Oh, Yarn!

I was led astray by a bad (good) companion today.  My knitting friend, LB, proposed last night at Friday Night Knitting that we pursue a yarn crawl today since, Patti's, the oldest yarn shop in town is being sold out due to the passing of the owner last year.  We can all agree that I don't need more yarn but, in my defense, that yarn shop had the best buttons in town and the biggest, broadest selection of buttons.  So I bought buttons.  They were all priced at fifty cents per button which was at least half off but mostly seventy-five percent off.  I got very cool buttons, don't you think?



Because one shop doesn't make a yarn crawl we tootled a bit further east to a quilt shop that has begun to carry a little yarn.  I hadn't been there since they started carrying yarn. (see how good I am at avoiding temptation?)  LB had been there and luckily found three more skeins of angora yarn that matches the five she bought at Patti's.  I only bought a pattern for three bucks; the other one was free.  (pats self on back)



Next came the real reason for the yarn crawl.  We drove up to Sturgeon Bay to a consignment shop where the remaining stock of Spin, the yarn shop there which closed a few years ago, was being sold.  The knitters' grapevine is a powerful thing.  A friend of a friend was there yesterday, told her friend, who came to knitting last night, showed us a photo of the bags of yarn on the store's shelves so we decided to investigate.  I found three skeins of "fire" colored wool and silk, eight skeins of black 100% wool, and three skeins of natural cotton.  Oh, and a teeny tiny crochet hook that's good for putting beads on stitches.  After that we went up the street to the Blue Front cafe for lunch.  I had a curried chicken salad sandwich.  Yum.

Since we were already in Door Co. and LB hadn't visited the new yarn shop in Baileys Harbor, we stretched our crawl up the peninsula.  I almost made it out empty-handed but fell prey to this ingenious leather wrist ruler/bracelet with a magnetic clasp.  Pretty nifty.






This morning before LB picked me up I whipped up two batches of WW Granola which made my house smell like warm honey and ginger.

But first I baited and set out two rat traps.  Within fifteen minutes some frisky squirrels had tripped one of them and when I got home late this afternoon I saw that the other one was tripped too.  Neither one had caught anything.  I got some advice from friends and will be setting up a rat swimming pool, well, more like a drowning pool and also buying some cheap weenies to shove Warfarin pills into.  One way or another I'm getting rid of THE RAT.  A couple people asked if I was sure it was only one, and I can say that I only see one at a time.  If they drowning pool and the poison weenies don't work I'm calling in a professional.  I do not want to go into winter with THE RAT in residence.

 



I knitted on LC's first mitten, got the thumb gusset increases done, and started on the hand.  It needs a couple more inches before the top gets decreased, then the thumb will get knitted, and mitten #2 cast on.  I hope she likes them.


21 September--Barbara Malcolm, Horizon. 

            March came in like a lion, as the cliché goes, but for me it was a whirlwind of art shows, painting, and dating Abel.  I've always hated March; I've said that before.  Bert and Pop died in March and the weather taunts you with moments of spring-like warmth and then winter races back to slap you down with icy winds and freezing rain.  But this March was different.

I found myself looking forward to the days in my studio.  My brushes had suddenly become obedient; what was in my head appeared on the paper.  On the floor of my studio, discarded paintings that hadn't turned out the way I wanted still crackled underfoot, but there were fewer of them than ever before.  Abel came over nearly every day, bringing some of the beautiful wood frames he made for my paintings.  I was glad I had agreed to let him make them, certain that the reason I had sold so many pictures at the church craft fair last December was, at least partly, due to his frames.

I liked having him around too.  He was so well read.  He'd bring books of poetry to read in the evenings while we sat in front of the fire, or novels, classics, that we'd take turns reading aloud.  It was so civilized, like a PBS mini-series.

I sometimes felt as if I were living in a novel myself; my life was so different from the life I had with Bert.  Not better, because I had liked my old life pretty well, just different.

You could see the changes in my paintings too.  I was much freer, much braver than I had been.  Forms were softer, colors brighter or with stronger contrast, subject matter more creative.

I never imagined that you could tell the mood of the artist when he painted something but, now that my eye was trained, I couldn't believe I had missed it before.  I can look at every one of my paintings and see what I was feeling when I painted it.  Sometimes I felt embarrassed when I looked at a few of them.  I remembered all too clearly how angry or hurt or disappointed I had been when I made the painting and was afraid that anyone looking at it would be seeing inside of me.

I spent a lot of time poring over the articles in Watercolor World and drooling over the beautiful expensive brushes and paints in the ads.  In the back of the magazine they listed all the art shows and exhibits in the surrounding area.  Abel and I dragged out the Rand McNally and plotted trips to the ones nearby.  One-day trips since the weather in March in Wisconsin is so unpredictable.

            I made a lot of soup and stew in March.  Abel baked bread.  He'd come over in the afternoons with a loaf of fresh bread under his arm and a handful of frames, arriving just as I was cleaning my brushes at the end of a long day of painting.  I teased him that he must have a spy outside my window because he had uncanny timing.

         "A spy?" he said.  "I don't need a spy.  I just keep my eye on the light and when the sun gets to a certain spot in the sky, I grab a loaf of bread, pick up some frames, and drive on over." 

I rationalized buying that yarn today because at the November knitting guild meeting we'll be having a swap/sale/giveaway so starting tomorrow I'm going to go through my yarn culling out what I don't think I'll ever knit up.  Out with the old and in with the new.  It'll be fun to revisit some yarn that's been around a while.
--Barbara