Happy Halloween

OK, aside from “have a happy one,” I don’t have much to say about Halloween, actually. We forgot to carve a pumpkin this year, and our costumes are homemade but pretty half-assed (I’m wearing a Kittyville hat, Rahul’s wearing his mustache hat.) I have a bag of Fun Size Kit Kats at the ready (but this size is the least fun of all! They should name the Costco-sized, bigger-than-Family-Size, baking-and-industrial-use-only candy bars “Fun Size.”) No children have come by, yet, though.

Mainly, I’m really looking forward to the show we’re going to in a couple of hours: local Madison bands are impersonating greats of the past, many of which are particular favorites of mine: Spinal Tap, Nirvana, Oasis, the Stone Roses, Weezer, and the Kinks.

Aside from that, tomorrow is a big crazy Halloween party in downtown Madison (not sure if we’ll go) and more than that, tomorrow is my trip with fiber-lovin’ friends to the Wisconsin Spin-In! It’s nearly 2 hours away, but hopefully will be lots of fun.

Here are two things I want to share with you today:

Are you ready to see the cutest baby sloth in the entire world and squeal over sleepy sloth cuteness? Then watch this Youtube video. Sneezing panda, you have been deposed from the Youtube animal baby throne.

Also, I just published a new cowl pattern named Metheglin. I’ve been working on this for ages (Nicole helped me test knit this back when I was still in Bloomington) and I finally finished reformatting the chart and instructions. You can see the details of the pattern here. It’s kind of Teva Durham-meets-Louis Comfort Tiffany, kind of science fictiony, kind of Arts and Craftsy, and because it uses so little yarn, it’s a great showcase for small amounts of something special–a variegated or self-striping main yarn would look great in this pattern, contrasted with a solid color.

I’ve been wearing these cowls a ton while I’m working at home. The garter stitch makes a thick, dense, cozy fabric that traps heat around my neck like a little chimney, and the tidy cowl feels much easier and less cumbersome than wearing a scarf at home. I like the fact that the base of the cowl flares to cover the top of my chest, an area that gets cold easily. (I’d call that area the dickey zone, but that sounds like something else entirely.) The only problem with wearing it is that I really look like a crazy woman when I’m all kitted up in my usual work-at-home outfit of blue penguin pajama pants, handpainted, handknit sweater, and this cowl and the UPS guy comes to the door to have me sign for a package. At least I’m warm.

BRAAAAAAAINS

“What do we want?”

“BRAAAAAAIIIINNS!!!”

“When do we want them?”

“BRAAAAAAINNNS!!!”

This was the rousing call to undead political action that echoed through the streets of Madison, Wisconsin last Saturday at the 2008 Zombie Lurch. Like dead rights activist Reg Shoe, whose livejournal can be read here, these fine members of the postmortem population were lurching for zombie rights (and delectable brains.)

We stopped by to see them and saw an impressive zombie “Thriller” synchronized dance routine:

The zombies included hikers who had met with some kind of unfortunate ancient evil on their backpacking trip, a scientist who had been bitten by a rabid possum, and a zombie holding a “Zombies for McCain” sign–unfortunately, I didn’t get close-ups of most of them.



Check out the zombie biker at the left of this photo:

A neuroscientist was monitoring the situation while protesting zombie brain waste:

Local news story here, youtube photo montage with excellent soundtrack choice here. (You can see the top of my head (in turquoise bike helmet) in the foreground at 1:36. I’m faaaamous!)

The zombies started at the Capitol building and lurched down the main drag, State Street, until they reached the university. Every so often, the calls of “BRAAAAAINS” would be interrupted by a moan of “BUUUUSSSS,” and the seemingly chaotic mob of zombies would flow smoothly over to one side of the street to let the bus go by.

A woman standing outside Ben and Jerry’s said to me in a puzzled, wondering tone, “What would ever possess a group of people to get together and do something like this?”

Whatever the reasons–delicious brains, camaraderie, Halloween, a sense of humor, raising awareness of Election Day next Tuesday–it was fun! Our friends Steve and Jeanne were visiting us over the weekend, and even their dog Nola got into the undead act:

Back in the land of the living, here’s what’s on my needles (STILL Flicca: I’m perhaps 1/3 of the way through the sleeves now, and then I’ll have to set them in and knit the collar and front bands. This cardigan is taking forever):

And here’s what’s on my wheel:
3.5 beautiful ounces of hand-painted merino in “Tapestry” from my new favorite Etsy seller, Bee Mice Elf. I’m currently trying to produce soft, thick, knittable, self-striping singles, but I have a tendency to spin too fine:

She also sent along this little sample with my order:

It’s the same stuff I spun up for my Quantette, and I also spun up some of her merino in the “Early Drop” colorway last month–spun over the fold for extra bounce, and twisted into a two-ply:

She doesn’t have too much listed in her shop at the moment, but you can special order a 4 oz. braid of any of her fall/winter color collections anytime, and they’re all totally gorgeous. I think the Quiet collection is my favorite, particularly Pensive Plum.

The Urban and Coastal collections aren’t up on her photostream yet, but you can see them in her sold items by clicking through those links.

Well, that was weird

I’m probably going to wind up making knitting nemeses or something by posting this, but I just came home from the weirdest Stitch ‘n’ Bitch of my entire life. Dude.

I’d been to this particular group once before. I’d made plans to meet up there this week with turtleknitter (Mary)–we were going back and forth between either meeting up on Thursday or going to the S’n'B tonight (Wednesday) to see the musician they’d booked. Apparently he’d come to play once before and a lot of people liked his show. Having listened to some clips on his MySpace page, I said I was interested in going to see him, so Wednesday it was.

I almost cancelled–I had a bunch of work to do by EOD today (spent a couple of hours finishing it up once I got home from knitting)–but decided no, I should make the effort to go see some live music and meet some new people.

The S’n'B is held in a very large local cafe with lots of different rooms. The concert was in a room all the way in the back. When I arrived, people were sitting around four tables arranged in a circle; on the other side of the room was a stage with folding chairs set up in front. I sat down, started chatting to the people around me, and not long after that it was time for the music to get going. The organizer of this S’n'B asked if we should perhaps either move to the chairs in front of the stage, or move the tables forward so they all faced the stage. Since yarn and coffee was already spread out everywhere, there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm about either idea, and the musician ended up just sitting at a chair at the circle of tables.

He requested that perhaps we could all stop talking and quietly listen while he played, if that would be OK. I have to admit I was kind of put off by this, since I had come to the S’n'B pretty much specifically to socialize, and the postings about the concert hadn’t really made it clear that we weren’t supposed to talk at all. I guess I’m not sure whether the default at a concert should be talking or not talking, but I’ve been to a lot of coffeehouses over the years, worked in one in high school, and I’ve never been to one that demanded absolute silence from the audience. Usually the normal background activities go on during the music–talking, drinking coffee, studying, working–and if the musician is really good, people will shut up and listen.

The woman next to me kept talking to me and showing me her knitting. I admired (she had some great fingerless mitts made from Rowan Scottish Tweed Chunky in a deep purple color, and a newly finished merino hat) and after the first song, we were admonished again by the musician: “please, it would be really helpful if you would not talk while I’m playing, it’s really, really distracting.”

“Well, it’s not like you even wrote that song yourself,” said the woman next to me (he’d just played a cover song).

“Well, this one is one I wrote myself,” he said, and went on playing.

So we sat quietly for a while and listened to the music. Mary came in, and sat down across from me–I sneaked over and gave her the skein of handspun I’d been saving for her:


(posed below alongside my new Sundara yarn:)

Mary had given me a huge chunk of this delicious purple Miss Babs BFL batt at our last spinning meet-up, so I thought it would be nice to give her the squooshy, lofty, pretty Navajo-plied handspun that the batt became. (As it turns out, it was great timing, since it was her birthday on Monday and I didn’t know! Happy birthday, Mary!)

I admired the mittens she was making vewy, vewy quietly and then went back to my seat.

The musician played a cover of “Androgynous,” by the Replacements, which I appreciated, and a fun song about sneakers. He apologized if he had sounded bitchy earlier, and told us he had been to Africa and “it’s amazing how it changes your life.”

After a bit, the musician took a break, and the organizer made an announcement that anyone who felt like talking should go into the other room before the music started up again. “It’s not just distracting for him to play, it’s distracting for us, who want to listen.”

I may be misquoting a little here, but this is the gist of what happened next:

The musician called out to the woman next to me, “You should try working on your attitude!”

She retorted, “Well, you should try working on your singing!”

He started talking about how his singing might be an acquired taste, and maybe you would have to have refined tastes and appreciate music in order to like it.

The organizer said to the woman next to me, “Go fuck yourself!”

And about half of us trooped off into the Talking Zone and the rest of the room arranged themselves adoringly before the musician for the rest of his set.

So, yeah. We got kicked out of the S’n'B for being too loud. And the organizer swore at us. It was really weird. Now I’m kind of afraid to go back! It wasn’t even that I was trying to make a statement about the music, or identify myself as a troublemaker… actually, I thought the guy’s music was nice; he sings and plays the guitar well. It was just that I came to S’n'B for socializing in general, and Mary and I had specifically made plans to meet up there to chat, and neither one of those goals was being met by the concert setup. But now I think I may have been blacklisted.

I also found out afterwards that the organizer is engaged to the musician, which would explain a lot about the interpersonal dynamics there.

It was just a very, very odd experience all around.

Amusingly enough, one of the people who left the room with us was an anthropology student who had come to the meeting because she had to write a paper about a group of people, and she had chosen to come observe a group of knitters in action. She had expected to write a fairly boring paper about a standard Stitch ‘n’ Bitch session–looks like she hit the anthropology jackpot.

On the bright side, I’m now about 4 inches into both sleeves for my Flicca coat. Soon, cuddly sweater coat goodness will be mine! I’ll have to decide soon if I want to close it with buttons or a belt or leather toggles (I’m leaning towards toggles, but I think they’ll be the most trouble to locate). It is pretty gigantic and heavy already (10 skeins in) and I can only imagine how heavy the versions on Ravelry knit in Rowan Yorkshire Tweed Chunky must be–I have both yarns in my stash, and RYC Soft Tweed seems pretty airy and lofty, while Yorkshire Tweed Chunky is much heavier and denser. I did the math and ten yards of RYC Soft Tweed weigh 5.7 grams, while ten yards of Yorkshire Tweed Chunky weigh 9.17 grams!

Edited to add a few corrections to clear things up as per some comments made by the organizer (Mackenzie), since it looks like I did misquote:

• The person who was talking was talking loudly and yes, her comments were rude. I think that was already clear from the description of what she said, but just in case that wasn’t, there you go. I also missed reporting an additional bitchy/sarcastic exchange between her and the musician, which you can read about in Mackenzie’s comments below
• I was wrong; it wasn’t the organizer who said “go fuck yourself,” but the person sitting next to her.
• I accidentally gave the impression that the Africa comment had to do with asking people to be quiet, which it didn’t. I was just summing up the different things he said during the first part of the set. It was unrelated banter between songs and had to do with the content of one of the musician’s songs.
• Mackenzie wasn’t the one who organized the show; the owners of the cafe did that.

Blog Action Day 2008: How Much Is That In Yarn?

1 skein of Sundara Sock Yarn in Roasted Persimmon over Green Papaya, Seasons Sock Club, Autumn, October 2008 shipment: $25.

Average monthly per capita income in Cambodia: $24.16

Ashford Traditional single-drive, lacquered, single-treadle spinning wheel: $535

The gross national income per capita in Benin, 2006: $540

The theme of this year’s Blog Action Day is Poverty. All over the blogosphere, people are writing about poverty and how it relates to their little corner of the world.

I don’t hold a lot of illusions about people stopping their yarn stashing, eating out at restaurants, buying new clothes, going to the movies, or what have you, and donating all that money to charity instead while living a virtuous, ascetic life in the cheapest place they can afford. It’s just not the way things work in this day and age and place, for the vast majority of people. I’m certainly not saintly enough to live that simply. And despite their ideals, people have a strong tendency to want to spend their hard-earned money on fun stuff rather than donating it to someone they don’t know and will never meet.

Knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers, let me suggest 3 simple actions that will change little about the way you live your happy, well-fed, yarn-filled life from day to day, but will make a difference (be it ever so slight) in fighting global poverty–and without making you feel guilty about spending your money as you please:
1) Download the AidMaker browser plugin and shop online as usual. When you shop from online stores like the Apple Store (or Ultimate Colon Cleanse, apparently!) while using this browser plugin, AGoodCause.com receives a commission, which (aside from operating costs) they then donate to the charity of your choice, at no extra cost to you. Let’s say you go to Amazon and buy Knitted Lace of Estonia or some Cascade 220 yarn–or even an Ashford Kiwi spinning wheel–they’ll donate 3% of your purchase price to the charity of your choice, without you spending an extra dime.
2) When you feel like you need a shopping fix, or decide you could use some retail therapy, consider going to a charity site instead and spending your money on a charitable donation. If you’re a stasher, you can just pretend you bought some yarn and it went straight into the stash, hidden under the bed or in a drawer out of sight somewhere. But instead, you can spend the money on a sheep, llama, or goat from Heifer International, a camel from Mercy Corps, or a loan to a textiles entrepreneur via Kiva.org (at the moment, one of the open loans seeking lenders is for a group of Peruvian weavers trying to start a textiles factory)
3) Or if you feel like you need something tangible as a result of your shopping spree, consider spending money on products that help the economies of developing countries. You could buy some yarns via The Hunger Site–that angora-cotton blend looks especially tempting, doesn’t it? In your LYS, a few yarn brands you can look at include the Snow Leopard Trust, Manos del Uruguay, Malabrigo, Shokay, Lantern Moon, and Mirasol. If you’re feeling indulgent, splurge on some qiviut from the Oomingmak cooperative. If you’re feeling even more indulgent than that, how about some vicuna at $300 per 28.5 grams? According to Peace of Yarn, after maintaining state control and protection of the wild vicuna herds since 1825, the Peruvian government “handed ownership of the animals back to the common villagers of the country, creating a viable and stable source of income for struggling villagers” by sponsoring traditional shearing days called chacus in which the vicunas are trapped using traditional methods, sheared, and released.

So in honor of today, I’m going to go install that plugin, lend some money via Kiva, and ogle qiviut on Ravelry for a while.

P.S. I just bought the Ashford Traditional used on Craigslist and it was actually closer to the GNI per capita of Afghanistan. I’m pretty excited about it–I’ll have enough bobbins to actually do a two-ply without having to wind off into centerpull balls! Lots of ratios! A nice big drive wheel! I can adjust twist and pull separately using the Scotch tension!–though I’m surprisingly feeling sort of anxious and attached about selling my old wheel. It’s prettier, and easier to treadle.

You stuttered like a kaleidoscope

Look at this great poster I found linked on the Malabrigo Junkies ravelry group a few days ago:

MALABRIGO: THE MOVIE

So we had an excellent time yesterday spinning. I loved Mary’s Turkish spindles–two normal-sized, one tiny and adorable, all from Jenkins–they are beautifully turned, spin fast and smooth, and make a centerpull ball when you’re done, ready for plying! Rosemary Knits made a clever homemade version using Brio Mec construction toys.

Along with spindles and tons of fiber to share, Mary brought along some delicious homemade samosas with 4 kinds of homemade chutney (mint, cilantro, tamarind, and tomato) and yogurt!

Her friend’s daughter brought chocolate chip cookies to share and exuberance and energy to spare. Her 5th-grade art class sounds pretty great: apparently they’ve been wet-felting llama fiber and dyed sheep’s wool, and talking about natural dyeing with onion skins, etc.

We all took turns with spinning on the 2 different kinds of spindle and wheel. I can’t say that the Jelly Yarns drive band worked very well with my wheel, unfortunately–it would start out nice and tight, but kept stretching and popping off after a minute or two of picking up speed. Perhaps I didn’t tie the knots right… I was never a Girl Scout, and have likely missed out forever on valuable knot-tying and cookie-selling skills.

In any case, it was a fun way to spend a Saturday morning!

Rahul and I went for a nice bike ride in the Arboretum later. The leaves are starting to turn, and thinking about all the beautiful Autumn colors around me, I’m eagerly awaiting my next Sundara Seasons shipment, sock yarn in a color called Roasted Persimmon over Green Papaya–the color looks pretty different in all the photos I’ve seen so far and I really want to see how it looks in person.

In the afternoon, I spun up some yarn: a magenta-purple chunk of a Miss Babs BFL batt Mary shared with me. I loved it–the fiber was so fluffy and light and nicely prepped, it spun like a dream. I Navajo-plied it today and it’s hanging in the bathroom to set the twist–I wound up with about 60ish yards of DK/worsted weight from 1.5 oz of fiber.

And yesterday evening we had a truly remarkable coincidence.

To preface this, on Thursday, we’d gone to a dinner outing at Africana arranged via a new Livejournal group for Madison-area foodies. (When I sat down, the woman sitting next to me asked if I was on Ravelry! She’s a knitter too and recognized my name.)

Last night, we went to the Magnetic Fields concert at the Overture Center–fun, if perhaps a bit heavy on the Gothic novelty songs and short on the yearning, bittersweet, melancholy songs I like best. Though they did play a really nice version of “Take Ecstasy with Me” from Holiday, one of my favorite albums.

As we were leaving the concert, Rahul noticed that two of the women from the Madison foodies group (the Raveler and her roommate) were leaving the concert as well, so we biked up and said hi. We talked to them for a few minutes, then their companion introduced herself, and it turned out she had gone to junior high with Rahul! This was in a town of 35,000, in Southern Missouri, almost 500 miles away–it’s not as though they had both gone to school nearby in Wisconsin or something. Totally wild.

The last big excitement for the weekend (barring anything unexpected and really great happening tonight) was that we went to a restaurant called Yen Ching this morning for their Sunday dim sum. I don’t even really know if you’d call it dim sum, since it’s more Northern-style breakfast foods, but I loved it and it reminded me strongly of home–they had much better food, in my opinion, than Hong Kong Cafe, which is unfortunate since the latter is just around the corner from us.

My favorite of everything we got was the sweet soy milk with you tiu, which translates literally to “oil sticks”–I think they called them crullers on the menu. It shouldn’t be hard to make, but I’ve been to plenty of restaurants where they burned the soy milk or gave you an impossibly tiny portion. The worst offender served it in a mug. In my opinion, properly made, it should be a huge, steaming-hot bowl of sweet and slightly fragrant soy milk without a trace of bitterness or burned/smoky flavor, with hot, crisp, freshly fried you tiu to break into little pieces and dunk into the bowl. You spoon them up after letting them soak up the soy milk for a moment, and they’re wonderfully juicy and soft. Yen Ching did it perfectly. The you tiu were crisp, so fresh out of the fryer that they burned my fingers when I broke them into pieces, and the soy milk was delicious and came in a very generous portion.

We also tried steamed pork buns (plain pork, not the barbecued pork you would expect in a Cantonese-style restaurant), har gao (a little surprising in a Northern-style restaurant, I guess, but very well done–the shrimp tasted fresh and sweet, and the skin was delicate), won ton soup, steamed buns, fried buns (to my surprise, these were essentially the steamed buns, sliced and deep-fried and sprinkled with sugar, a bit like rusks, not at all what I was expecting), and siu mai. Aside from the steamed and fried buns, where our problems could be attributed to user error in ordering, I had no complaints about any of it; I really enjoyed the meal.

If I haven’t been eaten by ladybugs in my sleep, hopefully I’ll actually have some pretty pictures of craft-related content to show next time. Have a lovely, lovely Sunday!

(Edited to add: I wrote earlier and then apparently accidentally deleted a small saga about the ladybugs invading our house. Hence the closing ladybug comment, which I just realized makes no sense without the preceding ladybug story. I removed about 20 ladybugs from our living room yesterday and around 15 today. They’re EVERYWHERE! All I can say is I’m glad they’re ladybugs and not roaches or centipedes.)

Shopping at the Dig ‘n’ Save

My parents (Dad and stepmom) came to visit me in Madison! Now they’re in Chicago (or possibly on their way back to CA by now). I miss them! It was kind of a whirlwind, last-minute, chaotic kind of trip, but we managed to fit in a good trip to the St. Vincent de Paul Dig ‘n’ Save, where you buy clothes for $1.00 a pound and junk for 35 cents a pound. Rahul and I had a great trip there before where I came away with a ton of good stuff–among other things, a really cute boiled wool rust-and-green colorwork jacket, a Brooks Brothers seersucker skirt, an adorable Vera Bradley zippered pouch with tiny owls on it.

This time around I found a trove of cute patterns from the 70s and 80s, including this one, Simplicity 4867–how awesome is the top right view? It reminds me very much of wikstenmade’s beautiful Tova top (right down to the similarity of the model’s hairstyle to Jenny’s!) Also Butterick 4631, a collection of yoked peasant tops with pockets. This one, Simplicity 5497, is very, very dated, but the asymmetrical ruffled button front seems like it might have potential. I couldn’t find the last one online (McCall’s 4866), but it includes a very cute dress and blouse with mandarin collar and round pintucked, button-up yoke.

I also got a brown leather Fossil/Relic purse in pretty good condition, and a blouse that turned out to be a little too small. The purse + shirt + 4 patterns cost me $1.35!

Anyway, although my parents have left, I have plenty of stuff coming up this next week to distract me. Mary and I are going to teach her Hindi teacher’s kid to spin Saturday morning (she’s 8 years old and wants to learn to spin cotton on a charkha! and weave! just like Grandma!) and then Rahul and I are seeing the Magnetic Fields on Saturday night. My uncle will be in town next week, as will an old friend from Berkeley, though both are here for conferences and I don’t know how much time they’ll have to spend on social events. Monday night is also the next meeting of the Madison Knitters’ Guild and Vivian Høxbro is coming to speak; I think I might go and see her.

Other crap: I’ve finished the back and one front of Flicca. Still no pictures, though.

This fake A-Ha video made my day: Band montage!

In response to my blog post mentioning that I’d heard Jelly Yarns make good drive bands for spinning wheels, I got a free sample to try out. Isn’t that nice of them? I’m looking forward to giving it a spin.

And my parents said they kept wondering when I was going to post something about the election. Well, there are other venues that do the ranting better (how could I even scratch the surface of this whole Sarah Palin debacle?) so for the most part I leave the political talk out of here, but I did want to share this story that I saw for the first time recently: McCain calls his captors “gooks” and refuses to apologize. (On the topic of Vietnam PTSD, did you know he also addressed a crowd recently as “my fellow prisoners” rather than “my fellow citizens,” and didn’t seem to notice the slip-up?)

Guy Aoki, the president of the Media Action Network for Asian-Americans, sums it up pretty well, I think: “If Sen. McCain had been captured by Nigerians, could he call those people ‘niggers’ and think he wasn’t going to offend everyone who is black?”