D’oh!Mestic

Sometime last week, right when I was emerging from the sadness of losing Buttercup, I got this idea in my head to do an Etsy run in the mid-summer. I don’t know — I’m writing it off as that period of lunacy that crops up after any run-of-the-mill heartbreak. Some people don’t eat. Some people chop off their hair (okay, I did that, too). Some people decide to go into commerce making scarfs.

When I had my brainstorm, I had been working on a lovely fan-and-feather pattern scarf for about two weeks using Rowan’s Calmer blend of cotton and awesome and I couldn’t help but picture the product shot — gorgeous moss green scarf wound around gorgeous friend’s neck, shot in gorgeous early morning light using the Gorgeous Lens in gorgeous Old Town. And about the same time, I was propelled into the opium den for one more ball of yarn to finish the project, because it’s a gorgeous scarf and a gorgeous yarn, and of course I want to sell this in my future (gorgeous) Etsy store!

Except this gorgeous scarf is being knit on size five needles and is. taking. forever. And it’s also going to be mine. All mine.

So that leaves the issue of what to put in this mythical Etsy store in mid-June. But hell, I was in the opium den, where every problem is easily fixed with a simple exchange of currency for goods. Semi-mindless consumerism always solves everything.

So I picked up two hanks of Rowan’s cotton-silk blend Summer Tweed in peach and paged through my anthology of stitches looking for a simple lace pattern and I came up with the above. It’s great. It’s going a lot faster than the gorgeous scarf which prompted all of this madness, and I should have it finished by the end of the weekend, and it’ll make a good starting point for my stab at electronic commerce.

But it’s the damnedest thing. My male colleagues seem fascinated by this new scarf. I’ve had three self-described straight white guys pick up my knitting from under my desk just so they could finger the open work (there’s a new euphemism — teh c.) and ask me how hard it is to work the pattern. My female colleagues are completely nonplussed — at this point, it’s more noteworthy if I’m not working on something during my lunch — but the dudes are all up ons the lace. The want to touch it. To see the progress on it. Talk about it.

I don’t get it. I don’t even know how to begin to explain it. Straight guys love the lace.

I’m semi-drunk on a Tuesday night, listening to Lucy on XM. U2 crooned about the last night on earth and now Gwen’s singing about being just a girl. Buttercup, a sweet little soul, died in The Capt’n’s arms this morning and I have no coping mechanism beyond getting looped on an undistinguished pinot from Sanford and singing along with No Doubt.

Buttercup was one of those sweet little faces who loved unconditionally and didn’t go to sleep until sometime after her fourth birthday, because she was just. so. busy. Maybe she knew her time on this earth was short, because she was constantly up and asking what we were doing or if she could have a raisin. She was always in everything. She destroyed my stash basket. I loved her more than just about everything else on this planet combined.

Goodbye, my baby.

Comforts:

* A tasting glass filled with five dollar shiraz purchased (and opened) two days ago. It has a banana top note that wasn’t there on Monday night and the lovely trademark pepper of the Australian five buck bottle.

* Eight orange tulips

* A salmon roll, a bit of collateral from the Capt’n’s night gig as sushi photographer

* Scrabulous

* The Simpsons movie.

* Chocolates from the other side of the pond!

* More yarn than I know what to do with.

* The cat.

Comforts.

No photos with this one, because I couldn’t stand the humiliation.

The sweater project of the last week’s turned into a bust — for me, at least. I finished the torso this morning and slipped it on with great anticipation. Yeah, I have to keep reminding myself that bulky knits are not for the round girls. The sweater’s great chunky ropes stretched across my belly and added a good thirty pounds to my midsection, and the plunging V-neck I had envisioned femming up the design only added to the “HOLY PLANETOID, BATMAN!” effect.

I’m going to finish the sleeves because one can never judge a project fully until it’s finished, but I know in my heart of hearts that this one was a complete disaster of misguided intentions, and that the only type of person who could pull off this sweater is an underfed emo boy or his equally underfed girlfriend.

I’m half-tempted to start a traveling sweater group on Flickr, getting my friends to take stupid pictures of this ugly, ugly exercise in ugliness. Or I could sell it for a bundle on Etsy — I don’t know. The possibilities are few but seemingly endless!

I’m a touch obsessed with brown right now. Not the average drab shade worn by schlubby accountants in the 1970s, but rich, warm chocolates that were popular last season and are just now sinking into my consciousness. I am, as ever, a slave to Pantone’s trendmavens, even if I’m a little late.

The above pajamas are proof enough of the obsession, but I’ve also got a new sweater on the needles in Lamb’s Pride Roasted Coffee and I’ve noticed that my Purl Soho favorites have all trended towards the chocolate end of the spectrum.

I think I could probably break down the source of the infatuation evenly between trend and holiday — all those Russell Stover red satin hearts will get to a girl this time of year. There might be a pinch of “My Fair Lady” contributing as well. Henry Higgins bellowing “Brown, brown, brown!” was bound to burrow into my psyche at some point or another.

So. Brown. I give it six days before I tire of it.

But before I do, let me tell you about the sweater. I know that after the cardigan debacle, I swore I wouldn’t knit another sweater, but I can’t help it. This pattern seduced me. It’s a vintage jobbie from a Columbia/Minerva pattern book published in what I estimate to be the Kennedy administration (not a copyright to be found) and features a similar cable motif to my Corked gloves. I was originally going to knit it in Mira Sol’s Sulka (a merino, alpaca and silk blend that I love, love, love), but the yarn shop didn’t have enough skeins, so I settled for Lamb’s Pride bulky in Roasted Coffee, and I’m glad I did, because the Capt’n’s already got designs on liberating the sweater from me when I’ve finished. [if it doesn't suck, which it won't. -- teh c.]

And, to my endless delight, I’ve figured out how to knit the bastard on circs, which is always satisfying.

I’ll post pictures once I’ve gotten beyond the bottom edging, but again, I think I’m in love.

Twenty-ish years ago, I graduated from the “Kidz Kin Sew!” training program held at the local vac-n-sew emporium in our little town. The proprietors were Jehovah’s Witnesses who spent many an earnest Wednesday afternoon trying to talk me out of my idea of college, and here, have a Watchtower, but my Episcopalian ass went every week, through two project books, until my pubescent body outgrew the precious little patterns for precious little girls and I moved to the middle school, where sewing just wasn’t cool.

(Strangely enough, those same shun-happy girls would later worship at the altar of Betsey Johnson and talk about how cool it was that some people could like, make clothes. O, hai, public Facebook profiles!)

I’ve done a little sewing since 1989 — a misguided nightshirt here, a hemmed prom dress there — but not enough to require owning my own machine.

Until today. As with the story of most of my ill-thought out purchases, Target was having a sale, and I walked out $90 lighter and the proud owner of a Singer Esteem — which the Capt’n promptly dubbed “Singer Low-Self Esteem, or ‘Britney’ for short.”

Well, like that troubled pop tart, my new sewing machine is a little bit of a hot mess. Loading the bobbin was, er, trying and the top thread had to be threaded just right, otherwise the machine wouldn’t make any sort of forward progress, but once I smacked it around a bit, it fell into line, and whoa, that humor’s getting a little freaky.

I got a sewing machine. Oh, and fabric. And I have great plans involving making a pair of pillows for the downstairs couches, but I’m sure that will take the better part of 2008, so don’t get your collective hearts set on anything past that.

I’m not sure Britney could handle it.

Like King Bill on a particular disappointing Wednesday in New Hampshire, I give up. That’s right, I’m surrendering here and now. My white (vintage, garage sale find) hankie’s tied to a stick and I’m waving it for all to see. I surrender and I for one welcome my Martha overlords.

Because really, it’s just easier to give up and go to MarthaStewart.com and use the advanced recipe search function than to scour through the hits on Google, randomly decide to try out Kathy in Kenosha’s recipe for whatever and then, in a fit of disgust, decide to search the MarthaStewart.com site to see what they have, which is usually better, uses far fewer processed products and is always beautifully photographed.

Sorry, Kathy in Kenosha. I am leaving you for Martha.

Speaking of which, these are just fantastic. The Capt’n took one of my test batch and sighed, saying, “Now I can have Thin Mints whenever I want, and I don’t even have to mug a Girl Scout for them.”

The recipe needs tweaking, because every recipe I touch always needs tweaking. The cookies need to be smaller. They could also stand a 1/4 cup more of sugar. The chocolate coating could probably be a mixture of semi-sweet and milk, rather than bittersweet. And it needed more peppermint — probably a 1/2 teaspoon would do in the future. But damn if those cookies weren’t sassy little bites.

The mint chocolate wafer cookies are part of a three cookie project I have planned for this weekend. Tomorrow morning brings my fallback of the Greatest Cookie Ever (triple ginger) and a macadamia treat which will require a new baking pan, which means that when I’m in Target, I’ll have to ignore the rather severe David Thoreau who lives in the back of my head and warns me from attempting new recipes involving kitchen gadgets.

Thoreau was kind of a killjoy, wasn’t he?

I know, I know. Simplify, simplify — which is the heart of this little confession.

I’m not conflicted at all.

I’ve been knitting for a long, long time. Mom taught me the basics when I was twelve — cast on, knit, purl, bind off — and for years that was it. I never adventured beyond the never-ending afghan, a project which would take months to complete, even though it was the most stupid simple pattern ever: CO 4, K2, yo, knit to end, until it was wide enough, and then, K1, K2t, yo, K2t, knit to end.

I’ve been knitting for a long, long time, but it was only this past year that I became adventurous enough to break free of the stupid simple afghan. At the Capt’n’s urging, I made a hat, and then a sock, patiently following instructions posted on the intarwebs and learning that there was more to the craft than just using two pointy sticks. I started hitting up the local yarn store, bypassing the big box acrylics for real live, honest to god wool. I made a cardigan from a trendy book on knitting, hated the end results and went back to knitting hats and gloves.

I found Knitty.com and Village Wools and became obsessed with knitting with DPNs and cabling. I started altering other people’s patterns — big person socks shrunk down to little person socks, better fitting gloves — but I was still dazzled by the artist who could pick up a hank of yarn and design something new.

And then, about the time my mother gave me a battered copy of “A Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns” by Barbara G. Walker, the Capt’n asked for gloves of his own. He was impressed by the Fetching pattern, but it was too girly. I showed him the complementary pattern, Dashing, but he wasn’t into it. He wanted something cooler, something with cables going up the length of the garment, something awesome.

It’s amazing how much of this new hobby has been the result of the Capt’n gently urging me to expand my horizons.

These gloves are based off the “Cork” cable pattern found in the Second Treasury, but the design, with the cables offset, is my own.

I’m hesitant to post the pattern right away — it feels like my baby, and I’m not quite ready to send it out into the world. Hell, I’m half expecting some anonymous crafter to pipe up and tell me that it isn’t original, that I’ve basically plagiarized a popular pattern that I haven’t stumbled across yet, that I’m a talentless hack, a knitting dilettante, a waste of perfectly good wool.

So the pattern’s not going up quite yet, but if you really, really want it, leave a comment, and we’ll work something out. It’s my baby. I’m sure you understand.