Fiber Raven Soiree

M'aidez! May Day!

Here is my May Basket. I've traded in the bloom of youth for the catharsis of the Cosmopolitan. A spree of sheepy shopping shall replace a sally 'round the maypole, and the serendipity of Spring will not be compromised. M'aidez!

The reindeer are progressing but I am too lazy to arrange a photo. The fees they are starting to charge are becoming unreasonable, pheh! There are 12 of them, you see, and each thinks he is more attractive than the next. I've named them after the months of the year, in French. They vie for the spotlight; the resulting din is much too annoying for a person of my years ( and they haven't even got their heads on yet). M'aidez!

I'm hoping the "ridges" block out when I'm finished. These occur where a color change appears at the same place for several rows, and are especially prominent on Juin, Juillet, Janvier et Decembre, the four which are next to the side "seams". If I weren't the lazy person I am, I would remedy this by pretending this is intarsia and twisting my yarns at different intervals on the other side of the change. Every so often I yank and pull at the knitted fabric and convince myself that once its washed and stretched on the woolly board it will be fine.

I finally received my cone of soft blue cashmere/silk laceweight that I won on eBay three weeks ago. The Seller, Nandia Cashmere, advertises that they ship via priority mail "within 4 days of the end of auction". This has not been the case in my experience and although the yarn is very nice and the price is wonderful I probably won't buy anything more from them. My dwindling bank account will appreciate that!

What am I going to do with a cone of Alice Blue Gown laceweight? Perhaps after the mourning shawl is done and I am once again in the mood for a large lace project I'll endeavor to do a full-scale, enormous lacy shawl to wrap myself in in the unlikely event that I'll ever be outdoors enjoying a garden party on a balmy midsummer's eve where the light weight of a cashmere wrap would be as perfect for the night as dark chocolate for strawberries.

Madame Glitchbane has been working on another little contraption, That Which Calculates The Prescription For Increasing. It is always annoying when I reach the part of a pattern that tells me to "increase x number of stitches evenly over the next round." It's not that I am bad at math, for I am not. It is not that I dislike math, for I do not. I simply like to choose the time and circumstance under which I perform the miracle of numbers, and 99 times out of 100 my wild urge to calculate does not simultaneously occur with an increase round in knitting. So I have implored the good Madame to provide me with a Remedy for my Ailment, and we shall see what she comes up with.

To illustrate my point about enjoying math: In the early years of my existence in the Emerald Rain Forest I often thought that I would move somewhere else. The reasons I came here had dissolved (I decided that I didn't, after all, wish to be a flight attendant for Alaska Airlines), and I longed for sunshine and southern hospitality. The PNW folks are nice enough, but they seemed at the time to be interesting creatures given more to the pursuit of individual interests (hiking, biking, running, kayaking, etc) than to those of a more comraderic and less athletic nature. I had not yet discovered the fiberocity within the area.

So I bought myself a copy of the Places Rated Almanac and got to work. The PRA rates the 300 largest cities in the U.S. based on a number of factors, including weather, economy, crime, sports, education and others. I weighted each of these factors according to how important they were to me, and weighted them further by how close the city was to my children. I multipled everything out, added up the totals and compared. The winner? Knoxville, Tennessee. I would be living there today, except for a certain marriage proposal that I accepted. I still dream of living in Knoxville; I worked so hard (at a time of my own choosing) to calculate its correctness for me!

And I feel certain that balmy summer evenings in Knoxville would be perfect for the Alice-Blue shawl.