Mossy Cottage Knits

I Don't Call This Mossy Cottage for Nuthin'

The first seven minutes of my Friday:

Startle awake, heart pounding.

Realize you’ve slept through your alarm to the tune of half an hour.

Catapult yourself out of bed and into jeans and a t-shirt. (What can I say? The dress code at a high mid-tech company: Monday through Thursday, you wear jeans and clean t-shirts. On Casual Friday, you wear jeans and Wednesday’s t-shirt scrounged up from the floor and flapped until some of the wrinkles come out. For variety, change your earrings.)

Race out of the house.

Do a spectacular pratfall on wet moss, landing on a driveway made of what seems like particularly hard cement.

Check self for broken bones; find none. Discover, however, that you, your jeans and Wednesday’s t-shirt are covered in a primordial, gray-green slime.

Wonder for a brief moment if anyone at work will actually notice the primordial, gray-green slime, most of which is covering your arse. Realize the answer is yes, especially since you smell ever so faintly like primordial, gray-green slime.

Race back into the house, desperately sidestepping any and all squidgy, slimy spots on the driveway, now that you are wise to the ways of moss. (You know those obstacle-course races where the contestants do a fast, high-stepping prance into and out of a tires lying on the ground? I looked like that.)

Change into new jeans and Tuesday’s t-shirt.

Race back out, desperately sidestepping blahblahblah.

Head off to work, aching in places you didn’t even know you had and picking gravel out of your hand at each red light.

And, so, on to minute eight. And a Saturday spent trying to suck all possible sympathy out of TMK by showing her each new bruise as it appeared. We’re still trying to figure out how and why, if I fell on my hip, I have no bruise on my gluteus maximus but a doozy on my left knee (and, I was sure, another on my right—good for at least one more boo-boo kiss—until it turned out to be dirt. Drat.).

On the Dulaan front, thank you so much for your comments. As those that I have spoken to personally know, there is much more to this story than my blog entry reveals but that'all will remain unblogged. From here on out, I leave this all up to you. I am happy to see that people are starting to make up their own minds about all of this. Some will still send items to F.I.R.E., some won’t, some see this as an opportunity to support other charities they’ve been eyeing all along, some see this as an opportunity to get out of the charity-knitting biz altogether. Thumbs up to all of you. Whichever way the four winds take you, thank you everyone for your (99.9999%) supportive comments and Cuzzin Tom for working to keep me somewhat objective (although the jury’s out on whether it actually worked. My false objectivity seems merely to be masking a very pissy core.). I’ve created a link at the top of the left column of this page called "What Happened to Dulaan?" that latecomers can click on to see last week’s posting.

The upside to all of this? I’ve plunged headfirst into non-Dulaan knitting. Here, for example, the finished Transylvania hat:

There are some nitpicky things I’d fix about this but overall I’m thrilled with it. The hat is a little long; it doesn’t need the extra scallop-y terra cotta border at the bottom that I threw in at the beginning when I was 200% convinced it was going to be too short. The top also decreases manically and looks like a pinwheel badly in need of some Prozac. Other than that, I’m standing here with my thumbs through my suspenders, rocking on my heels, looking rather smug.

Most exciting, though, is I now have an almost-perfect template for a chapeau. Give me two skeins of Jamieson’s, size 0 and 1 circulars, a design that fits 144 stitches, 12 hours of free time, and I’m golden.

(I’ve been asked to post the pattern for this hat but I’m not sure I can, since the design (the terra cotta part) comes from a book. I charted it in Excel, worked out how many repeats you would need for a hat and, of course, figured out the hat part but I still think the actual design comes too close to the original. Thoughts?)

Posted by Ryan at August 8, 2007 09:51 AM