Next Comes the Magic

At Friday Night Knitting last night I knitted the heel flap of the Llama sock #1.  Next comes the magic of turning the heel.  It still takes quiet and concentration for me to turn the heel even though I've done it quite a few times.  Essentially you knit partway across the heel stitches, then turn back to purl partway the other way, going back and forth like that, adding short rows that turn the stitches from coming down from the heel to jutting out toward the toe, making a cup for the heel of your foot.  So these few rows make your knitting turn a corner all by itself.  Abracadabra!  This magic is followed by the slog (for me) of picking up and decreasing the gusset stitches to get back to the correct number for the foot.  It doesn't seem fair that my most favorite part of making socks is immediately followed by my least favorite part but it's a fairly short-lived slog--if I don't feel sorry for myself and keep putting my needles down.



I love seeing the tracks in the backyard snow.  There're rabbit tracks and bird tracks and squirrel tracks, plus we saw a cat out there the other night so there're cat tracks too.  It's like an aerial view of a highway interchange, I think.




While scrolling through Facebook last week I somehow got back to a blog post from a few years ago on which Aunt B recommended a book.  I didn't remember seeing it at the time but I checked and the library closest to home had a copy on the shelf so I swung by, checked it out, and devoured it over last weekend.  It's called The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt by Caroline Preston and it's a novel told in pictures.  The author inherited family scrapbooks so that sent her to buying pertinent ephemera on eBay to tell the story of one young women in the 1920s.  Aunt B said it reminded her of Grandma Babe's Girl Graduate book from the mid-20s wherein all her friends wrote and drew and she saved flowers and ribbons and cards.  It was very like that.  It also made me want to comb eBay looking for trinkets and postcards.  I don't need any of it but I love looking at it and having it.  I have resisted the temptation.



Last night LB brought a pair of finger puppets to Friday Night Knitting that she'd made years ago on her knitting machine.  One is a mouse and the other is a tiger.  I shamelessly wheedled them out of her because I knew LC will love the tiger--she's a serious Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood fan--and OJ will love chewing on both of them, if I let him get his mitts on them.  I'm more than a little embarrassed that I asked for them so I've written her a nice thank you note to put in the mail.  Hopefully that'll make up for my rudeness a bit.

March 4--Corner between Terrified Woman and Silenius, Pompeii.  Julie was falling into a doze.  Her hand kept moving her trowel in slow shallow pulls, scraping away the overburden a millimeter at a time.  It was hot and airless in this space with its partial walls blocking a breeze from the sea and concentrating the sun's rays like a reflector oven.  There wasn't enough water to quench her thirst or enough sunscreen to keep her fair skin from burning.  Every day she hoped to uncover a bead, coin, or pot sherd.  She knew that field wok was hours of tedium broken by infrequent moments of excitement when something was found.  The change in sound as her metal trowel scraped the dirt and sand woke her from her stupor.  She looked down and saw flakes of red and white painted plaster mixed with the tan and gray of the ash-tinted soil

Our grocery list has grown very long so Durwood and I are off to seek food.  I think he might have gin on his list.  It might even be the only item on his list.  I've already got tonight's supper in the slow cooker--Chicken Tikka Masala, Weight Watcher-ized.  I can't wait.  Toodle-oo.
--Barbara