About Me

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Ten years into widowhood, after one year of incredible happiness and nearly 14 years of single blessedness. Retired, and mostly enjoying it. Still knitting. [Zen]tangling.again after a brief hiatus.

Monday, June 04, 2007

The Nun I Am Living Like

As promised a week or so ago.


The large pillow on the left is a Kaffe Fassett design. I took the liberty of changing out some of the colors. [You will recall that blue is not my favorite color.] So all the blue shadows in her wimple are now gold shadows. And the dark tealish-navy bits in the background are now dark brown. And her eyes are green. This was a project I worked on in the summer of 2005. I think she looks much happier than the face in the book. Probably because she's not feeling “blue”.

The pillow to her right is one that I found at Pier One, who-knows-when? I've had it at least four years, because I had it at the previous apartment, and possibly the one before that. The bolster pillow features two tiny mohair sheep. I'll have to try a close-up for you.


A little out of focus, but you get the idea. The fabric it's mounted on is a remnant from the back to the nun pillow, and all the passementerie is from the sale bin at my fabulous local upholstery shop. As is the pillow form. The other pillow form is from Pottery Barn, purchased before I knew there *was* a fabulous local upholstery shop. I bought two, and the other one is still in my closet, waiting for me to stop knitting long enough to stitch up the gargoyle pillow that I graphed using my cross-stitch software and a notecard that I bought at Barnes and Noble maybe ten years ago. I won't stitch it up until I can get permission from the copyright holder of the original image.

I have found that artists are remarkably generous about granting permission when they know that I want to adapt their design to a needlework format and only for personal use. BittyBit's name means “water lily” in another language, and I found a lovely photograph of waterlilies online and tracked down the photographer. I'm adapting his image for a birth sampler, which I hope to have finished sometime before she graduates high school. So many ideas; so little time!

And I have permission to adapt another artist's image for a wall quilt. I need to get moving on that one, as he is getting up in years, and he wants to see what I have done with his idea. I will probably make *two* very small quilts: one for him, and one to keep.



I think the photo above may be deja vu; I think I gave you a shot recently of two socks at approximately this state of done-ness. This is the heel turning on the first Jitterbug sock. I was halfway done when I decided to frog back and incorporate a narrow garter-stitch band along each line of decreases. I stopped because I had to decide if I wanted K2P2 ribbing or K2P1 ribbing. I pondered that while I brought the second sock to this point.

I think next time I'm going to try a shorter, wider foot shape. More stitches, fewer rows. I really do not have Pippi Longstocking feet; this skinny sock will squinch down to fit my average-length, high-arched, emphatically plump tootsie. My Sister of the Wool, Susan, knits socks that are distinctly chibi. I really don't think her feet are 2/3 the length of my own.
Non-knitting digression: I like to work the puzzles at aarp.org. Today's online jigsaw puzzle had unexpected aerobic benefits. When I solved the puzzle and the caption came up, it definitely raised my pulse and respiration. No, it wasn't a portrait of Sean Connery or Liam Neeson. It was this statement: “Crochet is a type of knitting performed with a hook." That's like saying that fishing is a form of crocheting done in hip-waders. Or the ignoramus who interviewed me for the the local paper 20-years ago [back when local was somewhere else in Texas] who stated that I used my spinning wheel to weave yarn into wool. Muggles, all. What's to be done with them?

If you like jigsaw puzzles and you want something [in addition to knitting, not in lieu of it] to keep your mind sharp, here's a link: http://www.uclick.com/client/aap/uj/ Or you can go here: http://www.aarp.org/fun/puzzles/ Just be sure to have taken your blood pressure medication first. Speaking of blood pressure, I am once more having difficulty getting Blogger to publish my post with the spacing that I specify.

1 comment:

Tan said...

It's like when Paul went to Wisconsin on a business trip and brought me a gift from Susan's Fiber Shop. He said when he went in there was a room full of weavers having a class. I was trying to picture all those looms. When I called Susan to see if she could remember what kind of fiber she had sold him I used the weaving class to indicate when he had been there. It was actually a spinning class. I think he knows better now.