting to be plied,  and once they are plied I can spin the final yarn, and then the Cormo will be done.

I have made a Navajo spindle for the Navajo spindle class I will be taking in October.  It cost about ten dollars to make,  including buying a seven dollar drill bit.

I am knitting a round pink and white dishcloth – it is the first new knitting I have done this year.  Everything else has been stuff that was on the needles in January.

I have decided to comb as much of the sweater fleece as I can, and card the rest.  That will give me two yarns, and between them I should have plenty to make my sweater.

I am trying to decide how to process the Jacob I have.   Probably I will card it, because it has a very short staple, and the black and white locks have different staple lengths.   I will blend some, and keep others black and white.

This post brought to you by the letter F.

F is for Fair – the Stark County Fair:

At the Fair, F is for Fleece – which I did not succeed in buying at the 4H Jr. Fair wool auction this morning.  Did you know that a prize winning fleece can go for over $300?   Neither did I.

F is for the Full Moon, which was on Friday (F is also for Friday,  but I’m leaving that out since this is Saturday),  and not for vanilla incense.  But if it were for vanilla incense, it would be for the Ohio made incense from Rita at CommonScentsEtc.  Her incense is hands down the best I have ever used.

And finally, F is for Finished!    DasHusband’s green socks are done!

Tuesdays are for knitting.

I am still working on the green socks – endless rows of ribbing.   And I am contemplating using some of my homespun to knit a plain garter stitch triangular shawl.  I need to pull it all out and see if I have enough yardage in similiar gauges.

Mondays are for spinning.

In an attempt to create a slightly more balanced and less conflicted life,  I am hereby declaring Mondays my designated spinning day, and Tuesdays my designated knitting day.   Hopefully this will let me spin and knit without guilt that I “should” be doing the other.

That being said, on to the Cormo!