Mistakes & Happy Endings

I was dreaming about showing y’all my new market bag this weekend.  Or at least showing a close to finished version.  It’s what I’m doing with the rubber tubing from the earlier post — my plan is to turn the tubing into handles and have a really sturdy felted bag to use at our farmers market, which starts up in a few weeks.

You know what I did?  About 5" into  rounds of 150 stitches, I realized that I twisted the stitches when I did the join.  Arggghhhh.  How did I knit for that long without figuring it out?  Well, I had stored my circulars in a really pretty silk needle case, and it required me to bend them around themselves to fit.  When I took the needle out to knit with, it was pretty kinked up.  I thought I was being extra-careful because of all the twisting.  I wasn’t.  I discovered it while knitting during the conversation after a dinner party last night.

After thrashing myself for being so lazy, I straightened out the cable (easily done by setting it in a bowl of very hot water for about thirty seconds and then smoothing it) and cast back on.  All you get to see is this:

Hopefully there will be more progress soon, but this has the feel of one of those black hole knitting projects already.

In far more exciting news, my friend Ramona came home from spring break in Paris and brought me this:

It came from the Anny Blatt store.  And most amazingly of all, Anny Blatt was there when she bought the yarn and she met her!  She bought the yarn thinking it would make up into a wonderful little tank for summer, and I think that is just the right project.  Isn’t it lovely to have friends who are knitters who go to Paris?

More jewelry news too.  In the second class, I completed this bracelet, which goes with the earrings I made and showed you earlier in the week.  As a completely self-taught beader (I only went that direction because of some felting projects that required beading and then one thing led to another), this class opened a lot of horizons and I can’t wait to incorporate some of what I learned back into collage work, and specifically, into a couple of artist’s fat books I’m in the middle of working on!

There are two other things I want to show y’all.  One is really odd, and one is really beautiful.

This is the odd thing:

I asked the 16 year old boy to cut up carrots to go with the roast, and this is what he left for me.  It is strangely sculptural.  I would like to think it is his teenage attempt at communicating to me that he sees beauty and value in art.  Do you think it’s an over-reading?  After living with teenagers, I sometimes find myself grasping at straws.

The beautiful thing is this — I am managing to grow lilacs in the deep south.

Lilacs don’t grow in the deep south.  But I baby these two, just outside my front door, and this is the fourth year they have bloomed for me.  The scent is incredible.  I’m starting to notice that I grow all the same things in my garden that my Grandmother and Mother loved best.  I grow roses and iris and gardenias.  I manage a small strawberry patch.  We have three peach trees, which is a feat in a small urban yard.  My Mom loves lilacs.  I can’t even count the number of times she talked about how she remembered them from her childhood in the east and how much she regretted that they wouldn’t grown in California.  So I grow them, for my Mom, even though she is still in California, and can only see them in pictures.